The Widow and Her Hero - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Thomas Keneally (12) #14

12

It was not easy of course, but I adjusted to the new terms of Leo’s death because people do that, changing the course of their thinking even while believing it can’t be done. In some ways I didn’t want to examine too closely, the new version of Leo, once painfully digested, made it easier for me to enter a new phase. I married Laurie Burden in 1953, and – in defiance of doctors and nurses who considered me an ‘elderly primaparens’, a first-time mother of advanced age, an opinion they expressed in terms such as my making ‘a late run’ or ‘leaving things a bit late’ – I gave birth to a healthy boy, Alexander. Alexander was one of those children who carry an air not of being a stranger visiting the earth but of having the ways of the world worked out. He was what we sometimes called a happy warrior, perpetually engaged in cricket, rugby and surfing, an adequate scholar but not to an extent that interfered with his social life. His father considered him not adequately serious. I blessed the kindly star under which he’d been born.

We were suddenly a sanguine and fortunate family, living above Balmoral Beach, sailing every second Saturday on Laurie’s boat, opening up Laurie’s house and garden to a tide of visitors, contacts of Laurie’s, many of whom I found myself liking.

Dotty also seemed to have remade her life. I got letters from her. About 1948 she had published a brilliant novel about East End women. It had been made into an angry little film everyone considered a classic. She was poetry editor of two magazines, and a literary figure, and she was tossing up whether to join a new publishing company as senior editor. She had not remarried.

Occasionally a Memerang story would surface without warning in the press – brave Doucette, brave everyone, the gallant Captain Leo Waterhouse. A tale of confrontation, escape, betrayal and tragedy, etc. I knew by some instinct I had not heard the last of any of it.

In the 1960s, Memerang came to a head again through the researches of a young man named Tom Lydon. He was one of those Australian journalists who heavily populated the British press in the days when Fleet Street was a name synonymous with newspapers. A handsome, mannerly young fellow whose clothes had the appropriate scuffed look of a graduate student, he worked for the Observer in England and was contemplating a book on the history of Memerang. From the way he carried himself when he came to see me on a journey home to Sydney, I noticed in him a doggedness which might raise awkward questions all around. The Beatles had just become big, and I wished his mind was set on them rather than the 1940s. But he was easy to talk to, and I did enjoy revisiting such subjects as what an extraordinary pair Dotty and Rufus were.

The submarine? he asked me at last. You know, it came back late to the meeting place, this NE1, Serapem. But it did come back in the end. And Eddie Frampton, their conducting officer, landed there but decided they weren’t there to be picked up. He landed once. And that was it.

I said, He landed once? To look for them?

Yes, I regret that’s the situation.

For the moment, I felt impaled.

Look, that’s all it seems from the documents I have.

But if you want to pick men up, you have to look more than once.

When I go back to England, said Tom Lydon, I’ve got to try to see Frampton. He invented the Silver Bullets, you know. But why did he land on the pick-up island just once.

He certainly had a hunger to question Major Frampton. Look, I said, I’m sure he did all he could. I was almost tempted to say, Leave Eddie Frampton in peace.

Is it possible, I asked myself, for the dead to appoint their archivist? For Lydon was as relentless and painstaking as a brother. Maybe more so.

A year or so later I received a letter from Dotty, and enclosed in it a suicide letter from Eddie Frampton addressed to Dotty and Minette and none of the rest of us. Eddie Frampton had been found dead in his car at Doncaster Station.

This applies to you as much as it does to myself and Minette, wrote Dotty. In fact, more so. I think old Frampton expected we’d send it on to other involved parties, and though I hate to subject you to this stuff, Grace, I also feel it would be criminal not to.

The letter was written on the stationery of Frampton Engineering, Single Girder, Double Girder, Torsion Girder with Cantilever, Gantry Portal Cranes, and Traverser Cranes. It was an excruciating document, occasionally falling away into self-pity, but ruthless as well.

February 20th, 1966

NOT TO BE SHOWN TO MY FAMILY

To be sent under CONFIDENTIALITY instead to Mrs Minette Doucette, England; Mrs Dotty Mortmain, London.

Dear Ladies,

This is told you in confidence. A simple rough letter full of the blunt sentiments of a man who’s dying, and if I offend you with that you’ll just have to forgive it. I have to let you know straight what I can’t tell my wife, and beg you in decency not to disturb her or visit her.

I’ve been questioned by this Tom Lydon fellow, and I always knew it would happen. If I’d stayed on at SOE in Baker Street and not gone gallivanting off to the Indian and Pacific, I could have had an honoured career. Everyone knows the letters SOE these days. Books coming out. Special Operations Executive. The letters are an adequate explanation of a life to those chaps in bars who still ask what you did in those days. And who were you with, old chap? SOE does the trick. Sworn to discretion. They imagine parachute drops and explosions and being bound not to reveal anything.

Mr Frampton? this author, Lydon, asks me on the phone. He’s an Aussie, a Fleet Street bugger works for the Observer. Trying to write an account of Doucette’s two great missions to Singapore. He has a British publisher. He mentions the name and it’s a publisher I recognise.

