Kal (42 page)

Your son, Enrico
.

To his uncle Giovanni, Enrico was not so circumspect.

I hope you have kept up the reading and writing lessons since I left—I'll bet Kate has made sure of it—as you are the only person I feel I can talk to from my heart
.

Tomorrow we attack and, after the months of waiting, I suppose we are eager for the event. The odds are not in our favour, however, and I see fear in the faces of many. I am fearful myself. I do not want to die. But we all know why we are here, to take the risk and to pay the price, if such payment is necessary
.

The concertina is with me still. It has been a friend to me and a friend to all. Particularly the men from Kal. During training we would sit around the campfire each night and sing the old songs and this is why I needed to write to you. To thank you for everything you have given me. Above all the music. The music in a man's soul makes him a brother to all men—this is what you have given me, Giovanni. I have written a song about it and I will enclose the words with this letter. It's called ‘Kal' and it's about people, just simple people, but I have a good tune in my head. When I come home I'll sing it to you. But, if I shouldn't, please make up a fine tune for me
.

My love to Kate and the family
,

Your friend, Enrico
.

 

T
HE LANDING BEGAN
shortly after three in the morning of the 25th of April, 1915.

Out to sea, the destroyers waited silent and motionless, watching as the battleships advanced towards the shore with their small boats in tow, churning the dark waters.

Just before dawn, the tows were cast off and in raced the pinnaces to take them up. Then the race for shore was on, the men crouching in the small boats, waiting for the moment when they would be cast adrift to row for their lives.

The destroyers now entered the action. They were ordered through the slow-moving battleships, to approach as close to the shore as possible and provide covering fire.

The sea was a turmoil of activity and the air throbbed with the noise of engines. But there was not a movement, not a sound, from the land.

The dawn light had not yet tinted the sky when the pinnaces prepared to cast off their tows and, in the dark and confusion, they had lost direction. They were roughly one thousand yards too far to the north, but by now it was too late.

Two hundred and fifty yards to shore and still no sound from the land. Two hundred yards …

‘Prepare to cast off!' was the command aboard the pinnaces. One hundred and fifty yards. Still no sound from the land. One hundred yards …

Then it started. The hellfire from the shore. A flame from the funnel of one of the pinnaces shot high into the air lighting up the confusion of men and boats in the churning black waters. The light died as quickly as it had flared and, from the inky wall of the shore, rifle bullets
cracked and machine-gun fire cleaved the air. The tows were cast off. The men of A and C Companies were on their own.

‘It's up to us now, lads!' Tony Prendergast yelled, grabbing his oar.

Freddie, in front of him, grabbed his and started to row with the strength of a bull. On the other side of the boat the Brereton brothers set to with all their might.

Packed like sardines in the centre, the men leant what help they could with the weight of their bodies and their eighty-pound packs, leaning forward and aft as the rowers heaved on their oars.

‘A bit bloody early for birdsong, don't you reckon?' Tom Brereton grunted as the bullets whistled all about them. The men laughed.

Not fifty yards away, Jack Brearley focused on Rick Gianni's head in front of him as they strained on their oars in unison. ‘Pull, two, three, four!' he yelled over the constant crack of the gunfire. ‘Pull, two, three, four!' The men took up the chant.

It was ironic he was sharing the same boat as Enrico Gianni, Jack thought. He'd far rather have been rowing alongside Tom Brereton. He smiled grimly; it was hardly the time to quibble.

The first of the boats reached the shore. Bowed under their heavy equipment, the men struggled through the shallows for the beach. Most were mowed down before their boots hit dry sand.

Fifty yards. Thirty yards. The boats kept coming. Men were being hit now before they were able to scramble out into the shallows and shrapnel screamed all about them. The one comforting sound was that of the shells whistling overhead as the warships fired on the enemy.

‘Give it to them, boys!' Tom Brereton screamed, but he didn't turn around to look, he just kept rowing as hard as he could. They all did.

The first glimmer of dawn revealed the chaos. The beach was strewn with the bodies of men who had made it to shore but no further. Some were struggling up the beach to the higher sand and safety. Boats were overturned and bodies floated in the water. Others lay drifting in the shallows.

Suddenly Freddie slumped forward, shot through the head. A man in the centre of the boat grabbed the oar, jostled into his position and started to heave the body over the side.

Tony stopped rowing. He grabbed young Freddie's arm. ‘No,' he ordered. ‘No, man, let him be.'

