Trustee From the Toolroom Read Free Page A

international reply coupons, though.'
    'Do a lot of them come from foreign countries, then?'
    'About a third.'
    John Dermott went back to the bench and picked up the copper box. ' I'll take this along with me,' he said. He hesitated. 'You'll keep this under your hat?' he inquired diffidently. 'I mean, it's quite all right. They're just Jo's rings and bracelets and things - they're all her own property. But the regulations are so stupid about taking things like that out of England, and she'd be miserable without them. I mean, a woman sort of values her little bits and pieces when she's away in a strange country. And we may be away for years.'
    Keith said, 'Oh, that's all right. I shan't talk about it.' He paused, and then he asked, 'You're going to live out there?'
    ' I think so - if we like it. Jo says she wants to live in Tahiti, but I don't go much on that, myself. It's French, ; and it's a very little place, you know.^Still, she wants to see it. I think we'll probably end up in British Columbia - it's a grand country, that. I'd like to bay a house in Victoria, on Vancouver Island.'
    Keith nodded. He had only the vaguest idea where Vancouver Island was, but it was the sort of place that people like his brother-in-law who sailed about the world in little yachts would want to go to. 'Suppose I tell Katie that I'm going down to rig up an electric light over the compass, so you can see it at night?' he suggested.
    John Dermott smiled. 'That's just the thing.'
    They went up the narrow wooden basement stairs to the main floor and Keith went to wash the grime off his hands. When he rejoined them in the parlour his sister and her husband were standing, ready to leave, having pleaded a somewhat formalized dinner engagement to Katie. He , did not press them to stay for tea, because he had learned long ago that they pursued different meal habits. Katie and Keith had their main meal in the middle of the day. Their evening meal was high tea at six o'clock when Katie got back from work, a meal ,of perhaps a kipper, bread and jam, and a piece of plum cake, washed down with tea. They knew that Jo and John ate differently at eight o'clock, favouring perhaps potted shrimps followed by soup, a grilled steak, and mushrooms on toast, the meal preceded by a couple of gifts and followed by coffee. The couples got on well together, but they had long ago accepted differences springing from their ways of life.
    Jo and John Dermott called for Keith at about nine o'clock next morning, driving their vintage sports Bentley open four-seater, nearly thirty years old and with many prosecutions for noise and speeding to its credit. They loved it very dearly. Katie had already left for work, so she did not see the two small sacks that Keith put into the back compartment beside him, or she might have wondered why a small electric light required cement and sand. It was a warm summer morning in late July, and Keith enjoyed the drive through southern England. They got to Hamble on the creek that runs into the east side of Southampton Water, parked the car near the entrance to Luke's Yard, and carried the sacks out on to the long wooden walkways above the tidal mud, the yachts moored bows-on in tiers. Presently they came to the Dermotts' ship, Shearwater IV.
    Shearwater was a healthy looking, modern Bermudan cutter about twenty-eight feet on the waterline and nine feet beam. On deck she was practical and well equipped for deepsea cruising, the dinghy stowed upside down over the cabin skylight between the mast and the aft hatch, the twin spinnaker booms in chocks beside it. She had roller reefing to the mainsail and a very short bowsprit no more than four feet long for the jibstay. -Aft, she had a self-draining cockpit well protected by the vertical extensions of the cabin top, and a sail locker in her canoe stern. Below, she was conventional in her arrangement. A roomy forecastle served mainly as a sail store. Aft of that there was a washroom and toilet to