Shame and the Captives (33 page)

Colonel Abercare got out. “What's up, Mrs. Galloway?” he called out in solicitude. He could see by the vivid moon and the headlights that her eyes were not fully focused. Her own beaming headlights made it worse, illuminating her in a way that suggested each eye had a different objective. She almost looked fit to bay, as the moon was said to make mad people do.

Thelma said, “I've been inspecting the engine, but I can't diagnose its ills.” She shook her head slowly. Her bemusement seemed whimsical—obviously the engine did not upset her as much as other factors did.

“No pipes loose,” she said. “The battery cells are all right, the radiator's got enough water, and the fan belt isn't broken. That's all my father ever taught me to do with a broken-down car. If I'd been the son he might have taught me more. God, it's cold, isn't it?”

“I'll get the driver to see what's the trouble,” said Abercare.

The driver, carrying a torch, had already got out, and now he set to work under the hood. Since he would need two hands, Colonel Abercare offered to hold the torch for him.

“Carburetor seems all right, sir,” he said cheerily. He opined that there might be carburetor problems.

“Do you think you can fix it here?” asked the colonel.

“Don't have the tools for that, sir,” the driver told him.

Ewan Abercare looked at Mrs. Galloway. She stood by the limit of the torchlight now, and her eyes looked withdrawn, dreaming of something else.

“I think it'll need a repair truck from the camp, sir,” said the driver.

Colonel Abercare peered into the darkness as if desperately hoping a redeeming mechanic might present himself. It was utterly characteristic of Thelma Galloway to break down in such a place, in the path of his pressing business. It was what women like her did.

“Well, we can't have you out here in this cold,” he said, trying to keep a trace of blame out of his voice. “I'm afraid I'm expected at camp. I'll take you there with me and you can sit in my living room until we rouse our mechanic. Then you can come back here in the truck with him.”

“It is the coldest and brightest night of the year,” Thelma told him as he sat beside the driver on the way to the camp. He could smell an unpleasant emanation of gin and perfume coming from the backseat. Gin is a fragrant liquor, thought Abercare, but it was beginning to turn rancid in Thelma. A gate with an armed guard by it stood open at the camp entrance. Most of the sentries were in the watchtowers and in Main Road, and at either end of that great avenue.

As they progressed through the camp it was bright as nighttime at a fair. There were lights around the perimeter, and though it was lights-out in the barracks, the interior of the guardhouse and sundry rooms in the officers' quarters also shone—one from the room in which Major Suttor was up, probably writing his serial.

The car stopped outside Colonel Abercare's quarters.

“I'm sorry I can't drive you straight back,” he said. “But I need to keep my car here. I shall organize another . . .”

“Understood,” Thelma muttered as he helped her from the car. “Understood.”

As he handed her into his quarters, he saw his orderly hustling towards them, woken, he assumed, by the duty sergeant or possibly by yet another mercurial rumor—that his boss had arrived out of the night trailing a drunk woman from town.

He led Thelma into his sitting room while his orderly stooped and fanned into existence a wood fire in the stove in the middle of the room. The fire drew cleanly, and Abercare decided nothing burned so
aromatically as Australian eucalyptus. The residual oils released from a dead bough like an ascending soul.

The proposition that he had orders to keep his car by him was not strictly the truth, but it was true enough. If he felt the necessity to come to camp in the middle of the night, then he should have his car nearby. So he called the duty officer, Lieutenant Cook, a slim little fellow with a game leg. Cook was about forty years old and was said to have been the last Australian wounded in the Great War, though he was too modest to press such a claim. Abercare got a report from him. Guard posts had reported that though lights were out in the compound, there was still more movement than usual, hut to hut.

“Have the duty sergeant call for a mechanic and the tow truck,” Abercare ordered the officer, “to attend to Mrs. Galloway's car. It's broken down on the road to town. I gave Mrs. Galloway a lift here, and she's in my quarters. I'll meet you at the north gate of Main Road in five minutes and visit the posts with you. In the meantime, call Major Suttor and tell him I'll meet him in a quarter of an hour in my office.”

