Nevil Shute - On The Beach

He took the red carton from his pocket, took the tablets from the vial, and threw the carton on the ground. No point in going on; this was the way he’d like to have it.

He took the tablets in his mouth, and swallowed them with an effort.

Peter Holmes left the club and drove down to the hardware store in Elizabeth Street where he had bought the motor mower. It was untenanted and empty of people, but somebody had broken in a door and it had been partially looted in that anyone who wanted anything had just walked in to take it. It was dim inside, for all the electricity had been turned off at the main. The garden department was on the second floor; he climbed the stairs and found the garden seats he had remembered. He selected a fairly light one with a brightly coloured detachable cushion that he thought would please Mary and would also serve to pad the roof of his car. With great effort he dragged the seat down two flights of stairs to the pavement outside the shop, and went back for the cushion and some rope. He found a hank of clothesline on a counter. Outside he heaved the seat up on the roof of the Morris Minor and lashed it in place with many ties of rope attached to all parts of the car. Then he set off for home.

He was still ravenously hungry, and feeling very well. He had not told Mary anything of his recovery, and he did not intend to do so now; it would only upset her, confident as she now was that they were all going together. He stopped on the way home at the same café that he had breakfasted at, kept by a beery couple who appeared to be enjoying remarkably good health. They were serving hot roast beef for lunch; he had two platefuls of that and followed it up with a considerable portion of hot jam roly-poly. Then as an afterthought he got them to make him an enormous parcel of beef sandwiches; he could leave those in the boot of the car where Mary would not know about them, so that he could go out in the evening and have a quiet little meal unknown to her.

He got back to his little flat in the early afternoon; he left the garden seat on top of the car and went into the house. He found Mary lying on the bed, half dressed, with an eiderdown over her; the house seemed cold and damp.

He sat down on the bed beside her. "How are you feeling now?" he asked.

"Awful," she said. "Peter, I’m so worried about Jennifer. I can’t get her to take anything at all, and she’s messing all the time." She added some details.

He crossed the room and looked at the baby in the cot. It looked thin and weak, as Mary did herself. It seemed to him that both were very ill.

She asked, "Peter—how are you feeling yourself?"

"Not too good," he said. "I was sick twice on the way up and once on the way down. As for the other end, just been running all the time."

She laid her hand upon his arm. "You oughtn’t to have gone..."

He smiled down at her. "I got you a garden seat, anyway."

Her face lightened a little. "You did? Where is it?"

"On the car," he said. "You lie down and keep warm. I’m going to light the fire and make the house cosy. After that I’ll get the seat down off the car and you can see it."

"I can’t lie down," she said wearily. "Jennifer needs changing."

"I’ll see to that, first of all," he said. He led her gently to the bed. "Lie down and keep warm."

An hour later he had a blazing fire in their sitting room, and the garden seat was set up by the wall where she wanted it to be. She came to look at it from the French window, with the brightly coloured cushion on the seat, "It’s lovely," she said. "It’s exactly what we needed for that corner. It’s going to be awfully nice to sit there, on a summer evening..." The winter afternoon was drawing in, and a fine rain was falling. "Peter, now that I’ve seen it, would you bring the cushion in and put it in the verandah? Or, better, bring it in here till it’s dry. I do want to keep it nice for the summer."

He did so, and they brought the baby’s cot into the warmer room. She said, "Peter, do you want anything to eat? There’s plenty of milk, if you could take that."

He shook his head. "I couldn’t eat a thing," he said, "How about you?"

She shook her head.

"If I mixed you a hot brandy and lemon?" he suggested. "Could you manage that?"

She thought for a moment. "I could try." She wrapped her dressing gown around her. "I’m so cold..."

The fire was roaring in the grate. "I’ll go out and get some more wood," he said. "Then I’ll get you a hot drink." He went out to the woodpile in the gathering darkness, and took the opportunity to open the boot of the car and eat three beef sandwiches. He came back presently to the living room with a basket of wood, and found her standing by the cot. "You’ve been so long," she said. "Whatever were you doing?"

"I had a bit of trouble," he told her. "Must be the meat pies again."

Her face softened. "Poor old Peter. We’re all of us in trouble..." She stooped over the cot, and stroked the baby’s forehead; she lay inert now, too weak apparently to cry. "Peter, I believe she’s dying..."

He put his arm around her shoulder. "So am I," he said quietly, "and so are you. We’ve none of us got very long to go. I’ve got the kettle here. Let’s have that drink."

He led her from the cot to the warmth of the huge fire that he had made. She sat down on the floor before it and he gave her the hot drink of brandy and water with a little lemon squeezed in it. She sat sipping it and staring into the fire, and it made her feel a little better. He mixed one for himself, and they sat in silence for a few minutes.

Presently she said, "Peter, why did all this happen to us? Was it because Russia and China started fighting each other?"

He nodded. "That’s about the size of it," he said. "But there was more to it than that. America and England and Russia started bombing for destruction first. The whole thing started with Albania."

"But we didn’t have anything to do with it at all, did we—here in Australia?"

"We gave England moral support," he told her. "I don’t think we had time to give her any other kind. The whole thing was over in a month."

"Couldn’t anyone have stopped it?"

"I don’t know... Some kinds of silliness you just can’t stop," he said. "I mean, if a couple of hundred million people all decide that their national honour requires them to drop cobalt bombs upon their neighbour, well, there’s not much that you or I can do about it. The only possible hope would have been to educate them out of their silliness."

"But how could you have done that, Peter? I mean, they’d all left school."

"Newspapers," he said. "You could have done something with newspapers. We didn’t do it. No nation did, because we were all too silly. We liked our newspapers with pictures of beach girls and headlines about cases of indecent assault, and no government was wise enough to stop us having them that way. But something might have been done with newspapers, if we’d been wise enough"

She did not fully comprehend his reasoning. "I’m glad we haven’t got newspapers now," she said. "It’s been much nicer without them."A spasm shook her, and he helped her to the bathroom.

While she was in there he came back to the sitting room and stood looking at his baby. It was in a bad way, and there was nothing he could do to help it; he doubted now if it would live through the night. Mary was in a bad way, too, though not quite so bad as that. The only one of them who was healthy was himself, and that he must not show.

The thought of living on after Mary appalled him. He could not stay in the flat; in the few days that would be left to him he would have nowhere to go, nothing to do. The thought crossed his mind that if Scorpion were still in Williamstown he might go with Dwight Towers and have it at sea, the sea that had been his life’s work. But why do that? He didn’t want the extra time that some strange quirk of his metabolism had given to him. He wanted to stay with his family.