Shame and the Captives Page 11

  She said, “Giancarlo,” and he woke in alarm and sat up.

  “Missus ’Erman?” he asked in a voice husky from sleep.

  “I thought I ought to come here,” she told him. “You’re not in a position to come up to the house.”

  “What do you say, missus?” he asked.

  “Don’t call me “missus” ever again,” she told him. “Call me Alice, for God’s sake.”

  But she knew she was setting him a hard task.

  “Except maybe in the house.”

  There was little light, some would say none. Without permission, she sat near the end of the bed. Who had she become? To do that with plaid gown and a nightdress coating her determination. Becoming accustomed to the darkness, she could see a singlet on his upper body, but bare legs. She reached for his wrist. She had never done this before. Her wrists had always bided the touch of other people.

  She saw the sudden childlike luminosity of his eyes. She could see he thought everything was dangerous now. There was no move he could make to satisfy her. Underneath it he wanted what young men want, but that wasn’t the point anymore.

  She held his wrist and raised it. Her left hand was on top, clasping, and her right was like a clenched heart in his palm.

  “Missus ’Erman,” he said. “Alice. Mr. ’Erman, he’s a boss and he’s the kind boss. I get sent right back too. I don’ want to get sent back to Compound D.”

  She could sense a torment in him—it was broader than simply being sent back. He did not want to lose his way. Suddenly, she let go of his wrist. It had been right to take it but was not right now. It was a kind of bullying.

  “I’m sorry, Giancarlo,” she said. She got up. She wanted to flee. “This is your room.”

  “No,” he said, trying to encompass all the perils and guilt, and again not managing to. “Not my room. It’s yours, Missus and Mr. ’Erman’s. Mr. ’Erman . . . he’s a good man to me. And you . . . a good woman.”

  St. Alice, the frigid widow of Herman’s place!

  “Good night, Giancarlo,” she said, and she got up and charged through the door. In the altered moonlight, making for her room again, she was ridiculous. Giancarlo must think she was mad. He’d been here a mere seven weeks. Seven weeks isn’t enough to justify this lunacy.

  Her face blazed when she heard his boots on the veranda the next morning, bringing the eggs. She heard a somber, “Eggs, missus.”

  She gathered herself, hooded her eyes, and assured herself her face was empty of any statement, including shame. She stepped out, and he placed the wire handle of the bucket in her hand. It was close to Christmas and the promised heat of the day breathed on her from over his shoulder.

  “Thank you,” she somehow muttered, to open and end the transaction. She turned to take the eggs inside, but he murmured, “Missus. Alice.” There was a content in his two words whereas she’d tried to take out all the contents she could from hers.

  He said, “You are the most good. You don’ know it, the good and beautiful, you are. I was sap.” (American slang again, Alice thought.) “I was drongo.” (Australian.) “I was bloody yellow.” (Some war film?)

  That’s how it was established, on the edge of a bush Christmas.

  She said, as the demented always do, “No one will find out.” That night during her visit, he told her, “I have nothing here to protect,” waving his hand briskly across his pelvic area, implying she could face the risk of a child. But there was the fact she had not conceived in her brief time with Neville, though they’d expected she would as a national duty and so she might have the comfort of a soldier’s child in his absence. Neville had confided quite gently and without apportioning blame that he didn’t think it was his deficiency—his father had had a kid. So it was pretty much established to be her. What had been a domestic misfortune in the making then, became another kind of fortune now.

  “I don’t have babies,” she told him.

  “Still,” he told her, as if he knew the male and thus the female mysteries. “I know to be careful. Bella!”

  She did not want the debate to go any further. She stood up and took off her upper garments. And indeed it didn’t.

  12

  D earest Emily,” Ewan Abercare wrote to his estranged wife.

  I received by way of Cecil a kind invitation to join you and your sister and him at Tathra for Christmas. Since I know he would have asked you about your feelings on my visit, I am overwhelmed by your kindness, and of course Cecil’s and Florence’s as well.

