The Narrow Road to the Deep North(4)

And the Greeks?

The Greeks?

No. The Port Adelaide Magpies. Of course, the Greeks. What are they?

Violence. But the Greeks are our heroes. They win.

Why?

He didn’t know exactly why.

There was their trick, of course, he said. The Trojan horse, an offering to the gods in which hid the death of men, one thing containing another.

Why don’t we hate them, then? The Greeks?

He didn’t know exactly why. The more he thought on it, the more he couldn’t say why this should be, nor why the Trojan family had been doomed. He had the sense that the gods was just another name for time, but he felt that it would be as stupid to say such a thing as it would be to suggest that against the gods we can never prevail. But at twenty-seven, soon to be twenty-eight, he was already something of a fatalist about his own destiny, if not that of others. It was as if life could be shown but never explained, and words—all the words that did not say things directly—were for him the most truthful.

He was looking past Amy’s naked body, over the crescent line between her chest and hip, haloed with tiny hairs, to where, beyond the weathered French doors with their flaking white paint, the moonlight formed a narrow road on the sea that ran away from his gaze into spreadeagled clouds. It was as if it were waiting for him.

My purpose holds,

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars until I die.

Why do you love words so? he heard Amy ask.

His mother died of tuberculosis when he was nineteen. He was not there. He was not even in Tasmania, but on the mainland, on a scholarship to study medicine at the University of Melbourne. In truth, more than one sea separated them. At Ormond College he had met people from great families, proud of achievements and genealogies that went back beyond the founding of Australia to distinguished families in England. They could list generations of their families, their political offices and companies and dynastic marriages, their mansions and sheep stations. Only as an old man did he come to realise much of it was a fiction greater than anything Trollope ever attempted.

In one way it was phenomenally dull, in another fascinating. He had never met people with such certainty before. Jews and Catholics were less, Irish ugly, Chinese and Aborigines not even human. They did not think such things. They knew them. Odd things amazed him. Their houses made of stone. The weight of their cutlery. Their ignorance of the lives of others. Their blindness to the beauty of the natural world. He loved his family. But he was not proud of them. Their principal achievement was survival. It would take him a lifetime to appreciate what an achievement that was. At the time though—and when set against the honours, wealth, property and fame that he was now meeting with for the first time—it seemed failure. And rather than showing shame, he simply stayed away from them until his mother’s death. At her funeral he had not cried.

Cmon, Dorry, Amy said. Why? She dragged a finger up his thigh.

After, he became afraid of enclosed spaces, crowds, trams, trains and dances, all things that pressed him inwards and cut out the light. He had trouble breathing. He heard her calling him in his dreams.

Boy, she would say, come here, boy.

But he would not go. He almost failed his exams. He read and reread ‘Ulysses’. He played football once more, searching for light, the world he had glimpsed in the church hall, rising and rising again into the sun until he was captain, until he was a doctor, until he was a surgeon, until he was lying in bed there in that hotel with Amy, watching the moon rise over the valley of her belly. He read and reread ‘Ulysses’.

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

He clutched at the light at the beginning of things.

He read and reread ‘Ulysses’.

He looked back at Amy.

They were the first beautiful thing I ever knew, Dorrigo Evans said.





5



WHEN HE AWOKE an hour later, she had painted her lips cherry-red, mascaraed her gas-flame eyes and got her hair up, leaving her face a heart.

Amy?

I’ve got to go.

Amy—

Besides—

Stay.

For what?

I—

For what? I’ve heard it—

I want you. Every moment I can have you, I want you.

—too many times. Will you leave Ella?

Will you leave Keith?

Got to go, Amy said. Said I’d be there in an hour. Card evening. Can you believe it?

I’ll be back.

Will you?

I will.

And then?

It’s meant to be secret.

Us?

No. Yes. No, the war. A military secret.

What?

We ship out. Wednesday.

What?

Three days from—

I know when Wednesday is. Where?

The war.

Where?

How would we know?