by Nevil Shute
I cannot deny that in that time her letters have been a great interest to me, perhaps the greatest interest in my rather barren life. I think that after the affair of Mr Curtis and the poddy dodging she became more closely integrated into the life of the Gulf country than she had been before, because even before her marriage there was a subtle change in her letters. She ceased to write as an Englishwoman living in a strange, hard, foreign land; she gradually began to write about the people as if she was one of them, about the place as if it was her place. That may be merely my fancy, of course, or it may be that I made such a study of her letters, reading and re-reading them and filing them carefully away in a special set of folders that I keep in my flat, that I found subtleties of meaning in them that a more casual reader would not have noticed.
She married Joe Harman in April after the mustering, as she had promised him. They were married by a travelling Church of England priest, one of the Bush Brothers who had been, queerly enough, a curate at St John’s in Kingston-on-Thames, not ten miles from where I used to live in Wimbledon. There was, of course, no church in Willstown at that time though one is to be built next year; they were married in the Shire Hall, and all the countryside came to the wedding. They had their honeymoon, or part of it, on Green Island, and I suppose she took her sarong with her, though she did not tell me that.
In the first two years of her married life she made considerable inroads into her capital. She was very good about it; she always started off one thing and got it trading smoothly before starting on another, after the first effort when she started both the ice-cream parlour and the workshop together. She used to send me accounts of her ventures, too, prepared for her by a young man called Len James who worked in the bank. But all the same, she asked me for three or four thousand pounds every six months or so, till by the time her second son was born, the one that she called Noel after me, she had had over eighteen thousand pounds for her various local businesses. Although they all seemed to be making profits Lester and I were growing, by that time, a little concerned about our duty as trustees, broad though our terms of reference under the Macfadden will might be. Our duty was to keep her capital intact and hand it over to her when she was thirty-five, and I began to worry sometimes about the chances of a slump or some unknown disaster in Australia which would extinguish the thirty per cent of her inheritance that we had let her have. Too many eggs seemed to be going into one basket, and her investments, laudable though they might be, could hardly be classed as trustee stocks.
The climax came in February, when she wrote me a long letter from the hospital at Willstown, soon after she had given birth to Noel. She asked me if I would be one of his godfathers, and of course that pleased me very much although there was very little prospect that I should live long enough to discharge my duties by him. Wakeling was to be the second godfather, and as he had married Rose Sawyer about six months previously and seemed to be settled in the district I felt that she would not be injuring her child by giving him an elderly godfather who lived on the other side of the world. I made a corresponding alteration to my will immediately, of course.
She went on in the same letter to discuss affairs at Midhurst.
‘You know, Joe’s only manager at present,’ she wrote. ‘He’s done awfully well; there were about eight thousand head of cattle on the place when he went there, but now there are twelve or thirteen thousand. We shall be selling over two thousand head this year, too many to send down to Julia in one herd, so Joe’s got to make two trips. It looks as if there’ll be a steady increase for the next few years, because each year in the dry Bill Wakeling builds a couple more dams for us so we get more and more feed each year.’
She went on to tell me about Mrs Spears, the owner. ‘She left the Gulf country after her husband died about ten years ago,’ she said, ‘and now she lives in Brisbane. Joe and I went down and stayed a couple of nights with her last October; I didn’t tell you about it then because I wanted to think it over and we had to find out if we could get a loan, too.’
She told me that Mrs Spears was getting very old, and she wanted to realize a part of the considerable capital that she had locked up in Midhurst; probably she wanted to give it away during her lifetime to avoid death duties. ‘She asked if we could buy a half share in the station,’ she said. ‘She would give us an option to buy the other half at a valuation at the time of her death, whenever that might be. It means finding about thirty thousand pounds; that’s about the value of half the stock. The land is rented from the State, of course, and there’s seventeen years to go upon the present lease; it means an alteration to the lease to put Joe’s name into it jointly with hers.’
