by Nevil Shute
I tried all last night to write a letter wrapping up those facts and making it sound all right, but I couldn’t do it. He’s a barrister; he’d see through it at once and get suspicious. I know if I could see him and talk to him quietly before he gets home I could explain how it all happened and make him understand, but I don’t believe it’s possible to do it in a letter.
The curtains and the pelmets in Alan’s room are finished. They look lovely. The carpet’s supposed to be arriving at the end of the month. We’ve got all the furniture piled in the middle of the room and I’ve been waxing and polishing the floor with the electric floor polisher. It’s some kind of Tasmanian hardwood, myrtle I think; it’s a sort of golden colour with a bit of pink in it. It’s starting to look awfully nice for him.
September 25th. Alan sails from England in about ten days’ time. I’ve been drifting, hoping something would turn up, but now I can’t drift any longer.
Yesterday morning I was dusting in the hall and when I’d finished that I went through to the dining room to do the sideboard and the chairs. Mrs. Plowden was in the kitchen scrubbing the floor and talking to Annie. They were making a fair bit of noise and they didn’t know I was there, and the swing door was open so that I could hear every word they said. They were talking about Alan and a girl called Sylvia Holmes whose people have a property near Hamilton, just speculation based on the fact that he took her to the races six years ago. They’re terribly anxious to see him married, and they’re always gossiping. And then Mrs. Plowden said, “He might do worse than look in his own kitchen, to my way of thinking.” And Annie said, “Aye, that’s a fact. It wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened, and it won’t be the last.” I went back into the hall. I’m sure they didn’t know that I was there.
Well, now it’s come out into the open, and I think I’m glad. It’s what’s been wrong for a long time, this interest that I’ve been feeling for Alan. That’s really what’s kept me here in the last months although I wouldn’t admit it — that, and the comfortable living of Coombargana, that I’ve been reluctant to give up. There are some things about oneself that it’s not very nice to wake up to.
All this time I’ve been kidding myself about Alan. I’ve been thinking I could go to Fremantle and talk to him like a big brother, and he’d get me out of this jam that I’ve got in. But it’s nastier than that. What I’ve really been up to is that if I had a heart-to-heart talk with Alan about Bill and all that I’ve been doing here I could make him fall in love with me, and then I wouldn’t have to go away from Coombargana. It’s time now to be honest, and that’s what I’ve been intending. Coombargana means ease and gracious living and security and wealth for the remainder of my life. I think that that’s what I’ve been reaching out for, really. And I’ve damn nearly got it. If Alan married me, everybody here would be quite glad.
This isn’t a fairy story. This isn’t King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid. This is another story altogether, of the Beggar Maid plotting to tell King Cophetua a sob-stuff story so that he would fall in love with her and take her out of the kitchen, and marry her, so that she’d be Queen and lord it over all the other servants, and live in luxury for the remainder of her life. There’s no happy ending to that one, not even for King Cophetua because he’d come to realize quite soon how he’d been trapped.
Oh, Bill, I can’t imagine what I’ve been doing, how I’ve got myself in such a mess.
October 10th. Alan sailed about five days ago, and I suppose his ship would be somewhere near Gibraltar now, and coming closer every minute. It docks at Fremantle on the 30th and they’re expecting a letter from him to say that he’ll be flying home from there. There’s only about three weeks now to go.
There’s no way out of this one. I’ll have to meet him sometime, either here or at Fremantle, and now I don’t know that it makes much difference which. There’s something horrible about me. I know when I meet him I’ll be wanting him to fall in love with me, and I’ve got such good cards to play. But it’s all wrong. It’s horrible and sordid and wrong, because I’m only thinking of him in that way because I want to stay at Coombargana.
I really did love Bill. I loved him very truly, and I still do. I didn’t know his family had all this money. He was just Bill to me. But now I’m playing with the idea of making up to his brother, kidding myself that I could fall in love with him. It’s time I woke up to myself. I had a good look in the glass just now, and it’s not very flattering. Rather an ugly woman, not so young, who had been genuinely in love with one brother planning to fall in love conveniently with the other brother who is heir to the property. But there’s nothing in the mirror to show that the trick would come off. I’d probably just be making a complete fool of myself, as I have been for the last few months.
The worst part is that there’s just a tiny fragment of sincerity which makes the whole thing so insidious. I did like Alan when we met nine years ago. I’ve been looking back through this diary and I see that I thought then that he was something rather terrific. I still think of him like that, and I’d like to meet him again. But that’s nothing to do with being in love with him. You can’t possibly be in love with somebody you only met for one day nine years ago when you were head over heels in love with his brother.
There’s no way out of this one. I can’t meet Alan. There’s too much intimacy in the explanations that I’d have to make to him to tell him why I’m here at all to make it possible to go on with him here as master and servant, or even to go on as neutral friends. I’d want him to fall in love with me and marry me, I know I would. If he did, I think I’d be unhappy for the remainder of my life, because I’d know it was all phoney and wrong. I’d make him unhappy, too. If he didn’t, then there’d be shame and confusion all round, and everything here would be spoiled, and I’d have to go away. And the mirror says that’s probably exactly what would happen.
