Shame and the Captives Read Online Free Page B

come up where Neville goes all glum himself and keeps you and your kids secluded on the farm.”
    Alice and her mother had always irritated each other, sometimes severely so. She was a blunt woman whose opinions Alice’s father went to some trouble to avoid challenging. She had warned Alice about a certain bush type—the narrow and mean-fisted contrarian, and his joyless spite. But Alice was willfully certain Neville did not fit the category. Yet she knew her mother was correct in another sense in her doubt about the marriage. During the engagement, Alice was more excited, skittish, and feverish than at any other time of her life, and she realized she was enacting a version of something she had seen at the Rialto Cinema—the breezy, happy engaged girl over whom no cloud hangs. There was something in it all she herself didn’t quite believe. Whether she loved Neville or not was a mystery to her. His announcements of love were compelling, however.
    As for the risk of Neville becoming Duncan, she thought the contrast between them was extreme. Neville liked the picture houses, too, and said he’d come to town every night if he could. He had at least half a dozen close men friends from school and had been a good dancer at the Bachelor and Spinster Ball. He’d even brought other soldiers home with him on leave and showed Alice off to them. Her mother had come with her to the Hermans—Alice couldn’t very well prevent it—and in the lounge room Neville had played the gramophone and the soldiers had taken turns dancing with Alice and her mother. Neville wasn’t jealous, either, if a visitor danced with Alice. In fact, occasionally he’d chase up a few Gawell friends to play mixed doubles, Alice partnering the other fellow. Nature seemed determined not to repeat in him the characters of his parents, but to send him off on a new and healthier tangent.
    Before a child was conceived, Neville was convoyed off to Egypt. That had been two and a half years before she served the lemonade to the unreadable presences on Herman’s Road. Before Neville went, there had been a little time to raise questions about fertility, but they would not be answered until she saw him again. She had alwayscalmly seen herself, without desperate yearning, yet of her essence, as an eventual mother—but, given the circumstances, the eventuality was to be delayed. Still, she could imagine children hanging from a tree like fruit, or riding together, burlap bag for saddle, on the old plough horse Duncan kept.

2
    T he young man, led by desire for the farmer’s wife and by what he was sure was witchery to drink lemonade rather than defy thirst, went in the camp by the name Tengan. He had been a prisoner for more than two years. As he remembered it years past, in blue dawn, far to the northwest of the target, all their cowlings and propellers had been blessed by a priest and, insofar as it counted, deities were called down to loose their favors on fliers and machines. Tengan, a city boy, was sceptical of religion but was conservative enough to feel that to ignore the ritual might bring misfortune.
    The first light had promised the finest of tropic mornings, like a day three months before when the aircraft from his carrier had cracked open the sky on the enemy’s holy day, and descended towards hapless airfields and ships, dominating the air and flaying the earth which—until then—another empire, the hubristic American one, had assumed was their own. That day had been just short of a jaunt. One of them had said so in the crew room after a jubilant return.
    But—as they had been frankly told in flying school—they must realize they rode through the sky propelled by a fallible engine, and sitting in a barrel of volatile fuel with two temporary bombs and apermanent cannon strapped to it. So, though in the past months their missions had proved favorable, and had included unopposed strikes against