The Unforgiving Shore Read online

  The Unforgiving Shore

  Gil Hogg

  Copyright © 2015 Gil Hogg

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study,

  or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents

  Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in

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  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

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  For Maureen

  Contents

  Cover

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  PART 1

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  PART 2

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  PART 3

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  FICTION

  A Smell of Fraud

  The Predators

  Caring for Cathy

  Blue Lantern

  Present Tense

  The Cruel Peak

  Codename Wolf

  Don’t Cry for the Brave

  NON-FICTION

  Teaching Yourself Tranquillity

  The Happy Humanist

  PART 1

  THE LETTER

  1

  Ellen thought that she would rather live on Mirabilly for the rest of her life than go back to England.

  John continued to speculate vaguely about where they might travel when they left Mirabilly and this went on for several months. The disconcerting factor for Ellen was John’s unsettled attitude. He seemed to have lost some of his enthusiasm for new places and, plainly, he felt confined at Mirabilly, vast as it was. Life on the station appeared to be a phase which was over for him.

  Ellen was as cooperative as she could be and gently guided him with an itinerary which was going to take them to Broome, Perth, Adelaide and Sydney and then New Zealand. On the way back, they would visit Melbourne and Brisbane and after that, America. This journey would take endless time. After that? God knows.

  They would have to slow down on their travels at times to allow the trickle of money from John’s trust fund to form a puddle and then they could go on. Ellen packed their schedule with new places to ensure that England was as far away as possible. John tacitly agreed on these destinations without considering them closely.

  She also realised that there was an element of absurdity in her behaviour in planning, or at least thinking of a journey without end. She was trying to avoid what the end might be. She was frightened by what the end might be; she didn’t want to think about it, much less discuss it with John.

  Their departure date had not been finally decided in June when the DC3 supply plane from Darwin brought a letter for John; Ellen couldn’t help noticing it amongst the leaflets and newspapers placed on the sideboard in the dining room by the maid; it was the kind of letter which John didn’t receive. The envelope was stiff bluish paper with an embossed sender’s address on the back: Leyton’s, Solicitors, Leadenhall Street, London.

  When John came in to breakfast after his morning ride he kissed her cheek absently and scooped up the mail from the sideboard; he placed it beside him at the table as he always did. She watched his face when he noticed the letter; he picked it up, felt it and turned it over curiously. He ignored his coffee and toast, opened the envelope and began to read.

  He was completely silent for a while, frowning. “Bloody hell! This can’t be right,” he muttered. He flipped over the pages, going back to the beginning to read the letter again.

  “What is it, John?” Ellen tried to sound casual. This was the world beyond Mirabilly reaching out to John, intruding. She felt that the unknown, in relation to him, could not be good news for her. She had already done what she could to construct a flimsy potential existence for them beyond Mirabilly. In a perverse way she didn’t want to leave. Mirabilly was crude and while it had at first been unattractive in comparison with the excitements of Sydney, here they at least had each other. John was more completely hers on this remote station than perhaps he could be anywhere else. But after their long stay he was restless.

  “Something very odd has happened, Elly.” John’s voice was unsteady. He looked radiant. “It seems I’ve inherited a major interest in all the Marchmont booty! By accident! Can you believe it?”

  He dropped the letter on the table and buried his face in his hands, his long pale hair falling forward. He made a weird wailing noise. “Can you bloody believe it, Elly?”

  She forced a smile and pushed her plate away. She should have felt elated. She actually felt ill at the uncertainty of what it meant. “That’s really great, John,” she said in a very low voice.

  He was too enthralled to notice her grudging reaction. He began rereading the letter. “It’s all completely against the odds. Not what anybody planned. Old Geoffrey wouldn’t have left me a cent.”

  He explained, waving the letter. “You remember old Geoffrey at the Grange, Elly? He was the elder statesman of the family. He was also a crafty old fox who had either inherited or acquired the bulk of the Marchmont interests. According to the solicitors, he was talking to them about a new will, but he died suddenly at nearly eighty. Only then was it found that he had already destroyed his existing will! He was a bachelor, as you know and the old boy’s next of kin was his older sister, Bernice. Dear old Bernice. She inherited everything from him. Then she died, only a few months after Geoffrey. Nearly ninety she was. In a nursing home, in Hove. And guess who, out of the whole Marchmont clan, was her favourite?”

  Bernice had a valid will made many years before and although her estate was small, it would have been a welcome inheritance for the young man she idolised, John Charles de Vries Marchmont; but as the solicitors explained, with dire warnings about the effect of taxes, Bernice lived long enough to inherit from her brother.

  “Oh, Bernice! Lovely old duck. She was one of my holiday minders when I was younger. Took me to Paris when I was fourteen. I hated every moment. All that walking and bloody art galleries. Ungrateful sod, I was!”

  “I’ve never heard you mention Bernice, John.”

  “No, well, I’d more or less forgotten about her to be truthful. I’ve only seen her once, I guess, in the last ten years and that was only for a quick slurp of tea at her doll’s house in Chelsea. I never did get around to visiting her in Hove. Always meant to. I’d have written every week if I’d known!”

  She didn’t know if John was joking or being naively honest. “How much a
re you worth, then?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, looking up at the ceiling. “The solicitors don’t say. The estate hasn’t been valued yet.”

  “Does it include Mirabilly, and even the Grange?”

  “It looks like it.”

  It was hardly worth speaking. John was in a reverie. “When you put the money in the bank…” she began. She wanted to know what he, a person who was careless with money and appeared to despise it, was going to do.

  “In the bank? What do you mean, Elly? It’s taken about seventy-five years for the family to run out of steam. I’ll be picking up the pieces and trying to put them together.”

  She shook her head in confusion. “We’ve often talked about what you were going to do and you always said you could have gone into the family business at any time, but you weren’t interested.”

  John looked at her curiously as though she hadn’t understood the obvious. “That’s right, Ellen. I never wanted to be a piece of dead wood pushed in place because of my family name. But I’m not going to be a family place-man. I’m going to be the boss, the fucking boss! Well, according to the letter, I’ll be far and away the major owner. I’ve just inherited a piece of British history, a tradition, a part of the old Empire. And that brings with it duties…”

  *

  She left John to his euphoria. She spent the day distractedly walking in the shaded paths on the Hill, or sitting under the trees and looking out over the golden territory which rolled toward the horizon; and she worried about what was to happen to them. In the evening when they were having a sherry together before dinner, she tried to be as vivacious as she could, but John hardly seemed to notice. When they sat down at the table and the girl had served the food, he spoke seriously and without preliminaries.

  “I need to get back to the old country, Elly.”

  “Surely it can all be fixed from here?”

  “The solicitors say there are papers to sign,” he began importantly and then changed to his more casual self. “I’d like to have a look at the goodies. You know, the odd cargo ship and tea plantation.”

  She played with her fork in the salad. “What about us, John?”

  “Yes, of course, Elly. I’ve been thinking about you…”

  His voice tailed away. She looked down the glassy surface of the oak table, with its candles in silver candlesticks giving a rich mellow light, at the face of the man with whom she had spent so much time alone. She was surprised by the firmness, immediacy and calculation behind the smooth geniality. The blue eyes, usually so clear, were now almost glacial.

  “Would you rather stay here, Elly? I know you love the place. I do, too.”

  She bowed her head. He was thinking of her comfort, not their relationship. She remained silent.

  He got up and came around the table and took her hand. “Ellen, you can come back with me, if you want…”

  “The grand tour is off?” she asked, trying to keep back tears, and knowing the answer.

  “Yes.” He spoke decisively, almost coldly.

  She could see clearly the end she dreaded. Back to King’s Lynn. Ellen Colbert returns, dumped by her lover!

  “I had a feeling you might not want to leave Mirabilly for a while, since we can’t go on with our plans.”

  “I don’t want to leave, John. I’m happy here, but I love you more. I’d go anywhere with you.”

  “I’ll be busy when I get to London, Elly. You can’t pick up the threads of an old colonial empire with interests all over the world in a few days, or even months.”

  She could see herself working in a shop or factory or waiting at tables in a Barton Village cafè. ‘Don’t you know who that is?’ people would say. ‘That’s Ellen Colbert. Deserted her sick husband for John Marchmont. A fat lot of good it’s done her! Not so high and mighty as she was, not by any chalk!’ She could already hear Aunt Hilda’s stinging condemnation.

  “I don’t feel I have any home, not now,” she said.

  Standing beside her, he ran his hand through her hair as she was slumped at the table. “We’ve had great times together…”

  It was all past tense. “Can’t we go on?” she asked looking up at him, her voice dry, a croak.

  “Things change, Elly.”

  “People change, John!”

  “They do… I think the best thing you can do in the meantime is to stay here as long as you want. Look after the Big House. You’ll be in charge…”

  “You mean housekeeper?”

