The Far Country (2 page)

Jack Dorman sat turning the wool cheque over in his hands, twenty-two thousand one hundred and seventy-eight pounds, eight shillings and twopence. Last year’s cheque had virtually cleared the overdraft. His balance fluctuated a good deal, but, broadly speaking, if he had died last year the whole of the money from the sale of land and stock would have gone to his heirs, a matter of eighty or ninety thousand pounds at the inflated prices of the time. It was an academic figure to him, because neither he nor Jane would have wanted to leave Leonora; they had grown into the place and it had become a part of them. The eighty thousand pounds was quite unreal to them; if it was there at all it only concerned the children, and they might not touch a quarter of it if the bad times came again. All that concerned Jack Dorman and his wife was that last year’s cheque had made them safe; however much wool slumped they could never be turned out of Leonora. They could sleep without bad dreams of wandering bankrupt with no home, nightmares that had plagued them through their thirty-two years of married life.

Jack Dorman folded the wool cheque and put it in his shirt pocket again; this one was his own. He sat on in the shade for a few minutes looking out over his property, a grey-haired, heavy man of fifty-eight, humming a little tune. He had little musical appreciation but he liked the lighter programmes on the radio; he was normally five years behind the times with the tunes that pleased him and
stayed in his memory. If Jane had heard him she would have known that her stout, ageing husband was very happy.

Twenty-two thousand pounds and a bit, and the fat lambs, and the bullocks—say twenty-six thousand pounds in all. Expenses, and income tax…. He drew a stub of pencil from his pocket and began figuring on the back of the wool cheque envelope. He’d whoop up his expenses this year, my word he would! He’d have to see his accountant to find out what he could get away with. He ought to have a new utility, a Mercury or an Armstrong Siddeley even. A station like this needed a Land Rover. He’d keep the Chev for the boys to use. Buildings—Mario ought to have a house and get his girl out from Italy; he’d be more settled then. Could a weatherboard shack go on the one year, or would they make him do it on depreciation? If it went on the one year the tax would pay three-quarters of the cost …

Say twenty thousand for tax. He figured with his pencil. He’d have about seven thousand left after paying tax. Seven thousand pounds of his own money to spend or save that year, and the price of wool still holding nicely. He was in the money, for the first time in his life.

There must be something that the station needed, besides a Land Rover, and a new utility and a house for Mario….

Presently he got on to his horse again and rode down to the homestead, humming his little tune. In the yard he unsaddled and hung saddle and bridle on a rail of the hay-barn, gave the pony a slap behind and turned it into the house paddock. Then he went into the kitchen and sat down at the long table. Jane was roasting a saddle of mutton for dinner as she had cooked mutton most days of her married life; they ate a sheep in about ten days.

“Want a cup of tea?” she asked.

“I don’t mind,” he said, and she poured him one out from the teapot on the table. And then he told her, “Got the wool cheque.”

“How much?” she asked idly.

“Little over twenty-two thousand,” he told her.

She was only mildly interested. “That’s a bit more than last year, isn’t it?”

“Aye.”

She said, “Like to peel these potatoes for me, if you’re doing nothing?”

“We don’t have to do anything,” he told her. “Not with a wool cheque like that.” But he got up and began to peel them at the sink. “You ought to have a girl to help you, make her do things like this.”

“Where do you think I’d get the girl from?” And then she asked, “How much would we have of that to spend, after paying tax and expenses?”

“About seven thousand, near as I can figure it.” He scraped away at the potatoes. “It’s all ours this time. What do you want out of it?”

She stared around the kitchen. “I want a Memory Tickler like Bertha Harrison’s got, one of those things you hang upon the wall, with a long list of things to get in town, and tabs to turn over to remind you. She got hers in Melbourne, at McEwens.”

“That’s only about five bob’s worth,” he complained.

“I know, but I want it. Could we have a new stove, Jack? This one’s about worn out, and the top plate’s cracked.”

“We’d better have an Aga, or an Esse.”

“You’ve got to have coke for those,” she said. “A wood stove’s best out here, and only about a tenth the money. Another one like this would be all right.”

