by Nevil Shute
I think I’m beginning to understand more about Bill. after eight years. This is what he was brought up in. This house and this view made him what he was. No wonder he was different to all the other Pongoes. One couldn’t help being different, living in a beautiful place like this, not as a passenger but doing a real job of work upon the land. Because it is a real job of work—it must be. Twenty-eight thousand sheep don’t just look after themselves and cut their own hair and send it to market for you.
I’ve got to start thinking of a different Bill, a Bill who was a part of Coombargana. I only knew him as a marine sergeant in a battledress. That wasn’t the real Bill at all; it was Bill in a disguise, and I never knew it though I should have done. The real Bill was a part of all this loveliness.
When I got to that point in her diary I couldn’t go on reading for a time. I got up from the table and made up the fire, and then I went over to the window and pulled the curtains aside. It was nearly four in the morning and the moon was setting; in little more than an hour it would be beginning to get light. I opened the window and the cool night air blew in around me; before me lay the paddocks misty by the river in the slanting, silvery light. I stood there thinking how right she had been, how well she had understood. Bill had been a part of all this loveliness.
Both Bill and I had spent our lives at Coombargana and at school till we had gone away to England before the war. We had never thought about our home much, except perhaps to grumble that it was too far away from city life. We had gone away to very distant places and Bill had not returned; I had travelled the world and I had come to realise, in faint surprise, that I had seen no countryside that could compare in pastoral beauty with that of my own home. It takes a long time for an Australian to accept the fact that the wide, bustling, sophisticated world of the northern hemisphere cannot compare with his own land in certain ways; I was nearly forty years old, and I was only now realising that by any standard of the wider world my own home was most beautiful.
Bill had been fortunate in being born and brought up here, as I had, though we never knew it. In her diary Janet had written that this house and this view had made Bill what he was. Perhaps she had got something there. In the dark night at Le Tirage, within a stone’s throw of the Germans, Bill had gone forward to attach the gadget to the German mines on the lock gates while Bert Finch stayed in support. Perhaps when he worked under water at the wires using up oxygen and so implementing his death, the British Navy had been cashing in on all that Coombargana had put into him throughout his childhood in the Western District.
I closed the window, searched for my pipe and my tobacco, and sat down to the diary again. After the first entries at Coombargana the diary became infrequent, as had happened several times before in the years since the war. I think that means she was contented, with an easy mind; she seems only to have written in it when she was troubled. An early entry, however, seems to be important.
September 13th. There are two photographs of Bill in her bedroom, one that I hadn’t seen before of him on a horse, I think by the stockyard here. He’s much younger in that one, probably only about fifteen or sixteen. The other is the rather stiff studio portrait he had done at Portsmouth that I didn’t like. I’ve got such a much better one in my case, but of course I daren’t put it up in my room here. I haven’t heard them say a word about Bill and I suppose that’s understandable because it’s eight years ago and everything there was to say must have been said. But they talk a lot about Alan.
Everybody here talks about Alan; he’s very much in everybody’s mind. Annie says something now and then, and Mrs. Drew was talking about him when I went to tea on Sunday, and the Colonel and Mrs. Duncan say something about him at practically every meal that I can’t help overhearing. They all hoped that he was coming home this spring but he’s staying in London for another year to get called to the Bar. There’s no sign of him getting married, but he does a lot of motor racing.
I think the fact of the matter is that they’re all a bit anxious. If he doesn’t come back to Coombargana the place will be sold on the Colonel’s death, and that means a tremendous upset for everyone connected with it. Annie has been here for forty years, and some of the men for over twenty. They’ve all got houses on the place and very good houses they are, too—all with electric light from the main generating plant and all with septic tanks. Apparently that’s much better than conditions usually are on these country properties. The Duncans have been very good employers. They pay a good bonus after each wool sale so that all the men have cars of some sort. I think that’s why they’re all so interested in Alan. They want to see him marry somebody and settle down here, and carry on the property.
October 26th. The weather has been lovely while the Colonel and Mrs. Duncan have been in Melbourne, warm sunny days, and not much wind. We’ve had Mrs. Plowden in to help us with the spring cleaning, and we’ve had all the windows open every day, letting the warm wind blow through the house. It’s been a lot of work but we’ve broken the back of it now. They’re coming home tomorrow.
Last night after supper we were sitting in the kitchen and Annie started talking about Alan again. She said it was a great trouble to his mother that he hadn’t married. She said they hoped that when he came home after the war he’d have taken to one of Helen’s friends, but he was very much put out with having lost his feet and didn’t seem to want to have anything to do with girls. They all said it was because he was crippled, but Annie herself always thought he’d got a girl in England he was thinking of. She said he never rested till he could get away and back to England, and she thought when he went that they’d have heard he was engaged to somebody in England within six months. But it didn’t happen. Gossip of the servants’ hall, of course.
I’m terribly sorry for Alan. He sounds rather a lonely person.
