The Far Country (5 page)

He glanced down the row of girls beside the floor, and saw two black-haired girls sitting together. They were both rather broad in the face, and both wore woollen dresses of a sombre hue and rather an unfashionable cut. They were obviously a pair and strangers to Banbury; Tim had never seen them before. They were clearly New Australians.

He nudged Mario. “What about that couple over there?” he asked. “They’d be Italian, wouldn’t they?”

“I do not think,” said Mario. “I think Austrian perhaps, or Polish. I have not seen these girls before.”

“Nor have I. Let’s go and ask them.” Once Mario was launched with these two, he would be able to go off and dance with his own sort.

They crossed the floor to the girls, and Tim, taking the nearest one, said, “May I have this dance? My name’s Tim Archer.” Mario bowed from the waist before the other, looking as if he was going to kiss her hand at any moment, and said, “Mario Ritti.”

Both girls smiled and got to their feet. Tim’s girl was about twenty-five years old and pleasant-looking in a broad way; in later life she would certainly be stout. She danced a quickstep reasonably well, and as they moved off she said with a strange accent, “Teem Archer?”

“That’s right,” he said. “Tim.”

She tried again. “Tim?”

“That’s right,” he said again. “Short for Timothy.”

“Ah—I understand. Timothy.”

“What’s your name?”

She smiled. “I am Tamara Perediak.”

“How much?”

“Tamara Perediak.”

“Tamara? I never heard that name before.”

“It is a name of my country,” she said. “Where I was born, many girls are called Tamara.”

“Are you Polish?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I was born in the Ukraine.” He did not know where that was, but didn’t like to say so. “Now I am come from Mulheim, in the American zone, to Australia.” She called it Owstrahlia. “I am to work here at the hospital.”

“Have you just arrived?” he asked.

“In the camp I have been three weeks, but here only three days.”

“Three days? Then you’re brand-new!” They laughed together. “How do you like Australia?”

“I like it very much, what I have seen.”

“Are you a nurse?”

She shook her head. “I think you call it ward-maid. I am to do scrubbing and the carrying trays, and the washing dishes, and the washing clothes.”

“Do you know anybody in Australia?”

She said, “I have good friends that I met on the ship, but they have gone to Mildura. But I have here Natasha who came with me, who is dancing with your friend. She comes also from the Ukraine and we were together at Mulheim, working at the same canteen.”

“Natasha?”

She laughed. “That is another name of the Ukraine. Natasha Byelev. Are our names very difficult?”

“My word!”

“Tell me,” she said presently, “your friend, is he Australian also?”

“No,” he replied. “He’s Italian. His name’s Mario Ritti.”

“Ah—an Italian. I did not think he was Australian.”

“That’s right,” Tim said. “He works at Leonora, where I work. He’s on top of the world tonight, because he’s got a girl in Italy and the boss is going to pay her passage out here so that Mario can get married.”

He had to repeat parts of that once or twice before its full import sunk in. “He will pay for her to come from Italy to Australia?” she said in wonder. “He must be a very rich man.”

“He’s doing all right with the wool,” Tim said. “He’s not a rich man, really.”

“Your friend is very lucky to work for such a man. Is his loved one to come soon?”

“Soon as the boss can get her on a ship. He’s scared that Mario will leave when his two years are up. He wants to get him settled on the station in a house of his own, with a wife and family.”

She stared at him. “He is to make him a house also?”

“That’s right. Just a shack, you know.”

She thought about this for a minute as they danced. “I also must work for two years,” she said. “I am to work here in the hospital, with Natasha.”

“Do you like it?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “I have been working so since five years, in the works canteen at Mulheim. Once I was to be schoolteacher, but with the war that was not possible.”

“Where were you in the war?” he asked.

