by Nevil Shute
“I’ve not got any clothes for staying in a place like that,” she said.
“We’ll get some,” he replied. “After all, we’ve got seven thousand pounds to spend.”
“We won’t have long, if you go on like this.”
“We don’t want to have it long. If we hang on to the money it’ll only go to the kids after our time, and they’ll have enough to spoil them, anyhow. I don’t hold with leaving kids a lot of money. We never had any, and we got through.”
She poured herself a cup of tea and he left the sink and came and sat at the table with her. “I’d like to go to Melbourne for a week,” she said thoughtfully, “if we’ve really got the money. When was it we went down there last?”
“Two years ago,” he said. “When we took Angie to the University.”
“Is it as long as that? Well, I suppose it would be. I wouldn’t want to go before the Show.” The Banbury Show was in the middle of December; she always competed in the Flower section and in the Home-Made Cakes, and usually won a prize in both. “And then there’s Christmas,” she said. “Everybody’s on holiday till the middle of January.”
He nodded. “Suppose we booked a room for a week about the middle of January?”
She smiled. “I’d like that, Jack. Give me time to get some clothes made up. I couldn’t go to the Windsor with what I’ve got now.”
He pulled a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and passed it across to her; she took one and he lit it for her, and for a while they sat smoking in silence. “We could do a lot of things,” he said. “We could make that trip home.”
In their hard early married life a trip home to England had been her great desire, always to be frustrated by their circumstances. She was English, the daughter of an admiral, brought up in all the comfort and security of a small country house before the first war, and sent to a good school. In 1917 she had joined the W.A.A.C.s with a commission as was proper for the daughter of a senior naval officer, and in 1918 she had shocked her parents by falling in love with an Australian, a lieutenant in the first A.I.F. Her family never understood Jack Dorman and did everything they could to dissuade her from marrying him, and succeeded in preventing her from doing so till she was twenty-one, in 1919; she married him on her birthday. He was a ranker officer, for one thing, which in those days damned him from the start; he had been an N.C.O. in Gallipoli and in France for nearly three years, and he had only recently been commissioned. He was an unpleasantly tough young man, addicted to a strange, un-English slang, and he never pulled up men for not saluting him because he didn’t believe in saluting, and said so. He used to have meals with private soldiers in cafés and in restaurants, and even drink with them; he had no idea of discipline at all. All he could do, with others like him, was to win battles.
Thirty-two years had passed since those bad months of 1918, but Jane could still remember the unpleasantness as she had rebelled against her family. She was too young, too immature to be able to stand up and state her conviction that there was solid stuff in this young man, the substance for a happy and enduring marriage; she felt that very strongly, but she could never get it out in words. She could remember as if it were yesterday her father’s frigid politeness to this uncouth young officer that she had brought into the house, and his blistering contempt for him in their private talks, and her mother’s futile assurances that “Daddy knows best”. She had married Jack Dorman in February 1919 in Paddington a week before sailing with him to Australia, and her parents had come to the wedding, but only just. Nobody else came except one old school friend, and Aunt Ethel.
Aunt Ethel was her father’s sister, Mrs. Trehearn, married to Geoffrey Trehearn, a Commissioner in the Indian Police, at that time stationed in Moulmein. Aunt Ethel had come home with her two children in 1916 to put them to school in England, and she was still in England waiting for a passage back to Burma. Aunt Ethel, alone of all Jane’s relations, had stood up for her and had told the family that she was making a wise choice, and she had cut little ice with her brother Tom; indeed, in some ways she had made matters worse. Admiral Sir Thomas Foxley had little regard for the sagacity of women, and to mention the woman’s vote to him in those far-off days was as a red rag to a bull.
All these things passed through Jane Dorman’s mind as she sat sipping her tea in the kitchen of her homestead thirty-three years later. Seven thousand pounds to spend after paying tax, all earned in one year and earned honestly; more money than her father had ever dreamed of earning, or any of her family. Extraordinary to think of, and extraordinary that after their hard life the money should mean so little to them. Jack didn’t quite know what to do with it, so much was evident, and certainly she didn’t.