The boat was changing direction. Tom stopped rowing. ‘Let him go, Tony,' he yelled. ‘We're sitting ducks. Let him go, mate, or we'll all cop it.'

Knowing Tom was right Tony helped push Freddie's body overboard and as he heaved on his oar once again, each time he chanted over and over to himself, ‘What will I tell Freddie's mother? What will I tell Freddie's mother?'

Now the sun was on the horizon and, in the clear dawn light, the Turks could pick their targets with ease.

Concentrated machine-gun fire caught four men in Jack's boat simultaneously. In the struggle for control, the boat capsized and the men started swimming to shore. They were easy prey.

‘Stay with the boat!' Jack yelled. ‘Stay with the boat!' but no one seemed to hear. As Rick Gianni started to swim, Jack grabbed his arm. ‘Stay with the boat,' he yelled again.

The two of them swam around the stern, keeping the boat between them and the shore, and watched as, one by one, their comrades were picked off in the water. Easy, slow-moving targets.

The boat was drifting into the shallows and they stayed with it until they felt their boots touch the sand.

When they were less than waist-deep, Jack yelled ‘Run!' And they ran, he and Rick Gianni. They ran for all they were worth as the machine-gun fire whipped the sand about their ankles and the noises of hell screamed in their ears.

‘The Aussies are copping it at Gallipoli,' Paolo announced to the family as he entered the breakfast room. Early each morning he collected the newspaper delivered to the Dunleavy doorstep and he'd been avidly following the progress of the war.

Paul Dunleavy helped himself to one of the boiled eggs in the steaming bowl the maid had just placed on the table. He knew what was coming next.

‘I want to go home, sir.'

Paul stemmed his irritation as best he could. ‘We've had this out before, Paolo,' he said, placing the egg in his silver eggcup and carefully tapping the top with his teaspoon. ‘You know only too well that I deeply respect your desire to fight alongside your countrymen.' He didn't; why anyone should fight a war when they didn't have to was beyond his comprehension. ‘But we agreed that you would finish your final year at Harvard before you make any such decision.' Hopefully the wretched war would be over by then.

‘But that was before Gallipoli,' Paolo insisted. ‘Look, sir.' He spread the newspaper out on the table, overturning the small silver salt salver in his excitement. ‘Oh,' he said, startled, gathering up the grains in his fingers, ‘I'm sorry, Elizabeth, I didn't mean …'

‘It's perfectly all right, Paolo,' Elizabeth smiled.
Unperturbed, she nodded to the maid who had just arrived with Paul's fresh rack of toast. ‘Some more salt thank you, Edith.'

‘Where's Gallipoli?' Meg asked. She'd recently become a little jealous of her father's protege, who lately seemed to pose a threat to the place she held in her daddy's affections. Which was a pity because, from the very outset, she'd found Paolo Gianni fascinating. Meg had never met an Australian before, let alone one who insisted he was half-Italian.

‘There's a map here.' Paolo turned the page of the newspaper, threatening yet more damage to the breakfast table, but Paul interrupted.

‘Look it up in the big atlas, Meg. You may go into my study. You too, Paolo; it will do you good to acquaint yourself with the precise location …' Paolo was about to protest. ‘We will discuss the personal aspects of the matter this evening.'

Recognising the suggestion as a command, Paolo left the table with Meg.

‘Never fear,' Paul said when they'd gone, more to himself than to his wife, ‘I'll persuade him otherwise.'

Elizabeth nodded, resigned. She was sure he would. Her husband was a very persuasive man. He had certainly managed to talk the boy around the previous year, when the Australians had first entered the war and Paolo had wanted to return home and join the army.

‘One man more or less will hardly alter the course of the war,' had been Paul's caustic opening remark, but he'd quickly changed tactics when he'd recognised that the boy was in earnest. ‘You'll have an engineering degree in only eighteen months, Paolo, don't throw it away …'

The boy was no fool, and eventually he had seen the sense of the argument. Elizabeth had no doubt that her husband would once again convince him. ‘Wait until the
end of the year,' she could hear Paul say, ‘just until the end of the year. And, if the war is still in progress you may join the army with my blessing.' That's what he'd say, but of course the boy would join the army over Paul's dead body. Indeed she now realised, if Paul had his way, the boy would never leave Boston.

‘He is my natural son, Elizabeth,' Paul had told his wife the night he'd returned home from Kalgoorlie. Elizabeth had simply stared back at her husband in a state of shock. As Paul explained his intention to bring the boy to Boston in two years to study at Harvard, she continued to stare blankly at him.

