Shame and the Captives

by Thomas Keneally

  “Geometry has its uses, believe me,” he assured her, and sounded to himself as if he had the arrogance of geometry at his fingertips. He stopped himself talking about its utility in navigation and artillery.

  “Everyone says you were a soldier in India,” she observed.

  “Well,” he told her, “Kenya and Ceylon for a little while too.” He had met Emily in Kenya, having lingered there during a home leave. He had intended to spend as much time as he could in London and Edinburgh, visiting his widowed mother and members of the family, and going to the country houses of the parents of fellow officers for parties and shooting and fishing weekends. Instead, he let his ship leave Nairobi and delayed a month for Emily’s sake, courting her with a passionate respect. He remembered the Muthaiga Club, its pink walls and the casual dusks, the endless evenings and the sweet eternities of conversation with her in the garden, and a torrent of kisses beneath sharp stars towards the end of his stay. He’d written to her from England, once he got there, telling her that he had been given a passage which did not take in Nairobi and asking would she come to India at the end of his leave to marry him. Now he felt a moment’s bewilderment that all of it could have ended up in Elgin—all that pleasure taking, all that glut of color, all that sumptuary excitement and transimperial passion.

  “And what was it like?” asked Nola.

  “Oh,” said Abercare, “India was peaceful, strangely.”

  He told her of the few months he had spent campaigning in Waziristan. A chap preposterously called the Fakir of Ipi had got the local people stirred up. “All I had to do was guard the roads with my fellows and make an occasional search through the villages, looking for arms. Apart from that, it was a wonderful life altogether.”

  “How was it wonderful?”

  “Well, normally we only worked about four hours or so a day.”

  “Four hours!” she said and whistled under her breath.

  “Yes. The rest of the time we played polo or cricket, and sometimes we went on tiger hunts. And then there were mess dinners and balls. The wives of Indian rajas and nizams were there in the most astonishing gowns—swathes of golden cloth and the most beautiful rings and bracelets. When I was young, I thought it would last forever.”

  The train pulled into a station, and one sullen and reclusive farmer entered the compartment and, as the train moved, showed his determination to check every paddock between there and Stanthorpe in case it carried more pasture than his.

  Nola leaned towards Abercare. “The only wonderful thing that’s happened to me is that I saw a marsupial lion once. I can’t tell too many people, my husband says, or they’ll think I’m soft in the head. They’re supposed to be extinct, see. Anyhow, I saw it when I was young, about twelve. I was with my father up Crohamhurst way, where the bush gets so thick that you can’t see the sun. How does anyone know whether—in bush like that—the lions are there or not, living in the shadows?”

  He leaned forward too. He had a sense that she thought this her central secret, and that to give it up was a serious gift.

  “How long would you say it’s been extinct?” he asked. “Thousands of years, isn’t it?”

  “No. Sixty years. Sixty years ago someone saw one, and they believed him because he was a scientist. I saw the stripes—because they have stripes, you see. They started behind the shoulders, and thinned out and vanished.”

  It was, he thought, a mature summary. It also had the delightful weight of something confidentially shared. At the local School of Arts at Elgin, she went on, she had heard a professor from Brisbane speak about the creature. The lion’s Greek name meant “pouched flesh eater,” she said, as if those words were riveted in her brain. Its large head gave it a strong bite. And when it caught other animals it killed them by dropping on them from trees. Its natural enemy, as it turned out, was the giant goanna, which, thank God, was definitely extinct.

  She went on at a slightly manic length, which he afterwards saw as a sign that there was no center to this girl, that her knowledge and her soul were scattered. But at the time of his enchantment, it was what she had to give him, and she gave it in full. “If there is a lion in the bush, then it can’t be alone—it must have parents, and perhaps there are four or more of them out there, males and females. Trouble is, there are only four nipples in the pouch, so if more than four are born at the one time, it’s bad luck for the weakest one.” They arrived in Stanthorpe in what Abercare thought was a half hour but was in fact over three. He offered to carry her relatively light bag, but she declined. He asked if she needed a taxi, but country people rarely took them and so she said she could walk—it was less than a mile. He found himself walking with her into High Street. Before the stores and hotels began, there was a public garden. She said, “Sometimes I go there, too, and sit about for a while. The picnic shelters.”

