The Narrow Road to the Deep North

by Richard Flanagan

  Mrs Tomokawa picked up the separate page on which the death poem was copied, and read it out to her husband:

  Winter ice

  melts into clean water—

  clear is my heart.

  6

  SOMETIMES I THINK he is the loneliest man in the world, Ella Evans announced one night at a dinner for the College of Surgeons’ executive committee. And everyone laughed. Dear old Dorry? she imagined them thinking. Every man’s best friend? Every woman’s secret desire?

  But he knew she knew. He was alone in his marriage, he was alone with his children, he was alone in the operating theatre, he was alone on the numerous medical, sporting, charity and veterans’ bodies on which he sat, he was alone when addressing a meeting of a thousand POWs. There was around him an exhausted emptiness, an impenetrable void cloaked this most famously collegial man, as if he already lived in another place—forever unravelling and refurling a limitless dream or an unceasing nightmare, it was hard to know—from which he would never escape. He was a lighthouse whose light could not be relit. In his dreams he would hear his mother calling to him from the kitchen: Boy, come here, boy. But when he would go inside it was dark and cold, the kitchen was charred beams and ash and smelt of gas, and no one was home.

  Dorrigo Evans did not view his marriage as a wasteland though. Far from it. For one thing, he felt strongly that it wouldn’t do to regard his marriage as a failure, or to think he hadn’t loved Ella. For another, in the practical manner of arranged marriages—admittedly, arranged by themselves—they worked at love. When he first met Ella, because marriage was so much on everyone’s mind, he saw Ella only through the prism of a prospective wife. In his youthful mind love was more or less marriage brocaded with lines of poetry. And, as a wife for a man who was clearly going to amount to something, Ella seemed to him perfect: loving, doting, more determined even than him to see him rise. Ella accorded with convention and mortised with literature. He presumed all this was love, and although after their marriage it quickly did not seem enough, he accepted it had to do.

  And then, when Ella’s body had changed into lustrous circles while bearing their children, her full breasts and dark nipples a wonder, her thinking unexpected, her aura strange and anything but boring, he had loved her very much. Before the sum of his adulteries meant she could no longer bear to have him in bed with her, he would lean into her back, smell her and know a peace that otherwise evaded him. He did not bother explaining to her that to him sex was not infidelity, that sleeping with someone was. And that he never did.

  Their three children—Jessica, Mary and Stewart—he loved more deeply the further away he voyaged from them. His attitude was one of benign neglect; he had not expected that they would act out his relationship with Ella among themselves. Their enmities and coldness to each other were to him unbearable; it broke his heart, he hoped it was not permanent, he begged them not to be cruel or callous when he saw them echoing the cruelty and callousness he showed Ella. He recognised himself as unfit for fatherhood but stayed the course, because staying the course was what he did in all things. He wondered if it was surrender to his own private terror.

  He and Ella were at their best in company, and found the other at such times admirable—even, as he heard Ella say at one dinner, adorable. Adorable! And he admired her and pitied her for being with him. He heard her telling her friends in all sincerity that the war and the camps would not let him go. She seemed to want to make of him a tragedy, and he, who had seen tragedies, was angry that she would be so naïve, so self-dramatising as to make her husband one more. He wished she would just damn him for what he had become—a bastard. But that would have been too straightforward for Ella, and, besides, she loved him in her way, which is to say she refused to give up on him long after he had given up on himself. She took to having her hair cut like Françoise Hardy and smoking purple Sobranies in an attempt at chic distance that perhaps she hoped might also prove seductive to him. Her fragility—which to him was always her most interesting feature—remained, though it was increasingly enshrouded in a perfumed smoke he found abhorrent.

  What do you want? Ella would ask, taking the Sobranie from her lips, and that was the question to which there really was no answer. And when he lied and said Nothing, or he lied and said, Serenity, or he lied and said, You, or he lied and said, Us, she would say, But what do you really want, Alwyn? Tell me, what? What?

  What indeed? he wondered.

  Is it just their bodies, sex, is that it? she said, and her calm hurt him far more than any anger. Just getting your end wet? she said. Is that it?

