by Nevil Shute
“Did you ever hear the like of that!” exclaimed her father. “It’s a queer thing, I’m thinking, that the shearers’ quarters would be good enough for an Australian shearer and not good enough for an American, with all the lechery and evil in the world in his black heart.”
David Cope laughed. “I see we’re going to have some fun and games around here in the next week or two,” he said. “I can put a couple of them up at my place if they can make do with the gins’ cooking.”
“They’d be better doing their own cooking in the shearers’ quarters,” said Mrs. Regan drily. “No, leave it, David. Mr. Bruce knows the way things are with us and that we can’t accommodate that many. They’ll have everything they need for camping by their trucks, or they can sleep in the shearers’ place. I might make shift to feed them if it comes to that.”
She turned to the other letters on her lap. The Judge went off to his desk in the store office to write an order for school desks and slates, and Mrs. Regan opened all the other letters for the two men. Spinifex Joe vanished in the direction of the kitchen; he would wait at Laragh till the letters were written before going on. The two half-caste boys began rolling the drums of kerosene and petrol towards the store. The aboriginals squatted motionless in the dust beneath the truck.
David Cope picked up his own letters and glanced them through. There was nothing that required immediate attention. He slipped the letters he had brought with him in the breast pocket of his shirt into the post bag, said good-bye to Mrs. Regan, and walked towards his jeep. Mollie got up and walked out into the sun with him, to see him off.
She was a red-headed girl like her father, and she had something of the same square line to her chin. She was wearing very light, loose khaki linen slacks and a khaki shirt; she wore soiled leather sandals on her bare feet, as he did. “How are you off for water at Lucinda?” she asked as they walked.
“Not too good,” he said. “We’ve got a little left in the big dam—last about a month. The bores are running well, though.” He had two bores that produced water from a depth of about seven hundred feet; a windmill over each pumped up this water to a raised storage pool from which it was piped to troughs. His property was chronically short of water. Though Lucinda Station comprised over three hundred thousand acres, most of this land was useless to him when the heat of summer had dried up the few natural pools. The sheep then congregated about the two bores that supplied the only water left upon the property. They would graze for a radius of about two miles from the water; in a bad summer they would eat out every blade of grass within this area and then die of starvation by the water. For this reason Lucinda Station could only carry about four thousand sheep on its three hundred and twenty thousand acres, and a dry summer would imperil even those.
“Are you going to put down any more bores?” she asked.
“I’m not sure that it’s worth it.”
“They cost an awful lot of money,” she agreed. “What are they quoting now? Thirty bob a foot?”
“Two quid,” he said. “It’s not the money, though. We’re making enough from the wool cheque to put down one a year, say. But I don’t think there’s any water there. We’ve got the two along the line of Blackman’s Creek, and there’s no sign of water anywhere else. We might put one down between them to spread the feed, but it’ld probably reduce the flow of the ones we’ve got.”
She nodded. She had lived all her life on Laragh but for periods at boarding school, and in her short memory four graziers had tried their luck on Lucinda Station and had given it up after a year or two. When David had come, this young English boy so full of energy and hope, the Regans had been sorry for him, the more so because he worked so hard on his depressing property. He lived quite alone, being unmarried, with only his half-caste and aboriginal stockmen for company. By his enthusiastic energy he had achieved more than his predecessors; he ran four thousand sheep without disaster where the best of them had run a bare three thousand, by dint of herding them by night out to the fresh pastures and herding them back again to water after a few hours; he had a lucerne paddock where he grew a hay crop in the rainy season, an unheard-of innovation in the district. He had sheared ninety-eight bales of wool in the previous year, which had given him a wool cheque of nearly nine thousand pounds; after paying expenses this still left him a considerable income on his sixty per cent share of the property, good money for a boy of twenty-two. The Regans, good graziers themselves upon a million acres of very much better watered land, respected him and showed him kindness, while they waited for the years of drought that would dry up his bones and finish him completely, and send him back into some city for a job, a ruined man.
