The Climate of Courage

She laughed, stubbed out her cigarette and slid off her chair on to the lounge beside him. “People notice you, all right. I saw you as soon as you came into the Buffet. I wondered how long it would be before you asked me to dance. If you hadn’t I’d have asked you.”

“You’d have circulated, eh?” he said, and kissed her.

Then her sister came in. “Don’t mind me, go right ahead! I shan’t peek.”

Silver drew back. “My sister has a one-track mind. Mamie, this is Jack Savanna.”

They were sisters, there was no doubt of that, though one was as dark as the other was fair. Mamie was not as tall as Silver, but her body had the same womanliness and her face the same good bonework. Even the eyes and mouths were alike. But there was a looseness about Mamie that wasn’t there in Silver; not only in the face and body, but one sensed it also in the character. Then he remembered it was Mamie Bendixter that Tony Shelley had known, and he was surprised at how glad he was. He pressed Silver’s arm and stood up.

“My!” said Mamie. “So big!”

“In his stockinged feet too,” said Silver. “Six feet three, all man, and I saw him first.”

Mamie smiled up at him: there were no dimples and her smile was somehow not as soft. “Silver has a complex about me. She thinks I want to get my claws into every man I see.”

“Don’t you?” There was no rancour in Silver’s voice: she sounded almost a little bored.

“Not all, sister dear,” said Mamie. “Only those with red blood in them.”

“We’ll take a blood test of him later,” said Silver. “Right now I’m just getting acquainted with his surface features.”

“And they’re not bad,” said Mamie. “Except for his moustache.”

Jack at last managed to get a word in. The only time he was defeated in conversation was when he was in the company of two females. It was gratifying to think that they might fight over him, but he had already made up his mind whom to crown the winner. He chipped in before Mamie began thinking she had got a foothold on him.

“Silver and I have already discussed the moustache,” he said. “She also happens to have got her claws into me a couple of hours ago.”

The smile stayed around Mamie’s mouth, but died in her eyes. My God, he thought, she’s a mean, vicious, dissipated bitch; I can believe everything they say about her. Without getting her name in the papers for anything more notorious than having lunch at Prince’s, she had become a legend of sin in Sydney. Her own circle had known her for years, and cab drivers too, and the odd anonymous men she had picked up off the streets: in the last two and a half years, with men talking among themselves as they did, she had probably become known to half the Army. Navy and Air Force. She read his mind and the smile widened, completely shameless.

“You’ve heard of me, have you, Jack?”

“He’s in the same unit as Tony Shelley,” said Silver. “Dear drunken, perverted Tony.”

“That’s what we call him,” said Jack. “Pervy B. Shelley.”

For a moment Mamie looked as if she were going to stay and fight. The smile changed almost to a snarl and the eyes thinned dangerously. Then suddenly she changed the whole expression to a yawn. “I’m tired. I’ve been out with a Navy type who’s been at sea for ten months, so he said. You’ll be around again, Jack, or are you staying the night? Good night, then, and don’t sleep in Mother’s room. She’s coming home to-morrow.”

Then she had gone and the room seemed cleaner and fresher. Jack sat down and began to draw on his boots.

“Going?” said Silver. “Did that bitch of a sister spoil things for you?”

“I don’t like her,” he said, buckling on his belt. “But she didn’t spoil things. She just somehow made me see you in a new light.”

“Better or worse?”

“Better. I’ll be back again. I’m going to spend the rest of my leave with you. Do you work at all?”

“Since the Japs came into the war, yes. I’m secretary to a doctor friend of ours in Macquarie Street. Some people wouldn’t call it war work, but it depends on the way you look at it. Sid Hugo is overworked, like all doctors now, and I do my best to help him.” She had spoken a little forcibly, but suddenly she smiled and made a deprecating gesture. “I’m sorry, I’m always defending myself. It’s a habit of the conscientious rich.”

“Lunch to-morrow, then.” They were at the front door now and he took her in his arms. “Is Silver really your name?”

“Don’t you like it?” And when he nodded, she said, “Dad was nicknamed Silver, because of his hair and, I suppose, because of his money, too. When I came along and had hair exactly like his——” She looked up at him, frankly pleased. “I’m glad you like it, Jack.”

“It suits you.” He kissed her, and was aware of the passion in her. The night hadn’t ended as he’d originally planned, but he had no regrets. The future, compared with the prospect of a few hours ago, looked better than to-night could ever have been. It was the first time he could remember meeting a girl and thinking beyond the next morning. “Good night, Silver.”

It seemed that he had been saying good night to women and leaving them all his life and would be for ever. Even when he had been living with Rita they had both known that one night he would walk out and not come back. He could not do without women, but for as long as he could remember he had been frightened of their hold on him.

He had even been frightened of his mother’s hold on him. Tenuous yet strong, like the line a fisherman holds. She had played him as one plays a fish: several times he had tried to escape, but she had always known how to bring him back.

“I wasn’t cut out to be a mother, Johnny,” she had said once, “but that doesn’t mean I want to forget I am one.”

“You’re all right,” he had said, knowing he was expected to say something. She had been a vain woman and would have liked him to say she was a wonderful mother: she was greedy for any sort of praise, even when she knew it wasn’t true. But he hadn’t been able to bring himself to make the lie an extravagant one. “When is Dad coming home?”

“Next week.” She had turned to him, giving him the smile he had seen her give his father when she wanted something. “And I wouldn’t mention that Mr. Garry and Mr. Phillips have been coming here, Johnny. Your father sometimes misunderstands things, sees them in the wrong light. So we shan’t mention them, shall we?”

