Abercare was strangely proud of the four-hundred-year-old resistance to the established system that Emily’s family had accomplished. He knew Protestantism had ultimately encouraged diversity of opinion and had given men a lot of time to invent the steam engine, and so forth. They weren’t distracted by holy days and novenas and too many saints. But he boasted now to Delaney that Emily’s family had been Catholics through the age of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, through the Gunpowder Plot and Act of Settlement. Politics had always been closed to them. But they had crept into the army.
“I’ve read about families like that,” said Delaney when Abercare had finished. “They hid priests in cavities in the wall. That’s the case, isn’t it?”
“There are stories of that kind,” Emily conceded. “We’ve only had a few generals in the family, of course. If you’re Catholic, you need superlative military skills to become a brigadier.”
“What is the explanation for my humble rank, then?” asked Ewan Abercare, comfortable for once with his place in all hierarchies.
“But we had other consolations,” Emily said. “The thing I have never understood about other Christian religions is how they get by without a mother in them. Just God—who is always a male or shown in those terms. Since I was a little girl I’ve needed the Virgin Mother, and would feel orphaned without her.”
Dr. Delaney said, “Yes. But of course we need to be careful of Mariolatry.”
Ewan Abercare let the unfamiliar term flow over him and pursued his normal private puzzlement about how a Virgin could be described as a “mother” and in what sense. But he did not know how to comment and he let this great Catholic contradiction slide by him.
Delaney told Emily, “You’ll discover our congregation a pretty hardhanded lot of people. Generous. And very observant. There’s not a lot of mysticism there or much visible spirituality, you know. Their spirituality is deep, though. It’s like Australian rivers that run pretty far down in the earth—to avoid evaporation. I certainly don’t get too many of them discussing my book on the mysteries of faith. But they have a strength I don’t. It’s the strength to lead a normal life. You’ll hear plenty of laughing and raucous talk outside the church door.”
“You have to take whatever congregation is offered if you’re a Catholic,” said Emily. “I’m not great shakes as a mystic myself.”
The priest nodded and said, “You’re a member of a very big club. Colonel, I wanted to say that you are very welcome, too, but that’s not an attempt to proselytize you. I’m no good at converting people. It happens if it’s going to happen.” Abercare could tell that Emily was delighted with this man, and his willingness to descend from his three-volume work to see his congregation as more gifted and virtuous than he was. In inviting him to morning tea, almost by instinct Abercare had done something to reconcile her to this house and to him.
On the strength of the blessings this theologian had given him, Abercare approached her in his bed that evening. His hands reached over her back and took hold not of the breast, but of the ribs below, a lesser claim, he thought, and tolerable. She understood what his ultimate objective was. She allowed him to cup her breast and then she turned and addressed herself to fulfilling the reunion.
Beyond the house was silence—the silence of an achingly quiet room in an achingly still house girt by streets that slumbered as soon as the night came down on Gawell. And no one knew what remarkable shifts of trust and penitence and longing were being acquitted on the corner of Parkes Street.
• • •
The colonel came home one evening when Mrs. Cullen was leaving. She had insisted on staying back to cook an evening stew for the Abercares, so the colonel offered her a lift, which she refused. When he insisted, she acquiesced, but, embarrassed by the attention, she told him he could drop her three miles southwest of town. It was a distance which, in these exorbitant reaches of earth, town to town, was minute to drive and considered appropriately walkable. When he offered to drive her to her house, and saw the corrugated iron shack in which she lived, he knew that this was what she was trying to hide. This was but one of many houses on a property owned by a family called the Doyles, and Mr. Cullen was a rouseabout there and elsewhere, and when the shearing came on every spring, a shearer.
This first time Abercare dropped her through the gate and up to the shack in its nest of granite boulders, he did not see the husband. He saw a boy of about sixteen appear in a doorway wearing the uniform of Gawell High School. He had sharp, intelligent features and eyes like his mother’s.
