Helen’s voice at the other end was calm when she spoke. ‘You’re very probably right, but I think I deserve a cup of tea or, if you like, a drink, at some neutral place, so I – we – can decide what we want to do.’
‘Helen, you don’t understand – my face . . . I’m a freak.’
‘Danny, I’ve seen your face.’
‘What?’
‘I watched you walk down the gangplank yesterday. You seem to have forgotten I was in an intelligence unit, a lieutenant colonel by the end of the war. I’ve even read your medical report from Rangoon and Dr Woon’s excellent notes.’ Helen paused to allow Danny to absorb what she’d just told him, then added, ‘Now, can we please stop all this nonsense?’
CHAPTER FIVE
DANNY ARRANGED TO MEET Helen at a cafe across from the university off Parramatta Road late that afternoon after his meeting with the dean of admissions. He’d phoned for an appointment, expecting to see a clerk in the registrar’s office, but when he explained that he was a veteran wanting to complete his degree, he was asked to wait, then shortly afterwards granted an appointment with the dean.
Danny wasn’t at all sure about his future, about his capacity to rise to the challenges that civilian life would surely present. Now he recalled that final session with Dr Woon before leaving Rangoon, when he had asked, ‘So, what plans have you got for the future, Danny?’
While it seemed like a normal enough question, Danny had successfully avoided it. Thinking about what might lie ahead was too daunting for his frail ego, and all he could think of was finding somewhere to hide and lying low. He’d answered in the vernacular so that he sounded more assured than he really felt and didn’t seem to be stalling for time. ‘Buggered if I know, mate . . . I’ll stumble across something.’
Craig Woon was silent, lips pursed, tapping the end of his unopened fountain pen on the desk. It was obvious to Danny that he wasn’t going to accept such an answer. ‘What about completing your degree?’
‘That would please my mother, but otherwise it’s pretty meaningless.’ Danny shrugged, thinking that once Brenda saw his face she might realise that it was now out of the question for him to be a ‘somebody’.
‘Danny, you’ll be arriving in Australia in November. It will probably be March or April before there’s a chance of any surgery on your face – Concord Military Hospital is already overwhelmed with urgent cases – and it will take at least six months for you to heal properly, possibly longer, before you’re really fit to face the outside world. Why not complete your degree and think of further study? Law, for instance; you’d make an excellent lawyer . . .’
‘As a matter of fact you’re not the first to suggest that. Dr Evatt, the judge, is a mate of my mum’s and he suggested it once, although it was before this, of course.’ Danny pointed to his face, then smiled as an amusing thought occurred to him. ‘What happens when the defending lawyer looks more of a villain than his client?’
Craig grinned. ‘I imagine it would make the prosecutor extremely happy.’
‘But I don’t know about law, mate. I’ll probably help out at the pub. I pull a bloody good beer, and where I come from that’s a very significant achievement. If you know how to give a good head,’ he grinned, ‘half an inch, no more, with the amber fluid beneath it clear as a toddler’s eyes, then nobody will care what the barman looks like.’ Craig chuckled as Danny concluded, ‘If you forced a choice between the two sorts of head, most of our patrons would choose a beer with a perfect head over the female variety any day.’
Craig laughed. ‘You’d be good in a courtroom, but I’m not so sure about the rough and tumble of a pub. You’re going to find that some days are difficult for you no matter where you are: dealing with the public won’t be easy, dealing with a drunk looking for trouble might be impossible. You may find you’re on a very short fuse at times. Perhaps you should think about that.’
After he’d attempted to wash some of the uglies out of his head that morning in the harbour, Danny had promised himself that he would complete his degree, if only for Brenda’s sake. But the thought of taking law increasingly preoccupied him. It was a profession constrained by rules and traditions, and it just might prove to be an excellent place to hide. So he’d phoned for an appointment to discuss it with someone at the university who knew nothing about his history.
He was rather nervous as he crossed the quad. This once-familiar hunting ground was now completely alien. Then, he’d seen himself as a young bloke taking a degree he thought he’d never need, bursting to get on with his life and to fight for his country. Now, he felt like an old man who had already had the shit kicked out of him by life.
