by Nevil Shute
They got a paper and pencil after lunch and jotted down a few essential things to do in Cairns when they got back there, and orders to be placed. Then they retired to their own huts and slept in the heat of the day. She was roused by Joe calling her outside her hut. ‘Come on and bathe,’ he was saying. ‘It’s nearly five o’clock.’
She pulled the sheet over quickly. ‘I won’t be a minute. Have you been looking in?’
‘I wouldn’t do a thing like that.’
‘I wish I could believe you.’ She pulled the curtain across and put on her bathing dress, and joined him on the beach. And lying with him in the warm blue and silvery water on the sand, she said, ‘Joe, do you want us to be engaged, with a ring and everything?’
‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’
She shook her head. ‘Not unless it would prevent you worrying. I’ll marry you early in April, Joe – that’s dinkum.’ He smiled. ‘But for the present, I believe we’d get on better if we weren’t officially engaged.’ She turned to him. ‘You see, when we get back to Willstown I’ll be doing some pretty odd things, things that Willstown people will think crazy. Some of them may be, because there’ll probably be some mistakes. I don’t want you to have to be mixed up in it, just because we’re engaged. You’ve got a position to keep up.’
‘Wouldn’t it help if people thought I was with you in whatever you’re doing?’
She smiled, and rolled over and kissed him. ‘You’re all salt. It wouldn’t help if you get in a fight every Saturday night in the bar because somebody says something rude about your fiancée.’ He grinned. ‘They will, you know. They’re bound to think I’m crackers.’
They got out of the water presently and sat in the shade of the trees, talking and talking about the future. ‘Joe,’ she said once, ‘what do I do if a boong comes into the ice-cream parlour and wants a soda? A boong stockrider? Do I serve him in the same place, or has he got to have a different shop?’
He scratched his head. ‘I dunno that it’s ever happened in Willstown. They go into Bill Duncan’s store. I don’t think you could serve them in an ice-cream parlour, with a white girl behind the counter.’
She said firmly, ‘Then I’ll have to have another parlour for them with a black girl in it. There’s such a lot of them, Joe – we can’t cut them out. We’ll have two parlours, with the freezes and the kitchen between.’ She drew a little diagram on the white sand with her forefinger. ‘Like this.’
‘Oh my word,’ he said. ‘You’re going to start some talk in Willstown.’
She nodded. ‘I know. That’s why I don’t want us to be engaged till just before we’re married.’
In the evening as they kissed goodnight between their bedroom huts, she said, ‘We won’t be able to do this in Willstown. I’ll remember this Green Island all my life, Joe.’
He grinned. ‘Come back here in April, if you like. Before Julia Creek.’
They left next morning, when Eddie came for them with his motorboat, and landed at Cairns early in the afternoon. They took their bags to the hotel, and then went straight to see Mr Gordon at the tannery, and spent an hour with him discussing alligator skins and other shoe materials. He advised them to dismiss the idea of kid for linings. ‘Anything that can be done with kid we’ll do for you with wallaby,’ he said. ‘You’ve got any amount of wallaby out there, and it’s as good as kid – texture, appearance, bleaching, glazing – anything you like.’ Harman arranged to send him half a dozen skins for sample treatment by the next lorry. ‘Be a good thing to keep down some of these wallabies,’ he said. ‘They eat an awful lot of feed out on the station. Too many of them altogether.’
They spent the rest of the afternoon shopping and ordering, and got back to the hotel at dusk, tired out, having booked their passages to Willstown upon the morning plane. Jean said, ‘There’s one thing I must do tonight, Joe, before leaving Cairns. I must write to Noel Strachan and tell him what’s happened.’
In the warm scented night of early summer by the Queensland sea, she sat down on the veranda after tea and wrote me a long letter. Joe Harman sat beside her as she wrote, smoking quietly, at peace.
She was very good about writing, and she still is; she still writes every week. I got that letter early in November; I remember it so well. It was a foggy, dark morning with a light rain or drizzle falling. I had to have the electric light on for breakfast, and the Palace stables on the other side of the road were hardly visible. In the street below the taxis went past with a wet swish of mud and water on the wet wood blocks.
