Читать книгу The Breaking Wave - Nevil Shute Norway - Страница 4

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As old age had crept upon my father and mother they had reduced the scale of their expenditure upon themselves to quite a small proportion of their net income. They never had kept racehorses as many of our neighbours do, and they had outgrown the pleasures of spending money. They got a book each month through the Book Society and they bought a few gramophone records when they were in Melbourne, but with increasing years and infirmity they got more pleasure out of old things than new, out of old books that they had read fifteen or twenty years before and turned back to now with pleasure, out of old gramophone records, out of furniture that they had bought thirty years ago when they took over Coombargana.

Helen’s allowance and my own had absorbed a good slice of their net income after taxation, which in recent years had fluctuated between twenty and thirty thousand pounds a year. Much of the rest had been saved and invested prudently to provide for death duties on an estate which might well be assessed at a quarter of a million pounds upon my father’s death, but this cash reserve was now adequate for any calls that were likely to be made on it. In other countries and in other circles a prosperity such as ours might be accompanied by wild parties in the city, with a nude girl in a bath of champagne in the middle of the dinner table and a dozen crashed motor cars next morning. In the Western District things have never been like that; perhaps an agricultural prosperity doesn’t go that way. Certainly Australian wool producers, those who survived the hard times of the thirties when wool was down to a shilling a pound, got such an economic fright as would keep them in the straight and narrow path for the rest of their lives. I can vouch for it that at Coombargana and all the other stations that I know the money made seems to be spent prudently and well.

My father’s great interest was in the property, and all his spare money was now going into improvements. Wherever I looked as we drove round in the Land Rover there was something new, new stockyards, new spray sheep dips, new vehicles, new pumps, new generators, new houses, new fences, new windmills, and new dams. In the hard times before the second war, when I was a boy at Coombargana, much of this expenditure would have been classed as rank extravagance, but times had changed and my father had had the wit to change with them. Labour costs had trebled since the thirties and the output of the property had doubled, so that any machine that would save an hour of a man’s time was now a good machine.

We went into the long shearing shed, now empty and swept clean, of course, for the shearing was over and the shed would remain unused till next year. He showed me how he had rearranged the stands and the tables and the bins, and the new machinery. He had made a job of it all right; I could visualize the production line, so to speak, when this place was going full blast and sheep were passing through at the rate of three hundred an hour. I was keenly interested in all that he had done for this was my job from now on, but the dead parlourmaid was still in the background of my mind.

We rested for a few minutes in the long, cool aisle of the shed, leaning against a table, looking around. “Mother doesn’t seem to think much of my idea that the girl was married,” I said.

“She doesn’t?”

I shook my head.

“I’d never thought of her as a married woman, myself,” my father remarked. “She might have been, of course.”

“How old was she?”

“Twenty-eight or thirty, I should say. It’s difficult to judge.”

“Harry said she never took a holiday.”

“I don’t think she did. I think she went into Ballarat once or twice for shopping, but apart from that I don’t think she left the place the whole time she was here.”

I wrinkled my brows. “What did she do on her days off?”

He thought for a minute. “I think she was interested in the property,” he said. “She used to go out with Jim Plowden and the rabbit pack. I think she liked the dogs. She liked shooting, too. I never had much to do with her outside; she kept her place, you know. The men say that she was a very fine shot at rabbits, either with a gun or a rifle. They say she never seemed to miss.” He paused. “I’ve been wondering if she was a farmer’s daughter perhaps, back at home.”

I nodded. “You don’t know what part of England she came from?”

“I don’t,” he said. “Annie thinks she came from London, but I don’t think she really knows.”

“That doesn’t line up with her being a farmer’s daughter.”

“I know.”

We sat silent for a minute. Then I glanced at him, and said, “The coroner’s coming here tomorrow morning, with the police?”

He nodded. “They’ve got to give a certificate for burial. There’ll have to be an inquest, of course.”

“Bit awkward, if we don’t know who she was.”

He bit his lip. “I know,” he said. I glanced at him, and there was an old man’s tremor moving his head, the first time I had seen it. “It makes us look—well, careless.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that, Dad,” I said. “It’s not as if she was a young girl that you were responsible for. She was a grown woman.”

His hands moved to his chin, as if to stop the tremor. “I know,” he replied. “But it looks bad all the same. As if we didn’t care.”

He turned to me. “It’s a very good thing for your mother that you’ve come home, Alan. It’s going to take her mind off it. Be with her as much as you can till the funeral is over. Tell her about England—anything.”

“She’s going to miss her, is she?”

He nodded. “She’s going to miss her a great deal. When a woman’s getting on in years and not very well, it’s a great comfort to have a girl about the place who’s sensible and responsible. She’s a great loss to your mother, Alan.”

I nodded slowly. “Mother was fond of her?”

“I think so. Yes, I think she was,” my father said. “The girl kept her place, but she used to think ahead and do things for your mother before she thought of asking for them, if you understand what I mean. She was very thoughtful for your mother in that way.”

If she had been thoughtful for my mother it seemed to indicate that she had liked being at Coombargana; indeed, everything that I had heard seemed to point that way. She had never even bothered to take the holidays that were due her. Then why had she taken her own life? I glanced at my father. “What do you think about this theory of Mother’s, that it was an accident?” I asked. “I didn’t want to say too much in front of Mother. Would you say she was a suicidal type?”

He said, “I simply don’t know, Alan. I don’t know what a suicidal type looks like. To me she was just an ordinary, decent girl, not very good looking. I wouldn’t have expected her to commit suicide—I’d have said she was too level-headed. But who’s to say?”

“Do you think it was an accident, Dad?” I asked. “I’ve never heard of anyone taking an overdose of sleeping tablets by mistake. I mean, you’ve got to eat such a lot, and gulp down such a lot of water. How many does the doctor say she took?”

“More than twenty.”

“Well, surely to God, that couldn’t have been a mistake. You can’t go on taking tablet after tablet till you’ve taken twenty, by mistake. If it had been one, or even two, it might be possible. But not twenty.”

