Complete Works of Nevil Shute

by Nevil Shute

  I had another matter to fix up with Aggie Topp. Jean was very anxious to get hold of an air-conditioning unit, a thing about the size of a small refrigerator which stood in the room and took hot air into itself and pumped it out cold into the room; it seemed to her important to have this to prevent the girls’ hands from sweating as they worked and marking the delicate leathers of the shoes. She had not been able to get hold of one in Australia and had cabled me, and I had found a firm that made them and got hold of one with a good deal of difficulty and some small payments on the side. Derek Harris is rather good at that sort of negotiation. I had it in our office standing at the foot of the stairs and I showed it to Mrs. Topp, and arranged for her to take it out with her to Sydney. From Sydney it would have to be flown up with her to Cairns and Willstown at some considerable expense, but it seemed to me to be worth it since it was then the hottest time of the year.

  This was the biggest commission that I got from Jean and was my own main contribution to the venture; the remainder of her cables were concerned with little bits of things that were no trouble. Aggie Topp took out with her a good deal of stuff from Pack and Levy, too: three cases full of tools and lasts and formers and all sorts of things, the bill for which came to about a hundred and forty-six pounds, which I paid for Jean in England.

  Joe Harman helped her to get the buildings started on the day that they arrived in Willstown. They had a meeting with Tim Whelan and his two sons, in the carpenter’s shop amongst the coffins. They had already placed orders for two lorry loads of lumber in Cairns. The men stood or sat squatting, ringer fashion, on the floor with papers on the floor before them, planning the layout of the buildings; the workshop with its three-bedroom annexe was to be built first, and after that the ice-cream parlour next to it, leaving room for the expansion of the workshop one way and of the ice-cream parlour the other way. There were no great difficulties of expansion in the built-up area of Willstown.

  They sent Tim Whelan presently to find Mr. Carter, the Shire Clerk, to pass the plans of the new buildings and to grant a lease of the site in the main street. “It’ll be all right there,” he said thoughtfully. “There was a whole row of houses there in 1905 — I’ve got a photograph. But nobody ever paid rent for that land in my time.” Jean asked what rent would be required for the area she wanted, a difficult matter to decide in view of the fact that no plans existed and the area that she wanted was quite uncertain. “This is a town borough,” Mr. Carter said. “You don’t lease land upon an acreage basis in a town borough. If you’re going to develop the land by building, then I’d say about a shilling a year for each hundred foot of frontage. It’s in the main street, you see. If you wanted it for chickens or anything like that I’d have to charge five shillings.”

  They adjourned to the bar of the hotel to seal the contracts; Jean sat on the steps outside with a lemonade, as was fitting for a lady with a reputation to preserve in Willstown.

  She went to Brisbane a week later, flying to Cairns and flying on the same day down to Brisbane. She stayed there for three days and came back having ordered an electric generating set, a very large refrigerator, two deep freezes, a stainless steel counter, eight glass-topped tables, thirty-two chairs, two sink units, and a mass of minor shop fittings, glasses, plates, cutlery, and furnishings as well as a good deal of electrical fittings and cable. She made arrangements with the firms for all this stuff to be crated and consigned to Forsayth; in Cairns she made arrangements for the truck transport of these goods from Forsayth to Willstown. I had arranged the necessary credits for her and she was able to pay cash for everything.

  She came back to Willstown a week later having made tentative arrangements for supplies of stock for her ice-cream parlour, and found the framework of the workshop already erected; a wooden building goes up very quickly. The matter was a nine days’ wonder in Willstown and old men used to stand around wondering at this midsummer madness of an English girl, a stranger to the Gulf country, who proposed to make shoes there and send them all the way to England to be sold. They were too kindly to be rude to her or to laugh at such an eccentricity, but an aura of disbelief surrounded the whole venture and made her feel very much alone in those first weeks.

  She visited Midhurst at a very early stage, one Sunday when no work was going on upon her building. Joe Harman drove in to fetch her in his big utility at dawn one day, and took her back to Midhurst in time for breakfast. As soon as they were out of sight of the town they stopped for five minutes to kiss and talk.

