The Far Country (42 page)

On that same Saturday evening, Jennifer Morton drove in the coach from London Airport to the airways termini at Victoria, dazed and unhappy in the London scene. A thin February drizzle
was falling, and the air was damp and raw after the hot Australian summer. She had bought a copy of the
Evening Standard
at the airport and had glanced at the headlines, after which the paper lay unheeded in her lap. The meat ration was down to matchbox size, and was to be increased in price, the Minister for War had made a foolish speech, and the Minister for Health an inflammatory one, full of class prejudice. She knew it all so well, and she was so tired of these people, tired, tired, tired of everything that she had come back to. It was a terrible mistake, she felt, to go out of England if you had to come back. It was far better to stay quietly at home and do the daily round, and not know what went on in other, happier countries.

She was too tired to go on to Leicester that night although she could have done so, too miserable to face her father in his grief till she had mastered her own troubles and grown more accustomed to the English way of life. She took a taxi from the airways terminal to St. Pancras station and got a room for the night at the St. Pancras Hotel, a clean, bare impersonal hotel room, but warm, and with a comfortable bed. Her head was still swimming with the vista of the countries she had flashed through, her stomach still upset with irregular meals served at strange hours and in strange places. She could not eat anything; she threw off her clothes and had a bath and went to bed, and lay for a long time listening to the clamour of the London traffic, crying a little, mourning for the brown foreigner she loved and for the clear, bright sunlight of the Howqua valley.

On Sunday morning Carl Zlinter got up at dawn and went up early to the flat among the gum trees, and stood for a few minutes planning his work. He decided that it was not practical to place his house exactly where the other one had been; he would move it laterally about a foot to clear the charred stumps of the old posts. He came to the conclusion that he would build the brick chimney first and make the wooden house to suit the chimney; for an inexperienced builder it would be easier that way. He marked out the foundations for the chimney with thrusts of his spade and considered the stone slab, reputed to weigh four hundredweight. It now lay more or less where the fire was to be; it would have to be moved back about three feet, and to one side. He went back to the forest ranger’s house to borrow his crowbar, resolved to work all day and exorcise his troubles with fatigue again.

On Sunday morning Jennifer Morton came by train to Leicester station and left her two suitcases in the cloak-room for her father to pick up in the car, and walked in a fine, misty rain up the grey length of London Road to her home by Victoria Park. She pushed the familiar front door open and walked into the narrow hall; it now seemed small and rather mean to her. She opened the drawing-room door and caught her father just getting up out of his chair at the sound of her step, and realised that he had been asleep. He
looked older than when she had gone away about ten weeks before, and the room was dirty, and the tiny fire of coal was smoking.

His face lit up when he saw her. “Jenny!” he cried. “I was waiting by the telephone, because I thought you’d ring from London.”

She crossed to him and kissed him. “Poor old Daddy,” she said softly. “I’m back now, anyhow. I wish to God I’d never gone away.”

J
ENNIFER
soon found that she had a full-time job ahead of her in Leicester. In the last fortnight of her mother’s life the house had been in complete confusion, with a nurse living in; because of the extra work the domestic who came in each morning had given notice and left, and it had proved impossible to replace her. The hospital nurse, as nurses will in an emergency, had done cleaning and housekeeping for her patient, jobs which were no part of her duties; since she had left, little had been done within the house. Jennifer’s father had been greatly overworked in that grey winter season, and in the crisis he had taken all of his meals out to ease the burden. He had gone on taking his meals out after the funeral and the house had been let go; it was dirty and uncared for, and her mother’s bedroom was still full of all her clothes and personal belongings. On top of that her father was working fourteen hours a day and requiring meals at irregular hours, and every day at surgery hours Jennifer had to monitor innumerable patients who came for a prescription of a few tablets of aspirin on the Health Service, or a certificate from her father exempting them from work. Until she came to do the job herself, Jennifer had not realised how great a burden can be thrown upon a doctor’s wife in the English system of State medicine without staff and buildings adapted for the crowds of patients.

As she had realised, the loss of his wife had made an enormous gap in her father’s life. She found him distracted and morose, and with a morbid interest in her mother’s grave, and the choice of the tombstone, and the text to go on it. At first she fell in with these interests because they seemed to be the only ones he had, but presently she came to feel that the continual walks up to the cemetery were not good for him, and started to try to get him interested in other things. They dined several times at a hotel and went to the pictures, but neither of them enjoyed these evenings very much. Edward Morton wasn’t greatly excited by the cinema, and both of them disliked the poorly-cooked and standardised meals at the hotel.

Presently she found that when her father managed to get free from patients to go to his club for a game of bridge before dinner he came back relaxed and cheerful from good company and whisky, and she began managing the patients to contrive that he should get at least two of these evenings a week. She came to look with some resentment at the surgery patients with their trivial requirements
for free medicine and their endless papers to be signed. The bottom was reached, for her, when a man came for medicine and a certificate exempting him from work because he couldn’t wake up in the morning.

Presently she extended these activities, and by disciplining the patients with a sarcastic tongue she managed to free her father for lunches of the Rotary Club, for dinners of the organisations he belonged to, and even for an occasional game of bowls as summer came on. Patients began to shun this cynical, bad-tempered, red-haired girl who thought so little of their rights to free aperients and said rude things about the forms that they brought to be signed by the doctor, and they began to transfer their allegiance and their capitation fees to more accommodating practitioners, which Jennifer thought was a very good thing. With the closer insight that she now had into her father’s finances she was coming to the conclusion that he could do a good deal less work and still be comfortably solvent. She was distressed to find how much he had been saving for her mother in case he had died first, and how restricted his own life had been in consequence. She was staggered to find how much her mother’s illnesses had cost, how much her father had been paying out in life insurance premiums for her security.

She got him to surrender two of the policies in June.

She had no close friends in Leicester, having worked in London for some years. The two or three girls with whom she had been intimate at school had married and gone away, and though she had a number of school acquaintances in the district she did not bother much with them. She felt herself to be a transient in her own home town, and though she had only been in Australia for about a month, she felt herself to be far more Australian than English in her outlook. Controls that she had once accepted as the normal way of life now irritated her; it infuriated her when she neglected to order coal before the given date and so lost two months’ ration of the precious stuff. Studying to make meals more interesting for her father, she thought longingly of the claret that Jack Dorman bought in five-gallon stone jars for seven shillings a gallon, and of unlimited cream; the ration books perplexed her, and meat was a continual, bad-tempered joke.

She did her best to conceal these feelings from her father; she had not come home to England to distress him by whining about a better country on the other side of the world. All his friends and all his interests were in Leicester, and her job was to make the best of it. She was not entirely successful in her efforts; Edward Morton was no fool, and as the grief at his wife’s death abated he began to take more interest in his daughter. The frequent air-mail letters that she never discussed with him showed that her interests were very far away, and the fact that most of them were in a continental handwriting intrigued him; he was quite shrewd enough to realise that in the few weeks she had spent out there a man had come into her
life. He set himself to draw her out one evening, sitting by the fire when they had done the washing-up.

“What’s it really like out in Australia, Jenny?” he enquired. “Is it very different from this? I don’t mean physical things, like food and drink. What’s it really
like?”

She sat staring down at the socks that she was darning.

“It’s very like England in most ways,” she said. “The people out there think of everything in terms of England. I believe they think more of the King and Queen than we do. England seems to mean an awful lot to them. I don’t know how to tell you what it’s really like. It’s like England, only better.”

He sat digesting this for a minute or two. “Is it like Ethel Trehearn thought that it would be, like England was half a century ago?”

“Not really,” she said slowly. “There aren’t the servants and the social life that she was thinking of. All that’s quite different. But out there you feel perhaps it may be rather like the England she was thinking of, essentially. If you do a good job you get a good life.” She raised her eyes. “It’s all so very
English
,” she said. “When they make some money, they spend it in the sort of way we’d spend it, if we were allowed to make any and if we were allowed to spend it.”

“You didn’t feel as if you were a stranger there?”

She shook her head. “I never felt as if I was a stranger.”

He filled and lit his pipe. “Meet any doctors out there?”

“I met one,” she said.

“They don’t have any Health Service there, do they?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “There’s no panel even, like we used to have. I think there may be some sort of a voluntary insurance scheme, but I’m really not very sure, Daddy.”

“Are there enough doctors to go round? Too many, or too few?”

“Far too few, I think. That’s in the country, where the Dormans live. I don’t know about the towns.”

He sat in silence for a minute, thinking it over. “This doctor that you met—do you know what he charged a visit?”

“I don’t know—he wasn’t in practice.” There was no harm in telling him, and it might make things easier between them than if she were to keep up an unnecessary concealment. “He was a D.P., a Czech doctor who’s not on the register. He’s the one who keeps writing to me.”

“Oh. I wasn’t trying to be nosey, Jenny.”

“I know you weren’t. I don’t mind telling you about him.”

“What’s his name?”

“Carl Zlinter,” she said. “They call him Splinter in the lumber camp. All D.P.s have to work where they’re directed for two years when they first come to Australia; he works at cutting down trees. He graduated at Prague, and then he was a surgeon in the German Army in the war.”

He opened his eyes; this daughter of his had certainly wandered far from Leicester. “How did you meet him, Jenny?”

“There was an accident with a bulldozer in the forest,” she said. “I was with Jack Dorman; we came along just after it had happened.” She could smell the aromatic odours of the gum tree forest, and feel the hot sunshine in her memory. She stared into the fire, too small for coal economy to warm the room. “Two men were hurt very badly, one with a foot trapped under the bulldozer that had to be taken off upon the spot, and one with a fractured skull. There was nobody to do anything about it but Carl, and no woman to act as nurse but me, so he asked me to help him with the amputation and the trephine. He did both of them beautifully, but then the man with the amputation got hold of a bottle of whisky and got fighting drunk, and died. There was a fearful row about it, because Carl wasn’t on the register, of course.”

Her father was deeply interested; in all his medical experience such a situation had never arisen in Leicester. He asked a number of questions about the operations and the treatment but refrained from more personal enquiries, and Jennifer did not take the story further than the medical side. Her father had enough information to digest without telling him about the lost township of Howqua, and Charlie Zlinter and his dog. All she said was, “Working with him like that kind of broke the ice. He writes to me still.”

Her father smiled. “I imagine that you couldn’t be too distant after getting yourselves into a scrape like that.” Jennifer’s mother had been a nurse; his mind went back to the day when he had met her first, at St. Thomas’s, when he was a medical student; he had stepped back suddenly and made her drop a thermometer, which broke, and then he had to pacify the sister and explain that it was his fault. Medicine was strong in Jennifer’s family, but it was a pity that she had got mixed up with a foreigner who wasn’t on the register.

Jennifer kept up a correspondence with Jane Dorman, largely about Angela’s coming visit to England; with some reluctance the Dormans had decided to let her go and take a job in the old country provided that she had a job lined up to go to before leaving Australia, and they had booked a passage for her for the following January. Jennifer and her father went to some trouble over this, and finally got the promise of a job for her at St. Mary’s Hospital in Paddington and put her down for a room in a hostel for young women in Marylebone; they were rewarded by an ecstatic letter from Angela and a steady flow of food parcels from Jane. Tim Archer wrote rather a depressed letter about all this to Jennifer, who told him in reply that he had nothing much to worry about; in her opinion Paddington would probably cure Angela of her obsession in about two years, and what he had to do was to get himself a grazing property within that time.