The Climate of Courage

“My mother,” said Silver with mock reverence, but Greg had already left them, plunging back towards his bodyguard and the centre of interest. One of the bodyguard detached himself from the group and came towards them. He ignored Silver and looked up at Jack.

“What are you doing here?” He was a lieutenant with neat wavy hair, a soft round face and an air of authority he was just trying out. “This is a bond rally for business girls, not the Anzac Buffet. You won’t find what you’re looking for here.”

“When you speak to me address me by my rank,” said Jack, and wondered how many bonds it would sell if he smacked the lieutenant here and now. In the past he had several times felt like hitting officers, but had been restrained by second thoughts for which he had later despised himself. But if this officer went too far, there mightn’t be a second thought this time. “And speak to me again like you just have, and I’ll drop you down the lift well. Pips or no pips.”

The officer’s round face seemed to get even rounder, and his air of authority almost choked him. “What’s your name and Army number? I’ll fix you, my friend——”

Jack looked down at him from his full height, past the bristling moustache that stuck out like the horns of an angry bull. “Just step aside, mister, and allow me to escort Miss Bendixter through to join her mother.”

The lieutenant stepped back, his mouth open but empty of words, and Jack and Silver moved on across the room. “You would have hit him, wouldn’t you?” Silver said. “Or thrown him down the lift well.”

“Certainly. Don’t you think he asked for it?”

“I suppose so. But here! Do you always choose such crowded places for your assassinations? And when you’re with your lady friends? I felt a little like some floosie from Paddington”

He stopped and looked down at her. “For that last remark, I should drop you down the lift well. I don’t know why, but one thing I hadn’t expected from you was snobbishness.”

She said nothing for a moment, and he thought she was going to walk away from him. Then she put her hand in his and suddenly he was aware of a new intimacy between them. It was as if they were old lovers who had patched up a quarrel, and there was none of the awkwardness that would have been natural in view of their short acquaintance. “I’m sorry, Jack. That was something I should never have allowed myself even to think. My apologies to the girls in Paddington.”

Then a grey-haired handsome woman, better dressed than anyone else in the place, came steaming towards them. “Silver! My God, I thought you were never going to arrive!” She looked up at Jack. “So this is our war hero! So big and handsome, too! We should sell a hundred thousand pounds’ worth of bonds to-night. I wish all our heroes were like you. What did you win?”

“The Melbourne Cup,” said Jack. “Only man ever to do it. It’s always been won by a horse before.”

Silver patted her mother’s arm. “This is not the war hero, darling. This is Jack Savanna.”

“Oh, he’s with you?” said Mrs. Bendixter, and it was a long time since Jack felt he had been so neatly dropped over-board. Mrs. Bendixter looked about her. “Then where is he? You’d think he’d be on time, even if he is a hero. Have you seen Smithy?”

A small pony-faced woman materialised out of nowhere. She wore an expression of dedicated enthusiasm: the war had been the first cause big enough in which to lose herself. When peace came she would need rehabilitating as much as the men who had fought on the battle fronts.

“You wanted me, Mrs. Bendixter?” Even her voice was enthusiastic, a thin reedy trumpet blowing the national anthem. “Such a crowd! We should sell enough bonds tonight to buy at least one bomber!”

“All we need,” said Jack. “One more bomber, and the war is won.”

He felt Silver kick his leg and when he looked down at her she was frowning severely at him. But Miss Smith’s attention had been hauled in by Mrs. Bendixter.

“Where’s this war hero, Smithy? We must get started soon. We have to go on to a bridge party after this for the war widows——”

“Orphans,” said Miss Smith, glowing with charity. “And it’s not a bridge party, it’s a musicale.”

“A musicale? Well, that’s good. I can doze off. My God, I’m so tired!” Mrs. Bendixter put a hand to her forehead, suffering from war fatigue. “Well, where is this man? Hasn’t he turned up yet?”

“He’s here, Mrs. Bendixter! You’ve already met him. Sergeant Morley, the thin dark boy——”

“The boy with those lovely teeth! Why didn’t someone say so? My God, if I wasn’t here to organise things, they’d never get started!” Mrs. Bendixter turned round as a newspaper photographer came up. “Hallo, you’re from the Sunday Telegraph, aren’t you? Take me full face this time. Last week I was in profile and I looked like General MacArthur.”

