Shame and the Captives (20 page)

•  •  •

In late April, Colonel Abercare finally took some leave to visit his wife, Emily, at her sister and brother-in-law's property in Tathra on the south coast. Leaving Gawell, he traveled as a husband and private citizen, but his rank made it an easier journey, first class and with a sleeping compartment overnight to Sydney. There he would need to change trains and travel south along a beautiful and seemingly illimitable coastline with notable escarpments crowding in, blocking the afternoon sun and bringing an earlier dusk.

According to Emily's letters, she seemed content there in Cecil's verdant pastures. She got on well with Florence, who never made
her feel like a relative who was endured simply because there was nowhere else for her to go.

As for going to pay court to Emily again—its subtleties were such as to interrupt his sleep. During the invasion scare of '41, when he had commanded the militia battalion, he had half hoped for the great intrusion by the enemy to take place and absolve him of his sins by death or heroism. But now that he was a pure bureaucrat, he had no mitigating military perils of the here-today, gone-tomorrow variety to shield him. Demanding forms of truthfulness, diplomacy, penitence were incumbent on him. And indeed he could exercise them with sincerity. Reconciliation was his total ambition.

He had, in barracks in India and elsewhere, seen the faces of men such as he going sour for a telltale second at balls and mess dinners. Men who knew they were sidelined now, that the great military river would never pick them up again, that they would need hereafter to be content, no matter what talents burned unquenched within them, with middling rank and the title it might give them for mild respect in some limited place in England or the dominions.

His own fatuity had not directly altered his military career, as it had altered and destroyed the careers of other officers. He could not blame his never having been given brigade or divisional command, with a major-general's double crown at his shoulders and red lapels, on the fact he'd gone after a senior officer's wife. On the other hand, those who weighed promotions might have sensed in him the possibility of losing proportion. Those submerged tendencies were sometimes instinctively read by the wise. So he had grown out of military vanities. His one ambition was to get Emily back: marriage mending was the supreme task. Occasionally, during the day around the camp, Abercare would be shifted about like seaweed by a wave of grief for his wife; for her orphaned childhood after her parents had died in a truck on some perilous road in Rhodesia, and then her failure—which might well be his failure too—to bear children. Parentless and childless, she'd had only him.

Still, women did not want pity; they wanted the other—the deathless love. He was always puzzled about which of the two operated in him, and did not see them as poles but as two sides of the one entity, one of which underwrote the other. That might have explained his folly back there—that he'd tired of the pity and the politeness and wary tenderness they had somehow come to treat each other with. Now, pity and politeness and wary tenderness looked pretty desirable to him.

Cecil told him in a letter that he'd overheard Emily tell a dinner guest that she must join poor Ewan in Gawell soon, and she gave as an excuse for not having gone earlier the fact that the seasons were so severe out there. He hoped this excuse would give way to another soon—to her excuse for going to Gawell after all. So Ewan Abercare's ambitions ran.

•  •  •

For him, part of the pain of going to Tathra was the surmise as to whether Emily had told her sister about
it
. He imagined that her sister knew something was not right, but would have made no fuss about it. Surely the brother-in-law, Cecil, who was a decent enough fellow and who had in the past sat up with him whisky-bibbing and exchanging anecdotes, and mentioning nothing of marriage, would have suspicions, too, but, Abercare hoped, no exact knowledge.

The slow overnight train to Sydney then, the Western Mail! That title “Mail” stated a priority for envelopes over passengers and meant mailbags must be dropped off at and dragged along the gravel of every larger station throughout the night journey. Even without that, he would have slept badly. He woke frequently to locomotive brakes applied or released, or to carriage doors banging and the inconsiderate shouts of railway yokels. In the sour dawn he was served a cup of tea and an arrowroot biscuit by the porter, and disembarked at Sydney Central, where a military porter carried his bag and took him to the officers' section of the tearoom. Here he read the
Herald
. He had a
novel with him, too, but could not read it for more than three minutes at a time. Nothing stuck. Print didn't stick. So come back, Emily, and save me from this fretfulness and from the stupidity of envisaging a fling with a certain Mrs. Galloway, the solicitor's wife, who had glimmered in his direction at a civic reception at the Council Chambers at Gawell.

