Jon Cleary

The Climate of Courage

Copyright

Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in 1954 by William Collins Sons & Co Ltd

Copyright © Jon Cleary 1954

Jon Cleary asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780006139652

Ebook Edition © JULY 2015 ISBN: 9780007568987

Version: 2015-04-26

Dedication

ToBarry

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Chapter One

SYDNEY AND home came towards them gradually, a slowly returning memory. The outer suburbs, shallows of the city, were behind them and now the familiar stations were rushing past. Granville, Auburn, Lidcombe, the names all at once were personal. Rookwood cemetery went past, the long rows of ghostly headstones stretching away to the pale morning sky, the dead arranged neatly for Judgment Day. The old jokes were made about digging up a friend and everyone laughed: laughter hung on the lips like a bubble, ready to burst at any moment. Strathfield, Ashfield, Summer Hill: there was a yell as each station went past, of recognition and greeting and excitement. People on the platforms waved, and even their fleeting smiles, out of sight almost as soon as they were seen, left an impression that warmed the men. They were coming home and every welcome counted.

A sergeant, his thick black hair blown into a frightened wig about his small head, his lean body still bent from the wind, plunged into the carriage from the outside platform. He slammed the door behind him and leaned back against it, laughing and his eyes quick and bright in the brownness of his thin smooth face. Men looked at him for a moment, for Greg Morley was the sort of man everyone looked at, always expecting him to say something that would make them laugh or take their minds for the moment from their particular problem; but he had nothing to say this time, still laughing to himself because of his inner good feeling, and the men went back to finishing the game of Five Hundred, to staring out the windows, to waiting for the end of the journey. Sergeant Morley slapped a man on the shoulder and moved on through the carriage, picking his way none too carefully through the litter of bodies and legs.

Morley at last came to a vacant seat. He dropped into it almost gracefully; every movement was quick but there was never any awkwardness. He was the battalion swimming champion and had been a State champion before the war; nearly all his life had been spent close to the sea and there was the fluidity of water in every movement he made. There was also some of the unreliability of water in him. Strangers meeting him would note the faded sergeant’s stripes on his sleeves, there too long, and the purple ribbon of the Victoria Cross on his chest, and they would wonder that he wasn’t an officer by now; then after a while they would be aware of the lack of stability in him and would reason that the Army authorities were also probably aware of it. Morley himself was aware of it, but it didn’t bother him. Nothing bothered him, except getting home.

He took a cigarette from a packet flipped it into the air and caught it between his lips. He was full of such small vaudeville tricks: he should have gone on the stage instead of on to the clerical staff of the Water Board. In the Middle East he had even made the Arabs laugh with his antics and more than once had stolen the show from a street magician. He loved to be the centre of interest, but no one, except possibly the street magicians, had ever resented his conceit. It was hard to resent anything about Greg Morley.

He lit the cigarette, then abruptly sat up straight. “Where are we now?”

The lieutenant beside him turned from the window. “Relax, she won’t mind if you’re a little late. Haven’t you kept her waiting before?”

“Not two bloody years.” His voice was quick and light: a laugh lived in his throat. “And I’ll bet there’s a Yank just waiting for me not to turn up.”

“Two years,” said Vern Radcliffe. “I’m going to notice a difference in my kids.”

“Just so long as there’s none in the wife, that’s the main thing.” Morley grinned, then impatiently dropped his cigarette to the floor and ground it out with his boot. “Sometimes I used to be scared that by the time we got back I’d be too old.”

“You’ll never be too old for that or anything else,” said Radcliffe, and looked at Morley with affection. “You’ll be one of those eternally young bastards.”

Morley laughed again, glad and proud of his youth. He was twenty-five, but Radcliffe was right: he would never be old. Age never shows on water.

Radcliffe turned and looked out of the window. He was a thick-set man who looked short sitting down but would be of medium height when he stood up. His face was the type that is square when the man is in condition but is round when he falls into fat; the corners were a little soft now after the long lay-off on the journey home from Tewfik. His brows and moustache were thick and ginger and his hair lay like a heavy auburn pelt on his well-shaped head. He had a certain animal look, amiable but not finely bred. Some day when he had slowed down and all the corners were round he would remind people of a sleepy old bear. But now there was still strength and a hint of controlled quickness in him, something that appealed to women who met him; if later they were a little disappointed in him it was because they found there was also a good deal of caution in him. The unit thought him a good officer.

The train sped on: Sydney came up out of the past at fifty miles an hour. Stations rushed backwards out of sight: now there wasn’t far to go on the journey towards home.

It had been a long journey, beginning almost two years ago, in the winter of 1940, when the last farewell had been said; and it had included an ocean twice crossed, a desert, mountains, and these last two days the hills and plains they knew so well. They had boarded the train at Adelaide and had passed through Melbourne, and every mile had brought another remembrance. There had been the wide brown paddocks, the horses curving away in white-eyed fright like the chargers on a carousel, the nude corpses of the murdered gums, the shifting grey billabong that had turned into a mob of sheep, and the drab towns whose only beauty was the friendliness one knew one would find in the houses. The last stage of the journey had been the shortest and yet the longest, but above all the best.

There had been little to see at night, but Australia had been there outside the train. Some had stared out the windows seeking the Southern Cross, but the engine smoke had blown like a cloud across the sky. The train’s whistle had wailed across the dreaming countryside: somewhere an echo had been evoked in a heart and someone had felt the chill of sadness. Houses, windows of cats’ eyes, had crouched in the lee of invisible hills; a town had spun away, spangled with lights, beautiful at last in the darkness. Then the world had fallen past the moon and there had been the pale landscape stretching away as far as the eye could see and the heart remember: the hand of home had reached out and touched the sleeping brain, and the men, disturbed, expectant and yet frightened, had turned over to face the darkness of the racing train. In the morning their loneliness and their fear had been forgotten in their excitement.

Now they were almost home. The city closed about them and everything was suddenly, startlingly familiar. A church a bridge, even the posters on the hoardings were the same: Ginger Rogers smiled invitingly, Tooth’s KB Lager was a Man’s Drink; and the men wondered what had ever attracted them to brothels and arrack. There was the black smudge in the clear day, the railways workshops at Eveleigh overhung with their fog of soot; and for the first time the men saw them as a target and felt a sudden emptiness, as if they had seen an old friend stricken with an incurable disease. Redfern Station went by, the men’s shouts echoing back as part of their own welcome; the tracks multiplied, spread out like the silver flood of a river; and at last there was the tall clock tower of Central Station, the landfall they had all been waiting for. The train began to slow.

“I’ll lay five bob he pulls her up out here in the middle of nowhere. There! What did I tell you?”

“Hey, Mr. Radcliffe, go up and pull your rank on the engine driver. You must wanna get home as much as us.”

Vern Radcliffe turned from the window and smiled at the smiling faces. Good humour lurked constantly at the corners of his wide mouth like another, intangible feature; sometimes his good humour had been taken too much for granted and he had had to convince a few of the men that he also believed in discipline. But not now: the men didn’t need discipline this day. He smiled at them, then looked at Greg Morley, who shook his head and rolled his eyes downwards.

Radcliffe caught the hint. “Where’s Sergeant Savanna?”

“Here, sir.” Sergeant Savanna was stretched out on the floor, his head pillowed on a kit bag; he made no effort to lift his long bony frame into an upright position. “Always on hand for the call of duty.”

Like Radcliffe and Morley, Jack Savanna had come out of the ranks of these men and some of the old relationship still remained. But when it was needed, he could be as tough as any permanent army N.C.O. He was a born leader who had continually held back his own promotion by getting into scrapes; his waywardness was not a result of weakness, like Morley’s, but of a stubborn streak of rebellion in him. He had been reduced from a sergeant to a corporal twice, and had only been repromoted because he was so much better than anyone else available. But he had been born to lead revolutions, not the forces of tradition; had he been born a hundred years earlier he would certainly have had a say at the Eureka Stockade. He looked up at Radcliffe, one of the minor pillars of tradition. “You wanted me, sir?”

“Go up and tell the driver to get a move on,” said Radcliffe, enjoying the feeling of good humour that pervaded the carriage. “Private Brennan wants to get home to his girl.”

“Plural, sir,” said Private Brennan. “I’ve got seven of ’em waiting.”

“That makes it even more urgent, sergeant,” said Radcliffe.

Sergeant Savanna didn’t stir. “Corporal Talmadge.”

“Here, sarge.” The tall man with the close-cropped prematurely grey hair, turned from the window; there was no look of expectancy on his leathern face, he had another three hundred miles to go before he would see home. “Want something?”

“Go up and tell the driver to get a move one. Private Brennan wants to get home to his harem.”

Corporal Talmadge hadn’t been listening to the conversation, had been completely isolated from it by his own thoughts, but he moved immediately into the joking intimacy of the rest of the men. “Private Brennan.”

“I might of bloody well known it.” Private Brennan ran his hand resignedly through his fair curly hair as the carriage broke into the one easy laugh, the sort of laugh that comes from an inner spring of feeling and is ready to greet even the feeblest joke. “The flaming chain of command. Forget I mention it. I don’t care if we’re stuck out here all day. The sheilas can wait. They been waiting two and a half years for me.”

“Get a load of him! Six months longer than the rest of us. Tell us about your war experiences, dig. You were with the Sixth Div., weren’t you, dig? The mob that lost the war in Greece, weren’t you, dig?”

“I heard the bugle when they blew it the first time.” Joe Brennan had gone to the Middle East with the first convoy of Sixth Division troops in January 1940, and had transferred to this Seventh Division battalion after the Greece and Crete campaigns. He was the only man in the battalion who had tasted the sobering bitterness of defeat, and he was that much a better soldier because of it: he would never again underestimate the enemy. “They didn’t have to send me an invitation like they did you mugs.”

“They didn’t invite us, they advertised. It was in the Positions Vacant column in the Herald. Good jobs, it said. Five bob a day and all found. Pensions if you survive, it said.”

“I’d of been in sooner. I was looking around for a good job on the home front, that was all. But I was too late. All the bookies and jockeys had ’em.”

“I was making three thousand quid a year, meself, at the time. But I chucked it all up——”

“Bull, you were on the dole like the rest of us!”

The chi-acking went on, anything to fill in the waiting minutes, long and unsettling as the minutes just before an attack. It was all the same, Radcliffe thought: farewell, war, return, all of it waiting and very little else. He had the sudden feeling he had been waiting all his life, that to-morrow was the only real ambition; from the slapping palm on the new-living buttocks to the gentle fingers on the new-dead eyelids, one spent one’s time in waiting. He moved uneasily, all at once feeling impatient and a little afraid; then seeking reassurance, he leaned across Greg Morley and looked down at Jack Savanna.

“How do you feel?”

“Like a girl on her wedding night.” Savanna’s face, though long and bony like his body, was not unhandsome; when he smiled it was surprisingly boyish. The smile belied the eyes and the drawling voice; a natural faith struggled hard against an acquired cynicism. He had seen too much too young: the cruelty in the dormitory, the stranger rising confusedly from his mother’s bed, his dead and bloody father; but some relic of childhood struggled through and made him liked even by those he insulted. “Although, being a bachelor, I can only use my imagination in choosing such a simile. You married wrecks would know better than I.”

“Christ, I wish they’d get a move on!” Morley’s voice was petulant with impatience.

“You expecting Sarah to be at the station?” Radcliffe was asking himself the same question: would Dinah be there, would she have changed? It was their first time away from each other and he was surprised how, now at the time for reunion, it had frightened him.

“Oh, she’ll be there, all right.” The petulance was gone from Morley’s voice immediately: any mention of his wife could only have the effect of wiping out the mood of a moment before. He had always been ready to talk about her and she was as well-known as any film star or racehorse to his many friends in the battalion. Her photo had occupied pride of place in the pin-ups in the tent he had shared with three other sergeants, above a line of anonymous nudes and between Rita Hayworth and, the choice of the orderly-room sergeant, Tamara Toumanova. “She hasn’t failed yet.”

“Sure of yourself, aren’t you?” said Savanna, and only Radcliffe detected the faint bitterness under the banter. “The conceit of the married man.”

“The poor kid’s probably been waiting there an hour,” Morley said.

“God, listen to him!” said Savanna. “It’s only you married bastards who believe women are so faithful.”

“It’s only we married bastards who know,” Radcliffe grinned.

“How far out are we?” said Morley. “Can you see the platform from here?”

“Better strap him down.” Savanna sat up, then slowly got to his feet, untangling his length. He was several inches over six feet and seemed to be all bone, though broad and heavy bone. Then one looked again and noticed there was also a good deal of muscle, and realised here was a man tough enough to battle a team of bullocks or a whole company of men. It was a shock to learn that in civilian life he had been only a radio announcer. He affected a thick Air Force type moustache and his blond hair was long enough to have begun to curl on his neck. He was a mixture the men had never understood. Several of them had seen him in civilian clothes while on leave before they had gone overseas, and he had been wearing suède shoes; but as Basher Hanna had said, there was no accounting for taste, for he had once known a bloke who wore gloves even when it wasn’t cold. The men had never understood him, but they liked and admired him.

Not that Jack Savanna cared much what people thought of him. He stretched himself now, his bones cracking, then slapped Morley heartily on the back. “We don’t want you jumping out the window and galloping up to the platform.”