“If it was deliberate,” my father said, “she wouldn’t have left two tablets in the bottle, would she? She’d have taken the lot, to make sure.”

There was a pause. “I can’t think it was an accident,” I said at last. “I’m sorry, Dad, but I should say it was deliberate.”

He stood up, and I was deeply sorry for him, for he looked so old. “Well, don’t tell your mother that,” he said. “It’s better if she thinks it was an accident. I’m hoping that we’ll get the coroner to see it that way in the morning. If it was deliberate we’ll probably never know the reason, and there’s no sense in stirring up trouble.”

We left the shed and got back into the Land Rover and went on with our tour around the property. In the evening light we came to his trout hatchery by the river, a series of little pools with water running through controlled by little sluices from the river, overhung by weeping willow trees. When I had written to tell them that I would be coming home next spring my father had had this disused hatchery put in order and had commenced to breed up about a thousand little fish with which to re-stock the river against my return; he intended to keep them a few months longer and then discharge them into the main stream. Next year the fishing should be very good indeed.

We paused by the pools, in the rippling sound of running water, and he began to ask me questions about my time in England. I had taken my degree in Law at Oxford, but I hadn’t enjoyed it much. “It was a bit like Rip van Winkle, Dad,” I said. “I was so much older than the others, and things had changed so. It would have been different if I’d gone back straight after the war, in 1945 or ’46, when there were other service people up. There was no one there like me in 1948, or hardly anybody, and nobody at all when I went down in 1950. They were all boys straight from school on government grants. The people I got along with best were the young dons.” I paused. “I want to get one or two of them out here on a visit, but it’s difficult because they’re all so hard up.”

He nodded. “That’s always a difficulty. But you never can get people to come out from England on a visit. It’s not only the money.”

I went on to tell him about my time in chambers, in Lincoln’s Inn. “I don’t know that I haven’t wasted my time,” I said quietly at last. “I don’t know that being called to the Bar is going to help me much in running Coombargana.”

He smiled. “Do you think you’ll want to go back and live in England?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think I’ve got that out of my system. I’d like to go back again some day for fun, say in about ten years’ time, and see how it’s all getting on. But I won’t want to live there again. I don’t think so.”

“Not like Helen?”

“No.”

“What’s Laurence really like?” my father asked. He had never met him, for with their increasing age my mother and father had not felt equal to leaving Coombargana to travel to England. It was one of my secret irritations with my sister that she had not thought fit to bring her husband out to Australia on a visit to let Dad and Mum meet him, though perhaps it was better so.

“He’s all right,” I said. “I’ve not got a lot in common with him, Dad, and I don’t think you would have.” My father had served all through the first war in Gallipoli and France, and had spent three years of the second war organizing truck transport in the heat and sweat of the Northern Territory when he was over sixty years of age, while Laurence had had trouble with his health and had served his war with the BBC. “There’s nothing wrong with him. He’s getting very well known as a dramatic critic—people think a lot of him.” I glanced at my father. “I’m not sure that he’s not a bit of a passenger in this world, but he probably thinks that of us.”

“He’s making her a good husband, is he? Not a lot of other women, or not more than a reasonable number?” My father grinned.

I laughed with him. “I don’t think there’s any trouble of that sort.” There wasn’t likely to be, either, because Helen has quite a lot of character and she kept control of her own money. Laurence wasn’t the type to sacrifice all for love.

“What about you, Alan?” my father asked. “Did you ever think of getting married?”

I shook my head.

“You ought to think about it,” he said. “You’re getting on, you know. Thirty-nine, isn’t it?”

I nodded. “It’s never happened to come my way.”

“You ought to think about it,” he repeated. “It’s going to be mighty lonely if you try and carry on this place alone after our time.”

“It’s not so easy when you’re a cripple,” I said. “It needs special qualities in a girl to settle down married to a chap that’s got no feet.”

“Well, think it over,” he said irresolutely. And then he said, “You never thought of flying again, I suppose?”

“As a matter of fact, I did,” I told him. “Not in Typhoons, of course. I did quite a lot of flying at the London Aeroplane Club, at Panshanger, on Tiger Moths and Austers. I didn’t tell you in the letters because I was afraid it might worry Mother.”

“Are you going on with it here?”

“I doubt it,” I said. “I just wanted to show myself that I wasn’t afraid of it and that I could do it still, even with dummy feet. I did about a hundred hours in all. But I don’t want to carry on with it, unless there is some object. Which there isn’t, now.”

He smiled. “What was it like when you got into the machine for the first time?” he asked with interest. “Were you scared?”

“A bit,” I said. “About as much as on my first solo. But of course, one knew it was dead safe in a pipsqueak thing like that.”

We left the pools of the trout hatchery and walked slowly back to the Land Rover. “Your mother’s been concocting an exceptional dinner for you all day,” my father said. “Do you want to change?”

“She’d like it, wouldn’t she?” I asked. “What do you usually do?”

“I generally put on a dinner jacket in the winter, when it’s dark,” my father said. “In summer when one may want to go out afterwards I usually change into a suit.”

“I’ve got a dinner jacket in my bag,” I said. “The shirt’s probably a bit tatty after travelling round the world. Let’s change. Mother’ld like it.”

At the house we found my mother in the drawing room seated before the log fire, wearing a long black evening dress with a shawl round her shoulders. We stood warming ourselves, for the evening was turning chilly, and drinking a pink gin while we chatted about London and about Helen; then I went up to my room to change. In my bedroom somebody had lit a fire and left a huge basket of gum tree logs, scenting the air with the fragrance of the burning eucalypt. Somebody, perhaps old Annie, had unpacked one suitcase and had laid out my evening clothes upon the bed.

