‘Good God!’ I gasped. ‘What in the name of —?’
He grinned. ‘You do not perceive my field-marshal’s baton, old cock? Is that it? I keep it in my knapsack.’ He turned to a copy-boy hovering at the fringes of the group. ‘You have Mr Meredith’s name there on the whip-round list? Put him down for five bob. No, make it ten bob, the same as the executives.’ He turned to me again. ‘I know one should not take this direct role in one’s own farewell presentation, but I’m deathly afraid they’ll give me an entrée-dish, and I’m trying to get the total up to a tenner. I’ve rather set my mind on something more martial. A small cannon, say.’
‘But you mean you —?’
He spread his arms in rueful display. ‘You have only to observe,’ he said, ‘this rare shade of shit in which they’ve robed me to know that I have joined what are euphemistically called “the colours”. On battlefields – they assure me of this – it is the most neutral tone. Chameleon Turley they will call me.’
‘Yes, but damn it all, Gavin —’
‘Why, you ask? Simply because I felt I needed a rest. They have been working me too hard here. I’m looking for the easy life.’ He grinned again. ‘Ha-ha, now you’ll have to take your finger out, won’t you, Golden Boy? The whole war effort on your slender shoulders now, old cock, eh? It will be nice to know, though, that I shall have you here to background my intrepid exploits.’
It was an illogical anger that took me this time to Mr Brewster’s office. I felt as if a moral prop had fallen. I felt deceived, betrayed, tricked into something against my will.
Mr Brewster was imperturbable, and this time sentimental.
‘You told me,’ I said, ‘that Gavin and I were classified as reserved occupations. You insisted that —’
‘Reserved occupations? The term is loosely defined.’ He looked at me blandly. ‘And we must apply for withdrawal. The onus is on us, you see.’
‘But you said Gavin’s work was absolutely vital, and that —’
‘David, let me explain. Turley was very insistent about it. I did not feel that we had the right to hold him back while we have you here. I realize this will mean more work for you, a greater responsibility will have to fall on your shoulders. It will —’
‘That’s not the angle that upsets me, Mr Brewster. Excuse me, sir, but I have to say this. Gavin and I were doing the same sort of work and —’
‘I tried to dissuade him. I honestly did. I told him very much what I told you, David, when you were in to see me several weeks back. He was quite immovable. He has some sort of “call”, you might even say, some visionary thing about it all.’ He gave a slight shrug, almost, I could not help thinking, as if to imply that he had washed his hands of Gavin Turley. ‘I cannot convey to you his obstinacy,’ he said. ‘There was simply nothing I could do. I did make suggestions, once I knew the chap was set on it. I would have thought a commission, with his background … some useful role where he could avail himself of his technical accomplishments – censorship, say, public relations, even military intelligence. He would have none of that. It seems he must go into the ranks. Well …’ The slight, dismissive shrug was repeated, and he put his fingertips together and stared down at his desk. ‘David, this is a total war,’ he said very seriously. ‘Every civilian organization must make its sacrifices in the cause. Let me say to you then, as man to man – and in the strictest confidence – that if there has to be a question of sacrificing Gavin Turley or of sacrificing David Meredith, then we have no hesitation. To the Morning Post you are by far the more valuable writer. To the overall war effort you are the far more valuable asset. So there it is …’ He looked at me and smiled. ‘And since Turley’s heart is set on it, well … some rough campaigning might not do the chap all that much harm, you know.’
‘Yes, but I think it still makes my position rather invidious, and —’
‘Nonsense! Why should it? Heavens above, boy, these are early times yet. We’ve years ahead of us. Our own AIF has not yet fired a shot in anger. There’ll be plenty of time for you. But for the time being you are needed right here. Again in the strictest confidence, there are things brewing for you. Important things. You may be interested to know that your name was mentioned only yesterday by the Chief of the General Staff. There are things in the wind, David. Big things in the wind.’
He looked at me very carefully, as if waiting for me to say something, but I remained silent. I felt intensely curious, and I felt reassured, and I was no longer angry.