“In Dresden,” she said. “When I was little girl my father and my mother left Odessa because they were not members of the Party and the life there was not good, and so they went to live in Dresden. There my father was schoolteacher, to teach the boys Russian. All before the war, and in the war, we lived in Dresden. Then the English bombed Dresden and my father and my mother were killed, both together. Our house was all destroyed. I was not there, because I worked that night in the factory outside the city and that was not bombed. But I went to go home in the morning, our house and the whole street was all destroyed, and my mother and my father were dead, both of them. So then the war came to Dresden very soon after, and I went first to Leipzig and then to Kassel because the Russians were coming, and there I met Natasha and we went to Mulheim in the end to work in the canteen.”

Tim Archer said, “You’ve seen a mighty lot of foreign places. I should think you’d find it a bit slow in Banbury.”

“I think it will be better to be in a slow place and live slowly for a time,” Tamara said. “So much has happened since I was a little girl.”

Presently the dance ended and he took her back to her seat. Mario immediately asked her to dance again, and Tim escaped, and went to dance with Joan McFarlane.

At the same time, at Leonora, Jane sat with Jack before the kitchen stove in wooden arm-chairs with cushions; they generally sat there in the evening rather than in the parlour, a prim, formal room where nothing was to hand. Jack Dorman was reading the
Leader
, a weekly farming paper which was about all he ever read. Jane sat with the open letter from Aunt Ethel in her hand, worrying about it.

“I wrote to Myers with a cheque,” she said. “They sent a statement for the parcels, seven pounds eighteen and six. I told them to keep sending them, one every month….”

He grunted without looking up. “What are you sending now?”

“I told them to keep sending the dried fruits,” she said. “It’s what she seems to like.” She turned the letter over in her hand. “It’s so difficult, because she never asks for anything, or says what she wants. She does seem to like the dried fruit, though.”

“I’d have thought that a meat parcel might be better,” he said, “They haven’t got much meat, from all I hear.”

“An old lady like her doesn’t eat a lot of meat,” she replied. “She can make cakes with the dried fruit for when she has people in to tea.”

She turned the letter over, reading it again for the tenth time. “I can’t make out about this vest,” she said, troubled. “It almost reads as if she’s short of money, doesn’t it?”

“Could be,” he observed. He laid the
Leader
down, and glanced across at his wife. He could still see in her the girl he had brought out from England, stubborn in her love for him to the point of quarrelling with her parents, supported only by this aunt to whom they now sent parcels.

“Like to send her some?” he asked.

She looked up quickly, and met his eyes. “Send her money? She might take it as an insult.”

“She might buy herself a vest,” he said.

She sat in silence for a time. “We couldn’t send her just a little money, Jack,” she said at last. “It would have to be nothing or else quite a lot, as if it was a sort of legacy. Enough to be sure that she wouldn’t take it badly. Enough to keep her for a couple of years if she’s in real trouble.”

“Well, we’ve got a lot,” he said. “We’ll do whatever you think right.”

There was a pause. “I feel we kind of owe it to her,” he said presently. “To see her right if she’s in any trouble. We haven’t done so bad together, you and I. It might never have come to anything if she hadn’t backed us up.”

“I know. That’s what I feel.” She stared down at the letter in her hands. “I’m not a bit happy about this, Jack,” she said at last. “I don’t like the sound of it at all. If we’ve got the money, I’d like to send her five hundred pounds.”

J
ENNIFER
M
ORTON
went home for the following week-end. She was the daughter of a doctor in Leicester, his only child now, for her two brothers had been killed in the war, one in the North Atlantic and one over Hamburg. She was twenty-four years old and she had worked away from home for some years; she had a clerical job with the Ministry of Pensions at their office in Blackheath, a suburb of London. Most of her life was spent in Blackheath, where she had a bed-sitting-room in a boarding-house, but once a month she went home to Leicester to see her parents, travelling up from London early on the Saturday morning, and returning late on Sunday night.

