Shame and the Captives Read Online Free Page A

greatly.
    Duncan’s wife had developed consumption and been operated on and put in a sanatorium in the Blue Mountains. The expense had been a burden, but Duncan had met it for two years. It was on a day after he had visited her that Mrs. Herman had died unexpectedly of a stroke. Neville had been eighteen at the time and knew that Duncan carried a vague sense of blame, convinced that a woman was a set of symptoms which in Mrs. Herman’s case he had somehow set off.
    Not long after Alice had met Neville at the dance in Gawell, where she had been visiting a girlhood friend, he had told her this, because—typically of a country town—there were gossips. Alice should understand, Neville insisted, that because his mother had been a town beauty, scandalmongers had talked with pursed lips about the tragic contrast between her as a girl and as a woman, and somehow had found his father to blame for the difference. But it was just really bad luck, said Neville. Okay, a bit of a mismatch, but made in good faith. None of it was Duncan’s fault—according to Neville. His father was a brick, a true gentleman. Farm work had been hard on Mrs. Herman, of course, but no harder than on other women. But it did show you that farmers should marry farmers’ daughters. Your average mixed livestock and grain farm could be a shock to a town girl. For it had hidden tests.
    Neville was a different creature from his father. Already a recruit, and possessing the faint glamour of warriorhood, he had an arduously brilliantined head of dark hair, which somehow touched Alice, not for the reasons he would have wanted it to, but because of all the solitary effort he put into it. He had a glimmer of unmeasured possibility in his eye, and that, too, seemed poignant to Alice. It would need a great deal to happen to him before that glint of hope was snuffed out. It seemed to be great days for marriage. Soldiers’ girlfriends were becoming engaged, it seemed to Alice, as a gesture towards morale.When Neville asked her about ten o’clock on a Saturday night during a School of Arts dance, acceptance had seemed unavoidable. It was well-known from the flicks and radio serials that a soldier needed the solace of a remembered girl to soothe the harshness of army life, and on foreign fields a wife’s name and picture and letters to provide him with certainty and wisdom and discretion.
    â€œI don’t want to have to chase any Pommy girls,” he told her. At that stage he thought his division would be sent to England. “They wouldn’t be a patch on you.”
    The very ordinariness of his sentiments had, in the circumstances, more force than if he’d quoted Wordsworth.
    He was considered A1 by the army, which had condemned him to the infantry and only occasional leave; and she knew what a mixed farm was, and how to be of use on one—marriage would be a matter for her purely of changing locations from Coonamble to Gawell.
    When he was home on leave, Alice and Neville married. Her mother had met Neville earlier and liked him but thought the marriage ill-advised given the state of the world—as well, Alice thought, for other, unstated reasons, whose aroma her mother had the power to release into the air rather than going to the trouble of defining them.
    Alice judged her marriage a matter of sensible decision as well as infatuation. She thought sometimes that she had decided to fall in love with this young soldier, who wore a uniform which, like everything about him except his good nature, put him at a remove from his father and at a brave distance from the family tragedy. Her mother asked her if she knew the story of Neville’s mother. “Don’t be angry with me,” she said in a way that always and infallibly angered Alice. “You have to be careful in case he inherits that personality his father has. His father’s a hermit, and his mother had bad lungs. You don’t want the situation to