The Widow and Her Hero

13

But of course, time does erode betrayals and further subtleties of loss. You absorb it all, no matter how terrible. I never thought either that Eddie Frampton deserved the death penalty, though I could see the sense of his last act, and I never wrote his widow a condolence letter. I was helped by the fact that I loved my job. By the mid-1980s, I was and had been for two decades head of English at North Sydney Girls’ High, teaching bright and receptive girls, and fortunate to be liked and respected by them. I was ageing and was spoken of by other teachers as ‘an institution’. Though I had accepted that my education as a widow would never cease, I was a happy woman, a reader, a savourer of gardens, with a companionable husband. Laurie and I were frequently visited by our son, Alex, a structural engineer, a man who relished life and had an acute sense of its value. Though he lacked a few of the literary bones which I would like to have given him, his wife was a first-class conversationalist, an athletic, intelligent woman who sometimes reminded me of Dotty. And of course I had those visits from my post-modernist, gender-studies granddaughter Rachel. We sparked off each other.

I knew from letters from Dotty, now about to retire as a senior editor in a so-called ‘hot’ publishing firm, that she was as harried as I was by an increasing number of Memerang hobbyists and even serious researchers. The chief of them was still the journalist and author Tom Lydon, whose interviews with Major Frampton had triggered the latter’s suicide. Lydon had been shattered for a time by Frampton’s swallowing of his death pill, but after a number of psychiatrists assured him that Frampton’s suicide had been Frampton’s choice and could not have been foreseen, Tom returned to his book, ultimately publishing a fairly flattering version of Memerang entitled The Sea Otters, in which he extolled Doucette and Rufus and Leo and the others and was, perhaps inhibited by his own sensibility, mildly critical of Frampton and Moxham.

After The Sea Otters Tom, who could be seen as conscientious to a fault, became a life-long devotee of Doucette’s story, and others joined him or competed with him in businesslike pursuit of new information. In the end they found out everything that could be known, every little squalor, every little move. About the rest, they had hypotheses on such subjects as what Leo Waterhouse really felt like in the bus from Outram Road prison to Reformatory Road, what mixture of terror and exhilaration – for everyone mentions the evidence of exhilaration! People spoke during the French Revolution about a shining serenity on the faces of some enemies of the state as they travelled in the tumbril to the blade. As if the guillotine were such a total cancellation of the world that it solved many of the victim’s smaller daily anxieties. They no longer travelled in uncertainty.

But I couldn’t bear to discuss that sort of thing with Lydon or any other outsider. It might just encourage them. As it was, they rushed to tell me new information as if I hungered for it. Between these flurries of research by others I felt content, engrossed in my only grandchild, my son’s daughter, a child I felt was very like I had been but thankfully less burdened with painful bush politeness than I was. By now I had seen the sad decline of both my parents, who died with the uncomplaining demeanour of their type, but my world was nonetheless enlivened by Rachel and her capacity from childhood to ambush me with unexpected questions.

Meanwhile, about 1985, Tom Lydon successfully tracked down and visited the Japanese interpreter Hidaka, who had worked on Leo and others. Hidaka had worked under a false name for some decades, precisely because he felt that he might somehow be made accountable for what befell the Memerang men, and Lydon found the man through his disgruntled wife, a former nightclub dancer. Lydon took the ageing man’s photograph outside his broken-down steak-house in Yokohama, with a red banner advertising Suntory at the door and a murk beyond the door to match the mysteries behind his edgy smile. For, like all of us, Hidaka had not even told himself everything! Poor old Hidaka, the former interpreter for the Japanese in Singapore, with his evasions and boasts about a special relationship with Leo and the others!

I stayed away that day because I could not bear to see what was done with them.

That’s one of his claims.

I brought them books. I bought them sweetmeats.

But you did not save them, nor could you, nor did you at a profound level dissent from what was done to them. So you’re no use to me.

And your superiors also valued you for the way the men trusted you and told you things, and you took that credit too!

So to what extent was Hidaka a man of sentimental fraternity, and to what extent a cunning operative?

