Shame and the Captives Page 13

  13

  Two 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.

  “Well,” she said, “you don’t look like a pisspot or a gambler to me. And I can’t very well ask for a reference from your parish priest! Come and have some tea.”

  She took him into the kitchen, where a thin man sat reading Smith’s Weekly, an irreverent tabloid. The man looked up. He had a nose they call aquiline, but that was helped by the fact that the other planes of his face had shrunk away. At the sight of Eamon, the surprise of a strange face, he began to cough painfully and put aside, unlit, a narrow cigarette he had rolled. Mrs. McGarry took no notice of the paroxysm and began filling a kettle. The man was introduced by his wife as Pete.

  “You Irish?” Pete gasped.

  “No, I’m what they call a Geordie. Irish parents. But I’m a Geordie.”

  Pete said, glancing at Smith’s Weekly again, “I know what a Geordie is. If you like, I’ll take you down to the Sandringham for a drink later.”

  “I don’t mind a drink when someone invites me,” said Eamon. “I don’t mean I can’t pay for it myself. I’m all set for a job just now. I’ll happily shout you one.”

  Pete laughed and, of course, as Eamon already seemed to know from its first notes, the laughter faded away into coughing of such ferocity that Eamon lowered his eyes with a sort of reverence. Brave enough to look up at last, he saw Mrs. McGarry smiling at him from the stove.

  “A person doesn’t get much blushing around here,” she said. “It’s not a suburb for blushers.”

  Within this simple opening conversation between him and Maddie McGarry, a pattern of connection grew. On the way home from the pub, Eamon paused for one of Pete’s coughing spasms. When it passed, Pete stood up straight with tears in his eyes. “This makes Maddie crazy,” he said, thumping his own chest and with half his voice. When the whole of it returned, he said, “I sleep out on the back veranda so as not to disturb her.”

  By 1943, Eamon Cassidy had been involved in Maddie and Pete’s welfare for twenty years. For he had become Maddie’s lover after meeting her one evening two months into his tenancy, twenty years past, in the hallway as she came from her bath. It was about eight o’clock on a summer’s night, but Pete was already in his uneasy bed on the veranda. It had become an obsession with him, being out there, she would explain to Eamon later when they were in bed. “And why did it become an obsession?” she asked. Eamon, circling his fingers gently on her right breast, knew he was not meant to answer.

  “Not entirely for his lungs,” said Maddie, “but because he really has some fear from back then—all to do with being trapped inside.”

  Eamon was at first uneasy about his gradual taking on of Pete’s role with Maddie. He sometimes resolved during his hours at work that he would leave the family behind, the beautiful hungry wife and the noble, suffering husband looking for a night breeze that would console his lungs and his fear of being buried alive. But his arrival home always brought a call from one or other of them. Pete would shake his head over the sacking of Jack Lang, Mussolini’s unimpeded grab for Abyssinia, imperialist armor vented against peasant spears, Franco’s advance to the Ebro River, iron-ore shipments to Japan, the Anschluss.

  Eventually, Pete acknowledged the reality one dusk as they drank tea. “About Maddie,” Pete had said. “I know, son. Do you think she’d keep me in the dark? She isn’t dishonest. When I remember what it was like before, and I try to reopen this box where it all was, some high explosive or other bangs it shut.”

  In that one conversation, Cassidy was transformed from lover into a family man. He brought his pay home for Maddie to distribute from a commonly held fund, into which her own part-time pay went. Eamon’s engineering shop closed about the time Franco won, and Hitler banged the table asking for Czechoslovakia.

  By 1943, his aspirations were chiefly civilian: to eventually get away from the army to mind what you could call “two old friends,” if you wanted to simplify matters. When he was home on
leave, he saw the shadow over Maddie’s face—a tower of hard years had cast it on her at last. He did not like her blood-pressure level or the tremble in her hand, the tentative way she reached for things, this woman who had always been definite.

  So when he got on the train that Christmas at Gawell and left Headon’s phantom machine gun behind, he was a man who had ailing and dependent elders waiting for him.

  14

  On Christmas Day Duncan rose at the prodigiously late hour of nine o’clock. Coming into the kitchen, he told Alice, “Woke up at dawn but went on pretending I was having a good time lying there. Have you wished Johnny a happy Christmas yet?”