  Her calm, her vile candour, her inestimable sadness—was that what he had led her to?

  Is that all you are about? Ella would say, exhaling more Sobranie smoke. Is it?

  Was it? How he hated that smoke. He feared he had made her coarse, she who had been anything but. He thought of how the world organises its affairs so that civilisation every day commits crimes for which any individual would be imprisoned for life. And how people accept this either by ignoring it and calling it current affairs or politics or wars, or by making a space that has nothing to do with civilisation and calling that space their private life. And the more in that private life they break with civilisation, the more that private life becomes a secret life, the freer they feel. But it is not so. You are never free of the world; to share life is to share guilt. Nothing could wash away what he felt. He looked up at Ella.

  Is that it? Ella said.

  It is not so, he said.

  The wording of his answer sounded stilted and unbelievable to them both; worse, it sounded weak, and she just shook her head. Despite what she said, she always preferred strong lies to weak truths.

  Along with her new candour, Ella had taken to wearing heavy perfume in her middle age, and the fumes of that entwining with the fug of the Sobranie smoke gave her an aroma that he found occasionally exciting, even erotic, but mostly—and more and more—stale and claustrophobic, like a wardrobe of old clothes destined for charity. How he wished she wouldn’t wear that perfume, that she wouldn’t smoke Sobranies, that she wouldn’t do her hair like Françoise Hardy. Because he felt in all these things a disguise made up of her bravery, her pride, her huge sadness so painful it throbbed through their home. How he wished he hadn’t made her hard.

  7

  IN HIS EARLY years with Ella he thought of Amy frequently. He wondered what it was that he had known with Amy. He had no idea. It seemed a power beyond love. He recalled their first meeting as unremarkable. He had noticed her beauty spot above her lip obscured by the dust motes, not because she was pretty but because the sight of her through the shafts of dusty light was striking. He thought of their strange conversation, not because it was bewitching, but because it had vaguely amused him. He remembered how, the following day, when he went back to the shop to buy the Catullus, it was the book and not her of which he had the strongest memory. The chance meeting with the girl with the red camellia had been a curious encounter of a type he understood he would soon enough forget.

  And if he hadn’t forgotten her in those early post-war years, as surely as Amy had for a time become his entire reason for existence, so too she now began to recede from his thoughts. In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss. To hold a gesture, a smell, a smile was to cast it as one fixed thing, a plaster death mask, which as soon as it was touched crumbled in his fingers back into dust. And as over the years his memory of Amy atomised, Ella became his most formidable ally and his most trusted adviser. She soothed him when he was enraged, encouraged him when he found obstacles, and little by little, event by event, in the tumble and mudslide of life, his memory of Amy was slowly buried, until he had trouble remembering very much about her at all. Whole weeks would pass and he would realise he had not thought about her, then that period became months, and then several months could run together and of her specifically he had thought noth
ing. He began smelling on himself the same strange, blanketing complicity of small things shared—food, towels, cutlery and cups, the combined purpose of lives pursued together—that he had once been repulsed to smell on Keith Mulvaney.

  There grew between him and Ella a conspiracy of experience, as if the raising of children, the industry of supporting each other in ways practical and tender, and the sum of years and then decades of private conversations and small intimacies—the odour of each other on waking; the trembling sound of each other’s breathing when a child was unwell; the illnesses, the griefs and cares, the tendernesses, unexpected and unbidden—as if all this were somehow more binding, more important and more undeniable than love, whatever love was. For he was bound to Ella. And yet it all created in Dorrigo Evans the most complete and unassailable loneliness, so loud a solitude that he sought to crack its ringing silence again and again with yet another woman. Even as his vitality leached away, he laboured on in his quixotic philanderings. If there was no real heart to any of it, if it was dangerous in so many ways, that added to it for him. But far from ending the scream of his solitude, it amplified it.

