The Narrow Road to the Deep North Page 14

  For this much Amy did know: she was alone.

  When they left the card evening, Amy found Keith uncharacteristically quiet. copyrightly he babbled, but of late he said less and less, and through the hands of five hundred he had said next to nothing. The sadness emanating from Keith seemed to empty the world. She tried to lose her thoughts in the Cabriolet’s rattling side windows, the road noise, the slight clatter of its motor. But all she was aware of was Keith’s deep turn into himself, and the rattle and the thrum and the clattering points remained just that.

  The magic’s gone, he said.

  The council will see the sense of what you’re arguing, Amy said, picking up on a conversation earlier in the evening.

  The council? Keith said, looking at her as if he were a grocer and she a customer who had walked into his shop and inexplicably ordered a bag of common sense. The council has got nothing to do with it, he said, his gaze returning to the road.

  And though she knew she shouldn’t, she said brightly, Who does then?

  It was a lie of sorts. Everything was a greater or lesser lie now.

  For a moment, Keith turned and looked at her. In the darkness she could make little out, but she could see he was staring at her not in rage, which would have been understandable, nor in accusation, which would have been helpful, but in a terrible judgement she could not escape for as long as he kept on looking at her—with pity, with horror, with a hurt that the blackness could not obscure and which she feared would stay with her forever after. She suddenly felt very frightened.

  I didn’t know, you know? he said. Not really.

  She could not love him, she told herself. She could not, must not, could never, ever love him.

  He went on, never raising his voice: I hoped I had it all wrong. That you’d prove what a horrible, jealous old man I was thinking such awful things. That you’d make me feel ashamed thinking such things. But now. Well, now I do. Everything is . . . clear.

  For some moments he seemed lost in thoughts, calculations, some calculus of betrayal. And then he said in a vague and slow way—

  And when you tell me something, it’s, like . . . like . . .

  He looked back to the road.

  It’s like hearing the hammer click back on the rifle.

  She wanted to hold him. But she didn’t and wouldn’t do any such thing.

  Perhaps I should have done something, said something, Keith continued. But I felt, well, what is there to say? He’s her age, I told myself, more or less; I am an old, fat fool. I had—

  He paused. Were his eyes moist? She knew he would not cry. He was braver than her, she thought. And better. But it was not virtue she wanted, but Dorrigo.

  Had suspicions. Yes, Keith said, his tone as though he were speaking to Miss Beatrice on his lap. And I thought, well, Keith, old fellow, make yourself scarce when he comes around. They can be together, and it’ll burn out, and she’ll come back to you. It wasn’t my first mistake, though.

  An army truck passed them, and in the brief dim slit of light it threw into the Cabriolet she stole a glimpse across. But his face, shadowed, intent, staring far away down that long straight Adelaide street, told her nothing.

  I should have let you keep the baby, he said.

  He dropped gear and the car floor shook beneath Amy’s feet. Its vibrations seemed to be shouting to her DORRY!—DORRY!—DORRY!

  I had, I guess, Keith went on, ideas. That you, me . . . His tongue was stumbling. Each word was a universe, infinite and unknowable. Us, he continued.

  She recognised within herself a deep feeling for him. But though she felt a great deal, what she felt was not love.

  There’s nothing going on, Keith.

  No, no, he said. Of course. Of course, there’s not.

  What do you want me to do?

  Do? Do? What can be done? he said. The magic’s gone.

  Nothing has happened, she lied a second time.

  We, he said, and turned to her. We? he asked. But he seemed unsure, lost, as defeated as France. We could. That we could be something. Yes, said Keith.

  Yes, she said.

  That we could. But we couldn’t. Could we, Amy? I killed the baby and that killed us.

  26

  ON MONDAY MORNING Dorrigo Evans was about to lead a route march into the Adelaide Hills when he was called to regimental administration to take an urgent call from his family. The office was a large corrugated-iron Nissen hut in which staff officers worked in temperatures unknown outside of bakeries and pottery kilns. The infernal heat was trapped and further stifled by the hut’s partition into unworkable offices delineated by single-sheet Masonite walls painted a grimy mustard. Out of frustration everyone seemed to smoke more, and the air had a haze about it that was only rivalled by its odour—compounded of tobacco smoke, sweat and the stale, ammoniacal scent of overcrowded animals—that left everyone coughing incessantly.

