It was in traffic-cluttered Oxley Street, which seemed crammed all at once with every adult and child who populated the shire, that, inevitably, she saw the face of Mrs. Cathcart, who was bound for the School of Arts and her prisoners’ women’s meeting. Another instant and Alice could have avoided her glance and pretended not to have seen her, and so hurry on with that Friday-afternoon urgency that drove people from one encounter with friends or shopkeepers to another. But she was too late in looking away—there had been mutual recognition which necessitated an exchange of words.
“Alice,” called Mrs. Cathcart, moving in, “we’ve missed you. As I said to some of the others, I hope everything is all right.”
She had the power to express concern while making Alice feel like a slack participant.
“Things have been pretty busy out our way,” Alice told her, but in a mutter.
“But you haven’t given us up, have you?” Mrs. Cathcart asked in a half-amused way that annoyed Alice and brought out in her the determination to be an equal arguer.
“I might give up on the whole business,” she admitted with a sudden acrimony. “I haven’t heard anything from Neville for four months, and even then it was just a postcard saying he was well. I don’t think that news would be very interesting to the others, do you?”
“Ah,” said Mrs. Cathcart, “but interesting each other is only part of what we do. We support each other too. And there’s always that matter of prisoner exchange.”
Those overused words—“prisoner exchange”—enraged Alice and made her study Mrs. Cathcart in a new way. She stared directly at the column of certainty and stoicism Mrs. Cathcart was. It was easier for her, beef prices being what they were. Even though people said it couldn’t be done—you couldn’t send prisoners of war money—she wouldn’t be surprised if smug Mrs. Cathcart had found a way to send some to her husband. Though probably not. It may just be that Alice had come to dislike the woman.
“There’ll be no prisoner exchanges,” Alice said as a challenge. “You must know that too. Stringing those poor women along does them no good.”
“I beg your pardon, Alice. I don’t believe that’s what I’m doing. Hope is a marvelous benefit.”
“But half of us know that it’s nonsense. Even the Italians up in the camp there are not being let go. And their government’s on our side now.”
“So, are you fed up with Mr. Herman’s Italian and want him returned?”
Alice studied Mrs. Cathcart for signs of a knowing sarcasm. But no, it seemed just to be old-fashioned bullying.
“I don’t care one way or another,” said Alice. “I’m saying the Nazis will not let our men go. And as for the others . . .”
Mrs. Cathcart, Alice was astonished to see, was partly routed and a tremble took hold of her lips. “There are medical and other benefits the government wants to give us all,” she argued. “And our little committee is the only one who keeps the women informed of all that.”
“If the government wants to give me something,” Alice stated, “I’ll wait for it to tell me.”
Mrs. Cathcart shook her head. “I am sure that this will be a disappointment to the older women,” she told Alice. “They’re so comforted by the presence of the younger ones.”
“But what is it for, for God’s sake?” asked Alice.
“What’s come over you? If I have to explain all that over again, then perhaps it’s best you don’t come.” Mrs. Cathcart nodded and, moving on, was done with her. The idea did not distress Alice at all. She was more amazed to find herself a woman who had offered a civic leader a solid talking-to. She was sure it had something to do with the change Giancarlo had produced in her. It had to do, too, though, with forgetting Neville or failing to reinvigorate her memory.
Afterwards she felt ashamed for assailing Mrs. Cathcart’s kindliness or delusions, and knew that she would report the incident in her own terms to other prisoners’ wives. The thought of this chastened Alice, in the same way her other bouts of frenzy did.
19
Aoki, as a straightforward fellow and a married man, could not help disapproving of the female impersonator, Sakura. Given the conservative streak almost guaranteed by his rural upbringing, he found it inappropriate for an elite soldier to dress the way Sakura did. At least on morning and evening parade Sakura dressed in the weeds of a prisoner. But she took refuge in her identity as entertainer, and perhaps seductress, at first every Friday and Saturday night, then on most nights, except when she professed herself very tired. One or two performances were one thing, but the fabrics had taken over and made the soldier something other than she was in the field.
