Forward, he whispered to himself, gathering his face into a smile that he understood was thought charming. Charge the windmill.
A conventionally pretty woman was waving a gloved hand in a conventional gesture that he knew was meant to convey a conventional glory chest of emotion: joy, ecstasy, relief—love, he supposed; fidelity vindicated, he feared. None of them meant much to him, for he was outside of it all. Though after the first few words he recognised her voice, the summer air seemed mild and empty and somehow disappointing after the steamy must of Asia, and even after they kissed he still couldn’t remember her name. Her lips seemed dry and disappointing—like kissing dust—and finally, thankfully, it came to him.
Ella, he said.
Yes, he thought, that was it. It felt more than rusty.
Oh—Ella.
Oh, Ella, he said more softly, hoping some other words that made sense of that name and him and them might stumble onto his tongue if he just said her name enough. They didn’t. Ella Lansbury just smiled.
Don’t say anything, darling, she said. Just don’t say anything bogus. I can’t stand bogus men.
But I am, he said, completely bogus. That’s all I am.
She was already smiling, that dull, all-knowing, knowing-nothing smile he was to find ever more unpleasant, those unexpectedly dry lips telling him that everything was arranged, that he was to worry about none of it. He recalled now that he had proposed to her in 1941 as a way of kissing her breasts. In as much as he could remember, it had been the final night of what would transpire to be his last leave with Ella before embarkation, and he could not stop thinking of Amy. To gain some relief from Ella’s constant questioning him as to why he had not proposed, to escape from his incessant thoughts about Amy and the guilt he felt in consequence, he sought to find his way through the complex maze that led into Ella’s cleavage and that demanded he put to her the ultimate riddle: Ella, will you marry me?
Hadn’t she known what he was really thinking? Hadn’t she?
There had been no oblivion in her breasts. Everything about Ella only reminded him ever more painfully of Amy. He had felt ashamed then, and worse now.
That’s why I love you, Alwyn, she said.
Alwyn? For a moment he had no idea who she meant. And then he remembered it was him. That too felt more than rusty.
Because you’re anything but bogus.
And in the way she had then embraced him, in a smother that was inescapable, all the people he met in the next few days similarly and unquestioningly embraced the idea that they were to marry—that there could be no question that an engagement made hastily in the looming shadows of war seven years earlier and his imminent departure overseas was now to be rushed to a conclusion that did not bear any reflection or second thoughts. In the intervening years he had lived several lives, while her only life—or so it appeared to Dorrigo Evans—had been devoted to an idea of him that he scarcely recognised. Occasionally he felt something within him angry and defiant, but he was weary in a way he had never known, and it seemed far easier to allow his life to be arranged by a much broader general will than by his own individual, irrational and no doubt misplaced terrors. His mind, in any case, he felt was a prison camp of horrors. He did not wish to give it any more weight than was necessary. He recognised the many people around him who were excited by his impending marriage as far more sober and sane than he, and he gave himself up to their sobriety and their sanity—so at odds with his ever-stranger thoughts—in the hope that they might draw him to a new and better place. In that childish way that was also part of his nature, he was inevitably attracted to the excitement of anything new and unknown, particularly when it was frightening. And because nothing frightened him more than the prospect of marrying Ella Lansbury, that is what he did three weeks later, in an alcoholic haze and a new suit that she chose and he forever after felt looked as affected as their wedding at Saint Paul’s Cathedral.
Even before they kissed, he once more forgot his name—he felt lost in her smell of powder—and then finally it came to him. Alwyn, yes, that was it—I, Alwyn, he said. He turned and looked at her, all made up and framed in lace and orange blossom, but he could see only the narrow face and that strange nose he had always found slightly repugnant and the high-arched, thin eyebrows, and he could find nothing attractive in her. Take you, Ella, he said more softly, and Ella Lansbury, soon to be Ella Evans, just smiled, lips slightly parting but saying nothing.