Silent Parts

Finding yourself can change  the way you see the world

JOHN C H A R A L A MB OUS

John Charalambous was born and educated in Melbourne. After graduating from Melbourne State College with a teaching degree in fine arts, he studied literature and creative writing at Melbourne University. His first novel, Furies, was published by UQP in 2004, and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize Best First Book (South East Asia and South Pacific region). He lives in Glenrowan, Victoria. For more information, visit www.johncharalambous.com

Also by John Charalambous Furies

First published 2006 by University of Queensland Press PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia www.uqp.uq.edu.au © John Charalambous 2006 This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. Typeset by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group Front cover photographs (clockwise from top left) courtesy of the Australian War Memorial (negative number PO1911.002), Australian Picture Library and Getty Images. Cataloguing in Publication Data National Library of Australia Charalambous, John, 1956-. Silent parts. ISBN 0 7022 3562 8 (pbk). ISBN 0 7022 3818 5 (ebook). I. Title. A823.4

Acknowledgments

Along the way this book was improved by the attentions of a number of people. I’m indebted to my wife Evalyn not only for encouragement and support, but also for her astute suggestions. I’m similarly grateful to the novelist and poet Ian Irvine/Hobson who talked me through the character dynamics and implications of the story. Further thanks must go to Linda Arnel for advice on the French language, to Neville Clark for his overview of historical and military matters, and to Anna Crago at UQP for her insights and commitment to question every word and sentence of Silent Parts.

one

Three men, nominally soldiers, stroll back in the failing light. Sleet flickers at their faces, but they are warm within their greatcoats and appreciative of being, for a few freakish moments, no one’s special responsibility. The pretence of freedom is there to enjoy. Besides, if they get back too soon they’ll almost certainly be given a job. So they dawdle, confident that if challenged they could mount a case. After all, they’re returning from a legitimate task – constructing shelves in a medical store. Three days in all. Of course they strung it out. Though relative newcomers to France, they are fast learners, more or less adept at the art of ducking and dodging. When their sergeant bawls them out they’ll blame the illogical layout of Base Depot. And it’s true: the camp is a labyrinth. If they could go conveniently as the crow flies, through several tall fences, through the field prison and a labour compound, they would be back at the bakery in no time – a walk of five hundred yards. But as it is they must

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go in the opposite direction, to the hospital gate. Their boots crunch on the hard snow, sinking a little with each step so that it’s like walking on beach sand. For Harry Lambert this is no longer a novelty. In Australia he learnt about European snow from chocolate-boxes. To see and feel it for the first time was arresting, for about five minutes. Then it was plain miserable. ‘Nice while it lasted,’ says Aubrey Brett. He is the shortest of the three, bug-eyed and plump. The men call him Bunter. ‘There are carpentry units,’ says Natty Mills, a recently arrived boy of eighteen. ‘A bloke could get himself transferred.’ ‘You know what you’d be doing there, don’t you?’ says Bunter. ‘What?’ ‘Making coffins.’ Mills doesn’t like to argue, but it’s clear he has his doubts. Coffins are just one of many possibilities. He looks to Harry, who is more than twice his age, for an authoritative opinion. Harry is silent. Early in their brief friendship Mills showed him a photograph of his brothers and sisters, all broad-faced and pale as if deprived of light by the whopping trees of their Gippsland hills. Emerging from among the timber huts, the men cut across the open paddock. Surprisingly, there is still a convalescent moving slowly near the perimeter fence. Harry resists the impulse to look away, knowing it’s better to be ready with a cheery word. But the man isn’t a cheery sight:

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face like a skinned rabbit, bluish in the cold. He crooks his dented head into the hollow of his collarbone and shudders on his crutch. ‘His dancing days are done,’ says Bunter. Mills disapproves. One day he might tell Bunter to shut up, as most people do. ‘Chin up, mate,’ Bunter hollers into the wind, apparently unaware that it might be construed as a taunt. The convalescent swivels on his crutch to give them a long agate-eyed look. He bares his teeth in an ambiguous smile. Mills surprises Harry with a quiet nudge. ‘I’d shoot myself rather than come back like that.’ At the gate they present their passes to the provosts. ‘Field Bakeries South,’ a Red Cap reads aloud. He looks them over dismissively. Cooks and dough-boys. The sort that don’t bite back. ‘Yeah, go on – home to mother.’ ‘I’ll give you mother!’ says Bunter, but skipping away so the Red Caps grin. Back in barracks, after Parade and grub, Privates Lambert and Mills squat to clean their mess-tins at the outdoor pump. They are alone and the youth catches Harry with an earnest look: ‘You’ve never been in the line?’ Harry guesses he’s remembering the man with the skinned face. It’s not an impertinent or a reproachful question, just youth referring to supposed experience. He has to admit he’s been no nearer the front than Amiens, a few hours between trains. Mills is understandably disappointed.

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He wants to know about killing, and how to subdue his terror. Harry would like to help. While almost wholly ignorant of warfare, he knows a thing or two about terror – how to hold it in, how to panic unobtrusively. He has had many provocations, from Uncle Lew’s lurid stories to his first astonished awareness of distant artillery fire (actual shells, actual death!). His will is inclined to flicker, to go out altogether for a split second or longer. So far it has always reignited, and that’s what people see, the resurrected Harry Lambert, and generally without any inkling he has repeatedly collapsed. He can think of only one recent instance of an outsider seeing through to his timid heart. At a training camp outside Melbourne there had been an instructor who’d hated him with a passion. Not a first, but still a shock. Sergeant Cairns was undersized and elderly – a silver-haired terrier with a dirty turn of phrase: ‘Lambert, you big bum-fucker! Where were you in ’15?’ Harry tried to explain: his age . . . sick and dependent mother . . . But the terrier had the scent of something sly and despicable. On route marches he flung pebbles at Harry’s big lumbering body for no better reason than it amused him. ‘I’m awake to you, Lambert!’ Awake to what? That he would never be a good soldier? That he held himself distinct? The sergeant had ideas of reshaping him. His method was simple. He denied him leave and set him the solitary

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chore of honing his bayonet to a razor edge. Before long Harry was rehearsing the sensations of sudden death, because you can’t hone a bayonet and not contemplate the damage it must do to a man’s belly. He couldn’t conceive of an enemy belly, only his own. Rasping metal on metal, he considered how the weapon would penetrate his softness; how it would pierce the gut and spongy organs that were as much the centre of his being, his essential self, as his flinching mind. The lesson he took from this, if he didn’t already know it, was that the army was a sort of suicide. At the time he didn’t much care. He supposed it was because his mother wasn’t long dead. But none of this helps Mills, who seems to believe there is no steadier man than Harold Lambert. The youth scours his mess-tin with two gritty fingers, not exactly waiting for a reassuring word, but as if he expects something of the older man’s apparent self-possession to rub off. Harry is uneasy but also sorry for him. ‘I don’t know about you, Natty, but I’m in no hurry to get shot at. They can keep their blood and carnage.’ ‘But if you’ve never seen it . . . ’ ‘Don’t want to. I’m comfy back here. I had a little taste in Britain. A mule. I saw a mule get his innards blown out. That cured me of any curiosity for battle.’ Mills shakes the drips from his mess-tin. He nods politely. Harry doesn’t continue. He’s afraid he’s made too much of a small thing. Yet he remembers the mule very clearly – an ugly animal, rusty-looking with a black and hairy mouth. They were out on Salisbury Plain. The exercise was said to

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simulate an advance behind a protective barrage. Two antiquated guns fired blanks to give proceedings the stink and din of authenticity. Gathered with his unit on a slight rise, Harry watched another group move in formation, each man equidistant from his neighbour, through a snowy corridor bounded by a river and a line of smoke flares. Fifty yards to his right a team of four mules, whose role it was to haul the guns, stood in their traces. They seemed quite indifferent to the racket, the nearest of the lead pair intent on niggling its partner. Then, the instant Harry turned again to the field, a gun broke up – an abrupt crack quite distinguishable from the uniform din. After a moment’s indecision the men ran to help the crew, vanishing into the smoke. Harry supposes he followed a few paces. But then he froze. He remembers the terror of not knowing what the smoke might conceal, remembers turning back, only to see the mules, one with its belly pouring out onto the snow. Still upright, it stumbled and stamped, pulling at the others, who went a little way in response then resisted. He can still see its entrails, smooth and marbled, steaming in the cold air – a paler vapour than the prevailing smoke and fumes. Astonishingly, the mule didn’t scream or whinny. Such a gaping wound and no apparent pain! He wondered how long it could continue to stand there before dropping. And then the men returned at a jog, exultant, shouting ‘Bloody miracle!’ because no one was hurt. This was when it fell, collapsing sideways and dragging at the others – living, then dead.

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two

Mrs Sylvia Wadley, 30 Sargood Street, Hampton, Melbourne,Victoria, July 27, 1968 Dear Julie, What a lovely surprise to receive your letter – Liz Lambert’s girl! I remember your mother very well. I think that as a young girl I was at her christening, although I can’t be sure. I might even have a picture. There are so many photos in Mum’s old albums that I can’t put a name or a date to. It’s dreadful when the old people go. Everything is lost. I think you are very good to put on this reunion thing. And it’s a wonderful idea to honour old Harry. Who else will remember him if not us? I must say I thought of him a lot when Jack was away in New Guinea. I didn’t like to. I couldn’t help it.

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You know you might lose them, but you keep saying: not me, not us, not my Jack. Be that as it may, it happens. Men get killed. It’s very cruel. I don’t remember the memorial service for Harry. I do remember them saying he got shot and drowned in the mud. I’m not sure whether it was Gallipoli or France. I think probably Gallipoli because that’s where they came in off the boats. The old people would know. And there are records of course. Uncle Dick is still hanging on, eightyfive or more. He’ll be able to tell you. I suppose there will be a great to-do everywhere, and not just with the Lamberts. I read in the paper that the government is planning a big commemoration. I don’t remember the armistice, but you can’t let fifty years go by without some sort of hoorah. The old ones deserve it. If you like I can get up and say a word about Harry, just a few things that stick in the mind. He wasn’t always dour. He could be quite the clown. I wonder, do they still make those neenish tarts? Those little fruit pies with pink and white icing? I think they do. According to Harry, they came from a country called Neen. I believed him. I believed him until I was nineteen or twenty, long after he was dead.Also, I saw him in several pantomimes and funny talking parts. I saw him play a Chinese emperor who chopped off people’s heads.You need something happy to remember, don’t you think? I sent him letters and presents – we did it for all the uncles. There are too many sad stories. When Jack and his service mates get together it’s always sad stories.They get drunk and

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weepy. I’m not saying hide the beer. God forbid! But these occasions cry out for a bit of levity. I’m sure you’ll manage things wonderfully, a person with your schooling.You can bet on me and Jack being there, and maybe my daughter and one or two of the boys as well. The photos in the big envelope are for the display. Please treat them like gold. I don’t have copies.You should also try my sister Ruby. She will certainly have something to say, although I doubt she’ll be well enough to come down. I’ve enclosed the address. Thank you for your efforts. It’s lovely to see you taking an interest, best wishes, your Aunty Sylvie and Uncle Jack

PROJECT NOTES, July 29, 1968 Mum will love this one, even if she can’t say for certain whether they have met as adults. She remembers, or imagines she remembers, the aunts and uncles hovering benevolently over her childhood and would like me to bring them back, dead ones included. Doesn’t matter that Aunt Sylvie was never one of them. Aunt Sylvie is almost the right vintage, a little young perhaps, but a true Lambert and a relic of a better world. What I find surprising, these relics aren’t all geographically distant. Mum is suddenly ashamed to think that there are Lamberts on the opposite side of Melbourne and we have never bothered to say hello. I told her, ‘Write to them, if it’s so important to you.’ She

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wouldn’t. I don’t know what constrained her, perhaps the assumption that I would do it for her. I wonder: when she reads Sylvie’s words will she recognise herself? I had no idea I would find my own mother in various guises. The same concerns, the same quirks of speech, the same careless notions of history. Photos mostly of Sylvie’s Hampton family. Weatherboard house going up amid the tea-tree, when the suburb was new. Kids under big hats. Her Jack sitting proudly behind the wheel of a friend’s Riley. There is only one item from the first war: a 1916 postcard from old Uncle Dick in a Cairo hospital. Pyramids and camels. He writes of an ulcerated leg-wound. Mentions his brothers. There is nothing by, from or about Uncle Harry, which is disappointing. If Sylvie and the other young women wrote to him, surely he wrote back. I want to hear his voice.

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three

During his time in France, Harry has come to understand his mother’s antipathy to snow. She called it the white wolf at the door, though as a bookbinder’s daughter growing up in the East Anglian city of Ipswich she can’t have suffered too many deprivations. His father, on the other hand, had dug mangels from the rime-crusted fields of his village. He told horror stories of frostbite and fingers reduced to stumps. He recalled Christmas as a hungry time – ‘and none of your holly and mistletoe and threepenny pieces in the pudding!’ Harry doesn’t go hungry. At the Australian army bakery at Rouen the cooks serve up roast beef and flaming ‘plum duff’. The mess-hut is hung with Union Jacks and ruffled crepe. The tables glitter. There is Castlemaine bitter and Rutherglen port and the faces of his companions are red and beaming. He tugs at bonbons and snorts at clever jokes and speeches, to all appearances a happy man. But it isn’t the seasonal camaraderie that buoys him. He is planning a

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sortie into Rouen. He has applied for leave, though until now he hasn’t been interested in sightseeing. The impetus was a little greeting card that arrived with the rest of his Christmas mail. It contained a pressed yellow rose from his garden. His great niece Sylvia wrote: ‘Mademoiselle Elise Cordier that Aunt Sarah said was one of the best.’ He pictured her not as a young woman but as the little girl she’d been in 1905, a year after his father’s death. He wanted to weep, so intimately had she touched his longing for home – or for that imaginary home that no longer exists. It brought back how Sarah, his mother, had coached the girl; how she had lifted Sylvie up onto her knee and demanded, ‘Tell me the name of that there rose.’ Four-year-old Sylvie had been reluctant to guess. She sat gnawing her fist. Ma pouted and scoffed, saying that Sylvie must have been behind the door when the brains were given out. ‘Captain Christy,’ Sylvie at last summoned the courage. ‘Captain Christy? No no, you’re all mixed up. You’re not like your Uncle Harry. Do you know when he was your age he could say the name of every lady and gentleman in the garden? His father made him a lesson of it. “What’s that one, Harry-lad?” And Harry would say: “That there’s General Jack.” Or: “That there’s Souvenir de la Reine de Anglestairs.”’ The curriculum at Harry’s inferior boarding school, where he’d passed his adolescent years, hadn’t run to modern languages, but he knew that his father’s French had been preposterous. With the exuberance of a man who

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came late to reading, Sammy Lambert had looked at the foreign names in catalogues and pronounced them as he saw fit. The upshot was that Harry and his mother were fluent in a secret gibberish. ‘Ask your Uncle Harry, ask him that one there.’ They gazed up to where the rose overhung the verandah in sinuous zigzag canes. The new buds were egg-yolk yellow, the open blooms like straw-coloured crepe. This plant had a history. It was older than Harry. ‘Sylvie, you must know her!’ ‘Oh yes, Sylvie,’ said Sarah. ‘Mademoiselle Elise! One of the best. See if you can remember. Mademoiselle Elise Cordier.’ And she drilled the girl just as she and Sammy had once drilled their son. ‘Mademoiselle Elise Cordier, Mademoiselle Elise Cordier . . . ’ In this way they had perpetuated Samuel Lambert’s enthusiasms. That night Harry dreamt of his father’s garden. It was an unchanging place, the same old clones living on and on. The roses bobbed and rocked and reeked sweetly of human ingenuity. Here were the eminent ones of his father’s century, mostly Gauls it has to be said: Victor Hugo, purplish and drooping, General Jacqueminot, upright and spiny amid the lop growth of countesses and dukes. By the tin fence was Frau Karl Druschki, a stately matron of sculpted ivory – recently taken in hand by patriotic nurserymen and relaunched as White American Beauty. Harry soaked up his mother’s quirky gestures, the sensation of sun on his body, the mingled scents of roses and freesias and early

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summer plums, and wafting elements from further afield: wheat pollen, the clucking of a neighbour’s chickens, yeast and sweet cinnamon from the bakery, street voices from beyond the fence. This impression of stasis, he suspects, is influenced by a photograph he carries in his wallet. Uncle Lew Broughton took it in 1903, a year before Sammy’s death. There’s a pretence of spontaneity, as if Harry and his mother are looking up suddenly at an unexpected visitor, but in reality Lew posed it carefully. While the printing process gives the light that coppery look of a dust storm, it’s nonetheless intense. Shadows are compact and dark. And the clarity is extraordinary. You can see the opal brooch on Ma’s blouse and the rose petals strewn under the bushes. And there is Harry in his sleeveless baker’s shirt, tall to the brink of ungainliness, solidly built but narrow-shouldered (like a bottle of hock, according to Lew). The exposed skin of his upper arms is pale as dough. Looking impossibly young, he bows over a rosebush. In one hand he has a harvest of flowers, in the other a knife. He likes the man in this picture. Perhaps the instinct for evasion, for wriggling and shifting, is there, but undeveloped. He has an ironic charm and self-confidence. He is a man in his element. Beside him at the table, Natty Mills tells the story of his sister’s wedding. He sparkles with pride when he speaks of all the good things laid out on trestles. The cake was iced with marzipan. Would they have tasted marzipan? For Mills the word is as marvellous as the flavour. Bunter is surprisingly

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tactful. He doesn’t belittle the glories of marzipan. He says it’s a French invention, and a French word, and embarks on an etymological exposition to demonstrate his mastery of the language. Harry sips his beer. He is conscious of how small things can revitalise a person. Mills has his marzipan. Harry is thinking roses. Somehow Sylvie’s little card has effected a shaky rejuvenation. He keeps it by his stretcher bed. The flower is a blotchy stain against the stippled surface, the last image he sees at night, the first in the morning – a charm, a memento of the impossible stasis of his dreams. It won’t last. It can’t last. But it’s better to have something. Having inherited his father’s sticky and obsessive mind, he knows as much as there is to know about Mademoiselle Elise. She dates from the mid-60s. She was named for the breeder’s infant daughter. But what sets him humming with intention is a phrase from an old catalogue – ‘the famed Cordier establishment at Montigny, convenient to Rouen’. He sips his beer and plans an expedition. When the opportunity comes – six hours’ leave on a witheringly cold Sunday – he finds he must put up with Bunter. It can’t be helped. It would be an unsociable act, beyond the pale, to go off without him. They ride in a tram, the mist freezing into blisters on the window. Of course Bunter doesn’t know it’s an expedition. He has his own ideas. There are time-honoured ways for a soldier

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to spend his precious leave, and Bunter is both an opinionated virgin and a traditionalist. He’s for a stroll about the city, a good feed, a bottle of plonk, a woman. Not that he’s the carousing sort, swearing that in his native Footscray he’s a model of sobriety, a straight-laced solicitor’s clerk. But they’re not in Footscray, and after weeks of being confined to camp he thinks he’s owed a soldier’s pleasures. ‘I don’t fancy your chances,’ says Harry. ‘Got to know where to look,’ Bunter boasts. ‘It’s Sunday for Christ’s sake!’ ‘Sunday or no Sunday.’ Harry doesn’t believe him. He looks out at the leaden sky. Even Bunter has to concede that the day is bleak. For a minute his enthusiasm seems to fizzle. Then all at once he initiates a conversation with the woman opposite. She smiles tolerantly, though Harry suspects she finds his French incomprehensible. Bunter’s voice is louder than the rattle and clank of the tram. Other passengers avert their eyes. Harry feels implicated, damned by association, especially when the woman takes refuge behind a little pamphlet. ‘They love it,’ Bunter murmurs in his ear. He subscribes to the theory that French women are everything that Australian women aren’t – informal, unshockable, greedy for sex with strangers. It’s a common enough theory in camp, but Bunter is undeniably a cockhead. Harry has been thinking in such terms for months and is no longer surprised. Good blokes and cockheads. Then there are mugs. He suspects he might be a mug. Who else would share his leave with Bunter?

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He would prefer to be indifferent to what other men think of him. As far as he can make out he’s regarded as an accepting sort, docile and easily put upon. From the beginning he was old Harry, vaguely comic for being fortytwo years of age and a peculiar specimen. He plays cards for matches but not for money – ‘Like a Methodist,’ they quip. He gives out his razor and brush, and sometimes a few shillings, and passes around the back issues of Harper’s Magazine that Lew sends from home. Whether because of his age or his height, or his expertise as a baker, or because he seems to be above the usual fray of bickering, he attracts lonely and uncertain men. It seems he reassures them. He can’t imagine a more fraudulent father-figure, though he recognises that people in need are slaves to a fixed idea. On the other hand, there is something sustaining in their conception of him. It dispels the misery of snow. It buffers him from the ugly habit of introspection. Through the iced glass he gets a distorted view of the city. Along the Seine the respectable citizens have abandoned the Grand Cours to foreigners: a few British but mostly straggling colonials, clots of New Zealanders, Australians and Canadians. A lucky few have female company: nurses and WAACs, and here and there a gregarious Frenchwoman. Americans are still thin on the ground, though the papers assert that they are here in numbers. Out the front of a public office a pair of black-bearded Sikhs, purplish about the lips, scurry away from an elm as the wind dislodges snow from the upper boughs. The street restaurants, having retreated indoors, are full of huddling soldiers. Occasionally, despite

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the clatter of the tram, he catches a phrase of feeble song, and finds himself thinking: So this is what’s on offer – eggs and chips and a miserable pretence of pleasure. His own nostalgic quest seems a world more promising. ‘Hey,’ he tells Bunter as if suddenly inspired, ‘what about something different? Let me see the map.’ Bunter is instantly suspicious. ‘I know your something dif ferent. You know what you can do with your churches and museums.’ Harry assures him he has no desire to poke about in public buildings. ‘We could go see a friend.’ ‘What friend?’ ‘A woman, Bunt – a woman if you can behave yourself. Mademoiselle Elise Cordier.’ Bunter snorts dismissively. Harry couldn’t possibly know any French women. But he likes being joshed. He rises to the promise of a sham adventure. ‘I can’t find her without you,’ Harry tells him. ‘You can’t find her because she doesn’t exist.’ Feigning hurt, Harry takes the map. The tramway ends at a place called Bapeaume. From there there’s a broken line – signifying what? a rough track? – through open fields and forest. Then they can pick up the Montigny road. ‘This mademoiselle, she got two heads or what?’ ‘Mademoiselle Elise? She’s got all the essential parts, Bunter, don’t you worry.’ At the terminus they accost the driver as he jumps down from his cabin. Harry feeds Bunter the questions. The driver is impatient and not at all helpful to them. Cordier?

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A rose grower in Montigny? Never heard of him. ‘Surprise, surprise,’ says Bunter. They try a gendarme. Same result. Then a woman with a whimpering child. Cordier? Un horticulteur? No, not here. There are several in Martainville, but not in Montigny. And she should know, because she has a daughter who married into the village. By now Bunter’s fed up, but Harry won’t turn back. The streets are a wilderness of snow: white heaps in the gutters, on the tops of walls, on the sills of exposed windows. Great cracked slabs cling to the roofs. With their papered windows and smokeless chimneys the houses have an abandoned aspect. Coal is like gold, Bunter remarks morbidly. He reads the French papers. Says that every day some poor old duck freezes to death in her bed. The wind comes in whistling gusts, spattering their faces with sleet. But across the road there is a boy, apparently quite indifferent to the cold. Harry guesses he must be about twelve, and probably a bit simple, the way he drags along in the ditches kicking at ice. He wears only a light shirt and corduroy trousers, and clogs, heavy wooden clogs such as Harry has only seen in illustrated fairytales. The boy skips when he sees them. ‘Messieurs, messieurs,’ he calls rapturously. He has a bunch of raffle tickets. ‘Ask what the prize is.’ Bunter obliges, rephrasing the question several times before making himself understood. ‘Coffee,’ he reports at last, not bothering to hide his scepticism. Even so, they fish in their wallets for a few coins. The boy’s very particular

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about taking down their names. To Harry’s horror, Bunter gives his as Napoleon. The boy doesn’t bat an eye, writing it down gravely and adding a note that Harry gathers means ‘care of the Australians’. To show him they’re not all bastards, Harry takes the butt and writes his name in full, complete with rank and enlistment number. He doubts the boy appreciates this. A sou is a sou, with or without the humiliation. ‘Ask if he’s heard of Monsieur Cordier.’ ‘I’ve had a gutful of Monsieur Cordier. Ask him yourself.’ Harry stops still. Bunter catches his look, so uncharacteristically black, and can manage only half a grin. For Harry anger is a distressing emotion, as unwelcome and mysterious as epilepsy. He holds himself tightly. He practises circumspection, remembering the pain of past eruptions – almost all concealed and bearing on no one but himself. Bunter’s grin departs in stages. He questions the boy with a sullenness that makes Harry want to swat him. The boy hasn’t heard of Cordier, but knows of a house with roses. Acres of roses. He offers to take them there. Nothing is said of money. He simply trots on ahead without looking back. He has an almost military step that forces them to hasten in keeping up. Before long they’re out in the blanketed steppes. After fifteen minutes’ tramping, the wagon-track joins the more substantial Montigny road and they push on through what the map describes as the upper reaches of the state forest of Roumare. Where the trees end they pass a single free-standing store, a cat

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squawking mutely from a window. Then on through the blinding fields. A red brick cattle byre, more fields, hedges like iced puddings. The church spire and huddled houses of Montigny are clearly visible half a mile away, but the boy takes them north, following the verge of the forest. Underfoot the way becomes a hoof-gouged cattle path. Bunter declares them lost. ‘If I aren’t the biggest fool for listening to you, Harry Lambert!’ Sensing their concern, the boy urges them on. Several times the trees open and close around them. Isolated farmhouses, their high thatched or black-tiled roofs seeming to bow under the weight of snow, loom and are left behind. Finally the boy indicates a wiry block of vegetation and the part-obscured outlines of various buildings. Harry consults the map. It seems they are somewhere in the agricultural hinterland between Montigny and Maromme. The boy would come all the way, out of curiosity, yet Harry stops him at a thicket of poplars. If he could he’d stop Bunter too. He would like better company altogether, impossible company, his deceased parents no less. He would blindfold them and whisk them past all the squalor of undeserving France to arrive here at this isolated relic of their century. He can imagine his father’s reverence. They should proceed humbly. Hats off to Monsieur Cordier, high priest of selective breeding. If he still exists. High on the brick wall of the barn is a faded sign: cordier, rosieriste. ‘Top class, this,’ Bunter sneers. Yet they emerge from the trees and walk across the

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road. Geese honk and racket in the buried fields. The house stands behind a brushwood fence, and banked on three sides by more than an acre of leafless, knotted and arching rose canes. There’s a gate, timber with a few flakes of ancient blue paint. It sticks and requires a kick and a heave to open. Then the path forks, left to the privacy of a bleak garden, right to the brick-paved yard. As uninvited intruders they really should knock at the front door. Harry has Sylvie’s pressed rose in the pocket of his greatcoat, brought along in the absurd belief that it might serve as an introduction. But suddenly he feels ridiculous. He leads the way into the plant nursery, which has obviously ceased to be a going concern. Never mind. As foreigners they can plead ignorance. In any case there’s no one about. While Bunter shivers under the eaves of the barn Harry strolls between the rectangular rosebeds. Very formal affairs, reminiscent of pictures he’s seen of the Luxembourg Gardens: a stark tree-rose at each corner, occasional arches and pillars roped with thorny canes. The dwarfs are dumped with snow, muffled mounds, a brittle stick poking through here and there. Further along terracotta pots stand in tight phalanxes, unpruned growth tangled like razor wire. Beyond this, the first of the glasshouses stands open, dark within on account of straw mats laid over the steep roof. He can see only a little of the interior: rusted steel frameworks and benches, a disused burner. Wired to the wall of the barn, a series of old climbers have braided stems as thick as his wrist. In the bare zigzag twigs he imagines he can recognise the same cultivar that tumbled over

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his back verandah in Rushburn – the original Mademoiselle Elise, fifty years old if she’s a day. Grasping the thornless wood, he follows the convolutions up to the extent of his reach. He remembers his father’s delighted confessions of having stolen a cutting from a swish house in Bendigo – a youthful crime, pre-Harry, when Mademoiselle Elise was the latest novelty from Europe. Yet it disturbs him to see her so bare and dishonoured by the season. It disturbs him to think she has grown old, forever a young woman, but old. Still, what did he expect? He decides to leave before they’re discovered. But Bunter shouts and waves up to a tiny panel of glass, a small dormer jutting out from the frosted thatch. He’s certainly observant. There is a rippling shadow. Then the glass is clear. Bunter goads him with a smile. So here they are! What a lark, Harry! Definitely worth the effort. Harry turns away. From behind the house comes the bang of a door. Bunter composes himself, ready to meet the face they had seen in the glass. What Harry notices first is that she walks with a flat-footed grip on the world. Then her big hands, and her solidity. She is sculpturally fat, bottom-heavy, compact. Her phrases are crisp and abrupt, and though he can’t understand a word it’s clear she’s not rolling out the red carpet. Bunter does his best to explain, fending off her belligerence with a series of shrugs. She has no patience with his inept French, no liking for foreigners. The nursery is shut, Bunter translates. Shut, shut. No one to run it. The men are in the army. Could they please go away.

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Harry reaches for Sylvie’s pressed rose. ‘Tell her we know Monsieur Cordier’s roses and have come to pay our respects.’ ‘Pay our respects!’ Bunter mocks. ‘Tell her!’ He addresses her with another apologetic shrug and a cocked eye at Harry. Blame him, he insists. Blame that lunatic there. The woman replies with a few curt words. Monsieur Cordier is dead. Has been for fifteen years. Harry tells her in English how sorry he is, and feels thoroughly stupid. Yet that doesn’t stop him bullying Bunter into pumping her further. Would she perhaps be the great man’s daughter? ‘Oh no mistake about that,’ Bunter assures him with vindictive pleasure. ‘She’s your girl, Harry.’ Whether Mademoiselle Elise has any English, she can certainly recognise ridicule. Harry feels himself blush. The geese they heard when coming in seem impossibly close, their honking invading the yard though presumably they are still at a distance. Shamed, Harry turns to go. What would the old boy say? Poor Father! His mademoiselle so prickly and unappreciated! On the long trek back he is full of regrets. He shouldn’t have brought Bunter. He feels sure the woman knew she was being laughed at. But as they tramp again through the forest he has tentative ideas of making a second trip when the weather improves in spring. If he returns alone she will recognise his sincerity and somehow they will manage to communicate. Being so new to France, and to travel in

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general, he has a naive belief that no one can be completely ignorant of English. And Mademoiselle Elise, daughter of a successful rose-grower, undoubtedly received an education. So gradually he grows less ashamed of his lapse. You can plod along just so long, head down like a shire nag, whereas exuberance – indeed foolishness – is a human trait, a Lambert trait.

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four

Mrs Ruby McWhirter, Frog’s Hollow, Ouyen,Victoria, August 2, 1968 Dear Julie, I must apologise for the confusion on the telephone. I do not hear well. I’m afraid ‘Elizabeth Lambert’s daughter’ did not ring any bells.You must have thought me terribly rude. Nevertheless, I read your subsequent letter with interest and curiosity. It doesn’t surprise me that there are, as you say, Lamberts in every state and several more in New Zealand, not to mention those back in Britain. The old people were good breeders. I imagine it takes a particular vigilance to keep track of the various branches. I wish you luck. But as much as I welcome your letter you’ve probably written to the wrong person. I’m hardly the one to help you gather

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up a family history. I fancy I was an ignorant girl, not very observant and not a good listener. What’s more, after marrying Wattie and coming up here in 1925 I naturally lost touch with the Lambert side. I say naturally because in those days we didn’t travel much. His people were delightful, very welcoming and kind to a girl a long way from her parents. After Mum died in ’32 I didn’t have any great hankering to go back and see my sister and cousins, and I must say I was never close to Dad. If you leave out funerals and a few trips to Melbourne twenty years ago I’ve hardly been away. My sister Sylvia used to visit occasionally after the last war. She still writes once or twice a year, which is how I know anything at all of recent family matters. As to your invitation to the reunion in November, I thank you and decline. I can’t sit up for long periods any more and the train journey to Melbourne would exhaust me.To be honest, I’m almost wholly reliant on my daughter to get about. Another thought, and probably you know this already, but old George Lambert – Pa George as he was to us – wrote a few pages for posterity soon after his brother’s death. I believe it was done at the prompting of his second son. I’d be very much surprised if this isn’t still tucked away in someone’s Bible.That at least would be something first-hand and reliable. Still, for what it’s worth, I’ll repeat what I was told as a child, and you can see how it tallies.As to the exact year they came out from England I can’t say. By guesswork

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and a little deduction one would have to say around 1864. Pa George I remember as a bad-tempered old fellow who went quite mad at the end. He had the joinery and employed several men. Sylvia has two of his chairs, collector’s items now. Uncle Sammy I don’t remember, except by hearsay. By all accounts a good sort. He died young, like my Wattie. Fifty something. He’s supposed to have dropped dead at the dinner table in the middle of a conversation about plums. I daresay you know he had the bakery. I believe the building’s still there in High Street, but vacant. I’m told Rushburn is much run down, shrunken away to nothing in fact.As to who begat whom, you’d know more about that than me. Suffice it to say, we’re all descended from old Pa George and Mary-Nan, as Uncle Sammy and Aunt Sarah had only the one child, and I’ll get to him in a minute. I was very much intrigued by the photograph you sent.To me it looks like Market Square, or at least some other sports ground in the district. As to the year I’d say 1915.The Allies Fair.There were any amount of patriotic carnivals in those days, but I’d say it was the Allies Fair. That was the big one. I have written on the back my opinion as to who each person might be.The fellows in dungarees are my two uncles and my father, all of whom went to Palestine and came back whole,quite an achievement considering the losses.The two old ladies sitting on chairs under the tree are the Suffolk wives, and a more fearsome pair of old Tartars you never met. Mary-Nan is the stout one, Pa George’s wife, and all that enormous

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spread was probably her doing. She would bake and bake for days and none of the married daughters was allowed to contribute. A matter of pride or self-importance or whatever you want to call it.The same every Christmas and new year, mountains of food. I can’t say I liked her. She was one of those silent women who breed up a big family to preside over with a glance and a nod and just you watch out if you transgress! The other one, Great Aunt Sarah, was a different story. In Rushburn she was SOMEBODY. Not because of wealth, though I can tell you the bakery was quite lucrative, but because she had a wit and a presence. Of course standing six foot helped. She towered over most people. For years she all but ran the shire, telling her Sammy or Mary’s George or old Lew Broughton what to do. (I’ve marked Lew – the little rooster in shirtsleeves and braces.) When Aunt Sarah got sick they put me in the shop, so I got to know her a little.And to give her her due she was fair and quite kind in an offhand way, though if you crossed her she had a tongue like a knife. No one dared stand up to her. They came in so meekly to buy their bread it was like church. She had them all bluffed. But she got sicker and sicker and I’d go days without seeing her. Sometimes I’d hear her vomiting out back. Stomach cancer I suppose it was. That left just me and Uncle Harry, your particular interest.I said I would get to him.He was my actual boss, the one who paid me. If anything the photograph flatters him. He wasn’t handsome, too portly and stooped.

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But you can see his height. He was disconcertingly tall, and awkward to go with it.To this day I think of him as old, though he can’t have been more than forty. One of the aunts, I can’t remember who, said he was burnt in a wash-house fire as a baby. He was in a Bendigo hospital for weeks.You could see the shiny skin on the backs of his hands like modern-day plastic. The left side of his face was a little scarred too, around the temple and ear, but not obvious unless you looked hard at him. To work for he was very stiff and formal but otherwise agreeable, although always preoccupied with his mother. I was just fourteen and he was a middle-aged man, so it’s not surprising he didn’t tell me his thoughts. When the old girl died he enlisted and went to France, the only one of our lot not to come back. It was early 1917. I know this because the shop shut and I lost my job. I don’t know if there are any letters, or who in fact he’d have written to. I’m quite sure there wasn’t a sweetheart. Whoever told you that is quite wrong. A grieving girl would have been mentioned and I would have remembered. Well, I’m afraid that’s about it for family tattle.You must understand I was very young.The truth is you’re years too late. It’s my father might have been able to help, or his mother, Mary-Nan. They had it all on the tips of their tongues and I must confess I didn’t pay much attention. yours faithfully, Ruby McWhirter

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PROJECT NOTES, August 5, 1968 First refusal. Should I send a formal invitation to be safe? Refreshing to hear from someone who says she knows nothing but puts all the blather in perspective. Uncle Harry becomes just a country baker who didn’t come back. No mystery, no heroics, a fair slice of sadness. I love it when the hallowed oldies don’t toe the line. Mum confesses to having been afraid of her, though Aunt Ruby can’t be more than fifteen or twenty years her senior. Must check. Essentially a personality gulf, rather than generational. To Mum’s mind R is one of the Rushburn Lamberts, close in spirit to the Pioneers, or closer than we suburban softies. R knew old Harry personally. Fine credentials. She shares in the glow of the ‘good old days’ when the Lamberts were gregarious and unified and no one was left out in the cold. Poor Mum. She feels the cold. I can hear her saying, ‘Enough of your psychologising! Is it so abnormal to want to bring the family together?’ R’s lack of enthusiasm would baffle her. Never heard anyone else describe Uncle Harry as ‘portly and stooped’. As a child I didn’t have a mental picture. Rather he was a name in a special book kept in the Shrine of Remembrance. Mum first took me there after Dad left, around the time she chucked in Keely and went back to her maiden name. I suppose she was reclaiming her first identity, her heritage.

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A soldier wore white gloves to open the glass case and turn the pages of the book. Here were all the men who had served, their identities recorded in a script that looked like handwritten copperplate but wasn’t. Now I see the deliberate parallel with the Book of Life. Not then. There was a double page of Lamberts, nearly all relations. Mum singled out Harold George. ‘Your Uncle Harry,’ she said. ‘The one we lost.’ I’m told that for thirty years all the far-flung Lamberts, known and increasingly unknown to one another, did the same. I see them climbing the high granite steps to pay homage to a dead baker. Not Aunt Ruby, however. She gives him no special significance. And she’s adamant there was no sweetheart! Mum will be disappointed. I should have asked about the French Wife, another favourite motif. Cousin Terry says it’s a concoction. If his dad was still alive all this would be easier. Probably I am wrong – unscholarly – to wish for one authoritative individual. Too many scruples. Things to do: 1. Obtain service records. 2. Pro-forma letter. Include diagram showing bare, missing and disputed branches. All information welcome. General inquiry about the French Wife. Did she exist? Was there correspondence? 3. Individual letter to old Dickie. 4. Ring Terry. 5. Collate and label photos, clippings, etc.

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6. State Library for Rushburn and Burrakee Express. Microfiche? Originals? Have they a means of reproduction or must I copy out everything longhand? 7. Sting the uncles for financial assistance. It’s their party and they can pay for it. 8. Venue. 9. Catering. 10. Printed invitations. 11. Commemorative booklet. ‘The One We Lost’. Do they want it? Yes or no?

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five

For Harry there is an inevitable low time. He decides he’s been guilty of mad escapism. He thinks, Mademoiselle Elise is just a fat old woman. It is like dipping his head in icewater, a rough corrective. The woman was coarse-looking. She had yellow teeth. She was abrupt and annoyed to have been disturbed. Why should she care that in far-away Australia Harry Lambert grew up in the shade of her father’s rose? She doesn’t know him from Adam. She has no wish to know him. He thinks: You’re unbalanced, Harry! Crazy! Why this stupid hankering? Can’t you see there’s nothing beautiful in this place? His insistence on beauty frightens him. Such excitability comes in spates and must be fought. He looks about at other men and understands that, of necessity, they are bereft of far-reaching thoughts, their subtle feelings denied. They have reduced themselves to a cooperative force of muscle, because the enemy must be broken. Along with his fellows he accepts that a nation must defend both its borders and

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its interests, but he remains terrified of what this entails on the battlefield. He is not a nation. What or who he might be is a debilitating mystery. He’s ashamed of his run-away mind, of how it bucks against the utilitarian bleakness of Base Depot. It flees the present, always bolting back to the comfort and love of his parents’ house. How easily he is knocked flat by trifles, a card, a dried rose in the mail evoking a surge of longing for the love that does not exist in this foreign place. Such eruptions are weakness. They’re unmanly. To survive he must shut himself down to a more primitive level. He has done it before. He falls back on bread: three hundred loaves a shift from his team of four. He works in a lather of desperation, a fanatic. Before dawn he heaves fifty-pound bags from the flour shed and stacks them seven and eight high on the rail carts. ‘Push, you buggers!’ Corporal Maitland cries, and they bend their backs. Their boots slip in the snow and mud but the iron wheels creak into motion. They unload at the mixing room, then the teams disperse to their respective bakehouses. Harry greets his oven with a slap on the firebox. He is possessive and professionally vain, thinking that only he can get the best from this antiquated contraption. He lugs timber and feeds the fire while the others stand idle, waiting for the dough to come from the kneading machine. It’s Harry who drives the rivalry between the teams. Daily production is recorded for all to see on a board outside the captain’s quarters. Bakehouse eleven is a consistent leader. In the diminished world of Field Bakeries South this is a cause for pride and a substitute for individual assertion.

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Most of all, Harry is grateful to be able to fall exhausted and thoughtless onto his bed at 9:00 p.m. Not everyone is grateful for bread. ‘Simple Simon was a pieman,’ says Herb Grinter, mocking their collective lot. He’s a querulous sort, a bad card-player, slow to pay his debts. He gripes because they don’t wear the khaki, but a simple baker’s workshirt, little different to those Harry wore at home. For Herb it’s an affront to his manhood. ‘I didn’t sign up to be a navvy,’ he says. False airs in Harry’s view. In the service corps they’re all navvies, men of lesser quality in the military estimation. Almost daily Herb declares his intention of swinging a transfer to a fighting unit. Nothing ever comes of it. To such hypocrisy, Harry prefers Bunter’s honest funk. When anyone complains about the weather Bunter says, ‘Don’t go wishing for blue skies. That’s when Fritz has a go.’ He’s not the only one who believes in a coming German attack. The newspapers predict it too. Throughout January and February the rumours and pronouncements accumulate, all ending in ‘spring offensive’. There is a regular chorus of doomsayers. It will be hell on earth, they say, more bloody than anything that has gone before. On principle Harry keeps aloof from this talk. He pulls back into his utilitarian shell. He looks no further afield than bread – three hundred loaves a shift, six days a week. He eats, he works, he sleeps. It is impossible, however, to hold back spring. One morning he discovers that he’s vaguely elated, and for no better reason than it has stopped raining. The sky, made ominous

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by Bunter’s predictions, is blue, and not the steely blue you see after a frost – a soft spring blue! Beyond the bakehouse the sun transforms the drabness of the place, and as it slants in under the roof he feels almost a holiday laxness. Not that it’s possible to slacken pace. The dough comes inexorably from the kneading machines and if they dawdle it banks up. Even so, the sunshine effects a quickening in their veins. It chips away at their regime, melting the illusion of permanence. In winter you could be forgiven for thinking the whole sprawling concern had been there since the world began: the hospitals, the kitchens, the stables, the huts, the training grounds, the sodden fields of mouldy marquees. Admittedly, the bakehouses are rough structures, open on all sides. But everything within, from the scarred benches to the fire-blackened shovels, gives the misleading impression of having seen generations of use. Then along comes a sunny day and it’s all an aberration, their incessant industry, the distant killing, their quiet dread. He choses to ignore Bunter’s predicted spring offensive. He contemplates a second excursion to the Cordier property, to see the roses in leaf. What harm is there in that? He applies for leave. But in late March, a day after he receives his pass, a bakery team returns from the Australian field hospital with grim rumours. They report that the doctors have been told to throw out the mild cases to make room for new casualties. Why? Because the Germans have broken through! Where? Near Amiens, not one hundred miles away. The British are running like rabbits!

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There are plenty of sceptics. British soldiers don’t run. The idea is invidious, a slur. Harry is in the opposite camp. For him catastrophe is entirely possible, since armies are composed, in part, of men as unreliable as himself. Not that he reveals his misgivings. He keeps his cards close, unlike Bunter who goes about with a look of proud vindication and terror. By late afternoon there’s no controversy at all, just overwhelming evidence of trouble, if not of a full-blown emergency. Their sergeant informs them that all leave has been cancelled. They see a company of provosts depart for Amiens, apparently to restore order to the roads between the outlying villages, where, it’s said, troops brought up to plug the breach are impeded by an opposing stream of refugees. A great body of black labourers sets off at a march for Rouen, while in the transport compound there’s a frenzy of salvage work – men stalking over the acres of wrecked vehicles, searching for redeemable parts, others knocking and tugging at battered lorries. ‘Didn’t I tell you?’ Bunter moans. Yet after the initial shock there is a week or more of excruciatingly normal routine. There is still flour and wood to be shifted, dough to be kneaded, bread to be baked. During smoko they watch the Rouen road. The wounded come in lorries and horse-transport, in any sort of vehicle that will do the job. In all the Allied hospitals the wards are choked with mutilated troops. Everyone insulates himself from this in his own way. Harry notices a strange inwardness in the faces of his fellow bakers. Even Bunter grows quiet. For Harry there is the

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usual expedient of blind toil and exhaustion, but also, at the end of the week, the promise of a hot bath. This is not a simple wash, the sort of quick splash of cold water he engages in every evening. It is a cherished indulgence, a once-weekly opportunity to soak away the ash and smoke and flour dust from the sweaty creases of his skin. He anticipates the pleasure of it all the preceding afternoon. That there is a crush of broken and dying men just a few hundred yards away is sometimes disturbing, but mostly he is able to shut them out. His body pleads for comfort. He makes a nest of his private needs. He burrows deeply. He doesn’t know whether this is obscene or crazy or a special gift. The ablution shed is a cavernous building, with rows of oak tubs that give it the look of a brewery. It reverberates with the shouting and horseplay of bathers. Steam curls up to the high ceiling and condenses, falling back down in big cold drips. Harry strips and some clown flicks at his buttocks. To his surprise he has lost all shyness in standing naked with other men. Nor does he object to immersing himself in their spent bathwater. He sweeps his hands through the warmth of a vacated tub. He climbs up and in. The former occupant grins and assures him he’s pissed in it. ‘Better than bath salts, mate! Good for the complexion.’ Harry doesn’t believe him. An orderly warns him to push to the far side and adds another scalding bucketful. The sudden heat swirls against Harry’s knees and thighs and stings his tender parts. He doesn’t flinch but welcomes the sensation. He’s determined to keep this moment, however corrupted and public, above

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the tedium and anxiety of the week – a sort of Sabbath of the body. It’s here that he rediscovers his abundant flesh, pink and soft and steaming with heat. He raises a sparse lather and scrubs himself with a bristle brush. He washes and rinses his hair then sloshes about beneath a dirty scum, wallowing and savouring the weight of water. Too soon, far too soon, an orderly blows a whistle. ‘Out,’ he says, jerking his thumb for emphasis. The men delay, beginning to move only when he threatens to turn the hosepipes on them. Reluctantly, Harry throws a leg over the rim of the tub. He sees Sergeant Ticker picking his way fully dressed through the puddles. He patters his feet in the suds that gather on the concrete. He rasps his body with a towel that has been so many times boiled and bleached it has the feel of rawhide. Then suddenly Ticker is under his nose. ‘Sergeant?’ ‘Your lucky day, Lambert.’ The sergeant doesn’t whisper, but is vaguely confidential. ‘Special Parade in twenty-five minutes. Six-thirty sharp.’ ‘I can’t make that.’ ‘My oath you will. Full uniform and kit.’ ‘Uniform?’ ‘That’s what I said.’ Harry hasn’t worn his uniform in weeks, not since he last attended church Parade. He jumps to a disturbing conclusion. ‘We’re on the move?’ ‘Maybe. Not for me to say.’ ‘What about grub?’ It’s a ludicrous concern. He’s not hungry. He’s anxious to preserve the regularity of his day.

