Amongst the Dead (3 page)

He then turned to us.

‘Which of you is the femme?’

‘I beg your pardon,’ I said. ‘Why is it necessary for either of us to be the femme?’

‘What’s a femme?’ Brian asked.

‘A femme, Brian,’ I said, ‘is a man who dresses as a woman, and not in sensible tweed and flat shoes.’

‘No,’ Corporal Pyers said, and walked to a rack of costumes. ‘More in this line.’

He pulled forth a satin sheath which would have looked fabulous clinging to Jean Harlow’s body, and not quite so fabulous clinging to mine or Brian’s.

‘What about you, Glen?’ I said. ‘You look thin enough to carry off a dress like that.’

He smiled.

‘I’m the magician, I’m afraid, unless one of you gentlemen is The Great Levante. The men up north expect the magician to have a pretty sidekick.’

He raised an eyebrow. Brian was out of his depth, I could tell. I didn’t want him getting cold feet this early in the piece, so I agreed to be fitted for the dress.

‘I’m not saying I’ll do it,’ I said quietly to Pyers, ‘but if it’s altered to fit me, it’ll also fit Brian. We’ll work out who’s doing what later.’

Joycey Dover manhandled me into a corner and told me to undress. Despite being conscious that both Glen Pyers and Brian were watching me with smirks on their faces, I did so without hesitation. A professional actor doesn’t baulk at a simple fitting. Wardrobe mistresses are like sculptors. To them, a body is little more than an armature on which they hang cloth instead of clay. I stood in my underwear as she measured me and jotted down figures.

‘You’ll have to take everything off,’ she said. ‘The dress can’t be adjusted properly if it’s competing with singlet and underpants.’

Without batting an eyelid, I did as requested, and Joycey Dover slid the satin sheath over my head. I closed my eyes and thought of England as she tucked and pinned.

‘Very nice,’ she said. ‘It fits well, but you’ll have to tape your bits down at the front. You can’t go on stage with a bulge sticking out the front of the dress.’

Brian had the gall to guffaw like a schoolboy.

‘That’s something that won’t be such a problem for you, Brian,’ I said.

It took only a few more minutes to be fitted with a wig and to find a pair of shoes that almost fitted. When I took stock of myself in the mirror, my reflection wasn’t the grotesque, pantomime dame I was expecting. With a bit of make-up and a close shave I felt I could give some of the Tivoli scrubbers a run for their money. Not that it would come to that. I’d decided that Brian was to be the femme in this outfit. I had more to offer than a lithe silhouette.

Afterwards, when Corporal Pyers had headed off with his bundle of costumes, Brian didn’t take the opportunity to pass any remarks about my appearance as a woman. I knew he wanted to, but I suppose he thought that if he remained silent he’d escape the grim possibility of his winding up as the femme. In the tram on the way up to our mother’s house in Princes Hill, I told him frankly that, as he had no other skills to offer, slipping into a satin sheath would have to substitute for talent.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘We’ll see,’ and he managed to inject a surly, defiant note into this otherwise bland riposte.

Our mother’s anxiety about our imminent departure was mollified by the assurance that we’d be seeing our youngest brother, Fulton, to whom she wrote every day, and from whom she heard little. This was hardly surprising, given that he’d been posted to Darwin, and Darwin wasn’t ideally placed at this time for normal postal deliveries. I now knew, as well, that Fulton wasn’t even in Darwin, but that he was somewhere ‘out bush’ with the North Australia Observer Unit. Our first loyalty was to Army Intelligence, and neither Brian nor I revealed to our mother the truth about Fulton’s position. She was sufficiently pleased that we were able to confirm that Fulton was alive and well, and that in only a few short weeks, when we returned, we would be in a position to bring her more detailed news about her youngest son.

I was perfectly, and unconcernedly, aware that our mother had a hierarchy of affection where her three children were concerned. I came a distant third behind Fulton and Brian, perhaps because as the oldest I reminded her most strongly of our late father. It hadn’t escaped my attention that whenever she pointed out the similarities they were attached to traits she considered unpleasant. I was only sixteen when my father died, so I can’t confirm the truth or otherwise of Mother’s observations. Given that she’d been having an affair with the family solicitor, Peter Gilbert, even before her husband’s death, I’d respectfully submit that her views on my character must, at the very least, be open to question. I have no objection to being least favoured, but I confess a resentment towards being ill-favoured; and if it weren’t unseemly, at the age of thirty-two, to express such a resentment, I would do so. My strong sense of personal dignity forbade raising such matters with Mother. Her indignation would have been epic, and I’ve never been fond of the epic form.

Over dinner that night, we told Mother as much as we could about our new roles in defeating the Japanese menace.

‘I’m not at all sure,’ she said, ‘that I understand any of this. Are you, or are you not, soldiers?’

‘Not soldiers exactly,’ said Brian. ‘We’ll be in uniform, but that’s sort of part of the act.’

‘Our job, Mother,’ I explained, ‘is to raise morale, and no one’s going to shoot at us.’

‘Your morale-boosting efforts haven’t really been all that successful in the past, do admit, darling,’ said Mother, with chatty indifference to my feelings.

‘Fortunately we won’t have to battle the collective simple-mindedness of the general public,’ I replied. ‘Soldiers are hungry for entertainment, and if I were out in the middle of nowhere I’d certainly appreciate hearing a bit of Shakespeare for a change, instead of the drone of the moron I’m obliged to bunk with.’

Mother looked at me over the rim of her raised teacup.

