by Nevil Shute
They got up presently, and went to see Billy Slim. The bridge across the river to his homestead consisted of two steel cables slung across the river with planks lashed to them to form a footway; another two cables formed hand-rails with rabbit-wire sides from the hand-rails to the footway. Jennifer paused before going on to it, and turned to Carl. “Do you think this is the same bridge?”
“Very likely,” he said. “It is only fifty years.”
“I’ll have to be careful not to do the same thing.”
“He was drunk, and it was dark, and he had a dog in his arms,” Zlinter said. “It is a little different.”
“It was nice of him to carry the dog,” said Jennifer. “He was probably rather a nice man.”
“Mary Nolan thought so.” She turned and saw a gleam of humour in his eye, and made a face at him.
They found Billy Slim asleep, that hot summer afternoon; there was a stir from the bedroom as they stepped on to the veranda, and presently he looked out at them, clad only in a pair of khaki shorts. “Aw, look,” he said. “I won’t be more ‘n a minute.” He came out presently with a shirt on. “Just having a bit of shut-eye,” he said. “I saw you, Splinter, earlier on today, going down the river somewhere.”
Zlinter said, “This is Miss Jenny, who is staying with Jack Dorman.”
“This the young lady who helped you do those operations at Lamirra?”
“This is the one. How did you get to know about that?”
“Aw, everybody knows about that. I heard about it at the Jig.” To Jennifer he said, “How do you do, Miss. I’ll just put on the kettle for a pot of tea.” He busied himself with a Primus stove.
They sat down at his table. “We have just been to see the gravestones at the cemetery,” Zlinter said. “To see the one that has my name upon it.”
Slim paused, teapot in hand. “I went and had a look at it myself the other day. Charlie Zlinter and his dog, just like you said.”
“I have found out a little more about Charlie Zlinter. He drove a bullock team.” He started in and told the forest ranger most of the information that he had collected from Pat Halloran, omitting the information that Mary Nolan was still alive. “Now I would like to find out where he lived in Howqua,” he said at last.
Billy Slim set the cups before them and poured out the tea. “You mean, where the hut he lived in was?”
“That is what I want to know.”
“You don’t know the street or the number?”
The Czech said, “I do not know anything but that he lived here, in the town of Howqua.”
The ranger sat down at the table with them and stirred his tea. “I never saw the town myself,” he said. “I come here first as just a little nipper some time in the first war, but that was some years after it was burnt through for the first time. The fire went through here in 1909 — or was it 1910? I don’t know — one or the other. There wasn’t any town here when I saw the valley first, but there were a lot more stumps of brick chimneys, and iron roofing, and that sort of junk. When I come here, I picked up all the iron there was and used it as walls for sheds, with new iron on the roof; I had a stable built of it, before the second fire came through. The chimney stumps, well, they just went away in time. Fell down.”
“Were the houses in streets?” Carl Zlinter asked.
“Oh my word,” the forest ranger said, “it was all laid out proper. Jubilee Parade ran round by the river from my dad’s hotel by the big tree, and Victoria Avenue crossed it running up towards the path that you came down. Most of the houses were on one of those two streets, but there were several others, I know. I forget their names.”
Jennifer said, “I suppose you don’t know where Charlie Zlinter lived?”
The ranger shook his head. “I don’t. I don’t think anyone could tell you that, not at this distance of time. What do you want to know that for?”
Carl Zlinter said, “It was just a fancy. I would like to build a little hut here, a place where I could sleep when I come fishing and not always trouble you. A little place of one room where I could leave fishing rods and blankets, and perhaps a few tins of food. It is better when you live always in the camp to have a little place that is your own, to come away to sometimes.”
The forest ranger nodded. “Sure,” he said, “you could do that. You’d have to buy an allotment from the Lands Department.”
“What is that?”
“The Lands Department, in Melbourne, they own all the land, and they’ve got it all mapped out as town lots in the valley here. They sell these lots, see? like in any town you buy a vacant lot for a house. Well, if you’ve got a lot and you don’t pay the rates, after a while you lose your allotment, and it goes back to the Lands Department, and they can sell it to someone else.” He paused. “That’s happened with every one of the township allotments here. They’re all back with the Lands Department because everybody’s gone away and stopped paying the rates, but the township’s still mapped out that way, and if you want a bit of land you’ll have to buy a town allotment.”
Jennifer asked, “You mean, if you wanted to put up a hut down by the river you’d have to buy a town site?”
“That’s right. You’d get so many yards frontage on the street, and so much depth.”
They laughed, and the girl said, “No. 12, Jubilee Parade?”
“That’s right.”
Carl Zlinter asked, “How much would that cost?”
“Aw, look,” the forest ranger said, “there’s not a lot of competition for town sites in Howqua just at the moment. I wouldn’t pay more than five quid for it, not unless you picked a corner site. They might make you pay ten quid for that, because of having frontage on both streets and being able to do more trade that way.” He grinned.
“How much would the rates be?”
The ranger scratched his head. “I couldn’t rightly say. The Council’s been running on the cheap the last half century. They might make you pay five bob a year for the allotment.”