These were duty visits; she was fond enough of her father and her mother, but she had now no interests and few acquaintances in her own home town. The war and marriage had scattered her school friends. She had no particular fondness for the Ministry of Pensions or for her job in Blackheath; she would have stayed at home and worked in Leicester if there had been any useful purpose to be served by doing so. In fact, her mother and her father were remarkably self-sufficient; her mother never wanted to do anything else but to stay at home and run the house and cook her father’s dinner. Her father, an overworked general practitioner, never wanted to go out at night unless, in the winter, to a meeting of the British Medical Association or, in the summer, to a meeting of the Bowls Club. This was a good thing, for the night air made her mother cough, and she seldom went out of the house after midday in the winter. As the years went on, her father and her mother settled firmly into a routine of life moulded by overwork and by poor health, a groove that left little room for the wider interests of a daughter.

Jennifer went to Leicester for her week-end once a month, but there was never very much for her to do there. She could not help her mother very much without breaking through routines that she was not familiar with; unless the water jug was on a certain spot upon the kitchen shelf, unless the saucepans were arrayed in a certain order, her mother became fussed and unable to find things, and very soon made the suggestion that Jennifer should go and sit with her father, who was usually deep in the
British Medical Journal
if he wasn’t out upon a case. She came to realise that in her case the barrier of the generations was higher than usual in families because her father and her mother were so complementary; she accepted the situation philosophically, and found the interests of her life away from home.

Those interests were not very startling. She had been mildly in love when she was twenty, soon after the war, but he had gone to a job in Montreal and gradually the correspondence languished; when finally she heard that he was married it was just one of those things. She was friendly with a good many men, for she was an attractive girl, with auburn hair that had been bright red as a child, and the grey eyes that go with it, but she had been inoculated and never fell seriously in love. She knew a good deal about the London theatres, and she saw most of the films worth seeing, including the Continental ones; she could speak a little French, and she had spent two summer holidays in France with a couple of girls from her office. Now she was planning a trip to Italy for her next holiday, but that was nine months ahead, for it was October. She had bought three little books by a gentleman called Hugo, and she was teaching herself Italian out of them.

That week-end was like all the others, only more so. Though it was only October her mother was coughing as if it were January; she had not been out of doors for a week, but she had her household organised so that she could order from the shops by telephone, and what could not be done that way the daily woman did. Her father was more overworked than ever; he seemed to spend most of his time writing certificates for patients of the nationalised Health Service, who stood in queues each morning and afternoon at the surgery door. There was nothing Jennifer could do to help them and no place for her; she left them late on Sunday afternoon and travelled back to London, and so by the electric train from Charing Cross down to her own place at Blackheath. She got back to her room at about ten o’clock, made herself a cup of cocoa, washed a pair of stockings, did an exercise of Hugo, and went to bed.

She worked all next day, as usual, at her office. She left at five in the evening, and walked back through the suburban streets in the October dusk to her boarding-house. Very soon now it would be dark when she came out from work; for two months in the winter she would not walk home in daylight. She was beginning to dread those two months; in mid-winter she got a sense of suffocation, a feeling that she would never see the sun and the fresh air again.

It was raining a little that evening, and she walked back with her blue raincoat buttoned tightly round her neck. She had intended to go out to the pictures with a friend from the boarding-house after tea, but now she thought that she would stay at home and read a magazine and do her Hugo. There wasn’t much joy in going to the pictures and then walking home in the rain.

She went up the steps of the shabby old brick house that was her home, spacious with its eight bedrooms, its four reception-rooms, and its range of basement kitchens, and she let herself in at the front door with her latch-key. As she took off her wet coat her landlady climbed up the stairs from the kitchen.

“There was a telephone call for you about an hour ago,” she
said. “A personal call. I told them you’d be back about five-thirty.”

Jennifer looked up in surprise. “Do you know who it was from?”

The woman shook her head. “They didn’t say.”

Jennifer went to the telephone booth and told the exchange that she could take the call, and learned that it was a call from Leicester. She hung up, and stood uncertain for a moment, hoping there was nothing wrong at home. Presently she went up to her room on the first floor and changed out of her wet shoes, and then she stood looking out of the window at the glistening lamplight in the wet suburban street, waiting and listening for the call. In the yellow lamplight the plane trees in the street waved a few stray leaves that still held to the twigs.