The carriage had quietened down. Some of the men had begun to put on their webbing and packs as long as twenty minutes before, and now they were beginning to feel the effects of trying to move in the cramped space with such awkward loads. Their kit bags, packed with souvenirs for the kids and dirty clothes for the wife to wash, added to the congestion. The men sat uncomfortably in the seats, squatted on the floor, leaning back to back against each other like native porters.

Then the train began to move again, easing forward and moving quietly into the platform, as if it had pulled up to collect its breath and make a composed entrance, like a woman checking on her looks before going in to meet some old lover. Steam blew past the windows, then it had faded and there were the laughing, tearful, frightened faces. Fear hung on every face like a veil, only to be lifted when the man was seen to be unmaimed and unchanged as his letters had claimed. Relatives stood like customs agents along the platform, searching for the contraband of war: the hidden wound, the undeclared change of feeling. The train ground to a stop and this stage of the journey was over.

The men fell, were pushed, were pulled from the carriages. Bodies clung with the adhesion of passion and gladness; mouths closed on mouths with long hunger; tears mingled on cheeks. Somewhere a child cried, but no one heeded it; an old woman walked the platform looking for someone, unable to see him for the blindness of tears; a girl laughed hysterically, then screamed aloud as if the climax of ecstasy had been reached ahead of schedule. Four women stood apart, widows smiling bravely, drawn there by a woman’s affinity for grief: their husbands would never be buried, for they hadn’t seen them dead. The smoke of the engine hung in the air, smudging the skin, watering the eyes and bitter on the tongue, a reminder of the farewell of two years before, a warning that another farewell lay just ahead. The waiting wasn’t over, just changed in character.

Vern Radcliffe saw his wife and two children and dived towards them through the bewildering crush of reunion, aware of how small and precious was his world. Jack Savanna looked about him, smiling at nothing, wearing a disguise he hadn’t realised he had adopted; then he turned away, feeling lost and envious and more angry than he had been since his father’s death. And Greg Morley, clutching his wife and besieged by photographers, enjoying both experiences, laughing his head off at the wonder of it all, shouted something to Radcliffe and Savanna that neither of them heard nor cared about.

The crowd began to move towards the platform gates, towards the laden table, the passionate bed, the real welcome home.

Chapter Two

“WE HAVE a few battles of our own.” Happy Fredericks laughed and would have blushed if he hadn’t given up blushing twenty years before. “But I guess you’ve been hearing that ever since you landed back.”

“A bit,” said Vern. “My wife’s brother told me I didn’t know how lucky I was. He’s in wholesale groceries. Says it keeps him awake at nights.”

Happy Fredericks rolled back in his chair and laughed at full blast, his vast bulk shaking like a mountain about to fall. “Well, if you’re so lucky, you wouldn’t want to come back to us, eh?”

“Come back?”

“Be a war correspondent. We can get you out. The Army is releasing certain newspapermen if their papers claim them.”

“And you’d like to claim me?”

“Why not? Things are different now the war is close to home. The brass is starting to wake up that the public is interested in what’s going on. The battles we’ve had with them!” He grinned again, his red face bulging like a balloon that had been squeezed, and a chuckle rumbled somewhere in the mountain of him. “I look at it this way, Vern. You’ve been a soldier long enough to know what it’s all about, appreciate the purely military side. Right?”

“Nearly right,” said Vern. “No one fully appreciates the military side, except the generals who dream it up. It’s an esoteric passion denied to part-time soldiers like myself. But go on.”

“I see your point. Some of these Regular Army wallahs feel they’ve just descended from Olympus, now that war’s here again.” Fredericks turned and spat into a huge brass spittoon by his chair, an old-fashioned custom that disgusted his secretary, a girl who came from a Vaucluse family that hadn’t spat in four generations. “I think I can swing something where you can also work for a couple of the British papers. We’ll be overrun with Yanks pretty soon, they’ve got almost as many correspondents as they have soldiers, but the Chooms have practically no coverage at all out here …” Fredericks tilted back in his chair and looked more than ever like a mountain about to fall; people on the floor below went about their work unconscious of the danger overhead. “Well, how does the proposition sound to you?”

“Pretty good. It couldn’t sound otherwise.”

“You don’t sound over-excited,” said Fredericks.

“My excitement is the delayed-action type,” Vern said. “Tell you the truth, Happy, I’ve never really given a thought to being a war correspondent. I guess this sounds strange to you, as if I’ve been inoculated with militarism, but over the last two years I’ve got used to thinking of myself as a soldier, even if only a temporary one.”

“Bought your own drum and flag, eh?” Fredericks laughed, and Vern felt a flash of anger; then abruptly the editor’s round face was stiffly sober. “I’m sorry, Vern. I shouldn’t have said that. I think more of it than that, myself. And it’s a credit to you that you do think of yourself as a soldier.”

Vern moved a hand in a gesture of embarrassment. “I’m not being jingoistic. I’m just trying to point out that if you’d offered me this job two years ago, I’d have said yes right away. Now I’d like time to think it over.”

“Of course.” Fredericks lay back in his chair, crossing his hands on the mound of his stomach, looking like a wicked old bishop. After a while he began to fiddle with the old-fashioned gold watch-chain that hung like a small hawser across his waistcoat. “It will be the biggest story you’ve ever covered, Vern.”

“I guess it will,” said Vern, thinking Fredericks was stating the obvious.

“Bigger than you realise.” Fredericks seemed to be making up his mind about something, his forehead creased into rolls of fat and the twinkle gone from his eyes; then he let go the watch-chain, dropping the hawser with a clink against the bursting buttons of his waistcoat, and said, “Vern, the Japs could walk into Australia to-morrow.”

Vern sat quietly. Through an open window he could hear the nervous hum of traffic and the harsh cry of a newsboy, like a metropolitan crow, coming up from the street below. A clock ticked away placidly on Fredericks’ desk, then its sound was gone as three planes went overhead in a roar that drowned out everything. He looked out the window, almost as if expecting the bombs to be already beginning to fall.

Over the past two years he had become too accustomed to bad news to be shocked by it. But now suddenly it had deeper significance and was a good deal harder to comprehend. The fall of France, the debacle in Greece, Pearl Harbour, even the surrender of Singapore, had had a remoteness about them that made it hard to imagine the same thing happening to Sydney or Melbourne or, even though the bombs had already fallen there, to Darwin; even when the Japs had landed in Timor and New Britain, one had still had some blind faith that they could come no farther. What was to stop them, one really didn’t know: one just didn’t bother, or was afraid, to think. No enemy had landed in Australia before and it was just impossible to imagine its happening. Invasions, like earthquakes and pogroms, happened to other countries. One clung to the old bromide: it can’t happen here.

“I didn’t know things were that grim,” he said. “There’s little hint of it. So many of us on leave——”

“Camouflage.” Fredericks waved a hand. “Trying to keep the people from knowing. The truth is, we haven’t enough equipment to outfit the whole Army. We’re short all along the line: planes, artillery, transport, the whole bloody bundle.”

“What about the Yanks?”

“They’re coming,” Fredericks said, “but they’ve got a long way to come and I don’t know that they’re much better prepared that we are. Two years to get ready, and they’re still dragging their heels.”

“Maybe they’re like the people in the street outside.” Vern had often felt in the last two years that the Americans should have come into the war, but he had tried to be fair-minded about it. In 1938 he had spent a year in the New York office of the paper, and he knew how strong was the influence of the Middle West isolationists. “Just couldn’t believe the war would fall into their laps.”

Fredericks shrugged, a movement that would have been a convulsion in a smaller man. “Maybe. I shouldn’t talk about them in that way, not the coves who are out here to fight, anyway. Politics has been the whole trouble over there.”

“What happens if the Japs get here first?”

“Christ knows.” Fredericks shrugged again. “I’ll probably lose a lot of weight.”

Vern looked down at the blue overseas strips on his sleeve: they represented the stretch of time in which Australia had come from the outskirts of war into the very centre of it. He wondered if the country could see it through, and was suddenly frightened and disgusted at his lack of faith. “I think I’d have felt better if you hadn’t told me how bad things are.”

“Mind you, what I’ve told you is top secret. Or it’s supposed to be, as far as the general public is concerned. I wouldn’t have told you if I hadn’t known what a close-mouthed bastard you can be. Anyhow, you’ll discover it for yourself when you get out into the field as a correspondent. Things are so bad, I don’t know how we’re going to keep it quiet much longer. Right now they’ve got MacArthur to hold their attention. You’d think Christ had come back to earth.”

“What’s he like?” Vern said. “The boys haven’t been impressed. His type of soldier doesn’t go down too well with the Aussie, all that grandiloquent bull of his.”

“Well, they’d better get used to the grandiloquent bull. He’s here as boss.”

“Blamey won’t like that.”

“Blamey will look after himself,” Fredericks said with a grin. “I’m no admirer of him personally, but he’s the bloke we want if we’re to have any say in the way things are run. MacArthur reckons he has God on his side. He’ll need Him, if he’s to push Tom Blamey around.” Then he tossed the two generals out the window and said, “How much leave have you?”

“Eight days. I report back next Monday morning to Ingleburn. Where we go from there, and when, I haven’t the faintest.”

“Righto, call me at home Sunday. It’s still the same place, Macleay Street, and the number is in the book. You just need an American visa to come up there now, that’s all. How are the wife and kids?”

“Fine. I’m like a stranger in the house, seeing them for the first time. I just sit back and admire the three of them, and feel bloody proud of myself.”

“Good for you.” Fredericks extended a plump hand across the desk; Vern had forgotten the strength, in the plump fingers. “I’m glad to see you got back all right, Vern.”

Vern said good-bye to Fredericks, promising to give a lot of thought to the war correspondent offer, and went out to the lift. It was operated now by a girl, instead of the World War 1 veteran who had been there for years (had he gone back into the Army? Some people didn’t know when enough was enough. But Vern had noticed when war first broke out that the older men had rushed just as quickly as the young men to enlist). The girl was a blonde who munched on bubble gum, and gave him a franker stare than he had been accustomed to from Australian girls before the war. She stood leaning on the power handle, one hip thrown out in an attempt at dislocation that was supposed to be provocative, a bubble now and again hanging from her lips like an ectoplasmic burp. She stared at him again as the lift bounced gently to a stop.

“Ground floor, loo-tenant.”

“Thanks, babe,” said Vern, and winked at her as he got out. She smiled and watched him as he went out to the street, her hip still thrown out, still blowing bubbles, one hand stroking the blonde hair. Some of these Aussie boys weren’t bad when you came to think of it. Why, her sister Elsie had even married one….

Vern, unaware that he had almost been tagged as eligible, had turned out of Elizabeth Street and into Martin Place. He walked down and turned into George Street and was walking against the crowd as he headed down towards the harbour. The faces came swimming towards him above the dark river of bodies. He looked for signs of worry or panic, but there was none. True, some faces were unhappy, the eyes a little dead and the mouths drooping in self-pity, but the unhappiness was personal: a husband had been killed, a girl had given back an engagement ring, there were bills to be paid and no money. But there was no general mask of concern, no nervous attitude that showed the crowd knew danger was just around the corner. The Australian had always had the reputation of being easy-going: to Vern’s suddenly acute and worried eye, he had never looked more easy-going than now. Vern walked on, beginning to have the first doubts that the country would have what was needed when the time came.

He skirted the wharves of Circular Quay and climbed the steps to the Bridge and walked out into the middle. He stood there and looked out at home. It was an Australian early autumn day, no hint of dying in it, and the upper sky was streaked with thin cloud that looked like the brushings of a white wind. The light was clear and fine, and everything, even the smoke from ships in the harbour, had an edge to it. The sun put a silver sheen on the afternoon air and everything glittered with the sharpness of a poignant memory.

Above him the arch of the Bridge reared against the sky, a heavy tracery of steel touched with sun that went in a single curving leap from pylon to pylon, and the pylons themselves towered like bleached medieval forts above the polished harbour. The coloured roofs of Milson’s Point and Mosman stretched away over their hills with a pointillism effect that danced before the eyes. A ferry came across the water, its hooter protesting in a sharp moan at nothing at all, and an American naval launch went over towards Garden Island, spreading a cool white fan behind it. Beyond the island he could see the grey shapes of an American cruiser and some destroyers; he looked away from them, a reminder of how close the war had come to home, and up towards the city. The buildings were stacked in confusion on top of each other, their windows flashing like small explosions and the shadows stretching down between them like black bombing scars. Already, he thought, the war is giving me my similies: I’m half-way to being a war correspondent.

He turned and walked back along the Bridge, now and again turning his head to look back at the harbour and the city sprawled about the hills. It all looked good, better even than the memory that had changed almost imperceptibly, like a growing child, as time had dripped down out of the glass and the desire to come home had grown stronger.

Home was where people worshipped racehorses and took no pride in work and drove the seeds of their culture overseas; but he didn’t want it invaded nor did he want to leave it ever again.

“They offered me a job to-day as a war correspondent,” he said.

“Gee, that’s wonderful, Daddy,” said Jill, and hastily swallowed a lump of meat. “My, won’t the girls at school like this! Someone glamorous in the family!”

“Thank you,” said Dinah. “Let me tell you, when I was in the chorus I was called glamorous, seductive——”

“Ah, you’re all right, Mum,” said Michael. “But being a chorus girl isn’t like being a war correspondent.”

