Complete Works of Nevil Shute

by Nevil Shute

  Another entry reads,

  January 5th. We had awful fun today. I’m supposed to get one full day off a week and one half day, but I’ve never bothered much about them. I felt I wanted a bit of fresh air and a change though, and yesterday I asked Harry Drew if I could go out rabbitting with them. Old Jim Plowden is the King Rabbitter here and he looks after the rabbit pack, about thirty of the most ferocious mongrels you ever saw. He keeps going after the rabbits steadily all the time, but now they’re having a big drive to clean them up and they’ve got half the men on rabbitting. I drove out with them in the truck up to the hill that they call the Eight Hundred Acre. It’s got an awful lot of rabbits in it, or it had last week; I don’t think it’s got many now. They’ve been ripping up the warrens with sort of prongs that stick down into the ground behind the tractor and rip down about two feet deep, make an awful mess of the ground but make a mess of the rabbit holes too. Then they work the tractor backwards and forwards to stamp the earth in, and run a great big roller with a lot of things sticking out of it, a sheep’s-foot roller they call it, run that over the lot.

  Where the ground’s stony and they can’t do that they put in ferrets and chase them out and set the dogs on them as they come out, or shoot them. All the men were armed to the teeth with various sorts of cannon popping off in every direction and having a grand time. I asked Harry if I could have a go and he looked a bit doubtful and asked if I’d ever fired a shotgun, and I said I had, so he lent me his gun. I missed the first two, but then I got the hang of it and bowled over four rabbits in four shots — running, too. It’s only a question of laying off enough ahead of them and imagining a ring sight on the gun. The men were very impressed and wanted to know where I learned to shoot, but of course I didn’t tell them. We ran out of rabbits then, but on the way home they asked if I’d like a go with a .22 and I said I would. I think they wanted to see if the rabbits had been just a fluke. So they put up a beer bottle on a stone wall and gave me a little rifle and made me try it at about thirty yards. I was just below with the first shot but I got it the second time. I knew I could do it so I told them to put up three bottles in a row and I smashed them in three shots, rooty-toot-toot. I said, any time they wanted anything shot, just get a Pommie girl from England and she’d shoot it for them if they couldn’t. They thought that was a scream and laughed about it all the way home.

  It was a lovely day. Harry let me clean the rifle when we got back to his house, and I had tea with them. He tried again to find out where I learned to shoot, but I wasn’t having any and dodged the question.

  After that there are long gaps in the diary of five or six weeks at a time, and such entries as there are are not significant. She seemed to have settled in to the routine of washing and cleaning in the house, making the beds and serving the meals. Because neither of my parents are very good on stairs at their age she used to go down to the cellar for my father to fetch up the drinks, and she got to know what wine or cocktails they required when they had friends in the house, and how to serve them. I think her relations with my mother were always those of mistress and maid, but inevitably they became close friends. When the arthritis was painful she could do things for my mother that no one else could do and inevitably my mother talked to her freely about family affairs in the winter months, when few visitors came to the house and there was no other woman for my mother to talk to.

  An entry early in the winter is important:

  May 6th. It’s been bitterly cold today with a dark, leaden sky and a few flakes of snow. They say it’s too early for snow to lie, but outside it’s as cold as charity. They’ve got the heating going and the house is warm enough, but I got her to stay in bed till after lunch. I always thought Australia was a warm country, and it was hot enough here in the summer, but it’s good and bracing now.

  They had great news today, because there was a long letter from Alan. He’s definitely coming home, and they’re so excited over it. He’s staying in England till September to get called to the Bar, but he’s booked a passage sailing from England on October the 5th, so he’ll be home at the beginning of November.

  They’re both so happy today, and it was all round Coombargana by the evening. I asked the Colonel if he’d like me to get up a bottle of champagne for dinner and they had that, and Annie made a special effort over dinner for them with caviar to start with and mushrooms on toast to end up — there are a lot of mushrooms in the paddocks now and we can get a basket any time. They had music at dinner for a celebration. Alan’s been away five years, but from what they say he’s definitely coming home for good now, to get down to work and manage Coombargana. I’m so glad for them.

  I’m glad for Alan, too. I haven’t seen his letter, of course, but she was talking about him this afternoon when I was helping her get up. She says he’s quite made up his mind now that his place is here and he doesn’t want to do any of the other things any more, like being a barrister or going in to politics. He feels he ought to stay in England till September and finish off what he’s begun and get called to the Bar, but he feels that he’s too old to start in practice at the English Bar and he’s tired of being in England now and wants to come home and settle down. I suppose that was all in the letter. She was saying that he was so restless after the war and being crippled, but she thought he’d got it out of his system. She said she hoped he’d find some nice girl and get married.

  It’s been a great day for them.

  I’ll have to move on somewhere else before Alan gets home. He’d be bound to recognize me. I wouldn’t want to go much before November because I do think they need someone to look after them a bit, but when Alan gets home everything will be different; he’ll be able to do a lot of the things I do for them now. He’ll organize things for them, and he’ll be able to race around and get some decent servants in the house, not like that ghastly Polish couple that were here before. There won’t be any need for me when he comes home. I’ll aim to get away a week or two before he arrives.