October 28th. They came back yesterday. I thought the Colonel was looking better for the change, but Mrs. Duncan not so good. Of course, staying in her club and going about shopping in Melbourne she can’t look after herself, and she told me this morning she’d had a great deal of pain while she was away, but it had been worth it. I persuaded her to stay in bed all day. This evening I asked her if she’d like me to bring the little table from the study in to her bedroom and lay the Colonel’s dinner there so that they could have it together. It’s got a good polish on it and it really looked quite nice with the silver and the dinner mats laid out on it just as we do it in the dining-room. It wasn’t much more trouble, either.
They had a letter from Alan today. He doesn’t write often enough.
There is no mention in the diary that she was pressing to move on to Adelaide, or any mention of another married couple. I think that she was happy in the queer position that she had made for herself at Coombargana, and content to stay on as a parlourmaid indefinitely. I think Dr. Ruttenberg in Seattle had probably summed her up correctly; she felt a great need to be of use to somebody, and this was satisfied for the time being. A significant entry when she had been at Coombargana for three months shows her developing relationship with my mother.
December 11th. The Colonel had to go to Ballarat this afternoon to speak at a dinner of the R.S.L.—I think that means the Returned Servicemen’s League but I’m not quite sure, so Mrs. Duncan had dinner by herself. When I took the coffee in to the drawing-room after dinner she was sitting at her desk turning over a lot of things she’d taken out of one of the little drawers at the side. I put the coffee down beside her on the desk and handed the sugar on the salver, and when she’d helped herself she picked up a photograph and showed it to me and said, “Jessie, that was my other boy, Willy.” It was a photograph of Bill, of course, standing by the front door with a shot gun and a dog probably when he was about eighteen years old. I couldn’t think of anything to say, and after a minute she told me, “That was taken just before he went away to England, just before the war. He was killed in 1944, doing something on the coast of Normandy just before the invasion.” I’d got a grip on myse
lf by that time, and I said, “I know, madam. Annie told me. He must have been a great loss to you.” She didn’t say anything for quite a time, and then she said, “Yes. Willy wasn’t clever like Alan. He was more of a home lover. If he’d lived I think that he’d have been the one to carry on this place, and Alan would have gone in to Parliament or else into the Department of External Affairs. Willy never wanted to do anything else but come back here and manage Coombargana.” I couldn’t stand it any longer, and I said, “Will that be all tonight, madam?” And she said, “Yes, thank you, Jessie. Good night.” I think I got out of the room without giving myself away to her, but I wouldn’t be so sure about Annie. She doesn’t miss much that goes on in Coombargana.
Another entry reads:
January 5th. We had awful fun today. I’m supposed to get one full day off a week and one half day, but I’ve never bothered much about them. I felt I wanted a bit of fresh air and a change though, and yesterday I asked Harry Drew if I could go out rabbiting with them. Old Jim Plowden is the King Rabbiter here and he looks after the rabbit pack, about thirty of the most ferocious mongrels you ever saw. He keeps going after the rabbits steadily all the time, but now they’re having a big drive to clean them up and they’ve got half the men on rabbiting. I drove out with them in the truck up to the hill that they call the Eight Hundred Acre. It’s got an awful lot of rabbits in it, or it had last week; I don’t think it’s got many now. They’ve been ripping up the warrens with sort of prongs that stick down into the ground behind the tractor and rip down about two feet deep, make an awful mess of the ground but make a mess of the rabbit holes too. Then they work the tractor backwards and forwards to stamp the earth in, and run a great big roller with a lot of things sticking out of it, a sheep’s foot roller they call it, run that over the lot.
Where the ground’s stony and they can’t do that they put in ferrets and chase them out and set the dogs on them as they come out, or shoot them. All the men were armed to the teeth with various sorts of cannon popping off in every direction and having a grand time. I asked Harry if I could have a go and he looked a bit doubtful and asked if I’d ever fired a shot gun, and I said I had, so he lent me his gun. I missed the first two, but then I got the hang of it and bowled over four rabbits in four shots—running, too. It’s only a question of laying off enough ahead of them and imagining a ring sight on the gun. The men were very impressed and wanted to know where I learned to shoot, but of course I didn’t tell them. We ran out of rabbits then, but on the way home they asked if I’d like a go with a .22 and I said I would. I think they wanted to see if the rabbits had been just a fluke. So they put up a beer bottle on a stone wall and gave me a little rifle and made me try it at about thirty yards. I was just below with the first shot but I got it the second time. I knew I could do it so I told them to put up three bottles in a row and I smashed them in three shots, rooty-toot-toot. I said, any time they wanted anything shot, just get a Pommie girl from England and she’d shoot it for them if they couldn’t. They thought that was a scream and laughed about it all the way home.
It was a lovely day. Harry let me clean the rifle when we got back to his house, and I had tea with them. He tried again to find out where I learned to shoot, but I wasn’t having any and dodged the question.
After that there are long gaps in the diary of five or six weeks at a time, and such entries as there are are not significant. She seemed to have settled in to the routine of washing and cleaning in the house, making the beds and serving the meals. Because neither of my parents are very good on stairs at their age she used to go down to the cellar for my father to fetch up the drinks, and she got to know what wine or cocktails they required when they had friends in the house, and how to serve them. I think her relations with my mother were always those of mistress and maid, but inevitably they became close friends. When the arthritis was painful she could do things for my mother that no one else could do and inevitably my mother talked to her freely about family affairs in the winter months, when few visitors came to the house and there was no other woman for my mother to talk to.