  Presently they disentangled and went on. Jean was accustomed by this time to the idea that no road in this country had a metalled surface. She had not been beyond the town hitherto; very soon she discovered that a road was where the car drove across country. The land was parched and dry with the heat of summer, covered with thin tufts of scorched grass. It was a wooded land, covered thinly with spindly, distorted eucalyptus trees averaging twenty to thirty feet in height; these trees were fairly widely spaced so that it was possible for a car or truck driven across country to find a way between them. This was the road, and when the surface of the earth became too deeply pitted and pot-holed with traffic the cars and trucks would deviate and choose another course. These tracks followed the same general direction, coming together at the fords where creeks, now dry and stony, had to be crossed, and fanning out again upon the other side.

  Once in the twenty miles she saw half a dozen cattle, that stampeded wildly at the noise of the utility as it bounced and rocketed over the uneven ground. She asked Joe what on earth the cattle found to eat; the ground seemed to her to be completely barren. “They get along,” he said. “There’s plenty here for them to eat, my word. This dry stuff in the tussocks, why, it’s just the same as hay.” He told her that there was a water-hole a little way from their track. “They never go more than three or four miles from water,” he said. “Horses, now — you’ll find them grazing up to twenty miles from a drink.”

  Once she exclaimed at three brown, furry forms bounding away among the trees. “Oh Joe — kangaroos!”

  He corrected her. “Wallabies. We don’t get any ‘roos up in these parts.”

  She stared after the flying forms, entranced. “What’s the difference between a wallaby and a kangaroo, Joe?”

  “A wallaby’s smaller,” he said. “A big, buck kangaroo, he’ll stand up to six feet high, but a wallaby’s not more than four. A kangaroo, he’s got a face like a deer. A wallaby, he’s got a face like a rabbit, or a rat. I got a little wallaby to show you at the homestead.”

  “A wild one?”

  “He’s a tame one now. He’ll get wild as he grows older; then he’ll go off to his own folks.” He told her that when they had shot the wallabies to send the sample skins to Cairns for her they had shot a doe with a joey, and rather than leave the small defenceless creature to die they had taken it home to rear. “I like a wallaby about the place,” he said.

  They came to Midhurst presently. A fence of two wire strands tacked to the trees, with an occasional post in the wider gaps, crossed their path, with an iron gate; beyond the gate the track became the semblance of a road. She got out of the utility and opened the gate and he drove through. “This is the home paddock,” he said. “For horses, mostly.” She could see horses standing underneath the trees, lean riding horses, swishing long black tails. “I’ve got about three square miles fenced off like this around the house.”

  The road swung round, and she saw Midhurst homestead. It was prettily situated on a low hill above the bend of a creek; this creek was not running, but there were still pools of water held along its length. “Of course, you’re seeing it at the worst time of year,” he said, and she became aware of his anxiety. “It’s a lovely little river in the winter, oh my word. But even in the worst part of the dry, like now, there’s always water there.”

  The homestead was a fairly large building that stood high off the ground on posts, so that you climbed eight feet up a flight of steps to reach the veranda and the on
e floor of the house. It was built of wood and had the inevitable corrugated iron roof. Four rooms, three bedrooms and one sitting-room, were surrounded on all four sides by a veranda twelve feet deep; masses of ferns and greenery of all sorts stood in pots and on stands on this veranda at the outer edge and killed most of the direct rays of the sun. There was a kitchen annexe at one end and a bathroom annexe at the other; the toilet was a little hut over a pit in the paddock, some distance from the house. Most of the life of the building evidently went on in the veranda and the rooms seemed to be little used; in the veranda was Joe’s bed and his mosquito net, and several cane easy-chairs, and the dining-room table and chairs. Suspended from the rafters was a large canvas water-bag cooling in the draught, with an enamelled mug hung from it by a string.

