Complete Works of Nevil Shute

by Nevil Shute

  About an hour later the old lady died. Jennifer, standing by the bedside, could not say within a quarter of an hour when death occurred.

  Three

  JENNIFER MET HER father at the front door of the house early the next afternoon. She had gone out into the wet, windy streets at about four in the morning to stand in a call-box in the Broadway to ring him up in Leicester; the telephone was by his bed and she got through to him without delay, and told him of the death. Then she had walked back to the house. She had expected to be troubled and reluctant to go back there, but in fact she found she was not worried in the least by the thought of her dead grandmother upstairs. She was calm and serious; she felt that she had done a good job and her grandmother was pleased with her; if she had still been alive the old lady would have wanted her to have a little meal and get some sleep. So she made herself a meal of tea and bread and jam in the kitchen of the silent house, turned on the radiator in the living-room, curled herself up on the sofa with a rug over her, and slept. She did not wake until the middle of the morning, when the district nurse came.

  Her father came down to Ealing alone. Her mother had made arrangements to come with him, but she was coughing a good deal and far from well, and on the news of her mother’s death Jennifer’s father had persuaded his wife to stay at home and not risk making herself ill just for the funeral. So he came down alone, and met his daughter at the house at about two o’clock.

  “I’m very sorry you had this alone, Jenny,” he said. “I’m very sorry indeed.”

  “That’s all right, Daddy,” she said. “It’s a good thing I was working in London.”

  He glanced around the drawing-room. “She was very fond of this house,” he said. “We tried once or twice to get her to come up to Leicester and live near us, but she insisted on staying here.”

  The girl nodded. “This was her own house, and she wouldn’t have wanted to be a burden upon anybody. She was very independent.”

  Her father said, “We never dreamed that there was anything wrong with her pension, or her money generally. I suppose I should have come to see her more often, and gone into things a bit more.”

  “She probably wouldn’t have told you,” the girl said.

  He asked her about the practical business of the doctor and the death certificate and the undertaker, and went out to see about these things himself. Jennifer went out to find somewhere for her father and herself to stay that night, and with some difficulty found a private hotel with a couple of bedrooms empty; then she went back to the house to wait for her father. When he came she made him tea, and they sat in the drawing-room among the Burmese relics before an electric radiator while she told him what had happened the night before.

  “She insisted on giving me the cheque,” she told her father, “and she made me go out and post it to my bank. What ought I to do, Daddy? I’ll have to pay it back to the executor, shan’t I?”

  He shook his head. “Keep it.”

  “Is that all right?”

  “I think so,” he said. “Unless she’s changed her will, I’m the executor and the whole of the residuary estate goes to your mother. The four hundred pounds is probably yours, legally. But anyway, it doesn’t matter.”

  “Oughtn’t it to go back to Aunt Jane?” She paused. “After all, she sent it for Granny, not for me.”

  He pondered this. “Did you say there was a letter from Jane Dorman?”

  She went and fetched it for him from her grandmother’s room, and he read it carefully. “I don’t think you need give it back,” he said. “The intention is quite clear; she says that if Ethel didn’t need it she was to give it to a charity. Well, she doesn’t need it, and she’s given it to you. It’s yours to do what you like with, Jenny.”

  The girl stared at the hot elements of the fire. “I’m not so sure about that,” she said. “I think it’s mine to do what Granny liked.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She told him what had passed between them in the last hour of the old life. “She kept saying what a rotten time girls have in England now, compared with when she was young,” she said. “I suppose all old people are like that, that everything was better in their day. And then, it seemed quite definite, she wanted me to go and see Aunt Jane with the money. Go to Australia, I mean. It seemed as if she thought that I’d be getting back into the sort of life she knew when she was a girl, if I went out there and stayed with Aunt Jane.”

  Her father said thoughtfully, “I see. Do you want to go, Jenny?”