Arriving on time he was made to wait almost forty minutes. His nervousness was soon replaced by impatience, and he grew decidedly irritable. His back hurt and he was on the verge of leaving when he was finally admitted to the dean’s office.
The dean looked up as he entered and gave Danny a thin smile. ‘Ah, Mr Dunn. Welcome back. It’s always nice to see old faces, particularly when they belong to men who’ve served their country with distinction.’ He spoke somewhat pompously in the home-counties accent affected by many well-educated or simply pretentious Australians. Half Dunn described this particular accent as ‘Bob M.’ – ‘He spoke in a Bob M. accent’ – meaning in the somewhat patronising tones of Bob Menzies, known in academic circles as standard or received pronunciation. Despite the November weather, he wore a tweed suit with leather elbow patches, and a white business shirt with detachable starched collar, the gold collar stud peeking out above the knot of what looked like a club or old school tie. His cuffs were fastened with small monogrammed gold cufflinks of the sort that an advertising copywriter might describe as being worn by a gentleman of distinction.
Danny, despite his annoyance at the long wait, smiled at the inappropriate welcome. ‘I doubt if three and a half years of slave labour under the Japs can be described as serving one’s country with distinction, building a railway to Burma plus two airfields intended to be used to more effectively bomb the Allies,’ he said, not adding the mandatory ‘sir’ to his reply. Somewhere out to sea on the voyage home from Singapore Danny had decided that he would take Dr Woon’s advice and never again refer to anyone as if they were superior in position or rank. He’d used up a lifetime supply of kowtow, of being obsequious; from now on, as far as he was concerned, Jack was as good as his master. But having decided to abandon the appellation ‘sir’, Danny now wondered how to address the man. Was it Dean? Or was it Mr McCarthy? Dean McCarthy? Wayne? The man had a distinctly pernickety air about him and didn’t seem like the sort of bloke you’d call Wayne – Charles perhaps, or Samuel, even Cuthbert, but not Wayne, certainly not if you were a student.
The dean half rose and reached across to take Danny’s hand, his grip decidedly limp. The glass-topped desk, the only modern furniture in the room apart from the dean’s swivel chair, was ostentatiously big and completely free of clutter, apart from a large and spotless blotter, a telephone, a pipe stand containing two pipes, and a nameplate in dark wood bearing the name Wayne McCarthy, carved and picked out in gold paint. It looked like something from an Asian street market. Each of these objects was placed sufficiently far from the others to give them the appearance of isolated islands on a sea of glass.
McCarthy was a man in his mid-fifties, tall and fairly slim, with greying sandy hair, a neatly clipped moustache and eyes so pale that if the sum of their blue had been doubled it wouldn’t have matched the intensity of Danny’s single almost violet eye. The dean’s cherubic complexion clearly seldom saw the sun, despite its rubicund flush, which suggested a better than nodding acquaintance with a scotch bottle.
‘Kindly take a seat,’ the dean invited, adding, ‘The armchair is mine.’ He pointed to a traditional brown leather armchair, appropriately scuffed and aged, opposite a matching two-seater couch, either side of a small and well-worn Persian carpet. The wall
behind the desk consisted of a floor-to-ceiling glass breakfront bookcase containing green, maroon and black leather tomes, the titles in gold on the spines. Most of them seemed to deal with university by-laws, and though they were indeed books, they would never be read unless a question of protocol or precedent needed to be answered.
Danny seated himself, conscious of the sharply creased newness of his elegant grey flannels and the slightly starchy feel of the smart, mid-blue, open-necked shirt he’d purchased less than an hour before his appointment. He’d left a large Grace Brothers paper bag containing his old clobber, as well as the tie and trilby he’d bought for Lachlan, with an obliging receptionist, a bespectacled lady he judged to be in her fifties, wearing sensible brown shoes, lisle stockings, a tartan skirt and a starched white blouse, whose presence perfectly matched the general ambience of the office of the dean. Danny hungered for these small details of normalcy. The three and a half years in which he and his men had worn only ragged khaki shorts or loincloths and broken army boots had made him an avid observer of the different ways people dressed, no two quite the same, and usually with some small detail that told you more than they realised about themselves. For instance, the receptionist wore a heavy silver skull-and-crossbones ring on the third finger of her left hand. How did one explain that?
