1915 (21 page)

At the wharf on the day of their departure Frances had thrown Walter her silk scarf, flinging this last token of contact in among strangers. Nugget Arthur took the catch, passing it to Walter who waved it from the railing as the iron cliff of the
Suevic
enacted their ultimate rift while they mourned it unknowingly. In Egypt he carried the scarf everywhere, but in the weeks after the arrival of her cold letter left it alone. Now he ran his lips through its folds, those echoes of her creased clothing in the night, and sought the trace of perfume that clung to its hem, the warmth of her enclosed body released by the scarf's unknotting, the thermal waves of her kiss. Now he wanted to sleep, wanted to dream, and did so with his knees drawn up on the stone-corrugated groundsheet. But it was not Frances who came to him out of the smooth veil of the scarf, but a girl resembling her, the one he had walked past in Alexandria, and walked past again, and again before stopping and daring to go in. The dark-eyed girl of indeterminate nationality who had clicked the door behind them, served coffee from a silver pot, and invited his hands to search among scented robes for this — a tumbling outwards into cool air, a graceful triple somersault with an exquisite tuck, and a curving underwater glide to a silvery surface where she smiled down at him from a small sad mouth, then disappeared,
shimmering, her short straight nose, her low broad forehead thatched with glossy black hair, her dream self dissolving into damp coins and leaves of light.

Bugger and blast
. He woke and cursed the still-pulsing pungent semen as it stickily dammed in his trousers. Frank on one side, Mick Aitcheson on the other: would they notice?

That day in Alexandria when he reached the street a newspaper seller had chased him, a man smaller than anyone in Australia with a black apricot for a face and one skewed leg absurdly trying to run off to the side:

“Very goot news, English 'vancin.”

“Bully for the English.”

“Very goot news: strike in Glas
gow
.”

“P.O.Q.”

“Very goot news: Lord Roberts dead.”

“About time.”

The tanned dwarf produced a rag: “Mister, clean 'im boots?” Wherever he went, “merchants” followed. In the end he reached the
Athens
cafe bearing an armload of oranges and figs. Five loose cigarettes, two behind each ear, one wet in his mouth, had been thrust impudently at him so that now, collapsed at a table cascading bounty, he foolishly tossed a handful of coins at his pursuers (a spray of brazen confetti through the cafe's wide open front) forcing a waiter beat off the more determined.

 

It had been typical of Ollie Melrose to arrange a meeting place, set a time, insist on that time with a flickerless stare of ocean-blue eyes under brows like thunder, and then not turn up. But after thirty-seven
minutes by the pearl clockface, and six cold glasses of beer, when Walter began to think about gathering his parcels and counting
paisa
for the Greek, there arrived without apology the supercilious Englishman in his Australian uniform. First he had been required to deliver a chit for the horses to an elusive officer at the docks, and then, then? Another habit of Ollie's was to lug his chair forward giving the legs a fascinated squawk and with a snap of fingers (“Lager!”) donate all his attention to his interlocutor. Or seem to. One needed experience of such occasions to comprehend the rudeness of the motion. Deep down he was saying, Stuff your little world, chum. If I was to go into details about mine you'd never understand.

Walter told a tipsy set of lies about a cushioned and carpeted room. Here his bought love at the height of their professional entanglement had actually raised a haunch and scratched herself. But this and other details he skipped. After the heart-stopping revelation in the street all had been drab: the picked nose, the yellow nails like old ivory spoons (inverted). For Ollie he draped a Persian carpet on the wall where only the ruined hulls of mosquitoes had clung, and he patched and then multiplied a scatter of ruptured cushions. His description of the girl was to recur in the dream of weeks later, but in the waking world perfection had not been purchasable.

One thing he told Ollie was true. The girl had beckoned him with her resemblance to Frances. (It hadn't survived the stairs, but why say so?) Because he knew all about the letter from home with its indifferent formal phrases, Ollie said:

“You could have taken it worse.”

“How?”

“A wronged man feels better for a smack of revenge … Welcome to the wide world.”

Then it seemed that Ollie had indeed admitted Walter to full membership of his club, a worldly enclosure where the rough and tough blended appealingly with culture.

But after more beers the impression weakened. Walter strained forward stupidly to wag a finger at his mentor, asserting that to square things with Frances would demand a different sort of accounting. Something much closer to home. Wouldn't it?

