‘Couple of days, you said?’
‘That’s all. And you don’t need to spend hours out there.’
‘Could you not ching, from wherever you’ll be?’
‘That may not be possible. Anyway, I’d rather someone went there in person. You know how it is.’
‘Yes,’ Memphis said, in long-suffering tones. ‘One does. Well, you would not ask this lightly, I think. I will inspect Matilda’s herd from an airpod. Will that suffice?’
‘If you could also land and inspect the perimeter monitors, and then check on the camp, that would be even better.’
‘Will one inspection per day suffice?’
Geoffrey shifted on his seat. ‘If that’s all you can give me—’
‘Which is your way of saying you would rather I made at least two.’
Geoffrey smiled softly. ‘Thank you, Memphis.’
‘This mysterious trip of yours . . . you’ll be sure to tell me what it’s all about, when you get back?’
‘I will, I promise. I don’t want there to be any secrets between us.’
‘Nor I.’
There was a lull. Memphis looked ready to return to his work, so Geoffrey made to stand up. But his old mentor was not quite done.
‘Now that Eunice is never coming back, we should give some thought to what happens to her room. She would not have wanted it kept as some miserable, dusty shrine.’
‘There are plenty of rooms in the household going spare.’
‘When we have many guests – as we did during the scattering – we are considerably stretched. If the subject upsets you, I won’t raise it again. But I know your cousins will be anxious to move on.’
‘Bury the past, you mean.’
‘We must all do that, if we are to keep living,’ Memphis said.
In the morning, Geoffrey saw a glint of moving silver, an aircraft with an upright tail fin, sharking low over the trees. Gradually he heard the drone of . . . He shook his head, ready to laugh at the patent absurdity of it. The only thing in his experience that made a sound anything like that was the Cessna, and the Cessna was sitting in plain view.
‘Eunice,’ he said quietly, ‘I could use some help here.’
She was with him in an instant, as if she had never been more than a few paces away. ‘What is it, Geoffrey?’
‘Need a reality check. Tell me I’m not looking at an aeroplane even older than my own.’
Geoffrey was shielding his eyes from the sun. Eunice echoed his gesture, but at the same time – from where, he hadn’t noticed – produced a pair of slim grasshopper-green binoculars, which she held to her eyes single-handed, as daintily as if they were opera glasses. She tracked the moving form of the aircraft, now almost nose-on.
‘If I’m not very much mistaken, that is a DC-3. Is there any particular reason why a DC-3 would be coming down to land, miles from anywhere, in the middle of equatorial East Africa?’
‘It’s my ride,’ Geoffrey said.
Eunice lowered the binoculars. ‘To where?’
‘Somewhere interesting, I hope.’
The DC-3 dropped under the treeline, its engines throttling back. They walked over to meet it.
‘They were extraordinarily numerous and long-lived,’ Eunice said as they picked their way through dry brush. ‘Sixteen thousand, and that’s not including all the copies and knock-offs. Even when they were old, you could strip out the avionics, put in new engines and begin again with a zero fatigue rating. Dakotas were still flying when I was a child.’
‘Did you like planes?’
‘Adored them.’ Eunice was stomping her merry way through thigh-high grass as if it wasn’t there at all. ‘Look at it this way. You’ve been born in a time when it’s possible to
The DC-3 sat tail-down at the end of the airstrip. It was quite astonishingly beautiful: a gorgeous sleek thing, as curvaceous and purposeful as a dolphin.
But, incongruously, there was no sign of a welcoming committee. A door had been opened and a set of steps lowered, but no one was standing at the top of those steps, beckoning him aboard.
‘Are you sure this is for you?’
‘I thought so,’ he said, but with ebbing confidence.
Yet what else could it be but the transport Truro had promised? Then he saw a neat little logo on the tail fin, a spiral galaxy painted green, the only marking anywhere on the highly reflective silver fuselage.
If that didn’t clinch it, nothing would.
They climbed aboard. It was cool inside, with seats and settees laid out lounge-fashion and a bar situated at the rear of the fuselage. The compartment ran all the way to the nose: there was no cockpit, no flight controls or