“I told one of the nuns the other day that my mother had been a hoofer,” said Jill. “She said she’d say a rosary for you.”

“That’s nice,” said Dinah. “Tell her in return I’ll put on my tights and do a bit at the school concert.” She stabbed at a piece of kidney. “A hoofer!”

Michael was looking at his father. “Where will you go, Dad? Up to New Guinea? Will you get your name on your stories? Heck, I hope there’s a war on when I grow up——”

“If there is,” said Dinah, “I’ll see you get a nice soft cop in a reserved occupation.”

She said it without any particular emphasis, but Vern looked along the table at her. She smiled at him, a smile as unreadable as a chorus girl’s. “Go on, darling. Did you take the job?”

“I haven’t decided.”

“Ah, ’struth!” Michael carved at the air with his knife, disgusted with a father who didn’t recognise opportunity when it knocked. “Someone else will get it if you don’t hurry up! I bet everyone on the paper wants——”

“Don’t you want it, Daddy?” said Jill.

She was eleven, small but well-built, with her mother’s feature’s and her father’s colouring, but with the temperament of neither of them. She already had all the poise that Vern had spent years trying to acquire; a trick of retiring into herself that made her completely beyond and independent of what went on about her; and an intelligence that sometimes dismayed Dinah.

Vern looked at her, aware that, with her uncanny sense of feeling, she knew something was troubling him. “I don’t know. It’s not something I can just say yes to, just like that——”

“I could,” said Michael. “Ask me.”

Dinah was the first to admit that her brain was little better than a chorus girl was required to have, but like her daughter she could sense when anything was worrying Vern. “Righto, Michael, we’ll ask you when you leave school, in six or seven years’ time. Now get on with your eating and let’s forget all about the glamour.”

Michael grinned, his blunt dark face suddenly like his father’s. “Ah, you’re only jealous. How’d you like to be a lady war correspondent?”

“I’d rather be top of the bill at the Tivoli,” said Dinah. “And by golly, I would have been if it hadn’t been for you two coming along.”

“Other women have had babies and continued their theatrical careers,” said Jill. “Even hoofers.”

“When you’re married and going to have a baby,” said Dinah, “let me see you do the can-can.”

Vern again felt the sudden warmth that had come over him several times in the two days since he had arrived home. The children had developed amazingly in the two years he had been away, and his pride in them was like a heady tonic. But what pleased him more was the intimate, almost adult relationship they had with their mother. That, he realised, had come about because of his absence: she had encouraged it, perhaps unwittingly, to make up for what she had missed by his being away. The family seemed to have become tighter knit while he had been away, and yet he didn’t feel out of it. Dinah had kept him a part of it, and he looked along the table at her now and loved her more even than in the lonely moments overseas.

Later when they were going to bed she took off all her clothes and stood in front of the big wardrobe mirror. She turned side on and patted her stomach. “Think I’ve got fat while you’ve been away? I went on a diet when I knew you were coming home, even did exercises. Hoofer’s exercises.”

Vern hung his trousers in the closet. “The belly’s all right, but I detect a slight droop in the bosom.”

“What do you expect at thirty-two? You wanted to marry a thirty-six inch chest. I remember distinctly that was the first thing you said to me after you’d asked my name. You said I had a magnificent chest.”

“And I remember you shoved it out a little more.” Vern had sat down and begun to take off his shoes and socks. “I had to stand back to make room.”

“Well, the older I get, the tireder I get holding it up. But while you’re home I’ll make a special effort.” She drew back her shoulders. “There, how’s that? My God, you’re lucky, you know.”

He was, he knew that. Her bosom had deepened after the birth of the two children, but it was still firm and lovely. Her waist was slim and there was no thickening over the hips; they curved, then came in a smooth sweep to her long thighs. No birth wrinkles marred her stomach: her slightest movement brought exciting shadows to the firm modelling of it. And the face with its good wide bonework, short straight nose, dark sparkling eyes that could suddenly become lazy-lidded, all of it backed by the shining black hair, had remained vividly clear in his memory over the last two years. She wasn’t strictly beautiful, but she was Dinah and there was no one else. He was lucky, all right.

“There are a lot of men who would give their right arm to get into bed with a body like this,” she said.

“Good-o, try your luck some time. We’ll collect right arms.”

She had climbed into bed. “Come on! God, I’ve never seen a man so slow at getting into bed. Are you as slow as this in the Army? You must get in just in time to get up again for reveille.”

“I don’t have naked women in my bed in the Army.”

“It’s not making you move any faster now. Why the hell did I have to marry such a damned neat man? Drop your clothes on the floor and get in here quick!”

He got into bed and put his arms about her. There had never been anyone before her, and he was as excited now as he had been the first time. They had had no trouble discovering each other in those early days and their love-making had been successful from the start. But now he was trying to restrain himself. He hadn’t yet become accustomed again to the idea of having his wife beside him in bed each night. It was like a second honeymoon: everything, the smoothness, the intimacy, the claiming surrender, was still a little unbelievable.

But now he was beside her she had suddenly quietened down. “Darling, what is it about the job as a war correspondent?”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t really want it, do you? Wouldn’t it be a good job?”

“Better than I’ve ever had before,” he said, and all at once was surprised how remote he felt from the newspaper office. Two years ago he would have been excited about the job, would have lain awake well into the night to talk with her about it. Now it was as if the job had been offered to someone else, someone he knew but wasn’t particularly interested in. “Remember how ambitious I used to be? This could be the answer. I might finish up famous, make a lot of money——”

His voice trailed off and after a while she said, “So what’s holding you back? Am I too dumb to see something?”

“No.” He grinned in the darkness and patted her shoulder; sometimes she was more of a child to him than the two youngsters in their rooms down the hall. “Though I don’t know if you’ll understand when I do explain it to you——”

“Thanks,” she said. “I’m not dumb, just a little backward.”

But he hadn’t heard her. “I don’t know that I completely understand it, myself. Darl, I don’t want the correspondent’s job, because I want to prove myself to myself.” She made no comment and he went on, “I’ve been an officer now for nearly two years. In another month or so my third pip will be through——”

“Captain Radcliffe,” she said, testing it for sound. “You didn’t tell me.”

“I was going to surprise you. I know how rank-conscious you women are.”

“I’m just surprised you’re not a colonel by now. The Army doesn’t appreciate you like I do. I think you’re wonderful.” She moved closer to him, if that were possible. “The hope of the nation.”

“Thank you.” he said, and patted her shoulder again. “Trouble is, I don’t think I’m so wonderful. Darl, for two years now I’ve been responsible for other men and I still don’t know if I’m big enough for the responsibility. I’ve never been tested. Every time we were in action in the Middle East there was never a time when a decision rested wholly on me. There was always someone there who out-ranked me, and all I had to do was carry out their orders. And what I don’t like is that I was always glad they were there.”

“Is that something to be ashamed of?”

“Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. I haven’t thought about shame, because no one else knows about it. But I worry—am I good enough to be responsible for the lives of other men?”

“The Army must have thought so.”

“One of the things you learn in the Army, darling, is that it is far from infallible. It has a greater talent for making mistakes than any other organisation yet devised. I could be one of its major mistakes.”

She was silent for a while, then she said, “How you feel—is it really so important?”

He said nothing for a while, wondering if she would understand when he did tell her. Women had a greater sense of responsibility than men, but they also had a different perspective. There were certain things that a man saw in himself, questions that worried him and had to be answered, that a woman could never take too seriously. Honour, for instance. Women had a sense of honour, but they were rarely foolish or heroic about it: they were not so afraid of the alternative, dishonour, because they had a greater armour against shame. Would Dinah understand, or think him a fool, playing up to some schoolboy code?

At last he made the confession: “It’s important to me, darl. More important than the job as a war correspondent. If I take that, I’ll never know if I had what it takes when the moment called for it. I don’t want to be a hero. I just want to know that I’m not a coward.” He turned and looked at the dark mass of her head on the pillow beside him; in the darkness he couldn’t see her face and (cowardly, he thought) it was better that way. “Do you understand what I’m getting at, darl?”

“Does a woman ever understand a man?” It was the answer he had half-expected. “I don’t want to understand it, darling. If it’s the way you feel, then it’s all right with me.” He could feel her fingers digging into his back. “I just don’t want to lose you, that’s all.”

“I could be killed just as easily as a war correspondent,” he said, and knew at once that he was being cruel; he ran his hands gently over her. “Don’t let’s think about that part of it, darl. I’m not going to shove my neck out to prove I’m not a coward. I’m not searching for physical courage, although I don’t know that I have an abundance of that, either. It’s something else again, something I’d like to know I had, even if I never have to use it but once.”

“I said it a moment ago, Vern. If it’s what you want, it’s all right with me. I told you a long time ago, all I want is for you to be happy. And that includes every way, In the Army or out of it.”

There was no answer but to kiss her, to draw her to him and take the love that he sometimes felt was more than he deserved. Life had been a long climb over the rocks before he had met her, and disappointment had lost its bitterness for him. When he had met her he had expected something to go wrong with their love as a matter of course, but it never had. It had been a long time before the surprise had worn off that she loved him completely and forever.

She murmured sleepily as he held her to him, and the bed creaked as she moved closer to him. Outside in the street some youths laughed as they came up the hill from the picture theatre, and in the Hastings’ house next door he could hear the phone ringing peremptorily but in vain. A car went swishing by and a cat cried mournfully at the night; the phone next door stopped ringing and the youths had gone on, and abruptly there was silence.

The sounds I’ve missed, he thought, and almost instantly fell asleep with his face buried in his wife’s neck.

Standing there in the bar, amid the loud foreign-sounding babble of the hundreds of anonymous voices and beneath the thick blue smoke climbing lazily to the ceiling like diaphanous vines, he thought of the bazaars they had visited back in the Middle East and their superior comments on them, and he smiled to himself.

“What’s so funny, chum?” said Jack Savanna.

“Just thinking.”

“Well, quit thinking and start drinking. We’re waiting to order again.”

Just before the train had drawn in at Central Station and each of them had been whirled into the tight embracing circle of his own welcome home, several of the men had arranged to meet here in the Marble Bar this evening. In the confusion at the station, embracing wives or girl friends at the same time as they wished each other a good leave, saying hallo to relatives while they shouted See you in the Marble Bar! they had forgotten that the civilised drinking customs of the backward Middle East were now behind them. They were in civilised Australia again with its backward drinking customs, away from the Wogs and back with the wowsers, and one just didn’t join one’s friends for a drink at the Marble Bar or any other bar. Drinking in Sydney wasn’t as simple as that.

Vern had come in from the street, had looked about him, seen Jack Savanna waving to him above the heads of the crowd like a man calling for help in the middle of a riot, and had prepared for battle. He had taken a deep breath, raised his arms in front of him so that his elbows had stuck out like cow-catchers, and had ploughed his way through the sweating, yelling crush that is the Australian man in his leisure moments after a day’s work. Some day, perhaps, the blue laws that closed all hotels at six o’clock would be rescinded. In the meantime the wowsers, the narrow-minded of certain churches and societies, went smugly on in their belief that Sydney was being saved from further degradation by having limited drinking hours. Vern arrived at the bar bruised, dishevelled and feeling more degraded than if he had come by way of the sewer.

“With this sort of training,” he had said, “we can’t lose the war.”

The second round of drinks arrived, dumped in front of them by the cheerful, durable barmaid. She bad the hard brassy brightness of those women who would be out of a job if there were no men.

“Who’s your friend?” she said to Jack Savanna. “Another boy from your unit?”

“This is Mabel, Vern,” Jack said. Mabel smiled at Vern as if he were the only boy in the world, winked at him as if she knew all about him, then went away down the bar. Jack looked after her, then turned back. “Well, how’s the leave going? How are Dinah and the kids, chum?”

“Fine.” Vern sipped his beer, the good strong Australian stuff that made all the other beers taste like waste water. “What have you been doing?”

“Just taking things quietly,” said Jack. “Sort of easing myself back into Sydney so the impact won’t be too much for the population. But I’ll have to start stepping out soon if I want to get something out of my leave. Celibacy shouldn’t be one of the aims of such an occasion.”

Vern turned to the two men nearest him, Bluey Brown and Dad Mackenzie. “What sort of leave are you having? Has celibacy been one of your aims?”

“I’m too bloody old,” said Bluey Brown. “I’d like to know I had the choice of being celibate or not. I’m known as Old Impotence in our house.”

Staff-sergeant Brown had been a First World War man, and had only got into the current show by putting his age back and because he had been a member of the same club as the battalion’s first C.O. Vern knew that Bluey could have had a commission as the battalion quartermaster, but for his own reasons he had preferred to be nothing more than an N.C.O. He was forty-eight, cheerfully plump, his red hair was now only a suggestion, like rosy cirrus clouds round the beaming sun of his face, and he was the most popular man in the whole battalion despite the fact that he was the company quarter-master sergeant.

Dad Mackenzie grinned, the smile as cautious as everything else he did. “Things have changed since we went away. The chookies seem much easier.”

“Influence of the Yanks,” said Jack Savanna. “I don’t know that it is a bad thing.”

“You wouldn’t,” said Vern. “I can’t ever remember you supporting the morals of the community. You were always doing your best to bring about a lowering of them.” He had known Jack before the war, when the latter had worked for the Australian Broadcasting Commission: not much more than casually, but enough to know that Jack was something of a rake. “Easy chookies, as Dad calls them, were always your meat.”