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‘I’m sure they’ll save you something,’ says Ticker. Appalled, Harry watches him weave among the naked men. Ticker refers to a typed list. He pulls up close to his victims. Their eyes go wide. Their mouths either drop or tighten. Harry thinks: Why me? There are ninety-odd more suitable men, younger men. He pats the pale bulge of his stomach. Twenty bakers stand before the lieutenant in the guise of common infantrymen. They amount to less than a quarter of the company. Harry continues to resent his inclusion. He fears any sort of change, preferring to stick with what he knows. Bunter is also present, white-faced and wary. Harry wonders how they were chosen. Names from a hat? The lieutenant apologises for bringing them away from their bathing. He refers vaguely to ‘the press of events’. It has become rare for Harry to look past the conventions of rank – the man has pips, the long and the short of him – but he’s aware, too, that the lieutenant is said to be only nominally in command, too shy to say boo. Ordinarily he keeps his distance, leaving the men to Ticker. So this small and exclusive Parade is probably an ordeal for him. His address is predictable enough. Difficult times, a difficult job. ‘You will have heard,’ he says, ‘that other companies have been asked to provide field cooks for the forward areas . . . ’ Harry’s thighs flex and shiver. His belly is in turmoil. The front lines are no place for a big slow-moving lump! He’ll be lucky to last a day. Surely his age disqualifies him. When

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he failed to fail his medical they said this would never happen. Even then he had his doubts. Once you’re in you’re in. They had also said he would never be sent overseas. The lieutenant assures them they are the envy of their unit. There are men, he says, who will undoubtedly feel slighted for having been overlooked. It’s while he’s wishing them luck that Bunter begins to vomit. The sound is a sort of stuttering groan. He’s bent double in the front rank, spewing his midday stew on the ground. Harry can’t help but steal a look. Bunter’s trousers and puttees are a mess. There’s a gob of what might be gristle on his boot. The smell is foul. Ticker heads towards the disturbance but the lieutenant pulls him up with a glance. Let it go. Bunter lifts his white face, distressed and ashamed. He looks like something carved in wax. Harry can’t spare him any feeling. He has his own visceral knowledge. It comes to him as something he has known all along. He will not die for them. He will not die for anyone. He must run, or at least try. He must run with the appearance of poise. There is no moment of decision, no doubt, just the press of necessity. He holds his attention fiercely on the officer, who refers with trembling delicacy to a written itinerary. They have an hour and a quarter to make themselves ready. Muster at 8:00 p.m., motor transport to Rouen, train to Amiens. Harry thinks: Perhaps an hour, at most an hour to get lost. He’s not at first conscious of having made a leap. Certainly something has tripped a wire – pure fear, but also defiance. He experiences an abrupt refusal, less a decision than a bodily revolt against months of obedience and self-abnegation. His

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signature, his oath, his dubious adherence to the outward form of a soldier, all mean nothing. He won’t die for them. It occurs to him that the terrier instructor in Australia has contributed to this – all those hours of obeisance to the bayonet and its sinister truths. He forces down a meal of bread and jam. His gut feels shrunken and rebellious. He has the squirts. Yet his discomforts have become peripheral. It is like being drunk – a strange paring down of perceptions. But there are sober moments too. The old Harry can’t believe what the present Harry, the fleeting Harry, is up to. The charge will undoubtedly be premeditated desertion. Forty-five minutes before Parade he leaves his haversack and hat on the bed. He has the jitters and is convinced everyone is watching as he throws one foot in front of the other with the disjointed emphasis of a puppet. In his pocket he has 200 francs and a worthless leave pass. Bunter pauses in his letter-writing – he writes twice weekly to his mother – to fix him with a taut-lipped smile. He rolls his eyes as if to say, ‘What the fuck, we’re in for it now!’ Harry hastens from the hut, too urgently, whatever composure he possessed quite shot. But it isn’t a clean escape, as Natty Mills catches him outside in the cold and shakes his hand. Mills becomes grave and formal and tells him they will certainly meet again. Harry is embarrassed to see how important he has become to him. He draws away, feigning urgency to visit the latrines. A night shift has been instituted and he hurries past a knot of men shoulder-bent to a loaded rail cart. They’re too absorbed to look up. If they notice him at all, they assume he is off to shit away his nerves.

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At this point he becomes aware of a strategic advantage. Within popping distance of death, they expect men to run. Not back here. And true enough, the way is clear, no one paying the least attention to an apparently brisk and purposeful private putting the barracks behind him. But this is the easy part. Base Depot is a maze of compounds within compounds, and he is afraid to contemplate the fences that stand between him and the Rouen road. Yet he has a nebulous plan, born as a vague flicker during the upheaval of Parade. It begins with the field hospital. By the time he reaches the hospital gate the light is fading. The military police light their lamp just as he arrives. He salutes and waits deferentially, imagining it pays to approach Red Caps on your belly. For all his agitation, he recognises a feeling of tautness and harmless deceit reminiscent of family card-play. He knows that it is illusory, a form of light-headedness, but that it is better than dwelling on the consequences of failure. He asks for their help. His brother’s in the hospital, he says, and tonight his unit goes forward. If they’ll let him through he won’t be more than ten minutes. Just to say toorah! These two hard-bitten types exchange vacillating looks. Will they or won’t they? They give him five minutes. He walks between the tents, dreading that he will run into some officious nurse or orderly. Above the sandbags, electric lights shine through the canvas, creating a peculiar puppet show of shadows. Sometimes he hears fragments of conversation, the squeak of castors rolling on boards, an

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occasional clap of laughter. He crosses the bare exercise paddock, remembering the raw-faced cripple, his tucked-up skull, his juddering gait. This is the image that had come to him at Parade. It had struck him that such a human wreck could go anywhere, no questions asked. Beyond a block of huts a house stands in a ruined garden. A blaze of light. Evidently the resident doctors have no fear of German bombs. He decides it’s time for stealth – difficult for a man of his height and bulk. Bent double, he scoots across to a deciduous hedge. If he’s caught now they must assume he’s up to no good. But as far as he can see there’s little danger. The house is shut up tight against the night. He sidles along the base of the hedge, which claws at his hands and scalp. Coming within feet of the rubble wall that abuts the house, he emerges to try the gate. His fingers encounter a chain but no lock. A simple clasp. He lifts the gate and eases it open without a sound. The light from a back window seeps across the yard but doesn’t reach the medical store – a converted stable – where he worked before Christmas. In the open, in the diffuse light, he’s inclined to panic. His hearing is heightened and he agonises over the squelch of his boots. Then he’s pressed against the cold masonry of the stable, edging towards the double doors. Naturally they’re bolted, but underneath, from memory, there’s a deep hollow in the earth from constant foot traffic. What he discovers is an ice-cold puddle. He removes his greatcoat and pushes under the doors on his back. The water penetrates almost instantly. Scrambling up on the other side, he swipes the excess from his uniform

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and tries to restrain his gasping. The darkness is total as his hands play along a timber railing. He inches his feet up a series of steps. Before long he’s exploring the shelving that he helped to construct. In the first he clasps the boot of a prosthetic leg. Not what he wants, but on the right track. He explores other less identifiable hardware: stiff canvas with cane ribbing, straps, buckles, rubber sheeting with a fungus-like texture. Then on to the next, and the next. Three four five along, and there they are: splints, crutches, sticks. For a moment he’s in a quandary. A crutch or a stick? A crutch is unmistakable evidence of a disability, but cumbersome. A stick is ambiguous. At a distance he might be taken for an officer. Perhaps an advantage. A stick it is. Purportedly the hospital is the way out, the tried and trusted route for a little unofficial furlough. Several in his unit have availed themselves of it, or say they have. They report the fences are poorly maintained. They argue the police don’t bother patrolling in the belief the wounded and sick are in no condition to break out and that the malingerers won’t want to. Impressive logic. But now as he crouches beside the first of two ten-foot razor-topped fences, he has cause to despise camp hearsay. Certainly in this dark corner there are no police, but these fences are daunting. A mile off Rouen is a black hump that sometimes twinkles ever so slightly. The plain is flat and dark, fuzzed with hedgerows. On the road there’s the usual movement. Men. The occasional lorry. According to his father’s watch, which has phosphorescent Roman numerals, Parade has begun. Perhaps at this

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moment the sergeant is calling his name. He can imagine his consternation. Lambert? Gone? They will question Bunter and Mills and one or two others. Did he give any inkling? Have they any suspicion of where he might be? He wonders, too, whether the Red Caps at the hospital gate, piqued at his failure to return, will have the initiative to come searching for him. He must dig. Any point is as good as the next. Without a suitable tool he must make do with his bare hands and the blunt end of his stick. The soil is wet, but compacted and icy below the turf. The bottom wire is pinned with iron pegs, and as he tries to extricate them his fingers ache then go numb and lock at the joints. He jabs savagely then paws away once more, alternating until a peg loosens. He twists and pulls, twists and pulls. Then more digging. The noise can’t be helped. The first peg gives way. Then another. Though the bottom wire is still very taut, he levers it up so he can force his head through. Not unexpectedly it clamps down on the back of his neck so he’s momentarily trapped. But he wriggles and pushes on. By now he’s soaked and trembling from the core of his body. One last heave and he’s through. But this is no spot to celebrate, as he’s confined within the perimeter strip, just twenty yards wide – one of the first places they’ll come looking. He tackles the next fence. Quicker now, he locates the pegs without indiscriminate digging, exposing their heads with a few well-aimed strokes. Latching onto the first with the crook of his stick, he stands and pulls. For a moment it seems he’s achieving nothing, until all at once he topples backwards, the peg

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hurtling overhead. Uninjured, he bounces up and wrenches at the next. Soon he’s tearing at the matted grass to produce a hollow, finally slipping under with comparative ease. Out in the open he stands briefly motionless, fearful but also appreciative of the spread of fields. The nearest cover is a cluster of leafless trees. From the road a hundred yards away come voices, British, the same rural sing-song his father spoke. He’s not without a sense of shame, but he’s seen enough of England – admittedly in the bleakest circumstances – to know it’s not the land of hope and glory. His loyalties have become very narrow. Moment by moment they narrow. For several hundred yards it’s possible to keep to the hedges. He’s wet and cold and no matter how energetically he moves, he can’t warm himself. The track curls into the oversized village of Sotteville, which gradually merges with St Sever, the manufacturing district of Rouen. He teeters between confidence and terror, for a few brief moments driven by a peculiar certainty that nothing and nobody will impede him, then chastising himself for idiocy. He doesn’t allow himself to think definitely of his destination, but knows that it is there, a choice too fragile and absurd to examine. Twenty yards further along he’s convinced he’s proceeding on the basis of fantasy. He resolves that if challenged, he will give himself up. He will not run or struggle.Yet he continues to push the possibilities, casting his escape as an almost passive endeavour, at every step testing fate. His route becomes a cobbled backstreet bisecting the high brick walls of mills and dye-works and rows of bleak cottages. All the windows of the

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dwellings are draped or blacked out with paper but he doubts there’s any activity within. The residents have succumbed to the enforced darkness and war-time routine of early to bed, early to rise. Faintly from across the river, probably from the Amiens line, comes the howling of a locomotive: a place to steer clear of, particularly with Bunter and the others on their way there. He turns towards the wharves. A face looms suddenly: a spare old Frenchman, well-dressed and nodding amicably. No time to conjure up pretences. Harry offers a reciprocating ‘Bon soir’ as the man disappears. That it was not a gendarme seems cause for confidence, and once more, in wild contrast to just a few seconds before, he strides out with a conviction of invulnerability. He can smell the Seine, a reek of oil and shipping, and hear the jabber of Chinese labourers. The sounds of their exertion lead him on, until he has a view of the vast boulevard and quay along which he and Bunter passed weeks before. Glinting ropes sweep down from launches and small ocean-going ships. Engines chug in the darkness and winches grip and rattle. Men strain against rail trolleys. The same brash instinct that has brought him this far sends him out into this activity with a sudden lurch. He is a convincing cripple. His left leg creeps forward, trembling from the thigh down. Then his weight goes onto his stick and he pivots. Slow progress but he feels perfectly safe. Passing the entrance of a weakly lit cafe, he musters a withering resentment for the able-bodied within. He thanks God for the Rushburn Anglican Players, where he first learnt to impersonate others. With each step he becomes more consummately a ruin.

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It doesn’t surprise him that the Chinese are quite indifferent as he continues his crippled march into their midst. He has experienced the same blinkered absorption, the same dread of looking beyond what’s close at hand. The European overseers, British soldiers, refuse to look at him. He’s almost cocky. Yet not far away is the Place Carnot, wide and without cover, and probably crawling with police. He emerges laboriously into the square as a tram clatters away from a stop. A group of women factory workers, evidently coming off shift, divides around him. Despite his anxiety, and quite involuntarily, he watches the way they move, watches them bustle onto the bridge and hears the provosts calling to them in a mixture of English and French. The French is lost on him, but the English is clear enough. Nothing too improper. The women respond with a weary raillery of their own, routine half-hearted banter that makes one of the Red Caps laugh. As good a time as any for Harry to advance. The laughing provost sees him rock and lurch. His eyes become businesslike within his beaming face. The women haven’t slowed, haven’t missed a step. He fires a parting quip but they’ve already forgotten him. Which leaves just the unwelcome distraction of a broken-down soldier. Harry gasps and stamps his stick. His left leg shudders and he swings again. The Red Cap opens the latch of his lantern to get a better look. Breath hooting, Harry fishes in the pocket of his coat. He manages to articulate the word ‘Pass’. The Red Cap, a coarse-looking English boy not much older than twenty, openly winces. Harry makes several attempts at another word and extends an open hand at the cafes over the bridge.

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‘Sorry, chum. All leave’s cancelled. They should have told you.’ Harry shakes his head, insisting the pass is good. He sees the doubt forming on the boy’s face. And the impatience: What’s this human wreckage doing out of hospital anyway? Should be locked up tight. But it’s his offsider who has the solution: ‘Just you sit here a bit. We’ll put you on the next motor back to camp. Save your legs.’ Harry protests limply as they settle him on a stool outside their shelter. He could laugh or he could howl. Damn decent lads, they’ve nabbed him with kindness. Mostly he wants to howl. He peers down through the hinged mechanism that allows the bridge to open up for tall ships. The river is black, flowing soundlessly. A truly desperate man might jump in. He can hear the young Lamberts back home, George’s myriad descendants, telling the comic story of how Uncle Harry killed himself in the Seine rather than face the Germans. On the Nord line the locomotives continue to shriek. Next stop, slaughter. Poor Bunter. Not that his own lot’s any better. He fears he’s coming to, his rational side resurfacing with a belated regard for the odds against him. At best he might have stolen a few hours. And then what? Precisely what awaits him now. Detention and beatings. Disgrace. And ultimately the same chances of being killed. All at once he has a maudlin desire to confess, to tell these pleasant English boys they’ve caught a bad one. He’s on the brink of calling to them when a soldier jogs out of the darkness, shouting obscenities and turning in circles.

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Soon there’s another, less vocal but more slippery. He’s wheeling an invalid. Drunkards. But not the man in the chair. He’s the genuine article, lolling side to side and all but toppling out, his white face as impassive as a doll’s. ‘Bloody Jocks,’ the Red Caps curse, and reluctantly set off after them, waving their arms and lurching as if rounding up livestock. The Scots think it’s hilarious, until they’re cornered. Then they turn argumentative, insisting they have a right to show their comrade a bon time. If their comrade’s having a bon time he’s not showing it. His mouth hangs permanently open. His eyes are opaque and unmoving. Awake to the opportunity, Harry moves briskly, the object of a miraculous cure. He imagines the bridge is swaying with every step. Yet when he treads on the far side, glancing back, he sees the dispute has advanced to pushing and shoving and that the police are fully occupied.

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six

PROJECT NOTES,August 17, 1968 Day trip to Rushburn to poke about and photograph Anglican church window. Bad road after Bendigo. Three hours up, three hours back. Exhausted. But what a revelation! What a precious little scandal, even if it’s rubbish! Thank you, Mrs Straughan. I’m glad I didn’t invite Mum. She would have talked herself hoarse about the worthy Lamberts. We would have got bogged down in genealogy. No one would have got a word in. Mrs Straughan certainly wouldn’t have said what she said. The woman who I’d arranged to meet, Anglican stalwart with keys to the church, was unexpectedly absent. Instead I ended up with Mrs Straughan. Nasty little person with a monkey face. She didn’t have time to walk up to the church. And no, she couldn’t give out the keys to a stranger. I explained that I’d made arrangements with Mrs So-and-so. I was expected. I’d driven three hours

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from Melbourne, for goodness’ sake. All very well, but she had a sick dog to look after. I said I’d drive her up and back. It was only 200 yards. Finally convinced her, but she remained crabby. What did I want to look at the window for anyway? General interest, I said. She had no idea who I was and I didn’t let on. The church sits at the top of a hill. Granite blocks, slate roof, not particularly pretty or impressive. But from the inside the windows sparkle – four intricate stained-glass pictures. I had no trouble picking out Uncle Harry’s. There’s a brass plate underneath: In mem ory of Private Harold Lambert who answered the call of duty. Date: 1930. Sponsors: Mr Lewis Broughton and ‘grateful parishioners’. The scene itself is beautiful in a morbid way, very sombre tones. A pale and English-looking Jesus carries a lantern through a garden of transparent blues and greens. Lilies spring up at his feet. A pomegranate bush droops with ripe fruit. Jesus knocks at the door of a little barrel-vaulted temple: the House of God. I took several photos. Mrs Straughan had been standing impatiently at the door, but now she came up beside me. ‘That dirty bugger!’ she said. I nearly dropped. What dirty bugger? Who did she mean? ‘That Lambert fellow. He ran for his life.’ I stared at her. ‘Harold Lambert?’ ‘Everyone knows he ran from the enemy. He was a dirty bugger.’

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When she saw my unusual interest she clammed shut. She had imagined I was interested in windows, not the man. I couldn’t get her to repeat herself. What did she mean he was a dirty bugger? No explanation. I wanted to talk to other people, but who? It’s not something you repeat to just anyone. ‘Mrs Straughan says Harold Lambert was a deserter and a dirty bugger. Please comment.’ I rang cousin Terry when I got home, just for someone to tell. ‘Oh, yeah,’ he said. ‘That’s been around for years.’ Is it true? He doesn’t know. It’s just something he was told. Why hadn’t Mum heard it? Why hadn’t I heard it? Boys’ gossip, not for female ears. ‘You know what the old blokes are like!’ ‘You mean Uncle Dick?’ ‘Don’t know. Can’t remember. Might have been old Dickie.’

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seven

Harry is conscious of little birds squabbling in the branches well before the day plays on his eyelids. Though curious to see the cause of the commotion, he can’t bring himself to move a muscle. His knees are locked against his chest and it seems his spine has fused into a contorted bow. He has a ricked neck and a throbbing head, yet to adjust his body even a little exacerbates the pain. His only comfort is the warmth of his breath on his scarred knuckles. At last he opens his eyes and sees the pale thatch of the house and light splintering on the greenhouses. In the yard someone is busy. He strains for a better view, suffering a fierce pulse at the back of his skull, and catches only an inconclusive glimpse. But he supposes it’s her. The same squarish build. Who else can it be? She opens the barn, and once inside, chatters unintelligibly as if to a child. As far as he can gather she’s feeding livestock. Probably pigs, though in this climate they lock up everything at night. Uncle George talked to his pigs. Good listeners.

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He detects the first sounds of a train. Reinforcements coming up from Le Havre. Very faint at this stage, the chuffchuff-chuff has a peculiar solidity, as if the steam is turning to hard matter on contact with the cold air. He’s becoming practised at identifying trains. In the night he got to six before he stopped counting. He makes the effort to refer to his watch, a difficult manoeuvre, considering his numbed hands. He hasn’t the steadiness to insert his fingernail beneath the cover, but eventually it pops open. Two minutes after six. At the bakery the world begins at five. He’s sure he’s behaved foolishly. He aches for the security of his bakehouse, and even for the men of his unit. By now Bunter will have arrived in the back areas. They may be doing nothing more dangerous than nursing a mobile cooker. Between the railway and the house a thin fog lies in the depressions. Smooth humps of pasture rise up like islands. Eventually the locomotive reveals itself as a smudge against the developing green of the hills. He can’t judge the distance. Anything from half a mile to several. Preoccupied with the train, he fails to notice that the woman has come from the front gate. All at once she’s just thirty yards away and heading directly towards him. Mademoiselle Elise Cordier. No mistaking her slightly pugged features. He stays put among the poplars, hoping she won’t look up. She is grimmer, even more worn than last time. A strand of ironcoloured hair hangs loose from her kerchief. She treads mechanically, passing within feet of him. He recognises the brown uniform. They all wear it, all the factory workers, a sort of limp fustian that looks permanently soiled. He

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doesn’t know why he should be so dismayed. He has grown accustomed to the idea of her being old, and even to the possibility she was no great beauty to begin with. But those big agricultural boots! Old Cordier must have been a fond father, a man with a generous imagination. As the woman shrinks into the brightening fields, dipping in and out of the fog, he discovers a fresh discomfort. Hunger. His stomach has been counting the hours. The thought of scrambling day after day for food horrifies him. Worse, a song has stolen into his head, a song from the last months of his mother’s illness – sweet and debilitating. He shuffles out onto the gravel road, standing openly, almost hoping he’ll be seen so he can surrender without a fuss. In both directions there is no one. He knows that he should conceal himself but, bereft of both energy and will, he can’t muster the conviction. Even as he pulls open the gate he experiences a sense of distance from his actions. He takes the left-hand path and raps at the door – just in case. No response. Moving along the side of the building, he finds a window that isn’t wholly papered over. The interior is gloomy and cluttered with closely packed furniture. He tries the sash and discovers it’s locked from the inside. A brief search of the garden turns up a smooth stone, but when he arrives back at the window he freezes, unable to bring himself to break the glass. He doesn’t know what restrains him. A dread of sudden noise? Of criminality? Ridiculous inhibitions in a deserter, but for several minutes he stands in a daze, until he feels the stone slip from his fingers.

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Roused, he pushes along the fence beside the rose-fields. Small flames of green have ignited along the otherwise naked canes. At the end of the yard he steps over the collapsed fence and follows a furrow. Fifty or sixty yards on he arrives at an embankment, a dam wall, wet and bristling with sedge. Up top he’s confronted by an expanse of black water. The first rays of morning sun penetrate the fog obliquely, and he slumps down, hoping to thaw a little in the promise of warmth. He wishes he could return to the resolve and certainty of the previous night. But the only urgency left in his belly is hunger. He is without wisdom or discipline and his head is full of his mother’s sickness and a lilting female voice, a pure and sisterly soprano. He remembers the sheet music passing from family to family, copied by hand. They sung it around the piano at Albion, Maggie and old Mary and the cousins warbling like birds. They sung it at the Burrakee Sports, a chorus of pretty girls done up in the colours of the Allies. ‘We don’t want to lose you but we think you ought to go . . . ’ It’s beyond him how he became useless. Until the war he was well thought-of. He thought well of himself. But when he examines this quick appraisal of his past he begins to doubt. The best he can say is he existed in comfort. He had a defined place, a hidey-hole, the nest of a solitary animal. A part of him longed to emerge from the unwholesome air as a man. But for several years now there has been only one sort of man. It occurs to him that if he’d valued himself more highly, that if he’d been able to hold to a gem of personal conviction, he would have avoided France like death.

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His mother got sick in the third year, in the middle of the conscription row, just after his last apprentice enlisted and when his mother’s beloved Anglican choir was noticeably lacking in virile male voices. She had stomach pains; complained of terrible wind. From the beginning he spoke of her ‘nerves’. The song ebbs and flows, soaring away behind his resurgent thoughts. He is susceptible to the sadness, to the longing and despair, and despises it at the same time. He remembers young Ruby humming it in the shop. Not once has he heard it in France. The men have less sentimental songs. His mother claimed to be too ill for songs, too ill for after-dark visitors, too ill even for family. Too ill for pleasure. And yet she continued to read. She sat upright with the rigour of an Egyptian statue, her nose in the pages of Agnes Giberne. She wore her woollen nightgown and an old cardigan. Her long carbuncled feet were bare on the rug. Undeniably she missed the music and gossip and cardplay but she had made her bed. If the children came in the afternoons she would have him believe they were a great bother. She fooled no one. She never reproached him for not providing her with grandchildren of her own, perhaps because she had been instrumental in freezing out Susan Minton after his father’s death. Losing Sammy was her first great catastrophe. She wasn’t about to lose her son as well. And Susan was an opinionated woman, a schoolmistress, to Ma’s mind an arch interloper. He didn’t fight hard. He was too baffled

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by his father’s death. But also he recognised that his feelings for Susan Minton didn’t run deep. They played tennis. They collected wildflowers from the scrub. They were the leads in several skits and an Easter pageant. It was a public friendship, a pleasant convenience, interspersed with as much secret touching as Susan judged necessary. She telegraphed her intentions by sucking breath-sweetening lozenges. He found her orchestrated kisses overly wet. The couple of times he pushed his trousered dick against her middle she broke into a teacherly smile as if congratulating him on his equipment. His cousin Maggie, from whom he’d been inseparable as a child, took a nosy interest in his attachments. By this time she was Mrs Andrew McArdle, mother of three, but she continued to speak of ‘my big Harry’. ‘We’re friends,’ he said. ‘But it’s on the wane,’ Maggie observed. She meant ‘doomed’. He didn’t confirm this, but it was patently true. ‘I always thought she had a fat behind,’ said Maggie. She too had a fat behind, especially now, but hers was confidently fat. Susan Minton sensed a dead end. She took the expedient of offering greater sexual licence, allowing him to grope about under her skirt, but it wasn’t particularly exciting for either. Although their friendship continued to limp along, she understood not to expect ‘developments’. Eventually she became Mrs William Tanner, a policeman’s wife, and moved away.

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‘She weren’t the right one,’ Ma consoled him. ‘No hurry. You’re still young. Weddings and littlies are best left to when you’re settled in the mind.’ Settled in the mind. When had he ever been that? Yet he slipped easily enough into a reverential mourning for Sammy, and his mother didn’t complain that in the face of George and Mary’s tally of thirty-seven descendants, she could boast just one. Not that she was openly envious. Glad as she was to see ‘all the little Lamberts’, she was equally glad to see them go. It’s Harry’s belief she came to prefer the simplicity of their immediate family of two (with its echo of three). Light glimmers across the black water of the dam. A frog croaks sluggishly within a few yards of his feet. His head aches with singing, the single voice swelling momentarily into a choir and demanding first attention: ‘We don’t want to lose you but we think you ought to go . . . ’ He knows it can’t be killed or shut out, that it must be allowed to die naturally. It distresses him to remember his mother as she was during those last months – the sagging around the eyes, that familiar frown of absorption. She was a woman subjecting herself to austerities, literally making herself sick on his behalf. He made efforts to shake free of her, feeble efforts. ‘Did you hear Eddie Holt’s gone off?’ he asked. She acknowledged him with a minimal nod. She knew what was coming, needed all her will not to flinch. ‘My turn next,’ he said with a tilt at flippancy. He can map out her deterioration. He understands it on

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one level, not on others. There are precipitating events, the most memorable being Mrs Hanna’s son Albert winning the Victoria Cross. The premier of Victoria came to Rushburn, and other important people too. There were ceremonies and speeches and the mother of the hero, a bristle-chinned Baptist in a bell dress, stood on the podium to exhort every mother who called herself British to relinquish her son. Lew Broughton expanded the Express to six pages, four devoted to Albert Hanna – reminiscences of family, teachers, church elders and friends, excerpts of letters from Cairo, and then from Gallipoli, eulogies from officers and soldiers, and authentic-looking diagrams of the terrain in which Albert achieved his apotheosis. The turmoil and hoopla lasted a month, and afterwards even Harry could perceive the shift in who was who among the town’s women. In with the new, out with the old. ‘My turn next,’ he repeated. ‘What, at your age?’ she snarled. ‘I can name others older.’ She slapped her book shut with some of her old contempt. ‘We’d be in a sorry state if it came down to you, Harold Lambert!’ In the night, to emphasise her feelings, she awoke and vomited.

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eight

By late afternoon he’s famished. But on the positive side he’s less cold, his inner clothes now moist rather than wet, and his headache has faded. He’s aware of the connection between his mental and physical tides; feels the rising swell of hope. His desires begin to seem sacred again. He fixes the previous night’s faith in his mind, the child-belief that strangers and circumstances and even inanimate objects might bend to his needs. Yet the feeling is precarious. He doubts it could survive another night in the open. Lying low in the grass, he keeps watch on the road, and on the path from the poplars. What strikes him is the isolation of the Cordier property. It’s all of four miles to the outskirts of the city. To the north-west, in the direction the trains come from, is a biggish settlement, most probably Maromme. Montigny is just as distant, hidden in the southern forest. Along the raised road that presumably goes back to Rouen there are two equally isolated farmhouses, both tucked away among low-lying woods. He suspects they

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are deserted, as he doesn’t see any smoke. All day hardly anyone has happened by. A woman driving a cow. A little troop of old buffers going shopping. A pensioned-off soldier still wearing the gaudy red pants of 1914. He speculates that old Cordier had premises in Rouen, or in Montigny proper. Even the fame of Mademoiselle Elise, the rose, can’t have lured many people out here. When she reappears, plodding resolutely from the trees, he thinks better of showing himself. He can see her panicking: a big unshaven man jumping up out of nowhere! She passes through the gate and vanishes around the side of the house. He resolves that after a proper interval, giving her time to settle, he will knock politely at the front door. He doesn’t know what he will say. Five minutes later, while he’s still procrastinating, she comes out again. He hears rather than sees her. He hears the swish of an implement. He crawls along the furrow for a better view. On the embankment, silhouetted against the glare, she shifts her weight rhythmically. It’s some time before he understands that she is cutting grass. Every so often she bends down, gathers up an armful and drops it onto what must be a spread cloth (he can see a fragment of printed blue). Periodically she stands and arches her back, the hooked blade raised overhead. Then she resumes her routine, hips swinging, kerchief bobbing in the sunset. Finally she ties up her bundle into a blue bale and heaves it up onto her shoulder. Stooping under the load, she finds a way down and through the roses and disappears behind the building. Soon there’s a knock and a clang, which he interprets as her unbolting the barn. He

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hears geese, a fractious welcome, and then her voice, brusque yet somehow indulgent. When she eventually returns to the house the first bright star has risen, though the sky is still a metallic grey. The grass is wetter and his chest feels sodden. Unwilling to delay any longer, he moves back along the row and emerges to straddle the side fence. He walks through her garden, scales two worn steps and taps timidly at the door. So as not to crowd her he steps down again and waits below. She comes noisily, opening up without caution. He’s prepared for her puzzled look and composes what he hopes is an innocent face. She says something he doesn’t understand. Her expression hardens as she recognises him: one of those Australians who came about roses. Doubtless she’s telling him again that the nursery is closed and has been since the men left; that he should go away. At last he finds a word, just one, dredged up from God knows where. ‘Effrayé.’ This isn’t what he intended. I’m afraid. Again there’s her searching look, partly curious, partly hostile. In his frustration he resorts to Charlie Chaplin gestures. First he’s running on the spot: exaggerated under-water movements, knees pounding his chest, repeated glances back over his shoulder at unknown assailants. All at once they have him! Captured! With the flat of his hand across his eyes to signify a blindfold he stands at attention. Next comes the firing squad. bang! He falls back dead. Even in the exertion of his performance he doesn’t miss her fleeting concern. She observes the scarred backs of his hands. He turns his bad ear to her, hoping that this mild childhood disfigurement – a ruddiness of the skin, barely

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visible in the failing light – might persuade her he’s suffered a soldier’s horrors. Since she stands on the upper step their faces are on a level, and she examines him earnestly. There are questions in her gaze, and a plea for straight dealing, and a threat. She glances furtively at the road. East and west. Not a soul. Indecisively, nervously, she jiggles her dirt-etched hands. His heart whops and bumps. He’s cold with sweaty apprehension, yet dares to believe that this might be one of those rare coincidental moments when the world agrees with his needs. She jigs her hands. He doesn’t know whether she means ‘Come in’ or ‘Get lost’ – but he follows as she retreats inside. He pulls the door shut behind him and listens in the darkness for her breath, for the brush of her clothing, for the squeak of loose boards. The palms of his hands encounter architraves and sudden recesses, rooms leading off the hall. He trails her through an open space without furniture, and on into a salon with a west-facing window that lets in a pinkish glow. The ceiling feels very close, as if the upper storey is weighing on his head, and the air has a damp locked-up smell. There is a sofa and matching chairs, dirty and threadbare with shabby gold braiding and carved griffin feet, and a set of three-legged tables tucked one under the other, smallest to largest. His eye is caught by twinkling decanters on the sideboard, all empty, and by framed certificates on the wall. Water stains run in brownish strips down the floral wallpaper. He can’t imagine sparkling family gatherings taking place between these walls. This is a room that has been in decline for years, since well before the war. And yet, apparently, it is the place to bring a visitor.

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She has him sit, and dispensing with speech altogether, ladles imaginary food into her mouth. Her thick eyebrows, still youthfully black in contrast to her grey-streaked hair, rise up in inquiry. He mimes his eagerness and she slips away, presumably to cook, leaving him to wait as the sun sets and his hands grow indistinct in his lap. In a far-away room she bangs and scrapes, and he’s struck by the enormity of the house, a great empty beehive in which the last worker labours alone. And doubtless there is as much space again upstairs. He has a mental picture of all the family together, old Cordier presiding over a laden table. Of course there must have been a swarm of servants, too, in the prosperous days. And all on the strength of one rose. He knows of no other Cordier success, or not one that raised the family to prominence beyond France. As for the actual Mademoiselle Elise, he knows he’s on shaky ground. Relieved as he is to have been permitted into her house, he wonders on what basis. He doesn’t believe in her spontaneous generosity. From the little he’s seen, and the good deal he’s heard, they are a shrewd lot, these French women. And this one, being older, has his measure at once. She finds a big strapping man on her doorstep, a foreigner, maybe a lunatic, and he spins her a tale about firing squads. What is it to her whether they blow him full of holes? No, she simply sees a dangerous customer and rather than risk violence, she plays along. The darkness is distressing, more complete than outdoors, and heavy with atmospheric moisture. The first of the nightly trains pushes across the plain. At its closest

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point it makes the house shake ever so gently. Windows tremble in their sills. On the sideboard the decanters tinkle. On impulse he rises to go looking for her. But she’s silent now, and when he gropes into the passage down which she’s vanished there’s no light to guide him. ‘Mademoiselle Elise!’ he sings out. She doesn’t respond, yet he hears a shuffle, and several steps further on has the aroma of food to steer by. Eventually he sees a gentle light wavering on a wall. ‘Mademoiselle Elise,’ he tries again, wary of bursting in on her. She looks up as he stands in the doorway. A big room, a kitchen. In English he tells her he’s come to help – not that in the dark salon he had been lonely and vaguely afraid. It’s his form of address, as far as he can make out, that annoys her. ‘Mademoiselle Elise . . . ’ He has no grasp of French manners, but it seems that this is too intimate. A presumption. She rises from the niggardly fire and chastises him. Her mouth is tight with impatience, as if he’s not only rude but stupid. Then she pats her sternum and gives herself a title he can’t correctly pronounce. Holum or Colom or something. He must call her this. What it means, who can say? Host? Good Samaritan? Yet it smacks of formality, somehow stressing her superior position. He’s not arguing. When she sees him standing there in abject submission she extends her open hand like a dinner plate. She expects something, a reciprocal act. He takes a punt and tells her his name. She takes it up at once, pronouncing it ‘Erri’. Then she insists he return to the salon. He might refuse to go. The smell of bubbling food, the dancing light, her presence, are all comforts he doesn’t want to give up.

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But he’s aware, too, of her tension. He has invaded her privacy. There is a low bed with untidy rucked blankets beside the hearth, and a clothes chest. Long socks, a blouse, and a pair of grey drawers drape over the iron fender. The daughter of Monsieur Cordier reduced to camping in the servants’ kitchen! Offering apologies, he wades back into the darkness. He proves an appalling night navigator. Remembering that contemptuously pursed mouth, he hasn’t the courage to call for help. For a while he blunders along passages and from room to room, one of which, quite by chance, turns out to be the salon. He sits obediently, listening to his stomach gurgle, until she arrives with a lit candle and a bowl of stew. She situates the biggest of the three-legged tables in front of him, drips hot wax onto the polished walnut surface and fixes the base of the candle there so he can see what he’s eating. He’s mildly shocked by this disrespect for the family assets, but not so shocked that it spoils his appetite. He sucks appreciatively from the spoon. Potatoes and onions, and not much else. Certainly no meat. But good and hot. When he looks up she’s gone. Disgusted perhaps. He scoops the last skerricks from his bowl, but his stomach is still biting. A full hour he sits with nothing to do, no company, and increasingly cold. He refers regularly to his watch. A little after 8:00 p.m. she returns, detaches his candle, now a dribbling stub, and beckons. A certain amount of wandering, a sweep through a derelict dining room, and they have stairs to climb. Steep stairs. There’s a landing halfway up and he

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glances vertiginously down: a fine place to break his neck. Then up they go again, she leading the way. He keeps his eyes downcast to avoid looking at her behind, which at one point burbles and bugles with the exertion of successive steps. Neither of them say a word, but he thinks of the famous farters of his acquaintance, all men, and of his coy women relations who swear that women don’t do it. (‘May God strike me down if I did!’ Aunt Mary declares when George, her husband, makes insinuations.) Harry can’t see the mademoiselle’s expression to gauge whether she’s quite so mortified. And a moment later, when they stand at the head of the stairs, she’s wholly composed, and certainly not about to acknowledge anything so trivial. The upper storey seems less complex, less like a rabbit warren. It consists of a central hall and half a dozen rooms. The one she allocates him is large and dominated by a high double bed. He accepts the candle and explores, boots loud on the timber floor. When he turns to thank her he finds that she hasn’t come in. She bids him ‘Bonne nuit’ and closes the door. Almost simultaneously she clicks the key in the lock. Although he understands her distrust, he’s nonetheless indignant. He might protest; he might shout and bang the walls, but it would only confirm her fears. He stands in the middle of the room, undecided whether to undress. If she has gone for the gendarmes they might be here within the hour. Then there are the provos to look forward to, the questions, the abuse. He’s heard of terrible beatings, men left permanently damaged. But he’s sceptical; can’t see the

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Australian police laying into one of their own. And he’s very tired. Even an hour’s kip would be something. He peels off his damp coat, then his even-damper tunic and shirt. The skin of his upper body is yellow in the candlelight. The muscles appear loose and wasted, and he’s convinced that after just twenty-four hours of privation his health is suffering. Unravelling his puttees, he shifts his weight on the bed and it groans and twangs like a primitive stringed instrument. He removes his trousers and pulls aside the sheets. They are clean, but with an odour, and icy cold. Once in, he curls up like a child. The pillow smells distinctly of poultry. He drifts off into sleep itching at notional lice. His father is there waiting, his face perpetually puckered and winking. All these years dead – fourteen this recent Christmas – yet here he is, popping up the instant Harry closes his eyes! These days his repertoire is very limited, just the one expression: a facetious grin. Appropriate enough to the circumstances he knew, but not in the least comforting. He would have Harry believe that everything is a laughing matter, even desertion. ‘Them Froggies could teach us a thing or two,’ he says. Then he’s gone and Harry’s awake, inhaling the damp. Outside the window lightning flickers. The thunder is distant but louder than the fizzling of rain on thatch. And in place of his grinning father there is a more rational construction, a good-natured and liberal man, but not one who would have smiled on cowardice. Harry has heard the stories, mostly from Uncle George. Poverty and blind patriotism. How in their one-roomed cottage in rural Suffolk

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the brothers had dreamt of bright red coats and marching into battle. How their heroes were Wellington, York and Sir John Moore, two generations gone but celebrated like living gods. How there had been uncles and cousins who had gone to India, mostly to die, and how even this didn’t stop half-starved village boys regarding the army as the royal road off the farms. Fortunately his father and George were apprenticed to a joiner in Ipswich instead. They took brides and crossed the world and by the time Harry came along, a late child ten years into the marriage, Sammy was devoted to the civil arts: bread, roses, painting, all the good things as they appeared to a labourer’s son. Harry doesn’t doubt that he has become a believer in turn – in liberality, in peace. But it amuses him, lying there in a Frenchwoman’s bed, to think of his father’s love for France. Never set foot in the place, couldn’t speak a word of the language (other than what he read in those hyperbolic rose catalogues), but no one could tell him it wasn’t the most civilised country on earth – a nation of democrats and creative geniuses, the engine-room of human progress. Witness the dining room walls at home: the monochromatic prints of scenes from Ovid, the captions all reading ‘after Monsieur So-and-so’. ‘Oh yes, them Froggies could teach us a thing or two.’ His ignorance and his optimism went together, as ludicrous as his stumpy pint-sized figure (like all the old Suffolkers, he attributed his lack of inches to the starvation diet of his youth). People admired his energy and laughed at his good nature. He laughed with them. Harry credits

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his father with never having felt beleaguered or unappreciated or blocked in his endeavours. And what results! Of course George and Lew and certain others had a hand in it too, but without Sammy, Rushburn might have remained a rough gold town, and never have become a city in miniature with slate-roofed churches, a lending library and a shire building dignified by moulded Doric columns. Yet the Sammy Lambert Harry remembers is without airs or condescension. While his mother is an assertive force, Sammy is a quiet word in his ear, a consoling presence. ‘Poor things,’ Sammy remarked one afternoon as they stood watching George’s twin bull-calves. The animals had been removed from their mother too early, and took comfort in sucking one another’s pistil. ‘They don’t know no better,’ Sammy said. This was as near as he ever came to disapproving of Harry’s interest in a boy called Christopher Duncan. For cousin Maggie, who was thirteen, a year older than him, it was farcical. ‘They won’t get any milk doing that.’ ‘No,’ said Sammy. He continued to lean against the rail. Harry doesn’t think he was embarrassed or disgusted by the ‘poor things’. Christopher was never a special friend. Harry did not have special friends. But nor was he unpopular. He drifted happily between groups and individuals, secure in the complacent self-absorption of an only child. In the weeks before what his mother euphemistically referred to as his ‘troubles’ he went several times to Christopher’s house, once with Maggie, to look at his Orpington chicks. These

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were noisy and dirty, forever shitting, but Christopher’s tenderness for them was infectious. They prepared a feed of mashed bran and milk sops and collected greens from the night-man’s lane behind the yard. Harry learnt to enjoy their insistent pecking at his hand. He enjoyed their trust. Lunchtimes at school, when he played British Bulldog in the shadows of the black cypresses, Christopher was among the boys who tried to storm past him. For his age Harry was a colossus, able to lift his peers effortlessly from the ground, so almost always he was ‘he’ – the ogre in the middle. He looked along the line to choose his adversary. He was not aware of choosing Christopher more often than anyone else, but it seems he did. Soon it was a teasing game. The boys said he wanted to give Christopher Duncan one up the ring-hole. He wanted nothing of the sort. The idea was incomprehensible. But he laughed along with them, following his father’s affable example. He didn’t see any harm. It was just childish talk, meaningless noise. Or was it? At some point he discovered that Christopher was quietly beautiful. Christopher was thin. His hair was black and lank. He had dark eyes, always with a quick bead of light. Harry liked to be near him, but his longing, despite what the boys said, was naive and undiscerning, innocent of conceptions of male and female, or sexual heat. Sometimes he looked at him in class. Naturally, he was observed. For a week or two he enjoyed the notoriety – until his teacher, Mr Saunders, pulled him aside one morning to tell him he must stop worrying poor Christopher. Worrying was his word. And Mr Saunders was one of the luminaries