  Was this some sort of invitation?

  “You really do like parks.”

  “Well, you’re pretty safe in parks,” she told him, looking at him directly, in a way that inflicted delight and incredulity on him.

  They came to his hotel. She had to go straight on, she told him. He watched her go. After leaving his bag in his room at the hotel he went out again and walked down Connor Street to a solicitor’s office, where he had the inheritance documents notarized—a tedious business following the methods inherited from Britain. The rigmarole done, he accepted the man’s congratulations on the modest but far from unwelcome legacy. He took the documents back to the hotel but then, in a fever of possibility, walked two miles, eschewing the chemists’ shops in the middle of town, to find a suburban pharmacist, and from him received in a brown bag a small supply of condoms, just in case the marsupial lion had been Nola’s mating display.

  Back at the hotel he dined in late dusk. “Getting an early night?” a waiter asked him.

  “Might go for a spin round town.”

  “Good luck seeing anything of interest,” the young man told him.

  Outside, it was properly dark now. The streetlights penetrated only fragments of the place. An occasional light from a house in the backstreet combined with wood smoke and the odor of plain, muttony food to make you think a town like this had been here, fixed in manners and aroma, for centuries instead of a mere eighty, ninety years. The street was vacant of witnesses as he turned into the park and walked down paths amongst floral beds and then amongst the little cluster of picnic huts.

  He heard her call. “Mr. Abercare.” She sat within one of those small cubicles, in a corner.

  “Ah,” he said, mimicking the last shreds of ordinary, falsely surprised social greeting. As remembered by Abercare, their plain, conspiratorial sentences were enchanting. His blood went hurtling through his body. After a while they moved out of the strict confines of the picnic table and lay on an embankment, where he gallantly spread his coat. Her dress seemed light and enabled him to reach her breasts and shoulders and belly and thighs beneath. Whether she was one person or two, he wanted possession and if asked then would have given his life lightly for that. “A moment, Nola,” he pleaded, and artificiality blighted time as he paused to roll the condom onto his prick, a process about which she seemed patient.

  Some sense of transcendence took away the indignity of his exposing his middle-aged arse to the night and entering her. Nothing abashed him, and her cries seemed to have nothing to do with the trivialities of his belts and buckles and imperfect flesh. In the moments after climax he felt a sudden tide of reality, and he returned to his normal habits, and advised her to go home to her aunt before they did each other greater damage. But the disabling passion rose again in him before he’d finished uttering the advice. He had a second to think before his thighs followed their own intention.

  Then, towards ten o’clock—the first time he had consulted a watch—he was sated enough for reason to have its last say. He would love to meet like this again, but he was married and she was married, too, and from what he could judge there was a risk of damage being done h
er if this ever became known.

  “I’ve heard that talk before,” she told him, half-amused, because she did not believe that the wall he was erecting would stand. “Men never say any of that at the start, when they want a girl. It’s always afterwards.”

  “You should go first, Nola,” he told. “I can watch from here so that you get out safely.”

  On his way to the street he nearly tripped over a couple clenched together on dark grass closer to the gate.

  • • •

  He returned to Elgin and from his mixture of wisdom and cravenness he avoided the store. He saw Emily off on an already planned long train journey to visit Florence in New South Wales, beginning with that archaic regional locomotive, on its creaking regional rails, on which he had conversed with Nola Sheffield.

