St Kilda Road was probably busier, Liam thought, than it had ever been in its existence, with packed trams rattling one way and empty ones back, and men on foot all heading for the barracks. He could see the tall, bluestone building sitting back from the road, but it was impossible to see the gates for the jostling crowd outside. The army had imagined itself geared and ready for an enthusiastic response but was not prepared for this avalanche of volunteers. Although Liam and his companions were already enlisted, they had to wait to be processed and sworn-in. The morning passed in endless queues, men keeping places for others who returned into town for food. New volunteers were still crowding in, more than one weeping with frustration as he was turned away.
‘At least we’re in,’ Ned muttered, ‘but I wish I knew what they were going to do with us. It’s a bloody circus, this.’
With the lines of flimsy trestle desks across the parade ground, it reminded Liam more of a market place with impatient customers and extremely harassed stall-keepers. Considering the army’s reputation for efficiency and organization, he wanted to laugh.
Processed at last, they were formed up in lines of four into a rough sort of company, and under the guidance of a middle-aged sergeant and a couple of veteran corporals, marched out of the barracks towards an exercise ground at Broadmeadows, twelve miles away. It was a bleak-looking expanse of bushland, with a few temporary buildings and a lot of bell-tents. Within days, the weather, which had been remarkably dry, changed abruptly. Broadmeadows dust became Broadmeadows mud, making next few weeks a miserable existence of endless drilling and lectures delivered in the pouring rain. A first taste, though none of them knew it, of what was to come.
Organizing that mass of untrained, authority-hating individuals into a cohesive fighting force was no easy matter, especially as most of the hastily-promoted NCOs had no more experience than the men they were attempting to instruct. When asked for volunteers to take the rank of corporal, Liam and Arnie pushed Ned forward. He was older, had always assumed the position of leader at the Maddox farm, and they liked him. Rather Ned than some arrogant stranger, Liam reasoned, and that opinion was reinforced by the other Dandenong men. The Post Office clerk was designated lance-corporal, and while both men were initially reluctant, they took their new positions seriously, particularly once they had their uniforms.
Ned became surprisingly conscientious, attending all the lectures and special courses, and whether it was the fact of those stripes at his shoulder or the weight of a new responsibility, Liam could not have said, but there was a distinct change in him. His laugh was less ready, and his critical streak was suddenly channelled into practical rather than personal matters. Once, after a particularly tough day, he confessed to Liam that he wished he had paid more attention at school.
‘You’d walk through this lot,’ he said, showing a ream of regulations and instructions that he had to learn. ‘I don’t know why you didn’t put yourself forward, you’d be a damn sight better at this than me.’
Wanting to laugh, Liam confined himself to a wry grin. ‘But you can tell the blokes what to do, and they do it. You’ve been giving orders for years, you know you have – I wouldn’t know what the hell to say. Anyway, they’d laugh as soon as I opened my mouth — my lingo’s all wrong.’
Ned shook his head and grumbled some more, so obviously over-faced by that mass of army jargon that Liam felt constrained to offer some help. ‘Do you want me to go through it with you?’ he asked tentatively. ‘Two heads might be better than one.’
So he read and interpreted, unconsciously absorbing everything; and when Ned did well in his courses, Liam’s satisfaction could not have been greater had the success been his own. Although of necessity they spent less time together than on the farm, Liam was pleased to note that he had earned a measure of respect from Ned, and in return tried hard not let him down in practical matters. It was not easy. Soldiering struck him as a boring, mind-destroying occupation, a constant struggle on behalf of the officers to replace individuality with conformity, to reduce each man to the level of a cog in a vast, smooth-running machine. But the cogs, at this stage, did not want to be forced. Some had poor physical co-ordination, others deliberately made a mess of drill sessions, turning them into tests of endurance. From past experience Liam knew that in the long run it was easier to conform than to rebel, and being blessed with both stamina and ability, often cursed the less willing.
Arnie was one of them. Not only did he seem possessed of two left feet, he hated what he had to struggle to achieve; his moans of regret wore everyone down. On the day of their enlistment Ned had said to Liam that they must ‘look out’ for Arnie, as he was not one of the brightest. But with Ned having other responsibilities, Liam was left very much alone in that task. Arnie seemed to have a talent for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the only thing he liked about being in the army was the uniform. That went to his head. Suddenly he was a success with girls, and at every opportunity was away into Melbourne, along with half the camp, ignoring regulations and having a high old time.
For a while Liam tried to keep steering him away from the worst of the city’s attractions, but it was an expensive and exhausting business. Training all day and drinking all night was not Liam’s idea of pleasure, and even his stamina was no match for Arnie’s. It struck him, too, that most of the girls who made such a play for these uniformed demi-gods, were not much better than the prostitutes who haunted seamen’s hotels the world over. He tried to explain but Arnie would not listen, and Liam was too fastidious to enjoy being coaxed and touched in turn by women who were coarse and none too clean. Eventually, unable to curb Arnie’s excesses, Liam simply gave up trying. Camp life became no easier, but a full night’s sleep reinforced his stoic acceptance.
