“Do you want company on the drive?” Galloway asked, wanting to escape the emanations of reproof from his wife.
“Roy,” Mrs. Garner chided him, “you’ll leave the company unbalanced.”
“Roy . . . doesn’t . . . mind . . . about . . . that,” said Thelma in an exaggerated, drawn-out, drunk thespian sort of way.
“Well, I can stay,” said Galloway. “It’s the same either way. I just thought . . . Donald might like company.”
Thelma looked past him.
“All right, I’ll go with you, Donald,” Galloway decided, since he was to be punished either way and might as well delay it.
“Good night, sweet ladies,” said Dr. Garner, “and good night, Colonel. Come on, Roy. I’m very pleased for the company.”
They went up the corridor, stopping at Garner’s surgery, and Abercare could hear the two men talking in there.
“Christ,” said Thelma, “this is so boring and so predictable. Sometimes I think the bugger is a pansy.”
Mrs. Garner exchanged a glance with the Abercares. The voices in the surgery receded. They heard the doctor’s car start. It would be more than an hour’s drive to Reids Flat, and a dreary, winding one.
“Roy’s in for a good time,” said Mrs. Garner with fond irony. “I know how Donald fills in the time while he’s driving. He recites cricket scores to himself. Honestly. First, he argues why Test cricket should date from 1883 instead of 1877, then he starts quoting batting figures. He’ll then continue with intercolonial and interstate batting averages and bowling figures. The Gregory brothers and Demon Spofforth matter more to him than latecomers like McCabe and Bradman. He can recite Sheffield Shield matches from 1908. Entire innings, how out, and the bowling figures too. It’s astounding. I was very impressed by it all when I first met him. But as a trick, it wears thin after thirty-five years.”
Thelma asked, “How do you know he’s not making it all up?” It was precisely what she’d suspect a man of.
“Because he’s an honest fellow,” said Mrs. Garner, bridling a bit. “And it would only satisfy him if it was right. Look, it’s going to be quite a time before the men are back, Thelma. Would you like to have a lie-down in the spare bedroom?”
Thelma refused. “Damned Roy,” she said. “We go to events and one way or another he gets away. If I’m indoors, he’s outdoors. And Reids Flat is about as outdoors as you can get.”
She had provided them with a window into a habitual conflict, but the view was stale. She looked very beautiful, Ewan Abercare thought.
“Look,” she said. “I think I’ll go, if you don’t mind. He left the keys with me for safekeeping.”
“Are you sure you can drive, Thelma?” asked Mrs. Garner.
“Perhaps you should wait, and the colonel and Mrs. Abercare could perhaps . . .”
“I’m afraid I don’t have a car at the moment,” said Abercare. “Perhaps I could call the camp for one . . .”
He hoped it was obvious that he didn’t want to do that; it would be untoward, an excess where he had forsworn excess.
“We would be delighted if you stayed here, Thelma,” he suggested. “And gave us the pleasure of your company.”
As if he hadn’t spoken, Thelma said, “Everyone forgets I’ve been driving since I was fourteen.”
But she stayed on and set a fast pace of consumption as she ate the roast and vegetables and half the flummery, and then decided to go. She insisted on not being accompanied to her car. “It is so much fuss,” she said, waving them back to their chairs with an exaggerated movement, up and down, of her spread right hand.
“Well, at least I’ll see you to the door,” Mrs. Garner insisted. In the absence of the other two women, Emily looked across the room to Abercare and smiled a private smile. It declared they were no longer in conflict. It confessed a kind of luckiness she felt.
But I must leave you tonight, my one flesh, he thought.
“She’ll be all right, I think,” said Mrs. Garner when she came back into the lounge room. “The problem is that they live two miles out of town, at her late father’s property. Lovely old house, but a few gullies on either side of the track into the homestead.”
Abercare was not entirely at ease about that either. He wanted mad Thelma to get home safely, so that he was not distracted from the issue of Compound C. By and large, however, he had enjoyed this evening to which Thelma Galloway had given her own little flavor of unruliness.
