Tiger Men (67 page)

There was a light tap at the drawing-room door, which was ajar, and he turned to discover that Iris Watson had popped her head in.

‘Shall I serve morning tea, sir?’

Reginald was about to say no, but Caitie got in first.

‘Thank you so much, Mr Stanford,’ she said charmingly, as if the offer had come directly from him, ‘but I’m afraid I can’t stay.’

The cheek of the girl.

The housekeeper left and Caitie decided there was no point in continuing with any further niceties. The man obviously did not like her, so she might as well get straight to the point.

‘Does Hugh know about his mother and his brother, Mr Stanford?’

‘What the deuce business is that of yours, girl?’ Reginald snapped. The audacity!

‘I correspond with Hugh, sir. It would be an advantage to know which topics should be avoided.’

Damnation, he thought, of course they correspond. Why hadn’t that simple possibility occurred to him? He’d been thinking out-of-sight-out-of-mind and hoping Hugh would forget the O’Callaghan girl while he was serving overseas.

‘My son knows about neither his mother nor his brother, Miss O’Callaghan,’ he said stiffly, ‘I thought it best not to burden him.’

‘On that subject at least we are in agreement, sir. I too have no intention of adding to his burdens. I bid you good day.’

‘Good day, Miss O’Callaghan.’ He opened the drawing-room door wide for her.

Instead of passing him by, she halted and looked him directly in the eyes. ‘Why is it you do not like me, Mr Stanford?’

He had to admit she had guts. But then all the O’Callaghan girls had guts.

‘It’s nothing personal, my dear. I don’t actually dislike you at all. In fact I rather admire you. But I sense you have designs upon my son, and you are simply not good enough. I certainly could not allow you to marry him. I feel it only fair that I should warn you of this in case your inclinations are currently trained in the direction of matrimony.’

‘I see. Thank you for your honesty.’

Caitie swept past him and out into the hall, her head held high, but she felt decidedly rattled. Was Reginald Stanford spiteful enough to disinherit his son if Hugh chose a girl who did not meet with his approval? She had the distinct feeling that he was. If such was the case, then she must bow out rather than ruin Hugh’s life. But she would not think about that now. His father’s stand against her would be another in a burgeoning list of subjects that she would avoid in her letters to Hugh.

In the meantime, she would catch the ferry up the Derwent to New Norfolk at the first opportunity and visit Rupert. Whatever his condition, she would not desert him as his father clearly had.

*

Three months of trench warfare on the hills and ridges of Gallipoli Peninsular had resulted in a daily existence that now seemed hideously normal to the hardened troops. The stench of excrement and blood and their own foul body odour seemed normal. Flies swarming over food, the continual itch from body lice, dysentery and red-raw backsides all seemed normal. Even death seemed normal as they ate their maggoty meals beside rotting corpses.

Gone now were the fresh-faced young men eager for adventure; in their place were soldiers toughened by the horror of war. Some had gone under, succumbing to shell-shock, others had managed to disguise their shattered nerves and fight on, but most ANZACs, as the troops of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps had become known, had adapted to the fearsome reality of battle, dealing out death with ferocity and accepting their own fate with a sense of the inevitable.

The arrival of the mail, which continued miraculously to find its way through the hellfire, was without doubt the highlight of life in the trenches. Men treasured the link with home. Huddling in the filth, they read the precious words, hearing the voices and seeing the faces of families and sweethearts, and in the days that followed they scribbled feverish replies with stubby pencils.

The mail was also something to be shared. News from home was read out loud, family pictures passed around, wives and sweethearts shown off and dutifully admired. Those who’d missed out on a mail delivery didn’t feel altogether excluded, as they shared in the letters of others. The arrival of the mail raised everyone’s morale.

‘Listen to this,’ Hugh said to the Balfour boys. Hugh Stanford had been promoted to lance-corporal by his Company Commander and placed in charge of a section of seven men, including Wes and Harry Balfour. Along with other troops of the 12th Battalion they were holed up in a reserve trench awaiting orders. The stink from the nearby latrines was particularly nauseating, but Wes was still managing to scoff down his bully beef, digging it out of the tin with his knife while flapping a hand ineffectually at the swarm of flies surrounding him. Harry had just read out a letter from their big brother Norm, and it was now Hugh’s turn to share some of his news from Caitie. Having read all three of her letters (they had arrived at once, as they so often did), he was naturally selective in his choice. Wes and Harry were both very fond of their cousin Rupert.

‘
I called in to see Rupert again on Saturday
.
As before, and upon his insistence, we spent the entire afternoon playing games. There we were sprawled out on the floor eating biscuits and playing endless draughts and snakes and ladders. I must confess that I have developed a routine. I always let him win at draughts in order to hear that terrible laugh of his
. . .’

Wes and Harry grinned. They found Rupert’s laugh so funny themselves it had been a regular habit of theirs to set him off, which had never been difficult. Wes opened up his mouth to give a donkey bray in imitation of Rupert, but quickly choked on a fly. Hugh waited until he’d swallowed it before continuing.

‘. . .
and I always ensure that I win snakes and ladders simply because a girl has to have some pride. Then last Saturday, as if that wasn’t enough, he insisted we start on the jigsaw puzzle I’d bought for him, a bucolic picture of a farmhouse and cows, I know how much he likes jigsaw puzzles. Rupert opted to do the cows, of course, and I had to do the sky, because as I am sure you’re well aware he does not like the blue bits.
’

Hugh smiled to himself. Caitie’s voice sprang off the page. He could just see her and Rupert sprawled out on the floor of his mother’s front drawing room. He was glad his family had so welcomed her into their lives, and also, he had to admit, just a little surprised. He’d suspected on the night of the ball that his father hadn’t considered her as coming from quite the right stock.

