A Town Like Alice

by Nevil Shute

  She suggested that Jean should come swimming in the late afternoon. ‘Mrs Maclean’s got a lovely swimming-pool, just out by the aerodrome,’ she said. ‘I’ll ring her up and ask if I can bring you.’

  She called for Jean that afternoon at five o’clock and Jean joined the swimming party at the pool; sitting and basking in the evening sun and looking at the gaunt line of Mount Ertwa, she became absorbed into the social life of Alice Springs. Most of the girls and married women were under thirty; she found them kindly, hospitable people, well educated and avid for news of England. Some spoke quite naturally of England as ‘home’ though none of them had ever been there; each of them cherished the ambition that one day she would be able to go ‘home’ for a trip. By the end of the evening Jean was in a humble frame of mind; these pleasant people knew so much about her country, and she knew so very little about theirs.

  She strolled down to the hospital in the cool night, after tea. Mrs Duveen had not been able to give Joe Harman’s address offhand, but she confirmed that he was managing a station somewhere in the Gulf country. She would ask her husband and send a message on the morning schedule.

  That night Jean thought a good deal about what she would do when she did get the address. It was clear now that her first apprehensions were unfounded; Joe Harman had made a good recovery from his injuries, and was able to carry on his work in the outback. She was amazed that this could be so, but the man was tough. Though there was no compelling need for her to find him now, she felt that it would be impossible to leave Australia without seeing him again; too much had passed between them. She did not fear embarrassment when she met him. She felt that she could tell him the truth frankly; that she had heard of his survival and had come to satisfy herself that he was quite all right. If anything should happen after that, well, that would be just one of those things.

  She drifted into sleep, smiling a little.

  She went down to the hospital in the morning after the radio schedule and learned that Joe Harman was the manager of Midhurst station, near Willstown. She had never heard of Willstown before; Mr Taylor obligingly got out a map of Australia designed to show the various radio facilities and frequencies of the outback stations, and showed her Willstown at the mouth of the Gilbert River on the Gulf of Carpentaria.

  ‘What sort of a place is it?’ she asked him. ‘Is it a place like this?’

  He laughed. ‘It’s a fair cow up there.’ He studied the map. ‘It’s got an air-strip, anyway. I don’t suppose it’s got much else. I’ve never been there, and I’ve never heard of anyone who had.’

  ‘I’m going there,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to see Joe Harman, after coming all this way.’

  ‘It’s likely to be rough living,’ he said. ‘Oh my word.’

  ‘Would there be a hotel?’

  ‘Oh, there’ll be a hotel. They’ve got to have their grog.’

  She left the hospital and went thoughtfully to the milk bar; as she ordered her ice-cream soda, it occurred to her that it might be a long time before she had another. When she had finished her soda she walked up the street a little way and turned into the magazine and book shop, and bought a map of Australia and a bus timetable and an airline timetable. Then she went back to the milk bar and had another ice-cream soda while she studied this literature.

  Presently Rose Sawyer came into the milk bar with her dog. Jean said, ‘I’ve found out where Joe Harman lives. Now I’ve got to find out how to get there. There doesn’t seem to be a bus going that way at all.’

  They studied the timetables together. ‘It’s going to be much easiest to fly,’ said Rose. ‘That’s how everybody goes, these days. It’s more expensive, but it may not be in the long run because you’ve got so many meals and hotels if you try and go by land. I should take the Maclean service to Cloncurry, next Monday.’

  It meant staying a few days more in Alice Springs, but it seemed the best thing to do. ‘You could come and stay with us,’ said Rose. ‘Daddy and Mummy would love to have somebody from England. It’s not very nice in the hotel, is it? I’ve never been in there, of course.’

  ‘It’s a bit beery,’ said Jean. She was already aware of the strict Australian code, that makes it impossible for a woman to go into a bar. ‘I would like to do that, if you’re sure it wouldn’t be a lot of trouble.’

  ‘We’d love to have you. It’s so seldom one can talk to anyone that comes from England.’ They walked round to the Sawyers’ house; on the way they met Mrs Maclean; fair-haired and youthful, pushing her pram. They stopped, and Jean said, ‘I’ve got to go to Willstown in the Gulf country to see Joe Harman. Can I get a seat on your plane on Monday as far as Cloncurry?’