Then Greg Morley came back, dragging a pretty girl with honey-coloured hair after him. “You remember Sarah, Jack! Look after her, will you? I’ve got to go up and do my act now.”

Then he had gone plunging away, surrounded by his bodyguard, the whole group moving towards a platform at the end of the hall, headed by Mrs. Bendixter with Miss Smith in close tow.

“Looks like Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort,” said Jack. “Is there no band?” Then he took Silver’s arm. “Sarah Morley, this is Silver Bendixter.”

Sarah smiled and shook her head in wonder. “Your mother puts up with this sort of bedlam often?”

“Every day,” said Silver. “She loves it.”

“So does your husband,” Jack said to Sarah. “Look at him up there. Clark Gable never felt more at home.”

Greg was up on the platform, beaming round at the thousand or more girls below him. Mrs. Bendixter was speaking, reading from a typescript that Miss Smith had shoved into her hands, but she was standing too close to the microphone and her voice was just wave after wave of almost unintelligible blasts. Nobody minded, because nobody had come to listen to Miss Bendixter anyway. And Jack somehow felt sure that Greg at the microphone would be as practised as any crooner.

“His life is complete,” Sarah Morley said. “He’s waited all his life for these past few days.”

“I suppose you’ve been besieged by the newspapers?” said Silver.

“And radio, and the newsreels, and the magazines, and war loan committees. It’s like being married to a public property, a new statue or something.” There was no spite or rancour in Sarah’s voice it was as if she had succeeded in detaching herself completely from the whole business. She looked at Jack. “The surprising thing is, he’s terribly modest with me about it all. He hasn’t told me a thing about what he did to get the V.C All I know is what I read in the papers. Was he really as brave as they said?”

“He was.” There was no mockery now in Jack’s voice: he had seen the incident and he knew Greg deserved the honour he had got. “We’d been held up for an hour by these two machine-gun posts. They had us as nicely taped as I ever hoped to be taped. We were stuck behind some rocks on the bank of the Litani River.” As he spoke the whole rocky sunbaked Syrian countryside came back to him, and he felt suddenly nostalgic. The campaign had been tougher and more important than the outside world, for some political reason, had been told. The Vichy French had fought with the same whole-hearted hatred as the Germans had in the Western Desert. But after the armistice, camped among the olive groves in the shadow of the sharp-ridged mountains, bathing in the warm Mediterranean, loving the dark-eyed Lebanese beauties, when one could get them away from their hawk-eyed parents. Syria had become the first piece of territory worth fighting for that they had so far met. Jack had liked Syria and one day hoped to go back. “I didn’t see Greg start out, I don’t think any of us did, but the next thing we knew he was across the river and going up the opposite bank. He took those two machine-gun posts on his own. He threw in grenades and then went in and used his bayonet. We were still on the other side of the river and it was like sitting in the dress circle watching a film, the sort of film that excites you but that you don’t believe in. When he’d finished he stood up, grinning all over his face just like he is now, and yelled back at us, ‘Righto, what are you bastards waiting for?’ It’s the first and only time I’ve ever heard a man cheered while we were in action. Yes, Sarah, he was really brave.”

“I’m glad,” she said. “It makes me feel better for him.”

“What do you mean?” said Silver.

“Nothing,” Sarah smiled, her grey eyes looking a little tired. “It’s been all a little confusing these past few days, married to Public Hero Number One.”

“It can’t have been much of a reunion for the two of you,” said Silver. “I mean, no privacy. So little time to yourselves.

“It’s been like spending our honeymoon on Central Station,” Sarah said. “I’m afraid to take my clothes off for fear the doorbell will ring again.”

“That wouldn’t worry Greg, would it?” said Jack. “He’d welcome them all, naked or not.”

Sarah nodded. “He was interviewed the other day by the Herald in his underpants. He was never what you’d call self-conscious. I must have had a too modest upbringing, like to be fully dressed in front of strangers. Anyhow, we’re escaping for a couple of days. We’re going up to Katoomba to-night.”

