Love in the Years of Lunacy Read Free

then pointed to Pearl. ‘No swearing. No dancing. No fraternising with the boys.’ She glanced at Martin, swallowing a smile. ‘Is that clear?’
    â€˜ Hear, hear,’ said Martin.
    Pearl saluted her. ‘Aye, aye!’
    â€˜And don’t fill up your dance card, Captain,’ Martin added, touching Roma on the shoulder. ‘Later on, I plan to give you a real swing around the ballroom!’
    Roma giggled again and backed away towards the front door. Pearl followed Martin through a library hung with sepia-tinged photographs of stern men in suits. She recognised Abraham Lincoln with his distinctive beard, but the black faces were unfamiliar. The names on the brass plates at the bottom of the frames were equally obscure: W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington. It was all so new to her—the portraits, her brother’s behaviour—that suddenly she wanted to turn back. She caught the sleeve of Martin’s dinner jacket and he turned towards her. Her hand dropped from his sleeve and she opened her mouth to ask him to take her home, but before Pearl could utter a word Martin linked his arm in hers and wheeled her around.
    â€˜Don’t worry, Miss Willis,’ he said, bunging on his best posh British accent. ‘Your prince will accompany you to the dance.’
    She had to laugh, which relaxed her a little. They walked arm in arm through the library, her brother so close she could smell the lemony starch of his collar. Then the door to the auditorium swung open and there were crashing waves of laughter and music and she forgot that she was nervous, that her dress was streaked with mud, that she was white. Some of the windows were cracked and the stage sagged to the left—so different from the Trocadero ballroom, with its revolving stage and bevelled-glass wall panels. The light was dim, but through the coils of cigarette smoke she could make out the shapes of people gyrating on the dance floor, couples spinning away from each other and back again, a girl somersaulting over the back of a crouching man, the dip and swivel of hips. The GIs were all in uniform, though some had loosened their collars and rolled up their sleeves, and when she looked closer she could see sequins of sweat glistening against their faces.
    Each black man dancing had a black woman in his arms. She knew that Amcross had recruited scores of Aboriginal and Pacific Islander girls to serve as dance partners for the Americans, but still she was taken aback to see so many black Australian girls in one place. She noticed a few of the dancers slowing down to stare at her. Some of the girls looked hostile, as if offended by her presence. The men leaning against the walls sipping beers nudged one another and nodded in her direction, and all at once she felt as if she were an alien. Throat dry, she glanced at Martin, who smiled and winked at her in a big-brotherly kind of way, even though Pearl was actually ten minutes older.
    â€˜Car’n, Burly,’ said Martin, invoking his long-time nickname for her. He cocked his head. ‘Follow my lead.’ Martin threaded his way between the dancers, head held high, and Pearl shadowed him as they made their way towards the stage. She knew the bandleader, Merv Sent, and his quartet, the Senders. In his heyday, Merv had been the first clarinettist for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, until, the rumour went, he woke up one morning after a two-day drinking binge to find himself lying on top of the Harbour Bridge, clutching a half-bottle of rum in one hand and his clarinet in the other. He had no memory of his drunken crawl along the steep arc of metal the night before. The police had to summon the fire brigade to get him down and once it got into the papers he was fired from the orchestra. For the last year he’d been touring outback army camps in an entertainment unit, but was now on leave, along with the other three musos in the band, and was picking up