‘He's a brilliant student,' Paul was saying enthusiastically, ‘and he will come to live with us when he's eighteen.'

The man's insane, Elizabeth thought. She had always been aware of her husband's intense desire for a son. Indeed she had felt guilty for years after the complications of Meg's birth had left her unable to bear more children.

‘Of course, he will be known simply as my protege, but he is my blood. He belongs here and he will remain here.'

Elizabeth was barely hearing her husband as Paul continued with his plans. Was he honestly proposing that he bring his bastard son to live openly with them? He wasn't even asking her permission, Elizabeth realised, the subject wasn't even being opened for dicussion.

‘And the boy?' she asked, barely trusting herself to speak. ‘The boy is happy to be bought?'

Paul was so carried away he didn't register the coldness in her voice. ‘He doesn't know and he mustn't until I have won his trust. He simply thinks I am furthering his education and he remains loyal to his peasant mother and her husband. But that will change with time.'

‘Am I to have no say in this whatsoever?' Elizabeth
had found her voice and Paul finally recognised the anger in her tone. ‘Do you have any idea of the effect this could have on your daughter?' she continued. ‘The repercussions it could have on your entire family?'

They argued well into the night but Paul was adamant and Elizabeth was finally forced to agree to his plans. She made her conditions quite clear, however.

‘No one must know this boy is your son. Will you promise me, Paul? He must never be recognised as a Dunleavy. Will you swear to that?'

‘Of course, my dear.' Paul embraced her. ‘The boy will be known as my protege, I swear it.' She felt warm and soft in his arms. The embrace had been a distraction, his promise ambiguously worded—the boy could be his protege
and
his son—but the touch of her reminded Paul how long he had been away. ‘Now surely it's time for bed, Elizabeth.'

Elizabeth was a sensual woman, and she had missed her husband. But even as she felt her desire grow, she could not rid herself of her fearful misgivings. In the bedroom, as she undressed, aware of his eyes lingering on her body in the half-light, she forced the subject out of her mind. It was a whole two years away, she told herself. The boy might even change his mind over the next two years. Away from Paul's influence, he might even decide to stay in Kalgoorlie.

But he didn't. Paul's weekly letters kept the flame of excitement burning in the boy and, three months after his eighteenth birthday, young Paolo Gianni was standing on the Boston Railway platform meeting his half-sister and her mother.

‘How do you do, Paolo.' As Elizabeth shook the young man's hand, she couldn't help but register his resemblance to her husband. Why, she could have been looking at the young Paul Dunleavy, she thought with a sense of shock. The young man who had swept her off
her feet. ‘This is our daughter Meg,' she said, strangely taken aback.

Paolo was surprised at the strength of Meg's handshake. He wasn't accustomed to shaking hands with girls at all, and certainly not with one who shook hands like a bloke. But she was very attractive, with a strong-boned aristocratic face like her mother's and the clear grey eyes of her father. And of himself too, Paolo realised, momentarily startled. He wondered if he and Meg looked alike. Paul Dunleavy's letters, however, had been quite explicit. No one, Meg included, was to know of their true relationship.

The sea voyage to America and the day Paolo had spent, awestruck, wandering the streets of New York before boarding the New England train should have prepared him for Boston. But nothing had prepared him for the elegance of the Dunleavy home and lifestyle. They had a housekeeper and a maid and a butler. Paolo had never known anyone who had servants. And the house itself was huge. Four storeys.

The servants' quarters were in the basement, with separate access downstairs from the street, and the main entrance was up several steps to a large landing. Two magnificent wooden doors opened into a marble-floored hallway. A drawing room was to the right, a large front lounge to the left, and behind the central wooden staircase with heavy curved railings which led to the upstairs studies and bedrooms was the formal dining room and family breakfast room. Paolo's and Meg's bedrooms were up yet another floor, in the attic with its decorative slate roof and copper cupola. To Paolo's delight, he even had his own study. From his table by the little attic window, he could look out over the broad tree-lined boulevard at the other grand houses of Commonwealth Avenue.

Paul Dunleavy delighted in the boy's open admiration. ‘The Back Bay area all about here is reclaimed,' he
said. ‘You're standing on land which was once part of the Charles River. Extraordinary, isn't it?' He'd bought the house ten years ago, he explained, although he still owned the original family home in Beacon Hill. ‘I'll take you there one day and show you where my father lived. And his father before him.'

Paul would dearly have loved to have said ‘your grandfather and your great-grandfather', but he knew he must bide his time and not overwhelm the boy.

