Shame and the Captives (3 page)

One of the guards sighed, left the shade of the red gum, his rifle at the slope, and gestured to the prisoners. The six men, strung out between the gravel heap and the needful holes, put down their shovels. The other sentries took a more professional hold of their weapons. First Alice laid the tray on a tree stump, then poured six glasses,
though five of them had already been drunk from. She did not know if she wanted to wait long enough to watch them drink one at a time. She offered the tray to the nearest prisoner.

He was one of the younger ones. He had very startling wide-set eyes and handsome features, to the point of prettiness, and he made a minute bow with a few seconds of half smile on his lips.

“Watch out for him,” one of the guards called. “He's a flash pilot. Only thing is, he crashed.”

The guard uttered a momentary laugh. The young man seemed not to recognize the taunt. The prisoner stared at her with such a limpid-eyed directness she was forced to look away. It seemed the result of something that would not be soothed in her that made her avert her eyes in a landscape that belonged to her and not to him. She became convinced he would refuse to take the glass, that he would embarrass her in front of the guards. She was surprised by the small noise of his picking it up and turned her eyes back. His style of accepting the glass, of bowing and of drinking, was to Alice like the practices of a religion she had never before encountered. When he was finished, he bowed to her and replaced the glass on the tray. By then his other companions were accepting glasses, though none of them quite matched him in bearing and ceremony.

Alice had a chance to study them as they drank. Apart from the handsome boy, there were three narrow-mouthed kids who were not expressive at all, but who nonetheless made quick bows of the head when accepting the lemonade. Then came a stooping older man with a limp—as she'd observed—who obviously considered refusing the glass and delayed some seconds before seeming to find the frost on its flanks too great a temptation. His long face was a hard map to read. Last of all was a thin man about the same age as the lame one, and wearing a judicious sort of frown.

Alice felt she was learning little by reading these mute prisoners so intently. She realized she would have welcomed sneers or leering since
that would have, by contrast, made Neville somehow realer, more sharply seen. But they were prisoners in a different way from Neville. They were here and could not be interpreted. Neville was in another hemisphere yet his nature was formulated—not least by the tale of his capture. Neville wanted liberation. But what did these men want? They did not even take her lemonade with any outright gratitude, though the temperature was as high for them as it was for the other men.

An untoward sadness seized her. She felt cheated that she had studied so hard the faces of those she had been merciful to and had learned so little. She was consoled to some extent because she knew she had defeated their understanding too. But it was mercy without the reward of knowledge, a gesture that didn't earn enlightenment, a mere dimple in the day's argument between guards and shovelers.

They put the glasses back on the tray after they were finished. The guards moved in and reclaimed the day for labor, ordering the six prisoners to take up their shovels. And although these people had at one stage of their history owned every island in the Pacific except this one, the biggest and driest, here on Herman's Road they were like wisps of men. She and they were ghosts to each other, and nothing had been learned for Neville's sake.

•  •  •

Duncan Herman was a wiry fellow, smaller than his absent son, who had inherited his build from his late mother. Duncan was one of those fellows who had always been baffled by women and maneuvered edgily around them with a gruff jolliness. Now, as a widower, he had that same wary manner towards Alice. It was obvious he would never remarry; Alice had overheard him murmur to another farmer he'd met on the street in Gawell, “I've retired from the business of women.” In his system, you tried things once and if they ended halfway badly you did not attempt them again. It was an agricultural attitude and on the
level of farming had proved fairly reliable. He held no rancor against the human race—he just didn't need it greatly.

Duncan's wife had developed consumption and been operated on and put in a sanatorium in the Blue Mountains. The expense had been a burden, but Duncan had met it for two years. It was on a day after he had visited her that Mrs. Herman had died unexpectedly of a stroke. Neville had been eighteen at the time and knew that Duncan carried a vague sense of blame, convinced that a woman was a set of symptoms which in Mrs. Herman's case he had somehow set off.

