In the Wet (13 page)

“Would you like to come and have supper with us, in
Evadne
?” she asked. “There’s only my uncle and me—he’s a retired captain, R.N.”

He hesitated. “It’s very kind of you to ask me,” he said. “What about the food, though?”

“That’s all right,” she said. “We’ve got a lot of tins.”

“Shall I bring my ham?” he suggested.

“We couldn’t eat your ham,” she said. “We’ll be all right. There’s heaps to eat on board.”

“I’d better bring the ham,” he said. “It’ll go bad if it’s not eaten. The last one did.”

She was startled, and a little shocked. “Went bad?”

“I couldn’t get through it,” he explained. “I had to throw half of it away.”

What was normal to him seemed an inconceivable blunder to her. “If that’s what’s going to happen we’d better help you eat it,” she said firmly. “Let’s have a look at it.”

Down in the saloon they held a small conference over the ham, an enormous mass of meat to her. “How big is it—Nigger?” she asked.

He smiled. “Eighteen pounds—Rosemary.”

“Whatever are you going to do with it? It’ll take you months to get through that alone.”

He looked puzzled. “I don’t think so. One eats a pound or so a day. The other only went bad because I was away.”

“You couldn’t possibly eat that!”

“Why—I should think so. Look, that bit that’s cut—that was supper last night and breakfast this morning.”

“Just you alone?” He nodded, and she stared at the gap: what he said was probably true. “I suppose we don’t eat so much meat in England,” she said.

“Too right,” he remarked drily. “I’ve noticed that already.”

They wrapped the ham up and took it up into the cockpit. “How long have you been working at the Palace?” he asked.

“Three years,” she said.

“Like it?”

She nodded. “One feels so much in the centre of things. It would be awfully flat working anywhere else, after being there.”

He said curiously, “Do you see much of the Queen?”

She laughed. “Not me. Miss Porson takes her letters if she ever wants to write one herself, to be typed. Mostly she writes in her own hand, or else one of the Secretaries writes for her.” She paused. “I’ve seen her often enough, of course—taking things to Major Macmahon when he’s in with her, or passing in the corridor. I don’t think she knows my name.”

“What’s she like?” he asked. “I’ve only seen her on the pictures.”

“You’ll be meeting her before long, of course,” she said. “She’s much smaller than you’d think from photographs.” She stared out across the harbour. “She’s a very wonderful
person,” she said quietly. “She’s got such courage …”

“Courage?”

“That’s what I said.” She turned to him, smiling a little. “We’re gossiping too much,” she said. “That’s one of the things we have to learn in our job—not to gossip about our betters. And when I say betters, I mean betters.”

She turned to her boat. “Come over about six o’clock,” she said. “Uncle Ted wants to go on shore first, but we’ll be back by then. I think I’ll make some ham toasts of this ham. I won’t take too much.”

She rowed off in her dinghy, and David watched her thread her way between the yachts and climb up on to the deck of the yawl.

He rowed across later in the evening, and was met by the uncle, a man of about seventy still lean and athletic, called Captain Osborne. He greeted the Australian warmly, and offered him a drink, but the pilot refused. “I don’t at all,” he said. “I never have. But please don’t let me stop you.”

From the saloon Rosemary said, “I’ve got some tomato juice. I could make you a tomato juice cocktail.”

“I’d like that.” So they sat in the cockpit while the girl cooked dinner, appearing now and then for a glass of sherry with the men and going down again, while the captain drank pink gins and David drank tomato juice.

For half an hour they chatted. Then his host said, “There’s one thing about Australia I wish you’d tell me. How does your multiple vote work? It’s quite an issue here in England, as perhaps you know.”

The pilot raised his eyebrows. “I didn’t know that. You don’t have it, do you?”

“No. How does it work out in practice?”

“I don’t really know,” said David. “I’ve never thought about it much.”

Captain Osborne asked, “Have you got more than one vote, yourself?”

The pilot nodded. “I’m a three vote man.”

“I hope you don’t mind me asking these questions,” the captain said. “It really is getting rather important now in England.”

