Beyond the Black Stump (29 page)

She stood back and looked at him, equally amazed. “Stan darling!” she exclaimed. “Honestly, I’d never have recognised you. It’s the clothes, I suppose.”

He laughed. “I guess this is the first time you’ve seen me in a suit.”

“It is,” she said. “You’ve always been in that battledress thing before.”

He smiled. “I’ld say we’ve still got quite a bit to learn about each other, hon.”

He took her to the theatre that evening to see Ralph Richardson appearing in the flesh in
Separate Tables
. At the interval Stanton said, “I guess there’s something about a play the movies haven’t got. I kind of wish we had some more of them at home.”

“Don’t you have a live theatre in Hazel?” she asked.

“Oh—no, honey. Hazel’s quite a small town, you know. Matter of fact, it’s got to be a pretty big city in the States to have a play on all the time. There’s lots of theatres in New York, of course, and two in San Francisco. I wouldn’t think you’d ever find a regular theatre in a city the size of this, though. They haven’t got one in Portland, and I don’t think in Seattle, either.”

On the next day, which was Sunday, Mollie went early to Mass, a thing she hadn’t done for lack of opportunity for quite a time. Later, she drove out with Stan to visit her old school and to take her sister Jean out to tea at the Regans’. They returned her at about six o’clock and went on to a farewell party given for Stanton by the officials of the Topex organisation in Perth. Most of the Americans and Australians drank Scotch, Stanton and one or two other Americans drank coca cola, and Mollie elected for beer. She said to him, “Will I have to stop drinking beer in Hazel, Stan?”

He hesitated for a minute. “Women don’t drink it the way they do here,” he said. “But, shucks—anyone can drink beer back home. There’s skads of people do.”

They left for Sydney on Monday evening, after a day of
last-minute shopping and re-arranging of baggage. Sylvia and Mike drove them to the Guildford airport to see them off on the first long flight across Australia in the Viscount. It was the first long flight that Mollie had ever made and she was thrilled by the experience, and deeply impressed by the comfort of the aeroplane. Already the Lunatic seemed far behind her, and America very close at hand. She turned to Stanton at her side as the engine note reduced after the take off.

“We’re really off, now Stan,” she said.

“That’s right,” he replied. “We’re on our way. Happy about it, hon?”

She nodded emphatically. “It’s going to be wonderful,” she said. She looked around her. “It’s so
comfortable.”
She fingered the ashtray at her side, the airline folders on her lap.

He smiled. “Think you’ll be able to sleep later on?”

“I should think so.” She put the reclining seat back experimentally. “I should think I’d sleep like a top. But it’s too exciting to sleep.”

He smiled again. “I don’t sleep so well in an airplane, myself,” he said. “But this is a pretty quiet plane, I’d say. Quieter than most.”

She nodded. “It’s much quieter than the ones that go up to Onslow.”

The hostess came with a light meal on plastic trays for Mollie to marvel at and to eat every scrap of, and then she came with rugs and pillows and advice. Mollie kissed Stanton good-night, and composed herself for sleep, but it was some time before sleep came. She lay in comfort watching the slow march of the stars above the firm line of the wing, completely happy. Life with Stanton Laird in America was going to be wonderful.

Before leaving Laragh she had had a letter from Stanton’s mother welcoming her for the visit, a pleasant, cordial letter that had told her little, partly because Mrs. Laird had been uncertain how far they were committed since they were not engaged, and partly because she wasn’t a very fluent writer at the best of times. She had written in a similar strain to Mrs. Regan and Mollie knew that her mother had replied to it; everything was secure and happy and arranged for her new life. She lay there looking at the blue immensity beyond the window, wondering if the stars would be the same in
Oregon. Presently she slept, and did not wake up until the hostess roused her to do up her safety belt before the plane touched down to refuel at Adelaide.

It was still dark when they got out to stretch their legs and drink a cup of coffee in the lounge. She had slept better than Stanton, who looked tired as he fetched her coffee and biscuits, a fact which did not escape her notice. She fussed about him a little, and when he confessed to a headache she made him take a Veganin from a tube she carried in her bag. Then they were summoned to the aeroplane, and they were on their way again.

