Flying finish / Бурный финиш. Книга для чтения на английском языке

Saturday night I did my level best to be civil to Mother’s youngest female week-end guest, while avoiding all determined manoeuvres to leave me alone with her, and Sunday morning I slid away before dawn northwards to Lincolnshire.

Tom Wells was out on the apron when I arrived, giving his planes a personal check. He had assigned me, as I had learned on the telephone the previous morning, to fly three men to Glasgow for a round of golf. I was to take them in an Aztec and do exactly what they wanted. They were good customers. Tom didn’t want to lose them.

‘Good-morning, Harry,’ he said as I reached him. ‘I’ve given you Quebec Bravo. You planned your route?’

I nodded.

‘I’ve put scotch and champagne on board, in case they forget to bring any,’ he said. ‘You’re fetching them from Coventry – you know that – and taking them back there. They may keep you late at Gleneagles until after dinner.

I’m sorry about that.’

‘Expensive game of golf,’ I commented.

‘Hm,’ he said shortly. ‘That’s an alibi. They are three tycoons who like to compare notes in private[148]. They stipulate a pilot who won’t repeat what he hears, and I reckon you fit that bill, Harry my lad because you’ve been coming here for four years and if a word of gossip has passed your lips in that time I’m a second class gas fitter’s mate[149].’

‘Which you aren’t.’

‘Which I’m not.’ He smiled, a pleasant solid sturdy man of forty plus, a pilot himself who knew chartering backwards and ran his own little firm with the minimum of fuss. Ex-R.A.F., of course, as most flyers of his age were: trained on bombers, given a love for the air, and let down with a bang when the service chucked them out as redundant[150]. There were too many pilots chasing too few jobs in the post-war years, but Tom Wells had been good, persistent and lucky, and had converted a toe-hole copilot’s job in a minor private airline into a seat on the board, and finally, backed by a firm of light aircraft manufacturers, had started his present company on his own.

‘Give me a ring when you’re leaving Gleneagles,’ he said, ‘I’ll be up in the Tower myself when you come back.’

‘I’ll try not to keep you too late.’

‘You won’t be the last.’ He shook his head. ‘Joe Wilkins is fetching three couples from a weekend in Le Touquet. A dawn job[151], that’ll be, I shouldn’t wonder…’

I picked up the three impressive business men as scheduled and conveyed them to Scotland. On the way up they drank Tom Wells’ Black and White and talked about dividend equalisation reserves, unappropriated profits, and contingent liabilities: none of which I found in the least bit interesting. They moved on to exports and the opportunities available in the European market. There was some discussion about ‘whether the one and threequarters was any positive inducement,’ which was the only point of their conversation I really understood.

The one and three quarters, as I had learned at Anglia Bloodstock, was a percentage one could claim from the Government on anything one sold for export. The three tycoons were talking about machine tools and soft drinks, as far as I could gather, but the mechanism worked for bloodstock also. If a stud sold a horse abroad for say twenty thousand pounds, it received not only that sum from the buyer, but also one and three quarters per cent of it – three hundred and fifty pounds – from the Government. A carrot before the export donkey. A bonus. A pat on the head for helping the country’s economy. In effect, it did influence some studs to prefer foreign buyers. But racehorses were simple to export: they needed no after sales service, follow-up campaign or multi-lingual advertising, which the tycoons variously argued were or were not worth the trouble. Then they moved on to taxation and I lost them again[152], the more so as there were some lowish clouds ahead over the Cheviots and at their request I was flying them below three thousand feet so that they could see the countryside.

I went up above the cloud into the quadrantal system operating above three thousand feet, where to avoid collision one had to fly on a steady regulated level according to the direction one was heading: in our case, going northwest, four thousand five hundred or six thousand five hundred or eight thousand five hundred, and so on up.

One of the passengers commented on the climb and asked the reason for it, and wanted to know my name.

‘Grey.’

‘Well, Grey, where are we off to? Mars?’

I smiled. ‘High hills, low clouds.’

‘My God,’ said the weightiest and oldest tycoon, patting me heavily on the shoulder. ‘What wouldn’t I give for such succinctness in my boardroom.’