He realized Thelma Galloway was still standing, waiflike, in the middle of the floor.

“Please, sit down,” he said, pointing to an undistinguished easy chair appropriate to his rank. Majors had to do with slightly more spartan upholstery still.

“Could we have some tea, please?” Colonel Abercare asked his orderly, after the man had been able to quit the business of fire making.

“I think I'd rather have a drink, if you don't mind, Colonel.”

“Oh,” said Abercare. “Of course. I just wondered . . . Gin again, then?”

“Come on,” Thelma protested, at least in amusement, but implying for the orderly a closer relationship of teasing and reproof than existed between her and Abercare. “I haven't had that much. Yes, gin, thank you.”

The orderly, who had some experience as a waiter, went to the plain dresser where Abercare kept the liquor for visits from civilians such as the mayor of Gawell or the Red Cross and the Japanese and Italian sections of the Swiss consulate general.

“Don't worry, Private,” said Abercare. “I'll get the drink. If you could check first on what's happening with the mechanic we're sending out to take Mrs. Galloway home and repair her car.”

The orderly went. Abercare poured Mrs. Galloway's gin on the weak side, with plenty of tonic, scarce though it was. In the mess, they served it from crushed-up quinine tablets mixed with sugar and water, but here he poured Thelma Galloway the authentic thing, and she took it from him and looked at it blearily, shifting in her seat and with a gloss of sweat on her forehead. “We'll have you on your way soon,” he told her, but it was largely a promise to himself. “You won't mind waiting here while I attend to business, Mrs. Galloway, will you?”

“No, no,” she growled, and then she smiled a lenient, bilious smile. “I hear there's a war on.”

“I'll have you informed as soon as the truck is ready to leave,” Abercare assured her. “And even if he can't fix your car at once, the mechanic will drop you home and then tow your automobile to one of the garages.”

“Our overseer on the property will see to it,” she told him blearily. “If your chap can't.”

In the functional, upholstered chair, Mrs. Galloway began to drowse before she had half finished her gin. The orderly returned and suggested tea to Abercare.

“Is the mechanic here?” asked Abercare.

“Not yet, sir. He's just getting back from town. I've left an urgent message.”

Thelma Galloway closed her eyes. He went into his bedroom and fetched an army blanket and spread it over her.

“I think you can go to bed now, Private,” he told his orderly, who saluted and left.

Abercare stood and reached for his overcoat and gloves and stick. He emerged into the night and walked amongst the huts towards the sentries at the gates of Main Street and saw the extraordinary drench of searchlight across Compound C, turning the earth blue-gray and making the wire glitter decoratively with frost. He met with Lieutenant Cook by a sentry box there, and they visited the sentries at the gates and along the wire. Abercare even undertook a rare visit to the towers, so cramped as to hold only a solitary man. He certainly didn't intend to send a detachment in to forestall the occasional prisoners who still moved across the crusty ground carrying messages of farewell.

“Coldest night of the year,” said Abercare to Cook, before asking for a report. Cook responded that there was no exceptional or dangerous behavior, given the circumstances. He told Abercare he was about to visit the guard detail located in the tent within Main Road itself.

“I could just call them, sir. But they feel a little exposed there.”

Abercare was cheered by Cook's genial report and by the high, huge moon. He now made his way to the meeting with Suttor. Waiting for the compound commander, Abercare called the orderly in the guardhouse and told him he wanted the guard doubled. This would put half the garrison on the perimeter, but so be it. Suttor arrived, in fact, just after Abercare had entered his office and taken off his overcoat, even though it was still cold enough to wear it. Suttor himself did not wear an overcoat or gloves and when Abercare congratulated him on his imperviousness to cold, he rebuffed the compliment by saying the short journey from his quarters had not been worth the trouble of putting them on.

Abercare, at his desk already, told Suttor to feel free to smoke. Unless events were too pressing for that.

“No,” said Suttor, placing a brief written report on the table and bringing out his fashionable cigarettes. “I don't think pressing is the exact word. There are certainly reportable incidents. But the duty
officer has no doubt told you this, and some of it you witnessed earlier in the evening for yourself.”