It struck me as I unpacked my other suitcase in my old, familiar room, savouring all my old belongings, that I would be the only person sleeping on the upper floor of the main house that night. My father and mother who had had the bedroom, dressing room, and bathroom next to mine now slept on the ground floor and their bedroom was now the billiard room. On the other side of the corridor to their room was the corner room that had been Helen’s and was now a spare room, and next to that and separated by the second bathroom was the guest bedroom, empty tonight, of course. Beside my room there was another bathroom, and opening from that was Bill’s room, very seldom used now. Bill had been killed in Normandy in the spring of 1944; by the time I got back to Coombargana my father and mother had taken all Bill’s possessions and pictures out and had refurnished and redecorated the room as a second guest room, thinking perhaps that too intimate a reminder of Bill and the war in Europe would have been bad for me. Nothing of Bill remained there now, but they had forgotten the bathroom. Since 1946 I had never sat in that bath without glancing at the door into Bill’s room with the thought that it would open and he would come striding in, seventeen or eighteen years old, with little or no clothes on.

That happened to me again that evening as I bathed before dressing for dinner. Bill was still a very real person in my life, though nine years had gone by since I had met him last, at Lymington in Hampshire, and sixteen years since we had shared that bathroom. One does not easily forget one’s only brother.

As I sat in the bath thinking of these things and enjoying the benison of hot water after days spent in the aeroplane and in the Sydney hotel, I felt a little lonely up there on the first floor by myself. I was not quite alone, of course. Beyond the stairs and the gallery that overlooked the big central hall of the house lay the servants’ wing over the kitchen quarters, their bedrooms separated from those of the main house by a swing door. There were four servants’ bedrooms there, relic of the days of more plentiful domestic service, and in one of these Annie, our old cook, would be sleeping that night. In another, the house parlourmaid would be sleeping now.

I had not drawn the curtains, and there was still a little light outside as I dressed before the fire. I stood for a few minutes looking out in the last of the light before turning to the mirror to tie my tie. Below me the wide lawns ran down to the river, with the formal flower gardens upon the right and the screen of oaks, gums, wattles, and pines upon the left that hid the station buildings. Beyond the river our pastures stretched over and beyond the rise a couple of miles away, and far on the horizon the long ridge of the Grampians stood black against the last of the sunset light. There was contentment here, with no war and no threat of war, no aircraft, no tanks and no soldiers. This was a place to which a man might come when he had had the great world and its alarms, to do a good job in peace. Some day a war might come again and I would have to leave my peace and go and do my stuff as my father had before me, but for the moment I was glad to be out of it all and back at Coombargana as a grazier.

I finished dressing and went down to the drawing room. My father and mother were both there waiting for me and wanting to know if everything in my room had been all right. “Fine,” I said. “I might have walked out yesterday instead of five years ago,” and I laughed. Actually, in five years one changes and there were things in that room that I would alter as soon as I could. There were things there that I now had no need of, like the stick from my crashed Typhoon, or the compass from the first M.E. 109 I got, over Wittering. These things had solaced me in 1946, but that was seven years ago; I did not need them now, and they were better out of the way.

I had another pink gin with my father, and then dinner was announced. Mrs. Plowden put her head in at the door. She was untidy as ever with a wisp of grey hair falling down over her face; her sleeves were rolled to the elbow and she wore a coarse apron of hessian. She said brightly, “It’s all in, on the table, Mrs. Duncan.” My mother thanked her, and she withdrew.

I saw my mother glance at my father, and caught his glance in return. Things must have been different in the days of the parlourmaid, and they had to adjust themselves to new ways and new manners.

We went into the dining room. To me the bare, polished table with the lace mats and the silver was well laid, but to my mother everything was in the wrong place and she hobbled about rearranging salt cellars and wine glasses, moving dishes from the table to the sideboard, till the arrangement was as she was used to having it. “I’m afraid everything’s a bit higgledy-piggledy tonight, Alan,” she said. “We’ll get things organized in a few days.”

I said, “It looks all right to me, Mum.”

She said quietly, “I suppose the fact of the matter is that we’ve been spoiled for the last year or so. I’d almost forgotten what it was to have to train somebody to do things nicely.”

“She was good, was she?”

My mother said, “She was an educated girl, so one only had to show her how to do a thing once. I think she must have come from a good home, where they lived nicely.”

My father said, “She used to work the radiogram.”

“The radiogram?”

My mother said, “Whenever your father and I had a little celebration here, on my birthday, or when we heard about the wool sale, we used to have a bottle of champagne with dinner, and music. Your father would put on a long-playing record in the drawing room, Oklahoma! or South Pacific or something nice like that, and we’d leave the doors open so that we had music during dinner. And then we found that Jessie knew how to change the record, and she knew most of the records that we liked, so after that we didn’t have to bother.”

“She got to know our ways,” my father said. He turned to my mother. “Remember when we heard Alan was coming home? She finished handing the entrée and asked if she should put on a record.”

My mother nodded. “It will be a very long time before we find another girl like Jessie.”

We seemed to have drifted back on to the difficult subject. I cast about hurriedly for something fresh to tell my mother that would take her mind off the dead parlourmaid, but I seemed to have told her most of the things already. The thought of Bill came into my mind and the new details I had learned about his death, but I rejected this hurriedly as a subject that had better wait for another time. My journey home was something that I had not told her of, that might amuse and interest her and take her mind off the more sombre topic. “I stayed four or five days in New York,” I said. “It’s a stimulating place, but I don’t know that I’d like to work there.”

My father played up, sensing the move. “What’s it really like?” he asked. “Is it like you’d think it was from the movies?”

“I suppose it is, physically,” I said. “You know more or less what it’s going to look like before you get there. But as regards the people, I’ve never yet met an American that was much like the people that you see upon the movies, and I didn’t this time. I suppose there are Americans like that.”

My mother said, “They probably exaggerate their own types, Alan, when they put them on the stage or on the screen. We do that, too. All countries do it. You don’t often meet people who behave like people on the stage.”

My father carried on the steering of the conversation. “I suppose they have to make them larger than life on the screen, in all their characteristics. Did you go to Los Angeles?”

