Complete Works of Nevil Shute

by Nevil Shute

  He stepped back and looked critically at the picture. “Too much art,” he said. “Art all the day and night; I think my mind was sour. Perhaps it is better to work on the railway for the living, and come to art for pleasure, not so often.” He stood with half-closed eyes staring at the portrait. “This will be a good picture,” he said thoughtfully. “This will be better than the paintings that I brought from Germany.”

  In these sittings Jennifer could sit quietly with her own thoughts, and these were mostly on the Howqua valley and the memory of her day there with Carl Zlinter. The Howqua had a dream-like quality of unreality for her, a place so beautiful and so remote from anything she had encountered in her life before that it fell into the category of a fairy story in her mind, a fairy story with a Prince Charming, moreover. Her life up to that point had been in the somewhat bleak settings of Leicester and the London suburbs. These places were more real to her than Melbourne or Merrijig; she knew what to do with a red London bus, but it was still unreal to her that a horse should be used in this country as a normal means of locomotion. Stranger still was the story of Charlie Zlinter and his dog, whose tombstone she had felt and touched, who had driven his bullock team daily from this town named in the memory of Banbury near Oxford only fifty years ago, and who had drunk and loved in a town called Howqua that had vanished absolutely from the face of the earth, and had left only beauty in the place where it had been. This sort of thing didn’t happen in Leicester or Blackheath, and as she sat quiet in the little railway coach, while the Lithuanian platelayer painted her portrait, she wondered which of her two lives was real and which was a dream.

  Carl Zlinter rang up from Lamirra on Wednesday evening to ask Jack Dorman if he could borrow the utility on Saturday to go to Woods Point with Jenny. “That’ll be right,” the grazier said. “She told us you wanted to go over there. Want to speak to her?”

  When she came to the telephone she was in a slight flutter of eagerness to speak to him, which annoyed her slightly because the telephone was in the kitchen and everyone was there. She made the arrangements with him about lunch and time of starting with elaborate casualness that deceived nobody. Then he said, “There is one other thing. I have now got a map of the town of Howqua.”

  “Where on earth did you get that from, Carl?”

  “It was in the Shire Hall, at Banbury,” he said. “It belongs to the Lands Department. I went in there yesterday to see if perhaps there would be anything, and there I found this map. It is very yellow and torn, and they would not allow me to take it away, and so I went out and bought paper and I made a tracing of it.”

  “Does it show where the houses were?”

  “It shows all the streets and all the town allotments with their numbers,” he said. “It does not tell us where Charlie Zlinter lived or anybody else, because there are numbers only on the map, street names and the numbers of the lots. It is ver’ interesting.”

  She said, “Could you tell from it where any particular house was?”

  “I think it would be possible,” he said. “There are marks on it which a surveyor will understand, but I do not; these I have copied with great care. I will ask Mr. Forrest before Saturday if he can tell me what they mean, and how to find the place where any house was from the map.”

  “That’s fine, Carl. I’m awfully glad.”

  “What have you been doing all the week?”

  “I’ve been sitting for my portrait — to Mr. Shulkin.”

  “For your portrait?”

  “Yes. He’s painting me. I’ll tell you about it when we meet.”

  “I shall want to see this portrait,” he said. “I must visit Stanislaus.”

  She laughed. “You’re not to till it’s finished — if then. Good-night, Carl.”

  “Good-night, Jenny. I will not promise anything.”

  He came to the homestead on Saturday morning with his grill and his steaks in newspaper, having got a lift down from Lamirra on a truck. She was ready for him and the Chev was full of petrol; he made a half-hearted attempt to reckon with Jack Dorman, who said, “Aw, forget it. It all goes on the farm, ‘n comes off tax.” So they started for Woods Point before the day grew hot.

  Jane watched the Chev go off across the paddocks to the road. “Well, there they go again,” she said. “I don’t know what her father’s going to say, or her mother.”

