The Narrow Road to the Deep North(99)

He was killed in New Guinea in 1943, he said. Bougainville.

The shop slowly emptied, the staff cleaned up, locked up and left, and outside the street died away to the very occasional car slashing a puddle. Inside, they just kept talking to the old Greek about many things until it was so late that not a pub was left open. But they didn’t care. They sat on. They talked about fishing, food, winds and stonework; about growing tomatoes, keeping poultry and roasting lamb, catching crayfish and scallops; telling tales, jokes; the meaning of their stories nothing, the drift of them everything; the brittle and beautiful dream itself.

It was hard to explain how good that fried fish and chips and cheap red wine felt inside them. It tasted right. The old Greek made his own coffee for them—little cups, thick, black and sweet—and he gave them walnut pastries his daughter had made. Everything was strange and welcoming at the same time. The simple chairs felt easy, and the place, too, felt right, and the people felt good, and, for as long as that night lasted, thought Jimmy Bigelow, there was nowhere else in the world he wished to be.





7



STEPPING DOWN FROM the Douglas DC-3 at Sydney in the autumn of 1948, Dorrigo Evans was both horrified and impressed to see her waiting for him. The Japanese and the Germans may have surrendered in 1945, but Dorrigo Evans hadn’t and wouldn’t for some time. He valiantly tried to keep his war going, lapping up any opportunities for adversity and intrigue and brinkmanship and adventure that presented themselves. Inevitably, they presented less and less. Many years later he found it hard to admit that during the war, though a POW for three and a half years, he had in some fundamental way been free.

And so Dorrigo Evans had put off returning for as long as he could, but after nineteen months working around various army instrumentalities throughout south-east Asia—dealing with everything from repatriation to war graves to post-war reconstruction—he had run out of cover and faced either a conventional career in the army or the possibilities of civilian life. He had no sense of what these possibilities might be, but they suddenly seemed attractive, and the army no longer the wild jaunt it had been with its defeats and victories and the living—the living!—constantly tearing anything established into ribbons, melting everything solid into air. Wealth, fame, success, adulation—all that came later seemed only to compound the sense of meaninglessness he was to find in civilian life. He could never admit to himself that it was death that had given his life meaning.

Adversity brings out the best in us, the podgy War Graves Commission officer sitting next to him had said when the DC-3 had bounced around rather disturbingly as they circled down through a squall into Sydney. It’s everyday living that does us in.

As he walked across the tarmac towards a small crowd of people he didn’t know, he resolved to meet his new civilian life as he had met and overcome so many other obstacles over the seven years since they had last met—with charm and daring, and with the knowledge that time would soon wash over the follies of long ago, as it seemed to do, or so it seemed to him, with almost all things.

Forward, he whispered to himself, gathering his face into a smile that he understood was thought charming. Charge the windmill.

A conventionally pretty woman was waving a gloved hand in a conventional gesture that he knew was meant to convey a conventional glory chest of emotion: joy, ecstasy, relief—love, he supposed; fidelity vindicated, he feared. None of them meant much to him, for he was outside of it all. Though after the first few words he recognised her voice, the summer air seemed mild and empty and somehow disappointing after the steamy must of Asia, and even after they kissed he still couldn’t remember her name. Her lips seemed dry and disappointing—like kissing dust—and finally, thankfully, it came to him.

Ella, he said.

Yes, he thought, that was it. It felt more than rusty.

Oh—Ella.

Oh, Ella, he said more softly, hoping some other words that made sense of that name and him and them might stumble onto his tongue if he just said her name enough. They didn’t. Ella Lansbury just smiled.

Don’t say anything, darling, she said. Just don’t say anything bogus. I can’t stand bogus men.

But I am, he said, completely bogus. That’s all I am.

She was already smiling, that dull, all-knowing, knowing-nothing smile he was to find ever more unpleasant, those unexpectedly dry lips telling him that everything was arranged, that he was to worry about none of it. He recalled now that he had proposed to her in 1941 as a way of kissing her breasts. In as much as he could remember, it had been the final night of what would transpire to be his last leave with Ella before embarkation, and he could not stop thinking of Amy. To gain some relief from Ella’s constant questioning him as to why he had not proposed, to escape from his incessant thoughts about Amy and the guilt he felt in consequence, he sought to find his way through the complex maze that led into Ella’s cleavage and that demanded he put to her the ultimate riddle: Ella, will you marry me?