  The phone where Dorrigo’s call waited was mounted on a wall opposite the duty officer’s front desk, past which flowed all those seeking to get outside on any pretext. Offsetting this insurmountable lack of privacy was a crazed cacophony of typewriter keys being pounded and typewriter carriages returning, phones ringing, men yelling and coughing, electric fans here and there droning as they hacked the unbearable heat into intolerable hot tufts.

  Dorrigo picked up the Bakelite earpiece and, leaning down into the voice cone, coughed to make his arrival known. For a moment there was no sound, and then he heard her unmistakable voice utter two words.

  He knows.

  He felt himself falling through the cosmos, with nothing to stop him. Somewhere far below was his body, attached to an earpiece that was attached to a wire that ran through other wires all the way to where Amy Mulvaney stood in the King of Cornwall. He could see his body turn its back to the other men. He coughed again, this time inadvertently.

  What? Dorrigo said. He cupped his hand around the end of the earpiece, both to better hear Amy and to ensure no one else could.

  Us, said Amy.

  Dorrigo ran a finger between his wet collar and his neck. The heat was impossible. He was breathing in long pants to try to get enough air.

  How?

  I don’t know, she said. How, what, I don’t know. But Keith knows.

  Dorrigo understood that Amy would next say she would leave Keith, or perhaps that Keith had thrown her out. In any event, he and Amy would now start a life together. He understood all this, and he knew to this he would say yes—yes, he would end it with Ella Lansbury, and yes, he would immediately begin to arrange his affairs so he and Amy could become a real couple. And all this seemed to him inevitable and as it should be.

  Amy, whispered Dorrigo.

  Go back, she said.

  What?

  To her.

  Dorrigo felt himself tumbling, returning into the oven-like office. He longed to talk to her anywhere but here—in a bookshop full of dust, at the beach, in the corner room he now thought of as theirs, with its peeling French doors and breezes and softly rusting wrought-iron balcony.

  Go back to Ella, Amy said.

  He replied as flatly and unemotionally as he could, breaking his words up so that the duty officer sitting behind him would not understand what he was saying.

  What. Do you mean. Go back?

  To her. That’s what I mean. You must, Dorry.

  She didn’t want this, he thought. She couldn’t want it. Why then was she saying it? He had no idea. His face was flushed. His body felt too hot and too large for his uniform. He was angry. He needed to say so many things and he could say none of them. He could feel the mustard Masonite walls closing in on him, the weight of khaki around him, of discipline and rules and authority. He felt he was choking.

  Go to Ella, she ordered.

  His body just wanted to flee the awful oven-like room of the Nissen hut, to escape, to—

  Amy, he said.

  Go, she said.

  I—

  I what? Amy said.

 
I thought, he replied. That—

  That what? Amy said.

  Everything now was inverted. The more he wanted her, the more she pushed him away. And then Amy said that she could hear Keith coming, that she was sorry, that she had to go. He would be happy, she said.

  And though he wasn’t happy, Dorrigo Evans felt the most unexpected and enormous relief. In a moment he would be outside the furnace of regimental administration, and he would no longer have the overwhelming confusion close to paralysis that Amy Mulvaney had brought into his life; henceforth, he would be able to live life on his own terms, in a straight and honest way with Ella Lansbury. He understood that he would be free, that he would no longer have to swim in a maelstrom of swirling lies and deceits, that he could with full heart devote himself to the task of finding love with Ella Lansbury. So, afterwards, he never understood why he then said what he did, only that he meant every word of it. That in one sentence he forsook that freedom and with it that reasonable hope of love being built.

  I’ll be back, Dorrigo Evans said. When it’s over. For you, Amy. And we’ll marry.

