A Town Like Alice

by Nevil Shute

  ‘I see,’ I observed. ‘You hadn’t spent it?’

  He shook his head. ‘I was saving it, in case some day I got to have a station of my own, or do a deal with cattle, or something.’

  ‘How much do you think you’ve got left now?’

  He said, ‘There’s five hundred pounds of our money on the letter of credit, and I suppose that’s all I’ve got. Four hundred pounds of yours. There’s my pay as manager goes into the bank at Willstown each month, of course.’

  I sat smoking for a time in silence, and I couldn’t help being sorry for this man. Since he had met Jean Paget six years previously he had held the image of her in his mind hoping to find somebody a little like her. When he had heard that she was not a married woman he had drawn the whole of his small savings and hurried expensively half across the world to England, hoping to find her and to find that she was still unmarried. It was a gambler’s action, but his whole life had probably been made up of gambles; it could hardly be otherwise in the outback. Clearly he thought little of his money if it could buy a chance for him of marrying Jean Paget.

  It was ironical to think that she was at that moment busy looking for him in his own country. I did not feel that I was quite prepared to tell him that.

  ‘I still don’t understand why you’ve given up the idea of writing to Miss Paget,’ I said at last. ‘You said something about Willstown.’

  ‘Yes.’ There was a pause, and then he said in his slow way, ‘I thought a lot about things after I left you, Mr Strachan. Maybe I’d have done better to have done some thinking before ever I left Midhurst. I told you, I got none of them high-falutin ideas about not marrying a girl with money. So long as she was the right girl, I’d be tickled to death if she had money, same as any man. But there’s more to it than that.’

  He paused again. ‘I come from the outback,’ he said slowly.

  ‘Running a cattle station is the only work I know, and it’s where I like to be. I couldn’t make out in any of the big cities, Brisbane or Sydney. I couldn’t make out even in Cairns for very long, and anyway, there’d be no work there I could do. I never got a lot of schooling, living on a station like we did. I don’t say that I won’t make money. I can run a station better’n most ringers, and I seem to do all right with selling the stock too. I’ll hope to get a station of my own one day, and there’s plenty of station owners finish up with fifty thousand pounds. But if I get that far, it’ll be staying in the outback and doing what I’m cut out for. And I tell you, Mr Strachan, the outback is a crook place for a woman.’

  ‘In what way?’ I asked quietly. We were really getting down to something now.

  He smiled a little wryly. ‘Take Willstown, as an example. There’s no radio station to listen to, only the short wave stuff from Brisbane and that comes and goes with static. There’s no shop where you can buy fruit or fresh vegetables. The sister says that it’s because of that so many of the old folk get this pellagra. There’s no fresh milk. There’s no dress shop, only what a woman can get in Bill Duncan’s Store along with the dried peas and Jeyes Fluid and that. There’s no ice-cream in Willstown. There’s nowhere that a woman can buy a paper or a magazine or a book, and there’s no doctor because we can’t get one to come to Willstown. There’s no telephone. There’s no swimming-pool where a girl could sit around in a pretty bathing dress, although it can be hot there, oh my word. There’s no other young women. I don’t believe there’s more’n five women in the district between the age of seventeen and forty; as soon as they’re old enough to leave home they’re off out of it, and down to the city. To get to Cairns to do a bit of shopping you can either fly, which costs money, or you can drive for four days in a jeep, and after that you’ll find the jeep needs a new set of tyres.’ He paused. ‘It’s a grand country for a man to live and work in, and good money, too. But it’s a crook place for a woman.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘Are all the outback towns like that?’

  ‘Most of them,’ he said. ‘You get the bigger ones, like the Curry, they’re better, of course. But Camooweal and Normanton and Burketown and Croydon and Georgetown – they’re all just the same as Willstown.’ He paused for a moment in thought. ‘There’s only one good one for a woman,’ he said. ‘Alice Springs. Alice is a bonza place, oh my word. A girl’s got everything in Alice – two picture houses, shops for everything, fruit, ice-cream, fresh milk, Eddie Maclean’s swimming-pool, plenty of girls and young married women in the place, and nice houses to live in. Alice is a bonza town,’ he said, ‘but that’s the only one.’