  “No,” she said. “I might go down later.”

  She wiped the morning’s sweat off her cheek. It was already fiercely hot, the oven range radiating inside the house and, she could almost imagine, outside in the country itself.

  “You’re looking tired, Alice,” said Duncan.

  Duncan was a babe, with the mouth of a babe as mentioned in the Bible. No evil came from that mouth. She had not been to see Giancarlo since the night she had invaded his room, but thought of him kept her awake, she who had always been drugged into profound sleep by the languor of her days. Now she did not know whether to deplore or welcome Duncan, a fellow so deficient in suspicion.

  “A man should go to bloody church on a day like this,” said Duncan, sighing with mock self-reproof. “But you need a wife to get you there on the big days. On just about any day, for that matter. Look, I bought you this, Alice.”

  He handed her a canister of Yardley’s talcum and two bars of Pears transparent soap.

  She thanked him at length. She made a fuss because she felt he deserved it, and she kissed his pate with its reddish, balding hair. The simple offer of this unwrapped present, the thought of him buying it for her, made tears push behind her lids. She took her present for him from the dresser and gave it to him. Rum-flavored tobacco and a book on North Africa, where Neville had spent time before gimcrack generals and gear and aircraft had let him down in Greece. And then handkerchiefs and a woollen vest with an accompanying card. Duncan opened the package and lifted the items one by one, exclaiming at his liking for the patterns on each handkerchief. “Must have used half of your coupon ration,” he said in wonder.

  This simple man, so easy to deceive, so willing to see no signs but those in weather and livestock. Her mother-in-law, she thought, must have sometimes silently screamed at the limitations of her husband. She wondered whether Neville would end after all as calm, straightforward, and childlike as Duncan. Not likely, though, since Neville had some of his mother’s sharpness to him.

  “Do you think we maybe ought to wait to fetch Giancarlo up until towards lunchtime?” she asked, to show herself, and whatever unseen powers observed her, that she could wait so long. She was busy on the cloth-wrapped plum pudding, just testing it for moistness, putting it on the sideboard for final boiling later in the day, and placing the chicken and vegetables ready to roast in the oven.

  “I hope Neville’s having a bit of cheer,” said Duncan dreamily.

  What sort of Christmas did prisoners have in that unimaginable camp where he was? She agreed with Duncan. Maybe by next year . . . But then what? she wondered. Neville’s joy at homecoming running up against my hollowness. He’ll deserve better than that.

  “The room looks good, though,” said Duncan with reviving liveliness.

  She had decorated it with all the resources and imagination to hand. There were arches of crepe paper over both doors and ribbons of colored paper strung above their heads at the level where the picture boards would be in other rooms. She had also found a couple of Chinese lanterns, which her late mother-in-law must have bought, when she was searching for novels for Giancarlo to read.

  She decided that roasting a chicken in a fuel oven was a delightfully distracting exercise, even on a day like today when sweat ran out of her dark hair and down her temples. There was something to be said for becoming engaged with the heat. It made you feel as if anything undesirable was being purged from the blood. There was the joy of the penitent sinner earning merit in checking the oven now and then, and in seeing the Christmas chicken turn golden and then tend towards brown, and in turning the spuds and the pumpkin and the onions. Before she knew it, she was mixing gravy and standing it on the stove. And now it was a decent time to go and fetch Giancarlo.

  While Duncan was poring over photographs in the North Africa book she’d given him, she took from the cupboard her present for Giancarlo, a red-covered copy of a Galsworthy novel she’d found in town. This Italian would soon be better read than any of the Gawell yokels. She pushed her way to the shearers’ quarters through the scalding sou’wester. She found him sitting reading at his small pine table on the veranda.

  Seeing her approach, he stood up and she noticed, not for the first time, that curious boyish downiness on his cheeks, which took a certain angle of light to spot. She could see, as he looked up, the second of joy and uneasiness she created in him, as if he were an utter servant.

  She came up to him and he stood up in that altered air that Christmas Day possessed, because of the enchantment it had for a person as a child.

  “Buon Natale,” she said in a low voice.

  He had taught her that in the past week. It came with a layer of new vowels she had not previously known.

  He said, “Even anarchici say Buon Natale.” He lowered his voice even further. “I say it to you, Alice.”