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of Harry’s world, second only to his father. He had never before been the recipient of such sharp words. His instinctive remedy was anger – perhaps not his first uprush of cruel stupidity, but the one he remembers as a sort of Fall. Come lunchtime he was among the British territorials sent to put down the rebellious blacks. He chased Christopher through the African fastness and finally caught and pinned him against a tree. Panting for breath, Christopher regarded him without fear because despite the annoyances of recent days Harry was his friend – big Harry with the eternal fat-lipped smile – and this was a game, or so he thought. For a second or two Harry looked into his beaming child-eyes, furious because he was beautiful. Then he punched him. Christopher bled and bled. Christopher’s father had words with Sammy. It seemed Harry had broken Christopher’s nose. There was a bill from Dr Marchant. Sammy paid up, but with the disclaimer that what had happened was just an unfortunate accident, all part of the rough and tumble for which boys were known. For weeks Christopher’s nose was hidden behind a plaster cast. He was masked with racoon-like bruises and the whites of his eyes were stained with clotted veins. Harry did not know how to say sorry. He was afraid Christopher would think he was trying to worry him. He noticed that no one made jokes about him any more, or not to his face. It was very lonely. ‘No, they don’t know no better,’ said Sammy, and moved away at last. Harry didn’t want to be one of those ‘poor things’ his

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father pitied. He felt suddenly unwell, with headaches and hot joints that Dr Marchant attributed to a vague ‘fever’. Home from school for a fortnight, he kept to his upstairs room, read Sir Walter Scott and ate big consoling meals. He swallowed pills and slurped curative syrups from a tablespoon, but sensed that no medicine could dispel the effects of Mr Saunders’ abhorrence. Some mornings he woke up angry that he couldn’t be as he was. He had liked himself. He had imagined he was likeable no matter what he did or said. But they had got inside him. How did adults manage to stop other people getting inside them? He sat at the window of his citadel above his father’s shop looking down at pedestrians and animals in the dusty street. He listened to how rough boys called to one another, learning the rhythms of their half-belligerent raillery. Gradually it occurred to him that he’d blundered into a big iron trap that most boys knew how to step around. And it wasn’t the only trap. If it hadn’t been Christopher Duncan, it would have been something else. How did adults live? How could his father go about with such a broad and sincere smile on his face? Harry welled with admiration for his father. Sammy loved him like his own fingers and toes, without question. So did Ma. He really didn’t need anyone else. Fortified by this idea, he began to improve. He sat out in the sunny backyard and read Robinson Crusoe, and was heartened by how well the hero managed without others. His island seemed less a prison than a paradise. After going three days without a headache Harry returned to school, but with a careful step, determined to

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fend off further assaults on his worth and equilibrium. No one’s opinion, favourable or unfavourable, would ever get inside him again. Mr Saunders could think what he liked, say what he liked; the boys could admire or despise him, and Harry would remain unmoved. The danger was letting the outside penetrate. His parents recognised his tension.There was nothing they could put a finger on. He smiled his old smile and climbed the stairs two at a time with his familiar grandfatherly roll – so endearing when he was younger! Sometimes, even now, he laughed so hard he showed his tonsils. But Sarah in particular saw that it was a performance. He was partclosed, even in his own home. When neighbouring boys made fresh attempts to involve him in their games, coming to the back gate on a Saturday morning, Harry was indifferent. Sometimes he agreed to go netting yabbies or panning for gold in the Five Mile Creek, sometimes not. He revealed no eagerness to resume his place. And how callous in his remarks he’d suddenly grown – like any other boy. Once she caught him butting Tim McInnley against the shed, a test of strength that would have ended in tears if she hadn’t intervened. She feared she was witnessing her own imperious nature at last manifesting in her son. Sweet Harry, gentle Harry, had vanished. Contemplating this, he sees that he had come to his own imperfect solution, and with little or no intervention from his parents. Certainly at boarding school he was his own creation, this aloof and sometimes callous individual whose beginnings his mother had seen and lamented. But he likes

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to think that a certain softness has persisted within him, along with a weak faith in the truth of his early perceptions. For this, even if it is not a blessing, he must thank his parents, particularly his mother. She is the paragon who encouraged him to look to a magical woman to lift him from difficulty and set him down, safe and exultant, in wonderland. It occurs to him that his presence here in a stranger’s bed, a fugitive in a foreign country, is a consequence of old, infantile yearnings. Yet this precious refuge is real and undeniable. How long it will hold against the weight of external force, he can’t guess. Rather than try to map all the threats to his calm, it seems easier to surrender to memory. For a long time he didn’t guess at how purposefully his mother had worked to save his self-esteem. Foremost in her mind, perhaps, was a desire to redirect his sexual energy. He imagines he must have had a doughy soul, infinitely pliable. What he remembers, what excites him even now, is the thought of thirteen-year-old Maggie spreading against him in her scratchy nightdress. They lay top-to-toe in the dark annex beside his parents’ suite at the Doutta Gala Hotel in Flemington, an arrangement that Aunt Mary, her mother, would not have countenanced, but a small matter to Harry’s mother, who maintained, perhaps archly, that they were still children. Just two months after his ‘troubles’, they had come to the Centennial Exhibition in Melbourne – a two-day journey on Sammy’s crunching wagon – to see the treasures of the globe. Yet anticipation of the morrow’s wonders was swamped by new sensations

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in the hotel bed: the firm koala grip of Maggie’s short legs, her gentle rocking against the protuberance of his knee. Despite his inexperience, he sensed that this went beyond a simple wriggling for comfort. Her rocking continued for many minutes, always restrained, easing back almost to stillness when the springs began to squeak, but then reviving. He was conscious of the heat of her foot against his side. There was also the greater heat of her thighs. Her breathing was like that of a person holding back tears. She did not touch his hard penis, though she must have been aware of the eagerness in his pyjama trousers. Along with his excitement, along with his astonishment, there was undoubtedly fear, because he whispered her name, posing it as a question, a plea for reassurance: ‘Maggie?’ She sighed and murmured as if he’d woken her. He wasn’t convinced. ‘Go to sleep,’ she said, and nestled again, squirming and pushing then settling, as before, flush against his knee. In the strange silence of the hotel they lay feigning sleep. If his parents had expected Melbourne to rejuvenate him they were immediately vindicated. The days were almost as marvellous as the nights. He had never before seen the city, never ridden on a tram, never seen a cathedral or such a multitude of unknown faces. They stepped down onto dusty Rathdowne Street and gazed up at what seemed to be a cream-coloured palace on the hill of Carlton Gardens. Maggie took his arm so they walked like grown-up people, yet skittish with anticipation. They joined the crush of stout elegance and old-man dignity beside a small lake and a monstrous four-tiered sculptural fountain (pagan sea

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gods with tousled beards, a bare-breasted nymph whose promising nakedness terminated – disappointingly, to Harry’s awakened eye – in a coil of fishy scales). But this oddity was nothing beside the towering mass and facade of the Exhibition Building. A great faceted dome floated above the masonry, surmounted by a gleaming cupola and a flagpole flapping with the Union Jack. ‘Solid gold,’ said Sammy, eyes upward and teetering back in admiration, his spade beard horizontal to the ground. He was referring to the cupola. Harry had read in The Age that this was not the case, that it was merely plated with gold leaf, but held his tongue. His father was right in principle: such an extravagance was entirely possible. They were all wealthy beyond imagining – a truth reinforced as they entered through the great portals and witnessed a symbolic mountain of counterfeit gold. A plaque stated that this pyramid of gilded timber, rising up monumentally into the bunting-furled heights, signified the quantity of gold mined in Victoria since settlement. Sammy’s murmurings of reverent pride were absorbed into the general din of the Main Hall, where the swell of voices and laughter and clattering feet vied with the rumble of the machinery courts and an unmusical blaring of a pipe organ and orchestra concealed at the end of the eastern transept by a vast yellow sailcloth. They were drawn down the Grand Avenue of Nations where all the industry, enterprise and ingenuity of mankind was concentrated for their convenience and edification. They circled glass-sided cabinets of English porcelain, Irish linen, silver cutlery and musical instruments with a pellucid

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onyx sheen. They goggled at a cut-glass Belgian punchbowl, at engraved emu eggs that depicted bush idylls, at a gem-encrusted cruet stand. They admired, and counted, eighty-five German pianos. They passed under the wool-bale arches and stuffed sheep of their New South Welsh neighbours and wove between benches of mineral specimens and unprocessed ore. They were deafened by the thump of a quartz crusher identical to those that operated at home.They gawped at the cork chasm of Jenolan Caves, and at the waxwork representation of Captain James Cook and company landing at Botany Bay. Then it was on through the industrial courts, where his father was awed by the whirring clattering thumping energy of the working machines – lathes, saws, ringers, millers, threshers, dehullers, huskers, brick presses . . . Among the bright festoons overhead were inspiring banners: ‘Ability Is A Poor Man’s Wealth’ and ‘The Wheels Of Progress Do Not Stop’. His mother, however, had eyes for domestic machinery. Out front of the American court a dozen seamstresses demonstrated the inventions of the Singer Company. They smiled like music-hall performers while their elegant boots rocked the treadles and their fine fingers guided the fabric under the dancing needles. Despite her grown-up dress – there was a mound of velveteen riding on her false behind – and the fashionable top-knot of clematis in her hair, Maggie’s attention wasn’t long held by womanly pursuits, especially when they spied another American booth nearby. There were clots of children and indulgent parents, and a few sceptical young couples, all intrigued by the novelty

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of a gum that one chewed for its flavour and medicinal benefits but refrained from swallowing. It strengthened the jaws, said a winning young man, and in stimulating the saliva glands, promoted good digestion. He distributed samples with written endorsements from medical practitioners. And since Harry and Maggie had separated themselves from his parents, there was no one to dissuade them or advise caution. His gum had a sweet citrus tang; Maggie announced that hers was somewhere between Turkish delight, with its hint of rosewater, and toffee. She reached into her mock-pearl purse and outlaid four shillings for the complete range of flavoured gums. When Harry’s mother arrived to see them chewing like cows, Maggie, accustomed to the censoriousness of her own mother, was apprehensive. She needn’t have been. Sarah examined the box, sniffed the contents then asked leave to try one for herself. By the time they began their climb to the upstairs galleries to look at paintings even Sammy was chomping enthusiastically. ‘This one you give me, Maggie . . . ’ ‘Oranges of Grenada.’ ‘And very nice too!’ Sammy gave due respect to as many paintings in the British gallery as time would allow. He liked portraits of men and livestock. He liked vases of flowers. But most of all he liked a picture to have a good story, either historical (a clash of swords, a famous cavalry charge, unfortunate King Harold falling from his mount with the fated arrow in his eye) or dramatic (the humble sea-folk aghast with grief at

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the sight of their dead son’s sea-chest). Harry loved these stories too, but he loved the unclothed gods and goddesses more. He and Maggie searched these out with sly determination. Such sordid pictures were placed high up, often barely visible above five or six historicals and dramatics. They were not satisfied until they entered the French gallery, for which Sammy, admiring as he was of the high morality of his mother country, had been secretly hankering too. Here there was pink flesh in all directions, also brown and black flesh, flagrantly exposed. There were Diannas bounding after stags and boars; nymphs pursued by lusty goatmen; steamy bathhouses packed with languorous women. ‘What is an odalisque?’ Harry asked, having read the word. The unapologetic display of so much painted nudity had emboldened him. He was beguiled by the bottomheavy shape of girls and women, and particularly by the closeness of Maggie, and accepted the evidence of art that there were places, far from disapproving Rushburn, where his new-born feelings were legitimate and celebrated. Sammy had no idea what an odalisque was. ‘A sort of lady,’ said Sarah, whose reading ranged to exotic climes. Jaw engaged in busy mastication, Sammy made a very slow sweep along the wall. He had a catalogue and a pencil and took frequent notes, constantly consulting Sarah, who stooped down from her giraffe-like height to offer attentiveness. For the entire month past Sammy had been speaking of a purchase – something small and affordable, but with the stamp of European excellence. He had prepared a space on

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their dining room wall. When the crowd became too constricting Sarah detached herself from his arm and walked behind like a governess trailing an excited boy. So protracted was their study of French art that Harry and Maggie slumped on an ottoman. He complained that his gum had lost its sugar. He was angling for more, but Maggie was determined to conserve what they had. They must bring gum back to Rushburn, an enterprise as grand and noble as towing icebergs to the equator. ‘If you’re going to spit it out,’ she said, ‘put it back in the paper.’ Forty-five minutes later they were called on to offer their opinions on two paintings. Rather than odalisques, they had roses, two very similar compositions, both spilling over with blush and purplish blooms. By some magic they contained all the allure and sensuality of odalisques. In one there was a single flash of yellow. ‘Chromatella,’ Sammy confidently identified the cultivar. Harry was attracted to the less tidy picture, to the naturalness of dust and lint on polished timber, to flowers not only new and tight but blowzy and disintegrating. ‘Aye,’ said his father, ‘that’s the one.’ Sarah concurred. She appealed to Maggie. Yes, the ‘messy one’ it was. Sammy roared laughing. ‘Ha! Ha! The messy one!’ Then with a nervous eagerness he left them, setting off to inquire after the price. They saw him conferring with a man in a swallow-tailed coat. He returned red-faced, flabbergasted. ‘Fifty-five pounds,’ he hissed to Sarah. They could see him agonising.

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‘Perhaps if it’s still there come January they’ll be asking less,’ said Sarah. ‘Oh, Sarah,’ Sammy groaned, ‘we’re not talking old vegetables.’ He agonised over a late afternoon tea. He gobbled applecinnamon cake but couldn’t for a moment forget roses, because their table sported a brass urn of stripy flowers. Sammy regarded them almost mournfully. Fifty-five pounds was a frightening sum. ‘We shall sleep on it,’ he said, but before they could leave, he felt compelled to scoot upstairs again to view his choice. He gazed with agitated longing, fretting that someone else would come along and take his prize. He dragged himself away. After returning to the Doutta Gala in the dark they ate a light supper in their suite. Maggie and Sarah washed and changed for bed in the larger room while father and son sat in the cramped annex playing rummy. ‘It’s a very fine picture,’ Sammy enthused. ‘Who’s to say this Guinoisseau fellow isn’t another Carot in the making? And fifty-five pounds a steal? We take a punt, don’t we? Your mother says, “Offer them forty and see how they bite!” But no, that wouldn’t be decent. It is a very fine picture. You all said so. I didn’t prompt you. The messy one! Ha!’ By this Harry understood that the decision would be made and unmade many times before morning. Ordinarily he appreciated being let into his father’s dilemmas, helping to examine and tease out the pros and cons, but tonight, thinking only of Maggie, he was impatient to see his father retire to his room with Ma. As if to persuade him Maggie

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emerged in her nightdress to sit on their shared bed. Her bare feet smelt of perfumed talc. After brushing her hair she wriggled down beneath the tight-tucked sheet. She turned from the light, seemingly asleep at once. Sammy was for one more hand but Harry put him off, pleading exhaustion. Then he and Maggie were alone. He folded back the footend of the bed and snuffed out the lamp. He slid in beside her turned back. Within thirty seconds she flipped over and began her expansive squirming and stretching, accommodating herself to his pyjamaed legs. This time he did not distract her with silly words. She rocked sedately, her powdered heel pressed against his chest. Overpoweringly the scent was that of dusty roses, a cloying hot-summer smell, slightly irritating to the sinuses. He imagined he was facilitating her pushing, or at least participating, with a rhythmic flexing of his thigh. They had a silent compact. It was his first, and perhaps only, experience of mutuality. At one point she flinched, a quick withdrawal, when the bare sole of her foot brushed over his penis. But she soon resumed, avoiding the offending part. Sometimes her insistent heels hurt his chest or his lower ribs. It was a discomfort he was willing to endure all night. But gradually her enthusiasm waned. Her legs softened. Her movements became languid – brief episodes within a growing stillness. Next morning at the Exhibition Sammy paid fifty-five pounds for a flower painting by an unknown Frenchman. They wandered through the temporary pavilions for another three hours, viewing British armaments and pickled fish

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and towers of French champagne, but essentially their business was done. Returning over two days to Rushburn, they stayed overnight at another hotel in Kyneton. To Harry’s disappointment, there was no shortage of beds. Maggie had a little room to herself. He slept in the hallway outside his parents’ room. Nevertheless, when at last they saw the spires and boxlike buildings of tiny Rushburn through the bluemallee scrub their mood was triumphal. Sammy brought home French booty, the female principle encapsulated in muted colour, to further civilise their dining room. Maggie brought two intact boxes of gum, which she would hoard for six months, hiding them from her sister and brothers and nephews and nieces in a secret nook in her mother’s creamery. Sarah had parcels of books and dress fabric. Harry’s hands were empty, but he felt equipped with a great disdain for the meanness of Rushburn. He carried a beautiful after-image in his heart, a fantastic belief in transcendental possibilities. It enabled him to return to his old life with an appearance of ease. For Maggie the adjustments were harder. She feuded with her mother, taking every chance to escape Albion and visit her Aunt Sarah. She was an outdoor person, the first girl after three big brothers. But Harry was the one she cleaved to, doubtless because he was not a brother and had the precocious height and bulk of a man. They traipsed through the ironbark scrub behind the town. In their underclothes they took illicit dips in an old tailings dam and she pretended he could not see her breasts through the wet cloth nor the dark place between her legs. Often she told him to turn away – an honour system – while she

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pissed behind a sparse bush. Candidly, since he understood that she expected and condoned it, he looked at her white behind hovering above the prickly grass. He was fascinated by her protuberant tuft, and slightly repelled by the gush of urine. This was one of the secret images he took to boarding school. Having learnt from early mistakes, he adapted readily to the shambles of a third-class institution. He bowled a tight in-swinger and learnt a wry pretence of humour, though essentially he remained dour. At night he reworked and developed his experiences with Maggie and squirted semen on his bedsheets. The other boys boasted about such things, so he didn’t feel guilty or remorseful. But returning to Rushburn for term breaks, he sensed Maggie drawing away, even if he was still her favourite cousin. By her mid-teens she had recognised male admirers. He didn’t feel wholly replaced. She remained easy in his presence, habitually looping her arm in his, often kissing his cheek and sometimes, when unobserved, the back of his neck. He guessed she might be practising for other boys, but he was nonetheless grateful, and celebrated the memory of these little explosions of pleasure during the dreary months of school. He resisted telling anyone about his beautiful cousin, until he was sixteen and wished to impress Martin Tolmey, who had a reputation for serious adult debauchery. Martin expressed a desire to stay with him during the Christmas holidays, to meet this cousin. Would she take her pants down for him, he wanted to know? Harry put him off throughout fifth and sixth form,

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and by the time Martin did eventually visit Rushburn Maggie had become a confident young woman courted by older men, and was certainly not interested in a swaggering boy, whether he came from Melbourne or the moon. A crack of thunder brings Harry back to France. He wonders at the backward-looking scope of his thoughts. It strikes him that it’s a long time since he thought about Maggie in this way. Or any woman. Towards morning he dreams again. He climbs an enormous tree, thinking it to be the great eucalypt that grew behind George’s Albion. And certainly there are familiar footholds and convenient forks that allow him to push up higher and higher into the canopy. Then after a certain point the branches are suddenly smooth and pink and wreathed with looping foliage quite unlike that of George’s old applejack. He hears the hum of insects and peers about in search of the whiskery flowers he remembers. Instead there are sprays of blond roses, each small bloom perfectly bell-shaped, the outer petals tinged with pink. Beautiful as they are, they have a peculiar scent. He can’t place it, not until they have spilled a dirty grey nectar into his hand. A viscous substance: machine oil.

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nine

In the pre-dawn dark he feels vibrations. Then there are sounds: her feet in the hallway. Hastily he sits up in bed, the steel mesh stretching noisily under his weight. He waits for her knock but it doesn’t come. Instead he hears the click of the key, then her departing steps. Uncertain, he wraps himself in a blanket and tries the door. It opens. But far from taking advantage of his unexpected freedom, he returns to bed. Doubtless she would like him to move on. Burden someone else. But where would he go? A quarter of an hour later, as his window begins to lighten, he hears the thud of a door. He reasons she’s off to work, rather than to alert the authorities. If the latter had been her intention, she would have acted during the night when he was securely locked away. No, she is begging him to leave, having done everything that he could reasonably expect of a stranger. But Harry demands more. Having glimpsed her kindness, he assumes it can be stretched. How much more can she be persuaded to give?

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Feeling the need to urinate, he searches under the bed for a chamber pot. There isn’t one. Dressing to go downstairs, he flinches as his damp shirt touches his chest. In a wardrobe he finds another – small but relatively dry. Only after he has put it on and is tugging at the sleeves to bring them down over his thick forearms does it occur to him it’s a dress shirt, the kind Uncle George wore to lodge meetings and shire functions. And sure enough, in the further reaches of the wardrobe, there is also a starched dickie and a silk-lined vest. The vest is useful, another layer against the cold, and under his tunic and coat it won’t be seen. There are also several pairs of trousers, all unsuitable, six inches too short, and too narrow around the waist. So he makes do with his own, though he doesn’t bother with the rigmarole of puttees. By daylight the house is less complicated. Both levels have a central passage, the lower one dog-legging between the servants’ rooms and ending at the kitchen, and ultimately the back door. He notices her bed, now carefully made. The fire is out. In passing he makes a cursory search for food. Nothing on the table. Potatoes in a bag, a rotting pumpkin on the floor. Not very promising. He emerges into the yard, and unable to recall or find an outhouse, goes to the back fence to piddle on the grass. Turning his face from the steam, he looks out over the roses at the seeping fog and the sun-flecked islands of pasture. That it is beautiful, that he can recognise it as such, surprises him, especially as his stomach is complaining again. At the well, a concrete dome with an iron pump, he finds a bucket part-filled with

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the previous night’s rain. He washes his face and hands, douses his eyes. The cold makes him shudder. He’s convinced she has a stash of food. She certainly doesn’t look underfed. She has work, a wage; presumably she can buy what she likes. In his imagination – and he’s aware of the absurdity – there’s a great hamper. He can almost taste his mother’s devilled eggs, which increases his feeling of outrage and deprivation. The downstairs bedrooms yield little of interest. Stored furniture. Bad air. Several are quite bare and uniform, containing the same make of rusty iron bed. But on his fourth or fifth pass through the salon he discovers she has thought of him after all. On the three-legged table is what looks like a small block of wood or a wad of pressed tobacco. Civilian bread, stale and hard and probably without goodness. He gnaws at the crust and finding it harder than his teeth, is forced to soften it with saliva before it will begin to break up. It has no flavour, only a texture, coarse and chafflike. Despite years of experience, he can’t identify the ingredients, but is quite sure there is no trace of wheaten flour. For all that, it fills a hole. He can feel it blowing up in his stomach almost immediately, and realises that at Base Depot, stuffing himself daily on meat and hot white bread, he was fortunate. Yet he wonders whether the mademoiselle has been stingy or generous, whether she has a store of more palatable bread or has shared her last crust. The latter interpretation appeals most: the generosity of strangers, of women in particular. Of the large upper rooms, he discovers he has the best.

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The others have been stripped of anything useful. All the doors are warped and stick in their frames, but one in particular holds firm against his weight. Then all at once he tumbles in. The room is bright with sunshine pouring in through a rift in the ceiling, and riotous with birds – swallows that sweep and hover or scratch vainly at the smooth plaster walls to gain a claw hold. Then one flits up through the hole and the others follow. Motionless, he watches a single grey feather eddy in the light. He observes the beginnings of mud nests on the beams, and piles of bird droppings on the floor and on the brass end of a bed much larger and more matrimonial-looking than his own. At last he moves, brushing the straw and muck from the quilt. He assumes this is the old monsieur’s bed. He sees him as a widower, mean and crotchety, even something of a tyrant. He sees Mademoiselle Elise forsaking sweethearts to look after him. (She doesn’t wear a ring, he’s noticed.) As the hours pass and still no one comes to arrest him he is forced to subdue a premature gratitude. Her bread sits in his stomach like a brick, undigested yet warding off hunger into the afternoon. He reflects that it’s his instinct to trust – a peace-time instinct – and that he expects to be trusted in return. If he is wrong, so be it. He has nowhere else to go. From his trouser pocket he removes his wallet and lays his money on her kitchen table. Everything he has: 200 francs. She will regard this as quite a windfall. But how to make her see it as a contribution and not a bribe? He smooths the notes under his palm. Whatever colour they might have

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been when they left the printer, they are now a dirty grey. Men in his unit blame French money for transmitting disease. It’s not this that makes him doubt his impulse. There’s something upsetting about money, something coarse and contractual, which isn’t what he wants at all. And to leave it sitting on the table! She will have her pride, naturally. At a loss to see how it might be done more discreetly, he stuffs the notes back where they came from. In the barn the geese become restless, noisy for the first time all day. Which is why he doesn’t need to consult his watch to know she’s due home. Rather than let her find him in her room he goes to wait in the salon. He listens for a key in the front door, but she enters via the back, calling to him tentatively, trying to discover whether he’s still there. ‘In here!’ he answers in English. And when she stands before him, limp-looking in the muddy light, the shifting of his eyes is quick and involuntary. He sees first her frown, accentuated by her steely hair pulled tight and knotted behind her head, then her low-slung breasts filling out the fabric above her belt, and finally her ludicrous boots. Belatedly he realises he’s been observed in turn, and squirms to think how his behaviour must seem. He rises abruptly, at the same time trying to make himself small and apologetic. She pushes something at him, nudging his chest, and for an instant he imagines she’s assaulting him. But no, it’s a newspaper, a rolled newspaper, and because he’s too flustered to remember even the word for thank you, he shuffles and grins like a ham actor. Her frown grows more severe and she turns on her heels,

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and of course the instant she’s gone he recalls whole textbook dialogues swotted on the voyage out. He tucks the newspaper, a low-brow British daily, under his arm and retreats to his room. After dragging a rickety balloon-backed chair over to the window he pulls open the curtain. Then he settles down to read. The paper is a fortnight old, and incomplete. He imagines her rescuing it from the factory latrines despite the middle pages having gone the way of bum-wipe. Not that he’s missing anything important. The same cheery propaganda, multiplied over and over. Though he’s never been a soldier at heart, he supposes he’s absorbed a footslogger’s contempt for the pronouncements of politicians and interpolators. All guff. The preparedness of the Allies for the coming German push. A British lord’s certainty that the Hun will exhaust himself with the effort. The fine mettle of recent drafts (a bare-faced lie, if you take the Americans out of the equation). But nothing current, no news. He’s not anxious. He only has to look out the window to take in the haze of peacefulness, the green checkerboard of pasture and grain crops, and the mademoiselle swinging her scythe beyond the dam. From the opposite window he has a view of the road. There are no vehicles, no contingents of troops moving urgently one way or the other. Clearly the fighting has run a distance then dried up again, just as in previous years. He’s curious to know how Bunter and the men of his unit are faring, but the bigger outcomes, provided the enemy doesn’t swarm before his eyes, are somebody else’s concern. Still, it’s pleasant to read English, to hear the words in his head, and considerate of her to think

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of him. As much as he would appreciate a current edition, he understands her reluctance to be seen buying a publication she can’t read. Very sensible. And in any case what she’s brought him amounts to an implicit welcome, and is a world less clumsy than his 200 francs. Returning to the first window, he notices she’s changed out of the drab sack of a factory worker. The hem of her navy skirt swings outward, forming a plump bell as she transfers her weight. In his eyes she becomes an abstraction, the beautiful after-image of his youth – the female shape. Perhaps too soon, perhaps unwisely, he finds himself nestling into a comfortable optimism. He weighs up the favourable circumstances, his good fortune, and begins to feel secure. If the mademoiselle isn’t inclined to turn him over to the police, where are the dangers? He ran away on a bleak night, amid confusion and wider concerns. Beyond the city he saw no one, and no one – touch wood – saw him. The provosts will make their inquiries back at Base Depot, keeping to the people and language they know. They may or may not send someone to catch up with Bunter. Far from worrying, he imagines the interview in some detail: ‘Oh yes, Sir, good mates. Trained together at home. Came out in the same draft . . . ‘No, Sir, just up and went. Didn’t say a word . . . ‘Completely out of character, Sir. An older chap, very sober-minded and decent. And no slouch in the bakery either. Section Leader. Conscientious to a fault . . . ’ There is an element of relish in this exchange: the idea of Bunter running rings round the plods:

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‘No, Sir, I don’t know of anyone who might be inclined to harbour him. He doesn’t know a soul outside camp. Can’t speak the language, Sir. I’m surprised he’s lasted this long. What’s it been, two days? I’d say that’s about the limit. He’ll be back any tick of the clock. You might think I’m being funny, but there’s a fair chance he’s lost. He’s got no sense of direction. Whenever we went on leave I’d have to lead him around by the nose . . . ‘Where’d we go? Just the usual, Sir. We did the rounds of the cafes, wandered by the river . . . ‘No, Sir, no women. As I said he’s very sober-minded. When the boys start skiting about brothels and whores he stays right out of it . . . ‘You mean a proper sweetheart? Good God, no. Old Harry wouldn’t know where to start! Like I said, Sir, he couldn’t ask the way to the lavatory, let alone get amorous. I’d say some little thing has put the wind up him and he’s shot off without considering. He’ll be back by now. He’ll have wandered into camp contrite and miserable and asking to be sent on to us . . . ’ He watches Mademoiselle Elise make her bundle of freshly cut grass and haul it to the barn for her geese. When she’s out of sight he goes down to wait in the salon. It’s nearly dark by the time she comes in. He hears her clattering in her part of the house. Eventually she brings him a candle and a bowl of her unvaried stew. Once again they eat separately, Harry by sputtering candlelight in the salon, she in her kitchen. But afterwards she comes to him with a pack

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of playing cards and a half-bottle of wine. She pulls up a chair opposite. She rests the bottle on the floor between her feet then clears the table, pushing his empty bowl aside and flicking his breadcrumbs carelessly on the carpet. The cards flutter between her hands and she slaps one down, face up. ‘Un,’ she says, and with an upward jerk of her head, charges him to repeat her. ‘Un,’ he says, somewhat put out by her estimation of his ignorance. In a short time he demonstrates his mastery of the faceless cards. She offers no pat on the back and doesn’t smile. A job of work is what she’s doing, educating a foreigner. Next comes the jack. ‘Le valet,’ she says. ‘Le valet,’ he repeats. Child’s play. Likewise the others: le roi, la dame . . . The suits are trickier. ‘C’est quelle carte?’ she demands, revealing a new card. ‘Neuf carreau!’ he trumpets. Then hesitation. Could he have it wrong? And is he seeing things or is that a quiver of amusement in her eyes? Abruptly she rises and goes to the sideboard for wine glasses. Settling again, she twists the cork from the bottle and, before attending to his glass, flips another card. Jack of spades. ‘Valet pique,’ he says before she can ask. She dribbles a little in his glass. A greasy film adheres to the sides but the smell is appetising, like church sherry. And down it goes warm and sweet. He’s curious to inspect the label. But there’s no chance of that, as she flips another card. He guesses correctly and she rewards him with another drop. Then, while the warmth radiates from his stomach, she teaches him the words for a collection of cards of the same suit, for a running flush and for three or four of a kind. He learns quickly, knowing she has a game in mind.

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He suggests vingt-et-un. She grimaces: an unworthy game. Or maybe she’s tired or it’s simply that the wine is gone. In any event the lessons are over. She sweeps up the cards and forms them into a deck. Rising, she removes the candle so he must follow or be left in the dark. Up the creaking stairs she takes him, escorting him to his room. In keeping with the previous evening she hands him his candle but doesn’t enter. And after the door is shut he listens for, and soon hears, the click of the lock. His understanding is she’s afraid of being molested in the night.

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ten

You are mistaken if you think I was looking below his belly. I was in no state for that. The first time I didn’t even notice him. The young one did the talking. They wanted roses. Well, couldn’t they see the roses were all forgotten? Who worries about roses when the world is eating itself up? But I must have noticed him a little, because I recognised him the second time. He’s no Adonis. Know what I thought? A plough horse. An English plough horse. I saw one at a fair in Caen when I was a girl, a great big monster standing twenty-seven hands at the shoulder, big teeth and a head that made you feel like a dwarf. There’s your handsome guest for you. A plough horse. And one who’d seen better days. I tell you he was ready for the butcher, so slow and broken down. He was scared dumb and you could see it was just a matter of time before someone saw him and told the police. I should have put him in the barn. But I thought of my son. I was thinking of Joseph. If Joseph had taken a different turn, if he’d happened on someone decent, he might

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be alive today. So I thought: Enough, no more cowardice, no more throwing innocent boys away like rubbish. Yes, I know, my Australian is no boy, but you understand what I’m saying. I couldn’t send him away. It’s the principle. You can laugh and be crude but the truth is old Boche could have come knocking and I would have taken him in. That’s what I said to the investigator. A stupid thing to say. I was angry. I was full of unspent rage for my son’s death. A little restraint at the beginning and I’d have been out of here long ago. I might have had the run of their world. They wanted me to howl and look sorry. They wanted me to say, ‘Yes, your honour, I’m a disgrace and I pray to Jesus for His pardon.’ I refused. I told them they were cruel butchers. They knew they were guilty. You could see it in their eyes: guilt and shame. They dress a boy up in blue and call him a soldier. They never knew him. They didn’t nurse him through sickness. They didn’t hold him as a frightened child. His officer sent a letter. He said it was quick. Quick! The truth is Joseph died slowly in a slimy hole. He screamed half the day. That’s how it was. I bullied the truth from his friend. My son died because no one would risk going out for him. By the afternoon he’d stopped shouting. By night he was dead. Now that’s a hero’s death. I don’t blame the other boys. No one can help being scared. I blame the men who sent him. Did I tell you about his ‘godfather’? Not his true godfather – he died years ago. Joseph got himself one of those official sponsors, an American diplomat with a cosy flat in Paris. His officer arranged it. The American sent him chocolates and good brandy. I thought a nice little ‘godmother’

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would be better. All the girls at the canvas-works had their ‘godsons’. They had a glorious time when they got to see their boys face to face. Gabrielle Imbert had three. She was just a tiny little thing, a child, but she could pull those big machines down like a man. She had clever fingers. I was never as good as her. I had the strength but not the cleverness. One of her ‘godsons’ gave her a baby. I wanted my son to have a girl like that, someone to fuss over him. Instead he had the foreigner promising the sun and the moon. Anything for the boys at the front. At that time Joseph was in Dijon for training, and hadn’t been near the front. We knew it couldn’t last. I told him what to write. We asked for warm underwear and potted herrings. The herrings were pure cheek. He sent chocolates and brandy. He thought my son was a child to be bribed with sweets. Sweets and a shot of courage. Then two months later Joseph was pulled out of Dijon. They’d picked out some nasty place for him on the Marne. He didn’t tell me. He must have been terrified, because he ran away in Paris between trains. He knew no one there. Not a soul. So he asked directions to his ‘godfather’s’ flat. My poor boy had no brains at all. I brought him up all wrong. I taught him to trust people. You know he went there thinking he would get help. A godfather is supposed to help isn’t he? You mightn’t believe me, but that’s what I saw in the Australian. Never mind his big horsy face. I saw innocence. Or immaturity. Call it what you will. He was like my son – half-asleep, trusting in providence. So many times I wanted to kick him to wake him up, for his own good. Well, he came to the right door.

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Joseph went to the wrong door. Good luck and bad luck. The American listened without a word. He fed him and gave him a bed and sent for the police. For his troubles my son lost two teeth and three months’ pay. Then off to the Marne to be killed. A good deal. Beaten and betrayed and his life slowly bled out of him in some stinking hole – all before his twenty-second birthday. I went to see his ‘godfather’. I couldn’t resist. The concierge wouldn’t let me in. I hung about but it did no good. His housekeeper said he was at his club. His club! I imagined them all sitting there, all those old men stuffing themselves on goose and chicken and pork and saying wise things about the war. I had a train to catch. I went back to Rouen. I sent him a gift – a nice box of horseshit tied up with a ribbon. He knew who sent it. He must have.

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eleven

Sunday. Sunday because the bells ring in Rouen, and in Maromme, and in Montigny, and in several other unseen villages. (For confirmation he counts back to the evening he deserted.) Yes, Sunday, a morning too bright and far advanced for his liking. He has overslept, or he would have heard her release him. Sunday because she hasn’t left for work and can be heard bustling in the kitchen as he descends the stairs. He treads heavily to announce his presence, and she shouts an inquiry, or even an invitation, judging by her upward inflection. Still, he can’t be sure, and he approaches tentatively. Without ceremony she indicates a stool by the fire, and for a time they sit together peering into a pot. Three big white goose eggs rattle against the metal as the water begins to boil. A grey froth forms on the surface. He has his doubts about goose eggs. But she has bread too, the usual heavy stuff, and that at least is safe. Clasping the cob to her chest, she saws methodically, thin slices, brittle. They

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toast these on short forks, and while she seems quite insensitive to the heat, he scorches one hand then the other and is sure he can smell his knuckle hairs being frizzled to the follicles. The bread emerges from the exercise quite unchanged in appearance, simply hotter, and he drops it on an enamel plate. By now the eggs are battering against the base of the pot and in danger of cracking. She plunges her bread into the fire for one last blasting then knocks it from the fork. With an off-hand gesture, she sends him to the table with the plate. She herself tackles the bubbling pot, hooking a finger under the hot handle and lifting it without a whimper. He sits at the table, which, as a crude concession to formality, she has set with an oil-cloth and two wine glasses. The prospect of alcohol at breakfast turns his stomach, but when he sees her hasten to the table juggling a fuming egg he understands that the glasses are make-do eggcups and holds one steady for her. Back she goes and retrieves another egg from the saucepan. It jumps and spins between her fingers, only briefly touching her skin. Having lobbed it into the glass, she sits and beheads it with one swift swipe of the breadknife. She sniffs the yolk then offers him the knife. He doubts he can dispatch his egg so expertly, but gives it a firm knock with the blade. The shell holds firm. Another knock, quite as hard as hers. But the egg remains intact, isn’t dented in the least. He looks up with a shrug of helplessness and vague astonishment. Head bowed, she continues to gnaw at her toast, feeding it into the side of her mouth. When she does deign to look at him, cocking an overgrown eyebrow, it’s with an expression of humourless pity, as if

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he’s some sort of sad case who will never know the simplest things. Stung, he addresses his egg once more, golf-style, a gentle tap, a little preparatory swing, then whack! The egg jumps clean out the glass, skims the table and bounces with a resounding and noticeably ceramic clack on the stone floor. Revelations wash over him. He recalls a china egg that Christopher Duncan’s mother had employed to turn her chickens broody. But as well as the mystery of the egg, which is whole and unmarked and clearly indestructible, there is the mademoiselle’s hyena laugh. It’s as if her face has split open, as if he’s seeing beneath the skin. She jabbers and smacks the table so her own breakfast jumps. There are tears in her eyes, floods, as if she’s been holding back since birth. He can’t match her hilarity. Best he can manage is a wooden chuckle, which sets her off afresh, roaring at his discomfort, at his determination to be a good-natured victim. Later in the morning she takes him to see her geese. A quick glance left and right (no one in the fields, no one on the road) then out into the crisp morning sun. She tugs at his sleeve, dragging him across the brick-paved yard to the barn. The geese honk ferociously behind the wall. She produces a key and pops the padlock. Again with a touching desire for stealth (didn’t he say he would be shot?) she stuffs him through the opening. He sees only one bird, a white gander with wings outstretched like an archangel. It advances and retreats, posturing, and makes a terrible racket in the enclosed space. Having clapped the door shut on the outside world, the mademoiselle indulges in a game of chase. The bird panics, tumbling over its wide flat feet. But then it

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makes a stand, rising up and exposing its angular breast. He decides she does a good impersonation of an enraged bird, right down to the wobbling hips. She goads and chastises it, wags her finger as if laying down the law to a bad-tempered boy. Undeterred, it attempts another little charge, until driven back with a clap and a shout. She grins, inviting him to share in the fun. Then she closes on it, seizing its throat with a lightning grab. It flaps but in no time she has the hinge of its wing, and dangles it like a sugar-sack, giggling at the startled look in its eye. Bringing it close for him to inspect, she folds it up under her arm with only its indignant head and blunt bill free to harass him. He has never liked livestock. The thought of George’s old working horse and its big teeth and even bigger half-moon shoes still causes him apprehension. Big or small, two-legged or four-legged, they’re all dirty or dangerous. In this he recognises the word-for-word pronouncement of his mother, a lifelong town dweller. Trouble is, the mademoiselle is delighted by his squeamishness, and would like to see him snuggle up to the gander. To demonstrate how harmless it is she permits it to savage her fingers. ‘See!’ she seems to be saying, ‘just a bag of wind!’ So he too proffers his hand and discovers that the snapping bill is about as dangerous as a clothes peg. She lets the bird fall so it hits the floor in a fury. With cupped hands she gives herself a pair of pointed ears that swivel at the slightest sound. A fox, he understands at once. She thumbs in the direction of the bird, slits her throat. ‘Oui,’ he says. No match for a fox. But the bag of wind doesn’t know this. It delivers a feathery blow to his thigh. She laughs and feigns another grab

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at its throat so it flees then turns defiantly at a safe distance. She brings him to an empty horse stall, in which the floor is slippery with goose droppings and a corner heaped high with straw and fresh greens. She points out three Greylag geese, each watching him silently from a disorderly nest. He joins her squatting beside the nearest, the gander trumpeting at their backs. The goose permits her to slide a hand beneath its baggy undercarriage. Yet it has the look of an invalid submitting to medical indignities, its eyes wide and somehow ridiculous. She reassures it with a liquid warbling and reveals the clutch of eggs, removing one to show him the pencilled date on the shell: 24/3. In his hand it is heavy, like a heated stone, and he recalls the strong-flavoured yoke of the one he eventually managed to eat for breakfast. There is still an oiliness in his mouth. Again she lifts the goose, pushes it from the nest so it stumbles down onto the flagstones, raises its tail and squirts green muck. It surprises him that the nest itself is so clean. Not a trace of shit anywhere. He can feel the heat dissipating, can almost see it. She takes the egg and holds it up before the clerestory window so the light penetrates the shell. He can see no interior detail, just distinctions in mass, dark and less dark, which mean nothing to him but obviously something to her. She scrutinises the next egg in the same way, and another. He doubts this is strictly necessary for the wellbeing of the unhatched birds, more a source of pleasure for the mademoiselle. She turns and rolls them in the nest, her stumpy fingers lingering in the fluff. But nor, he supposes, is it a miserly appreciation of wealth. Or not wholly. Within

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those waxy shells a commonplace process is occurring. Her black eyes turn on him very briefly, and shyly. ‘Aren’t they beautiful?’ she appears to ask. It’s self-evident: eggs are beautiful. A tactile and undeniable good. Any child knows it. And despite her grey hair and pushed-in face, she does seem childlike. Yes, he wants to tell her, eggs are beautiful. He’s never believed this before, and he wonders whether he’s wholly sincere, whether under present circumstances he might assert anything. She sends him to open the door and he floods the barn with light. Suddenly he’s aware that everything underfoot is spattered with green stains. And there is the reek too of ancient fox hides stiff on the wall. The mademoiselle rouses the other sitting birds, herding them out into the sunshine where the gander has already ventured. Wary of being seen, he remains behind while she directs them with a flexible stick. Out past the greenhouses they go, honking and flapping and clearly rejoicing in the fresh air. A glance at the road and he slips across to the house to observe them from his window. There she is above the dam, stationed like a sentry in the grey waist-high remnants of last summer’s reeds. On the water the birds duck their heads to be rid of the accumulated filth. Then they splay and shake their feathers, and all at once the gander is propelling itself with belting wings, its keeled breast like a white up-raised hull. Freedom! She doesn’t come back at midday, nor later as the day grows warm and dust rises from dry sections of the road. He looks for her on the plain. First he locates the geese,

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pale blips on the verge of the railway. Then their guardian emerges from a fold in the country. She moves along a line of lighter green. Undoubtedly there is a wire fence, a rarity in this landscape, else the geese would be through to the crop. If anything she is diminishing; moving further away. Leaving the window, he takes his laundry down to the kitchen and pours water into the concrete sink. He peels off his tunic and throws it in with the rest. In a cupboard he finds a block of home-made soap with a repulsive abattoir smell. He rolls up the sleeves of his borrowed shirt and wrestles with the clothing. The water is cool on his hands and forearms, and when he pauses his skin is ticklish with suds. But the feeling of abandonment remains. He lifts, folds, bears down with his fists on the wet cloth. The practised and unconsidered movements are relaxing. He has always made his bread this way. Lift, fold and bear down . . . His father, had he lived, would undoubtedly have obtained a kneading machine. Sammy was an innovator, a lover of new ideas and techniques, a hater of repetitive chores. While he never ceased to regard breadmaking, which he learnt from a German during his first weeks in Melbourne, as a fascinating process, he resented the toil. In the early years he thought and talked and dreamt bread, seeking out old recipes, inventing new ones, combining flours from different districts and from different grains, experimenting with chestnut meal and potatoes and with yeasts, German and brewer’s, activated in water or milk or root beer of all

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things, and one Easter dispensing with it altogether to make what he promoted as the leaven of the Holy Land. Despite his scant training, he entered his loaves in commercial fairs and won prizes. He publicised his successes and in no time was regarded as a master baker. His rivals lost ground and were slow in catching up. For the farmers’ wives of Rushburn shire the crowning pleasure of a trip into town was a beef and pickle sandwich at Lambert’s. Of course this is family hearsay. Harry came along after the glory days. By the time he was old enough to take an interest in the business his father was bored with it. Art beckoned, and roses, and a hundred other whims. It’s Harry’s opinion the shop was in decline, trading on the ghost of its early reputation, all the years of his adolescence, and might have fallen in a heap if he hadn’t returned from boarding school with a superfluous matriculation certificate and no special ambitions, if he hadn’t become a partner and, as Uncle Lew would have it, a Bachelor of Buns. Then with Sammy suddenly gone, the bakery became something of a trap. To abandon it would have been disloyal to his father’s memory. And who would have supported Ma? So he made the best of a dull and solitary occupation. He learnt to make his dough in a ritual trance, taking pleasure in its warmth and malleability, in the physical act of expending energy. He was proud of the strength in his arms – a hidden force below the fat. Certainly he’d grown fat. On those uncommon occasions when he served in the shop people commented, joking with impunity, because he had the big frame to carry it. Mostly

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it was the presumptuous old ladies of his mother’s generation who teased him, but in recent years women close to his own age had been at it too. ‘How’s brave King Harry?’ they inquired, remembering back years to his part in one of Susan Minton’s extravaganzas at the Mechanics’ Institute. To please them, he made kingly gestures and declaimed, ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers!’ He noticed that his mother bridled. He thought her overly sensitive. Lift, fold and bear down . . . Then one morning the power wouldn’t come on. He managed to feel his way through to his kitchen with its odours of yeast and cloves and smouldering wood. He lit a lamp then stirred up the firebox. The vibrations of his mother’s snoring came in waves from her upstairs room, shaking the walls. With a snore like that, she could hardly be dying! But there was also a more abrupt sound from the street outside. Something had knocked against the glass. His thoughts jumped to tomcats. Leaving the lamp behind, he moved through the storeroom to the shop. With absurd stealthiness, as if he might achieve a great thing by catching the culprits in the act, he pulled aside the curtain. The shop was all gloom but outside in the street a sheen of moonlight slipped under the verandah. His intruders weren’t feline. Two silvery shapes pressed close to the glass. Boys. He pushed slowly out into the shop and stood behind the counter as if expecting a customer. They couldn’t see him, but as his eyes adjusted the boys became clearer. He could discern their faces; could see the resemblance to other boys,

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now men, with whom he’d grown up. Rather than disturb them he stood motionless, intrigued. He didn’t have to wait long. One of them worked a soft object against the glass. With a broad sweep he painted a back-to-front S. What this meant didn’t immediately register, but Harry was horrified by the sight of his property – his father’s property! – being defaced. He bolted out from the counter, skittling something underfoot. There was a clang as the dustpan collided with the skirting. The boys dropped everything and ran, so that by the time Harry unlocked the door they were well gone. He cleaned up the mess with newspaper and turps. By first light there was just a slight spatter of red on the pavement. He puzzled over the S. He regretted not having let them finish. Still, the possibilities were limited: Shirker . . . Slacker . . . He got the drift. Yet he was also bewildered. He coiled up in defensive apprehension. It had been more than a prank. Young boys didn’t think up these things on their own. He wondered how many of his neighbours privately despised him. He chose to blame the war: the ugly contagion of grief. He said nothing to his mother. She could do without the upset.

