Читать книгу Glory Boys - Harry Bingham - Страница 37

You want to check a person out? Start from the air. From up there, you see the whole thing for what it is: for better or for worse.

And Abe saw. From two thousand feet and travelling at a hundred and fifty miles an hour, he saw. He saw Pen Hamilton’s home: a vast white house, maybe twenty bedrooms, maybe forty. Plus there were a number of cottages sprinkled around the grounds. And stable blocks. And servants’ quarters. And English-style lawns and rose gardens. And well-established stands of timber. And a lake, artificial but beautiful. And thousands of acres of plantation land. And, of course, an airfield, Pen’s own private paradise.

‘Jesus Christ!’

Abe didn’t actually speak the words, but he certainly mouthed them. Although it was early, Abe had intended to land the plane, clean up, then go up to the house, to say ‘hi’. But plans change.

A bunch of roses lay squashed in the racer’s cramped cockpit. The blooms were pale pink and had looked nice in the florist’s shop, only when he had been in the florist’s shop, he hadn’t seen the one acre rose garden or the glittering curves of glasshouses beyond.

His face moved in a hard-to-interpret expression. Regret? Uncertainty? Loneliness? Even fear? Abe let the plane fly itself, letting the perfectly tuned controls find their own balance, and looked at the roses. The colours were pretty, but an open-air cockpit is a tough place for roses. The blooms weren’t at their best and there was already a scatter of petals on the cockpit floor.

Abe’s face moved again: the same expression as before, only stronger. He took the flowers and held them out of the cockpit. As he did so, he slammed the throttle open and the control stick down. The hundred-and-fifty-mile-an-hour wind rose into a two-hundred-and-forty-mile-an-hour roar. The wind took one look at the roses, then tore their pretty pink heads off. The leaves snickered, then shredded. Abe levelled off. The roses were now just green sticks dotted with thorns.

He felt a stab of regret. Maybe if he had the last minute over again he wouldn’t have done it. But maybe he would. And minutes never come again. He glanced out of the cockpit and threw the sticks away.

Some people have money. Some people have none. The two sorts of people sometimes look like they live in the same place, but they don’t. They live in different countries, different planets.