A new detachment of guards was stationed in a tent in Main Road where Kelly’s Lane intersected it. And Abercare ordered Suttor to bring in extra generators from suppliers in the larger towns to power high-placed lights to shine down on the camp. Every man of the garrison was to sleep with his rifle beside his bed. Yet despite the precautions, still Abercare could not believe that the crisis would arise—Gawell was simply not a credible venue for such dramatic events.
Major Suttor, part distracted by his fictional radio family the Mortons, who were in the process of consoling a family named the Carters, whose son had been lost in the battle at Wewak in New Guinea, went as well into the compound every day and looked into every hut, assessing it for portents. Dark nights came as the moon waned and the machine guns, mounted on trailers, were manned. Foggy predawns wrapped up Gawell Camp. And there was no assault on the wire.
Soon, thought Abercare, the moon would be in the ascendant and too bright to allow any adventure from within the compound. He thought that in any case the lights he had ordered to be set high on poles around the place had settled the matter. The conditions that might permit a great demonstration against the inner wire had been ruled out.
22
As an unconvinced agent in putting a close to the Giancarlo business, she entered a time of abstinence, knowing its allure would wane. When it did, Alice made up the tray of tea and newspaper cuttings for Giancarlo, took it down to his quarters, and found that he was missing. He had recently had a letter from his father in Italy, and her first thought was that it must have distressed him. He shouldn’t have been distressed, though. Rome had fallen a month or more before, and his own region had long fallen to the Allies.
Alice set down the tray on his small table and decided she would wait there, in the room. She sat on the bed, but it carried the smell of him. She walked the room and even read a few pages of A. J. Cronin’s The Keys of the Kingdom, one of the books she had supplied to him. But the words did not penetrate, and she found this a feverish wait. That other crucial virtue of patience, essential in a country woman and a farmer’s wife, had been carried away like all her rectitude. So where in the name of heaven was he?
There were credible reasons, though, that Giancarlo might lag behind Duncan in coming home. She walked and walked in the small scope of his room, and felt a rising fury, directed not so much at Giancarlo himself but at the general forces of delay that now mocked her. The afternoon grew freezing without him there. The air went blue gray with the promise of coming dark.
A wise counsel overtook her and urged her to return to the house, and—as if the news might contain a clue—ask Duncan what was in the paper. Where were the Allies located just now in their many-pronged advance towards the core of Europe where Neville was located? That was always a fruitful line of discussion with Duncan. Would the army advancing from Italy, the army advancing through France, or the Russian army from the east be the one who set Neville free? She could discuss Neville in a fever of submerged dread. Poor boy who deserved to be free! She had finally received a postcard: All good, Neville had written, and having some theatricals in camp. Food OK, considering. Lots of love to you.
History was in favor of liberating him, and yet she wondered again if his release would pull her further down into the life of dreariness her mother had been right to foretell.
On her fretful return towards the house, chickens seemed intent on running between her legs and tripping her. The calf had not yet been locked in the shed—one of Giancarlo’s evening tasks. She did the job herself, smelling the complex, earthy aromas of the shed, pollen, fodder, motor oil, all turning cold with the dwindling day. She went out again amongst the chickens, and all at once decided that Giancarlo’s nonappearance was serious enough for her to go searching. By the water tank she found her bike with its frayed netting over the back wheel, to prevent her skirt getting caught in the spokes. Surely, even at dusk, riding a bike was an innocent enough exercise, explainable in terms of Giancarlo’s nonappearance and apt for a woman used from childhood to cycling on bumpy surfaces, gravels and ruts, and with a friend to look for.
She rode the tracks left by truck and tractor along fence lines, and the failure of the landscape to present him in this half light seemed malicious, a judgment emanating from the darkening fringes of bush. The idea of Duncan’s two small dams suddenly tormented her, the chance of a face submerged by some unlikely accident. Now she pedaled without any pretense of casual journeying. She fumbled with the cranky, gimcrack wire fasteners with which Duncan closed his paddock gates. Arriving at the dams, in each case she flung her bicycle from her. But he hadn’t come to grief in either of them.