  Five or six dogs greeted them noisily as the utility came to a standstill before the steps. He brushed them aside, but pointed out a large blue and yellow bitch like no dog Jean had ever seen before. “That’s Lily,” he said fondly. “She had a bonza litter, oh my word.”

  He took her up into the coolness of the veranda; she turned to him. “Oh Joe, this is nice!”

  “Like it?” Puppies were surging about them, grovelling and licking their hands; odd-shaped yellow and blue puppies. Along the veranda a small animal stood erect behind a chair, peering at them around the corner. Joe took the puppies one by one and dropped them into a wire-netting enclosure in one corner. “I let them out this morning before driving in,” he said. “They’ll be big enough to go down in the yard pretty soon.”

  “Joe, who fixed up these plants? Did you?”

  He shook his head. “Mrs. Spears did that, when she used to live here. I kept them going. The lubras water them, morning and evening.” He told her that he had three Abo women, wives of three of his stockriders, who shared the domestic duties of the homestead and cooked for him.

  He looked around. “There’s the joey somewhere.” They found the little wallaby lolloping about on the other side of the veranda; it stood like a little kangaroo about eighteen inches high, and had no fear of them. Jean stooped beside it and it nibbled at her fingers. “What do you feed it on, Joe?”

  “Bread and milk. It’s doing fine on that.”

  “Don’t the puppies hurt it?”

  “They chase it now and then, but it can kick all right. A full-grown wallaby can kill a dog. Rip him right up.” He paused, watching her caress the little creature, thinking how lovely she was. “It’s all in fun,” he said. “They get along all right. By and by when he gets bigger and the dogs are bigger he’ll get angry with them, and then he’ll go off into the bush.”

  A fat, middle-aged lubra, a black golliwog of a woman, laid the table and presently appeared with two plates of the inevitable steak with two eggs on the top, and a pot of strong tea. Jean had become accustomed to the outback breakfast by this time but this steak was tougher than most; she made mental notes to look into the Midhurst cooking as she struggled with it. In the end she gave up and sat back laughing. “I’m sorry, Joe,” she said. “It’s because I’m English, I suppose.”

  He was very much concerned. “Have a couple more fried eggs. You haven’t eaten anything.”

  “I’ve eaten six times as much as I ever ate in England for breakfast, Joe. Who does the cooking?”

  “Palmolive did this,” he said. “It’s her day. Mary cooks much better, but it’s her day off.”

  “Who are they, Joe?”

  “I’ve got a ringer called Moonshine,” he said. “Palmolive’s his gin. My boss Abo, he’s called Bourneville; he’s a bonza boy. Mary’s his gin. Mary cooks all right.”

  “Tell me, Joe,” she said, “do you ever get any indigestion?”

  He grinned. “Not very often. Just now and then.”

  “You won’t mind if I reorganise the cooking a bit when I come in?”

  “Not so long as you don’t do it all yourself,” he said.

  “You wouldn’t like me to do that?”

  He shook his head. “I’d rather see you keep time for the things you want to do, the shoes, and the ice-cream parlour, and that.”

  She touched his hand. “I want to keep time for you.”

  He took her out before the heat of the day and showed her the establishment. Although the property covered over a thousand square miles, there were no more buildings round the homestead than she had seen on a four-hundred-acre farm in England. There were three or four cottages of two rooms at the most, for stockmen; there were two small bunk-houses for unmarried ringers, white and black. There was a shed housing the truck and the utility and a mass of oddments of machinery. There was a stable for about six horses, which was empty, and a saddle-room, and a butcher’s room. There was a Diesel engine that drove an electric generator and pumped water from the creek. That was about all.

  Once he said, “Can you ride a horse?”

  She shook her head. “I’m afraid not, Joe. Ordinary people don’t ride horses much in England.”

  “Oh my word,” he said. “You should be able to do that.”

  “Could I learn?”

  “Too right.”

  He put his fingers in his mouth like a schoolboy and blew a shrill whistle; a black head came poking out of the window of a single-room cottage. “Bourneville,” he called. “Get out and bring in Auntie and Robin, ‘n saddle up. I’ll be down to help you in a minute.”