  I would love to get away from here—the heat is withering even by African and sub-Continental standards. The whole country’s shrieking with cicadas and the grass has dried to straw, and yet farmers tell us it’s a good season. But I’m desolated to tell you I can’t leave. Some hundreds of Italian prisoners have arrived here from camps in India. The reasons have something to do with the idea the British had that Italian prisoners might work on Australian farms, whereas they were more confined and of less use in India. To relieve the pressure I’ve managed to negotiate with the Control Center that a further fifty of our longer-term resident Italians be distributed to farms near and far-off.

  The added work—and you have no idea how much paperwork even a single prisoner involves—means I can’t leave Gawell for the holiday season, but if Cecil, with your agreement, will permit me to visit in the New Year, I would be unutterably grateful. I am desolated not to be with you for the festival. May I wish you all a very Happy Christmas and dare subscribe myself

  Your loving husband,

  Ewan

  But almost as soon as the fifty-two Italians went off in Control Center trucks, seven other prisoners returned from farms—six with fevers, one rendered catatonic by loneliness. In addition, a certain Gabriele Basile came in one hot day after walking off a farm at Orange on his own authority. A court of inquiry was held under Abercare and he was sentenced to twenty-eight days’ detention in what even the Japanese called the “hoosegow”—the detention cells in his compound. A Private Giovanni Verano was meanwhile returned to camp by the farmer he’d been assigned to. He had refused to work. Benedetto Pachessa was returned because he had gestured with a pitchfork towards his employer. Once again a sentence of four weeks, but Abercare intended to amnesty him for Christmas. Private Alberto Marangoni had been brought back by truck from Oberon’s Control Center. He had left the shed where he and another prisoner slept, and crossed into another farm and slept there. Marangoni, when he was brought to Abercare, showed a half-healed wound on his lower arm. The prisoner he’d worked with had inflicted the wound and had threatened to kill him. What was the cause of the problem, he was asked, and the answer was, “Songs.” Songs were a big issue with Italians, especially if they were political. The “Internazionale” could indeed provoke a wound. Abercare could gauge the fear in Marangoni, and dismissed the charge and sought another farm for him by way of the Control Center. Abercare was asked, too, to approve the transfer of one Corporal Marco Barbetta, newly arrived from India, from Compound D to A, where he could enjoy the company of Alessandro, his cousin.

  Correspondence and report writing on these and other issues blocked out Christmas as Abercare was put to the considerable paperwork of confirming these small but frequent shifts, punishments, and leniencies. Some Red Cross parcels were also referred to him for his ultimate inspection, often on fatuous grounds, by the major who ran Compound A. The officer concerned was wary that hardcore Fascisti or simply criminal elements might forge cans of tinned tomatoes and sausages into weapons.

  And, above all, to be carefully studied, were reports from Nevski and Champion on the abiding mysteries of Compound C.

  • • •

  Was there a certain relief in Abercare that he would not face the test of Emily at such a high season—that he could spend the day with his town friends Dr. and Mrs. Garner, Garner being one of the more venerable physicians of the town and one who sometimes visited cases in Gawell prison camp?

  The recklessness in him that h
ad driven off Emily had occurred far enough away, in Queensland. Perhaps where she was now, in the far south of New South Wales, it could be slowly accommodated and forgiven by her. But Christmas was a dangerous feast, when resentments lay close to the surface. It would be better if he went to see her at a more neutral time.

