The Widow and Her Hero

10

As Rufus and Leo had promised, Doucette came back to his best. Charming at parties, he was again forthcoming with the ukulele, and sang ‘When I’m Cleaning Windows’ in a range of regional accents. Uncertainty was over for him now, and a course had been set. Leo devoted a lot of energy to persuading me that what came next would be the climacteric of clever endeavours, beyond which we would have earned the right to breed children and live tranquilly.

One Saturday that winter, Leo was given two tickets to the stand at the Melbourne Cricket Ground for an Australian Rules game between Carlton and Collingwood, which the newspapers said would be the game of the season. Under a severe Melbourne sky we went off on the tram, carrying all that had happened and what was to come on our shoulders with apparent ease. I was unversed in Victorian football, and so to an extent was Leo, but he reacted to the contest between leaping and kicking men with an excitement that flowed into me when he grabbed my shoulder as if to protect it against the cold at moments of high sporting tension.

A chill wind was dimpling the surface of the river when we got home. Coming inside, we found a very sombre Foxhill drinking with the Mortmains. We could see the traces of tears on Dotty’s cheeks, so that at first we thought there might have been an almighty row between her and Rufus. Foxhill rose. Leo, he said.

Dotty and Rufus had also risen. Dotty said, Please, Foxy, let us get out of your way. And she and Rufus disappeared to the interior of their side of the flat. I felt a distinct pulse of fear at that moment. What could be so bad that Rufus and Dotty needed to make a space for it?

Foxhill said, Jesse Creed has access to a lot of information, you understand, Dig.

But we knew that already. How do you mean? asked Leo.

Well, you’ll be getting notification from the Red Cross. But I’m afraid your father… he’s been killed, Leo. After he was taken prisoner in Honiara they shipped him to a camp in the Philippines, and a month ago he was put with 200 others on a ship for Japan, the Terasao Maru. It was torpedoed by an American sub. The only survivors were a handful of crew members. Both Japanese and Red Cross sources concur.

I felt that primal convulsion of grief and the surge of tears, and began clumsily hugging Leo, trying to make hard contact with his flesh despite the fact that he was sheathed in an army overcoat still.

We have independent confirmation of it, Foxhill told us, to ward off any argument of hope. Of course, the American sub commander had no idea the ship was full of POWs.

Leo had not shed a tear but his mouth was open as if he was pathetically rolling probabilities around in his jaw.

Let’s sit down, he said. I insisted I take his coat off, as if that would ease the hour. Then we both sat down. I held him. Foxhill fetched him some whisky.

They were all below, of course, Leo reasoned with himself. The prisoners. The sub commander couldn’t have known.

Foxhill said, That’s right.

So he’s with my mother now, said Leo with a sort of primitive faith. Foxhill nodded earnestly, encouraging this sudden theology in Leo. That’s right, Dig. That’s exactly right.

Well, said Leo, blinking. He was a very skilled man. Never got over my mum dying like that. It changed the whole direction of his life.

The thing would have been sudden, I guess, Dig, Foxhill insisted. The commander said the thing just exploded amidships. One great explosion, no, two actually. The ship went up and then settled in an instant.

The sub commander said that? asked Leo.

Pretty much, said Foxhill. Just one thing – we can’t say anything yet, or have any public memorial service. I mean, for the moment can you just keep it in your own circle, Dig? It shouldn’t be in the paper or anything.

Leo looked at him, but dully.

What I mean is, said Foxhill, we’re not supposed to know about this yet. The Japanese don’t know we know. You understand, Dig? After the Red Cross tells you officially, by all means go ahead. But I suppose you’ll be off… on your adventure by then. If you’re up to it.

Leo shook his head. No, of course I’m up to it. No. This alters nothing.

But my fear was that it might alter a great deal, not least in Leo himself.

Eventually Dotty and Rufus reappeared. Foxhill informed Leo, I did tell the Mortmains why I was here. I hope that you don’t mind that, Dig.