  As a meteorite strike long ago explains the large lake now, so Amy’s absence shaped everything, even when—and sometimes most particularly when—he wasn’t thinking of her. He flatly refused ever to visit Adelaide, even when major professional or veterans’ events were held there. The only interest he ever showed in gardening—which he otherwise left to Ella and the gardener—was to have a large and very beautiful red camellia ripped out, much to Ella’s fury, when they moved into a new house in Toorak. His perennial infidelity was, in a strange way, a fidelity to Amy’s memory—as if by ceaselessly betraying Ella he was honouring Amy. He did not conceive of it in this way and would have been horrified if anyone had said it, yet no woman he met in those years meant anything in particular to him.

  So the women came and went, angry, mystified, shocked; his marriage continued; his work went on and his standing grew. He headed departments, reviews, national enquiries into health, discovered that people’s goodwill was frequently in inverse relationship to their position, and felt completely baffled when at a dinner he heard a speaker describe with such profligacy his own life as a glittering career. The feeling passed, and shaded into a bewildered disappointment. He was compelled to travel frequently; long periods of tedium and waiting, interspersed by unnecessary meetings with people similarly suffering the vertigo of achievement. During sleepless nights in hermetically enclosed rooms that had the persistent, unpleasant underscent of chemicals, he wondered why fewer and fewer people interested him. Inexplicably to him, his reputation continued to grow. Newspaper profiles, television interviews, panels, boards, the incommunicable tedium of social events to which he had to go, so flat and endless that he feared he might see the curvature of the earth if he looked too hard. The world is, he would think. It just is.

  One evening he was called back to the hospital late for an emergency appendectomy. The young patient’s name was Amy Gascoigne.

  Amie, amante, amour, he murmured as he scrubbed up.

  The head nurse at the next sink, used to the surgeon’s recitations, laughed and asked what poem that came from. As they walked into the operating theatre, Dorrigo Evans realised it was the first time he had consciously thought of Amy in several years.

  I’ve forgotten, he said.

  He had stolen light from the sun and fallen to earth. For a moment he had to turn away from the table and compose himself, so that the rest of the team would not see his scalpel shaking.

  8

  IT WAS DURING these years that Dorrigo Evans renewed his relationship with his brother, Tom. He found in this some salve for the loneliness he otherwise felt, even with—and sometimes most particularly with—Ella and their children. He found in the time he was able to spend with Tom—by phone once a month and what became after a time an annual visit to Sydney in midwinter, and then, as his reputation grew and he travelled to Sydney more frequently—that special closeness that siblings sometimes have. It was an ease of company that allows for most things to be unsaid, for awkwardness and error to be entirely unimportant, and for that strange sense of a mysterious shared soul to be expressed through the most trivial of small talk. If beyond their blood relation they had almost nothing in common, Dorrigo Evans still increasingly felt with Tom that he was but one aspect of a larger thing, of which his brother was another, different but complementary part, and their meetings were not so much an assertion of self as a welcome dissolution of it in each other.

  Their father had survived their mother by only a few years, dying of a heart attack in 1936; as the youngest of seven, Dorrigo had little to do with his older siblings, who had scattered around Australia in the years before the Depression looking for work. Four sisters went to the woollen mills in the western districts of Victoria; he never really knew them, and he attended their funerals through the 1950s as they passed away, broken by life. He looked at their children and husbands as strangers, but he still helped them all when they came to him. The last of them, Marcy, who was also the oldest and whom he supported entirely for more than a decade, died in Melbourne in 1962 of an undiagnosed cancer. His eldest brother, Albert, who had found work as a cane-cutter in far north Queensland, had died there in an explosion in a sugar refinery in 1956. Tom had ended up in Sydney in a childless marriage, a labourer in the vast works of the Redfern railway yards, and after retiring had spent his days tending his vegetables in his Balmain backyard and playing darts at his local pub.

  In February 1967 Ella planned a week’s holiday in Tasmania with the children at the home of her sister, who had recently moved there with her husband. These planned holidays, conceived and booked without Dorrigo’s involvement, under the pretence of being a high point of their shared lives, were rather the last vestige of them as a family. Accordingly, Ella created them and he agreed to them and they all loathed them as a form of corrective punishment known as family time.

