Complete Works of Nevil Shute

by Nevil Shute

  He led the way into the old billiard room. They had redecorated it, and with the French windows opening on to the lawn it made a sunny, pleasant room. My mother was sitting up in bed, not very much changed in her appearance. I went over and kissed her. “Back at last,” I said. “You’re looking very well, Mum.”

  She held me for a moment. “Oh, Alan dear,” she said, “it is nice to have you back. But how did you get here so soon?”

  I told her my story about being held up in London and missing the ship, and complimented her on the arrangement of the room. My father went out and Mother asked me about Helen, and I spent a few minutes answering all her questions about my sister in London.

  Helen was the youngest of us; she had gone to England in 1946 when she was twenty-four, avid to get away into a wider world, like many young Australians. In England she had gone all arty and crafty and had picked up with a chap called Laurence Hilton who worked for the BBC and put on plays for the Third Programme. She married him in 1947 and had not been home since; they had one child, rather an unpleasant little boy. I had tried to like Laurence and to get alongside him but we had very little in common. Privately I thought him a phoney and I suspected that he had seen Helen coming because, of course, she had a good bit of money behind her. However, she seemed happy with him and had adopted most of his views, including the one that Australia was a cultural desert that no decent person would dream of living in. His earning capacity, of course, was quite inadequate for the life they wished to lead. They have a very pleasant little house in Cheyne Walk overlooking the river where they entertain a lot of visitors from ivory towers, and Coombargana pays.

  I annoyed Laurence very much one day by referring to my father as a patron of the arts. I’d probably have annoyed my father too if he’d known.

  I gave my mother a roseate, expurgated account of Helen and Laurence and their way of life, stressing its importance and the reputation that Laurence Hilton was building up in the artistic world. My father came in again then, pushing a tea trolley, for my parents live and eat in the English way with dinner at eight o’clock in the evening. There was trouble about the tea, because my father had brought the wrong sort of cups and had forgotten the tea strainer and the hot water jug, and my mother sent him off to get them.

  “We’re all a bit upside down today,” she said sadly. “We haven’t had to do this ourselves for so long.”

  “I know,” I said. “Harry told me. I was very sorry to hear about it.”

  “Yes,” my mother said quietly, “it’s been a very great blow to us, Alan. I’m so sorry that it had to happen on the very day that you come home.”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “I’m glad in a way it did happen now, if it had to. Dad doesn’t look too fit.”

  “I think he’s just tired today,” Mother said. “He had that operation last year, you remember.” I nodded. “The specialist assured us that it was non-malignant. I think it’s just that he’s tired and upset.”

  “I should think so,” I said, but I didn’t think so at all. “Tell me, has there got to be an inquest?”

  She nodded. “Dr. Bateman, he’s the coroner. He’s coming out tomorrow morning, with the police. Dr. Stanley was here again this afternoon. I think there’s got to be a post mortem.”

  “Why did she do it, Mum?” I asked. “Was she depressed?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “She was just as usual, I think. She was a very reserved girl, Alan. She never talked about herself or her own affairs, like most women do. It was rather difficult to know what she thought of anything. She was always just about the same.”

  “Was she attractive, Mother? Attractive to men?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so. She was rather plain. I’m sure it wasn’t anything like that.”

  It was puzzling; we seemed to have come to a dead end. “Have you got any idea why she did it?”

  My mother said, “I think it was an accident, Alan. I think it must have been. There was this bottle of sleeping tablets by her bedside, quite a big bottle, with only two left in it. Dr. Stanley said he thought she must have taken at least twenty.” She paused. “I think she took one, perhaps, when she went to bed and then had a nightmare or something, and got up, sort of sleep walking, and took tablet after tablet. I’m sure it was an accident.”

  It was a possibility. “There were two tablets left in the bottle?”

  “Yes.”

  “If she was going to commit suicide,” I said, “she’d have taken the lot. She’d want to make sure of it. You don’t think she had any motive for wanting to make away with herself, Mother?”

  “I’m sure she hadn’t, Alan. She seemed just the same as ever.”

  I thought for a moment. “Did she get any letters yesterday?”

  “She never had any.”

  “Never had any letters?”

  My father came back with the tea strainer and the hot water jug and put them on the trolley. “I was telling Alan about Jessie,” she said, and now there was a suspicion of moisture about her eyes, and a break in her voice. “He was asking if she got a letter yesterday.”

  “She never got any mail at all, according to Annie,” my father said. “She never got a letter all the time that she’d been here. I never saw one addressed to her, and nor did Annie.”

  “I never did,” said my mother.

  I stared at them. “That’s very unusual, surely. Did she write any?”

  “I don’t think so,” said my father. “I usually take the mail in when I go, but she never gave me one to take. I don’t even know her handwriting. Annie says she never wrote a letter, and she never got one.”

  “Could she write?” I asked. Sometimes a domestic servant can’t.

  “Oh yes. She was a well-educated girl,” my mother said. “Very well educated. I knew her handwriting. She used to take down messages on the pad in the hall, when someone telephoned. You’ve seen them, Richard. You do know her handwriting.”

  My father said, “Oh, yes, of course I do. But that’s the only place I’ve ever seen it.”

  My mother leaned from her bed and poured out the tea. “Do you know anything about her relations?” I asked. “You’ve sent a telegram?”

  My father said, “We haven’t, Alan. There’s not a scrap of anything in her room to tell us who she was.”

  My mind, of course, was still concerned with the details of travel. “There must be something,” I said. “Vaccination and inoculation certificates. She must have had a passport, too.”

  My father said, “There isn’t anything at all, Alan. There’s no document of any sort in her room. There’s only her clothes and a few novels. Practically all of those are from the house, too.”

  “That’s all right,” my mother said, and again there was a tremor in her voice. “I told her she could read any of the books she wanted to, at any time.”

  She passed me my tea, and I sat with it in my hand in silence for a minute. I did not want to say what I was thinking, that here was clear evidence of suicide, because my mother wanted to believe it was an accident and maybe it was better that she should. But if the girl before her death had taken pains to destroy evidence of her identity it meant that her death was planned beforehand. It must mean that.

  I glanced at my father. “So we’ve got nobody to telegraph to, to tell them that she’s dead? We don’t know who she was, or where she came from?”

  “That’s right, Alan,” said my father. “We don’t know who she was, or where she came from. She came to us from the Post Office Hotel,” and he went on to tell me what I knew already.

  My mother said, “Annie says that she had worked in Sydney. She thinks she came from England several years ago. But I don’t think that’s right. She said once that she only landed in Australia a few weeks before she came to us from the hotel.”

  “She never told anyone what she’d been doing before she came to Forfar, to the hotel?” I asked.

  My mother shook her head. “She never tal
ked about herself at all.”

  “She was probably married,” I suggested.

  My parents stared at me in astonishment; the thought was quite a new one to them. I said slowly, “An unsatisfactory marriage, here in Australia, that she wanted to forget about. That would explain why she didn’t talk about her past life. If all her documents were in her married name, it would explain why she destroyed them. She would have wanted to make a completely fresh start.”

  My father said, “Well, that’s a new idea entirely.” He paused. “It certainly seems to fit the facts.”

  I pursued my line of thought. “Proctor is almost certainly her maiden name. We’ll have to try and find the husband, or the police will. I suppose it’s their job. He’ll have to be found and told about her death. They’ll have to start looking for a man who married an English girl called Jessie Proctor, probably in Sydney, probably two or three years ago, and who probably left him fifteen or sixteen months ago, a little time before she fetched up in Forfar and came to you. It’ll mean a bit of work for them, but it won’t take them very long.”

  My father sighed with relief. “I think you’ve got it, Alan,” he said. “It’s far the most likely idea so far. And it accounts for everything.” He turned to me. “I don’t mind telling you, I’ve been worried over this. The inquest is tomorrow, and it’s going to make a lot of trouble if we don’t know who she is.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Dad,” I said. It seemed to me that he was in no state to get worked up about anything, and I had come home to unload him. “I’ll go to the inquest.”

  “I’ll have to come with you,” he said. “It would certainly be a help if you came too, Alan. I suppose living here in the country one gets rather out of touch with the world. It certainly never occurred to me that she might be a married woman.”

  My mother said nothing, and it seemed to me that we had talked about this rather unsavoury business long enough. I began to ask them questions about the property. Rabbits, it seemed, were now reduced to manageable proportions thanks to myxomatosis and my father’s energy. The result had been a progressive increase in the stock upon the property, partly due to pasture improvement but mostly, I think, due to the reduction of rabbits. Old Jim Plowden who had been a boundary rider when I went away had fallen from his horse and broken his thigh some years ago; as he was over sixty my father had put him in charge of the rabbit pack, a miscellaneous assortment of about thirty mongrel dogs kept in a kennel and run as a disciplined force in the war against the rabbit. This war went on continuously with tractor-drawn rippers to destroy the warrens, with smoke bombs and ferrets, and above all with the rabbit pack to chase and destroy the vermin as they were flushed from their burrows. Seven rabbits will eat as much feed as a sheep, and on Coombargana after the neglect of the war years there must have been a hundred thousand rabbits, or more.

  My father had been experimenting with spreading super-phosphate from the air on paddocks that were too rough and stony to make spreading it from trucks a possibility, and this again had increased the carrying capacity of the land. Two Tiger Moths had done the work efficiently and well, and he was going to have more paddocks treated in this way in the coming summer. He had built new shearers’ quarters soon after I had left, which I had never seen, of course, and in the last year he had largely remodelled the shearing shed and had installed new machinery throughout. He had built four new weatherboard houses for the station hands to replace the last of the older, two-roomed shacks of my grandfather’s time, and a couple of years ago he had put up a considerable power station with a diesel engine of no less than sixty horsepower to provide electricity not only for our house but for each of the eleven houses on the property.

  My father was only able to give me the bare outline of all these activities during tea, and my mother, of course, wanted to know all about my life in London so that we had much to talk about. My mother seemed much brighter when she had had her tea, and announced her intention of getting up for dinner, which I thought was a good thing and better for her than lying in bed thinking about the dead parlourmaid upstairs. It was arranged that my father would drive me round the property for a couple of hours in the Land Rover before dinner while my mother got up and dressed and organized the dinner with Annie our old cook and Mrs. Plowden, who was usually brought in to help with the washing up in times of domestic crisis.

  We finished tea and put the cups and plates back on the tea trolley, which my father proceeded to wheel out through the big, galleried central hall to the pantry. I stayed for a moment with my mother before going out to carry my suitcases up to my bedroom on the upper floor.

  My mother said, “I think you’re wrong about Jessie, Alan.”

  “In what way?” I asked. “Wrong about what?”

  “About her being married,” said my mother quietly. “I’m sure she wasn’t.”

  I was silent, because it’s a difficult subject for a bachelor to dispute with a woman of my mother’s age. “Did she ever say she wasn’t?” I asked at last.

  My mother shook her head. “She never said anything at all about her own affairs. But I’m quite sure she wasn’t married.”

  2

  AS OLD AGE had crept upon my father and mother they had reduced the scale of their expenditure upon themselves to quite a small proportion of their net income. They never had kept racehorses as many of our neighbours do, and they had outgrown the pleasures of spending money. They got a book each month through the Book Society and they bought a few gramophone records when they were in Melbourne, but with increasing years and infirmity they got more pleasure out of old things than new, out of old books that they had read fifteen or twenty years before and turned back to now with pleasure, out of old gramophone records, out of furniture that they had bought thirty years ago when they took over Coombargana.

  Helen’s allowance and my own had absorbed a good slice of their net income after taxation, which in recent years had fluctuated between twenty and thirty thousand pounds a year. Much of the rest had been saved and invested prudently to provide for death duties on an estate which might well be assessed at a quarter of a million pounds upon my father’s death, but this cash reserve was now adequate for any calls that were likely to be made on it. In other countries and in other circles a prosperity such as ours might be accompanied by wild parties in the city, with a nude girl in a bath of champagne in the middle of the dinner table and a dozen crashed motor cars next morning. In the Western District things have never been like that; perhaps an agricultural prosperity doesn’t go that way. Certainly Australian wool producers, those who survived the hard times of the thirties when wool was down to a shilling a pound, got such an economic fright as would keep them in the straight and narrow path for the rest of their lives. I can vouch for it that at Coombargana and all the other stations that I know the money made seems to be spent prudently and well.

  My father’s great interest was in the property, and all his spare money was now going into improvements. Wherever I looked as we drove round in the Land Rover there was something new, new stockyards, new spray sheep dips, new vehicles, new pumps, new generators, new houses, new fences, new windmills, and new dams. In the hard times before the second war, when I was a boy at Coombargana, much of this expenditure would have been classed as rank extravagance, but times had changed and my father had had the wit to change with them. Labour costs had trebled since the thirties and the output of the property had doubled, so that any machine that would save an hour of a man’s time was now a good machine.

  We went into the long shearing shed, now empty and swept clean, of course, for the shearing was over and the shed would remain unused till next year. He showed me how he had rearranged the stands and the tables and the bins, and the new machinery. He had made a job of it all right; I could visualize the production line, so to speak, when this place was going full blast and sheep were passing through at the rate of three hundred an hour. I was keenly interested in all that he had done for this was my job from n
ow on, but the dead parlourmaid was still in the background of my mind.

  We rested for a few minutes in the long, cool aisle of the shed, leaning against a table, looking around. “Mother doesn’t seem to think much of my idea that the girl was married,” I said.

  “She doesn’t?”

  I shook my head.

  “I’d never thought of her as a married woman, myself,” my father remarked. “She might have been, of course.”

  “How old was she?”

  “Twenty-eight or thirty, I should say. It’s difficult to judge.”

  “Harry said she never took a holiday.”

  “I don’t think she did. I think she went into Ballarat once or twice for shopping, but apart from that I don’t think she left the place the whole time she was here.”

  I wrinkled my brows. “What did she do on her days off?”

  He thought for a minute. “I think she was interested in the property,” he said. “She used to go out with Jim Plowden and the rabbit pack. I think she liked the dogs. She liked shooting, too. I never had much to do with her outside; she kept her place, you know. The men say that she was a very fine shot at rabbits, either with a gun or a rifle. They say she never seemed to miss.” He paused. “I’ve been wondering if she was a farmer’s daughter perhaps, back at home.”

  I nodded. “You don’t know what part of England she came from?”

  “I don’t,” he said. “Annie thinks she came from London, but I don’t think she really knows.”

  “That doesn’t line up with her being a farmer’s daughter.”

  “I know.”

  We sat silent for a minute. Then I glanced at him, and said, “The coroner’s coming here tomorrow morning, with the police?”

  He nodded. “They’ve got to give a certificate for burial. There’ll have to be an inquest, of course.”