“No,” I said. “I spent a few days with a chap in San Francisco.” I carried on talking about the United States, and the topic lasted us all through dinner. My parents eat little at their age, but what little they do eat they like to be good, and I think Annie our old cook had made a special effort though I can only remember the fresh asparagus from the garden, and the jugged hare. I pleased my mother by appreciating the dinner, and promised her that I would speak to Annie about it. They had put a good deal of thought into getting together the dishes that I would like best. My father opened a particularly good bottle of Burgundy from somewhere on the Hunter River, and a glass of vintage port from South Australia served with the dessert was really very like the real thing.

We went through to the drawing room after dinner. My parents had always gone early to bed; one does so in the country where it is usual to be up and about the property at seven in the morning to keep the men from getting slack. Since his operation my father had been ordered to bed at nine o’clock by his doctor, and with the increasing infirmity of my mother they had both got into the habit of retiring about that time, though I think they usually read in bed for an hour or so before sleep. When I had lived at home before, after the war, I had frequently played a game of chess with my mother after dinner; I had not played since then and I had all but forgotten the moves, but now to take her mind off our troubles I suggested we might have a game to celebrate my return. She was pleased at the idea though she had played very little in my absence, so I brought up the inlaid chess table that they had bought in Paris before the war and that had once stood in some chateau or other in Touraine, and now stood in somewhat similar surroundings in the Western District, and found the box that contained the eighteenth-century carved ivory chessmen, and set them up by my mother’s chair before the fire. We played two games and then it was half past nine and time for them to be in bed.

I put the things away and helped my mother up out of her chair. “It seems terribly early to be going to bed on your first evening,” she said. “I feel rather badly about it, Alan, but it’s what Dr. Stanley says we’ve got to do, especially because your father gets up so early.”

My father said, “Help yourself to a whiskey, Alan. And there’s the paper here.”

I smiled. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll probably take to going off early myself in a few days, and getting up early. It’s the best way in the country.”

I walked with my mother as she hobbled slowly to the door and opened it for her. In the hall as we walked together to her room she said, “It is good to have you home again, Alan. You don’t know how we’ve been looking forward to you coming.” She paused, and then she said, “It’s really getting too much for your father now. And then this trouble ...”

“Don’t worry about that, Mum,” I said. “It’ll all be over in a few days now.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” she said quietly. She hobbled on a step or two, and then she said, “She must have been so terribly unhappy, to take her own life, and I had no idea of it. If she was unhappy, I should have known about it, and I didn’t. I feel that I must be very much to blame, as if I’ve failed in some way, or made her unhappy without any idea that I was doing it. And I just can’t imagine what it was I did ...”

“Don’t worry about it, Mother,” I repeated. “It’s nothing to do with you. We all think it was an accident.”

“Perhaps it was. But I wish I could really think so.”

We reached her door. “Good night, Mother,” and I kissed her.

She held me for a moment. “Good night, son. I am so very, very glad you’re home.”

When my father and mother had gone to bed I went back to the drawing room and stood for a moment before the fire, deep in thought. This matter of the parlourmaid was evidently worrying my mother very much indeed, and the more I thought about it the more inexplicable it seemed. I could not accept the idea that my mother had made the girl unhappy. Invalids, of course, are frequently bad tempered and querulous. I had been away for five years and I felt able to regard my mother objectively; she had never seemed to me to be bad tempered and she did not seem so now. Whatever the reasons had been that had made the girl take her own life, I was quite sure it was not that. Yet it had been deliberate, or she would not have destroyed her documents and letters. I wondered what she had done with them.

The thought of murder crossed my mind, of course, and I put it out of my head. We read too many detective stories, which set one off upon the most unlikely trains of thought. Nothing suggested any conceivable motive for murder in this instance, nor any possibility of it in Coombargana House.

Annie might know something that she had not told my parents, and it was time that I saw Annie anyway. Annie had been at Coombargana before I was born. She came from some village near Peterhead in Scotland, and as a young girl she had worked in the fishing, gutting and packing herrings on the quays. I think my grandfather knew her father, old McConchie, as a boy, or perhaps he met him when he went home in 1895. In any case, Annie came out with her brother James to work for my grandfather in 1908 or 1910, when she was probably about twenty years of age. James was still working as a stockman with us when I was a child and Annie was the kitchen maid, but James left us in 1920 and took up a property near Mortlake, helped by a bank guarantee from my grandfather. He and Annie, being Scots, lived frugally and saved every penny that came into their hands, with the result that in the depression of the thirties when everyone was going broke and all the properties were coming under the hammer at a knockdown price, the McConchies were prudently buying land. Jim McConchie has a property of two thousand acres over by Mortlake now where he runs Merinos and a stud of Angus cattle; he makes a trip back home every two or three years to buy stud beasts and last year he paid three thousand five hundred pounds for an Angus bull at the Royal Agricultural Show. Annie still works for us in Coombargana House; she never married and would scorn to live on James, though she is very proud of his success.

I wondered if Annie was still up. I left the drawing room and went through the dining room; the light was still on in the kitchen. I opened the swing door and there she was, standing by the table.

“Evening, Annie,” I said. “How are you today?” She was not much changed, a little smaller perhaps, and the grey hair a little thinner.

“I’m fine,” she said. “How have you been keeping? It’s good to see you home again, Mr. Alan.”

“I’m very well,” I said. “Very glad to be home.”

“Aye,” she said. “There’s no doubt about it, your own place is the best. How do you find your father and mother, Mr. Alan?”

“Not too good,” I said. “It’s time I came home. I didn’t realize that they were getting so old.”

“Ah well,” she said, “we none of us get any younger.”

“You haven’t changed a lot,” I said.

“I keep pretty fair,” she said. “I get the rheumatism now and then, but I keep pretty fair.”

“I think this trouble today may have upset my mother,” I remarked.

“Aye,” she said. “It’s a great shock to the lady when a thing like that happens in the house.”

I leaned back against the bright steel sink. “I don’t understand why she did it,” I remarked. “Was she unhappy, do you think?”

“I would not say so,” she replied. “Very quiet she was, these last two or three days. But then, she was always quiet.”

I cast about for some clue. “Was she sulky?”

She shook her head. “She was not. She was very even tempered, very easy to get on with, but she never talked about herself. We got on fine, because maybe I’m a bit that way. I never sought to pry into her business, nor she into mine.”