  The farmhouse was lonely when Emily went off on her trip. He had never greatly liked it—its rooms had always seemed grim in a way that could not be remedied by mats or prints or vasefuls of gardenias. He liked growing apples and stone fruit, though, and the previous season had been a good one, with plenty of workers willing to come in and help, and occupy the shanties out beyond the orchards. The thick-forested mountains to the northwest also invigorated him: he liked the sunsets mediated by a ridge line and the upper branches of trees.

  He went to the store, and after each visit Nola would meet him by dark in the park at Elgin. He had become addicted to copulation al fresco.

  The better part of a month passed and Emily was due home when, one late afternoon, as he came in from pruning a row of plum trees, he saw Nola on the road, approaching along the dirt track with the same sturdy stride with which he had seen her advancing, bruised, into the downpour on the day he’d given her a ride. He waited, mesmerized by her progress. She opened and closed the main gate and came tramping on towards him. He moved to meet her on the gravel path to the front steps.

  “Nola,” he said. But he couldn’t very well say, “You ought to go back. I’ll drive you.”

  “It would be good for us if we went away,” she told him. “Elgin isn’t the world.”

  So he had his wish, and it terrified him.

  “No, Nola. We can’t do that. You’re a lovely girl but I have to take you back home. The end of town then.” Because she was shaking her head. “I don’t want to get you into trouble with your husband.”

  “Bugger my husband! I’m not going back.”

  Panic swelled within Abercare.

  “It’s the end, Nola,” he cried.

  “You didn’t tell me there’d be an end.”

  “No. I should have. Look, let me take you back.”

  They were still on the path to the front door, and the absurdity of the whole business threatened to abound when a column of dust advanced down the road from town. Nola was silent as the drone and shudder of the truck grew in volume. Then he understood: She knows this isn’t a passing truck. This is her husband’s truck, with “Elgin Store” in white on both doors.

  Sheffield descended from it to open the outer farm gate and then drove through and closed it, then drove up the track and parked in front of the garden and got out—a gray, ageless man who wanted to strike both Nola and Abercare.

  “She’s not to be touched, Mr. Sheffield,” declared Abercare. Sheffield laughed like a man who would never learn to laugh for jollity. With amazement, Abercare heard himself threaten Sheffield with prosecution for trespass. Nola moved in, pushed her husband, slapped his face, and Abercare and Sheffield were tussling and trading ineffectual blows. In the hubbub of the threats and the banging of his blood, in the shrieks of Nola, in the baying of Sheffield himself, they had not seen the postal contractor, the man named Allen—beloved in the district because he was as good as a newspaper delivering mail farm to farm—enter Abercare’s property. It was only the surprising cry of brakes that caused them to stop a moment.

  “Bloody hell!” said Allen, taking in the scene.

  • • •

  Returned unwitting and weary from the long journey to the south coast of New South Wales, Emily was welcomed by Abercare with edgy joy, as if his connection to an ordered world had been restored. But he knew she would hear and so that evening he told her. She was silent. It did not seem anger, so it was all the more punishing. She was calculating what to do as well, in a desperate way.

  At first she was pointed out as an object of muttering pity at Mass and in the main street. She did not dare enter the Sheffields’ shop and drove as far as Applethorpe for household stores, and everyone knew why. She must have heard at some stage that her husband had been interviewed by the sergeant of police, though Sheffield had dropped the charges of assault for fear of enhancing the ridicule he, too, was suffering. Back home, on the afternoon of the brawl, with Nola pleading behind him, Sheffield had gone into his yard and fetched the rifle and threatened her with it, before going to the doctor’s and unsuccessfully asking him to commit her to an asylum.

  This poured another element into the brew of rumor and yet was still no defense in Abercare’s case. Hadn’t fornication, or, more accurately, adultery, ever occurred before in the boundaries of Elgin? But he had committed too extreme a sin. He had done what they all wanted and fucked Nola, and that fed their outrage more intensely.

  Nola vanished from town, was seen at the railway station and in the carriage on the regional rattler going south.

