A Town Like Alice

by Nevil Shute

  I want to do this, Noel. Apart from Joe Harman and me, they’re decent people in Willstown, and they’ve got so very little. I’d like to work there for a year as a sort of self-discipline and to keep from running to seed now that I’ve got all this money. I think I’d want to do this even if there wasn’t any Joe Harman in the background at all, but I shan’t make up my mind or take any definite step until I’ve had a talk with him.

  So what I want is five thousand pounds, please, Noel. May I have it if I want to go ahead with this?’

  JEAN

  I got this letter five days later by the air mail. I marked the passages about her money with a red pencil, and wrote a little note upon the top, and sent it into Lester for him to read. I went into his office later in the day. ‘You read that letter from the Paget girl?’ I asked.

  He took it up from his desk before him. ‘Yes. I’ve just been looking at the will. Did you draft that discretionary clause yourself?’

  ‘I did.’

  He smiled. ‘I think it’s a masterpiece. It covers us all right, if you think she ought to have this money.’

  ‘It’s about nine per cent of her capital,’ I said. ‘For a commercial venture that she intends to work at whole-time herself.’

  ‘The testator didn’t know her, did he?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘She’s twenty-seven years old?’

  ‘That is correct.’

  ‘I think that we might let her have it,’ he said. ‘It would be very extreme to do the other thing, to withhold it. We’ve got ample latitude under your discretionary clause to let her have it, and she seems to be a responsible person.’

  ‘I’d like to think it over for a day or so,’ I said. ‘It seems to me to be a very small amount of capital for what she wants to do.’

  I put her letter on one side for a couple of days because I never like to take any action in a hurry. After a period of reflection it seemed to me that I would be carrying out the wishes of the late Mr Douglas Macfadden if I exerted myself to see that Jean Paget did not lose her money in this venture, and I picked up my telephone and rang up Mr Pack of Pack and Levy Ltd.

  I said, ‘Mr Pack, this is Strachan, of Owen, Dalhousie, and Peters. I believe you’ve had a letter from a client of mine, Miss Jean Paget.’

  ‘Aye, that’s right,’ he said. ‘You’re her solicitor, are you? The one that’s her trustee?’

  ‘That is correct,’ I said. ‘I’ve had a letter from her, too. I was thinking it might be a good thing if we got together, Mr Pack, and had a talk about it.’

  ‘Well, that suits me,’ he replied. ‘She asked for a list of what she’d want to start up in a small way. I got a list together, but I haven’t got all the f.o.b. prices in yet.’

  I made an appointment with him for the following Friday when he expected to be in London on other business. He came to see me then at my office. He was a small, fat, cheerful man, very much of a works manager. He brought with him a brown paper parcel.

  ‘Afore we start,’ he said, ‘these come in this morning.’ He untied the parcel on my desk and produced a pair of alligator-skin shoes. I picked up one curiously.

  ‘What are these?’ I asked.

  ‘They’re what she made herself at this place Willstown,’ he said. ‘Did she tell you about that?’

  I shook my head, and examined them with fresh interest. ‘Did she make these herself, with her own hands?’

  ‘Made ’em with her own hands in her hotel bedroom, so she said,’ he replied.

  I turned one over. ‘Are they any good?’

  ‘Depends on how you look at it,’ he observed. ‘For selling in the trade they’re bloody awful. Look at this, and this, and this.’ He pointed out the various irregularities and crudities. ‘They’re not even the same. But she knows that. If you take them as a pair of shoes made by a typist that hadn’t ever made a shoe before, working on her bed with no equipment, well, they’re bloody marvellous.’

  I laid down the shoe and offered him a cigarette. ‘She told you what she wants to do?’

  He told me what he had heard from her, and I told him some of what she had written to me; we talked for a quarter of an hour. At the end of that time I asked him, ‘What do you really think about her proposition, Mr Pack?’

  ‘I don’t think she can do it,’ he said flatly. ‘Not the way she’s thinking of. I don’t think she knows enough about the shoe business to make a go of it.’