There’s no way out of this one.
October 17th. I asked for a day off and went for a long walk alone all round Coombargana today, getting back about six o’clock. It’s such a lovely place, and I’m so happy to have seen it all. They’re shearing now, finishing on Friday, and everybody’s down at the shearing shed in a mad rush. I hardly saw anyone at all, all day.
I wanted a day’s tramp to clear my mind and make quite sure that I was doing the right thing, because it’s one of those things that you can’t undo when once you’ve done it. It’s so permanent. But now I know I’m right. After a year like this I don’t think that I’d ever be happy anywhere else but here, and it’s not possible for me to stay here any longer now. The only thing I could do now would be to run away, go to Ballarat on some excuse, get on an aeroplane and fly away to England or somewhere and start again. I think I’d rather stay here.
I’ve got Aunt Ellen’s knock-out drops, a whole bottle of them, still. They must be good, because the name was always cropping up in the Seattle papers; they’re what all the film stars turn to when they’re through. The very highest recommendation. Then all the people in the Junkers will be paid for.
Alan’s ship gets in to Fremantle on the Friday, so I think I’ll do it on the Sunday night. Everything will be over and done with by the time he gets home on the Saturday and the excitement of his homecoming will put it all out of their minds. It’ll be a bit of a shock to them, of course. I’m sorry about that because they’ve been so kind to me, but in a day or two Alan will be home and everything will be forgotten. Old people get a bit like children; their griefs don’t last very long.
October 23rd. I went walking round the garden this afternoon looking at things and enjoying them, and in the greenhouse Cyril had a lot of azaleas in pots. I picked out a big red one just coming in to bloom and took it into the house and asked her if I could put it in Alan’s room. She said I could, so I put the flower pot in a dark blue jar and took it up and put it on his table. It’s going to look lovely in a few days’ time. I hope they keep it watered.
There the diary ends. The azalea was still upo
n my table in full bloom.
10
THE FIRE WAS practically dead and the dawn was light behind me at the window. I closed the diaries, and arranged them in a little pile upon the table. I stood up stiffly and reached out for her attaché case to put the volumes back in it, and as I did so her bank books caught my eye. I wondered dully what on earth I ought to do about those, for she had considerable sums of money in Seattle and in England.
When things like this happen there’s just nothing to be done about it; even suffering itself is a mere waste of time. I crossed to the window and opened one of the casements, and the cold air came streaming in to the warm room around me like a shower. Before me lay our property, a few ewes in the ewe paddock moving over the wet grass in the first glints of the sun, the river running quietly between. This was the view that she had known and loved, as Bill and I had loved it, all unconsciously. She could have been mistress of Coombargana twice over, but it didn’t work out that way.
I turned from the window after a long time, and took my sticks, and went out of my room into the gallery. The house was dead quiet except for the loud ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall; nobody was yet astir. I moved slowly down the stairs, and as I went I wondered a little at the decency of my home, after all that I had read during the night. Even into this quiet place the war had reached like the tentacle of an octopus and had touched this girl and brought about her death. Like some infernal monster, still venomous in death, a war can go on killing people for a long time after it’s all over.
I paused in the hall and looked around me, at the flowers that she had arranged, the chairs and tables she must have dusted, the radiogram that she had turned on for my mother when they celebrated the news that I was coming home. I drew a coat on over my dinner jacket and went out on to the lawn, and walked slowly down towards the river bank. From now onwards loneliness would sit with me at Coombargana, in my bedroom with the polished myrtle floor and the scrubbed wallpaper around the electric light switch, in the dining room that she had served, and with the rabbit pack. I had been lonely in my home when I had come back from the war in 1946; I should be doubly so now. I had found Coombargana difficult to bear in those days, but with Janet Prentice ever in my mind it would be intolerable now.
I moved along the river bank and sat down on the low stone wall by the trout hatchery, where I had talked with my father only twelve hours before. I sat there for a long time thinking of what lay before me. From there I could see three of the new station houses that my father had built while I was away, and as I sat there suffering little signs of life started to appear. A woman came out of one house with a four-gallon oil drum serving as an ash can, and emptied the ashes on a heap in the back yard. A man came out of another house in soiled and blue overalls walked down a path that led behind some trees to the main station buildings, perhaps to start the diesel. The sun grew stronger, and all over Coombargana life began to appear.
I did not know the names of half the people on the property, but they all knew me. The diary that I had been reading made that very clear. Everybody on the property knew all about me, what my interests were, how far I could walk, how much I drank, how long I had been away, what I had been doing in England. All of them were watching anxiously to see what I would do on this my first day back at Coombargana, trying to read the oracle to form their judgment from my first actions whether I was going to carry on the property or sell it, whether they could settle down with their minds at ease about the future or whether they must condition themselves to the probability of change. They knew all about me, yet perhaps they did not know quite all. They did not know that I had been in love with Janet Prentice.