She told me that they had been to the bank. The bank would advance two-thirds of the thirty thousand pounds that they would have to find. ‘They sent an inspector up who knows the cattle business, and he came out to Midhurst,’ she wrote. ‘Joe’s got a good name in the Gulf country and I think he thought that we were doing all right with the property. That leaves us with ten thousand pounds to find in cash, and that’s what I wanted to ask you about.’
She digressed a little. ‘Midhurst’s a good station,’ she said, ‘and we’re very happy here. If we can’t take it over Mrs Spears will probably sell it, and we’d have to go somewhere else and start again. I’d hate to do that and it would be a great disappointment to Joe after all the work he’s put into Midhurst. I’d be miserable leaving Willstown now, because it’s turning into quite a fair-sized place, and it’s a happy little town to live in, too. I do want to stay here if we can.’
She went on, ‘I know a cattle station isn’t a trustee investment, Noel, any more than any of the other things you’ve let me put my money into. Will you think it over, and tell me if we can have it? If we can’t, I’ll have to think again; perhaps I could sell or mortgage some of the businesses I’ve started since I got here. I should hate to do that, because they might get into bad hands and go downhill. This town’s like a young baby – I know something about those, Noel! It needs nursing all the time, till it’s a bit bigger.’
Another ten thousand pounds, of course, would mean that we should have allowed her to invest half of her inheritance in highly speculative businesses in one district, which was by no means the intention of Mr Macfadden when he made his will. Legally, of course, we were probably safe from any action for a breach of trust by reason of the broad wording of the discretionary clause that I had supped into the will. I spent a day or two thinking about this before I showed her letter to Lester, and it came to me in the end that our duty was to do what Mr Macfadden would himself have done in similar circumstances.
What would that queer recluse in Ayr have done if he had had to settle this point? He was an invalid, of course, but I did not think he was an unkind or an unreasonable man. He had not made that long trust because he distrusted Jean Paget; he did not even know her. He had made it for her good, because he thought that an unmarried girl in her twenties who was mistress of a large sum of money would be liable to be imposed upon. In that he may well have been right. But Jean Paget was a married woman of thirty with two children now, and married to a sensible and steady sort of man, whatever his ideas on poddy-dodging might be. Would Mr Macfadden, in these circumstances, still have insisted on the trust being maintained in its original form?
I thought not. He was a kindly man – felt sure of that – and he would have wanted her to have her Midhurst station, since that was where her home and all her present interests were. He was a careful, Scottish man, however; I thought he would have turned his mind more to the details of her investment in Midhurst to ensure that she got good value for this ten thousand pounds. Looking at it from this point of view I was disturbed at the short tenure of the lease. Seventeen years was a short time for Joe Harman to regain the value of the dams that he was building on the property and all the other improvements that he was making; he could not possibly go on with capital improvements until a very much longer lease had been negotiated.
I showed her letter to my partner then, and we had a long talk about it. He took the same view that I did, that the lease was the kernel of the matter. ‘I can’t say that I take a very serious view of this trust, Noel,’ he said. ‘I think your approach is the right one, to try and put yourself in the testator’s shoes when looking at this thing. He was quite content to leave the money to his sister without any question of a trust, while her husband was alive to help her. It was only after the husband’s death that he wanted the trust. Well, now the daughter’s got a husband to help her. If he was disposing of his money now, presumably he wouldn’t bother about any trust at all.’
‘That’s a point,’ I said. ‘I hadn’t thought of that one.’
‘I don’t suggest we disregard the trust,’ he said. ‘I think we ought to use it as a lever to get this lease put right for her. Tell all and sundry that we won’t release her money till the leasehold is adjusted to our satisfaction. Then, so far as I’m concerned, she can have all she wants.’ I smiled. ‘I wouldn’t tell her that.’