He said, “Aw, look, Jane, we’ve got money to spend now.”

The anxious years had bitten deep into her. “No need to chuck it away, though,” she said.

“We wouldn’t be chucking it away. It’ld be cooler in the kitchen with a stove like that. It’s time we spent a bit of money, anyway; my word, we haven’t had a holiday for years. What do you say if we go down to Melbourne for a week and do a bit of shopping, stay at the Windsor and see some theatres? I’ve got a lot of things I’d like to do down there.”

“I’ve not got any clothes for staying in a place like that,” she said.

“We’ll get some,” he replied. “After all, we’ve got seven thousand pounds to spend.”

“We won’t have long, if you go on like this.”

“We don’t want to have it long. If we hang on to the money it’ll only go to the kids after our time, and they’ll have enough to spoil them, anyhow. I don’t hold with leaving kids a lot of money. We never had any, and we got through.”

She poured herself a cup of tea and he left the sink and came and sat at the table with her. “I’d like to go to Melbourne for a week,” she said thoughtfully, “if we’ve really got the money. When was it we went down there last?”

“Two years ago,” he said. “When we took Angie to the University.”

“Is it as long as that? Well, I suppose it would be. I wouldn’t want to go before the Show.” The Banbury Show was in the middle of December; she always competed in the Flower section and in the Home-Made Cakes, and usually won a prize in both. “And then
there’s Christmas,” she said. “Everybody’s on holiday till the middle of January.”

He nodded. “Suppose we booked a room for a week about the middle of January?”

She smiled. “I’d like that, Jack. Give me time to get some clothes made up. I couldn’t go to the Windsor with what I’ve got now.”

He pulled a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and passed it across to her; she took one and he lit it for her, and for a while they sat smoking in silence. “We could do a lot of things,” he said. “We could make that trip home.”

In their hard early married life a trip home to England had been her great desire, always to be frustrated by their circumstances. She was English, the daughter of an admiral, brought up in all the comfort and security of a small country house before the first war, and sent to a good school. In 1917 she had joined the W.A.A.C.s with a commission as was proper for the daughter of a senior naval officer, and in 1918 she had shocked her parents by falling in love with an Australian, a lieutenant in the first A.I.F. Her family never understood Jack Dorman and did everything they could to dissuade her from marrying him, and succeeded in preventing her from doing so till she was twenty-one, in 1919; she married him on her birthday. He was a ranker officer, for one thing, which in those days damned him from the start; he had been an N.C.O. in Gallipoli and in France for nearly three years, and he had only recently been commissioned. He was an unpleasantly tough young man, addicted to a strange, un-English slang, and he never pulled up men for not saluting him because he didn’t believe in saluting, and said so. He used to have meals with private soldiers in cafés and in restaurants, and even drink with them; he had no idea of discipline at all. All he could do, with others like him, was to win battles.

Thirty-two years had passed since those bad months of 1918, but Jane could still remember the unpleasantness as she had rebelled against her family. She was too young, too immature to be able to stand up and state her conviction that there was solid stuff in this young man, the substance for a happy and enduring marriage; she felt that very strongly, but she could never get it out in words. She could remember as if it were yesterday her father’s frigid politeness to this uncouth young officer that she had brought into the house, and his blistering contempt for him in their private talks, and her mother’s futile assurances that “Daddy knows best”. She had married Jack Dorman in February 1919 in Paddington a week before sailing with him to Australia, and her parents had come to the wedding, but only just. Nobody else came except one old school friend, and Aunt Ethel.

Aunt Ethel was her father’s sister, Mrs. Trehearn, married to Geoffrey Trehearn, a Commissioner in the Indian Police, at that time stationed in Moulmein. Aunt Ethel had come home with her two children in 1916 to put them to school in England, and she was
still in England waiting for a passage back to Burma. Aunt Ethel, alone of all Jane’s relations, had stood up for her and had told the family that she was making a wise choice, and she had cut little ice with her brother Tom; indeed, in some ways she had made matters worse. Admiral Sir Thomas Foxley had little regard for the sagacity of women, and to mention the woman’s vote to him in those far-off days was as a red rag to a bull.