Outside, the pavement tilted. Walter surged off in the wrong direction. Bloody Ollie with his way of lording it over a bloke, then whacking his shoulder, as he just had, proposing a sightseeing tour on the way to the station —

Yet —

“You could be right,” Walter grunted after five minutes' plodding in the proper direction followed by a head-clearing halt to pelt half the oranges at a persistent merchant.

“Why so?”

They pissed against a wall in an alley. Foam surged at their feet while an urchin watched earnestly.

“Oh
Christ
, Ollie, you just told me. I wanted to get back at her I s'pose. But it didn't work. The other was —”

“Overripe? I've never yet met one who wasn't moulting. You have to go out to the villages to find 'em fresh.”

He addressed the ragged boy.

“From all the deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil, Good Lord, deliver us.”

He advised Walter:

“The aesthetic solution, that's what you need.”

Ollie's habit was to demand a certain formula, but on winning its recital demand something more. Or seem to: as if the truth, the moment he pounced on it, turned pathetically unappetizing. And it was typical of him to pour cold water on what had been, after all, exactly the experience he himself had several times recommended.

 

Angry at finding himself childishly, tearfully, endlessly awake, Walter clenched and unclenched his fists seeking control. Where was Ollie at this very moment? Somewhere in a gully back from the beach where half the squadron had been left digging a hole to China while the rest had been delivered up and abandoned here at the price of a dead major, a suicided madman, and a long-winded failure named Hurst who had preached (magged) cut and run. The floor of the bombproof chamber pitched at such an angle that fingernails clawed the earth and clung to it as if to a stormy clifftop. A giddy stupor was the cause, and only three hours left before the pre-dawn stand-to, when he and his section, their stint of fatigues exchanged for something less exhausting but more dangerous, would once again step giddily out into nothingness. Though his eyes were closed Walter experienced none of the thankfully collapsed concentration of the sleeping man. He was — well, Reg Hurst had thrown him a (not unkind) parting look which plainly said: I thought you were the type who'd listen. I think I was wrong. You're such a stunned, wooden type, really. At the beginning you wanted to make sense of me, but you're lost. I kept talking, we all
like to shout down an empty well — but —

Lost.

The place where they slept was a new chamber, smaller than before, still half-formed with temporary props and a soon-to-be-abandoned look, though the plan was to make it permanent. It had an air of inviting a direct hit. The men were cramped in two rows, most with their blankets drawn over their heads as if already dead and awaiting a burial party.

Asleep? Awake? A third state existed where sheet after sheet of fire-blackened galvanized iron peeled from a shadowed stack and slithered almost noiselessly here, there, alarming the ears with its sly and terrifying guillotine-rasp, then bounding off to flutter over the abyss in recriminating flocks, whispering of fate as debris whispers in a willy willy.

But memory if it took care could still re-enact those last ever-echoing hours of freedom, which had begun at two pm on the Thursday in Alexandria after the disembarked horses, a shipload of remounts from Queensland, had been safely hup-hooed to their train for Cairo, and Ollie Melrose and Walter found themselves among the elated six who drew short straws for an afternoon's leave. Walter saw himself alight from the “Circular” tram after plying a route taking in the Quays, and

— but look (memory demanded) excuse me, you dazed Australian trooper, why do you hold your hands protectively over your head? The future has not yet made its claim. In a minute you'll freely dawdle down that street of bleached awnings, and among ravaged faces glimpse a form, and a face, to tantalize unbearably.

Thus passed the hour from two to three.

From three to three thirty-seven exactly passed the wait for Ollie. And between four and five the afternoon bloomed with colour and life. In the city of Alexandria, where ageless brick and stone volunteered their outlines as sanctuary for wandering thoughts, the evanescent seemed not as usual to have shimmered and gone, but to have defied the world's hardest rule and been rendered solid. This happened when Walter, sobered on their sightseeing tour, was steered by Ollie into the tiled portico of a church.

Not a church exactly: a mosque.

They clutched their parcels but kicked off their boots as was the custom and dribbled tiny coins into the lap of an old man at the door whose hidden mouth, wreathed in silver whiskers, made smacking noises over the valueless currency. Outside, the place was nothing — a hole in a wall framed by black- and red-painted bricks — but past a heavy leather curtain the most astonishing sight met them: coloured tiles mounting up and up with light pouring from everywhere as if through the glazed belly of an enormous jar.