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twelve

I won’t say it was like having Joseph back. When you have nothing but work and resentment you give yourself to any distraction. Even to trouble. Still, I was scared. I wanted him gone. I thought: One night and no more. Tomorrow I’ll throw him out. But I’ll tell you something: I dreaded he would melt away. I knew it would be for the best, but every time I came home and called out ‘Are you there?’ I braced myself for silence. When something hits you from nowhere you want to know what it means. I didn’t invite him. I didn’t welcome him. He created a terrible disturbance. You wouldn’t think a silent person could make such a noise in my head. He said he was afraid! Afraid! What sort of man confesses this to a stranger? And to a woman? I was ashamed for him. That’s the trap of thinking for two. Like a wife or a parent. Like Jesus or God, if they’re not a stupid joke. You learn the habit early and it’s there for good. I suppose it was conceit. I thought: Why not? What’s to stop me holding this

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one back? Just one. Surely they won’t miss one. I didn’t care whether he was good or worthless, intelligent or dangerous or demented. All I saw was that he filled the house. He tried to make himself small, but he filled every room. Leave the cabbages. I’m dizzy. I can’t chop and speak. I need all my breath. Maybe I’m childish, but after a while it was a thrill to know he was hidden away there. It put things right. It was payback, a victory. I was terrified someone would see it in my face. Still, I wanted to crow and sing. ‘Look what I’ve done! Given a man his life! Yes, me, a person nobody notices in the street!’ I came so close to telling Isabelle Bravy. You go through extremes – one minute over-confident, the next so suspicious you think kids are hiding in the hedgerow. I’m sure they were. Several times I heard someone playing a bottle, hooting on the opening like we did with my mother’s bottles. It makes a sound like a bird, which you wouldn’t know was artificial unless you’d made the same sound yourself. Of course my Australian went on in blissful ignorance. He felt safe. He left all the risks and worry to me. Like a fool I was proud to keep it that way. I coddled him. I fretted over how he spent his days, whether he was bored or content, whether he had enough to stimulate him. A man loses his bearings so quickly. They don’t know how to endure. If it was me I’d have buried myself like a frog in winter. You wouldn’t have felt my heart or detected a breath. Not him. He sang! Did I tell you he sang? Oh, he was always driving me crazy, taking chances, showing himself for no good

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reason, even singing! When Isabelle Bravy and her halfwit son came to buy geese he was booming at the top of his lungs. Singing. They heard it. I know they heard it. He was there in the upstairs window, singing. I thought: You idiot. Do you want everything to go wrong? Do you want to be taken away? It was hair-raising. Let me sit a moment. You don’t want me seeing black again. A moment. Anyway, Isabelle gave me a look. What it meant I can’t say. Maybe if I’d told her everything there and then she’d have been too ashamed to speak against us. She’d have been bound. I was on the brink. But her older son wasn’t long dead. I gave up a morning’s pay to stand beside her at his funeral. I was there for her husband, then for her son. I think this is what restrained me. I was afraid she would say I kept him there for disgusting purposes. Grief makes people fierce. Isabelle could be like that. So I said nothing. Strange how you think you know someone and you don’t. Nine or ten years we’d been friends. She came out to Montigny to dig roses when she got sacked from the mill. There was very little work that year. She wouldn’t have got it without me. It was too hard for her. She wanted it soft. Not that I blamed her, but maybe it created bad feeling on her side. Her men were mobilised six weeks before Joseph. She bitched because they got thrown straight into the fighting while Joseph went into reserve. A lot of good it did him. She had no reason to speak against us. We did her no harm. At least she has one left – not the smartest or the best, but a son all the same. I don’t begrudge her. If I ever

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see her again I’ll hit her face, but only to wake her up. It’s a common thing. You see it everywhere. ‘My pain is bigger!’ They think they’re evening things up. Misery for everyone in equal share.

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thirteen

His drying laundry blocks the meagre kitchen fire. At the table a candle flickers and a white aura disintegrates and reforms repeatedly around the flame. A string of black smoke wriggles upward. The room has become very small, a glowing corral of light, and within this they sit at either end of the table, she leaning back in her chair, one hand cupping her wine glass. He has gulped his share of wine, indeed a glass more than she initially offered, and now he turns partially away, pretending to contemplate the darkness. It’s thirty minutes since they finished eating but neither moves. He guesses she is worn out after the day’s wandering. Her face is red and greasy with sunburn. Sometimes she reaches out to a packet of cards that sits on the bare wood. She toys with the cardboard fold, pulls it open, closes it again. He doubts this is anxious indecision or an aborted stab at communication. More probably she is tired and comfortably idle, indeed comfortable in his presence. He listens to the clack-clack of frogs on the dam. She

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lays down her glass and her hands come together, fingers folded. She looks up, studying him in the belief she’s unobserved. Wrong. He can see her perfectly in the glass pane of the cupboard. Of course it’s possible she’s aware of and connives in this mutual scrutiny, which makes him more self-conscious. What does she see? A soft-bodied oaf with no useful knowledge or capacity to contribute. A fraud who instead of defending her country imposes on her hospitality. It’s not pleasant, measuring himself in this way. She reaches again for the cards, fiddling. He observes her short fingers, the calluses, the blackened and missing nails, and posits a life beginning with toil in the rose-fields and progressing to toil in a factory. Her father’s fondness hasn’t saved her from this. He estimates that she is well into her fifties, and wonders how long she can keep working. Her head begins to droop. Strands of white hair, freed from the darker mass, loop about her temple. Her forehead gleams and her black eyebrows are impressive even when still. Then there is the misfortune of her crooked nose, the kink below the bridge that on certain angles, but not this one, creates the impression of pugged ugliness. Her mouth is lipless, and already drawn in on itself, rayed with minute creases. How will she look at sixty? At seventy? At his mother’s age? But there is another question, one that has occurred to him more often: how did she look at twenty? For some reason he finds it easy to conceive of her as a young woman. Not beautiful but fresh and brimming with cheek and arch bad manners. His imagination builds on the

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frame of her bones, lifts the ageing muscles. He enjoys the stirrings of bodily interest then quells it. A woman of her age! But his eyes, and his imagination, won’t let go. At last she has decided to remove the cards from the packet. She flicks them between her fingers then lays down a ten and a jack of spades, shuffles again and finds the queen to join them. He turns from her reflection to face her squarely across the table. In the absence of language there is pee-kay. Rule by pernickety rule, term by term, she will lead him there, to a game with conventions as strict as matrimony. ‘Tierce,’ he says, naming the sequence. ‘Ben c’est combien de points?’ Yes, he knows this one: how many points is it worth? ‘Trois.’ Three. Another shuffle and she extracts the king and ace to complete a meld of five consecutive cards. ‘Cinq,’ he says. She congratulates him with a smile. Then: ‘C’est combien de points?’ ‘Quinze.’ Fifteen. She gives him the thumbs up (doubtless picked up from some Tommy). He’s aware that without words their gestures have become excessive. It is somehow wearying, constantly focusing on hands and eyes. He finds rest in her silent parts, in observing the arteries of her throat or the low-slung softness of her middle. It’s then that, out of the blue, and despite his relative ignorance of the female body, it comes to him: Mademoiselle Elise has had a child, or several, else her breasts wouldn’t hang so.

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A six-card sequence confronts him on the table. He names it ‘Sixième’. How many points? Sixteen. Yes, she’s pleased with him – Madame Elise. Later they climb the stairs together. He discovers that he’s wine-affected in that his tongue and extremities tingle, but otherwise sober, aware of her movement behind him, of her steps falling a split second after his. He is used to this, to being herded, even to being put away for the night. It no longer rankles. It is a kind of safe-keeping. Madame Elise – why has he been so slow to see it? Marriage. Children. A family life. It’s recorded in her face and body. Language and nationality don’t change these things. Suddenly her naked ring-finger implies a tragedy. Not a natural tragedy. A woman doesn’t stop wearing her wedding ring because her husband dies. He has no difficulty conceiving of her as a deserted wife, as a person who has been ill-treated. From a bachelor’s high ground he has seen many bad husbands. But the children? Where are they? If she has sons they must be old enough to fight. Yet there are no letters, or none that he’s found. Searching for food, he has pried into every nook and cupboard. Without scruple he has sorted through her private things – a girl’s white dress, photo-cards of singers and actors, tram tickets, a bottle of perfume, blood tonics, a transferable ration-card for coal (no name), a wad of paper money in a calico bag. Nothing to indicate she keeps in touch with her family. Which seems to preclude the possibility of daughters. Sons might be complacent or self-obsessed, but daughters know their

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duty. At least the daughters he’s known. Then again, the world is different beyond Rushburn shire. ‘Bonne nuit,’ she says. A woman of rituals. ‘Bonne nuit, mademoiselle,’ he replies. Can’t call her madame, not after they’ve both grown used to the other form. On cue she closes his door. He listens. No click. Just her flat-footed tread as she departs. He can’t believe this is an oversight, wine or no wine. At the end of his bed the eiderdown is raised in an enigmatic hump. It doesn’t give under pressure. Something firm, indeed hard, and warm. He raises the mattress to untuck the bedclothes. His fingers encounter metal. Then it’s revealed: a brass contraption, a pan on a stick. A bedwarmer. When did she find time for this? Within the family they made light of his disinclination to marry. His self-styled ‘uncle’ Lewis Broughton, a life-long bachelor himself, and therefore awake to aberration in others, was first to identify it as such – a disinclination. There was never any unkind intent, quite the contrary, though perhaps somewhere behind Lew’s jocular style there was a sensitivity to Harry’s earliest humiliations. Of course Harry’s reputation was a laminated thing, the upper layers more acceptable than the inner, because they involved women. In his later teens – and Lew believed the rumours – Harry was said to have redeemed himself with regular late-night visits, along with other boys, to Rough Rene. In fact he went there twice, to a tin-and-hessian shack on the Five Mile Creek. Rough Rene was barely forty but looked sixty.

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She reeked of sweat and spirits. He was never tempted, but waited on the far side of the linen partition while Tim McInnley got his six shillings’ worth. But for Harry’s nineteenth birthday Martin Tolmey teamed with Tim McInnley to buy him Rough Rene’s daughter. Five pounds was a lot of money, so Harry couldn’t refuse. The girl was seventeen, recently returned from a charitable home in Melbourne, but he remembered her as an underfed shrimp in second grade, always stinking of pee. She made out she didn’t recognise him, and lay vacant-eyed and motionless in her cotton nightdress while he peeled off his underclothes. When she thought he was ready, his nakedness dressed up in a thick prophylactic sheath like a mariner’s oil-skin, she reached for a jar on the bedside stand and hooked between her fingers a glob of some greasy stuff – butter perhaps. She smeared her private parts. Five, six, seven thrusts and it was over. He came away disgusted and ashamed. He was angry, blaming Rough Rene and his friends. He imagined the girl had been held down with invisible hands. What was terrible, he knew that this same thought had quickened and exhilarated him. Lew welcomed the rumours. Harry was putting it about, as a man should. Yet this couldn’t be spoken of openly in the family. Hence his comic assertion that Harry was ignorant of women, even indifferent. Certain women swallowed it. They smiled at the mention of his name, especially his nieces, who imagined they had the wood on old Uncle Harry. Cousin Maggie, by then a young wife,

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communicated her doubts with a grave smirk. He was never too concerned. Exaggeration (not to mention falsehood) was the stock of Lambert humour. And while Lew was not a blood relation – as a child Harry had thought of him as ‘the left bower’, a powerful card of a different but complementary suit – he was an acknowledged master of the ridiculous. If the old Suffolker said you were a clot, how could you argue? Friday afternoons, warming his fleshless buttocks by Harry’s mother’s dining room fire, Lew honoured them with private readings from his Rushburn and Burrakee Express. His delivery was always grave, but in those pre-war years, undermined by a mischievous twinkle. He made a performance of Getting The Best From Your Manure or Local Boy Excels At Merit. He delighted in a good wedding, especially if he imagined Harry had some interest in the bride. No matter how humble the participants, their special day took on the dignity of a vice-regal event: . . . the bride was attired in a very pretty costume of ivory crepe de chine with wreath and veil . . . sumptuous wedding breakfast laid out in the barn . . . toasts proposed and honoured . . . And at the end of it all, after reporting that the happy couple had left to catch the afternoon train en route to the Gippsland Lakes or the Blue Mountains, a rueful wink: ‘But for the grace of God, eh Harry-lad!’

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fourteen

Audrey Tanner, 3 Williams Court, Balwyn, Melbourne,Victoria, August 16, 1968 Dear Miss Keely, Thank you for your recent letter. At the risk of seeming testy, I must tell you that my mother was never engaged to be married to the man you’re inquiring into. She did speak of him occasionally. She knew him briefly before she met my father. I understand they were connected through amateur theatre. I understand she coached him, as she did many people. It may be a tradition in your family that she had ‘hopes’, as you put it, but my mother never expressed anything of the kind. She respected the fellow’s memory, as she respected all servicemen. It is no small thing to fight and die for

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one’s country. However, by no stretch of the truth could my mother be said to have been Harold Lambert’s fiancée, disappointed or otherwise. I’m sorry if this spoils things, yours sincerely, Audrey Tanner

PROJECT NOTES, August 22, 1968 Exactly as I expected. If she knew the trouble I went to to track her down, all at Mum’s insistence. ‘Find someone belonging to that Minton woman. If she loved him she’s sure to have talked.’ Mum would like a pleasant romance. If you put events far enough back in time all the heartache and disappointment, even premature death, flattens out into a nice romance. Still, it keeps her off my back. I can show her this. She will say something catty about the Mintons and Miss Audrey Tanner and feel a certain satisfaction. I still haven’t found the courage to mention Mrs Straughan. Mum would be offended that I went up there without her. Were I to suggest that Uncle Harry might have deserted she’d have kittens. Waiting for corroborating evidence. Still nothing from Army Records. Public servants! If Harry was up to no good it will be there in black and white. Mum can look at it for herself. They all can. Why do I find the idea vaguely pleasurable? Rang cousin Terry again. Two trunk calls in the last

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week, very expensive. We haven’t talked so much since we were kids. That’s what Mum enjoys – resuming contact. He doesn’t like the old men any more than I do. He doesn’t seek them out but if he happens across one of the New Guinea crew they’re all over him in remembrance of his father. Hates Uncle John. Has a soft spot for Uncle Dick, because he’s ancient and ridiculous I guess. In any case, I have put Terry to work. My mole in the boys’ club. Don’t know how committed he is. But I’ve got him thinking. He offers all sorts of new nonsense. Not only did Uncle Harry run under fire but he survived his famous drowning in the mud, indeed the whole war. He has this from his grandmother Margaret McArdle, who died in ’51. Another one to be settled by his service records – when they arrive. Bloody army. Also, he’s warming to the French Wife. His dad never pooh-poohed the French Bride. The letters, yes, they are a figment of someone’s imagination. But the French Bride is quite possible. Terry has promised a further prize, if he can find it. Says I should remember. Have I heard of the Ashes? I had no idea what he was talking about. ‘Harry Lambert’s funerary urn!’ he said. ‘The Ashes.’ I knew he was having me on. He loves a good scam, especially at the family’s expense. But he swears he has something for me. It’s all getting too big. There are too many stories. They accumulate like the rubbish in my spare room. I have three cardboard boxes of dubious relics handed on for safekeeping. In a few months they’ll get their

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hour in the sun, then what? I won’t keep them. But I will definitely write the booklet. It will be like one of those recipe books with treats from far and wide, inclusive but lacking in quality.

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fifteen

Harry must go back to childhood to remember a time when he was so dangerously idle. His mother, and successive teachers, diagnosed a congenital dreaminess. They watched his vague expression as he floated far away from the topic or action of the moment. He had to be dragged back, tied down and earthed with repeated questions, though often his answers betrayed a skewed understanding of the serious matters that occupied others. Sammy was blamed for permitting him to remain whimsical and childish. Aged seven, Harry enraged Uncle George by shutting down the little donkey engine in his workshop, telling him that the donkey was tired and hungry and needed a rest. George thought he should be walloped, but didn’t dare, fearing repercussions from Sarah. Sammy laughed himself hoarse. He laughed again, as if he knew better, at the nonsense and half-truths Harry made of what he learnt at school: that Wellington invented gumboots, that the ancient Greeks played with boats in the bath. Mr Saunders

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told his parents, ‘Your son has a romancing mind.’ They took it as a plus. But what is acceptable in a boy is absurd in a man. Harry has always been ashamed of the triviality of his thoughts. Without the ballast of work and family responsibility, where would he be? Who would he be? Therefore he goes apprehensively into the burgeoning rose-plot, knowing that it has the power to lull and seduce him with past associations; to cover him over in careless oblivion. Slithering along the rows, he supposes he ought to feel low and cursed like the snake. The new season’s watershoots hoop over and through the old wood, creating a thicket, so that he couldn’t stand up if he tried. The grass and milk thistles are alive with insects that spring and leap and burr in flight: dragonflies, beetles, mosquitoes. Frogs drum on the dam and a vaguely mournful booming, a peculiar bird call that ascends in semitones, emanates from somewhere in the hedgerows. In time he happily embraces this animal perspective. How else is he to pass the hours while she’s away? Close by, the bruised foliage of roses smells peppery. If he lies still, blinking at the sky, it is possible to believe the world hasn’t aged a day since he was a boy. A knob of colour floats beneath the clouds, an improbably early bloom. Soon he finds others, twos and threes of the same ruffled pink, a whole tribe nodding in the sunshine. And these large matt leaves are familiar. What throws him is the vigour of the plants. Giants. Broad and dense, quite unlike the weaklings that hung on year after year in the Rushburn clay. Yet it’s the same cultivar. Paul Neyron.

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The same bright pink, the paler reverse like the plush inner lining of his mother’s sewing box. His mind reaches back to one of his father’s catalogues: dedicated to the memory of a medical student who died after having borne the fatigues of the recent siege. Well, wouldn’t this make the old boy sit up and take notice! His Neyron thriving in its native soil! The recent siege ended almost fifty years ago. It’s said the Parisians were reduced to eating rats. They slaughtered the animals in the zoo; ate the flesh of elephants and zebras. How exactly the medical student distinguished himself is anyone’s guess. But the name is known in every country because of this flag of ruffled pink. Whether this amounts to anything, whether it’s trivial or important, it’s what his father bequeathed him and what he knows. He supposes he is like the hero of his youth – Crusoe marooned with his thoughts, retrieving all he can from his wrecked ship. He goes back again and again to his father, to his walled-up youth, in search of mental provisions. Yet within a day or two he decides it’s an incomplete and patchy heritage. He’s tripped up by horticultural complexity, by false premises, by a vain longing for fresh confirmations of what he knows. While he has been loath to venture out into the exposed yard between the house and barn, he has nevertheless watched the explosive burgeoning of Mademoiselle Elise. Almost overnight the bare wood became a mass of soft purple growth. Tender water-shoots seemed to lengthen before his eyes and he awaited the flowers, watching for the egg-yolk yellow of the buds. They didn’t appear. Astonishingly, mortifyingly, they didn’t appear. He recognised in

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himself a pattern of unjustifiable contentment and sharp awakening. In place of the familiar flowers of Mademoiselle Elise came clusters of pinkish bells, attractive in their way, but distinct and therefore disappointing. Then, as if to unsettle him further, the first and more reliable Mademoiselle Elise brings him a newspaper. Very kind of her, but he receives it with apprehension. He knows it’s quite capable of disturbing his peace. He gives it the onceover because she’s watching, and because he can’t resist. The date is April 9th. Eight days old. A photograph ambushes him. Australians. Men in chalk-smeared uniforms and the same tin hats the British wear, but somehow distinctive in their postures and expressions. A sporting insolence. At home he has seen it in the faces of boys in short pants, and hated it. Now he’s prepared to recognise its value. It seems they are the heroes of the hour, having stopped the Germans at a ring of villages outside Amiens. The fighting has entered a new fluid phase. Open warfare . . . conditions uniquely suited to the temperament of the Australians . . . High praise from the grudging British press. His pride, his warmth of belonging, can’t be helped. The world is offering accolades and Australia must have its share. Even hiding in a woman’s skirts he would like to indulge in the national swagger, until he considers his own soft body, and the wreckage of others. He shakes the pages to make them more manageable, licks his finger to catch a corner. A general sacked. Squabbles in London. His gaze strays down to a dribble of soup on his vest, then up to see whether she’s noticed. Almost certainly she has, though now she’s clearing the crockery. His

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idleness is an embarrassment, but she won’t let him help. She insists on a strict division of labour. For her there are nine hours at the factory, followed by farm-work, cooking and cleaning. His obligation? To eat, look contented and cast a manly eye over international events. The soup has already penetrated the glossy cloth and will probably leave a stain. He should be more careful. What will the legitimate man of the house, the brother or brother-in-law whose bed he has appropriated, say when he returns to find his things dirty and tampered with, the buttons shifted on his coats and vests, his trousers lengthened by six inches? All night his mind, awake and asleep, brims with images of cocky Australians. Martin Tolmey is there, and Natty Mills as well, both wearing proud smears of dirt and blood. They jog by in the middle of an anarchic mass. Even Bunter is transformed, hardened and elevated by collective resolve or the power of print. He spares Harry a brief and dismissive half-smile, like something thrown to a child. Next morning Harry does not descend to the rosefields. Like someone fighting an addiction, he sits in the old monsieur’s bedroom, dutifully rereading the newspaper. He must keep his mind fixed on grim truth. The colony of swallows has swooped and shrilled then flitted out through the torn plaster. He feels very alone. He turns back and forth from war news to the little window, which affords a broad view of the plain. The roses form a dense wickerwork of canes and undulating foliage splashed with pink and purplish red. The air is thick with swarming insects, a

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drifting mist over the fields. There is the painted green of wheat, a paler green of tufted pasture, and far away where road, railway and river twine together, a soft haze, and a chalk outcrop as insubstantial as the sky. He can’t imagine a more indolent landscape, so separate and cut off from the feverishness of Rouen. But then he is startled by a noise: a scrape from below, from the back of the house. He hears the clop of hard heels on board though he believed he had the house to himself. He doesn’t panic. The tread is recognisably feminine. He descends the stairs. In the salon they all but bump into one another. ‘Mademoiselle!’ From under a black gauze veil she regards him with impatience. She’s dressed primly, and too heavily for the warm spring weather: a dark hip-length coat and matching skirt, a round-topped hat, a parody of a bowler made more ludicrous by the veil, but fashionable from what he’s seen in town. And the shoes, small-heeled with high anklelaces. She offers a parting word of explanation, as if his little pool of French words amounts to fluency. She needn’t have bothered. A funeral. He can see that at a glance. She pushes past him and vanishes into the gloom of the hall. He decides it must be a peremptory and public mourning, that it can’t be anyone close. After the bang of the front door he stands alone, wondering why he should feel unsettled. The funeral of a stranger in no way bears on him. Or it shouldn’t. Innumerable strangers die every day, every minute. A fellow worker perhaps. A neighbour? Someone’s husband sent back from

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the front in a box? And like it or not, Mademoiselle Elise must go. He has been inclined to think of her as a detached and isolated being, but of course she must be subject to the usual web of obligations. That she should have friends is only to be expected. Yet the thought disturbs him. He sits on the back doorstep. The sun warms his knees. The jumbled scents of the garden are contaminated with dust, cloyingly sweet yet contaminated. He quells the urge to sneeze, although there is almost certainly no one coming along the unseen road. He is invisible, unnoticed even by the thrushes pattering in the shrubs. An irresistible sadness settles over him, though all he can find for a cause is his inability to possess the mademoiselle’s outside life. It is as if she has broken free, escaped him, and with only a careless conception of his need for her. He feels as if he is in danger of slipping from human existence. If she wasn’t there to recognise his face, he might disappear forever. His situation reminds him of his father’s precarious afterlife. By general consent the family spoke of Sammy as if he’d just popped out for a walk. His remains decayed in the Rushburn clay under a veritable battleship of pink granite and chiselled marble, but Sammy continued to share in family life. When visitors gathered for cards and there was an odd number of participants they employed a dead hand, the unknown cards lying face-down on the table. ‘That there’s Sammy’s hand,’ Ma quipped. At the end of each game she was always interested to discover what Sammy had been holding. ‘Well look at that! The king and right bower! And not a peep out of him!’

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In this way they kept him alive. But it was a failing ploy, all that pretence and effort. They swallowed their grief down yet it remained there like a fishbone in the throat, or the sensation of an obstruction when in reality there was nothing. Until this event, until Sammy dropped mid-sentence at the dinner-table at Albion, no Lambert had died in the charmed land. In thirty-five years not a single death! In Britain little babies might starve, adult men and women might succumb to the cold and damp, but not here, not in Australia where working people prospered and grew sleek with comfort and the esteem of their neighbours. The old Suffolkers forgot their village pessimism. Apart from Sarah, they believed in constant increase, in never-ending pregnancies and births and youngsters maturing before their eyes. They believed in progress and social amelioration, in the Mechanics’ Institute and reticulated water and roses like captured booty in the backyard. Then Sammy spoilt it all. They all knew it was spoilt, for all their games and irreverence for the dead. But they kept mum; for years not a word. Until Harry awoke one night to a succession of sounds that had the feel of wet offal. He gagged on the stench of vomit and thought: Poor Ma! She can’t help it. He might have acknowledged her illness earlier. But he had learnt his reticence from her. And there was the dilemma of who to turn to. Certainly not to her sister-inlaw, Aunt Mary, whom Ma detested. Nor to George, who was far too hard on himself to ever have sympathy for others. Harry might have confided in Maggie, if she hadn’t

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been so thick with his mother. Word would have gotten back. He could foresee the reaction. ‘Am I such a terrible burden that you’ve got to go whispering behind my back?’ In desperation he settled on Lew Broughton, trekking early one morning the hundred yards up High Street to the Express office. He knocked and gazed into the lighted window but the grime defeated him. ‘Door’s open,’ came the usual invitation. ‘You’re not too busy?’ Braving a miasma of pipe smoke, he stooped in the lowceilinged room. Lew swivelled on his captain’s chair and smiled with all his own teeth – yellow and crazed but still intact after seventy-five years. ‘Harry-lad! Busy be buggered! Come and take the load off your feet.’ His table was a dog’s breakfast of writing materials and greasy wool, as he rose at five to do a little journalism and knit socks for the needy. He knocked his pipe out on an open book, leaving a small pile of resinous ash. ‘Do you like fish, Harry?’ ‘Sometimes.’ ‘Then I’ve got just the thing for you. Uncle Lew’s perch hollandaise.’ ‘A recipe?’ ‘A recipe. They asked for it, and here it is.’ ‘Who asked for it?’ ‘You haven’t heard? A damn silly story but I’ll tell you anyway. Bill Koop comes in about this time and catches me pickling a fish in spirits – an oddity like nothing on God’s earth. I tell him the plain truth: it’s been caught in the

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Loddon and I’m sending it down to Melbourne for identification. End of story, or so I thought. Next I know I have a stream of facetious fools knocking on my door asking for my secret fish recipe. Well here it is. Lifted from Mrs Beaton, but who’s to know? They can read it in the Express and pay for the privilege.’ ‘Good for you, Uncle.’ ‘You can tell your mother I’m expecting an invitation for fish dinner. I’m expecting a great many invitations, but I’ll give precedence to hers.’ ‘Ma’s very ill.’ ‘So I heard. But she can’t be so poorly she don’t appreciate company – even if it’s only me.’ ‘She’s very unwell.’ ‘Never too bad for a hand of euchre. Tell her Sunday evening suits me nicely.’ It was then that, impatient and frustrated, Harry resorted to the kind of extreme statement that was normally anathema to Lamberts: ‘Honestly, Lew, it gets so I fear the worst.’ ‘The worst! You are a dreadful worrier, Harry-lad. Too morbid by half. She’s got no intention of leaving us. She’s enjoying her twilight way too much. And I ask you, have you ever seen your mother give up something she’s partial to? Wait till she looks you in the eye and says “Harry-meboy, I’ve decided to give up the ghost.” Then you might count it a possibility, though like as not she’ll change her mind. Creaky doors never fall, Harry-lad. Creaky doors.’ There was no getting through to Lew. ‘That garrulous little parrot,’ Ma called him – in the nicest possible way.

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Rather than despair Harry decided it mightn’t be such a bad thing, a visit from Lew. Just what she needed. Bring her out of herself. And even if it did no good, at least Lew would see the extent of her deterioration. Sarah winced at the idea of Lew coming. But she stirred herself to clean the house and for the first time in days put in an appearance behind the counter in the shop. She looked jaundiced and miserable and without specifically discussing her health, let it be known that she was suffering. It probably wasn’t good for business, but Harry was glad to see her up and about rather than moping on the back verandah. More heartening still, she marched across High Street into McInnley’s Butchery and told Jack McInnley he must procure for her a couple of decent-sized perch by Friday afternoon. Jack offered her a nice rabbit. Nothing doing, said Sarah. Fish it had to be, preferably perch, though she might be persuaded to accept something similar. Jack said she was the tenth person after fish that week. If he got hold of Lew Broughton he would ring his scrawny neck. How was a man to come by fish under present circumstances? His old supplier, a fellow who had come up once a week from Bendigo, had gone missing in Belgium. Sarah said that was neither here nor there, leaving Jack mindful of the small mountain of minced steak the bakery bought from him each week. And when Friday rolled around there were the perch, not two but twelve silvery tiddlers pulled out of the town reservoir by Jack’s enterprising grandsons. Sarah didn’t complain. She guessed the trouble they’d gone to. On Sunday afternoon Harry lounged in the warmth

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of the kitchen watching her make hollandaise sauce. She whipped the egg yolks with a vigour that was positively violent. The whisk clattered against the bowl and her face jigged and her bosom shook. Healthy as a horse! All she had needed was a project, a little interest shown in her. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? He observed how expertly she warmed the mixture over a pot of simmering water; how she added the butter patiently in drabs. ‘You’re not using Lew’s recipe.’ ‘To blazes with him! Who does he think he is?’ In the evening Lew turned up in his tweed sac suit and presented her with a monster bouquet of blue everlastings, which Harry recognised as the sea-lavender that grew wild by the side of the road. Lew sniffed the aromas of food. ‘Oh lovely, just lovely, Sarah. I knew you’d do it justice.’ Sarah gave him a wry glance as she took his homburg and hung it on the highest peg of the stand where he wouldn’t be able to reach it without a concerted stretch. They ate at the big deal-wood table in the dining room, a match to the one at George’s Albion, on Sarah’s good china which hadn’t been out of the sideboard in many months. Head bowed, his crown a disorderly rick of grey fluff, Lew slurped his soup and mumbled appreciation. Over the fish, which Lew dubbed Minnows Broughtonaise and picked from his teeth with a fingernail, there was the inevitable talk of France. Lew rejoiced in the war. It was the unexpected fillip of his latter years. As president of the Patriotic Committee he visited boys in their homes, urging them to sign up on their eighteenth birthdays. Just

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a few weeks later – Sarah being dead and buried – he would add to the thespian unreality of Harry’s send-off by styling him ‘the fist of Leviathan’ sent to smash the enemies of the Commonwealth. For now he contented himself with gossip. ‘You heard about Robbie Maslin?’ he asked. Sarah pushed a morsel of fish into her sauce and said nothing. Lew looked back and forth inquiringly – a wizened little countenance, more whisker than flesh. ‘That he got killed?’ Harry said. ‘Aye, but the manner, lad.’ Harry glanced at his mother. Lew wasn’t known for his sense of time and place. ‘As I heard it,’ Lew’s voice became grave and important, ‘it happened away from the front line. I grant you the letter they sent poor Dotty said killed in action but they have to say that don’t they? In consideration of the loved ones. No, the truth is he was well back. Him and three others, squatting in some old support trench. Playing a quiet hand of vingt-et-un and out of the blue it comes – kaboom! Got the lot of them. A right butcher’s shop, apparently. Poor old Robbie had his innards blown high and low. They identified him by his insignia. A bad business eh! You won’t read that in the obituary.’ Lew obviously regretted this. He wished he could display his omniscience to the world (right down to who had been holding the winning hand). Harry was forearmed against lurid stories. They might have been true, anything might be true in far-away France. Robbie Maslin was dead and wouldn’t be coming home. Best

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to leave it at that. Best to leave the nasty details to the likes of Lew, for whom the war was an enthralling sporting event. ‘Very sad,’ Harry told him. ‘Very sad for everyone.’ ‘Oh I don’t know, Harry. Far be it for me to speak ill of a chap who’s fallen on the field of valour, but there’s no denying Robbie Maslin was a terrible piss-pot. And by God didn’t he give poor Dotty an awful pizzling! That woman’s been a picture of health since he went. And the pension’s nothing to be sneezed at. What’s she got – three, four children? Why that’s four pound fortnightly, four pound fifteen shillings if my reckoning’s halfway decent. Dotty wouldn’t have seen two shillings from Robbie.’ ‘His father wasn’t much better,’ Sarah said at last. ‘Sozzled day and night.’ ‘Old Pop Maslin? No, Sarah, you malign the poor fellow. The drunkard was his brother Ted – Teddy as married little Sheila Richardson . . . ’ ‘Heavens, you’re right! Little Sheila with the crooked eye.’ ‘Now you’re on track.’ Harry grinned over his plate to think how expertly she’d led him back to common ground. Of course she knew her Maslins, probably better than Lew. Fifty years of shared memories. Yes, Lew was just the one. A bag of tricks. Look at the good he was doing her!

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sixteen

John Lambert, 37 New Street, Brighton, Melbourne, Victoria, August 25, 1968 My dear Julie, You have no idea how pleased and grateful your aunt and I are that you have put this event in motion. We will most certainly attend, and I believe I have the answer to your venue difficulties. You are perhaps aware of our Masonic Temple in Church Street. It is a substantial building with an excellent reception area. I have checked to see whether it might be made available and at what price. The 11th of November is out of the question, but the 12th is fine. Is $115 too much? I am happy to contribute; please let me know. As you know I have a great many curiosities from my

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time in the islands and would be delighted to have them displayed. Unfortunately, I have nothing at all to help you commemorate Uncle Harry. You probably know that I did once have his funerary urn, which Lew Broughton obtained from France via the War Graves Commission. I believe there was also a letter from his French wife, although I did not find it among Lew’s papers when I acted as his executor. Should you hear tell of this letter, please let me know. As for the urn, I would dearly love it back. I imagine all families have these silly little squabbles and disputes. They are quite demeaning. I have written to your cousin Terry several times, as I wrote to his father before him, but he refuses to answer. If you are able to talk some sense to him I’d be very grateful. His grandmother, Margaret McArdle, was always the stubborn and assertive one in this affair. She once saw the urn in Lorna’s locked buffet and demanded the key. There was a terrible scene. Then a month or two later little Terry comes visiting and the urn goes missing. I don’t believe she put him up to it. I imagine he simply wanted to please his grandmother. I thought it might come back to me quietly, without a fuss, after she passed away, but no. Forgive me, my girl, for loading you up with such foolishness. You have bigger things on your mind. Your Aunt Lorna asks whether you have given much thought to catering. She says to tell you she knows of a very good person connected with the Girl Guides, and that she has eaten their fare twice at bowls club functions. $3.25 a head for a roast and vegetables, pudding

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with custard and a cup of tea. That was for a group of 55. Lorna checked and they are free for the 12th, which would tie in well with the availability of the Masonic Temple. Time is pressing on, so in both cases we would need to book immediately. We look forward to hearing from you, all our love, John and Lorna Lambert

PROJECT NOTES, August 28, 1968 Rang Terry straight away. I knew he’d enjoy this, though at first he was annoyed, calling Uncle John a Slimy Old Bastard. He said he wasn’t going anywhere near anything the S.O.B. had a hand in. He blamed me for involving him. I explained that I had not corresponded with S.O.B. at all, and that S.O.B. had got hold of it all by himself and offered his services. After that Terry cooled down. I said, ‘Does this mean you might come?’ Last week he’d said it was too far – nine hours on a hot bike, not his idea of fun. Now he says ‘Maybe’. I wanted to know about the urn. Should I take it seriously? He laughed. ‘You don’t remember do you?’ ‘Remember what?’ ‘How could you forget the Ashes, Jules?’ I thought: Not that again. I have enough people mucking me around.

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He said, ‘Don’t you remember carrying the drinks for Australia when you were a little kid? Mick wouldn’t let you bat, you were a girl for Christ’s sake! but you were on the team. Whenever the ball went under the prickle bush we sent you in after it. You were a trooper, mate.’ I recalled the cricket matches – McArdles and kin against a neighbouring English family – but not the Ashes. I communicated my impatience. He said he’d ring back later. He waited until eleven-thirty, for the exact moment I was getting into bed. ‘Jules! Found it! Got the stolen goods right in front of me. Boy oh boy were there some to-dos over this lump of junk!’ I wasn’t sure whether he was referring to family contentions or cricket. Eventually he described how his grandmother had accused John Lambert of pinching her ‘big Harry’. ‘So the urn in the buffet story is true?’ ‘There was a big blow-up, yeah. Great entertainment for a kid. Maggie-Nan was obsessed. What right did bloody John and Lorna have to keep her big Harry locked up in their buffet? She never said a word about how I got it. No questions asked. She kept it like a precious trophy. She would have been happier if there’d been something in it. Earthly remains of the great man. Dad didn’t have the heart to tell her it was just rubbish cooked up by old Lew Broughton. You would have heard of him. Died some time in the thirties. They all talk about him. God knows what he was

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trying to achieve. Like you said, Uncle Harry was everybody’s hobbyhorse. Everybody wanted a piece. Nan had an excuse. They grew up together. They were like brother and sister. Still, she was gullible. I mean, even if her ‘big Harry’ had been cremated why would his wife put him in an urn inscribed AIF? Maybe she sent him over in something less flashy and Lew rehoused him. The bottom says the manufacturer’s name. Viviers. Well, according to Dad there was a monumental mason in Swan Street, Richmond. Viviers & Son. Turns out they did a nice urn.’ A fake. I couldn’t see any sense in it. Terry merely laughed as if absurdity is the Lambert stock and trade. He says he’ll try Uncle Dick. I explained that I had written to the old boy and received no reply. It’s as if he’s hiding from me. I suspect he thinks I’m out to trivialise the sacred past. Terry’s last word: ‘Take care, Jules. Keep it bland. Don’t want those old buggers tearing you to bits.’ Rang Army Records again this morning and tried to push things along. The usual excuses. National commemoration. Unprecedented demand for dossiers. A brave boffin suggested I could expect something in the mail early next week. Not holding my breath. After Terry’s late call I couldn’t sleep. Wrote John a brief note to go with the invitations that came from the printer yesterday. Thanks for the offer but venue and catering all settled. Did not mention the Ashes. As Terry says: ‘Stuff him!’

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seventeen

The barn is full of the nasal whistling of birds, tiny goslings, yellowish fluff-balls that huddle beside their mothers or totter on the flagstones. He is an unexceptional feature of their lives. They aren’t afraid. They nestle in the palms of his hands, and against his chest, and have defecated on him so many times he no longer cares. He sees that they are not so much affectionate as insistent, demanding warmth and food. How is it that he has never thought it possible to be fond of geese? At times he supposes he can distinguish their mothers: ‘Bonjour, Augustine! Bonjour, Celeste!’ Complete guesswork. But it gets a laugh, and the geese themselves appear to accept him as readily as they do her. Only the gander, whom she refers to as ‘le Kaiser’, resists his advances. ‘Les hommes,’ she says – Men! – as if it’s as much his fault as the bird’s. This morning she’s purposeful, rounding up the goslings and corralling them behind a barricade of scrap timber. She pries the lid off a can of bitumen then produces a coin, a

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battered old sou with a hole in the middle. To this she ties a length of string so the coin dangles. She has him remove the first bird and set it down separately on the floor. She jerks the coin over it, and he sees that at first it describes a wobbly ellipse before gradually stabilising and swinging back and forth in a line. Superstition? Or legitimate animal husbandry? He’s inclined to laugh, but senses it wouldn’t be well received. ‘Garcon,’ she says, to teach him. Yes, a boy, he grasps that much, but the rest of the lesson is beyond him. How does this coin signify a boy? Where’s the logic? Patiently she demonstrates that the coin is capable of swinging in a circle. ‘Fille,’ she says. A girl. Alternatively it might swing like a pendulum. A boy. A sort of sexual dowsing. Now he can’t restrain his smile, and is immediately afraid she will think him supercilious, a man puffed up with bogus education. Seeing his scepticism, she insists he try his hand with the coin. He twirls it over the bird, deliberately swinging it wide. The circle gets progressively smaller as he ceases to manipulate the string. After thirty seconds it settles, rocking back and forth in an undeniable line. She cocks an I-told-you-so brow and he sniggers. There has to be a trick. Chicanery! What has sex to do with circles and lines? As further proof she catches his hand and has him extend it palm up, just as he was obliged to do at boarding school when receiving the cuts. She twirls the coin, apparently on the principle that maleness resides in every cell of his body. And sure enough, he’s a boy! This established, she dips a brush in the tar and dabs his knuckle – a black stain, glistening. Then one for the gosling, or gander-to-be. He can

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imagine the purpose of these stains. The ganders are least valuable, and will be first to be sold off. Room for just one Kaiser Bill in this goose house. Whereas the geese will have a couple of years’ reprieve before they too become roast dinners. They at least are productive. So enthralled has he become with her small concerns, so at ease in the intimacy of her dark barn, so enclosed, that greater France is a distant abstraction. But from outside comes a shout, the word ‘Colombe’. Startled, she bustles him into one of the stalls then goes to meet the visitor, but preceded by the gander in full cry. He follows little of this first exchange. An emotional gasp, a blurted greeting, that word again: ‘Colombe’. The visitor is a woman. Curiosity getting the better of him, he moves out to peer between jamb and door. A widow. Formal black crepe. And she embraces his mademoiselle, sobbing into her cotton blouse. Her grief is torrential, and to his British sensibility, extreme. But there is something else, an irregularity, a baffling element that worries him like a small dog tearing at his trouser leg. Colombe, she calls her. Colombe. Suddenly he feels the bite: his mademoiselle is called Colombe! Her name is Colombe! Stunned, he watches her twist free of the widow and let fly a distracted kick at the overly protective gander. The widow laughs through her tears and they clinch again, clapping one another’s back. Then, like competitors in a three-legged race, they stumble and lurch towards the potted roses. It seems this is what the widow has come for. Still sobbing, but with an eye to quality, she selects one with

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a single red bud. A martial colour, appropriate for a dead soldier. The mademoiselle – this Colombe – has difficulty wrenching the pot from the ground. The roots have grown through, and in freeing it she cracks the terracotta. No, she won’t accept money. A gift. As they move towards the front of the property the gander blusters ten paces behind, intent on seeing the outsider off. Sitting opposite him at lunch, she appears quite unaware she has become a stranger again. But certainly she’s changed, a true foreigner for the first time. Elise is almost English, a derivative of Elisa. Colombe? What is Colombe? Not a beautiful sound, for one thing. After they have finished eating he unfolds a sheet of yellowish paper and lays it on the table. He has salvaged it from the bottom of the wardrobe in his room. With the blunt stub of a pencil he prints in large clear letters: harry george lambert. Curious, she rotates the sheet till the words are right-way up. She manages to make his name sound quite French, a slurred and lazy pronunciation from the front of the mouth. Her smile broadens as she takes the pencil. After smoothing the paper she forms her letters very carefully, tackling her name like a provisional sketch. Seeing her clumsiness, he regrets what he has done. But she isn’t self-conscious. If anything her expression is condescending. A frivolous pastime, this writing. Still, there you have it: colombe adele jacotot. She is taken aback by his frown. He is sorry to have shown his disappointment. It has the feel of gratuitous cruelty.

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Only in her absence can he think. While she escorts her geese out into the spring fields he remains frozen at her table, examining the vastness of his stupidity. It is easy to curse Bunter for fooling him, but he accepts that he himself is most to blame. Remembering back, he realises that the woman did in fact tell him her name. True, he had supposed it was just another unfathomable French word, but perhaps a part of his mind had refused to understand. He recalls her disconcerting coarseness and his determination to overlook it. Surely his gullibility was wilful, a desperate clinging to what he thought he knew. With this he ordered the chaos – with a name, with a tatter of seductive knowledge. Mademoiselle Elise was a precious entity because he had brought her from home. He owned her, as he owns all the sweet and inconsequential detritus of his past. Suddenly she is gone. He feels stiff in the spine, icy at his extremities. He is immobilised by shame and wonder. Undeniably, he has wafted here to this place, to this woman, to this moment, on a self-preserving blimp of delusion. But what astounds him, what reduces him to total incomprehension: it has preserved him.

