The Climate of Courage

“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.”

It was the first time he had ever seen her weep: even when they had said good-bye two years ago she had kept a brave face. He had been glad of that then, because he knew he hadn’t the armour to withstand her breaking up. Now she looked younger than he had ever seen her look, helpless for the first time, and he had an almost overpowering desire to take her in his arms. Instead he got up and began to walk about the room.

“I think it would have been better if you’d told me while I was away,” he said.

“Why? You might have taken it much worse than you are now.”

“Christ, how do you think I’m taking it now? Do you think it isn’t hurting me as much as it would have over there?” His hand pulled at his hair: the mobile face was almost splitting with emotion. “I still love you, hon! Just because I’m back, doesn’t alter or lessen that. Look at you now. You’re half-naked. Do you think I can’t remember what we’ve done together? Do you think I can shut my eyes and say I’m going to forget all that? I can remember you, every inch of you, and so long as you’re around I’ll go on remembering you. And unless I stay up all night, I’ve got to get back into bed with you now. If you’d told me while I was away in the Middle East, at least I wouldn’t have had to do that.”

“If that’s all you’re going to miss of me, the sex part——”

“Ah, God Almighty! Can’t you see what I’m getting at? I remember everything else about you, too. You’d be surprised at the small, no-account things a man remembers when he’s away. And likes to remember. It sounds silly now, but time and again I used to think about the day you fell in the water fully dressed at National Park. I used to laugh about that and feel good about it. It was something I loved about you, although it’s hard to explain why. I’m in love with you, hon, and I want to stay in love with you. If I’ve talked about getting back into bed with you, it’s because we both know it’s the best way of showing love.” He sat down on the bed again and twisted his face with his hands. “I realise now, that since I’ve been back I might just as well have patted your hand for all it meant to you.”

“I’m sorry, Greg.” They sat in silence for a while, both of them unaware of the cold night air coming in the open windows. Somewhere down in the gorge a night-bird cried, and on the terrace below their windows a woman giggled nervously. There was the sound of light running footsteps, high heels click-clacking on the cement, a man said hoarsely, “Come here, you little dope, I’m not going to hurt you!” then there was the sound of heavier running footsteps going away along the terrace. Then there was silence again and after a while Sarah said, “Shall we go home to-morrow?”

“Do you want to?”

“I don’t know, I like it here. It seems a pity—but you say you can’t go on sharing the same bed with me. I suppose you’re right. It doesn’t mean anything to me any more.”

He took off his dressing-gown and slowly got back into bed. Already he felt a strangeness beside her, a restraint upon himself as if he mustn’t touch her for fear she should scream. She was doing nothing to help him. Her nightgown was low cut at the neck and as she turned towards him her breasts, the breasts he knew so well and would remember, were almost completely exposed. He looked away from her and sought some relief in sarcasm.

“The double bed,” he said. “The torture rack for about-to-be-divorced couples.”

“We’d better go home to-morrow,” she said. “I’ll take some things and go and stay with Mum till your leave is up. When you go back to camp, I’ll come back to the flat.”

“There’s no need for that. We’ve got a date on Saturday night. We promised we’d go to Bluey Brown’s party.”

“Do we have to go to that? Is it so important? Haven’t you had enough of being fêted?”

“The party isn’t being put on for my benefit. And if it were, I wouldn’t be thinking about that part of it, believe it or not.” The excitement of the last few days had been completely forgotten: he suddenly wished he was a nobody. “I just don’t want people feeling sorry for a V.C. winner. I’ll be the one who’ll get the sympathy, you know that. I just don’t want people calling you a bitch.”

“I don’t deserve so much consideration,” she said slowly. “Is that what you want to call me, a bitch?”

He ignored the question because he had no answer for it: his mind was still in too much of a turmoil to begin thinking of calling her anything. “We’ll go home to-morrow and I’ll sleep in the spare bedroom. We’ll keep up appearances till I go back to camp. You won’t have to worry,” he said bitterly, “you can lock the bedroom door at night. When I’m back with the unit, we’ll see about getting a divorce.”

“You’re taking it better than I’d hoped,” she said very quietly.

He reached up and switched off the bed lamp. He turned away from her to stare at the dark wall before him, dark and blank as the future.

“You forget I’m a V.C. winner,” he said. “Brave beyond the call of duty.”

Next morning they went back to Sydney. The train wound its way down out of the mountains, threading its way through narrow culverts, skirting the edges of deep drops, passing small towns that had once been only holiday resorts and now were the dormitories of munition workers. The grey-walled gorges were as wild and deserted as they had ever been and the ranges still had the appearance of lonely sleeping beasts; but the Blue Mountains, once just a playground, were already caught up in the war. Munition works, stark and utilitarian and temporary-looking, money and materials thrown into tremendous sheds of death, were springing up all down the line. And from the train the roads seemed to be carrying little but military traffic.

The train itself was crowded, as much as it had ever been when returning from a holiday week-end. The authorities had cancelled all inter-state passenger traffic, unless one had a permit, and had asked people not to travel within the state unless their reasons were urgent. Everyone suddenly seemed to have urgent reasons for going somewhere: it was doubtful if so many people had ever moved so far so often. For the first time in years the New South Wales Government Railways looked as if they might show a profit.