  ‘I should think you could. I’m just going to the office; I’ll tell them to put you down for Monday. Shall I ask them to arrange the passage for you from Cloncurry on to Willstown? I think you can get there direct from the Curry, but they’ll find out that and make the booking if you want.’

  ‘That’s awfully good of you,’ said Jean. ‘I would like them to do that.’

  ‘Okay. Coming down to the pool this evening?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  They went on to the Sawyer house, a pleasant bungalow with a rambler rose climbing over it, standing in a small garden full of English flowers, with a sprinkler playing on the lawn. Mrs Sawyer was grey-haired and practical; she made Jean welcome. ‘Much better for you to be here with us than in that nasty place,’ she said, with all of an Australian woman’s aversion to hotels. ‘It’ll be nice having you, Miss Paget. Rose was telling us about you yesterday. It’s nice to meet somebody from home.’

  She went back to the hotel to pack her suitcase, and on the way she stopped at the Post Office. She spent a quarter of an hour sucking the end of a pencil, trying to word a telegram to Joe Harman to tell him that she was coming to see him. Finally she said,

  Heard of your recovery from Kuantan atrocity quite recently perfectly delighted stop I am in Australia now and coming up to Willstown to see you next week.

  JEAN PAGET

  She took her suitcase round to the Sawyers’ house in a taxi, and settled in with them. She stayed with these kind people for four days. On the third day she could not bear to go on lying to them; she told Rose and her mother what had happened in Malaya, and why she was looking for Joe Harman. She begged them not to spread the story; she was terribly afraid that it would get into the papers. They agreed to this, but asked her to tell her story again to Mr Sawyer when he came back from the office.

  Mr Sawyer had a lot to say that interested her that evening. ‘Joe Harman may be on to a good thing up there,’ he said. The Gulf country’s not much just at present, but he’s a young man, and things can happen very quickly in Australia. This town was nothing twenty years ago, and look at it now! The Gulf’s got one thing in its favour, and that’s rain. We get about six or seven inches a year up here – about a quarter of what London gets. Up where Joe Harman is they probably get thirty inches – more than England does. ‘That’s bound to tell in the long run, you know.’

  He sucked at his pipe. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘it’s not much good to them, that rainfall, because it all comes in two months and runs off into the sea. It’s not spread out all the year round, like yours is in England. But I met a chap from home last year, and he said most of your water would run off into the sea, in England, if you hadn’t got a weir every three miles or so on every river. That’s what Australia hasn’t got around to yet – water conservation on the stations. They’re doing a little at it, but not much.’

  In the days she spent with the Sawyers, Jean inevitably heard about Rose Sawyer’s love life, which was not so far very serious. It chiefly centred round a Mr Billy Wakeling, who built roads when he could get a road to build. ‘He did awfully well in the war,’ she told Jean. ‘He was a captain when he was twenty-three. But he’s nothing to compare with your Joe Harman. He hasn’t been crucified for me yet …’

  ‘I’m not in love with Joe Harman,’ Jean said
with some dignity. ‘I just want to know that he’s all right.’

  Rose was still looking round for work that would suit her.

  ‘I like a shop,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t ever learn shorthand, like you do. I like a shop all right, but I don’t know that the dress shop is much catch. I can never tell what suits a person till I see it on, so I don’t think I’ll ever be a dress designer. I’d like to run a milk bar, that’s what I’d like to do. I think it must be ever such fun, running a milk bar …’

  Jean visited Mr Sawyer at the bank in his professional capacity, and arranged for him to transfer to Willstown any credits that might come for her account after she had gone. She left Alice Springs on Monday morning with regret, and the Sawyers and Macleans were sorry to see her go.

