Night Over Water - Ken Follett [75]
Nancy was agitated. What was happening? Was the problem serious or not? She wished she could just see his face, but it remained resolutely turned forward.
The engine sound was no longer constant. Sometimes it seemed to recover to its previous full-throated roar; then it would quaver again and become uneven. Scared, Nancy peered forward, trying to discern some change in the spin of the propeller, but she could see none. However, each time the engine stuttered the plane lost a little height.
She could not stand the tension any longer. She unbuckled her safety belt, leaned forward and tapped Lovesey’s shoulder. He turned his head to one side and she shouted in his ear: “What’s wrong?”
“Don’t know!” he yelled back.
She was too frightened to accept that. “What’s happening?” she persisted.
“Engine’s missing on one cylinder, I think.”
“Well, how many cylinders has it got?”
“Four.”
The plane suddenly lurched lower. Nancy hastily sat back and buckled up. She was a car driver, and she had a notion that a car could keep going with one cylinder missing. However, her Cadillac had twelve of them. Could a plane fly on three out of four cylinders? The uncertainty was torture.
They were losing height steadily now. Nancy guessed the plane could fly on three cylinders, but not for long. How soon would they fall into the sea? She gazed into the distance and, to her relief, saw land ahead. Unable to restrain herself, she undid her belt and spoke to Lovesey again. “Can we reach the land?”
“Don’t know!” he shouted.
“You don’t know anything!” she yelled. Fear turned her shout into a scream. She forced herself to be calm again. “What’s your best estimate?”
“Shut your mouth and let me concentrate!”
She sat back again. I may die now, she thought; and once again she fought down the panic and made herself think calmly. It’s lucky I raised my boys before this happened, she told herself. It will be hard for them, especially after losing their father in a car crash. But they’re men, big and strong, and they’ll never lack for money. They’ll be okay.
I wish I’d had another lover. It’s been ... how long? Ten years! No wonder I’m getting used to it. I might as well be a nun. I should have gone to bed with Nat Ridgeway: he would have been nice.
She had had a couple of dates with a new man, just before leaving for Europe, an unmarried accountant of about her own age; but she did not wish she had gone to bed with him. He was kind but weak, like too many of the men she met. They saw her as strong and they wanted her to take care of them. But I want someone to take care of me! she thought.
If I survive this, I’m going to make damn sure I have one more lover before I die.
Peter would win now, she realized. That was a damn shame. The business was all that was left of their father, and now it would be absorbed and disappear into the amorphous mass of General Textiles. Pa had worked hard all his life to build that company and Peter had destroyed it in five idle, selfish years.
Sometimes she still missed her father. He had been such a clever man. When there was a problem, whether it was a major business crisis such as the Depression or a little family matter like one of the boys doing poorly at school, Pa would come up with a positive, hopeful way of dealing with it. He had been very good with mechanical things, and the people who manufactured the big machines used in shoemaking would often consult him before finalizing a design. Nancy understood the production process perfectly well, but her expertise was in predicting what styles the market wanted, and since she took over the factory Black’s had made more profits from women’s shoes than from men’s. She never felt overshadowed by her father, the way Peter did; she just missed him.
Suddenly the thought that she would die seemed ridiculous and unreal. It would be like the curtain coming down before the play ended, when the leading actor was in the middle of a speech: that was simply not how things happened. For a while she felt irrationally cheerful,