It was a long letter from a very happy girl, telling me about her love. I was delighted at the news, of course. I sat reading it with my breakfast before me, and then I read it through again, and then I read it a third time. When I woke up to realities my coffee was cold and the fried egg had frozen to the dish in front of me in cold, congealed fat, but I was too absorbed in her news to want it. I went into my bedroom to put my shoes and coat on for the office, and as I opened the wardrobe to get my coat I saw her boots and skates, that I had been keeping for her till she came back for them. Old men get rather silly, sometimes, and I must say that that rather dashed me for a moment, because she wouldn’t be coming back for them. She wouldn’t be coming back to England ever again.
I went to the front door, and my charwoman was in the flat, just coming out of the dining-room. ‘Such good news, Mrs Chambers,’ I said. ‘Do you remember Miss Paget, who used to come here sometimes? She’s got engaged to be married, to an Australian, out in Queensland.’
‘Oh, I am glad,’ she said. ‘Such a nice lady, she was.’
‘Yes, wasn’t she?’ I repeated. ‘Such a nice lady.’
She said, ‘You didn’t eat your breakfast, sir. Was everything all right?’
‘Yes, quite all right, thanks, Mrs Chambers,’ I said. ‘I didn’t want anything this morning.’
It was cold and raw out in the street, one of those yellow foggy mornings with a reeking chill that makes you cough. I walked on towards the office in a dream, thinking about wallabies and laughing black stockmen, about blue water running over the white coral sands, about Jean Paget and the trouble she had had with her sarong in that hot country where all clothes are a burden. Then there was a fierce, rending squeal right on top of me, and a heavy blow on my right arm so that I staggered and nearly fell, and I was in the middle of Pall Mall with a taxi broadside on across the road beside me. I didn’t know where I was for a moment, and then I heard the white-faced driver saying, ‘For Christ’s sake. You can think yourself bloody lucky that you’re still alive.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t looking where I was going.’
‘Stepping out into the road like that,’ he said angrily. ‘Ought to have more sense, at your age. Did I hit you?’
A little crowd was starting to collect. ‘Only my arm,’ I said. I moved it, and it worked all right. ‘It’s nothing.’
‘Well, that’s a bloody miracle,’ he said. ‘Look out where you’re going to next time.’ He put his gear in, straightened up his taxi, and drove on; I walked on to the office.
The girl brought in the letters for me to go through, as usual, but I put them on one side in favour of another letter that I had in my breast pocket. I had a client or two that morning, I suppose; I usually have, and I suppose I gave them some advice, but my mind was twelve thousand miles away. Lester Robinson came in once with some business or other and I said to him, ‘You remember my Paget girl – the heir to that Macfadden estate? She’s got herself engaged to be married to an Australian. He seems to be a very good chap.’
He grunted. ‘I forget. Does that terminate our trust?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘That goes on for some time to come. Till she’s thirty-five.’
‘Pity,’ he said. ‘It’s made a lot of work for you, that trust has. It’ll be a good thing when it’s all wound up.’
‘It’s been no trouble, really,’ I said. By the end of the day I think I knew her letter by heart although it
was eight quarto pages long, but I took it with me to the club. I had a glass of sherry in the bar and told Moore about her engagement because he knew something about her story, and after dinner we sat down to a couple of rubbers of bridge, Dennison and Strickland and Callaghan, the four of us who play together every evening, and I told them about her.
I got up from the table at about eleven o’clock, and went into the library for a final cigarette before going back across the park to my flat. The big room was empty but for Wright, who had been in the Malay Police and knew her story. I dropped down into a chair beside him, and remarked, ‘You know that girl, Jean Paget? I think I’ve spoken to you about her once or twice before.’
He smiled. ‘You have.’
‘She’s got herself engaged to be married,’ I told him. ‘To the manager of a cattle station, in Northern Queensland.’
‘Indeed?’ he said. ‘What’s he like?’