He could not tell them any more, and presently they left him to his lonely life and went back across the wire bridge to the meadow by the river. It was very still and quiet and beautiful in the valley; the sun was dropping towards the hill, and already the shadows were growing long. “It’s a lovely, lovely place,” the girl said. “Whether you find out about Charlie Zlinter or not, Carl, it’s a lovely place to build a little hut.”
“You like it so much, too?” he asked eagerly.
“I do,” she said. “I think it’s perfectly beautiful.”
They turned from the river and walked slowly up the track towards Jock McDougall’s paddock and the utility. They talked as they went about Paris mostly; Jennifer had spent a fortnight’s holiday in Paris in 1946, and Carl had spent several leaves in Paris in 1943 and 1944, so that though they had seen it under different circumstances it was a bond between them as a place that they both knew and had enjoyed. They came to the utility too soon, and stood for a time looking over the wide forest in the evening sunlight.
At last the girl said, “It’s been a wonderful day, Carl. Thank you so much for taking me.”
She held out her hand instinctively, as if she were saying good-bye, and it seemed better to say what they had to say here in the solitude and quiet of the forest than at the homestead, where there would be other people. He said, “If I ask Jack Dorman to lend us this Chev again, will you come with me to Woods Point on Saturday?”
“Of course. I’d love to do that, Carl.”
“I will ask him when we get back.” He looked at her smiling. “It will seem a very long time,” he said.
“Not so long as that,” she said. “I shall see you tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
She laughed up at him. “At the inquest.”
“The inquest! I had forgotten all about it!”
“That’s what I hoped you’d do,” she said, getting into the car. “Don’t start thinking about it now.”
They drove down the rough track thr
ough the woods not talking very much, but very conscious of each other. They came out in the end upon the main road to Lamirra, and then, too soon, they were at Leonora, opening each paddock gate as they passed through.
Jack Dorman met them in the yard, glancing critically at the Chev. “Brought it home all in one piece?”
“I have not hit it against anything,” said Zlinter. “It was very, very kind of you to lend it to us.”
Jennifer left him talking to Jack Dorman by the car, leading up to a suggestion that they should borrow it again on Saturday, and went into the house. She found Jane in the kitchen, ironing.
“There was a telegram for you from England, Jenny,” she said. “It came over the telephone; I wrote it down.” She passed an old envelope with pencilled words written on the back across to the girl. “Not too good news, I’m afraid.”
The girl took the paper from her. It read,
“Think you should know Mummy very ill bronchitis and asthma sends you all her love with mine. Writing airmail.
“Daddy”
Nine
THE TELEGRAM JERKED Jennifer back into the hard, bleak winter of England, that in the heat and ease and beauty of the Australian summer she had almost forgotten. It was only about seven weeks since she had sailed from Tilbury, but in the short time that she had been in Australia she had become so steeped in the Australian scene that it was difficult for her to visualise the conditions of winter weather in England. With the shirt sticking to her back in the heat, it was difficult for her to think about the freezing fogs of Leicester, and all that they meant to her bronchial and asthmatic mother.
At Jane’s suggestion she wrote her mother a telegram that they telephoned through to the post office, a telegram of sympathetic, conventional words of love. She felt as she drafted it that it was totally inadequate and for the first time she felt real regret that she had ventured so far from her home, but there was nothing to be done about that now, and no other words but the hackneyed ones to express what she would have liked to convey to her mother.
Jane said casually, “Of course, you can telephone if you really want to. I believe it costs about two pounds a minute. They say it’s very good.”
Jennifer had become so used already to the Australian way with money that she considered this seriously for a moment. “I don’t think so,” she said. “She hasn’t got the telephone in her bedroom, so she couldn’t take the call herself. Unless I could speak to Mummy personally, I don’t think it would be worth it.”
She sat down and wrote her a long air-mail letter instead, all about everything except Carl Zlinter and the Howqua valley.
She went into Banbury next morning with Jane and Jack Dorman in the Ford utility. The inquest was held in the police court next to the police station, a smallish room uncomfortably furnished with a jury box and a dock and a few wooden benches. The coroner was an elderly grazier, a Mr. Herbert Richardson, who had been a Justice of the Peace in Banbury for many years and took the infrequent inquests that arose, as deputy coroner for the district. Jim Forrest was there with Carl Zlinter, and Dr. Jennings, and a fair number of onlookers. Inquests did not happen very often in Banbury.
Mr. Richardson was rather deaf and unaccustomed to an inquest; he needed a good deal of prompting by the police, but finally he opened the proceedings by inviting Sergeant Russell to tell the story of the death of Albert Hanson, which the police sergeant did with commendable detachment. The deceased, he said, had been the victim of an accident to a bulldozer in the bush above Lamirra; the manager of the Lamirra Timber Company was present in the court. The foot of the deceased had been amputated on the scene of the accident by a man called Zlinter, who was present. Mr. Zlinter was not registered as a practitioner in Victoria. He was assisted in the operation by a Miss Morton, who was present, and who held no qualifications as a nurse. The man Hanson had died some hours later at the camp at Lamirra, and Dr. Jennings, who was present, had seen the body shortly after death. The deceased was known to the police as an alcoholic. The circumstances leading up to the man’s death appeared to the police to be irregular, but they had not yet made any charge.
