The Narrow Road to the Deep North (7 page)

She had known privilege and never spent the night with doubt. As her beauty drifted away from her, a wake receding from a now-stilled boat, she came to need him far more than he did her. Imperceptibly to them both, she had become to him one more duty. But then his life was all duty now. Duty to his wife. Duty to his children. Duty to work, to committees, to charities. Duty to Lynette. Duty to the other women. It was exhausting. It demanded stamina. At times he amazed even himself. He would think there ought to be some sort of recognition for such achievement. It took a strange courage. It was loathsome. It made him hate himself, but he could no more not be himself now than he could have not been himself with Colonel Rexroth. And somehow what gave him sense and direction and the capacity to go on, the duty above all other duty, was what he believed he owed to the men he had been with in that camp.

You’re thinking of her, she said.

Once more he said nothing. As he did all his other duties he bore Lynette in a manner he felt manful—which is to say, he covered the growing distance between them with an increased affection. She bored him more and more; were it not that she remained an adventure, he would have stopped seeing her years before. Their lovemaking had been desultory, and he had to concede both to himself and to her that things weren’t as they once had been, but Lynette hadn’t seemed to mind. In truth, nor did he. It was enough to be allowed to smell her back, to rest a hand between her soft thighs. She could be jealous and selfish, and he could not help it, but the smallness of her satisfied him.

As she prattled on about the politics and gossip of the magazine where she worked as a deputy editor, the petty humiliations she endured from superiors she regarded as her inferiors, her office triumphs, her fears, her innermost desires, he was again seeing that sky during the Speedo, always dirty, and he was thinking of how he hadn’t thought of Darky Gardiner for years, not until the previous day, when he had tried to write an account of his beating.

He had been asked to write the foreword to a book of sketches and illustrations made by Guy Hendricks, a POW who had died on the Line, and whose sketchbook Dorrigo had carried and kept hidden for the rest of the war. The sky was always dirty and it was always moving, scurrying away, or so it seemed to him, to some better place where men didn’t die for no reason, where life answered to something beyond chance. Darky Gardiner had been right: it had all been a two-up game. That bruised sky, blue-welted and blood-puddling. Dorrigo wanted to remember Darky Gardiner, his face, him singing, that sly split smile. But all he could ever see, no matter how hard he tried to summon his presence, was that filthy sky racing away from all that horror.

Every throw is always the first, Dorrigo remembered Darky saying. Isn’t that a lovely idea?

You are and you won’t admit it, Lynette Maison said. Go on. Aren’t you? Thinking of her?

I never paid up, you know. Ten shillings.

I know it.

Twenty to three. I remember that.

I know it when you’re thinking of her.

You know, he whispered into Lynette Maison’s fleshy shoulder, I was working on the foreword today and I got stuck there in the Speedo, when they worked us seventy days and nights without a day off through the monsoon. And I was trying to recall when they bashed Darky Gardiner. It was the same day we cremated poor old Guy Hendricks. I tried to write what I remembered of the day. It sounded terrible and noble all at once. But it wasn’t any of those things.

I do, you know.

It was miserable and stupid.

Come here.

I think they were bored with it, with the bashing. The Japs, I mean.

Come. Let’s sleep.

There was Nakamura, that lousy little bastard the Goanna with his marionette strut, two other Japanese engineers. Or was it three? I can’t even remember that. What sort of witness am I? I mean, maybe they really wanted to hurt him at the beginning but then it was boring for them, as boring as the hammer and tap was for our fellows. Can you imagine that? Just work, and tedious, dull work at that.

Let’s sleep.

Hard, sweaty work. Like digging a ditch. One stopped for a moment. And I thought, Well, that’s that. Thank God. He brought his hand up to his forehead, flicked the sweat away and sniffed. Just like that. Then he went back to work beating Darky. There was no meaning in it, not then and not now, but you can’t write that, can you?

But you wrote it.

I wrote. Something. Yes.

And you were truthful.