“Do you know if she was in the habit of taking things to make her sleep?” I asked. “Was she a girl who took a lot of medicines?”

She shook her head. “There’s a bottle of Eno’s Fruit Salts on her washstand, and a tube of Veganin. Then there was the bottle by her bedside, that the doctor took away.”

“You don’t know what those sleeping tablets were?”

“I do not, Mr. Alan.”

“And there were no letters or papers in her room?”

“Not a scrap. There was nothing written at all, saving one or two books from the house.”

I glanced at her. “That’s very extraordinary, because she must have had some papers. She must have had a passport to come from England. What’s happened to that?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe she got rid of everything when she decided to make an end to herself.”

“You think she did decide to do it, Annie? You don’t think it was an accident?”

“It’s not for me to say, Mr. Alan. But if it was an accident there would be papers or letters of some kind, I would think.”

I thought for a minute. “Where could she have burned things?”

“In the coke boiler, out behind,” she said. She meant the central heating boiler. “She could have burned them there.”

“Without anybody knowing?”

“Oh, aye. It gets made up in the morning, and at midday, and at night, but in between times nobody goes there.”

I glanced at the slow-burning cooking stove. “Not here?”

She shook her head. “I tend this myself, and I would soon have known if there was any paper. I would not think that she burned anything here.”

I stood in silence for a time, thinking over this conundrum. Then I looked at her. “Is there really nothing, nothing at all amongst her things, to tell us who she was? No ornaments, or lockets ... anything?”

She shook her head. “Would you like to have a look inside her room, Mr. Alan?”

I hesitated, reluctant. It seemed an invasion of the dead girl’s privacy to go into her room to try to find out things she evidently preferred to keep from us. Yet other people had already done so; my father had certainly been there, and perhaps my mother. The police had been there, turning over with unaccustomed hands the underclothing and the dresses. It was doubtful if I could add anything to what had already been done and I didn’t want to go, yet to refuse had something of an element of cowardice attached to it.

“She’s up there, is she?” I asked.

“Aye, she’s lying there,” she said. “Covered over with the sheet.” She glanced at me, remembering perhaps the little boy that had been running about Coombargana House when she was a young woman. “There’s nothing to be feared of, Mr. Alan.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s a bad thing to intrude unless you’ve got some very good reason. But I think perhaps I ought to have a look.”

“I’ll come up with you,” she said.

She motioned me to go before her, but I told her to lead the way and we went out to the back lobby and up the bare, scrubbed back stairs to the servants’ bedrooms. There was a short corridor ending in the swing door to the main house near my own bedroom, and there were two rooms on each side of this short corridor. I was not very familiar with this part of the house, though I had been in it as a child.

Annie led the way to the second door on the left. I checked her before she opened the door. “This is her room?”

She nodded.

“Which room do you sleep in?” I asked.

“In there, Mr. Alan.” She indicated the next room on the same side. “The mistress, she said to use these rooms because they have the better light and view. The others are a wee bit dark.” I nodded; the two rooms they occupied looked out in the same direction as my own, and shared the same view over the property towards the Grampians. In the house Bill’s room and the bathroom lay between my own room and that of the dead girl.

I asked, “Did you hear anything unusual last night, Annie?”

She shook her head. “Nothing at all.”

She paused for a moment, and then opened the door and switched the light on, and we went into the bedroom. It was a bare room, with white paint on the woodwork and cream water paint upon the walls. It was furnished adequately but simply with a cheap bedroom suite of Australian hardwood, consisting of a bed, a chest of drawers with a mirror on it, and a wardrobe. In addition there was a table and a chair. On the bed a sheet was stretched over the dead girl.

On the table was a small, folding, travelling alarm clock of an American make, and a bottle of fountain pen ink. With letters and documents in the forefront of my mind I unscrewed the top of this bottle; the top came off readily, the bottle was half full. I turned to Annie. “Had she got a pen?” Instinctively I spoke in a low tone, as if in a church.

“Aye,” she said. “I saw a pen in her bag.” She opened the left-hand small drawer of the chest of drawers and took out rather a worn, fairly large bag of dark blue leather. She opened it, and picked out the pen. It was a Parker 51, dark blue in colour, in good condition; the ink was still fresh in the nib. It had been used for writing very recently.

I put it back in the bag and examined the remainder of the contents. There was a compact, a purse with a little money in it but no papers, and the usual things that a woman carries round with her, a comb, a lipstick, three keys on a ring, a clean handkerchief that had evidently been there for some time. There was nothing to be learned from these. I glanced at the contents of the drawer, mostly handkerchiefs and stockings; they conveyed nothing to me. I came back to the purse and opened it again. “What did she do with her money?” I asked in the same low tone. “This isn’t all she had?”

“She had a savings bank account in the Post Office, Mr. Alan. She’d go to Forfar once in a while and pay her money in.”

“Where’s the book for that?” I asked. “Is that here?”

She shook her head. “I would say no. I have not seen it, Mr. Alan, and I was here when the police made the search.”

“Do you know how much she had in the bank?”

She shook her head. “I do not.”

There were three books on the chest of drawers, but they told me nothing except that her tastes were catholic; The Last Days of Hitler was sandwiched between Anne of Green Gables and Hocus Pocus. I looked for a Bible or a Prayer Book, and found neither. Annie asked, “Do you want to see the clothes, Mr. Alan?” and put her hand on the first drawer.

I shrank instinctively from the intrusion. “There’s nothing there, is there? You’ve turned them over?”

“Aye,” she said. “The police, they went through everything very carefully.”

“Leave them be,” I said. I turned from the chest of drawers and looked around the room. Two suitcases lay one on top of the other in a corner. I moved over and examined them. Both were old and one was in an unfamiliar style, probably foreign, but both were empty and without labels. “Is this all the luggage she had?” I asked.

Annie hesitated. “I think it is,” she said. “I’ve been wondering, perhaps there should have been another. I mind she had to make several journeys when she came here first, carrying her luggage from the outside door up to this room. She wouldn’t want to carry more than one of these up the stairs, one at a time. Maybe she went up and down twice only. It’s a while ago since she came, and I was cooking at the time and didn’t notice her particularly.”