Caitie never lied in her letters, but she allowed Hugh to assume she visited Rupert at Stanford House, and she always wrote in a lighthearted vein. Rupert did indeed respond well to her visits and being gregarious by nature had made some friends amongst his fellow inmates at New Norfolk, but according to Eunice Cartwright, with whom he had become a favourite, his nights were tortured.

Hugh read a little more of Caitie’s letter out loud. She wrote of the latest football results, as she always did, although they knew them already from Norm’s letter to his brothers, and then she gossiped about her new secretarial position with the legal firm of Kramer, Fox & Hutchinson, telling wicked stories about the people who worked there. Caitie always went out of her way to provide amusement and was sometimes quite outrageous.

‘That’s it,’ Hugh said, ‘the last bit’s private,’ and Harry and Wes made foolish kissy noises.

But Caitie did not close solely with expressions of affection. In response to Hugh’s previous letter, she had been compelled this time to end on a serious note.

He
had
felt the need to share his thoughts, but he couldn’t have written about that day any earlier. Not while the images were still so stark in his mind and the stench of burning flesh still lingered in his nostrils. They hadn’t buried all of those who’d been putrefying in the sun for days. They’d doused some in petrol and set fire to them. The smell of burning flesh was as bad as the smell of rotting flesh, he’d decided. But during the weeks that had followed the truce, the lingering memory of that day had been one of mutual respect. This much he had been able to share with Caitie, and he’d needed to share it with someone, the recognition between both sides that they were really no different. They’d seen it in each other’s eyes. They’d exchanged cigarettes and communicated in ridiculously charade-like exchanges while they’d disposed of their dead. They’d liked one another. From 0730 to 1630 they’d been friends. Then the killing had started all over again. Caitie’s right, Hugh thought, war is a terrible thing; it is also bloody ridiculous.

Further down the trench photographs of sweethearts were being bandied about. Several Western Australian soldiers had started the ball rolling, one of them having received a photograph in a letter. The other two produced the pictures they carried with them always.

David Powell, not to be outdone, took his wallet from his top pocket and passed around the well-worn picture of his fiancée. He’d just received two letters from Jeanie and was glad to show her off to a fresh audience.

‘That’s my Jeanie,’ he said.

Big Gordie looked at Oscar and rolled his eyes comically. David flashed Jeanie’s picture at every given opportunity.

David, like Hugh, had been promoted to lance-corporal and placed in charge of a section of seven men, including his cousin Gordon and his friend Oscar O’Callaghan. Following the death of so many platoon members, new NCOs had been needed and the Company Commander had clearly seen leadership qualities in both Hugh Stanford and David Powell.

‘I’ve got a picture too,’ Gordie said with a wink at Oscar, and he took out the photograph that he’d just received from his younger sister. Nineteen-year-old Cynthia had a very droll sense of humour.

I worry that as you do not have a regular sweetheart, Gordie
, she’d written,
you may long for the image of a female face to carry close to your heart.
Cynthia well knew that her brother treasured his bachelorhood and had no desire at all for a regular sweetheart.
I therefore enclose a photograph of Delilah, which I took during a visit to Charlotte Grove last weekend. Her company I’m sure will help you through many a lonely night.

Gordie handed over his photograph. ‘That’s my girl,’ he said as it was passed around by the half dozen or so men. One by one they burst out laughing, some covering their mouths to keep away the flies, others catching one or two and hawking them out or swallowing them. The picture was a close-up shot of a huge sow’s face, snout glistening, eyes staring lovingly into the camera lens.

‘That’s Delilah,’ David said, recognising the family pet. Delilah had the run of the orchard and household alike as had Falstaff before her.

‘It certainly is,’ Gordie replied in all apparent seriousness. ‘As you know, I have a particularly soft spot for pigs. I think it’s extremely thoughtful of Cynthia to go to such trouble on my behalf.’

The mail had as always distracted the men from the surrounding muck and the stench and the flies, but Oscar had noticed that one of the Western Australians, a young chap from Perth, no more than eighteen, whose name he thought was Ben, hadn’t joined in the fun. Ben was hunkered down to one side, chewing on a dry biscuit and appearing to take little interest in the proceedings, but Oscar knew he was following every word. Ben hadn’t received any mail and he was trying to pretend it didn’t matter. Oscar could also see that Ben was one of those whose nerves were shot to pieces. He could read the signs; they all could. He squatted beside the boy.

‘Ben, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I’m Oscar.’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘Fancy copping a picture of a pig, eh?’ He grinned, just trying to cheer the lad up.

‘Yeah,’ Ben smiled, ‘that’s real funny,’ he said, and something in his response led Oscar to believe that Ben would have given anything for a picture of his own, even a picture of a pig.

‘You got a girlfriend, Ben?’

‘Nup.’ He didn’t shrug and he didn’t pretend nonchalance. There was both regret and longing in the brevity of his answer. Ben was not only frightened, he was lonely.

Without giving the matter a second thought Oscar dug a hand into his pocket and produced the photograph of Mary Reilly. ‘There you go,’ he said, handing it to the lad, ‘you keep a hold of that.’

‘Eh?’ Ben stared blankly down at the photograph.

‘She’ll be good company for you. She’s very nice.’

‘Are you mad?’ Ben looked incredulously from the photograph back to Oscar. ‘I can’t take this.’

‘Why not?’

‘Why
not?
She’s your girl.’

‘Nah,’ Oscar waved a hand airily, ‘she’s not my girl, she’s just a friend. Like I said, she’s very nice – a really good person, you know what I mean? She’d like to think she was of some comfort, I know she would. That’s the sort of girl she is.’

Ben’s eyes returned to the photograph. ‘She’s very pretty.’

‘Yes, she is isn’t she? Her name’s Mary. Mary Reilly.’