It would be intolerable now to live at Coombargana. But we had twenty-one people employed on the place, all with their eyes on me and looking for a sign. If I gave up now and went off back to England it would be intolerable again, for Janet Prentice would have had me stay. Only cowards run away because they are afraid of ghosts.
I sat there by the trout hatchery for an hour or more till I grew very cold. Then I got up and I walked slowly through the trees towards the stockyard, thinking of Janet Prentice and of her integrity. I found two men saddling up in the horse yard. I knew neither of their names, but I said, “Good morning,” to them absently. They stared at me curiously and then wished me good morning in return, and I moved on wondering a little at their attitude until I remembered that I was in my dinner jacket still, with an overcoat thrown loosely over it. I went back to the house to change.
Annie must have seen me from the kitchen window coming to the house, for she met me in the hall. “I have a pot of tea just made, Mr. Alan,” she said. “Will I bring you a cup?” And then she said, “Mercy, have you not been to bed?”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t go to bed. I found that case.”
“You did, sir?”
I nodded, and then looked her in the eyes. “Did you know she was Bill’s girl?”
She was silent for a moment, and then she said, “I did not know that for certain, Mr. Alan. But I thought perhaps it might be something of that sort.”
I said heavily, “Well, that’s who she was.” And then I said, “I’d like that cup of tea, Annie.”
“Go on up to your room, Mr. Alan, and get changed,” she said. “I’ll bring it to you there.”
I went upstairs and turned on the bath water, and started to undress. She came in a few minutes with a tray of tea and biscuits and put it down upon the table by the red azalea in the blue pot. She glanced at the case on the other table before the dead fire, where I had sat all night, and then she said, “Did you know her, Mr. Alan?”
“I met her once, during the war, just before Bill got killed,” I said. I glanced at her, and then I said, “This is all something pretty private to the family. I don’t want it talked about upon the station.”
“I’ll watch that, Mr. Alan.”
She went away and I went through to the bathroom, took off my feet, and got into the bath. The benison of the hot water was refreshing, for I was very cold, and as I sat in the warm comfort gradually I came to my senses and the power of reasoning put out emotion from my mind.
As always, Bill was very real to me in that bathroom. Never again would he come striding through the door that led into his room, eighteen years old and impatient to get under the shower. He had become one of the ghosts that haunted Coombargana for me, and now he had been joined by another ghost, standing in her proper place close by his side. They were friendly ghosts, utterly benevolent, but they were ghosts just the same; with all their integrity they could not do the job of work they would have done at Coombargana if they had been left alive. In their mute presence they appealed to me to do the job for them.
That ghosts have power nobody can deny, for as I sat there in the warm water they put in to my mind the little restaurant known as Bruno’s in the Earl’s Court Road, twelve thousand miles from Coombargana in the Western District. If you want help you will find it there, they told me as I sat in the warm water in a stupor of fatigue, and as they stood beside the bath and told me that, arm linked in arm as they had been nine years before at Lymington, I knew that what they said was true. There was one person and one person only who could take my hand as I walked with the gentle ghosts of Coombargana, who would understand and comfort me, who would not be afraid.
I got out of the bath and went into my room and dressed for my new fife. I put on a grey flannel shirt, the brown-green trousers of a grazier, a woollen pullover and a tweed coat. Then I took the case in my hand and went down to the hall.
My father came out of his dressing room that once had been the gunroom to meet me. “Morning, Alan,” he said. “You were up very early.”
“I know, Dad,” I said. “I didn’t go to bed at all. I found a case that this girl left behind, with all her papers in it. I’ve got a lot I want to tell you before Mother comes to life.”
“We’ll go into the study,” he suggested.
We went int
o his study and closed the door. “Before we start on this I want to put in a call,” I told him. I picked up the telephone and waited while Forfar got Ballarat and Ballarat got an overseas radio telephone operator in Melbourne. “I want to book a call to England,” I said. “It’s a London number, Western 56841, Miss Viola Dawson. I shall want about a quarter of an hour.”
They repeated it and booked the call, and I put down the handset and turned to my father. “Hold your hat on, Dad,” I said. “I’m going back to England, flying back at once. I don’t expect to be there longer than a week or so, and I’ll be coming back here then to live for good.”
“For some reason that I haven’t fathomed, Alan,” he said drily, “with Miss Viola Dawson, I presume.”
I opened the case upon his desk. “I hope so,” I replied. “And now I’ll tell you why.”
Beyond the Black Stump (1956)
CONTENTS
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
The first edition
My mother used to say to me,
“When you grow up, my son,
I hope you’re a bum like your father was
‘Cos a good man ain’t no fun!”
Stonecutters cut it on stone,
Woodpeckers peck it on wood,
There’s nothing so bad for a woman as
A man who thinks he’s good.
