Requiem for a Wren Read Online Free PDF Page A

more pleasure out of old things than new, out of old books that they had read fifteen or twenty years before and turned back to now with pleasure, out of old gramophone records, out of furniture that they had bought thirty years ago when they took over Coombargana.
    Helen's allowance and my own had absorbed a good slice of their net income after taxation, which in recent years had fluctuated between twenty and thirty thousand pounds a year. Much of the rest had been saved and invested prudently to provide for death duties on an estate which might well be assessed at a quarter of a million pounds upon my father's death, but this cash reserve was now adequate for any calls that were likely to be made on it. In other countries and in other circles a prosperity such as ours might be accompanied by wild parties in the city, with a nude girl in a bath of champagne in the middle of the dinner table and a dozen crashed motor-cars next morning. In the Western District things had never been like that; perhaps an agricultural prosperity doesn't go that way. Certainly Australian wool producers, those who survived the hard times of the thirties when wool was down to a shilling a pound, got such an economic fright as would keep them in the straight-and-narrow path for the rest of their lives. I can vouch for it that at Coombargana and all the other stations that I know the money made seems to be spent prudently and well.
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    My father's great interest was in the property, and all his spare money was now going into improvements. Wherever I looked as we drove round in the Land Rover there was something new, new stockyards, new spray sheep dips, new vehicles, new pumps, new generators, new houses, new fences, new windmills, and new dams. In the hard times before the Second War, when I was a boy at Coombargana, much of this expenditure would have been classed as rank extravagance, but times had changed and my father had had the wit to change with them. Labour costs had trebled since the thirties and the output of the property had doubled, so that any machine that would save an hour of a man's time was now a good machine.
    We went in to the long shearing shed, now empty and swept clean, of course, for the shearing was over and the shed would remain unused till next year. He showed me how he had rearranged the stands and the tables and the bins, and the new machinery. He had made a job of it all right; I could visualise the production line, so to speak, when this place was going full blast and sheep were passing through at the rate of three hundred an hour. I was keenly interested in all that he had done, for this was my job from now on, but the dead parlourmaid was still the background of my mind.
    We rested for a few minutes in the long, cool aisle of the shed, leaning against a table, looking round. 'Mother doesn't seem to think much of my idea that the girl was married,' I said.
    'She doesn't?'
    I shook my head.
    Td never thought of her as a married woman, myself,' my father remarked. 'She might have been, of course.'
    'How old was she?'
    'Twenty-eight or thirty, I should say. It's difficult to judge.'
    'Harry said she never took a holiday.'
    'I don't think she did. I think she went into Ballarat once or twice for shopping, but apart from that I don't think she left the place the whole time she was here.'
    I wrinkled my brows. 'What did she do on her days off?'
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    He thought for a minute. 'I think she was interested in the property,' he said. 'She used to go out with Jim Plowden and the rabbit pack. I think she liked the dogs. She liked shooting, too. I never had much to do with her outside; she kept her place, you know. The men say that she was a very fine shot at rabbits, either with a gun or a rifle. They say she never seemed to miss.' He paused. 'I've been wondering if she was a farmer's daughter perhaps, back at home.'
    I nodded. 'You don't know what part of England she came from?'
    'I don't,' he said. 'Annie thinks she came from