  I must say, I was disappointed, but it was as well to have the facts. ‘I see,’ I said quietly.

  ‘You see,’ he explained, ‘she hasn’t got the experience. She’s a good girl, Mr Strachan, and she’s got a good business head. But she’s got no experience of making shoes to sell, and she’s got no experience of keeping girls in order ’n making them bloody well work for their money. It’s not even as if she was in her own country. These Australian country girls she writes about, they’re just like so many foreigners to her. They may be willing, but they’ve never seen a factory before – they won’t have the idea at all. She’s got to learn her own job and teach them theirs at the same time. Well, she can’t do it.’

  ‘I see,’ I said again.

  ‘I’d like to help her,’ said the little man, ‘but she’ll have to change her ideas a bit. She’s on to a good wheeze, if she can put it over. I must say, when I read her letter where it says that she’s paying seventy shillings for an alligator skin uncured, you could have knocked me down with a feather. Australian shillings, too – fifty-six bob of our money. Here have I been paying a hundred and seventy, hundred and eighty shillings for a cured skin, all these years, and thinking I was getting ’em cheap at that! I said to Mr Levy, I said, couple of bloody mugs, we are.’

  ‘What can you suggest to help her?’ I asked.

  ‘What I thought was this,’ he said. ‘If she could pay the passage of a forewoman out and home, I’d let her have a girl out of my shop, say for the first year. I got a girl that’s getting restless – well, a woman she is, thirty-five if she’s a day. She’s a married woman but she isn’t living with her husband – hasn’t been for a long time. She was a sergeant in the ATS in the war, out in Egypt some of the time, so she knows about a hot country. Aggie Topp, the name is. You wouldn’t get girls playing up in any shop with Aggie Topp in charge.’

  ‘Does Miss Paget know her?’ I inquired.

  ‘Oh, aye, Jean knows Aggie. And Aggie knows Jean. Matter of fact, Aggie came in yesterday and handed in her notice. I handed it back to her and jollied her along, you know. She does that every two or three months, getting restless, like I said. But I asked her then, how would she like to go out to Australia for a year to work with Miss Paget. She said she’d go anywhere to get away from standing in a queue for the bloody rations. She’d go out for a year, if Jean wants her. They all liked Jean.’ I said, ‘Can you spare her?’

  ‘She won’t stay long, anyway,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to lose her and perhaps I won’t. If she gets a trip out to Australia and sees that other places aren’t so good as England, then maybe she’ll come back and settle down with us again. Get it out of her system.’

  We talked about this for a time. The woman’s passages and pay while travelling would tot up to about three hundred pounds, but it seemed cheap to me if it would help the venture through the early stages. For the rest of it, Mr Pack thought Jean’s estimates of capital were on the low side, but not excessively so. ‘You can’t afford much mechanization in the quality shoe trade,’ he said. ‘You got to keep changing the style all the time.’

  About the style, he suggested that they air-mailed a sample to Willstown from time to time for Jean’s party to copy. He was quite willing to do the selling for her. ‘Mind, I don’t know if she’ll be able to make a go of it upon the prices we can sell at,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell her what we can buy at, and it’s up to her. But I’d like to give this thing a spin, I must say. Manufacturing’s getting so bloody difficult in this country with controls and that, one feel
s like trying something different.’

  I thanked him very sincerely, and he went away. I wrote all this out to Jean Paget by air mail, and I believe Mr Pack wrote to her by the same mail. She did not get these letters for some days after their arrival, because she had gone down to Rockhampton to look for the girl Elsie Peters who worked in the shoe factory there. She went economically by train, a slow, hot journey of some seven hundred miles; till then she had not realized how vast and sparsely populated a state Queensland was. The aeroplanes had dwarfed it for her; fifty-one hours in the train to Rockhampton expanded it again.

