The Narrow Road to the Deep North(24)

I am Keith’s wife, she said.





7



HIS EYES DARTED everywhere, along the top shelf of rums and whiskies, to the other drinkers, to the bar towel that read THE KING OF CORNWALL. Resting on it, a woman’s hand, holding a damp tea towel. Elegant fingers with nails painted burgundy. He was seized by a mad desire to feel them in his mouth. He felt himself shimmering, spinning before her.

Tell Keith that—

Yes.

That my leave was shortened. And I can’t stay.

And you’re—

His nephew—

Dorry?

He couldn’t remember his name but it sounded right.

You’re Dorry? Dorrigo? Isn’t that what they call you?

Well, yes. Yes.

It’s . . . unusual.

My grandfather was born there. They say he rode with Ben Hall.

Ben Hall?

The bushranger:

For just as in the days

Of Turpin and Duval

The people’s friends were outlaws

And so too was bold Ben Hall.

Do you ever use your own words? she asked.

Dorrigo’s my middle name but it—

Stuck?

I guess so.

Keith’s not here. He’ll be very disappointed he missed you.

The war.

Yes. That Mr Hitler.

I’ll drop by another time.

Do, Dorry. He’ll be so sorry you couldn’t stay.

He went to leave. Deep inside him was a terrible tumult of both excitement and betrayal, as though he was hers and she had abandoned him, and coupled to this a sense that she was his and he had to take her back. At the door he turned around and took two steps towards the bar.

Haven’t we—? he said.

She pinched the top of her blouse between her thumb and forefinger—her two brightly coloured nails like a Christmas beetle splaying its wings—and tugged the blouse upwards.

The bookshop?

Yes, she said.

He walked back to the bar.

I thought, he said, that they were—

Who?

He felt it, something about him and her, but he did not know what it was. There was nothing he could do about it. He did not understand it but he felt it.

Those men. That they were—

That they were what?

With you. That—

Yes?

That they were—your—your admirers.

Don’t be silly. Just some friends of a friend from the officers’ club I hadn’t seen for a long time. And some of their friends. So you’re the clever young doctor?

Well, young, yes. But so are you.

Ageing. I’ll tell Keith you called.

She began wiping the bar. A drinker tilted an empty froth-rimed glass in her direction.

Coming, she said.

He left, drove the truck back to the city, found a bar and determinedly drank himself into oblivion and couldn’t remember where he had parked the Studebaker. But when he awoke there was no annihilation of the memory of her. His pounding head, the pain in every movement and act and thought, seemed to have as its cause and remedy her, and only her and only her and only her.

For several weeks after, he tried to lose himself by joining with an infantry company’s endless route marches as a medical officer, marching up to twenty miles a day—from valley vineyards, where they filled their canteens with muscat and red wine, to coastal beaches where they swam, and then marched back, and then back again—through heat so intense it felt like a foe. He would help carry the packs of men who collapsed with fatigue, he drove himself beyond any sense. Finally, the company commander ordered him to back off a little so that he not seem a fool to the men.

Of a night he wrote letters to Ella, in which he tried to lose himself in the forms and tropes of love that he had learnt from literature. The letters were long, dull and false. His mind was tormented by thoughts and feelings that he had never read. Accordingly, he understood that they could not be love. He felt a swirling of hatred and lust for Keith’s wife. He wanted to seize her body. He wanted never to see her again. He felt a contempt and strange distance, he felt a complicity—as though he knew something he should not know—and he felt, strangely, that she knew it too. He reasoned that once his corps embarked for overseas, he would happily never think of her again. And yet he could not stop thinking of her.

He ate little, lost weight and seemed so oddly preoccupied that the company commander, both impressed and slightly concerned by Dorrigo’s extraordinary zeal, gave him a special twenty-four-hour furlough. Ella had said that she would come to Adelaide if he received a short-leave pass and lacked the time to travel to Melbourne. And though he fully intended to spend the leave with her, having even picked out a restaurant he would take her to, he somehow never got around to mentioning in any of his many letters and cards to Ella that he was about to go on leave. When the date grew close he reasoned that it would be unfair to tell her, as it would be too late for her to make any arrangements and she would be left only with a crushing disappointment. Having decided on this course of silence, and after solemnly vowing he would never return to the King of Cornwall, he rang his Uncle Keith, who invited him down to stay the night, saying that ‘my Amy’, as he called his wife, would be as pleased to see him as Keith himself.