“I don’t know about going home,” she said at last. “I don’t believe I’d know anybody there now except Aunt Ethel, and I don’t suppose I’d recognise her now. There was a letter from her in the post today, by the way. I’d like to see the old thing again before she dies, but she’s about the only one. She must be getting on for eighty now.”
“Wouldn’t you like to go and see your old home?” he suggested. He knew how much her mind had turned to that small country house when first she had come to Australia.
She shook her head. “Not now that it’s a school. It’ld be all different. I’d rather remember it as it used to be.” Her father had kept two gardeners and a groom, and three servants in the house; she knew that nothing would now resemble the gracious, easy routine of the home that she had lived in as a child.
He did not press her; if she didn’t want to go to England that was all right with him. He had only memories of a cold, unfriendly place himself, where he had been ill at ease and that he secretly disliked. He would have liked very much to go back to Gallipoli again, and to France and Italy—it would be interesting to see those. His mind turned to his Italian hired man. “There’s another thing,” he said. “About Mario. He’s got that girl of his in this town that he comes from. I don’t know how much he’s got saved up now, but it might be a good thing if we could help him with her fare. It wouldn’t be so much, and we might be able to charge it up against the tax. After all, it’s all connected with the station.”
Mario Ritti was a laughing man of about twenty-eight, tall and well built, with dark curly hair, a swarthy complexion, and a flashing eye; a peril to all the young girls in the neighbourhood. He had been taken prisoner by the Eighth Army at Bardia in 1942, and he had spent two years in England as a prisoner of war, working on a farm in Cumberland where he had learned about sheep. After the war he had got back to his own place, Chieti, a hill town in the Abruzzi mountains near the Adriatic coast where his parents scratched a bare living from a tiny patch of rather barren land. In Italy there were far more people than the land could support, and Mario had put his name down almost at once for a free immigrant passage to Australia. He had worked as a labourer and as a waiter in a hotel in Pescara and as a housepainter till his turn came round upon the quota three years later and he could leave for an emptier country. By the terms of his free passage he had to work for two years as directed by the Department of Immigration in Australia, after which he would be free to choose his work like any other man. Jack Dorman had got him from the Department, and was very pleased with him, and he was anxious not to lose him at the end of the two years.
“I was thinking that we might build on to the shearers’ place,” he said. “Extend that on a bit towards the windmill and make a little place of three rooms there. Then if we got his girl out for him he’d be settled, and the girl could help you in the house.”
Jane laughed shortly. “Fat lot of help she’d be, a girl who couldn’t speak a word of English having babies every year. I’d be helping her, not her helping me. Still, if she could cook the dinner now and then, I wouldn’t say no.” She sat for a moment in thought. “How much is her passage going to cost, and how much has he got saved up?”
“He sends money back to Italy, to his parents,” Jack said. “He was sending home five
pounds a week at one time, so he can’t have very much. I suppose the passage would be about fifty quid. We’d better pay that, and let him spend what he’s got saved on furniture.”
“Find out how much he’s got,” his wife said. “He ought to put in everything he’s got if we’re going to do all that for him.”
“That’s right.” He pushed his chair back from the table. “Like to drive into town this afternoon and put this cheque into the bank?”
She smiled; he was still very young at times. “Don’t you trust the postman?”
“No,” he said. “Not with twenty-two thousand pounds. A thing like that ought to be registered.” He paused. “We could take a drive around,” he said. “Look in on George and Ann for tea, at Buttercup.”
“Giving up work?” she asked.
“That’s right,” he said. “Just for today.”
“Who’s going to get tea here for the boys if we go gallivanting off to Buttercup?”
“They can have cold tonight,” he said.
“All right.” She reached behind her for an envelope upon the table. “Want to read Aunt Ethel’s letter?”