  She found Elsie Peters, and the meeting was a complete fiasco. It only lasted ten minutes. They met in a café close outside the works; as soon as Jean broached the subject of a job in the Gulf country, Elsie told her she could save her breath. It might be a good thing, she conceded, to start something in the Gulf country, but not for her. Wild horses would not drag her back again.

  Jean came away from the café relieved in one way, and yet depressed. She would not have wanted anybody in that frame of mind, but she had been counting rather heavily on this unknown woman. She was very conscious of her own lack of managerial experience; as the venture became closer difficulties loomed up which had not been quite so obvious at the birth of the idea. She spent a depressed evening in the hotel, and flew back to Cairns next day in revolt at the long train journey; she found the air fare very little more expensive.

  She found our letters waiting for her at the Strand Hotel when she got back there, and her spirits revived again. She remembered the gaunt, stern Aggie very well; if Aggie was prepared to come to Queensland for a year that really was something. I think she was beginning to feel very much alone and amongst strangers while she was waiting in Cairns for Joe Harman.

  She wrote temporizing letters to us, for she would not make her mind up about anything until she had seen Harman. She told me later that the three weeks that she spent in Cairns living at the Strand Hotel after she came back from Rockhampton were the worst time of her life. Each morning she woke up in the cold light of dawn convinced that she was making a colossal fool of herself, that she could never settle down in this outlandish country, that she and Harman would have nothing in common and that it would be much better not to meet him at all. The wise course was to take the next plane down to Sydney and get a cheap passage to England, where she belonged. By noon some rough Australian kindness from a waitress or the manageress had sown a seed of doubt in the smooth bed of her resolution, that grew like a weed throughout the afternoon; by evening she knew that if she left that country and that place she would be running away from things that might be well worth having, things that she might never find again her whole life through. So she would go to bed resolved to be patient, and in the morning the whole cycle would start off again.

  She knew the name of Harman’s ship, of course, from my letters, and she had no difficulty in finding out when it docked at Brisbane. A few discreet inquiries showed her that he must pass through Cairns to get to Willstown, and convinced her that he would have to wait for several days in Cairns because his ship docked in Brisbane on a Monday and the weekly plane into the Gulf country left at dawn on Tuesday; he could never make that connection. She had found out in Willstown that he stayed at the Strand Hotel in Cairns, and so she waited there for him.

  She wrote to him care of the shipping line at Brisbane, and she had some difficulty with that letter. Finally she said,

  DEAR JOE,

  I got a letter from Mr Strachan telling me that you had been to see him while you were in England, and that you were sorry to have missed me. Funnily enough, I have been in Australia for some weeks, and I will wait at Cairns here so that we can have a talk before you go on to Willstown.

  Don’t let’s talk too much about Malaya when we meet. We both know what happened; let’s try and forget about it.

  Will you let me know your movements – when you’ll be coming up to Cairns? I do want to meet you again.

  Yours sincerely,

  JEAN PAGET

  She got a telegram on Tuesday morning to tell her he was staying to see Mrs Spears, the owner of Midhurst, and he would be flying up to Cairns on Thursday. She went to meet him at the aerodrome, feeling absurdly like a girl of seventeen keeping her first date.

  I think Joe Harman was in a position of some difficulty as the Dakota drew near to Cairns. For six years he had carried the image of this girl in his heart, but, in sober fact, he didn’t in the least know what she looked like. The girl that he remembered had long black hair done in a pigtail down her back with the end tied up with a bit of string, like a Chinese woman. She was a very sunburnt girl, almost as brown as a Malay. She wore a tattered, faded, blouselike top part with a cheap cotton sarong underneath; she walked on bare feet which were very brown and usually dirty; and she habitually carried a baby on her hip. He did not really think that she would look like that at Cairns, and he was troubled and distressed by the fact that he probably wouldn’t be able to recognize her again. It was unfortunate that the inner light in her, the quality that made her what he called a bonza girl, didn’t show on the surface.

