by Nevil Shute
“She’s not married?”
“Who? Elsie Peters?”
“That’s the one who works at Manning Cooper, is it?”
“No, she’s not married. Got to be a charge hand now, with a lot of girls under her.”
When he had moved on Jean asked the pilot, “Who was that?”
“Him? Ted Horner. He runs the garage here.” She noted the name for future reference.
They flew on to Cairns early the next morning; she drove into the town and went to the Strand Hotel. Cairns, she found, was a prosperous town of about twenty thousand people, situated rather beautifully on an inlet of the sea. There were several streets of shops, wide avenues with flower beds down the middle of the road; the buildings were all wood and most had iron roofs. It looked rather like the cinema pictures she had seen of American towns in the deep south, with its wide board sidewalks shaded by verandas to enable you to look into the shop windows in the shade, but it was almost aggressively English in its loyalties. She liked Cairns from the start.
She wrote to me from there. She had written to me twice from Willstown, and at the Strand Hotel she found a letter from me waiting for her that had been there for some days, on account of her delays. She wrote,
Strand Hotel,
Cairns,
North Queensland.
My dear Noel,
I got your letter of the 24th when I arrived here yesterday, and you will have got my two from Willstown by this time. I wish I had a typewriter because this is going to be a long letter. I think I’ll have to get a portable soon in order to keep copies of my letters — not to you, but I’m getting involved a bit in business out here.
First of all, thank you so very much for telling me what you did about Joe Harman. You’ve evidently been very nice to him and, as you know, that’s being nice to me. I can’t get over what you say about him rushing off to England and spending all that money, just to see me again. But people out here are like that, I think. I could say an awful lot of rude things about Australians by this time, but I can say this, too. The people that I’ve met in the outback have all been like Joe Harman, very simple, very genuine, and very true.
And now, about Willstown. I don’t know if Joe Harman will still be so keen on marrying me when he sees me; six years is a long time, and people change. I don’t know if I’ll be keen on marrying him. But if we were to want to marry, what he told you about Willstown is absolutely right.
It’s just terrible there, Noel. There are some places in the outback where one could live a full and happy life. Alice Springs is a grand little town. But Willstown’s not one of them. Noel, it’s absolutely the bottom. There’s nothing for a woman there at all except the wash-tub. I know that one ought to be able to get along without such things as radio and lipstick and ice-cream and pretty clothes. I think I can get along all right without them — I did in Malaya. But when it comes to no fresh milk and no fresh vegetables or fruit, it’s a bit thick. I think that what Joe told you was absolutely right. I don’t think any girl could come straight out from England and live happily in Willstown. I don’t think I could.
And yet, Noel, I wouldn’t want to see Joe try and change his way of life. He’s a first-class station manager, and he’ll do very well. I asked all sorts of people about the way Midhurst is run, and it’s good. I don’t say it couldn’t be better if he travelled a bit more widely and saw what other cattle breeders do, but relative to the other stations in the Gulf country, Midhurst is pretty good and getting better every year. The last manager let it run down, so they tell me, but Joe’s done a good job in the two years that he’s been there. I wouldn’t want to see Joe try and make his life anywhere else, just because he’d married a rich wife who couldn’t or wouldn’t live in Willstown, where his work is.
Of course, you’ll probably say that he could get another station near a better town, perhaps near Alice. I’m not sure that that would be very easy; I’ve thought a lot about that one. But if it was possible, I wouldn’t like it much. Midhurst is in good country with more rainfall than in England; for a life’s work it seems to me that the Gulf country is a far better prospect than anything round Alice. I wouldn’t like to think that he’d left good land and gone to bad land, just because of me. That wouldn’t be a very good start for a station manager’s wife.