He had been at Broadmeadows a little over a month when Ned rushed up to tell him that he had just bumped into Lewis Maddox. Lacking a uniform as yet, but shortly to be commissioned into the Light Horse Regiment. Apparently his father had threatened to cut him off without a penny unless he came home immediately, but Lewis was over twenty-one and could do as he pleased. And Mary had been accepted into the Australian Army Nursing Service, so with any luck they would all set sail together.
Liam could not make up his mind which piece of information pleased Ned more: the fact that Lewis had managed to outwit his father, or the idea of sailing all the way to Europe with Mary Maddox close at hand. On small reflection, Liam thought the latter. It made him smile.
A few weeks later mail reached him from England. Two letters, much delayed by the war and a circuitous journey via the Maddox farm and Victoria Barracks. Both bore familiar handwriting: Edward’s elegant copperplate and his mother’s firm, rounded script. With her letter uppermost, Liam paused in drizzling rain to watch the fine drops make a haze of each clear black line. When name and address were almost obliterated, he stuffed both envelopes into his pocket and strode away.
So completely did he erase them from his consciousness, it was a surprise to him later to feel the crackle of paper when he removed his tunic. Most of the men were either away to town or in the canteen; Arnie was for once collapsed and asleep, his phenomenal strength having temporarily deserted him. Lighting a small candle-lamp, Liam was tempted to burn the letters unread, his mother’s particularly. He even held a corner of it over the flame and watched with satisfaction as it began to brown: a little curl, edged by sparks, peeling away from the tight-packed pages within. The charred edges were like a reproach. Beset by sudden fury, Liam dashed it away; he would not read it, he would not! She had no right to intrude upon this new life, no right to impose herself here.
There were voices outside the tent; Arnie moaned and stirred. Hurriedly, Liam retrieved that heavy bundle of pages and hid them amongst his kit. Edward’s missive lay unmarked and unopened beside the lamp. The voices went away, Arnie slept on. Liam doused the light and settled himself down. Sleep eluded him, and sometime before midnight he gave up the struggle and re-lit the lamp. He picke
d up Edward’s letter, weighed it in his hands, the contents less than his mother’s. Wanting to read it, some instinct told him to get the worst over first. From his kit Liam extracted the other one, sliding the charred pages from their envelope.
If his brother’s letter had given Liam an inkling of what to expect, this direct communication from his mother was worse, pouring the salt of guilt and bitter resentment into wounds which had failed to heal. She wrote of love, love which had broken her heart with his leaving, love which had tried to protect, and succeeded only in deceiving. And with an honesty which scoured her son, Louisa wrote of her early life with Robert Duncannon. Love again, but a very different kind of love, one which was tarnished, in Liam’s translation, by overwhelming lust. No matter how hard she stressed Charlotte Duncannon’s madness and the impossibility of divorce, Liam refused to believe it, except as a story attributable to Robert Duncannon. After all, he reasoned, the woman could not have been so repulsive: she had borne a daughter to her husband; and that daughter was very beautiful. Robert Duncannon must have loved his wife, if only in the beginning; that he could abandon her so quickly for another woman, said nothing for his morals. It said little for his mother’s, either, that with no hope of marriage, she should leave her home and family, and go to live openly with him in Dublin. If anything had driven Charlotte Duncannon out of her mind, Liam reasoned it must have been that.
He read on, his heart hardening with every line. In Dublin, apparently, as the first flush of passion faded, things had begun to go wrong. She said she had become obsessed by guilt, by a realization that life with Robert could never work as a real marriage should. Reading between those lines, Liam guessed that his natural father’s attention and affections had begun to wander. Away from home a great deal, driven by the kind of strong sexual needs Liam was coming to understand from the men around him, he had decided that Robert Duncannon had no more idea of abstention or faithfulness than a stallion with his choice of mares in season. And like a willing mare his mother had gone with him, the fact of their continuing affair obvious from Tisha’s birth.
Louisa wrote that she had not known, when she left Dublin, that Tisha was on the way, that she had returned to York simply because she had nowhere else to go. Her mother, their old servant Bessie, and particularly her cousin Edward, had made a home for Louisa and her two sons, and supported them. But the hotel on Gillygate, which Liam dimly recalled, had begun to fail as a business, and with Mary Elliott’s death it had been necessary to look for somewhere smaller. Louisa, Edward and the three children, had moved to the cottage by the river. She and Edward had married ten months later, in 1899, on Liam’s fifth birthday.
Astonishingly, with the day named for him, Liam’s memory of was both clear and detailed. He had returned from school to find a party gathered: Aunts Blanche and Emily, Uncle John Chapman, and old Bessie, who had gone to work for the Chapmans in Leeds. There was a cake and a table groaning with food; everybody was very happy, laughing and talking and congratulating him on his fifth birthday. There were presents, too. But his clearest, most vivid memory of that surprise party was of his mother looking lovely as a princess, laughter dancing in her eyes, and himself wanting to stay with her to be cuddled and fussed at bedtime. Instead there were tears and disappointment, he and Robin and Tisha being whisked away to Leeds with Aunt Emily and dour Uncle John, to endure the nips and pinches of cousin Elsie, and the whinings of little Johnnie and Harold. Despite its size, the house had no more than a tidy square of garden in which they could not play, and was hemmed in on every side by grimy terraces, all depressingly alike. Liam had visited the house many times in the succeeding years, but never again stayed overnight.