  ‘Why is that?’ I asked. ‘What makes Alice different from the others?’

  He scratched his head. ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘It’s just that it’s got bigger, I suppose.’

  I left that one. ‘What you mean is that if you got Miss Paget to agree to marry you, she wouldn’t have a very happy life in Willstown.’

  He nodded. ‘That’s right,’ he said, and there was pain in his eyes. ‘It all seemed sort of different when I met her in Malaya. You see, she was a prisoner and she hadn’t got nothing, and I hadn’t got nothing either, so there was a pair of us. When I got to know there was a chance she wouldn’t be married I was so much in a hurry to get over here I didn’t stop to think about the outback, or if I did I thought of her as someone who’d got nothing so she’d be all right in Willstown. See what I mean?’ He looked at me appealingly. ‘But then I come to England and I see Southampton and the sort of way people live there, bombed and muggered up although it is, and I been in London and I been in Colwyn Bay. Then when you told me she’d come into money I got thinking about how she would be living and the sort of things that she’d be used to and she wouldn’t get in Willstown, and then I thought I’d acted a bit hasty. I never know it to work, for a girl to come straight out from England to the outback. And for a girl with money of her own, it’ld be worse still.’ He paused, and grinned at me. ‘So I went out on the grog.’

  In all the circumstances, it now seemed to me that he had taken a very reasonable line of action, but it was a pity it had cost him seventy pounds. ‘Look, Joe,’ I said. ‘We want to think about this thing a bit. I think I’ll have to write and tell Miss Paget that I’ve met you. You see, she thought you were dead.’

  He stared at me. ‘You knew about me, then?’

  ‘Not very much,’ I said. ‘I know that you stole chickens for her, and the Japs nailed you up and beat you. She thought you died.’

  ‘I bloody near did,’ he said grinning. “‘She told you that, did she?’”

  I nodded. ‘It’s been a very deep grief to her,’ I said quietly. ‘You wouldn’t want her to go on like that? You see, she thinks it was her fault.’

  ‘It wasn’t her fault at all,’ he said in his slow way. ‘She told me not to stick my neck out, and I went and bought it. It wasn’t her fault at all.’

  ‘I think you ought to write to her,’ I repeated.

  There was a long pause.

  ‘I dunno what in hell I’d say to her if I did,’ he muttered.

  There was no point in going on agonizing about it. I got up. ‘Look, Joe,’ I said. ‘Take a bit of time to think it over. When have you got to be back in Australia?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be doing right by Mrs Spears unless I get back on the station by the end of October,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to serve her a crook deal.’

  ‘That gives you two and a half months,’ I said. ‘How much did your airline ticket cost you when you came here?’

  ‘Three hundred and twenty-five pounds,’ he said.

  ‘And you’ve got five hundred pounds left, on your letter of credit.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Do you want to go back by air, or would you rather go by sea? I could find out about sea passages for you, if you like. I think it would cost about eighty pounds on a tramp steamer, but you’d have to leave pretty soon – within a fortnight, say.’

  ‘There don’t seem to be much point in staying here,’ he said a little wearily. �
��There wouldn’t be no chance that she’ll be coming back to England?’

  ‘Not in that time, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I’d better go back by sea, and save what’s left of the money.’

  ‘I think that’s wise,’ I said. ‘I’ll get my office on to finding out about the passage. In the meantime, why don’t you move in here? You’re welcome to use that spare room till you go, and it will be cheaper for you than living in the hotel.’

  ‘Wouldn’t I be in your way?’

  ‘Not in the least,’ I said. ‘I’m out most of the day, and I’d be very glad for you to stay here if you’d like to.’

  He agreed to that, and I asked him what he wanted most to see in England in his brief visit. He wanted to see No 19 Acacia Road, Hammersmith, where his father had been born. He wanted to see a live broadcast of ‘Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh’ which he listened to on short wave from Brisbane when the static permitted. (‘They’ve got a bonza radio at Alice,’ he said wistfully. ‘A local station, right in the town.’) He wanted to see all he could of thoroughbred horses and thoroughbred cattle. He was interested in saddlery, but he didn’t think that we had much to teach them about that.