  The girl said honestly, “I don’t know. I’ve not had time to think about it. I’d love to travel, of course, and see something of the world. But Granny’s world ... that’s gone for ever, surely? Huntin’ and shootin’ and fishin’, and about fifteen servants all calling you Madam.... If that’s what happens in Australia, I don’t want to go there.”

  “I should be sorry to see you go to Australia, Jenny. You’re the only one we’ve got.”

  She smiled at him. “Don’t worry, Daddy. I can’t see myself going.”

  There was one job that had to be done before they left for the hotel, and that was to gather up all the papers in the house for examination. Edward Morton decided to start on that that evening at the hotel, but when they came to investigate the papers they found a formidable mass of stuff. The drawers of the old lady’s bureau, and a sort of tallboy, were crammed full of letters and papers, the relics of a long life thrust into drawers and there forgotten. Insurance policies of 1907 were mixed up with leases of furnished houses rented on some leave in the dim past, and personal letters, and receipts, and cheque-book stubs were everywhere among the mass. They found three suitcases in the house and filled them full of all this paper, and at that there was enough left over to fill another two. Her father said, “I’ll go through these tonight, Jenny, and chuck away what it’s not necessary to keep. Then perhaps I’ll be able to look through the rest of it tomorrow here.”

  Jennifer hoped that The Poplars private hotel would be complacent about a hundredweight of waste paper, in the morning.

  They got a taxi from the station and drove to The Poplars and dined together meagrely. Jenny had had two virtually sleepless nights and she could hardly keep her eyes open during the meal. As soon as it was over, she said, “Daddy, do you mind if I go up now? I’m practically asleep.” He kissed her and wished her good-night. Then he went up to his own room and put a shilling in the slot of the gas meter and lit the stove, and pulled a chair up to the little radiants, and opened the first suitcase.

  In the white-painted, rather bleak and functional bedroom the pageant of a long life gradually unrolled before him as the heap of torn papers on the floor beside him grew. It was about twenty minutes after he had started that he came upon the cookery book.

  It was a small manuscript book. It began in a hand that was feminine and strange to him, and about half the recipes in the book were written in that hand; thereafter it had been written on by Ethel Trehearn, first in an unformed, almost childish hand, later maturing into the writing that he knew. On the fly-leaf was the inscription,

  For my dear daughter, Ethel, on the happy occasion of her Marriage to Geoffrey Trehearn, from her mother. June 16th, 1893.

  It had been a pleasant and a practical thought of the mother to give the bride a personal cookery book as one of her wedding presents; fifty-seven years later Edward Morton smiled a little sympathetically, as he turned the leaves. How unformed the writing of the bride was in the first entry ...

  Aunt Hester’s cake (very good).

  Take two pounds of Jersey butter, two pounds best castor sugar, ½ gill of caramel, 2½ lb of flour, 18 eggs, 3 lb of currants, 3 lbs of sultanas, 1½ lb of mixed peel, ½ lb of blanched sweet almonds, the grated rind of two lemons, a small nutmeg, 1 oz mixed spice, and ½ a pint of brandy.

  He ran his eye down the recipe with the tolerant amusement of a doctor to the final,

  — cover with almond icing and coat with royal and transparent icing. Then pipe the
cake with royal icing according to taste.

  What a world to live in, and how ill they must have been! His eye ran back to the ingredients. Two pounds of Jersey butter ... eight weeks’ ration for one person. The egg ration for one person for four months.... Currants and sultanas in those quantities; mixed peel, that he had not seen for years. Half a pint of brandy, so plentiful that you could put half a pint into a cake, and think nothing of it.

  He laid the book down on his knee and stared at the stove. Funny the way that things worked out sometimes. This bride had died of starvation, with nothing to eat but currants and sultanas and candied peel in the end. He wondered, had she thought in those days of “Aunt Hester’s cake (very good)”?

  Things had changed, and people no longer lived as they had done in 1893. He had eaten such cakes when he was a young man before the war of 1914, but now he could hardly remember what a cake like that would taste like. Jennifer had never eaten anything like that at all, of course, and so she couldn’t miss it. Funny how the standards of living had changed, at any rate in England.