He had loved his father as he had never been able to love his mother. Big Pat had had boats going out of both Thursday Island and Broome, and had spent his time between both places, with four visits a year to Sydney. Then he would come down for a fortnight each time and be like a north-west storm, a Cocky Bob, blowing through the house. He had built a house on Thursday Island for them all, but Jack had been there only twice and his mother never at all. The house had never been a home, just an outpost where Big Pat slept and drank and (as his son learned later) pined in secret. The four visits a year to Sydney were like four Christmases to Big Pat’s son.

Then Big Pat had come down from Broome on one of his visits and had arrived a day earlier than expected. He had called for Jack at school, persuaded the master to let him go early, and they had caught a cab and gone home, both of them happy as schoolboys, flushed with the thought of the fortnight ahead.

“We’ll surprise your mother,” his father had said, and he had seen no danger in it because he knew both Mr. Garry and Mr. Phillips were out of town. “She’s probably in the middle of her afternoon beauty sleep. We’ll sneak in and scare the daylights out of her. Cripes!” He slapped Jack’s knee, almost breaking it. “You’ve got no idea how I like coming home to you two! One of these days you’ll find there’s no feeling like returning home.”

But his mother hadn’t been having her beauty sleep. She was in bed, all right, but there was a man with her, someone he had never seen before. His father had said nothing intelligible, just let out a roar of animal rage, and plunged into the room, slamming the door after him. Jack had stood for a moment, sick and frightened, then he had turned and walked slowly down the hall to his room.

From the window there a few minutes later he had seen the stranger staggering down the drive, his clothes hanging on him in shreds, his hands to his broken bloody face, never looking back, an adulterer who hadn’t known what had hit him. Five minutes later Big Pat had come into his son’s room.

“I was wrong, son,” he had said, and, unbloodied and unscathed, he had looked more broken than the man who had just gone stumbling down the drive. “You can’t win, after all.”

Then he had gone downstairs and locked himself in his study and begun to drink. Two hours later, when they heard the shot and Jack had burst the door in, he was dead. Big Pat lay among a litter of bottles and photographs and letters, and in a pool of blood that spread to touch the bottles and stain the photographs and letters. Jack would never forget that sight of the wreckage of his father’s life.

His mother had looked in the room past him and then, the only womanly decent thing she had ever done, she had fainted. He had closed the door quietly on his father, stepped over his mother with only a hateful glance at her and left her to the care of the gardener and his wife, and had walked out of the house and down the road to the home of the doctor who had brought him into the world. Old Dr. Cotterell, who had known what was going on, had opened the door and from the look on Jack’s face had guessed at tragedy. But his guess had been only half right. He had cried out in shock and grief when Jack told him Big Pat had killed himself and not his wife.

Jack had never gone back to his mother. At first, out of remorse, she had come pleading to him to return; then after a while her vanity had got the better of her again and she gave up chasing him. Big Pat had died in a hurry, without expecting to, probably without meaning to, if he hadn’t been so blind with anger or sorrow or drink or perhaps all three. When it came time to settle his affairs it was found he had over-expanded and in doing so had borrowed right and left. He had left little but goodwill and a fleet of half-paid-for luggers that added up only to a man’s dreams. In solid cash they meant very little.

Jack’s mother had married again, not Mr. Garry nor Mr. Phillips nor the bloody stranger but a French woolbroker, and had gone to live in Paris. Whether she was still there, he didn’t know nor care. Whatever the Germans did to her couldn’t be worse than what she had done to his father.

And so because of his mother and because he would always remember his father’s last words—you can’t win—he had spent his life running away from women. Well, not running away from them immediately, but only when he had begun to fear they were getting a hold on him.

Good night, Silver, and she had five more days in which to strengthen her hold on him. For she did have a hold on him, he admitted, even after only four hours and two kisses. And sitting on the ferry edging its way past the wartime boom defences in the outer harbour, going over to Manly where an understanding cousin had lent him his flat for the eight days of his leave, he further admitted that perhaps this time he wouldn’t be so keen to run away. The war, that had ruined so many futures, had begun to make him think of his.

This return to Sydney, to the welcome that wasn’t there for him, had made him realise for the first time just how lonely he was. His father had been right, there was no feeling like returning home. But one needed a welcome, if the feeling was to mean anything.

They had lunch the next day at Prince’s. They sat close to a table that was fast becoming famous as the command post of certain American war correspondents covering the New Guinea front, and behind a table that was already famous as the command post of a genteel lady who covered the Society front. Gay young things were being industriously gay, keeping one eye on each other and one eye on the door in case a photographer appeared. Matrons pecked at their food like elegant fowls, also eyeing each other and waiting the advent of a photographer. Two suburban ladies from Penshurst, having a day out in Society, sat toying with their food and wishing they had gone to Sargent’s, where they could have had a real bog-in for less than half the price. Aside from Jack and the American correspondents, there were only one or two other men in the place, and they looked as uncomfortable as if they had been caught lunching in an underwear salon. Australian men still hadn’t learned to be at ease when outnumbered by women.

Silver told Jack she had to go to a meeting that night. “It’s some sort of bond rally that my mother has organised for business girls. David Jones’ have lent their restaurant. Everyone has tea and sandwiches, then this war hero gets up and says something. After that, the idea is that the girls all rush up and buy war bonds.”

“I thought they’d rush up and lay themselves at the feet of the war hero. It has better possibilities, I mean as a spectacle.”

“Well, anyway, that cuts out dinner to-night,” she said. “Unless you want to wait until after the meeting.”