A Town Like Alice (20 page)

"The funniest do I ever struck," said the chief pilot presently, "was a party of women and children that never got into a prison camp at all. They spent most of the war in a Malay village working in the paddy fields."

Joe said quickly, "Where was that in Malaya? I met that party."

The pilot said, "It was somewhere between Kuantan and Kota Bahru. When we got back they were taken in trucks to Kota Bahru, and I flew them down to Singapore. All English, they were, but they looked just like Malays. All the women were in native clothes, and brown as anything."

Joe said, "Was there a Mrs Paget with them then?" It was vastly important to him to hear if Jean had survived the war.

The pilot said, "There was a
Miss
Paget. She was the hell of a fine girl; she was their leader."

Joe said, "Mrs. A dark-haired girl, with a baby."

The pilot said, "That's right-a dark-haired girl. She had a little boy about four years old that she was looking after, but it wasn't hers. It belonged to one of the other women, one who died. I know that, because she was the only unmarried girl among the lot of them, and she was their leader. Just a typist in Kuala Lumpur before the war. Miss Jean Paget."

Joe stared at him. "I thought she was a married woman."

"She wasn't married. I know she wasn't, because the Japs had taken all their wedding rings so they had to be sorted out and that was quite easy, because they were all Mrs So-and-So except this one girl, and she was Miss Jean Paget."

"That's right," the ringer said slowly. "Jean was her name."

He left the bar presently, and went out to the veranda and stood looking up at the stars. Presently he left the pub and strolled towards the stockyards; he found a gate to lean upon and stood there for a long time in the night, thinking things over. He told me a little about what he had been thinking, that morning in my London flat.

"She was a bonza girl," he said simply. "If ever I got married it would have to be with somebody like her."

I smiled. "I see," I said. "That's why you came to England?"

"That's right," he said simply. He had ridden back with Jim Lennon and the Abo stockmen to Midhurst, a journey that took them about ten days, leading their string of fifteen packhorses; since they had started mustering on the station in February he had been in the saddle almost continuously for three months. "Then there was the bore to see to," he said. "I'd made such a point of that with Mrs Spears that I couldn't hardly leave before that was finished, but then I got away and I went into Cairns one Wednesday with John Duffy on the Milk Run"-I found out later that he meant the weekly Dakota air mail service-"and so down to Brisbane. And from Brisbane I came here."

"What about the Golden Casket?" I inquired.

He said a little awkwardly, "I didn't tell you right about that. I
did
win the Casket, but not this year. I won it in 1946, the year after I got back to Queensland. I won a thousand pounds then, like I said."

"I see," I observed. "You hadn't spent it?"

He shook his head. "I was saving it, in case some day I got to have a station of my own, or do a deal with cattle, or something."

"How much do you think you've got left now?"

He said, "There's five hundred pounds of our money on the letter of credit, and I suppose that's all I've got. Four hundred pounds of yours. There's my pay as manager goes into the bank at Willstown each month, of course."

I sat smoking for a time in silence, and I couldn't help being sorry for this.man. Since he had met Jean Paget six years previously he had held the image of her in his mind hoping to find somebody a little like her. When he had heard that she was not a married woman he had drawn the whole of his small savings and hurried expensively half across the world to England, hoping to find her and to find that she was still unmarried. It was a gambler's action, but his whole life had probably been made up of gambles; it could hardly be otherwise in the outback. Clearly he thought little of his money if it could buy a chance for him of marrying Jean Paget.

It was ironical to think that she was at that moment busy looking for him in his own country. I did not feel that I was quite prepared to tell him that.

"I still don't quite understand why you've given up the idea of writing to Miss Paget," I said at last. "You said something about Willstown."

"Yes." There was a pause, and then he said in his slow way, "I thought a lot about things after I left you, Mr Strachan. Maybe I'd have done better to have done some thinking before ever I left Midhurst. I told you, I got none of them high-falutin ideas about not marrying a girl with money. So long as she was the right girl, I'd be tickled to death if she had money, same as any man. But there's more to it than that."

