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?”
Even in his thick khaki pullover he felt the cold.
“No coughs or anything, I hope?”
“No,” she said. “The old house up north was much worse than this.”
“Yes, it could get much chillier up there,” he admitted briskly. That house sold at a sacrifice price and was never to be visited again. She flipped the sheets, blankets, and eiderdown aside and launched herself athletically and girlishly into the bed. A high jumper when she was young. He knew that.
“I have to admit,” he said, “there have been some beggars of frosts out Gawell way. The interpreter says the Japanese can’t understand why it doesn’t snow. We had a brief dusting of the stuff—when was it?—early last winter. But it aches and aches with cold and all we get are these ironclad frosts.”
“Ewan?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know where it comes from,” she said, relaxing her shoulders. “When I go quiet.”
“That’s no problem.”
“You probably think I do it to get even, but it’s something older than our problem. It’s me. I just wanted to let you know. And I’ve taken too long to cure. I’ve been difficult. A reasonable person might say that a reconciliation should have taken place long ago. It’s an indulgence, and I feel sorry for you.”
“You feel sorry for me?”
“Because I haven’t known how to do it.”
As if to demonstrate that she still felt apartness, she arranged the bedclothes about her functionally, laying definite and discreet claim to part of the territory. “Are you seeing another woman out there? I could barely blame you. My pride would have caused it.”
“No,” he said. “I thought that was understood. I’m willing to wait for you to come out there and join me. Because you’re the only true love I’ve had.”
He recollected Mrs. Galloway. Her gin-inflamed gaze lighting on him, unchecked and hungry; the chance of compounding the mayhem of his life and hers.
“Forgive me for asking,” she said. “I know that you’re a man and that men have certain needs. But I can’t manage it all yet. I have a real phobia, for some reason, of turning up in a new town and . . .”
“No,” he said. His face burned beneath his tan. “No, it won’t happen.”
He stood some feet from the bed. He would not get in with the ease of possession that characterized Emily. He removed his pullover and exposed a crisp khaki shirt—one as issued by the quartermaster, no visits to private shirtmakers as in the old days—and he wore his pants and socks still.
“Look, do you think you might consider coming out there at some stage? I know nice people—Dr. Garner and his wife. He
and his partners come up and do the rounds in the hospitals now and then. There’s an interesting priest out there, a Father Delaney. We’ve even got an Italian army padre as a prisoner. Father Frumelli. Not sure he isn’t a bit Fascist from the songs he lets some of them sing at Mass. Or else he’s naïve. But what I’m trying to say is, you’d make friends there. Fairly easily.”
He could see the idea of Gawell flicker a second in her mind as a chance. But there’d be no final answer tonight.
Behind a screen, he put on his pyjamas and approached the bed.
“Would you put the light out, like a dear?” she asked. He went across the room and did it. It was an autumn night designed for shared body warmth. Whether he would be given any he was not sure. But he had made progress, he knew that as well.
“So let’s sleep on the prospect of coming to Gawell,” he suggested as he settled under blankets. He had an erection and turned aside to hide it.
She said, “Very well, Ewan.”
She turned her back and settled herself to rest.
That night he was troubled by half dreams of the Urdu-speaking woman who had been his maid and bedmate when he was a callow first lieutenant. He had actually believed, from her knowledge of erotic possibility, that she was a partner to his pleasure. He had not understood it was the habit of submission; that she made the bed and set the table and sat on his prick and that it was all one to her. It was necessary to achieve her take-home pay with a bonus for copulation.
He heard Emily wake in the middle of the night to use the chamber pot. A chaste and—he thought—careful flow.
18
In late autumn there was a visit to Compound C by a Red Cross delegation of two Australian Red Cross men and the vice-consul in charge of the Japanese bureau of the Swiss consulate general. In some ways it was like earlier visits. They all wore solemn suits and plain ties. None of them spoke Japanese; they depended on Nevski. Thus, with Major Suttor and Sergeant Nevski attending them, the officials inspected the huts, the sleeping arrangements, the cook house, the supplies, the sanitary arrangements—all as usual. There was an assembly at which they asked through Sergeant Nevski if there were any complaints, and promised immunity to those who did complain. There was the profound complaint amongst them that they had been captured in the first place, but they did not deign to voice it. In fact, they offered no plea and uttered no dissatisfaction. They saw the Russian sergeant in his ill-fitting uniform turn to the Red Cross delegates to assure them that his translation of their invitations and reassurances had been accurate.
The novelty turned out to be that the officials had brought with them a Red Cross photographer. He began his work in the two Italian compounds, taking photographs for the Red Cross to send to families. That took some days, and then it was the turn of Major Suttor’s compound. Nevski and an escort of guards accompanied the major through the gate in Main Road. Sergeant Nevski made it apparent to a meeting of hut leaders in the recreation hall that the photographer was to take a portrait of each prisoner in Compound C and the Red Cross would send the photographs home to families. If any man did not wish his photograph sent home, the photographer was still authorized to take photographs of them, purely for Red Cross records.
Aoki stepped forward and growled, not entirely negatively, and declared that they would need some time to decide this matter with their men. Major Suttor said that he would return with the photographer a little later in the day to hear their decision. But they must have their photographs taken, entitled with their names, to ensure the Red Cross could help them be repatriated when the war was over.
