On the Beach (16 page)

“But Melbourne is the last big city?”

“That’s what it looks like, at the moment.”

They sat in silence for a little while. “What will you do,” the grazier asked at last. “Will you move your ship?”

“I haven’t decided that,” the captain said slowly. “Maybe I won’t have to decide it. I’ve got a senior officer, Captain Shaw, in Brisbane. I don’t suppose he’ll move because his ship can’t move. Maybe he’ll send me orders. I don’t know.”

“Would you
move, if it was at your own discretion?”

“I haven’t decided that,” the captain said again. “I can’t see that there’s a great deal to be gained. Nearly forty per cent of my ship’s company have got themselves tied up with girls in Melbourne—married, some of them. Say I was to move to Hobart. I can’t take them along, and they can’t get there any other way, and if they could there’s nowhere there for them to live. It seems kind of rough on the men to separate them from their women in the last few days, unless there was some compelling reason in the interest of the naval service.” He glanced up, grinning. “Anyway, I don’t suppose they’d come. Most of them would probably jump ship.”

“I suppose they would. I think they’d probably decide to put the women first.”

The American nodded. “It’s reasonable. And there’s no sense in giving orders that you know won’t be obeyed.”

“Could you take your ship to sea without them?”

“Why, yes—just for a short run. Hobart would be a short trip, six or seven hours. We could take her there with just a dozen men, or even less. We wouldn’t submerge if we were as short-handed as that, and we couldn’t cruise for any length of time. But if we got her there, or even to New Zealand—say to Christchurch; without a full crew we could never be effective, operationally.” He paused. “We’d be just refugees.”

They sat in silence for a time. “One of the things that’s been surprising me,” the grazier said, “is that there have been so few refugees. So few people coming down from the north. From Cairns and Townsville, and from places like that.”

“Is that so?” the captain asked. “It’s just about impossible to get a bed in Melbourne—anywhere.”

“I know there have been some. But not the numbers that I should have expected.”

“That’s the radio, I suppose,” Dwight said. “These talks that the Prime Minister’s been giving have been kind of steadying. The A.B.C.’s been doing a good job in telling people just the way things are. After all, there’s not much comfort in leaving home and coming down here to live in a tent or in a car, and have the same thing happen to you a month or two later.”

“Maybe,” the grazier said. “I’ve heard of people going back to Queensland after a few weeks of that. But I’m not sure that that’s the whole story. I believe it is that nobody really thinks it’s going to happen, not to them, until they start to feel ill. And by that time, well, it’s less effort to stay at home and take it. You don’t recover from this once it starts, do you?”

“I don’t think that’s true. I think you
can
recover, if you get out of the radioactive area into a hospital where you get proper treatment. They’ve got a lot of cases from the north in the Melbourne hospitals right now.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“No. They don’t say anything about that over the radio. After all, what’s the use, They’re only going to get it over again next September.”

“Nice outlook,” said the grazier. “Will you have another whisky now?”

“Thank you, I believe I will.” He stood up and poured
himself a drink. “You know,” he said, “now that I’ve got used to the idea I think I’d rather have it this way. We’ve all got to die one day, some sooner and some later. The trouble always has been that you’re never ready, because you don’t know when it’s coming. Well, now we do know, and there’s nothing to be done about it. I kind of like that. I kind of like the thought that I’ll be fit and well up till the end of August and then—home. I’d rather have it that way than go on as a sick man from when I’m seventy to when I’m ninety.”

“You’re a regular naval officer,” the grazier said. “You’re probably more accustomed to this sort of thing than I would be.”

“Will you evacuate?” the captain asked. “Go some place else when it gets near, Tasmania?”

“Me? Leave this place?” the grazier said. “No, I shan’t go. When it comes, I’ll have it here, on this verandah, in this chair, with a drink in my hand. Or else in my own bed. I wouldn’t leave this place.”

“I’d say that’s the way most folks think about it, now that they’ve got used to the idea.”

They sat on the verandah in the setting sun till Moira came to tell them that tea was ready. “Drink up,” she said, “and come in for the blotting paper, if you can still walk.”

