by Nevil Shute
At least he hadn’t got to beat about the bush with her. “I dunno,” he said unhappily. “Sometimes I think I did and sometimes I think I didn’t. But that’s not all of it. Somebody got killed.”
To her, that was much more serious. She reached out and took his hand. “Tell me about it, if you want to. I shan’t get mad at you.”
He hesitated, uncertain how to begin. “I guess you must think I’m a strait-laced kind of a guy,” he said at last. “Only drinking cokes and like that. I wasn’t always that way. Chuck an’ me, we went kind of wild when we were kids together, in high school. Both of us had old torn-out jalopies. We used to get bottles of rye an’ drive out some place in the country, and get tight. Used to take the girls along, and they got tight, too. And then we’d get to playing tag on the way home.”
She wrinkled her brows. “In the cars?”
“Uh-huh. First I’d bump him just a little, and then drive away lickety-split while he tried to bump me.”
She smiled. “Sounds a good game.”
“Maybe. I guess we didn’t know the chances we were taking. But that wasn’t all we played, taking the girls along, and getting tight all together.”
She nodded. “I don’t suppose it was.” A light began to dawn on her. “Do I know any of the girls?”
“Ruth Eberhart was one,” he said unhappily. “The other was a girl called Diana Fawsitt, but she got killed.”
“Got killed, Stan?”
“Uh-huh. We got in a tangle, corner of Roosevelt Avenue and Fourth Street, both going about seventy. Those scars on Ruthie’s face are where she went through the windshield. Chuck an’ me got away with it, only broken ribs and like that. I guess that’s because we had the wheel to hang onto. But Diana, she got thrown out on the sidewalk. And she died.”
She pressed his hand. “Oh, Stan!” She knew the corner so well. She passed it every day on the way down to Main Street, an innocent suburban corner with grass borders and mountain ash trees, covered in red berries now. It seemed incredible that tragedy could happen there. “Was she any relation to Mr. Fawsitt at the jewelry store?”
He nodded. “His daughter.”
She said quietly, “I’m so sorry, Stan.”
“I guess kids get to doing things that are plumb crazy,” he went on. “Like smoking marijuana cigarettes — we used to do that, too. We were all pretty tight, of course — Diana, too, poor kid. I dunno how we dodged the penitentiary. Chuck an’ me got the reform school but the judge suspended sentence, and we went on at High. But after that, I gave up liquor. It doesn’t do you any good, that stuff.”
“Not when you’re sixteen, anyway,” she said. There was a pause, and then she said, “But Stan, that’s all over and done with now.”
“That’s not the whole story,” he said. “When they started digging into things, they found that Ruth was going to have a baby.”
“I see,” she said. “A lot of people have done that before.”
“Mostly they get married first,” he said.
She smiled at him kindly. “Not in the Lunatic. I’d say it’s about fifty-fifty there.”
“I guess it’s different in Hazel,” he remarked. “Or anyways, folks like to cover up a bit more here.”
“Was Chuck responsible?” she asked.
“Honest, Mollie, I dunno,” he said. “Chuck, he allowed he was responsible, but I was just about plumb certain it was me. We spent all one afternoon trying to get it figured out when we got out of hospital, in the Piggy-Wiggy Café.”
She burst into laughter. “In the Piggy-Wiggy Café?”
“That’s right. It was the best place to meet, in the middle of the afternoon when most folks are off the street. You see, our jalopies were sold for scrap.”
“Over a couple of milk shakes, I suppose?”
“Chuck didn’t go much for milk shakes. He liked ice cream.”
“I see. Well, what was the result?”
“We agreed we’d leave it up to Ruthie to say. Her folks were at her, anyway. We wrote a note in the café and gave it to the janitor at the hospital to give to her. She took quite a while making up her mind, and then she said that it was Chuck.”
“I see; he was the bad boy. Is that when they got married?”
“Uh-huh. They got married about a month after she got out of hospital. I never did know how she settled it was Chuck and not me. Sometimes, I kinda get to thinking that she settled it wrong.”