With memory and astonishment came shock at the magnitude of that deception. They had used him, used the occasion of his birthday to cover the reason for that family gathering. It seemed such an abuse of innocence that Liam was outraged, unable and unwilling to see, for all his mother’s protestations of love and protectiveness, that it had been done in anything but a calculated manner. He was so irrationally hurt by that revelation, he did no more than skim through the rest, which seemed to amount to no more than a lame collection of excuses for her marriage to Edward.
The flimsy tale that they had loved each other all along, yet failed to notice until that summer of 1899, seemed incredible to him. In love himself, passionately and without hope, Liam was sure that if they had been in love all those years, they would each have known about it. His limited experience did not allow for different levels of love at different times, and between people who had been brought up in close proximity to one another.
Disbelieving, sickened by what he saw as self-deception on his mother’s part, invented to ease her bad conscience, Liam was also outraged by her temerity in thinking he wanted to know the intimate details of her life. It was enough to know that she had shared another man’s bed; he did not want to know that she had done so willingly. Edward was so gentle, so fatherly, it disturbed Liam not at all to imagine him sharing his mother’s bed, holding her, kissing her, loving her; indeed he had seen them in bed so often, arms around each other, it was the most natural thing in the world. Or had been. Until that world was shattered. The image of her with Robert Duncannon was altogether different. It smacked of animal-like coupling, and had become more graphic as his knowledge of other men’s sexuality increased.
He could not bring himself to read Edward’s letter. It lay unopened in his pocket for several days, while his few solitary moments were taken up with self-pity. It seemed he was doomed to be denied all the things which were most important to him: people, places, even a way of life. He missed the Maddox family and their farm with a poignancy akin to homesickness; but he would not admit that he missed York. The army was a poor exchange for all that should have been. When he did allow himself to dwell on Robert Duncannon, the fact that he had willingly chosen the military life only served to underline the differences between them.
No solitude, no privacy, poor food and a succession of days full of noise, and endless, mindless drilling. That was the army. It amazed Liam that so many of the men seemed to thrive on it. At the end of a crushing week he took himself off into town, eager to shed his depression in any way he could. After several beers in a back street bar, he left the crowd to look for somewhere to eat. Amongst the maze of dark, wet, ill-lit streets, he found a little chop-house quiet in the early evening and tolerably clean. The waitress had seen enough uniforms in the past few weeks to be unimpressed; or perhaps, he thought, glancing up into her expressionless face, she had troubles of her own. Either way, she took his order for steak and fried potatoes without enthusiasm, and slouched back to the kitchen. He drank another beer while he was waiting, slowly this time; and in the stillness remembered Edward’s letter. For the first time in a week Liam felt sufficiently fortified to read it.
Its tone was calmer, less impassioned than his mother’s, beginning not with recriminations at his leaving, but hope that his new life in Australia would turn out to be all that he was looking for. There was such unintentional irony in that, Liam almost smiled as he reminded himself that this had been written well before the storm-cloud gathered. The news about Robin and Tisha was so old, Liam could not help longing suddenly for more up-to-date information. Especially from Robin. But the letter was not what he had feared. Apart from a passage which begged for understanding of Louisa, and that he would read her words with compassion, Edward made little attempt at explanation. For that, at least, Liam was grateful: he could not have borne another lengthy version of what had gone before, and why. Reading the simplicity of Edward’s statement that he had always loved Louisa, but that at one time it had seemed wrong to acknowledge it, Liam tried to view it cynically, and failed. Instead, he was ridiculously touched by the older man’s loyalty. Even more so when the next sentence went on to acknowledge Liam’s feelings for Georgina.
‘I could not speak, because I was not free to do so – yet I watched and feared and prayed that I was
wrong in what I suspected. That was why I was so short with you, and because of that, my dear boy, I humbly crave your forgiveness. I understand, in part, what you must have felt then, and indeed what you are perhaps still feeling. There can be no greater tragedy in life. I pray that it will pass, as these things sometimes do, and that your memory of this anguish will fade with time. We see Georgina less often now, but she seems well, if much chastened. She always asks for news of you, but I do not think she was aware of your feelings for her, and we have not enlightened her. Nor, I think, has her father, but I cannot be certain of that point…’
In a sudden mist, the words disappeared. Folding the letter over, Liam coughed to clear his throat. As he found his handkerchief, the waitress reappeared with his meal, and for the moment he set Edward’s letter aside. It surprised him that he felt no anger towards his adoptive father, and that those brief lines regarding Georgina should have brought forth such a swell of gratitude. It was little enough, but it was news of her. He had longed for her to understand his feelings all those months ago, but in retrospect it was probably just as well that she had no inkling. She, at least, would be spared this anguish.
The meal was good and satisfying. Afterwards, Liam felt refreshed and suddenly more cheerful. He picked up the letter again and read on. There was not much more, but the last few lines made him glad of his quiet corner with its shadows.
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