  “I should abominate the betrayal, Ewan,” a superrational and coldly charitable Emily said at one time, as if with a terrible self-knowledge. “And by God I do! But there’s the damage to my vanity, too—to my standing. It compounds everything. It shouldn’t, since these are fatuous opinions. But they’ve left their mark. It’s the pressure of them, all around, from every direction.” She decided to leave the farm, refusing to give him any idea of her destination. She liked Brisbane, and he imagined her taking an office job there, if one was going, for she had typing and shorthand. Or she might join Florence again.

  Abercare himself was by now so aware of the amusement and disdain of men and women acquaintances in the street that he felt a rural excommunication. He found he abhorred the loss of social standing and had never loved Elgin or his farm enough to stay there as an object of gossip. He had received notification that he was to stand by for active service. That much, given the war and his experience, was true. He put the farm up for sale, received derisory offers, and at last sold it for a halfway reasonable price to a farmer who had not yet heard the story.

  • • •

  Abercare went to live for a time in a boardinghouse in Saint Lucia in Brisbane, and got a job as an insurance salesman. Emily was indeed working as a typist in the city, Abercare found out by consulting a private detective. He consulted the private detective again and gave him Nola’s name. Abercare was told that Nola Sheffield was living in a flat in Kelvin Grove and working as a shopgirl at McWhirters’. He went to the address after work and as he approached he saw Nola emerge from a building accompanied by a man of middling years in a splendid suit. She was handed into a sedan.

  He realized he had hoped to resume with Nola, and as the car took her off into a summer night he began whimpering, trying to stop his mouth with his fingers and wailing “Nola” through them. She would not need his concern anymore. He need no longer speculate on the permanence of the marsupial lion, nor of the bewilderment and grief of the girl, who had so swiftly made another version of herself and no doubt had other potential versions available within her.

  The great Japanese aggressions of December 1941 saved him. No one amongst the military officers he met seemed to have heard of his small-town scandal, and it lay below the level of interest of an embattled nation.

  In Brisbane he was appointed CO of a training battalion of militia camped on the city’s edge, soldiers of the country’s secondary but suddenly full-time force made up of marginally competent raw youth and much older men. They served as temporal brackets to the great conflicts in another hemisphere. They were too old in some cases, too young in others. T
hey were the understudies to the true fighting force, which in those days operated in Africa and Syria, Greece and Crete, and they were exempt by law from being sent to such distant places.

  But now they might be asked to step forward if all this newspaper talk of Japanese imminence was accurate. They could be sent to the scatter of Australian-owned archipelagos in the southwest of that supposedly peaceful ocean. Abercare—he knew this himself—was unlikely to be sent with them, even though he had at first returned to the military scene with ideas of the chance of expiatory valor, and of cutting, in his wife’s eyes and in the world’s, a better figure—that of a fiftysomething-year-old veteran with gifts still to be deployed. He had, within months of their initial estrangement, sent Emily a photo of himself in uniform—taken by a street photographer in Brisbane—that turned out well enough but was not too vainglorious. “This is where your foolish husband finds himself,” he had written. “I wish every second of the day that you are well.” More sentiment than that would have been a provocation even to a temperate soul like Emily. He found his behavior with Nola incredible now—the acts of another man.

  He and Emily met for tea in Brisbane. She told him she was a typist, residing in a boardinghouse, though she had the means to rent or acquire a place of her own. Their conversation was painful. She said, “I know I must be lenient, now we’re away from that terrible place. But I’m just not good enough to manage it. I understand, Ewan, that this is as much my fault now. I’m hurt, but that’s not an excuse. The onus is on me as well.”

  And she meant it. So he couldn’t get angry when she seemed to condemn him to a long reconciliation.

  Afterwards, perhaps a month or so later, a functional letter from her arrived, hoping he was well and informing him that she had decided at her sister’s urgent invitation to live for the time being with her and Cecil on the farm in New South Wales.

  Yes, thought Abercare, but it’s remote. It will be like living in a nunnery.