She eyed him keenly. “How do you mean, Stan — settled it wrong?”
He said, “Her first boy, Tony — he’s grown up to look a lot like me.”
He was glad, very glad that it was over. Now there was nothing more to tell, no more to be revealed. But he was not prepared for her to burst out laughing again, and he was hurt. He said, “I don’t see nothing much to laugh about.”
She said, “Stan, it’s just the sort of thing that might have happened in the Lunatic!”
He was silent, very deeply concerned. The Lunatic was in a foreign country, where people lived to standards that were wholly alien to the United States, drank to excess in an outlandish manner, swapped wives for pistols, and cohabited with native women. It was the way of foreign countries to behave like that, and he could readily believe from his reading that worse things happened in France, but it was not the way of the United States. It was deeply insulting to suggest that things that happened in his home town could be in any way comparable with things that happened in the northern part of West Australia. Hazel was a part of the United States.
He must be patient, because she was a foreigner and would naturally take some time to learn their ways, and because he loved her. He said quietly, “I guess it’s kind of different here, honey.”
To her there was very little difference between his situation and that of a white stockman disputing with a friend the paternity of a yellow baby, but she didn’t say so because she knew that she had hurt him by her laughter, and because she loved him. Moreover, his case was worse, far worse, than anything in her experience that had happened in the Lunatic, for through his action and his games with Chuck a young girl had been killed. Girls might have casual babies in the Lunatic as they did elsewhere, but they didn’t casually get killed in the course of a drunken game as they seemed to do in Hazel. In the Lunatic, at any rate, a girl’s life was safe.
She said, “I’m sorry I laughed, Stan. It’s really nothing to laugh about, is it?”
“I’ll say it’s not,” he said.
“Is that what you wanted to tell me?” she enquired. “Just about Ruth’s boy — what’s his name? Tony?”
He nodded. “I guess you must think me a heel.”
She smiled. “I don’t think that, Stan. I’d like to meet him. Is he a nice kid?”
“He’s okay. Honest, Mollie, I dunno if he’s mine or not. But if he is, would that make any difference between us?”
“Of course it wouldn’t Stan. It happened such a long time ago, and you were only sixteen.”
He breathed a deep sigh of relief. “Gee, it’s swell of you to take it that way, Mollie. I been lying awake nights over it, thinking that I should’ve told you ‘way back, right at the beginning. But honest, I never thought about it. It all happened so long ago, and then she married Chuck.”
She pressed his hand. “Don’t think about it any more.”
They stood together in silence for a minute under the speckled shade of the elm tree, its leaves already turning to gold. “Tell me one thing,” she said presently. “The other girl, Mr. Fawsitt’s daughter. She got killed?”
He nodded.
“What did you say her name was?”
“Diana. Diana Fawsitt.”
“Was she killed at once?”
He hesitated; what morbid curiosity was actuating her? “I guess she was killed almost at once,” he said. “I think she died on the sidewalk before they could get the ambulance.”
She pursed her lips; so she hadn’t died at once. There was no sense in prying further into
details, but her imagination could reconstruct the scene, the smashed cars, the children pulled from the wrecks by the horrified neighbours, the smashed body of the child Diana dying in a pool of blood on the grass verge between the paved sidewalk and the road, in the slanting light of the evening sun, under the flowering mountain ash trees, in the prim decency of Roosevelt Avenue. “What a terrible thing, Stan,” she said.
“Uh-huh,” he said. “Too bad it had to happen.”
She recoiled a little, but he was a foreigner and looked at things differently. She had to know a little more about Diana, though. “Did the Fawsitts have other children?” she asked.
He wrinkled his brows. “Well now — I’ll just have to think. There was Sam in the senior class the year I went to Hazel High . . . an’ then . . . and then there was another one. What was his name? I just forget what he was called, Mollie.”
“Another boy?”
“That’s right.”
“Was she the only daughter that they had?”
He thought for a moment. “I’d say she probably was. I think there were the two boys and Diana.”