  There was no difficulty about Hammersmith, of course; I put him in a bus that afternoon, and went into my office to deal with my neglected work. Apart from the clients who came to see me, I had plenty to think about. Whether Jean Paget chose to marry this man when she met him was entirely her own affair, but it was quite a possibility that she would do so. Whatever one might think about the suitability of such a match, there was no denying that Joe Harman had some very solid virtues; he seemed to be hard-working, thrifty if one excepts the great extravagance of flying half across the world to look for the girl he loved, and likely to make a success of his life; quite certainly he was a kind man who would make a good husband.

  There was another aspect of the matter which was worth investigation. Whether she knew it or not, Jean Paget had Australia in her ancestry. She had never mentioned her grandfather, James Macfadden, to me and it seemed quite possible that she had never thought about him much. And yet, he was the original source of her money, and apparently he had made it in Australia before coming home to England to break his neck while riding in a point-to-point in Yorkshire. It would be interesting, I thought, to find out a little more about James Macfadden. Had he made his money on an outback cattle station, too? Had he been just such another as Joe Harman?

  I sent my girl that afternoon to bring me the Macfadden box, and I sat looking through the old deeds and wills after my last client had gone. The only clue I found was in the Will of James Macfadden dated September 18th, 1903, which began, ‘I, James Nelson Macfadden of Lowdale Manor, Kirkby Moorside, in the County of Yorkshire, and of Hall’s Creek in Western Australia, do hereby revoke all former wills … etc.’ I knew nothing of Hall’s Creek at that time, but I noted the name for future investigation. That is all there was.

  I got Marcus Fernie on the telephone that afternoon at his office at the BBC and asked if I could have a ticket for ‘Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh’. I had to tell him something about Joe Harman in order to get it because there seemed to be considerable competition, and he came back at once with a demand that Harman should be interviewed for the programme ‘In Town Tonight’. I said I’d see him about that, and he promised to send over the ticket. Then I got on to old Sir Dennis Frampton who has a herd of pedigree Herefords at his place down by Taunton and told him about Joe Harman, and he very kindly invited him down for a couple of nights.

  I got back to my flat at about seven o’clock; I had arranged for dinner there. Joe Harman was there, and he had been to the Bank and the hotel, and he had brought his suitcase round to my spare room. I asked if he had found his father’s house at Hammersmith.

  ‘I found it,’ he said. Oh my word, ‘I did.’

  ‘Tretty bad?’

  He grinned. ‘That’s putting it mild. We got some slums in Australia, but nothing like that. Dad did all right for himself when he come away from that and out to Queensland.’

  I offered him a glass of sherry, but he preferred a beer; I went and got him a bottle. ‘When did your father leave this country?’ I inquired.

  ‘1904,’ he said. ‘He went out to the Curry, to Cobb and Co. They used to run the stage coaches, before motors came. He must have been about fifteen then. He fought in the first war with the Aussies at Gallipoli.’

  ‘He’s dead now, is he?’

  ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘He died in 1940, soon after I joined the army.’ He paused. ‘Mother’s still alive. She lives with my sister Amy at the Curry.’

  ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘do you know a place called Hall’s Creek?’

  ‘Where the gold was? Over by Wyndham, in West Australia?’

  ‘That will be the place,’ I said. ‘There are gold mines there, are there?’

  ‘I don’t think they work it now,’ he said. ‘There was a lot of gold there in the nineties, like in Queensland, in the Gulf country. I’ve never been to Hall’s Creek, but I’ve always thought that it would be like Croydon. There was a lot of gold at Croydon, oh my word. It lasted for about ten years, and then they had to go so deep for it, it didn’t pay any longer. Croydon had thirty thousand people one time, so they say. Now it’s got two hundred. It’s the same at Normanton and Burketown – Willstown’s the same. All gold towns at one time, they were.’