An entry early in the winter is important:
May 6th. It’s been bitterly cold today with a dark, leaden sky and a few flakes of snow. They say it’s too early for snow to lie, but outside it’s as cold as charity. They’ve got the heating going and the house is warm enough, but I got her to stay in bed till after lunch. I always thought Australia was a warm country, and it was hot enough here in the summer, but it’s good and bracing now.
They had great news today, because there was a long letter from Alan. He’s definitely coming home, and they’re so excited over it. He’s staying in England till September to get called to the Bar, but he’s booked a passage sailing from England on October the 5th, so he’ll be home at the beginning of November.
They’re both so happy today, and it was all round Coombargana by the evening. I asked the Colonel if he’d like me to get up a bottle of champagne for dinner and they had that, and Annie made a special effort over dinner for them with caviar to start with and mushrooms on toast to end up—there are a lot of mushrooms in the paddocks now and we can get a basket any time. They had music at dinner for a celebration. Alan’s been away five years, but from what they say he’s definitely coming home for good now, to get down to work and manage Coombargana. I’m so glad for them.
I’m glad for Alan, too. I haven’t seen his letter, of course, but she was talking about him this afternoon when I was helping her get up. She says he’s quite made up his mind now that his place is here and he doesn’t want to do any of the other things any more, like being a barrister or going into politics. He feels he ought to stay in England till September and finish off what he’s begun and get called to the Bar, but he feels that he’s too old to start in practice at the English Bar and he’s tired of being in England now and wants to come home and settle down. I suppose that was all in the letter. She was saying that he was so restless after the war and being crippled, but she thought he’d got it out of his system. She said she hoped he’d find some nice girl and get married.
It’s been a great day for them.
I’ll have to move on somewhere else before Alan gets home. He’d be bound to recognise me. I wouldn’t want to go much before November because I do think they need someone to look after them a bit, but when Alan gets home everything will be different; he’ll be able to do a lot of the things I do for them now. He’ll organise things for them, and he’ll be able to race around and get some decent servants in the house, not like that ghastly Polish couple that were here before. There won’t be any need for me when he comes home. I’ll aim to get away a week or two before he arrives.
I’ll have to go back to Seattle first, I think, to get hold of Aunt Ellen’s money. That should be settled up by now. After that, God knows. I would like to get back into the Wrens, if they’ll have me. If the armistice negotiations in Korea break down, and it looks as if they will, the war will all flare up again and everyone says it will be much worse than before, and there may be a full scale war breaking out between America and China, with Russia and England and everyone else joining in. If that happened they’d be bound to want all the Ordnance Wrens they could get hold of.
It’s going to be a bit of a wrench leaving this place.
She was to discover as the months went on that it wasn’t going to be so easy for her to leave Coombargana. She had made herself too much a part of it.
May 29th. She’s been talking for some time of getting Alan’s room ready for him, but it seemed a bit early to me. This morning she got up directly after breakfast and wanted to go upstairs, so I helped her with the stairs and then she made me go and get a pencil and paper and the tape measure and she got down to things. There are two big rooms there with a bathroom in between. Alan has got bits of aeroplane in it and some of his clothes there still in the wardrobes and chest of drawers, all put away with mothballs. She told me that the other room was Willy’s, but she’d refurnished it after
the war and now they use it as a spare guest room. I took a look in there this afternoon, but there’s nothing in it now to remind anyone of Bill. The view is practically the same as from my room.
She’s really going to town over Alan’s room. First of all she said it needed new curtains and she made me get the steps and measure up the pelmet and the curtains; she said when she was in Melbourne she’d seen some Italian material in Georges that she thought would do; it cost four pounds ten a yard but it would last a long time. She’ll need thirty-eight yards for the curtains. Then she said the carpet wouldn’t do at all; it was much too shabby, but it looked perfectly all right to me. There are two upholstered arm-chairs there and she wasn’t satisfied with those, so we’re going to get those downstairs and send them in to Ballarat on a truck to have loose covers made, two sets for each. She’s going to get the material for that in Melbourne, to go with the curtains. She wants a new bedspread and new shades on all the lamps. She’s going to have all the woodwork repainted and the bathroom repainted completely.
She wanted to re-paper Alan’s room, but I persuaded her not to. There’s nothing the matter with the paper and I thought it would make the room look so different for him. I said that half the fun of coming home was to come back to all the things you knew and you remembered, and if she did the wallpaper it would make it look like another room and he wouldn’t feel at home. She saw that in the end, and we agreed that the paint should be as much like the old paint as possible, so that the appearance of the room would be the same, but everything clean and nice. I said I’d get a loaf of stale bread and rub down the paper by the electric light switch at the door where it’s got a bit dirty. It’s good paper and I’m sure it’ll come up all right. She made me measure up the carpet, but she’ll have a job to get one big enough. It wants to be about twenty-five feet by twenty. She says that if she can’t find anything she likes she can get one made specially, in Bombay.