No.

You weren’t truthful?

I was accurate.

Outside in the night, as though searching for a thing hopelessly lost, a reversing truck sounded a forlorn cheep.

I don’t know why it stands out for you, she said.

No.

I really don’t. Weren’t there so many who suffered?

There were, he agreed.

Why does it stand out then?

He said nothing.

Why?

Lying in that hotel bed in Parramatta, he felt he should be thinking of the world full with good things beyond their room, that blue sky just waiting to come again in a few hours, that great blue sky which in his mind was forever associated with the lost freedom of his childhood. Yet his mind could never stop seeing the black-streaked sky of the camp.

Tell me, she said.

It always reminded him of dirty rags drenched in sump oil.

I want to know, she said.

No. You don’t.

She’s dead, isn’t she? I’m only jealous of the living.

From that woman
on the beach, dusk pours out
across the evening waves.

Issa

DORRIGO EVANS WAS
in Adelaide, doing his final training with the 2/7th Casualty Clearing Station at the Warradale army camp in the ferocious heat of late 1940, before embarking to who knew where. And he had a half-day leave pass—good for nothing, really. Tom had telegrammed him from Sydney to say their Uncle Keith, who ran a pub just out of Adelaide on the coast, was keen to see Dorrigo and
will
look after you royally.
Dorrigo had never met Keith Mulvaney. All he really knew about him was that he had been married to their father’s youngest sister who had died in an automobile accident some years ago. Though Keith had since remarried, he kept in contact with his first wife’s family through Christmas cards to Tom, who had alerted him to the news of Dorrigo being stationed in Adelaide. Dorrigo had meant to visit his uncle that day, but the car he had hoped to borrow had broken down. So instead he was meeting some fellow doctors from the 2/7th that night at a Red Cross dance in the city.

It was Melbourne Cup day, and there was a languid excitement in the streets following the race. To kill time before the event, he had walked the city streets and ended up in an old bookshop off Rundle Street. An early evening function was in progress, a magazine launch or some such. A confident young man with wild hair and large tie loosely knotted was reading from a magazine.

Dorrigo Evans was unable to make head or tail of it. His tastes were in any case already ossifying into the prejudices of those who voyage far into classics in adolescence and rarely journey elsewhere again. He was mostly lost with the contemporary and preferred the literary fashions of half a century before—in his case, the Victorian poets and the writers of antiquity.

Blocked by the small crowd from browsing, he headed up some bare wooden stairs at the far end of the shop that seemed more promising. The second storey was composed of two smaller rear offices, unoccupied, and a large room, also empty of people, floored with wide, rough-sawn boards that ran through to dormer windows that fronted the street. Everywhere were books he could browse; books in teetering piles, books in boxes, second-hand books jammed and leaning at contrary angles like ill-disciplined militia on floor-to-ceiling shelves that ran the length of the far side wall.

It was hot in the room, but it felt to him far less stifling than the poetry reading below. He pulled out a book here and there, but what kept catching his attention were the diagonal tunnels of sunlight rolling in through the dormer windows. All around him dust motes rose and fell, shimmering, quivering in those shafts of roiling light. He found several shelves full of old editions of classical writers and began vaguely browsing, hoping to find a cheap edition of Virgil’s
Aeneid,
which he had only ever read in a borrowed copy. It wasn’t really the great poem of antiquity that Dorrigo Evans wanted though, but the aura he felt around such books—an aura that both radiated outwards and took him inwards to another world that said to him that he was not alone.

And this sense, this feeling of communion, would at moments overwhelm him. At such times he had the sensation that there was only one book in the universe, and that all books were simply portals into this greater ongoing work—an inexhaustible, beautiful world that was not imaginary but the world as it truly was, a book without beginning or end.

There were some shouts coming up the staircase, and following it there came a cluster of noisy men and two women, one large, red-haired, wearing a dark beret, the other smaller, blonde, wearing a bright crimson flower behind her ear. Every now and again they would reprise a half-song, half-chant, raucously chorusing
Roll on, Old Rowley, roll on!

The men were a jumble of service uniforms, RAAF, RAN and AIF—they were, he guessed, a little drunk, and all in one way or another were seeking the attention of the smaller woman. Yet she seemed to have no interest in them. Something set her apart from them, and much as they tried to find ways of getting in close to her, no uniformed arm could be seen resting on her arm, no uniformed leg brushing her leg.

Dorrigo Evans saw all this clearly in a glance, and she and they bored him. They were nothing more than her ornaments, and he despised them for being in thrall to something that so obviously would never be theirs. He disliked her power to turn men into what he regarded as little more than slavering dogs, and he rather disliked her in consequence.

He turned away and looked back at the bookshelves. He was in any case thinking of Ella, whom he had met in Melbourne while completing his surgical training. Ella’s father was a prominent Melbourne solicitor, her mother from a well-known grazing family; her grandfather was an author of the federal constitution. She herself was a teacher. If she was sometimes dull, her world and her looks still burnt brightly for Dorrigo. If her talk was full of commonplaces learnt as if by rote and repeated so determinedly that he really wasn’t sure what she thought, he nevertheless found her kind and devoted. And with her came a world that seemed to Dorrigo secure, timeless, confident, unchanging; a world of darkwood living rooms and clubs, crystal decanters of sherry and single malt, the cloying, slightly intoxicating, slightly claustrophobic smell of polished must. Ella’s family was sufficiently liberal to welcome into that world a young man of great expectations from the lower orders, and sufficiently conventional for it to be understood that the terms of its welcome were to be entirely of that world.

The young Dorrigo Evans did not disappoint. He was now a surgeon, and he assumed he would marry Ella, and though they had never spoken about it, he knew she did too. He thought that marrying Ella was another thing like completing his medical degree, receiving his commission, another step up, along, onwards. Ever since Tom’s cave, where he had recognised the power of reading, every step forward for Dorrigo had been like that.

He took a book from a shelf, and as he brought it up to his chest it passed from shadow into one of the sun shafts. He held the book there, looking at that book, that light, that dust. It was as though there were two worlds. This world, and a hidden world that it took the momentary shafts of late-afternoon light to reveal as the real world—of flying particles wildly spinning, shimmering, randomly bouncing into each other and heading off into entirely new directions. Standing there in that late-afternoon light, it was impossible to believe any step would not be for the better. He never thought to where or what, he never thought why, he never wondered what might happen if, instead of progressing, he collided like one of the dust motes in the sunlight.

The small group at the far side of the room began once more to swarm and head towards him. It moved like a school of fish or a flock of birds at dusk. Having no desire to be near it, Dorrigo made down the length of bookshelves closer to the street windows. But like birds or fish, the swarm halted as suddenly as it had begun and formed a cluster a few steps away from the bookshelves. Sensing some were glancing his way, he stared more intently at the books.

And when he looked up again he realised why the swarm had moved. The woman with the red flower had walked over to where he stood and now, striped in shadow and light, was standing in front of him.

HER EYES BURNT
like the blue in a gas flame. They were ferocious things. For some moments her eyes were all he was aware of. And they were looking at him. But there was no look
in
them. It was as if she were just drinking him up. Was she assessing him? Judging him? He didn’t know. Maybe it was this sureness that made him both resentful and unsure. He feared it was all some elaborate joke, and that in a moment she would burst out laughing and have her ring of men joining in, laughing at him. He took a step backwards, bumped into the bookcase and could retreat no more. He stood there, one hand jammed between him and a bookcase shelf, his body twisted at an awkward angle to her.

I saw you come into the bookshop, she said, smiling.

Afterwards, if asked to say what she looked like, he would have been stumped. It was the flower, he decided finally, something about her audacity in wearing a big red flower in her hair, stem tucked behind her ear, that summed her up. But that, he knew, really told you nothing at all about her.