‘I’ve met him,’ I replied. ‘He’s a very good chap. She’s very much in love with him. I think they’re going to be very happy.’
‘Is she coming back to England before getting married?’ he asked.
I sat staring at the rows of books upon the wall, the gold embossed carving at the corner of the ceiling. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think she’s ever coming back to England, ever again.’
He was silent.
‘It’s too far,’ I said. ‘I think she’ll make her life in Queensland now.’
There was a long pause. ‘After all, there’s no reason why she should come back to England,’ I said at last. ‘There’s nothing for her to come back for. She’s got no ties in this country.’
And then he said a very foolish thing. He meant it well enough, but it was a stupid thing to say. I got up and left him and went home to my dark, empty flat, and I avoided meeting him for some time after that. I was seventy-three years old that autumn, old enough to be her grandfather. I couldn’t possibly have been in love with her myself.
9
In the months of November and December that year Jean Paget worked harder than she had ever worked before.
Rose Sawyer joined her in Willstown within a fortnight, and Aggie Topp sailed early in November. I got Mr Pack to send Aggie to see me before she left. She was a gaunt, rather prim woman, but I could see at once that Pack had been quite right; if anyone could make girls work this woman could. I gave her her ticket and a typed sheet of instructions telling her how she would get by air from Sydney to Willstown, and then I talked to her about the job. ‘You know, it’s very, very rough,’ I said. ‘It’s rough, and it’s hot, and Miss Paget is having to start absolutely from nothing. She’s got plenty of money, but it’s going to be hard, all the time. You understand that, Mrs Topp?’
She said, ‘I’ve had two letters from Miss Paget, and she sent a photograph of the place, the main street. It don’t look up to much, I must say.’
‘You’re quite happy to go out there, are you?’
She said, ‘Oh well, I’ve been in rough places before. It’s only for a year to start with, anyway.’ And then she said, ‘I always liked Miss Paget.’
I had another matter to fix up with Aggie Topp. Jean was very anxious to get hold of an air-conditioning unit, a thing about the size of a small refrigerator which stood in the room and took hot air into itself and pumped it out cold into the room; it seemed to her important to have this to prevent the girls’ hands from sweating as they worked and marking the delicate leathers of the shoes. She had not been able to get hold of one in Australia and had cabled me, and I had found a firm that made them and got hold of one with a good deal of difficulty and some small payments on the side. Derek Harris is rather good at that sort of negotiation. I had it in our office standing at the foot of the stairs and I showed it to Mrs Topp, and arranged for her to take it out with her to Sydney. From Sydney it would have to be flown up with her to Cairns and Willstown at some considerable expense, but it seemed to me to be worth it since it was then the hottest time of the year.
This was the biggest commission that I got from Jean and was my own main contribution to the venture; the remainder of her cables were concerned with little bits of things that were no trouble. Aggie Topp took out with her a good deal of stuff from Pack and Levy, too; three cases full of tools and lasts and formers and all sorts of things, the bill for which came to about a hundred and forty-six pounds, which I paid for Jean in England.
Joe Harman helped her to get the buildings started on the day that they arrived in Willstown. They had a meeting with Tim Whelan and his two sons, in the carpenter’s shop amongst the coffins. They had already placed orders for two lorry loads of lumber in Cairns. The men stood or sat squatting, ringer fashion, on the floor with papers on the floor before them, planning the layout of the buildings; the workshop with its three-bedroom annexe was to be built first, and after that the ice-cream parlour next to it, leaving room for the expansion of the workshop one way and of the ice-cream parlour the other way. There were no great difficulties of expansion in the built-up area of Willstown.
They sent Tim Whelan presently to find Mr Carter, the Shire Clerk, to pass the plans of the new buildings and to grant a lease of the site in the main street. ‘It’ll be all right there,’ he said thoughtfully. There was a whole row of houses there in 1905 – ‘I’ve got a photograph. But nobody ever paid rent for that land in my time.’ Jean asked what rent would be required for the area she wanted, a difficult matter to decide in view of the fact that no plans existed and the area that she wanted was quite uncertain. ‘This is a town borough,’ Mr Carter said. ‘You don’t lease land upon an acreage basis in a town borough. If you’re going to develop the land by building, then I’d say about a shilling a year for each hundred foot of frontage. It’s in the main street, you see. If you wanted it for chickens or anything like that I’d have to charge five shillings.’