“Giancarlo!” she hopelessly called under early stars. She found her bike again and bounced fretfully back towards the homestead, but then detoured at a fork onto the road that would lead her to the front gate. She knew, though, that he could not have taken to the main road. It was forbidden, and she thought there was something regular about him, something of the rule obeyer. Though he was an anarchist, he had a contradictory respect for Control Center rules, or, more likely, for Duncan. She did not go outside the farm herself—there was no point—but her eyes stretched east-west along the rutted and determined loneliness of the road.
She did not know what destination to choose now and so rode back to the shearers’ quarters again rather than confront the kitchen. Giancarlo’s neat room with dusk collecting in it was a dead space. And colder still. By his absence he seemed to permit ice to form over the frenzy they’d occupied this space with whenever, afternoons and early mornings, resolve evaporated, as they had clearly planned it would. But she was sweating with fury, too. She was the ordained agent who would end the issue. He was trying somehow, by vanishing, to steal that role, and steal it early instead of later.
She dragged her bike back to the water stand and doubled over and straightened again in a rhythm of pain. She gathered herself and went into the bleak homestead to dish up the lamb that was that evening’s meal. No meat rationing on Herman’s farm!
“How’s our Italian friend?” asked Duncan, seated at the table in his slippers, putting aside his thin cigarette into an ashtray. The kitchen had a warmth that meant nothing. Like warmth on the wrong side of a window, it did not benefit her.
“He wasn’t there,” said Alice, straining for offhandedness. “I just sat there and had a read of a book we gave him. But he didn’t turn up. He might have gone for a walk, I don’t know.”
“Then where do you reckon he is?” asked Duncan.
She said vengefully, “Who can tell with those people?” And then, “Did you two have a row?”
“No,” Duncan answered with a little annoyance. “He was a bit quiet. But no row.”
She opened the oven and was inspecting the lamb and probing it with a fork as if its tenderness counted for anything when the telephone rang. Fork in rigid hand, she immediately suspended her inquiries into the condition of the meat. Duncan went to the hallway to answer it. After some seconds she could hear the surprised intonation of his speech, though not what he was saying. She began to move after a while, putting the fork down and numbly putting out the plates and knives and forks, the Worcestershire and mint sauces, the salt and pepper and Keen’s Mustard. Then the bread Duncan liked to use to attack the gravy with, on its bread board and with its bread knife. God save me from all this—from plates that expect food, from muted flavors, from the endless chewing of animal sinew.
Duncan came back frowning. “That was the Hammonds,” he told her before she could ask. “Giancarlo’s over on their place. Hiding out with their dago. Will our tea spoil if I go and get him?”
She shook her head in what she hoped was a matter-of-fact manner at such inexplicable news. “No,” she muttered. “I’ll keep it warm.”
The kitchen became somehow intolerable when Duncan had gone. Rage unhinged her. She walked to the back veranda, continued out under a trellis where straggly vines grew, found the outer air gravidly dark, the nig
ht flopping to earth like a slothful beast. Fretfully, she left it all and went into the house again. An hour and a half passed this way. Long enough for her margin of fear to grow. It could not be guessed what arguments, confessions, humiliations, declaring of intentions, would accompany the two men back from Hammond’s place, and how this would enable further men and Control Centers and colonels to take him from her.
When she heard the truck approach the farmhouse, the urge to flee for fear of what she’d see and hear and, above all, say was intense. As she further heard the garden gate creak, she began—like a claim to innocence and command—to slice the lamb and serve the meal onto three plates. He would eat it, she swore—every shred. She heard them both walking around the house towards the kitchen door, and the harshness of their boots on the boards of the back veranda.
