OF A NIGHT, the heat seemed without end. But it was not like the summer of two years before. The war ground on, the families on the beach were mostly fatherless, uniforms rather than suits or singlets drank in the bar now, and their talk was full of new words, naming places hitherto unknown to either the front or back bar of the King of Cornwall—El Alamein, Stalingrad, Guadalcanal. It was the eleventh day of the heatwave, the King of Cornwall’s bars were as busy as on a pre-war Cup day. A man who had killed his wife with a poker blamed the murder on the heat, and Amy had just returned home early after cutting her foot on a broken beer bottle while taking an evening walk along the beach. She washed her foot in the bath, bandaged it, and came into the room of the hotel that served as their parlour to find Keith Mulvaney standing over the wireless as he switched it off.
That was a good episode tonight, he said as the static softly died. You would have liked it.
And Amy had once liked it well enough, but now she could no longer abide her husband’s domestic rituals, not least this, the silent listening to his favourite weekly radio serial—only broken by his match-striking and pipe-sucking, by the dog slobbering—and now she tried to escape it when she could. She hated the radio serial, his pipe, his old man’s movements; she hated the very air she had to share with him, the stifling, unbreathable, stinking air that she was drowning in every day.
Keith sat down in an armchair, Miss Beatrice hopped into his lap, gasping and slobbering as he tamped his pipe. The windows were all open but still Amy found it stifling after the sea breath of the beach. She sat down. Her foot ached. The evening sea breeze found its way in, but seemed only to heighten the smell of brilliantine embedded in the antimacassar, to enhance the odour of stale pipe tobacco in the russet armchairs, to remind her of the scent of stale dog that always made her want to walk straight back out and leave forever.
After the council meeting tonight, Keith Mulvaney began, and Amy looked down at the dog hair on the rug, fearing another tale of municipal drudgery.
The council clerk, Ron, Keith Mulvaney said. You remember Ron?
No, Amy said.
Of course you do. Ron Jarvis. You remember Ron Jarvis.
No.
Ron Jarvis was saying he had heard on the by and by that it’s very bad news about our boys in Java.
Amy looked up. Keith’s rictus smile betrayed nothing—a dreamy, half-demented look, she felt. Yet at that moment she understood he had always seen further than she had known.
I have never heard of Ron Jarvis, Amy said, though she could now put a small, whippet-like face to the name. Was Keith seeking to gloss over the worst with some good? He lit his pipe, chugged on it till the tobacco was a ripe coal, and then, his smile never once faltering, leant forward in his armchair. Miss Beatrice, sandwiched in his lap, squawked as she adapted to the billow of Keith’s belly.
I was asking, Keith Mulvaney said. Well, more than that. I said to Ron, I have a nephew, Dorrigo Evans—can you find out anything about him or his unit? Gave him details. Well, he came back yesterday. The thing is, Amy, the news is not so good.
Amy stood up, wincing, and hobbled over to the sash window.
No, he went on, not so good at all. Grim, really. Which is why it’s hush-hush. Very hush-hush.
She stood next to the window, and although the night air outside was of a lower temperature than inside, the exterior heat still felt a brutish, menacing thing. She could hear the disturbing small sounds of things drying, crackling, breaking—grass, wood, God knew what else. She could make out the corrugated iron on the roof far above aching loudly as it contracted from its sunlit excesses. She leant hard on her cut foot to make the pain stab hard up into her.
Grim? Amy Mulvaney said. What’s grim? They’re prisoners, we know that. And the Japs are brutes. But they’re safe.
The Australian prisoners in Germany you can correspond with. May as well be on holiday. But the POWs in Asia, well, it’s not such a pretty picture. There’s no news, no reliable testimony. There’s been no real word of them since the surrender of Singapore. Nothing has been heard of his unit for nine months. They think thousands of the POWs have perished over there.
Maybe. But there’s no proof Dorrigo’s dead.
They’ve been told—
Who told? Who said it? Who, Keith?
I . . . Their intelligence, I guess. I mean—
Who, Keith?
I can’t say. But Ron—well, he knows. People.
People?
Well-placed people. Defence Department people.
Keith Mulvaney halted; his mask-like smile seemed to be signalling something else—pity? uncertainty? rage? —and then continued with an implacable force.