In her/his childhood, Sakura had pursued for a time a lesser career on stage in Kabuki. His taste was not serious theater, but one-act slapstick plays that enabled him to be outrageous and flaunting. But his true forte was his own amalgam of narrative and improvised and performed ballad—that was how he, or let us say she, had made her living before the army. She had in those days, as now in Gawell, performed to the strumming of the three-stringed samisen and gingered up her quick-witted comic song act with female mimicry, clothing, and makeup.
Sakura was perhaps most popular in Compound C, whose members believed she would have been famous, had it not been for the war, for a play she had written that allowed more natural acting. It was a comedy concerned with reverence for parents and rebellion against them, and was played by prisoners costumed in ordinary modern clothing, the more angelic-faced young prisoners filling the child roles, and Sakura as the handsome mother. Sakura was so far advanced in performance skills, and so talented, that she filled the recreation hall with longing—filial and sexual. Tengan and his clique were appalled by this cheap betrayal of the classic forms, and Sakura compounded the sin by setting her popular play in a warless world. It had been accepted with such joy and enthusiasm by many that there were further performances. Some people in the compound had attended two or three times. Even though it filled them with a near-unbearable nostalgia, it also supplied them with hilarious double entendres.
Sakura was unashamedly frank about her promiscuity. “If it was good enough for the warriors of old, it’s good enough for me,” she had once said during a ballad performance. She did not, however, offer honest warrior-style sex, said the more serious-minded. Not a fortifying, head-clearing, undisclosed exchange between equals. Instead she flaunted. She flounced.
Her true companion and confidant was a lame little man named Tamura, the costumier for performances staged in Compound C. Tamura did not seem interested in Sakura in any way other than advising her on costume. He had been a tailor, and spent his days in Compound C sewing costumes for which fabric had been requested from and supplied by the captors. He devoted to Sakura’s finery the best of the cloth provided by the commandant. Though it was banal material, austerity fabrics, the little tailor transformed it all, and Sakura wore her clothes with an assumption that tended to turn everything to satin—except, of course, the shameful maroon of captivity.
So with the end of roll call and the setting of the sun, she spent her time snaking around the huts in costume, her face made up with arduously collected and blended cosmetics—even with red clay extracted from the earth of Gawell.
When she swayed into huts, the ones she knew she was welcome in at night, she would be greeted by cheers and whistles, by howls and hoots, by the banging of tin mugs and fists against timber walls. There was no chance that she would ever be violated or misused or beaten up for decadence by the dogmatic types from Tengan’s hut. She was protected not least by her popular hut commander and his section chief, both of whom she had got on side by means that did not need specifying. As well as that she was muscular and had been a senior private and explosives expert in the South Seas detachment. And now as a prisoner she covered her individual diminished condition under a front of strutting.
Hello, soldier, she might sing—for she was a demon for improvisation and it was different every night—
Guess my name
,
Or we could play a different game.
Once I’ve tapped you on the knee,
You’ll soon see more than you’re s’posed to see.
You’ve been bowed by battle’s grief.
I’ll give your spirit some relief . . .
Each song stuck to that theme: the question of exile, and the momentary forgetting she brought to men. If one of them lunged for her posterior, she’d slap him resonantly on the face. “I have other friends to visit, and my arse must last the journey.”
A man unable to restrain himself might come up to fondle the bogus breasts. “Please desist!” she’d roar like an NCO. “I may be a nursing mother soon, and my baby will need those things more than you do.”