“In this particular instance,” said Jack, “I am trying to be impersonal. I am looking at the picture from a distance, as it were. I have a great interest in the future of Australian womanhood.”

“He’s a nephew of Dorothy Dix,” Bluey Brown told Dad Mackenzie.

“Go on?” said Dad Mackenzie. “Legitimate or illegitimate?”

Jack hadn’t heard the interruptions. “I think a leavening of the Americans’ preoccupation with sex, their wonderfully uninhibited attitude towards it—at least while they’re abroad—may do something towards breaking down the broad, if not admitted, puritanical streak in our national make-up.”

“I haven’t detected any broad puritanical streak in you,” said Bluey. “Turn around and let’s have a look.”

“I have done my best to eradicate it,” said Jack.

“You’ve been eminently successful,” said Vern, then turned round to see Charlie Fogarty grinning at them. “Hallo, Charlie. What the hell’s that you’re drinking?”

“Shandy,” said Charlie. “Three parts lemonade, one part beer. It saves the barmaid embarrassment.”

“Meaning?”

“Some of them don’t know if they ought to sell an aborigine grog, even if he is in uniform. This saves ’em having to ask the boss if it’s all right.”

Charlie Fogarty was the best-looking aborigine Vern had ever seen. He was tall and broad-shouldered and his smile was as wide and bright as sheet lightning. His voice was soft and musical, the voice of a man who belonged to broad sunlit plains and singing streams; it wasn’t an apologetic voice, but Vern couldn’t imagine its ever being dogmatic or insistent. He knew Charlie’s story, it stretched behind him like a travelogue of Australia. The mission in the Northern Territory where they had made him conscious of his magnificent black body by putting it in white man’s clothing; the cattle station in western Queensland; the abattoirs in Brisbane; the flour mill in Sydney; the army camp at Ingleburn—he was more Australian than any of them, but he was also more alien.

“I wonder how they’ll treat you coves after this is over?” said Vern.

Charlie smiled again, not a trace of bitterness in his dark shining face. “I’m thinking of going back to the tribe. Then we’re gunna bring in a Black Australia policy and kick all you white bastards out of the country.”

“Speaking of bastards,” said Dad Mackenzie.

They all turned, and for a moment Vern didn’t recognise the burly figure in the tight blue suit pushing its way through the crowd towards them. Then suddenly he remembered the figure as it had been in khaki, remembered the arrogance and stupid discipline and petty spite of ex-Major Caulfield, and he knew this was going to be an awkward moment.

“Hallo, men,” said Caulfield, and the smile on his face was as shaky as a scaffolding in a gale. The big red face with the dark freckles on the forehead and across the broad nose did its best to look friendly; but, as one, the five men turned back to the bar, picked up their drinks and stood in silence. Farther along, two other men from the battalion, Joe Brennan and Mick Kennedy, interrupted their close confab and stood looking silently at Caulfield. Vern, looking down at his drink, knew that Caulfield could hear that silence more than he could hear the hubbub of voices or the occasional shout.

Caulfield stood there behind them for a moment and Vern could only guess at the expression on his face; then he said, “Ah, come on, let’s forget all about rank for just this once. Just call me Jim.”

No one moved and Vern felt the prickle of embarrassment spreading through him: he had never had the defensive thick skin of a superiority complex. He was sensitive to other people’s feelings, even to those he disliked. He could feel Caulfield’s reaction almost as much as if it were his own when Jack Savanna turned slowly from the bar and said, contempt thick as spittle in his mouth, “Why should we call you anything?”

Jack raised his glass, looking at it and not at Caulfield, took a drink, and just as slowly turned back to the bar. Then Bluey Brown said, “If I called him anything, it wouldn’t be Jim.” He smiled at Mabel, the barmaid, who stood at the taps just in front of them. “You wouldn’t like to hear me using bad language, would you love?”

“Why, what’ve I done now?” Then Mabel caught sight of Caulfield clinging to the edge of the group like a giant limpet. “Hallo, is this another of your boys?”

“No,” said Bluey. “He’s one of our bastards.”

Then Vern felt the touch of his arm and knew what he had feared had come. “Hallo, Vern. How’s tricks?”

Vern could feel the others waiting to see what move he would make. He was the only one who, as far as the Army was concerned, could meet Caulfield on a social level: rank called to rank, the only caste system, outside of money, that Australians had so far had to contend with. Vern remembered with what resentment the Australians had viewed the Officers Only signs outside the hotels in the Middle East, and now here was Caulfield trying to strike up a conversation on an Officers Only basis.

“Hallo, Ape.” It was the first time Vern had called him that, the name the battalion had given him two days after he had joined it; Vern, with a thought for discipline, had never referred to Caulfield by that name even in private conversation with the other men. He stood there looking at Caulfield, wondering why the latter had deliberately walked into such a situation, then suddenly he knew. Caulfield took the insult without a blink, as if he had been expecting it and was prepared for it. He had been slapped across the face with the past and he had taken it without any of the violent outburst that might have been expected. Vern knew then that he was lonely. The man had been invalided home six months before, after the Syrian campaign, and he had found that it was home no longer.

“Ah, we can let bygones be bygones, can’t we?” He licked his thick lips and smiled tentatively. “I’m another bloke altogether now.”

“A leopard can’t change his spots,” said Bluey. “Neither can an arch-bastard.”

“A very true statement, staff,” said Jack. “Your own?”

“Just made it up,” said Bluey. “Inspiration.”

Dad Mackenzie turned round and Vern was surprised at the fire in the heavy stolid face. “You were an officer and a gentleman, Caulfield, while you had a crown on your shoulder. An officer and a gentleman, by the King’s permission.” Dad Mackenzie’s grandfather had been a Glasgow Scot and his grandmother a London Jewess, and he’d inherited all the caution of both races. But he had still been one of those who had suffered at Caulfield’s hands, just as much as the reckless types like Greg Morley and larrikins like Mick Kennedy. There was no hint of caution now in Dad, just a quiet hatred that was more chilling than any display of anger. “The King doesn’t know you like we do. You’re not a gentleman, Caulfield, you’re not even an officer, because an officer is someone who deserves to be in charge of men. You shouldn’t even be in charge of dogs in the council pound.”

There was another silence, then a drunken soldier stumbled out of the crowd and bumped into Caulfield. The latter spun round, anger in his eyes ready to be turned on anyone, but the drunk put his arm about him and hiccupped loudly in his ear.

“G’day, dig. Me ol’ mate, me cobber. Everybody’s me mate to-day. Ain’t it a lovely day? It’s a lovely day to-day, not t’morrer, like the song says. Plentya beer and lotsa people. ’At’s what I like. It’s me birthday, dig. Many happy returns. Thanks. It’s me birthday and everybody’s me mate. Hoo-ray.”

He patted Caulfield on the shoulder, beamed droopily at the others, then stumbled on in search of another mate. Caulfield looked after him, then back at Vern and the others.

“You ought to have gone with him, Ape.” Mick Kennedy spoke for the first time. He had always been one of the loudest in his hatred of Caulfield, and his voice now carried far enough to attract the attention of the policeman who had just come in the door. Vern saw the policeman look towards them, and he hoped Mick Kennedy wouldn’t run true to form and start a brawl. But Mick looked as if he was quite satisfied to use his tongue this time instead of his fists. “He wanted to be your mate, Ape. You ain’t in a position to knock back offers like that.”

Caulfield suddenly threw away the air of friendliness he had brought with him, almost with an expression of relief, as if he had known from the start that it would be useless. He put his hands behind his back and rocked back on his heels; the pose was familiar to the men leaning against the bar, but it was out of place here.

“This is going to be good,” said Bluey. “Company, shun!”

“Righto,” said Caulfield. “So I made a mistake. I tried to be a good soldier, but it wasn’t your idea of what a good soldier should be. All right. But there were some of you who weren’t good soldiers, some of you who were up before me more times than I can remember, who weren’t my idea of a good soldier. Some of you had rank, but I’ll tell you now I only agreed to your promotions because there was no one else. But I’m forgetting that——”

“Generous to a fault,” said Jack Savanna.

“—Those days and those mistakes are past.” He stopped, suddenly lost, as if he had just realised he wasn’t on the parade ground and that the men in front of him couldn’t be dismissed. He brought his hands from behind his back and shoved the right one, with its stumps of fingers, into his jacket pocket. He had dropped his parade ground voice when at last he said, “I was hoping we could make a new start.”

It was Jack Savanna who answered. Vern knew that, with his rank, he was the one who should have answered for the men and while Caulfield had been talking he had been searching for the words to reply to him. But now they wouldn’t be needed. Jack, drawing himself up to his full height, his hat pushed back on his head, his sweeping moustache accentuating the curl of his lip, had taken over.

“I doubt that your brain, Caulfield, shrivelled as a piece of old copra, could understand how we feel about you. You were all right as a soldier, perhaps—at least you had guts, which not all of us profess to have. But you weren’t a man, that’s our complaint. We know something of your background, that you spent fifteen years in New Guinea before you came into the Army, and perhaps that’s to blame. I’m told that only missionaries and fools treat boongs as human beings—and you had some idea that everyone in the Army was a boong.” Jack cocked an eye at Charlie Fogarty. “You will forgive my using the term boong, Charlie? I am trying to speak in this bastard’s language.”

“Go ahead,” grinned Charlie. “In the tribe we’d call him a white boong.”

“Stay out of this, darkie!” Caulfield snapped.

The men straightened up and Vern tense, ready to step in front of Jack Savanna, expecting the latter to swing his fist into Caulfield’s furious red face. He had seen Jack in action several times when he had lost his temper; time and place meant nothing to him if he thought a swung fist was the answer needed. Caulfield seemed suddenly aware that his incautious tongue had gone too far again, and he took a step back. He was pressed against the crowd as against a wall, his eyes flickering over the men without fear but expecting them to move towards him, and Vern waited for the moment to blow up.

“Sock the bastard!” Mick Kennedy snarled.

“Pull your heads in,” Vern said, and tried to sound reasonable and not like an officer throwing his weight around. “He’s not worth the strife it would cause. There’s a copper over there.”

“You’re right, Vern.” Jack Savanna was surprisingly calm. He looked again at Charlie Fogarty. “Although we’ll hit him if you like, Charlie.”

“Skip it,” said Charlie, and looked at Caulfield with a dark, impassive face. He’s got more dignity than the rest of us put together, Vern thought.

Jack turned back to Caulfield. “You’re fortunate, Caulfield. But don’t ever make a remark like that again while we’re around. You’ve just illustrated what I was saying about your thinking everyone in the Army is a boong. It may surprise you, but to every one of us here, Charlie is just a man who’s a little more sunburned than the rest of us. But you would never be able to see it that way. You have to be a man, Caulfield, to know how to treat men properly. And you never knew how to treat us. If the boongs disliked you as much as we did, then I shouldn’t go back to New Guinea if I were you. Not now, when they could blame your death on the Japs.”

Caulfield’s face got redder, the freckles turning almost black, but before he had a chance to speak the men had turned back to the bar; and there was that little island of silence again in that sea of noise. Vern stood there waiting for the burst of temper that they all knew of old.

But Caulfield just muttered, “You’ll be sorry for this,” and when Vern looked back over his shoulder he had gone.

“I’ve been waiting to say that for two bloody years,” said Jack. “In the circumstances I thought I was remarkably restrained.”

“Too bloody restrained,” said Mick Kennedy. “I’d of jobbed him if I’d been closer to him.”

“I wanted to job him,” said Bluey. “Trouble is, my days of jobbing people are over. Even with that bung hand of his, he’d have knocked me arse-over-Bluey.” He looked wistfully into his glass. “You miss a lot when you get past forty.”

“‘I’m another bloke,’ he said.” Joe Brennan almost spat into his beer. “‘Let’s make a new start.’ Christ, what does he think we are, lovers?”

“Now in the tribe,” said Charlie Fogarty, and sipped his shandy, “we would’ve pointed the bone at him, and he’d of been dead in a week. You blokes are too civilised.”

Vern had been thinking of all they had had to put up with in the time Caulfield had been with them. The sarcastic arrogant way he had of talking to the men; the looking after his own comfort and ignoring that of those under him; the trivial rules instituted just to show his authority. The company after a while had called itself Caulfield’s Boongs, and had put up with him with good-humoured resignation. Then the good humour had begun to run dry and threats were muttered against him. On the trip to the Middle East he had headed the shark-bait list; but somehow he had landed safely in Palestine and had survived the months spent there and at Mersa Matruh. Then the battalion had gone into the Syrian campaign and he had had his hand mangled by a shell splinter, and he had been invalided home to the accompaniment of loud cheers from the men. Vern had never seen anyone hated so much, and now here was the man daring to come back and ask that the past be forgotten. Was he so thick-skinned or just blind or did he have more guts than the men, though reluctantly, had conceded him? And what had he meant by his remark that they would be sorry?

Chapter Three

JACK WATCHED Vern Radcliffe board the tram, waved at him, then turned away with the feeling of being lost that had kept recurring ever since they had first landed back at Adelaide. Vern had asked him home for dinner, and he had almost accepted. But then he had recognised the invitation for what it was, sincere but a spur-of-the-moment thought; he had thought of Dinah sharing the moments with her husband after two long years, and so he had told Vern he had a date.