  ‘You never heard of anybody called Macfadden over at Hall’s Creek, did you?’

  He shook his head. ‘I never heard the name.’

  I told him I was getting a ticket for ‘Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh’, and that they wanted him to broadcast on Saturday night. He agreed diffidently to do this; when the time came I listened in and thought he did it surprisingly well. The announcer shepherded him along quite skilfully, and Harman spoke for about six or seven minutes about the Midhurst cattle station and the country down below the Gulf of Carpentaria that he called the Gulf country. Marcus Fernie took the trouble to ring me up next day to tell me how well it had gone. ‘I only wish we could get more chaps like him now and then,’ he said. ‘It makes a difference when you hear the real McCoy.’

  I put him on the train on Sunday down to Taunton to see Sir Dennis Frampton’s cows. He had not much time left, because a ship of the Shaw Savill line was leaving on the following Friday morning for New Zealand and Australia, and I had managed to get him a cheap berth on that. He came back on the Wednesday full of what he had seen. ‘He’s got a bonza herd there, oh my word,’ he said. ‘I learned more about raising up the quality of stock there in two days than I’d have learned in ten years in the Gulf country. Of course, you couldn’t do the things that he does on a station like Midhurst, but I got plenty to think about.’

  ‘You mean about breeding?’

  ‘We don’t breed for quality at all in the Gulf,’ he said. ‘Not like you set about it here in England. All we do is go out and shoot the scrub bulls when you see them so you keep the best ones breeding. I’d like to see a herd of pedigree stock out there, like he’s got. I never see such beasts outside a show.’

  After dinner I had a word with him about Miss Paget. ‘I shall write to her in a day or two and give her your address,’ I said. ‘I know that she’ll be very sorry to have missed you, and I should think you’d find a letter from her waiting for you at Midhurst when you get there. In fact, I know you will, because I shall write air mail, and she’s certain to write air mail to you.’

  He brightened considerably at the thought. ‘I don’t think I’ll write to her from here,’ he said. ‘If you’re going to do that I’ll wait and write when I hear from her. I’m glad I didn’t meet her over here, in a way. It’s probably all turning out for the best.’

  It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him then that she was in Australia, but I refrained. I had written to her in Alice Springs the day before Joe Harman had come to me, and I was expecting a letter from her any day now, because she used to write once a week, very regularly. If nec
essary, I could cable her to tell her his address in order that she might not leave Australia without seeing him, but there was no reason to lay all her cards before him at this stage.

  I saw him off at the docks two days later, as I had seen Jean Paget a few months before. As I turned to go down the gangway he said gruffly, ‘Thank you for doing so much for me, Mr Strachan. I’ll be writing from Midhurst.’ And he shook my hand with a grip that made me wince, for all the injury his hand had suffered.

  I turned to go down the gangway. ‘That’s all right, Joe. You’ll find a letter from Miss Paget when you get back home. You might even find more than that.’

  I had reason for that last remark, because I had a letter from her in my pocket that had come by that day’s post, and it was postmarked Willstown.

  6

  When Jean Paget stepped down the gangway from the Constellation on to Darwin airport she was wildly and unreasonably happy. It is a fact, I think, that till that time she had never really recovered from the war. She had come to England when she was repatriated and she had done her job efficiently and well with Pack and Levy for two years or so, but she had done it in the manner of a woman of fifty. She lived, but she had very little zest for life. Deep in the background of her mind remained the tragedy of Kuantan, killing her youth. She had only been speaking the truth when she had told me once that she felt about seventy years old.

  She landed at about eight-fifteen at night, after dark; as she was getting off the plane at Darwin, Qantas had booked a room for her at the Darwin Hotel. She stepped on to the concrete and was marshalled to the Customs office in the hangar; at the foot of the gangway there were three young men who scrutinized her carefully. At the time she took them for officials of the airport. It was only later that she found out that they were reporters on the staff of various Australian newspapers engaged in what must surely be the worst assignment in all journalism, meeting every aeroplane that lands on Darwin airport in the hope of finding a Prime Minister on board, or a woman with two heads.