The Far Country by Nevil Shute Read Free Book Online

sat with Jack before the kitchen stove in wooden arm-chairs with cushions; they generally sat there in the evening rather than in the parlour, a prim, formal room where nothing was to hand. Jack Dorman was reading the
Leader
, a weekly farming paper which was about all he ever read. Jane sat with the open letter from Aunt Ethel in her hand, worrying about it.
    “I wrote to Myers with a cheque,” she said. “They sent a statement for the parcels, seven pounds eighteen and six. I told them to keep sending them, one every month….”
    He grunted without looking up. “What are you sending now?”
    “I told them to keep sending the dried fruits,” she said. “It’s what she seems to like.” She turned the letter over in her hand. “It’s so difficult, because she never asks for anything, or says what she wants. She does seem to like the dried fruit, though.”
    “I’d have thought that a meat parcel might be better,” he said, “They haven’t got much meat, from all I hear.”
    “An old lady like her doesn’t eat a lot of meat,” she replied. “She can make cakes with the dried fruit for when she has people in to tea.”
    She turned the letter over, reading it again for the tenth time. “I can’t make out about this vest,” she said, troubled. “It almost reads as if she’s short of money, doesn’t it?”
    “Could be,” he observed. He laid the
Leader
down, and glanced across at his wife. He could still see in her the girl he had brought out from England, stubborn in her love for him to the point of quarrelling with her parents, supported only by this aunt to whom they now sent parcels.
    “Like to send her some?” he asked.
    She looked up quickly, and met his eyes. “Send her money? She might take it as an insult.”
    “She might buy herself a vest,” he said.
    She sat in silence for a time. “We couldn’t send her just a little money, Jack,” she said at last. “It would have to be nothing or else quite a lot, as if it was a sort of legacy. Enough to be sure that she wouldn’t take it badly. Enough to keep her for a couple of years if she’s in real trouble.”
    “Well, we’ve got a lot,” he said. “We’ll do whatever you think right.”
    There was a pause. “I feel we kind of owe it to her,” he said presently. “To see her right if she’s in any trouble. We haven’t done so bad together, you and I. It might never have come to anything if she hadn’t backed us up.”
    “I know. That’s what I feel.” She stared down at the letter in her hands. “I’m not a bit happy about this, Jack,” she said at last. “I don’t like the sound of it at all. If we’ve got the money, I’d like to send her five hundred pounds.”

Two
    J ENNIFER M ORTON went home for the following week-end. She was the daughter of a doctor in Leicester, his only child now, for her two brothers had been killed in the war, one in the North Atlantic and one over Hamburg. She was twenty-four years old and she had worked away from home for some years; she had a clerical job with the Ministry of Pensions at their office in Blackheath, a suburb of London. Most of her life was spent in Blackheath, where she had a bed-sitting-room in a boarding-house, but once a month she went home to Leicester to see her parents, travelling up from London early on the Saturday morning, and returning late on Sunday night.
    These were duty visits; she was fond enough of her father and her mother, but she had now no interests and few acquaintances in her own home town. The war and marriage had scattered her school friends. She had no particular fondness for the Ministry of Pensions or for her job in Blackheath; she would have stayed at home and worked in Leicester if there had been any useful purpose to be served by doing so. In fact, her mother and her father were remarkably self-sufficient; her mother never wanted to do anything else but to stay at home and run the house and cook her father’s dinner. Her father, an overworked