  He was aware it was a path to misery and even damnation. What a moment before he had never even thought about now seemed inevitable, and it was as if it could never have been any other way—their meeting in the bookshop of wild dust motes, the bedroom of flaking paint and lazy curtains ruffling in ocean breezes, a tin hut as hot as a smokehouse. The Bakelite earpiece was so wet with sweat that it slid off his ear, and it was a moment or two before he understood that she had hung up and possibly not heard a word of what he had just said.

  He had to see her—that was all he could think. He must see her. In one of the two nights he had left, he would have to somehow steal out of the barracks and arrange a meeting so that they might talk.

  You’re out of it, Evans, a voice behind him said. He turned to see a 2/7th staff officer with a clipboard.

  Dorrigo’s mind was awhirl with how he would get out of Warradale without permission, where he would find a vehicle, where they might secretly meet.

  The 2/7th CCS are catching the train to Sydney tonight. On arrival, you’ll be advised of what ship you’re embarking on. Final destination to be advised somewhere in the middle of the bloody Pacific. You’ve been ordered to cancel all planned activities and be prepared to leave at 1700.

  Dorrigo’s mind was pitching and reeling. The import of what he was being told was beginning to sink in.

  But—I thought it was to be Wednesday?

  The staff officer shrugged his shoulders.

  Bloody relief to get going, if you ask me, he said. You’ve got five hours. The staff officer raised his wrist and looked at his watch. Or less, he said.

  And Dorrigo realised he might never see Amy again. And with this knowledge, he knew he would have to work, to operate, to go to bed and rise again and live, and now go wherever the war took him, without another soul knowing what he carried deepest in his heart.

  27

  OF A NIGHT, the heat seemed without end. But it was not like the summer of two years before. The war ground on, the families on the beach were mostly fatherless, uniforms rather than suits or singlets drank in the bar now, and their talk was full of new words, naming places hitherto unknown to either the front or back bar of the King of Cornwall—El Alamein, Stalingrad, Guadalcanal. It was the eleventh day of the heatwave, the King of Cornwall’s bars were as busy as on a pre-war Cup day. A man who had killed his wife with a poker blamed the murder on the heat, and Amy had just returned home early after cutting her foot on a broken beer bottle while taking an evening walk along the beach. She washed her foot in the bath, bandaged it, and came into the room of the hotel that served as their parlour to find Keith Mulvaney standing over the wireless as he switched it off.

  That was a good episode tonight, he said as the static softly died. You would have liked it.

  And Amy had once liked it well enough, but now she could no longer abide her husband’s domestic rituals, not least this, the silent listening to his favourite weekly radio serial—only broken by his match-striking and pipe-sucking, by the dog slobbering—and now she tried to escape it when she could. She hated the radio serial, his pipe, his old man’s movements; she hated the very air she had to share with him, the stifling, unbreathable, stinking air that she was drowning in every day.

  Keith sat down in an armchair, Miss Beatrice hopped into his lap, gasping and slobbering as he tamped his pipe. The windows were all open but still Amy found it stifling after the sea breath of the beach. She sat down. Her foot ached. The evening sea breeze found its way in, but seemed only to heighten the smell of brilliantine embedded in the antimacassar, to enhance the odour of stale pipe tobacco in the russet armchairs, to remind her of the scent of stale dog that always made her want to walk straight back out and leave forever.

  After the council meeting tonight, Keith Mulvaney began, and Amy looked down at the dog hair on the rug, fearing another tale of municipal drudgery.

  The council clerk, Ron, Keith Mulvaney said. You remember Ron?

  No, Amy said.

  Of course you do. Ron Jarvis. You remember Ron Jarvis.

  No.

  Ron Jarvis was saying he had heard on the by and by that it’s very bad news about our boys in Java.

  Amy looked up. Keith’s rictus smile betrayed nothing—a dreamy, half-demented look, she felt. Yet at that moment she understood he had always seen further than she had known.

  I have never heard of Ron Jarvis, Amy said, though she could now put a small, whippet-like face to the name. Was Keith seeking to gloss over the worst with some good? He lit his pipe, chugged on it till the tobacco was a ripe coal, and then, his smile never once faltering, leant forward in his armchair. Miss Beatrice, sandwiched in his lap, squawked as she adapted to the billow of Keith’s belly.