“That’s my son, Martin,” she said. “He’s in fourth year high school.”
Mrs. Cullen said “fourth year” with a faint emphasis. Most Gawellians had left school by the end of the third year at the latest, and perhaps more than half of them much earlier than that. Fourth year meant a Leaving Certificate and then God knows what! A job in a bank. Or there was a subtler ambition he sensed in Mrs. Cullen, which put a university not beyond her objectives for the boy.
Colonel Abercare said, “Thank God the war is going well. It’ll be much better if it ends and your boy is allowed to be a scholar.”
“Of course,” said Mrs. Cullen. “But we all have to pull our weight.”
Pulling our weight to save this corrugated iron shed for the commonwealth of Australia, Abercare thought.
“But I prefer he wasn’t put in danger too,” she admitted.
The colonel could bet that Martin Cullen was the only fourth year Gawell student who came from corrugated iron.
20
There was an occasion when Giancarlo asked if it was possible for him to go to Mass. It wasn’t that he believed much, he told Duncan and Alice, but he wanted to meet up with other men from around the farms of the district. A great deal was happening in Italy, and even if the things other men were saying were half wrong, he said, it meant they were also half-truths. He said he could walk—“She only five kilometers, Mr. ’Erman.” But perhaps to relieve his guilt about the extra petrol ration he’d been given and used for other purposes, Duncan suggested that they could take Giancarlo to the Catholic Church, and then he and Alice could go to the Methodist service—it wouldn’t kill them, said Duncan, to go to Sunday service. Alice wondered if the straight and dimly perceived God of Methodism could somehow cure what was, within her, a glory and a disease that seemed to belong to another jurisdiction altogether.
She waited by the truck in a dress, straw hat with veil, and brown, heeled shoes, and when the men appeared—Giancarlo in his prison clothes as required—she climbed into the front beside Duncan while Giancarlo vaulted onto the back. And so they set out to their diverse worship.
“You won’t tell the priest?” she had asked him, privately, and nearly as a joke. They had been together in his room twice that week and had not yet fully repented. And she had heard the priests of the Catholics were hypnotic in their influence, and sometimes she had a fear that they might glean the truth from Giancarlo, who said he did not believe but who surely must retain some of what he’d learned of these things in his childhood.
“I don’t tell the priest,” he had assured her with his wryest smile. “I say to God on his own—where this girl of dreams comes from?”
She and Duncan dropped Giancarlo outside the large church, where POWs milled beneath a tall gum tree waiting for the people with names such as Doyle and Hogan and Murphy to enter the church first in their suits and best dresses and hats; and for the young girls dressed in blue and white, the Legion of Mary, to march into the church in a phalanx. Duncan called as Giancarlo walked towards the others, “Keep out of trouble, Johnny.” He thought the admonition very funny, and after his chuckle died, he turned the truck and drove to the humbler Methodist church on the eastern edge of Gawell.
Alice had always enjoyed the Methodist hymns. She fancied herself as a passable soprano, and had felt in the days of her vanity and innocence that the Wesleyan anthem “All People That on Earth Do Dwell” was well suited to her gifts. This Sabbath it
meant nothing when put beside her incapacity to direct her mind to anything but the thought of Giancarlo, lost for an hour or more in the unimaginable environs of his idol-worshiping childhood faith.
The Reverend Temple’s sermon was very different from John Wesley’s hymns—a most unmusical rant about the evils of American films and the false glamour with which they imbued improper clothing, smoking, and alcohol. He named Bette Davis and Cary Grant as embodying the flippancy Hollywood brought to issues of courtship and marriage, though he was willing to admit there were worse cases whose names had been reported to him by his congregation.
