The Climate of Courage. Jon Cleary

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СКАЧАТЬ the war, when the latter had worked for the Australian Broadcasting Commission: not much more than casually, but enough to know that Jack was something of a rake. “Easy chookies, as Dad calls them, were always your meat.”

      “In this particular instance,” said Jack, “I am trying to be impersonal. I am looking at the picture from a distance, as it were. I have a great interest in the future of Australian womanhood.”

      “He’s a nephew of Dorothy Dix,” Bluey Brown told Dad Mackenzie.

      “Go on?” said Dad Mackenzie. “Legitimate or illegitimate?”

      Jack hadn’t heard the interruptions. “I think a leavening of the Americans’ preoccupation with sex, their wonderfully uninhibited attitude towards it—at least while they’re abroad—may do something towards breaking down the broad, if not admitted, puritanical streak in our national make-up.”

      “I haven’t detected any broad puritanical streak in you,” said Bluey. “Turn around and let’s have a look.”

      “I have done my best to eradicate it,” said Jack.

      “You’ve been eminently successful,” said Vern, then turned round to see Charlie Fogarty grinning at them. “Hallo, Charlie. What the hell’s that you’re drinking?”

      “Shandy,” said Charlie. “Three parts lemonade, one part beer. It saves the barmaid embarrassment.”

      “Meaning?”

      “Some of them don’t know if they ought to sell an aborigine grog, even if he is in uniform. This saves ’em having to ask the boss if it’s all right.”

      Charlie Fogarty was the best-looking aborigine Vern had ever seen. He was tall and broad-shouldered and his smile was as wide and bright as sheet lightning. His voice was soft and musical, the voice of a man who belonged to broad sunlit plains and singing streams; it wasn’t an apologetic voice, but Vern couldn’t imagine its ever being dogmatic or insistent. He knew Charlie’s story, it stretched behind him like a travelogue of Australia. The mission in the Northern Territory where they had made him conscious of his magnificent black body by putting it in white man’s clothing; the cattle station in western Queensland; the abattoirs in Brisbane; the flour mill in Sydney; the army camp at Ingleburn—he was more Australian than any of them, but he was also more alien.

      “I wonder how they’ll treat you coves after this is over?” said Vern.

      Charlie smiled again, not a trace of bitterness in his dark shining face. “I’m thinking of going back to the tribe. Then we’re gunna bring in a Black Australia policy and kick all you white bastards out of the country.”

      “Speaking of bastards,” said Dad Mackenzie.

      They all turned, and for a moment Vern didn’t recognise the burly figure in the tight blue suit pushing its way through the crowd towards them. Then suddenly he remembered the figure as it had been in khaki, remembered the arrogance and stupid discipline and petty spite of ex-Major Caulfield, and he knew this was going to be an awkward moment.

      “Hallo, men,” said Caulfield, and the smile on his face was as shaky as a scaffolding in a gale. The big red face with the dark freckles on the forehead and across the broad nose did its best to look friendly; but, as one, the five men turned back to the bar, picked up their drinks and stood in silence. Farther along, two other men from the battalion, Joe Brennan and Mick Kennedy, interrupted their close confab and stood looking silently at Caulfield. Vern, looking down at his drink, knew that Caulfield could hear that silence more than he could hear the hubbub of voices or the occasional shout.

      Caulfield stood there behind them for a moment and Vern could only guess at the expression on his face; then he said, “Ah, come on, let’s forget all about rank for just this once. Just call me Jim.”

      No one moved and Vern felt the prickle of embarrassment spreading through him: he had never had the defensive thick skin of a superiority complex. He was sensitive to other people’s feelings, even to those he disliked. He could feel Caulfield’s reaction almost as much as if it were his own when Jack Savanna turned slowly from the bar and said, contempt thick as spittle in his mouth, “Why should we call you anything?”

      Jack raised his glass, looking at it and not at Caulfield, took a drink, and just as slowly turned back to the bar. Then Bluey Brown said, “If I called him anything, it wouldn’t be Jim.” He smiled at Mabel, the barmaid, who stood at the taps just in front of them. “You wouldn’t like to hear me using bad language, would you love?”

      “Why, what’ve I done now?” Then Mabel caught sight of Caulfield clinging to the edge of the group like a giant limpet. “Hallo, is this another of your boys?”

      “No,” said Bluey. “He’s one of our bastards.”

      Then Vern felt the touch of his arm and knew what he had feared had come. “Hallo, Vern. How’s tricks?”

      Vern could feel the others waiting to see what move he would make. He was the only one who, as far as the Army was concerned, could meet Caulfield on a social level: rank called to rank, the only caste system, outside of money, that Australians had so far had to contend with. Vern remembered with what resentment the Australians had viewed the Officers Only signs outside the hotels in the Middle East, and now here was Caulfield trying to strike up a conversation on an Officers Only basis.

      “Hallo, Ape.” It was the first time Vern had called him that, the name the battalion had given him two days after he had joined it; Vern, with a thought for discipline, had never referred to Caulfield by that name even in private conversation with the other men. He stood there looking at Caulfield, wondering why the latter had deliberately walked into such a situation, then suddenly he knew. Caulfield took the insult without a blink, as if he had been expecting it and was prepared for it. He had been slapped across the face with the past and he had taken it without any of the violent outburst that might have been expected. Vern knew then that he was lonely. The man had been invalided home six months before, after the Syrian campaign, and he had found that it was home no longer.

      “Ah, we can let bygones be bygones, can’t we?” He licked his thick lips and smiled tentatively. “I’m another bloke altogether now.”

      “A leopard can’t change his spots,” said Bluey. “Neither can an arch-bastard.”

      “A very true statement, staff,” said Jack. “Your own?”

      “Just made it up,” said Bluey. “Inspiration.”

      Dad Mackenzie turned round and Vern was surprised at the fire in the heavy stolid face. “You were an officer and a gentleman, Caulfield, while you had a crown on your shoulder. An officer and a gentleman, by the King’s permission.” Dad Mackenzie’s grandfather had been a Glasgow Scot and his grandmother a London Jewess, and he’d inherited all the caution of both races. But he had still been one of those who had suffered at Caulfield’s hands, just as much as the reckless types like Greg Morley and larrikins like Mick Kennedy. There was no hint of caution now in Dad, just a quiet hatred that was more chilling than any display of anger. “The King doesn’t know you like we do. You’re not a gentleman, Caulfield, you’re not even an officer, because an officer is someone who deserves to be in charge of men. You shouldn’t even be in charge of dogs in the council pound.”

      There was another silence, then a drunken soldier stumbled out of the crowd and bumped into Caulfield. The latter spun round, anger in his eyes ready to СКАЧАТЬ