She was so convincing, so expert in her lewdness, she gave men erections that some were willing to display to her. But she was, by the standards of what might have been possible, relatively chaste, and she had her rules. Sometimes she would walk out of a hut dragging a young man by the hand. Since it was known one of her assignation places was the bakehouse, men might call after her, “Don’t get anything in the dough.” There were known to be uncomely men she took pity on, this simulacrum of a woman. Perhaps that was how the friendship with the tailor Tamura had begun, before it became akin to that of racy niece to wise uncle. Perhaps only he knew that Sakura felt as bound as anyone else to approach the pit they all confronted and to throw herself in.
• • •
Emily Abercare arrived in Gawell on a June Friday at the beginning of the region’s bright, frosty winter. She found her edgy, attentive, and delighted husband waiting for her on the station platform. They exchanged kisses on cheeks, chaste and accustomed gestures that implied habitual marriage rather than hard-won reunion. Emily believed that it was no use reuniting on cold or reserved terms. Both of them must risk themselves again, she said. (It was kind of her to imply an equal duty on her side.) But obviously she was not quite ready to deploy all the force of her nature, which was reserved anyhow, at Gawell railway station.
A driver took them in the colonel’s car to the house he had rented in Parkes Street—a corner house, in fact, with a garden of defiantly surviving gerberas and daphne, as well as flowering shrubs and a coral tree dazzling beneath the sun.
“You can garden if you wish,” said the colonel just before they left the car, “and one of my chaps will mow the lawns for us.”
He gestured to the front door.
“Mrs. Cullen’s inside with morning tea.”
He led her up the path and the steps. The driver was behind them with Mrs. Abercare’s bags, and when the colonel opened the door—it was characteristic not to use keys in houses in Gawell—the driver asked, “Do you want me to take them to the bedroom, sir?”
“No, thank you,” said Abercare—the private man, the householder who did not want his innermost rooms snooped on, or some indefinable snide tale released amongst the garrison. “Just leave them there,” he said.
Emily went ahead of him up the hallway and inspected the living room. Her father and brothers had all been of middling rank in India and East Africa where, in peacetime, promotion was slow and billets were often humble, and one had to console oneself with the fact that at least servants were everywhere and cheap. So she inspected this new billet without any expectation of perfection. She looked at a scene on the wall of a red lane with a stockman and a flock of sheep on it. Parts of it had come loose from its backing board and so it bulged here and remained fast there, further distorting and cheapening the effect. It looked even worse than the picture of Cecil’s failed thoroughbred back in Tathra.
“This living room,” she said, giving it a reasonable mark out of one hundred. “One could get a few prints, maybe . . .”
He knew she liked prints of distant prospects of the elegant homes of Britain, of a fabled home that, because of her family’s service in remoter places, she had elevated to an ideal; the kind of home everyone, the Australians, too, seemed to yearn for in their way, and which she had barely glimpsed while at a severe convent boarding school in Surrey. Indeed, he wondered now, did such a place, incarnate in elegant Georgian houses, seen by way of botanical avenues designed by artful gardeners, even exist? For most Britons, it lived only in prints, a reflection of the imagination rather than reality. Yet was this embedded print in the British brain what we all fought for?
“Next time we’re in Sydney,” Abercare said, “we’ll go to a shop that sells those things. I’m afraid there aren’t any art or antique shops in Gawell.”
“I wouldn’t expect so,” she said, with a half smile and stalwartly refusing to bring down any negative judgment on the town.
“You are really a true brick!” he complimented her.
She nodded, but in a way that said, “We’ll see about that.”
Mrs. Cullen came in from the kitchen, rubbing her hands on an apron. She was sturdily built and she earned her money cooking and cleaning for people around Gawell. She had come recommended by the colonel’s friend Dr. Garner. He introduced the woman to his wife, feeling an unfamiliar uxorial pride as he did it, showing off Emily’s angular beauty at forty-four to this worn and hollowed former girl, misshapen from labor and rural poverty, who might have been any age between thirty-five and fifty-five, and who had reached a plateau of endurance of which her body was a map. When Mrs. Cullen said she had fresh tea and fruitcake in the kitchen, and would they like it brought into the dining room—the dining room not set for tea yet, she was sorry, the time had got away—Emily said, “The kitchen. That’ll be cozier. The Romans had kitchen gods, didn’t they? They knew their stuff.”