The service was familiar from her childhood and allowed room for the forefront of her mind to wander. Thought swung, of course, compass-like, to Giancarlo and for the first time, the nearness of Duncan and his redolence of tobacco and shaving cream and soap placed the two men, Duncan and his prisoner, into the one frame and in a new way. Her skin prickled from the idea this evoked. Was Duncan, who she’d assumed was almost perniciously unaware, in fact utterly aware, and putting up tolerantly with the Giancarlo affair until it reached what she now knew must be its conclusion, Alice returned to her chaste vigil, her temporary widowhood? She heard herself swallowing, trying to absorb or choke the idea down. She covered her eyes with her hands as if in an onset of a phase of devotion.
What would be his motive? she then asked herself. Could this simple being really be so immoral as to tolerate Giancarlo and herself? And why would he? Did he do it in a kind of tired wisdom, letting her find out by exhausting herself on the body of another, different kind of prisoner? Or did he let it happen for pure malign enjoyment and one morning soon would call the Control Center and demand they take the Italian back? Was she kneeling beside gullible virtue or worldly viciousness?
The minister spoke relatively briefly and the service ended by ten o’clock. Somehow, Alice stumbled from the church.
Outside again, hauling himself into the truck, Duncan called to Alice, as if he were the target of the Reverend Temple’s condemnations, “Haven’t been to the pictures since nineteen thirty-seven. Not since Mrs. Herman got ill. She was always more keen on it than I was.”
And so Duncan reckoned himself safe from the baleful influence of the flicks.
There was something so completely convincing about this, she decided with a spasm of delicious reprieve. She was convinced again that he had decided at some time, out of fear of the world, not to look beyond himself. And now, from lack of use, he’d lost the ability to do it. A minister spoke of the sins of moving pictures, and Duncan thought at once only of himself and the flickers. So he had—it was obvious again—resigned from all wisdom except the wisdom of running a farm.
But before that pulse of reassurance ended, it was followed instantly by something immensely bitter. While idling her mind in church and being put in a sudden sweat by the idea of a satanic Duncan, even she had thought of an end to the Giancarlo business. It was the first time her mind had alluded to a limit to all that. She was suddenly and sharply conscious of a finish that was part of the unchangeable order, but also that she was the one who must finish it. This did not seem a duty. It seemed something she would do, independently of what she wanted, sooner or later. Bleakness possessed her as she crawled up into the truck. She wanted the end to be later, not sooner. But her crimes, as she envisaged them now, had something like a piece of fuse attached. She knew it spat fire, but she did not know its length.
They drove into town, back to the other, larger church behind the town hall. Incomprehensible Catholic singing could be heard from inside. Duncan left the truck and stood in the shade of the tree where the prisoners had earlier gathered and smoked a roll-your-own cigarette. She got out herself after a while and went to join him.
“I’m going inside,” she said. And to anticipate his question, she declared, “To see what it’s like.”
She wasn’t looking for his good advice on the matter. Her going inside and seeing for herself what Giancarlo had believed in before he’d lost his soul to anarchism was the reigning proposition. She felt nervous but was determined not to be tentative while mounting the steps of the strange cult and entering the shadow of the vestibule. She passed the marble font full of water in which people dipped their hands before making their sign, and saw the racks of pamphlets—“The Plain Truth”; “Catholicism—the True Faith?”; “The Papacy and the Faithful”; “The Blessed Virgin and the True Faith”—and advanced into the sinister smell of incense, like the reek of paganism itself, that reached even to the backseat, where a number of thick-necked farmers knelt on one knee. Across from them, on the other side of the crowded church, were the Italian prisoners, in whose numbers she could not see Giancarlo.
She must have arrived at a pause in the ritual. Organ music crescendoed and ceased, the choir stopped singing, and the congregation began hauling themselves from their knees and sitting. She found herself a place to sit. This church is a space like any other space, she reassured herself. Even though it doesn’t feel like it, it is part of Australia, and to prove it, all those prisoners our nation has captured are there in their dyed uniforms. Amongst them somewhere the familiar flesh of Giancarlo.
