by Nevil Shute
September 3rd. Mr. Fox, the postman, was in the bar this evening. He came out from England as a boy about forty years ago, from Beverley, in Yorkshire. We got talking when he heard that I was English, and I told him I was working my way round seeing the country. He said I ought to come out with him on his round; he starts off with the mail at about ten o’clock each morning in an old car and goes to all the outlying properties, getting back here about three or four in the afternoon. He takes the newspapers, too. He suggested I should go with him tomorrow if it was a nice fine day. It seemed too good a chance to miss, so I went and asked Mrs. Collins if I could go if I got up early and did out the bar and the dining room before breakfast. She said I could, so I’ve set my alarm clock for five thirty.
September 4th. I’ve taken a job at Coombargana, as a parlourmaid. I did it on the spur of the moment without really thinking. I rather wish I hadn’t now, but it’s done and I go there next Friday. It’s only for a week or two till they can get another married couple.
I went out with Mr. Fox and we called at every house on the way, of course. It’s a lovely countryside, rather like Salisbury Plain but on a much larger scale and with fewer houses and villages. All the houses wooden and rather new looking, except the very big properties which are quite different.
We got to Coombargana about half past eleven. It’s just like a big English country house with a long drive, stone pillars and iron gates permanently open on the road and an avenue of flowering trees and pines about half a mile long through the paddocks. The house stands by a river in a very beautiful place, though the house itself is as ugly as sin. It’s a big rambling two-storied house built of brick I think, rather like a Scotch castle gone wrong. The grounds all round it are lovely and very well kept, acres of daffodils in bloom, and japonica, and camellias in the sheltered places, enormous great bushes of them beside the clipped yew hedges.
We went to the back door and the old cook came out to meet us and took the post. Her name is Annie. She asked us into the kitchen for a cup of tea; apparently this is the usual routine. Mr. Fox introduced me and said I came from London, and Annie asked at once if I had met Mr. Alan there. The locals all seem very interested in Alan.
While we were sitting at the kitchen table over tea Mr. Fox said something about the married couple and asked if they had anyone else. Annie said the mistress was trying the registry offices again but it was very difficult; they could only get the riffraff to come out into the country these days. She said that for her part she didn’t want any more foreigners; she’d rather carry on and do the housework herself with what help they could get from the wives on the place though it was too much for one person. She said the mistress was trying for a Dutch girl, and that might be better.
I liked Annie, and I said I wouldn’t mind coming for a week or two myself if it would help them, till they got someone permanent. I can’t imagine what made me say that; it just sort of slipped out. Annie was on it like a knife, though. She said that if I meant that she’d go and tell the mistress and she’d want to see me. I started hedging then; I said I could only stay for a week or two because I was going on to Adelaide and I didn’t want to let down Mrs. Collins at the Post Office Hotel and I’d never done parlourmaid work, but if Mrs. Duncan could make it right with Mrs. Collins I’d come for a short time.
She said she thought the mistress was in her room still because she stayed in bed till lunch time this cold, wet weather when she couldn’t get out, but she would go and see. She came back and said the mistress was getting up and she would see me in half an hour. Mr. Fox had to get on, of course, so we fixed it that I’d stay and have lunch in the kitchen with Annie and he’d call back for me at about three o’clock on the way back to Forfar at the end of his round. He said it would only be two or three miles out of his way to do that.
Annie said I’d better take a walk round the house with her to get an idea of the work before I saw the mistress. She took me first into the dining room, a big room with a long polished table that I think she said was blackwood, all exactly like a big English country house, very good furniture. Then the hall which is the whole height of the building with a gallery all round it on the bedroom floor, and the drawing room, all beautifully furnished and with lovely flowers in the bowls. Mr. and Mrs. Duncan sleep on the ground floor in what used to be the billiard room because Mrs. Duncan can’t manage the stairs, because of her arthritis. There’s a study on the ground floor but the Colonel was in it so we didn’t go in there. We took a quick look at the top floor but it’s only guest rooms and Alan’s room if and when he comes home. Annie sleeps up there over the kitchen, and she showed me the room that would be mine, quite nice and with the most lovely view out across the lawn to the river and the pastures and the hills in the distance. There’s a great deal in the house to keep polished and dusted, but so few people it shouldn’t be too bad. They’ve got an electric floor polisher and a Hoover.