Leo stood up to receive Dotty’s embraces. This bloody, bloody war, she said.

Yes, said Leo. But it will end, you know, Dotty.

Rufus muttered, a sort of melodious condolence, and poured more drinks. We all sat down. Leo began speaking spontaneously about his father. He had a hard life, you know. We have a good farm, but dairy farming’s tough. We were better off than most. Landed gentry.

He laughed at the idea.

Bush aristocrats. Seven hundred good acres. Flood plain. An educated man, too, my father. An agronomist. So when my mother died, he turned the farm over to his sister, my Aunty Cass, and her husband. And he took this job with the British administration in the Solomons.

But what was he like? I wanted to ask. This man I had never known. I did not even know if he was gregarious or reserved, loud or quiet. Leo had lapsed into deep thought in our midst. We were not going to find out much more.

That night as I held him, he said, He wasn’t without his faults, you know. I wouldn’t want to say that. He started drinking too much in the Solomons. But everyone did. And he let me run wild, and he had a woman. My nanny. Delia. A great, full-bodied Melanesian woman. A really jolly sort of person. I loved her. I didn’t quite understand that he did too. I can see now why the colonial wives were sniffy about him. Anyhow, most of them probably died on the ship, and Delia’s probably still on Guadalcanal, getting by.

After a silence, I thought Leo had gone to sleep but suddenly he said, He was a bloody good fisherman too, you know. And then, It would have been an awful death. Locked in the hold. It would have been hot, about 120 degrees, and it would have been foul and cramped. And then all at once the concussion, and water flooding in.

I could hear a little stutter of tears from him, merely a stutter, the habit of easy tears had been suppressed since his wild Solomon Islands childhood.

I said, You don’t have to think about that. Most death is hard. He wouldn’t want you to dwell on that.

Leo said, But I have to.

The flat was unheated, and for the first time I felt the malice of the cold of that southern city in winter.

Only two weeks later, Leo and Rufus left by train for Western Australia. It was another dismal night – we had had a last supper at the flat and went across to Swanston Street in a taxi. Rufus had a lot of business to attend to, supervising the loading of gear into the goods vans at the back of the passenger train. I met little Jockey Rubinsky, the young man of many languages who was too awed by the occasion to say anything meaningful to me. I was astonished to meet my cousin Mel Duckworth, the one who had brought Leo home to Braidwood in the first place, amongst the men boarding. Leo had not mentioned his possible membership of the Memerang group, and I thought until then he had a comfortable training job in Queensland. I’m just in support, said Mel. I’m like the lighting man on a student production. He had none of his New South Wales family and no girlfriend to see him off, and he gave an impression of being a little more lost than some of the others.

Leo took me aside. I’ll be back for Christmas. It’s going to be wonderful. I agreed with him. I’m not making empty promises, he said. The weather conditions mean we’ve got to be back well before Christmas anyhow. That’s between you and me.

I’m pleased to hear that piece of information, I told him.

Look, he said, you’re allowed to worry a bit. Just a bit.

I remember saying – wittily, I thought, for a woman doing her best – All right. I’ll indulge that luxury.

And listen, he said further, you don’t have to worry about other things. I believe there’s a searchlight battery of women at our training ground. You don’t have to worry about any of that. You’re the woman. There isn’t any other.

He put his lips to my ear. As for Rufus, he said through crushed lips, I can’t give any guarantees.

I’m not worried about women. I’m worried about your father.

I meant the influence his father’s death might have on him.

He kissed me. I’m not Hamlet Prince of Denmark, he told me. Don’t fret about that.

For some reason, on the cold station, the assurance was a comfort. Doucette turned up, with bright eyes utterly lacking in doubt or the madness I’d seen at the beach house. He was compact, full of a burning energy. Kissing my hand, he assured me he would look after his young friend Dig, and that I was to live blithely until Leo’s return. In the coming months I would remember and cling to Doucette’s air of certainty, and I would not tell Dotty about it for fear she would diffuse it with another story of the Boss’s Singapore berserkness.