Well, he’d better see if he did have a date. He crossed the road to St. James station, lined up outside the phone box and ten minutes later was dialling a number, conscious of the thick stuffy smell of the box and the belligerently impatient queue outside.

“Rita? This is Jack here.”

“Jack? Jack who?” Her voice sounded the same, light and empty as her head.

“Jack Savanna. How many Jacks do you know? They had once lived together for three months, but now she had forgotten him. He grinned to himself and patted his bruised ego.

“Jack Savanna! Well, Ah declare! How you been, huh?” Her voice had changed, after all: it had crossed the Pacific. “Long time no see, Jack, honey.”

Why did I ring her? he thought; and thought what a trap was the telephone. In the old days, when one had to write a letter there was always time for a second thought. But now: two pennies in the slot, a spin of the dial, and bingo! Why had he called her? Rita, with the blank pretty face, the pretty blank mind and the beautiful body—yes, that was why he had called her. “I’ve missed you, too, Rita, honey. How about dinner to-night, and afterwards we can talk about old times, huh?”

“Ah gee, Jack honey, if I’d only known! But I already gotta go out—I’m gonna see”—he could hear her two-stroke brain changing gears—“my aunt.”

“Your ant? Are you interested in entomology now?”

She laughed, light and meaningless as a child’s bell. “Still the same old Jack! Still making with the big words.”

Serves me right, he thought, for having designs on her body. He hadn’t taken her mind into account, and he was beaten before he had started. Suddenly the box seemed more stinking and stuffy than ever. Abruptly he said good-bye, hung up and pushed open the door.

“You been long enough, dig,” said a sailor. “Who you been ringing, MacArthur?”

Jack hunched his shoulders. “Want to make something of it, matelot?”

“I gotta ring me sheila,” said the sailor, and skipped nimbly into the box. He grinned through the glass, then turned to the phone, a red-headed, broken-nosed, freckle-faced Romeo who was sure of his girl.

Jack walked past the other people waiting to use the phone and out into Elizabeth Street again. It was a mild night with light still in the sky behind the buildings on the west side of the street. Right above him a few stars, poignant as tears, looked down at the city. A plane appeared from behind the towers of St. Mary’s Basilica, a metal angel with winking red and green light, heading north; it passed over the harbour, suddenly an angel no longer but a small black fly caught in the tangled skein of the searchlights. I should be on that, he thought, getting out of this bloody unfriendly city. And then was angry at himself for being sorry for himself.

He looked about him, aware now of a change in the atmosphere of the city he had loved so well. There was that air of electric nervousness that came upon all cities at this time of day during the war. In London and Cairo and Berlin, and in all cities within reach of the bombers, there would be fear behind the nervousness; here in Sydney and in Melbourne, probably New York too and San Francisco, there was just the hope of a good time. Girls stood waiting for their men, looking at other men, wondering if they were better prospects than their date for to-night: modesty had become a wartime casualty and had been replaced by the roving eye and the calculating mind. Couples walked arm-in-arm out of the great green bed of Hyde Park, flushed with love-making and stained with grass juice. An American sailor, his arm about a brazenly successful girl, stood on the kerb waiting confidently for the cab that would come to him past all the hailing Australian arms. The city had changed all right.

He began to walk along Elizabeth Street, aimless and lost in the city that was his home, big Jack Savanna who was always so definite and self-possessed and impregnable. Then he heard the music coming across the park and suddenly he remembered the Anzac Buffet. There would be girls there, plenty of them, all dedicated to the enjoyment of the boys on leave. He turned and began to hurry across the park, almost as if he had to get there before the supply of girls ran out. He wasn’t drunk, he’d had only four beers with the boys in the Marble Bar, but he suddenly had the pleasant lightness of feeling, that warmth that makes the world a good place that must be enjoyed to the full, and his low mood of the last quarter-hour had suddenly gone like the last light of day behind the buildings across the street. He was determined to enjoy to-night.

He saw the girl as soon as he entered the large hall where the band was bouncing out Chattanooga Choo-Choo. She was sitting in a deep chair, turned away from him, and all he could see was the smooth blonde hair, almost silvery and suggesting metal in its polished sleekness. He stood for several minutes watching the blonde head, waiting for it to turn and let him see the face that went with it. He had seen plenty of girls who looked like Miss Australia from the back and like the wreck of someone’s grandmother from the front. To-night had suddenly become too good to spoil by being in a hurry. Then he saw an R.A.A.F. corporal coming from the other side of the room, heading for the blonde in the chair: the expression on the corporal’s face, the way he was smoothing his hair, the hand straightening his tie, told Jack that the girl could not be too bad. He had to take a chance, otherwise he might miss out and spend the rest of the night kicking himself.

He beat the corporal by a good two yards, without appearing to hurry, lazy and casual, the approach that had been so successful in the past. “Would you care to dance?”

She looked up at him, and he could guess at the disappointment of the corporal behind him. She was even better than he had expected, much better: with the all-out war effort, beauty standards had been raised in the leave centres. Perhaps her beauty had frightened away most of the other men, because a girl as good-looking as this must surely be booked for the night and she was just waiting for her boy-friend to arrive. Her face was an original one: nothing about it had been borrowed from film stars or cover girls or beauty salons. The bones were strong yet fine, and her skin glowed like a golden peach bursting with sun. Her mouth was heavy, but the lipstick covered only the natural outline of her lips: the passionate mouth couldn’t be wiped off with a handkerchief or a kiss. Her eyes were dark, too dark really for the colour of her hair, though the latter looked natural, and when she looked up at him they shone with a soft amused gleam under their heavy lids.

She nodded to the girl she had been talking to, and stood up. She was taller than he had expected, but not too tall; big though he was himself, he didn’t like women to look as if they could swing an axe or carry a banner at the head of an army.

The silver-haired girl was wearing a light grey jersey frock with short sleeves, and it showed off the deep tan she still retained from summer. It also showed off her body. With the blonde sleekness of her head and the deep tan he had somehow expected her to be the athletic type all the curves slim and firm and almost a little muscular. He had seen that type of girl in Russell Flint paintings and on the beaches, healthy and vital and always somehow a little disappointing, as if one knew all their passion had dried out with the exercise in the sun. But this girl was built like a woman, soft yet firm, and the sun had only kindled her passion.

“Do I pass?” She danced with a lazy sort of rhythm, as if her body was tired and she would rather be in bed.

He grinned, and they danced for a while, easily and well: they could have been old partners. “I’m Jack Savanna.”

“Silver Bendixter,” she said, and saw his eyebrows go up. “You have heard of me?”

“I used to read the Society columns in the Sunday papers in the Red Shield hut,” he said. “One read anything and everything in the Middle East.”

“Fame, fame.” She shook her head slowly and a lock of the blonde hair fell down. When she looked up again she was smiling and he was surprised at how soft and young-looking her face had become with its unexpected dimples. “Are you sure it was me you read about, or my mother or my sister?”

“It could have been all three. The Bendixters are pillars of Sydney Society, aren’t they?”

“Don’t sneer.”

“Forgive me. It’s my proletarian upbringing.” Then he said, “There was a fellow in our unit who knew you, or said he did. Tony Shelley.”

“A stinker, if ever there was one,” she said calmly. “A rat, and a friend of my sister.”

“I didn’t like him, either.” He twisted his head to look at the hand resting on his shoulder. “Are you engaged or anything?”

She held up bare fingers. “Or nothing. I’m completely unattached, if that will put your mind at rest. Were you thinking of proposing, or don’t the proletariat propose to pillars of Society?”

“Oh, we do, by all means. It’s the proletarian blood that keeps Society alive. But that wasn’t why I asked.”

She smiled. “Is something the matter, then?”

“Yes. A girl as beautiful as you shouldn’t be unattached. I’m prying into your private affairs and I’m unashamed about it, but have you lost a man in the war?”

“No. I’m just unattached, that’s all.”

There was a faint note of bitterness in her voice, but he didn’t comment on it. He decided he was going to learn all there was to know about this girl, and there would be time. He grinned down at her, liking the way her cheeks shadowed with the dimples as she smiled back, and he thanked his luck that dear dumb Rita had had a date with her “ant.”

“In The Mood” finished, then there was “Dolores.” After that a girl got up before the band and wailed that she didn’t “Wanna Set The World On Fire”; and didn’t. Songs hadn’t been particularly inspired during the war, and everyone was still waiting for something resembling the great favourites that had come out of the last war. The dance tempo had become bouncier since Jack had last danced in Sydney, and the floor quivered like the bruised back of some great beast. A sailor and a girl, both chewing gum as if gasping for air, jived in a corner, completely isolated in their own little world of twisted limbs, vibrating muscles and communion of intellect. A girl and a soldier went by, he plodding in his heavy boots as if on a route march and she doing her best to avoid being crippled. By a doorway an Australian private and an American corporal were arguing, the Australian red in the face and the American looking as if he wanted no part of the argument.

After the fourth dance she said, “We’re supposed to circulate. We girls, I mean.”

“Do you really want to dance with someone else?”

She smiled and shook her head. “Would you like to take me home, or would that spoil your evening?”

“I haven’t eaten yet. Have you?”

“Then we’ll have dinner together at home. I’ll get my coat.”

By a miracle he managed to get a cab, and twenty minutes later they drew up outside the Bendixter home in a quiet street in Darling Point. They pushed open the big iron gates and walked up the drive. A line of poplars supported the night sky and behind the house there was the dark mass of other trees. The house itself shone faintly in the starlight, white and square like some huge tomb.

“Not a bad place at all,” said Jack. “What is it, a branch of Parliament House?”

“It’s nothing much,” said Silver, “but we call it home.”

Jack stopped and looked at the house. “It’s top heavy. It looks as if someone got big ideas only after the foundations were down.”

“Are you always so critical of the homes of girls you meet?”

“The only other girl I’ve taken home lived in a tent,” he said. “She was a Bedouin I met in Gaza.”

“I must be a disappointment. Your life’s been so full of romance.”

They went up the steps to a terrace and crossed to the front door. Silver took out her key.

“No butler?” said Jack. “Not even a maid?”

“Nobody at all. We have a cook and a maid, and a gardener who doubles as chauffeur. But they’re all down at our place at Bowral at present. They’ll be back to-morrow, when my mother comes home. In the meantime, there’s just my sister and me—and God knows where she is.”

Inside the hall, with the light on, Jack looked around at the sumptuous furnishings. “All this from a few mob of sheep, eh?”

“And timber and mines and shipping and a hundred other things.” She tossed her coat on a chair and led the way out to the back of the house. “My dad was a fine man, but he couldn’t help making money. He liked making it, but he made too much. In the end we were the only ones who knew how good and kind he could be. Nobody has any time for the rich in this country.” She looked back at him as they entered a large gleaming kitchen. “Or am I offending a member of the proletariat?”

“You’re talking to an ex-rich man’s son,” he said. “Your father would have known my old man. He was one of the biggest pearlers on the north-west coast”

“You lost everything only recently then?” she said. “Since the Japs came into the war?”

“No,” he said, and felt the old sadness even after twelve years. “He committed suicide when I was sixteen. Things just went wrong.”

She stopped and put her hand out.

He took it, and felt the warm sympathy in her fingers. He had noticed it several times in the hour he had been with her, a sudden softening in her that belied the polished sophistication of her looks. Being rich had spoiled her, he thought, but not entirely.

A long time later they were sitting in what Silver called the small living-room. It reeked of luxury, but on a small scale, and Jack felt at home. He lay sprawled on the lounge, his shoes off and his webbing belt thrown on the floor. She had taken his coffee cup from him and put it on a small table with her own. She lit a cigarette for him, lit another for herself, kicked off her shoes, sat down in a deep chair and drew her feet up under her.

“When did you last have some home life?”

“Too long ago. I’ll tell you about it some other time.” He waved his hand, throwing the subject away as if it were some foul thing that had unexpectedly clung to his fingers. “Sit over here.”

“There’ll be time for that later,” she said, and sat looking at him for a while. “You’d be handsome if it weren’t for that damned great broom under your nose.”

“This?” He fondled his moustache. “No other girl has complained.”

“Not even the Bedouin?” she said. “Why do you wear it?”

“Vanity. I liked to be noticed.”

She laughed, stubbed out her cigarette and slid off her chair on to the lounge beside him. “People notice you, all right. I saw you as soon as you came into the Buffet. I wondered how long it would be before you asked me to dance. If you hadn’t I’d have asked you.”

“You’d have circulated, eh?” he said, and kissed her.

Then her sister came in. “Don’t mind me, go right ahead! I shan’t peek.”

Silver drew back. “My sister has a one-track mind. Mamie, this is Jack Savanna.”

They were sisters, there was no doubt of that, though one was as dark as the other was fair. Mamie was not as tall as Silver, but her body had the same womanliness and her face the same good bonework. Even the eyes and mouths were alike. But there was a looseness about Mamie that wasn’t there in Silver; not only in the face and body, but one sensed it also in the character. Then he remembered it was Mamie Bendixter that Tony Shelley had known, and he was surprised at how glad he was. He pressed Silver’s arm and stood up.

“My!” said Mamie. “So big!”

“In his stockinged feet too,” said Silver. “Six feet three, all man, and I saw him first.”