Mrs. Duncan saw me in the hall, sitting in front of the fire. She’s terribly like Bill. She walks with a stick, very lame. She asked me about myself and I told her as little as possible; I said I was working my way round seeing the world and when I’d seen Australia I was going on to South Africa. She asked if I’d worked in hotels. She asked why I wanted to come to such an out-of-the-way place, and I said that I wanted to see all of Australia and I hadn’t been able to see a big station property yet. I said I wouldn’t be able to stay longer than a week or two till they got someone permanent. She said she’d ring up Mrs. Collins and see what she thought about it, and let me know after dinner. She asked if I had any dark dresses because I was in my French blue jumper and grey skirt, and I said I’d got my dark blue costume. She said she wouldn’t want me to wear light clothes in the dining room but she didn’t want me to ruin my best costume by working in it; she thought she had something that would fit me with a bit of alteration. It looks as though the servants dress in the old style at Coombargana, like in England thirty years ago. I’ll probably have to wear a starched white apron or something, over a black dress.
She sent me back to have lunch with Annie in the kitchen and I got Annie to show me how to lay the table in the dining room. They’ve got beautiful silver, and it looks so nice upon the polished table. It’s all got to be cleaned every week. They had cutlets for lunch, and new potatoes and green peas, and English Stilton cheese afterwards. There was only the Colonel and Mrs. Duncan. I asked Annie if they’d like me to serve them with the stuff in the entrée dishes and she said drily that they hadn’t had a parlourmaid who did that for years but they’d like it well enough. So I did it like that for them; they looked a bit surprised but I think they were pleased.
After dinner Mrs. Duncan came to the kitchen and asked me to come out into the hall. She said she’d spoken to Mrs. Collins and it was quite all right, and I could leave on Friday. I said I’d have to go to Ballarat and get my suitcases and come back to them, and she said they’d pick me up in Forfar when the bus came in. They’re giving me eight pounds a week and my keep. The Colonel was there and they both said that they hoped I’d be very happy with them. He said that in the afternoons, in my time off, I could go anywhere on the property and he’d tell the men to show me anything I liked.
Mr. Fox came, and I went back to the hotel with him in time for the evening rush at the bar.
She’s so terribly, terribly like Bill, it’s almost unbearable sometimes.
September 8th. I think I must be crazy to have come here, but here I am. Colonel Duncan sent the foreman, Harry Drew, in to Forfar in a Land Rover to meet me at the bus and I drove out with him. His father came out from Gloucester forty years ago, but Harry was born here. He invited me to tea at his house on Sunday to meet his wife. I said I didn’t know what my times off would be, but I’d come if I could and I’d let him know tomorrow.
I took my suitcases up to the room Annie had shown me. I always thought the servants in a big country house must have the whale of a good time and now I know it. The view from my bedr
oom is just perfect, the room is very clean and comfortable, and there’s a lovely bathroom just for Annie and me, with a shower. There was a dark grey dress laid out on the bed which fitted more or less. I put it on because it looked as if it had been left there as a sort of hint, rather a broad one, and then I went downstairs to start work. They have afternoon tea on a wheeled tea trolley and Annie showed me how to get that ready, and I wheeled it into the hall and through into the drawing room. Mrs. Duncan was there in a chair before the fire and she showed me how she likes the tea arranged and made me turn round to show her how the dress fitted. It wants taking in a bit at the waist and it’s a bit long; I told her I’d have a go at it tomorrow afternoon. I wonder who had it before me.