The train was delayed and delayed, and it got to the point where everyone wanted it to be gone, and to have done. We had said every possible version of goodbye and exchanged every consoling promise, and invested ourselves into too many farewells, so that by the time the whistle went there was a sense of staleness in the air. At that second, a revived, mad Rufus did a lanky somersault on the platform and delivered himself upright into the doorway of the train. A small group of soldiers and sailors further along the carriage whistled and cheered him, and his smile went crooked and toothy beneath his eye-glass.

Goodbye, goodbye. Dotty and I and other girlfriends and wives ran along the platform as the train gathered speed, until the barrier at the end stopped us.

I know from Tom Lydon’s book The Sea Otters most of what happened in the training of the group for Memerang on Australia’s west coast. Rufus and the Boss instituted a severe regime at the base near Fremantle, on an island connected to the mainland by a spit of sand, Garden Island. The camp was primitive and tented, but the British submarine flotilla was nearby. Here was stationed a mine-laying submarine named Orca. It had been assigned the job of taking Doucette’s party to a well-wooded island off Singapore where a pick-up base could be established. Then it was meant to convey them further throughout the region till they found a junk that suited them for their attack on the port of Singapore.

The winter nights were severe, and Leo and the others spent many of them in folboats at sea, between Fremantle and Rottnest Island, named by Dutchmen making for Indonesia. Those men who came down with exhaustion were thereby eliminated by Rufus. Dig – Leo – passed every test of course. Jockey similarly. Old hands. The news came that the submersibles, the Silver Bullets, had arrived in Melbourne by ship and were being flown across. For many of the young soldiers and sailors, they would be the ultimate test for membership of the raiding party. They arrived in specially built canisters designed by their inventor, Major Frampton. By this time, their English instructor, one Lieutenant Lower, had also arrived, with Major Frampton. After the first Silver Bullet was uncanistered and displayed to the men, there was enthusiasm and some secret anxiety. Lower warned them that the vehicle proceeded well on the surface, travelling on its batteries at more than 4 knots, but it was harder to handle in the mode in which the operator’s head was just above the surface and the Bullet below, and it also took some skill if the operator drove it down below the surface altogether. The mask had to be breathed into in a particular way. Otherwise carbon dioxide would build up and kill the breather. If any of them got disoriented or otherwise panicked and abandoned the Silver Bullets, they would be court-martialled, since the vehicles were too precious to be let sink. Make sure the submersibles come to the surface! said Lower, a calm, devout man, as it turned out, an Anglo-Catholic. You are free to remain below and drown, he instructed them.

In that rough proving ground off Western Australia, disoriented men drove the Silver Bullets into the silt and came gasping up through murky water to the surface. How I wish one of them had been Leo! But solidarity with the Boss sustained him – even when he found, as he experimented on survival in opaque, churned water, testing the vessel’s every gear, that he could get it to rise only by driving it backwards to the surface.

Doucette decided that Major Eddie Frampton, the engineer creator of the machines, must be their conducting officer, their representative on the submarine, the man who would arrange their delivery and pick-up. Frampton began work with the captain of the submarine Orca, a young officer rather strung out by the long war. When he found that Frampton’s SB containers were incorrectly dimensioned to easily fit his mine tubes in the aft of the Orca, and that when they were jettisoned they fouled against the roof of the compartment, he became very petulant and seemed to have decided that this is what happened once you got into the business of transporting raiding parties.

A lost commando from the abandoned great Natuna plan also turned up at Garden Island. He was an English officer named Filmer, a member of an élite regiment, the Green Howards. Though a professional officer, a type usually suspect to Leo (apart from Doucette, of course), everyone seemed to like Filmer. He had the status of having been an actor in great events – he was one of the commandos who went ashore by canoe during the night preceding D-Day to make gaps in the wire of the coastal defences. How could you leave a man like that out, especially if you were Doucette? Even though his arrival in Australia was due to absurd accidents and mixed signals between SOE and IRD, he became one of the party.