He paused again. "I come from the outback," he said slowly. "Running a cattle station is the only work I know, and its where I like to be. I couldn't make out in any of the big cities, Brisbane or Sydney. I couldn't make out even in Cairns for very long, and anyway, there'd be no work there I could do. I never got a lot of schooling, living on a station like we did. I don't say that I won't make money. I can run a station better'n most ringers, and I seem to do all right with selling the stock too. I'll hope to get a station of my own one day, and there's plenty of station owners finish up with fifty thousand pounds. But if I get that far, it'll be staying in the outback and doing what I'm cut out for. And I tell you, Mr Strachan, the outback is a crook place for a woman."

"In what way?" I asked quietly. We were really getting down to something now.

He smiled a little wryly. "Take Willstown, as an example. There's no radio station to listen to, only the short wave stuff from Brisbane and that comes and goes with static. There's no shop where you can buy fruit or fresh vegetables. The sister says that it's because of that so many of the old folk get this pellagra. There's no fresh milk. There's no dress shop, only what a woman can get in Bill Duncan's Store along with the dried peas and Jeyes Fluid and that. There's no ice-cream in Willstown. There's nowhere that a woman can buy a paper or a magazine or a book, and there's no doctor because we can't get one to come to Willstown. There's no telephone. There's no swimming-pool where a girl could sit around in a pretty bathing dress, although it can be hot there, oh my word. There's no other young women. I don't believe there's more'n five women in the district between the age of seventeen and forty; as soon as they're old enough to leave home they're off out of it, and down to the city. To get to Cairns to do a bit of shopping you can either fly, which costs money, or you can drive for four days in a jeep, and after that you'll find the jeep needs a new set of tyres." He paused. "It's a grand country for a man to live and work in, and good money, too. But it's a crook place for a woman."

"I see," I said. "Are all the outback towns like that?"

"Most of them," he said. "You get the bigger ones, like the Curry, they're better, of course. But Camooweal and Normanton and Burketown and Croydon and Georgetown-they're all just the same as Willstown." He paused for a moment in thought. "There's only one good one for a woman," he said. "Alice Springs. Alice is a bonza place, oh my word. A girl's got everything in Alice-two picture houses, shops for everything, fruit, ice-cream, fresh milk, Eddie Maclean's swimming-pool, plenty of girls and young married women in the place, and nice houses to live in. Alice is a bonza town," he said, "but that's the only one."

"Why is that?" I asked. "What makes Alice different from the others?"

He scratched his head. "I dunno," he said. "It's just that it's got bigger, I suppose."

I left that one. "What you mean is that if you got Miss Paget to agree to marry you, she wouldn't have a very happy life in Willstown."

He nodded. "That's right," he said, and there was pain in his eyes. "It all seemed sort of different when I met her in Malaya. You see, she was a prisoner and she hadn't got nothing, and I hadn't got nothing either, so there was a pair of us. When I got to know there was a chance she wouldn't be married I was so much in a hurry to get over here I didn't stop to think about the outback, or if I did I thought of her as someone who'd got nothing so she'd be all right in Willstown. See what I mean?" He looked at me appealingly. "But then I come to England and I see Southampton and the sort of way people live there, bombed and muggered up although it is, and I been in London and I been in Colwyn Bay. Then when you told me she'd come into money I got thinking about how she would be living and the sort of things that she'd be used to and she wouldn't get in Willstown, and then I thought I'd acted a bit hasty. I never know it to work, for a girl to come straight out from England to the outback. And for a girl with money of her own, it’ll be worse still." He paused, and grinned at me. "So I went out on the grog."

In all the circumstances, it now seemed to me that he had taken a very reasonable line of action, but it was a pity it had cost him seventy pounds. "Look, Joe," I said. "We want to think about this thing a bit. I think I'll have to write and tell Miss Paget that I've met you. You see, she thought you were dead."