They adjourned to the bar of the hotel to seal the contracts; Jean sat on the steps outside with a lemonade, as was fitting for a lady with a reputation to preserve in Willstown.
She went to Brisbane a week later, flying to Cairns and flying on the same day down to Brisbane. She stayed there for three days and came back having ordered an electric generating set, a very large refrigerator, two deep freezes, a stainless steel counter, eight glass-topped tables, thirty-two chairs, two sink units, and a mass of minor shop fittings, glasses, plates, cutlery, and furnishings as well as a good deal of electrical fittings and cable. She made arrangements with the firms for all this stuff to be crated and consigned to Forsayth; in Cairns she made arrangements for the truck transport of these goods from Forsayth to Willstown. I had arranged the necessary credits for her and she was able to pay cash for everything.
She came back to Willstown a week later having made tentative arrangements for supplies of stock for her ice-cream parlour, and found the framework of the workshop already erected; a wooden building goes up very quickly. The matter was a nine days’ wonder in Willstown and old men used to stand around wondering at this midsummer madness of an English girl, a stranger to the Gulf country, who proposed to make shoes there and send them all the way to England to be sold. They were too kindly to be rude to her or to laugh at such an eccentricity, but an aura of disbelief surrounded the whole venture and made her feel very much alone in those first weeks.
She visited Midhurst at a very early stage, one Sunday when no work was going on upon her building. Joe Harman drove in to fetch her in his big utility at dawn one day, and took her back to Midhurst in time for breakfast. As soon as they were out of sight of the town they stopped for five minutes to kiss and talk.
Presently they disentangled and went on. Jean was accustomed by this time to the idea that no road in this country had a metalled surface. She had not been beyond the town hitherto; very soon she discovered that a road was where the car drove across country. The land was parched and dry with the heat of summer, covered with thin tufts of scorched grass. It was a wooded land, covered thinly with spindly, distorted e
ucalyptus trees averaging twenty to thirty feet in height; these trees were fairly widely spaced so that it was possible for a car or truck driven across country to find a way between them. This was the road, and when the surface of the earth became too deeply pitted and potholed with traffic the cars and trucks would deviate and choose another course. These tracks followed the same general direction, coming together at the fords where creeks, now dry and stony, had to be crossed, and fanning out again upon the other side.
Once in the twenty miles she saw half a dozen cattle, that stampeded wildly at the noise of the utility as it bounced, and rocketed over the uneven ground. She asked Joe what on earth the cattle found to eat; the ground seemed to her to be completely barren. ‘They get along,’ he said. ‘There’s plenty here for them to eat, my word. This dry stuff in the tussocks, why, it’s just the same as hay.’ He told her that there was a waterhole a little way from their track. ‘They never go more than three or four miles from water,’ he said. ‘Horses, now – you’ll find them grazing up to twenty miles from a drink.’
‘Once she exclaimed at three brown, furry forms bounding away among the trees. Oh, Joe – kangaroos!’
He corrected her. ‘Wallabies. We don’t get any ’roos up in these parts.’
She stared after the flying forms, entranced. ‘What’s the difference between a wallaby and a kangaroo, Joe?’
‘A wallaby’s smaller,’ he said. ‘A big, buck kangaroo, he’ll stand up to six feet high, but a wallaby’s not more than four. A kangaroo, he’s got a face like a deer. A wallaby, he’s got a face like a rabbit, or a rat. I got a little wallaby to show you at the homestead.’
‘A wild one?’
‘He’s a tame one now. He’ll get wild as he grows older; then he’ll go off to his own folks.’ He told her that when they had shot the wallabies to send the sample skins to Cairns for her they had shot a doe with a joey, and rather than leave the small defenceless creature to die they had taken it home to rear. ‘I like a wallaby about the place,’ he said.