  I was asking, Keith Mulvaney said. Well, more than that. I said to Ron, I have a nephew, Dorrigo Evans—can you find out anything about him or his unit? Gave him details. Well, he came back yesterday. The thing is, Amy, the news is not so good.

  Amy stood up, wincing, and hobbled over to the sash window.

  No, he went on, not so good at all. Grim, really. Which is why it’s hush-hush. Very hush-hush.

  She stood next to the window, and although the night air outside was of a lower temperature than inside, the exterior heat still felt a brutish, menacing thing. She could hear the disturbing small sounds of things drying, crackling, breaking—grass, wood, God knew what else. She could make out the corrugated iron on the roof far above aching loudly as it contracted from its sunlit excesses. She leant hard on her cut foot to make the pain stab hard up into her.

  Grim? Amy Mulvaney said. What’s grim? They’re prisoners, we know that. And the Japs are brutes. But they’re safe.

  The Australian prisoners in Germany you can correspond with. May as well be on holiday. But the POWs in Asia, well, it’s not such a pretty picture. There’s no news, no reliable testimony. There’s been no real word of them since the surrender of Singapore. Nothing has been heard of his unit for nine months. They think thousands of the POWs have perished over there.

  Maybe. But there’s no proof Dorrigo’s dead.

  They’ve been told—

  Who told? Who said it? Who, Keith?

  I . . . Their intelligence, I guess. I mean—

  Who, Keith?

  I can’t say. But Ron—well, he knows. People.

  People?

  Well-placed people. Defence Department people.

  Keith Mulvaney halted; his mask-like smile seemed to be signalling something else—pity? uncertainty? rage? —and then continued with an implacable force.

  And they expect very few of them to survive to tell the tale.

  Amy realised he had abandoned his copyright practice of asking a question only to immediately answer it. He wasn’t trying to win an argument. He was trying to tell her something. It was as if he had already won.

  He wrote to us, said Amy, but she could hear th
at her voice was shrill.

  That card?

  The card, yes. And his brother Tom wrote you that his family in Tasmania had one after us.

  Her voice, she knew, was thin and unconvincing even to her.

  The card he sent us, Amy, was dated May 1942, and we got it in November. That was three months ago. It’s getting close to a year since we’ve had any word from him. Not a word—

  Yes, Amy Mulvaney said. Yes, yes. Quickly, definitely, as though this somehow proved her point rather than demolished it.

  Not a word since.

  Yes, Amy Mulvaney said. Though she pressed down even harder on it, her foot didn’t really hurt that much at all. Habit and circumstance, the reassurance and security of marriage, were no longer enough for her. She would leave him. But having thought this bitter thought, she immediately felt confused. How? Where? And what would she live on?

  The card his family got in December was dated April.

  Yes, Keith, Amy Mulvaney said. Yes, yes, yes.

  Her body was being tossed and rolled, and she was reaching for words to help keep her balance. She did not say she had written over a hundred letters to Dorrigo since they had heard he had been taken prisoner. Surely, Amy Mulvaney thought, one would have got through.

  Ron Jarvis also said there are reports coming from other sources. Not good. Saying the men are skin and bone and being starved to death.

  There’s been nothing in the papers.

  There was. Atrocities. Massacres.

  That’s propaganda, Keith, Amy Mulvaney said. To make us hate them.

  Though she put all her weight on her cut foot, it merely ached.

  If it’s propaganda, Keith Mulvaney said, it’s very bad propaganda.

  But nothing else, no follow-up.

  It’s a war, Amy. Bad news is no news. It vanishes. There’s the best part of a fifth of the Australian army missing, and only a few reliably traced.

  That doesn’t mean he’s dead, Keith. It’s like you want him dead. He’s not dead. I know. I know.

  The sea breeze, she realised, had ceased. Even the world struggled to breathe. From outside, she thought she heard the sound of a dried leaf snap. Keith coughed. He was not finished.