Complete Works of Nevil Shute

by Nevil Shute

  “Bit awkward, if we don’t know who she was.”

  He bit his lip. “I know,” he said. I glanced at him, and there was an old man’s tremor moving his head, the first time I had seen it. “It makes us look — well, careless.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that, Dad,” I said. “It’s not as if she was a young girl that you were responsible for. She was a grown woman.”

  His hands moved to his chin, as if to stop the tremor. “I know,” he replied. “But it looks bad all the same. As if we didn’t care.”

  He turned to me. “It’s a very good thing for your mother that you’ve come home, Alan. It’s going to take her mind off it. Be with her as much as you can till the funeral is over. Tell her about England — anything.”

  “She’s going to miss her, is she?”

  He nodded. “She’s going to miss her a great deal. When a woman’s getting on in years and not very well, it’s a great comfort to have a girl about the place who’s sensible and responsible. She’s a great loss to your mother, Alan.”

  I nodded slowly. “Mother was fond of her?”

  “I think so. Yes, I think she was,” my father said. “The girl kept her place, but she used to think ahead and do things for your mother before she thought of asking for them, if you understand what I mean. She was very thoughtful for your mother in that way.”

  If she had been thoughtful for my mother it seemed to indicate that she had liked being at Coombargana; indeed, everything that I had heard seemed to point that way. She had never even bothered to take the holidays that were due her. Then why had she taken her own life? I glanced at my father. “What do you think about this theory of Mother’s, that it was an accident?” I asked. “I didn’t want to say too much in front of Mother. Would you say she was a suicidal type?”

  He said, “I simply don’t know, Alan. I don’t know what a suicidal type looks like. To me she was just an ordinary, decent girl, not very good looking. I wouldn’t have expected her to commit suicide — I’d have said she was too level-headed. But who’s to say?”

  “Do you think it was an accident, Dad?” I asked. “I’ve never heard of anyone taking an overdose of sleeping tablets by mistake. I mean, you’ve got to eat such a lot, and gulp down such a lot of water. How many does the doctor say she took?”

  “More than twenty.”

  “Well, surely to God, that couldn’t have been a mistake. You can’t go on taking tablet after tablet till you’ve taken twenty, by mistake. If it had been one, or even two, it might be possible. But not twenty.”

  “If it was deliberate,” my father said, “she wouldn’t have left two tablets in the bottle, would she? She’d have taken the lot, to make sure.”

  There was a pause. “I can’t think it was an accident,” I said at last. “I’m sorry, Dad, but I should say it was deliberate.”

  He stood up, and I was deeply sorry for him, for he looked so old. “Well, don’t tell your mother that,” he said. “It’s better if she thinks it was an accident. I’m hoping that we’ll get the coroner to see it that way in the morning. If it was deliberate we’ll probably never know the reason, and there’s no sense in stirring up trouble.”

  We left the shed and got back into the Land Rover and went on with our tour around the property. In the evening light we came to his trout hatchery by the river, a series of little pools with water running through controlled by little sluices from the river, overhung by weeping willow trees. When I had written to tell them that I would be coming home next spring my father had had this disused hatchery put in order and had commenced to breed up about a thousand little fish with which to re-stock the river against my return; he intended to keep them a few months longer and then discharge them into the main stream. Next year the fishing should be very good indeed.

  We paused by the pools, in the rippling sound of running water, and he began to ask me questions about my time in England. I had taken my degree in Law at Oxford, but I hadn’t enjoyed it much. “It was a bit like Rip van Winkle, Dad,” I said. “I was so much older than the others, and things had changed so. It would have been different if I’d gone back straight after the war, in 1945 or ‘46, when there were other service people up. There was no one there like me in 1948, or hardly anybody, and nobody at all when I went down in 1950. They were all boys straight from school on government grants. The people I got along with best were the young dons.” I paused. “I want to get one or two of them out here on a visit, but it’s difficult because they’re all so hard up.”

