‘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.’

They were in good form, enjoying their day as well as making serious use of it. The smell of whisky in the warm luxurious little cabin overcame even that of hot oil, and the expensive cigar smoke swirled huskily in my throat. I enjoyed the journey, and for Tom’s sake as well as my own pride, knowing my passengers were connoisseurs of private air travel, put them down on the Gleneagles strip like a whisper on a lake[153].

They played golf and drank and ate; and repeated the programme in the afternoon. I walked on the hills in the morning, had lunch, and in the late afternoon booked a room in the hotel, and went to sleep. I guess it was a satisfactory day all round.

It was half past ten when the reception desk woke me by telephone and said my passengers were ready to leave, and eleven before we got away. I flew back on a double dogleg[154], making for the St. Abbs radio beacon on the Northumberland coast and setting a course of one sixty degrees south-south-east from there on a one five two nautical mile straight course to Ottringham, and then south-west across country to Coventry, coming in finally on their 122.70 homer signal.

The tycoons, replete, talked in mellow, rumbling, satisfied voices, no longer about business but about their own lives. The heaviest was having trouble over currency regulations with regard to a villa he had bought on the Costa del Sol: the government had slapped a two thousand pound ceiling on pleasure spending abroad[155], and two thousand would hardly buy the bath taps.

The man sitting directly behind me asked about decent yachts available for charter in the Aegean, and the other two told him. The third said it was really time his wife came back from Gstaad, she had been there for two months, and they were due to go to Nassau for Easter. They made me feel poverty-stricken[156], listening to them.

We landed safely at Coventry, where they shook my hand, yawning, thanked me for a smooth trip, and ambled off to a waiting Rolls, shivering in the chilly air. I made the last small hop back to Fenland and found Tom, as good as his word, on duty in the control tower to help me down. He yelled out of the window to join him, and we drank coffee out of a thermos jug while he waited for his Le Touquet plane to come back. It was due in an hour: earlier than expected. Apparently the client had struck a losing streak[157] and the party had fizzled out.

‘Everything go all right with your lot?’ Tom said.

‘They seemed happy,’ I nodded, filling in the flight details on his record chart and copying them into my own log book.

‘I suppose you want your fee in flying hours, as usual?’

I grinned. ‘How did you guess?’

‘I wish you’d change your mind and work for me permanently.’

I put down the pen and stretched, lolling back on the wooden chair with my hands laced behind my head. ‘Not yet. Give it three or four years; perhaps then.’

‘I need you now.’

Need. The word was sweet. ‘I don’t know. I’ll think it over again, anyway.’

‘Well, that’s something I suppose.’ He rufled his thinning light brown hair and rubbed his hands down over his face, his skin itching with tiredness. ‘Sandwich?’

‘Thanks.’ I took one. Ham, with French mustard, made in their bungalow by Tom’s capable wife Janie, not from the airport canteen. The ham was thick and juicy, home cooked in beer. We ate in silence and drank the hot strong coffee. Outside the glass-walled high up square room the sky grew a thick matt black, with clouds drifting in to mask the stars. The wind was slowly backing, the atmospheric pressure falling. It was getting steadily colder.

Bad weather on its way.

Tom checked his instruments, frowned, leaned back on his chair and twiddled his pencil. ‘The forecast was right,’ he said gloomily, ‘snow tomorrow.’

I grunted sympathetically. Snow grounded his planes and caused a hiatus in his income.

‘Have to expect it in February, I suppose,’ he sighed.

I nodded in agreement. I wondered if Stratford races would be snowed off[158] on Thursday. I wondered if weather interfered much with Yardman’s trips. I reflected that Janie Wells made good coffee, and that Tom was a sound sensible man. Untroubled, organised surface thoughts. And it was the last night I ever spent in my calm emotional deepfreeze.

The sky was a sullen orange-grey when we took off at eight the next morning from Gatwick, the as yet unshed snow hanging heavily as spawn in a frog’s belly. We were carrying eight brood mares in an old unpressurised D.C.4, flying away from the incoming storm, en route to Milan. Timmie and Conker were back, to my relief, but neither had had a scintillating holiday, by the sound of it[159]. I overheard Conker, a much harassed small father of seven large hooligans, complaining as he loaded the cargo that he’d done nothing but cook and wash up while his wife curled up in bed with what was, in his opinion, opportunist malingering influenza. Timmie showed his sympathy in his usual way: a hearty gear-changing sniff. A thick-set black-haired square little Welshman, he suffered from interminable catarrh and everyone around him suffered also. It had been his sinuses, he unrepentantly said after one particularly repulsive spitting session, which had stopped him going down the mines like his pa. The February holiday, Timmie agreed, was not much cop[160].

‘How many holidays do you have?’ I asked, fixing chains.

‘A week off every two months,’ Conker said. ‘Blimey mate, don’t tell me you took this job without asking that.’

‘I’m afraid I did.’

‘You’ll be exploited,’ Conker said seriously. ‘When you start a job, you want your terms cut and dried[161], wages, overtime, holidays with pay, bonuses, superannuation, the lot. If you don’t stand up for your rights, no one else will, there isn’t a union for us, you know, bar the agricultural workers, if you care for that which I don’t. And old Yardman, he don’t give nothing away you know. You want to make sure about your weeks off, mate, or you won’t get any. I’m telling you.[162]’

‘Well, thank you, I’ll ask him.’

‘Aw, look man,’ said Timmie in his soft Welsh voice, ‘We get other times off too. You don’t want to work yourself to death. Mr Yardman don’t hold you to more than two trips a week, I’ll say that for him. If you don’t want to go, that is.’

‘I see,’ I said. ‘And if you don’t go, Billy and Alf do?’

‘That’s about it,’ agreed Conker. ‘I reckon.’ He fitted the last lynch pin on the last box and rubbed his hands down the sides of his trousers.

I remembered Simon saying that my predecessor Peters had been a belligerent stand-on-your-rights man, and I supposed that Conker had caught his antiexploitation attitude from him, because it seemed to me, from what they’d said, that Conker and Timmie both had free time positively lavished upon them. A day’s return trip certainly meant working a continuous stretch of twelve hours or more, but two of those in seven days wasn’t exactly penal servitude[163]. Out of interest I had added up my hours on duty some weeks, and even at the most they had never touched forty. They just don’t know when they are well off, I thought mildly, and signalled to the airport staff to take the ramp away.