  He turned to her, surveying her cotton frock. “I dunno about your things. Could you get into a pair of my strides, or would you rather not?”

  She laughed. “Oh Joe, they’d go round me twice!”

  “I wasn’t always as fat as this,” he said. “I got a pair I used to wear before the war, I can’t get into now. It doesn’t matter if they don’t fit right; we’ll only be walking the horses so you’ll see what it feels like.”

  He took her up into the homestead and produced a clean man’s shirt and a faded pair of jodhpurs and a belt for her; she took them from him laughing, and went into his spare room and put them on, with a pair of his elastic-sided, thin-soled riding boots that were far too big for her. It gave her a queer feeling of possession to be dressed all in his clothes. She walked gingerly down into the yard with the feeling that everything was likely to fall off her, as it had done on another memorable occasion.

  He helped her up into the saddle; once astride the patient, fourteen-year-old Auntie the feeling of insecurity left her. They adjusted her stirrups and showed her how to set her foot; once she was fairly settled she felt very safe. She knew little about horses or saddlery at that time, but this saddle was like no saddle she had ever seen in England, even in a picture. It rose up in an arch high behind her seat and high in front of her, so that she was seated as in a hammock. There was a great horn that projected above each of her thighs and another one under each thigh, so that she was as if clamped into place. “I don’t believe that anyone could fall off from a saddle like this,” she said.

  “You aren’t meant to fall off,” he replied.

  They walked the horses out of the yard and down the track to the creek; as they went he showed her how to hold the reins and how to use her heels. He took her up the creek for about a mile and then by a wide circuit through the bush, winding beneath the trees so far as possible to seek the shade. Once she saw four scurrying black forms vanishing among the trees and he told her that these were wild pig, and once in a wide stretch of water covered with water lilies there was a violent swirl of water as an alligator dived away from them. She saw several wallabies bounding away before their horses.

  They returned to the homestead after an hour or so. Although they had walked the horses all the way Jean was drenched with sweat under the hot sun, and she had a raging thirst. In the veranda she drank several mugs of water, and then she went into the bathroom and had a shower, and changed back into her own cool clothes.

  They lunched in the veranda on steak and bread and jam, a repeat of breakfast without the eggs. “Palmolive hasn’t got much imagination in the matter
of tucker,” he said apologetically.

  “She’s looking very tired,” Jean said. “Great black circles under her eyes. Give her the afternoon off, Joe. I’ll make tea for you.”

  He offered her the use of the spare room bed to sleep on after lunch, but they had seen so little of each other in the last fortnight that the time seemed too precious to waste in sleep. “Let’s sit out here,” she said. “If I should go to sleep, Joe, it’ll be just one of those things.” So they pulled two of the long cane chairs to the corner of the veranda where there might be a little breeze, and sat together close, so that they could touch hands. “It’s not always as hot as this,” he said, still anxious for her approval of the place. “Just these two months are the bad ones. By January it’ll be beginning to cool off, when the rain gets properly under way.”

  “It’s not too bad,” she said. “I remember times when it was quite as hot as this in Malaya.”

  She led him on to tell her about his work on the station; having seen a little of the terrain that morning she felt she could appreciate what he told her better now. “There’s not a lot to do this time of year,” he said. “I like to get up to the top end of the station once a fortnight, if I can, in case of duffers. Make a cache or two of tucker up there, too, this time of year, and shoot the worst of the scrub bulls you see around.”

  “What’s a duffer, Joe?”

  “Why, cattle duffers — cattle thieves. We’ve not had much of it this year. Sometimes the drovers coming down to Julia Creek from the Cape stations — they pick up a few as they go through the property and put them with the herd. It means faking the brands, of course, and there’s the police at Julia to keep an eye open for fresh-branded beasts as they go on the train. They caught a joker at it two years ago and he got six months. We’ve not had much since then. Poddy-dodging, now — well, that’s another matter.”

  “What’s poddy-dodging, Joe?” She was beginning to grow sleepy, but she wanted to know all she could.