She did not sleep again, but sat and watched the dawn creep up ahead of them as they flew on to Sydney. The hostess brought them breakfast for her to marvel at again, and after that there was hardly time for a cigarette before they were down to circuit height on the outskirts of Sydney and coming in to land at Kingsford Smith.

It was the middle of the morning before they found themselves in adjacent: rooms in their hotel. Both felt a little washed out after the night flight. They strolled out for half an hour before lunch, but the streets looked very much the same as the streets of any other city. They lunched back at the hotel, and in the afternoon they took Mike Regan’s advice and went on the ferry from Circular Quay to Manly, a journey down the harbour that took the best part of an hour and showed them a good deal of the waterfront. They found Manly to be a prosperous seaside resort with a magnificent bathing beach; they walked about it for a little, had tea in a café, and took the ferry back again, glad to sit and to enjoy the genial winter sunshine and the moving panorama of the harbour.

They dined in the hotel before going early to bed, for another twenty hours of flying lay before them. Over dinner Mollie turned to Stanton, and said, “Tell me something, Stan. Are you sorry to be giving up the oil business?”

He hesitated, and replied, “I guess the answer to that one would be both yes and no, honey. The oil business is a fine thing to be in ’n mighty big; it makes you feel you really are somebody. But it sure means you have to spend your life in rugged places. Hazel’s a small town and folks who move around might say the job’s not so important as the one I’m quitting. But it’s a happy little town to live in, full of nice people, ’n a go-ahead place, too. I guess we’re going to make
out better home in Oregon than if I went on in the oil business, ’n always going off for years to Arabia or Patagonia or some other goddam place.”

She laughed, and touched his hand. “Or to the Lunatic. I’m glad you came there, anyway.”

He pressed her hand upon the table. “I couldn’t agree more, honey.”

They started after breakfast on the tedious formalities that must precede an international flight. Finally they got into the Pan American Stratocruiser at about midday and took off on the long flight to Fiji. A subtle change in the voices of the hostesses and in the food upon the trays told them that they were travelling in a little part of the United States.

“She said, ‘Are you-all comfortable?’ ” Mollie remarked. “I haven’t heard that before.”

“We don’t say that in Oregon so much,” he told her. “I’d say she’s from Kentucky or some place in the deep South.”

They flew on for eight hours, seemingly motionless above a sea seen intermittently through layers of cloud far below. They read a little, talked a little, dozed a little, and ate a little, suspended in the tubular room in space. Night came as they nosed downwards to the clouds; they broke through at about three thousand feet to see a rocky coast in the moonlight, and then they swept in low over the sea and touched down on the airstrip of Nandi, the airport of Fiji.

As they went down the steps out of the aeroplane the heat hit them like a blow, a warm wind scented with salt and with the smell of tropical flowers. They walked across the road and through the garden of the airport hotel for dinner, a hotel with bamboo decoration in the lounge, with straw hula skirts and brassières for sale in one corner among the picture postcards, the Siamese silverware, and the souvenirs of Fiji. They dined in the draught of many fans, served by native boys with the great shock of upstanding hair that she had seen in travel books, and then sat over their coffee in the lounge. It was totally different from anything that Mollie had ever seen before.

Stanton said, “We got another ten or eleven hours to go this time before Honolulu. What say I get you a little drink of something, honey? Make you sleep better?”

She turned to him, smiling. “I will if you will, Stan.”

“I guess I’d just as soon stay on coke, or somethin’. But you have it, hon.”

She said, “I won’t unless you do, Stan—on principle. When we get to Hazel I’m going to be as dry as a bone until I see what other people do. But I do think it might be a good thing now. If I have one will you have just a little tiddly bit, in your coke?”

He laughed. “Okay.” And then he asked, a little helplessly, “What’ll I get? Some wine?”

The barmaid’s daughter said, “When we were very tired sometimes, Ma used to give us ginger ale and brandy. That’s the only drink I know anything about, except the rum the men drink. I only tried that once, and it made me sick. Get a coke and a ginger ale, Stan, and a little brandy in another glass.”

When he came back from the bar she poured about a quarter of the brandy into his glass, and the rest into her own. Sipping his coke and feeling a bit of a devil, Stanton said, “I tell you what, honey. I think it makes a better drink this way.”

“It does when you’re tired, anyway,” she said. “And we’re both a bit tired now.”