“You didn’t come in here much?”

She shook her head. “I never went into her room, Mr. Alan, nor she into mine. The mistress, she comes round once in a while and looks in at the rooms, to see that everything is tidy and kept nice.”

I stood looking round the room; there was little more to examine. The room was fitted with a wash basin with running water, and here the soap and the toothpaste were of normal brands. The Eno’s and the Veganin were on a shelf nearby, but there were no medicines in evidence, and practically no cosmetics or lotions, which seemed to me unusual for a woman’s room.

There was nothing to stay for, nothing to be learned. I moved towards the door. Annie paused by the bed, and said in a low tone, “Would you want to look at her?” Her hand moved towards the sheet.

I shook my head; there was nothing to be gained by that, and we had done enough intruding. “Leave her be. There wasn’t any locket, or anything under the pillow?”

She shook her head. “Nothing of that, Mr. Alan. We looked carefully, when the police were here.”

I went out into the corridor and she followed me. “Well, thanks, Annie,” I said. “It’ll be a good thing when all this is over, and we can get back to having things normal.”

She nodded. “Aye. It’s been upsetting for everybody. Your parents must be very glad to see you home again.”

I nodded. “I’m glad I came in time to help them out with this.” I paused. “Well, good night, Annie. Thank you for showing me.”

“Oh, that’s nothing,” she said. “Good night, Mr. Alan.”

I went through the swing door to the main house and my own bedroom. The fire was low; I threw on two or three logs and went downstairs at my slow pace, to get a whiskey and to look around the house a little before going up to bed.

I poured myself a drink and went and stood in front of the dying embers of the drawing room fire, in the silence of the house. I was still glad to be home again, glad to be taking up the work that was my proper job, that I had spurned five years ago, but my pleasure was swamped and tempered by this matter of the dead parlourmaid, so that I could think of nothing else. In this comfortable, homely atmosphere there had been a deep and secret trouble that nobody had known anything about, so deep that it had led a girl who seemed to have been normal and balanced in her mind to take her own life. It was incongruous at Coombargana. In a great city such things happen now and then, where people are too strained and hurried to pay much attention to the griefs of others, but in a small rural community like ours, led by wise and tolerant people such as my father and mother, staffed by good types culled and weeded out over the years, such secret, catastrophic griefs do not occur. Troubles at Coombargana had always been small troubles in my lifetime. Nothing like this had ever happened there before, and it was disturbing that it should have happened now. Was something very wrong in all these easy, comfortable surroundings, something that nobody suspected, something that we none of us knew anything about? I felt that I would very much like to know the answer to that one. In fact, it was my duty to find out.

I could not put my mind to the affairs of the property; I could think of nothing but this trouble. What curious impulse had it been that had led this girl to burn every scrap of evidence of her identity, to burn even her bank book? Perhaps there was no money in her savings bank, of course; perhaps she had withdrawn all that she had and used it in some way. That would have to be checked by the police. By all accounts she had lived very quietly, spending practically no money. I knew approximately what wage she would have been getting; in fifteen months she might have saved two or three hundred pounds. What had happened to that? Perhaps the savings bank had made a transfer of her balance which would provide us with a clue. Was it a possibility that some solicitor, perhaps in Ballarat, might have a will? It was conceivable, though hardly likely, that she had made a will.

How carefully planned, how deliberate it had all been; how certain she had been in all the movements leading to her death! Practically nothing that was personal to her was left behind. The passport—that could go into the fire; she would not need that again. Letters and papers—they could go, for she would be reading nothing more after tomorrow. Photographs and souvenirs; she would not need them now for she would have emotions no more to be stirred—into the furnace with them. The bank book—she would have no need of money for the journey she was setting out on; let it burn. She had cleaned out her life as one might clean out a house or a bed sitting room before leaving it, and having done so, she had lain down to die. In any normal person some enormous emotional upset would have accompanied the sum of all these sacrifices, and yet apparently there had been nothing of the sort. By all accounts, if she had planned her death she had gone to it cheerfully, with a quiet and an easy mind. She had appeared unmoved to my mother and to Annie, though both had remarked that she seemed rather quieter than usual.

The bizarre thought crossed my mind that if the sleeping tablets hadn’t worked she’d have been in a bit of a spot, having destroyed her passport and her bank book and everything else. If by some chance she had been discovered before the drugs that she had taken had proved fatal, if she had been rushed in to a hospital and her life had been saved, she would have plumped straight from the sublime to the ridiculous and she might have had a lot of bureaucratic difficulties in getting hold of her money and in getting another passport. I smiled cynically and checked the smile, for after all the girl had been in deep and secret trouble and it was no laughing matter. But how certain she had been of death!

How could she have been certain of her death? There are ways of committing suicide that really are certain, but taking sleeping tablets isn’t one of them. When you take sleeping tablets you go to sleep, and death, if it occurs, occurs several hours later. Even then, only a doctor experienced in the particular drug and in its effect upon a wide variety of patients could say with certainty that the dose she took would really prove lethal at all, or would prove lethal before she was found in the morning. Nothing I had heard indicated that this girl had any close or intimate knowledge of medical practice; she might conceivably have been a nurse at one time, but if so she had never betrayed the fact to my mother, who was an invalid.

Everything that I had heard indicated that this girl was an educated, intelligent, and rational person. How could she possibly have been so sure of death as to get rid of everything by burning in the furnace? Surely it must have crossed her mind that suicide in the way that she proposed, though easy and pleasant, was by no means certain. She must have had some special knowledge of the drug, or she would not have destroyed her things.

The whiskey may have been responsible though I had not had very much, because the sentence came in to my mind inverted. She would not have destroyed her things unless she had some special knowledge of the drug. She would have hidden them.