  He nodded. “That’s always a difficulty. But you never can get people to come out from England on a visit. It’s not only the money.”

  I went on to tell him about my time in chambers, in Lincoln’s Inn. “I don’t know that I haven’t wasted my time,” I said quietly at last. “I don’t know that being called to the Bar is going to help me much in running Coombargana.”

  He smiled. “Do you think you’ll want to go back and live in England?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I think I’ve got that out of my system. I’d like to go back again some day for fun, say in about ten years’ time, and see how it’s all getting on. But I won’t want to live there again. I don’t think so.”

  “Not like Helen?”

  “No.”

  “What’s Laurence really like?” my father asked. He had never met him, for with their increasing age my mother and father had not felt equal to leaving Coombargana to travel to England. It was one of my secret irritations with my sister that she had not thought fit to bring her husband out to Australia on a visit to let Dad and Mum meet him, though perhaps it was better so.

  “He’s all right,” I said. “I’ve not got a lot in common with him, Dad, and I don’t think you would have.” My father had served all through the first war in Gallipoli and France, and had spent three years of the second war organizing truck transport in the heat and sweat of the Northern Territory when he was over sixty years of age, while Laurence had had trouble with his health and had served his war with the BBC. “There’s nothing wrong with him. He’s getting very well known as a dramatic critic — people think a lot of him.” I glanced at my father. “I’m not sure that he’s not a bit of a passenger in this world, but he probably thinks that of us.”

  “He’s making her a good husband, is he? Not a lot of other women, or not more than a reasonable number?” My father grinned.

  I laughed with him. “I don’t think there’s any trouble of that sort.” There wasn’t likely to be, either, because Helen has quite a lot of character and she kept control of her own money. Laurence wasn’t the type to sacrifice all for love.

  “What about you, Alan?” my father asked. “Did you ever think of getting married?”

  I shook my head.

  “You ought to think about it,” he said. “You’re getting on, you know. Thirty-nine, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. “It’s never happened to come my way.”

  “You ought to think about it,” he repeated. “It’s going to be mighty lonely if you try and carry on this place alone after our time.”

  “It’s not so easy when you’re a cripple,” I said. “It needs special qualities in a girl to settle down married to a chap that’s got no feet.”

  “Well, think it over,” he said irresolutely. And then he said, “You never thought of flying again, I suppose?”

  “As a matter of fact, I did,” I told him. “Not in Typhoons, of course. I did quite a lot of flying at the London Aeroplane Club, at Panshanger, on Tiger Moths and Austers. I didn’t tell you in the letters because I was afraid it might worry Mother.”

  “Are you going on with it here?”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “I just wanted to show myself that I wasn’t afraid of it and that I could do it still, even with dummy feet. I did about a hundred hours in all. But I don’t want to carry on with it, unless there is some object. Which there isn’t, now.”

  He smiled. “What was it like when you got into the ma
chine for the first time?” he asked with interest. “Were you scared?”

  “A bit,” I said. “About as much as on my first solo. But of course, one knew it was dead safe in a pipsqueak thing like that.”

  We left the pools of the trout hatchery and walked slowly back to the Land Rover. “Your mother’s been concocting an exceptional dinner for you all day,” my father said. “Do you want to change?”

  “She’d like it, wouldn’t she?” I asked. “What do you usually do?”

  “I generally put on a dinner jacket in the winter, when it’s dark,” my father said. “In summer when one may want to go out afterwards I usually change into a suit.”

  “I’ve got a dinner jacket in my bag,” I said. “The shirt’s probably a bit tatty after travelling round the world. Let’s change. Mother’ld like it.”

  At the house we found my mother in the drawing room seated before the log fire, wearing a long black evening dress with a shawl round her shoulders. We stood warming ourselves, for the evening was turning chilly, and drinking a pink gin while we chatted about London and about Helen; then I went up to my room to change. In my bedroom somebody had lit a fire and left a huge basket of gum tree logs, scenting the air with the fragrance of the burning eucalypt. Somebody, perhaps old Annie, had unpacked one suitcase and had laid out my evening clothes upon the bed.