His own manner of dress for the interview was not a rebellion against the ubiquitous white business shirt, tie and sports jacket a gentleman student would be expected to wear to a formal appointment, but rather pragmatism: it was pointless buying a sports jacket that in a matter of months would be too small for him. Besides which, when he chose his next suit or sports jacket, he wanted to do so with great care. His army gear, acceptable on almost any occasion, was in the wash, probably boiling away in the newfangled electric copper. Anyway, he didn’t want to wear a uniform to his assignation with Helen and, of course, Pineapple Joe’s suit probably hadn’t yet reached the cutting table.
The dean rose and reached for one of the two briars on the desk, then came to sit in the armchair, his legs crossed at the ankles to reveal sensible grey woollen socks rising from a pair of brown brogues. He produced a tobacco pouch and proceeded to prepare his pipe in silence, finally striking a match and squinting as he drew the flame down through the tobacco, puffing until his head practically disappeared in a cloud of aromatic blue smoke. Danny observed this ritual with a wry smile, reminding himself that he was back in a world where leisurely affectation had its place, where he would have to learn almost from scratch how to live.
‘Now let me see, your file shows you left us a little precipitously, one might even say impetuously, when you were mere months from taking your degree.’ The dean paused. ‘A trifle injudicious, wouldn’t you say?’
Danny was no longer a young student wet behind the ears. ‘Well, at the time, in my opinion, no. France had collapsed, the Japs looked like linking up with the Germans, our troops were stuck in the Middle East and it looked as if we might very well lose the war.’ Danny paused. ‘It seemed the right thing to do, wouldn’t you say?’ he asked pointedly, his look challenging the dean.
The older man’s head jerked back in surprise as if he wasn’t accustomed to being questioned. Sucking at his pipe to give himself time, he finally withdrew it, cleared his throat and said, ‘Quite so,’ leaving Danny with the clear impression that he disagreed.
Irritated, Danny said, ‘If you want to know if I regret it in retrospect, then take a look at my face. The answer is, obviously, yes, I do. I was young, foolish, impetuous and regarded myself as bulletproof. That’s why I’ve returned, hopefully to take up where I left off.’
Before the war Danny had seldom needed to be assertive; things came easily to him. A big, good-looking bloke, a noted sportsman and local hero, he’d always found that folk wanted to be helpful, to be associated with him. As a prisoner of war, assertiveness was a characteristic you soon learned could get you badly hurt or even killed. Now being assertive felt good.
‘Yes, I applaud your decision, Mr Dunn,’ puff, squint, puff, exhale, smoky silence. ‘With your war experience you’ll make an excellent teacher.’
Teacher? Danny was tempted to ask him why. Was it because he’d learned how to be an absolute bastard? ‘Oh, but I don’t want to teach,’ he said instead.
This produced another series of thoughtful puffs, then finally, ‘Ah, I see. What then did you have in mind?’
‘I hoped to go on and do law.’
‘Hmm.’ The briar went back into his mouth to buy some more time but, alas, it had gone out. With his prop now missing the dean was forced to reveal prematurely the ace he’d been holding up his sleeve. ‘Well, I can’t say I entirely approve. One would have liked to have seen you complete your first degree, but if you’ve successfully completed seven units of your Arts degree you may apply to the law faculty in Phillip Street. Your results were excellent, and I feel sure you would have been invited to do honours or perhaps undertake a masters. A generous Canberra government has decided that ex-servicemen should be given every encouragement. I shall have my secretary prepare a letter informing the law faculty of your eligibility and no doubt you will receive confirmation in the mail of an interview.’ As he spoke he patted his pockets busily, and eventually found the one containing the matchbox. Then, as Danny was about to ask him if this meant he had been awarded his Arts degree, he shoved his pipe into his mouth, struck a match and began the lengthy process of lighting his tobacco all over again.