He stared at me. "You knew about me, then?"

"Not very much," I said. "I know that you stole chickens for her, and the Japs nailed you up and beat you. She thought you died."

"I bloody near did," he said grinning. "She told you that, did she?"

I nodded. "It's been a very deep grief to her," I said quietly. "You wouldn't want her to go on like that? You see, she thinks it was her fault."

"It wasn't her fault at all," he said in his slow way. "She told me not to stick my neck out, and I went and bought it. It wasn't her fault at all."

"I think you ought to write to her," I repeated.

There was a long pause.

"I dunno what in hell I'd say to her if I did," he muttered.

There was no point in going on agonizing about it. I got up. "Look, Joe," I said. Take a bit of time to think it over. When have you got to be back in Australia?"

"I wouldn't be doing right by Mrs Spears unless I get back on the station by the end of October," he said. "I don't want to serve her a crook deal."

"That gives you two and a half months," I said. "How much did your airline ticket cost you when you came here?"

"Three hundred and twenty-five pounds," he said.

"And you've got five hundred pounds left, on your letter of credit."

"That's right."

"Do you want to go back by air, or would you rather go by sea? I could find out about sea passages for you, if you like. I think it would cost about eighty pounds on a tramp steamer, but you'd have to leave pretty soon-within a fortnight, say."

"There don't seem to be much point in staying here," he said a little wearily. "There wouldn't be no chance that she'll be coming back to England?"

"Not in that time, I'm afraid."

"I'd better go back by sea, and save what's left of the money."

"I think that's wise," I said. "I'll get my office on to finding out about the passage. In the meantime, why don't you move in here? You're welcome to use that spare room till you go, and it will be cheaper for you than living in the hotel."

"Wouldn't I be in your way?"

"Not in the least," I said. "I'm out most of the day, and I'd be very glad for you to stay here if you'd like to."

He agreed to that, and I asked him what he wanted most to see in England in his brief visit. He wanted to see No 19 Acacia Road, Hammersmith, where his father had been born. He wanted to see a live broadcast of 'Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh' which he listened to on short wave from Brisbane when the static permitted. ("They've got a bonza radio at Alice," he said wistfully. "A local station, right in the town.") He wanted to see all he could of thoroughbred horses and thoroughbred cattle. He was interested in saddlery, but he didn't think that we had much to teach them about that.

There was no difficulty about Hammersmith, of course; I put him in a bus that afternoon, and went into my office to deal with my neglected work. Apart from the clients who came to see me, I had plenty to think about. Whether Jean Paget chose to marry this man when she met him was entirely her own affair, but it was quite a possibility that she would do so. Whatever one might think about the suitability of such a match, there was no denying that Joe Harman had some very solid virtues; he seemed to be hard-working, thrifty if one excepts the great extravagance of flying half across the world to look for the girl he loved, and likely to make a success of his life; quite certainly he was a kind man who would make a good husband.

There was another aspect of the matter which was worth investigation. Whether she knew it or not, Jean Paget had Australia in her ancestry. She had never mentioned her grandfather, James Macfadden, to me and it seemed quite possible that she had never thought about him much. And yet, he was the original source of her money, and apparently he had made it in Australia before coming home to England to break his neck while riding in a point-to-point in Yorkshire. It would be interesting, I thought, to find out a little more about James Macfadden. Had he made his money on an outback cattle station, too? Had he been just such another as Joe Harman?

I sent my girl that afternoon to bring me the Macfadden box, and I sat looking through the old deeds and wills after my last client had gone. The only clue I found was in the Will of James Macfadden dated September 18th, 1903, which began, 'I, James Nelson Macfadden of Lowdale Manor, Kirkby Moorside, in the County of Yorkshire, and of Hall's Creek in Western Australia, do hereby revoke all former wills… etc.' I knew nothing of Hall's Creek at that time, but I noted the name for future investigation. That is all there was.