Greg had now begun to speak. Just as I thought, Jack said to himself. Bing Crosby, Clark Gable, Richard the Lion-Heart, all rolled into one. You’d think he’d been doing it all his life. Listen to the microphone technique, better than I could ever use it and I’ve had years of practice. Look at the charm flowing out like syrup out of a barrel. And just the right touch of modesty to season the devil-may-care attitude. I like the bastard and I admire him, but in a moment I’m going to be sick right in the middle of Mrs. Bendixter’s bond rally.

“I’m going downstairs for a breath of air,” he said. “I don’t want any bonds to-day, thank you.”

“I’ll come with you,” said Silver. “We can go and have dinner now.”

“What about helping your mother?”

“She won’t need me. It was just in case the hero was unmarried. Sometimes I’m expected to find him a girl, or in the last resort go out with him myself. But Greg’s all fixed.” She smiled at Sarah. “Have a nice second honeymoon, Sarah. No photographers or visitors.”

“Take your clothes off and leave them off,” said Jack.

Sarah smiled at them. “I’ll do my best. And thank you. I’ll say good night to Greg for you.”

They left Greg and his bated-breath audience and went down in the lift and out into Elizabeth Street. The air was pleasantly cool and the crowds in the streets had thinned out. A breeze came across the park, brushing the leaves like a restless child, and the moon struggled to free itself from a net of clouds.

“Sarah looked rather tired,” said Silver, “as if she’s been under something of a strain.”

“Living with Greg under any circumstances would be a strain on a woman.”

“Sometimes you sound as if you don’t like him.”

“I do like him.” He had come to cherish the friendship of several of the men in the last two years, particularly Greg and Vern Radcliffe. He had been self-sufficient before the war, having no close men friends and needing none. But of late, knowing these men in arms with him, exchanging confidences with them, having them sometimes depend on him, he had become aware of a feeling of selflessness that had given him more pleasure than he could remember in his dealings with men before. At one time he had laughed at the Australian religion of mateship, the spirit of fraternalism that was evident in so many movements in the country’s history. If he hadn’t yet succumbed to it completely, he had at least stopped laughing. He had recognised it as one of the few things of constant value in a world of changing values. “I have a great affection for the irresponsible bastard. But that’s his trouble, he’s too irresponsible.”

“You sounded like a good responsible type to-night, when you were going to sock that officer.” She stopped walking and stared at him, then she moved on again. “I believe you would have, too. You’re a queer mixture. Jack. Sometimes you sound too cynical to care about anything. And other times——” She made a hopeless gesture with her hand. “Remind me to think twice if ever you ask me to marry you.”

“I’ve never asked anyone yet,” he said.

“Oh, pardon me for being so forward!” She had regained her poise, was cool and slightly mocking again. “I’m so used to being asked, I just take it for granted.”

He grinned, losing his dark mood. “Let’s have dinner, before I take to beating you. I’m a patient man——”

“Like hell, you’re patient,” she said, and put her arm in his and smiled up at him: the dimples took all the cool mockery out of her face and made her young and lovely. He pressed her arm tightly against his body, feeling it like a soft link in a chain she was winding about him, and they walked up through the cool electric night, on the verge of love in the city that was just experiencing its first epidemic of lust.

When they had finished dinner she looked at her watch. “It’s still only twenty-past eight, a young night. What would you like to do now?”

“Go to bed with you,” he said, and somehow succeeded in making the words not so brutal and vulgar and selfish.

“With anyone else, that could have spoiled a lovely evening.” She reached across the table and put her hand on his: in the pressure of her fingers he could feel her desire answering his. “But I’m not going to any cheap hotel room. I’m not like my sister. I have a distaste for the sordid.”

“I have the loan of a flat at Manly.” He signalled for the waiter and tipped that surprised worthy as liberally as any American who had come into the place: everyone benefited from love, even waiters. “We’ll go down to the Quay and catch a ferry.”

He kissed her as they rode on the outside of the ferry, with the cool breeze stirring her hair like wisps of spun silver, and with a quartet at the rear of the ferry serenading the moon with the Maori Farewell. Behind them the city was dark in its brown-out, and as they crept out past the defence boom he had a sudden shivering feeling of unreality. His arm tightened about her.

