by Nevil Shute
That happened to me again that evening as I bathed before dressing for dinner. Bill was still a very real person in my life, though ten years had gone by since I had met him last, at Lymington in Hampshire, and sixteen years since we had shared that bathroom. One does not easily forget one’s only brother.
As I sat in the bath thinking of these things and enjoying the benison of hot water after days spent in the aeroplane and in the Sydney hotel, I felt a little lonely up there on the first floor by myself. I was not quite alone, of course. Beyond the stairs and the gallery that overlooked the big central hall of the house lay the servants’ wing over the kitchen quarters, their bedrooms separated from those of the main house by a swing door. There were four servants’ bedrooms there, relic of the days of more plentiful domestic service, and in one of these Annie, our old cook, would be sleeping that night. In another, the house parlourmaid would be sleeping now.
I had not drawn the curtains, and there was still a little light outside as I dressed before the fire. I stood for a few minutes looking out in the last of the light before turning to the mirror to tie my tie. Below me the wide lawns ran down to the river, with the formal flower gardens upon the right and the screen of oaks, gums, wattles, and pines upon the left that hid the station buildings. Beyond the river our pastures stretched over and beyond the rise a couple of miles away, and far on the horizon the long ridge of the Grampians stood black against the last of the sunset light. There was contentment here, with no war and no threat of war, no aircraft, no tanks, and no soldiers. This was a place to which a man might come when he had had the great world and its alarms, to do a good job in peace. Some day a war might come again and I would have to leave my peace and go and do my stuff as my father had before me, but for the moment I was glad to be out of it all and back at Coombargana as a grazier.
I finished dressing and went down to the drawing-room. My father and mother were both there waiting for me and wanting to know if everything in my room had been all right. “Fine,” I said. “I might have walked out yesterday instead of five years ago,” and I laughed. Actually, in five years one changes and there were things in that room that I would alter as soon as I could. There were things there that I now had no need of, like the stick from my crashed Typhoon, or the compass from the first Me.109 I got, over Wittering. These things had solaced me in 1946, but that was eight years ago; I did not need them now, and they were better out of the way.
I had another pink gin with my father, and then dinner was announced. Mrs. Plowden put her head in at the door. She was untidy as ever with a wisp of grey hair falling down over her face; her sleeves were rolled to the elbow and she wore a coarse apron of hessian. She said brightly, “It’s all in, on the table, Mrs. Duncan.” My mother thanked her, and she withdrew.
I saw my mother glance at my father, and caught his glance in return. Things must have been different in the days of the parlourmaid, and they had to adjust themselves to new ways and new manners.
We went into the dining-room. To me the bare, polished table with the lace mats and the silver was well laid, but to my mother everything was in the wrong place and she hobbled about, rearranging salt cellars and wine glasses, moving dishes from the table to the sideboard, till the arrangement was as she was used to having it. “I’m afraid everything’s a bit higgledy-piggledy tonight, Alan,” she said. “We’ll get things organised in a few days.”
I said, “It looks all right to me, Mum.”
She said quietly, “I suppose the fact of the matter is that we’ve been spoiled for the last year or so. I’d almost forgotten what it was to have to train somebody to do things nicely.”
“She was good, was she?”
My mother said, “She was an educated girl, so one only had to show her how to do a thing once. I think she must have come from a good home, where they lived nicely.”
My father said, “She used to work the radiogram.”
“The radiogram?”
My mother said, “Whenever your father and I had a little celebration here, on my birthday, or when we heard about the wool sale, we used to have a bottle of champagne with dinner, and music. Your father would put on a long-playing record in the drawing-room, Oklahoma or South Pacific or something nice like that, and we’d leave the doors open so that we had music during dinner. And then we found that Jessie knew how to change the record, and she knew most of the records that we liked, so after that we didn’t have to bother.”
“She got to know our ways,” my father said. He turned to my mother. “Remember when we heard Alan was coming home? She finished handing the entrée and asked if she should put on a record.”
My mother nodded. “It will be a very long time before we find another girl like Jessie.”
We seemed to have drifted back on to the difficult subject. I cast about hurriedly for something fresh to tell my mother that would take her mind off the dead parlourmaid, but I seemed to have told her most of the things already. The thought of Bill came into my mind and the new details I had learned about his death, but I rejected this hurriedly as a subject that had better wait for another time. My journey home was something that I had not told her of, that might amuse and interest her and take her mind off the more sombre topic. “I stayed four or five days in New York,” I said. “It’s a stimulating place, but I don’t know that I’d like to work there.”
My father played up, sensing the move. “What’s it really like?” he asked. “Is it like you’d think it was from the movies?”
“I suppose it is, physically,” I said. “You know more or less what it’s going to look like before you get there. But as regards the people, I’ve never yet met an American that was much like the people that you see upon the movies, and I didn’t this time. I suppose there are Americans like that.”