I laid the dining room table then and washed up the tea things, and then I came up here to unpack. I’ve been sitting at the table looking out over the river and the paddocks in the evening light. A man went by just then on the other side of the river riding a horse, at the walk. It’s so very, very quiet and peaceful here.
I think I’m beginning to understand more about Bill, after eight years. This is what he was brought up in. This house and this view made him what he was. No wonder he was different to all the other Pongoes. One couldn’t help being different, living in a beautiful place like this, not as a passenger but doing a real job of work upon the land. Because it is a real job of work — it must be. Twenty-eight thousand sheep don’t just look after themselves and cut their own hair and send it to market for you.
I’ve got to start thinking of a different Bill, a Bill who was a part of Coombargana. I only knew him as a marine sergeant in a battledress. That wasn’t the real Bill at all; it was Bill in a disguise, and I never knew it though I should have done. The real Bill was a part of all this loveliness.
When I got to that point in her diary I couldn’t go on reading for a time. I got up from the table and made up the fire, and then I went over to the window and pulled the curtains aside. It was nearly four in the morning and the moon was setting; in little more than an hour it would be beginning to get light. I opened the window and the cool night air blew in around me; before me lay the paddocks, misty by the river in the slanting, silvery light. I stood there thinking how right she had been, how well she had understood. Bill had been a part of all this loveliness.
Both Bill and I had spent our lives at Coombargana and at school till we had gone away to England before the war. We had never thought about our home much, except perhaps to grumble that it was too far away from city life. We had gone away to very distant places and Bill had not returned; I had travelled the world and I had come to realize, in faint surprise, that I had seen no countryside that could compare in pastoral beauty with that of my own home. It takes a long time for an Australian to accept the fact that the wide, bustling sophisticated world of the northern hemisphere cannot compare with his own land in certain ways; I was nearly forty years old, and I was only now realizing that by any standard of the wider world my own home was most beautiful.
Bill had been fortunate in being born and brought up here, as I had, though we never knew it. In her diary Janet had written that this house and this view had made Bill what he was. Perhaps she had got something there. In the dark night at Le Tirage, within a stone’s throw of the Germans, Bill had gone forward to attach the gadget to the German mines on the lock gates while Bert Finch stayed in support. Perhaps when he worked under water at the wires, using up oxygen and so implementing his death, the British Navy had been cashing in on all that Coombargana had put in to him throughout his childhood in the Western District.
I closed the window, searched for my pipe and my tobacco, and sat down to the diary again. After the first entries at Coombargana the diary became infrequent, as had happened several times before in the years since the war. I think that means she was contented, with an easy mind; she seems only to have written in it when she was troubled. An early entry, however, seems to be important.
September 13th. There are two photographs of Bill in her bedroom, one that I hadn’t seen before of him on a horse, I think by the stockyard here. He’s much younger in that one, probably only about fifteen or sixteen. The other is the rather stiff studio portrait he had done at Portsmouth that I didn’t like. I’ve got such a much better one in my case, but of course I daren’t put it up in my room here. I haven’t heard them say a word about Bill and I suppose that’s understandable because it’s eight years ago and everything there was to say must have been said. But they talk a lot about Alan.
Everybody here talks about Alan; he’s very much in everybody’s mind. Annie says something now and then, and Mrs. Drew was talking about him when I went to tea on Sunday, and the Colonel and Mrs. Duncan say something about him at practically every meal that I can’t help overhearing. They all hoped that he was coming home this spring but he’s staying in London for another year to get called to the Bar. There’s no sign of him getting married, but he does a lot of motor racing.
