Boy, she would say, come here, boy.
But he would not go. He almost failed his exams. He read and reread ‘Ulysses’. He played football once more, searching for light, the world he had glimpsed in the church hall, rising and rising again into the sun until he was captain, until he was a doctor, until he was a surgeon, until he was lying in bed there in that hotel with Amy, watching the moon rise over the valley of her belly. He read and reread ‘Ulysses’.
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
He clutched at the light at the beginning of things.
He read and reread ‘Ulysses’.
He looked back at Amy.
They were the first beautiful thing I ever knew, Dorrigo Evans said.
5
WHEN HE AWOKE an hour later, she had painted her lips cherry-red, mascaraed her gas-flame eyes and got her hair up, leaving her face a heart.
Amy?
I’ve got to go.
Amy—
Besides—
Stay.
For what?
I—
For what? I’ve heard it— I want you. Every moment I can have you, I want you.
—too many times. Will you leave Ella?
Will you leave Keith?
Got to go, Amy said. Said I’d be there in an hour. Card evening. Can you believe it?
I’ll be back.
Will you?
I will.
And then?
It’s meant to be secret.
Us?
No. Yes. No, the war. A military secret.
What?
We ship out. Wednesday.
What?
Three days from— I know when Wednesday is. Where?
The war.
Where?
How would we know?
Where are you going?
To the war. It’s everywhere, the war, isn’t it?
Will I see you again?
I—
Us? And us?— Amy—
Dorry, will I see you again?
6
DORRIGO EVANS FELT fifty years pass in the wheezy shudder somewhere of a refrigeration plant. The angina tablet was already doing its work, the tightness in his chest was retreating, the tingling in his arm had gone, and though some wild internal disorder beyond medicine remained in his quaking soul he felt well enough to return from the hotel bathroom to the bedroom.
As he walked back to their bed, he looked at her naked shoulder with its soft flesh and curve that never ceased to thrill him. She partly raised a face damasked with sleep, and asked— What were you talking about?
As he lay back down and spooned into her, he realised she meant a conversation earlier, before she had fallen asleep. Far away—as if in defiance of all the melancholy sounds of early morning that drifted in and out of their city hotel room—a car revved wildly.
Darky, he whispered into her back, as though it were obvious, then, realising it wasn’t, added, Gardiner. His lower lip caught on her skin as he spoke. I can’t remember his face, he said.
Not like your face, she said.
There was no point to it, thought Dorrigo Evans, Darky Gardiner died and there was no point to it at all. And he wondered why he could not write something so obvious and simple, and he wondered why he could not see Darky Gardiner’s face.
That’s flipping inescapable, she said.
He smiled. He could never quite get over her use of words like flipping. Though he knew her to be vulgar at heart, her upbringing demanded such quaint oddities of language. He held his aged dry lips to the flesh of her shoulder. What was it about a woman that made him even now quiver like a fish?
Can’t switch on the telly or open a magazine, she continued, warming to her own joke, without seeing that nose sticking out.
And his own face did seem to Dorrigo Evans, who had never thought much of it, to be everywhere. Since being brought to public attention two decades before in a television show about his past, it had begun staring back at him from everything from charity letterheads to memorial coins. Big-beaked, bemused, slightly shambolic, his once curly dark hair now a thin white wave. In the years that for most his age were termed declining he was once more ascending into the light.