Shame and the Captives by Thomas Keneally Page A

confession of the folly of the war.
    It was not all grim stuff, though. There were nights when the recreation hall in Compound C rocked with laughter.
    Someone was being satirized—General MacArthur, Colonel Abercare, he himself, Nevski. Then there were nights whenCompound C went quiet after dark, emitting only an occasional yelp or shout, or short spates of laughter or fury. It was then that the further-off Italian songs could be heard, sometimes accompanied by a full band—jaunty stuff convinced either of the hilarity of life or of the total validity of love. The Italians sang every night, and their music provided the accompaniment to Suttor’s devotion to The Mortons .
    His life in Gawell would seem to some people lonely. He, like Colonel Abercare, lived all the time in camp, except for leave. It was said the colonel was looking at houses to rent in town in the expectation his wife would join him soon, but Suttor knew his would not. Eva Suttor had been an actress in Raymond Longford’s early silent films, and adored for a time. She’d continued acting for the screen after their son was born, and was still a yearning virgin in the eyes of picturegoers. Australians said that her longing and blazing eyes were better than Lillian Gish’s, thus indulging the national myth that Australians could outdo Americans, whether it came to racehorses, boxers, or actors, but that they were willfully ignored by the world because they were at its end.
    Eva and Bernard Suttor had married in 1923, and it had not been easy since. During their life together, she accused him of coldness, and, as time went on, he recognized the validity of the charge. He was a cold man at core. But he also came to see in her what he could not believe he had not seen when they’d first met—the influence of her alcoholic father, the melancholy of the mother. She had frequently threatened him with knives, even with the boy, David, the infant who was the future prisoner, in the kitchen doorway watching. When he thought of his son now, he saw that spectating waif.
    It was an omen of his child’s imprisonment, since a small boy cannot escape from a household, however questionable the elements out of which it is constructed might be.
    Eva had found herself unsuited to motherhood and had doused her misery and fueled both her depression and her occasional peaks of manic and unreliable affection for the child with any liquor shecould find. Interestingly, she had an especial appetite for rum, the drink of farmers and shearers and stevedores, but she added milk to it as if that endowed it with innocence. It couldn’t be said that she did not love the child, but unevenly—sometimes with an intense and proud indulgence, sometimes with a blazing petulance which might even be called cruelty.
    Years ago she had gone to a hospital in Sydney and been given shock treatment, and when Suttor visited her she would beg him to rescue her from it. He worried now that there had been vengefulness in his insistence, echoing the doctor’s, that staying there was essential for her health. Later, she was moved to a sanatorium down the coast.
    Then he had taken what some might have thought of as further revenge by going to work in America for a time. But she had remained ill and became markedly worse after the capture of her son. Suttor dutifully and cautiously visited her as irregularly as he could get away with while maintaining some passing repute as a husband. His excuse was that he was likely to be blamed for indifference whether he went there weekly or monthly. Even the nurses took a vaguely chastising air with him, though that had softened a little now in view of his military duties. The word had got around, too, that he was still doing service to the nation as writer of that national favorite and cultural glory The Mortons .
    For two years he had pursued an affair with Marcia, the girl who did the voice of Nellie Morton. At the start of his