Ollie said nothing but padded softly in a circle with his neck tipped rearwards and his hands folded unmilitarily behind his back. On his third or fourth circuit he cruised alongside and said pedantically in travel-dented upperclass English: “The door of the pulpit, see? has duplicated Cufic inscriptions, which on the right read from right to left, as is usual, and on the left are reversed for the sake of symmetry: a good instance of the decorative tendency of Arab art.” Then he whispered away in his smelly socks.

Something … something had descended from that wonderful dome of old geometry, where sprang to life a pot of flowers, deep cornflower-blue, so beautiful
that it went on duplicating itself all the way down to a finite horizon of rucked sawdust. Up went the flowers again, and ever-down, weaving their way through a fretwork that here was white, there yellow, here china-blue, there green, until the finite horizon deflecting the flowers again upwards bounded an infinity of motion.

Walter now paraded in the track of Ollie like an assistant school inspector. In their protestant wonder both might have been engaged in an assessment of the place of wall tiles in public instruction.

In unhurried contemplation Walter felt himself absorb the dome's lesson, but it was difficult to shift whole from Egypt, that cloudless land of ever-snoozing monuments with eroded paws on monumental knees, to
here
, after a day of Hurst and constricting burrows, where at noon had come a sudden thunderstorm, and afterwards, briefly, drizzle: then, overhead, a stemmed rivulet in the rotten earth had burst, confirming the pallor of the unsightable sky — and a dun stream had vomited through to scour clear a dead man's leg built into the earthworks.

Stopping even the mouth of Hurst.

What was it about “lessons” that made them elusive? Were they lessons only for the duration of their precipitation in words, later to evaporate, like the storm, and leave things as arid and unknowable as ever? Did nothing stick? Were they just sayings which the body, that alternately ruthless and pathetic companion of the soul, sneered at, rejected, or most terribly, with deadly acceptance, permitted — just to have the lesson reveal in greatest extremity the washed-clean deadness of the body's lack of understanding?

Far down a silvery corridor of ocean, cold wet leaf
heads of eucalypt in a gust of wind burst open to show the grey home-paddock bones of granite. Here Coalheap had clattered Walter to earth and then whizz bang in hospital Miss Edie Davis — here, gone — had challenged his sixteen-year-old equanimity. Spinning from the effort he had met the challenge.

Again Walter caught at the discovery made in the mosque. And an absurd, fanciful thing it was, at the gangling age of twenty-one to have grasped this idea of art and his destiny being intertwined. In the mosque it had expressed itself as a wish to walk obliquely away from all past selves, and yet to retain them. To play with their patterns, to organize, fragment, and reconstruct — otherwise all heartburning and anguish, and bliss as well, might seem nothing but ashes in the wind. And such a thought could not be borne.

He felt a fool and dared not breathe a word of this to Ollie.

At last Walter dozed, and not only did the force and certainty of the feeling return, but it buoyed him up, carried him along to a point where fate picked him out from the thousands of others similarly sleeping on those racked slopes and promised to deliver him into a magnificent vocation far from here and safe from harm.

But (awake again) it did not seem so.

What a bastard fate was to pluck him from Australia, set him on the rails to war, then give him a vivid glimpse of the what-might-be before tossing him wastefully into the realm of never-shall. He was in no way unique. Had not Hurst said that on the battlefield the mass of men were not so very different from … this special person whose billion cells and self-regarding sensations told him he would never die? Whose path to a cruel glimpse of destiny was for
military youth a much-frequented one through the room of a whore? Who, an innocent, had been surprised by the way the bought girl's manner alluded to the sincere tremors of two other girls he had kissed, Ethel and Frances, one fleetingly, the other (he had thought) to the depths of her soul. Who had left the room as if more than a scant hour of experience had been gained, steadied by a ritually heartfelt farewell — the emission of a trans-national sigh. But who found that the satisfaction thus obtained had the force of a lie believed by no-one. Who was so recently born into his true self that it must show like the guileless gleam of a baby, for Hurst the bad listener after all day talking about himself had in a parting phrase caught Walter to perfection: