Shame and the Captives (32 page)

Roy Galloway said straight off, “Well, congratulations, Colonel. You'll soon have the troublemakers out of the camp.”

“You know about that, do you?” Abercare asked, a little bemused and overtaken by a sudden anxiety. He certainly didn't want the town to be apprised about what was to happen on Monday. It was as if news of the prisoners' removal to Wye were in the air like influenza and the knowledge had been caught like an infection. Garrison soldiers drinking in the pubs, of course; the filament between the town and the camp being so porous.

Abercare's sense of the appropriate was affronted. It was bad taste for Galloway to hit him on the head with this during the introductions. As well, that evening Suttor had phoned through a report that there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing in Compound C, which could be entirely explained by farewell taking, but which was nonetheless obviously putting Suttor on edge.

The colonel answered Roy Galloway with a banal question about how the law was treating him. He kept his eyes on Galloway, though he could feel the pull of Thelma's, like the cliff you couldn't help looking over.

Dr. Garner held up a whisky in his hand, which also clutched a cigarette, as if he wanted to combine a large swathe of the pleasures of the earth in one fist. “Look what we have,” he told Abercare. “Johnnie Walker Black. It's a gift from a publican. Supposedly for curing his wife's lumbago, which would have cured itself.”

“Just one,” said Abercare.

“Terrible thing is,” said Dr. Garner, “I am restricted myself to one or two weak ones, in case I have to go forth into the night.”

When Emily was introduced enthusiastically to Thelma by Ann Garner, a moment the colonel had feared, nothing unwanted occurred. No snide message was sent. There was a slight indifference
on Thelma's part, which a reasonable person might consider to be due to the level of tipsiness she'd already achieved.

Emily and Thelma began to talk amiably about Parkes Street, and Thelma ventured to say that it was a well-made house. The slightest slip and hesitation in her voice, and a perhaps too-frequent blinking, showed again that this was not her first drink of the day.

“The biggest question people ask when your name comes up,” Galloway said in the men's corner of the room, “is whether you will stay on here in town when the peace comes.”

“That's jumping the gun a bit, isn't it?” asked Abercare. He could not imagine, without ill-defined fear, what he would do when the war ended and the compounds emptied and he gave up his uniform for the last time and received the pro forma thanks of the authorities. People at home, in Britain, talked about genteel poverty, and there was something about the indoors climate of Britain that allowed people to hide shame and decline better than here, where all seemed exposed under brightness.

“Well, you're liked around here, you know,” said Dr. Garner. “You'd be very welcome.”

Abercare nodded his appreciation. But his postwar occupations would be unlikely to put him in the company of the Garners or their circle. He had thought intermittently and with some dread of the necessity to parlay his rank into a suburban insurance brokerage, but it remained to be seen whether his separation pay from the army would permit that. Or he could run a little real-estate office somewhere. But a colonel did not necessarily have the liberty to do that. If he expected soldiers to honor his rank, he must honor his rank too. Perhaps it was better to live in obscure poverty in a city than to become a visible struggler in a country town.

“The liking mightn't last if I settled in,” he told the solicitor. “Anyhow, sometimes it seems the end might be a long way off, doesn't it?”

“We've got them both beaten,” Galloway assured him. “Japan and Germany. Just that they won't lie down and admit it.”

Sometimes Abercare considered what might happen when Malaya was invaded—Japan, for that matter. Would his prisoners abound, thousands upon thousands?

The women were still conversing very easily, he noticed with relief. In fact, it was as if Thelma were enlisting them in some grievance against her husband. But Abercare's peace of soul had been disturbed by Roy Galloway, and it struck him again that if the town, or at least Galloway, knew all about Compound C, then that somehow added a volatility to the whole business and meant that he must go up to the camp tonight. And tomorrow night. Just to be on top of things between the knowing town and the knowing Compound C.

The telephone rang in the hallway. Abercare had left the number at the camp. If it were from there, he would have no option but to be gone. It proved to be a medical call. There was a farmer way out at Reids Flat whose wife couldn't breathe, Dr. Garner announced to the company. Ann groaned, but the groan had a habitual quality to it, an acceptance. Reids Flat lay at the end of dirt roads, set by a creek with some notable hills beyond it.

“Do you want company on the drive?” Galloway asked, wanting to escape the emanations of reproof from his wife.

“Roy,” Mrs. Garner chided him, “you'll leave the company unbalanced.”

“Roy . . . doesn't . . . mind . . . about . . . that,” said Thelma in an exaggerated, drawn-out, drunk thespian sort of way.

“Well, I can stay,” said Galloway. “It's the same either way. I just thought . . . Donald might like company.”

Thelma looked past him.

“All right, I'll go with you, Donald,” Galloway decided, since he was to be punished either way and might as well delay it.

“Good night, sweet ladies,” said Dr. Garner, “and good night, Colonel. Come on, Roy. I'm very pleased for the company.”

They went up the corridor, stopping at Garner's surgery, and Abercare could hear the two men talking in there.

“Christ,” said Thelma, “this is so boring and so predictable. Sometimes I think the bugger is a pansy.”

Mrs. Garner exchanged a glance with the Abercares. The voices in the surgery receded. They heard the doctor's car start. It would be more than an hour's drive to Reids Flat, and a dreary, winding one.

“Roy's in for a good time,” said Mrs. Garner with fond irony. “I know how Donald fills in the time while he's driving. He recites cricket scores to himself. Honestly. First, he argues why Test cricket should date from 1883 instead of 1877, then he starts quoting batting figures. He'll then continue with intercolonial and interstate batting averages and bowling figures. The Gregory brothers and Demon Spofforth matter more to him than latecomers like McCabe and Bradman. He can recite Sheffield Shield matches from 1908. Entire innings, how out, and the bowling figures too. It's astounding. I was very impressed by it all when I first met him. But as a trick, it wears thin after thirty-five years.”

Thelma asked, “How do you know he's not making it all up?” It was precisely what she'd suspect a man of.

“Because he's an honest fellow,” said Mrs. Garner, bridling a bit. “And it would only satisfy him if it was right. Look, it's going to be quite a time before the men are back, Thelma. Would you like to have a lie-down in the spare bedroom?”

Thelma refused. “Damned Roy,” she said. “We go to events and one way or another he gets away. If I'm indoors, he's outdoors. And Reids Flat is about as outdoors as you can get.”

She had provided them with a window into a habitual conflict, but the view was stale. She looked very beautiful, Ewan Abercare thought.

“Look,” she said. “I think I'll go, if you don't mind. He left the keys with me for safekeeping.”

“Are you sure you can drive, Thelma?” asked Mrs. Garner.

“Perhaps you should wait, and the colonel and Mrs. Abercare could perhaps . . .”

“I'm afraid I don't have a car at the moment,” said Abercare. “Perhaps I could call the camp for one . . .”

He hoped it was obvious that he didn't want to do that; it would be untoward, an excess where he had forsworn excess.

“We would be delighted if you stayed here, Thelma,” he suggested. “And gave us the pleasure of your company.”

As if he hadn't spoken, Thelma said, “Everyone forgets I've been driving since I was fourteen.”

But she stayed on and set a fast pace of consumption as she ate the roast and vegetables and half the flummery, and then decided to go. She insisted on not being accompanied to her car. “It is so much fuss,” she said, waving them back to their chairs with an exaggerated movement, up and down, of her spread right hand.

“Well, at least I'll see you to the door,” Mrs. Garner insisted. In the absence of the other two women, Emily looked across the room to Abercare and smiled a private smile. It declared they were no longer in conflict. It confessed a kind of luckiness she felt.

But I must leave you tonight, my one flesh, he thought.

“She'll be all right, I think,” said Mrs. Garner when she came back into the lounge room. “The problem is that they live two miles out of town, at her late father's property. Lovely old house, but a few gullies on either side of the track into the homestead.”

Abercare was not entirely at ease about that either. He wanted mad Thelma to get home safely, so that he was not distracted from the issue of Compound C. By and large, however, he had enjoyed this evening to which Thelma Galloway had given her own little flavor of unruliness.

“My dear,” he said to Emily, as they walked home the short distance to Parkes Street, “I feel I must sleep at the camp tonight, and tomorrow night too. Just to be on the spot, you know.”

“Oh?” she asked. It was a neutral question, but a question just the same. The streets were bright under the blatant full moon. You could have played cricket in Parkes Street by moonlight. He had done
that sort of thing in India, wearing mess uniform, bowler and wicketkeeper and slips elegant in their regimental mess gear, hooting and tipsy.

“It might not be quite a rational thing,” he admitted. “I mean, it's a full moon and nothing is going to happen. But those fellows tonight, Galloway in particular, talking about what's happening in Compound C, with as much information as if they were part of the garrison—that's set me fretting. There is no danger, of course, but I feel I must be on the qui vive, you understand.”

“Yes,” she conceded. He was aware of her elbow securely locked around his. “I certainly see that. And after Monday morning, you'll be at greater ease.”

“That's right,” he said.

He knew it was beneath her to have him asking whether she would be all right on her own. Soldiers' women were by definition all right on their own.

He continued to explain, not as a necessity but as a form of sharing matters with her. “Everything seemed calm enough today, but Sergeant Nevski reports there was nobody at the baseball plate this afternoon. A little curious when they're not being moved until Monday and you'd expect some of them would want to get a final game in over the weekend. Mind you, they're probably saying prolonged good-byes to their NCOs—that would be enough to suspend play.”

He could feel her shiver suddenly inside her coat. “Are you all right, darling?”

“Yes, tonight is one of the cold ones, though, isn't it? It would be very nice to have you here.”

“It would be very nice to be here. I won't be a soldier too much longer. And next week is going to be much easier. We'll be in better control.”

They were nearly home. But Ewan Abercare could not put aside the subject of Roy Galloway's opening conversational gambit that evening: it had caused him to make decisions for reasons he felt he
did not quite control, ones he could not define. He liked to define things.

“I mean,” he asked, “how is it possible that the word gets to Galloway, a solicitor in town? Roy Galloway and the prisoners don't even have the same sort of mind, the same background, the same language, and he has never even visited the camp.”

“Stop fretting,” Emily told him, “I do understand you'd want to go. It's what I'd do. But Galloway—you shouldn't fret about him. He's the country town god and Thelma's his Achilles' heel. He should be worrying about that.”

Emily opened the front door before Abercare could dutifully do so. “I'll make some tea before you go,” she offered.

“Thank you. I'll call the duty officer at the camp to send someone for me.”

“You'll find fresh flannel pyjamas in your drawer,” she called to him from the kitchen. “And remember to take your dressing gown.”

S
oon after the Abercares arrived home, a car turned up at Parkes Street to collect the colonel. The driver was at the rear door to salute him and Abercare returned the greeting with his baton and got into the backseat. The driver took them through the still streets, streets that soothed some of Abercare's unrest by seeming lost in the earth's far south and disconnected from the world's serious traffic, and so far from anguish and untoward events. At this time of night, country towns had finished their society, sportiveness, and excesses. He saw two soldiers of the training battalion weaving in the broad main street, and the car slowed for them and they let it roll past. They were not his task, these schoolboys, these apprentices. If by some false impulse of democracy he had got them to squeeze into the front seat, at least one of them would have been sure to have vomited.

It was a different matter a mile east of Gawell when he saw a civilian vehicle, a Chrysler, pulled up on the side of the road with its hood raised, as if broken down. It looked to be the car of a person of eminence, Gawell-wise, and Abercare knew he must take a moment to see if the wayfarer could be helped. He told his driver to pull over but leave the engine running. By the hooded headlights he saw Thelma
Galloway move out into the road with a wry hope of rescue on her face. She carried in her hand a metal crossbar of the kind designed for inspecting spark plugs or loosening battery bolts. He remembered that Mrs. Garner had said that the Galloways lived out this way, on a property owned by Thelma Galloway's late father. Roy Galloway had a manager in to run the place, which allowed him to keep the farm going and work at his law practice as well.