In the Wet by Nevil Shute Page A

credible that his father had been a stockman or a drover, as it was incredible that he had married a girl from Oxford. I would remember the addressthat he had given me at Canberra, but it was most unlikely that he had a wife and family living there. And then I thought, it really didn’t matter. I could find out about him from the Post Office, because he drew a pension once a month. Some Government office would have most of the particulars of his life; indeed, Sergeant Donovan probably knew a good deal about him. I should only have to ask the sergeant.
    “I’m sick, aren’t I?” he asked. “On Dorset Downs, up in the Gulf Country?”
    “That’s right,” I repeated. “We’ll get you into hospital tomorrow.”
    “There’s one thing you can do, cobber,” he muttered. I bent to catch his words. He said, “Send a telegram to Rosemary at Letchworth. Air Vice-Marshall Watkins. Got that, cobber? Air Vice-Marshal Watkins. Say to see Air Vice-Marshal Watkins, ’n the R.A.A.F. ’ll fly her up to Group at Invergarry, ’n she can come on in one of them helicopters.”
    It was all delusions, of course, a hotchpotch of war memories. Invergarry was real enough. It was a bomber station in the second war, from which the Liberators had flown against the Japanese in Timor and New Guinea. I knew it as two vast bitumen runways in the bush, that would endure for ever. No aeroplane had landed there since 1946, except perhaps the ambulance to take away some injured stockman. There were no buildings there, no installations, and no people; nothing but wild pigs and wallabies.
    “I’ll see to that in the morning,” I said quietly. “Now try and get some sleep.”
    It seemed to me that he stirred restlessly in the darkness. “I got to get in touch with Rosemary,” he muttered, and it seemed to me that he was sobbing. “I got to get toher. This ain’t real. She’ll get me out o’ this.…”
    There was nothing I could do for him. I sat holding his hand, and listening to him sobbing in the darkness. Death sometimes comes in very distressing forms. After a time I asked him, “If you can’t sleep, shall I ask Liang Shih to make you another pipe?” I knew that Sister Finlay would allow it, if it would give him rest.
    “I don’t smoke a pipe,” he muttered. “Never did. I
got
to get to Rosemary.”
    He lay twisting and turning on the bed in his delirium, so far as the paralysis would allow. I had a raging thirst; half in a dream I got up and went to the table—I think—and took a long drink of the muddy water. As I moved across the room I seemed to be gliding in mid air; I could not feel my feet upon the ground or hear my movements, and when I picked up the glass I could not feel it in my hands. I was intolerably hot and my body was streaming sweat; my clothes were drenched, and sticking to me with each movement, and I could not think very clearly. After I had had the drink I went fumbling around to try and find my torch, because I wanted to switch it on, to look at Stevie lying on the bed. In my feverish state I had a strange thought that it wasn’t Stevie who was talking, and though with my intellect I knew this to be nonsense I wanted to switch on the torch and look at the old man. But I couldn’t find the torch, and then it didn’t seem to be important any longer, and I went back to the chair and sat down again, holding his limp hand.
    He was still restless, muttering something incoherent. I bent to hear what he was saying but I could make no sense of it, though I heard the name Rosemary again. I straightened up wearily and sat there in a daze. His insistence on the name worried me. It was just possible that some part of all this rigmarole was true, and that he reallyhad a wife called Rosemary who had been born in England. My lips were thick and dry again in spite of the drink that I had taken, too parched to speak, but I managed to ask him somehow, “How did you come to meet Rosemary?”
    The drumming of the rain