Mamie smiled up at him: there were no dimples and her smile was somehow not as soft. “Silver has a complex about me. She thinks I want to get my claws into every man I see.”

“Don’t you?” There was no rancour in Silver’s voice: she sounded almost a little bored.

“Not all, sister dear,” said Mamie. “Only those with red blood in them.”

“We’ll take a blood test of him later,” said Silver. “Right now I’m just getting acquainted with his surface features.”

“And they’re not bad,” said Mamie. “Except for his moustache.”

Jack at last managed to get a word in. The only time he was defeated in conversation was when he was in the company of two females. It was gratifying to think that they might fight over him, but he had already made up his mind whom to crown the winner. He chipped in before Mamie began thinking she had got a foothold on him.

“Silver and I have already discussed the moustache,” he said. “She also happens to have got her claws into me a couple of hours ago.”

The smile stayed around Mamie’s mouth, but died in her eyes. My God, he thought, she’s a mean, vicious, dissipated bitch; I can believe everything they say about her. Without getting her name in the papers for anything more notorious than having lunch at Prince’s, she had become a legend of sin in Sydney. Her own circle had known her for years, and cab drivers too, and the odd anonymous men she had picked up off the streets: in the last two and a half years, with men talking among themselves as they did, she had probably become known to half the Army. Navy and Air Force. She read his mind and the smile widened, completely shameless.

“You’ve heard of me, have you, Jack?”

“He’s in the same unit as Tony Shelley,” said Silver. “Dear drunken, perverted Tony.”

“That’s what we call him,” said Jack. “Pervy B. Shelley.”

For a moment Mamie looked as if she were going to stay and fight. The smile changed almost to a snarl and the eyes thinned dangerously. Then suddenly she changed the whole expression to a yawn. “I’m tired. I’ve been out with a Navy type who’s been at sea for ten months, so he said. You’ll be around again, Jack, or are you staying the night? Good night, then, and don’t sleep in Mother’s room. She’s coming home to-morrow.”

Then she had gone and the room seemed cleaner and fresher. Jack sat down and began to draw on his boots.

“Going?” said Silver. “Did that bitch of a sister spoil things for you?”

“I don’t like her,” he said, buckling on his belt. “But she didn’t spoil things. She just somehow made me see you in a new light.”

“Better or worse?”

“Better. I’ll be back again. I’m going to spend the rest of my leave with you. Do you work at all?”

“Since the Japs came into the war, yes. I’m secretary to a doctor friend of ours in Macquarie Street. Some people wouldn’t call it war work, but it depends on the way you look at it. Sid Hugo is overworked, like all doctors now, and I do my best to help him.” She had spoken a little forcibly, but suddenly she smiled and made a deprecating gesture. “I’m sorry, I’m always defending myself. It’s a habit of the conscientious rich.”

“Lunch to-morrow, then.” They were at the front door now and he took her in his arms. “Is Silver really your name?”

“Don’t you like it?” And when he nodded, she said, “Dad was nicknamed Silver, because of his hair and, I suppose, because of his money, too. When I came along and had hair exactly like his——” She looked up at him, frankly pleased. “I’m glad you like it, Jack.”

“It suits you.” He kissed her, and was aware of the passion in her. The night hadn’t ended as he’d originally planned, but he had no regrets. The future, compared with the prospect of a few hours ago, looked better than to-night could ever have been. It was the first time he could remember meeting a girl and thinking beyond the next morning. “Good night, Silver.”

It seemed that he had been saying good night to women and leaving them all his life and would be for ever. Even when he had been living with Rita they had both known that one night he would walk out and not come back. He could not do without women, but for as long as he could remember he had been frightened of their hold on him.

He had even been frightened of his mother’s hold on him. Tenuous yet strong, like the line a fisherman holds. She had played him as one plays a fish: several times he had tried to escape, but she had always known how to bring him back.

“I wasn’t cut out to be a mother, Johnny,” she had said once, “but that doesn’t mean I want to forget I am one.”

“You’re all right,” he had said, knowing he was expected to say something. She had been a vain woman and would have liked him to say she was a wonderful mother: she was greedy for any sort of praise, even when she knew it wasn’t true. But he hadn’t been able to bring himself to make the lie an extravagant one. “When is Dad coming home?”

“Next week.” She had turned to him, giving him the smile he had seen her give his father when she wanted something. “And I wouldn’t mention that Mr. Garry and Mr. Phillips have been coming here, Johnny. Your father sometimes misunderstands things, sees them in the wrong light. So we shan’t mention them, shall we?”

He had loved his father as he had never been able to love his mother. Big Pat had had boats going out of both Thursday Island and Broome, and had spent his time between both places, with four visits a year to Sydney. Then he would come down for a fortnight each time and be like a north-west storm, a Cocky Bob, blowing through the house. He had built a house on Thursday Island for them all, but Jack had been there only twice and his mother never at all. The house had never been a home, just an outpost where Big Pat slept and drank and (as his son learned later) pined in secret. The four visits a year to Sydney were like four Christmases to Big Pat’s son.

Then Big Pat had come down from Broome on one of his visits and had arrived a day earlier than expected. He had called for Jack at school, persuaded the master to let him go early, and they had caught a cab and gone home, both of them happy as schoolboys, flushed with the thought of the fortnight ahead.

“We’ll surprise your mother,” his father had said, and he had seen no danger in it because he knew both Mr. Garry and Mr. Phillips were out of town. “She’s probably in the middle of her afternoon beauty sleep. We’ll sneak in and scare the daylights out of her. Cripes!” He slapped Jack’s knee, almost breaking it. “You’ve got no idea how I like coming home to you two! One of these days you’ll find there’s no feeling like returning home.”

But his mother hadn’t been having her beauty sleep. She was in bed, all right, but there was a man with her, someone he had never seen before. His father had said nothing intelligible, just let out a roar of animal rage, and plunged into the room, slamming the door after him. Jack had stood for a moment, sick and frightened, then he had turned and walked slowly down the hall to his room.

From the window there a few minutes later he had seen the stranger staggering down the drive, his clothes hanging on him in shreds, his hands to his broken bloody face, never looking back, an adulterer who hadn’t known what had hit him. Five minutes later Big Pat had come into his son’s room.

“I was wrong, son,” he had said, and, unbloodied and unscathed, he had looked more broken than the man who had just gone stumbling down the drive. “You can’t win, after all.”

Then he had gone downstairs and locked himself in his study and begun to drink. Two hours later, when they heard the shot and Jack had burst the door in, he was dead. Big Pat lay among a litter of bottles and photographs and letters, and in a pool of blood that spread to touch the bottles and stain the photographs and letters. Jack would never forget that sight of the wreckage of his father’s life.

His mother had looked in the room past him and then, the only womanly decent thing she had ever done, she had fainted. He had closed the door quietly on his father, stepped over his mother with only a hateful glance at her and left her to the care of the gardener and his wife, and had walked out of the house and down the road to the home of the doctor who had brought him into the world. Old Dr. Cotterell, who had known what was going on, had opened the door and from the look on Jack’s face had guessed at tragedy. But his guess had been only half right. He had cried out in shock and grief when Jack told him Big Pat had killed himself and not his wife.

Jack had never gone back to his mother. At first, out of remorse, she had come pleading to him to return; then after a while her vanity had got the better of her again and she gave up chasing him. Big Pat had died in a hurry, without expecting to, probably without meaning to, if he hadn’t been so blind with anger or sorrow or drink or perhaps all three. When it came time to settle his affairs it was found he had over-expanded and in doing so had borrowed right and left. He had left little but goodwill and a fleet of half-paid-for luggers that added up only to a man’s dreams. In solid cash they meant very little.

Jack’s mother had married again, not Mr. Garry nor Mr. Phillips nor the bloody stranger but a French woolbroker, and had gone to live in Paris. Whether she was still there, he didn’t know nor care. Whatever the Germans did to her couldn’t be worse than what she had done to his father.

And so because of his mother and because he would always remember his father’s last words—you can’t win—he had spent his life running away from women. Well, not running away from them immediately, but only when he had begun to fear they were getting a hold on him.

Good night, Silver, and she had five more days in which to strengthen her hold on him. For she did have a hold on him, he admitted, even after only four hours and two kisses. And sitting on the ferry edging its way past the wartime boom defences in the outer harbour, going over to Manly where an understanding cousin had lent him his flat for the eight days of his leave, he further admitted that perhaps this time he wouldn’t be so keen to run away. The war, that had ruined so many futures, had begun to make him think of his.

This return to Sydney, to the welcome that wasn’t there for him, had made him realise for the first time just how lonely he was. His father had been right, there was no feeling like returning home. But one needed a welcome, if the feeling was to mean anything.

They had lunch the next day at Prince’s. They sat close to a table that was fast becoming famous as the command post of certain American war correspondents covering the New Guinea front, and behind a table that was already famous as the command post of a genteel lady who covered the Society front. Gay young things were being industriously gay, keeping one eye on each other and one eye on the door in case a photographer appeared. Matrons pecked at their food like elegant fowls, also eyeing each other and waiting the advent of a photographer. Two suburban ladies from Penshurst, having a day out in Society, sat toying with their food and wishing they had gone to Sargent’s, where they could have had a real bog-in for less than half the price. Aside from Jack and the American correspondents, there were only one or two other men in the place, and they looked as uncomfortable as if they had been caught lunching in an underwear salon. Australian men still hadn’t learned to be at ease when outnumbered by women.

Silver told Jack she had to go to a meeting that night. “It’s some sort of bond rally that my mother has organised for business girls. David Jones’ have lent their restaurant. Everyone has tea and sandwiches, then this war hero gets up and says something. After that, the idea is that the girls all rush up and buy war bonds.”

“I thought they’d rush up and lay themselves at the feet of the war hero. It has better possibilities, I mean as a spectacle.”

“Well, anyway, that cuts out dinner to-night,” she said. “Unless you want to wait until after the meeting.”

“I’ll come along and eat tea and sandwiches. Maybe afterwards, just to set the girls an example, I’ll rush up and throw myself at the war hero.”

That evening, shortly after the stores had closed, he met her outside David Jones’. They went into the big gleaming store and, in a lift crammed with chattering females who looked with an appreciative eye on Jack and a critical one on Silver, they went up to the restaurant floor.

As soon as they entered the large high-ceilinged restaurant Jack saw the war hero. “You mean he’s the one who’s supposed to inspire these girls to save their money for war bonds? He’s never saved a penny in his life! I’ve kept him in spending money ever since we joined the Army on the same day.”

“Who is he?” said Silver. “My mother’s a bit on the vague side. She couldn’t remember his name.”

But before Jack could tell her, the war hero had broken away from the group around him and come plunging towards them. “You old bastard, Savanna! What are you doing here?”

“After you speak, I get up and say a piece,” said Jack. “They want the girls to get both sides of the question. You, you bludger!” he said elegantly, and shook his head disgustedly. He turned to Silver. “This is Sergeant Morley, V.C. Miss Bendixter.”

He was glad to see that Silver remained cool and didn’t gush. “My, we are honoured to-night. A real live V.C. winner.”

“I’ll say this for him,” said Jack. “Most of them don’t stay alive.”

Greg Morley’s black eyes were bright with light and his thin face was flushed under its tan. He’s just like a big kid, thought Jack. Even the thin brown face had a suggestion of boyishness about it: the features seemed thrown together above the mobile mouth, as if they had never settled into a mature countenance. He was good looking, but in a way one could never remember: there was a suggestion of impermanence, of possible change, about his face, as if when one saw him next he might have changed beyond recognition. And his face, like a young boy’s, showed every emotion.

“I’m glad I stayed alive for this,” he said, throwing an arm towards the room, laughing with a mouthful of bright white teeth. “I’m lapping it up! You should have been a hero, Jack.”

“God forbid,” said Jack. “Is Sarah here?”

“She’s over there with the mob,” Greg said. “I’ve got my own bodyguard of Army Public Relations blokes, War Loan johnnies, a photographer from D.O.I. The works, all for Greg Morley!”

“What are you going to talk about to-night?” said Silver.

“God knows.” Greg couldn’t have been more cheerful: he wasn’t a modest hero to be frightened by public adoration. “They’ve written it for me. All I have to do is deliver it.”

“What are you doing next week?” said Jack. “Hamlet?”

But Greg couldn’t be dented. “Come and meet Sarah and the old duck who’s organising this. You’ll love her, Jack. Doesn’t know a bee from a bull’s foot about the war, but you’d think she was Lady Blamey.”

“My mother,” said Silver with mock reverence, but Greg had already left them, plunging back towards his bodyguard and the centre of interest. One of the bodyguard detached himself from the group and came towards them. He ignored Silver and looked up at Jack.

“What are you doing here?” He was a lieutenant with neat wavy hair, a soft round face and an air of authority he was just trying out. “This is a bond rally for business girls, not the Anzac Buffet. You won’t find what you’re looking for here.”

“When you speak to me address me by my rank,” said Jack, and wondered how many bonds it would sell if he smacked the lieutenant here and now. In the past he had several times felt like hitting officers, but had been restrained by second thoughts for which he had later despised himself. But if this officer went too far, there mightn’t be a second thought this time. “And speak to me again like you just have, and I’ll drop you down the lift well. Pips or no pips.”

