Shame and the Captives (15 page)

“Mrs. Sheffield,” he called, half-abashed in case she was ashamed to be seen like this. “Might I help you?”

With dark, outraged eyes, she was inspecting his uniform, which he still wore in full—Sam Browne belt and service ribbons and all. Somehow he could see her decide that his shell of office did not fit
hers of misery. She wanted to be alone in a landscape that suited her grievance.

“Thanks,” she said, having decided to treat him as neutral. Her tone became pleasant, but you could tell that alternative tones lay banked within her. She conceded a wet smile beneath her burlap hood. “That's a pretty nice uniform you have.”

“Oh,” he said, boyishly delighted. “I've just been at weekend maneuvers. Chocolate soldier stuff!”

He could tell she wavered.

“Look, get in, please. It's ridiculous to get so wet.”

He wanted to know, but couldn't ask, why her husband had hit her. Who else would have? She got in beside Abercare. It was done lithely. He could smell the wetness of her clothes and the cleaner, cold odor of her saturated flesh.

He put the car back in gear. “Look, I can see you've had a bit of an accident. Would you like to come home, and my wife can give you some tea and sort out some dry clothes?”

And I'd have had you beneath my roof and could watch how you sat at my table. The table had been cold since Emily had grown discontented in this place, and it was worse because she didn't say so. Nola Sheffield would make the table radiant again.

She said woodenly, “Do you mind just dropping me at the park in town?”

“Well, it's not my business. But you'll get wetter still.”

“No,” she said, “there's picnic shelters there. I just want to have a think. I like parks a lot. They give you a bit of time.”

She gave a small, tentative smile that caused a definite movement of something within him, a jolt. The quaintness and the beauty.

“All right,” Abercare conceded. “I'll turn the car around.”

“Oh,” she said, feeling her lip for a second, then—in a sort of stoicism—at once withdrawing her finger. “I hadn't thought of that. Sorry.”

But he was already grinding the shuddering Morris into the turn. He decided to be adventurous. “I hate to see you bruised like that.”

She said nothing. He'd reached the limit of what was permitted to be said, at least for now.

“I have time for you, Mr. Abercare,” she said then, plainly and without emphasis. “You're a different kind of man than they are around Elgin.”

“I wouldn't say that. I'm a pretty standard-issue sort of fellow.” He put some effort into not glowing with delight. It had struck him by now, though, that if she were observed sitting in the park, he would be observed dropping her off there. Nonetheless, he continued up the rain-slicked gravel road and reached the slumped old houses on the edge of the town and so rolled past pubs and shut drapery shops and the long front of Western Stores to the comfortless park beyond.

“Thanks a lot,” she told him and got out.

He knew there was something off-balance in her. The elements did not add up to a whole. She got out into the stubborn downpour. She put the wet burlap over her head again. By the time he'd backed and forwarded a few times and turned the car, he saw she had taken up a seat in a picnic shed.

When he got home, he told Emily all about it, as a sort of expiation, though he didn't know for what. It did not prevent Nola Sheffield and her remembered bruises seizing him by night. In a dream he took this exquisite and baffling creature, his intentions almost as pedagogic as lustful, to an indefinite city.

•  •  •

An uncle of Abercare's died in Scotland, and he received news of a small inheritance from a solicitor in Edinburgh. There were papers enclosed that needed to be signed and notarized, and he was on his way to Stanthorpe on a cranky branch line, in a carriage infested with coal dust from an ancient and inefficient locomotive, to attend to that
business. Ninety seconds before the train left, the storekeeper's wife, Nola Sheffield, appeared at his carriage door in a straw hat and a floral dress like the one she had worn in the rain, and stepped up and made her way down the central aisle. She was carrying a middle-sized “port,” as Queenslanders called a piece of luggage. He rose to take it from her and say hello and place the bag on the wire rack overhead.

Nola Sheffield permitted this gallantry and thanked him. He turned away to find a seat at a distance from her.