Noel, do you think I could have five thousand pounds of my capital? I’m going to take the advice you always shove at me, and not do anything in a hurry. If when I meet Joe Harman he still wants to marry me, and if I want to marry him, I’m going to wait a bit if I can get him to agree. I’d like to work in Willstown for a year or so myself before committing myself to live there for ever. I want to see if I could ever get to adapt myself to the place, or if it’s hopeless. I don’t want to think that. I would like to find it possible to live in the Gulf country even though I was brought up in England, because they are such very, very decent people living there.
I want to try and start a tiny workshop, making shoes and handbags out of alligator skins. I told you about that in my last letter. It’s work I know about, and all the materials are there to hand in the Gulf country, except the metal parts. I’ve written a long letter this morning to Mr. Pack to ask him if he would sell for me in England if the stuff is good enough, and to let me know the maximum price that he could give for shoes delivered at Perivale. And I’ve asked him to make me out a list of things I’d want for a workshop employing up to ten girls, and what they cost; things like a press and a polisher with the heads for it, and a Knighton No. 6 sewing-machine.
The sewing-machine is a heavy duty one for leather and that’s the most expensive single item. I should think the lot, including ₤400 for a building to work in, would cost about a thousand pounds. But I’m afraid that’s not the whole story. If I’m going to start a workshop for girls, they’ve got to have something to spend their wages on. I want to start a shop to sell the sort of things that women want.
Not a big shop, just a little one. I want it to be a sort of ice-cream parlour with a few chromium-plated chairs and glass-topped tables. I want to sell fruit there and fresh vegetables; if I can’t get them any other way I’ll have them flown in from Cairns. There’s plenty of money in the outback for that. I want to sell fresh milk there, too; Joe will have to play and keep a few milking cows. I want to sell sweets, and just a few little things like lipstick and powder and face cream and magazines.
The big expense here is the refrigerators and freezes, of course. I think we’d have to allow five hundred pounds for those, and then there’s the building and the furniture — say ₤1,200 the lot. That makes, say, ₤2,500 for capital expenditure. If I have five thousand of my capital, I should be able to stock the shop and the workshop and employ five or six girls for a year without selling anything at all, and by that time the income should be coming in, I think. If it isn’t, well that’s just too bad and I shall have lost my money.
I want to do this, Noel. Apart from Joe Harman and me, they’re decent people in Willstown, and they’ve got so very little. I’d like to work there for a year as a sort of self-discipline and to keep from running to seed now that I’ve got all this money. I think I’d want to do this even if there wasn’t any Joe Harman in the background at all, but I shan’t make up my mind or take any definite step until I’ve had a talk with him.
So what I want is five thousand pounds, please, Noel. May I have it if I want to go ahead with this?
Jean.
I got this letter five days later by the air mail. I marked the passages about her money with a red pencil, and wrote a little note upon the top, and sent it into Lester for him to read. I went into his office later in the day. “You read that letter from the Paget girl?” I asked.
He took it up from the desk before him. “Yes. I’ve just been looking at the will. Did you draft that discretionary clause yourself?”
“I did.”
He smiled. “I think it’s a masterpiece. It covers us all right, if you think she ought to have this
money.”
“It’s about nine per cent. of her capital,” I said. “For a commercial venture that she intends to work at whole-time, herself.”
“The testator didn’t know her, did he?”
I shook my head.
“She’s twenty-seven years old?”
“That is correct.”
“I think that we might let her have it,” he said. “It would be very extreme to do the other thing, to withhold it. We’ve got ample latitude under your discretionary clause to let her have it, and she seems to be a responsible person.”
“I’d like to think it over for a day or so,” I said. “It seems to me to be a very small amount of capital for what she wants to do.”
I put her letter on one side for a couple of days because I never like to take any action in a hurry. After a period of reflection it seemed to me that I would be carrying out the wishes of the late Mr. Douglas Macfadden if I exerted myself to see that Jean Paget did not lose her money in this venture, and I picked up my telephone and rang up Mr. Pack of Pack and Levy Ltd.
I said, “Mr. Pack, this is Strachan, of Owen, Dalhousie, and Peters. I believe you’ve had a letter from a client of mine, Miss Jean Paget.”