“It must have been a frightful thing for her parents.”
He nodded. “I know it. Getting smashed up in a couple of old jalopies.”
She recoiled from him again, but the beauty of the cars that had surrounded her in America had influenced her, too. In the six weeks she had come to understand the enormous part that the automobile played in his thinking, in the thinking of all Hazel. She could understand him, though she could not go along with him. She became very conscious that she was a stranger in this country, that she must be very careful what she said, or she would offend again.
“Is she buried here?” she asked.
He wrinkled his brows; why did she keep harping on this old tragedy? “I guess she must be.”
“You don’t know?” she asked a little sharply.
“I never gave it much thought, Mollie,” he said. “You think I’m kind of callous, or somethin’?”
“I think you might have put some flowers on her grave sometimes,” she said with sudden bitterness. “After all, you killed her.”
He stared at her in amazement and concern. “Say . . .” he exclaimed, “that’s not right. It was an accident! Folks get killed in auto accidents every day!”
She bit her lip, and was silent though the red-headed indignation was rising in her. If she was to marry him and make her life in Hazel she must learn his way of thought and not go flying off the handle because Americans in this small town didn’t think exactly as she did. She was silent for so long that he said, puzzled, “You mad at me, or somethin’?”
She raised her head. “I’m not mad at you.”
“What’s eating you, then? You better tell me, Mollie.”
She was still silent.
“Come on, honey,” he said gently.
“I don’t know how to put it, Stan,” she said slowly. “We’ve both got a lot to get accustomed to, about each other. We’ve been brought up pretty differently. You thought that I’d be worried about Ruth’s son. Well, I’m not a bit worried about that. After all, I’m not too legitimate myself; I’d be an awful hypocrite if I was bothered about Ruth. But I can’t get over this other girl, Diana Fawsitt.”
He wrinkled his brows, trying to understand. “You didn’t mean it when you said I killed her? We were all having a game. Nobody meant to do it.”
She looked him in the eyes. “You’d better understand the way I see it, Stan,” she said. “So far as I can understand it, you were all sixteen. That’s very important, because a kid of sixteen can’t be held entirely responsible for what he does. I suppose that’s why you didn’t go to prison. In my country I believe you would have done. Apparently you got a lot of liquor, you and Chuck, and took these two girls out and got them full. I don’t mind about you seducing them; that’s probably the girls’ fault as much as yours, and anyway it’s not important. What is important to me is that you got into a drunken game and killed one of the girls. You and Chuck were driving, and you were responsible for her, and you killed her between you. And you don’t seem to care a thing about it.”
She paused, and he stood in silent consternation at her strange attitude. “I’m going to remember that you were sixteen,” she said. “I’m going to try and forget all the rest.”
He looked down, kicking the turf. “I think you’re being kinda rough on us, Mollie,” he said. “All accidents, they happen because somebody does somethin’ silly.”
“I know they do,” she said. “Don’t let’s talk of it again.”
“Okay.” He glanced at her. “And you don’t mind about Ruth’s boy? I never was just sure if he was mine or Chuck’s.”
She smiled. “I’ll tell you when I’ve had a look at him.”
They went back to the house, and he went to the works, and she went on with the household chores with Helen Laird. In the middle of the morning a boy of twelve strolled in.
“Hi-yah, Mrs. Laird,” he said. “Mom sent me over to get the diapers.”
Mollie took one look at him, and endeavoured unsuccessfully to control the laughter that was twitching her face at the ridiculous thought of Stan’s uncertainty. “Hi-yah,” she repeated. “You must be Tony.”
“That’s right,” he said. “You the Australian girl come back with Stan?”
“That’s right,” she said. “I’ve got the diapers right here.”
“Gee,” he said with interest, “you look just like an American. What are you laughing about?”
To cover up, she laughed out loud, and said, “Did you think that I’d be like a coloured girl?”
She had embarrassed him with her laughter. He said resentfully, “I seen pictures of Australians and they were coloured. With spears. They throw things called boomerangs that come back.”