  “From the looks of it, her mother won’t be saying anything before so long,” he remarked.

  “That’s right,” she replied. “It doesn’t look too good, from the letters she’s been getting.”

  Neither of them had ever met Jennifer’s mother, and they could discuss the matter dispassionately. “What’ll she do if she dies?” he asked.

  “I think she might go back,” Jane said. “She’s very fond of her father, and he’d be alone.”

  “She don’t want to get too deep with this chap Zlinter, then.”

  She stood silent for a minute. “It’s her business,” she said at last. “She’s got her head screwed on right. We can’t interfere.”

  As Jennifer got back into the Chev after closing the last gate, and as they started on the road for Banbury and Woods Point, Carl Zlinter said, “Will you mind if I drive over the police sergeant when we go through Banbury?”

  “Not specially,” said Jennifer. “It might make trouble, though, because you haven’t got a licence.”

  “Does one need a licence to drive over police sergeants in this country?”

  “My word,” she said. It was easy to fall into the idiom. “You can go to prison if you do that without a licence. Why do you want to drive over the sergeant, anyway?”

  “It was not necessary to have that inquest at all,” he said. “He knew the answer before he started anything. It was stupid, and it caused me very much worry, so I could not sleep the night before.”

  “There were a lot of things that could have stopped you sleeping the night before,” she observed. “Too much steak, for one thing.”

  “It was the inquest,” he asserted. “I was ver’ worried, for that they would send me back to Germany. I could not sleep. If we see that police sergeant we will not run over him, because I have not got a licence, but we will give him a very big fright. Now we will go and see Stanislaus Shulkin on our way to Woods Point and we will see what he has been up to.”

  She turned to him, “Carl, you’re not to go and see that picture. It’s not finished, and it’s nothing like me, anyway.”

  “So,” he said. “If it is a bad picture of you then I will cut it with my knife so it cannot be finished. If it is good, then I will let him finish it and I will hang it in the house that I shall build in Howqua City.”

  She burst into laughter. “You are a fool. You can’t have it; it’s for Jane Dorman. He’s painting three pictures for her to choose from.” She told him what was happening.

  “All right,” he said. “We will now go and see this picture, and decide what is to be done with it.” She could not move him from that, and she did not try very hard.

  His mood was different from anything that she had known in him before. Hitherto she had known him as a surgeon faced with a difficult and delicate task in improvised conditions, and as a man with the threat of a manslaughter charge on his mind. She was now seeing a totally different Carl Zlinter, a man on his way out from years of life in camps, a man beginning to enjoy life who was unused to joy, a man laughing clumsily because he was unused to laughter. She did not know quite what to make of him.

  Mr. Shulkin was working in his garden; he stopped and came to the gate as the utility drew up. “So,” he said, “the model has arrived. You have come to make another sitting?”

  “She has not,” said Carl Zlinter. “She has come to ride in this utility with me to Woods Point. She has told me that you make a portrait of her, and I have come to see if it is good enough.”

  Mr. Shulkin said, “I do not think that any portrait will be good enough when you have her with you. A portrait is for when you cannot
see the sitter. But you may see if you want. It is not finished.”

  He led the way into the railway coach and they followed him. The picture stood upon the easel. He had given more space to the background than is usual in modern portraits, using rather a wide canvas and placing the head to one side. For the background he had chosen a part of Leonora station, with the Delatite river, the paddocks, and the wooded slopes behind. He had made it a spring scene when the tips of the gum trees take a tinge of orange-red, so that the colour motif of the Leonora scene repeated the bronze lights in Jennifer’s hair.

  “It is not a portrait,” said Mr. Shulkin, as they looked at it in silence. “It is an order for a beautiful picture with quiet colour and good drawing, that the lady will like to live with. The portrait is nothing, nothing, only a detail of the whole picture — you understand? A bunch of flowers would have done as well, but they would not have had the fine drawing and the delicate colour of the head of this young lady.”