  Some years back, the better part of three, in fact, Abercare, after his life in the army in India, had taken up fruit farming in the Darling Downs. The Australians sold remount horses to the army in India, as well as the idea that Australia was a good place for British officers from the army in India to retire to. He had not known, though, that the idea of being a gentleman farmer in the English manner was one not quite understood, or even viable, on the Darling Downs. He brought with him his wife, Emily, a lean, handsome woman whom he had married in India, after their first meeting in Kenya over a decade past, and who was pliable enough to take on a new country, having come from a family like his own—the kind that spent so much of their lives in British outposts. Emily and her sister, Florence, came from a gentrified but now fairly impoverished Lancashire Catholic family. In their girlhoods, they had shared Mass with the Irish working class of northern England and the Irish soldiers of British garrisons in Kenya, Rhodesia, and India.

  On the Downs Abercare had joined the local militia unit, and there his welcome from other part-time officers had at least been sincere. A calamity was considered imminent then. Czechoslovakia lay in the balance, and Nanking had fallen to the barbarians. Through the disasters of the early war, amidst far echoes but disturbing ones for this southernmost region of Britannic zeal and hope, he and other men awaited full-time postings and did not receive them until intelligence arrived of coming, surprise, assaults in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. He had been confident that Emily and a manager could run the fruit farm, but by the time his call-up to a training battalion came, he had already committed that awful bush folly of his, that adolescent wantonness.

  All the region he and Emily had settled in when they came to Australia knew the wife of the storekeeper in Elgin. Her name was Nola Sheffield. She was perhaps fifteen years younger than her husband, and it was said the couple was unhappy. It was true that the husband seemed to lack faith in anything except groceries and hardware. Patches of stubble lay on his long face like ash. When Mrs. Sheffield, a woman in her prime, served customers, particularly ones she did not know, she moved behind her counter with a strange, slatternly undulation Abercare found memorable and alluring. Everyone called her by her first name, never by her married title. She was Nola, childless and recently wed, out of pity on Sheffield’s part or otherwise, in a town where most girls married at eighteen or nineteen. Hence rumor proliferated. That she had had a child in another town. That she was very simpleminded. That she was very clever and had gone to a private school in Brisbane. On his visits to the store, Abercare certainly found her a village phenomenon, quick at mathematics, at pounds, shillings, and pence.

  Whenever he left the store, Abercare found himself indulging the sharpest memories of her walk and intimately remembered details of her body and face, her mouth like a crushed rose, and every subtlety of resentful movement.

  As Nola got to be familiar with the sight of Abercare, her demeanor as she approached him up the length of the counter was warmer, and involved an almost expectant smile.

  “The usual, Colonel Abercare?” she would ask. Like other men in Elgin, he looked for omens in that simple exchange. “How is Mrs. Abercare?”

  He was returning in his Morris car, one dim spring Sunday evening early in the war, from a weekend of militia training. It was a period just before the Japanese crisis, when the military had decided they would require his full-time services at some stage but not quite yet. And, despite the farm, a military renewal was what he hoped for. Then he saw a woman’s figure in Wellington boots and with a burlap sack over her head and shoulders as protection against the rain. The woman wore a light summer dress of floral print that was soaked. It was Nola Sheffield, he could tell as she turned to the sound of wet tires on gravel. She faced him with a tear-bruised face, with the rain cascading from its planes. Her lip was also darkened and swollen and divided by a small, sharp-edged cut.

  “Mrs. Sheffield,” he called, half-abashed in case she was ashamed to be seen like this. “Might I help you?”

  With dark, outraged eyes, she was inspecting his uniform, which he still wore in full—Sam Browne belt and service ribbons and all. Somehow he could see her decide that his shell of office did not fit hers of misery. She wanted to be alone in a landscape that suited her grievance.

  “Thanks,” she said, having decided to treat him as neutral. Her tone became pleasant, but you could tell that alternative tones lay banked within her. She conceded a wet smile beneath her burlap hood. “That’s a pretty nice uniform you have.”

  “Oh,” he said, boyishly delighted. “I’ve just been at weekend maneuvers. Chocolate soldier stuff!”

  He could tell she wavered.

  “Look, get in, please. It’s ridiculous to get so wet.”