This degree of scholarship made Mrs. Cullen blink. Emily’s was not a very Gawell sentiment. “Yes,” said Mrs. Cullen. “I’ve got the old range going. It’s warm in there.”
Colonel Abercare’s heart sang when she chose the kitchen. It said to him that she intended to give staying here, on this corner in Gawell, a real try for as long as her husband had his job with prisoners.
So they sat down to homemade scones, blackberry jam made by Mrs. Cullen, and the fruitcake rich from eggs and butter, to which Mrs. Cullen’s laborer husband got access through his work on farms. Mrs. Cullen wiped her hands again in gratification on her apron, excused herself, and left. The fruitcake was so good and such a simple delight that a profession of love for the colonel trembled on the edge of Emily’s lips. But her wariness restrained it, and she was unhappy that it did.
• • •
Colonel Abercare declared to his wife at dinner on the night of her arrival, “I thought we might introduce ourselves to Father Delaney, the parish priest here. I hear he’s rather a scholar. Trained in Rome, too dreamy to be a bishop. But apparently—so one of the officers told me—he wrote three volumes of theology, all in Latin. Actually, they call him Dr. Delaney. As in, doctor of divinity.”
Emily was half-amused that his efforts to win her back had extended to researching the condition of Catholicism in Gawell. “I thought I might just turn up on Sunday,” she said. “I mean, it’s kind of you. But we don’t have to give him notice beforehand, do we? He sounds more interesting than the Irishman down at Tathra, though.”
“Mrs. Cullen says he lacks the common touch. But the ‘touch’ out here is very common indeed. What if I call him? I’ll tell him he’ll be meeting just one Catholic, and that I’m godless.”
Emily declared, with what seemed like artlessness, “None of us is godless. If He’s not there in our acts then He’s there in our punishment.”
Ewan Abercare was of course both made uncomfortable and impressed by this aphorism. But—to be honest—it was delivered the way Emily had delivered her theological reflections before the disaster, easily and without trying to hammer it to his forehead. He said nothing for a while, suppressing the tendency to mar the exchange with yet another of his useless apologies. At last he said, “I’ll concede that. Although if it’s not God who punishes us, we certainly know how to punish ourselves.”
“Handsomely said yourself,” Emily smiled. “You’re a clever man, Ewan.” There was a genuine smile of admiration for him in her eyes. She actually thought he was a professional success, and that compliment elevated him.
He smiled at her. “I could have gone far,” he said.
The next morning, from his office at the prison camp, Colonel Abercare called Dr. Delaney’s presbytery and managed to persuade his ferocious Irish housekeeper to fetch the priest, who was disrobing after weekday morning Mass. He introduced himself to the priest and said that he had been born a Protestant, but his wife was from an old English Catholic family and he would be honored to introduce her to him. Indeed, he invited Delaney to morning tea in the house on the corner of Parkes Street.
Emily got in Mrs. Cullen, her coreligionist, to help with the morning tea. Dr. Delaney proved thin and wild haired, and had a melancholy, though willing, face. Despite Gawell’s climate, he looked far more like the pale English-born priests Emily had known in her childhood than someone from this part of the world. He shook hands with the colonel and bowed to Emily. A professional man’s bow. He would in the end come to know, Abercare presumed, by way of the confessional, much of her inner soul—though not, he hoped, her history, since she seemed to have at last recovered from it.
After the three of them had sat down and Mrs. Cullen had served the tea, Delaney said, “I go up to the camp sometimes myself, to say Solemn High Mass with Padre Frumelli for the Italians who aren’t out on the farms. As for the Italians who come to my ten o’clock on Sundays, most of them use it purely as a get-together. But in any case, that’s a sung Mass. We have an excellent choir.”