At the front of the church, she saw people milling to receive the wafers of bread in their mouths, and some of the Italian prisoners, when it was their turn, going up to the altar to fetch the snow-white sacrament. As those who had been given it returned to their seats and their queues thinned, she saw Giancarlo, sitting back in his pew, dissenting, and felt no longer threatened by the abnormality of the space with its strange scents and Latin utterances. The choir began to sing again, and she was not alarmed. Other and more important matters swamped the incense.
As Catholics whose faces she knew from around the town, townspeople and farming families, knelt with the wafers in their mouths, the choir sawed on with a repetitive and ancient-sounding chant. Giancarlo was again invisible in the press of his fellow Italians. She rose and left. She did not try that strange bobbing that Catholics managed so negligently.
After the Mass the Italians were allowed to socialize for a little while outside. From the truck, Alice saw they were passing around a newspaper and discussing it excitedly, some laughing as if it were good news. An Italian officer, apparently trusted by the authorities, soon told them to break up and depart, either to walk back to their allocated farms or to the trucks of their allocated farmers.
Duncan, who had shown no interest in her adventure inside, now took to the front seat of the truck and so did she. They watched without a word as Giancarlo separated himself from the vocal group, arrived, and prepared to launch himself into the tray of the truck. Alice looked through the rear window to observe the imminent grace of the vault, but Duncan called, “Hang on! Tell us what all the excitement’s about, Johnny.”
Giancarlo canceled his jump and moved respectfully to Duncan’s window. From her side of the truck Alice could see his face—a liveliness there. He had got it from mixing with his own kind. It made her anxious. “It is a Corriere di Campo—a prisoner newspaper made in another camp and sent us. Antifascismo. It say in print the British want use Italian mechanic—in factory—and send the young back in the war. Maybe, too, the Australia want that same thing. Italia antifascismo now.”
He said it so lightly. But the story had not only increased her anxiety but brought out something close to anger. For he was thinking of the end, too, and it wasn’t—in her mind—his business to do that.
“But you weren’t on our side when you were taken prisoner,” she said. He stood, instantly chastened, in the Sabbath light. Within a few seconds she regretted that meanness. It had been there, too, in the supposed honesty with which she’d told off Mrs. Cathcart. She was by some lights proud of that encounter, by others frightened she had somehow become an acid woman. She could feel his confusion too. That she’d so randomly reminded him that she had all the power.
“Well,” said benign and stupid Duncan, “we’ll face up to losing you when it happens,
Johnny. Hop in the back.” She heard him leap, one hand on the truck, onto the rear tray. She looked back through the glass behind her and saw his well-made and bemused face and his profound eyes, both young and aged at the same time, and puzzled. She could not continue inspecting him much longer with her head turned—pretense was back, and she wanted her interest to appear casual to Duncan.
The news from the camps rendered her skittish—as she would have acknowledged to a confidante, if she’d had one. But, if she took a respite from her certainty that he would put a closure to things, the earth, in occasionally allowed mad spates of imagination, had also expanded with new chances—a shift in hemisphere, the contour of foreign earth and new terrain, Italian towns, the taking in of a new language through the pores of her delight. Wife of the meccanico anarchico.
The spoilsport within convinced her at most hours of the absurdity of these delusions, but there were also hours on end during which they seemed ordained and definite. In the coming days, which were days of painful abstinence mutually embarked upon by her and Giancarlo, she studied more intently the copies of the Herald Duncan got, and scoured the maps of the Allied line in southern Italy, its flanks and its center, looking for that mass of Allied victory that might mean the repatriation of Giancarlo.
Naples had fallen, Giancarlo’s parents were safe, she knew, though he rarely mentioned them. The line had advanced to the south of Rome. In its wake, Frattamaggiore and a thousand other places were repairing themselves and looking for nourishment.
The armies of the right side had not yet liberated Neville. But would the whole affair resolve itself into a race between Neville’s repatriation and Giancarlo’s? Could she let poor Neville be victim of some kind of race? When she was halfway undeluded, she knew matters wouldn’t resolve themselves in such a theatrical way.
21