‘David, my boy,’ he went on in a softer, mellower voice, ‘do believe that I am acting in your interests, that I am doing the best that is possible for you. I have a great personal fondness for you – I’m talking as a man, now, as a friend, not merely as your editor … David, how long is it now … ten years? … heavens it must be even more … that night when I looked up from my desk to see some hoary old shellback and there he was, this sixteen-year-old Ancient Mariner blushing to the roots of his hair, this Stunsail’ – an affectionate chuckle exploded from his bulk – ‘yes, there he was, a raw lad, and I think I sized you up instantly, David. I do, you know. I believe that from that very night I saw you as … well, almost as my own protégé. And you can’t say that I haven’t looked after you since then, can you? I have never let you down, have I? And I shan’t let you down. This you must believe, my boy. You have come a very long way, you know, since those Stunsail days. And you have a very long way still to go. You could have a brilliant future. You could, one day, be sitting at this very desk. We have plans for you, David. Great plans. Don’t worry, my boy. I shall never let you down, you can rely on that. And there will be all the time in the world for you to find the more obvious outlets for your patriotism. Great patriots have worn mufti too, you know.’
I left his office with all my doubts allayed, and I was walking along the corridor to my room – I had my own room now – when one of the copy-boys came panting after me.
‘Mr Meredith,’ he called. ‘I took a phone-call for you while you were in with Mr Brewster. I typed out the message,’ he said, handing me a slip of copy-paper with a few sentences of typescript amateurishly picked out on one finger. I took it from him and read:
10.12 p.m. Memo. Mr D. Meredith. Your sister-in-law, Mrs Sheila Meredith, telephoned to say your brother was seriously injured in an accident at camp. He was transferred to Caulfield Military Hospital. He is in Ward 12-F. Mrs Meredith says it is serious but not critical.
In spite of my Defence Department special pass they would not let me see him that night, and all I could find out was that he had been brought down from Puckapunyal by ambulance, that the final medical report was still not in, and that it was ‘something to do with his leg’.
Sheila was already at the hospital when I got there next day, sitting beside his bed in a long cool ward that opened on to a screened veranda. Jack’s left leg was a hard bolster of plaster slung at an angle of thirty degrees from a scaffold-like contraption at the end of the bed. He looked cheerful, rueful, rather drawn, and happy to see me.
The accident had happened quite absurdly, it seemed, during a mock air-raid alarm two nights before, and Jack had been jumped on in a slit-trench by a crowd of other soldiers.
‘So I’ve done my femur – that’s the thigh-bone, isn’t it? – although it’s only a simple fracture, nothing complicated, they reckon, and then there’s something about the pelvis … nothing broken, but cracked or something, they think, but I haven’t heard about the X-ray reports yet. What a way for a bloody thing to happen, eh?’ he said disgustedly. ‘Wouldn’t it! You know, I’ve always said, haven’t I, that if they sawed Mae West in halves I’d be the poor unlucky bastard who’d get the half that talks! And, do you know, Davy, I swear it was that little prick Dud Bennett that done it to me. On purpose, I mean. He’s been dwelling on it for years, just to get me. They all came down on me like a bloody ton of bricks. He’s been dwelling on me, I’ll bet you a quid!’
‘Well, a broken leg’s not serious these
days,’ I said comfortingly. ‘It’ll take a bit of time, that’s all.’
‘Yeah, that’s all very well, but there’s been the buzz around Pucka for days now that our pre-embarkation leave’s due to come up any minute … five days they reckon, and then off.’
‘I haven’t heard anything.’ I said this, too, to comfort him, because it was a lie, and I had heard.
He was probably in quite a bit of pain, because as he talked he would wince a little every now and then, and once Sheila reached over and took his hand and said, ‘Is it hurting, Jack?’ and he grinned at her and said, ‘Only when I breathe.’