The colonel opened the report. As he read, he, too, pulled out a cigarette and lit it.

“So, reportable,” he said, and inhaled from his cigarette and continued to read. Then he looked up at Suttor, rather reassured. Suttor looked back at him with those blank, handsome, hostile eyes, and began his verbal report. The feverish walking about, hut to hut, had continued. Nevski, said Suttor, had had the guard take him into the entertainment hall to confirm that there were no play rehearsals going on at the moment. All the costumes were hung up. But that was understandable given that half the cast of future shows would no longer be in Compound C to perform. On a slightly later visit to a hut, he'd discovered that, partially hidden behind a draped blanket hung from a mosquito net bracket, the man they called Sakura was in drag, all queened up, as if intending to perform later. If anything were seriously untoward, Nevski reported, he doubted the female impersonator would have gone to the trouble of attiring himself.

Suttor had delivered the report until this point through lips pursed around his cigarette. Even though the man had been offered the opportunity to smoke, to deliver a report in this way—in a manner appropriate to a recording studio, perhaps—affronted the regular officer in Abercare. This apparently minor gaffe of Suttor's seemed like a case of mockery—was almost certainly mockery. Even so, that didn't worry Ewan Abercare as much as the competing images of a deserted stage but a female impersonator dressed as for a performance. That paradox enhanced a little the unease he'd contracted at the Garners.

Abercare said, “We've given them free run tonight. But we must tell the triumvirate tomorrow that we won't tolerate all this running around tomorrow night, or the next. As far as I'm concerned, they've had their party.”

“Yes,” said Suttor dreamily. “I think they have. I have to remind
you, though, that if they hadn't been told about the move, this would have been a more normal night.”

Abercare stared at him. “Would tomorrow have been a normal night, if they found out by accident? There'd be greater unrest still.” He broke off, thinking, This is not wise—having a debate with the bugger who had his cigarette cocked upwards like a bookmaker about to write a ticket. It seemed to have gone out, too.

“Do you want the machine guns manned?” asked Suttor. “As a display of serious intentions.”

“There's no need,” said Abercare, and chose to leave his reasons unexplained. The guard had been doubled, for Christ's sake!

“Machine guns in the wrong place,” muttered Suttor, like a civilian. “And unmanned.”

Abercare said, “Suttor! None of that.”

He was thinking he would contact the training camp, and remembered the two tottering young trainee warriors he had passed in Gawell that night.
Training brigade.
The backup. He got up now, ending the interview with Suttor. Too much time spent on humoring this scribbler! Suttor got his own back by holding that bloody cigarette, which should by now have been ground out in the ashtray, cupped in his left hand as he saluted.

Uneasy that he was working from such imponderables, which seemed most imponderable now, at midnight, Abercare called the duty officer at the training camp. He told the man, a true veteran, minder of boys, to inform Colonel Deakin that the signs in Gawell were ambiguous and that Deakin should entertain for the next three nights the possibility of an outbreak at the prison camp and make his dispositions accordingly.

He felt less restless in his soul as he hung up. He returned now to his quarters and, opening the door into the warm living room, saw that the fire had burned down a little. He smelled an acid sourness in the air. Mrs. Galloway lay on the floor with a spilled gin bottle. She had been sick within the ambit of the spillage. He was appalled, but
making jolly pronouncements—“Here we go, Thelma!”—he lifted her from the floor to an easy chair. Her body was firm in his arms, a young woman's body still, asserting its hope for appreciation or even something as fulsome, as un-Gawell-like, as adoration. She opened her eyes and groaned.

“Sorry,” she told him. “Came on sudden.” She belched and laughed a private laugh. “Madame Garner's bloody hospitality . . . It creeps up on you, doesn't it?”

He hoped none of this acrid smell would attach itself to him. He dumped her in the easy chair again and covered her, and picked up the bottle of largely spilled gin, and then set himself to considering whether to clean up the mess himself. That would create a supposition he had something to hide. He went to his bathroom and got a bleached towel of pale khaki and threw it over the mess. Then he called the guardhouse and demanded to know where the truck and mechanic were.