“Any news of Charlie?” he asked.
“He’s still in England.”
“Is he coming back here?”
“I don’t think so,” she replied. “Not for a long time, anyway.” Charlie was her half-brother, for he had been born to Mrs. Regan in the days when she was married to Uncle Tom. “He’s still working on cancer, at the London Hospital. He’s setting up as a consultant now, in a place called Harley Street. That’s something good, isn’t it?”
“It’s where all the big doctors live,” he said. “He must be doing very well.”
“He’s awfully clever.”
He glanced down at her. “You know, you’re a pretty bright family. Is Bridget still in Canberra?”
She shook her head. “She’s still in the Department of External Affairs, but she’s doing a course of Chinese, somewhere near Melbourne.”
“I thought she was absolutely brilliant when she was here last year,” he said. “I was scared stiff of opening my mouth.”
She laughed. “Not like me.”
“I don’t know about that,” he said. “You took a second, didn’t you?” She had been home from Perth University for some months.
“Only in History,” she said. “That’s an easy school.”
“It’ld be damn difficult for me,” he said. “You’re a clever family.”
They paused by his jeep. “We aren’t really,” she said. “I don’t think so. Ma says it’s all the Judge’s doing. I think he’s a wonderful teacher. I got really interested in history before I left here to go to school. And Bridget was the same. She could speak French and German before she was ten.”
David blinked. It seemed incredible on Laragh Station. “Tell me,” he asked, “why do you all call him the Judge? What’s his real name?”
“I don’t know his real name,” she replied. “I suppose he doesn’t want people to know it. He’s called the Judge because he is one—or he was. I don’t think he was a very important one—County Court or something. He got the sack.”
He grinned. “I didn’t know a judge could get the sack.”
“Well,” she said, “there’s one that did.”
“What did he get pushed out for?”
She dimpled. “I’m not supposed to know. I think it was for taking too much interest in delinquent girls.”
“Too bad. When did that happen?”
“Oh, ages ago, before I was born. Uncle Tom found him stinking drunk in a hotel at Geraldton and took him on as book-keeper. He’s been here ever since.”
“Where was he a Judge?”
“In England somewhere,” she replied. “He talks about Dunchester sometimes—it might have been there.” She paused. “Ma says he was a schoolmaster when he was a young man at a place called Eton. That’s a good school, isn’t it?”
“That’s right,” he said. “It’s supposed to be the best school in England.”
“Were you there?” she asked.
“Me? Never came within a mile of it. I went to the grammar school at Newbury.” He paused. “You were at school in Perth, weren’t you?”
She nodded. “Ma said all of us must go away to boarding schools. She’s Scotch, you see. Father and Uncle Tom wouldn’t have bothered if we went to school or not, because they’re Irish. Ma’s very firm about school. I think that’s why she’s pu
t up with the Judge all these years—because he’s a good schoolmaster. He’s not much of a book-keeper, really. Mike checks the books over when he comes up for his summer holiday each year, and he finds an awful lot of mistakes.”
“Is Mike one of your brothers?”
“Well—sort of. He’s Uncle Tom’s son, when Ma was married to him. Mike and Charlie and Bridget—they’re all Uncle Tom’s. Mike’s a chartered accountant, with Gordon and Bottomley, in Perth.”
He wrinkled his brows. “Well, who’s Stanley?”
“Stanley and Phyllis,” she explained, “—they’re Fosters. You see, Ma was a Mrs. Foster and she had two children. Then Foster got killed in a car smash and Ma hadn’t any money, so she worked in a bar in the Unicorn Hotel in Perth. Uncle Tom went down to Perth for a holiday and met Ma in the bar and married her, and brought her and Stanley and Phyllis back here to the Lunatic. Before that, of course, they only had the gins.”
His head was swimming. “It all sounds a bit complicated,” he said.
“It isn’t really. It’s just that there are rather a lot of us. Ma had eleven children, and then of course there were all the others.”
