Shame and the Captives by Thomas Keneally Page B

infatuation, he would turn up to recordings and stand in the booth with the producer simply to listen to Marcia’s velvety voice. She was an amiable, earthy, practical girl, and ever afterwards, when he thought of her and of arriving at her flat on summer evenings with the glint of the harbor stinging his eyes, the memory of her was associated with blatant sunlight. Inevitably, their affection and hunger for each other diminished over two-and-a-half years. He wondered now if she had kept the affair going because she feared she would lose lines if she ended it.
    When a friend invited him to New York in the year of the Munich Crisis to write a nationally broadcast serial named White Man of the Congo , both Marcia and he knew that this was a natural close to their affair. He had made a lot of money in New York, but there was David, just finishing boarding school, who could not be required to live alone and like a freestanding bachelor yet. His son wanted to stay close to his flawed mother, but then contradictorily wrote to neutral New York that he had enlisted in the great struggle, and Suttor feared David would be consumed in another European war.
    Suttor came back across the as-yet-unthreatened Pacific early in 1941, and himself enlisted—out of patriotism, of course, but also to find a new life. He was shunted into a garrison battalion, and—given that the enemy failed to invade as some men, including himself, had silently hoped they would—thus to the witheringly tedious military business that garrison life involved, until he was offered his position at Gawell.
    After the novelty of his outlandish prisoners in Compound C had worn off, the major found that he was stuck with paperwork and routine. In fact, the only drama in his situation was provided by the idiosyncrasy of his prisoners and his attempts to read their motives. But familiarity with this chore, and their determined churlishness and muteness in his presence, eventually seemed to complement the rote work of administration. He wrote reports for Abercare and for Sydney headquarters, and requisitions for equipment and supplies. He issued detentions for grosser acts of rebellion, insult, or assault upon authority. He needed to attend a daily meeting of the colonel and the other compound commanders, and of course receive delegations from the three Compound C leaders, whose ways, expressions, and postures he got to know well. There were also issues to do with the company of the Australian garrison he commanded—drunkenness, insubordination, neglect. He did not like to be a schoolmaster and depended on his orderly sergeant, an old regular, for advice, and on Nevski. He attended roll call at 1600 hours after making an inspectionof the compound from outside the fence. All this made a busy day, two-thirds of which was repetition and fuss.
    It was a pathetic boast, and he made it purely to himself, that his most enthusiastic hours were invested in the utterly fictional The Mortons . The Mortons were Suttor’s forte and his vocation, but they also allowed him to visit a more kindly planet with a better climate. It was in his characters that he transformed himself into the dutiful husband and the warm soul. It was in them that he was solaced. He had created them himself and had been writing them into being since 1933 with a while off when he was in New York.
    The period in which he’d begotten them had been a time of bad and risky days, when there was a chance of a civil war being waged by the not-so-secret secret armies of the pastoral and commercial gentry against the “Communists”—anyone who was actively discontented. None of this shadow had, however, fallen across the Mortons. There had been a reference to the Depression in one episode, when Mr. Morton’s job was under threat, but Mr. Morton had sympathized with his boss’s struggle to keep the stock and station agency, for which Morton was accountant, going. There was no