The officer’s round face seemed to get even rounder, and his air of authority almost choked him. “What’s your name and Army number? I’ll fix you, my friend——”

Jack looked down at him from his full height, past the bristling moustache that stuck out like the horns of an angry bull. “Just step aside, mister, and allow me to escort Miss Bendixter through to join her mother.”

The lieutenant stepped back, his mouth open but empty of words, and Jack and Silver moved on across the room. “You would have hit him, wouldn’t you?” Silver said. “Or thrown him down the lift well.”

“Certainly. Don’t you think he asked for it?”

“I suppose so. But here! Do you always choose such crowded places for your assassinations? And when you’re with your lady friends? I felt a little like some floosie from Paddington”

He stopped and looked down at her. “For that last remark, I should drop you down the lift well. I don’t know why, but one thing I hadn’t expected from you was snobbishness.”

She said nothing for a moment, and he thought she was going to walk away from him. Then she put her hand in his and suddenly he was aware of a new intimacy between them. It was as if they were old lovers who had patched up a quarrel, and there was none of the awkwardness that would have been natural in view of their short acquaintance. “I’m sorry, Jack. That was something I should never have allowed myself even to think. My apologies to the girls in Paddington.”

Then a grey-haired handsome woman, better dressed than anyone else in the place, came steaming towards them. “Silver! My God, I thought you were never going to arrive!” She looked up at Jack. “So this is our war hero! So big and handsome, too! We should sell a hundred thousand pounds’ worth of bonds to-night. I wish all our heroes were like you. What did you win?”

“The Melbourne Cup,” said Jack. “Only man ever to do it. It’s always been won by a horse before.”

Silver patted her mother’s arm. “This is not the war hero, darling. This is Jack Savanna.”

“Oh, he’s with you?” said Mrs. Bendixter, and it was a long time since Jack felt he had been so neatly dropped over-board. Mrs. Bendixter looked about her. “Then where is he? You’d think he’d be on time, even if he is a hero. Have you seen Smithy?”

A small pony-faced woman materialised out of nowhere. She wore an expression of dedicated enthusiasm: the war had been the first cause big enough in which to lose herself. When peace came she would need rehabilitating as much as the men who had fought on the battle fronts.

“You wanted me, Mrs. Bendixter?” Even her voice was enthusiastic, a thin reedy trumpet blowing the national anthem. “Such a crowd! We should sell enough bonds tonight to buy at least one bomber!”

“All we need,” said Jack. “One more bomber, and the war is won.”

He felt Silver kick his leg and when he looked down at her she was frowning severely at him. But Miss Smith’s attention had been hauled in by Mrs. Bendixter.

“Where’s this war hero, Smithy? We must get started soon. We have to go on to a bridge party after this for the war widows——”

“Orphans,” said Miss Smith, glowing with charity. “And it’s not a bridge party, it’s a musicale.”

“A musicale? Well, that’s good. I can doze off. My God, I’m so tired!” Mrs. Bendixter put a hand to her forehead, suffering from war fatigue. “Well, where is this man? Hasn’t he turned up yet?”

“He’s here, Mrs. Bendixter! You’ve already met him. Sergeant Morley, the thin dark boy——”

“The boy with those lovely teeth! Why didn’t someone say so? My God, if I wasn’t here to organise things, they’d never get started!” Mrs. Bendixter turned round as a newspaper photographer came up. “Hallo, you’re from the Sunday Telegraph, aren’t you? Take me full face this time. Last week I was in profile and I looked like General MacArthur.”

Then Greg Morley came back, dragging a pretty girl with honey-coloured hair after him. “You remember Sarah, Jack! Look after her, will you? I’ve got to go up and do my act now.”

Then he had gone plunging away, surrounded by his bodyguard, the whole group moving towards a platform at the end of the hall, headed by Mrs. Bendixter with Miss Smith in close tow.

“Looks like Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort,” said Jack. “Is there no band?” Then he took Silver’s arm. “Sarah Morley, this is Silver Bendixter.”

Sarah smiled and shook her head in wonder. “Your mother puts up with this sort of bedlam often?”

“Every day,” said Silver. “She loves it.”

“So does your husband,” Jack said to Sarah. “Look at him up there. Clark Gable never felt more at home.”

Greg was up on the platform, beaming round at the thousand or more girls below him. Mrs. Bendixter was speaking, reading from a typescript that Miss Smith had shoved into her hands, but she was standing too close to the microphone and her voice was just wave after wave of almost unintelligible blasts. Nobody minded, because nobody had come to listen to Miss Bendixter anyway. And Jack somehow felt sure that Greg at the microphone would be as practised as any crooner.

“His life is complete,” Sarah Morley said. “He’s waited all his life for these past few days.”

“I suppose you’ve been besieged by the newspapers?” said Silver.

“And radio, and the newsreels, and the magazines, and war loan committees. It’s like being married to a public property, a new statue or something.” There was no spite or rancour in Sarah’s voice it was as if she had succeeded in detaching herself completely from the whole business. She looked at Jack. “The surprising thing is, he’s terribly modest with me about it all. He hasn’t told me a thing about what he did to get the V.C All I know is what I read in the papers. Was he really as brave as they said?”

“He was.” There was no mockery now in Jack’s voice: he had seen the incident and he knew Greg deserved the honour he had got. “We’d been held up for an hour by these two machine-gun posts. They had us as nicely taped as I ever hoped to be taped. We were stuck behind some rocks on the bank of the Litani River.” As he spoke the whole rocky sunbaked Syrian countryside came back to him, and he felt suddenly nostalgic. The campaign had been tougher and more important than the outside world, for some political reason, had been told. The Vichy French had fought with the same whole-hearted hatred as the Germans had in the Western Desert. But after the armistice, camped among the olive groves in the shadow of the sharp-ridged mountains, bathing in the warm Mediterranean, loving the dark-eyed Lebanese beauties, when one could get them away from their hawk-eyed parents. Syria had become the first piece of territory worth fighting for that they had so far met. Jack had liked Syria and one day hoped to go back. “I didn’t see Greg start out, I don’t think any of us did, but the next thing we knew he was across the river and going up the opposite bank. He took those two machine-gun posts on his own. He threw in grenades and then went in and used his bayonet. We were still on the other side of the river and it was like sitting in the dress circle watching a film, the sort of film that excites you but that you don’t believe in. When he’d finished he stood up, grinning all over his face just like he is now, and yelled back at us, ‘Righto, what are you bastards waiting for?’ It’s the first and only time I’ve ever heard a man cheered while we were in action. Yes, Sarah, he was really brave.”

“I’m glad,” she said. “It makes me feel better for him.”

“What do you mean?” said Silver.

“Nothing,” Sarah smiled, her grey eyes looking a little tired. “It’s been all a little confusing these past few days, married to Public Hero Number One.”

“It can’t have been much of a reunion for the two of you,” said Silver. “I mean, no privacy. So little time to yourselves.

“It’s been like spending our honeymoon on Central Station,” Sarah said. “I’m afraid to take my clothes off for fear the doorbell will ring again.”

“That wouldn’t worry Greg, would it?” said Jack. “He’d welcome them all, naked or not.”

Sarah nodded. “He was interviewed the other day by the Herald in his underpants. He was never what you’d call self-conscious. I must have had a too modest upbringing, like to be fully dressed in front of strangers. Anyhow, we’re escaping for a couple of days. We’re going up to Katoomba to-night.”

Greg had now begun to speak. Just as I thought, Jack said to himself. Bing Crosby, Clark Gable, Richard the Lion-Heart, all rolled into one. You’d think he’d been doing it all his life. Listen to the microphone technique, better than I could ever use it and I’ve had years of practice. Look at the charm flowing out like syrup out of a barrel. And just the right touch of modesty to season the devil-may-care attitude. I like the bastard and I admire him, but in a moment I’m going to be sick right in the middle of Mrs. Bendixter’s bond rally.

“I’m going downstairs for a breath of air,” he said. “I don’t want any bonds to-day, thank you.”

“I’ll come with you,” said Silver. “We can go and have dinner now.”

“What about helping your mother?”

“She won’t need me. It was just in case the hero was unmarried. Sometimes I’m expected to find him a girl, or in the last resort go out with him myself. But Greg’s all fixed.” She smiled at Sarah. “Have a nice second honeymoon, Sarah. No photographers or visitors.”

“Take your clothes off and leave them off,” said Jack.

Sarah smiled at them. “I’ll do my best. And thank you. I’ll say good night to Greg for you.”

They left Greg and his bated-breath audience and went down in the lift and out into Elizabeth Street. The air was pleasantly cool and the crowds in the streets had thinned out. A breeze came across the park, brushing the leaves like a restless child, and the moon struggled to free itself from a net of clouds.

“Sarah looked rather tired,” said Silver, “as if she’s been under something of a strain.”

“Living with Greg under any circumstances would be a strain on a woman.”

“Sometimes you sound as if you don’t like him.”

“I do like him.” He had come to cherish the friendship of several of the men in the last two years, particularly Greg and Vern Radcliffe. He had been self-sufficient before the war, having no close men friends and needing none. But of late, knowing these men in arms with him, exchanging confidences with them, having them sometimes depend on him, he had become aware of a feeling of selflessness that had given him more pleasure than he could remember in his dealings with men before. At one time he had laughed at the Australian religion of mateship, the spirit of fraternalism that was evident in so many movements in the country’s history. If he hadn’t yet succumbed to it completely, he had at least stopped laughing. He had recognised it as one of the few things of constant value in a world of changing values. “I have a great affection for the irresponsible bastard. But that’s his trouble, he’s too irresponsible.”

“You sounded like a good responsible type to-night, when you were going to sock that officer.” She stopped walking and stared at him, then she moved on again. “I believe you would have, too. You’re a queer mixture. Jack. Sometimes you sound too cynical to care about anything. And other times——” She made a hopeless gesture with her hand. “Remind me to think twice if ever you ask me to marry you.”

“I’ve never asked anyone yet,” he said.

“Oh, pardon me for being so forward!” She had regained her poise, was cool and slightly mocking again. “I’m so used to being asked, I just take it for granted.”

He grinned, losing his dark mood. “Let’s have dinner, before I take to beating you. I’m a patient man——”

“Like hell, you’re patient,” she said, and put her arm in his and smiled up at him: the dimples took all the cool mockery out of her face and made her young and lovely. He pressed her arm tightly against his body, feeling it like a soft link in a chain she was winding about him, and they walked up through the cool electric night, on the verge of love in the city that was just experiencing its first epidemic of lust.

When they had finished dinner she looked at her watch. “It’s still only twenty-past eight, a young night. What would you like to do now?”

“Go to bed with you,” he said, and somehow succeeded in making the words not so brutal and vulgar and selfish.

“With anyone else, that could have spoiled a lovely evening.” She reached across the table and put her hand on his: in the pressure of her fingers he could feel her desire answering his. “But I’m not going to any cheap hotel room. I’m not like my sister. I have a distaste for the sordid.”

“I have the loan of a flat at Manly.” He signalled for the waiter and tipped that surprised worthy as liberally as any American who had come into the place: everyone benefited from love, even waiters. “We’ll go down to the Quay and catch a ferry.”

He kissed her as they rode on the outside of the ferry, with the cool breeze stirring her hair like wisps of spun silver, and with a quartet at the rear of the ferry serenading the moon with the Maori Farewell. Behind them the city was dark in its brown-out, and as they crept out past the defence boom he had a sudden shivering feeling of unreality. His arm tightened about her.

“It’s hard to believe,” he said. “In Alex and Haifa and Beirut, yes. But not here.”

“I get scared stiff at times,” she said. “What if we should lose the war?”

The ferry was rolling now, meeting the swell coming in through the Heads. They were on the lee side of the boat, looking back up the moonlit harbour. Other ferries, dark as their own, crept like cats from shore to shore. Against the far stars the Bridge was like some great night-beast in mid-leap. Only an occasional shaded car light showed, peering furtively, then quickly disappearing. Then ahead of them they saw the dancing tops of the pine trees that identified Manly.

“Don’t let’s talk about losing,” he said. “There are more important things to think about to-night.”

“Spoken like a true man,” she said, and kissed him lightly.

Chapter Four

THIS TRIP to Katoomba looked as if it was going to be a waste of time. Greg lay on his back staring up at the ceiling and tried to remember what he’d imagined his homecoming would be like. Not the public homecoming, the photographers and the reporters and everyone congratulating him. That had been just as he’d expected it and there had been no disappointment there. But though he’d enjoyed it all, that wasn’t what he had come home for. He had come home to be with Sarah again, to revive the past and all he had remembered in the lonely nights overseas but the past hadn’t caught up with him and sometimes, like now, he felt as lonely as he had ever felt in the Middle East.

He lay beside her now and said, “What’s the matter, hon?”

“How do you mean?”

“You know how I mean. Have I got repulsive or something while I’ve been away?”

“No.”

“You used to like it once. What’s got into you?”

It was bright moonlight outside. A swathe of it, slanting through the window lay across the bed. Sarah too was lying on her back staring at the ceiling, unmoving as if asleep, and he had the feeling she was hardly listening to him. The side of her face towards him was in deep shadow and all he could see was the silhouette of her profile. She had a good face, especially in profile: there was character in the nose and chin, a hint that she could be depended upon.

“I’ve been wondering how to tell you,” she said at last. “Greg, I don’t love you any more.”