  He thumbed the book through idly, glancing here and there at a page. Her mother had had little confidence in the memory or interest of her daughter before marriage, for she had written out the simplest recipes in full. “For breakfast, bacon and eggs. For four people, take eight eggs or more if the men will want them and about a pound of streaky bacon cut in rashers ...” He could remember breakfasts like that when he was a boy — how long it seemed since he had eaten like that! He turned the pages idly. “Steak and Onions. Take three pounds of steak ...”

  He had not eaten a grilled steak and onions for twelve years; perhaps Jennifer at twenty-four had never eaten it at all. People seemed to keep healthy enough on the English rationed food. He was approaching sixty years of age himself and he knew well, perhaps too well, that men of his years think everything was better organised when they were young. It was an old man’s fancy, doubtless, that the young men were more virile in England, and the girls prettier, in 1914 than they were today. People kept healthy enough, but they had not the zest for life that they had had when he was young. Jennifer with her auburn hair looked pale and sallow most of the time, but at twenty-four she should be in her prime.

  He laid the cookery book aside, too precious to destroy; though it might only be of academic interest in England now it was a pity to throw away a little book that had been prized for so many years. He turned over and tore up masses of old letters, only glancing at the signatures in case they were the autographs of famous people, and he retained one or two. Then he shook out the contents of a cardboard box that once held envelopes, and out fell dance programmes, dozens and dozens of them.

  It was years since he had seen the little cards, heavily embossed with gilt and coloured lettering, with little pencils attached by a thread of silk. How thick and fine the paper was, how generous! Dance programmes with little pencils attached seemed to have gone out in England, perhaps because of fashion or perhaps because of paper rationing; if they were used, however, cards like that would cost two or three shillings each, with printing, pencils, purchase tax, and everything. Things had been cheaper, easier, and more gracious when Ethel had been young. And how many of the cards there were, how many dances she had been to! There were thirty-five or forty of them; assuming she had kept the programme of every dance that she had ever been to, which seemed unlikely, even so it was a considerable number of formal dances for a young girl to attend. She had been married at twenty-two, younger than Jennifer. He was quite sure that Jennifer had not been to thirty-five or forty formal dances. People didn’t seem to give them so much now as they had in his young days; perhaps it had grown too expensive.

  There were photographs almost by the hundred. He discarded the faded, sepia snapshots, hardly looking at them; there could be nothing worth keeping in those. He paused longer over the professional portraits. One was a very grand affair, hand-tinted by a photographer in Dover Street; it showed a mother and daughter in Court dress, the long trains sweeping from behind each side of the standing pair. He could see the Ethel he had first met as a middle-aged woman in the features of the girl. But what a dress, and what a train! white silk with delicate lines of a pale rose pink, showy and ornate by modern standards, it might be, but very lovely all the same. And what jewellery for a young girl to wear! That necklace, carefully worked up by the tinter, apparently of gold and rubies. Jennifer had never worn a dress or jewellery like that, and yet she came of the same family. He put the photograph aside, thinking that Jennifer might like to see her grandmother as a young woman.

  There was a little bundle of letters tied with ribbon, perhaps love letters. He hesitated for a moment, thinking to throw them away unread; then he undid them and glanced at the signatures. They were all signed ‘Jane’. He picked one for its embossed letterhead and glanced it through. It was dated March 5th, 1919, and it read,

  “s.s. Mooltan.

  “In the Mediterranean.

  “My darling Aunt,

  “I would have written to post at Gibraltar but I’ve been terribly seasick ever since we left England just like being in a funny story only I didn’t think it funny at all. Jack was only sick one day but I was in my bunk for five days, all through the Bay, in a cabin with five other girls all married to Australians and going out like us, all sick together except one. I felt awfully silly and very glad in a way that Jack and I couldn’t have a cabin together because it would have been horrid for him with me being sick all the time. However, it seems to be over now and I’ve been sitting out on deck in the hot sun for two days and going into the saloon for every meal, and eating like a horse.