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eighteen

I couldn’t make all the letters properly. I wrote Colombe Adele Jacotot. My husband taught me. Jacotot is his name. I never learnt to write my father’s name. They brought in school and free lessons after I was too old. My sister who came last summer, the one who looked like she’d stepped in shit, she can write. She’s younger. She got it all. I missed everything. My Australian looked very sad. I thought: You stupid man, what’s it to you whether I can read and write? I can look after myself a lot better than you. I can work, I have money, I know how much things cost. But it hurt. You don’t like people looking down on you. And really, this rush to read things was never there when I was a girl. Even wealthy people didn’t bother. My mother sent me off to keep house for Marsaults when I was twelve. They had bits and pieces of land all over Caen. Could any of them read a word? No. If they wanted something put down on paper they went to the notary. Oh, they were good years. My head was empty and I was

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happy. I slept by the kitchen fire. I had plenty to eat. Servants, family and visitors all sat around the table together. On Sunday we trooped off to church in a bunch. Naturally there were distinctions, but no one could say I didn’t belong. That’s how I learnt what a family is. My father wanted to bring me back. He said they should pay me. He was after the money. But my mother said, ‘Leave her there. She’s getting everything she needs. She’s happy.’ I worked from morning till night – scrubbing and cleaning, helping with the cooking. Then they put me outdoors, which I liked better. Everyone lent a hand with the apples – children, old people, everyone. Marsaults had two large presses and all the neighbours brought their fruit as well. It was a big occasion. Then there was the first tasting, private and just for the household. You felt privileged. You felt cosy. I got dizzy on a single mug of cider. You don’t forget these things. If I smell fruit I’m immediately happy. Do you remember when he brought me pears? I wept. I wept for the smell of them. It was like he was bringing me those four good years in a bag. I learnt everything there. Everything good. Old Henri taught me about poultry. He called me ‘Blossom’. Imagine that. I was already fat but he called me ‘Blossom’. He was the sweetest man. Claire Chabrier warned me he would try to touch me but he never did. There was nothing he didn’t know about birds – how to choose breeders, how to keep them healthy, feeding, butchering, protecting the eggs and young ones from clumsy feet. Geese are rough mothers if you don’t give them room. There they had the run of the orchards. It was all new to

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me. We’d never stayed in one place long enough to keep poultry. Always flitting about, running between relations and rented rooms. But with Marsaults I had my own life. Then along came my husband to take it away. Jacotots had a little land, not as much as Marsaults, but to my eyes Jacotots were big people. They had a triangle of pasture on the other side of the stream where I went to do the laundry. He took off his shoes and crossed the water in his bare feet. He said, ‘I am Leon.’ I said, ‘I know who you are.’ I didn’t really. I knew his face. I knew Jacotots were big people. I swear I had no idea what he wanted. I was sixteen and he was twenty-two. I thought that when a man kissed you it meant marriage. He did a lot more than kiss me. It went on for weeks. Then one day he did it to me, the whole jiggetyjig, but I wasn’t sure. I thought maybe he had and maybe he hadn’t. No, I’m not stupid. It felt the same as what he’d been doing. In any case, by that time I thought I loved him. He said, ‘What does it matter if you have a baby? We’re getting married aren’t we?’ That’s what he said and I believed him. I had a cousin rushed to the altar. Everything turned out all right for her. I went down to the stream three times a week because he said he couldn’t go two days without me. I won’t deny I liked it too. You know how it is when everything’s new. Then I stopped bleeding and some instinct told me that meant trouble. Perhaps I had heard something. I told Madame Marsault first, before I had a chance to speak to Leon. It was pure accident, and lucky, even if I didn’t think so at the time. She scolded and hissed and made me cry. She thought it was a disgrace and a big problem. Leon

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got more than he bargained for. Monsieur Marsault went to his people and said, ‘I didn’t take this girl under my roof for you to mess with. If you think she’s got no one to protect her, think again!’ He didn’t have to say it. They could have dropped me. But he looked on what had happened as a personal slight. He promised them 900 francs if they took me. So we were married and I became a Jacotot. They all complained because they never saw the 900 francs. But it was too late. We’d been to the deputy then stood up in church, so old man Jacotot could cry and carp all he liked and never change a thing. The baby was a girl. She lived long enough to be christened. My father-in-law blamed me for that as well. A girl, a dead girl! And look what they were lumbered with: big fat Colombe! I tell you, they hated me and I hated them back. Not Leon. He was just weak, too afraid to stand up to them. I didn’t blame him. They were a brawling lot, the old man ranting and humiliating him, the sisters not speaking. I don’t think I saw his mother smile in twenty-three years. Leon called her the Living Dead. We prayed the old man would drop dead. That was what we had in common, hating his father and one particular bitch of a sister. It was a closed-off, creeping sort of life. You were scared to speak, scared to put your head up. Add to this my failed pregnancies. They never got past a few months, not for thirteen years until Joseph. At first the family made sympathetic faces, but it happened so often they lost patience. Then Joseph came along and my mother-in-law took a look and said, ‘I’ll give him a month.’

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I said, ‘That’s a Christian thing to say.’ And she said, ‘Just speaking the truth.’ So you see what it was like. Cruelty came out of their mouths without thinking. It was all they knew. But I didn’t think it of my husband. I thought he was better. Then our prayers were answered and the old man fell face-down on the road. They said he was dead before he hit the ground. We cleaned him up and laid him out on the kitchen table and everyone wailed and told lies about what a good man he’d been. Naturally I did my share of bawling too, but for joy. You can’t imagine my relief, my absolute glee to see him stretched out there with a rag clamping his jaw shut. I tied it myself, pulled it so tight it creased the flesh, as punishment for all the cruelty that had come out of his mouth when he was alive. But if I expected a change for the better, I was mistaken. For a week or two everything seemed fine. Leon shifted the Living Dead out of the best bedroom so we could have it. There were three of us. Joseph was getting big. We needed the space. She went meekly enough, no arguments. It was Leon who caused trouble. No sooner had we jumped into their hard old bed than it became, ‘Don’t you say anything against my parents! You’ve always hated them!’ I couldn’t believe my ears. Suddenly his father was a saint in heaven. Cruel? Never! A loud-mouthed pig? Oh, shame! How could I say such things? I didn’t know proper respect. I was always jealous, always spitting behind people’s backs. No wonder God wouldn’t give us children. Did I want Him to take Joseph away as well? God this, God that. When had he ever

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cared about God? I howled. You don’t expect your husband to turn on you, not after going through all those hard years together. He was never a man I could be proud of, but we had our laughs. We were two together, then this. He teamed up with his eldest sister when she came visiting with her husband. I didn’t know how to look after Joseph. I didn’t dress him properly. I didn’t keep him warm. I shouldn’t feed him so much bread. He would choke. I shouldn’t be lazy. I should make him stewed plums. I shouldn’t carry him. He should walk or he’d always have crooked legs. That was a lie: he didn’t have crooked legs. She said it to rile me. And all the while the Living Dead sat there with a look like she had bad wind. She was thinking: So how does it feel to be queen? I was getting what I deserved. But she couldn’t say it. She had to hold it all in so her son would think she was an angel. I put up with it for months thinking he would improve, but no, he was a different man – his father over again. I suppose it was guilt, for having hated him. Not that I cared to make excuses for Leon. He wore the old man’s clothes. He stomped through the house in just the same way. He started speaking like him, barking at everyone. It got so I trembled when he entered the door. I had no one to turn to. Then one day they went off to a cattle fair and I kept Joseph back sick. He wasn’t sick at all. I don’t know what I was thinking. I had nowhere to go. My mother was dead, my father destitute and in the asile. I tried my sister. She’d only just married and didn’t want trouble. She told me to go home. So I went to Marsaults where I’d been happy.

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They let us stay two nights. But on the second morning Leon came to get us. He was stiff with rage. He took Joseph in his arms and walked on ahead. Whether I came back or not, that was nothing. He had Joseph. Out on the road where people could see us he was all restraint and injured dignity, but I knew what to expect once he got me indoors. He let me have it. No words, no accusations, just whack in the face! The Living Dead intervened. She took my part like a good mother-in-law, so impartial and noble. Still, I was a mess. My nose went this way, my jaw the other. The sisters were appalled. They told me to keep indoors till I looked better. Couldn’t have people talking about us. I was a Jacotot wasn’t I? After that I lost my nerve for running. I shut my mouth. If Leon was the image of his father, I was his mother. I think she began to like me. I won’t say we were friends, but towards the end, after her youngest daughter married, we sat together every evening. Our amusement was Joseph, by then the only child in the house. We spoilt him, never told him no, but he didn’t take advantage. My Joseph was placid and accepting. He was frightened of Leon, but every boy is frightened of his father. When Joseph was twelve, the old woman died. I never thought I would be sorry. I woke up in the middle of the night and listened to Leon rumbling in his sleep. A man seems very small when he’s asleep. He wasn’t so terrible any more. He was nothing. I thought, I will not lie here slowly dying. I will not let my son grow up to be his father. For a little while I was brave. This time I relied on no one. I waited till Leon was

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away, and took our savings. I told Joseph we were going visiting, but he knew. He helped me pack the bags. We caught the afternoon train to Rouen. I was thinking Belgium, but we never got that far. I rented a room in Sotteville. No one asked questions. I wasn’t interesting enough, just a widow with a son in tow. I never heard Joseph say he missed his father. His grandmother, yes, but never his father. He didn’t mention him, though I know he lived in fear of him turning up at our door. I got bits and pieces of work, never more than a few months at a time. I trudged five kilometres back and forth to Montigny for the roses, always in winter when the ground was frozen. It was harder than anything I’d done in Caen. Couldn’t get anything in the mills. You had to be born into it. You had to know someone. So eventually we shifted out to Maromme, because Cordiers liked the look of Joseph and wanted a permanent boy rather than a woman. I still did my few weeks in winter. Those last years before the war we were regulars there, digging, lifting, grading. In summer Joseph could bud three hundred a day, more than the boss. I used to look out on the rows after he was gone and think, Joseph created those. I never liked roses, horrible thorny things, but I clung to that view. It was my last trace of him, his handiwork in the fields, his memorial. Long gone now, I imagine. I don’t blame Cordiers for digging them up. They must make use of their land. They had to start again. And they were very fond of him, whatever they ended up thinking of me. Joseph won people over. It was his special gift. You wanted to please him. When mobilisation came they brought me in from Maromme to look after the house, so Joseph wouldn’t

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worry. It was a godsend. No work, but a roof over my head. Then they opened the factories to women. I went straight into the canvas-works, learnt machine maintenance from little Gabrielle Imbert. I thought I was doing very well for a while – till they wrote me he was dead. I went to Isabelle Bravy and she read it out but I already knew what it said. His officer wrote as well. Your son went quick, he said. I shouldn’t resent him for trying to spare me. But you’ve heard this before. Don’t let me repeat myself. I’ll tell you something you don’t know. Where do you think they sent his remains? Not to me, no. To his father in Caen. They buried him in Caen, and shut me out. They didn’t tell me the date. In any case, I couldn’t have gone. Leon would have killed me. I complained to the army. They said they sent all his effects to the address he’d given them. I found out he’d been writing to his father for years. Perhaps visiting him too, for all I know. I was so angry, so hurt. I kept asking: Why did he do it? He had no feeling for his father. They were never close. There must be a reason. At the same time I thought: All those years and Leon never found us – why? Then it came to me. It was Joseph’s way of keeping the peace, his way of protecting me. I don’t know when it began. Not before he came of age. He wouldn’t have gone there while his father still had power over him. But he soothed him, I’m sure. If you knew Joseph you’d understand. My son was a peacemaker.

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nineteen

The evening rituals don’t change. He watches her scrub the bowls with a coarse rag. Two bowls, two spoons, a saucepan – the extent of their washing up. The kitchen smells of soup and soap, spoiling the scent of roses on the table. He picked these yesterday afternoon but already they have gone limp. She tolerates his roses, though he suspects she would prefer to see outdoor things left where they belong. He knows it’s wrong to dislike her. Colombe Adele Jacotot. Not even a Cordier. On the salon walls, as far as he can remember, there are no medals, no prizes, no certificates of merit with mock wax seals for a Mademoiselle Colombe. But this is a carping thought, and he checks himself. Finished at the trough, she shakes her hands. Water droplets sizzle in the small fire. Then she reaches down into the cupboard for the playing cards. Out too comes the wine, an old bottle that they have drunk by measure. He supposes she is not so much disciplined as thrifty. It’s a fortnight

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since she accepted his 200 francs, yet she remains mistress of the alcohol. Always the same cheap wine, always the same limit. He’s in no mood for the humiliations of pee-kay, especially as she seems to make up the rules as she goes. Two nights ago it was carte blanche, a previously unmentioned little something worth all the points in the world. He maintained his good humour. He doubts she would tolerate churlishness. So they play again. Three games in he has quaffed two glasses and she regards him sternly. Wine, like entertainment, must be made to last. Two glasses and his hands seem to belong to someone else, are clumsy and far away, and the jack of clubs, who has a face like a boy with the mumps, appears to be smirking at him. In this vague and unfocused state he’s slow to realise she’s dealt him a oncein-a-blue-moon hand. Eight clubs, the full complement in the reduced pack, arranged in his fist highest to lowest without any help from him. Pure chance? Not on your nelly! No, there’s something miraculous happening here, or fishy. The mademoiselle is a prodigy on a par with the old Lamberts, except that he can’t recall his mother ever cheating. The idea! But how do you accuse a woman in whose house you are a self-invited guest? And how do you object to a suspiciously perfect hand? Of course she remains impassive, doesn’t even look in his direction. Is he really in need of such a head start? Is he such a miserable match? Well, he won’t cooperate. Point is his for the taking – the greatest number of cards in any one suit. Sequence too – the

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longest run of consecutive cards. But he won’t have either. Grimly, he exchanges his entire hand for another. She watches calmly. His sacrifice, his defiance, elicits no more than a brief twitch of her lips. Then she returns to her own cards, throws out two, picks up two, and frowns at the new possibilities. It’s then he begins to doubt his grip on events. Maybe she’s innocent after all. Maybe he has thrown away the best luck of his life. In the great groaning bed he lies bare-chested and flat on his back, the blankets flung to the floor. He has drunk too much. In an inexplicable departure from her principles of thrift and moderation she opened a second bottle. And now his fingers and toes buzz with energy, or twinkle like far-away stars. With each hot breath his body heaves and the steel mesh beneath him saws and twangs. The air reeks of fermentation and goose down, an unclean but comfortable smell. The sounds he hears in the hallway have no human connotation. Little teeth chiselling at the wainscotting. The dance of insect legs. Even the creak of boards doesn’t alert him. So that when he opens his eyes and sees the broad black shape of a woman he’s shocked. ‘I’m sorry,’ he exclaims, under the impression he’s guilty of some terrible transgression. How he knows he’s not dreaming: the bed plunges, screeching under her weight. He wriggles away to make room and then she’s lying there beside him, wheezing with nervousness or simple exertion after having climbed the stairs. Her breasts and stomach are a double hump in

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the darkness, and in the ensuing silence he feels the rhythmic touch of her nightgown against his arm. He knows he should do something, but can’t think what. A gesture of reassurance perhaps. As the seconds snowball into minutes his panic rises. He’s restrained by awful precedents: a clumsy excursion into Susan Minton’s underskirt, the stoicism of Rough Rene’s daughter. All at once the woman sits up, a featureless pyramid above him. He fears she’s lost patience and decided to go. He reaches out, catching her sleeve then her hand, then burying his face in the woolly weight of her breasts. His heart hammers. Soon he feels her tugging at the buttons of his long johns. A thread of cotton makes matters difficult, until he intervenes and snaps it. His cock is well ahead of him, pushing and demanding out. She grips it decisively and he has a flash thought of ‘Kaiser Bill’ seized by the throat. She lifts her nightdress and as her bulk descends on him he gasps at the smoothness of her skin. She is wet and hot and he marvels that women conceal such secrets. And an old woman! She hunches forward, shoulders pressing on his chest. Her breath is ferocious, until she turns away and wheezes into the pillow. No, he’s not dreaming, but nor is he wholly lucid. His body is unfamiliar, an escapee doing as it likes. Coupling. Coition. An engineering marvel, the way it all goes on without direction: their heat and urgency, the heavy rolling of her pelvis and his cock obeying impersonal physical laws. It occurs to him they should kiss, and he plants his lips on her sweaty neck, but she is preoccupied with the heat inside.

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At last she turns and brushes wetly at his mouth. Before he can respond she has plunged back into the pillow and is pushing and rocking with renewed ferocity, which his run-away body, the body that in adulthood he has seldom touched without a sense of weakness and regret, reciprocates. At a certain point he begins to participate, to want and need. He is determined to destroy something, to break or burst or burn up. Oh this sex, he knows what it is now! Then in a matter of moments she’s gone. His bed continues to groan sedately. In the darkness he feels light-headed, approving of what he senses inside and out. Whether it is the rhythm of his own breath, he has the sensation of drifting on an undulating sea. Somewhere beneath him there is a strong and determined current, but that isn’t his concern. He can’t conceive of a destination. He stretches out in a luxurious calm. He likes himself better. What has changed? Isn’t the world as separate and unknowable as ever? Yet this no longer matters. He wonders whether this is a common experience. A few minutes with a woman, a few minutes of this strange mutuality, and he’s at ease in his skin. He touches his wet stomach, pattering his fingertips in semen. Her smell is smeared on his body. He reasons that everywhere it must be the same; has always been the same – little spates of recklessness, people breaking out of their closed spheres. How does it work? How can a stranger do this for him? But along with his astonishment and wonder comes regret: how many years has he wasted? This last decade, where has it gone?

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He awakes late, long after she has left for work, and descends to a shimmering spring day: infinite blue sky, birds, wafting scents of roses and hawthorn, croaking frogs. He can’t remain indoors. Taking a towel and a cake of soap, he goes out the back way, steps over the fallen fence and plunges into the rose thicket. Even the broadest path is now a tangle, and several times he’s forced to stoop or drag gingerly at the canes. Then he emerges at the dam and climbs the wall. Choking the verges, the new season’s rushes are as tall as his chest. His boots slurp in the mud, disrupting the chorus of frogs. Eventually he finds a flat stone on which to stand while he undresses. He hangs his shirt, trousers and underwear on the reeds before stepping tentatively into the black water. The mud oozes between his toes, but he’s more concerned about submerged roots and stubble that might cut his tender feet. Up to his knees it’s cold but bearable. Thigh deep, he starts to breathe hard. A gasp and under! Then he pops up with a splash and an involuntary hoot. Cold! So cold! And he must move or sink. He resorts to an unorthodox sidestroke, a paroxysm of flapping and scissor-kicking that has him alternately rearing up and plunging under. Out in the middle the dragonflies hum and burr along almost geometric flightpaths. They sweep towards his face, veer at the last instant. Soon he feels his heart thudding. The cold is less piercing and he dives, opening his eyes to look up at the sun through the minestrone gloom. He pulls at the water, feels the resistance against his face. Breaking again into the glare of daylight, he realises he hasn’t swum since his youth. Middle-aged men, town worthies, don’t

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indulge in frivolous pleasures. But he has no nostalgia for those picnics beside the Rushburn reservoir. He feels freer today, freer than at any time he can remember. Kicking less vigorously, he slides into the reeds and squats in the shallows. He reaches up onto the flat rock where the soap nestles in his shoe. He scrubs his face, neck and armpits then lathers his thinning hair before wading out further to rinse away the suds. He stands thigh deep, a glistening white body, soft and plump about the stomach and hips. Examining his liver-coloured knob, he pulls back the skin and smears it in soap. He wags it clean in the water – clean but perfumed with mud. Not that he minds. He is better without his old squeamishness. At the same time he is inclined to self-ridicule. Quite the Don Juan, he tells himself.

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twenty

His elation lasts throughout the day, allowing him to think again of events that had previously seemed irksome. In particular he dwells on a conversation with Uncle George, which at the time – sixteen months ago – had assaulted his understanding of his deceased parents. His mother was only a week in the grave when Harry was called to his uncle’s work shed at Albion. He found George in a weeping rage, refusing to come out. Yet he admitted Harry, who remembers a defiant old man sitting in the midst of the obsolete tools of his trade – bow-saws, gimlets, spokeshaves, planes, relics of his Suffolk days – and whispering pitiably, ‘By Christ I miss Sammy.’ That George had a heart came as a surprise, especially as he’d managed to keep his grief within bounds at the time of Sammy’s death. ‘We all miss him, Uncle.’ ‘I weren’t jealous, I never begrudged him his successes, whatever she says.’

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She: bone of his body, mother of his eight children. Any conflict between the brothers had to be laid at her feet. She was the reason Sammy started the bakery and never went into the joinery. She was a dirty old sow, snide and vicious with envy! Dementia, Harry thought, yet was thrilled to hear his aunt disparaged – this woman who on the day Ma was buried remarked, ‘Well, there’s nothing keeping you now!’ In any case, George had a steam up and couldn’t be discouraged. ‘I was daft, Harry-lad, too sensible for my own good. I didn’t look at her bottom half. I kept my dick in my pants, as you did in them days. If I’d gone chasing skirt like your old man . . . ’ Was he saying Sammy was reckless? Harry is no longer sceptical. Rebellious, defiant, greedy for life – his mother and father both! ‘At one time I thought: What’s he see in her? Six foot, shoulders like a woodcutter and too shy to say boo! You wouldn’t credit it would you? Your Ma shy! And then there was the social difference. Her old boy being a bookbinder and naturally not wanting her marrying down. But that’s where old Sarah showed her colours. Shy or no, she tucks Sammy under her arm and says: “Now look you here, Pater, I’m having this one and no argument!”’ The rest was familiar, how Sarah said, ‘Emigrate!’ – principally to get away from her family – and Sammy jumped to, how George warmed to the idea and Mary was dragged along in terror. How Sarah had her schemes to pass the

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time, making it her project to educate Sammy, how he left England barely able to recognise his letters and stepped down onto South Melbourne wharf a reader of signage and newspapers on a footing with George, and even a little quicker in accounts. The old anecdotes, repeated for three generations now. But to Harry’s distress, in George’s retelling there was something new, something he hadn’t heard and didn’t want to hear. How for instance in steerage they slept in compartments like boxes, or big coffins, two high, an upper and a lower, each with a curtain for privacy, how George and Mary had the bottom, Sammy and Sarah the top, how Mary couldn’t sleep at night for their ‘spooning’. He remembers George puckering vindictively, relishing the opportunity to expose the woman with whom he had lived half a century. ‘It’s her authoritative opinion they’re doing it too much. “Like a pair of bloody starlings,” she says. Strong words for her. Furthermore, as older brother I should have a chat with Sammy. Tell him to lay off. I mean, God Almighty, Harry, who does she think she is?’ Strangely, this knowledge no longer seems sordid. He experiences a greater solidarity with his parents than he ever felt when they were alive. And yet he had been on the brink of fleeing, held there only by George’s anticipatory laughter. ‘So I tell her right-o, and afterwards I can see her wondering why them starlings keep at it. Plain impudence, the pair of them! Doing it to spite her! Oh yes, she developed a sizeable contempt for your Ma. Sammy she could forgive, but not Sarah. Then, come voyage-end old Mary discovers she’s got a bun in the oven. And what makes it doubly

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sweet, Sarah don’t. All that ruckus night after night and for what!’ About to explode, George leant close. He twinkled with malice and absurdity. ‘And you know what she says, Harry-lad? Two words. “God’s justice.” Now there’s a generous soul for you. God’s fucking justice!’

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twenty-one

When Colombe arrives home he’s waiting in the kitchen. ‘Bonsoir,’ he tells her brightly, hoping to bluster through any embarrassment. Certainly she’s uncomfortable, murmuring a vague response while her eyes flicker over her kitchen. He thinks: Patience, Harry. She can’t be allowed to regret what they have done. He has to be the soul of gratitude. For several minutes she appears determined to disregard his existence, until all at once her expression becomes grim and she looks directly into him. He sees that she is steeling herself for the ordeal of words, a mode of communication that, while it has its place in card-play, they have largely abandoned as too exhausting – so much effort for so little comprehension. Yet she chooses this moment to try again. For once her pronunciation is slow and deliberate, though it doesn’t increase his understanding. As usual he feels miserably inadequate. He catches one phrase: ‘Il regardait.’ He is watching? Who is watching? From the deep pocket of her oily skirt she removes an

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object for him to inspect. It is a child’s toy, a little wooden aircraft four inches long, painted burgundy red. At first it seems such an insignificant thing that he’s inclined to smile, but is soon chastened by her earnestness. ‘Un garcon?’ he asks. A boy? A boy has been watching them? For reply, she brings him to the back door, where she hesitates, scrutinising the rose-plots before taking his sleeve and leading him out. They pass along the side of the house under the eaves. She takes the child’s toy and gestures at the road, or perhaps at the dense hawthorn and dog-rose hedge. In either case, it seems that a child has dropped a toy near their front gate. If not for her agitation he would think nothing of it. But he trusts her judgement. ‘Il regardait,’ she’d said. He is watching. Continuously watching? It is so exasperating not being able to ask the simplest questions: such as whether she knows the boy by name, whether she has actually seen him or deduced his existence from the lost toy, whether he passes this way regularly, whether he has a special interest in the property, whether, in fact, he has seen Harry himself. This latter possibility is alarming. Could he have been more careful? Perhaps, in his dreaminess, he has been guilty of an inadvertent slip. She is clearly relieved to have convinced him of the seriousness of the risk. He follows her back to her kitchen, where she places the little aircraft conspicuously on the ledge above the trough as if to serve as a constant alert and warning to him. It seems to proclaim an end, at least for now, to any continuation of the previous night’s intimacy, though he aches to touch her. Instead he must stand at a

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distance, watching her lift the lid of her clothes-chest and root about till she comes up with an old skirt. Intent on undressing, she shoos him away. She has grass to cut, geese to feed. Later, when she’s out in the fields, he returns to her kitchen. He’s not good with gestures, but imagines that if he can surprise her with a cooked meal it must count for something. He kindles the fire, hangs a pot of water over the grate and sets about peeling potatoes. Within five minutes she’s stomping at the door. She comes in flapping at the smoke. A caustic look: what does he think he’s doing? Smiling sweetly, he exhibits a half-peeled potato. Her thinlipped mouth contracts. He can see that nothing frustrates her more than his good intentions. She turns on her heels and doesn’t come back till after dark, by which time his green beans and boiled potatoes are cold on her plate. Eating quickly and without comment, she turns periodically away from the table so she doesn’t have to face him. He understands that tonight there will be no wine or cards, or anything else. When she takes her plate to the trough he rises too, preparing to go to his room. ‘Bon nuit,’ he tells her, then more decisively: ‘Bon nuit, Colombe.’ Her name has an empty feel, new-learnt, not quite real. She’s slow to respond. He waits. When she glances back over her shoulder she looks tired and perplexed but acknowledges him with a slight tilt of her head. Patience, he reminds himself.

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twenty-two

The next day isn’t just warm, it’s hot – an almost Australian heat that dries the sodden soil around the well into a crust and melts the tar on the barn roof. Blackbirds pant in the shade of the garden. He too hides from the sun, among the roses, sipping tepid water from a flask. He’s made a discovery: a bank of vigorous Noisettes that smother their smaller neighbours. Mademoiselle Elise? After recent errors he’s wary. The reddish wood and zigzag growth conform but the flowers aren’t quite what he remembers – a degree too yellow. Of course there are other candidates. Marechal Niel. Deprez a Fleur Jaune. Both of which his father planted at one time or another. And that’s where the pleasure lies, in weighing up the possibilities, in sifting the unlikely from the likely, because each cultivar is as distinct as a human being. He captures a spray of half-spent flowers, twists and breaks the cane. A scent of spring berries. The tip-most petals fall at a touch, revealing tired rings of stamens and bald styles. The small ovaries are already swelling – the business-end of beauty.

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He recalls his father’s desultory experiments with crossfertilisation; how he went about the early morning garden forcing his pollen-dipped finger, almost obscenely, into newly opened buds; how for weeks certain bushes sported brown paper bags rather than roses. No new floral wonders came of it. A few nondescript little seedlings, nothing worth preserving. But this only served to increase Sammy’s respect for the professionals, especially when he read somewhere that Monsieur Nabonnand of Golf Juan (that genius of the tea rose) kept a record of crossings and backcrossings as fat as the Bible. Loyal as he is to his father’s enthusiasms, Harry doesn’t feel obliged to believe in genius, or for that matter in selective breeding. He has a suspicion, recently strengthened, that it might come down to a handful of hips plucked carelessly from a few good sorts and tossed over the shoulder. If this is disillusion, it doesn’t feel bad. There are still good sorts. A noise comes from the road. The suddenness of it whips Harry taut. He peers intently through the foliage, expecting to see the unknown boy. The hedge defeats him, but he is almost relieved to hear the sputtering cough of an adult man. He knows the source; has seen or heard this same individual several times at a distance – a former soldier by the evidence of his soiled, red-striped pants. At least once a week he trots in and out of Rouen, and today in the searing heat. It is some time before Harry realises he’s stopped at the gate. A moment later there is a battering on the front door. Then silence. By now Harry has crawled across two

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furrows to obtain a view of the house. He can’t see the front, just the side. But this is where the soldier eventually appears: an exceptionally tall man, round-shouldered, fair hair tinged grey. Apart from his lungs, there doesn’t seem to be much wrong with him. He examines the same window Harry tried nearly a month ago, and heaves unsuccessfully at the sash. If he was more methodical he might go round the back and find the door unlocked. The effort of trying to force the window leaves him bowed over. He spits on the grass. And there, conveniently at his feet, is Harry’s discarded river-stone. Briefly his face is clearly visible: clean-shaven, mild-eyed, unexpectedly intelligent. The clash of stone on glass is shockingly abrupt. He taps out the last shards and climbs up onto the sill, remaining there half in half out, apparently stuck. Less than twenty yards away, Harry considers rushing him, or shouting. He breaks through to the verge of the garden in anticipation. But he goes no further. After the moment of surprise, what then? How can he be sure he’ll run? He might have a weapon. Before Harry can regret his hesitation the soldier has slipped inside. And then Harry must wait. He waits impotently while a stranger riffles through his mademoiselle’s things. How long before he finds her money? She hasn’t been very careful – a calico bag in the cupboard. Already he dreads breaking the news to her. Her accusing look: why didn’t he stop it? What use is he? His bulk and height and well-nourished male muscles – what use? Unfair of course. She knows he’s in no position to play policeman. But she’ll think it, against all commonsense, just as he does.

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The minutes drag. Ten, fifteen, maybe more. Then there’s movement at the window. First a boot protrudes, then an entire crimson-clad leg stretching to touch the ground. Contorting his long body, the soldier squeezes through and stands in the sunlight. His cheeks bulge as he chews. Can only be bread. And if he’s found her bread he’s found her money. Certainly he seems pleased with himself, loping away with a world more energy and purpose than before. His wheezing and barking might almost be laughter. Gloating. Which is too much for Harry. Scrambling out from the roses, he hurls his flask. He sends it crashing into the side of the house and sees just enough of the departing soldier to know he’s put the wind up him. A short time later the soldier is a hundred yards up the road and still scurrying. Periodically he looks back but there’s nothing to see. Concealed in the lilacs, Harry despises himself for not acting sooner. The house is less ravaged than he feared, disorderly rather than damaged. Blankets flung to the floor, her clothes-chest ransacked. Two unopened bottles of wine have been removed from the cupboard and left on the kitchen table – probably too cumbersome to take. And beside these, the empty calico bag. Too easy. Blind Freddy could have found it. In the salon the sideboard is open. Linen, china, glassware and another unopened bottle of wine fan out on the rug. Three medallions, ripped from their frames on the wall, nestle together in a china bowl. Imitation gold. Worthless. Suddenly he’s wrestling a new anxiety. His father’s watch!

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Left it out on the washstand asking to be taken! He climbs the stairs without hope, sees at once that his room has been disturbed – his mattress shifted, the wardrobe emptied, gobs of pink spittle on the floor. And amid the clutter of toiletries on the washstand there is a noticeable absence. No gleam of gold-plate. He slumps down on the bed, quite prepared to wallow in self-pity. Later, without bothering to clean up the mess, hoping it will be an explanation in itself, he goes to wait in the salon. Not for the first time he wishes there was a dictionary in the house. His familiarity with the jargon of pee-kay is all very well, but right now he would prefer to know a little more basic French. For instance, the word for ‘thief’. By the time he hears her key in the front door he has their meeting rehearsed. But then she’s standing in the hallway with a baffled look and all he can do is stand solemnly with dangling hands. She bends over the embroidered linen and crystal decanters, the show-possessions of the Cordier household, trying to understand. Why are they out? What has he been doing with them? Not until he has brought her through to her kitchen does she grasp that she’s been robbed. At the sight of the empty bag tears well in her eyes. ‘Soldat,’ he tells her, and: ‘Pantalon rouge.’ She subsides onto her clothes-chest, apparently oblivious. He would like to more fully exonerate himself, but is unsure of the phrase ‘my father’s watch’. That she’s wobbling on the brink of collapse doesn’t escape him: the rigid way she folds her hands, her immobile face, suddenly so drained of colour. And then she

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springs up without explanation and goes out the back door, snatching the scythe from where it leans against the wall. He follows her a little but stops at the well. She vanishes into the roses, her progress marked by a shaking and thrashing of foliage. Then she’s up on the embankment, swinging at the grass. But her mowing is erratic, not her usual smooth and mechanical sweep. And when she flings the implement and drops down he’s not surprised. Mostly her weeping is silent, or overwhelmed by the furore of frogs. But he sees. Sees her defeatedness, her desolation. Sees an ageing woman with no family and only slightly more resources than himself. For the second evening running he cooks, tonight a tasteless white stew of potatoes and turnips. When it has been ready for twenty minutes and still she hasn’t come in he takes it off the fire and ventures out into the dusk. She hasn’t moved – a fading figure on the fading embankment. He moves quietly through the clawing roses and only when he’s within feet of her does she look up with glistening eyes. He sits beside her and she doesn’t object to his encircling arm, nor to the press of his mouth on her forehead. The evening is delineated by food and a shrinking candle. Otherwise there is silence and the usual stained crockery, and flies puddling in spilt stew. More than once she yawns. Without the help of wine, and with an opportunist’s qualms, Harry reaches for her hand, runs his fingertips over her knuckle. There’s a tremor in his thighs. Then they’re climbing the stairs together, sharing the light. He can’t quite believe in her willingness. It seems too

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soon, a sort of despair. She surveys the strewn clothes and sheets on his floor, strides over them to the bed and wrestles the mattress back into position. He watches her step on the back of her boot to remove it without bending, sees her kick it off with the laces still tied. And then the other. He snuffs the candle. In darkness there is licence. Interrupting her methodical undressing, he holds her to him thigh to thigh. Wants her to feel him pushing at her stomach. He hoists the greasy fabric of her factory skirt, gathering it up several times before he can uncover the bare skin of her buttocks. He grasps with splayed hands and outstretched fingers, thinking, ‘To have and to hold . . . ’ It begins with abhorrence and disgust, hunting for the congealed relics of the soldier’s phlegm, and progresses into a belated spring cleaning. They are most thorough in her room, less so in his. The rest of the Cordier kingdom isn’t their concern. Even then the work occupies an entire Sunday morning. First they discover that by spot-scrubbing the slates in the kitchen they have created little galaxies of cleanliness, and that the universe is still untouched. Down they go again on hands and knees with brushes, scouring every inch of bare stone. He finds this satisfying, but reminiscent of the bleak days after his mother’s funeral. Aunt Mary in her seventyfifth year drove in from Albion, rolled up her sleeves and, speaking sweetly of a woman she’d detested for fifty years, wore the varnish off the boards in Sarah’s room. Maggie lit

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the copper and boiled the bedding and curtains. There was no talk of contagion, or of virulent germs lurking in the woodwork. Everyone knew her heart had stopped. They scrubbed her things to get rid of the odour, and to feel better in themselves. When the floor is wet and shining black like a sea-swept rock Colombe spies a pink gob adhering to the wall above the door. He watches her throat contract, her mouth go angular. Moments later she has mounted an unsteady chair and is rubbing at the plaster. And once again the little patch she has cleared of grime offends her sense of completeness. She has him bring the bucket so she can dip her rag. Then she attacks the filth in great sweeping arcs, the chair squeaking and wobbling beneath her so that he must wrap an arm about her hip as a support. He pushes his face against her side, smelling her dusty blouse and her body. He feels her muscles straining. Soon she will have to move along to reach the next section. Where will she draw the line? A matter of judgement, knowing how much of the world to keep habitable, what to give up as lost.

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twenty-three

His mother did not die with a wise prescience of the event, cleanly and with dignity, as he believed great personalities should, but with a prelude of sour vomiting. The sound hit him with a slap, jerking him awake. He found her still in bed, lying on her side, straining to keep from subsiding into a lake of stinking fish – the famous Minnows Broughtonaise. She was unfamiliar, younger, the slack and pendulous parts somehow reabsorbed into her face. ‘Don’t fret, Ma, it’s only a little mess. Come and we’ll get you out of it.’ But when he went around the far side of the bed she convulsed and roared again. A fresh torrent slapped onto the sheet. ‘Should I go for the doctor?’ Nothing doing. ‘What if I run you a bath? Do you feel up to a bath? Then while you’re there I can clean this lot. Yes or no, Ma? Do you want a bath?’

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Decisive words, as if things could be done. Gagging at the smell, he construed a slight movement as a nod and went off to run the water. When he returned he was relieved to see her sitting upright on the side of the bed, feet on the floor. ‘Are you up to walking? Can you go under your own steam?’ ‘I’ll not have you carry me.’ ‘Of course not. You come on your own two legs. But let me help. We’ll go together. That’s the way. I’ve got you. Heave ho! That’s the way!’ Like a pantomime mule they were. He felt her strong fingers gripping the muscle of his shoulder. The pressure was reassuring. She took her own weight, relied on him only once – when her limbs jerked too suddenly and she threatened to buckle. In the bathroom he eased her down onto a chair and brought a clean nightgown and two towels. Then back to her bedroom where he swabbed her vomit into a bucket, stripped the bed and rolled everything – sheets, blankets, eiderdown, spread – all up into a bundle. To blow away the smell he lifted the window and let in the chilly air. Later he called to her through the bathroom door: ‘You haven’t gone to the bottom, Ma? Lost without trace?’ ‘I’m fine.’ Her voice was husky and acid-bitten, but unhesitating. ‘Don’t let it go cold on you. It wouldn’t be good to lay there too long. I’m getting fresh linen. Five minutes and I’ll have your bed done. How are you managing your hair? Be sure to wash your hair.’

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‘I thought I might let it set like this.’ Well, if her sarcasm had returned she must be all right. And he could hear her sloshing, probably lathering her scalp at the moment. He cut roses from the back verandah and arranged them in a vase – to mask the smell, and to comfort her. He was no more than five minutes. But by the time he went past again, telling her that he was nearly done, she had abandoned him. ‘Ma!’ There was a glacial silence. ‘Ma!’ Still he hesitated, constrained by the thought of her nakedness. But if she were to slip under and drown . . . ‘Ma, answer me!’ One heave and the door whacked against the tub. She didn’t object, lying there in the steaming bath with her head pillowed by a folded flannel, mouth open, a little bubble of spit still intact on her tea-stained teeth. Almost immediately he understood what this meant, but was nonetheless astonished. Unavoidably, he observed her leather-bag breasts. If he was inclined to weep, it was because of this reminder that he had once been new-born. It was a state he could only imagine. He had no memory of being small and dependent on breast milk. The idea was grotesque. He preferred to think of his growing years, when she had sustained and shaped him with words and smiles and touch. Of all the blind millions of faces in existence one had lit up for Harry Lambert. She had loved him.

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He couldn’t conceive of anything so intense being repeated. Gratitude would come later, but for now his grief was selfish, unconcerned with who or what she’d been. He resented her for leaving him alone. For the first time he wished he’d married and had a family so his feelings might have been more evenly spread. Surely the future would not have seemed so empty and funereal.

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twenty-four

Richard Lambert, Lot 33 Clegg Road, Wandin North, Victoria, September 1, 1968 Dear Julie, I’m obliged for your kind offer of a car ride to and from the November function. Provided my health stands up, I would very much like to be there. Your desire to publish a few notes about Uncle Harry does you credit. It would be a useful keepsake and memorial. I shall contribute what I can, although being the oldest of the old, the last one standing, doesn’t necessarily mean I am a repository of witty tales and anecdotes. The best I can do is clear away some of the nonsense, although by now you probably have his service records and don’t need me to tell you that Harry didn’t come within cooee of

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Gallipoli. Little Sylvie has probably confused him with one of her mother’s brothers, or perhaps with myself, since I was three years in Palestine and twice wounded. I cannot, however, recollect that I drowned to death. Nor I promise you did Harry. As you have discovered, there was a great deal of bunkum talked about him after the war, some of it continuing to this day. I remember as late as 1935 hearing it said that he died during the defence of Amiens. Some clever noodle had him killed at Villers-Bretonneux. Then it was Albert. Name a French town and that’s where Harry Lambert fell. I also met a lady, a cousin on my mother’s side, who said he had been posthumously promoted to captain for bravery. Pure fantasy. Both you and I know he was discharged alive and well, still a humble private, in 1919, but when a fellow doesn’t come home, when he doesn’t show his face in the street for people to see, there’s scope for all sorts of invention. On the other side of the ledger, there are those scurrilous stories about him shooting through. Look in his record. Where does it say he shot through? I remember old Lew Broughton speaking out in the Express. ‘Those who malign the heroes of the nation, etc. etc.’ He laid it on thick but the sentiment was proper. Lew might have been too fond of his own pronouncements, but didn’t he stick by the Lamberts! He put a deal of effort into tracing Harry. He thought that perhaps he was dead after all and that his particulars had been lost. He harped at the War Graves people to do a thorough

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search. Nothing came of it. Then the man himself, the same Phantom Harry we’d all been worrying about and mourning for, deigned to write a letter to my Aunt Maggie saying he would be delayed in France. No clear explanation, just delayed.Well I suppose delayed is right. We never saw him again. I shall tell you something else you mightn’t credit. I heard it from a chap I met some twenty years ago, when I settled here in the hills. He hadn’t known Harry first hand, but he was the pin in the wheel at the Lilydale RSL, and when I introduced myself he knew all the notables amongst my brothers and uncles. At the mention of Harry he grinned and hee-hawed as if we were discussing a likeable rogue. He seemed to think our Harry was a great one for the girls. News to me. I always found him a wooden sort of fellow. But get a man away from his family and who knows? I won’t tell you what they called him. It would make a young lady blush. If I haven’t been a mine of information, I daresay it’s because that branch of the family was more private and shut off than the rest of us. Old Uncle Sammy was jolly enough, but not Harry, and not Aunt Sarah. They kept to themselves.You never got more than a glimpse. I shall guard my health and write again closer to November. I have my fingers crossed, sincere regards, Richard Lambert

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PROJECT NOTES, September 7, 1968 It never rains but it pours. Weeks of trivia then the true business arrives all in one day: Harry Lambert’s army dossier plus, as if to provide an endorsement, Uncle Dick’s letter. Rang Terry to communicate my suspicions. He says I’ve got conspiracy on the brain. Uncle Dick might be a devious old boy, but he’s not God. Nevertheless, Terry reports that he goes judiciously silent on the question of whether Uncle Harry deserted. His most decided statement is that he was a ‘weak individual’. But on Harry’s civilian afterlife he’s very free. Swears Harry married a little French girl sixteen years old. What’s more, there were children, number and genders unknown. Terry says I should be sending invitations to a horde of French Lamberts, though they might not go under that name. He also divulged that Harry’s nickname was ‘Pokey Lambert’. Apparently Dick regards this as a real ribtickler. I imagine him having a good guffaw, though by today’s standards it’s hardly obscene. Finally, if Harry survived the war, how did he die? Dick has no hesitation. Harry Lambert died in an agricultural accident in 1929. Have I got something solid at last? Terry thinks so. When I complained that there was no way of checking Dick’s information he got a little sore, as if he thought I was ungrateful. Also, he has cooled on the idea of coming to the reunion. I told him I needed support. He says a room

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full of Lamberts is more than he could bear. ‘All those noisy uncles saying what heroes they were. Dad went right through the Ramu Valley and Bougainville. He saw his fair share of Nips. Never heard him skiting!’ He says he doesn’t want to be around when they read my scribblings. They’ll smell a rat for sure. A McArdle rat. In fact he’s not worried in the least. Now that he’s put Uncle Harry in his box, he’s simply lost interest. I’ll go see Mum tomorrow after work. Not once has it entered her head that I might be holding something back. She’s satisfied with the canon, Uncle Harry as handed down the line. I’ll give her today’s mail and she can make her own adjustments. I imagine it will take two or three hours for her to absorb and grow comfortable with the new Harry. She might lament losing his battle-front death, but there is plenty of romance left. I should hold off unveiling the French Lamberts. It would be sensible to write again to Uncle Dick and ask direct questions. No doubt he will reply with direct equivocations.