Mrs. Galloway was extremely pretty in a waspish, disappointed way. What they were beginning to call “neurotic”—a slightly kinder word than “mad” but one he couldn't have defined. One thing he knew: I attract the sick, and the sick attract me.

Now, on the south coast train on a lovely autumn afternoon, he saw the empty Pacific Ocean the Allies were slowly reclaiming. So immediate to the railway line, the sea did its glittering utmost to charm him, and only an occasional marring waft of coal dust from the engine came between it and him. He felt a spell of nausea as the train pulled in at the country station, which lay between the blatant azure of the beach and Tathra's lush, shadowy hills.

Cecil met him in his Buick with a rectangular coal gas bladder in a wooden frame on top of it, an imperfect means of dealing with petrol rationing, and drove him away from the sea through the somnolent town and up the valley of steep, luxurious pastures and fifteen miles inland, where he bred beef and sheep so profitably. Abercare asked after Florence and was told she had had some women's problems but was altogether in good health. “Still a perky talker,” said Cecil. “Natter, natter, natter. Emily's company's very good for her.”

Cecil's great-grandparents had owned these amiable coastal acreages, and he had met Emily's younger sister on a steamer to England—he had been making his Grand Tour. Florence had seemed pretty and somewhat pathetic after the simultaneous death of her parents. It was true that from the start of Abercare's own courtship with Emily, her orphan condition—even though she had been seventeen when it happened and was thirty when Abercare had first met her—had sharpened his feelings for her.

“And what about Emily?” Abercare asked, blushing beneath his tan. “I mean, I get letters from her. But . . . your assessment. Good health, would you say?”

“Oh, Emily's in great spirits, old fellow. I wouldn't worry too much about that.”

Cecil spoke quickly, to get past that giant fact that Emily and Abercare weren't living together. Cecil seemed to prefer to pretend Emily was on a fairly long holiday.

“For sisters,” he told Abercare, “they like each other's company pretty well. There's a link between sisters who like each other. You and I don't have a chance of understanding or disrupting it.”

“Oh,” said Abercare, “I wouldn't want to.”

They talked awhile about cattle prices, the world's hunger for wool—in neither of which Abercare was much interested. The drought was years over and there had always been rain here on the coast anyhow. And the war drove up demand. The colonel knew his brother-in-law was minting money.

Abercare got out and opened the gate into the property. Beyond its screen of poplars, the house was long, low, deep-veranda'd, graced in front with a garden full of winter-enduring purple, white, violet, and scarlet. He walked to the house, and his brother-in-law parked the car and got out.

With an uncertain face, Emily appeared with her sister at the door. They had heard the Buick turn up. Her lean, handsome looks immediately roused desire in him and hope of contentment.

“Hello, Ewan,” she called.

That was hopeful, thought Abercare. Her sister came out all the way to within feet of him, chattering about how well he looked in his uniform. But was that some weight he'd put on? she asked.

“Not enough soldierly exercise out there,” Abercare apologized. “The desk is our only obstacle course.”

He smiled across Florence's shoulder at Emily, who nodded. When he went up to her, she let herself be chastely kissed.

They had some sherry in the living room. Again, how much did Florence know? It seemed to him from the friendly style of his sister-in-law and her husband that Emily's reticence had saved him from utter shame here, in this homestead, and that she had laid down an unspoken ordinance that he be warmly treated, without a hint of chiding. Florence was certainly a conversationalist of a kind, and her flow of trivial chat rode like a well-intentioned tide over all that was unsettled between Emily and him. She was interrupted only by her visits to the kitchen. She had had one of the dairy farmers' daughters to cook the meals before the war, she said, but what with the manpower regulations, the girl was off doing men's work.

Emily asked, “Ewan, would you recommend Cecil get an Italian POW? Have you any to spare?”