  At this soft utterance, she suffered again an impulse to demonstrate her love to the outer world, to show the supervisory sky above them how with one lesson of the flesh he had enlarged her experience beyond all that had been blushingly taught by her mother and earnestly applied by Neville. But she was saved from that by the fact Giancarlo wore Neville’s old pants—Duncan had relented for the sake of fit—with Duncan’s old collarless shirt, and these inhibited and confused the impulse and provided necessary second thoughts. She hoped these second thoughts would last out the day, and would rescue her more permanently.

  Giancarlo put his head back and yelled across the wheat paddock where the robust crop would give them all plenty of post-Christmas labor, and out into the sheep pastures, “Happy Christmas!” Crows and cicadas answered with their scathing respects.

  “This is my Christmas present,” she said, giving him the book.

  “Wunderbar,” he said, and winked. “Is much too kind.”

  “It is far too kind,” she corrected him for the fun of it.

  “Eet is far too kind.” Then he repeated it in a lowered and reverent voice. “It is far too kind.”

  He began to inspect the pages. He raised the book a little to the sky, wanting to hail it in blistering air.

  “Beautiful,” he said. “I take ’er inside for now.”

  “You’ll take it inside. I am a her, but a book is an it.”

  “I notice the difference,” he murmured, no fear left in him now, and with his lips formed into a shape of a genial hook capable of catching fabrics and souls.

  “I come back,” he promised.

  His absence was itself a temptation to go in through that open door. But he was back in twenty seconds. He had grown solemn.

  “I am not very kind—I cannot get you a gift of any present.” She waved the oddity of the sentence aside.

  “I have to hurry and look at the chook,” she told him, and hastened off ahead of him through the gums and past the fruit trees, through the always opened gateway to the back garden, and up to the veranda by way of the path amongst shrubs.

  When Giancarlo entered the kitchen in his edgy, orphan way, Duncan called, “Here he is. Happy Christmas, Johnny!”

  “And Buon Natale, Mr. ’Erman.”

  Duncan raised his glass as if toasting. “You might be a Fascist bugger, Johnny, but you’re our own Fascist bugger.” Alice saw that though Duncan had had only half a glass of Dinner Ale to celebrate the day, it had brought out in him a vocabulary he didn’
t normally use.

  “Morte al Fascismo!” said Johnny, beginning to smile. “Abbasso il Duce! To hell the Fascisti! Mr. ’Erman, I wish your son he soon get home.”

  The wish sounded sincere. His eyes had not consulted Alice before uttering it.

  “Would you like a Dinner Ale, Johnny?” asked Duncan. “But hang on, I got you this.”

  He went to the cupboard and hauled out another bottle of red wine. He shook it around to prove its fullness. “Your plonk rubbish.”

  “Ah,” said Giancarlo. He contemplated the bottle, and she knew what he was thinking—a momentary shame. Then he said, with that expansive shy smile, “Thanks a lot and very kind, very kind. I goan have the plonk rubbish, Mr. ’Erman.”

  “Grab a glass for yourself, Giancarlo,” she called, since her hands were full. As he poured himself red wine, Alice arrived at the table with all the chicken and vegetables on the carving dish.

  “There are a lot of people in the world,” said Duncan with a sudden onset of sadness, “who don’t have a meal like this before them today.”

  But the solemn pronouncement did not dent his appetite.

  • • •

  At the end of the meal, which both men praised throughout, the pudding was served. Alice sat down, her hair limp on her forehead, and sipped a shandy of Dinner Ale and lemonade. All was normal as, earlier in the day, she had hoped it would be.

  Duncan belched softly and said, “Don’t you blokes sing all the time, Johnny? Why don’t you sing us one of your dago songs?”

  “Mr. ’Erman, I don’ have a Caruso voice.”

  Yet Alice could sense the music pressing up the column of Giancarlo’s throat. He was willing to sing but was uncertain. Did he think of Neville, too, and doubt if Neville was being allowed to sing?

  “No,” said Duncan, “don’t be shy, Johnny. Spit it out.” Giancarlo glanced at Alice for just an instant, checking where she stood on this issue of a song. Then he declared, holding up an index finger, “I know the one song. She’s the song from Naples.” He had learned to say the English version of the city’s name from reading Duncan’s copies of the Herald.