High Road to China. Jon Cleary
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he doesn’t want. I’ll get him to give us his cheque today and we’ll be down at the bank in the morning when it opens to deposit it to meet the cheques we’ve paid out. Now what’s dishonest about that?’
‘It’s not what I’d expect of a gentleman, that’s all.’
‘That’s because you’re not a gentleman. You socialists always expect more of us than we claim for ourselves. You secretly wish you had our honest hypocrisy.’
Half an hour later we saw the Rolls-Royce pull up outside our shed. It came down the perimeter of the field as if the chauffeur wasn’t quite sure that he wasn’t going to be attacked by the aeroplanes coming in and taking off. Arthur Henty got out, steadying himself with a walking-stick. He turned and helped out a girl. Even through the dirty windows of our office one could see she was a stunner, an absolute beauty. I know I’m looking back through a rose-coloured telescope and the girls of an old man’s youth always have an aura about them. But Eve Tozer was not only beautiful, she had what was later known as It or, still later, sex appeal; and she also had what is now known as class. Even through the grime of that office window and the rheum of an old man’s eyes, I can still see her that afternoon fifty years ago and still remember the feeling that, up till then, I had only experienced when looping the loop. And not in bed.
‘Holy Moses, did you ever see such a girl!’
‘They’ve got a bloody Chink with them,’ was all George said. He was only slightly prejudiced against women, but he had a consuming aversion to all the world’s populace who weren’t white, especially those outside the Empire. ‘We’re not going to sell any machine to him! Those buggers want to conquer the world.’
‘Let me do the talking, George. Just don’t declare war on China till we hear what Henty has to say.’
We went out to meet them. A Chinese had come round from the passenger’s side of the front seat and stood by the rear door behind Henty and the girl. As we walked towards them I whispered to George, ‘The Chinaman looks like a butler. Stop worrying about the Yellow Peril.’
Henty introduced himself and Miss Tozer, ignoring the Chinese, and came straight to his point. ‘Miss Tozer needs an aeroplane for a long-distance flight, O’Malley.’
The O’Malley was a measure of the sort of friends we had been. We had been fellow officers sharing a mess and several trenches together, but he had been wounded and demobbed before we had been through enough to get down to first-name terms. ‘How did you know where to find me?’
‘I saw that piece in the Illustrated London News on your attempts at sky-writing. I cut it out and kept it. One likes to keep track of chaps one knew in the army, y’know.’
It wasn’t a liking of mine, but I was glad it was one of his, if it meant he brought Miss Tozer to meet chaps he’d known in the army. ‘How long is the flight you’re planning, Miss Tozer?’
‘To China.’ I felt George start beside me. ‘I’d like to leave tomorrow at the latest.’
‘Are you serious?’ said George, starting to boil. ‘We don’t like having our leg pulled.’
‘I’ve never been more serious in my life, Mr Weyman. I am an experienced pilot, I know what I’m attempting should have more preparation than a day’s notice allows. But I just don’t have the time. I am flying to China because it is urgent, terribly urgent, that I get there by a certain date.’
‘How soon?’
She looked at Henty, then back at us. ‘21 August. I’ll need an aeroplane with maximum range and a good cruising speed. One that will carry myself as pilot and a passenger.’
I glanced at Henty and he shook his head. ‘Not me. Mr Sun Nan.’
The Chinese behind them stared at George and me. I almost said inscrutably, but there was a certain nervousness about him, tiny cracks in his mask. ‘Does Mr Sun Nan fly?’
‘No,’ said Henty. I became aware that he and Miss Tozer did not want to take me and George into their confidence. This flight they were talking about was no eccentricity, no madcap adventure by a bored rich girl; they were far too serious for that, too strained-looking. But I was certain that Miss Tozer, for all her claims to being an experienced pilot, really had no idea of what lay ahead of her. Henty must have seen the sceptical look on my face, because he went on, ‘On our way down here I’ve been talking to Miss Tozer about taking a second machine and pilot with her.’
‘Mr Henty vouched for you as a pilot and a gentleman,’ said Miss Tozer.
George coughed and ran his hand like a crab over his mouth. I wasn’t sure that Henty knew anything about my value as either a pilot or a gentleman; but he was one of those, now almost all gone, who believed that if a man came from a certain class he was taken as a gentleman until proven otherwise. He had told me so one night in our mess at Salisbury, before we had gone to France and found the Germans made no class distinctions as they shot at us. He knew nothing about my cynicism: that had developed after we had parted company.
‘What would the pay be?’ I said, ungentlemanly.
‘We could come to terms,’ said Miss Tozer. ‘There would be no quibbling on my part. My only concern is to get to China as soon as possible. And I think we are wasting time even now. May we look at the aeroplane you suggest I buy?’
‘It’s over there in the ADC sheds,’ I lied. ‘They let us store our machines there. We have four.’
‘Five,’ said George, determined to get a grain of truth in somewhere. ‘We have a Sopwith Camel, but that would be no good for your purpose.’
Mr Sun Nan stayed with the chauffeur and we led Miss Tozer and Henty across to the Company’s sheds. Being a holiday there was only a skeleton staff on duty; no salesman followed us as we made our way down past the long lines of parked aircraft. The first machine I showed Miss Tozer was a Vickers Vimy. It could carry four people and extra fuel tanks could be fitted; it had been a good bomber in the last days of the war. George had not come across with me to look at it when I had paid one of our rubber cheques as a deposit on it; but ten minutes’ inspection now told him it would need at least a week’s work before being ready for any long-range flying. It was the same with the De Havilland 9 and 4 on which I had also paid deposits; I could see our quick profits disappearing even quicker than that O in Oxo. We were left with only the Bristol Fighter at the end of the line.
‘There’s another DH4 at the other end of the shed.’ George suddenly sounded as if he had been a used aeroplane dealer all his life. ‘But I’d take the Bristol over it. The range is about the same, but the Bristol is about five miles an hour faster and it can climb about five thousand feet higher. You’ll be crossing a lot of mountains, I suppose.’
‘What’s the range?’ Miss Tozer asked.
‘The Bristol will stay up for three hours,’ I said. ‘I flew one for a while during the war. Say about three hundred miles or a little over.’
‘We could stretch that by fitting extra tanks,’ said George. ‘Assuming you cruise around ninety to one hundred miles an hour, with the extra tanks you’d probably get another hundred, possibly more, to your range. Let’s say four hundred and fifty miles maximum.’
Miss Tozer stared at the Bristol Fighter. It had been a great warplane, a two-seater almost as manoeuvrable as any single-seater and twice as effective because it had carried two guns, one fired straight ahead by the pilot and the other able to be fired in a complete circle by the observer. George and I had flown as a team in one of them and in three months we had brought down nine Huns. Miss Tozer walked round the machine, then came back to us.
‘Mr O’Malley, could you get us some maps? I think we need to sit down and have a talk. Perhaps we could go back to your office?’
Two people in our office crowded it; a four-person conference would have split it at the seams. ‘We’ll go back to our shed – we can find a spot there where we can have a talk. George will