There was so much for Paolo to marvel at, each day seemed a new adventure. The bite of the Boston air, the heavy jackets with fur-lined hoods and, above all, the snow. The pictures he'd seen in books and the stories his mother had told him of her childhood in the Alps hadn't prepared him for the wonder of snow.

The first night it snowed he stood outside on the pavement for hours watching the falling flakes, reflecting yellow in the light of the street lamps, settle gently on the ground and on the houses and in the bare, forked arms of the elm trees.

Meg, sent to bring him inside, was bemused by his fascination. ‘I've never met anyone who's never seen snow,' she said.

‘Listen. Listen to the sound.'

‘There isn't any sound.'

‘That's it. That's what I mean. The snow covers the sounds. It's a different sort of silence.' He stood listening for several moments. In the Australian outback, he had always loved the stillness of the night. But now, recalling the endless sounds of insects and frogs and nocturnal birds, he realised that there was no such thing as stillness. Not in the outback. ‘It's a very peaceful silence,' he added.

How could silence not be peaceful? Meg wondered. As yet, she wasn't quite sure what to make of Paolo Gianni. She certainly liked him, and there was
no denying his good looks, but she wasn't sure whether he was smarter than she was or whether it was the other way around. He was six months older, but so naive at times that she felt herself to be quite his superior, eminently more sophisticated and worldly. And then he would make some serious observation, and she would feel immature, ‘a giddy girl', as her mother used to say.

‘Wait until tomorrow,' she said, ‘I'll show you just how peaceful snow can be.'

And she did. They pelted each other with snowballs until they were laughing so much they had to declare a truce; then she introduced him to the joys of tobogganing and building a snowman.

 

T
HE MONTHS PASSED
, then a year, and Paul Dunleavy became increasingly delighted by the rapport between his daughter and Paolo. ‘Already they're brother and sister,' he said to his wife one night as he stoked the large open fire in the front lounge.

But Elizabeth was apprehensive. ‘So long as their affections remain that way inclined.'

Paul prodded the glowing logs, returned the poker to its shiny copper stand beside the grate and waited for her to continue, but she didn't. She merely sat in her alcove seat at the bay windows and concentrated on her petit point.

‘What do you mean by that?' he snapped, irritated. He hated women when they were enigmatic.

‘Just what I say, dear,' Elizabeth replied calmly. ‘I would hate to see their affections take a different path.'

Now Paul felt angry. ‘Good God, woman, what do you take my son for?'

‘Ssssh!' She looked up sharply from her tapestry, her eyes darting a warning to the door.

‘She can't hear, she's upstairs studying,' Paul said,
but he lowered his voice nonetheless. ‘The boy knows she's his half-sister, do you think for one minute he'd …'

‘No. No, I don't, but Meg is eighteen years old …'

Paul didn't hear a word as he sailed on. ‘Besides, he's deeply committed to his studies. He topped his first year, just like I said he would. The boy simply doesn't have time for—'

‘It's not Paolo I'm talking about,' Elizabeth interrupted angrily. ‘It's Meg.'

It infuriated Elizabeth that Paul found Meg's studies insignificant in comparison to Paolo's. Meg had just started her first year of Arts at Cambridge and her father, having successfully opened the doors of academia for her, professed pride in his daughter's scholarly aspirations, but Elizabeth knew otherwise. Paul was too wrapped up in his ‘protege' to take much interest in the child who had once been the very centre of his existence.

‘It's your daughter I'm talking about,' she repeated and her tone was sharp. ‘Your daughter. Meg.' It was rare for Elizabeth to speak crossly and Paul's attention was finally arrested.

‘But Meg's just a child.'

Dear God in heaven, Elizabeth thought, was the man blind? But she softened her tone. ‘She is a woman, my dear, barely two years younger than I was when we married.'

‘And you think she's set her sights on Paolo?' There was absolute horror in Paul's voice.

‘No, no, of course I don't,' Elizabeth was quick to reassure him, ‘but any moment now there will be suitors at the door. She is at an age where young men notice her and she notices them.'

‘Well, you make sure she doesn't notice Paolo.' Elizabeth returned a small sigh of exasperation. ‘I mean it, Elizabeth,' he said in earnest. ‘You're the diplomat in this family—you talk to her. If you really think there's any
danger then you tell her she's to leave Paolo alone. Tell her he has his studies to attend to; put it however you like.'

‘All right, all right,' Elizabeth said as he paced, agitated, about the lounge, ‘don't get overexcited.'