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twenty-five

The best antidote to grief, Harry decides all at once, is sex. No more pee-kay. He reorients himself with manic devotion. He develops an ability to sense the Frenchwoman’s presence in any part of the house. His belly, that great decision-maker, becomes warm and prickly at her approach. They enjoy one another in small instalments: a touch of hands, a brief embrace in the salon. They collide and pull away, grappling loosely. After a meal, or sometimes catching him in the hallway, she opens his trousers. She likes to keep him at a pitch, as if remembering an old game, recently neglected but never forgotten. She hitches her skirts so he might touch her. She sits in candid appreciation, her eyes open and inward. She huffs quietly, practising a greedy conservation of pleasure. Then she leads him urgently to her narrow bed, or they climb the stairs to his. Within a few days the act is as familiar as eating. They extend languid hands and nestle skin against skin. He appreciates the distinctiveness of her body. She’s one of those

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women whose ankles don’t taper; have probably never tapered. He has seen young girls with the same dropsical distribution of fat. Fat-fingered, fat-thighed, fat-ankled. Paradoxically, vigorous sporting girls. He can’t picture her swinging a racket. In certain places – her calf, behind her knee – he encounters a galvanic charge, her skin rising infinitesimally up to meet his own. This might be mere imagination, because he speculates that there is an invisible substance that passes between people, a restorative, quietly penetrating and reordering their beings. When this seems too fanciful, he frames their situation in mathematical terms: two sets with only a negligible union. They barely overlap. Yet this overlapping is substantial, and more than he’s ever had. In the night she breathes hoarsely beside him, her whole torso rising gently in silhouette. He is loath to wake her. It would be wrong, after the hours she’s worked. An antidote to grief is one thing, but to boredom? And if he’s honest he doesn’t desire her at this moment. He’s simply coursing with energy after the idleness of his day. So he listens to the frenzied frogs. He sets himself the task of trying to unravel their calls. The count rises to over a dozen, increasing as he makes finer and finer distinctions. Then his attention leaps to a fresh sound: the faintest hammering of steam. Another train, the first for more than an hour. By the time it’s at its nearest point, making the pitcher vibrate on the washstand, he can’t lie still a second longer. He lunges for his trousers. At the window the night is dark but clear of clouds. The

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glasshouses catch a peppering of starlight, multiplying it over and over so the structures seem like pieces shed from the sky. He doesn’t bother with a shirt, going bare-chested in the close heat of the house, moving swiftly through the nowfamiliar salon and passages to the kitchen and back door. The outside air is sharper and he feels his chest stiffen; feels the reserves in his muscles aching to be spent. His stride is long and energetic and the fleeting grip of thorns against his skin is a spur rather than a hindrance. Soon he’s bounding through the knee-high pasture. Underfoot the soil is dry and hard, all the moisture having risen up into the feather-topped grasses he crushes with each ploughing step. Empty acres, paddock after paddock without livestock, Harry Lambert the only large and significant creature. And for the first time in weeks he goes upright and without apprehension, meeting and overcoming the resistance of his body, the knotting in his calves, the slight giddiness brought on by the unaccustomed expansion of his lungs. When he trips in a hoof-hole and rolls over in the grass it’s an adventure, something to be welcomed and wallowed in. After which he springs up with an athleticism he has never possessed, certainly not as a boy on the sports fields of Rushburn or Melbourne. Ten minutes on he halts at a wire fence, throwing back his head and puffing and listening for the fading sounds of the train. He has an imperfect idea of where the track is, knowing only that it runs away in company with the hedge-bound Maromme road and the Seine. He straddles the top wire then pushes into a field of wheat that stands utterly still in the starlight, not a stalk wavering. It’s so uniform and featureless, and

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the night so dense, that the deeper he wades into it the less sure he is of its boundaries. Rather than face the problem of how he will find his way back, he strides faster, ripping the unripe heads from the wheat, which he chews, prickly awls, husks, the lot. He sucks the insipid flour and fancies that in a month he will come back here and harvest the ripe grain to make bread. True wheaten bread, to show her what he can do, to prove he has his uses in the wider world. And while he contemplates the difficulty of baking without an oven, throwing up dubious solutions and beginning again, the ground hurries on under his feet so that all at once the wheat is gone and he must jump a ditch of stagnant water that churns with life. His leap is long but not long enough and his boots fill before he can clamber up onto solid ground. He sits scratching at the grass rash on his arms and shoulders, and is amazed that he can still hear the train. Listening more attentively, he realises the hammering isn’t decreasing but building. Another train. The locomotive emerges from the darkness as a liquid smudge. It’s a long time before it has a distinct form, but eventually he can make out the halo above the funnel. The steam isn’t compact and tight as he remembers it in the cold, but a wispy grey skirt that can’t hold its form. The carriages are blacker than the land, windows shuttered, blinds drawn. He knows the frightened camaraderie that exists within, boys and men flipping cards as they career through the night. He has ridden in the sealed carriage too, supposing there was no escape. He feels sorry for them. And following the passenger cars comes a tail of trucks chattering on the rails. Repeatedly, over the racket of iron wheels and

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steam, he hears the bang of hooves against the interior walls. It’s the last sound to survive, the futile objections of horses that will work then die. He does not cross the broad Maromme road. Within fifty yards of the tracks he stops short, apprehensive at seeing the arcs of silver diminishing in either direction. No closer. There is a siren beauty in these simple lines, something smooth and decent. All across Europe they bring men to submission, men who travel willingly or complacently or with feigned good humour because they are cosy in their sealed carriages and think it’s too late to break out. It occurs to him that submission must begin somewhere. Is it inevitable? A matter of commonsense and self-interest? This was Lew Broughton’s forthright opinion. His editorials spoke of a covenant struck between free citizens. ‘If we enjoy a certain liberty, if we live in peace under the law, it is because together we are fused into one irresistible power or Commonwealth, which is like a great artificial man. His name is Leviathan, and without our proper and lawful submission to him, we are unprotected . . . ’ In Australia there were people who resisted. He recalls an incident at Burrakee Hall in which the Patriotic Committee, and notably Uncle George, were pelted with rubbish. Gutless scum, Lew branded the culprits. A banner headline: burrakee shame! The gutless scum were a mixed lot – drunks and certain overly pious Christians. Within a family such as his it was impossible to feel an affinity with any of these. He recognises now that his resistance was more subtle, more cowardly. He exaggerated his awkwardness and was glad to

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be regarded as a bit of a goose. He’s not repentant. He’s alive. And while the sealed carriages rock through the world he stands upright in the open air – alive. He dares to think that he might be saner than those reliable men. Perhaps braver. He defies the great artificial man, because Leviathan is too large and conceptual for truth or feeling. His thoughts become grandiose. He’s the living Adam, small, mortal, instinctively resisting the great annihilation. Words such as pacifist and conscientious objector solidify in his mind, words that in insular Rushburn had the same pejorative weight as shirker but now seem to offer a way out. He could have said no. Trouble is, they know how to get the better of men who say no. A reluctance to kill is all very laudable, but a dutiful citizen can have no objection to being killed – unless it’s all a ruse, plain sophistry and cowardice. Then it’s off to the front, where stretcher-bearers die as indiscriminately as combatants. On balance it seemed better to play the goose. But he’s had it with balance. He’s alive. He has a woman. Unashamedly, he celebrates his pared-back conception of love, an austere and unquestioning concurrence of need. Isn’t that how everything begins? First comes need. Colombe the individual will emerge. In the meantime it’s a fine thing to set up a great artificial woman in opposition to Lew’s Leviathan. She contains no harm that he can see. He could lose himself in such a person. So he decides to marry Colombe Adele. Turning back, straining his eyes for the wheat field, he plans a future with her in Australia. He knows of

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several men who’ve taken French brides. If he was still with his unit, stationed in Rouen, it would be a simple matter of asking his lieutenant for permission. If he were to give himself up, serve his detention and be permitted to marry he might visit her on leave. He has visions of bringing her smuggled food, of her gratitude, of extended reunions in their noisy bed. But how can he be sure they’ll send him back to the bakery? Even if they recognise his uselessness for the front, they might post him to some far-away town. He would have to persuade someone to write his letters – a humiliating situation. Besides, she might not feel strongly enough to want to keep in touch. Alarmed, he decides he must burrow away here until the war is over. ‘When the war is over,’ he says aloud, and plunges into the wheat. He’s well aware he’s thinking like a civilian. Hoping. Asking for a catastrophe to fall on his head. But this is an advance on where he was. With hope comes stamina. And there is also his wobbly conception of fate. How has he survived so far? Not through courage or particular cunning or any admirable quality. Quite the opposite. He has survived because he went to the right house, wholly in ignorance and misapprehension, following a trivial interest in his father’s roses. Could anything be more ludicrous, more misguided and therefore fateful? It has to mean something, this impossible luck. And he’s ready to keep pushing it. He can wait as long as it takes, and with effort and care their common ground will certainly expand. He’ll begin by teaching her English.

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twenty-six

Not until the following afternoon, a Saturday, can he make a start. And to complicate matters, she arrives home with resolutions of her own, having received her first pay since the robbery. She’s jovial, in a frivolous and teasing mood that makes him wonder where he stands. He helps her unpack a basket of groceries. Apart from a loaf of dark bread, it’s not their usual fare. The first surprise is a bag of last autumn’s pears. When he peeps inside he finds the fruit is individually wrapped in grease paper. Other luxuries include sugar, salt, macaroni, bacon and a box of maize flour. He doesn’t know the exact amount of her wage but guesses she’s splurged a good part of it. No more skimping. The future can look after itself. She removes a pear and partially uncovers the flesh, holds it to her nose and indulges in a long appreciative sniff. Grinning, she offers him the same pleasure. Because the fruit is old and soft, having been kept so long in storage, there isn’t that woody smell he associates with George’s orchard and the pears they picked green to mature in the loft. He peels

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away the paper and inspects the speckled skin, the flush of russet under the green, the brown bruises and small suppurating nicks. In other circumstances he might think the smell overly sweet, but deprived of fruit for so many weeks he finds it irresistible. He bites with his lips, teeth being unnecessary, and sucks the pulp and juice. His cheeks and chin are soon wet, his hands sticky, and Colombe laughs at the mess he’s making. He offers her the torn remains of his pear but she takes another from the bag, and for a while is content to inhale the sweetness. He wipes his face on his sleeve and draws himself up to a didactic height. ‘Pear,’ he says. She regards him with interest, yet is completely ignorant of what he’s referring to. He raises his fruit. ‘Pear!’ Up goes her wild brow, mocking. ‘Pear,’ he repeats, too insistently. Now she has no mercy. If he wants to play games . . . ‘Une poire pour la soif,’ she says. He frowns. ‘This is a pear.’ She continues to smile but won’t try his words. Stalemate. He can’t abide her childish wrestling matches. If only he could make her understand the consequences! She’s not stupid. Can’t she see what he’s offering? ‘La poire,’ she says. Tit for tat. The stuff of wars. Exasperated, he grasps the nape of his neck and appeals to the ceiling. He listens to her sucking on her pear, thinking that perhaps she’s sniggering – until he feels something small and wet strike him on the face. A pip! But before his anger can get too far he’s caught up in her laughter. ‘Une poire,’ she insists between breaths. ‘Une poire pour la soif.’

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He shakes his head, resisting, laughing. But he can’t continue. In the end he must try. With a magnanimity he knows is insincere she corrects his pronunciation, breaking down the chain of sounds into individual words. What does it mean? Something about a pear – a saying, a proverb, a joke, something to make him wiser. Only when he has it down pat will she agree to take her turn as pupil. ‘This is a pear,’ she says with almost perfect diction and a look that says, ‘Well, that’s an end to that!’ But he won’t let her be. He has submitted to her ridicule. She must pay in turn: this is my hand, this is a chair, this is a candle . . . As she speaks he tries to visualise her in the public places of Rushburn – High Street, church, serving behind the counter in his bakery. What he sees is his neighbours’ distain, Mrs Hanna and her kind – the innumerable Aunt Marys – treating her as an oddity and a poor thing. And she would be a poor thing, married to a man of his reputation. The truth is they will have to go somewhere else. In the night they are woken by a bang. Then there are several that seem very close. They stand at the window, he naked, she in her long nightdress, and peer out at the darkness. The flashes have faded but a speck of fire continues to the southeast, occasionally illuminating the angular lines of a building. Rouen. Or the camp complex. Even at this distance they can hear the burr of planes. He has endured similar raids, jumping into the dug-outs in the middle of the night. He has seen the results: a flattened store in the Canadian transport compound, fresh holes in the open fields, soon filled in by

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coloured labourers. Never any injuries or deaths, though this could be a lie put about to maintain morale. Fresh explosions leap up in other parts. The light seems to flutter then hang over the detonations. Colombe presses against him, almost wrestling him aside in her desire to get a better view. He grips her shoulder and tells her in English there is nothing to worry about. He imagines that she will respond to his authoritative tone, that of a man who has been a soldier, and that she can’t possibly unmask the deception. And in any case she must be able to see for herself that it’s only an air attack. Bombs from the sky. If the city was under ground attack there would be other kinds of fire. He would recognise the muffled thump of shells, the pock of rifles. No, this spectacle is down to bombs. Nuisance value. Yet the assault is more concerted than any he can remember. The planes drone on and on, even after the blasts grow less frequent. Then it’s clear the fireworks are over. With the exception of three little spot-fires the horizon is once more black and featureless. If anything the noise of aircraft is louder: British defenders up in pursuit. They swirl invisibly in the night, more of a danger to one another than to the raiders, who almost certainly have turned for home. So completely has Colombe monopolised the window, he’s forced to look over her shoulder. He cradles her breasts in his hands. ‘I am a pacifist,’ he announces to the night, more to give substance to the concept than with any expectation she will understand. But apparently pacifist is one of those words that gads about between languages. ‘Oui,’ she replies approvingly, ‘un pacifiste.’

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twenty-seven

In the morning light, the sun twinkling at his window, he stretches out a hand to find her side of the bed vacant and cold. Hardly surprising. She’s not about to waste her one free day of the week. It occurs to him that in Australia he would be up early too – for church. As with most things it had little to do with individual taste or proclivity. It was what Lamberts did. He took his place in the choir at the age of eight and rarely missed a mid-week practice or a Sunday service until his mother began to falter. In her last years, as she became less preoccupied with being seen and holding her head up, she sang less and less. She preferred the early service, to get it out of the way perhaps. He followed along obligingly. The stone church was icy, even in summer. The congregation was small, a mixture of fanatics and habitual early risers, notably Chas Porter who collected the town’s nightsoil. The Pariah Service, Lew called it, and sometimes came along to stand beside her in the manner of a beau. Perfunctorily they knelt on the blue leather knee rests and touched their foreheads in

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attitudes of earnest prayer. In Harry’s case, and perhaps for his elders too, very few words ever came. Twenty seconds of silence, as was proper. Then back up on their feet to sing. At that hour, the choir stall empty, the organist still tucked up in bed, their voices were echoingly naked: There is a green hill far away, Outside a city wall . . . And now, swinging his feet over the edge of the bed, he finds that his voice is hoarse and uncertain. It takes time to bring it back, a creaking and groaning up and down the halfdozen notes of the droning melody. He’s not at first overly loud – or not that he’s aware. It is enough to feel the vibrations, to exercise control over the flow of sound. The effort is acutely physical. A healthy outlet, as Ma would say. He died that we might be forgiven, He died to make us good . . . Sung without the support of Chas Porter’s brute baritone or the distraction of his mother’s declining ability to hold a tune, the words seem infantile. He was never devout, perhaps not even a believer, but nor was he critical. After all, Lamberts didn’t come to church to worship. They came to sing. O dearly, dearly has he loved, And we must love him too . . .

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As he dresses he relishes the rebirth of his voice. Very quickly, despite misjudgment and mishap, it achieves its former range, becoming a steady and well-modulated tenor. And now that he has remembered how to sing he devours songs like food. Half-witted village ditties his father taught him. A Harry Lauder favourite all the girls loved. But mostly hymns, the lyrics absorbed in early childhood – hymns and psalms about Redeeming Blood. Until, lacing up his boots, he hears, over and above his own reborn voice, another from outside. No – voices. Mostly Colombe’s. She’s talking far too loudly, sometimes laughing above the honking of geese, to warn him they have visitors. Has he been so oblivious? They are down on the bricked yard in front of the barn. He is careful to stand back from the window to avoid being seen. He suspects it’s the widow again, but the view isn’t clear. Certainly a woman in black. And a boy, presumably her son. Harry edges a little closer to the glass. Colombe has two fat goslings suspended by their throats. Gently she swings them like flexible skittles. It seems a cavalier method of handling birds, a form of maltreatment, but from what he has seen they always come out of it unhurt. And they know not to struggle, having been taught to accept it as natural. What they don’t know is that the woman in black – yes, certainly the same one who came the other week – is being asked to compare their merits. Turn about, Colombe lifts them for examination; the widow squeezes a downy leg, extends a wing and ponders. The boy offers his opinion. The one on the left. Definitely the one on the left. The widow feels it once more

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then concurs. Colombe hesitates, urging them to be sure of their choice. Yes, the left it is. She swings the chosen one up horizontal to the ground and thrashes it like a whip. Wings and legs shoot out, and a squirt of shit. Wary of other body fluids, she hangs it at arm’s length. If not dead it’s very close, trembling and twisting in spasms. She releases the other bird to take the widow’s money, slips the coins into the pocket of her skirt and in turning to escort her visitors away, can’t resist a quick glance up at his window. Almost instantaneously the boy’s eyes follow hers. A familiar face, small boned and very white. For a moment Harry is confused, thinking it’s an Australian face, that of a child he’s seen in the shop. Then he notices the boy’s feet – his clogs. His impulse is to jump back from sight, but he holds firm, reasoning that at a distance of thirty yards and distorted by glass he can’t possibly present more than an indistinct image, a shadow that may or may not be a human being. Yet he knows he’s erred. He knows it long before Colombe has seen the visitors off; long before she storms inside and stomps up the stairs. It does cross his mind that he might shut his door as a first defence, but he remains still, waiting in the middle of his room. Surely her shouting is louder than any of his songs and hymns. Her abuse has a rhythmic force that punches more violently at his chest than ever her fists could. Her eyes stream and she sprays him with careless spit. Without comprehending a word he feels every nuance of contempt. Singing! Singing as if her position and wellbeing mattered nothing to him! Is he insane? She shakes him by his shirtfront. She pushes at his face. She snags his

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thin hair in her fingers and rocks his head from side to side as if testing to see whether it rattles. His limp acceptance only exacerbates her anger, until finally, he supposes, it is the sight of his slow tears that stops her. He is stunned that everything can break so suddenly, so disastrously. The reverberations of her anger remain behind after she has gone, shaking the silence. He must gather his things and go. Even if the intruders didn’t hear him singing, even if the boy didn’t see him, he can’t stay. The uncertainty would be too terrible for Colombe. What would she say if he could tell her that this same boy brought him here? They cannot rely on his goodwill or indifference, or suppose that he is too stupid to understand their circumstances. Harry knows he must act, before he loses clarity. To stay another night would be to subject Colombe to torment. Yet minutes later he hears her once more down in the nursery yard talking to strangers. He marvels at her nerve and resilience. Wary of making the same mistake twice, he stands well back from the window. The figures below remain indistinct and faceless, but he guesses that they, too, have come for new-season’s goslings. He assumes she’s advertised somewhere or that this particular Sunday signals the beginning of the selling season. He waits for the disturbance to pass. But no sooner does one visitor leave than another arrives. It is exasperating, now that he feels the stab of urgency. They trap him indoors, denying him the opportunity to communicate with Colombe. Even if she has no wish to hear or see him he must try to explain his intentions. And he feels this need, this compulsion to

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explain, squeezed by shrinking time. Who knows how long they have? He worries about the widow. Perhaps she has harboured suspicions all these weeks; perhaps the rose she came to buy was merely a pretext to snoop. Likewise this morning’s gosling. And now she has heard him singing at the top of his lungs! Her son may have looked him in the face! How long before they go to the police? But down below, Colombe goes on with the sordid business of slaughtering geese. He’s conscious of wasted opportunities, of lethargy and self-deceit banking up behind this horrible morning. All along he has clung to the fiction that he would give himself up in his own good time. The opportune moment was what he’d been waiting for, a declaration of peace, a truce, an amnesty, utter victory or utter defeat, anything that he might use to his advantage. Pure evasions. But he had always assumed he would have time to quit her house. If he is found here, she will have no room to argue her innocence. He must get out; hide among the roses until there is an opportunity to see her. It might be just a five-second parting, but he can’t go without it. Quickly now, he sets about removing the traces of his stay. He tears his civilian clothes from his body. He throws on his khaki shirt and tunic, wriggles and shoves and drags his booted feet through the legs of his trousers and sits on the floor to wind his puttees up his calves. He strips the bed and remakes it meticulously, hoping to create the impression it hasn’t been slept in for months. Shaving brush and razor disappear into the washstand, clothing into the wardrobe, everything but the trousers Colombe lengthened to

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fit him. Can’t think where he will get rid of these, somewhere on the road perhaps, though for now they are useful in drying the ewer after he’s emptied the soapy water into the chamber pot. One last look about the room – clean but for a bloom of plaster dust on the dark wainscotting. Satisfied, he tumbles down the stairs and through to the kitchen to dispose of last night’s effluvium. The little red aeroplane above the trough no longer warns; it accuses him of inaction. He clicks open the door. The sun is painfully bright, but the twenty yards to the collapsed fence seem clear. Nevertheless, he waits for his eyes to adjust, until they are sharp enough to discern the slight smoke-residue of last night’s fires over Rouen. Then he goes out briskly past the well and scuttles into the tangle of roses. Crouched in the gloom, he listens to the voices from the unseen side of the house. What he hears is a woman’s laughter. It might not be Colombe’s, but he swells with admiration for her. How does she manage it? How does she keep her card-player’s poise, when surely she must feel sick inside? Midday comes and goes and still there are regular commotions. He welcomes the intervals of silence then does nothing because he can’t be sure that she is alone. He feels the afternoon stretching on, robbing him of clarity. Through a narrow vista of canes he stares miserably out at the fringed paddocks diminishing like stepping stones away to Maromme. The wind comes in spasmodic puffs, causing a rain of petals. Then all at once he looks up, compelled to listen. The house and yard are quiet. There is only the hiss of insects. Yet he feels called, as if Colombe has shouted. He sniffs at something strange, an

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aroma like hot butter. Impossible. Colombe buys margarine. Then it’s gone, lost in the orchestral scents of roses, dust and wind-blown dung. But undoubtedly she has slipped inside. She is cooking. A moment later it’s back, surging over the turf, penetrating the garden and rose-plot: fried onions and garlic and thyme, the same piercing blend that lurked in the restaurants of Rouen, but fresher, for the first time delicious and personal. He is astonished that she chooses this moment. In two months she has never prepared anything elaborate, and now, in spite of marauding outsiders and a great rift of hopelessness, she wedges open the kitchen door and cooks a hot meal like a written invitation to his nose and stomach. With this she drives a deliberate hiatus into this ruinous day. She calls him to shake off bad feeling. She calls him to a clean goodbye, such as they should have had if he’d been alert and disciplined. She has an aptness of feeling. They need this, else they belittle everything that has gone before. He moves quickly across to the house and stands on the threshold, peering into the diminished light. He discovers her shape, then her face. Her stare is uncertain, holding nothing of her earlier ferocity. He catches at her quick beat of distress, baffled until he guesses that she is disconcerted to see him dressed in khaki. It comes to him that she has not been thinking as he has. The realisation carries a thump of elation: she doesn’t want him to go! Despite everything, she won’t let him go! A bloating heat floods his chest. His throat shudders. In response, her expression is suddenly shy and self-deprecating, as if asking: ‘Am I crazy?’ He is grateful for silence. If he were to attempt to speak, it would be a sort of

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bleeding. He would bleed joy and bewildered devotion, but also shame – shame because her choice is so stunningly alien to him. No, not her choice. Her instinct. Surely he possesses it too. He must. Yet the initiative is hers. She is the one who fights so rashly, so vainly, for ascendency over events. She won’t let him go! She is prepared to run the risk, to go on dodging suspicious friends and neighbours. She is willing to gamble. And if she can find the courage, so must he! He pulls the door shut behind him, watching her bring the hot skillet from the fire to the table. She shakes the coins in her pocket. ‘Musique!’ she says, feigning lightness. Together they hover over the food. Having mixed maizeflour batter in a ceramic bowl, she chops bacon, the brown meat seamed with fat as white as quartz. Her coins jingle again as her knife clatters against the board. Eager to contribute, he peels the leathery tops from field mushrooms, and feels the pressure of her hip against his leg. She lumps the fried onions and fresh ingredients into the batter and smears her skillet with fresh margarine. Then, with a brief touch of his arm with her greasy hand, she invites him to the fire to witness the cooking. He follows at once, moved and overwhelmed to find himself so valued, perhaps loved. It doesn’t seem possible. It is a vast inversion, an incalculable miracle. She is willing to gamble for him, to bet blindly as if he contains all the precious qualities of her imagination. He wants to believe her. He is queasy with joy and uncertainty. She has such an inadequate grasp of the odds. If she knew it was the widow’s son who brought him here, would she be so decided?

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twenty-eight

I remember when it began, when the men went off spoiling for a fight. We were going to teach those Prussians a lesson. We were going to even up for the last time, for Alsace and Lorraine. The pork butcher in Maromme put a sign on his closed-up shop: Gone to Berlin. Back in two weeks. There’s confidence for you. People said we needed a good fight. After forty years it was overdue. You heard them talking in the street, cleverer people than me. War was inevitable. War would bring us together. People looked like they’d seen an angel. There was love in their eyes. We wanted a great misery for everyone to share in. Well, we got it. Our prayers were answered. I was at that morbid age when you look around and think you know something. I thought: This is a catastrophe and we go to it in our sleep. Don’t mistake me. I was no better than anyone else. I felt it too. The best joke I heard was that the Germans were doing our souls a favour. Ordinarily you waste so much energy

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worrying who is with you and who is against you. When war comes everything is clear. The enemy looks like this, he speaks like this. Now we know who he is we can all hate him together. In our little village it was very emotional. The government didn’t have to preach. Up went the mobilisation poster and that was it. People cried with relief. What could the Boches do to us when all at once you could trust your neighbour? When we were one big family? Love. We did it for love. People are stupid. I am stupid. How many bad bargains do we accept with open eyes, hoping for the best? I have no right to turn vicious. I said yes with everyone else. And I’m not the only woman to lose someone. You hear them say, ‘I died with my son, I died with my husband.’ I never had the opportunity to be reborn a martyr. Leon excluded my name from the notice. Every relation was there at the funeral, on his side and mine. I did not exist. It’s not clear how the boy was born. Maybe he came into existence with a puff of smoke, a magician’s trick. After that I was like a spat-out pip. I didn’t need a mirror to tell me I was a copy of my mother-in-law. And then a copy of my own mother. Everyone says you become your parents. It’s one of those truths you don’t believe until it happens. You know her insides were eaten out with drink. She died aged forty-nine not recognising any of us. I used to watch her guzzle a bottle in the afternoon, a bottle after dark. And when there was no wine and no money she cried like an imbecile. I myself was in danger, before the Australian arrived. Gabrielle Imbert said I smelled like the inside

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of a wine cask. She said do I want them to throw me out? The machines were hazardous. We had to be alert. That’s when I started marking my bottles. I got it down to a third an evening. Very disciplined. I had control. One third and no more. You could say I was picking up. I had one little ambition – to put away 5,000 francs so I could rot comfortably in a maison de retraite. I thought I might go to my grave with a better class of person. I was on target. Another year and I’d have got there. But then a big clown fell to earth to torment me. He said he was afraid! I remember when Joseph was very young: if something worried or hurt him he cried as if pain was invented by the Almighty for no one but him. It was the same with the Australian. ‘Afraid,’ he said, as if he had the monopoly. As a mother I tried to smooth away my son’s pain, but to achieve this for an adult man – impossible. Or maybe I was successful. A frightened man doesn’t sing from his window. I should have left him his fear. I had enough troubles without my mind leaping and jumping on his behalf. When the house became unsafe, what then? Where would I put him? I kept an eye out for vacant buildings. A barn, a dry spot under a bridge, any possible haven. That’s how it was, always trying to think ahead, poking my nose in here, listening, planning, imagining, dreading the days when he was left alone. When a person can’t speak, you see him as childlike. At least that is my understanding of why I couldn’t trust him to take sensible precautions. I agonised, but to him, not a word. My mistake. I should have snapped him awake. I should have

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screamed some sense into him. Then he mightn’t have sung from his window. In that last week I dreamt the police came while I was away in town. When I returned they said, ‘Do you know this man?’ Then I woke up. It haunted me. I imagined I would behave like Peter. ‘No,’ I would say, ‘I have never seen him before. Where did you find him? In the house! My God!’ I hated myself but was sure I would be sensible. You never know what you’ll do. You look over your shoulder, vigilant and scheming, but really there’s no point looking because you’re as ignorant as those boys who huddle from bombs. Maybe you hear it whistling through the sky, maybe not. It doesn’t matter. It still comes.

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twenty-nine

In the early morning, thirty minutes after she has left for work, he gnaws bread at her kitchen table. He wears his uniform, though he is still unsure whether he will go. He remains soft-centred with the sweetness of her touch. Sometimes he thinks that what they shared in the darkness amounts to a pledge: that he will stay with her, come what may. Sometimes it seems a pitiable act, something clutched at while falling. Rather than reach a conclusion, he bites and sucks his bread. At the same time he examines the child’s toy that Colombe set up as a spur to vigilance. He sees that it is crudely carved from several pieces of finegrained wood, and held together with glue and tacks. A matchstick gun is mounted on the nose behind the fused propeller. It seems probable that it belongs to the widow’s son. He imagines a father going to considerable trouble to please his child. Yet it strikes him that as a gift, even as a crafted object, it is ugly. Doubtless he’s a poor judge, out of touch, indifferent to the mysterious beauty of machinery.

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As the peaceable son of a peaceable father in peaceful times he was given books – Malory, Stevenson, Kingsley . . . There was any amount of killing but it took place in a limbo time that preceded the known world. He never felt the least desire to grasp Excalibur in his hands. He feels a certain satisfaction at this, as if it establishes his primal innocence or a secret superiority. But his pleasure is shattered by sudden impact. There is a racket at the front door, a determined fist. His impulse is to run, to escape out the kitchen door. But as he begins to move there’s a second barrage and he hesitates. If they’re knocking so insistently at the front, surely they will have covered the back. And if he runs they’ll shoot. He decides it would be futile to try to hide within the house. In the end they will find him and he doesn’t want the indignity of being dragged from under a bed. Best if they find him sitting calmly. ‘The prisoner did not resist and was in every way cooperative . . . ’ But how can he let them take him under her roof? Poor woman! What has he done to her? She can expect hard labour. The fist falls silent. They will be considering what to do, whether to hail him, whether to wriggle in through the broken side window or push in a door. As the silence becomes hard and crystalline he leaves the kitchen and edges along the passageway. Entering the salon, he’s startled by an abrupt clank – a blow of metal on metal. Not within the house, or even close. Then it hits him: the barn. They’re breaking into the barn. All he can think is that the boy must have seen him there, and told the police

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that this is where he sleeps. It doesn’t change anything. He remains trapped. At the front door he draws a long breath then speaks loudly through the panels: ‘I’m coming out. I don’t have a weapon. I surrender.’ Temples throbbing, he flicks the latch, turns the handle and eases the door slowly open. The day floods into the dark entrance hall and he steps blindly out into the light with his hands on his head. He flinches in expectation of a blow or at least the force of grappling hands. There is nothing. On the top step he pauses, searching the garden. No one. The gate stands open. Are they inviting him to run? He has heard of British police who would rather shoot a deserter than bring him in alive, especially if the deserter is an Australian and not subject to the death penalty. At the same time there is the lure of complete escape. Of course he’s sceptical, and cautious, keeping his hands up where they can be seen as he moves down onto the pathway. The road beyond the brushwood fence is clear. The yard is deserted. And yet he knows they’re watching. It occurs to him he should shout his surrender out loud so there can be no misunderstandings, but he’s distracted by a ruckus in the barn – an exasperated male voice and the usual pandemonium of geese. Now that he looks he can see the door is slightly open, the heavy padlock hanging loose on a mutilated loop of iron rod. The light steel hammer that ordinarily hangs in a shroud of spider webs from the eave, a bafflingly specialised tool with a small hexagonal head the size of a thumbnail, lies discarded on the bricks. From inside comes a gravelly gasp and a cough. His

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chest tightens. The geese trumpet furiously and he peers hard into and beyond the greenhouses. He turns in a circle to check again the gate and hedgerow. Is he so stupid? So ignorant? Since when do military police bother with geese? The anger flickers in his limbs. His hands drift tentatively down from his head and because no one shoots or shouts at him he advances to the part-open door where at the same instant a man emerges, carelessly, then astonished. Not three feet apart they face each other and in the shortest possible time Harry vacillates between recognition and doubt, restrained by a vague uncertainty – until he glances down at the dirty red trousers. He is aware of many things at once: his rage rising like something expelled from his stomach, the white gander hanging dead in the soldier’s hand, the look of hastily banished shock, the quick-witted leap of appraisal and the beginnings of a beguiling smile. But it’s only a beginning. It has no time to blossom. Because Harry has the hammer in his hand. The man parries belatedly with a forearm and a limp bird. He falls gracelessly, all angular joints and sprawled limbs. His skull bounces on the bricks. The geese stampede from the barn. In the midst of the welter Harry stoops or hovers, amazed. Where exactly he struck him is unclear – but somewhere hard, somewhere firm and now staved in below the gore. Even with his anger still humming he gropes after some half-learnt first-aid procedure. Staunch the bleeding. But how? He would have to explore with his bare hands. He doubts he’s capable. And surely there’s little point. The soldier trembles. His eye is distended, weeping blood. Harry remembers it as a

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well-proportioned face. In that fleeting moment he’d seen a man confident of his powers. He watches the hand shiver less vigorously; sees it cease and lie still for several seconds before spasming back to life. And though he’s terrified of what he’s done, a part of him drums with righteousness. He’s not ashamed; wouldn’t take back this one winning blow if he could. But this passes. And then there is only a dying man and impenetrable consequences. Harry listens to his rough breathing and wishes it would end. Nothing could be worse than seeing him regain consciousness. He would be obliged to go looking for help – as if there was hope. ‘Oh bloody Jesus!’ he bawls, not a prayer, just despair and incomprehension. A man killed. Killed! And out of nothing. He can’t see how it’s possible – the unlucky provocation of the man’s face, Harry’s unaccustomed rage, a single inexpert blow that instead of glancing or sailing aside couldn’t have been more fatally aimed. Still, he must do something. At the very least drag him out of sight. He throws the gander through the open doorway, then the fallen hammer, which rings on the stones. And along with his desire for concealment comes a specious concern for the victim’s comfort. If left there in the sun he will certainly dehydrate. Even such a hard death might be made a little softer. He’s surprised at the soldier’s lightness – mere bones and cloth. His head judders. His shirt mops a path through the blood. In the gloom of the barn he quivers less and less. Harry thinks that out of decency he should remain there with him, but he doesn’t feel decent.

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He feels bloodied, and is conscious of the minutes flying by. He steps out into the light and skirting the smeared bricks, notices something hooked on one of the potted roses: a military cap. Lifting it off, he remembers back several weeks to a bright parrot of a man whose stance was at once lethargic and invincible. He imagines a certain touchiness, a disabled patriot who believed he was owed the world. Such a regular figure on the Rouen road, he must be known. The soldier with the red trousers, he told Colombe, and she placed him at once. Probably knows his village or farm. Probably knows his parents or wife or the circumstances of his discharge from the army. No good supposing he won’t be missed. ‘You’re good and fucked, Harry-lad!’ comes a voice. The accent is unmistakably Suffolk. ‘Good and fucked, you and your desires!’ And because it seems a fair appraisal, and because in any case he has always deferred to the opinions of the old Suffolkers, he lobs the cap into the barn and doesn’t bother to shut the door. The blood remains like a carpet on the bricks, too broad to even begin to scrub away. Disgusted, he jogs along beside the glasshouses then behind the kitchen to the well. He pumps water into the bucket then stands it on the turf. He removes his greatcoat and dunks the sleeve, rubbing and squeezing so the water is soon flushed pink. In exerting himself he relives the charge in his limbs, his unaccustomed fluidity, the impact of metal on bone. The repetition is distressing, in itself and because it can’t be stopped. How can he think with a head full of slaughter? Space. He needs space and the respite of time. Throwing his coat over his shoulder, he strides over the

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fallen fence and weaves a path through the roses till he has the prospect of open fields. He edges around the dam, treks fifty yards into the adjoining paddock and simply drops to the ground and howls. He curls up and howls under the bright sun and perfectly blue sky of his father’s cherished land; howls for his helplessness and spattered vanity. His chin burrows into the dirt. He inhales dust and surrenders. ‘Nothing from me!’ he blurts. ‘Nothing good!’ A plea or an apology, he has no idea. Nor can he think whom he might be addressing. Certainly not the man in the barn. Yet he finds it strangely consoling. Between eruptions he’s almost silent. And with a quieter body comes a wheedling mind: The man was a thief! Robbing a woman! Who wouldn’t have knocked him down? And that was all he intended, if he intended anything, coming across him without warning – to knock him down, no more. But this doesn’t answer the future, which is already beginning to tug. He knows he should move, that he shouldn’t wait for the soldier to be missed. He visualises the effort of rising on his elbows, of drawing his knees up to take his weight, and remains snorting in the heat while the morning races on. Flies suck his sweat. Is it time to give in? To confess everything? It has the feeling of an easy path. Confess and repent. He can imagine her devastation. She can’t love a man who hasn’t the gumption to protect himself, or her. No, before he can return to camp he must cover his tracks. Bury the corpse. But he feels the hard ground against his face and knows it’s impossible. Digging would take an age. What is needed is something quick, something

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that won’t exhaust him. Sink the body in the dam. Drag it deep into the rose-plot. Two or three suitable spots leap to mind, all far from the road where there would be little possibility of the body being found, at least not for weeks. Hauling himself upright, he’s dazed and light-headed, and vaguely hopeful too. He re-experiences the impact of the hammer and for the first time it doesn’t seem a terrible thing. He reasons that so early in the morning it is unlikely that the widow’s son was there to observe him. He might return to Rouen; give himself up; tell them he has lived hard in the fields these last two months. They can have him for desertion, and in jail or wherever they send him he’ll be out of the picture. This country is littered with unidentifiable bones. The truth is he might go free and unscathed, if he chooses. But this is the dubious part, because he knows he can’t be sure of himself from moment to moment. So he moves now, uncertain of how much time he’s squandered, and lumbers back to the barn to shift the soldier, whom he prays is good and dead. He could not bring himself to drag a breathing man a hundred yards through a thorny tangle, dump him like a pile of butcher’s refuse and come away free and unscathed. A corpse, yes, but not a human being. After rounding the glasshouses he approaches the stained bricks. Something catches in his throat. He stands staring at the congealed blood. There are fresh liquid marks where the surface-skin has been torn away – large boot prints. And through the open doorway, certainly more open than before, there is nothing to see. Panic-stricken, he jumps back into the open, alert and braced to fight, though commonsense

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says the soldier can’t possibly present a threat. The yard is quiet and still. He examines the bloody boot prints, the semicircular heels at first distinct then fading. The trail vanishes well before it reaches the front gate. He imagines he would have heard if someone had come to the soldier’s assistance. Probably out on the road, staggering or long-since collapsed. He slips through the gate and looks in both directions. Nothing. He crosses to the poplars, searching amid the dry grass and saplings. Again nothing. Returning to the hedges, he takes a stick and parts the hawthorns. He eases into the low boughs and wriggles through the gloom. Animal trials, the smell of fox, but no soldier, and though he’s discouraged he’s also relieved because he doesn’t know what he would do if he did find him – revive and comfort him? Haul him away into the obscurity of the roses? Yet he keeps searching, pushing through the thicket close to the front wall of the barn then emerging once more into light. Confronted with the oceanic tangle of the rose-fields, the canes and foliage heaving, the mocking sweetness in his nostrils, he concedes the hopelessness of finding him. He has given him too much of a start. Clearly he is resilient. A broken skull! A shilling-sized hole in his head! How can he get up and walk away? But if he’s managed to drag himself in here, if he’s sprawled somewhere in the shadows, he’s as good as gone. Quite possibly already dead. How long before he begins to stink? The thought is disgusting. He aches for a dark place of his own. His thighs quiver and he finds himself ducking and sidling, then on the brink of flight. If not for the mademoiselle he would certainly run – put a distance

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between himself and this mess. The further the better. Another town. Ideally Paris, where he might loll about in a bar and grin with happy-go-lucky innocence when the Red Caps come to pick him up. But even if this were possible, even if he were capable of travelling so many miles without help, he can’t let her come back to an empty house, gendarmes at the door. He has to forewarn her. Leave her with a fighting chance. Briefly he brims with sweet nobility. If he hadn’t killed a man he might think of it as love. It’s not until after midday that his desire to prepare and preserve her amounts to a scheme. After repeatedly sweeping the hedges and blundering back and forth along the more accessible furrows between the roses, after going two and three times over old ground and finding nothing, he returns indoors. He guesses he has three or four hours before she’s due. More thoroughly than before he scrutinises each room for evidence of their co-habitation. In the kitchen he endeavours to recreate the austerity he glimpsed on that first night. One cup. One bowl. A single saucepan suspended over the fireplace. He rucks the bed as if it has been slept in, tosses her navy blue workskirt casually over the chair. He sweeps boot prints from the back step, lest some might be identifiable as his. Likewise the scuffed marks along the dog-leg hall. He spruces up the salon furniture, dusting the ragged chairs and scraping the congealed candle wax from the little walnut table. He wipes the greasy fingermarks from the wine decanters and realigns the certificates and medals of horticultural merit – all so his mademoiselle

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will appear in a good light, a conscientious retainer of the household. Then he must wait. He waits though he would be better gone, every minute exacerbating his doubts. He goes outside to squat on the pathway between the glasshouses where he has a clear view of the bricked yard and front gate. His attention flickers between the vibrancy of the pink roses and the dark stain on the bricks. His ears hum with insects or blood or the fear that all his measures will achieve nothing. He doesn’t like to think of the soldier. He tries to keep to matters that are ascertainable. Roses. Sunshine. Geese rioting on the dam. But inevitably he hears the soldier gasping his accusations to a third person. The unlikelihood doesn’t matter. It’s there in his head. Only with an unexpected surge of will can he turn to more realistic and manageable alternatives. If the soldier lies dead – dead and unseen – maybe he has a chance. He will explain and Colombe will see with her own eyes. They will put their heads together. And after he’s gone, after two or three days, she will report the disturbing stain in her yard and the cap in her barn, and because she has been away in the city, working, she will be in no way associated with whatever incident they eventually conclude has taken place. Even if they find the body, how is she implicated? As for him, the picture is less clear. He will not attempt to reach Paris. He will return to Rouen. If he can be found in the vicinity of the railway station he might plausibly claim to have spent these past months in the capital. He will crawl back into his old skin. He will hold tenaciously to his story.

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It is then that he remembers the widow and her son. It is like plunging into unbreathable air, the old cycle of futile thoughts: How much have they seen? How much do they know? Yet he also asks: Why should they report the existence of a foreign deserter? Is it possible to bet on their apathy? One thing is certain: if a dead soldier is found, that would be the end.

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thirty

From the clump of poplars opposite the house he watches a dot moving in the pastures. The spires of the city cathedral poke up above the forest in a late afternoon haze that seeps along the horizon. Sweeping clouds of insects rise from the drying grasses, flushed out by marauding birds. The dot several times vanishes into hollows or merges with vegetation before becoming a woman, dark and squat. Not until he sees her climb up onto a diversion bank and look back, shielding her eyes from the low sun, is he sure it’s Colombe. When she turns again he steps decisively out from the poplars to give her fair warning that something is wrong. At eighty yards she recognises him. He can see her bunched frown. Her stride quickens and he withdraws into the saplings. Then she’s on him, brushing aside his inarticulate hands. Her voice is an urgent whisper, as unintelligible as ever. He realises he’s been relying on her intuition, on a mythical female omniscience. She examines his face with obvious consternation and distress,

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running her fingers over what he quickly realises is dried blood. ‘Moi non,’ he tells her. ‘Le soldat.’ Yes, the soldier. Dead. ‘Il est mort.’ ‘Le soldat? Où?’ Where? Good question. He grasps at her wrist but she refuses to be led. Shaking free, she listens for travellers on the road then moves out in front. The open barn alerts her. She can hear her geese on the dam. Then she sees the stained bricks. Her look of horror is brief but profound and she turns to him gibbering in such rapid French he’s soon exasperated. Why does she persist? He pulls back the door to its furthermost extent, wedging it open so she can see the crumpled gander. She lifts her skirt above her ankles as she steps around the blood. He watches her mouth form a silent O as she guesses at what has happened. And then she’s interrogating him once more, an avalanche of tumbling sounds that undoubtedly signify all those questions he’s anticipated but can’t answer. Such as why? Such as what possessed him? Such as what has become of the soldier and are they safe? He’s prepared for her despair. It isn’t a cataclysm that can be swallowed at one gulp – down, gone, over with! She traces the blood away towards the gate and stands baffled at the last faint heel print. Then all at once she plunges into the garden and along the hedge, pushing and dragging at the foliage and peering underneath. The more he tries to restrain her, promising that it’s no use, that he’s gone over every inch, the more fiercely she searches. Then she’s over

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the fallen fence and out into the rows beside the house while he trails limply behind. She stops still, upright, eyes unfocused. It is as if she’s trying to catch the soldier’s scent. All Harry can smell is roses, sweet beguiling roses. What can she smell? Blood? An unwashed male body? Or perhaps she’s merely thinking, reasoning it out as he has tried so vainly to do. Either way she’s off again, pushing away from the house, back towards the dam. He follows her large bustling behind up the embankment and for a moment they stand together overlooking the black water and outraged geese. Already, even before they begin to trawl through the reeds, he feels caught out. He didn’t consider the dam. Wrong direction. And too far. But Colombe has followed the logic of it – water! water at all costs! – because here he is, a dirty red streak nestled in the sedge, bare head for all the world like a grey stone embedded in the mud. And to Harry’s astonishment the soldier breathes, deep and loudly like an aggressive sleeper. They go down on their knees, sinking, Colombe murmuring regret in the man’s mud-caked ear. He can’t be roused. His face is encased in sun-baked filth. Harry contemplates going back to the house to find something that might do as a stretcher – he could take a door off its hinges – but Colombe simply reaches under the soldier and lifts. Head and chest pull free of the sucking mud. It is as much as she can achieve alone, whereas Harry finds him light, a mere skeleton that he hauls up and spreads across his shoulder in a fireman’s lift. He tries to be gentle but has the shakes. As they tumble down the dam wall he feels the man’s head rocking against his back. And still he

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breathes, a little more hoarsely but without the least sign of faltering. Colombe selects the small servant’s bedroom a few yards from her kitchen. Harry unfolds him on the bare mattress, stretching him out on his back and manoeuvring his booted feet through the iron bed-end so he’s not crumpled and bent. But in no time they have to turn him on his side, because he barks and convulses. The air bursts up his windpipe and inflates his cheeks. He makes a sound like a horse with its nose in a chaff bag. He smells of shit. And all the while his bloodied eyes, blind as stones, are unflinchingly open and steady, giving an impression of stoicism. Colombe works at the mud and gore with a wet cloth, recreating his face, coaxing the fleshless contours and pale skin into existence. Eventually, touch by touch, she reveals a bloated mound in the hair. The wound itself is small and clotted, like a puckered mouth. It seems innocuous. They strip his upper body. Frail and ribby. Chest hair white as Christmas. Harry remembers his ineffectual attempt to block his blow, an absurd wave of the dead bird as the hammer struck. The man under his hands is old. Did he imagine his vitality? Removing his boots, Harry discovers he’s sockless. Out of modesty or discretion or plain contempt for what he’s done, Colombe leaves Harry to deal with the soldier’s proud red trousers. Penitentially, irked fingers negotiating the stinking fabric, he unbuttons and drags down. No underclothes. Shit on the mattress, shit on Harry’s hands. Which he hastily plunges into the basin Colombe has left. Then he

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flees to the kitchen for fresh water. Suddenly the abattoir soap smells wholesome. He slops a half pail into the trough and loiters there, scrubbing excessively, mindful of the filth between the soldier’s legs and loath to return. He hears the slap of her boots on the back step. She has a second bucket from the well and what is evidently a veterinary device, a thin rubber tube with a funnel end. She stomps straight past him into the soldier’s room. She speaks to the man quietly, prattle and goose-talk, to soothe them all. Shamed, Harry follows, soap, basin and cloth at the ready. Together they squat, Harry at the dirty end. And while he sweeps and dabs disgustedly along the man’s inner thighs she wriggles the tube down his gullet and into his stomach. Into the funnel she trickles water. Harry cleans his buttocks and between – scrotum and loose skin and difficult creases. At last he covers him with a blanket, folding it back beneath his chin as if bedding down a child. Colombe continues to trickle water. A pint or more and still she’s not satisfied. She waves Harry away – despising him less, he thinks, now that she has a resurrection to effect. He retrieves the soiled clothes and holds them at arm’s length like his unspeakable relief. She waves him away. He wants to believe. He is prepared to disregard the evidence of his eyes. He is susceptible to her hope and stubbornness, and feebly ashamed of his willingness to let her take command. She has a magical intent, the nursing nature he has always lacked – even when he cared for his mother. In her desire to put things right she absolves him. She takes back his killing blow. Once more death is an abstraction,

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threatening but not quite realised, unproven. And while Lazarus lies there waiting to rise, while Colombe proceeds in the belief it’s possible, he has his reprieve. There are sensible self-protective reasons why he should simply dispose of the soldier’s uniform, but that would be breaking faith. If she can bring back the dead, the least he can do is wash his clothes. But not in the kitchen trough. His sense of hygiene won’t come at that. So it’s out to the well, lugging everything in the heavy timber pail. He throws the soldier’s coat on the turf. It’s stiff and perhaps more putrid than his trousers, yet Harry lays it open, revealing the original sky blue of the lining. He fumbles through the pockets, inner and outer. Plum pips. A blood- and sputum-sodden handkerchief. No money. No inscribed pocket watch honouring Councillor Samuel Lambert. Liquidated. Turned to their not-so-daft thief’s need and advantage. It could be anywhere by now. And since Harry can’t have it back, the longer and more obscure the chain of commerce, the better. Nevertheless, he feels miserable with pessimism.