“That’s right,” she said. “But there are a lot more whites than colored in Australia. Just like there are here.”
“I guess I didn’t know that. Mom said she’d be around this afternoon to visit with you, and say thanks for the diapers.”
“Tell her that’ll be lovely,” the girl said.
He turned to go, the sack of diapers flung sturdily over his shoulder. “‘Bye now.”
She watched him go a little fondly; Stanton at that age must have been exactly like this boy. There was still laughter in her eyes at the absurdity of an uncertainty about his parentage when she turned back to the kitchen, and found Helen Laird looking at her apprehensively.
She had to say something. “Nice kid,” she said casually.
“Sure . . .” the older woman said a little faintly.
She looked so unhappy that Mollie took pity on her. “It’s all right, Mom,” she said. “Stan told me all about him.”
A wave of relief passed over Helen Laird. “He did?”
The girl laughed out loud. “I’m so sorry, Mom, but I can’t help laughing. Stan said he wasn’t sure if he was his or Chuck’s — and he meant it, too! As if you couldn’t tell by looking at him!”
The older woman said faintly, “He’s Chuck’s son, Mollie.”
The girl laughed again. “He can’t possibly be, Helen. Stan must have been exactly like him when he was that age!”
Helen Laird said dully, “You never saw Chuck, Mollie. I guess they were pretty much alike.” And then, to the girl’s consternation, she turned to the corner of the room and began to sob bitterly, her face hidden in her hands.
The laughter faded from the girl; though this was amusing to her it was a bitter tragedy for his mother. She crossed the room and put her arm round Helen’s shoulders. “It’s all right, Mom,” she said gently. “It’s not going to make any trouble, whoever his father was. Stan told me all about it, and I don’t mind a bit. Honestly, I don’t.” She pulled out a handkerchief tucked in the waist of her skirt and gave it to the older woman. “It’s quite all right. Come on and sit down, and I’ll get a cup of coffee.”
Helen Laird wiped her eyes. “H
e is Chuck’s son,” she said tearfully. “Ruthie’s always said so, and she must know.”
“It doesn’t matter whose son he is, Mom,” the girl said. “He’s a nice kid and that’s all that matters. I’d like to get to know him better.”
Helen Laird stared at her in tearful perplexity. “You wouldn’t want him around the place if he was Stan’s. But he’s not Stan’s, Mollie. Stan was never wild, like poor Chuck.”
The girl led the older woman to the table and switched on the electric coffee pot. “Sit down,” she said gently. “If he were Stan’s, it wouldn’t matter a bit to me, Mom. Stan was only sixteen, and he told me all about it.” She busied herself to get the cups and saucers, the carton of milk from the refrigerator, the sugar.
“I dunno how you young folks look at things,” the older woman muttered. “You surely couldn’t bear to have him around the place if he was Stan’s. Or, if you could, what would your folks say? But he’s not Stan’s, Mollie. I’m quite sure he’s not. Cross my heart.”
The coffee pot began to sing and the girl switched it off, and brought it to the table. She poured out the cups of coffee. “Don’t worry any more, Mom,” she said gently. “I suppose it might matter with some people, but not with me. We’re quite used to this at home. We live a long way out in the bush, you know, on Laragh Station, and things happen there that wouldn’t happen here. I’ve got a whole family of half-caste half-brothers and half-sisters living with us on the property, that we don’t talk about too much. Honestly, this doesn’t mean a thing to me.” She paused. “And it wouldn’t mean a thing to Dad and Ma, either. They’d just laugh.”
Helen Laird stared at her incredulously. “What did you say, about half-caste brothers?”
“I’ve got three of them,” the girl said, “and two sisters — yellow girls. There weren’t any white women in the district when Dad and Uncle Tom first went to Laragh after the first war, and they lived with the gins — the black women, you know. Of course, they gave that up when Mother came along.” She sipped her coffee. “I suppose we’re really a lot worse than you are here,” she said. “But honestly, you needn’t worry about this any more, Mom. Just forget about it.”