“Only one more hop to Honolulu,” he said. “You’ll be able to rest there a while, ’n freshen up.”

Presently they got back into the aeroplane and sat perspiring freely in the confined heat of the cabin till they were off the ground and climbing up to cruising height. Gradually they grew more comfortable, and as they grew more comfortable, more drowsy. Presently the hostess came with rugs and pillows, and they lay back and slept.

Dawn came, and breakfast as they hung poised in space, more reading, and a very early lunch. Then as they lost height towards the sea land appeared on the port side and they regained the sense of speed; they slipped along the coast and Stanton pointed out Pearl Harbour to her. Then they were down upon the runway, and taxi-ing into the airport of Honolulu.

It was by far the busiest airport that the girl had ever seen. Great silver aircraft stood around or taxied about; between the tarmac and the sea a wide car park housed all the motor cars she had seen in the magazines, and over all there was an indefinable sense of being in another country. On every side she heard the accent that she was familiar
with as Stanton’s; here he was at home, and she was a stranger and a little ill at ease. This feeling was accentuated by the immigration formalities, for as a U.S. citizen he was called for first and passed through quickly ahead of her, while she had to wait in line and answer a good many questions before she could go through to join him. When finally she did so she was hot and sticky with worry and with the humid heat, and very glad indeed to be with him again. With him she could relax and look around to savour her first sight of America, the country where the cars were bigger, the people busier, the sea more sparkling and the sun brighter than any place that she had ever seen before.

Presently the formalities were over, and they got into the airport limousine, an outsize vehicle that looked like a car but seated about ten people, and were driven through the town to the hotel near the beach at Waikiki. As they went, Stanton said, “Well, this is it, honey. Is it like you thought it would be?”

“It’s just exactly like the pictures,” she said, eyes gleaming. “Stan, look at that pineapple up there on stilts! Whatever is it?”

He laughed. “That’s a water tank, belongs to that factory.”

“Why is it like a pineapple?”

“They fix it up that way for advertising,” he said. “I guess they make canned pineapple, or somethin’.”

She stared at it in wonder. “It’s awfully good …” And then she said, “Everything’s so different here.”

The foyer of the hotel was small for the amount of traffic in it, very modern and well decorated. She was glad to stand back against the wall while Stan stood in line to claim their rooms, watching the Japanese and Philippino boys handling the baggage, a little dazed by the many American voices. Then they were going up in the elevator to the quiet of the upper floors. They had two rooms on opposite sides of a corridor; when the boy was gone they went into each other’s room to inspect, and then parted to change and take a shower and relax.

Her two days in Honolulu were a delight to Mollie. The humid heat was relieved by a perpetual trade wind, and her room was designed to take full advantage of it, with louvred windows and a louvred door, permitting the cool, scented wind to blow through by day and night, ruffling her hair gently as she slept. To her amazement and delight the room
was furnished with a little refrigerator, very small and white and cold, for the provision of ice and cold water, and for the storage of fruit. Her room looked out over the sea and over the hotel swimming pool, set in a shaded garden with many deck-chairs and tables, the water very blue in the bright sunlight. They bought nylon Hawaiian shirts and straw sandals to be in the fashion, and bathed in the pool, and sat around with cokes in bathing costumes in the warm sun and wind. Stanton hired a car for the two days, a very easy thing to do in Honolulu, and they drove to the yacht harbour and to Coral Gardens; they dined at The Reef and after dinner walked and kissed in the moonlight upon Waikiki Beach with a hundred other couples doing the same thing.

Everything was new to her, and yet she knew it all beforehand. When they went to buy a pack of cigarettes she spurned the hotel shop and walked out to a real drug store, the first that she had entered, and had a milk shake in it with Stan to mark the event. She wondered at the many Japanese shops, so well patronised so soon after the war; nothing in Australia had prepared her for such fraternisation. The affluence and the slow, restful tempo of the place were a delight to her, tired as she was after their long flights. The great, brightly coloured motor cars parked thick beside the sidewalks on every block amazed her with their size and pleased her eye, and she discovered very soon that these were Stan’s weakness, too. “Whatever folks can say against the United States,” he observed once, “and maybe they can say plenty—we certainly do know how to build automobiles …”