By the end of August they had boarded the sub, Orca, going north and largely living, officers and men, in the torpedo room. How does one exist on a submarine so severely overcrowded? How does a person sleep and keep one’s energy in the cramped, hot, dim daytimes of a submarine? Tom Lydon gives a brief and superficial picture of their two-week journey to the island named NE1, Serapem. In the first days, within reach of Australian aircraft, they were permitted on deck at night for a quarter-hour of callisthenics while the bosun and messmen were preparing the evening meal. Apart from that, it was the torpedo compartment, where they hunched, did exercises in batches, slept in batches, and ate communally of the normal submarine diet of tinned herring, canned bacon and tomato, powdered eggs and haricots musicales, as the sailors called baked beans. The edgy commander, Captain Moxham, had explained to Doucette that as much as he would have liked to entertain the other officers to his table, he could fit only Doucette himself at the wardroom table. Doucette decided, with appropriate thanks, it would be better to have meals with his own officers and men. That was, he said, the way it would be during the real part of the operation.

When the submarine got them to NE1, Serapem, east of Singapore, Rufus and a sailor went ashore at night in a dinghy and stayed there throughout the next day. Orca had gone off into deeper water, but now returned in the dark to signal to the shore by lamp and so to pick Rufus and his crewman up. Paddling aboard, Rufus declared NE1 was perfect – a good landing beach to the east, a hill for watching and a swamp for concealment, and deserted except for a few structures on the west side. During the rest of the night the Memerang group and the sailors of the watch transferred loads of supplies up through the forward hatches to the deck and onto a large inflatable raft which the Memerang men then rowed ashore. Well before dawn, canisters of food and equipment were safely concealed on the flanks of the island’s hill and, as he always planned, Doucette left one officer at NE1, Serapem, to dig in the supplies and await the return of the raiding party for Singapore. The officer he had chosen was my cousin Captain Melbourne Duckworth, son of a devout admirer of that southern city.

Everyone else boarded Orca again and went hunting for a suitable junk. On the coast of Borneo, Moxham sighted a junk named Nanjang, and invited Doucette and Rufus to inspect it through the periscope. They both declared it perfect for their needs. When Orca surfaced, the Malay crew of the 40-ton junk thought them a Japanese submarine and so merely prepared for inspection. The junk was boarded and the fairly amiable crew were transferred to the submarine and made secure, taking the place of the Memerang men who were getting ready to board the Nanjang, with its rather spectacular feature of a Japanese flag painted across its stern. Over a frantic night, as a nervous Moxham fretted on his conning tower, all that was needed to raid Singapore with Silver Bullets and perform great warrior endeavours was loaded on the junk. The Nanjang crew would be delivered back to Western Australia and interned. Orca would then return to collect Doucette and his men.

At dawn, the submarine departed and submerged, leaving over twenty men on the junk, whose marine master was lantern-jawed Rufus Mortmain. The junk was turned for Singapore and the trades filled its lateen sails.

Throughout the rest of the winter of 1944, Dotty and I were still working and living in the communal flat. We had the comfort of knowing that Foxhill would tell us what was happening if he learned anything, since he’d done that in the case of Leo’s father. I found it hard to discipline myself – not to call him every day, to check, especially since at the end of August Creed had whispered to Dotty in the office, Your husband’s on his way.

We both had a date in mind as the longest we’d have to wait. It was December 6th. Independently of each other, Rufus and Leo had told Dotty and me that by then at the latest they’d be back.

It was a rainy Melbourne winter and at night Dotty and I soothed ourselves with gin because it was hard to sleep. Dotty was writing a lot but was secretive about it all. I wrote a fair amount myself, but it was sporadic, it took many stages of concentration for me to get started. And often I’d be just started when Dotty would insist, as if our sanity depended on it and in a way it was hard to refuse, that we had to go out to the Albert Palais or one of the canteens to dance with soldiers. I thought she would be very selective about rank, being British, but while I sat on the balcony drinking a shandy, she proved that sergeants and corporals were not unworthy of her company. I could not have a good time on a dance floor, I decided. It was as if all my sensuality was bundled up with Leo, and was suspended pending his return. (Sometimes these days I fear it’s been bundled up all my life. I hope my second husband got a return on his desire and devotion.)