Perhaps he sensed her anxiety and concern because he deliberately changed the subject, and began to be nostalgic about the old hospital. ‘You know, Sheil’,’ he said, ‘Davy might’ve been a bit small to remember this, but when we were little nippers we used to come here on Sundays to flog postcards for the Red Cross. We’d go all round the wards – you know they don’t look much different now from the way I remember ’em – and all the visitors would sling us trey-bits and zacks and lollies … you’d remember those lollies, Davy? … the nullah-mullahs and silver sammies and liquorice-straps, and those Violet Crumbles you used to go for, and sometimes we’d get a whole box of Columbine caramels. Cripes! we used to have a marvellous time here. Davy,’ he said, turning to me, ‘do you know there are blokes still here from then. There’s a couple of old jokers in this ward, up that end there, they’ve been stuck in this place twenty-bloody-two years! And do they perform! Talk about a pair of bloody prima-donnas! They nearly drive the rest of us barmy. They never stop grizzling and whingeing, and they howl all night, always screeching for the bloody sisters or something, or they can’t find their bedpans, or there’s a draught blowing down their necks. They’re a real bloody circus, those two!’
Mother, he said, had been to visit him before anyone else. ‘I hadn’t been here half an hour and she comes puffin’ in – well, she just lives down the road there, of course – and the funny thing was she was so bloomin’ embarrassed. That’s what tickled me. Just sat in that chair there knitting away like mad, and anyone comes near she’s bobbin’ up and down like a yo-yo, and going red as a beetroot and I tell you straight I thought she was going to curtsy to the ward orderly! Can you understand that? Sheil’, Mum used to run this joint … she did, I tell you, she ran the bloody place! She was in there sawing off blokes’ legs and arms, and lugging ’em home to stay, or what was left of ’em, I should say! No, she ran the whole bloody joint! Min the Merciless!’
His last comment was to Sheila. He gave a long, rueful look at the suspended plaster bolster and said, ‘Couldn’t get me leg over you now, Sheil’, could I? Looks as if you might be safe for the duration, eh? Righto, Jackie Meredith, hang it up in the rack there with the other old cues!’
I left with Sheila and offered to drive her home, but she said, ‘Thank you, Davy, if you could just drop me off at Saint Teresa’s, that’s the Catholic church down —’
‘I know it,’ I said. ‘Jump in.’ We began to move off, and I said, ‘Well, what do you think of it all?’
For an appreciable interval she looked straight ahead through the windscreen. She was gripping the clasp of her handbag very tightly. ‘I’m pleased for me, of course,’ she said at last. ‘But I hate it for him.’ I studied her sidelong in the rear-vision mirror. Time was touching her, too, I saw … lightly yet, but there were little brushings of silver in the black, black hair, and there was something rather sweetly housewifely about that added matronly roundness that three children had given her, and about her simple serviceable clothes, too, and her shoes and her handbag and the rather shabby gloves she carried. I thought of Helen and her smartness and that slightly lacquered look she was beginning to get, and these two women were much of an age and yet so totally different, and Sheila was still very pretty and not at all smart – just a very pretty housewife in her thirties … and, in a way, another reason to envy Jack, too.
‘Davy,’ she said, ‘he’s not going to get away, is he?’
‘Now then, now then!’ I reproved her lightly. ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives. You’ve seen the posters. Troop movements come very strictly under military security.’ Then I became serious and said, ‘No, Sheila, not this time. Not with his own crowd. That buzz he heard wasn’t just a rumour; they’ll be going any day.’
‘It’ll break his heart when he knows,’ she said.
‘Nonsense. He knows already that he can’t possibly get away with the first lot now. But there are other divisions. There are three more forming right at this moment. Good God, Sheila, they couldn’t keep him out of it with wild horses, you know that.’ I paused. ‘It isn’t going to be easy for you when he does go,’ I said gently.
‘Oh, don’t worry about me,’ she said. ‘I’ll manage.’
I let her out at the church, but I didn’t drive off straight away, and she turned and waved to me from the top of the steps before she went into the dim, candlelit interior, and I drove off slowly, thinking what a warm, loyal, wonderful woman she was, and I knew that I had been a little bit in love with her ever since I had met her, and I knew that I would be for as long as I lived.
15
Helen took contagion from the war in her own special way. The change in her was neither sudden nor really profound: in fact, when you come to think about it quite dispassionately, she grew to the fulfilment of her true role as rightly as Jack had to his. It was and always had been her nature to be the sort of woman she eventually became.
