Love

Love in the novel is a lasting attachment that can outlive memory, escape rational explanation, and remain painfully unfulfilled. It enlarges Ella’s experience of the world, binds Dorrigo Evans to a shared family life, and continues to govern his relation to Amy Mulvaney long after they have lost one another. Yet the book refuses to treat love as a cure: its persistence can bring intimacy, loneliness, regret, and the knowledge that no happy ending is assured.

Love without a bargain

For Ella, love is not a response that depends on being repaid. Her family and friends, and Dorrigo among them, give her a way of understanding the world; with them it becomes larger and more wondrous. She hopes for Dorrigo’s love and feels the disappointment when it is absent, but that disappointment does not become a reason to stop loving him. Her attachment longs for requital without making requital its condition. The distinction matters: love’s endurance here is not evidence that the relationship is equal or that its pain disappears.

Ella’s habit of echoing Dorrigo’s words and opinions does not mean that she lacks thoughts of her own. Rather, she wishes to experience life through other people, and love gives that wish its fullest form. When Dorrigo is away at night, she lies awake thinking of their relationship and feels overwhelming sadness. Her devotion is therefore neither simple contentment nor unawareness. She can trust and love him while recognizing, in her own way, what is missing; the contradiction belongs to the attachment rather than resolving it.

The intimacy and loneliness of shared life

Over years and decades, Dorrigo and Ella accumulate the substance of a common life: raising children, helping one another in practical and tender ways, and sharing private conversations and small intimacies. Their closeness is registered in ordinary bodily and domestic details—the smell of each other on waking, the sound of the other’s breathing when a child is ill, and the food, towels, cutlery, and cups that become part of a life pursued together. Illness, grief, care, and unexpected tenderness deepen this history. What binds them is not one dramatic declaration but the dense, repeated experience of being responsible for each other.

For Dorrigo, however, this binding does not extinguish solitude. The accumulated life with Ella can seem more undeniable than the uncertain word love, while still leaving him lonely in a way he cannot overcome. He repeatedly seeks other women, and the affairs do not relieve his isolation; instead, they intensify it. The contrast complicates any notion that domestic fidelity of experience necessarily produces emotional harmony. Dorrigo is bound to Ella, but the bond and his loneliness coexist.

Amy, memory, and the life that persists in absence

Dorrigo’s attachment to Amy persists even as his conscious memory of her recedes. In the early postwar years, she had for a time been his entire reason for existence; later, weeks and then months could pass without his thinking of her. His memory becomes less distinct, while shared life with Ella grows more substantial. Yet Amy’s absence continues to shape his choices. He refuses to visit Adelaide, even for major professional or veterans’ events, and has a beautiful red camellia removed from the garden of the house he shares with Ella in Toorak. The flower’s destruction makes a private, consequential refusal visible in the domestic setting.

Dorrigo’s infidelity takes on an unintended paradox: although he does not consciously understand it this way, his repeated betrayals of Ella function as a kind of fidelity to Amy’s memory. No other woman means anything particular to him. The novel presents this not as a noble or deliberate tribute, but as a pattern that hurts and isolates him without recovering the lost relationship. Even forgetting Amy cannot make her absence cease to matter.

More than a quarter-century after first seeing Amy in an Adelaide bookshop, Dorrigo encounters her again on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Her changed appearance matters less to him than the return of feelings he had believed lost. As they approach, he weighs whether to call out and imagines the disruption that re-entering her life might cause. Her necklace sets memory moving; the sight of her adjusting her dress briefly feeds his hope that she might welcome him. The scene turns on a choice that never becomes an action: they walk past each other without speaking. Dorrigo recognizes that he has misunderstood her, himself, their past, and love, but cannot make himself turn back until he reaches the far end of the bridge. When he finally does, Amy is gone. The missed encounter makes love’s persistence inseparable from lost time: feeling returns, but it cannot restore the moment in which a response was possible.

Love without redemption

At the novel’s end, Dorrigo reads a romance he had expected to finish happily, with the lovers finding peace, joy, redemption, and understanding. Instead, its final pages have been torn out and used; there is no last page to supply the promised conclusion. The missing ending becomes an image for Dorrigo’s own life, which seems to break off without peace or hope. He understands that the love story will continue, but its continuation offers no guarantee of reconciliation or relief. Love can persist as a bond and as an injury; Dorrigo’s conclusion that he will live in hell because love is that also refuses to separate devotion from suffering.

After this recognition, he goes out into the rain and, returning by lantern light, notices a small crimson flower growing beside the muddy trail. The image does not undo the loss or provide the missing ending. Placed after the bleakness of the unfinished romance, it leaves love’s significance open to both pain and fragile persistence: something can remain, even when it cannot deliver the peace a story has taught its reader to expect.