Highways to a War Read Online Free PDF Page A

anywhere, from Kuala Lumpur to Hong Kong—but always in a bar. And eventually his paper fired him, and we came back home. He can manage, on that stupid little rag. It’s easy being news editor here; people cover for him. And he’s tapered off, in the last few years.”
    She looked away through the window, following the progress of a tow-haired young mother pushing a child in a stroller. She’d never spoken in this way before; never before uttered a serious criticism of Lockhart to me. Diana was reticent. But as is often the case with the reticent, once she’d started talking it led her deeper.
    “Sometimes I think it might have been better if he’d been shot down in one of his raids over the Ruhr,” she said. “That’s when his life really ended.”
    “You don’t mean that,” I said; but she looked at me without remorse, her eyes fixed, both hands gripping her cup.
    “He was a beautiful man, when I met him,” she said. “He seemed to have the world in front of him as a journalist. I didn’t understand then what the War had done to him. He’d enlisted when he was twenty in the RAAF; a year later he was in the RAF in England: a flight lieutenant at twenty-one, bombing Germany. He survived a lot of raids—and so many of them didn’t. Just boys. And the terrible thing is, Ray, part of him liked it. He didn’t say so, but it’s true. He never really had a life he wanted after that. Journalism wasn’t enough. Something stopped in him like a clock, in the War.”
    As she spoke, I was remembering the Lockhart of twenty years ago, when Mike Langford first started on the Courier. In the lounge bar of the Colonel Paterson Hotel on a Saturday night, Lockhart had presided, seated in his usual place, surrounded by a respectful circle of young reporters and photographers—Mike among them. In a town like ours, an ex—foreign correspondent was almost unknown, and had a film star glamour: the glamour of the outside world. Lockhart had many anecdotes to tell concerning his coverage during the fifties: the Korean War; the French struggle in Vietnam; the Communist insurgency in Malaya and Singapore. He was always in charge of the evening, and Mike became his most constant drinking companion.
    As though hearing my thoughts, Diana said: “I wish you could understand how it was, Ray, when Mike first came to Launceston. Full of a farm boy’s dreams of the world: he was appealing, and Rex got very fond of him. Maybe he saw himself in Mike, before he stuffed up everything. We had Mike home for meals all the time, and Mike was always bringing gifts. He wanted to work abroad like Lockhart; he truly admired him. But he didn’t go away for a long time: six years. He enjoyed his life here: playing his club football; having his nights out with Lockhart and the rest of our crowd. But mainly he didn’t go because of me.”
    I signaled for two more coffees.
    “He’d been badly hurt,” she said. “He’d lost that girl he wanted to marry. The pickers’ daughter on his father’s farm: I don’t remember her name. I never knew what really happened, and Mike wouldn’t talk about it. She just disappeared, didn’t she?”
    “Yes,” I said. “She just disappeared.”
    She stirred her fresh coffee, looking into the cup. “Mike and I were in love but we didn’t become lovers,” she said. “At least, not until the end. He had his girlfriends—I told him to, because I’d never leave Rex and the girls. But his affairs never seemed to come to anything. All three of us were friends: Rex was like a father, and I pretended I was like a mother.” She smiled. “Who did I think I was fooling? Mike was twenty-one when he first started on the Courier, and I was only twenty-seven. A lot younger than Rex, and I was starting to feel it. Mike and I would mostly see each other on Saturday nights in the Colonel Paterson, as part of a crowd. And afterwards the party at our place: you remember. My God, Ray, those nights in the Colonel! Like a