All these things passed through Jane Dorman’s mind as she sat sipping her tea in the kitchen of her homestead thirty-three years later. Seven thousand pounds to spend after paying tax, all earned in one year and earned honestly; more money than her father had ever dreamed of earning, or any of her family. Extraordinary to think of, and extraordinary that after their hard life the money should mean so little to them. Jack didn’t quite know what to do with it, so much was evident, and certainly she didn’t.

“I don’t know about going home,” she said at last. “I don’t believe I’d know anybody there now except Aunt Ethel, and I don’t suppose I’d recognise
her
now. There was a letter from her in the post today, by the way. I’d like to see the old thing again before she dies, but she’s about the only one. She must be getting on for eighty now.”

“Wouldn’t you like to go and see your old home?” he suggested. He knew how much her mind had turned to that small country house when first she had come to Australia.

She shook her head. “Not now that it’s a school. It’ld be all different. I’d rather remember it as it used to be.” Her father had kept two gardeners and a groom, and three servants in the house; she knew that nothing would now resemble the gracious, easy routine of the home that she had lived in as a child.

He did not press her; if she didn’t want to go to England that was all right with him. He had only memories of a cold, unfriendly place himself, where he had been ill at ease and that he secretly disliked. He would have liked very much to go back to Gallipoli again, and to France and Italy—it would be interesting to see those. His mind turned to his Italian hired man. “There’s another thing,” he said. “About Mario. He’s got that girl of his in this town that he comes from. I don’t know how much he’s got saved up now, but it might be a good thing if we could help him with her fare. It wouldn’t be so much, and we might be able to charge it up against the tax. After all, it’s all connected with the station.”

Mario Ritti was a laughing man of about twenty-eight, tall and well built, with dark curly hair, a swarthy complexion, and a flashing eye; a peril to all the young girls in the neighbourhood. He had been taken prisoner by the Eighth Army at Bardia in 1942, and he had spent two years in England as a prisoner of war, working on a farm in Cumberland where he had learned about sheep. After the war he had got back to his own place, Chieti, a hill town in the Abruzzi mountains near the Adriatic coast where his parents
scratched a bare living from a tiny patch of rather barren land. In Italy there were far more people than the land could support, and Mario had put his name down almost at once for a free immigrant passage to Australia. He had worked as a labourer and as a waiter in a hotel in Pescara and as a housepainter till his turn came round upon the quota three years later and he could leave for an emptier country. By the terms of his free passage he had to work for two years as directed by the Department of Immigration in Australia, after which he would be free to choose his work like any other man. Jack Dorman had got him from the Department, and was very pleased with him, and he was anxious not to lose him at the end of the two years.

“I was thinking that we might build on to the shearers’ place,” he said. “Extend that on a bit towards the windmill and make a little place of three rooms there. Then if we got his girl out for him he’d be settled, and the girl could help you in the house.”

Jane laughed shortly. “Fat lot of help she’d be, a girl who couldn’t speak a word of English having babies every year. I’d be helping her, not her helping me. Still, if she could cook the dinner now and then, I wouldn’t say no.” She sat for a moment in thought. “How much is her passage going to cost, and how much has he got saved up?”

“He sends money back to Italy, to his parents,” Jack said. “He was sending home five pounds a week at one time, so he can’t have very much. I suppose the passage would be about fifty quid. We’d better pay that, and let him spend what he’s got saved on furniture.”

“Find out how much he’s got,” his wife said. “He ought to put in everything he’s got if we’re going to do all that for him.”

“That’s right.” He pushed his chair back from the table. “Like to drive into town this afternoon and put this cheque into the bank?”

She smiled; he was still very young at times. “Don’t you trust the postman?”

“No,” he said. “Not with twenty-two thousand pounds. A thing like that ought to be registered.” He paused. “We could take a drive around,” he said. “Look in on George and Ann for tea, at Buttercup.”