Dorrigo and Amy’s first meeting in Adelaide

Dorrigo and Amy’s first meeting in Adelaide transforms a scene he initially watches with contempt into an encounter of involuntary intimacy. He first sees Amy as the centre of a noisy group of servicemen and resents her apparent power over them; when she comes to stand before him, however, the distance between judgment and attraction collapses. The later discovery that she is Keith Mulvaney’s wife gives the meeting a family connection that Dorrigo could not have known in the bookshop.

The bookshop and its company

Dorrigo is in a bookshop after a poetry reading downstairs, browsing among old editions and hoping to find an inexpensive copy of Virgil’s Aeneid. What draws him is less the poem itself than the sense of communion he finds in books: they seem to open onto a larger, continuing world in which he is not alone. Sunlight entering through the dormer windows makes dust motes shimmer and change direction, lending the room a quiet intensity sharply unlike the noisy gathering that arrives on the stairs.

The group includes servicemen in RAAF, RAN and AIF uniforms and two women: one large and red-haired, the other smaller and blonde, with a bright crimson flower tucked behind her ear. The men repeatedly join in a half-sung, half-chanted refrain, and appear to be seeking the smaller woman’s attention. She does not seem interested in them. Dorrigo notices that none has an arm resting on hers or a leg touching hers, and reads their efforts as futile orbiting around a woman who remains apart from them.

His first response is not fascination but dislike. He regards the men as her ornaments and despises what he sees as their subjection to an attraction they cannot possess. He also resents her apparent ability to reduce them to supplicants. This judgment establishes the distance from which he initially watches her: he thinks he understands the scene, and takes its social performance as a reason to dismiss both her and the men.

Amy approaches Dorrigo

When the group begins to move toward him, Dorrigo retreats along the bookshelves toward the street windows. The crowd halts nearby, and he concentrates more intently on the books rather than meet its glances. Looking up again, he sees that Amy has left the others and come directly to where he is standing. She is striped by alternating shadow and sunlight, a striking contrast to the clustered men left behind.

Her eyes hold his attention. He cannot tell whether she is assessing or judging him, and the uncertainty makes him resentful and unsure. He fears that the encounter might be a joke at his expense, with the men joining in; when he steps backward, he bumps into the bookcase and has nowhere further to retreat. His body is left awkwardly twisted, one hand caught between himself and the shelf. The scene’s first shift is physical as well as emotional: the detached observer is now the person being looked at.

Amy tells him she saw him come into the bookshop. When he cannot identify the flower, she says it was stolen. Asked whether he likes it, he says that he does. She explains that it came from a camellia bush. The crimson flower becomes the detail by which he later remembers her appearance, though he recognizes that it cannot tell him who she is. He is less able to describe her than to recall the audacity of wearing it.

An attraction neither names

Amy takes time to appraise Dorrigo and, having apparently found him to her liking, laughs in a way that makes him feel as if she has discovered everything appealing in the world in him. The moment reverses his earlier sense of superiority: where he had judged her from a distance, he now experiences himself as being seen and, through her attention, momentarily transformed. Her response is not presented as a calculated flirtation; the narrative stresses that she is oblivious to his unease and that the exchange is no attempt at charm.

Her laugh is sudden, slightly throaty and intimate. As she leans forward, Dorrigo smells perfume and alcohol. He does not will or want what follows, yet feels that something undeniable is passing between them. A shaft of light falls between them, dust rising in it, recalling the luminous particles that had drawn his attention while he browsed. The bookshop’s quiet sense of a world opening outward is now concentrated in the space between two people. He turns to face her squarely and smiles, though he does not know what he says. Across the light, he can still see the men waiting in the shadows, but their presence no longer defines the encounter.

Amy asks what sort of soldier he is. The question places his military identity into their first exchange, but the evidence does not give his answer or develop the conversation further here. What it does establish is the force of the meeting: Dorrigo’s initial contempt gives way to an attraction he cannot explain away as performance, while Amy’s direct approach has made him the focus of the scene he had tried to avoid.

The later recognition

The connection between Amy and Dorrigo’s family becomes explicit at the King of Cornwall Hotel. Dorrigo goes to the bar looking for Keith and explains that he is Keith’s nephew. The barmaid recognizes him as Dorrigo; when she begins to introduce herself, she identifies herself as Keith’s wife. The narrative thus confirms that the blonde woman with the red flower in the bookshop was Amy Mulvaney, though the first encounter itself did not disclose her name or her marriage.

The recognition sharpens the significance of what had passed between them. At the bar, Dorrigo’s attention darts across the bottles, the other drinkers and a towel bearing the hotel’s name before settling on Amy’s hand, resting on the bar with a damp tea towel. He notices her elegant fingers and burgundy-painted nails and is seized by a desire to feel them in his mouth. The first meeting’s unspoken attraction therefore persists into this later recognition, now complicated by the fact that Amy is the wife of the uncle Dorrigo has come to find. The scene links a chance encounter in a bookshop to a relationship whose personal and familial stakes are already present in its circumstances.