Anyhow, we didn’t analyse those things then – we acted them out, and as it was obvious that I was a sort of icy widow-for-the-duration on the balcony, it was obvious too that Dotty was available for comforting. Again, I didn’t blame her. I envied her the distraction.

Every day I went off to the military transport office job I had, and deadened myself with routine work and small office filing confusions. The Melbourne football Grand Final came and went as a marker between seasons, and Foxhill could tell us nothing. We found this a bad sign because we believed that however confident he insisted on sounding, there was an edge of bemusement to him too. The weather turned warm, but it was an empty, anxious warmth to Dotty and me. Captain Foxhill organised for us to attend the Members Enclosure for that year’s Melbourne Cup, and gin and expectation gave us a few hours’ respite until a horse named Sirius galloped over the line and we tore our betting tickets up and the vacuum returned.

I remembered that Jesse Creed, the American, had been involved in some way too. But Dotty assured me she had heard nothing from him. Sometimes, she said, I get the impression they’re all keeping some big secret. And I suppose the bastards are. But I think Jesse would tell me if he knew anything.

December arrived. When I felt hope it was feverish. Plain, flat, humid days set in, carrying no omens and dry of promise. Thunderstorms and dust swept down from the north onto the city. Foxhill and his wife visited us for a drink on December 2nd. I tried to gauge whether he knew anything he wasn’t telling us, but he seemed just as uncertain as us. He did not promise us quick news or mention dates. But he did say, When we hear, it will be sudden. Like a thunderclap.

Four days later, on the proposed date of their return, he was back with the news that they were missing. He stood bald-headed and genuinely saddened under the tatty, crepe Christmas streamers and Christmas bells we had hung in the flat. They’re all military personnel, he assured us, so if captured they’d be POWs, every chance of survival.

At what point of things did they go missing? I asked.

I can’t say, Foxhill claimed. I don’t know myself.

But radio messages? asked Dotty. They would have sent a radio message if they were in trouble.

No, Foxhill insisted. They haven’t. Look, for all we know they might have taken some native vessel and be on the way home as we speak.

Don’t play us for fools, Dotty warned him, her eyes blazing.

But I was rather taken with Foxhill’s scenario.

Of course, he said, he would tell us as soon as he got any more definite news. He invited us both to his place for a lunch, and I said how kind that was and that we would see if we were free, but when he left Dotty told me, with tears in her eyes, Bugger playing happy families! Did you sense this would happen? I could sense it. Bloody Rufus! I knew it!

We stayed in that night talking and comforting and sobbing and all the hopeless rest. I felt a mad urge to go out looking, as if he could be found in quiet streets running back from the Yarra. Next day we went to work, and kept our news secret. Dotty arrived home after me and cried out, To hell with staying in and moping. Let’s just go out to the Windsor for dinner.

For some reason it seemed exactly the right thing. We dressed, and made ourselves up and called a taxi.

As we walked up the stairs of the hotel we could hear the festive buzz from within the dining room. The Windsor had that pleasant young woman in black who met us at the doorway of the restaurant and told us there that sadly there was no table available until a quarter to nine. Indeed the tables seemed all taken, by military men and well-dressed women. Dotty obviously felt a primal rage at this unknowing girl, because I felt the same. Dotty told her in a voice thin as a skewer to fetch the head waiter. She fled and got him. He sailed up, a tall man, with his forced smile on his lips, and asked dubiously whether he could help us.

Dotty said in the same thinned-out, furious voice which had compelled the young woman, Our husbands have just been reported missing in action. All we want is a meal. Just get us a table. And not one in a broom cupboard somewhere. A decent table. Otherwise we’ll yell the roof in.

He looked at me for help, as the one with the less turbulent features.

