A Town like Alice

jacket and tie would not be served in the dining-room, nor would a woman in slacks.
    Harman had arranged a light lunch for her, cold meat and fruit; she was touched by the care that he was taking to make her weekend a success. While struggling to eat a mango decently she asked, "Joe, why don't places like Willstown have more fresh fruit? Won't it grow?"
    "Mangoes grow all right," he said. "We've got three or four mango trees at Midhurst. Aren't there any in the town? I'd have thought there must be."
    "I don't believe there are. I never saw any fruit in the hotel, or anywhere on sale."
    "Oh well, maybe you wouldn't. People don't seem to bother much about it. Some places have every shade tree a mango tree. Cooktown, in the early summer you drive over them, all along the road."
    "Don't the people like fresh fruit and vegetables? I mean, they get all sorts of skin diseases through not having them."
    "It's too hot for the old folks to work in gardens, like in other places," he said. "There aren't enough people in the country to grow things like that. We can't even get men to work as ringers on the stations-we have to use two-thirds boongs as stockmen, or more. There just aren't enough people. They won't come to the outback."
    She said thoughtfully, "There were plenty of fresh vegetables at Alice Springs."
    "Ah, yes," he replied. "Alice is different. Alice is a bonza little town."
    They slept on their beds in the heat of the day after lunch and bathed again before tea; in the cool of the evening they went out to the end of the jetty and fished. They caught some sand snappers and three or four brilliant red and blue fish which were poisonous to eat and had to be handled with a glove because they stung; then tiring of this rather unprofitable sport they rolled up their lines and sat and watched the sunset over the heights of the Atherton Tableland on the horizon. "It's a funny thing," Jean said. "You go to a new country, and you expect everything to be different, and then you find there's such a lot that stays the same. That sunset looks just like it does in England, on a fine summer evening."
    "Do you see much that's like England here?" he asked.
    She smiled. "Not on Green Island, and not much in Willstown. But in Cairns-a lot. Vauxhall and Austin motor cars parked in the streets, and politicians telling people to buy British, and the North British Insurance Company, and Tattersalls, and bank clerks in the hotel listening to 'Itma'. Even the newsboys selling papers in the street-'Read all about it'. Listening to them with your eyes shut, they sound just the same. They used to shout exactly like that when I lived in Ealing."
    "Ealing's the place near London where you lived when you were working, isn't it?"
    "That's right. It's a part of London, really-a suburb."
    "Are you going to live there again when you go home?"
    "I don't know," she said slowly. "I don't know what I'm going to do, Joe."
    In the evening light, sitting together on the jetty and watching the sunset over the calm water, she had expected him to follow up this opening, and she was disappointed that he did not do so. She had expected more than this of him, and that she didn't get it was beginning to distress her. She had expected to spend the whole weekend on the defensive, in repelling boarders, so to speak, but so far things had worked out very differently. Joe Harman's behaviour toward her had been above reproach; he had not tried to kiss her or even to make opportunities of touching her. But for the fact that he had been to England for no other purpose than to look for her, she might have thought he wasn't interested in her at all. By the end of the day she was becoming seriously worried about his restraint. She had caused him enough pain already.
    It was no better when they went to bed. She would have liked to have been kissed, in the quiet darkness under the palm trees, but Joe didn't do it. They said goodnight in the most orderly way, not even shaking hands, and they retired to their own huts with perfect decorum. Jean lay awake for some time, restless and troubled. She had taken it for granted that they would arrive at some emotional conclusion at Green Island, but if things went on as they were going they would leave on Monday with nothing settled at all. If that happened, she would have to go down to Brisbane and go home; there would be no excuse for doing anything else. The thought was almost unbearable.
    She knew that her English ways were strange