The first year of war, with its excitements and distractions was important to each of us; avoiding any open engagement we were easing out of an uncomfortable situation with as little fuss and friction as possible, dividing our unity almost as a single-cell animal divides, by natural processes, without particular effort, without any declaration of intentions. We allowed ourselves, without resistance, to be parties to an applied pattern of change, and if it was protracted at least it was fairly painless.
She became in the end a very typical woman of the war. Later, on my journeyings, I was to see them everywhere: indeed, so alike did they seem, so interchangeable, from city to city, even from continent to continent, that I am inclined now to visualize them all in the exact image of Helen herself.
Always a woman in her early thirties, extremely attractive, fashionably dressed, groomed in a fine polished lacquered way – one always felt there had been a visit to the hairdresser that very afternoon, that the cosmetics were expensive and the lingerie glamorous, that the elusive perfume would have to be Chanel No. 5 or Schiaparelli’s Shocking – invariably encountered at smart bars or in hotel lounges, in a beautiful suit and perhaps with a padded pompadour, with a glass in her hand and heavy bracelets jangling at her wrist. Always wearing a wedding ring, always … And inevitably with officers in uniform. Gay, charming, vivacious, laughing – to cover some emptiness within? … one never really knew …
Helen’s transformation towards this sort of woman began quite early, about the time Wally Solomons went into khaki. Almost at once the parties she gave or attended were bigger than before, with a special titillation to them – she drank more than she had previously – and increasingly sprinkled with uniforms, mostly Wally’s officer friends. But there were some surprises, too. Jerry Farley wangled some sort of commission and appeared as a lieutenant: the dull Justin Byrne, like many another bank teller, volunteered for the Air Force. After Gavin Turley had gone into camp at Darley I was the only one of the old set still wearing that Simpson suit and the Borsalino hat.
In my relationship with Helen it was inevitable, of course, that certain curious undertones should develop. I had never at any time discussed with her, other than superficially, the attitudes which either of us took towards the war, because to a very marked degree she seemed to have become almost apolitical, and appeared to have little or no interest in the developments in Europe. It was almost as if her war was confined to the Barracks, to familiar faces in familiar uniforms, to the hei
ghtened social gaiety which the times had forced. The question of whether I should or should not enlist was never debated between us. I think I felt that on the whole she was very content to leave things exactly as they were: she had a certain definite social standing as the wife of a journalist whose work was being talked about, whose name was appearing practically every day over important articles, and whose salary permitted her the parties and the clothes and the visits to the beauty parlour which were becoming increasingly necessary to her enjoyment. Even more so after Gavin’s enlistment when, because of the extra work and responsibility, Mr Brewster saw to it that I was promoted to the status of what used to be called a ‘super-senior’, which meant that not only was my salary greatly increased, but it came now in the form of a monthly cheque paid into my banking account, and I no longer had to go to the countinghouse every Friday and sign for a weekly envelope. Status has many symbols. Helen now had her own cheque-book. And since because of my work I was heavily involved with military staff-cars and taxis and trips away, the little red MG virtually became hers. Certainly she applied no pressure on me to enlist in the AIF and begin the life of a zealous patriot at nine shillings a day. Yet there were times, I think, when she could not quite resist – perhaps because of her own new passion for uniforms – trying to score a little off my continuing civilian status.
I remember returning from the office one night to find Jerry Farley sitting in his shirt-sleeves in the lounge, and Helen in her sewing-room with his officer’s tunic over her knees stitching new colour-patches to the sleeves.
‘Why you?’ I asked. ‘Can’t Rene sew?’
She laughed softly. ‘It so happens he likes my needlework,’ she said.
I was never really affected by any of her attitudes. In an odd way, our relationship had drifted back to something not unlike that which we had shared at Perce Parkinson’s library, when I would join her for the almost casual affections and comforts and be both oblivious and heedless of any other exterior life which she might be leading. She continued to be perfectly agreeable and conscientious in carrying out all her wifely duties: if I was to be home for dinner it was always prepared and pleasantly served: if I sought the conjugal pleasures of the bedroom, she was willing, submissive, and as efficient as before. No more than that – but no less, either …
My Brother Jack Page 35
