Shame and the Captives (11 page)

The serial, like all such entertainment, was subject to an advisory code. The Morton women, for example, mother and daughter, discussed how to design and wear austerity dresses, which fully satisfied their desires for fashion and which they wore with the awareness that the silk they were sacrificing would go to make Trevor's parachute, or the parachute of some other noble youth. They loudly disapproved of women who bought hosiery on the black market. Under the urgings of the code, Suttor made Mr. Morton use his petrol sparingly.

In his other and staler reality, Suttor had become now, without too much guilt, a man of casual encounters, restricted to leave in Sydney and gin-struck evenings with old flames from the Fellowship of Australian Writers, who, being Depression-era leftists, often ended up at the close of their lovemaking chastising him for his total lack of political insight. He didn't go to the radio studio anymore when he was in Sydney. He had lost interest in the recording process, and long since found radio producers to be annoying filters of his work. One of them, a youngish, shortsighted but unassuming sort of fellow, blithely changed lines. If Suttor ever challenged him, he would tell
the actors to change them back, while muttering, “No offense, Sutts. No offense.”

In the end, Major Suttor decided that listeners enjoyed the thing no matter what was done with it, as long as it was not totally usurped, which the management would not allow to happen. In any case, these days his visits to Sydney were too intermittent to guarantee his supervision would make much difference. He never listened to episodes himself. His comfort was totally in writing it. And if this was propaganda, he wished he could be allowed to write it full-time. For, after all, this was not like Dr. Goebbels's propaganda. This was holy propaganda. The mother of the child with the rash was Suttor's wife, perfected. The soothed child was his son, now saved by calamine and blessed with an invulnerable future. And all the others—the father, the cop, the alderman—were the wise he wished he were numbered amongst.

Some stringed instrument would peter out in Compound C; some Italian song parodying love would end with a mandolin twang. He would hear the boots and gruff commands associated with changing the sentries. Sedated by
The Mortons
, Suttor slept.

E
ventually Alice had the chance to read the documents Duncan had signed when the Italian had first arrived. Copies of them stood in a place of solemnity—the polished table in the lounge room. The prisoner's number was 411729. His name was Molisano, Giancarlo Benedetto. His place of birth was an unimaginable town named Frattamaggiore in the province of Naples, and the date of his birth was June 18, 1922. His marital status was single, and his next of kin was his father, whose address was Sant'arpino. The date of his capture was March 5, 1941 (hence, she presumed, the “41” with which his number began), and his “place of arrest,” to use the same quaint term his papers did, was Benghazi, Libya. His military service was recorded as having been with the 86th Regiment of Infantry (Abruzzi). She would discover in the end that Abruzzi was not his home region, but she knew by now there was no rationality to the military. He had been held in Africa and elsewhere until he'd arrived in Australia on the ship
Brazil
eighteen months past. His civil occupation was mechanic, and his religion was listed as Catholic with a question mark beside it.

Further, his personal description gave his height as 5 feet 8 and
his weight as 135 pounds. His eyes were brown—though Alice had thought them darker—his hair dark brown and his complexion fair but tanned. He had no distinguishing marks. Thus he came to Duncan's farm as intact as he had been at birth.

When she undertook to sweep his room while he was out with Duncan, she came across his prisoner-of-war identity card, and within it his thumbprints and his description again, and a full-face and profile picture. She found herself studying this young profile. For some reason, it occurred to her abstractedly—not, she could swear, as a thought connected to that particular Italian—that she had not been held by a clear-faced young man for three years, and everyone, the whole of her known world, considered that this was as it should be. She absorbed the fresh yet knowing face; its combination of willingness and steadfastness and wariness. Yet, as everyone would have said, not steadfast in battle, this Giancarlo. Because he had surrendered at Benghazi, as had some thousands of others of the garrison. Neville had been there, victorious. Before the stupid Greek campaign.