“Aye, that’s right,” he said. “You’re her solicitor, are you? The one that’s her trustee?”
“That is correct,” I said. “I’ve had a letter from her, too. I was thinking it might be a good thing if we got together, Mr. Pack, and had a talk about it.”
“Well, that suits me,” he replied. “She asked for a list of what she’d want to start up in a small way. I got a list together, but I haven’t got all the f.o.b. prices in yet.”
I made an appointment with him for the following Friday when he expected to be in London on other business. He came to see me then at my office. He was a small, fat, cheerful man, very much of a works manager. He brought with him a brown paper parcel.
“Afore we start,” he said, “these come in this morning.” He untied the parcel on my desk and produced a pair of alligator-skin shoes. I picked one up curiously.
“What are these?” I asked.
“They’re what she made herself at this place Willstown,” he said. “Did she tell you about that?”
I shook my head, and examined them with fresh interest. “Did she make these herself, with her own hands?”
“Made ’em with her own hands in her hotel bedroom, so she said,” he replied.
I turned one over. “Are they any good?”
“Depends on how you look at it,” he observed. “For selling in the trade they’re bloody awful. Look at this, and this, and this.” He pointed out the various irregularities and crudities. “They’re not even the same. But she knows that. If you take them as a pair of shoes made by a typist that hadn’t ever made a shoe before, working on her bed with no equipment, well, they’re bloody marvellous.”
I laid down the shoe and offered him a cigarette. “She told you what she wants to do?”
He told me what he had heard from her, and I told him some of what she had written to me; we talked for a quarter of an hour. At the end of that time I asked him, “What do you really think about her proposition, Mr. Pack?”
“I don’t think she can do it,” he said flatly. “Not the way she’s thinking of. I don’t think she knows enough about the shoe business to make a go of it.”
I must say, I was disappointed, but it was as well to have the facts. “I see,” I said quietly.
“You see,” he explained, “she hasn’t got the experience. She’s a good girl, Mr. Strachan, and she’s got a good business head. But she’s got no experience of making shoes to sell, and she’s got no experience of keeping girls in order ‘n making them bloody well work for their money. It’s not even as if she was in her own country. These Australian country girls she writes about, they’re just like so many foreigners to her. They may be willing, but they’ve never seen a factory before — they won’t have the idea at all. She’s got to learn her own job and teach them theirs at the same time. Well, she can’t do it.”
“I see,” I said again.
“I’d like to help her,” said the little man, “but she’ll have to change her ideas a bit. She’s on to a good wheeze, if she can put it over. I must say, when I read her letter where it says that she’s paying seventy shillings for an alligator skin uncured, you could have knocked me down with a feather. Australian shillings, too — fifty-six bob of our money. Here have I been paying a hundred and seventy, hundred and eighty shillings for a cured skin, all these years, and thinking I was getting ’em cheap at that! I said to Mr. Levy, I said, couple of bloody mugs, we are.”
“What can you suggest to help her?” I asked.
“What I thought was this,” he said. “If she could pay the passage of a forewoman out and home, I’d let her have a girl out of my shop, say for the first year. I got a girl that’s getting restless — well, a woman she is, thirty-five if she’s a day. She’s a married woman but she isn’t living with her husband — hasn’t been for a long time. She was a sergeant in the A.T.S. in the war, out in Egypt some of the time, so she knows about a hot country. Aggie Topp, the name is. You wouldn’t get girls playing up in any shop with Aggie Topp in charge.”
“Does Miss Paget know her?” I enquired.
“Oh, aye, Jean knows Aggie. And Aggie knows Jean. Matter of fact, Aggie come in yesterday and handed in her notice. I handed it back to her and jollied her along, you know. She does that every two or three months, getting restless, like I said. But I asked her then, how would she like to go out to Australia for a year to work with Miss Paget. She said she’d go anywhere to get away from standing in a queue for the bloody rations. She’d go out for a year, if Jean wants her. They all liked Jean.”