Hangdog, Giancarlo entered first in his abominable maroon-colored suit. He rarely wore it anymore on the farm. The fact that he wore it now was meaningful in a way she needed time to think about. And where did the cowardice of his posture come from? Had he learned that from his initial surrender, the North African one?
“There you are, then,” the relentlessly jovial Duncan said to her as he followed Giancarlo in. He veered off into the pantry and came back with a bottle of sherry.
“Get two glasses, will you, Johnny?” he asked Giancarlo. Giancarlo glanced wanly at Alice, but a mere second. Then, knowing the kitchen arrangements, what dressers held what, he got two glasses out and put them on the corner of the kitchen table, set as it was for the evening meal. His face grew vacant and his eyes were fixed on the bottle. Duncan poured half a tumbler and offered it to Giancarlo. He immediately accepted it, merely inclining his head.
Duncan said, “That’ll warm you. And make you feel more at home.”
Giancarlo took it and still looked at an indefinite middle distance. Alice wanted to take him by the jaws and drag his face towards her. She wanted to punish him, the way a cherished child is punished after petrifying its parents with its absence, and to punish him more than that, though all she could think of was hurling the meat plate at him. But she began to dole out the roast potatoes instead.
Duncan began to explain it all to Alice. “Poor Johnny was homesick. That’s what he told the Hammonds. Wanted to talk to the Italian they’ve got over there on their place. I can understand that. You’d expect it. A bit of homesickness.”
Giancarlo said, “You need send me back to the Centro, the Control Center. Not allowed to wander off. And for certain I wander off.”
“Rubbish,” said Duncan. “Do you think I’m going to lose a good worker like you? To hell with the Control Center!”
“How would going over to Hammond’s help your homesickness?” Alice asked Giancarlo in her cold fury. Why had Duncan accepted it as an explanation? “I never knew the man over there was such a friend of yours. It isn’t as if Italy is any closer at Hammond’s than it is here.”
“If I wander,” he told her, his regretful eyes on her suddenly, emphasizing the message, “the Centro take me back to camp. That is the true of it.”
“The truth of it,” she told him scaldingly. “Haven’t you learned anything from the books I gave you?”
Duncan frowned. “Don’t be hard on him. Come on, our tea’s getting cold.”
They all sat. Giancarlo’s eyes were still lowered. They began eating the lamb and roast potatoes and carrots and string beans.
“First class,” said Duncan. “Doesn’t this do your heart any good, Johnny?”
“I let you down,” said Giancarlo as a statement of fact. “You got to send me back. The commandante give me twenty-eight-day detention I deserve.”
She wanted to reach out and strike him. Here was a renunciation of her, right in front of Duncan.
“Sorry, Missus ’Erman,” said Giancarlo softly.
Duncan laughed. “She understands,” he said. “She understands homesickness.”
“I’m not so sure I understand this version,” she insisted.
• • •
On the night of Giancarlo’s temporary escape to the Hammonds’, Alice made another secret visit to his quarters. She felt calmer now, though still not appeased. Her excursion did seem absurd in some ways, her clothing—army overcoat, nightgown, thick socks within heavy boots—all ridiculous and ungainly. Yet as she skirted the house and slipped amongst the fruit trees, she began to feel sage, like a teacher about to show a student the order of the world. In the hour since the meal she’d served them, she had come to see that it was not a decline in his ardor that had caused his vanishing, but a heightening of his feelings, and fear of some vast outfall. These motives could be forgiven. Now the idea that she wanted to soothe and wisely chastise him obscured the other objective—to start up the entanglement again.
In any case, she knew she was in charge now, that she was in a position to question him. Her rat-tat-tat on the door was that of a person who expected entry as a right. She heard him move inside his room, as if it were exactly what he had lain waiting for. He answered the door so swiftly that he must have been waiting, his open eyes fixed on a ceiling it was too dark for him to see. She noticed as she edged past him that his body was somehow cowed and uncertain. When the door was shut and she stood there waiting, he went and lit his Tilley lamp in the corner, the one fitted with a mantle to shield the pulsing dim light even more, so that little of its glimmer would penetrate the heavy burlap curtains with which the window was hung. He left the lamp there on the floor, but when he rose it shone upwards against his lowered eyes. He sat at the table where their teas and reading classes had taken place and pointed with a solemnity of gesture for her to take a chair there as well.