•  •  •

At the breakfast table Duncan said to her, “I've got fifty lambs to load up. I'll get the Italian to help. That'll show me what he's made of. Then you'd better make up a few sandwiches.” As an afterthought he said, “And a sandwich for me to give Mussolini too. He can eat it after we've finished the muster. Then you'd better come into the saleyards with me. We can leave him here and try out how trustworthy the blighter is. Before we take too many risks.”

She would have preferred to stay and go down to the shearers' quarters to investigate further the otherness that had entered their lives. It was of immensely more interest than the sheep-stinking saleyards. But that would have been out of order and untoward. She began to get the evening meal ready, since she'd be gone that afternoon. Meanwhile Duncan fetched his dogs and the Italian, and
they mustered the lambs from the past season. Duncan was wonderful with dogs and at the subtleties of commanding them by varieties of whistling. And with that help and that of the Italian, he would drive them to the mustering yard and up a ramp leading into a large cage, exactly measured, which sat on the back of his truck. When the lambs were loaded, Duncan waved good-bye to the Italian and collected Alice from the farmhouse for the journey to town.

Duncan declared on the way to town that this fellow seemed a fairly able sort of bloke. But then he said, “We'll see. We'll see.”

•  •  •

Alice continued to take the prisoner his evening meal on a tray at dusk, for Duncan—tolerant boss though he was—was still making up his mind about Giancarlo's suitability for the farmhouse table. Giancarlo was generally sitting outside, by his door, smoking the same sort of thin, self-rolled cigarettes Duncan himself smoked. He would rise to bow and then receive the tray with formal thanks. She liked this ceremonial acceptance of the tray. It added an element of grace to her plain and torpid days.

At the table one night with her father-in-law, Alice suggested it might be useful to teach Giancarlo some further rudimentary English.

“I could get him a school reader,” she said, as if the purchase were hypothetical and she weren't utterly determined to do it. “I could get him one of those kid's primers from the bookstore.”

“You reckon he can read to begin with?” asked Duncan.

“I reckon he can if their school system's anything like ours.”

“Fair enough, then,” said Duncan. “It'll make it easier for me to talk to him anyway.”

“I'll just read with him for half an hour,” said Alice, as if she wanted to guard her own time from intrusive and lesser duties and might have trouble finding the time. “After knock-off.”

“Listen, I'll shout the book,” Duncan said. “You shouldn't have to
pay for it out of your POW allowance.” The government sent it to her with sparing gratitude, a month at a time. But in the light of this offer, it had to be said Duncan was not as tight-fisted as many farmers—as her own father was, for that matter. Frugality and meanness were not the same thing. Duncan had a reputation for being a man who would invest for a return and had the intelligence to see that Giancarlo's improved English would help the running of the farm. And the running of the farm was Duncan's entire world.

“Another thing,” he said, as if he had been waiting for a pretext. “We could invite him to dinner. Say on Wednesdays. That might teach him something too. Maybe just to use a knife and fork.”

She suspected Giancarlo had much to teach Duncan and her, rather than the opposite. But in any case, both prospects—lessons and Wednesday dinners—filled her with a pleasant feeling that utter monotony had ended.

Duncan claimed he was slowly improving Giancarlo, or assimilating him. To fit him out for work around the farm, Duncan had given the Italian a larger hat and one of his own sweaters. Some days later Duncan awarded the man some pants, and from that day Giancarlo did not wear burgundy on the farm and could not be distinguished by sight from an average farmhand working on his own behalf. Neville Herman's farm clothes, of course, lay untouched in Alice's bedroom. It seemed a blasphemy to give the Italian any of those.

Duncan's friendliness towards Giancarlo was a result of the Italian's industriousness. When the cutting of the cereal hay and wheat began, she brought the men their noontime sandwiches carried in the basket of her old bike. She had seen Giancarlo on the running board of the tractor Duncan drove, looking back like an old hand at the hay baler rolling behind and dropping its square packages of fodder across the paddock. He continued to attend to the milking of the Jersey, Dotty. Looking up from the stool, he would give Alice his long-lipped smile. “The bucket, she's full.” She would have liked to have been in a position to give advice on his method with Dotty, to
create a distance of instruction and authority and so protect herself. But there was nothing she could manage to say.