‘Don’t despise your audience, Will. They’ll know it, and they might throw grenades instead of flowers.’

I was rescued from the necessity of defending myself by the arrival of Mother’s lover, Peter Gilbert. I hadn’t yet reconciled myself to the fact of their relationship, let alone to its duration. I had no wish to cast moral aspersions against my mother — although her affair with Gilbert did begin adulterously — but I couldn’t quite bring myself to greet him with anything but cool disdain. He was, anyway, impervious and insensitive to my feelings about him. Brian shook his hand warmly, and their cosy display of mateship was so cloying that I couldn’t prevent my lip from curling with disgust. Mother saw it, and shook her head slightly. I’m sure if we’d been alone this would have been one of those occasions when she claimed I reminded her of my father. I excused myself and retired.

I didn’t sleep well, and not because of my agitation about Peter Gilbert and Mother, but because of my excitement at the prospect of returning to the stage — my natural home, and the only place where, in the guise of various characters, I could truly be myself.

The following morning, Peter Gilbert, still in his pyjamas, intruded upon me in the bathroom while I was shaving.

‘It’s customary to knock,’ I said.

‘A custom more honourecd in the breach than the observance?’ he said, and inflected it upwards to indicate that he considered the quote so apt as to be witty.

‘As you see,’ I said while drawing the razor carefully across my chin, ‘the bathroom is occupied.’

‘And by the very person to whom I wish to speak.’ He sat on the side of the bath and crossed one leg over the other. ‘It isn’t actually any of your business, so I’m telling you this more as a courtesy than a duty. Your mother and I intend to formalise our relationship. You’ll no doubt be appalled by the resulting change in our connection; but the fact is, when we’re married, you’ll become my stepson.’

‘Should I congratulate you?’

‘It wouldn’t kill you.’

I caught his eye in the mirror.

‘We should learn to tolerate each other, Will.’

I turned to face him.

‘My father has been dead for sixteen years. For all of that time, and longer, you’ve been having an affair with my mother, and neither of you thought it worthwhile to mention the fact to Brian, to Fulton. or to me.’

Peter Gilbert actually smiled.

‘That’s true up to a point, but both Brian and Fulton were aware of how things stood between your mother and me, and we assumed you must have known, too, but that you chose never to discuss it — a strange obstinacy, if you don’t mind my saying so, very like your father’s. To be fair, we never really talked about it with your brothers, either. It was all terribly discreet.’

Here he paused and coughed.

‘I had my own family, you see.’

‘So this was adultery on a biblical scale.’

‘Fortunately, Will, we don’t get stoned to death in this country for loving the right person and marrying the wrong one.’

I turned back to the mirror and finished shaving.

‘So, now you’re divorced and free to marry.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m widowed.’

I couldn’t hide the disbelief in my voice.

‘You were waiting for your wife to die?’

‘That’s what you do when you marry a Catholic.’

He stood up.

‘Now you know.’

He crossed to the bathroom door but, before leaving he said, ‘I have two children, Will. Both of them are grown up, of course. Cloris is twenty-eight and John is twenty-six. You’ll meet them when you come back from up north.’

I was so distracted by this avalanche of unwanted information that all I could think of to say was, ‘Your last name is Gilbert and you called your son John? Isn’t that a little vulgar?’

‘My father’s name was John. Not everything is connected to the movies.’

He left. I splashed water on my face, and a little bay rum, and returned to my bedroom to get dressed.

Chapter Two

setting out

OUR FAREWELLS HAD BEEN AWKWARD
; or, at any rate, mine had been. Mother and I had had no time to discuss her impending nuptials, and we were both aware, as she kissed me lightly on the cheek, that this rather large and important issue had not been broached. She’d no doubt read my silence on the matter as disapproval — and she wasn’t a million miles from being right about that — but her response was a familiar demonstration that my feelings weren’t, after all, of much interest or importance to her. She sent me off with that small, reluctant kiss, and a chilly smile — a smile that had begun warmly when it was turned on Brian, but which had lost all its heat by the time it was directed at me.

Brian and I arrived at Victoria Barracks as instructed, at eight o’clock on the dot. James Fowler and Corporal Pyers were there already, and on the floor in the office were three kit bags. Folded on a chair were two uniforms, and beside the chair were two pairs of shoes.

‘As soon as you change into these,’ James said, ‘you belong to us.’

With the recent news of Mother’s arrangements still running around in my head, I couldn’t wait to shed my civilian skin and turn myself over to Army Intelligence. The uniform was scratchy and immediately uncomfortable, and after only a few paces around James Fowler’s office I knew that the shoes would be torture. Nevertheless, as I moved inside the heavy, ill-fitting material, I felt something close to elation. As far as I was concerned, this wasn’t a uniform. It was a costume.

James Fowler looked at his watch.

‘I’ve got two hours to give you some idea of what’s in store for you. Obviously we don’t have time to turn you into real soldiers, but I’m afraid you can’t go where you’re going without a crash course in a few basic skills.’

Over the next hour or so I began to wonder whether I’d made a ghastly mistake in signing up for this run, if I might use a theatrical term for what now appeared to be rather more military in nature than I’d bargained for. We were to be put on a troop train immediately and sent to somewhere called Ingleburn in New South Wales where, God help us, we were to learn how to fire a gun and, worse, how to ride a horse.

‘The Observer Unit is basically a cavalry unit, so being able to ride, even inexpertly, is essential. Did I mention that yesterday?’

‘No,’ I said calmly. ‘No, you didn’t.’