  It struck me as I unpacked my other suitcase in my old, familiar room, savouring all my old belongings, that I would be the only person sleeping on the upper floor of the main house that night. My father and mother who had had the bedroom, dressing room, and bathroom next to mine now slept on the ground floor and their bedroom was now the billiard room. On the other side of the corridor to their room was the corner room that had been Helen’s and was now a spare room, and next to that and separated by the second bathroom was the guest bedroom, empty tonight, of course. Beside my room there was another bathroom, and opening from that was Bill’s room, very seldom used now. Bill had been killed in Normandy in the spring of 1944; by the time I got back to Coombargana my father and mother had taken all Bill’s possessions and pictures out and had refurnished and redecorated the room as a second guest room, thinking perhaps that too intimate a reminder of Bill and the war in Europe would have been bad for me. Nothing of Bill remained there now, but they had forgotten the bathroom. Since 1946 I had never sat in that bath without glancing at the door into Bill’s room with the thought that it would open and he would come striding in, seventeen or eighteen years old, with little or no clothes on.

  That happened to me again that evening as I bathed before dressing for dinner. Bill was still a very real person in my life, though nine years had gone by since I had met him last, at Lymington in Hampshire, and sixteen years since we had shared that bathroom. One does not easily forget one’s only brother.

  As I sat in the bath thinking of these things and enjoying the benison of hot water after days spent in the aeroplane and in the Sydney hotel, I felt a little lonely up there on the first floor by myself. I was not quite alone, of course. Beyond the stairs and the gallery that overlooked the big central hall of the house lay the servants’ wing over the kitchen quarters, their bedrooms separated from those of the main house by a swing door. There were four servants’ bedrooms there, relic of the days of more plentiful domestic service, and in one of these Annie, our old cook, would be sleeping that night. In another, the house parlourmaid would be sleeping now.

  I had not drawn the curtains, and there was still a little light outside as I dressed before the fire. I stood for a few minutes looking out in the last of the light before turning to the mirror to tie my tie. Below me the wide lawns ran down to the river, with the formal flower gardens upon the right and the screen of oaks, gums, wattles, and pines upon the left that hid the station buildings. Beyond the river our pastures stretched over and beyond the rise a couple of miles away, and far on the horizon the long ridge of the Grampians stood black against the last of the sunset light. There was contentment here, with no war and no threat of war, no aircraft, no tanks and no soldiers. This was a place to which a man might come when he had had the great world and its alarms, to do a good job in peace. Some day a war might come again and I would have to leave my peace and go and do my stuff as my father had before me, but for the moment I was glad to be out of it all and back at Coombargana as a grazier.

  I finished dressing and went down to the drawing room. My father and mother were both there waiting for me and wanting to know if everything in my room had been all right. “Fine,” I said. “I might have walked out yesterday instead of five years ago,” and I laughed. Actually, in five years one changes and there were things in that room that I would alter as soon as I could. There were things there that I now had no need of, like the stick from my crashed Typhoon, or the compass from the first M.E. 109 I got, over Wittering. These things had solaced me in 1946, but that was seven years ago; I did not need them now, and they were better out of the way.

  I had another pink gin with my father, and then dinner was announced. Mrs. Plowden put her head in at the door. She was untidy as ever with a wisp of grey hair falling down over her face; her sleeves were rolled to the elbow and she wore a coarse apron of hessian. She said brightly, “It’s all in, on the table, Mrs. Duncan.” My mother thanked her, and she withdrew.

  I saw my mother glance at my father, and caught his glance in return. Things must have been different in the days of the parlourmaid, and they had to adjust themselves to new ways and new manners.

  We went into the dining room. To me the bare, polished table with the lace mats and the silver was well laid, but to my mother everything was in the wrong place and she hobbled about rearranging salt cellars and wine glasses, moving dishes from the table to the sideboard, till the arrangement was as she was used to having it. “I’m afraid everything’s a bit higgledy-piggledy tonight, Alan,” she said. “We’ll get things organized in a few days.”

