Home is Goodbye by Isobel Chace Page B

at her with an anxious expression in his eyes.
    ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
    She nodded. She would have liked to reassure him verbally, but it had suddenly come to her that they were soon to leave the ground in this oppressive little box and she was more frightened than she had ever been in her whole life.
    John began to check the instruments and the little propeller sprang into life. Sara could feel her body tensing, until her muscles were so taut that she could scarcely breathe. She clenched her teeth, for she knew that if she didn’t she would scream to them to let her out. She put her hands on the back of Matt’s seat and held on with everything she had.
    The aeroplane moved forward and the worst was over. She was surprised to find one of Matt’s hands covering the two of hers. He grinned at her and she smiled back, wondering at the little green flecks in his eyes that she had never noticed before.
    ‘Are you okay at the back?’ John sang out. ‘Look down below! Your last glimpse of Sonjo!’
    Obediently she looked out of the window at the fortified village beneath them. It was probably the last time she would ever see it and she felt quite sentimental about it.
    ‘How long will it take us to get home?’ she asked.
    John screwed round to look at her.
    ‘What?’ he shouted.
    She screamed her question into his ear, feeling rather foolish. John gave Matt a look of inquiry.
    ‘You’d better put me down with the Auster,’ he shouted back. ‘If you’ll fly out the spare I need, we should get her fixed up pretty quickly and I’ll fly her back to Kwaheri tonight.’
    ‘No!’ Sara exclaimed before she could stop herself. Somehow she h ad to prevent Matt from doing any such thing.
    He gave her a quizzical look.
    ‘What would you have me do? Fly out the whole maintenance staff?’
    ‘Yes, I would. What’s so wrong with that? It might crash again!’
    Matt’s face softened. He was secretly rather touched by her dismayed expression and her worried, anxious eyes.
    ‘It’ll be all right,’ he assured her. ‘I can’t leave it out here, we need it on the estate.’
    ‘And you’re not?’ she demanded, throwing any caution to the winds.
    ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that!’ he teased her.
    Her mouth set in a mutinous line. ‘Then I’ll stay with you,’ she said. ‘We can fly back together. After all, we began the whole thing together, and we’ll finish together.’
    He was unexpectedly gentle in his reply.
    ‘I think you’d better get home to bed,’ he told her. ‘You won’t be feeling up to much for some time to come. I won’t crash the plane again, you can be sure of that!’
    ‘But—’ she began.
    ‘You are the most argumentative female I’ve ever met!’ he exploded. ‘You’ll go back with John and do as you’re told for once!’
    He turned round in his seat so that all she could see of him was the uncompromising rear of his head. Her own was now aching worse than ever and she wished herself anywhere but in the confined space of the cockpit. She was afraid too, deep down inside her. She began to wonder whether she would ever be able to travel in complete comfort again. The funny thing was that she wa s sure she would be safer if it was Matt’s hands that guided the craft, and Matt’s voice that checked their position at intervals over the radio. John Halliday sat at the controls with a negligent ease that spoke of hours of experience, but Matt had flown with that quiet competence that characterized all his actions. He had not been stiff or uneasy, but he had looked ready for an emergency, whereas such things obviously never entered John’s horizons, even as possibilities!
    Soon, she thought, she would be back at Kwaheri, and tomorrow she would be a nurse again at the little hospital that was already familiar to her. She would be in her own element again and out of this strange world that churned her into little pieces. The queue of out-patients would be there waiting for her and she