She would have hidden them, so that she could regain them if, in fact, she survived the sleeping tablets. I had assumed after talking to Annie that she had burned everything in the central heating furnace, but there was not a scrap of evidence that she had done anything of the sort. With Annie in my mind, the question of the suitcases came forward again. Annie had been vaguely puzzled that there were only two suitcases in her room. Perhaps, in fact, there had been a third. Perhaps she had packed into that third suitcase all that she valued of her personal possessions and deposited it somewhere where she could get it if she did survive—in the baggage room of a railway station, for example.

That wouldn’t work, because at Coombargana it would be impossible for her to get a suitcase off the place in privacy. No bus or other public transport comes to Coombargana or within five miles of us. She would have had to take it in to town in one of our cars or trucks. She could not possibly have taken a suitcase out of the house without someone noticing and commenting upon it, and no one had suggested anything of the sort. If she had hidden her belongings in a suitcase it would probably still be in Coombargana House; she would have had difficulty even in getting it down the stairs and out into the grounds without Annie noticing. It was at least a possibility that all the evidence that we were looking for was in the house with us.

I poured myself another drink, a small one, and sat down in my father’s chair beside the dying fire. I never believe in dashing at things, and this needed thinking about. Suppose the girl had wanted to hide a suitcase in the house, where would she put it? It had to be where nobody would think of looking, somewhere accessible to her, where nobody would see her as she went to hide it.

That seemed to mean the whole of the top floor. When Annie was in the kitchen or away the whole top floor of the house was hers to do what she liked with, for my parents seldom went up there now. Her case could be in any of the cupboards or closets, in any of the bedrooms. Downstairs would be far more difficult with Annie and my parents about. It would be difficult for her to take it out to one of the outbuildings, for the gardeners were frequently around or else the station hands; she could not count on being unobserved. But upstairs, on the bedroom floor of Coombargana House, she could definitely count on being unobserved at almost any time of day.

If one were to take a look through the top floor of the house, where would one start? Where would she be most likely to hide a suitcase if she wanted to do so? There were the two empty servants’ bedrooms opposite her room and Annie’s; those, I knew, were used as lumber rooms or boxrooms now. A suitcase in amongst a pile of our own ancient, disused cases would lie there for years covered in dust, till in the future someone clearing out the room to send the contents to some jumble sale might find this one and puzzle over what was in it, when the very name of Jessie Proctor had been long forgotten.

The more I thought of it, the more convinced I became that her belongings might be just across the corridor from her room. It was the rational and reasonable place for them to be.

I left the drawing room and made my way upstairs through the silent house. I looked in at my own room and put another log upon the fire, hesitated, and fetched a small electric torch from the dressing table; I never travel without one of those. Then I went out into the corridor and passed through the swing door into the servants’ quarters, paused for a moment opposite the dead girl’s room to make quite sure that I was right, and opened the door on the opposite side of the corridor. My torch showed me the light switch, and I turned it on.

It was a bedroom, a room with two beds, furnished sparsely as a servant’s room. This must be where they slept the married couple, when they had one. Except for the furniture it was completely empty; there were mattresses but no bedclothes on the beds. I opened the wardrobe door and all the drawers in turn and looked round for a cupboard, which wasn’t there. There was nothing in that room, at any rate.

There was another bedroom, the one opposite Annie’s room. I went along the corridor and opened the door of that one. This was the room I remembered, the one used as a boxroom. There were beds dismantled and stacked by the wall, trunks, suitcases, garden furniture, deck and steamer chairs, beach umbrellas, curtain poles of an antique design, an old commode, spears, boomerangs, and woomeras, and all the junk that a country house accumulates throughout the years. I stood in the doorway looking at all this stuff, wondering where to begin my search.

There was movement in the room behind me, Annie’s room, and a light switched on and showed under the door. I stood cursing and embarrassed in the door of the boxroom, till Annie came out of her room, dressed in a faded blue dressing gown, with wisps of thin grey hair hanging to her shoulders. “It’s all right, Annie,” I said a little testily. “I was just taking a look in here.”

She said, “Oh—I’m sorry, Mr. Alan. I heard a noise and wondered what it was.” She made a movement to withdraw into her room, and then she paused and said, “Were you looking for anything in particular?”

I hesitated. “It just crossed my mind that the girl might have had another suitcase, and that it might be in here.”

“I do not think so, Mr. Alan,” she replied. “I looked in there this afternoon.”

I stared at her; we had evidently been thinking along the same lines. “You did?”

“Aye,” she said. “After the police went away it came into my mind she could have packed some of her things away and put them in this room. I had a good turn-out in here this afternoon.”

“You didn’t find anything?”

She shook her head.

I glanced around the piles of junk. “Not amongst those suitcases?”

She shook her head. “I opened every one.”

“Nothing in that cupboard?”

“Only the candlesticks and lamps we used before the electricity.”

“Did you look in those two trunks?”

She nodded. “There’s only curtains in that one, and the other’s full of the colonel’s uniforms and tropical clothes. I took a good look through everything, Mr. Alan.”

There was nothing, then, for me to do in there. I turned and closed the door behind me. “Very thoughtful of you, Annie,” I said. “It was just an idea I had.”

“Aye,” she said. “I was thinking the same thing, that she might have left some of her stuff in there. I think she must have burned it all, Mr. Alan.”

“Maybe she did,” I said. I turned up the corridor. “Well, good night, Annie. Sorry I disturbed you.”

“Good night, Mr. Alan.”

I went back through the swing door to my room, disappointed, for I had expected to find something in the boxroom. It seemed to me to be by far the best hiding place for a suitcase on the top floor of Coombargana. I sat down in the long easy chair before the fire in my bedroom and lit a cigarette, and loosened one of the straps below my left knee which had been chafing a little. I sat there smoking and wondering about places where a suitcase could be hidden, and then it seemed to me that possibly the boxroom wasn’t such a good place, after all. It was too obvious. Both Annie and I had thought of looking there after a very few hours. Perhaps she had been cleverer than that.

It was conceivable that she had simply put her suitcase in one of the empty bedrooms, or even in my own room, working on the principle that a thing that is in practically full view is frequently overlooked. It did not seem a very likely one, but I got up and took my torch and made a tour of the top floor of the house, going into all the rooms and opening all the drawers and cupboards. It did not take me very long and it yielded nothing.