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thirty-one

He sleeps alone, or more correctly, he does not sleep but lies alone in his moaning bed without once encroaching on her abandoned territory. He’s restrained by a curious superstition. He maintains a place for her, as if he might preserve their common lives. In the night he hears occasional noises from downstairs, the scrape of her chair, a stray word that tells him she is still keeping vigil beside the stranger. But mostly he hears her silence. He wonders at it. He’s intrigued. Twice before retiring, an hour apart, he poked his nose in and was embarrassed by their stillness. It was a sort of communion. Did she suppose the soldier was capable of sensing she was there? He couldn’t sit with them. Yet he admires her resolution. He doesn’t want the soldier to die by himself. He hates the bleakness of that smug Biblical wisdom about coming into and out of the world alone. In the early morning he’s taken aback to see her dressed for work. In some respects it makes sense. She has an outward routine, concerned friends. She would be missed. They

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must go on as before, hoping that the soldier will recover, hoping that yesterday’s upheaval and distress went unnoticed. She eats a quick breakfast and leaves without giving instructions, as if he will instinctively know what to do. He discovers that the soldier isn’t stretched out as he left him, but curled up in a more compact and natural pose. He doubts that he’s managed this himself. Colombe must be responsible, perhaps disturbed by his earlier appearance of discomfort. He sees too that his head is less damagedlooking, less lopsided, than he’d feared. And while bruises have seeped into the soft tissues of his face, night tears have cleansed his eyes of blood. Against all reason, he’s intimidated by his unblinking gaze, which is blue and mild and insinuatingly intimate. ‘We’re in this together,’ he seems to say. Worse, he has Harry thinking that none of this is an accident, though he can’t conceive of any design, unless it’s knotted into his own fear and truculence and as much a part of him as muscle and bone. He recalls the exquisite physicality of his rage. Who or what had he been protecting? Colombe’s geese? Their secret sovereignty? His liberty? Even gazing eye to eye with the soldier he doesn’t repent. His pacifist gropings are exposed as having been weak and ephemeral, but he sees no great contradiction in his behaviour. He deserted because he was scared. He struck the soldier because he was angry. These are separate acts. He faces them squarely. He is no part of Leviathan. He is his own heart and mind and violent hand, and no excuses. He smells urine. Beneath the blanket the soldier’s body is dormant, yet leaking. All that water poured so laboriously

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into his stomach! Probably it has kept him alive. Even so, it is undoubtedly a half-measure. If Colombe and her rubber tubing can stave off death, what might a modern hospital achieve? And in keeping him here, who is she protecting? Who is her first concern? Her troublesome foreigner? Or this great carcass protruding beyond the iron bed-end? He doubts there is much separating them. Certainly Colombe isn’t careful in her distinctions, endangering herself as readily for a thief as for a deserter. Yet he feels priggishly superior to the soldier, more deserving. He has considered himself in love. He has aspired to marriage. Honourable Harry. It must count for something. And if he’s not mistaken her devotion to the newcomer has its limits, else she’d have contrived some method of bringing him in to Rouen for treatment. Either way, she is running a risk. If he dies here in her house, what then? How would the authorities look on that? Which gives him a fresh appreciation of her determination to keep the man alive. He looks into the blind eyes and gradually manages to strip them of individual or social significance. They become mere organs, mechanisms. And with this understanding he is able to touch the face, to apply pressure between the jaws so the mouth opens. He inserts the tube, manipulating it gently over the tongue and down along the soft membrane of the gullet. The obstruction barely affects the man’s breathing. Also, it seems to suppress his coughing. There is not the physical protest Harry was dreading. Then down into the stomach. Who would have guessed that a life-saving act could be so irksome?

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In the afternoon he manages to sleep in a bedside chair. He dreams of the big deal-wood table at Albion. Everyone wears festive hats of tinsel and golden crepe. All the old faces are there, and all the generations, squeezed impossibly close. George carves while Sammy tells of a plum tree in the village (Warwickshire Droopers – best for jam) and Mary and his mother recite the canon of who likes what – no fat for Ethel, nearest the bone for Dick, just a skerrick for young John . . . Uncle Lew’s delight in mutton has him spouting, irreverently but largely unremarked, on the mystery of the Paschal Lamb – a set of tenets, he says, natural to the minds of barefoot tribesmen steeped in the practice of animal sacrifice, but a deep conundrum to civilised folk such as themselves. And though nothing is said that wouldn’t normally be said, Harry knows they are showing off for his French bride. For the occasion she has shed considerable weight and many years. Her face is smooth and downy. And when she speaks her English is correct without pedantry, an example and a quiet reproach to her coarser company. George’s grandson Dick, the rogue and darling of the family, cannot take his eyes off her, except to wink at Harry, man to man, admiringly and in surprised recognition of a dark horse. This sweetness quickly sours. He wakes to the soldier’s face. Nothing has changed. There is the same insensible calm, the same flow of rheumy tears. Harry goes to the kitchen and prepares a meal of root vegetables and a few scraps of bacon, cooking them over the fire. After it has cooled a little he pulps it with a wooden spoon and

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experiments to see whether it is fine enough to flow down the soldier’s tube. Yet he doesn’t feed him, regarding it as too great and dangerous a step, as something best left to Colombe. And since she’s due very soon he takes the pot of warm slop and installs himself dutifully beside his victim, who seems no better or worse for having been left. The blanket continues to rise and fall. A protruding hand remains curled and claw-like. His blind eyes go on seeping meaningless tears. Despite this unpleasantness, Harry is hungry. The pot steams at his feet and more than once he has to restrain himself. Colombe brings medicines and tonics – brown bottles containing cheap cure-alls. She lights candle stumps and inspects the soldier’s face, sweeping her fingertips over the rasping stubble. Yes, it has grown. She doesn’t look up but Harry imagines he’s being accused. Why hasn’t he shaved him? In a confusion of self-justification, he passes her the pot. Sniffing, she inserts a finger and tastes. He can’t say whether her curt nod amounts to approval. Declining to take the rubber tube – isn’t Harry capable of feeding him? – she hurries off to her room. He hears her rummaging in her clothes-chest, doubtless for her workskirt. A minute later his guesses are confirmed by the clank of her scythe on the back paving. The geese must be fed. The candles spit and fume and in the yellow light the soldier has the complexion of stained and much-handled ivory. Once more Harry manipulates the tube down his throat and into his stomach. First he doses him with a capful of each of the tonics. Then he half-fills the funnel with lukewarm stew

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and jigs it as an encouragement to gravity. It’s a slow process, and while he waits he sops bread in the pot, softening it for himself, since he has been unable to find any other food. In this way they share a meal, and the soldier seems as content as an unconscious man can seem. But an hour later, after Colombe has come to sit with them, he begins to spasm and cough. The suddenness of it is frightening. Harry wrenches his jaws open but his windpipe is clear. His skin is wet and hot as if he’s erupting from within, one last store igniting – and all to no purpose. He will simply burn until exhausted. It’s then that Colombe catches Harry with a look that he realises is her first true communication since discovering the soldier. Grim, collusive, almost humorous, she says everything in a glance. Aren’t we ridiculous, demanding a say! Aren’t we fools! But the soldier takes his time. He coughs and shudders and goes on living. He lives through into the dark morning – they can hear his breath long after the candles have vanished. Harry is aware of Colombe leaning drowsily against him. Her head weighs on his chest. Several times it occurs to him that in their devotion to this man they are like despairing parents, clinging to absurd hopes. Even in his sleep he remembers her look. Aren’t we fools! Daylight comes beaming in at the dirty window. Somehow the soldier has managed to wedge his face in under the pillow. Harry is concerned that he might have smothered – but no, he’s still warm and breathing quietly. While he admires his tenacity, he can’t see him lasting the morning. Colombe goes to her room and washes at the trough.

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She returns wearing yesterday’s unlaundered work-dress with its wafting odour of oil and gritty sweat. Her expression as she stands at the door is resigned. They have done their best, but their soldier can’t possibly last. So composed is she that he imagines she has the measure of the risks and uncertainties this entails, even if he doesn’t. Yet after she’s gone he has sole charge. He decides that this is preferable and just. Colombe has dirtied her hands quite enough. All morning the soldier is still. Harry supposes he’s subsiding into a quiet death, because he seems to have lost the capacity even to cough. Several times he supposes the moment has come and gone, only to detect a faint breath. It strikes him that he should pre-empt events and dig a grave. So a little before midday he goes out into the sun and surveys the rose-plots, finally selecting a secluded area a hundred yards from the road. He scratches a shallow trench with a threepronged garden fork – the only halfway suitable implement he can find. He claws out the soil with his hands then jabs and scratches again. In a couple of hours, blowing and heaving in the heat, he achieves a depth of eighteen inches. But when he enters once more through the kitchen he discovers that the soldier isn’t ready for burying. He hears his voice, a gravelly mumbling that is almost conversational. He creeps to the bedroom door, looking in just as the soldier stretches his leg. The man’s eyes are closed, like someone dreaming. And after a silence his mumbling resumes. His tone is relaxed, as if he’s making some banal observation to a friend. Harry dares not enter. Arriving home in the twilight, Colombe finds him in

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her kitchen and sees from his face that something pleasing has occurred. He puts his finger to his mouth, bidding her to be silent and listen. She hears the soldier at once, still droning and muttering as he has been all afternoon. She rushes to his room and lavishes on him all the solicitous words she has been saving up. He doesn’t respond or acknowledge that he’s being spoken to, but their voices are somehow complementary, if only because they speak the one baffling language. Colombe comes out later when the soldier is quiet. Having brought back fresh supplies from town, she makes a stew and she and Harry sit together at the fire watching the pot. He senses her discomfort. Though the soldier is far from lucid, she does not want him to hear them talking. It’s best that he should have no hint that there is a third person in her house. And in any case, it transpires that she has only one thing to say to Harry. She draws close and whispers, speaking very slowly and carefully. He doesn’t need her prodding. He sees for himself that it is time to go. She gives his knee two valedictory pats. What’s most distressing, she remains full of the joy of having resurrected the soldier, and isn’t the least gloomy at losing her Australian. Ladling stew into the soldier’s bowl, she sees him staring at her and shrugs with eloquent finality. Then she goes next door. After eating alone Harry gathers up his greatcoat. Already his mind is pulling away. The night is obligingly dark. He listens for a moment longer to her sweet, pattering goose-talk, then leaves her house.

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thirty-two

For two days he is confined in a tiny wooden hut – six feet by six feet, just enough room for a pail and a plank bed. The only source of light is a ventilation slit at floor level, meshed over with pigeon wire to keep out vermin. If he lies flat on the boards he can get a view of about ten feet of bare earth but can’t see the other huts or the boundaries of the compound. Three times daily another prisoner, rarely the same individual, and always scrupulously silent, brings him a meal of bread or hard tack. He no longer asks for tea – not on the menu. He drinks cloudy water from an enamel mug and tries to disregard the smell. Mornings and afternoons he hears the other prisoners stamping on the parade ground, the Red Caps bellowing or shrilling on their brass whistles. No one comes to question him, though once, late in the afternoon of the first day, someone slides open the spy-hole and gives him a quick once-over. Then on the second evening he has a visitor, a lieutenant of the Mechanical Transport Service called Foster. Tanned

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and robust-looking, and at the same time quietly affable, he offers his hand like a civilian – a friendly egalitarian grip that makes it clear he’s not about to stand on rank. He grimaces at the cramped quarters and settles his lighted kerosene lamp on the floor. They sit at either end of the bed, the smell of day-old urine rising from the pail. ‘They’ve asked me to assist you,’ says Foster. A flat voice, in the spirit of the barracks, but unable to mask a gentle upbringing. His manner is vaguely reluctant, as if he thinks that in an ideal world no one should be called on to pry into the private business of a stranger. ‘A matter of regulations. A lot of blokes aren’t comfortable speaking for themselves.’ By blokes, Harry understands, he means ‘rankers’. ‘You’re a lawyer, Sir?’ ‘Heavens no!’ Harry waits for an explanation but none comes. He notices that among the lieutenant’s badges is a gold wound-bar. It’s slightly crooked, the stitching large and untidy. He doesn’t know whether this is affectation or genuine indifference. ‘I’m not permitted to represent myself?’ ‘Can if you want. You have the choice, a man of your background.’ Background? Education perhaps. ‘But you wouldn’t advise it, Sir.’ ‘No. Best to let someone else do the talking. It’s too easy to say the wrong thing. They don’t like soldiers with opinions. You’ve got to keep all that to yourself.’ ‘I haven’t got any opinions. I got scared and I ran.’ ‘Good. That’s what they like to hear.’

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The voice of experience. Yet Harry is sceptical. He can’t quite conceive of the lieutenant as an insider. ‘You’ve done this often, Sir – defending enlisted men?’ ‘Twice.’ ‘Successfully?’ ‘They’re both back with their units, if that’s what you mean. No jail sentences.’ ‘You must have a knack.’ Harry realises it’s an unfriendly remark, but the lieutenant doesn’t get haughty. ‘The knack is repentance. Are you prepared to plead guilty?’ ‘I can hardly plead innocent.’ ‘Quite.’ From his tunic pocket Foster removes a pencil and a small notepad. Down to business. ‘I’ll need to prepare an outline of events. Everything from day one. Places, people, dates and times. That story you told the provosts won’t do.’ Harry looks down at his bony feet. He has anticipated this difficulty but can’t think of a way clear. The Red Caps to whom he surrendered had a standard form to complete. Where had he been? Paris. With whom had he associated? Unknown servicemen, mostly drunks. That he could remain undetected on a two-month drinking spree must have struck them as improbable. Still, they had a prisoner, a man on the circulated list of deserters. With sudden petulance Foster says, ‘If you won’t trust me . . . ’ A naive reproach. The proposed exchange – trust for help – is plainly flawed. Surrender and they’ll go easy. On him maybe, but where’s that leave Colombe?

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‘Good God, man,’ Foster groans, ‘they’ll take one look at you and know you’re lying. I can’t see you getting three steps to Paris. Not without someone taking you by the hand. The first thing they’ll ask you is “What’s her name?” They’re not stupid, Lambert. They’ve sorted out cleverer chaps than you.’ No argument there. Though he can’t see why the lieutenant should immediately posit the existence of a woman. Has he heard something? ‘You may think it’s all very admirable, Lambert, keeping mum for some woman, but this is no three-act play. You’re in deep trouble. As I hear it they’ve got old Firth running the show. Major in the Veterinaries and a prick. How do you fancy ten years in Wormwood Scrubs?’ At last Harry looks up, begging him to understand. But by now the lieutenant is truly annoyed. ‘If I were you I’d show a little humility! You’re not the only bloke ever bolted from this war. They do a dozen of your sort in a day. Play it straight and the worst you’ll get is a few weeks’ Number One, but just you muck them about and see what you get! They shit on Clever Dicks, Lambert. Break them. Break them so they’re no good for the rest of their days. That’s the way it works and I wouldn’t like to see it happen to you. I’d take it personally. It’s not right and it’s unnecessary. So let’s start with April 6th.’ The lieutenant pauses, trying to ascertain whether he has his cooperation. Without meeting his eye Harry shifts on the bed. The air is poisonous with kerosene fumes.

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‘Six-thirty p.m. you’re told you’re going forward – is that correct?’ Harry nods but Foster demands a more active participation. ‘Is that correct?’ ‘Correct, Sir.’ ‘And your company was paraded at 8:00 p.m., at which time your absence was noticed. One and a half hours. So we can safely say you deserted on a whim. The question is whether you spoke to anyone before you went? The court will be very interested in that.’ ‘No one, Sir.’ ‘You acted completely alone and unaided?’ ‘Yes, Sir.’ ‘And you can’t think of anyone who might have had an inkling of what you had in mind?’ ‘I didn’t know what I had in mind.’ ‘Good. Now we’re getting somewhere. As I understand it you talked your way into the hospital compound and dug under the perimeter fence, is that right?’ ‘Yes, Sir.’ ‘Then where?’ ‘I went to the station.’ ‘Which station?’ ‘Saint Sever.’ ‘You can’t be serious. The place would have been a bloody ants’ nest. Troops everywhere.’ ‘I took a punt. Paris or bust.’ ‘Because you knew a woman there.’ ‘No.’

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‘Who did you know?’ ‘No one. I’d never set foot in the place.’ ‘Then why go?’ ‘Seemed like somewhere to get lost.’ ‘I wouldn’t have thought so. I’d say you’d have stuck out like dog’s balls. French police would have spotted you in no time. Unless you had somewhere to hole out.’ ‘I got in with some lads and they shunted me about every time the police showed their faces. They thought it was a laugh.’ ‘And this went on for more than two months! What do you take me for, Lambert? You’ve got to give me something better than that!’ ‘It’s the truth, Sir.’ ‘It’s cock and bull! You’ve got to give me something better! If you can’t convince me, how do you expect to convince the court? What about the name of a street? Give them an address and with any luck your mademoiselle will have had the sense to move on.’ All at once, it doesn’t seem such a bad idea – provided his luck holds and no one informs on him. He must accept that everything is fluid. He has no control. If the soldier talks, so be it. In the meantime he’ll stick with Paris. An address in Paris and a woman’s name. Any name. By the time the civil authorities draw a blank he might be safely convicted and punished with nothing to connect him to Colombe. ‘I don’t know the street, Sir. I’ll try to remember. But it was full of brothels. The woman was called Elise . . . ’

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At reveille a Red Cap brings him a mock rifle and a full kit and orders him and two others, all newcomers who’ve been kept in isolation, to jog double time around the perimeter of the parade ground. Soon he’s gasping and wheezing but nonetheless pleased to be out in the open. Each time he swings round the eastern side he’s able to see beyond the entanglements to the transport compound and coal stores, to the serried peaks of the marquees where the coloured labourers sleep, and ultimately to the tin chimneys of his bakery, blackened like cigars yet wafting fluffy white smoke. Despite his exertion, he imagines he can smell the bread – or more precisely the unbaked dough breathing a sour hopeful breath over the camp. He knows this is fanciful, and that probably what he smells is summer dust, pulverised over and over by the boots of prisoners. But he holds on to his delusion, until his spine begins to ache and his knees jolt bone on bone. What have they put in his pack? Lead ingots? Restored to his hut, he waits for breakfast. But instead of the usual plodding feet of a prisoner he hears the approach of a group of four or five. Police most probably. What is disconcerting, he catches a word or phrase of French. And after the barking English commands he’s just been subjected to on the parade ground, it sounds somehow melodious. An indulgent and forgiving language. Colombe’s. The feet shuffle outside his hut. The speakers go silent and he observes several pairs of army boots through the ventilation slit. Someone slips open the spy-hole. The sunlight flares, a white point in the door. Then a head blocks it

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out, and an eye pressed close. He tries to stare back but finds himself embarrassed and unnerved. His glance drops to the ventilation slit, to a pair of clogs and thin white shins. He feels his throat contract. A Frenchman murmurs, a French child whispers in reply. Abruptly they’re gone. For a long time he stares at the small oblong of light. The worst has come, precisely as feared. He tries to settle his thoughts, to throw off his sense of defeat. He has to sift the possibilities. If the boy came to identify him, then the police must have Colombe. What of the soldier? Has he recovered sufficiently to speak against them? Assault or attempted murder might be added to the charge sheet. It matters barely at all. There is no fighting back. He doubts that it can be any different for Colombe, though he has seen enough of her to know she won’t fold easily. She will reveal just as much truth as is necessary. A foreigner at her door. A man making threats. Really? For week after week? No, not a man making threats. A man on the brink of collapse. So yes, they’ll have her for misplaced compassion. When next he sees Foster he informs him of a change in his story. Forget Paris. Forget the woman called Elise. Far from put out, the lieutenant exhibits a wry smile. From this Harry is able to surmise that the charges still relate to desertion, and not attempted murder. He thinks it shouldn’t matter, but he shivers with relief, and feels an impulse to babble, to celebrate a fleeting happiness with this unusually generous officer. The lieutenant remarks that he has had a little chat to the battalion adjutant who will act as prosecutor. He likes

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the new circumstances. The truth is always a better starting point. The inquiries are held in an administrative hut enclosed within a separate entanglement. When his turn comes he’s jogged past the punishment post by a pair of Red Caps who wield their sticks with professional detachment. Duckboards lie embedded in the soil and more than once he nearly trips as the timber wobbles underfoot. ‘Lift your fuck’n knees!’ he’s told, and cops a whack across the back. At the steps he’s permitted to catch his breath before being escorted in. He doesn’t like the look of things. The presiding officers sit behind a single desk, two captains and a major. Purportedly a horse doctor in civilian life, Major Firth conforms with his pet picture of an amateur soldier turned professional: fiftyish, lean, scrupulously groomed, the perfect stickler. He reads the charge from a single sheet: ‘That at Divisional Headquarters, Rouen, at approximately 7:00 p.m. on April 6th, 1918, the accused, after being paraded with his unit and warned to hold himself in readiness to be entrained to the front, absented himself till apprehended on June 12th by Number 28 Examining Post, Rouen . . . ’ When asked to plead Harry looks uncertainly to Foster. ‘In entering a plea,’ the major snaps, ‘the accused must speak for himself.’ ‘Guilty, Sir.’ ‘You acknowledge that in entering this plea, and in preparing your case, you have been properly and diligently advised by Lieutenant Foster.’

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‘I do, Sir.’ ‘And you desire to have him speak on your behalf.’ ‘Yes, Sir.’ ‘Be seated.’ As Foster intimated, the court seems pleased not to have to deal with him directly, military justice being, apparently, an officers-only affair. And for his part Harry, who suddenly doesn’t feel equipped to contribute, is relieved to be able to leave almost everything to the lieutenant. His own role is to look suitably shamed and contrite while Foster paints him as a weak and inept individual, the perennial coward in the ranks. He describes how Private Lambert imposed on an elderly Frenchwoman’s kindness and manipulated her maternal instinct, convincing her that if she was to turn him in he would face a firing squad; how he hid in her house the entire period of his absence, until he aroused the suspicions of neighbours. Harry’s ears prick. Neighbours? Were there others besides the widow? He finds it difficult to maintain the right expression. The prosecutor is lenient. He agrees with Lieutenant Foster’s representation of the facts. He concurs that the accused is patently not the right stuff. A sad case, he says. Definitely a sad case. It’s then that the major thinks fit to ask whether Harry has anything to add. Rising awkwardly, the chair almost toppling behind him, Harry answers ‘No, Sir,’ and remains standing while the major expands on the theme of what a despicable excuse for a man he is. Disgrace to the forces.

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Disgrace to the British race. Unconscionable cowardice. A danger to his fellows. Harry can’t see the latter assertion. Perhaps if he’d deserted in the vicinity of the front, but 100 miles behind the lines? ‘I wish to make amends, Sir,’ he manages to interject. ‘Make amends? Oh yes, you’ll make amends. My word you will!’

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thirty-three

I knew him to look at. You saw him on the road, always coughing and drivelling to himself. They called him ‘the General’ because of his smart pants. Sometimes they were old and filthy, sometimes new. Someone must have kept him in trousers. ‘Look,’ Isabelle would say. ‘Here comes the General. Hide your silver.’ I should have taken her at her word. Nineteen hundred francs! Do you know how long it took me to save nineteen hundred francs? He deserved what he got. He was lucky the Australian got him and not me. I’d have knocked his brains out. I wouldn’t have stopped at one. But once a man’s down, you feel sorry. He wheezed and shivered and I felt sorry. No one deserves to die. I wanted him up and gone. We cared for him like a newborn. Not because I expected my money back: because I wanted him gone. I wanted the house empty again. After two days he started talking, but nonsense. I thought I might be stuck with him for weeks. Then he raised himself and I found him wrapped in a blanket on the back step,

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coughing and barking and firing his repulsive spit at the birds. He must have gone right past me while I slept. He said something about the hospice of St Maclou. I guessed that was his bolthole. He was looking into my eyes and not seeing. I supposed his brain had been damaged. Even so, I was in a rage. I said, ‘What about my nineteen hundred francs?’ He inclined his head to one side, as if considering. You couldn’t be sure he understood. He was either very stupid or very shrewd. I asked him his name. He stared. To test him I said, ‘What happened to your head?’ His face was empty, or there might have been a smile. When you’re anxious you imagine things. I had to half-drag him back to his bed. He wanted to sit in the fresh air. I was worried for my Australian. I did not imagine he would give himself up. I thought he would keep running. It had been less than twenty-four hours. I wanted to give him more time. But now that the imbecile was up and moving and threatening trouble, I had to jump. I went in to Rouen for an ambulance. I said I’d found an injured man in the yard. They wanted to know whether it was urgent. Didn’t trust my judgement. It was three hours before they sent anyone. They couldn’t spare a motorised van, just one medic with a slow horse and a cart like a hearse. He took one look and laughed. He said, ‘How are you, General? A nasty head by the looks of it.’ He was hardly respectful. He walked him to the cart and laid him inside. I said, ‘Will he be all right?’ Another big laugh: ‘The General? He’s unkillable. A few winters back we found him frozen on the

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deck of a motor-launch. We thawed and fed him and he walked away.’ So that was my thief – gone at last. I thought: Back to where I began. An empty house. No money, no Australian to worry about. A clean sheet. I couldn’t see the police following it up. Maybe eventually, if the hospital made a report. But that same afternoon, no, that was too soon. They came searching out the back where I was cutting grass. I knew something was wrong. I turned cold in the hot sunshine. Their first question was, ‘Do you know a foreigner called Lambert?’ I had dreamt of this moment. I supposed it was the General paying us back. That’s what you get for saving a person’s life. Not till later did I think of Isabelle Bravy. I was ready to fight. But what could I say? That the General had stolen my money? That would have put me in deeper. They’d have said we went after him. I was frantic. My head spun. It was like falling from a height and reaching for thin air. I said I’d never heard of any Lambert. They got particular. A soldier. An Australian. They showed me the butt of a raffle ticket, supposedly with his name on it. I didn’t know what it meant. But they persisted: Could he have stayed just a little while? A night perhaps? You know how they wheedle: starting small, getting bigger. I said, ‘You mean the man I found in the yard?’ No, not him. They didn’t want to know about the General. They wanted the Australian. I’d hidden him, they said. That’s when I blew up. Who said I’d hidden him? Let them say it to my face! Pure bluff. They went on just as before.

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They had ‘information’. Very mysterious and intimidating. A hundred witnesses for all I knew. They didn’t care about some vagrant getting a bang on the head. They wanted a big case to put in the papers. They wanted me for harbouring. When had the Australian first come? What had he said? How long had he stayed? I blocked them for fifteen minutes. They went around in circles repeating the same questions: Had I seen him before? Did I invite him? Was I sympathetic? Did he lie? Did he say he was on leave? Perhaps he confused me? When that got them nowhere they became snide. How old was I? How old was he? Their faces were blank but I knew they were sneering. They thought I was disgusting. Where did he sleep? they asked. I said, ‘Go away. I’ve given my answer.’ But they wouldn’t go. They said, ‘You know he’ll be court martialled? They’ll get it out of him. You think our boys are bad. Those Australians are hyenas. They won’t ask polite questions. Wouldn’t you rather get in first? It will look better on your deposition. A free confession. You’ll save yourself a lot of anguish. You might save him some broken bones. Do you want to see him hurt?’ Oh, I was heroic. I was ridiculous. I kept up a hard face. I said, ‘I don’t know who you’re talking about.’ But I did something weak. I lied about my age – added ten years. I was getting ready to scramble. I cried old woman’s tears. Poor me. If they wanted to punish a confused old woman . . . Is that cowardice? Lot of good it did me. They took me in to Rouen, then

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sent me to Paris. The investigator made the police look like schoolboys. He was a slippery eel. So many questions, so many insinuations. Did I speak German? No? Then I’d better learn. Because that was the way it was going. Maybe I liked the Boches. Maybe I was a traitor. No? Then who was going to fight the enemy? Who was going to push him back to where he came from if people like me turned men into cowards? Of course he knew about Joseph. So I’d lost a son. Was I the only one to lose someone? They are trained and prepared. They specialise in needling you. I had no support. I was alone with my thoughts or locked up with strangers, all of them ready to report what I said if they thought it would help them. I complained I was sick. He said, ‘Naturally you’re sick!’ As if the truth was a bad dinner. Bring it up and you’ll feel better. Before I knew it I was shouting at him, calling him a butcher. I lost my mind. No, not true. He made it so I didn’t care. I gave him exactly what he wanted. I put myself in here. My own words. They didn’t need Isabelle Bravy or anyone. I saw my advocate two days before the trial. I asked who would appear against me. He said, ‘No one. What’s the point? You admit everything don’t you? Why spoil a neat confession?’ I asked what had become of my Australian. No news. Could he find out? No. Military courts are closed. Only family have a right to know. It’s amazing how you accept as final a clever man’s word, at least while you’re still fighting. He said, ‘Forget him. Hasn’t he done you enough harm?’ And anyway, I had no energy for either remembering or forgetting. I was too busy

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clambering. It’s a landslide. You never get free of it. Whatever you do or say you end up buried at the bottom. That’s when you start to think again. All at once – silence. You have months and years to see what it means. We have too much time to think. That’s the evil part. Too much time to puzzle. I remember the pain on his face when I told him to go. He thought I was kicking him out. Of course I was kicking him out. What could I do? He was already lost. He was gone. What was the use of trying to console him? You get washed away. Something the investigator said. It still makes me smile. ‘Are you proud of yourself?’ What a question. He wanted me to feel like a child caught stealing. Well, it’s all stealing isn’t it? I took what didn’t belong to me. I pulled a man out of the stream. I stole a few weeks of his life. They had other plans for him. I had no right to him. He had no right to himself. Isn’t that their reasoning? I wasn’t accused of stealing Joseph, but it’s the same. They get you one way or another.

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thirty-four

Capt. A B Hassett, Central Army Records Office, Block A, Albert Park Barracks, Melbourne,Victoria, September 29, 1968 Miss Julia Keely, Further to our telephone conversation of June 13 concerning the service records of No 42743 Private H G Lambert, 38th Battalion, AIF. I have discussed your interesting observations about the above serviceman’s records with several colleagues. I have also conducted a second search and found no new documents. Whether Private Lambert was tried before a court martial, as you say your research suggests, this office does not hold a transcript of proceedings, or any record of such a proceeding having taken place.

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The dossier I forwarded to you on August 27 contained all available records. Your suspicion that some of these records may have been tampered with or fabricated strikes me, and others with whom I’ve discussed the case, as quite unfounded. I grant that it is not unknown for relations of servicemen, and sometimes servicemen themselves, to want to suppress unflattering information, but keep in mind that, in the main, these papers originated in France, and existed in triplicate. Rather than kept together in one office, they would have been dispersed to different places, sometimes continents apart. It is true, as you say, that war records were consolidated at the AIF Base Records Office in the twenties, but this was a secure military institution. Therefore it is unlikely that anyone in Australia, however influential, would have been in a position to corrupt or forge this material. Had Private Lambert gone absent without leave in France his Company Conduct Sheet would certainly say so.You will note that this form covers the period December 7, 1917, to his discharge on March 3, 1919, being the duration of his service in Rouen, and that there are no offences listed.You will also note that his character is described as ‘good’. Finally, the form is certified correct with the signatures of three officers. To my mind, the weight of probability would seem to suggest that your source is mistaken. A B Hassett

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PROJECT NOTES, October 2, 1968 Stonewalling. And they’re the experts. What to do? I have nothing solid to incorporate into the booklet. Yet it seems obvious that Lew Broughton was the meddler, or that he was the principal force. I have found two Express articles from 1920 in which he defends ‘our brave lads’ against unspecified calumny. I imagine he thought he was preparing the way for Harry’s return to Australia, providing the covering fire. Yet Uncle Harry stayed put. Probably convenient for everyone. Mum is delighted with the idea of her anonymous French relations. I showed her a draft in which I speculated at their existence. For her it’s a small step from speculation to reality. I told her that Lambert is a common name both sides of the English Channel and that it would be near impossible to identify Uncle Harry’s descendants. She didn’t mind. I think she prefers this oceanic connection, Uncle Harry’s genes swimming around in the great swell of French Lamberts.

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thirty-five

For two hours precisely each day – not a second more or less – they truss him up against a pole. A variation on crucifixion, Field Punishment Number One – but without the nails. He doesn’t feel in the least Christlike. The pain is searing. Pain in the ankles, pain in the knees where they have tightened the ropes so they eat into his flesh and cut the circulation. And they have hitched his hands high up the pole behind his back. The boots of past sufferers have worn a shallow ring in the ground so that he can’t get a proper grip with his feet, his toes always sliding lower than his heels. Which is why he doesn’t stand, but hangs, his arms taking most of his weight, the muscles of his shoulders burning. Once again it’s his size that aggravates the situation. He’s convinced the agony of a smaller man would be less. Hatless in the June sun, he is partially blinded with sweat. He can’t manage to wipe his face on his shirt, but regularly shakes his head or twists his whole torso away from the

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prevailing rays. He is careful not to lose patience, careful to husband his tolerance to last the distance. Best not to look at the other poor devils. The next man’s torment somehow exacerbates his own. To endure he must close off from others; plunge into the solitude of pain, submit. He would never have thought it possible, this ability to accept what can’t be changed or avoided. There is no slack in his mind for doubt, nothing extraneous, no person loved or hated. In the extremity of the moment he will last, is lasting, has lasted. And again. Over and over. They are wrong when they say he’s weak. He’s lasting. Afterwards he can’t appreciate the absence of strain. In the ten minutes before Parade he lies uncomfortably on his bunk in the common barrack, wishing he still had the privacy of solitary confinement. His hands and arms may cross limply over his stomach but his mind conceives of them as stretched and contorted. And while there isn’t the actuality of pain the shuddering continues, and an inner bracing. When the time comes he follows the other men out to stand in the sun. They’re called to attention – a rabble of shirkers, absconders and dishonourably wounded – and assigned to teams. ‘Coal fatigue,’ a prisoner explains while the provosts are busy. ‘Blackfella work for us, mate.’ It’s a chummy beginning, cheerful and ingratiating, the sort of all-inthe-same-boat camaraderie Harry only now discovers he’s missed. They’re marched to the prison gate and searched. One particularly conscientious guard peers into pockets, feels

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under collars and cuffs and has each man roll back the tops of his puttees. Eventually he’s rewarded with a couple of cigarettes, which he stows in his own pouch. ‘Many thanks,’ he says. Then they’re jogged out the gate and down the road, a tight phalanx escorted by a single Red Cap. Brought to a halt in a yard between blackened sheds, they’re issued barrows and broad-mouthed scoops. Harry is sent with half a dozen others to a concrete bay where the dust still hangs above a mound of anthracite. Already he feels it clogging his nostrils. Following the example of others, he ties a handkerchief over his mouth. Then, under the distant supervision of the provost, he falls into the simple routine of scooping and straining. The dust billows as his neighbour’s coal rattles in the barrow. Then he drops his own load. His breath is hot against the cloth. A gasp and he stoops again. The only respite comes in the intervals between barrows, after one has just been trundled away and the others are still not back from the hospital boilers. A couple of roughnuts watch him closely. They aren’t put off by his reticence. A man’s story precedes him. ‘They reckon you were giving it to some little Froggy sheila.’ They might reckon but they don’t know. They watch and wonder. A big lump like this could pack a punch. ‘You ought to go to the pox doctor.’ Harry knows he mustn’t bristle. ‘They send a bloke home don’t they?’ ‘Not any more they don’t.’ ‘Well, that’s a shame.’

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If he has managed to deflect their curiosity, it can only be temporary. But for now they discuss the generalities of pox – symptoms, prophylactics, sure-fire cures – until the first of the barrows rumbles on the path. They bend again, scooping coal. At night the twenty-odd men in his hut escape communality by burrowing in their blankets. They dream aloud. He hears them laughing, bickering, whimpering, masturbating. He himself has no sexual feelings, regards it as an easily broken habit. His body feels old and misused and undeserving of the benevolent touch he remembers. To think of her is to wound himself, deliberately. Darkness and the embrace of blankets persuade him his misery is private. Briefly he is unaccountable to the daytime regime. He cries. He tries to imagine a comfortable future and can’t. The thought of returning to Australia is abhorrent: his small town gutted of anything valuable, the whole country tyrannised by patriotic committees. He couldn’t survive there. She couldn’t survive. It would be wrong to ask her. Britain is a possibility. He has certain rights. As a native speaker he could make his way, though as a country it doesn’t inspire him. One big poorhouse, according to George in his dotage. He will put it to her, if ever he gets the chance. She must decide. He suspects it will be France. Her natural choice, the safest, the one by which she ventures least. And he has to concede that even in ruins it has its attractions. As a foreigner he would enjoy a freedom from social expectations. As an ex-serviceman, a man who came to fight for

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France, he would be well-regarded. But he knows too that he would be hopelessly dependent on her – assuming she would have him. There are many reasons why she might not. There are waking reasons and sleeping reasons. In one particularly vexing dream he searches for his fictitious brother, or for the injured soldier – can’t be sure – within the tent wards of the hospital. He’s compelled by an urgent and guilty desire that he should be recovered, recognised, acknowledged. The beds are packed with crumpled men, each hiding in a sort of feeble terror beneath his sheet. They turn their faces from him, as if he means them harm. Nevertheless, he goes from bed to bed tugging and tearing at their linen. He wrestles with their tenacious hands, which seem to be identical to his own. There’s always the same scarring, a speckled thinning of the skin from burns he received as a child. He doesn’t think much of this until he’s confronted by a woman. He understands that it’s Colombe, though in disguise, wearing the face and the nun-like wimple of a nursing sister whom he’s noticed once or twice at the Red Cross canteen. ‘It is impossible,’ she says in clear English. ‘I’ve watched you. You don’t care for him.’ Tried and condemned. She seems sad rather than reproachful. ‘Impossible,’ she says. He begins to protest. He tries to say his behaviour has not been characteristic, that he has not been himself. ‘You don’t care for him,’ she says. Such a short encounter, so uneventful! Yet when it comes back to him in the morning it’s a jab in the heart.

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He’s bewildered and irritated, ready to dismiss it as a random shuffling of anxiety. Nevertheless, the dream-woman’s observation that he didn’t care for the soldier is undeniable. He resented his intrusion. He wished him far away. He wished him dead. Is this so reprehensible? He grows angry at the idea that in not caring for the soldier he failed himself. But who is there to quarrel with? Something of this spills over into his days – not anger, not hatred, but a feeble refinement: distaste. The initial pleasure of hearing his own language has vanished. He discovers that for him a little company goes a long way, and that after a day or two he doesn’t like the men with whom he works. He doesn’t like their grinning prurience or the smell of their bodies or their clannish lingo. It has always been an ordeal, this mucking in. And now he has lost all patience. He spirals into self-doubt. Is it true, then, that he’s incapable of fellow-feeling and compassion? That he doesn’t respect or trust his own kind? Indeed, himself? Is this what she saw? He blames the inertia of his thirties, the insular habits that accumulated like a white crust. And going back further, there’s the desolation of his household after Sammy died. There’s his willingness to be cosseted in his mother’s grief, so that he became a half-living memorial to his father. There’s anxiety and distrust at school, and distances maintained, and before that, Christopher Duncan. This name, uttered in the tumult of his head, still makes him flinch. He can’t re-experience his original longing. It’s dead. What

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remains is the referred pain of his own fear and unkindness. Bad thoughts. Debilitating thoughts. Follow them back far enough and he will arrive at a chimerical Eden, an infantile golden time when he supposedly was generous and affectionate, when he made friends easily and offended no one. This is where the worthy Harry Lambert is situated – interred, sealed deep in the crypt of decades past. He knows the danger of self-pity, the familiar paralysis. He’s sick with the waste of years, the running, the hiding, the withdrawals and desertions that began long before France. He sees no good in what he’s been. There’s an almost religious lunacy to his penitence. He must be saved and made new. He can’t do it alone. He must have an idol, an external promise of strength. This is how he conceives of Colombe Adele. An infinitely open heart! A last hope! Sometimes this seems excessive and absurd, but he’s too much in need to wholly deny it. When they tie him to the pole a second time he welcomes the pain as right and just, not because he has defied the army, but as a mad restitution for the suffering he’s caused Colombe. Right until the last hour of his sentence he doesn’t know what is to become of him. He wields a shovel, helping to resurface a road in a far corner of the camp. The lorries roll in and drop their ballast and he labours distractedly, constantly looking about for someone to come and rescue him. It’s possible he’s been forgotten, or that his papers have been lost. These things happen. But eventually, after they’ve quit for the day and begun the slow jog back to the

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prison, he sees Corporal Maitland from the bakery. It seems they’re prepared to have him back. The provost looks over the authorisation. ‘So you want Pokey Lambert?’ This is what the men have taken to calling him. ‘Not a question of want,’ says Maitland. ‘Bad luck. He’s all yours. One less for me to worry about.’ Ten yards down the road, while the prisoners retreat in a bobbing mass, Maitland drops the pretence of hostility. ‘Where the fuck have you been, Lambert? Dipping your wick by all accounts.’ Harry shrugs. How many times must he go through this? Fortunately the corporal doesn’t demand a reply. A bit of a joke, young Maitland, irrespective of the stripe. Harry tries to like him, against the grain. It’s empathy by rote. He’s determined to rebuild himself. Whether he ever sees Colombe again, he hankers after worthiness. He’s caring for Harold Lambert. They enter the bakery compound shortly before Parade, when the men are shambling back from the ablution shed or idling about the fronts of the huts. Their weary faces are mostly unknown. There are others he has almost ceased to know. ‘Lambert, you dirty bastard!’ someone shouts, a welcome of sorts, but without great surprise or emotion. Morning has him back in his old bakehouse. The men are new to the work, recently transferred in from other units. The section leader has only a few days’ experience more than the others, and is quite prepared to defer to

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Harry, who cajoles the battered oven and shifts the loaves to counteract the uneven heat. That the first batch comes out a uniform brown without a blackened corner or topcrust is considered miraculous. They ascribe his success to ‘tickling her right’. A shy and almost respectful ribbing. Testing the waters, he suspects. Or is he unduly touchy? In any event, his spirits are high, soaring on the aroma of hot white bread and his resolution to be worthy. He’s too busy to look forward or back. In cutting the dough, in paddling the portions into shape, there is a familiar peace. Yet by the time the dixies of stew come around at midday he has done a great deal of oblique thinking. He has a course of action. He must make a serious attempt at French. Attack it systematically. If he can get hold of a dictionary or a good grammar he’ll make it the centre of his day. While his hands are busy his mind can be elsewhere, learning to grasp those slippery half-formed sounds, the nasal vowels, the consonants that fall off the end of words. And if he can find a French speaker, someone with a little more knowledge than himself, or even the raw interest, the task will be easier. Inevitably he thinks of Bunter. Although he hasn’t returned to the bakery, he could be working somewhere else within Base Depot. But the new men have never heard of him. Herb Grinter thinks he’s in Belgium. Corporal Maitland, whom Harry finds eating alone on the steps of his bakehouse, spits a mouthful of gristle on the ground. ‘Fritz got him,’ he says. ‘Dead?’ ‘That’s the word.’ ‘Official?’