I sat down next day and drafted a letter to her in reply. ‘I do not think it is impossible to release a further ten thousand pounds,’ I wrote, ‘but I should be very sorry to do so until this matter of the lease has been adjusted to our satisfaction. As the thing stands at the moment, you could lose your home in seventeen years’ time and lose with it all the money that you and Mrs Spears have expended on improvements such as dams and other water conservation schemes, which would pass to the State without any payment whatsoever, so far as my present information goes.’ I learned later that that was incorrect.
I came to the main point of my letter next. ‘No doubt you have a solicitor that you can trust, but if it would assist you I would very gladly come and visit you in Queensland for a few weeks and see this matter of the lease put into satisfactory order before you invest this money in Midhurst. It is many years since I left England and I have regretted that; I cannot expect to have many more years left in which to travel and see the world. I would like to take a long holiday and travel a little before I get too feeble, and if I could help you in this matter of the lease I should be only too glad to come and do so.’ I added, ‘I need hardly say that I should travel at my own expense.’
The answer came in a night letter telegram about ten days later. She urged me to come to them, and suggested that I should come out by air about the end of April, since their winter was approaching then and the weather would be just like an English summer. She said that she was writing with a list of clothes that I should have and medicines and things that I might need upon the journey. I was a little touched by that.
I saw Kennedy, my doctor, at his place in Wimpole Street next day. ‘Is there any particular reason why I shouldn’t fly out to Queensland?’ I asked.
He looked at me quizzically. ‘It’s not exactly what I should advise for you, you know. Have you got to go to Queensland?’
‘I want to go, very much,’ I said. ‘I want to go and stay out there about a month. There’s business I should like to see to personally.’
‘How have you been walking recently?’
There was no point in lying to him. ‘I walk as far as Trafalgar Square most mornings,’ I said. ‘I take a taxi from there.’
‘You can’t quite manage the whole distance to your office?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I haven’t done that for some time.’
‘Can you walk upstairs in your club, to the first floor, without stopping?’
I shook my head. ‘I always go up in the lift. But anyway, there aren’t any stairs in Queensland. All the houses are bungalows.’
He smiled. ‘Take off your coat and your shirt, and let me have a look at you.’
When he had finished his examination, he said, ‘Well. Are you proposing to go alone?’
I nodded. ‘I shall be staying with friends at the other end. They’ll meet me when I get off the aeroplane.’
‘And you really feel it’s necessary that you should go?’
I met his eyes. ‘I want to go, very much indeed.’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘You know your condition as well as I do. There’s nothing new – only the deterioration that you’ve got to expect. You put ten years on your age during the war. I think, on the whole, you’re wise to travel by air. I think you’d find the Red Sea very trying.’ He went on to tell me what I could do and what I mustn’t attempt, all the old precautions that he had told me before.
I went back to my office and saw Lester, and told him what I was proposing to do. ‘I’m going to take about three months holiday,’ I said, ‘starting at the end of April. I’m going out by air, and I don’t know quite how long I shall stay for. If I find air travel too tiring on the way out, I may come home by sea.’ I paused. ‘In any case, you’ll have to work on the assumption that I shall be away for some considerable time. It’s probably about time you started to do that, in any case.’
‘You really feel that it is necessary for you to go personally, yourself?’ he asked.
‘I do.’
‘All right, Noel. I only wish you hadn’t got to put so much of your energy into this. After all, it’s a fairly trivial affair.’
‘I can’t agree with that,’ I said. ‘I’m beginning to think that this thing is the most important business that I ever handled in my life.’
I left London one Monday morning, and travelled through to Sydney on the same airliner, arriving late on Wednesday night. We stopped for an hour or so at Cairo and Karachi and Calcutta and Singapore and Darwin. I must say the aeroplane was very comfortable and the stewardess was most kind and attentive; it was fatiguing, of course, sleeping two nights in a reclining chair and I was glad when it was over. I stayed two nights in Sydney to rest, and took a little drive around in a hired car during the afternoon. Next day I took the aeroplane to Cairns. It was a lovely flight, especially along the coast of Queensland, after Brisbane. The very last part, up the Hinchinbrook Channel between Cairns and Townsville, must be one of the most beautiful coastlines in the world.