There was only one other place, and that was in the roof. The possums used to get in to the roof of Coombargana House to nest when I was a boy, though the measures that my father had taken seemed to have defeated them and I don’t think we had had them in the house for a number of years. I had been up into the roof once or twice on possum hunts twenty-five years ago. It was reached by a trap in the ceiling of the corridor outside Helen’s room, ten or eleven feet above the floor, inaccessible without a ladder.

Where had I seen a ladder? I had seen one somewhere, very recently, a ladder of light alloy, painted red. It was a fire ladder. I remembered it. It hung on hooks along the wall of the servants’ corridor above three fire extinguishers. It was to put out of the window of the corridor to reach down to the flat roof of the scullery in case fire isolated people on the top floor of the building.

It was worth having a look up in the roof, and I could probably manage to get up and down the ladder if I was careful and took my time. I opened the swing door wide and went in to the servants’ quarters, hoping that Annie wouldn’t come out again, and took the ladder down from the wall, and carried it in to the main house, shutting the swing door behind me. I set it up in the corridor and poked the trapdoor upwards with the top end of it; it stood at a convenient angle, firm and adequate.

It would be very dirty in the roof and I was in my evening clothes. Moreover, for a man with my disability to get up in to a roof would be something of a gymnastic feat entailing much use of the arms; I had developed a good deal of muscular strength in my arms and chest in compensation over the years. I went back into my room and put on an old pair of trousers and a pullover, and then, with the torch in my pocket, I went up in to the roof.

Getting up in to the roof wasn’t too difficult, but when I was up there there were only a few planks laid loosely on the rafters above the plaster ceiling, with nothing to hold on to if I stood up. I looked around and there was nothing unusual to be seen; various tanks and water pipes, and brick chimneys, and electrical conduits. I hesitated to stand up and walk upon the planks and crawled along on hands and knees away from the trapdoor and the ladder, till in the end I found what I was looking for.

It stood upon the rafters behind one of the tanks and in an angle formed by the brickwork of a chimney, a little shadowed place where it might have rested for fifty years and never come to light. It was a small suitcase, fairly new and free from dust or dirt. It had the initials J.P. embossed on the lid, and it was locked.

There was a bit of rope up there lying on the rafters, perhaps some relic of our possum hunts, and with this I lowered the case down through the trapdoor into the corridor. I replaced the trap and eased myself carefully down the ladder to the floor, and took the case into my room. I was very dirty, and I washed my hands before doing anything else. Then I replaced the ladder on the wall of the servants’ corridor, and went back to my room, and put the suitcase on a table by the fire.

I knew where the key was, of course. There had been three keys on a ring in her bag, but I was reluctant to go back into her room to take them from her. I had a bunch of keys of my own for my own suitcases and for the trunks that were on their way to me by sea, and I tried these all in turn to see if I had one which would unlock her suitcase.

I failed; none of them would fit. There was nothing for it; with a heavy heart I went back through the swing door, and opened the door into her room. It seemed a despicable thing that I was doing. The girl had been in trouble and she was dead, lying there beneath the sheet in the room with me. She had gone to great pains to maintain some privacy in her affairs. Now she was dead and could no longer defend herself; I had all but breached her privacy and now I was robbing her bag, to find out things about her that she wanted to keep from us.

Standing by the chest of drawers opening her bag I imagined I could feel the horror and the protest from the girl beneath the sheet upon the bed behind me. I whispered, “My dear, I’m sorry to be doing this to you,” and took the keys, and thrust the bag back into the drawer, and got out of her room and through the swing door and back to my own place as quickly as I could.

I was in no hurry to open her case, now that I could do so. I was a little shaken and upset, and not at all sure that I was doing the right thing. I left the keys lying on the suitcase and went slowly downstairs to the drawing room. There were still red embers in the grate and warmth in the room, and I poured myself another whiskey and soda to steady my nerves. The clock struck eleven while I was doing so.

I stood in front of the fire, glass in hand, recovering my self-possession. I was intensely reluctant to open that case. To do so would clearly be to act in opposition to the dead girl’s earnest wish, and one should respect the wishes of the dead. The Law might require me to do so, but I had the power to tell the Law to go jump in the lake, for nobody but I knew that the case existed. There was no evidence that the slightest harm would come to anybody if I took that suitcase now and thrust it deep into the central heating furnace, and if I did that I should certainly be carrying out the dead girl’s wish.

On the other hand, I was responsible for the happiness and well-being of everybody in our little community so far as lay within my power. Amongst our little party there had been enormous, catastrophic grief that had made this girl take her life. Unless I knew what it was that grief might come again. It might be something that did not affect Jessie Proctor alone. It might be something to be rooted out of Coombargana, some evil that had grown up with the aging of my father and relaxation of the firmness of control. We might have got a sadist or a pervert of some kind on the property. If I left this uninvestigated the grief might come again, upon some other person. Some other person might now be suffering as this girl perhaps had suffered.

It was my job to open up that case and see if I could find out what the trouble had been. A brief inspection by the coroner might have to follow, but after that it could all go into the fire and the sooner the better. But opened it would have to be.

I went up to my room again presently, with a quiet mind. There was nothing now to wait for; I shut the door carefully behind me and turned the key in the lock. Then I went over to the fire side and opened the case upon the table with one of her keys.

It was full of papers of all sorts, neatly arranged. There were letters and bank books, and about a dozen quarto manuscript books at the bottom. I shuffled through the things on top, and her passport caught my eye. I pulled it out, and stood dumbfounded by the name upon the cover. I opened it and had a little difficulty in turning the pages, for my fingers were all thumbs. I stared at the photograph that stared back from the page at me, the broad, square, kindly face that I remembered so well, the bushy dark eyebrows.

This wasn’t Jessie Proctor. It was Janet Prentice.

Leading Wren Janet Prentice, that I had met with Bill in April 1944, at Lymington in Hampshire, before the invasion of Normandy.