“You're welcome to sit across,” she told him, pointing to the seat opposite her.

“That's very kind,” he told her, and as if it could be done by willpower, struggled to prevent an excess of blood from coloring his face.

Her features were healed and her eyes had lost that look of universal disappointment. She told him she was going to visit a sick aunt in Stanthorpe who had had a stroke. She would be staying with her cousin, who was minding the aunt.

“What will the store do without your gift for mathematics?”

“Oh, I reckon it will get on all right. True, I got the arithmetic prize in high school, but then my father needed to pull me out.”

“And why did he need to do that?”

“My brother was drowned. Dad wanted the help. I was glad to get away from geometry.”

“But you're so good at numbers,” he protested.

“They're easy,” she said. “You can see them in your head.”

“Geometry has its uses, believe me,” he assured her, and sounded to himself as if he had the arrogance of geometry at his fingertips. He stopped himself talking about its utility in navigation and artillery.

“Everyone says you were a soldier in India,” she observed.

“Well,” he told her, “Kenya and Ceylon for a little while too.” He had met Emily in Kenya, having lingered there during a home leave. He had intended to spend as much time as he could in London and Edinburgh, visiting his widowed mother and members of the family, and going to the country houses of the parents of fellow officers for
parties and shooting and fishing weekends. Instead, he let his ship leave Nairobi and delayed a month for Emily's sake, courting her with a passionate respect. He remembered the Muthaiga Club, its pink walls and the casual dusks, the endless evenings and the sweet eternities of conversation with her in the garden, and a torrent of kisses beneath sharp stars towards the end of his stay. He'd written to her from England, once he got there, telling her that he had been given a passage which did not take in Nairobi and asking would she come to India at the end of his leave to marry him. Now he felt a moment's bewilderment that all of it could have ended up in Elgin—all that pleasure taking, all that glut of color, all that sumptuary excitement and transimperial passion.

“And what was it like?” asked Nola.

“Oh,” said Abercare, “India was peaceful, strangely.”

He told her of the few months he had spent campaigning in Waziristan. A chap preposterously called the Fakir of Ipi had got the local people stirred up. “All I had to do was guard the roads with my fellows and make an occasional search through the villages, looking for arms. Apart from that, it was a wonderful life altogether.”

“How was it wonderful?”

“Well, normally we only worked about four hours or so a day.”

“Four hours!” she said and whistled under her breath.

“Yes. The rest of the time we played polo or cricket, and sometimes we went on tiger hunts. And then there were mess dinners and balls. The wives of Indian rajas and nizams were there in the most astonishing gowns—swathes of golden cloth and the most beautiful rings and bracelets. When I was young, I thought it would last forever.”

The train pulled into a station, and one sullen and reclusive farmer entered the compartment and, as the train moved, showed his determination to check every paddock between there and Stanthorpe in case it carried more pasture than his.

Nola leaned towards Abercare. “The only wonderful thing that's
happened to me is that I saw a marsupial lion once. I can't tell too many people, my husband says, or they'll think I'm soft in the head. They're supposed to be extinct, see. Anyhow, I saw it when I was young, about twelve. I was with my father up Crohamhurst way, where the bush gets so thick that you can't see the sun. How does anyone know whether—in bush like that—the lions are there or not, living in the shadows?”

He leaned forward too. He had a sense that she thought this her central secret, and that to give it up was a serious gift.

“How long would you say it's been extinct?” he asked. “Thousands of years, isn't it?”

“No. Sixty years. Sixty years ago someone saw one, and they believed him because he was a scientist. I saw the stripes—because they have stripes, you see. They started behind the shoulders, and thinned out and vanished.”

It was, he thought, a mature summary. It also had the delightful weight of something confidentially shared. At the local School of Arts at Elgin, she went on, she had heard a professor from Brisbane speak about the creature. The lion's Greek name meant “pouched flesh eater,” she said, as if those words were riveted in her brain. Its large head gave it a strong bite. And when it caught other animals it killed them by dropping on them from trees. Its natural enemy, as it turned out, was the giant goanna, which, thank God, was definitely extinct.