“I don’t mind,” David said. “The only thing is, I’m afraid I don’t know much about it. I’ve never bothered.”

“What do you get your three votes for?” the captain asked.

“Basic, education, and foreign travel.”

“The basic vote—that’s what everybody gets, is it?”

“That’s right,” the pilot said. “Everybody gets that at the age of twenty one.”

“And education?”

“That’s for higher education,” David said. “You get it if you take a university degree. There’s a whole list of other things you get it for, like being a solicitor or a doctor. Officers get it when they’re commissioned. That’s how I got mine.”

“And foreign travel?”

“That’s for earning your living outside Australia for two years. It’s a bit of a racket, that one, because in the war a lot of people got it for their war service. I got mine that way. I didn’t know anything about the Philippines, really, when I came away, although I’d been there for three years, off and on.”

“You had a wider outlook than if you’d stayed at home,” the captain said. “I suppose that’s worth something.”

“I suppose it is.”

“So you’ve got three votes. How does that work out in practice, at an election?”

“You get three voting papers given to you, and fill in all three, and put them in the box,” the pilot said.

“You’re on the register as having three votes?”

“That’s right. You have to register again when you get an extra vote—produce some sort of a certificate.”

They sat in silence for a time, looking out over the crowded harbour in the sunset light. Rosemary came to the saloon ladder and spoke up to them. “You can get more votes than three, can’t you?” she said. “Is it seven?”

David glanced down at her. “The seventh is hardly ever given,” he said. “Only the Queen can give that.”

She nodded. “I know. We get them coming through the office. I should think there must be about ten a year.”

“The others are straightforward,” David said. “You get a vote if you raise two children to the age of fourteen without getting a divorce. That’s the family vote.”

“You can’t get it if you’re divorced?” asked Rosemary smiling.

“No. That puts you out.”

“Do you both get it?”

“Husband and wife both get it,” David said.

“What’s the fifth one?” asked the captain.

“The achievement vote,” said David. “You get an extra vote if your personal exertion income—what you call earned income here—if that was over something or other in the year before the election—five thousand a year, I think. I don’t aspire to that one. It’s supposed to cater for the man who’s got no education and has never been out of Australia and quarrelled with his wife, but built up a big business. They reckon that he ought to have more say in the affairs of the country than his junior typist.”

“Maybe. And the sixth?”

“That’s if you’re an official of a church. Any recognised Christian church—they’ve got a list of them. You don’t have to be a minister. I think churchwardens get it as well as vicars, but I’m really not quite sure. What it boils down
to is that you get an extra vote if you’re doing a real job for a church.”

“That’s an interesting one.”

“It’s never interested
me
much,” said the pilot. “I suppose I’m not ambitious. But I think it’s quite a good idea, all the same.”

“So that’s six votes,” Captain Osborne said. “The basic vote, and education, and foreign travel, and the family vote, and the achievement vote, and the church vote. What’s the seventh?”

“That’s given at the Queen’s pleasure,” said David. “It’s more like a decoration. You get it if you’re such a hell of a chap that the Queen thinks you ought to have another vote.”

“Aren’t there any rules about getting it?”

“I don’t think so,” said the pilot. “I think you just get it for being a good boy.”

From the cabin hatch Rosemary said, “That’s right, Uncle Ted. It’s given by a Royal Charter in each case.” She added, “I’m just dishing up.”

They went down into the cabin of the yawl and sat down to the ham toasts. For a time they talked about yachts and the Solent, and of Rosemary’s cooking, and of English food, but Captain Osborne was absent minded. Presently he brought the conversation back to the Australian system of voting. “About this multiple voting,” he said. “They do it in New Zealand too, don’t they?”

“I think they do,” said David. “Yes, I’m pretty sure they do.”

“They do it in Canada,” said Rosemary. “Most of the Commonwealth countries have the multiple vote in one form or another, except England.”

David smiled. “You’re pretty conservative here.”

The naval officer nodded slowly. “Yes,” he said. “We
don’t take up new things like that till they’re well proved.” He paused, and then he said. “Of course, you’ve got your States. You can try a thing like that out in your State elections, and see how it goes.”

