The captain turned away with the girl, and they went down the stairs within the island. As they passed down the steel corridor towards the gangway he asked her, 'What was he teasing you about, honey?'
'Everything,' she said vaguely. 'Took his stick and poked it in my ear. Let's have a drink before we start looking for a train, Dwight. I'll feel better then.'
He took her to the same hotel in the main street. Over the drinks he asked her, 'How long have we got, this evening?'
'The last train leaves Flinders Street at eleven-fifteen. I'd better get on that, Dwight. Mummy would never forgive me if I spent the night with you.'
'I'll say she wouldn't. What happens when you get to Berwick? Is anybody meeting you?'
She shook her head. 'We left a bicycle at the station this morning. If you do the right thing by me I won't be able to ride it, but it's there, anyway.' She finished her first double brandy. 'Buy me another, Dwight.'
'I'll buy you one more,' he said. 'After that we're getting on the train. You promised me that we'd go dancing.'
'So we are,' she said. 'I booked a table at Mario's. But I shuffle beautifully when I'm tight.'
'I don't want to shuffle,' he said. 'I want to dance.'
She took the drink he handed her. 'You're very exacting,' she said. 'Don't go poking any more sticks in my ear-I just can't bear it. Most men don't know how to dance, anyway.'
'You'll find me one of them,' he said. 'We used to dance a lot back in the States. But I've not danced since the war began.'
She said, 'I think you live a very restricted life.'
He managed to detach her from the hotel after her second drink, and they walked to the station in the evening light. They arrived at the city half an hour later, and walked out into the street. 'It's a bit early,' she said. 'Let's walk.'
He took her arm to guide her through the Saturday evening crowds. Most of the shops had plenty of good stock still in the windows but few were open. The restaurants and cafes were all full, doing a roaring trade; the bars were shut, but the streets were full of drunks. The general effect was one of boisterous and uninhibited lightheartedness, more in the style of 1890 than of 1963. There was no traffic in the wide streets but for the trams, and people swarmed all over the road. At the corner of Swanston and Collins Streets an Italian was playing a very large and garish accordion, and playing it very well indeed. Around him, people were dancing to it. As they passed the Regal cinema a man, staggering along in front of them, fell down, paused for a moment upon hands and knees, and rolled dead drunk into the gutter. Nobody paid much attention to him. A policeman, strolling down the pavement, turned him over, examined him casually, and strolled on.
'They have quite a time here in the evenings,' Dwight remarked.
'It's nothing like so bad as it used to be,' the girl replied. 'It was much worse than this just after the war.'
'I know it. I'd say they're getting tired of it.' He paused, and then he said, 'Like I did.'
She nodded. 'This is Saturday, of course. It's very quiet here on an ordinary night. Almost like it was before the war.'
They walked on to the restaurant. The proprietor welcomed them because he knew her well; she was in his establishment at least once a week and frequently more often. Dwight Towers had been there half a dozen times, perhaps, preferring his club, but he was known to the headwaiter as the captain of the American submarine. They were well received and given a good table in a corner away from the band; they ordered drinks and dinner.
'They're pretty nice people here,' Dwight said appreciatively. 'I don't come in so often and I don't spend much when I do come.'
'I come here pretty frequently,' the girl said. She sat in reflection for a moment. 'You know, you're a very lucky man.'
'Why do you say that?'
'You've got a full-time job to do.'
It had not occurred to him before that he was fortunate. 'That's so,' he said slowly. 'I certainly don't seem to get a lot of time to go kicking around on the loose.'
'I do,' she said. 'It's all I've got to do.'
'Don't you work at anything? No job at all?'
'Nothing at all,' she said. 'Sometimes I drive a bullock round the farm at home, harrowing the muck. That's all I ever do.'
'I'd have thought you'd have been working in the city someplace,' he remarked.
'So would I,' she said a little cynically. 'But it's not so easy as that. I took honours in history up at the Shop, just before the war.'
'The Shop?'
'The university. I was going to do a course of shorthand and typing. But what's the sense in working for a year at that? I wouldn't have time to finish it. And if I did, there aren't any jobs.'
'You mean, business is slowing down?'
She nodded. 'Lots of my friends are out of a job now. People aren't working like they used to, and they don't want secretaries. Half of Daddy's friends-people who used to go to the office-they just don't go now. They live at home, as if they were retired. An awful lot of offices have closed, you know.'
'I suppose that makes sense,' he remarked. 'A man has a right to do the things he wants to do in the last months, if he can get by with the money.'
'A girl has a right to, too,' she said. 'Even if the things she wants to do are something different to driving a bullock round the farm to spread the dung.'
'There's just no work at all?' he asked.
'Nothing that I could find,' she said. 'And I've tried hard enough. You see, I can't even type.'
'You could learn,' he said. 'You could go and take that course that you were going to take.'
'What's the sense of that, if there's no time to finish it, or use it afterwards?'
'Something to work at,' he remarked. 'Just as an alternative to all the double brandies.'
'Work just for the sake of working?' she inquired. 'It sounds simply foul.' Her fingers drummed restlessly upon the table.
'Better than drinking just for the sake of drinking,' he observed. 'Doesn't give you a hangover.'
She said irritably, 'Order me a double brandy, Dwight, and then let's see if you can dance.'
He took her out upon the dance floor, feeling vaguely sorry for her. She was in a prickly kind of mood. Immersed in his own troubles and occupations, it had never occurred to him that young, unmarried people had their own frustrations in these times. He set himself to make the evening pleasant for her, talking about the films and musicals they both had seen, the mutual friends they had. 'Peter and Mary Holmes are funny,' she told him once. 'She's absolutely nuts on gardening. They've got that flat upon a three years' lease. She's planning to plant things this autumn that'll come up next year.'
He smiled. 'I'd say she's got the right idea. You never know.' He steered the conversation back to safer subjects. 'Did you see the Danny Kaye movie at the Plaza?'
Yachting and sailing were safe topics, and they talked around those for some time. The floor show came on as they finished dinner, and amused them for a while, and then they danced again. Finally the girl said, 'Cinderella. I'll have to start and think about that train, Dwight.'
He paid the bill while she was in the cloakroom, and met her by the door. In the streets of the city it was quiet now; the music was still, the restaurants and cafes were now closed. Only the drunks remained, reeling down the pavements aimlessly or lying down to sleep. The girl wrinkled her nose. 'They ought to do something about all this,' she said. 'It never was like this before the war.'
'It's quite a problem,' he said thoughtfully. 'It comes up all the time in the ship. I reckon a man has a right to do the things he wants to when he goes ashore, so long as he doesn't go bothering other people. Some folks just have to have the liquor, times like these.' He eyed a policeman on the corner. 'That's what the cops here seem to think, in this city, at any rate. I've never seen a drunk arrested yet, not just for being drunk.'
At the station she paused to thank him and to wish him good night. 'It's been a beaut evening,' she said. 'The day, too. Thanks for everything, Dwight.'
'I've enjoyed it, Moira,' he said. 'It's years since I danced.'