Not long after Alice had met Neville at the dance in Gawell, where she had been visiting a girlhood friend, he had told her this, because—typically of a country town—there were gossips. Alice should understand, Neville insisted, that because his mother had been a town beauty, scandalmongers had talked with pursed lips about the tragic contrast between her as a girl and as a woman, and somehow had found his father to blame for the difference. But it was just really bad luck, said Neville. Okay, a bit of a mismatch, but made in good faith. None of it was Duncan's fault—according to Neville. His father was a brick, a true gentleman. Farm work had been hard on Mrs. Herman, of course, but no harder than on other women. But it did show you that farmers should marry farmers' daughters. Your average mixed livestock and grain farm could be a shock to a town girl. For it had hidden tests.

Neville was a different creature from his father. Already a recruit, and possessing the faint glamour of warriorhood, he had an arduously brilliantined head of dark hair, which somehow touched Alice, not for the reasons he would have wanted it to, but because of all the solitary effort he put into it. He had a glimmer of unmeasured possibility in his eye, and that, too, seemed poignant to Alice. It would need a great deal to happen to him before that glint of hope was snuffed out. It seemed to be great days for marriage. Soldiers' girlfriends were becoming engaged, it seemed to Alice, as a gesture towards morale.
When Neville asked her about ten o'clock on a Saturday night during a School of Arts dance, acceptance had seemed unavoidable. It was well-known from the flicks and radio serials that a soldier needed the solace of a remembered girl to soothe the harshness of army life, and on foreign fields a wife's name and picture and letters to provide him with certainty and wisdom and discretion.

“I don't want to have to chase any Pommy girls,” he told her. At that stage he thought his division would be sent to England. “They wouldn't be a patch on you.”

The very ordinariness of his sentiments had, in the circumstances, more force than if he'd quoted Wordsworth.

He was considered A1 by the army, which had condemned him to the infantry and only occasional leave; and she knew what a mixed farm was, and how to be of use on one—marriage would be a matter for her purely of changing locations from Coonamble to Gawell.

When he was home on leave, Alice and Neville married. Her mother had met Neville earlier and liked him but thought the marriage ill-advised given the state of the world—as well, Alice thought, for other, unstated reasons, whose aroma her mother had the power to release into the air rather than going to the trouble of defining them.

Alice judged her marriage a matter of sensible decision as well as infatuation. She thought sometimes that she had decided to fall in love with this young soldier, who wore a uniform which, like everything about him except his good nature, put him at a remove from his father and at a brave distance from the family tragedy. Her mother asked her if she knew the story of Neville's mother. “Don't be angry with me,” she said in a way that always and infallibly angered Alice. “You have to be careful in case he inherits that personality his father has. His father's a hermit, and his mother had bad lungs. You don't want the situation to come up where Neville goes all glum himself and keeps you and your kids secluded on the farm.”

Alice and her mother had always irritated each other, sometimes severely so. She was a blunt woman whose opinions Alice's father went to some trouble to avoid challenging. She had warned Alice about a certain bush type—the narrow and mean-fisted contrarian, and his joyless spite. But Alice was willfully certain Neville did not fit the category. Yet she knew her mother was correct in another sense in her doubt about the marriage. During the engagement, Alice was more excited, skittish, and feverish than at any other time of her life, and she realized she was enacting a version of something she had seen at the Rialto Cinema—the breezy, happy engaged girl over whom no cloud hangs. There was something in it all she herself didn't quite believe. Whether she loved Neville or not was a mystery to her. His announcements of love were compelling, however.

As for the risk of Neville becoming Duncan, she thought the contrast between them was extreme. Neville liked the picture houses, too, and said he'd come to town every night if he could. He had at least half a dozen close men friends from school and had been a good dancer at the Bachelor and Spinster Ball. He'd even brought other soldiers home with him on leave and showed Alice off to them. Her mother had come with her to the Hermans—Alice couldn't very well prevent it—and in the lounge room Neville had played the gramophone and the soldiers had taken turns dancing with Alice and her mother. Neville wasn't jealous, either, if a visitor danced with Alice. In fact, occasionally he'd chase up a few Gawell friends to play mixed doubles, Alice partnering the other fellow. Nature seemed determined not to repeat in him the characters of his parents, but to send him off on a new and healthier tangent.