“Quite a lot of kids to send to school.”
She laughed. “The schools round Perth just live on us. Stanley and Phyllis went to Church of England schools, of course, but all the rest of us are Micks. We girls all went to Loreto and all the boys to Aquinas, and the half-castes to Alvan House and MacDonald House.”
“Are you going to be here for long?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I want to be a teacher, but Ma’s not getting any younger. I think I’ll stay here for a year till Elspeth leaves college and then let her come home and take a turn. Ma wants me to go home to Scotland then, and to France and Italy. I’d like to do that before I settle down and take a job.”
“That’ld be a grand trip. You could come back through America.”
“I never thought of that,” she said. “I say, won’t it be beaut having Americans here?”
“Your father doesn’t seem to think so.”
She laughed. “Do you think they’ll be like people on the movies?”
“I shouldn’t think so,” he replied. “If you think they live in penthouses on the top of skyscrapers or in old Southern mansions you’ve probably got another think coming.”
“They don’t live in places like our shearers’ quarters, anyway,” she said.
“No, I don’t suppose they do that. Talking of the movies, are you going to Mannahill on Saturday?” Mr. Clem Rogerson of Mannahill Station fifty-six miles over the bush tracks had a sixteen-millimetre talkie outfit, and gave a show in his garden each Saturday night, on films flown up from Perth.
“I don’t know. Are you going?”
“I usually go over. Makes a change.”
“I don’t know if they’re going over this time or not. Ma sometimes likes to go.”
“Tell me on the air tomorrow night, in the natter session. I’ll call in here and pick you up if no one else wants to go.”
She smiled at him. “All right.”
He drove off in the jeep, and she turned back to the homestead. James Connolly and Joseph Plunkett had finished unloading the drums from the semi-trailer, and had gone back to the stockyard with their father, to go on with the horses. Their mother, the Countess Markievicz, came out of the laundry with a great basket of damp clothes and began to hang them on the wires strung between the laundry and the store, a shapeless, coal-black woman, very ugly, who had been slim and even good-looking in an aboriginal way thirty years before. By the time she had finished hanging out the last garments in the basket the first ones would be ready to take down to iron, which she would do in the verandah of the laundry. That was her daily work for all the days of the year; it did not seem to her monotonous.
The Judge came out with the letters he had written and showed them to Uncle Tom and Mrs. Regan, who approved them. The letters were sealed up and stamped, and given to Spinifex Joe, now waiting for them at his truck. He dropped them in the mail bag, said good-bye, and got into the cab. The starter groaned, the diesel belched black smoke, the blacks got up on to the tray, and the vehicle moved off upon the next stage of its week-long journey. Life at Laragh Station sank back into its normal, quiet routine. The women cooked and mended, the aboriginal women moved languidly about the housework. Outside, Pat Regan and his half-caste sons broke horses in slow time and rode out quietly to the water-holes to move the sheep around, generally in the cool of the early morning. In the heat of the day they worked in the shade, maintaining the cars and trucks and pumps and lighting system. The Judge taught school in the morning and took a siesta in the afternoon, dreaming perhaps of Waynflete’s chapel or of the cloisters of Dunchester Cathedral, or merely of the incredible and ever increasing current account in the Commonwealth Bank in Perth. Mrs. Regan wrote letters every afternoon in the verandah, rather illiterate letters to each of her children; her main interests lay with them. Nobody at Laragh Station worked very hard; they bred a great many children, drank a good deal of rum, and made a good deal of money that they seemed to be unable to dispose of and that was rapidly becoming a responsibility to them, and a nuisance.
Mr. Bruce and his party arrived in the district a few days later. They came with two closed vans full of electrical recording gear, and a big four-wheel-drive truck containing all their other equipment. These were brand new American vehicles that attracted a good deal of interest at the places they had stopped at on their route. Donald Bruce was the only Australian in the party, and the only one who had taken part in the previous geological survey of the district. He was a public servant from the Bureau of Mineral Resources. The other six members of the party were American employees of the Topeka Exploration Company Inc., headed by a Mr. Stanton Laird. When Mr. Bruce had introduced his party to the pastoralists upon whose properties they were to work he would retire to his office in Melbourne and leave them to their job.