Her father said, “That’s not the way to talk to our guest.”

“You don’t know our guest as well as I do, Daddy. I tell you, you just can’t get him past a pub. Any pub.”

“More likely he can’t get you past one.” They went into the house.

There followed a very restful two days for Dwight Towers. He handed over a great bundle of mending to the two women, who took it away from him, sorted it, and
busied themselves over it. In the hours of daylight he was occupied with Mr. Davidson upon the farm from dawn till dusk. He was initiated into the arts of crutching sheep and of shovelling silage up into a cart and distributing it in the paddocks; he spent long hours walking by the bullock on the sunlit pastures. The change did him good after his confined life in the submarine and in the mother ship; each night he went to bed early and slept heavily, and awoke refreshed for the next day.

On the last morning of his stay, after breakfast, Moira found him standing at the door of a small outside room beside the laundry, now used as a repository for luggage, ironing boards, gum boots, and junk of every description. He was standing at the open door smoking a cigarette, looking at the assortment of articles inside. She said, “That’s where we put things when we tidy up the house and say we’ll send it to the jumble sale. Then we never do.”

He smiled. “We’ve got one of those, only it’s not so full as this. Maybe that’s because we haven’t lived there so long.” He stood looking in upon the mass with interest. “Say, whose tricycle was that?”

“Mine,” she said.

“You must have been quite small when you rode around on that.”

She glanced at it. “It does look small now, doesn’t it? I should think I was four or five years old.”

“There’s a Pogo stick!” He reached in and pulled it out; it squeaked rustily. “It’s years and years since I saw a Pogo stick. There was quite a craze for them at one time, back home.”

“They went out for a time, and then they came back into fashion,” she said. “Quite a lot of kids about here have Pogo sticks now.”

“How old would you have been when you had that?”

She thought for a moment, “It came after the tricycle, after the scooter, and before the bicycle. I should think I was about seven.”

He held it in his hands thoughtfully. “I’d say that’s about the right age for a Pogo stick. You can buy them in the shops here, now?”

“I should think so. The kids use them.”

He laid it down. “It’s years since I saw one of those in the United States. They go in fashions, as you say.” He glanced around. “Who owned the stilts?”

“My brother had them first, and then I had them. I broke that one.”

“He was older than you, wasn’t he?”

She nodded. “Two years older—two and a half.”

“Is he in Australia now?”

“No. He’s in England.”

He nodded; there was nothing useful to be said about that. “Those stilts are quite high off the ground,” he remarked. “I’d say you were older then.”

She nodded. “I must have been ten or eleven.”

“Skis.” He measured the length of them with his eye. “You must have been older still.”

“I didn’t go skiing till I was about sixteen. But I used those up till just before the war. They were getting a bit small for me by then, though. That other pair were Donald’s.”

He ran his eye around the jumbled contents of the little room. “Say,” he said, “there’s a pair of water-skis!”

She nodded. “We still use those—or we did up till the war.” She paused. “We used to go for summer holidays at Barwon Heads. Mummy used to rent the same house every year …” She stood in silence for a moment, thinking of the sunny little house by the golf links, the
warm sands, the cool air rushing past as she flew behind the motor boat in a flurry of warm spray. “There’s the wooden spade I used to build sand castles with when I was very little …”

He smiled at her. “It’s kind of fun, looking at other people’s toys and trying to think what they must have looked like at that age. I can just imagine you at seven, jumping around on that Pogo stick.”

“And flying into a temper every other minute,” she said. She stood for a moment looking in at the door thoughtfully. “I never would let Mummy give any of my toys away,” she said quietly. “I said that I was going to keep them for my children to play with. Now there aren’t going to be any.”

“Too bad,” he said. “Still, that’s the way it is.” He pulled the door to and closed it on so many sentimental hopes. “I think I’ll have to get back to the ship this afternoon and see if she’s sunk at her moorings. Do you know what time there’d be a train?”

“I don’t, but we can ring the station and find out. You don’t think you could stay another day?”

“I’d like to, honey, but I don’t think I’d better. There’ll be a pile of paper on my desk that needs attention.”