  I said, “It looks all right to me, Mum.”

  She said quietly, “I suppose the fact of the matter is that we’ve been spoiled for the last year or so. I’d almost forgotten what it was to have to train somebody to do things nicely.”

  “She was good, was she?”

  My mother said, “She was an educated girl, so one only had to show her how to do a thing once. I think she must have come from a good home, where they lived nicely.”

  My father said, “She used to work the radiogram.”

  “The radiogram?”

  My mother said, “Whenever your father and I had a little celebration here, on my birthday, or when we heard about the wool sale, we used to have a bottle of champagne with dinner, and music. Your father would put on a long-playing record in the drawing room, Oklahoma! or South Pacific or something nice like that, and we’d leave the doors open so that we had music during dinner. And then we found that Jessie knew how to change the record, and she knew most of the records that we liked, so after that we didn’t have to bother.”

  “She got to know our ways,” my father said. He turned to my mother. “Remember when we heard Alan was coming home? She finished handing the entrée and asked if she should put on a record.”

  My mother nodded. “It will be a very long time before we find another girl like Jessie.”

  We seemed to have drifted back on to the difficult subject. I cast about hurriedly for something fresh to tell my mother that would take her mind off the dead parlourmaid, but I seemed to have told her most of the things already. The thought of Bill came into my mind and the new details I had learned about his death, but I rejected this hurriedly as a subject that had better wait for another time. My journey home was something that I had not told her of, that might amuse and interest her and take her mind off the more sombre topic. “I stayed four or five days in New York,” I said. “It’s a stimulating place, but I don’t know that I’d like to work there.”

  My father played up, sensing the move. “What’s it really like?” he asked. “Is it like you’
d think it was from the movies?”

  “I suppose it is, physically,” I said. “You know more or less what it’s going to look like before you get there. But as regards the people, I’ve never yet met an American that was much like the people that you see upon the movies, and I didn’t this time. I suppose there are Americans like that.”

  My mother said, “They probably exaggerate their own types, Alan, when they put them on the stage or on the screen. We do that, too. All countries do it. You don’t often meet people who behave like people on the stage.”

  My father carried on the steering of the conversation. “I suppose they have to make them larger than life on the screen, in all their characteristics. Did you go to Los Angeles?”

  “No,” I said. “I spent a few days with a chap in San Francisco.” I carried on talking about the United States, and the topic lasted us all through dinner. My parents eat little at their age, but what little they do eat they like to be good, and I think Annie our old cook had made a special effort though I can only remember the fresh asparagus from the garden, and the jugged hare. I pleased my mother by appreciating the dinner, and promised her that I would speak to Annie about it. They had put a good deal of thought into getting together the dishes that I would like best. My father opened a particularly good bottle of Burgundy from somewhere on the Hunter River, and a glass of vintage port from South Australia served with the dessert was really very like the real thing.

  We went through to the drawing room after dinner. My parents had always gone early to bed; one does so in the country where it is usual to be up and about the property at seven in the morning to keep the men from getting slack. Since his operation my father had been ordered to bed at nine o’clock by his doctor, and with the increasing infirmity of my mother they had both got into the habit of retiring about that time, though I think they usually read in bed for an hour or so before sleep. When I had lived at home before, after the war, I had frequently played a game of chess with my mother after dinner; I had not played since then and I had all but forgotten the moves, but now to take her mind off our troubles I suggested we might have a game to celebrate my return. She was pleased at the idea though she had played very little in my absence, so I brought up the inlaid chess table that they had bought in Paris before the war and that had once stood in some chateau or other in Touraine, and now stood in somewhat similar surroundings in the Western District, and found the box that contained the eighteenth-century carved ivory chessmen, and set them up by my mother’s chair before the fire. We played two games and then it was half past nine and time for them to be in bed.