  “It is a very lovely thing,” the Czech said quietly. The artist had painted Jennifer in profile with lips slightly parted and a faint colour in her cheeks as if a blush was just beginning; as he had said, the portrait was subordinated to the colour values of the picture as a whole, and so became the more impressive by a type of understatement.

  “It’s going to be a very lovely picture,” the girl said, “but I don’t believe I really look like that a bit.”

  “I have seen you look like that,” the surgeon said. “I have seen you look like that many times. It is very true of you.” The girl coloured a little, and looked very like the portrait.

  Zlinter turned to the artist. “You must do something else for Mrs. Dorman,” he said. “She has not seen this, no? I will buy this one.”

  Mr. Shulkin smiled broadly. “That is not possible. I have three pictures that I must paint for Mrs. Dorman, and she will choose the one that she will like the best. Already she has paid me for the materials for all the three, so this canvas is her canvas and this paint is her paint. If she will not choose this picture and she wishes to have one of the other two, or none at all, then I will sell you this picture if you can pay enough money. I am ver’ expensive. I gain more than ten pounds each week on the railway; I am ver’ expensive man.” He grinned.

  Carl Zlinter said, “You must now paint two more pictures, very, very good, much better than this one, so she will choose one of those. Perhaps you need not show her this one at all.”

  Jennifer laughed. “She knows all about it, Carl; I told her. You don’t want it, anyway. What on earth would you do with it?”

  “I would sell it to a manufacturer of soap,” he said, “because it is so beautiful.” He paused. “Or, I would hang it in the house that I am going to build in the Howqua. I do not know.”

  “It would be better to sell it to the manufacturer of soap,” the artist said, “because then you would have money to build the house. But I do not think that I shall sell it to you if that is what you are going to do with it.”

  Jennifer said, “What about me? Don’t I have any say in this?”

  Carl Zlinter said, “You will get the soap.”

  “What soap?”

  “The soap that the manufacturer will give so you will say it is the best soap in the world, and he can put it underneath the picture.”

  “Don’t sell it to him, Stan,” she said. “I don’t want it used as a soap advertisement.”

  “I would not sell it to him in any case,” the artist replied. “He is a bad man and not serious, only when he cuts off people’s legs and they die. I do not know why you go out with him.”

  They left him presently, and got going on the road to Jamieson and Woods Point. It ran through pastoral, station country to begin with, an undulating, well-watered country in a bowl of hills, the pastures becoming dried and brown in the hot sun. The road climbed slowly and became more wooded; presently they came upon a considerable river, a wide river running in a series of pools and shallows on a rocky bottom.

  Carl Zlinter said, “My word. I did not know that there was such a river here.”

  He stopped the car by the roadside and they got out and looked at it; it ran completely deserted, winding through the woods and pastures, rippling in white foam at the little falls and rapids, with deep brown pools between. “It must be full of fish, this river,” the Czech said.

  “What is it, Carl? What’s it’s name?”

  “I do not know. I think that it is perhaps the Goulburn. But I did not know the Goulburn was like this.”

  The English girl asked, “Can anybody go and fish there, Carl, or is the fishing preserved?”

  He shook his head. “It is all free fishing here. There must be very many fish in this river. I will come and fish here one day.”

  “There doesn’t seem to be anybody fishing,” the girl said.

  “It is not like Europe, this,” he replied. “Here, in this country, there are not very many people, and so not many fishermen. It is another reason why I am happy to be here.”

  She turned to him. “You’re very fond of Australia, aren’t you, Carl?”

  “I have lived here fifteen months,” he said, “and I have seen only this little corner of this big country. But now I should be sorry to live anywhere else.” He glanced at her. “Are you happy to be here, and not in England?”