We’re fed up, I confirmed. Why aren’t half these home front warriors missing in action, and not our husbands?

As I spoke I saw a change come over his face. No longer the bland bestower of tables, he nodded at me and a weariness of grief entered his own face. He too had been the receiver of frightful news. He had dead or lost children. He said he sympathised with us, and of course he would try to find us a table. Just give him a minute.

I thanked him. But I had changed. I was unabashed by Dotty’s act, and by my own. But it had taken a lot out of us. Dotty dealt with every suggestion of the elderly waiters with a high, clipped voice, whereas I wasn’t sure what anyone was saying to me. Two British naval officers seated nearby were quick to move in and ask if they could join us. The wifely primness, if that was what it was, that had sustained me up to the point of knowing Leo was actually officially missing, not merely hiding somewhere in some archipelago, seemed to have simply run out. I could not be bothered telling them to go away, not in the face of Dotty’s manic, serial-smoking, serial-drinking eagerness for the diversion they offered. They were from a British cruiser presently in Melbourne, and the elder of the two did not seem to be able to believe his luck in finding a sparkling-eyed Dotty, full of a stored energy he hoped was sexual. He wasn’t as good as the younger officer in sensing that there was really something demented about us. This time, I could tell, Dotty would find comfort in repelling and punishing him in the end. The younger one held junior rank to the other but possessed immensely more sensibility. It would count against his ever becoming an admiral, I suppose, though I doubt he ultimately wanted that anyhow. My young officer was so lacking in expectation that I was able to talk to him about real things, and it was pleasant.

And then we saw the Enrights. They came from a table at the back of the dining room to the dance floor. They began dancing with an easy, casual grace, Major Enright light on his feet. Mrs Enright had stayed in Melbourne with him and had won her battle and was in clear, quietly triumphal possession.

Excuse me, gentlemen, Dotty told our two officers. I’ve just seen the man who might have killed my husband.

This had the mouth-gaping effect on them that she wanted. She stood and advanced onto the dance floor. She could handle her drink well, Dotty, in fact she would later write a poem to gin. ‘My constant lover and traducer,/ noble in promise, squalid in effect,/ companion of verse and bedrooms…’

The Enrights’ dance floor connubiality was about to be dive-bombed, and I’m ashamed to say it was fascinating to watch. Dotty reached out and tapped Major Enright’s shoulder playfully. He responded just as she wanted. He backed away from his wife, who still nonetheless carried a lacquered smile.

I could see Dotty ask him for a dance. How could a desk-born warrior respond when he had made the plans, as willingly as Rufus and Leo had gone along with them? He obviously wished this was not happening, but he turned to his wife and asked her to wait for him at their table.

In Enright’s suddenly stiff hands, Dotty grew loose-haired and sinuous and eager. With the threat she might become shameless, she swung herself with a lover’s confidence in his arms, fell back on his breast, twirled back to face him. She nibbled his ear, pulling languorously on the lobe. She cut off any impulse on his part to turn and explain to his wife that he was dealing with a mad woman; she whispered in his ear, hung her head back and laughed at the dance floor lights, lowered her head onto his campaign ribbons, the strands of her hair becoming mixed in with the vivid flashes of his merit and service awards.

When the music stopped, Dotty kissed him fulsomely, and I looked to Mrs Enright’s table, but she was gone. Our officers had sat through this display, but it convinced them that we were unreliable goods, and they were pleased to find a taxi for us soon after and send us home.

I didn’t try to chastise Dotty. I’d lost the confidence for that. And I was too much in awe of her work. It had been a calamitous night, yet I delighted in her irrational vengeance on the safely wed, clad and housed Enrights. When we got out of the taxi at our flats, she sat on the brick wall in front of the building and looked up and down the empty street, as if at any moment Rufus and Leo and Doucette might roll by, yelling greetings to us.

I’m a bitch, she admitted. But I can’t take this. I’m not as game as you. I’m going back to England. And then we’ll see. Won’t we, Gracie? We’ll see.