I said, “Can you spare her?”
“She won’t stay long, anyway,” he said. “I don’t want to lose her and perhaps I won’t. If she gets a trip out to Australia and sees that other places aren’t so good as England, then maybe she’ll come back and settle down with us again. Get it out of her system.”
We talked about this for a time. The woman’s passages and pay while travelling would tot up to about three hundred pounds, but it seemed cheap to me if it would help the venture through the early stages. For the rest of it, Mr. Pack thought Jean’s estimates of capital were on the low side, but not excessively so. “You can’t afford much mechanisation in the quality shoe trade,” he said. “You got to keep changing the style all the time.”
About the style, he suggested that they air-mailed a sample to Willstown from time to time for Jean’s party to copy. He was quite willing to do the selling for her. “Mind, I don’t know if she’ll be able to make a go of it upon the prices we can sell at,” he said. “I’ll tell her what we can buy at, and it’s up to her. But I’d like to give this thing a spin, I must say. Manufacturing’s getting so bloody difficult in this country with controls and that, one feels like trying something different.”
I thanked him very sincerely, and he went away. I wrote all this out to Jean Paget by air mail, and I believe Mr. Pack wrote to her by the same mail. She did not get these letters for some days after their arrival, because she had gone down to Rockhampton to look for the girl Elsie Peters who worked in the shoe factory there. She went economically by train, a slow, hot journey of some seven hundred miles; till then she had not realised how vast and sparsely populated a state Queensland was. The aeroplanes had dwarfed it for her; fifty-one hours in the train to Rockhampton expanded it again.
She found Elsie Peters, and the meeting was a complete fiasco. It only lasted about ten minutes. They met in a café close outside the works; as soon as Jean broached the subject of a job in the Gulf country, Elsie told her she could save her breath. It might be a good thing, she conceded, to start something in the Gulf country, but not for her. Wild horses would not drag her back again.
Jean came away from the café relieved in one way, and yet depressed. She would not have wanted anybody in that fr
ame of mind, but she had been counting rather heavily on this unknown woman. She was very conscious of her own lack of managerial experience; as the venture became closer difficulties loomed up which had not been quite so obvious at the birth of the idea. She spent a depressed evening in the hotel, and flew back to Cairns next day in revolt at the long train journey; she found the air fare very little more expensive.
She found our letters waiting for her at the Strand Hotel when she got back there, and her spirits revived again. She remembered the gaunt, stern Aggie very well: if Aggie was prepared to come to Queensland for a year that really was something. I think she was beginning to feel very much alone and amongst strangers while she was waiting in Cairns for Joe Harman.
She wrote temporising letters to us, for she would not make her mind up about anything until she had seen Harman. She told me later that the three weeks that she spent in Cairns living at the Strand Hotel after she came back from Rockhampton were the worst time of her life. Each morning she woke up in the cold light of dawn convinced that she was making a colossal fool of herself, that she could never settle down in this outlandish country, that she and Harman would have nothing in common and that it would be much better not to meet him at all. The wise course was to take the next plane down to Sydney and get a cheap passage to England, where she belonged. By noon some rough Australian kindness from a waitress or the manageress had sown a seed of doubt in the smooth bed of her resolution, that grew like a weed throughout the afternoon; by evening she knew that if she left that country and that place she would be running away from things that might be well worth having, things that she might never find again her whole life through. So she would go to bed resolved to be patient, and in the morning the whole cycle would start off again.
She knew the name of Harman’s ship, of course, from my letters, and she had no difficulty in finding out when it docked at Brisbane. A few discreet enquiries showed her that he must pass through Cairns to get to Willstown, and convinced her that he would have to wait for several days in Cairns because his ship docked in Brisbane on a Monday and the weekly plane into the Gulf country left at dawn on Tuesday; he could never make that connection. She had found out in Willstown that he stayed at the Strand Hotel in Cairns, and so she waited there for him.