I thought I’d better see this writer then, but I’ve had no peace of mind from that day. Sleepless nights. Isabel saying exasperated, Come to bed, love and similar, making me tea I put Scotch into.

I fought my way through a number of meetings with Lydon, but it was all hopeless, I knew. Did you nearly piss in your pants, I wanted to ask him, like I did when Private Stapler the Aussie and I landed at Serapem and saw that Jap walk past down Hammock Hill with his little dog? But that’s no defence. The reason I write this is because I have no excuse to offer, so I’d better stop offering one.

Private Stapler wanted to capture the man that day we visited the rendezvous island. He even said he’d shoot me if I didn’t do it. Rather shoot a Pommy than a Jap, he said. Pommy poofter! he said. He put the barrel of his Sten against my cheek. We could know everything that happened if you’d let me capture that Nip! he said.

And what would we do? I asked this berserk colonial boy. With ten hours to go before dark? What would we do with him after?

Anyhow, as we Framptons drink tea with this chap the author, Isabel said to him, I hope you appreciate Eddie’s got enough problems running the factory and serving on the County Council.

I do appreciate it, said the young man. I saw him nod all right, but could tell he was bloody ruthless. He’d read too much. He’d been into the records and he’d read my report on visiting NE1, and Lieutenant Commander Moxham’s – who’s a bloody admiral these days. He’d read Stapler’s report too, he told me, which I think should have been destroyed in 1945 in the interests of decency.

I wondered, asked this colonial, how Commander Moxham could have so misread the orders…? I mean, the orders for picking up Doucette’s men on time? As I understand it, he was to bring you to NE1 for the rendezvous every night for a month, starting on October 20th, 1944?

Yes, I admitted. But subject to the safety of the submarine.

The smell of Orca came back to me, and I felt I wanted to be sick in a new sense.

Well, he didn’t get you there till sixteen days after the agreed time.

I feel you women deserve the answer I gave the boy. Moxham got a fixation and insisted on staying out and using his fifteen torpedoes. I told Moxham we had to move along to NE1, Doucette’s crowd would be waiting. I didn’t like Moxham’s stubbornness any more than anyone else. But the simple truth was these submarine commanders hated picking up operatives. They didn’t get much credit amongst their peers for that.

As the baby author pointed out, we now know the Memerang operatives I was meant to pick-up were visiting NE1 within the appointed period. And by the time I got there they were still hiding on another island by day and paddling across to the Hammock Hill site on NE1 by night. My report showed I visited the Hill only once, and in the daytime.

It’s true that when I got back to the sub, Moxham said he couldn’t land me there again. Water’s too shallow in that archipelago, he said. I mean, Orca had been tracked that day by a Japanese anti-submarine plane. They were on to us, you understand. Only a matter of time…

I ask your pardon. I can give excuses. I had been, however, eighty days there, on that sub Orca, conducting them up there to Serapem, then back to Fremantle so the Malay crew of the junk could be interviewed by intelligence. Then off again to fetch them, the party. I had only three days ashore in Western Australia in all that time. By the time we got to NE1, I had no muscle tone left. I was physically done. I could barely stand, scarcely use an oar, and even found walking difficult.

But lack of muscle tone isn’t an excuse. I’ve never got over it, any more than you have. After the war I swore off sophisticated engineering, and became a plain old steelwright who liked putting together big transoms of steel for ordinary purposes. Deliberately went from little cunning devices to big plain structures – to get over what I think was a kind of crack-up, though a fellow couldn’t tell anyone that then.

You are right if you think I should have insisted on going back to the Hammock Hill on Serapem the next night, and the night after, and if that hadn’t worked, should have insisted we capture the locals and ask them what they knew of my lost brethren. There were still so many of the Memerang boys living and hiding out on NEs and NCs at that stage. Not only did Tom Lydon know that I should have done all that, should have been an enterprising officer like Doucette, who always consulted locals. But he also knew that I knew I should have done it, and that my failure was eating my vitals and that I dreaded all the stuff he had to tell me.

Right now, Mr Fleet Street is waiting at home for me, Isabel telling him, He’ll be here in a moment, something must have come up at the works. I remember when I met her her family didn’t use the word the in sentences and she’s had to learn. Soomthin coom oop at works, she would have said once. Dear Isabel.

The Independent Reconnaissance Department was so fussy in some ways, but also incompetent in others, and never asked me for my glass-coated death pill back. I kept it in my kit. I kept it in my office desk as a sort of insurance against anything becoming intolerable – cancer or bankruptcy or such. Bakelite and glass coating to stop accidental usage.

I am the last victim of Operation Memerang, and I suppose I can’t blame you for thinking I’m its last war criminal.

I would be obliged if you and your sisters in loss forgave me my neglect, and I seek that favour from you.

I’ll soon be walking the shadows with your brave fellows.

(MAJOR) EDDIE FRAMPTON