The Narrow Road to the Deep North(6)

I am become a name, he said.

Who?

Tennyson.

I’ve never heard it.

‘Ulysses’.

No one reads him anymore.

No one reads anything anymore. They think Browning is a gun.

I thought it was only Lawson for you.

It is. When it’s not Kipling or Browning.

Or Tennyson.

I am a part of all that I have met.

You made that up, she said.

No. It’s very—what’s the word?

Apposite?

Yes.

You can recite all that, said Lynette Maison, running a hand down his withered thigh. And so much else besides. But you can’t remember a man’s face.

No.

Shelley came to him on death, and Shakespeare. They came to him unbidden and were as much a part of his life now as his life. As though a life could be contained within a book, a sentence, a few words. Such simple words. Thou art come unto a feast of death. The pale, the cold, and the moony smile. Oh, them old-timers.

Death is our physician, he said. He found her nipples wondrous. There had been a journalist at the dinner that evening who had questioned him about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Once, perhaps, the journalist said. But twice? Why twice?

They were monsters, Dorrigo Evans said. You have no comprehension.

The journalist asked if the women and children were monsters too? And their unborn children?

Radiation, Dorrigo Evans said, doesn’t affect subsequent generations.

But that wasn’t the question and he knew it, and besides, he did not know whether radiation’s effects were transmitted. Someone a long time ago had told him that they weren’t. Or that they were. It was hard to remember. These days he relied on the increasingly fragile assumption that what he said was right, and what was right was what he said.

The journalist said he had done a story on the survivors, had met and filmed them. Their suffering, he had said, was terrible and lifelong.

It is not that you know nothing about war, young man, Dorrigo Evans had said. It is that you have learnt one thing. And war is many things.

He had turned away. And after, turned back.

By the way, do you sing?

Now Dorrigo tried to lose his memory of that sorry, awkward and frankly embarrassing exchange as he always did, in flesh, and he cupped one of Lynette’s breasts, nipple between two fingers. But his thoughts remained elsewhere. No doubt the journalist would dine out on the story forever after, about the war hero who was really a warmongering, nuke-loving, senile old fool who finished up asking him if he sang!

But something about the journalist had reminded him of Darky Gardiner, though he couldn’t say what it was. Not his face, nor his manner. His smile? His cheek? His daring? Dorrigo had been annoyed by him, but he admired his refusal to bend to the authority of Dorrigo’s celebrity. Some inner cohesion—integrity, if you like. An insistence on truth? He couldn’t say. He couldn’t point to a tic that was similar, a gesture, a habit. A strange shame arose within him. Perhaps he had been foolish. And wrong. He was no longer sure of anything. Perhaps, since that day of Darky’s beating, he had been sure of nothing.

I shall be a carrion monster, he whispered into the coral shell of her ear, an organ of women he found unspeakably moving in its soft, whorling vortex, and which always seemed to him an invitation to adventure. He very softly kissed her lobe.

You should say what you think in your own words, Lynette Maison said. Dorrigo Evans’ words.

She was fifty-two, beyond children but not folly, and despised herself for the hold the old man had over her. She knew he had not just a wife, but another woman. And, she suspected, one or two others. She lacked even the sultry glory of being his only mistress. She did not understand herself. He had the sourdough smell of age. His chest sagged into shrivelled teats; his lovemaking was unreliable, yet she found it strangely wholesome in a way that defied sense. With him she felt the unassailable security of being loved. And yet she knew that one part of him—the part she wanted most, the part that was the light in him—remained elusive and unknown. In her dreams Dorrigo was always levitating a few inches above her. Often of a day she was moved to rage, accusations, threats and coldness in her dealings with him. But late of a night, lying next to him, she wished for no one else.

There was a filthy sky, he was saying, and she could feel him readying to rise once more. It was always moving away, he went on, as if it couldn’t stand it either.





7



WHEN THEY ARRIVED in Siam in early 1943 it had been different. For one thing, the sky was clear and vast. A familiar sky, or so he thought. It was the dry season, the trees were leafless, the jungle open, the earth dusty. For another, there was some food. Not much, not enough, but starvation hadn’t yet taken hold and hunger didn’t yet live in the men’s bellies and brains like some crazed thing. Nor had their work for the Japanese become the madness that would kill them like so many flies. It was hard, but at the beginning it was not insane.