Ella

Ella is the Melbourne teacher Dorrigo Evans assumes he will marry, a woman whose family offers him entry into a confident and established social world. Kind and devoted, she becomes both his expected future and the measure of his growing emotional estrangement: when his desire turns elsewhere, he tries to hold on to the life she represents but can no longer feel at home in it.

Identity and Background

Ella is a teacher from a prominent Melbourne family. Her father is a solicitor, her mother comes from a well-known grazing family, and her grandfather helped write the federal constitution. Dorrigo meets her while completing his surgical training. Her family is liberal enough to welcome a young man from a poorer background with high prospects, but the welcome comes with an expectation that he enter their world on its terms.

For Dorrigo, that world has the reassuring look of permanence: darkwood rooms, clubs, sherry and single malt in crystal decanters. Its confidence contrasts with his own family’s history of survival rather than public distinction. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was nineteen, while he was away on a scholarship at the University of Melbourne. At Ormond College, he had encountered families whose wealth, status and inherited histories seemed to define achievement. He stayed away from his family until his mother’s death, and did not cry at her funeral. Only much later did he understand survival as an achievement in its own right. Ella’s social setting thus appeals to an ambition formed partly by his early sense that his origins amounted to failure.

The Future Dorrigo Expects

By the time he is a surgeon, Dorrigo takes for granted that he and Ella will marry. They have never discussed it, but he believes that she shares the expectation. He places marriage alongside completing his medical degree and receiving his commission: another step forward, and another movement into the life he has been pursuing. His certainty makes the relationship seem less like a decision made between two people than a natural continuation of his advancement.

Dorrigo does see Ella’s limitations. He sometimes finds her dull, and her conversation can strike him as a repetition of familiar commonplaces, leaving him unsure what she thinks beneath them. Yet he also finds her kind and devoted, and her looks and social world exert a powerful attraction. The relationship therefore holds both genuine affection and calculation: Ella matters to him, but so does the security and status he associates with her family.

Amy and the Strain on the Relationship

After an encounter with Amy Mulvaney in an Adelaide bookshop, Dorrigo returns to Melbourne for a forty-eight-hour leave and spends two days and a night with Ella. He tries to fill the visit with activity and clings to her as though she could steady him. He wants their closeness to make them new to one another, but feels nothing, despite recognizing her beauty. Ella refuses the intimacy he suddenly seeks, a refusal that leaves him confronting the discrepancy between his need for reassurance and his emotional absence.

Dorrigo does not initially tell her about the encounter. He asks himself what there is to disclose, since nothing happened; the repetition of that thought registers how urgently he is trying to reduce an inward disturbance to an event that can be dismissed. When he eventually tells Ella, he presents the woman as an odd encounter and describes her as unremarkable, inventing nice teeth as a safe detail he cannot genuinely recall. He feels shame at having made the story sound like an infidelity and at having misrepresented the woman, Ella, and himself. Ella responds by asking pointedly whether the stranger had a red camellia in her hair and by imagining her as monstrous. Her response punctures Dorrigo’s attempt to control the account, though the evidence does not establish what she knows beyond what he has told her.

Attempts at Reconciliation and Emotional Distance

On a later six-day furlough, Dorrigo takes the overnight train to Melbourne rather than returning to his uncle’s hotel. He spends all his money on outings and presents for Ella, hoping to smother his memory of Amy through renewed attention to his fiancée. Yet while Ella searches his face for the same hunger she feels, he sees her familiar features as dull and her trusting gaze as almost credulous. He dislikes himself for these judgments, and answers them by trying harder to immerse himself in her conversation, fears, jokes and stories.

At dinner in her father’s club, a RAAF major repeatedly makes Ella laugh. When the major leaves for a nearby nightclub, Ella urges Dorrigo to join them. Dorrigo experiences an emotion that combines jealousy with gratitude, without being able to separate the two. The scene shows that Ella is not simply waiting passively for him: she responds to the company around her, while Dorrigo watches his assumed place in her life become less secure even as he struggles to recover his own attachment.

Change and Narrative Significance

As Dorrigo’s wartime life moves further from the future he had imagined, Ella ceases to occupy the center of his emotional world. In the prison camp, he still thinks of a woman’s voice, smile, laugh and presence, but explicitly distinguishes this private preoccupation from Ella. The contrast makes clear that his earlier expectation of marriage has not endured as a reliable emotional bond. The evidence does not give Ella’s later actions or a definitive account of the relationship’s ending; it shows instead how Dorrigo’s certainty about their future gives way to concealment, strained efforts at closeness and inward separation.

Ella’s narrative importance lies partly in the way Dorrigo makes her stand for advancement and security. His changing perception of her exposes the limits of treating marriage as the next achievement in a sequence of qualifications and promotions. At the same time, the account gives her observable responses—her refusal of intimacy, her pointed questions, her enjoyment of the major’s stories—rather than presenting her only as a status symbol in Dorrigo’s plans. The distance between his assumptions and her presence is one of the clearest signs that the future he thought settled has never been as simple or as mutual as he imagined.