  On the Saturday they were to fly to Hobart, he thus took a phone call about his brother Tom’s heart attack with mixed feelings. On the one hand he was upset; on the other it gave him good reason to evade at least the first day or two of Tasmania. He managed to get a flight to Sydney that evening, but Tom was too heavily sedated on the Sunday to make much sense. It wasn’t until the Monday that Dorrigo was able to talk at some length with him.

  Tom told him how he had the heart attack that felled him in the Kent Hotel, just as he was about to throw a bull’s eye.

  A bull’s eye?

  Had it in the bag, Tom said. Bloody embarrassing way to go, though. In a puddle of piss on the floor with a dart in your mitt. Would have preferred somewhere private, like the tomato patch.

  His brother seemed unusually talkative, and Dorrigo soon found himself deep in reminiscences about their childhood in Tasmania. Tom was an endless song cycle of Cleveland stories, some of which Dorrigo knew, many of which he had never heard. Doughy Yates’ name came up, and Tom recalled how Doughy would frequently boast that he could outrun the train. Challenged to prove it, he stripped to his long white underpants and raced the Launceston to Hobart express through the peppermint gums and silver wattles of the Cleveland bush. As the train disappeared with a whistle round the bend heading toward Conara Junction, Doughy fell to the ground scratched and exhausted and had to admit defeat.

  He was into everything, Doughy, Dorrigo said.

  Still dancing solo at eighty-five, Tom said. Collected Leyland P76s at the end. A car you couldn’t give away. Had them bury him lying on his stomach so that everyone would have to kiss his arse forever after. But I always think of him running through the bush in those long white underpants. It’s like life, isn’t it? You think you’ll outrun it, that you’re better than it, but it makes a fool of you every time. It runs you into the ground and steams off whistling away, happy as buggery with itself.

  They laughed.

  You know Doughy was Jackie Maguire’s cousin? Tom said.
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  Dorrigo didn’t. He spoke fondly about his memories of reading poetry and Aunty Rose’s advice columns for Tom and Jackie Maguire.

  Old Jackie, said Tom. Good fella. Best of blokes. Knew the bush. His wife was a blackfella, you know?

  For a moment or two Dorrigo couldn’t place Jackie Maguire’s wife at all. Then a long dormant memory—a memory that had in some way troubled and shaped him far more than he knew—pushed its way to the front of his mind. Though he had heard vague tales of aristocratic Spanish blood, one of the traditional Tasmanian alibis, Dorrigo hadn’t known she was an Aborigine, and it led him to questions he had always wanted to ask.

  Back then, all those years ago. Just before she vanished. I saw you with her.

  Mrs Jackie Maguire?

  You were kissing her.

  Kissing? Where?

  The old chook shed behind St Andrews Inn.

  I weren’t kissing.

  I saw you both. She was holding you.

  I was coming back from shooting rabbits. She was hanging washing. I had nothing doing so I gave her a hand. Looking back, I can see she must have been in a bad way. But it didn’t feel quite that way. We were just talking. Stories of family. People. And I started saying what I hadn’t really said to anyone. Things I had seen. War things. And then it was too much. I remember that. I just started panting and not able to speak properly. Lost. And she held me like a child. That was it, more or less.

  You had your face buried in her neck.

  I was crying, Dorry. Crying, for Christ’s sake.

  What happened to her, Tom? Why did she vanish? I’ve always wondered what became of her.

  Old Jackie, he used to knock her about a bit. He loved her, but she was twenty years younger, she wasn’t happy and he knew it. Well, what could you do? Aunty Rose wasn’t going to help you. A good fella, Jackie, but then he’d touch the bottle along and give her what for. That much I knew. But where she went I never knew. Not for many years. Then a letter from her found me here in Sydney. She had gone to Melbourne, then later New Zealand. She married a brickie over in Otago. Said nothing more about him. The letter really said nothing more about anything. There was a note with it from her daughter over there saying her mother had asked her to post this to me after her death. And that was that. I guess because others were going to read it there was no mention of old Jackie, or of her family here in Tassie.