“Anything new in it?”
“Not really,” she said slowly. “You’d better read it, though.”
She tossed it across to him; he unfolded it and began to read. Jane got up and glanced at the clock and put the saucepan of potatoes on to boil, and put a couple more logs into the stove. Then she sat down again and picked up the pages of the letter as Jack laid them down, and read them through again herself.
It was addressed from Maymyo, Ladysmith Avenue, Ealing, a suburb to the west of London that Jane had never seen. Till recently her old aunt had always written by air mail but lately the letters had been coming by sea mail, perhaps because there was now little urgency in any of them. Her handwriting was very bent and crabbed; at one time she had written legibly, but in the last year or two the writing had got worse and worse. The letter ran,
“MY DEAR CHILD,
“Another of your lovely parcels came today all candied peel and currants and sultanas and glacé cherries such lovely things that we do so enjoy getting just like pre-war when you could buy everything like that in the shops without any of these stupid little bits of paper and coupons and things. I get so impatient sometimes when I go to buy the rations which means I must be getting old, seventy-nine next month my dear but I don’t feel like it it was rather a blow when Aggie died but I have quite got over that now and settled down again and last Friday I went out to bridge with Mrs. Morrison because it’s three months now and I always say three months’ mourning is enough for anyone. I’m afraid this is going to be a very long winter I do envy you your winter in our summer because it is quite cold already and now Mr. Attlee says there isn’t any coal because he’s sold it all to America or Jugoslavia or somewhere so there won’t be any for us and now the miners and the railwaymen all want more money if only dear Winston was back at No. 10 but everybody says he will be soon.”
Jane turned the pages, glancing over her old aunt’s ramblings that she had already deciphered once and that were clearly giving Jack some difficulty. Aggie was Mrs. Agatha Harding who had shared the house at Ealing with her aunt; she was the widow of an army officer. Now she was dead, Jane supposed that her old aunt must be living alone, although she did not say so. The letter rambled on,
“Jennifer came down to spend the day with me one Sunday in August and she is coming again soon she has grown into such a pretty girl reddish hair and our family nose twenty-four this year she ought to have been presented at Court long ago but everything seems to be so different now and she works in an office at Blackheath the Ministry of Pensions I think. I asked her if there was a young man and she said no but I expect there is one all the same my dear I hope he’s as nice a one as Jack I often think of that time when you were so naughty and ran off and married him and Tom was so angry and how right you were only I wish you didn’t have to live so far away.”
Jane wished she didn’t live so far away as she read that. It might be worth while to make the long journey back to England just to see this kind old lady again, who still thought of her as a child.
“It seems so funny to think of you over fifty and with all your children out in the world and so prosperous with wool my dear I am glad for you. Our Government are so stupid about wool and everything I went the other day to Sayers to buy a warm vest for the winter but my dear the price was shocking even utility grade and the girl said it was all due to bulk buying of wool and the Socialist Government so I told her to tell Mr. Attlee he could keep it and I’d go on with what I’ve got my dear I do hope things are cheaper with you than they are here but I suppose you can always spin your own wool on the station and weave it can’t you my grandmother always did that better than this horrible bulk buying that makes everything so dear. My dear, thank you again for all your lovely parcels and your letters write again soon and all my love.
“Your affectionate Aunt,
“ETHEL.”
“Keeps it up, doesn’t she?” said Jack Dorman.
“Yes,” said Jane, “she keeps it up. I don’t like the thought of her living alone though, at her age.”
“That’s since this Aggie died?”
Jane nodded. “It looks as if she’s living by herself now, quite alone. I wish we were nearer.”
He turned the pages of the letter back. “Who’s this Jennifer she speaks about?”
“That’s Jennifer Morton, her granddaughter. Her daughter Lucy married Edward Morton—the one that’s a doctor in Leicester.”
“Oh.” He did not know where Leicester was, nor did he greatly care. “This girl Jennifer works in London, does she?”