  I’ll have to go back to Seattle first, I think, to get hold of Aunt Ellen’s money. That should be settled up by now. After that, God knows. I would like to get back in to the Wrens, if they’ll have me. If the armistice negotiations in Korea break down, and it looks as if they will, the war will all flare up again and everyone says it will be much worse than before, and there may be a full-scale war breaking out between America and China, with Russia and England and everyone else joining in. If that happened they’d be bound to want all the ordnance Wrens they could get hold of.

  It’s going to be a bit of a wrench leaving this place.

  She was to discover as the months went on that it wasn’t going to be so easy for her to leave Coombargana. She had made herself too much a part of it.

  May 29th. She’s been talking for some time of getting Alan’s room ready for him, but it seemed a bit early to me. This morning she got up directly after breakfast and wanted to go upstairs, so I helped her with the stairs and then she made me go and get a pencil and paper and the tape measure and she got down to things. There are two big rooms there with a bathroom in between. Alan’s has got bits of aeroplane in it and some of his clothes there still in the wardrobes and chest of drawers, all put away with mothballs. She told me that the other room was Willy’s, but she’d refurnished it after the war and now they use it as a spare guest room. I took a look in there this afternoon, but there’s nothing in it now to remind anyone of Bill. The view is practically the same as from my room.

  She’s really going to town over Alan’s room. First of all she said it needed new curtains and she made me get the steps and measure up the pelmets and the curtains; she said when she was in Melbourne she’d seen some Italian material in Georges that she thought would do; it cost four pounds ten a yard but it would last a long time. She’ll need thirty-eight yards for the curtains. Then she said the carpet wouldn’t do at all; it was much too shabby, but it looked perfectly all right to me. There are two upholstered armchairs there and she wasn’t
satisfied with those, so we’re going to get those downstairs and send them in to Ballarat on a truck to have loose covers made, two sets for each. She’s going to get the material for that in Melbourne, to go with the curtains. She wants a new bedspread and new shades on all the lamps. She’s going to have all the woodwork repainted and the bathroom repainted completely.

  She wanted to re-paper Alan’s room, but I persuaded her not to. There’s nothing the matter with the paper and I thought it would make the room look so different for him. I said that half the fun of coming home was to come back to all the things you knew and you remembered, and if she did the wallpaper it would make it look like another room and he wouldn’t feel at home. She saw that in the end, and we agreed that the paint should be as much like the old paint as possible so that the appearance of the room would be the same, but everything clean and nice. I said I’d get a loaf of stale bread and rub down the paper by the electric light switch at the door where it’s got a bit dirty. It’s good paper and I’m sure it’ll come up all right. She made me measure up the carpet, but she’ll have a job to get one big enough. It wants to be about twenty-five feet by twenty. She says that if she can’t find anything she likes she can get one made specially, in Bombay.

  I totted it all up just for interest; she’s going to spend nearly eight hundred pounds doing up that room, I should think. They don’t spend anything on themselves in the normal way; they live quite modestly though they spend a good bit on the garden. But she’s really letting herself go on Alan’s room. It’s going to look awfully nice by the time we’ve done with it.

  I stopped reading and stared round the room. There were the new curtains, the new shades on all the lamps, the deep new pile of the Indian carpet beneath my feet, the new loose cover of the chair that I was sitting in, the slightly different appearance of the wallpaper by the electric switch, the gleam of the new paint. I had not noticed any of them.

  June 20th. The Colonel placed an order for a new Land Rover today for Alan. Delivery is about two months so it should be here about a month before he arrives. They don’t use horses much now, only the boundary riders who go round every day inspecting every fence and every gate and looking to see if any of the sheep are straying or if any of them have anything the matter with them. The Colonel goes everywhere in his Land Rover and he says that Alan must have his own. His feet won’t matter a bit then.

  I heard them talking about this at dinner, and of course I mentioned it to Annie in the kitchen because there didn’t seem to be anything confidential in the fact that they were getting a new motor vehicle upon the property. Everyone will know about it tomorrow. Her reaction was typically Annie. She said, “Aye, they’re getting for him everything the heart of man could desire, saving the one thing.” I asked, “What’s that?” She said, “A wife.” She’s very shrewd.

  July 10th. They came back from Melbourne yesterday. I think the prospect of Alan coming home has been very good for her; although it’s the middle of the winter and pretty cold she was quite fit and well and told me that she hadn’t had much pain; she got up for breakfast this morning, fit as a flea. She told me that she had chosen the pattern for Alan’s carpet and cabled the order; it will take about a month to make and she’s told them that it’s got to get on board a certain P. and O. boat on a certain date or she won’t have it, so it should be here about a month before he gets home. She’s got the curtain material and a woman is to come here next week from Ballarat and make the curtains and the pelmets here, staying till it’s done. The painters finished last week. She showed me the bedspread and the lampshades; they’re awfully pretty.