  “I wanted to write to you before now to thank you for all you have done for us over the last year. I believe you were the only one of the whole family who didn’t faint at the idea of me marrying an Australian soldier and who really tried to make Jack feel at home and one of us. I’m sorry in a way that I’m leaving England and going out to live so far away, sorry that I shan’t see Father and Mother again for years and years, or perhaps at all. But these last few months haven’t been a very happy time as I suppose you know, and though I’m sorry to be leaving everyone and everything I know, I’m glad at the same time, if you know what I mean. I’m glad to be out of all the complications and unpleasantness and able to start fresh in a new place with Jack.

  “We’re going to have a hard time for the first few years, much harder than if I’d been a good girl and stayed at home and married one of Father’s officers, solid bone from the chin upwards. I might have done that if it hadn’t been for the war, but two years in the W.A.A.C.s make one different. Jack has been promised a job with a firm called Dalgety which means going round the cattle and sheep stations selling machinery and stuff like that to the farmers in a place called Gippsland; we shan’t have much money but he’s got a house for us through his uncle in a little market town called Korrumburra somewhere in the depths of the country. I’ll write and give you the address as soon as ever I know it; write to me sometimes, because although I’m glad to be going I expect I shall be lonely sometimes, and longing for letters.

  “I don’t know how to thank you for being so sweet to Jack. It meant an awful lot to him to find one of my family who really liked him for himself — besides me, of course. I don’t suppose I’ll ever be able to do anything for you like you’ve done for us, like the elephant and the mouse. Only I’d like to call one of our children Ethel if there is a girl. I think I’m in the family way already but I’m not quite sure, so don’t tell anybody yet.

  “Our very, very dearest love to you and Uncle Geoffrey.

  “Your affectionate niece,

  “Jane.”

  Morton was tired now. He had barely sorted one of the three suitcases, but he was too tired to go on that night; the white bed beckoned him in invitation. He folded the letter carefully and put it with the others of the bundle and retied the ribbon. Better to keep that lot, or send them back, perhaps, to Jane Dorman in Austral
ia.

  He had never met Jane Dorman and he knew little of her but that she had made an unfortunate marriage with an Australian soldier after the first war, and had left the country with him, and had never been home since. That was all that he had known about her twelve hours ago; in those hours she had come alive for him, and now she was a real person. She had formed her own life and battled through, and now she had attained a point where she could send five hundred pounds to her old aunt to quell a fear for her that he had never felt. Jane Dorman, twelve thousand miles away, in her enduring affection had sensed that Ethel Trehearn was ill and short of money. Her daughter, who was his wife, and he, living no more than a hundred miles away from the old lady, had had no idea that anything was wrong.

  Jane and Jack Dorman, from her recent letter, had become wealthy people now, far better off than he himself. He could hardly have found five hundred shillings for the old lady without selling something. It wasn’t that he was extravagant, or Mary either. In these days, in England and in general practice, the money just wasn’t there, and that was all about it.

  He got into bed and turned off the light, but sleep did not come easily. How well Ethel Trehearn had lived when she was a young woman; how incredible it all seemed now! And yet, thinking back over his own youth, perhaps not quite so incredible. The standard of living had slipped imperceptibly in England as year succeeded year, as war succeeded war. His own father had been a doctor before him, but in York. He could remember how he lived as a boy in the big house in Clifton now used as part of the municipal offices of York and full of draughtsmen. They had kept a coachman and a groom before the days of motor-cars, and a horse for his father’s dog-cart, and a horse for the brougham. There had been a whole-time gardener, and always two servants in the house, and sometimes three. It was unthinkable in his father’s household that there should be any shortage of any food for family or servants; there always seemed to be plenty of money for anything they wanted to do, nor did his father have to work particularly hard. Only the most urgent cases ever called him out on Sunday, and all through the winter one day in each week was sacred to the shooting. It was a good life, that, that Ethel Trehearn had known as a young woman, and his father. It might some day come again in England, but not in his own time.