The Far Country (3 page)

“Giving up work?” she asked.

“That’s right,” he said. “Just for today.”

“Who’s going to get tea here for the boys if we go gallivanting off to Buttercup?”

“They can have cold tonight,” he said.

“All right.” She reached behind her for an envelope upon the table. “Want to read Aunt Ethel’s letter?”

“Anything new in it?”

“Not really,” she said slowly. “You’d better read it, though.”

She tossed it across to him; he unfolded it and began to read. Jane got up and glanced at the clock and put the saucepan of potatoes on to boil, and put a couple more logs into the stove. Then she sat
down again and picked up the pages of the letter as Jack laid them down, and read them through again herself.

It was addressed from Maymyo, Ladysmith Avenue, Ealing, a suburb to the west of London that Jane had never seen. Till recently her old aunt had always written by air mail but lately the letters had been coming by sea mail, perhaps because there was now little urgency in any of them. Her handwriting was very bent and crabbed; at one time she had written legibly, but in the last year or two the writing had got worse and worse. The letter ran,

“M
Y DEAR
C
HILD
,

“Another of your lovely parcels came today all candied peel and currants and sultanas and glacé cherries such lovely things that we do so enjoy getting just like pre-war when you could buy everything like that in the shops without any of these stupid little bits of paper and coupons and things. I get so impatient sometimes when I go to buy the rations which means I must be getting old, seventy-nine next month my dear but I don’t feel like it it was rather a blow when Aggie died but I have quite got over that now and settled down again and last Friday I went out to bridge with Mrs. Morrison because it’s three months now and I always say three months’ mourning is enough for anyone. I’m afraid this is going to be a very long winter I do envy you your winter in our summer because it is quite cold already and now Mr. Attlee says there isn’t any coal because he’s sold it all to America or Jugoslavia or somewhere so there won’t be any for us and now the miners and the railwaymen all want more money if only dear Winston was back at No. 10 but everybody says he will be soon.”

Jane turned the pages, glancing over her old aunt’s ramblings that she had already deciphered once and that were clearly giving Jack some difficulty. Aggie was Mrs. Agatha Harding who had shared the house at Ealing with her aunt; she was the widow of an army officer. Now she was dead, Jane supposed that her old aunt must be living alone, although she did not say so. The letter rambled on,

“Jennifer came down to spend the day with me one Sunday in August and she is coming again soon she has grown into such a pretty girl reddish hair and our family nose twenty-four this year she ought to have been presented at Court long ago but everything seems to be so different now and she works in an office at Blackheath the Ministry of Pensions I think. I asked her if there was a young man and she said no but I expect there is one all the same my dear I hope he’s as nice a one as Jack I often think of that time when you were so naughty and ran off and married him and Tom was so angry and how right you were only I wish you didn’t have to live so far away.”

Jane wished she didn’t live so far away as she read that. It might be worth while to make the long journey back to England just to see this kind old lady again, who still thought of her as a child.

“It seems so funny to think of you over fifty and with all your children out in the world and so prosperous with wool my dear I am glad for you. Our Government are so stupid about wool and everything I went the other day to Sayers to buy a warm vest for the winter but my dear the price was shocking even utility grade and the girl said it was all due to bulk buying of wool and the Socialist Government so I told her to tell Mr. Attlee he could keep it and I’d go on with what I’ve got my dear I do hope things are cheaper with you than they are here but I suppose you can always spin your own wool on the station and weave it can’t you my grandmother always did that better than this horrible bulk buying that makes everything so dear. My dear, thank you again for all your lovely parcels and your letters write again soon and all my love.

“Your affectionate Aunt,
“E
THEL.”

“Keeps it up, doesn’t she?” said Jack Dorman.

“Yes,” said Jane, “she keeps it up. I don’t like the thought of her living alone though, at her age.”

“That’s since this Aggie died?”

Jane nodded. “It looks as if she’s living by herself now, quite alone. I wish we were nearer.”

He turned the pages of the letter back. “Who’s this Jennifer she speaks about?”

“That’s Jennifer Morton, her granddaughter. Her daughter Lucy married Edward Morton—the one that’s a doctor in Leicester.”

“Oh.” He did not know where Leicester was, nor did he greatly care. “This girl Jennifer works in London, does she?”