“Well,” said Abercare, as if the question were more than fanciful, “in a general sense, yes. I mean, we've got hundreds out there on farms. We get a number—perhaps half a dozen—returned each month as unsatisfactory or insolent. But I'd suspect in half those cases it's the farmer who's at fault.”

“I bet you're right about that one,” said Cecil. “Some of these old farmers are sour, grudging beggars.”

“Do the Italians behave themselves around women?” asked Florence.

For reasons Emily would understand, the question made him uncomfortable.

“It seems so,” he said quickly. “And a number of them are from the Italian countryside and understand livestock.”

They moved on from the Italians. Florence chattered about her recent Sydney trip. At the Australia Hotel they have a jazz band in the lounge, not a palm court orchestra. The Americans had altered the nature of things! At the Trocadero it was all about jazz and swing and something called jive, and you'd need an American to explain the boundary line between them all. “Australian girls are queuing up to
dance in this ridiculous jitterbug way as if they want to say, ‘Look, we can be just as much up to date as you Americans.' ”

“Did you queue up to jitterbug, Flo?” asked Cecil. “Is there something I don't know?”

“I don't have the joints anymore. It's still the two-step for me.”

Emily reminded her, “There was a time you danced the Charleston in the Muthaiga Club, Flo. Is jive sillier than the Charleston?”

“I thought you were supposed to be my sister,” said Flo, in mock chagrin.

The two men both chose to hoot, and Cecil shouted, “Touché! I'd venture to say that it would make sense to you, Flo, if you were still twenty-two and living in a town full of amiable, ambling Yanks. I remember like Emily that fifteen or more years ago you rolled down your stockings and danced! I saw that. I thought, what a girl and what a free spirit! Next thing I knew you were taking me to Mass. It was a pretty nifty piece of missionary work you did there, old girl.”

“The interesting thing,” said Florence, ignoring Cecil's gibe, “is that white American soldiers are said to hate black ones. But they sing their songs and dance their dances. It's as if we decided to take up Aboriginal corroborees. Highly puzzling.”

“There is no accounting for what people do when they're young,” Emily asserted, keeping her eyes to herself. She became contemplative then. Her manner reminded Abercare of times in Elgin before the separation, in the era of rumors, when he'd enter a room where she might be talking to other people and see her features lively and imbued with a sort of light till she noticed him, when her conversation became subdued, dutiful, and halting. He had reduced her to that from her true self, in that terrible limbo time on the farm, before he met up with Nola.

But here at her sister's house it seemed her powers of conversation had mended a great deal. She
had
been party to the evening, had thrown in her share of observations.

It was time for bed. Cecil and Ewan sat up for one more whisky, but they could not make it a session, for Cecil was driving to the sales in Bega the next day. When Ewan Abercare got to the bedroom, he found his wife on her knees, finishing with her rosary beads, just beginning to ball them in her fist at the end of saying what they called “a decade.” The bedroom was cold. In a flannelette nightdress she rose from the floor, and Colonel Abercare saw her thin ankles and the protuberant balls of her feet. Lovely, lanky English bones were the bones she had. She was good-looking in that Nordic way, a woman whose ancestors came from dim regions where complexions could afford to be white and unblemished, and who had then been dragged off for the Empire's sake to the most blatant sun on the planet.

He thought, I was corrupted by Indian and Sinhalese women before such bones came my way. But it wasn't the women's fault. They were fulfilling the role of servants and bringing to it gifts that Northern Christianity had attempted to suppress in European women.

In this cold, plain bedroom, with a picture of the Virgin on one wall and a framed photograph of a racehorse Cecil had once owned on the other, and with Emily as his sole comfort and hope, it seemed to him an even more astounding, ridiculous thing that rank and hope, recorded diligence, loyalty, and companionship had ever meant, in the balance of his mind, less than the chance of a fifteen-minute adventure, with a possible repeat or two.

He and Emily were of course now inevitably uneasy at the prospect of sharing a bed again.

“Well,” he asked, taking off his jacket. “How have you really been, dear?”