Shame and the Captives (16 page)

On his way to the street he nearly tripped over a couple clenched together on dark grass closer to the gate.

•  •  •

He returned to Elgin and from his mixture of wisdom and cravenness he avoided the store. He saw Emily off on an already planned long train journey to visit Florence in New South Wales, beginning with that archaic regional locomotive, on its creaking regional rails, on which he had conversed with Nola Sheffield.

The farmhouse was lonely when Emily went off on her trip. He had never greatly liked it—its rooms had always seemed grim in a way that could not be remedied by mats or prints or vasefuls of gardenias. He liked growing apples and stone fruit, though, and the previous season had been a good one, with plenty of workers willing to come in and help, and occupy the shanties out beyond the orchards. The thick-forested mountains to the northwest also invigorated him: he liked the sunsets mediated by a ridge line and the upper branches of trees.

He went to the store, and after each visit Nola would meet him by dark in the park at Elgin. He had become addicted to copulation al fresco.

The better part of a month passed and Emily was due home when, one late afternoon, as he came in from pruning a row of plum trees, he saw Nola on the road, approaching along the dirt track with the same sturdy stride with which he had seen her advancing, bruised, into the downpour on the day he'd given her a ride. He waited, mesmerized by her progress. She opened and closed the main gate and came tramping on towards him. He moved to meet her on the gravel path to the front steps.

“Nola,” he said. But he couldn't very well say, “You ought to go back. I'll drive you.”

“It would be good for us if we went away,” she told him. “Elgin isn't the world.”

So he had his wish, and it terrified him.

“No, Nola. We can't do that. You're a lovely girl but I have to take you back home. The end of town then.” Because she was shaking her head. “I don't want to get you into trouble with your husband.”

“Bugger my husband! I'm not going back.”

Panic swelled within Abercare.

“It's the end, Nola,” he cried.

“You didn't tell me there'd be an end.”

“No. I should have. Look, let me take you back.”

They were still on the path to the front door, and the absurdity of the whole business threatened to abound when a column of dust advanced down the road from town. Nola was silent as the drone and shudder of the truck grew in volume. Then he understood: She knows this isn't a passing truck. This is her husband's truck, with “Elgin Store” in white on both doors.

Sheffield descended from it to open the outer farm gate and then drove through and closed it, then drove up the track and parked in front of the garden and got out—a gray, ageless man who wanted to strike both Nola and Abercare.

“She's not to be touched, Mr. Sheffield,” declared Abercare. Sheffield laughed like a man who would never learn to laugh for jollity. With amazement, Abercare heard himself threaten Sheffield with prosecution for trespass. Nola moved in, pushed her husband, slapped his face, and Abercare and Sheffield were tussling and trading ineffectual blows. In the hubbub of the threats and the banging of his blood, in the shrieks of Nola, in the baying of Sheffield himself, they had not seen the postal contractor, the man named Allen—beloved in the district because he was as good as a newspaper delivering mail farm to farm—enter Abercare's property. It was only the surprising cry of brakes that caused them to stop a moment.

“Bloody hell!” said Allen, taking in the scene.

•  •  •

Returned unwitting and weary from the long journey to the south coast of New South Wales, Emily was welcomed by Abercare with edgy joy, as if his connection to an ordered world had been restored. But he knew she would hear and so that evening he told her. She was silent. It did not seem anger, so it was all the more punishing. She was calculating what to do as well, in a desperate way.

At first she was pointed out as an object of muttering pity at Mass and in the main street. She did not dare enter the Sheffields' shop and drove as far as Applethorpe for household stores, and everyone knew why. She must have heard at some stage that her husband had been interviewed by the sergeant of police, though Sheffield had dropped the charges of assault for fear of enhancing the ridicule he, too, was suffering. Back home, on the afternoon of the brawl, with Nola pleading behind him, Sheffield had gone into his yard and fetched the rifle and threatened her with it, before going to the doctor's and unsuccessfully asking him to commit her to an asylum.