  She told me that when Alan comes home she wants me to look after his clothes, like a valet. She’s going to get Mrs. Plowden to come in every morning to do some of the cleaning I do now because she says that they’ll be having many more guests in the house when Alan comes home and there’ll be a good deal more work, but she wants me to take over Alan’s clothes. She’s going to show me how to do it and I can practise on the Colonel till Alan comes home. The drill is to lay out the clothes that he’ll be wearing in the evening ready for him on the bed at about six o’clock before he goes up to change for dinner; she’s going to show me how to put the studs into an evening shirt and how she wants it done. Then when I go up to turn the bed down I collect the clothes that he’s been wearing during the day and take them away and brush them and put them away in the wardrobe, looking out for any spots or dirt or loose buttons and doing something about it next day. Nothing’s got to go back in the wardrobe till it’s been brushed and looked over and put right. The same with the evening clothes; I collect them and take them away to brush when I take him in the morning tea.

  I tried to tell her that I wouldn’t be here when Alan comes home, but I wasn’t ready and I didn’t know how to bring the subject up. I’ll have to tell her soon, but it’s going to be frightfully difficult. I haven’t been able to think of any story yet that doesn’t mean telling her a whole string of lies, and I’d hate to do that. I’m not sure that I’d be very good at it, either.

  I don’t know what to do. I would like to see Alan again; he was such a grand person and he can’t have changed so much. I’ve been so happy here, I’ll just hate going away. I don’t know what I’ll do if I can’t get back into the Wrens. Perhaps I’ll be able to go back; the peace talks at Korea don’t seem to be getting anywhere. That would be much the best of all. If a full-scale war broke out again I could tell her that I was a Wren on the reserve and I’d got to go back into the Service. That wouldn’t mean telling any lies at all, hardly.

  July 22nd. I’ve been wondering if somehow I couldn’t see Alan and have a talk to him before he comes home. If I went to Fremantle or something and met him there. He’s such a very good sort, he’d advise me and tell me what to do, and he might somehow be able to put things right for me so that I could come back and go on here. The one thing which I couldn’t bear is that he should come home and walk into the house and say, “Hullo, Leading Wren Prentice, what are you doing here? I thought we’d finished with you when Bill got killed.” He wouldn’t say that, of course, but that’s what it would be like. If I could have a quiet talk with him before he gets home I think I could make him understand how it all happened, and perhaps we could concoct something together that would make it possible for me to go on here. After all, there’s no reason why his mother and father need ever know that I had anything at all to do with Bill. Alan would only have to keep his mouth shut, and everything could go on here as usual. Only Alan and I know what Bill and I were to each other. It wouldn’t be much to ask him to keep quiet about it. But it’s going to take a bit of explaining what I’ve been doing here at all, even to Alan.

  I don’t know what to do.

  July 28th. The Korean war is over, and they’ve signed a truce at Panmunjom. There isn’t going to be another full-scale war, and I suppose I ought to be glad. But this finishes all chance I ever had of getting back into the Wrens. They won’t be needing any more ordnance Wrens now; they’ll be needing less.

  I simply can’t think what I could do when I leave here; I’ve got nowhere to go, nothing I want to do. I’ve got to try and think of something.

  I laid the diary down, glad for an excuse to stop reading it for a time, and I put another log or two upon the fire. Outside the sky was starting to show grey.

  Viola Dawson had been right about ex-Service people. Janet Prentice, at any rate, had banked upon another war that would solve all her difficulties and bring her back into the full, useful life she once had known. Without it she was lost, because another war had been her main hope since the end of the last one.

  I sat down again and went back to the diaries with mounting reluctance. It was a violation of her deepest privacy that I should read what she had written, but I had to know.

  August 17th. It’s only about six weeks now till Alan sails, and I can’t make up my mind what to do. I’ve been putting it off and trying not to think about it, hoping that somethi
ng would turn up.

  I don’t think it would be possible to go to Fremantle to meet Alan on the ship before he gets here. I believe the Colonel’s going to fly across and meet him there and fly back here with him. That’s what he did when Alan came back before, after the war, and he’s talking of doing it again, but I don’t think they’ve decided anything yet. If he did that, of course, it would be impossible for me to meet Alan alone before he got here. I can’t help feeling that’s the way to tackle it. I know he’d be able to get me out of this mess. But even if the Colonel didn’t go to Fremantle, I don’t see how I could ask her for a holiday then. They’re all counting on me to be here and they’re looking forward so much to his homecoming. I don’t think I’d have the face to ask for a holiday just at that time. It would look awfully strange, and if they started to get curious and found out that I’d been to Fremantle to meet Alan before he got home it would be worst of all.

  Last night I thought I’d better write to Alan and explain things, and I tried to write a rough copy of a letter to send him. But it’s one of those things I don’t think you can do in a letter. I only met him once, nine years ago, and he probably hardly remembers me. I’ve been thinking of him as the same person he was then, but everybody here says that he’s changed a lot. He’s really a total stranger, although he doesn’t seem like that to me. He’d get a letter from his mother’s parlourmaid asking if he’d mind deceiving his mother when he comes home so that the parlourmaid could keep her job, because the parlourmaid had been deceiving her and living here under false pretences for the last year.