Jane nodded. “Just outside London, I think. Blackheath.”
“Well, can’t she go and live with the old girl?”
“I don’t know,” said Jane. “I don’t suppose there’s much that we can do about it, anyway.”
Jack Dorman went out to the yard, and Jane began to lay the kitchen table for the midday dinner. She was vaguely unhappy and uneasy; there was a menace in all the news from England now, both in the letters from her old aunt and in the newspapers. The most extraordinary things seemed to be going on there, and for no reason at all. In all her life, and it had been a hard life at times, she had never been short of all the meat that she could eat, or practically any other sort of food or fruit that she desired. As a child she could remember the great joints upon her father’s table at Sutton Bassett, the kidneys and bacon for breakfast with the cold ham on the sideboard, the thick cream on the table, the unlimited butter. These things were as normal to her as the sun or the wind; even in the most anxious times of their early married life in Gippsland they had had those things as a matter of course, and never thought about them. If she didn’t use them now so much it was because she was older and felt better on a sparing diet, but it was almost inconceivable to her that they should not be there for those who wanted them.
It was the same with coal; in all her life she had never had to think about economising with fuel. From the blazing fireplaces and kitchen range of Sutton Bassett she had gone to the Australian countryside, milder in climate, where everybody cooked and warmed themselves with wood fires. Even in their hardest times there had never been any question of unlimited wood for fuel. Indeed, at Merrijig with the hot sun and the high rainfall the difficulty was to keep the forest from encroaching on the paddocks; if you left a corner ungrazed for three years the bush would be five feet high all over it; in ten it would have merged back into forest. Even in the city you ordered a ton of wood as naturally as a pound of butter or a sirloin of beef.
Whatever sort of way could Aunt Ethel be living in when she could not afford a warm vest for the winter? Why a warm vest—why not three or four? She must do something about the washing. Was clothing rationed still? She seemed to remember that clothes rationing had been removed in England. She stopped laying the table and unfolded the letter and read the passage over a
gain, a little frown of perplexity upon her forehead. There wasn’t anything about rationing; she hadn’t got the vest because it was expensive. How foolish of her; old people had to have warm clothes, especially in England in the winter. It was true that the price of woollen garments was going up even in Australia by leaps and bounds, but Aunt Ethel couldn’t possibly be as hard up as that. The Foxleys had always had plenty of money. Perhaps she was going a bit senile.
She went and rang the dinner bell outside the flyscreen door, rather depressed.
The men came back to the homestead for dinner; she heard Tim and Mario washing at the basin under the tank-stand in the yard, and she began to dish up. They came in presently with Jack and sat down at the table; she carved half a pound of meat for each of them and heaped the plates high with vegetables; she gave Jack rather less and herself much less. A suet jam roll followed the meat, and cups of tea. Relaxed and smoking at the end of the meal, Tim Archer said,
“Would you be using the utility Saturday evening, Mr. Dorman? There’s the Red Cross dance.”
“I dunno.” He turned to Jane. “Want to go to the dance on Saturday?”
It was a suggestion that had not been made to her for seven or eight years and it came strangely from Jack now, but everything was strange on this day of the wool cheque. She laughed shortly. “I don’t want to go to any dance,” she said. “My dancing days are done, but let the boys go if they want to.”
“You going, Mario?”
The dark, curly-haired young man looked up with laughing eyes. “Si, Mr. Dorman.”
“Go on,” his boss grumbled. “Talk English, like a Christian. You can if you want to.”
The young man grinned more broadly. “Yes,” he said. “I like to go ver’ much. I like dance much.”
“I bet you do….” He turned to Tim. “If you go you’ve got to look after him,” he said. “Don’t let him get in any trouble, or get girls in any trouble, either.” There was some prejudice against the New Australians in the district, well founded in part, and there had been a row over Mario once before at the first dance that he attended and before he was accustomed to the social climate of Australia.