  “I think so, Carl,” she said slowly. “There are so many things, though. I’ve lived in towns most of my life — one does, in England — and all this is strange to me. I like it. I think I’d rather live here than in an English town.” She hesitated. “One has so many ties with England, and it’s so far away. I’ve been getting air-mail letters from my father all this week about my mother. She’s very ill. I’ve been wishing I was back in England all this week.”

  “I am so sorry,” he said. “What is it that is the matter with her?”

  She told him all about it, standing there with him above the Goulburn river; it was a relief to be able to tell somebody everything she thought. “They’ve been a very self-contained pair, my father and mother,” she said. “I had two brothers, but they were both killed in the war, one in a corvette and one in Bomber Command. Daddy and Mummy had so many interests that they shared, I was always a bit out of it after the war. That’s why I didn’t mind going away from home to work in London, and why it didn’t seem too bad to come out here. But now I wish I was back. I don’t know who’ll be running the house for Daddy, or how he can be getting on. If Mummy were to die, I think I’d have to go back. I don’t know what Daddy would do, all on his own.”

  “It would be very sad for me, if you went back,” he said quietly.

  “It would be very sad for me, too,” she replied. “I’d rather stay here.” She turned to the car. “Perhaps it won’t happen. The winter will be getting on now, back in England, and that’ll make it better for Mummy.”

  They drove on through a tiny village and crossed the river, and went on for ten miles or so through the woods along the valley by the river. The sun was hot and the trees made dappled overhung patches of shade upon the road, and the same brilliant parrots with crimson bodies and blue wings flew in the woods ahead of them. They were delighted with the day and with the old car and with each other; twice they stopped to walk down to the river and look at its desolate grandeur, and they hardly stopped talking all the time. They laughed a great deal about silly little things that were not really funny, but they wanted to laugh.

  They passed Gaffney’s Creek and a small gold mine shut down for the week-end, the first that Jennifer had ever seen. From there the road wound upwards through the woods, till they came out at the summit of a col, the road going down into another valley ahead of them.

  “This is Frenchman’s Gap, I think,” said Carl. “Woods Point will be about five miles further on. Shall we have our lunch here, with the gold grill?”

  She laughed again at the little joke. “It’s very lovely here.” She got out of the car and looked around. “Can we do a grill here, Car
l, without setting the whole country grilling too?”

  “There is here a fireplace,” he said, and he showed her the blackened stones. “I think it will be safe if we shall make it here.”

  He set to work to grill the steaks while Jennifer laid out the rest of the meal on a clean cloth upon the grass in the shade of a gum tree. “Carl,” she said, “tell me a bit more about Mary Nolan. Was she Irish?”

  “I think perhaps she was,” he said. “There were very many Irish people in this country at that time.”

  She paused, considering her words. “Did she have a job in Howqua, or how did she come to be there? I mean, a job apart from being a naughty girl?”

  He laughed, and she laughed with him. “I do not know if she had another job,” he said. “I have thought perhaps that she came to Howqua as a barmaid in the hotel, or perhaps she was to help one of the women with the children. I do not know, and I do not know how she happened to be living on the other side of the river. Perhaps she will tell us today.”

  “Perhaps she won’t,” the girl said. “I think we’re going to have a job to get anything out of her at all.”

  They cooked the steaks and ate them hot from the grill, sitting on the warm grass in the shade of the trees, looking out over the blue, misty lines of hills. “It’s so different here to anything I’ve ever known, Carl,” she said once. “People with so much money that they don’t have to worry, who can afford to be generous if they want to, and all made honestly in farming. In this lovely, empty place. I’ve always lived where people were hard up, even good, clever people. It’s all so different here to England.”

  He nodded. “I know. I feel like that also. I live in a camp and I must live so for nine months more, but sometimes I wake up early in the morning, and I look around, and I think of all the fine things in this country that I can do in nine months, the things that I could never do in Europe.” He looked at her a little shyly. “I have a calendar upon the wall,” he said, “and each day when I get up out of bed I cross off one day with a pencil, the day that has gone.”