  He wanted to know, but couldn’t ask, why her husband had hit her. Who else would have? She got in beside Abercare. It was done lithely. He could smell the wetness of her clothes and the cleaner, cold odor of her saturated flesh.

  He put the car back in gear. “Look, I can see you’ve had a bit of an accident. Would you like to come home, and my wife can give you some tea and sort out some dry clothes?”

  And I’d have had you beneath my roof and could watch how you sat at my table. The table had been cold since Emily had grown discontented in this place, and it was worse because she didn’t say so. Nola Sheffield would make the table radiant again.

  She said woodenly, “Do you mind just dropping me at the park in town?”

  “Well, it’s not my business. But you’ll get wetter still.”

  “No,” she said, “there’s picnic shelters there. I just want to have a think. I like parks a lot. They give you a bit of time.”

  She gave a small, tentative smile that caused a definite movement of something within him, a jolt. The quaintness and the beauty.

  “All right,” Abercare conceded. “I’ll turn the car around.”

  “Oh,” she said, feeling her lip for a second, then—in a sort of stoicism—at once withdrawing her finger. “I hadn’t thought of that. Sorry.”

  But he was already grinding the shuddering Morris into the turn. He decided to be adventurous. “I hate to see you bruised like that.”

  She said nothing. He’d reached the limit of what was permitted to be said, at least for now.

  “I have time for you, Mr. Abercare,” she said then, plainly and without emphasis. “You’re a different kind of man than they are around Elgin.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. I’m a pretty standard-issue sort of fellow.” He put some effort into not glowing with delight. It had struck him by now, though, that if she were observed sitting in the park, he would be observed dropping her off there. Nonetheless, he continued up the rain-slicked gravel road and reached the slumped old houses on the edge of the town and so rolled past pubs and shut drapery shops and the long front of Western Stores to the comfortless park beyond.

  “Thanks a lot,” she told him and got out.

  He knew there was something off-balance in her. The elements did not add up to a whole. She got out into the stubborn downpour. She put the wet burlap over her head again. By the time he’d backed and forwarded a few times and turned the car, he saw she had taken up a seat in a picnic shed.

  When he got home, he told Emily all about it, as a sort of expiation, though he didn’t know for what. It did not prevent Nola Sheffield and her remembered bruises seizing him by night. In a dream he took this exquisite and baffling creature, his intentions almost as pedagogic as lustful, to an indefinite city.

  • • •

  An uncle of Abercare’s died in Scotland, and he received news of a small inheritance from a solicitor in Edinburgh. There were papers enclosed that
needed to be signed and notarized, and he was on his way to Stanthorpe on a cranky branch line, in a carriage infested with coal dust from an ancient and inefficient locomotive, to attend to that business. Ninety seconds before the train left, the storekeeper’s wife, Nola Sheffield, appeared at his carriage door in a straw hat and a floral dress like the one she had worn in the rain, and stepped up and made her way down the central aisle. She was carrying a middle-sized “port,” as Queenslanders called a piece of luggage. He rose to take it from her and say hello and place the bag on the wire rack overhead.

  Nola Sheffield permitted this gallantry and thanked him. He turned away to find a seat at a distance from her.

  “You’re welcome to sit across,” she told him, pointing to the seat opposite her.

  “That’s very kind,” he told her, and as if it could be done by willpower, struggled to prevent an excess of blood from coloring his face.

  Her features were healed and her eyes had lost that look of universal disappointment. She told him she was going to visit a sick aunt in Stanthorpe who had had a stroke. She would be staying with her cousin, who was minding the aunt.

  “What will the store do without your gift for mathematics?”

  “Oh, I reckon it will get on all right. True, I got the arithmetic prize in high school, but then my father needed to pull me out.”

  “And why did he need to do that?”

  “My brother was drowned. Dad wanted the help. I was glad to get away from geometry.”

  “But you’re so good at numbers,” he protested.

  “They’re easy,” she said. “You can see them in your head.”