  “Housekeeper, guest, manager, what you want.” He was vague. “I’ll leave plane tickets and money for you and you can come to London when you’re ready and… we can meet.”

  After all they had done together, they could meet; that was all. She looked beyond him through the wide windows, across the lawns to the dying flare of red clouds and the prickle of early stars. The sun had set while they were talking. The room beyond the glow of the candles was shadowed. She remembered Doris at the Grange. Doris had called John a young toff and said he would drop her like a hot coal when he was ready. And wasn’t it true? Wasn’t that what was happening right now?

  And there was something else Doris had said, when she understood how determined Ellen was to go with John. ‘Everything with John will be all right if it doesn’t spoil things for you.’ Ellen had pondered what Doris meant by ‘spoiling things’ at the time. Now, she thought she knew. You can’t go back to working at a cafè in Barton Village, Norfolk after living in the Big House, dining in this room with nobody between you and the hills a hundred miles away and nobody even beyond that for thousands of miles. You can’t go back to being a skivvy after you’ve been a queen. If you have to go back, your life is spoiled.

  Doris had been right in seeing that her life could be spoiled. She wasn’t a waitress having a fling with one of the gentry any more. That was the way it had started, but as time passed she had come to think of John as hers, as she was his. The pain of losing him would be unimaginable. She couldn’t believe she would ever recover.

  She clung to John that night in bed and sobbed herself to sleep, but it made no difference to him. He had, unusually, drunk himself into near insensibility after dinner. In the few hours since he had received the letter he had become a different man.

  *

  A week later she was stoically at the airstrip seeing John off on the supply plane bound for Darwin. Half a dozen other senior staff were there too. She was the only person who knew of John’s fortune; his telephone calls to the solicitors in London had been very guarded and the news had not leaked so far.

  John took her in his arms in front of the Farrells and the others, as the pilot was gunning the engines of the Dakota. His lips touched hers perhaps for the last time and she pulled away from him in a cloud of red dust.

  “We’ll meet soon,” he said, releasing her.

  She seemed to recall something in Casablanca like this, but there was nothing romantic about the parting here; it was a cold moment of rejection. She held her head up and smiled. As soon as he turned to the aircraft, she walked quickly away. By the time the plane had cleared the trees, her driver was churning the Jeep in low gear up the drive to the Big House.

  She went into the cool, quiet interior. Other than two schoolgirl daughters of jackeroos who were doing odd jobs and two Aboriginal maids, there was nobody in the ‘owner’s wing’ where she and John had lived. Jim Farrell, the general manager of the station and Maureen, his wife, maintained scrupulous privacy in their wing. Ellen gave the girls a week’s pay and told them it wasn’t necessary to come back. She could rely on the maids to deal with her requests and not to bother her.

  In the solitude of the bedroom she started to cry and she may have cried for a day and a night. When she awoke her eyes and lips were swollen and her chest was sore.

  It was over.

  *

  After a week, Ellen went out of the Big House and walked or rode alone in the early morning or evening. She walked past the Village down to the Juduba River, now
shrunk to a muddly trickle, like her relationship with John.

  She couldn’t be bothered to supervise the maids and she let them get on with the housework and cooking. She rebuffed all callers and ate alone at her place at the long table in the dining room, with the crystal glistening in the candlelight. She took little notice of food except to swallow it. She had no confidant and kept Maureen Farrell and the other wives on the Hill at a distance. Maureen had brothers, sisters and children of her own and knew a troubled heart when she saw one; it wasn’t a secret Ellen could keep from anybody on the Hill or in the Village. All she could do was hide in the shadows of the Big House.

  She wanted to write to John and she sat for hours at the antique Dutch bureau in the lounge trying to make notes of what to say. She had followed an assiduous course of self-education since she met him, reading books and newspapers, always with a dictionary beside her, but she couldn’t find the words for the purpose of this letter. When she did find a phrase, her handwriting looked like a child’s.

  There was nobody to ask for help as a writer. Maureen Farrell and the wives on the Hill, if they knew all, would probably contend cynically that they had foreseen her plight. And the sluttish wives in the Village were as illiterate as she was. She couldn’t reveal her ignorance, or share her shame with any of them. She might have found a neutral scribe in Darwin, a parson perhaps. But she couldn’t ask a stranger to write a sensitive letter about two people he didn’t know, a letter she couldn’t clearly articulate herself. It was the same when she thought of the telephone. What could she say to John that she hadn’t already said? And what would she want to say with the Mirabilly operator listening in?