Jane nodded. “Just outside London, I think. Blackheath.”

“Well, can’t she go and live with the old girl?”

“I don’t know,” said Jane. “I don’t suppose there’s much that we can do about it, anyway.”

Jack Dorman went out to the yard, and Jane began to lay the kitchen table for the midday dinner. She was vaguely unhappy and uneasy; there was a menace in all the news from England now, both in the letters from her old aunt and in the newspapers. The most extraordinary things seemed to be going on there, and for no reason at all. In all her life, and it had been a hard life at times, she had never been short of all the meat that she could eat, or practically any other sort of food or fruit that she desired. As a child she could remember the great joints upon her father’s table at Sutton Bassett, the kidneys and bacon for breakfast with the cold ham on the sideboard, the thick cream on the table, the unlimited butter. These things were as normal to her as the sun or the wind; even in the most anxious times of their early married life in Gippsland they had had those things as a matter of course, and never thought about them. If she didn’t use them now so much it was because she was older and felt better on a sparing diet, but it was almost inconceivable to her that they should not be there for those who wanted them.

It was the same with coal; in all her life she had never had to think about economising with fuel. From the blazing fireplaces and kitchen range of Sutton Bassett she had gone to the Australian countryside, milder in climate, where everybody cooked and warmed themselves with wood fires. Even in their hardest times there had never been any question of unlimited wood for fuel. Indeed, at Merrijig with the hot sun and the high rainfall the difficulty was to keep the forest from encroaching on the paddocks; if you left a corner ungrazed for three years the bush would be five feet high all over it; in ten it would have merged back into forest. Even in the city you ordered a ton of wood as naturally as a pound of butter or a sirloin of beef.

Whatever sort of way could Aunt Ethel be living in when she could not afford a warm vest for the winter? Why
a
warm vest—why not three or four? She must do something about the washing. Was clothing rationed still? She seemed to remember that clothes rationing had been removed in England. She stopped laying the table and unfolded the letter and read the passage over again, a little frown of perplexity upon her forehead. There wasn’t anything about rationing; she hadn’t got the vest because it was expensive. How foolish of her; old people had to have warm clothes, especially in England in the winter. It was true that the price of woollen garments was going up even in Australia by leaps and bounds, but Aunt Ethel couldn’t possibly be as hard up as that. The Foxleys had always had plenty of money. Perhaps she was going a bit senile.

She went and rang the dinner bell outside the flyscreen door, rather depressed.

The men came back to the homestead for dinner; she heard Tim and Mario washing at the basin under the tank-stand in the yard, and she began to dish up. They came in presently with Jack and sat down at the table; she carved half a pound of meat for each of them and heaped the plates high with vegetables; she gave Jack rather less and herself much less. A suet jam roll followed the meat, and cups of tea. Relaxed and smoking at the end of the meal, Tim Archer said,

“Would you be using the utility Saturday evening, Mr. Dorman? There’s the Red Cross dance.”

“I dunno.” He turned to Jane. “Want to go to the dance on Saturday?”

It was a suggestion that had not been made to her for seven or eight years and it came strangely from Jack now, but everything was strange on this day of the wool cheque. She laughed shortly. “I don’t want to go to any dance,” she said. “My dancing days are done, but let the boys go if they want to.”

“You going, Mario?”

The dark, curly-haired young man looked up with laughing eyes. “Si, Mr. Dorman.”

“Go on,” his boss grumbled. “Talk English, like a Christian. You can if you want to.”

The young man grinned more broadly. “Yes,” he said. “I like to go ver’ much. I like dance much.”

“I bet you do….” He turned to Tim. “If you go you’ve got to look after him,” he said. “Don’t let him get in any trouble, or get girls in any trouble, either.” There was some prejudice against the New Australians in the district, well founded in part, and there had been a row over Mario once before at the first dance that he attended and before he was accustomed to the social climate of Australia.

“I’ll keep an eye on him, Mr. Dorman.”

“All right, you can take the Chev.” He paused. “Did you get the tickets?”

“Not yet. Thought I’d better wait and see about the ute.”

“I’ll be going down to Banbury after dinner, in about an hour. I’ll get them if you give me the money.”