On the suggestion of the police sergeant the coroner called Mr. Forrest to give evidence; he took the oath and started in to tell the story, the coroner laboriously writing down his evidence in longhand. Presently he asked:
“So you authorised the man Zlinter to take off the foot of the deceased man, did you?”
“Too right,” said Mr. Forrest. “I couldn’t do anything else. Zlinter said the foot would have to come off anyway, and I could see that for myself.”
“Did you know at the time that he had no medical licence to practice in Australia?”
“I knew that.”
“But you authorised him to do this operation?”
“Aw, look,” the manager said, “what would you have done? We couldn’t get a doctor, ‘n we couldn’t leave him there all night. If we’d tried to shift the sticks and bulldozer quick, we’d have dropped one on top of him, like as not. I reckoned I was lucky to have a doctor of any sort there, even if he was a crook one.”
The old man wrote all that down slowly. “I see. And then when you got him to the camp, what happened then?”
The tale went on. “And then some silly bastard went ‘n give him a bottle of whisky,” the manager said at last. “He got fighting drunk ‘n it was all that we could do to keep him in the bed. My word. And then, after an hour or two of that, the doctor give him something, ‘n soon after that he died.”
“When you say the doctor, you mean Mr. Zlinter?”
“That’s right. Mr. Zlinter.”
“Who was in charge of this man when he got the whisky?”
There was an awkward pause. “Well, we was all in charge of him, you might say. I’d got the doctor and the nurse there, ‘n I was round about myself most of the night.”
“By the nurse, you mean Miss Morton?”
“That’s right.”
The coroner whispered for a moment with the police sergeant. “That will do, Mr. Forrest. Call Miss ...” He peered at a paper before him. “Miss Jennifer Morton.”
Jennifer went to the witness stand and took the oath in a low voice. The coroner said, “Are you a registered nurse?”
She shook her head, and said, “No.”
“Eh, what’s that? What did she say?”
Sergeant Russell said, “She said, no, sir.” To Jennifer, “You’ll have to speak up a bit.”
The old man said, “Were you in charge of the deceased man at the camp, before he died?”
She said, “I — I don’t think so.”
“But you were acting as a nurse?”
“Yes. I was helping Dr. Zlinter.”
The coroner said testily, “Will you please stop talking about Dr. Zlinter. As I understand it, he is not a doctor at all.”
The girl flushed, and said nothing. There was a pause. At last the old man said, “Were you supposed to be looking after this man before he died?”
“I don’t think so, sir. I couldn’t have been. I was helping Mr. Zlinter in the next room with the other operation.”
“That was the head injury?”
“Yes. We must have been in that room for over two hours. It was in that time that he must have got the whisky.”
“And in that time you were not looking after him?”
“No, sir.”
The coroner whispered to Sergeant Russell, who shook his head. “That will do, Miss Morton,” and Jennifer went back to her seat tired with the brief strain. The coroner said, “Call Dr. Jennings.”
The doctor took the oath. “I understand that you examined this man shortly after death.”
“That’s right.”
“What was the cause of death?”
The doctor said, “Operational shock, aggravated by an excessive amount of alcohol. I understand that the man drank a whole bottle of whisky.”
“Yes. You conducted a post-mortem?”
“I did.”
“Did you find whisky in the body?”
“I did. I found a very large amount.”
“In your opinion, if this man had not taken this unfortunate dose of whisky, would he have recovered from the operation?”
The doctor said carefully, “I think he would have recovered. He had an enlarged liver, somewhat diseased; I have preserved a sample of that. That condition is usually due to habitual excessive drinking. Such a man would not be a good subject for an operation of any sort, and so it is a possibility that he might have died after the operation in any case. But the operation was skilfully and properly performed, and so I should say that he would have had a good chance of recovery — apart from the whisky.”
It took some time to write that down. “The operation was properly done?”
“I examined the amputation at the post-mortem,” the doctor said. “It was properly done, and I should have expected it to be successful.”
“I see.” The old man finished writing, thought for a minute, and then said, “I understand that this man Zlinter did another operation on the same evening. Can you tell us anything about that one — how that is going on?”
Dr. Jennings said, “That was a much more difficult operation than the amputation. It involved the removal of a portion of the skull completely, and the lifting of two other pieces. Normally one would not like to tackle such an operation without full hospital facilities, but in this case it was done by Mr. Zlinter in very difficult and improvised conditions, assisted by Miss Morton. That operation also seems to have been very well done, particularly well in the circumstances. The patient is now conscious, and likely to recover.”
There was a long pause while this was written down. “I see. Am I to take it that these men received satisfactory medical attention, then?”
The doctor thought deeply for a minute. “So far as the operations are concerned,” he said, “I think they were well done. The after-care was not so satisfactory. It was probably impossible to remove the head injury to hospital until the ambulance became available. It would have been possible, perhaps, to take this man Hanson into hospital, and he wouldn’t have got the whisky there. But that is being wise after the event, and I don’t think one should blame Mr. Zlinter for his decision to keep both men at the camp till I arrived with the ambulance.”