“I’ll find out about the train. What are you going to do this morning?”

“I told your father that I’d finish harrowing the hill paddock.”

“I’ve got an hour or so to do around the house. I’ll probably come out and walk around with you after that.”

“I’d like that. Your bullock’s a good worker, but he doesn’t make a lot of conversation.”

They gave him his newly mended clothes after lunch. He expressed his thanks for all that they had done for him, packed his bag, and Moira drove him down to the station.

There was an exhibition of Australian religious paintings at the National Gallery; they arranged to go and see that together before it came off; he would give her a ring. Then he was in the train for Melbourne, on his way back to his work.

He got back to the aircraft carrier at about six o’clock. As he had supposed, there was a pile of paper on his desk, including a sealed envelope with a security label gummed on the outside. He slit it open and found that it contained a draft operation order, with a personal note attached to it from the First Naval Member asking him to ring up for an appointment and come and see him about it.

He glanced the order through. It was very much as he had thought that it would be. It was within the capacity of his ship to execute, assuming that there were no mines at all laid on the west coast of the United States, which seemed to him to be a bold assumption.

He rang up Peter Holmes that evening at his home near Falmouth. “Say,” he said, “I’ve got a draft operation order lying on my desk. There’s a covering letter from the First Naval Member, wants me to go and see him. I’d like it if you could come on board tomorrow and look it over. Then I’d say you’d better come along when I go to see the Admiral.”

“I’ll be on board tomorrow morning, early,” said the liaison officer.

“Well, that’s fine. I hate to pull you back off leave, but this needs action.”

“That’s all right, sir. I was only going to take down a tree.”

He was in the aircraft carrier by half past nine next morning, seated with Commander Towers in his little office cabin, reading through the order. “It’s more or less what you thought it was going to be, sir, isn’t it?” he asked.

“More or less,” the captain agreed. He turned to the side table. “This is all we’ve got on the minefields. This radio station that they want investigated. They’ve pinpointed that in the Seattle area. Well, we’re all right for that.” He raised a chart from the table. “This is the key minefield chart of the Juan de Fuca and Puget Sound. We should be safe to go right up to Bremerton naval yard. We’re all right for Pearl Harbor, but they don’t ask us to go there. The Gulf of Panama, San Diego, and San Francisco—we’ve got nothing on those at all.”

Peter nodded. “We’ll have to explain that to the Admiral. As a matter of fact, I think he knows it. I know that he’s quite open to a general discussion of this thing.”

“Dutch Harbor,” said the captain. “We’ve got nothing on that.”

“Would we meet any ice up there?”

“I’d say we would. And fog, a lot of fog. It’s not so good to go there at this time of year, with no watch on deck. We’ll have to be careful up around those parts.”

“I wonder why they want us to go there.”

“I wouldn’t know. Maybe he’ll tell us.”

They pored over the charts together for a time. “How would you go?” the liaison officer asked at last.

“On the surface along Latitude Thirty, north of New Zealand, south of Pitcairn, till we pick up Longitude One-twenty. Then straight up the longitude. That brings us to the States in California, around Santa Barbara. Coming home from Dutch Harbor we’d do the same. Straight south down One-six-five past Hawaii. I guess we’d take a look in at Pearl Harbor while we’re there. Then right on south till we can surface near the Friendly Islands, or maybe a bit south of that.”

“How long would that mean that we should be submerged?”

The captain turned and took a paper from the desk. “I was trying to figure that out last night. I don’t suppose that we’d stay very long in any place, like the last time. I make the distance around two hundred degrees, twelve thousand miles submerged. Say six hundred hours cruising—twenty-five days. Add a couple of days for investigations and delays. Say twenty-seven days.”

“Quite a long time under water.”

“Swordfish
went longer. She went thirty-two days. The thing is to take it easy, and relax.”

The liaison officer studied the chart of the Pacific. He laid his finger on the mass of reefs and island groups south of Hawaii. “There’s not going to be much relaxing when we come to navigate through all this stuff, submerged. And that comes at the end of the trip.”