I’m sorry, John Menadue said to Dorrigo Evans. I went to see Mrs Les Whittle. I couldn’t do it again after that. Do you remember Les?
I do. He was a rather marvellous Robert Taylor in Waterloo Bridge. It was opposite Jack Rainbow, of all people, wasn’t it?
I don’t remember. You heard about his death?
No.
He ended up in a camp in Japan. Slave labourer in a coal mine under the Inland Sea for the Japs. They were starving. When the war ended the Yanks parachuted supplies into the POW camps there. US Liberators dropping forty-four-gallon steel drums chockers with food. They’re fluttering down—gentle as dandelions in summer, one bloke said. Blokes everywhere, excited. Then the forty-fours start landing, crashing through roofs, smashing up whatever they fell on. And a forty-four full of Hershey bars landed on Les. Crushed him to death.
He passed over a shoebox to Dorrigo Evans in which a few ribbons and medals rolled around. On the lid was sticky-taped the name and address of Mrs Jack Rainbow.
What sort of death is that? John Menadue said, his gaze fixed on the shoebox. A starving man killed by food? By our side? By Hershey bars. For God’s sake, Dorrigo, bloody Hershey bars. What do you say?
What did you say?
The right things. Lies. She was a very dignified woman. Small, chunky thing. But dignified. And she listened to me lie. And for a long time she didn’t say anything. Then she said, I never really knew him, you know. That’s the sadness of it. I would have liked to have known him.
Mrs Jack Rainbow lived near Neika, a few miles beyond the small village that sat in forest halfway up the mountain above Hobart. Overhearing Dorrigo Evans asking for directions, the barman introduced him to a small man who drove the Cascade brewery truck and was heading that way with a delivery. He could drop Dorrigo off and pick him up on his return home, two hours later.
A little out of Hobart, it began to snow. The truck had one shuddering windscreen wiper that cleared a small cone into a winter world where eucalypts and great man ferns heavy with fresh fallen snow leant over the road. The rest disappeared into white, and Dorrigo Evans found his thoughts following. He held a hand out and pushed his fingers into the air, trying to see if there was some other way he had not known of stopping that femoral artery emptying. His fingers pushed and shoved emptiness, coldness, whiteness, nothing.
Nippy, eh? said the brewery driver, noticing him moving his fingers. That’s why I have these, he said, lifting a wool-gloved hand from the steering wheel. Bloody well die of frigging frostbite otherwise. Scott of the bloody Antarctic, that’s me, mate.
They made their way up the mountain, through Fern Tree and past Neika. As they came down on the range’s far side, the brewery driver dropped Dorrigo Evans off at a farm entrance composed of two green lichen-bearded posts and a broken gate, which lay on the side of a snow-covered path. The farm looked dilapidated, and the whiteness and the intense hush that went with the snow made the place feel abandoned. Fences and hop frames were leaning, and in places fallen down. The sheds seemed weary; a little vertical-board oast house sagged.
He found her in a small concrete dairy shed, churning butter. She wore a cotton skirt decorated with swirling red hibiscuses and an old home-knitted woollen jumper that was unravelling at one elbow. Her bare legs were unshaved and bruised. Her face seemed to him only to hold broken hope, the line of her mouth a wobble that fell away at each end into thin lines.
He gave his name and his regiment number, and before he could say anything more she took him through her kitchen, which was warm from a fuel range crackling at its centre, into her parlour, which was cold and dark. She called him sir. When he said that wasn’t at all necessary, she called him Mr Evans. He sat in an overstuffed armchair that felt damp.
Across the hall and through an open doorway he could see beaded wainscoting painted bright cream enamel rising to the ceiling, and in front an iron bed. He hoped she had known some happiness in it with Jack. He imagined them together on such a winter night as would come in a few short hours, and them together warm, perhaps watching a bedroom fire dying into embers, Jack puffing on his Pall Malls.
12
WE HAVE FIVE children, she said. Two boys, three girls. Little Gwennie, she’s the dead spit of her father. The youngest, Terry, was born after Jack left and has never seen his dad.
There was a long silence. Dorrigo Evans had learnt in his surgery to wait for people to say what they really wished to say.
I couldn’t bear to be alone, she said finally. I have a terrible fear of being lonely. When he was away at the war I slept with all the kids. She smiled at the memory. Bloody six of us in the bed. Ridiculous, eh?