We landed at Cairns in the evening, and here I had a great surprise, because Joe Harman met me at the aerodrome. The Dakota, he told me, now ran twice a week to the Gulf country, partly on account of the growth of Willstown, and he had come in on the Friday plane to take me out on Monday. ‘I got one or two little bits of things to order and to see to,’ he said. ‘My solicitor, Ben Hope, he’s here in Cairns too. I thought that over the weekend you might like to hear the general set-up of Midhurst, ’n have a talk with him.’
I had not heard the slow Queensland speech since he had come to me in Chancery Lane, over three years before. He took me in a car to the hotel, a queer, rambling building rather beautifully situated, with a huge bar that seemed to be the focal point. We got there just before tea, the evening meal, and went in almost at once and sat down together. He asked me if I would drink tea or beer or plonk. ‘Plonk?’ I asked.
‘Red wine,’ he said. ‘I don’t go much for it myself, but jokers who know about wine, they say it’s all right.’
They had a wine list, and I chose a Hunter River wine which I must say I found to be quite palatable. ‘Jean was very sorry she couldn’t come and meet you,’ he said. ‘We could have parked Joe with someone, but she’s feeding Noel, so that ties her. She’s going to drive into Willstown and meet the Dakota on Monday.’
‘How is she?’ I asked.
‘She’s fine,’ he said. ‘Having babies seems to suit her. She’s looking prettier than ever.’
We settled down after tea on the veranda outside my bedroom, and began discussing the business of Midhurst. He had brought with him copies of the accounts for the station for the last three years, neatly typed and very easily intelligible. I commented upon their form, and he said, ‘I’m not much of a hand at this sort of thing. Jean did these before she went into the hospital. She does most of the accounts for me. I tell her what I want to do out on the station, and she tells me how much money I’ve got left to
spend. She’s got the schooling for the two of us.’
Nevertheless, I found him quite a shrewd man, very well able to appreciate the somewhat intricate points that came up about the lease and his capital improvements. We talked for a couple of hours that night about his station and about the various businesses that Jean had started in the town. He was very interesting about those.
‘She’s got twenty-two girls working in the workshop,’ he said. ‘Shoes and attaché cases and ladies’ bags. That’s the one that isn’t doing quite so well as the others.’ He turned the pages of the accounts to show me. ‘It’s making a profit now, but last year there was a loss of over two hundred pounds – two hundred and twenty-seven. But all the others – oh my word.’ He showed me the figures for the ice-cream parlour, the beauty parlour, the swimming-pool, the cinema, the laundry, and the dress shop. ‘They’re doing fine. The fruit and vegetable shop, that’s all right, too.’ We totted up the figures and found that the seven of them together had made a clear profit of two thousand six hundred and seventy-three pounds in the previous year. ‘It’ld pay her to run the workshop at a loss,’ he said. ‘She gets it back out of what the girls spend to make themselves look pretty for the ringers, and what the ringers spend in taking out the girls.’
I was a little troubled about the workshop. ‘Can she expand it?’ I asked. ‘Can she lower the overhead by doing a bigger business?’
He was doubtful about that. ‘She’s using just about all the alligator skins Jeff Pocock and two others can bring in,’ he said. ‘Wallabies, they’re getting scarcer than they were, too. I don’t think she can get much bigger in the workshop. She doesn’t want to, either. She’s got a kind of hunch that in a few years’ time the workshop won’t be necessary at all, that the town will be so big that a workshop employing twenty girls won’t be neither here nor there.’
‘I see,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘How big is the town now’?
‘There’s about four hundred and fifty people living in Willstown,’ he said. ‘That’s not counting boongs, and not counting people living out upon the stations. The population’s trebled in the last three years.’