The tenor of this meeting was of course different from early ones—everything between them was utterly changed by his attempt to be arrested and disciplined and returned to a prison compound.
“Well,” she said, and reached for his wrist and with her index finger stroked the downy hair there.
“Mr. ’Erman,” he said, lifting his eyes at last and emitting a small groan. “You know. A good fellow.”
She said softly, “Do you love Mr. Herman more than you do me? If you’d had your way, you’d have never seen me again. Did you want that?”
“No,” he said. “But it was getting too large. It had got so big there was no room anymore.”
“Oh,” she said, treading that edge between composure and a sort of acid amusement, yet already, she knew, displaying a meanness, a concealed bullying. “No room left? There was plenty of room when you first lay down with me. It was an adventure, then, wasn’t it? To use the lonely woman? La sposa solitaria?”
Behind her chagrin, she was crazily pleased to show him how her Italian had come on. To suggest how it might come on if it existed in Italian surroundings.
“It is not a good thing for you, Alice,” he told her. “What we do. Better it was just fun, like the girl and the boy in a park. Hello, good-bye.”
“Well,” she said, “it is not that.”
“You understand,” he insisted. “Better if it were, you know, avventura.”
“Oh yes,” she said, “an adventure.”
And she did not know what to do with the word, and was caught between scorn, which she sensed was useless but tempting, and stretching her imagination beyond spite and taking it close to agreeing with him. Safer if it had been an avventura. And more tidy. And more pardonable.
“Please don’t leave me here,” she said, suddenly, all her confidence and sense of power gone.
He took her hand. He stood up and leaned over and kissed her. He turned the Tilley lamp out and they returned to their tract of warmth, a bed designed for a single shearer against a cold wall. All questions were suspended or, more exactly, did not apply in that arena.
But it was as she returned later towards her bedroom window at an hour when in summer there would already have been a dawn glow, that the tedious spaces of the house and its skirt of garden and shed and fruit trees reclaim
ed her, and she felt the authority of her hunger fall from beneath her. If there had been a place where she could have been locked up, as Giancarlo had sought to get locked up, at that hour she would have chosen it herself.
23
Colonel Abercare was driven through the northeast sector of town and towards the training camp, which was set on flatter ground three miles north of Gawell. The Ewan Abercare who approached that installation had never been more at ease with his life, not even when he’d been young and wild in India and itching with ambitions, carnal and military. He had achieved Emily’s return. That was a guarantee of contentment. More keenly than ever, he knew the carnal and the military were evanescent. He had a sense from her embraces, which were at first wary, that he had partly to thank Dr. Delaney and Mozart for this thorough and new rapport—Emily was charmed and consoled by Dr. Delaney’s superior kind of Mass, which annoyed other worshippers by its length. Mozart, in invoking the true body of Christ so melodically and solemnly, had somehow reconciled her to Gawell and thus, within Gawell, to her marriage.
On the military side of his life, Abercare had himself chosen the positions of the Vickers guns on the perimeter, and even in this Suttor had chosen to quarrel over it, declaring it was his understanding that machine guns should be placed much further back, at least two hundred yards from the fence. Abercare declared that the first of them should be sited close to the wire and on the edge of the camp by the gates of Main Road. It should be left there unmanned and sitting on a trailer so that it might serve as mute discouragement to the prisoners. There, it was nearly two hundred yards from the prison huts, and it was the distance from the huts that counted. So placed, argued Abercare, it could fire down the length of the first of the camp’s twelve, nearly circular, sides, three of them owned by Compound C.
Shame and the Captives Page 20