  She flew all that day in a Dragonfly, and it was a very instructive day for her. The machine did not go directly to Cloncurry, but zigzagged to and fro across the wastes of Central Australia, depositing small bags of mail at cattle stations and picking up stockmen and travellers to drop them off after a hundred or a hundred and fifty miles. They landed eight or ten times in the course of the day, at Ammaroo and Hatches Creek and Kurundi and Rockhampton Downs and many other stations; at each place they would get out of the plane and drink a cup of tea and gossip with the station manager or owner, and get back into the plane and go on their way. By the end of the day Jean Paget knew exactly what the homestead of a cattle station looked like, and she was beginning to have a very good idea of what went on there.

  They got to Cloncurry at dusk, a fairly extensive town on a railway that ran eastward to the sea at Townsville. Here she was in Queensland, and she heard for the first time the slow, deliberate speech of the Queenslander that reminded her of Joe Harman at once. She was driven into town in a very old open car and deposited at the Post Office Hotel; she got a bedroom but tea was over, and she had to go down the wide, dusty main street to a café for her evening meal, Cloncurry, she found, had none of the clean glamour of Alice Springs; it was a town redolent of cattle, with wide streets through which to drive the herds down to the stockyards, many hotels, and a few shops. All the houses were of wood with red-painted corrugated iron roofs; the hotels were of two storeys, but very few of the other houses were more than bungalows.

  She had to spend a day here, because the air service to Normanton and Willstown ran weekly on a Wednesday. She went out after breakfast while the air was still cool and walked up the huge main street for half a mile till she came to the end of the town, and she walked down it a quarter of a mile till she came to the other end. Then she went and had a look at the railway station, and, having seen the aerodrome, with that she had exhausted the sights of Cloncurry. She looked in at a shop that sold toys and newspapers, but they were sold out of all reading matter except a few dressmaking journals; as the day was starting to warm up she went back to the hotel. She managed to borrow a copy of the Australian Women’s Weekly from the manageress of the hotel and took it up to her room, and took off most of her clothes and lay down on her bed to sweat it out during the heat of the day. Most of the other citizens of Cloncurry seemed to be doing the same thing.

  She revived shortly before tea and had a shower, and went out to the café for an ice-cream soda. Stupefied by the heavy meal of roast beef and plum pudding that the Queenslanders call ‘tea’ she sat in a deckchair for a little in the dusk of the veranda, and went to bed again at about eight o’clock.

  She was called before dawn, and was out at the aerodrome with the first light. The aircraft this time was a vintage Dragon, which wandered round the cattle stations as on the previous flight, Canobie and Wandoola and Milgarra. About midday, after four or five landings, they came to the sea, a desolate marshy coast, and shortly after that they put down at Normanton. Half an hour later they were in the air again for Constance Downs station; they had a cup of tea here and a chat with the manager’s wife, and took off on the last leg to Willstown.

  They got there about the middle of the afternoon, and Jean got a bird’s-eye view of the place as they circled for a landing. The country was well wooded with gum trees and fairly green; the Gilbert River ran into the sea about three miles below the town. There was deep, permanent water in it as far up as Willstown and beyond, because she could see a wooden jetty, and the river ran inland out of sight into the heat haze with water in it as far as she could see. All the other watercourses, however, seemed to be dry.

  The town itself consisted of about thirty buildings, very widely scattered on two enormous intersecting streets or areas of land, for the streets were not paved. Only one building, which she later learned to be the hotel, was of two storeys. From the town dirt tracks ran out into the country in various directions. That was all that one could see of Willstown, that and a magnificent aerodrome put there in the war for defence purposes, with three enormous tarmac runways each a mile long.

  They landed upon one of these huge runways, and taxied towards a truck parked at the runway intersection; this truck was loaded with two barrels of petrol and a semi-rotary pump for refuelling. The pilot said to Jean as he came down the cabin, ‘You’re getting off here, Miss Paget? Is anyone meeting you?’

  She shook her head. ‘I want to see a man who’s living in this district, on one of the stations. I’ll have to go to the hotel, I think.’

  ‘Who is it? Al Burns, the Shell agent out there on the truck, he knows everybody here.’

  ‘She said, Oh, that’s a good idea. I want to see Mr Joe Harman. He’s manager of Midhurst station.’

  They got out of the aeroplane together. ‘Morning, Al,’ the pilot said. ‘She’ll take about forty gallons. I’ll have a look at the oil in a minute. Is Joe Harman in town?’