This poured another element into the brew of rumor and yet was still no defense in Abercare's case. Hadn't fornication, or, more accurately, adultery, ever occurred before in the boundaries of Elgin? But he had committed too extreme a sin. He had done what they all wanted and fucked Nola, and that fed their outrage more intensely.

Nola vanished from town, was seen at the railway station and in the carriage on the regional rattler going south.

“I should abominate the betrayal, Ewan,” a superrational and coldly charitable Emily said at one time, as if with a terrible self-knowledge. “And by God I do! But there's the damage to my vanity, too—to my standing. It compounds everything. It shouldn't, since these are fatuous opinions. But they've left their mark. It's the pressure of them, all around, from every direction.” She decided to leave the farm, refusing to give him any idea of her destination. She liked Brisbane, and he imagined her taking an office job there, if one was going, for she had typing and shorthand. Or she might join Florence again.

Abercare himself was by now so aware of the amusement and disdain of men and women acquaintances in the street that he felt a rural excommunication. He found he abhorred the loss of social standing and had never loved Elgin or his farm enough to stay there as an object of gossip. He had received notification that he was to stand by for active service. That much, given the war and his experience, was true. He put the farm up for sale, received derisory offers, and at last sold it for a halfway reasonable price to a farmer who had not yet heard the story.

•  •  •

Abercare went to live for a time in a boardinghouse in Saint Lucia in Brisbane, and got a job as an insurance salesman. Emily was indeed working as a typist in the city, Abercare found out by consulting a private detective. He consulted the private detective again and gave him Nola's name. Abercare was told that Nola Sheffield was living in a flat in Kelvin Grove and working as a shopgirl at McWhirters'. He went to the address after work and as he approached he saw Nola emerge from a building accompanied by a man of middling years in a splendid suit. She was handed into a sedan.

He realized he had hoped to resume with Nola, and as the car took her off into a summer night he began whimpering, trying to stop his mouth with his fingers and wailing “Nola” through them. She would not need his concern anymore. He need no longer speculate on the permanence of the marsupial lion, nor of the bewilderment and grief of the girl, who had so swiftly made another version of herself and no doubt had other potential versions available within her.

The great Japanese aggressions of December 1941 saved him. No one amongst the military officers he met seemed to have heard of his small-town scandal, and it lay below the level of interest of an embattled nation.

In Brisbane he was appointed CO of a training battalion of militia camped on the city's edge, soldiers of the country's secondary but
suddenly full-time force made up of marginally competent raw youth and much older men. They served as temporal brackets to the great conflicts in another hemisphere. They were too old in some cases, too young in others. They were the understudies to the true fighting force, which in those days operated in Africa and Syria, Greece and Crete, and they were exempt by law from being sent to such distant places.

But now they might be asked to step forward if all this newspaper talk of Japanese imminence was accurate. They could be sent to the scatter of Australian-owned archipelagos in the southwest of that supposedly peaceful ocean. Abercare—he knew this himself—was unlikely to be sent with them, even though he had at first returned to the military scene with ideas of the chance of expiatory valor, and of cutting, in his wife's eyes and in the world's, a better figure—that of a fiftysomething-year-old veteran with gifts still to be deployed. He had, within months of their initial estrangement, sent Emily a photo of himself in uniform—taken by a street photographer in Brisbane—that turned out well enough but was not too vainglorious. “This is where your foolish husband finds himself,” he had written. “I wish every second of the day that you are well.” More sentiment than that would have been a provocation even to a temperate soul like Emily. He found his behavior with Nola incredible now—the acts of another man.

He and Emily met for tea in Brisbane. She told him she was a typist, residing in a boardinghouse, though she had the means to rent or acquire a place of her own. Their conversation was painful. She said, “I know I must be lenient, now we're away from that terrible place. But I'm just not good enough to manage it. I understand, Ewan, that this is as much my fault now. I'm hurt, but that's not an excuse. The onus is on me as well.”

And she meant it. So he couldn't get angry when she seemed to condemn him to a long reconciliation.