My mother said, “They probably exaggerate their own types, Alan, when they put them on the stage or on the screen. We do that, too. All countries do it. You don’t often meet people who behave like people on the stage.”
My father carried on the steering of the conversation. “I suppose they have to make them larger than life on the screen, in all their characteristics. Did you go to Los Angeles?”
“No,” I said. “I spent a few days with a chap in San Francisco.” I carried on talking about the United States, and the topic lasted us all through dinner. My parents eat little at their age, but what little they do eat they like to be good, and I think Annie our old cook had made a special effort, though I can only remember the fresh asparagus from the garden and the jugged hare. I pleased my mother by appreciating the dinner, and promised her that I would speak to Annie about it. They had put a good deal of thought into getting together the dishes that I would like best. My father opened a particularly good bottle of Burgundy from somewhere on the Hunter River, and a glass of vintage port from South Australia served with the dessert was really very like the real thing.
We went through to the drawing-room after dinner. My parents had always gone early to bed; one does so in the country where it is usual to be up and about the property at seven in the morning to keep the men from getting slack. Since his operation my father had been ordered to bed at nine o’clock by his doctor, and with the increasing infirmity of my mother they had both got into the habit of retiring about that time, though I think they usually read in bed for an hour or so before sleep. When I had lived at home before, after the war, I had frequently played a game of chess with my mother after dinner; I had not played since then and I had all but forgotten the moves, but now to take her mind off our troubles I suggested we might have a game to celebrate my return. She was pleased at the idea though she had played very little in my absence, so I brought up the inlaid chess table that they had bought in Paris before the war and that had once stood in some chateau or other in Touraine, and now stood in somewhat similar surroundings in the Western District, and found the box that contained the eighteenth-century carved ivory chessmen, and set them up by my mother’s chair before the fire.
We played two games and then it was half past nine and time for them to be in bed.
I put the things away and helped my mother up out of her chair. “It seems terribly early to be going to bed on your first evening,” she said. “I feel rather badly about it, Alan, but it’s what Dr. Stanley says we’ve got to do, especially because your father gets up so early.”
My father said, “Help yourself to a whisky, Alan. And there’s the paper here.”
I smiled. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll probably take to going off early myself in a few days, and getting up early. It’s the best way in the country.”
I walked with my mother as she hobbled slowly to the door and opened it for her. In the hall as we walked together to her room she said, “It is good to have you home again, Alan. You don’t know how we’ve been looking forward to you coming.” She paused, and then she said, “It’s really getting too much for your father now. And then this trouble …”
“Don’t worry about that, Mum,” I said. “It’ll all be over in a few days now.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” she said quietly. She hobbled on a step or two, and then she said, “She must have been so terribly unhappy, to take her own life, and I had no idea of it. If she was unhappy, I should have known about it, and I didn’t. I feel that I must be very much to blame, as if I’ve failed in some way, or made her unhappy without any idea that I was doing it. And I just can’t imagine what it was I did …”
“Don’t worry about it, Mother,” I repeated. “It’s nothing to do with you. We all think it was an accident.”
“Perhaps it was. But I wish I could really think so.”
We reached her door. “Good night, Mother,” and I kissed her.
She held me for a moment. “Good night, son. I am so very, very glad you’re home.”
When my father and mother had gone to bed I went back to the drawing-room and stood for a moment before the fire, deep in thought. This matter of the parlourmaid was evidently worrying my mother very much indeed, and the more I thought about it the more inexplicable it seemed. I could not accept the idea that my mother had made the girl unhappy. Invalids, of course, are frequently bad-tempered and querulous. I had been away for five years and I felt able to regard my mother objectively; she had never seemed to me to be bad-tempered and she did not seem so now. Whatever the reasons had been that had made the girl take her own life, I was quite sure it was not that. Yet it had been deliberate, or she would not have destroyed her documents and letters. I wondered what she had done with them.
The thought of murder crossed my mind, of course, and I put it out of my head. We read too many detective stories, which set one off upon the most unlikely trains of thought. Nothing suggested any conceivable motive for murder in this instance, nor any possibility of it in Coombargana House.
Annie might know something that she had not told my parents, and it was time that I saw Annie anyway. Annie had been at Coombargana before I was born. She came from some village near Peterhead in Scotland, and as a young girl she had worked in the fishing, gutting and packing herrings on the quays. I think my grandfather knew her father, old McConchie, as a boy, or perhaps he met him when he went home in 1895. In any case, Annie came out with her brother James to work for my grandfather in 1908 or 1910, when she was probably about twenty years of age. James was still working as a stockman with us when I was a child and Annie was the kitchen maid, but James left us in 1920 and took up a property near Mortlake, helped by a bank guarantee from my grandfather. He and Annie, being Scots, lived frugally and saved every penny that came into their hands, with the result that in the depression of the ’thirties, when everyone was going broke and all the properties were coming under the hammer at a knockdown price, the McConchies were prudently buying land. Jim McConchie has a property of two thousand acres over by Mortlake now where he runs Merinoes and a stud of Angus cattle; he makes a trip back home every two or three years to buy stud beasts and last year he paid three thousand five hundred pounds for an Angus bull at the Royal Agricultural Show. Annie still works for us in Coombargana House; she never married and would scorn to live on James, though she is very proud of his success.