It seemed to Danny deeply ironic that, should he receive his degree in return for going to war, Brenda’s grand moment would have come and gone in a puff of pipe smoke. She had always imagined herself seated in the great hall, dressed to the nines, her eyes moist with gratified tears, while he, in cap and gown, received the precious scroll from the hands of no lesser person than the vice chancellor, resplendent in tasselled velvet cap, black gown and gold braid. Now her moment of moments had been reduced to a sharp blast of the postie’s whistle and a soft thump in the letterbox. He knew Brenda would insist on hauling down the jeroboam of French champagne from the top shelf of the main bar and, after chilling it in the ice tank under the counter, proceed to conduct a brave, poignant ceremony of her own. In his mind’s eye he could see the cork exploding from the champagne bottle and smashing into the ceiling to leave a dent or other mark, a lasting reminder of that day of days when Danny Corrib Dunn became a ‘somebody’. Half Dunn, offering a toast, would make a characteristically exaggerated speech and Danny, knowing that his mother needed some kind of ceremony, would do his best not to show his acute embarrassment. The jeroboam contained more champagne than the three of them could drink in a week and, after they’d consumed a glass or two, was destined to go flat or be offered to the men drinking in the pub at the time who, never having tasted French champagne, would no doubt privately declare that it tasted like Frog piss with bubbles.
The pipe was finally alight again, and the air above the dean’s head was clouded with smoke rising lazily to the ceiling when Danny finally asked, ‘Does that mean I’ve been granted my bachelor’s degree?
‘Oh, no, no, dear boy. You have two choices: you can simply change to law, in which case that will be your degree, or you can complete the missing three units of your bachelor’s degree while you are studying law and be granted both degrees when you graduate in four years’ time. And did I mention that the government has agreed to pay for your studies? Again, I’m not at all sure that a free education for ex-servicemen is a good idea. I should warn you that the law faculty will be crowded with over eleven hundred first-year students, mostly back from the war. I fear that few of them would have qualified for the privilege under peacetime conditions.’
‘Surely you mean few of them could have afforded the fees?’ Danny shot back, appalled. ‘But they were qualified to sacrifice their lives . . .’ He drew back just short of saying so old pipe-smoking farts like you could sit on your socially superior bums, but instead
concluded, ‘ . . . for their country.’
The dean took two further pulls at his pipe, withdrew it, exhaled, then looked directly at Danny. ‘Well, then, we must agree to disagree,’ he said, giving him one of his thin smiles before dismissing him with the words, ‘That will be all for today, Mr Dunn.’
Leaving the campus to meet Helen, Danny reflected that he simply couldn’t take a trick. He grinned wryly. His mother would have to learn that her moment of glory, when Danny Corrib Dunn became a ‘somebody’, had been postponed for another four years. Oh, well, at least the champagne would benefit from the delay and she’d have two degrees, two ‘somebody’ scrolls to frame.
Danny entered the cafe Helen had suggested in a quiet lane just off Parramatta Road expecting he’d have to wait. He was early, but as he entered he saw her seated at a table towards the back, her head down, writing on a small yellow pad. A teapot, sugar bowl and two white cups stood on the pale grey Formica table. He was halfway across to her when he realised that this was the same cafe in which he’d been given a pie with a white feather stuck in it. He’d thrown the pie against the wall and emptied his teacup on the floor before walking out in high dudgeon without paying. He hesitated momentarily, wondering if the evil old bitch was still here.
Then Helen looked up and smiled, a soft easy smile such as he might have expected had they been together a couple of hours previously and not apart for the last four or so years. Danny was forced to respond in kind or appear churlish, and so without opening her mouth she’d settled any tension there might have been between them, although Danny wasn’t quite sure whether he should kiss her on the cheek or on the lips. But again Helen had anticipated him. As he reached the table she said, ‘Danny Dunn, I shall close my eyes and you will decide where you prefer to kiss me.’
‘Good Lord, not here!’ Danny quipped. ‘We’d be arrested! Besides, my French is pretty rusty.’ Both of them were laughing when he kissed her lightly on the lips.
The Story of Danny Dunn Page 18
