Ella and others explained away Dorrigo’s new awkwardness with that great solvent of the time: the war. The war pressed, the war deranged, the war undid, the war excused. For his part, Dorrigo thought that he couldn’t wait for the war to arrive, if this was the alternative.
Finally he told Ella, as though it were simply an odd encounter, yet in his telling it somehow sounded to him like an infidelity. He felt an incommunicable shame. Why could he not want Ella? And in portraying this stranger as an overly intense, rather inappropriate woman, he felt that he had betrayed what had happened, as well as her and somehow himself. He finished the story with a shudder.
Was she pretty? Ella asked.
He told her she was unremarkable. Feeling he had to say something more, he said she had nice—and he searched for some feature he had no memory of, that could not be deemed inappropriate—teeth. She had nice teeth, he said. And that was about it, really, he said.
Fangs, more like it, said Ella, her voice a little high. And a red camellia in her hair? I mean to say. She sounds a monster.
And yet she hadn’t been. She had stood there and something had happened, something had passed between them, and how he wished it hadn’t. Because Ella now appeared to him as someone he had never known before. Her chatter that he had once found joyful now struck him as na?ve and false, the perfume she wore only for him now stank in his nostrils, and he longed to hurt her so she would leave.
Should I be jealous? asked Ella.
Of what? he said. I can’t tell you how bloody happy I was to get out of that bookshop.
A moment later he was kissing Ella. Ella was kind, he told himself. And somewhere within him he pitied Ella, and buried even deeper was an understanding that they would both suffer because of her kindness and his pity. He hated her kindness and he feared his pity, and he wanted only to escape it all forever. And the more he hated and feared and wished to escape, the more he kept kissing, and as their embraces grew more passionate, and as one moment passed into another and that day into the next, as life filled with life, his bleak mood passed, and he almost stopped thinking of the girl with the red camellia altogether.
He grew cheerful, and the furlough seemed at once to go too fast and at the same time be a never-ending swirl of parties, chance meetings and new acquaintances. Everyone seemed to want to meet Ella’s man, be they her friends or her parents’ friends. And in this way he met much of Melbourne society, and he came to see himself in their image—as a young man who would after the war rise to great things. And everything in this perfect life fitted so sweetly together—he and Ella, and Ella’s family, and their place in the world, which would shortly be his place also. And what had been so difficult with Ella now became unexpectedly easy: there were no longer any barriers between them, and it was as it had been before, perhaps even better, and he had completely forgotten both the bookshop and his own doubts.
On returning to Adelaide, he lost himself in the general staff work that he copyrightly so loathed. Outside a Nissen hut in the administration block of the Warradale camp—where he and some of the other medical staff had offices—dust blew in whirls around the parade ground, while inside, in the appalling oven-like heat, he tried to concentrate on the preparations for embarkation—supplies and equipment that were either non-existent or no one had thought necessary, along with a bewildering amount of paperwork of which he rarely saw the purpose or the end. Of a night there was the prospect of slightly cooler weather and parties with cold beer and iced rum punches, and he threw himself into them as well, seeking an oblivion that he sometimes found.
A postcard arrived from Keith Mulvaney, repeating his invitation to come and visit him at his pub, the King of Cornwall. A hand-tinted photo of the hotel featured on the front of the card, showing a grand, four-storey stone building—complete with a three-sided verandah on every level that looked straight out onto a long, empty beach—built, according to the card, in 1886. To judge from the boaters and moustaches worn by the men at the front of the hotel, the card itself was only a little more recent. Dorrigo misplaced it amidst the office files.
There was about everything and everyone a growing sense of frustration as reports came in of the Blitz in London, along with the first reports of the Australians in action in Libya against the Italians, yet they remained in camp in Adelaide. Rumours of impending embarkation and possible destinations—Greece, Britain, North Africa, an invasion of Norway—came and went.