  Something of his difficulty was apparent to Jean; she had wondered if he would know her while she was making herself pretty for him in her room, and had decided that he probably wouldn’t. She had no such difficulty herself for he would have changed less than she, and anyway he carried stigmata upon his hands if there were any doubt. She stood waiting for him by the white rails bounding the tarmac as the Dakota taxied in in the hot sun.

  She recognized him as he came out of the machine, fair-haired, blue-eyed, and broad-shouldered. He was looking anxiously about; his gaze fell on her, rested a minute, and passed on. She watched him, wondering if she was looking very old, and saw him start to walk towards the airline office with his curious, stiff gait. A little shaft of pain struck her; that was Kuantan, and it had left its mark on him. With her intellect she had known that this must be so, but seeing it for the first time was painful, all the same.

  She left the rails, and walked quickly across the tarmac to him, and said, ‘Joe!’ He stopped and stared at her incredulously. He had been looking for a stranger, but it was unbelievable to him that this smart, pretty girl in a light summer frock was the tragic, ragged figure that he had last seen on the road in Malaya, sunburnt, dirty, bullied by the Japanese soldiers, with blood upon her face where they had hit her, with blood upon her feet. Then he saw a characteristic turn of her head and memories came flooding back on him; it was Mrs Boong again, the Mrs Boong he had remembered all those years.

  It was not in him to be able to express what he was feeling. He grinned a little sheepishly, and said, ‘Hullo, Miss Paget.’

  She took his hand impulsively, and said, ‘Oh, Joe!’ He pressed her hand and looked down into her eyes, and then he said, ‘Where are you staying? How long are you here for?’

  She said, ‘I’m staying in the Strand Hotel.’

  ‘Why, that’s where I’m staying,’ he said. ‘I always go there.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Mrs Smythe told me.’

  There was much here that he did not understand, but first things came first. ‘Wait while I get my luggage,’ he said. ‘We can drive in together.’

  ‘I’ve got a taxi waiting,’ she said. ‘Don’t let’s go in the bus.’

  In the taxi as they drove into the town she asked him, ‘How was Mr Strachan, Joe?’

  ‘He was fine,’ he said. ‘I stayed with him quite a long time, in his flat.’

  ‘Did you!’ She had not known that part of it because I had not told her; I had told her the bare minimum about him since it was obvious that they were going to meet. ‘How long were you in England, Joe?’

  ‘About three weeks.’

  She did not ask him why he went because she knew that already, and it was hardly a matter to be entered on behind the taxi driver. He forestalled her, however, by asking, ‘What have you been doing in Australia, Miss Paget?’
>
  She temporized. ‘Didn’t you know I was here?’

  He shook his head. ‘All I knew was what Mr Strachan said, that you were travelling in the East. You could have knocked me down with a feather when I got your letter at Brisbane. Oh my word, you could. Tell me, what are you doing in Cairns?’

  A little smile played around her mouth. ‘What were you doing in England?’

  He was silent, now knowing what to say to that. He had no lie ready. They were running through the outskirts of the town, past the churches. ‘We’ve got a good bit of explaining to do, Joe,’ she said. ‘Let’s leave it till you’ve got your room at the hotel, and then we’ll find somewhere to talk.’

  They sat in silence till they got to the hotel. Jean had a bedroom opening on to a veranda that looked out over the sea to the wild, jungle-covered hills behind Cape Grafton; they arranged to meet there when he had had a wash. She knew something of Australian habits by that time. ‘What about a beer or two?’ she asked.

  He grinned. ‘Good-oh.’

  She asked Doris the waitress to get four beers, three for Joe and one for her; large quantities of cold liquid were necessary in that torrid place. It was symbolic of Australia, she felt, that they should hold their first sentimental conversation with the assistance of four bottles of beer.

  She dragged two deckchairs into a patch of shade outside her room; the beer and Joe arrived about the same time. When the waitress had gone and they were alone, she said quietly, ‘Let me have a good look at you, Joe.’

  He stood before, examining her beauty; he had not dreamed when he had met her in Malaya that she was a girl like this. ‘You’ve not changed,’ she said. ‘Does the back trouble you?’