I think the fact of the matter is that they’re all a bit anxious. If he doesn’t come back to Coombargana the place will be sold on the Colonel’s death, and that means a tremendous upset for everyone connected with it. Annie has been here for forty years, and some of the men for over twenty. They’ve all got houses on the place and very good houses they are, too — all with electric light from the main generating plant and all with septic tanks. Apparently that’s much better than conditions usually are on these country properties. The Duncans have been very good employers. They pay a good bonus after each wool sale so that all the man have cars of some sort. I think that’s why they’re all so interested in Alan. They want to see him marry somebody and settle down here, and carry on the property.
October 26th. The weather has been lovely while the Colonel and Mrs. Duncan have been in Melbourne, warm sunny days, and not much wind. We’ve had Mrs. Plowden in to help us with the spring cleaning, and we’ve had all the windows open every day, letting the warm wind blow through the house. It’s been a lot of work but we’ve broken the back of it now. They’re coming home tomorrow.
Last night after supper we were sitting in the kitchen and Annie started talking about Alan again. She said it was a great trouble to his mother that he hadn’t married. She said they hoped that when he came home after the war he’d have taken to one of Helen’s friends, but he was very much put out with having lost his feet and didn’t seem to want to have anything to do with girls. They all said it was because he was crippled, but Annie herself always thought he’d got a girl in England he was thinking of. She said he never rested till he could get away and back to England, and she thought when he went that they’d have heard he was engaged to somebody in England within six months. But it didn’t happen. Gossip of the servants’ hall, of course.
I’m terribly sorry for Alan. He sounds rather a lonely person.
October 28th. They came back yesterday. I thought the Colonel was looking better for the change, but Mrs. Duncan not so good. Of course, staying in her club and going about shopping in Melbourne she can’t look after herself, and she told me this morning she’d had a great deal of pain while she was away, but it had been worth it. I persuaded her to stay in bed all day. This evening I asked her if she’d like me to bring the little table from the study into her bedroom and lay the Colonel’s dinner there so that they could have it together. It’s got a good polish on it and it really looked quite nice with the silver and the dinner mats laid out on it just as we do it in the dining room. It wasn’t much more trouble, either.
They had a letter from Alan today. He doesn’t write often enough.
There is no mention in the diary that she was pressing to move on to Adelaide, or any mention of another married couple. I think that she was happy in the queer position that she had made for herself at Coombargana, and content to stay on as a parlourmaid indefinitely. I think Dr. Ruttenberg in Seattle had probably summed her up correctly; she felt a great need to be of use to somebody, and this was satisfied for the time bein
g. A significant entry when she had been at Coombargana for three months shows her developing relationship with my mother.
December 11th. The Colonel had to go to Ballarat this afternoon to speak at a dinner of the R.S.L. — I think that means the Returned Servicemen’s League but I’m not quite sure, so Mrs. Duncan had dinner by herself. When I took the coffee into the drawing room after dinner she was sitting at her desk turning over a lot of things she’d taken out of one of the little drawers at the side. I put the coffee down beside her on the desk and handed the sugar on the salver, and when she’d helped herself she picked up a photograph and showed it to me and said, “Jessie, that was my other boy, Willy.” It was a photograph of Bill, of course, standing by the front door with a shotgun and a dog probably when he was about eighteen years old. I couldn’t think of anything to say, and after a minute she told me, “That was taken just before he went away to England, just before the war. He was killed in 1944, doing something on the coast of Normandy just before the invasion.” I’d got a grip on myself by that time, and I said, “I know, madam. Annie told me. He must have been a great loss to you.” She didn’t say anything for quite a time, and then she said, “Yes. Willy wasn’t clever like Alan. He was more of a home lover. If he’d lived I think that he’d have been the one to carry on this place, and Alan would have gone into Parliament or else into the Department of External Affairs. Willy never wanted to do anything else but come back here and manage Coombargana.” I couldn’t stand it any longer, and I said, “Will that be all tonight, madam?” And she said, “Yes, thank you, Jessie. Good night.” I think I got out of the room without giving myself away to her, but I wouldn’t be so sure about Annie. She doesn’t miss much that goes on in Coombargana.