“Thanks, Mr. Dorman.” Tim hesitated. “Would you be going by the post office?”

“I could.”

“Would you look in and tell Elsie Peters I’ll be coming to the dance with Mario?”

Jack nodded. “I’ll tell her.”

Presently they got up from the table, Tim to unload the utility, Jack Dorman to go into his office, and Mario to help Jane to clear the table and wash up. A quarter of an hour later Jack Dorman, going out on the veranda, saw Mario and Tim rolling the drum of Diesel oil down from the truck on timbers to the ground. He waited till the drum was on the ground, and then said, “Hey, Mario—come over here a minute.” They crossed to the paddock rail and stood together there in the warm sunlight.

“Say, Mario,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about that girl you’ve got, back in Italy. You still want to get her out here to Australia?”

“Yes, Mr. Dorman. I wanta ver’ much. I love Lucia. We marry when she come here.”

“That’s her name, is it? Lucia?”

“Yes. Lucia Tereno she is called.”

“Lucia Tereno. She lives in this town that you come from, Chieti?”

“She is from Orvieto, close to Chieti, signore.”

“Are you saving up to get her out here?”

“Si, signore.”

“How much does the ticket cost?”

“Fifty-eight pounds.”

“How much have you got saved towards it?”

“Twenty-seven pounds. I send—send money to mio padre.”

“Send money to your father, do you?”

“Yes, Mr. Dorman. E vecchio.”

“What’s that?”

“He—old man. Madre old also.”

The grazier stood in silence for a minute, thinking this over. At
last he said, “Look, Mario. I was thinking of building a bit of a house for you and Lucia, ’n paying for her ticket. You could spend your twenty-seven quid on furniture for it, ’n make the rest in the evenings. If I do that, will you stay with me two years after your time’s up, ’n not go off to someone else for better money?”

Only about half of that got through. They discussed it for a little, the Italian gradually breaking into rapture as the proposal became clear. “I pay her ticket and give you a three-room house on the end of the shearers’ quarters. You stay with me till September 1953 at the money you get now, plus the award rises. You get all the meat you want off the station at threepence a pound, and vegetables from the garden. Capito?”

“Si, signore.”

“Talk English, you great bastard. You stay with me till September 1953 if I do this for you. Is that okay?”

“Okay, Mr. Dorman. I thank you ver’, ver’ much.”

“You’ve been working well, Mario. You go on the way you’re going and you’ll be right. Okay, then—that’s a deal. What do you want to do now—send Lucia the money for her passage right away?”

“Yes, Mr. Dorman. Lucia—she very happy when she gets letter.”

“Aw, look then, Mario. You go and write her a letter in your own bloody language, ’n tell her to come out ’n marry you, ’n you’re sending her the money for the ticket. You go and write that now. I’ll take it into town with me this afternoon and put the money order in it, fifty-eight pounds, ’n send it off by air mail.” He got that through at the second attempt.

“Thank you ver’, ver’ much, Mr. Dorman. I go now to write Lucia.” He went off urgently to his bunkroom.

Dorman went into the house again to change for his journey into town; he had a dark tweed suit that he wore on these occasions, and a purple tie with black stripes on it. He sat in the kitchen polishing his town shoes while Jane changed, and presently he went out into the yard to get the utility. By the car, Mario came up to him with an envelope in his hand.

“For Lucia,” he said. “I no have stamp. Will you fix stamp on for me, please? For air mail?”

“Okay. You’ve told her in the letter that there’s a money order going in it, fifty-eight pounds?”

“I have said that, Mr. Dorman. In Italian I have said that to Lucia, and now she is to come, ver’ quick.”

“I bet you’ve said that that she’s to come ver’ quick, you bastard. Mind and keep your nose clean till she comes. I’ll see about the timber for your house when I’m in town.”

“I thank you ver’, ver’ much, Mr. Dorman.”

“Okay. Get down and go on with that crutching.”

He drove into the town that afternoon with Jane by his side; they parked the utility outside the bank and went in together while she
cashed a cheque. She went out first and went on to the dressmaker, and Jack went into the bank manager’s office to see about the draft for fifty-eight pounds payable to Lucia Tereno at Chieti, Italy. At the conclusion of that business he produced his wool cheque for the credit of his account.