She went on at a slightly manic length, which he afterwards saw as a sign that there was no center to this girl, that her knowledge and her soul were scattered. But at the time of his enchantment, it was what she had to give him, and she gave it in full. “If there is a lion in the bush, then it can't be alone—it must have parents, and perhaps there are four or more of them out there, males and females. Trouble is, there are only four nipples in the pouch, so if more than four are born at the one time, it's bad luck for the weakest one.” They arrived in Stanthorpe in what Abercare thought was a half hour but was in
fact over three. He offered to carry her relatively light bag, but she declined. He asked if she needed a taxi, but country people rarely took them and so she said she could walk—it was less than a mile. He found himself walking with her into High Street. Before the stores and hotels began, there was a public garden. She said, “Sometimes I go there, too, and sit about for a while. The picnic shelters.”

Was this some sort of invitation?

“You really do like parks.”

“Well, you're pretty safe in parks,” she told him, looking at him directly, in a way that inflicted delight and incredulity on him.

They came to his hotel. She had to go straight on, she told him. He watched her go. After leaving his bag in his room at the hotel he went out again and walked down Connor Street to a solicitor's office, where he had the inheritance documents notarized—a tedious business following the methods inherited from Britain. The rigmarole done, he accepted the man's congratulations on the modest but far from unwelcome legacy. He took the documents back to the hotel but then, in a fever of possibility, walked two miles, eschewing the chemists' shops in the middle of town, to find a suburban pharmacist, and from him received in a brown bag a small supply of condoms, just in case the marsupial lion had been Nola's mating display.

Back at the hotel he dined in late dusk. “Getting an early night?” a waiter asked him.

“Might go for a spin round town.”

“Good luck seeing anything of interest,” the young man told him.

Outside, it was properly dark now. The streetlights penetrated only fragments of the place. An occasional light from a house in the backstreet combined with wood smoke and the odor of plain, muttony food to make you think a town like this had been here, fixed in manners and aroma, for centuries instead of a mere eighty, ninety years. The street was vacant of witnesses as he turned into the park and walked down paths amongst floral beds and then amongst the little cluster of picnic huts.

He heard her call. “Mr. Abercare.” She sat within one of those small cubicles, in a corner.

“Ah,” he said, mimicking the last shreds of ordinary, falsely surprised social greeting. As remembered by Abercare, their plain, conspiratorial sentences were enchanting. His blood went hurtling through his body. After a while they moved out of the strict confines of the picnic table and lay on an embankment, where he gallantly spread his coat. Her dress seemed light and enabled him to reach her breasts and shoulders and belly and thighs beneath. Whether she was one person or two, he wanted possession and if asked then would have given his life lightly for that. “A moment, Nola,” he pleaded, and artificiality blighted time as he paused to roll the condom onto his prick, a process about which she seemed patient.

Some sense of transcendence took away the indignity of his exposing his middle-aged arse to the night and entering her. Nothing abashed him, and her cries seemed to have nothing to do with the trivialities of his belts and buckles and imperfect flesh. In the moments after climax he felt a sudden tide of reality, and he returned to his normal habits, and advised her to go home to her aunt before they did each other greater damage. But the disabling passion rose again in him before he'd finished uttering the advice. He had a second to think before his thighs followed their own intention.

Then, towards ten o'clock—the first time he had consulted a watch—he was sated enough for reason to have its last say. He would love to meet like this again, but he was married and she was married, too, and from what he could judge there was a risk of damage being done her if this ever became known.

“I've heard that talk before,” she told him, half-amused, because she did not believe that the wall he was erecting would stand. “Men never say any of that at the start, when they want a girl. It's always afterwards.”

“You should go first, Nola,” he told. “I can watch from here so that you get out safely.”