“That’s how women got the vote in the Commonwealth,” Rosemary said. “New Zealand started it, in 1893, and then South Australia gave women the vote in 1894. When the Australian Federal constitution was drafted in 1902 they gave women the vote. They didn’t get it in England till 1918.”

David stared at her. “Is that right? Where did you get that from?”

“It’s right enough,” the girl said coolly. “I did History at Oxford, and women take an interest in the women’s vote. But it was the same with the secret ballot in elections. South Australia started that in 1856, but English voters didn’t get a secret ballot till 1872.”

“Some time like that,” the pilot said. “A bit before my time, and I never did much history. I remember when the multiple vote started, though. It was when I was in Townsville, in 1963. They brought it in for West Australia.”

“Why did West Australia start it?” asked Rosemary. “Why not New South Wales, or Queensland?”

“I don’t know,” said David. “Labour was very much against it.”

“They’re against it here,” said Captain Osborne drily.

“West Australia was always pretty Liberal,” the pilot said. “People had been talking about multiple voting for a long time before that. I reckon it was easier to get it through in West Australia.”

“How did it come to be taken up by the other States, if Labour was so much against it?” asked Rosemary.

“Aw, look,” said David. “West Australia was walking away with everything. We got a totally different sort of
politician when we got the multiple vote. Before that, when it was one man one vote, the politicians were all tub-thumping nonentities and union bosses. Sensible people didn’t stand for Parliament, and if they stood they didn’t get in. When we got multiple voting we got a better class of politician altogether, people who got elected by sensible voters.” He paused. “Before that, when a man got elected to the Legislative Assembly, he was an engine driver or a dock labourer, maybe. He got made a minister and top man of a government department. Well, he couldn’t do a thing. The public servants had him all wrapped up, because he didn’t know anything.”

“And after the multiple voting came in, was it different?”

“My word,” said the Australian. “We got some real men in charge. Did the Public Service catch a cold! Half of them were out on their ear within a year, and then West Australia started getting all the coal and all the industry away from New South Wales and Victoria. And then these chaps who had been running West Australia started to get into Canberra. In 1973, when the multiple vote came in for the whole country, sixty per cent of the Federal Cabinet were West Australians. It got so they were running every bloody thing.”

“Because they were better people?” asked the captain.

“That’s right.” The pilot paused. “It was that multiple voting made a nation of Australia, I think,” he said. “Before then we weren’t much, no more than England.”

Miss Long laughed. “Thanks.”

He was confused. “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean it that way.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “I’ve never yet met anybody who could defend our way of doing things.”

She switched the conversation, and began to talk about boats; no more was said of politics. Later in the evening,
when he said good night to go back to his own vessel, the captain stayed below and Rosemary went up on deck to see the pilot into his dinghy. The moon was rising over the little town, the harbour bathed in silvery light reflected from the water. The pilot stood on deck, looking around him at the many yachts, the harbour, and the down. “My word,” he said quietly. “It’s a beautiful place, this.”

Beside him the girl said, “You don’t like England much, do you?”

“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “I love the scenery, like this. I’d always want to come back here again to see what’s new in aviation, or in engineering, or techniques.” He hesitated. “I don’t like what I’ve seen of the way you govern yourselves. I think a lot of that is obsolete and stupid.”

“Maybe some of us think that ourselves,” she said.

He glanced at her, slim and straight beside him in the moonlight, holding the ham wrapped up in greaseproof paper. He took the ham from her. “Your uncle seemed very interested in our way of voting.”

“Yes,” she said. “It’s coming to be quite an issue here, like the women’s vote was back at the beginning of the century. I suppose history’s going to repeat itself—it usually does. We’ll end by copying Australia.” She turned to him. “Be careful how you go, Nigger,” she said. “Some of the politicians don’t much care for the Dominions getting into the Queen’s Flight. Be careful not to get mixed up in anything.”

He smiled. “I’m here to fly the aeroplane,” he said. “I don’t intend to get mixed up in British politics.”

He stooped and untied the painter of the dinghy. “Thanks for everything, Rosemary,” he said. “See you some time at Buck House.”