“My dear,” he said to Emily, as they walked home the short distance to Parkes Street, “I feel I must sleep at the camp tonight, and tomorrow night too. Just to be on the spot, you know.”
“Oh?” she asked. It was a neutral question, but a question just the same. The streets were bright under the blatant full moon. You could have played cricket in Parkes Street by moonlight. He had done that sort of thing in India, wearing mess uniform, bowler and wicketkeeper and slips elegant in their regimental mess gear, hooting and tipsy.
“It might not be quite a rational thing,” he admitted. “I mean, it’s a full moon and nothing is going to happen. But those fellows tonight, Galloway in particular, talking about what’s happening in Compound C, with as much information as if they were part of the garrison—that’s set me fretting. There is no danger, of course, but I feel I must be on the qui vive, you understand.”
“Yes,” she conceded. He was aware of her elbow securely locked around his. “I certainly see that. And after Monday morning, you’ll be at greater ease.”
“That’s right,” he said.
He knew it was beneath her to have him asking whether she would be all right on her own. Soldiers’ women were by definition all right on their own.
He continued to explain, not as a necessity but as a form of sharing matters with her. “Everything seemed calm enough today, but Sergeant Nevski reports there was nobody at the baseball plate this afternoon. A little curious when they’re not being moved until Monday and you’d expect some of them would want to get a final game in over the weekend. Mind you, they’re probably saying prolonged good-byes to their NCOs—that would be enough to suspend play.”
He could feel her shiver suddenly inside her coat. “Are you all right, darling?”
“Yes, tonight is one of the cold ones, though, isn’t it? It would be very nice to have you here.”
“It would be very nice to be here. I won’t be a soldier too much longer. And next week is going to be much easier. We’ll be in better control.”
They were nearly home. But Ewan Abercare could not put aside the subject of Roy Galloway’s opening conversational gambit that evening: it had caused him to make decisions for reasons he felt he did not quite control, ones he could not define. He liked to define things.
“I mean,” he asked, “how is it possible that the word gets to Galloway, a solicitor in town? Roy Galloway and the prisoners don’t even have the same sort of mind, the same background, the same language, and he has never even visited the camp.”
“Stop fretting,” Emily told him, “I do understand you’d want to go. It’s what I’d do. But Galloway—you shouldn’t fret about him. He’s the country town god and Thelma’s his Achilles’ heel. He should be worrying about that.”
Emily opened the front door before Abercare could dutifully do so. “I’ll make some tea before you go,” she offered.
“Thank you. I’ll call the duty officer at the camp to send someone for me.”
“You’ll find fresh flannel pyjamas in your drawer,” she called to him from the kitchen. “And remember to take your dressing gown.”
28
Soon after the Abercares arrived home, a car turned up at Parkes Street to collect the colonel. The driver was at the rear door to salute him and Abercare returned the greeting with his baton and got into the backseat. The driver took them through the still streets, streets that soothed some of Abercare’s unrest by seeming lost in the earth’s far south and disconnected from the world’s serious traffic, and so far from anguish and untow
ard events. At this time of night, country towns had finished their society, sportiveness, and excesses. He saw two soldiers of the training battalion weaving in the broad main street, and the car slowed for them and they let it roll past. They were not his task, these schoolboys, these apprentices. If by some false impulse of democracy he had got them to squeeze into the front seat, at least one of them would have been sure to have vomited.
It was a different matter a mile east of Gawell when he saw a civilian vehicle, a Chrysler, pulled up on the side of the road with its hood raised, as if broken down. It looked to be the car of a person of eminence, Gawell-wise, and Abercare knew he must take a moment to see if the wayfarer could be helped. He told his driver to pull over but leave the engine running. By the hooded headlights he saw Thelma Galloway move out into the road with a wry hope of rescue on her face. She carried in her hand a metal crossbar of the kind designed for inspecting spark plugs or loosening battery bolts. He remembered that Mrs. Garner had said that the Galloways lived out this way, on a property owned by Thelma Galloway’s late father. Roy Galloway had a manager in to run the place, which allowed him to keep the farm going and work at his law practice as well.
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.