Again, as there had been over the less crucial matter of baseball, there was a quickly assembled hut leaders’ meeting, this time in Aoki’s barracks. Once Aoki, as camp leader, had spoken, it was apparent there was unanimous feeling against the photography. Goda and Aoki and Tengan were one on the matter, and so were the rest of the hut leaders. They in turn went off to put it to their huts, and no voice dissented, not even the Presbyterian, Ban, who did not oppose the combined will in his hut of the rejects, of stragglers on jungle marches, of homosexuals who made an unseemly show of their love, and of those rendered unreliable because of the shock of battle. The belief was that the photographs would be sent to families who were already reconciled to the individual prisoner’s death, and thus confuse, dishonor, and aggrieve.
At two o’clock that afternoon Major Suttor entered the compound again, to the sound of a bell, and saw the prisoners assemble. Nevski stepped up to speak to Aoki. Aoki replied with an uncooperative rumble. Nevski marched back to Suttor and his line of guards. They did not want photographs taken for their families or for the Red Cross records, he reported.
Suttor by now profoundly resented having had to organize this meeting. He needed to marshal all his composure to stop himself launching into a furious harangue and threatening these indulged creatures with unlikely punishment. He had not received any photograph of his son in captivity, and it bewildered him, even apart from the insights into the culture provided by Nevski, that these men should debate such an offer, and then reject it.
Tears pricked Suttor’s eyes. He said, “Tell the bastards it’s required that they submit to being photographed so the Red Cross can attach it to their files in Geneva. That’s all.”
Nevski said he had already told them.
“Tell them again,” Suttor demanded. “Tell them it is compulsory!”
Nevski saluted, turned, and reiterated this. At once every man in the compound dropped to his haunches, crossed his legs, and covered his face with his hands.
“Tell them to fucking get up,” said Suttor, and Nevski did, but they would not obey.
“No photographs,” called Tengan in English from behind his hands.
Aoki wondered how these fools could not understand that, with their burial services having taken place, men could not now show their faces to a photographer. Suttor told Nevski to inform them they would stay there, in that awkward and ultimately painful posture, indefinitely. He took the photographer and Nevski and the guards out of the gate, and watched the compound for a time from Main Road. When the prisoners did not move from their crouched and face-covering posture, he at last marched away.
I could be writing, he thought. Instead, this bullshit!
After some hours, Nevski visited Suttor in his office and told him they had not moved. Suttor called the Swiss vice-consul, who had by now returned to Sydney, and told him what was happening—that the Japanese were all crouched, their hands in front of their faces. The vice-consul sounded remarkably calm about it. “Oh yes,” he said. “There are reports of the same problem in camps elsewhere. There is regrettably little to be done if they continue to oppose the measure. It will delay their repatriation, but they don’t seem to mind.”
The sun was getting low in Gawell. The photographer had to leave the next day to go to the camp at Wye, where, except for the Italians—and they had some Germans there, too—the small number of Japanese would likely also resist his work.
Suttor, still aggrieved that his prisoners would pretend to be ghosts, called Abercare and suggested a punishment he considered utterly appropriate. (He did not understand that it was a punishment that would gratify Tengan.) “I want to send a platoon into the compound to confiscate every baseball bat they can find. I’ll put men with light machine guns in the towers.”
He heard a silence. He knew that Abercare was chewing the insides of his cheeks over the matter, and Suttor found it hard to endure those few seconds. For lack of a photograph of his imprisoned son, forcing these men to be photographed or punishing them for refusing was an imperative that burned within him. It had become more his business than that of the Red Cross.
Abercare spoke at last. “I shan’t confirm that order,” he said. “There is no regulation that says they need be photographed, and it must be obvious to the Swiss that they are not being brutally treated or starved. If we did what you suggest, then they would grow more intractable still, and . . .
and we would give them material to use against us.”
“Then they’ll have won,” said Suttor. “They’ll have bloody won, sir. As they always do, however we paint it.”
“Well,” said Abercare contemplatively, “they’re only winning in their own minds. They’re losing in terms of reality. Look at the war news. Events have shown, though, that it’s futile playing games with these chaps. They are not subject to the same set of reactions. No, I would really recommend, Major, that you not enter into direct contest with them. Let them sit there till nightfall if they must. Till there is no light left for photography, till it’s damned cold. I bet they’ll get up then. In fact, better to send Nevski over. I’m going to tell him to let them know the photographs are off.”
Suttor felt bewildered tears burning his eyes again. He wanted more than to deprive them of baseball bats. He wanted a larger and more penetrating punishment, but wasn’t even permitted a gesture.
At dusk, the prisoners did rise from their crouched postures and uncover their faces. The next day, Suttor—on his way to the compound and still aggrieved—saw with some bitterness prisoners wearing mitts and throwing balls to each other. In this mode they were like men anywhere throwing a ball, exercising that basic human comfort and duty of not letting the orb, the symbol of the essential egg, fall from your hands and into the dust.
“Can’t shoot ’em,” he muttered. “Can’t punish them.”
He was coming to a bitter awareness that the captors are prisoners too.
• • •
On Fridays in Gawell, Oxley and Castlereagh Streets were alive with the backing, surging, clutter, and creak of traffic, from buses arriving from remoter parts of the shire, and gas-bladder-topped cars of the better-off townspeople and families who could call themselves “graziers” to the trucks of mixed farmers such as Duncan, the drays of smaller soil scratchers, and the foot traffic of agricultural laborers and their families.
Alice had come in with Duncan, but she had her own tasks: some grocery shopping and the most enlivening of all endeavors—to find a copy of a new book for Giancarlo in one of the gift shops that stocked a modest number of titles. She had read of some of the latest titles in the Herald and sought something like Mrs. Parkington or And Now Tomorrow. She found in fact The Song of Bernadette, which Giancarlo would, anarchist or not, study for the sake of his English.