I wondered if Annie was still up. I left the drawing-room and went through the dining-room; the light was still on in the kitchen. I opened the swing door and there she was, standing by the table.
“Evening, Annie,” I said. “How are you today?” She was not much changed, a little smaller perhaps, and the grey hair a little thinner.
“I’m fine,” she said. “How have you been keeping? It’s good to see you home again, Mr. Alan.”
“I’m very well,” I said. “Very glad to be home.”
“Aye,” she said. “There’s no doubt about it, your own place is the best. How do you find your father and mother, Mr. Alan?”
“Not too good,” I said. “It’s time I came home. I didn’t realise that they were getting so old.”
“Ah well,” she said, “we none of us get any younger.”
“You haven’t changed a lot,” I said.
“I keep pretty fair,” she said. “I get the rheumatism now and then, but I keep pretty fair.”
“I think this trouble today may have upset my mother,” I remarked.
“Aye,” she said. “It’s a great shock to the lady when a thing like that happens in the house.”
I leaned back against the bright steel sink. “I don’t understand why she did it,” I remarked. “Was she unhappy, do you think?”
“I would not say so,” she replied. “Very quiet she was, these last two or three days. But then, she was always quiet.”
I cast about for some clue. “Was she sulky?”
She shook her head. “She was not. She was very even-tempered, very easy to get on with, but she never talked about herself. We got on fine, because maybe I’m a bit that way. I never sought to pry into her business, nor she into mine.”
“Do you know if she was in the habit of taking things to make her sleep?” I asked. “Was she a girl who took a lot of medicines?”
She shook her head. “There’s a bottle of Eno’s Fruit Salts on her washstand, and a tube of Veganin. Then there was the bottle by her bedside, that the doctor took away.”
“You don’t know what those sleeping tablets were?”
“I do not, Mr. Alan.”
“And there were no letters or papers in her room?”
“Not a scrap. There was nothing written at all, saving one or two books from the house.”
I glanced at her. “That’s very extraordinary, because she must have had some papers. She must have had a passport to come from England. What’s happened to that?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe she got rid of everything when she decided to make an end to herself.”
“You think she did decide to do it, Annie? You don’t think it was an accident?”
“It’s not for me to say, Mr. Alan. But if it was an accident there would be some papers or letters of some kind, I would think.”
I thought for a minute. “Where could she have burnt things?”
“In the coke boiler, out behind,” she said. She meant the central heating boiler. “She could have burned them there.”
“Without anybody knowing?”
“Oh, aye. It gets made up in the morning, and at midday, and at night, but in between times nobody goes there.”
I glanced at the slow-burning cooking stove. “Not here?”
She shook her head. “I tend this myself, and I would soon have known if there was any paper. I would not think that she burned anything here.”
I stood in silence for a time, thinking over this conundrum. Then I looked at her. “Is there really nothing, nothing at all amongst her things, to tell us who she was? No ornaments, or lockets … anything?”
She shook her head. “Would you like to have a look inside her room, Mr. Alan?”
I hesitated, reluctant. It seemed an invasion of the dead girl’s privacy to go into her room to try
to find out things she evidently preferred to keep from us. Yet other people had already done so; my father had certainly been there, and perhaps my mother. The police had been there, turning over with unaccustomed hands the underclothing and the dresses. It was doubtful if I could add anything to what had already been done and I didn’t want to go, yet to refuse had something of an element of cowardice attached to it.
“She’s up there, is she?” I asked.
“Aye, she’s lying there,” she said. “Covered over with the sheet.” She glanced at me, remembering perhaps the little boy that had been running about Coombargana House when she was a young woman. “There’s nothing to be feared of, Mr. Alan.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s a bad thing to intrude unless you’ve got some very good reason. But I think perhaps I ought to have a look.”
“I’ll come up with you,” she said.
She motioned me to go before her, but I told her to lead the way and we went out to the back lobby and up the bare, scrubbed back stairs to the servants’ bedrooms. There was a short corridor ending in the swing door to the main house near my own bedroom, and there were two rooms on each side of this short corridor. I was not very familiar with this part of the house, though I had been in it as a child.
Annie led the way to the second door on the left. I checked her before she opened the door. “This is her room?”
She nodded.
“Which room do you sleep in?” I asked.
“In there, Mr. Alan.” She indicated the next room on the same side. “The mistress, she said to use these rooms because they have the better light and view. The others are a wee bit dark.” I nodded; the two rooms they occupied looked out in the same direction as my own, and shared the same view over the property towards the Grampians. In the house Bill’s room and the bathroom lay between my own room and that of the dead girl.