“It’s hard to believe,” he said. “In Alex and Haifa and Beirut, yes. But not here.”

“I get scared stiff at times,” she said. “What if we should lose the war?”

The ferry was rolling now, meeting the swell coming in through the Heads. They were on the lee side of the boat, looking back up the moonlit harbour. Other ferries, dark as their own, crept like cats from shore to shore. Against the far stars the Bridge was like some great night-beast in mid-leap. Only an occasional shaded car light showed, peering furtively, then quickly disappearing. Then ahead of them they saw the dancing tops of the pine trees that identified Manly.

“Don’t let’s talk about losing,” he said. “There are more important things to think about to-night.”

“Spoken like a true man,” she said, and kissed him lightly.

Chapter Four

THIS TRIP to Katoomba looked as if it was going to be a waste of time. Greg lay on his back staring up at the ceiling and tried to remember what he’d imagined his homecoming would be like. Not the public homecoming, the photographers and the reporters and everyone congratulating him. That had been just as he’d expected it and there had been no disappointment there. But though he’d enjoyed it all, that wasn’t what he had come home for. He had come home to be with Sarah again, to revive the past and all he had remembered in the lonely nights overseas but the past hadn’t caught up with him and sometimes, like now, he felt as lonely as he had ever felt in the Middle East.

He lay beside her now and said, “What’s the matter, hon?”

“How do you mean?”

“You know how I mean. Have I got repulsive or something while I’ve been away?”

“No.”

“You used to like it once. What’s got into you?”

It was bright moonlight outside. A swathe of it, slanting through the window lay across the bed. Sarah too was lying on her back staring at the ceiling, unmoving as if asleep, and he had the feeling she was hardly listening to him. The side of her face towards him was in deep shadow and all he could see was the silhouette of her profile. She had a good face, especially in profile: there was character in the nose and chin, a hint that she could be depended upon.

“I’ve been wondering how to tell you,” she said at last. “Greg, I don’t love you any more.”

He heard her say the words quite distinctly and he knew what they meant: it wasn’t as if she had gabbled something in a foreign language. But he was so totally unprepared for what she had said, she might just as well have not spoken at all. He just lay looking at her, listening with the back of his mind to a woman laughing somewhere in the hotel.

Sarah turned her head on her pillow. “I suppose that’s a shock to you?”

He sat up, leaning on one elbow. “Don’t joke like that, Sarah!”

“I’m not joking, Greg.” Her voice was calm but definite: she had always known what she wanted to say. “I’m not in love with you any more.”

He reached up quickly and switched on the bed lamp. “When did this happen, for God’s sake? It’s bloody sudden. You didn’t say anything in your letters——”

“I didn’t think I should tell you while you were away. Somehow it wouldn’t have been fair.”

“Why didn’t you tell me when I first got back?”

“It would have spoiled the other business, wouldn’t it? The fanfare, the publicity——”

“Are you narked about that? Is that the cause of the trouble?”

“I was out of love with you before you won the V.C.,” she said. “I stopped loving you six months after you sailed for the Middle East.”

He dropped back on the pillow. He felt words bubbling up inside him, but he suddenly felt too weak to say them. Somehow they wouldn’t have meant anything. He just lay in silence, aware of his own heartbeats, till she spoke again.

“Aren’t you going to say something?” Her face was turned towards him, but he didn’t look at her. “Say something, Greg. Don’t just lie there.”

“What is there to say? You’ve said about everything there is. I could start swearing at you—that would come pretty easy. But what good would that do?”

He got up and walked across the room to the dressing-table. He picked up a cigarette packet but it was empty. He could feel his hand shaking as he dropped the packet back on the dressing-table.

“Have you any cigarettes?” Even now he had to depend on her. He wished he could have done without a cigarette, but he knew he must have it. “I’m right out.”

She took one for herself from the packet on the bedside table, lit it, then threw him the packet and the box of matches. He lit a cigarette, his hand still shaking, then walked across to the window. From here he could look down one of the many gorges of the Blue Mountains. The gaunt ridges were folded into a pattern of deep shadow and bright moonlight, and across the gorge a steep cliff-face shone like a wall of green ice. Down in the far valley the long beam of a car’s headlights came and went, tentatively, like a blind man’s tapping stick. The distant white beam only made the countryside more lonely.