They had hoped to arrive at Laragh Station on a Saturday afternoon. In fact, they took a wrong track between Malvern Downs and Mannahill which took them fifteen miles out of their way and landed them on the edge of a dry creek that Mr. Bruce could not recognise and knew to be wrong. They stopped and rigged their radio and made contact with the Flying Doctor service on the midday schedule, and spoke to Mr. Rogerson at Mannahill Station, who told them where they had gone astray. By the time they had got going again and had retraced their steps they had lost three hours, arriving at Mannahill at about five in the afternoon.
It was too late for them to go on to Laragh that night, over strange bush tracks in the dark; the chances of getting lost again were too great. They stayed that night as guests of the Rogersons at Mannahill, and found that they had come in for the big social event of the district, the weekly picture show. There were several Land Rovers and Jeeps from the adjoining stations, one of which had come over a hundred miles. Amongst the visitors Stanton was quick to notice a remarkably pretty girl, red-headed and white-skinned, who had come in a jeep with a young man called David Cope from Lucinda Station.
Mr. Bruce knew her well. “Hullo, Mollie,” he said. “How are you today?”
“Good,” she replied.
“Are your father and mother here?”
“They didn’t come. They were expecting you with the Americans. Ma said they’d better stay at home in case you came. David brought me over.”
“We got held up upon the road,” he said. “Look, let me introduce you to Mr. Laird. He’s the one who’ll be in charge of the party on your father’s land.” He called out down the verandah. “Hey—Stan! Come over here a minute. I want you to meet Miss Mollie Regan, from Laragh.”
Stanton held out his hand. “Why, hello, Miss Regan, I’m certainly glad to know you,” he said. “I hoped we’d get on to your property today, but Don will have told you that we’re running late.”
“I know,” she said. “What happened?”
“I guess we just naturally got lost
,” he said. “It’s kind of easy to go off on the wrong trail in this country.”
“You got lost between here and Malvern Downs?”
“That’s right.”
“But didn’t you follow the tracks that the mail truck makes?”
“One wheel rut’s just like another wheel rut to me, Miss Regan. I reckon when you’ve lived in Australia for a time you get so you can tell them apart.”
She laughed. “Mollie’s the name, Mr. Laird. We use Christian names in this country unless you’re trying to be very formal.”
“Fine,” he said. “I’m Stanton.”
She turned, for David was behind her. “David,” she said, “this is Stanton Laird. They got lost between here and Malvern!”
He laughed. “I got lost all along the road when I came up here first.”
She wrinkled her brows. “It doesn’t seem possible. I mean, you just turn left at the burnt Mulga tree and go straight on.”
He laughed again. “You’ll get a lot of this, Mr. Laird. When an Australian says you can’t mistake the road, that’s the time to get out your compass and start navigating.”
The girl flushed and laughed. “I suppose it is a bit difficult for strangers.”
“I’d agree with that,” said Stanton. He turned to David. “You aren’t Australian?”
The other shook his head. “I’m English. They call us Pommies here. I’ve got Lucinda Station, next to Laragh.”
The geologist nodded slowly, his mind running over the maps that he had studied. “That’s to the west of Laragh,” he said. “I guess we’ll be operating pretty near your boundary.”
“That’s right,” said David. “If I can give you any help I hope you’ll come and tell me.”
“That’s mighty nice of you.”
Mr. Rogerson turned the corner of the verandah and came to the little group. “Drinks just outside the dining-room,” he said cheerfully. “Mr. Laird, what can I get you? Gin, whisky, or rum?”
Stanton had travelled far, but Hazel still held him very close. “Thank you,” he said a little awkwardly, “but I don’t believe I’ll take anything right now.”