He heard her say the words quite distinctly and he knew what they meant: it wasn’t as if she had gabbled something in a foreign language. But he was so totally unprepared for what she had said, she might just as well have not spoken at all. He just lay looking at her, listening with the back of his mind to a woman laughing somewhere in the hotel.

Sarah turned her head on her pillow. “I suppose that’s a shock to you?”

He sat up, leaning on one elbow. “Don’t joke like that, Sarah!”

“I’m not joking, Greg.” Her voice was calm but definite: she had always known what she wanted to say. “I’m not in love with you any more.”

He reached up quickly and switched on the bed lamp. “When did this happen, for God’s sake? It’s bloody sudden. You didn’t say anything in your letters——”

“I didn’t think I should tell you while you were away. Somehow it wouldn’t have been fair.”

“Why didn’t you tell me when I first got back?”

“It would have spoiled the other business, wouldn’t it? The fanfare, the publicity——”

“Are you narked about that? Is that the cause of the trouble?”

“I was out of love with you before you won the V.C.,” she said. “I stopped loving you six months after you sailed for the Middle East.”

He dropped back on the pillow. He felt words bubbling up inside him, but he suddenly felt too weak to say them. Somehow they wouldn’t have meant anything. He just lay in silence, aware of his own heartbeats, till she spoke again.

“Aren’t you going to say something?” Her face was turned towards him, but he didn’t look at her. “Say something, Greg. Don’t just lie there.”

“What is there to say? You’ve said about everything there is. I could start swearing at you—that would come pretty easy. But what good would that do?”

He got up and walked across the room to the dressing-table. He picked up a cigarette packet but it was empty. He could feel his hand shaking as he dropped the packet back on the dressing-table.

“Have you any cigarettes?” Even now he had to depend on her. He wished he could have done without a cigarette, but he knew he must have it. “I’m right out.”

She took one for herself from the packet on the bedside table, lit it, then threw him the packet and the box of matches. He lit a cigarette, his hand still shaking, then walked across to the window. From here he could look down one of the many gorges of the Blue Mountains. The gaunt ridges were folded into a pattern of deep shadow and bright moonlight, and across the gorge a steep cliff-face shone like a wall of green ice. Down in the far valley the long beam of a car’s headlights came and went, tentatively, like a blind man’s tapping stick. The distant white beam only made the countryside more lonely.

“Hadn’t you better put on your gown?” said Sarah. “There’s no point in getting pneumonia.”

He had been so used to her looking after him, he picked up the gown now and put it on almost automatically. “Is there someone else? How long’s it been going on?”

“There’s no one else.” She was sitting up in bed now, propped against the pillow. One arm was folded across her breast, the hand holding the elbow of the other arm. She was smoking, much more calmly than he was, not attacking the cigarette as he was but almost enjoying it. “I’ve been faithful to you that way. Which was more than you were to me.”

He didn’t answer that.

“I’m sorry, Greg. Really. This hasn’t been much of a homecoming for you.”

“Yeah, that’s the bit that worries me, the spoiled homecoming.” There was sarcasm, but little edge of anger to his voice. He was still too let-down to feel anything but shock. His voice was carrying on automatically for him: it seemed to know the words for the part: “Do you want a divorce?”

“That would be the best thing, wouldn’t it? Though I don’t know what grounds we can have. Unless I leave you and you sue for restitution of conjugal rights, or whatever it is. Then the next step is desertion, I think. You can get a divorce on those grounds.”

“You’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you?”

“I’ve had plenty of time to think about it,” she said. “Eighteen months.”

He stubbed out his cigarette and went back and sat on the bed beside her. “Look, hon, are you sure you’re right about this? What makes you so sure you don’t love me? Maybe once you get used to having me around again, you’ll find you’re wrong.”

She drew on the cigarette slowly. The action suddenly made him angry, the one small thing needed to root him out of his shock, and he snatched the cigarette from her. He dropped it in the ashtray on the table beside the bed, grinding it savagely with the ball of his thumb. She looked at him for a moment, her eyes and lips narrowing, and he waited for one of her cutting remarks, one of the few things about her that had sometimes annoyed him. Then she seemed to make an effort and the tenseness went out of her face.

“This is going to surprise you, Greg,” she said. “But I’ve been thinking back and I wonder if I ever loved you. Really loved you, that is.”

He wanted to hit her, all at once hating her, but he knew dimly this was one time when he had to control himself. He was on his own here in this, the biggest crisis their marriage had ever had, and she wouldn’t help him as she had in the past. This was all his burden, and giving way to anger wouldn’t help at all. “You’re just making things up now. Why can’t you be honest? Are you trying to hurt me or something?”

“I’ve already done that. I can see that. Why should I try and rub it in? I told you I didn’t write and tell you while you were away because I wanted to hurt you the least I could.”

“Well, what do you mean, you wonder if you ever loved me? Why did you marry me?”

“I did love you in a sort of a way, I suppose. But not in the way that keeps marriages together. I think that was the trouble, Greg. Getting married. If we hadn’t married, I might have gone on loving you. The trouble with you, Greg, is you’ve never grown up. It often appeals to a girl when she hasn’t got to live with it every day. It appealed to me. I’ll admit. I always enjoyed seeing you, you were such good company. And you knew how to pay attention to a girl—even if you sometimes had trouble taking your eyes off other women.” Then she said, “That was one of the main troubles, Greg. The other women. When you had gone I started to think about them——”

“You’re not giving me any credit for having changed since those days.”

“Have you?”

He was silent, unsure himself if he had changed, remembering how much he had looked forward to women’s company when he had gone on leave to Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem and Beirut, and after a moment Sarah went on: “I don’t want to have to look after you all my life, Greg. Always having to hold our marriage together. A marriage, a good solid one, shouldn’t need holding together. It’s not some jerry-built thing that any wind can blow over. Your mother and father’s marriage, my people too, their marriages have never needed holding together. Some girls enjoy the mother role, I mean towards their husbands, but I don’t. I’d like to be a mother, but I want children, not a grown man! And what if we did have kids, Greg? Could I depend on you to help me care for them? All your life, Greg, you’ve waited for things to fall into your lap, and when they haven’t you’ve just turned around and borrowed off someone else.” For the first time she lost her calmness, and passed her hand wearily across her eyes. When she took away her hand there were tears on her cheeks. “I tried, Greg, you’ve no idea how I tried! But it’s just no use, no use at all.”

It was the first time he had ever seen her weep: even when they had said good-bye two years ago she had kept a brave face. He had been glad of that then, because he knew he hadn’t the armour to withstand her breaking up. Now she looked younger than he had ever seen her look, helpless for the first time, and he had an almost overpowering desire to take her in his arms. Instead he got up and began to walk about the room.

“I think it would have been better if you’d told me while I was away,” he said.

“Why? You might have taken it much worse than you are now.”

“Christ, how do you think I’m taking it now? Do you think it isn’t hurting me as much as it would have over there?” His hand pulled at his hair: the mobile face was almost splitting with emotion. “I still love you, hon! Just because I’m back, doesn’t alter or lessen that. Look at you now. You’re half-naked. Do you think I can’t remember what we’ve done together? Do you think I can shut my eyes and say I’m going to forget all that? I can remember you, every inch of you, and so long as you’re around I’ll go on remembering you. And unless I stay up all night, I’ve got to get back into bed with you now. If you’d told me while I was away in the Middle East, at least I wouldn’t have had to do that.”

“If that’s all you’re going to miss of me, the sex part——”

“Ah, God Almighty! Can’t you see what I’m getting at? I remember everything else about you, too. You’d be surprised at the small, no-account things a man remembers when he’s away. And likes to remember. It sounds silly now, but time and again I used to think about the day you fell in the water fully dressed at National Park. I used to laugh about that and feel good about it. It was something I loved about you, although it’s hard to explain why. I’m in love with you, hon, and I want to stay in love with you. If I’ve talked about getting back into bed with you, it’s because we both know it’s the best way of showing love.” He sat down on the bed again and twisted his face with his hands. “I realise now, that since I’ve been back I might just as well have patted your hand for all it meant to you.”

“I’m sorry, Greg.” They sat in silence for a while, both of them unaware of the cold night air coming in the open windows. Somewhere down in the gorge a night-bird cried, and on the terrace below their windows a woman giggled nervously. There was the sound of light running footsteps, high heels click-clacking on the cement, a man said hoarsely, “Come here, you little dope, I’m not going to hurt you!” then there was the sound of heavier running footsteps going away along the terrace. Then there was silence again and after a while Sarah said, “Shall we go home to-morrow?”

“Do you want to?”

“I don’t know, I like it here. It seems a pity—but you say you can’t go on sharing the same bed with me. I suppose you’re right. It doesn’t mean anything to me any more.”

He took off his dressing-gown and slowly got back into bed. Already he felt a strangeness beside her, a restraint upon himself as if he mustn’t touch her for fear she should scream. She was doing nothing to help him. Her nightgown was low cut at the neck and as she turned towards him her breasts, the breasts he knew so well and would remember, were almost completely exposed. He looked away from her and sought some relief in sarcasm.

“The double bed,” he said. “The torture rack for about-to-be-divorced couples.”

“We’d better go home to-morrow,” she said. “I’ll take some things and go and stay with Mum till your leave is up. When you go back to camp, I’ll come back to the flat.”

“There’s no need for that. We’ve got a date on Saturday night. We promised we’d go to Bluey Brown’s party.”

“Do we have to go to that? Is it so important? Haven’t you had enough of being fêted?”

“The party isn’t being put on for my benefit. And if it were, I wouldn’t be thinking about that part of it, believe it or not.” The excitement of the last few days had been completely forgotten: he suddenly wished he was a nobody. “I just don’t want people feeling sorry for a V.C. winner. I’ll be the one who’ll get the sympathy, you know that. I just don’t want people calling you a bitch.”

“I don’t deserve so much consideration,” she said slowly. “Is that what you want to call me, a bitch?”

He ignored the question because he had no answer for it: his mind was still in too much of a turmoil to begin thinking of calling her anything. “We’ll go home to-morrow and I’ll sleep in the spare bedroom. We’ll keep up appearances till I go back to camp. You won’t have to worry,” he said bitterly, “you can lock the bedroom door at night. When I’m back with the unit, we’ll see about getting a divorce.”

“You’re taking it better than I’d hoped,” she said very quietly.

He reached up and switched off the bed lamp. He turned away from her to stare at the dark wall before him, dark and blank as the future.

“You forget I’m a V.C. winner,” he said. “Brave beyond the call of duty.”

Next morning they went back to Sydney. The train wound its way down out of the mountains, threading its way through narrow culverts, skirting the edges of deep drops, passing small towns that had once been only holiday resorts and now were the dormitories of munition workers. The grey-walled gorges were as wild and deserted as they had ever been and the ranges still had the appearance of lonely sleeping beasts; but the Blue Mountains, once just a playground, were already caught up in the war. Munition works, stark and utilitarian and temporary-looking, money and materials thrown into tremendous sheds of death, were springing up all down the line. And from the train the roads seemed to be carrying little but military traffic.

The train itself was crowded, as much as it had ever been when returning from a holiday week-end. The authorities had cancelled all inter-state passenger traffic, unless one had a permit, and had asked people not to travel within the state unless their reasons were urgent. Everyone suddenly seemed to have urgent reasons for going somewhere: it was doubtful if so many people had ever moved so far so often. For the first time in years the New South Wales Government Railways looked as if they might show a profit.

By one of those unbelievable pieces of luck which seemed to be natural to him, Greg had managed to get two seats. From outside the carriage had looked packed as any cattle truck and almost as packed as any tram going home from a Saturday race meeting. They had just settled back in the seats when two young soldiers came plunging back into the compartment.

“Hey, those are our seats, dig! We just been out to get a cuppa tea. We’ve had them seats ever since we left Cowra.”

Greg made no move. “I’m sorry, dig. I’ve got a bad leg——” He tenderly felt the wound he didn’t have.

The youngster suddenly noticed the purple ribbon on Greg’s chest. “That’s all right, sarge. You’re Sergeant Morley, ain’t you? No, go on, you stay there. Me and me cobber’ll be all right. I’ll just get me kit bag. There. Well, best of luck, sarge. Look after yourself.”

When the two boys had gone Sarah whispered, “That was cheap.”

“I know,” said Greg, smiling at the woman opposite, who was looking at him with frank admiration. “I feel like being cheap to-day. Cheap and nasty and don’t-give-a-bugger-for-anyone.”

He knew that yesterday he wouldn’t have thought of taking the seats from the two kids, nor of putting on the cheap act about carrying a wound. But yesterday he had been another man, a friend to everyone: and to-day he was as badly wounded as any man who had ever stopped a bullet. But if he told that to Sarah, it would only look like another cheap bid for sympathy.

The woman opposite leaned across. “I heard the other young soldier ask if you were Sergeant Morley. You’re the Victoria Cross winner, aren’t you? That’s the ribbon there, isn’t it? I saw your photo in the papers earlier in the week.”

“Yes,” said Greg, all at once wishing he had taken off his ribbon this morning and carried it in his pocket. He glanced at Sarah, expecting her to look bored, but she smiled at the woman opposite. She moved her arm, linking it in his, and he knew then she was only keeping up appearances. For a moment he was angry, then with a sense of fairness that had once been foreign to him, he realised she was doing it for his sake. He pressed her hand, but there was no answering pressure.

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