So teaching him English seemed a most sensible thing. On the Friday just two weeks after the beginning of Giancarlo's service at the Herman farm, Duncan and Alice left the farm again in the Italian's care, this time with more confidence. They drove to the stock and station agent's, where Duncan intended to top up his depleted superphosphate fertilizer at a time of year when it generally got cheaper, which—along with the government bounty on the stuff—made it a good deal indeed. Alice left him to his business of purchasing and loading and walked down William Street to March's Western Stores to buy new ribbon for trimming one of her perfectly good old hats whose brim had become frayed.

Then, at three, for Neville's sake and for the sake of her marriage as undernourished and spectral as it had been rendered by absence, its substance being all in the future, and an honest hope of hearing some news or of extending solace to other women, not least those with children, who seemed each to have an acuter sense of the man she was missing than Alice had of Neville, she attended the Friday meeting for wives and mothers of prisoners of war at the School of Arts. One of the other motives for attending involved a sense of obligation to the indomitable Mrs. Cathcart, who had founded the group. The purposes of these meetings were said to be to fortify the souls of the women who were afflicted by their men's absence, to revivify memory, which was in the process of eroding, and to share any news that came by way of governments or the Red Cross—letter or postcard. Those who attended were invited—but only if they wished—to place in a box silver coins or even ten-shilling notes for wives who were having a hard time, and that, too, was why Alice came now and then, to make appropriate contributions.

She had been a loyal attendee of these events for the first two years but, like others, recently had begun to lose faith. Early on, there had been all manner of hopeful rumors. They had all evaporated.
Alice occasionally pleaded the demands of the farm. Mrs. Cathcart, though, was different. She could not be stopped. Her husband had been a notable fighter pilot who had been shot down near Brussels, and she had the qualities of an ace herself. She administered the Cathcart property, which was larger than the Herman place by some thousands of acres. She had also what many of the women perceived as an advantage in that her husband was a prisoner of Europeans, not of the unreadable Orientals. For many of the wives and mothers of those held by the Japanese had received, the better part of a year after capture, only the most rudimentary cards from their men, of the ilk: “I am well and a prisoner. I am in good health and well-treated but a bit busy but thinking of you.” There was too little to discuss in such messages to shed light.

Early in the existence of the group, women had been encouraged to read out edited sections of their husbands' letters from German prison camps. But the letters from Europe, intermittent though they might be, were so much more numerous than the ones reaching women from Asia, and remained so proportionally numerous as the months passed, that the practice was abandoned as too painful. Wives like Alice, whose souls were wavering as 1943 neared its end, were shamed by Mrs. Cathcart's cheerfulness, and temporarily exhilarated by her ceaseless questioning of governments and agencies, and her ferreting out of new information about the kindly involvement of the Red Cross and Swiss legations in camps throughout the world, though that always seemed less significant after you'd left the meeting than it did during it. It was hard to fly the flag for months on end if you had to live on a wives-of-prisoners' allowance. It was even harder to fly it with sufficient conviction when you were the as-yet-childless wife of a dimly remembered and briefly held husband.

There were a scattering of children around the meeting room on this occasion. Alice was drawn to a three-year-old named Bunny and praised her dress and bounced her on her knee. Bunny's father had been shot down just three months before, on one of his first missions,
in a bomber over Europe. Holding the child—indeed, before she even had begun to hold her—she felt a movement in her own stomach for all the world like some kindly, warm animal turning itself about there. It was pleasant, it was doleful, to hold the child so intimately, and a delight when the infant fell into afternoon sleep in Alice's arms, which continued to harbor the girl. In the child's trustful limpness, she felt a foretaste of her own motherhood. It seemed to her inevitable, and with that inevitability Neville's presence seemed more palpable. She could hear him whistling a dog and dropping boots on the back veranda and preparing to enter his kitchen and say something habitual. That was the problem. She did not know what that habitual utterance would be. Habit had not had time to form.