Us, said Amy.
Dorrigo ran a finger between his wet collar and his neck. The heat was impossible. He was breathing in long pants to try to get enough air.
How?
I don’t know, she said. How, what, I don’t know. But Keith knows.
Dorrigo understood that Amy would next say she would leave Keith, or perhaps that Keith had thrown her out. In any event, he and Amy would now start a life together. He understood all this, and he knew to this he would say yes—yes, he would end it with Ella Lansbury, and yes, he would immediately begin to arrange his affairs so he and Amy could become a real couple. And all this seemed to him inevitable and as it should be.
Amy, whispered Dorrigo.
Go back, she said.
What?
To her.
Dorrigo felt himself tumbling, returning into the oven-like office. He longed to talk to her anywhere but here—in a bookshop full of dust, at the beach, in the corner room he now thought of as theirs, with its peeling French doors and breezes and softly rusting wrought-iron balcony.
Go back to Ella, Amy said.
He replied as flatly and unemotionally as he could, breaking his words up so that the duty officer sitting behind him would not understand what he was saying.
What. Do you mean. Go back?
To her. That’s what I mean. You must, Dorry.
She didn’t want this, he thought. She couldn’t want it. Why then was she saying it? He had no idea. His face was flushed. His body felt too hot and too large for his uniform. He was angry. He needed to say so many things and he could say none of them. He could feel the mustard Masonite walls closing in on him, the weight of khaki around him, of discipline and rules and authority. He felt he was choking.
Go to Ella, she ordered.
His body just wanted to flee the awful oven-like room of the Nissen hut, to escape, to—
Amy, he said.
Go, she said.
I—
I what? Amy said.
I thought, he replied. That—
That what? Amy said.
Everything now was inverted. The more he wanted her, the more she pushed him away. And then Amy said that she could hear Keith coming, that she was sorry, that she had to go. He would be happy, she said.
And though he wasn’t happy, Dorrigo Evans felt the most unexpected and enormous relief. In a moment he would be outside the furnace of regimental administration, and he would no longer have the overwhelming confusion close to paralysis that Amy Mulvaney had brought into his life; henceforth, he would be able to live life on his own terms, in a straight and honest way with Ella Lansbury. He understood that he would be free, that he would no longer have to swim in a maelstrom of swirling lies and deceits, that he could with full heart devote himself to the task of finding love with Ella Lansbury. So, afterwards, he never understood why he then said what he did, only that he meant every word of it. That in one sentence he forsook that freedom and with it that reasonable hope of love being built.
I’ll be back, Dorrigo Evans said. When it’s over. For you, Amy. And we’ll marry.
He was aware it was a path to misery and even damnation. What a moment before he had never even thought about now seemed inevitable, and it was as if it could never have been any other way—their meeting in the bookshop of wild dust motes, the bedroom of flaking paint and lazy curtains ruffling in ocean breezes, a tin hut as hot as a smokehouse. The Bakelite earpiece was so wet with sweat that it slid off his ear, and it was a moment or two before he understood that she had hung up and possibly not heard a word of what he had just said.
He had to see her—that was all he could think. He must see her. In one of the two nights he had left, he would have to somehow steal out of the barracks and arrange a meeting so that they might talk.
You’re out of it, Evans, a voice behind him said. He turned to see a 2/7th staff officer with a clipboard.
Dorrigo’s mind was awhirl with how he would get out of Warradale without permission, where he would find a vehicle, where they might secretly meet.
The 2/7th CCS are catching the train to Sydney tonight. On arrival, you’ll be advised of what ship you’re embarking on. Final destination to be advised somewhere in the middle of the bloody Pacific. You’ve been ordered to cancel all planned activities and be prepared to leave at 1700.
Dorrigo’s mind was pitching and reeling. The import of what he was being told was beginning to sink in.
But—I thought it was to be Wednesday?
The staff officer shrugged his shoulders.
Bloody relief to get going, if you ask me, he said. You’ve got five hours. The staff officer raised his wrist and looked at his watch. Or less, he said.
And Dorrigo realised he might never see Amy again. And with this knowledge, he knew he would have to work, to operate, to go to bed and rise again and live, and now go wherever the war took him, without another soul knowing what he carried deepest in his heart.
27