Before a child was conceived, Neville was convoyed off to Egypt. That had been two and a half years before she served the lemonade to the unreadable presences on Herman's Road. Before Neville went, there had been a little time to raise questions about fertility, but they would not be answered until she saw him again. She had always
calmly seen herself, without desperate yearning, yet of her essence, as an eventual mother—but, given the circumstances, the eventuality was to be delayed. Still, she could imagine children hanging from a tree like fruit, or riding together, burlap bag for saddle, on the old plough horse Duncan kept.

T
he young man, led by desire for the farmer's wife and by what he was sure was witchery to drink lemonade rather than defy thirst, went in the camp by the name Tengan. He had been a prisoner for more than two years. As he remembered it years past, in blue dawn, far to the northwest of the target, all their cowlings and propellers had been blessed by a priest and, insofar as it counted, deities were called down to loose their favors on fliers and machines. Tengan, a city boy, was sceptical of religion but was conservative enough to feel that to ignore the ritual might bring misfortune.

The first light had promised the finest of tropic mornings, like a day three months before when the aircraft from his carrier had cracked open the sky on the enemy's holy day, and descended towards hapless airfields and ships, dominating the air and flaying the earth which—until then—another empire, the hubristic American one, had assumed was their own. That day had been just short of a jaunt. One of them had said so in the crew room after a jubilant return.

But—as they had been frankly told in flying school—they must realize they rode through the sky propelled by a fallible engine, and sitting in a barrel of volatile fuel with two temporary bombs and a
permanent cannon strapped to it. So, though in the past months their missions had proved favorable, and had included unopposed strikes against the Dutch in their supposed Indies, it was appropriate to welcome any ceremony, any cry of good luck, whether from priests or deck crew.

Tengan had not flown in China or acquired the languor and seen-it-all coolness the older fliers had. He needed to compensate, too, for his slightly girlish eyes, fine-drawn features, and sensitively wide lips, so difficult to maneuver into the ferocious slit most could manage for photographs sent home. Some severity of gaze was, however, not hard for him to adopt, because he did have a streak of zealotry in his temperament, quite irrespective of any training. He was also squadron wrestling champion. Without his knowing it, the aircraft commander on his carrier wondered whether Tengan's earnestness would survive exposure to the fallibility of some of his officers. The young pilot had not yet seen much fallibility.

This morning he lifted his plane off the deck in a state of ecstatic fervor. In a bright corner of the air, five thousand meters above a smooth sea, the aircraft of their fleet began to assemble in a series of large
V
s. Tengan took his place by his officer's wing. For two hours, they flew an uninterrupted course through skeins of clouds, which might later assemble to make an afternoon storm, and over a brilliant ocean. Then they crossed a blue slot of sea separating the two large islands that served as a marker to the target. Soon enough the mangrove coast came up beneath them and they began their descent. They swung to starboard over a great lagoon, and then banked over immense vacancies of yellow and red clay on which spaced trees made shadowings like a scatter of commas. They would sweep in a semicircle over this scrubby, inner terrain and then, unforeseen, take the port from the south, inland side.

The low-slung town and angled harbor emerged as if from the earth ahead. It was—at first sight—an objective lacking in grandeur. But according to the pronouncement of both Tengan's captain and
admiral, it was a key to the expanding world they sought. Darwin shared this with Shanghai and Manila, Honolulu and Singapore.

Flights of heavier aircraft stayed high, while other squadrons like Tengan's came down to less than five hundred meters. Tengan followed his officer to that lower altitude, and then lower still. The port with ships was sighted ahead and this side of it, the airfield Tengan's squadron was to assault. Breaking from the surface of the airfield were a few gusts of antiaircraft fire in sparse and futile black vapor. Tengan saw hangars and, wheeling on tarmac, planes intending to rise to the combat. Two hundred meters above the field he released one bomb and could see the upturned faces of men serving a small gun with almost piteous purpose. Ahead of and below him, an enemy pilot in an opened cockpit raced his plane down the field, determined to come up and make some answer to the interlopers. Very nearly as a cure for the man's innocence Tengan fired his cannons on him, and as the pilot, doomed and honorable, eked his plane a few meters into the air, both he and it were consumed by a frightful orb of fire.