“Hadn’t you better put on your gown?” said Sarah. “There’s no point in getting pneumonia.”

He had been so used to her looking after him, he picked up the gown now and put it on almost automatically. “Is there someone else? How long’s it been going on?”

“There’s no one else.” She was sitting up in bed now, propped against the pillow. One arm was folded across her breast, the hand holding the elbow of the other arm. She was smoking, much more calmly than he was, not attacking the cigarette as he was but almost enjoying it. “I’ve been faithful to you that way. Which was more than you were to me.”

He didn’t answer that.

“I’m sorry, Greg. Really. This hasn’t been much of a homecoming for you.”

“Yeah, that’s the bit that worries me, the spoiled homecoming.” There was sarcasm, but little edge of anger to his voice. He was still too let-down to feel anything but shock. His voice was carrying on automatically for him: it seemed to know the words for the part: “Do you want a divorce?”

“That would be the best thing, wouldn’t it? Though I don’t know what grounds we can have. Unless I leave you and you sue for restitution of conjugal rights, or whatever it is. Then the next step is desertion, I think. You can get a divorce on those grounds.”

“You’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you?”

“I’ve had plenty of time to think about it,” she said. “Eighteen months.”

He stubbed out his cigarette and went back and sat on the bed beside her. “Look, hon, are you sure you’re right about this? What makes you so sure you don’t love me? Maybe once you get used to having me around again, you’ll find you’re wrong.”

She drew on the cigarette slowly. The action suddenly made him angry, the one small thing needed to root him out of his shock, and he snatched the cigarette from her. He dropped it in the ashtray on the table beside the bed, grinding it savagely with the ball of his thumb. She looked at him for a moment, her eyes and lips narrowing, and he waited for one of her cutting remarks, one of the few things about her that had sometimes annoyed him. Then she seemed to make an effort and the tenseness went out of her face.

“This is going to surprise you, Greg,” she said. “But I’ve been thinking back and I wonder if I ever loved you. Really loved you, that is.”

He wanted to hit her, all at once hating her, but he knew dimly this was one time when he had to control himself. He was on his own here in this, the biggest crisis their marriage had ever had, and she wouldn’t help him as she had in the past. This was all his burden, and giving way to anger wouldn’t help at all. “You’re just making things up now. Why can’t you be honest? Are you trying to hurt me or something?”

“I’ve already done that. I can see that. Why should I try and rub it in? I told you I didn’t write and tell you while you were away because I wanted to hurt you the least I could.”

“Well, what do you mean, you wonder if you ever loved me? Why did you marry me?”

“I did love you in a sort of a way, I suppose. But not in the way that keeps marriages together. I think that was the trouble, Greg. Getting married. If we hadn’t married, I might have gone on loving you. The trouble with you, Greg, is you’ve never grown up. It often appeals to a girl when she hasn’t got to live with it every day. It appealed to me. I’ll admit. I always enjoyed seeing you, you were such good company. And you knew how to pay attention to a girl—even if you sometimes had trouble taking your eyes off other women.” Then she said, “That was one of the main troubles, Greg. The other women. When you had gone I started to think about them——”

“You’re not giving me any credit for having changed since those days.”

“Have you?”

He was silent, unsure himself if he had changed, remembering how much he had looked forward to women’s company when he had gone on leave to Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem and Beirut, and after a moment Sarah went on: “I don’t want to have to look after you all my life, Greg. Always having to hold our marriage together. A marriage, a good solid one, shouldn’t need holding together. It’s not some jerry-built thing that any wind can blow over. Your mother and father’s marriage, my people too, their marriages have never needed holding together. Some girls enjoy the mother role, I mean towards their husbands, but I don’t. I’d like to be a mother, but I want children, not a grown man! And what if we did have kids, Greg? Could I depend on you to help me care for them? All your life, Greg, you’ve waited for things to fall into your lap, and when they haven’t you’ve just turned around and borrowed off someone else.” For the first time she lost her calmness, and passed her hand wearily across her eyes. When she took away her hand there were tears on her cheeks. “I tried, Greg, you’ve no idea how I tried! But it’s just no use, no use at all.”