  ‘Joe Harman?’ said the man in the truck. He was a lean, dark-haired man of forty or so. ‘Joe Harman’s in England. Went there for a holiday.’

  Jean blinked, and tried to collect her thoughts. She had been prepared to hear that Harman was out on his property or even that he was away in Cairns or Townsville, but it was absurd to be told that he was in England. She was staggered for a moment, and then she wanted to laugh. She realized that the men were looking at her curiously. ‘I sent him a telegram to say that I was coming,’ she said foolishly. ‘I suppose he didn’t get that.’

  ‘Couldn’t have done,’ said Al Burns slowly. ‘When did you send it?’

  ‘About four or five days ago, from Alice Springs.’

  ‘Oh no, he wouldn’t have got that. Jim Lennon might have it, out at Midhurst station.’

  ‘That’s dinky-die is it?’ the pilot asked. ‘He’s gone to England?’

  ‘Went about a month ago,’ the man said. ‘Jim Lennon said the other night that he’d be back about the end of October.’

  The pilot turned to Jean. ‘What will you do, Miss Paget? Do you want to stay here now? It’s not much of a place, you know.’

  She bit her lip in thought. ‘When will you be taking off?’ she asked. ‘You’re going back to Cloncurry?’

  ‘That’s right,’ he replied. ‘We’re going back to Normanton tonight and night-stopping there, and back to the Curry tomorrow morning. I’m going into town now while Al fills her up. Take off in about half an hour.’

  Cloncurry was the last place that she wanted to go back to.

  ‘I’ll have to think about this,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to stay in Australia, till I’ve seen Joe Harman. Cairns is a nice place to stay, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, Cairns is a bonza town,’ he said. Townsville, too. ‘If you’ve got to wait six or eight weeks you don’t want to wait here, Miss Paget.’

  ‘How could I get to Cairns?’ she asked.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘You could come back with me to Cloncurry and then go by train to Townsville and up to Cairns. I don’t quite know how long that would take in the train – it must be between six and seven hundred miles. Or you could wait here till next Wednesday, today week, and go by the Dakota straight to Cairns in about two and a half hours.’

&nbs
p; ‘How long would the train take, from Cloncurry to Cairns?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about that. I don’t think they go every day from Townsville to Cairns, but I’m not really sure. I think you’d have to allow three days.’ He paused. ‘Of course, the best way would be to fly from Cloncurry to Townsville and then fly up to Cairns.’

  ‘I know.’ She was getting very sensitive of the cost of flying these vast distances, but the alternative of three days in an outback train in sweltering heat was almost unbearable. ‘It’ld be much cheaper to stay here and go by the Dakota next week, wouldn’t it?’

  The pilot said, ‘Oh, much. From here to Cairns would cost you ten pounds fifteen shillings. Flying back to Cloncurry and then on to Townsville and Cairns would be about thirty pounds.’

  ‘I suppose the hotel here is quite cheap?’

  ‘About twelve and six a day, I should think.’ He turned to the Shell agent, busy with the fuel. ‘Al, how much does Mrs Connor charge?’

  ‘Ten and six.’

  Jean did a rapid mental calculation; by staying in this place and waiting for the Dakota in a week’s time she would save sixteen pounds. ‘I think I’ll stay here,’ she said. ‘It’s much cheaper than going back with you. I’ll stay here and see Jim Lennon and wait for the Dakota next week.’

  ‘You know what it’s going to be like, Miss Paget?’

  ‘Like the Post Office Hotel at Cloncurry?’

  ‘It’s a bit more primitive than that. The whatnot’s out in the back yard.’

  She laughed. ‘Will I have to lock myself in my room and take a revolver to bed with me?’

  He was a little shocked. ‘Oh, you’ll find it quite respectable. But, well, you may find it a little primitive, you know.’

  ‘I expect I’ll survive.’

  By that time another truck had appeared, a lorry with a couple of men in it; they stared at Jean curiously. The pilot took her suitcase and put it in the back; the driver helped her up into the cab beside him. It was a relief to get out of the blazing sunshine into the shade again.