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‘I don’t know. Dead is dead. I heard it somewhere. If it wasn’t true they wouldn’t have said it.’ While Harry doubts Maitland’s logic, and is therefore impregnable to sadness, he does accept that Bunter is out of reach. Does the corporal know anyone else who might speak French? ‘Only about ten million Frogs.’ Very droll. The book proves easier. One of the men in his section has a little volume called When In France. He says he’s opened it maybe four or five times. Gave it up as a bad joke. It’s Harry’s for the taking. Another man, a former choir boy, asserts that French is just bastard Latin. Complete gibberish. A third offers to sing ‘Mademoiselle from Armentières’. So much for linguists. It’s not long before Harry’s regarded as an odd bird. In his determination to learn the language he loses his sense of the ridiculous and becomes quite impervious to criticism. When the black labourers who come to remove the nightsoil are replaced by a contingent of German prisoners he sees an opportunity. Gaunt and hungry-looking, the enemy complete their work in regulation silence then spread out on the grass ten yards apart, no two men together, to wait for their guards. The Australians in the southernmost of the bakehouses keep a distracted eye on them, sometimes shouting derisive remarks or throwing ruined loaves. The Germans turn away or look down at their feet, never stooping to accept the bread. During smoko Harry wades out into their midst.

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‘Any of you blokes know French?’ he asks, a considered and canny question, because if a man answers yes he must also have a knowledge of English. The Germans remain pointedly silent.

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thirty-six

Talk of an enemy collapse is there throughout the summer and into autumn. The British newspapers that circulate around the huts celebrate great Allied victories. The prison cages swell with captured Germans. But while Harry recognises that the Allies are certainly creeping forward, a hill there, a village here, he won’t yet acknowledge a pattern, unless it is the usual pattern of vain striving, miles gained, miles lost, and lives buried in the dirt. In spring it was the Germans who were advancing. Who’s to say there won’t be another reversal? Even so, their captain assures them the war is won. He says he sympathises with ‘those ardent chaps’ who have repeatedly applied for transfer to a fighting unit – fully twenty-five per cent of the bakery’s strength – but that for now he can’t accede to their wishes. And in the interim they shouldn’t devalue their work. In increasing output to new levels and continually improving quality, Field Bakeries South is helping to deliver the blow that will end the war.

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‘Not long now, men. The end is in sight!’ The ranks are accustomed to hearing the truth bent in the interests of morale. No one bothers to inquire after the mythical twenty-five per cent. But Harry can see that for some the promise of impending victory has a fairytale appeal, triggering suppressed thoughts of loved ones. He won’t allow himself to be seduced, especially as he’s aware the weeks have eroded his image of Colombe. Her face has disintegrated into elements, exaggerated features like a Punch drawing: tufted brows, eyes that are both shrewd and comic. Similarly her body. Sometimes he can picture her swollen ankles, less often, and with less assurance, a brown nipple and spreading areola. Sometimes this image is corrupted by memories of his dead mother. Yet his longing remains. And while he’s had no word, and is still denied leave, it’s a miserable and tenuous longing, far less defensible than his mess-mates’ desire for home. Of necessity he embraces the tedium of his ten-hour shift. He keeps his hands busy and occupies his mind with the utilitarian phrases of When In France. The words have a female cadence – words he can claim and own. Une poire pour la soif. A pear put aside for the time of thirst. Reserved. He discovers a wisdom in the French vernacular he has no trouble accepting. Conceptions of frugality, caution, foresight. Of making provision. When peace comes, filtering through the ranks on an ordinary working Monday, it’s almost incidental. No one is particularly exuberant. In the evening he finds the atmosphere of the mess-hut somehow morose and resisting,

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as if no one can quite shake off the habit of scepticism. In faltering spurts someone picks out a tune on a mandolin. Men huddle to gamble, or sit alone to write letters. The war is over, Harry promises himself. To give this meaning he must refer to Colombe. Her name produces a mellowness in his bones. And observing the introspective faces around him, he doesn’t feel quite so separate or unusual. He sees the urgency and doubt of minds prying open their secret caches of love. In anticipation of learning where she is, he joins the ranks of the letter-writers, drawing from under his bed a wad of crumpled drafts. His most recent effort is a shambles of cross-hatching and scribble – provisional phrases and words copied from his growing collection of French textbooks. He flits through it then starts again on a fresh sheet. He proposes marriage in the first paragraph. No preamble – straight to the point. He apologises for the hardship he has caused her and promises he will make it up. He mentions his material assets in Australia. (In an earlier version he had put a figure on them.) He says he will live wherever she chooses and take on whatever work he can find to support her. In his concern to be taken seriously and thought reliable he uses the word love very sparingly. Love, desire, need – these are tacit, else he wouldn’t be writing. Half an hour’s striving gives him a single page. In review it’s disappointing. His enticements seem lame and pedestrian, yet he can’t bring himself to be more expansive. He would like to mention his relative youth and good health but can’t without implying she is old and on the verge of

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infirmity. And with no one to correct his grammar he worries in case he’s made some farcical slip. So he pares it back harder and harder, until it reads like a telegraph: sincere regret . . . beg your forgiveness . . . our mutual happiness . . . There is a syllogistic logic here, a progression from premises to the desired outcome. But in turn this too seems inadequate. And pompous. He’s at a loss. There are too many omissions, a tangle of feelings too fierce and melodramatic to be put down on paper. He thinks: You are my survival. Nine days before Christmas, more than a month after Armistice, and yet another Sunday, he walks alone across the Pont Corneille and catches a tram for Bapeaume. If his superiors had been more obliging and granted him leave on a weekday he might have ferreted about for information in the law courts or the prefecture. Instead he’s forced to take a less direct approach. By an unpleasant coincidence the weather is similar to what it had been nearly a year before when he first came this same route with Bunter, who is now officially listed as dead. He tries to mourn for him, but finds it difficult. An unconscionable part of him regards Bunter’s death, and his own survival, as a vindication. Back home in Footscray, in Bunter’s family church perhaps, his name will be inscribed on some honour board, like those of the men who died in South Africa when Harry was young. Hardly a consolation. Snow – first of the season – spatters the windows. Footpaths, awnings, roofs, hats and bare skulls; all are powdered

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white. Soldiers turn up their collars while draughthorses quiver and snort opaque breath. And all at once the French women are dowdier; bulky and inelegant in scarves and heavy ankle-length skirts. Yet the restaurants are crowded, stuffed to the doorways and glowing yellow like Aladdin’s caves in the dull afternoon. If he notices a change in the city, it’s the resurgence of civilian traffic – sputtering motors, buggies, tradesmen’s carts, even a few well-cloaked cyclists. At the Place Cauchoise the tram takes its usual turn out through residential Bouvreuil, past rows of high tenements that have the same grim aspect as respectable Melbourne. Apart from two American soldiers, his fellow passengers seem to be French. Whole families travel together. They are in public mode, all in their best clothes, the children rocking back and forth as they stand between their parents’ knees, and looking resigned to dull visits with relatives. At the terminus at Bapeaume he steps down into the cold and begins the trek to the Cordier property. After five minutes he’s puffing, the blood coursing in his head. After fifteen he has left the paddocks behind and taken the slippery wagon track into the forest. Buffered by the trees he’s less bothered by the sting of wind. He sees the wood smoke of Montigny through the gauze of bare timber, then as he comes out into the clear, the village itself, quiet and snow-bound, but distinct and central in its few square miles of fields. He thinks of the soldier, whether he’s still in the district, whether he has fully recovered. Even if Montigny isn’t his village, Harry imagines he must come from a place very like it – small, insular, protective of its sons.

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From half a mile the wind carries a chill of accusation, so he’s pleased to turn north, skirting the forest, then trudging between now-familiar farmhouses. Ahead lies the copse of poplars he looked out on for more than two months. As he catches glimpses of the house between the bare branches – dark masonry sliced vertically by pale trunks – he shivers with apprehension. The thatch is caked with snow. Smoke drifts from one of the chimneys: a fire in one of the upstairs bedrooms, his bedroom. He fights an unreasonable excitement. She can’t possibly have returned. By now the family will have reclaimed their house, and even if she has received a lenient sentence or been released prematurely she will hardly have been welcomed back here. Coming out from the poplars, he crosses the road and drags open the gate. He glances at the nursery yard and sees that someone has made a start on the rubbish. Earth, prunings and pieces of broken terracotta have been raked into a heap. Involuntarily his eyes seek out the bricks where the soldier fell – bare, swept clean and indistinguishable from their surrounds. He knocks at the front door then steps down. He hears unfamiliar movements, the sound of strange feet, and is disappointed though he knows his hope was absurd. Eventually a man appears, old at first glance, short, barrelchested. He wears elastic braces to keep his trousers up. His moustache is feathery and drooping, a greying tobaccostained yellow. In his best rehearsed French Harry asks after Madame Jacotot. The man raises his chin in contempt. It’s then that Harry realises he’s younger than he’d first supposed, young enough to have been a soldier.

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‘I’m looking for Madame Jacotot,’ he repeats. ‘St Lazare,’ says the man, and shuts the door. In camp Harry tries without success to find the name in a guidebook. He assumes it designates a prison, or perhaps a religious institution, or simply a village too small to rate a mention. And now he has to wait weeks for his next leave to try the government offices. Having passed beyond the first flush of his idolatry, he questions whether his patience and determination are enough, whether he’s simply too ignorant and the world too intractable. But he can see no future without Colombe, no happiness, only a terrible reversion to the shrivelled and disappointed existence he led back in Australia. Already the troopships are steaming for home. He has told Maitland that he wishes to stay on till the last, and has put it in writing for the captain to consider, but eventually there will be a final ship. It’s Maitland who offers a little hope, not because he wants to, but because he has a problem. ‘Swap you a Fritz,’ he says. Harry is cautious, expecting a catch or some tasteless jibe. He waits for it to unfold. But no, Maitland wants to offload a German prisoner, one of several recently assigned to his team. As an experienced baker, and once more a section leader in his own right, Harry has several prisoners of his own to supervise, along with responsibility for the vocational training of a batch of Australians. Neither group shows any aptitude or enthusiasm. Everyone is waiting to be repatriated.

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‘My Fritz are good-oh,’ says Harry. ‘What do I want with yours?’ ‘He speaks French like a native.’ ‘So what’s wrong with him?’ ‘Nothing wrong with him,’ says the corporal. ‘You just think I should have him.’ Despite his earlier attempts to find and befriend a Frenchspeaking German, Harry senses trouble. But ultimately he doesn’t really have a choice. When he goes to investigate he finds a slightly built man in his mid-twenties with cropped black hair and olive skin. Unlike his compatriots, whose movements are ponderous, he divides the dough with maniacally active hands. Aware he’s being scrutinised, he looks up at Harry and winks – actually winks! – a greeting that causes one or two Australians to shake their heads and another to smirk and an irascible giant called Alf Barnes to scowl and mutter, ‘Jesus-Fucking-Christ!’ Harry takes it all in; can see precisely what he’s walked into, and why Maitland should be concerned. But he keeps an open mind, reasoning that perhaps the corporal’s Fritz isn’t to blame. Perhaps a different group of men won’t find him so irritating. Maitland motions to the prisoner to drop what he’s doing, and Harry accompanies them from the pavilion to an out-of-the-way spot behind the sergeants’ mess. Suddenly struck by the need for rudimentary civilities, Maitland confesses he can’t pronounce the prisoner’s name. ‘Atzert,’ says the German. Not quite by the book. He really should divulge his rank, though it’s clear from the remnants of his uniform that he’s not an officer.

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‘Atzert is your Christian name?’ Harry asks. ‘The blokes call him Gyppo.’ Maitland can’t see why the prisoner should be displeased. ‘My given name is Moritz.’ His English is effortless; his accent soft. ‘Must be a stroke of luck for you, working here.’ ‘It’s preferable to being shot at.’ ‘Clean work at least. There are worse places. You’re getting plenty to eat?’ The corporal has to laugh. ‘Fuck me, Lambert, if you’re going to propose to him you better go down on one knee.’ Atzert looks calmly at Harry, waiting for the upshot. Eventually it comes: ‘I believe you speak French.’ Atzert says yes and continues to wait. ‘I’m learning the language,’ Harry confesses. ‘Blundering along alone I’m afraid. I don’t pick things up very quickly.’ Still Atzert refuses to put two and two together. Harry doesn’t know whether it’s caution or hostility. ‘What he’s saying,’ Maitland jumps in again, ‘is he wants you to scribble obscenities to his missus!’ ‘I want nothing of the sort!’ Harry snaps. For a moment the German seems to step back in appreciation of a potential squabble. But when it doesn’t eventuate he remarks that what Harry needs is a tutor. It’s not exactly an offer but Harry’s relieved. ‘Perhaps you can help me with something.’ ‘Perhaps.’ ‘St Lazare.’ ‘I don’t follow.’

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‘Where is it?’ ‘In Paris. Not a very nice part. I used to go there sometimes before the war.’ For Harry this is enough. He can’t ask whether there’s a jail at St Lazare, not in front of Maitland, but he’s satisfied. ‘Have you any particular preferences to where you work? My bakehouse is the second last – number eleven. I don’t want to take advantage – I mean we can’t help our respective situations – but I’d be very grateful . . . ’ ‘Good then,’ says Maitland, ‘all settled.’ At first Atzert is a model worker, quiet, busy and efficient. The rest of the shift is largely indifferent to him, one Fritz being much the same as another, but the men know his presence there is down to a personal whim on the part of their section leader and keep their ears cocked for anything new or interesting in the vaguely ridiculous saga of Pokey Lambert. Instead their exchanges are a disappointment: French lessons, mostly informal but sometimes with reference to a book. It’s noted how tactful Atzert is in correcting Harry’s accent, and how after a time Harry becomes loud and excited; how he beams and laughs and demeans himself like a big dim-witted dog. But he’s oblivious to their disgust. He’s absorbed, listening for the direction of sentences, for the breaks and stops and reversals that lie beneath the specific meanings. Instantaneously he grasps and releases the known phrases and hurries on to the next and the next, only to find himself suddenly lost and gasping for a demystifying word of English, which Atzert provides sparingly, both to

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challenge Harry and because he obviously delights in leading him a dance. Not that Harry minds. He is flushed with ongoing achievement, thinking French is like drowning, and that the secret must be to keep your head submerged until you forget whether you’re below or above, and water tastes as good in your lungs as air. Longer and longer he remains there. And in the process he learns about Moritz Atzert, or at least the skeletal points of his life, and likes him for his enthusiasm, which might simply be naked conceit. Since the age of nineteen he has travelled on business for the family firm. He knows about leathergoods. He knows about Italy, England and France, and about films. Alone and at a loose end in London he saw Oliver Twist three sessions running. He loves Alma Taylor. He loves Chrissie White. He loves English women . . . The effort, the pleasure, the anxiety, all give Harry a headache. By midday he’s in need of respite, and at the risk of offending Atzert goes to eat with the other Australians, who pass a few remarks about his pet German but are essentially laconic in their humour, and less of a strain to keep up with. For several hours in the afternoon he works silently, avoiding Atzert’s too-quick eyes. Then shortly before knockoff, just as the guard detail arrives at the gate to escort the Germans back to their barracks, he asks the question he’s harboured all day. But evidently Atzert feels he’s been snubbed. He delivers his information with matter-of-fact indifference to Harry’s sensitivities. Yes, at St Lazare there is a prison for women. Yes, quite right, a civilian prison. Murderers, thieves, the lot.

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Though irritated, Harry has to admire his stubbornness, his absurd expectation of friendliness and personal fidelity even from his enemies – as if the massed armies of a dozen nations and five years of slaughter don’t come into it. He imagines he will have to win him back slowly, but to his surprise it takes only a few solicitous words the following morning. Obviously delighting in the role of tutor, Atzert reveals he has prepared a series of written exercises. Harry appreciates the hours of thought involved. And seeing as his German has expressed such a willingness to help, he takes advantage of a lull in the work to lead him away to the privacy of one of the woodsheds and show him his own unsatisfactory letter. Atzert is puzzled, less by the peculiar French than by the tone. He berates Harry in stern and gravid English. Does he really think he can woo his mademoiselle with this mean little note? Can’t he see it reads like a transaction between corn merchants: six bushels of companionship, five of material security, nine of bodily comfort? And though it mightn’t be polite to pry, what is this ‘great wrong’ he has done her? So Harry is forced to tell. ‘Well,’ says Atzert, ‘let’s begin again.’ The letter he constructs is florid and ambitious. It begins ‘Ma chère Colombe’ – an endearment Harry has never uttered in his head or aloud, let alone on paper. The first paragraph is devoted to how sincerely he loves her, the second to how morbidly ashamed he is that she should be punished for his transgressions. If only he hadn’t broken into her house, if only he hadn’t traded on her kindness! If only he’d heeded her repeated advice to return to his unit!

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‘But she never said this!’ Harry objects. ‘It’s called chivalry, my friend. Don’t you want to show her in a good light? It’s not simply a matter of pleasing your mademoiselle. You’ve got to please her keepers too.’ Which Harry has to concede is true. An antagonistic official might murder his letter, or withhold it from Colombe altogether on the grounds they are parties to a crime. And he has to admit that in other respects Atzert’s judgement is masterful. The letter is less a proposal of marriage than a plea. Pity him, forgive him, love him! One word and he will be happy for life. Harry can imagine her scoffing amusement, and her pleasure. He wants to laugh too. He’s often heard it said the civilian post is a lottery, even when you provide a correct and precise address – which he hasn’t. So in the week after he despatches his mail he feels quite helpless. And beyond all the barriers and unfavourable contingencies is the enigma of Colombe herself. He doubts she will be bitter. His fear is she will regard him as foolish, as something come and gone, a costly episode. All at once he regrets the glibness of Atzert’s style. Certainly she will laugh; certainly she’ll be flattered and charmed – but can she say yes to such a letter? At least his own proposal was in earnest. She wouldn’t have laughed at that. She would have totted it up to see what it came to. But all this might be immaterial, because when he examines their weeks together he’s distressed by their inequalities and suspects there is something infantile in the late-born intensity of his feelings. He perceives her as more level-headed, less compelled. She’s older. She’s been

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a wife, perhaps several times over. She has had children. He remembers that second time she came to his bed. She had been miserable with loss. He tasted her desperation and supposed it was excitement; heard her body shouting, ‘To hell with frugality and making endless provision!’ While waiting for her reply he receives a shrewdly offensive letter from Lew Broughton. Somehow Lew has got wind of his disgrace. He begins with family news; how everyone is well except young Dickie, who has nevertheless survived serious wounds and an attack of typhoid, and is recovering in a Cairo hospital. But the larger part of the letter concerns Harry’s interests. Lew confides his sadness at seeing the bakery closed. In contradiction to his usual line, he asserts that the family business is ‘an honourable edifice to return to and stand behind, one’s best face to society’. By this Harry understands he will find himself under siege. If this hint isn’t enough, there’s a blatant lecture, a dour examination of the freedoms and opportunities for happiness a man has a right to expect. ‘Whether you think so, Harry, we are all curtailed for the common good. A fellow has as much liberty as his nation allows. Depending on the times, he can steal a little something for himself here and there. He can withhold a few shillings that he is lawfully bound to give or leave his neighbour to do what he himself is bound to do, but he can steal just so much before there is no nation and no government . . . ’ But Harry shouldn’t abandon himself to remorse. He shouldn’t imagine he’s alone and unloved. Everyone is eager to have him home. The family is ready to fold itself around his errant life.

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How appealing! Lew couldn’t have honed his words more perfectly to achieve the opposite result. The blood thumps in Harry’s head. He thinks: Meddling little bastard! Who does he think he is? He knows he shouldn’t feel cut off. He has Maggie’s letters as a counterweight. She demands explanations – why the delay? Why is he still absent when he should be on his way home? There is also a card from a soldier nephew – very warm and chatty. Possibly the Lamberts do regard him as a problem to be managed, but they’re big enough to stare down any unpleasantness. They’re being good; extending a hand. Yet he ripples with anger. It’s almost blissful. Fuck their festering little town! They can practise their magnanimity on someone else! Fuck compulsion! Fuck sacrifice! Fuck Australia! The alternative, to stay here in France, has a liberating momentum. Wipe the past! Care nothing for what anyone thinks! It has the feel of something settled and decided. Whether it will be a feat of defiance or a brave new genesis depends on Colombe. He continues to hope. Her reply comes after three weeks, arriving in the company mailbag along with the letters of parents and sweethearts and legitimate Australian wives. The handwriting is quite accomplished, certainly not hers. There are three pages, which he tries to read without Atzert’s help, relying on his improved French and a dictionary. He recognises formal good wishes for his health. She makes no reference to her circumstances. Nor to his proposal, unless he counts her warning that he isn’t to be concerned for her welfare. Not to feel responsible does she mean? After this

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the going gets difficult. He claws at a knot around the word blesse. Signifying injury? Implying blame? He flicks through the dictionary, eventually alighting on what seems to be an English equivalent: injured party. She has no desire to be regarded as an injured party. She will get by. She has always gotten by. She has family. They will help her. He begins to plummet. What family? Where have they been? How can they be suddenly anxious for her welfare after having left her to fend for herself? Nowhere is it clear. The words have ceased to run. They coagulate. They guard their sense. They revert to mere loops and scratches of pencil. He leaps ahead, anticipating the worst, the bare assertion: I cannot marry you. He doesn’t find it. That at least is heartening. Nevertheless, she mentions an estranged husband. To the best of her knowledge he is still alive. Is this such an impediment? Surely divorce is possible. Can the stigma be so terrible? He resents her failure to give him an unequivocal answer. She has risked herself; she had gone to jail for him, but can’t discuss the subject of marriage. She seems to say she’s past the age for such things, but the language is impenetrable. Does she mean she’s not free to marry, or that she has no wish to? He pounces on Atzert the instant he arrives from his barracks. The German sees that he clings to a slim hope and reads rapidly. He looks up, offers a sympathetic grimace and shrugs. After a start, a visceral jolt, it occurs to Harry that he hasn’t properly prepared himself for failure. Exile might be bearable, even desirable, but how is he to survive the loss of his imaginary places?

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‘She is not asking to be persuaded?’ ‘It’s possible.’ To avoid the wind they sit together in the lee of the flour shed. Atzert translates patiently, paragraph by paragraph, pausing between each small revelation. It seems Harry has missed important points. ‘She says she has received letters from her family. She says she is not alone. You are not to worry for her.’ ‘What family?’ ‘She says family. That’s all.’ ‘Her husband?’ ‘No. He has been gone a long time. She says she is past the age for husbands, old or new. By the time she gets out she will be older still. Five years, my friend. She has another five years. She is not asking you to wait. She is letting you know.’ ‘Five years!’ ‘It seems very harsh.’ ‘They could release her earlier.’ ‘Perhaps. She does not mention it. She tells you the worst.’

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thirty-seven

Julie Keely 12 Morah Street, Parkville, Victoria, November 21, 1968 Dear Terry, I was so pleased to see you there. Thanks for coming all that way. It was a wonderful surprise after you said you had no heart for it.You mightn’t think so, but the research was as much your achievement as mine. Without your help I doubt I would have got far at all. I’m sorry we only had a few minutes together. It was a very demanding day. I’ve come to the conclusion that old people are bullies. I’m not whingeing. I knew what I was letting myself in for. I know you say the old men give you the willies too, but they’re worse with me – always wary, and so bloody condescending!

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I received commendations for the New Guinea display. The truth is I did very little. They brought in their odds and ends and I arranged them on the tables with a few notes. Those guys know their stories and I didn’t interfere. I must say I’m not overly thrilled by Bren guns and grass skirts. But the old boys were happy. Everyone loves attention. It’s not as if I neglected them. But really the whole thing was for the first war.That’s where I transgressed. I won’t pretend I didn’t know what I was doing.You don’t muck about with ‘the one we lost’ – not if you know what’s good for you. Old Harry’s untouchable. He holds us together. Mum said I got high marks for presentation. They liked the photos. If they were still smiling it was because they hadn’t read the texts. People are so lazy. I think I mortified old Dickie. Did I tell you I wrote to him two more times? I asked him several blunt questions. No reply.Then on the day he avoided me like the plague. They tell me he hobbled around the Harry stuff with an approving eye until he saw the words ‘Pokey Lambert’.They say he went very pink and spent the rest of the day denying he was the source of my lewd stories. A bit sad really. It’s possible he was more worried about this than my suggestion that Harry had deserted. If only your dad was still with us. He’d have settled the question. Several people said, ‘That old scuttlebutt!’ One of the aunts took me aside and said, ‘You shouldn’t listen to anything the McArdles say.’ No one referred to you specifically, certainly not me. But she had a sixth sense.

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My guess is you’ll be pleased to know the old rivalry is going strong.You McArdles! Always sniping! Your friend Uncle John wasn’t having any of it. He thought I was out of my depth. Silly little Julie. I kept my mouth shut.You learn what’s best with men like him. He asked me to pass on his thanks to you for your ‘gesture’. Couldn’t bring himself to speak to you directly. I guess by now your ‘Ashes’ are back in Lorna’s cabinet, safe from thieving hands. He asked whether I knew anything about the Frenchwoman’s letter. He seemed to think I had it. At any rate he was suspicious. I told him I’d found no trace of it. I didn’t mention your dad but I said it had probably never been more than a rumour, a furphy put about by Lew Broughton. John imagined I was trying to put one over on him. He was quite annoyed. He told me very hush-hush that Lew Broughton had paid for a translation, which John’s father had seen.You can imagine the tenor – a work of literature, so sad and poignant, the little French girl with her fatherless bubbies telling how Harry’s dying wish had been to have his remains sent back home, because he missed and loved us all. I didn’t contradict him. I thought maybe one day he’ll read the booklet and see what I think about old Harry missing us. I don’t say it outright but the implication is there. Harry didn’t like us. If he did he’d have come home. On the subject of Lew Broughton I had a satisfying conversation with one of the Rushburn Lowrys. I could tell you how they’re related but you probably wouldn’t be interested. I very shrewdly got her rattling

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on about Harry’s window, the one sponsored by Lew Broughton, in the C of E church. It’s more thrilling than it sounds, because she was under the misapprehension that it commemorates Harry’s death in action. I said, ‘But Harry Lambert died ten years after hostilities were over.’ ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Lew Broughton stuck by the Lamberts.’ She roundly approved. Someone had to shore up the family reputation. To my mind it’s a miracle there’s anything true and reliable left to gather. It’s all deliberately topsy-turvy. Of course Mum’s transported. There was such a good turnout! You were being funny when you said I should have left Harry in his black hole where he belonged, but it’s a fair summary of their attitude. They wanted a nice commemoration. I don’t know what I intended, definitely something more cerebral and searching than the occasion allowed.They wanted a good bloke, one of their own. But I doubt I upset their dinners too much. Most of them will go to their graves with their old opinions intact. Not that I pretend there’s all that much you can know about a person forty years after his death. The connection is imaginary and artificial, even if you go looking without preconceptions. I don’t think we can tell anyone what to think of Harry Lambert. I suppose a man who runs away must be a dissenter. Maybe that’s what I like. I don’t know. I’m glad you came, Terry, with love, Julie

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thirty-eight

Let me get up at my own pace. The cabbages can wait. Sister understands. Too quick and I get dizzy. You don’t want me seeing black again. I pray it’s not getting worse. I just want to be well when he comes. He makes such an effort, always coming from so many kilometres, I should be well for him. The first time I had a howling toothache. It’s a tradition between us. I’m always sick on the crucial day. Maybe I get nervous. But the tooth was real. I didn’t want to see him. I looked and felt awful. He stood there very neat and upright in the visitors’ room. I was startled. It’s amazing what a careful shave can do. Probably I was intimidated. We sat at the last table in front of the plaster Madonna. It was like she was eavesdropping. I could see him thinking: She looks dreadful. He swears he didn’t, but it was obvious. I felt dreadful. He says I frowned a lot. He says I looked like I wanted a fight. I wanted my tooth to stop hurting. I gasped when he spoke. He was so proud of being able

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to communicate. You know he couldn’t speak a word. At Montigny it was like a dumb-show, the two of us pulling faces and waving our arms. Now he wouldn’t shut up. He was so pleased with his new faculty and wanting congratulations. It was for me, he said. I said you don’t learn to talk to please someone. You learn a language because you have to. My tooth was killing me. I told him I’d been waiting months for the dentist. I had an appointment for the next morning. It was a big thing, maybe bigger than seeing him again. That was our reunion: we talked about my tooth. We talked about the gas and how it never stops the pain. I did say, ‘Why haven’t you gone home?’ He said, ‘You know why.’ He meant his proposal. We left it there. I didn’t believe in it. I still think it’s crazy. I say, ‘Oh, you again!’ Even now – as if I’m astonished to see his face. I suppose I am. I don’t know what’s in his head. But he keeps showing up. I used to think: Well, that’s it, he’s losing interest, he won’t come any more. But no, there he is again, grinning like a fool. Let me stand a minute. I need time to adjust. My blood moves too slowly. You have to wonder what kind of man would forsake his family. His parents are dead, he has no children, but he sometimes speaks of nephews and nieces. A whole tribe. They’ll all want a piece of the cake when he dies. The law’s different in his country, so he’s not obliged to leave them anything. He tells me there’s property. He owns it outright. No wonder the family is resisting. I would too. I tell him property should stay with flesh and blood – to prove I’m

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not mercenary. Fortunately he doesn’t listen. They know about me. In his letters I am the ‘French Wife’ – as if it’s all legal and fixed and Leon isn’t all too alive and well. He makes out we’re set up in a nice little cottage like birds in a nest. Maybe it will happen, who knows? You want to believe these things. You’ve seen his drawings. He makes it look beautiful – smoke from the chimney and tulips at the door. Maybe it’s real and maybe it’s not. How can you tell with foreigners? You have to ask whether there’s something wrong in his head. Who does he know in this country besides me? He has no friends, no true friends. Oh, he thinks they’re friends. He’s always saying how people have helped him. I hear where he’s been, all the good people he’s met, this job, that job, how much money he’s saved. Oh, he’s overjoyed. He makes me ashamed. And he looks so healthy, so brown in the face and arms. He’s dropped five or six kilos. He had hips like a woman. No, that’s an exaggeration. I’m cruel. I like him better without the uniform. Now it’s a nice brown suit. I don’t know what I did to become such an attraction. When I was young, yes, there might have been reason. I don’t complain. Sister Stump-Foot is besotted. ‘How is your Henri?’ I told her Henri because it’s easier. If I can’t say his name properly, how can I expect anyone else to? She lets us have longer than we’re entitled to. She sees this ring and believes it means something. I confessed it was only gold-plated, not the real thing, but for her it’s a legal token. He says he’s got her a New Year’s gift, to keep her happy. I tell him who matters.

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I wish I could get shifted to the machine room to make him something. You feel bad when you can’t give anything back. I don’t know what he has for me, something nicer than those glazed dates he brought in April. He has started teasing me. Yes, teasing. He lets me think he’s a walking disaster. There’s always someone taking advantage. Some woman. He’s not stupid. I laugh, but I don’t feel equal. When I feel rotten I look at his drawings. I think: A house of my own, and laugh. I’m laughing at myself, because I’m happy to believe anything. The nearest I came was the place at Montigny. I don’t count my husband’s house, which was never mine. I want a bed by the fire like I had at Marsaults’. I shouldn’t say what I want. It’s asking for trouble. But I like his drawings. They’re terrible. He has no skill whatsoever. Skill would spoil everything. You wouldn’t see his kind intentions. It began as an accident, something he did to soothe me after I argued with my sister. They arrived the same day. He saw us fighting. Not an out-and-out fight, just hard words. It was about an old dress, my mother’s confirmation dress. I’m the oldest so it’s always been with me. It’s perfectly safe. They’ll give it back when I go. But she wanted me to hand it over, because her daughter is doing her catechism and because I’m in here. If she’d asked respectfully, yes, I might have obliged. But to demand! I said I’d burn it. I said I’d burn it so the kid wouldn’t have to suffer all that rubbish. He didn’t hear, but he saw. And this after I’d been telling him how devoted she was, how she had a good husband and a farmhouse in Caen with a room set aside for me. It’s

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true. There’s a room. She wouldn’t refuse me, even now after what I said. They’d take me under sufferance. I’ve never asked. But he saw how it was. That’s when he drew me the cottage. He made it up so I would feel better. I’m sure there was no such place at the time. He drew ripe apples hanging on the trees, and funny looking geese in the field. I said, ‘What are these meant to be?’ ‘What do they look like?’ ‘Ostriches!’ He laughed but I couldn’t. I was afraid I’d cry. He had seen everything.

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thirty-nine

Up from the south a couple of weeks earlier than usual in this, his sixth European winter, Harry trudges between the hedges, his clogs slurping in the mud. He leans forward, straining, his improvised harness pulling tight against his shoulders and chest. He drags an iron-wheeled cart that he bought cheaply in a village near Le Mans. He has dragged it for more than sixty miles, steadily heaping it up with building materials and necessities. It squeaks with each revolution of each wheel, making a see-sawing phrase that after such a distance no longer sounds discordant. Beneath the tarpaulin there are cans of plaster and lime, bolts of cloth, tools, new workshirts, dried beans, potatoes, boxes of galvanised nails. There is window-glass, cutlery, china, a camp oven, a dozen sleeping tulip bulbs. In the February cold the hedges are dormant but nonetheless dense. Evergreen gorse and broom give substance to the enveloping net of grey twigs so that he has only a keyhole prospect of the way ahead. The bracken droops with

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the weight of dew and ice. Hoof prints brim with water and drowned worms. As the track rises he grunts and breathes noisily through his mouth. His knees jolt and ache and his hip grinds bone on bone, none of which spoils his mood of homecoming. He remembers that first winter when he began to wander – a plague-time of scarcity and improvisation, of hard labour, of influenza and lone women and vanished men – and swells a little with the achievement of survival. Step by slippery step he comes home to Normandy. The village he approaches is a diminished place, one of those purely agricultural settlements that the previous century’s railways never reached. Even before the war it was marooned in the deep countryside between centres of greater prosperity. The government institutions have vanished – no post office, no school. There isn’t even a shop. According to Victor Vanangot, widower and one-time hotelier, there are fewer than fifty residents left, mostly old like himself, and just two families of child-rearing age. Yet when Harry has stayed here in the past (routinely for three years now, always in the warm months) Victor has taken pleasure in a minor renaissance: a recent and prolific crop of boys. He swears that since the war no daughters have been born there, only sons. Harry regards it as an extreme instance of what he has seen elsewhere. Villagers in every region comment on the abundance of small French boys. They tell him God is restoring the balance, restocking the arsenal. They’re very pleased and proud, and think that he, as a man who crossed the world to fight for France, must be too.

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Not surprisingly the main and only street is empty. The front room of Victor’s house, where once his wife served cider and simple meals, is full of hay, small bundles hand-bound and packed tight. Wood smoke wafts from his squat stone chimney. In winter Victor lives beside his fire. But Harry drags his musical cart past his gate, past the small orchard of naked apple and pear trees, to a second falling-down cottage, also owned by Victor. It is a mere hutch, just two rooms, and with the glassless windows boarded up and the decaying thatch tented over with snow-decked canvas, there is little sign of the care he has lavished on it. Nevertheless, the heavy work is done – a faltering wall demolished and rebuilt with new oak beams, rotted flooring and roof timber replaced, the chimney mantle reinforced with a steel lintel. The renovated front door, installed last summer, is Lincoln green, startlingly bright. Harry has built for keeps, as George did at Albion. Leaving his cart on the protected side of the building, he unlocks the front door. The interior is dark and icy, smelling of mice and wet straw. He brushes dust and last season’s wood shavings from the kitchen table, which has the solidity of a butcher’s block. He notes the spread of damp down the walls where the canvas has leaked. In places the clay is deeply cut and runnelled. Yet he’s confident of beating out the winter gloom. He imagines the sun beaming in through his newly purchased glass; his little oven radiating warmth. It’s a reverie he’s loath to break, but knows that Victor has probably heard the squeak of his cart and poked his nose out to investigate. It would be unneighbourly to keep him waiting.

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Harry doubles back to his gate, then slips along the side path beside a bed of hoary cabbages. Victor is there at the back door. ‘So the swallow returns!’ he says. ‘And before his time.’ ‘Yes, out of season.’ Apart from great fleshy hands, Victor is lean and wiry with an austere hairless skull. His small eyes seem to sink deeper each year, as if his intelligence is being slowly grown over by bone. He brings Harry inside and hunts a pair of cats from his bed so that he has somewhere to sit. He pours him a fortified wine. ‘At last you have come to settle down with us,’ he smiles. ‘No more running about the country. When will your wife come? She is well? They have given her something for her blood?’ Harry has kept very little from Victor. The old man knows about her breathlessness and periodic fainting, that recently she confessed to having turned sixty. He knows, too, why she is locked up. Yet he has misconceptions about the itinerant life, and chooses, perhaps ironically, to conceive of Harry as a philandering rogue finally tripped up by love. In this light the Australian’s desertion is excusable. What red-blooded man wouldn’t jump the fence for a good woman? Victor says he’s come at an opportune time. Sunday will be an occasion. The church has been unlocked and cleaned. A priest is on his way. ‘A christening,’ Harry guesses. ‘Two,’ says Victor. Harry knows the family. He has picked their apples.

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They will expect him to attend. It is less an obligation than a mark of his acceptance. ‘You have mail,’ Victor announces, going to the chest beside his bed. He produces a thick brown-paper parcel, six by eight inches, addressed in English to Mr H G Lambert c/o Vanangot. He explains that he hasn’t been to town since early December, but doubts there is anything else. Harry recognises Maggie’s handwriting. Victor hovers, hoping his visitor will open the parcel in his presence. Harry has never owned to expecting money from Australia, but Victor has a nose for such things. He is disappointed to see the parcel slipped away for later. Feigning indifference, he airs his views about developments in the nearby market town: a war between Titans of the cattle trade, new saleyards, money from outside flowing like water. He has no interest in Paris, nor in world events, except in that he hates the Boches and wants them whipped. By and large, the nations are as good or as bad as the individuals he’s known. Australia is a paradise second only to France. In the afternoon he helps Harry unload his cart and pack everything away in the cottage. He and several others are interested in the Australian’s purchases. They are fascinated by the German-made oven and want to know whether it is a battle souvenir. Harry assures them it isn’t. They inspect his crockery, noting the chips and cracked glazes. They see that his uncut linen is new but that his blankets are British army issue and old. He doesn’t look like a man coming into money. And he stubbornly refuses to read his letter. Finally they crowd around as he digs and weeds a little strip of

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earth by the front door. They squat beside him as he plants his tulips, which they regard as a soft-headed extravagance. But as a foreigner he’s forgiven such foibles. ‘For his bride,’ they murmur, almost as if he’s not there. Not until dusk does he manage to shake them off. He treads the high road up past the church. The doors are pinned open, and he glimpses a pair of old women adding fastidious touches to the silver and brass. Their voices are muffled by the stone walls, finally escaping soft and feather-like into the mist. Adjoining the church is a lightly forested paddock visible through a break in the hedge. Someone has cut and gathered timber into several big wigwams supported by skeletal trees. A tethered bull, stumpy and undersized by Australian standards, grazes nearby. He’s intrigued by the terrible burden of its great balls dangling in the grass, and by the tuft of ropy hair like a Roman fringe between its horns. It hasn’t the look of a serious animal. He opens his mail and finds a batch of conveyancing documents. There are also letters and keepsake cards that he wrote to his parents as a boarder in Melbourne, and several photos – a studio portrait of the Samuel Lamberts, another of the McArdles, an unprofessional shot of Maggie sitting casually with Harry on the morning of her wedding day. He notices that she has excluded all the less personable Lamberts – most pointedly her mother. Nor is there a likeness of Lew Broughton. He marvels at how astutely she has sorted through his cupboards and drawers for exactly the items he would have chosen himself. But her accompanying letter lacks warmth. It teeters

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between displeasure and resignation: ‘So, Harry, you have cut yourself free. I can’t see your purpose. You have a screw loose if you think foreigners are any better than your own kind.’ Yet she has done everything he asked. She has organised the sale of his High Street property. The figure strikes him as somewhat low, but after a quick mental translation of pounds into francs he’s satisfied. No longer will he be obliged to go south chasing winter employment. Colombe will be astonished by the amount. He looks up through the broken hedge. A troop of boys creep towards the tethered bull. From tree to tree they advance, moving silently over pasture that is still sheeted white. Armed with sticks, they respond to the hand signals of their leader – back, hold your ground, to the left . . . The bull nuzzles down through the snow to graze. It has no inkling. Maggie gives thorough attention to banking. She will not risk sending a cheque by post. He must choose a reputable English bank with branches in Australia and also on the Continent. He suspects she wants to prolong his dependence on her. It is like a last hanging on of hands. She gives a short account of her family. Sons finding their feet in business once more after the war. Her father George regrettably worse than ever in a Bendigo hospice. Uncle Lew busy with the Returned Men. But just as he begins to grow impatient with her guarded tone he discovers something beautiful: a short note in passable French intended for Colombe. Most probably her Melbourne-educated husband has helped. The sentiments

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are generous. She calls Colombe not cousin but ‘sister’. She says she speaks for all the family in wishing them many good years. She writes a postscript in English, for Harry alone: ‘You know I loved your mother better than anyone. It hurts me to see the place closed up, both of you gone. Now it is filled with strangers.’ There are shrieks of titillated laughter from the paddock as the boys bolt into the mist. The startled bull dances back and forth, stamping and shaking its Roman head. Its mournful eyes are suddenly alert, awake to the mischief that surrounds it. The church bell rings very early, as the travelling priest has a busy schedule, and after performing the christenings must be on to another village. In the night Harry was aware of the touch of snow on thatch, a suppression rather than an absence of sound. And now when he steps out with Victor into the light, he sees the result, snow lying like talc, thin and dry and glaringly white. They are among the last to climb the hill. The community isn’t big enough to fill the building. There is a crowd at the front, while the back pews are mostly empty. He’s reminded of the Pariah Service in Rushburn, particularly as they sing without accompaniment. He sings heartily, like the boy he was forty years ago. While the villagers might feel enhanced by the war veteran and respectable Christian in their midst, he’s aware of nothing so much as his contented insignificance. In the French language, as in English, he sings about redeeming blood,

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because his individual opinions don’t matter much. The old ghost still exists – that seemingly passive spirit who lives behind other people’s impressions – but Harry no longer chastises him. He participates to the degree he is capable of. The priest cradles the child, dowsing him over the font. The mother weeps in the belief that ultimately her child is beyond all harm. Harry appears to lend his weight.

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Also by John Charalambous

FURIES Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize Best First Book (South East Asia and South Pacific region) Nicky’s a survivor. She’s lived through a difficult Greek childhood then spent years teaching in a small-minded country town after the failure of the utopian community where everyone, including her artist husband, walked away. Her greatest challenge now is Imogen, whom Nicky has raised as a daughter since her parents abandoned her as a baby. Now Imogen is fifteen and cutting loose, and Nicky wants to give her better opportunities for the future. Furies is an incisive exploration of contemporary family relationships. ‘The fusion of these two awkward, dependent souls drives this first novel along brilliantly.’ Weekend Australian ‘Charalambous has [Thea] Astley’s ability to find the soft centre of a hard story. Like her, he is compassionate towards the trapped.’ Sydney Morning Herald ‘John Charalambous … brings a distinctive new voice to Australian literature.’ Venero Armanno ISBN 0 7022 3455 9

Other fiction by UQP

THE ITALIAN ROMANCE Joanne Carroll

The Australian Women’s Weekly Great Read ‘Full of emotion, drama, romance and moments that will break your heart, this book is simply unforgettable. Bravo!’ Lilian has to make the hardest decision a woman can make. In 1940s rural New South Wales, she is forced to choose between her baby daughter and the love of her life, an Italian prisoner-of-war. Decades later, Lilian has made a life in Italy as a novelist. But an unexpected encounter with Francesca, the daughter she left behind, sets in motion a new chapter in both their lives. Set between Italy and Australia, The Italian Romance examines the choices we make and their unexpected consequences. In this best-selling novel about families and the different faces of love, Joanne Carroll reminds us what it is to be human. ‘… a work of great style as well as an enthralling and romantic (in the very best sense) novel.’ Australian Book Review ISBN 0 7022 3513 X

THE BUTTERFLY MAN Heather Rose If Lord Lucan escaped his past, what was his future? In November 1974 a young English nanny named Sandra Rivett was murdered in London’s West End. Her employer, Lord Lucan, was named as her attacker. Lord Lucan disappeared that night and has never been seen since. Henry Kennedy lives on a mountain on the other side of the world. He is not what he says he is. Is he a murderer or a man who can never clear his name? And is he the only one with something to hide? Set in Tasmania, Africa and London’s Belgravia, The Butterfly Man is an absorbing novel about transformation and the lengths to which we will go to protect the ones we love. ‘This is a convincing, haunting novel about deception, guilt and regret.’ Sydney Morning Herald ‘… an enthralling investigation into the nature of truth and the lies and deceptions with which we live. Intriguing as the real-life events of the Lucan story are, Rose transforms it into something far more substantial.’ Weekend Australian ‘The Butterfly Man is a fine read by a writer whose star is insistently rising.’ West Australian ISBN 0 7022 3535 0

SWALLOW THE AIR Tara June Winch Winner of the David Unaipon Award for Indigenous Writers ‘When Billy and me lost our mother, we lost ourselves. We stopped swimming in the ocean, scared that we’d forget to breathe. Forget to come up for mouthfuls of air.’ When May’s mother dies suddenly, she and her brother Billy are taken in by Aunty. However, their loss leaves them both searching for their place in a world that doesn’t seem to want them. While Billy takes his own destructive path, May sets off to find her father and her Aboriginal identity. Her journey leads her from the Australian east coast to the far north, but it is the people she meets, not the destinations, that teach her what it is to belong. In this startling debut, Tara June Winch uses a fresh voice and unforgettable imagery to share her vision of growing up on society’s fringes. Swallow the Air is the story of living in a torn world and finding the thread to help sew it back together. ISBN 0 7022 3521 0