Afterwards, perhaps a month or so later, a functional letter from
her arrived, hoping he was well and informing him that she had decided at her sister's urgent invitation to live for the time being with her and Cecil on the farm in New South Wales.

Yes, thought Abercare, but it's remote. It will be like living in a nunnery.

T
wo soldiers of the garrison who had managed to get leave that Christmas were Private Eamon Cassidy and Corporal Warren Headon. They were hut mates, but not close friends. Cassidy, after all, was not an easy man to get to know. Though obscure fellows, they were not without aspirations and they were members of a theoretical machine-gun crew.

There was meant to be such a weapon, Machine Gun A, located near the Main Road gate. But it was a phantom, an empty space by the wire, which had never been supplied. Headon, with the self-importance of an unsatisfied soul, had taken it as a duty to instruct the fairly pliable Cassidy on the use of their nonexistent weapon from a Vickers machine-gun manual supplied by Major Suttor. Sometimes Suttor would suggest Headon and Cassidy familiarize themselves with the manual and they would sit together in the guard hut peering at it as Headon informed his companion of the gun's wonderfully crafted and divinely complex parts, and the secrets of its smooth operation.

Headon was a good soldier. He had been an expert on the Vickers gun for perhaps a quarter of a century. He'd first fired one in the rear areas of Belgium at the close of the past Great War, and had more
recently admired the mechanism while serving in his militia unit in the scattered bush on Sydney's outskirts. The rites of soldiery, the prime condition of kit, were the male morality of his clan—an English immigrant family who had occupied modest army ranks for over a century and a half in a number of imperial locations from Egypt to Bengal.

Secretly, Corporal Headon regretted Cassidy's undramatic plate of a face, apparent stupidity, sparing talk, and temperamental indifference to the ceremonies of mentally assembling a Vickers. They seemed to bespeak his own misfortune—which was that he had lived a boring life, one that could be summarized in too few words and that generated too few anecdotes. He had never married—he knew he was shy in that regard, but had no idea that his didactic tendencies, bordering on a taste for the harangue, drove girls away. He was forced to keep silent when men from the campaigns of Palestine or France or Belgium compared the damage shrapnel had done to their legs or necks or shoulders. He had still been training in the lines when the Great War cranked to a close; he envied other men their wounds. And in this present world conflict, he was a prison warder, and gunner of a phantom Vickers.

Headon had gone home the previous September to see his mother and married sister in Sydney, and when he had taken the tram back to Central Station to catch the train to Gawell, he'd given way to an impulse to stand at its back window and flash a Morse code farewell at them through the rear windows. His sister had written and said they had laughed themselves sick at his acting the goat like that. In fact, under cover of apparent humor, he had been really displaying to the women his soldierliness. He had wanted them to admire, not laugh. He wanted to be seen as a man who knew mysteries, not as someone just showing off.

Headon looked on his Christmas homecoming with indifference; Eamon Cassidy with eagerness. Despite the double-barreled Celtic plushness and piety of his first and second names, Eamon was, as
Headon had observed, an unremarkable human. Years before, Cassidy's parents had crossed from Ireland of the Sorrows as deck cargo, and then traversed the north of England so that his father could work in the Tyneside shipyards, where Eamon also had begun his working life. His father had been a Cork man with no love of Empire, although he had been involved in building a number of large ships for the greatest navy on earth.

At the time of Eamon's first arrival in Sydney in 1923, his search for accommodation had taken him to a terraced house in Newtown, whose door was answered by a fine, mature woman with questioning, dark eyes and a bun of black hair. Her name was Mrs. Maddie McGarry. In the late high summer she wore a blue and white tissue-thin dress. She showed him his room. By the standards of his cramped childhood it looked very welcome, and there was a picture he recognized on the wall—Our Lady of Perpetual Succour. So they were Catholics.

He made an extraordinary decision, given the sobriety of his character. He would take this room whatever she would charge. He would take extra work to pay the rent if he needed to.