Every new, well-meaning interviewer and Memerang hobbyist puts the stress-mark between these two possibilities in a different place and then, visiting Hidaka, most of them want to call me up and tell me exactly what they think the formula for Hidaka’s supposed generosity to Leo and the others was. As if that’s a question on which I would still be working, adjusting still my balance of hatred or gratitude when it comes to Hidaka and the Japanese military code.

Some of the researchers are starting to be true scholars now, even a doctoral student who was a captain in the army. They either examine Hidaka’s record or go to Japan to interview him. This raises in me the old fear that something new might emerge which must be borne, something dangerous to the honour of Leo’s ghost and something perilous to me. More than the human frame could carry.

The young doctoral army captain thinks that Hidaka might have been lucky not to be prosecuted by the War Crimes Commission. After all, he did the interpreting for a number of Kempei Tai interrogations. But then, says the captain, dozens of more senior military men were let off too, through lack of personnel to investigate them or because of the war-weariness of the victors. I am a terminally polite old woman, but inwardly I flinch and there’s a trace of acid in my response. Thank you, captain, for your fascinating assessment.

The young captain completed his doctoral thesis, Planning and Operational Shortcomings of Operation Memerang, graciously sent me a copy, and disappeared from my life.

One enthusiast has told me it rained at 1300 hours as Leo and the others made their way in through the gate of Raffles College to appear before the sitting of the Military Court of Seventh Area Army. He had also kindly taken a photograph of the college motto above the gate: Auspicium Melioris Aevi, Hope for a Better Age.

Just a photograph to him, but I am thereby locked into the journey Leo made that day of his trial, and become raddled with the mad wish that I had been there to argue with the judges and offer my head for Leo’s. Over decades, Laurie, a man of great generosity of spirit, learned to read my moods, which were profound but not always very visible, and accommodated himself to them in the days after I’d been visited by the enthusiasts, when I felt myself hurtling down in a pocket of free air between two ages and two marriages.

Anyhow, on the day of Leo’s trial, when the accused parties dismounted from their Mitsubishi truck, guards took Leo and Filmer and the others in amidst the dripping shrubberies of the college garden, the leaves already steaming as the afternoon sun failed to decide whether it intended a cool afternoon or not. The prisoners entered a lecture hall with lead-light windows. I imagine sudden, renewed rain on the roof.

The presiding judge was a Colonel Sakamone of garrison headquarters, but the judge with the greatest experience in the inquisitorial Japanese system, which – as the researchers tell me – is based on the Code Napoleon, was one Major Torosei. A third major filled out the trinity of judges.

Hidaka the interpreter would later tell Lydon that his own senior officer, Colonel Tomonaga, had declined to serve as judge. He had made it clear to Hidaka he thought the men should simply be put in Changi as POWs. But Colonel Sakamone, a former policeman, disagreed. He was a fanatic, said Hidaka, even though fanaticism was getting less popular with officers as the war went on. Sakamone had said at dinner one night that he believed the war would begin only when the Japanese mainland was invaded, and he was looking forward to that cataclysm. Everything up to now had apparently been mere prelude. The war would be won on ancestral land, he said. Sakemone had taken the job which Hidaka’s colonel refused.

The prosecutor or attorney-judicial, a man the judges have already met with to decide the shape of the trial, was a professional lawyer, Major Minatoya. What did Minatoya think as he prepared his papers? Tokyo burning to ash, the home islands falling, even if the great nuclear secret had a month to go before it would be revealed. Singapore gravid fruit hanging on the empire’s tree. Yet at such times of uncertainty men cling to the certainty of routine duty.

Next to Minatoya the prosecutor sat the young Hidaka, Leo’s friend, in his white civilian suit. Hidaka has a slightly spiv-ish reputation amongst the officers for having once worked as a bookkeeper and greeter of foreigners in a Tokyo nightclub before the war, but he was always a meek figure, and the enthusiasts and hobbyists tell me he was not above soliciting women for officers. He was in love with a Tokyo nightclub dancer whom he’d marry after the war.

The supreme figure of the trial sat in the gallery at the rear of the courtroom, above the double-leafed doorway of the lecture hall. Major General Okimasa, head of the judicial apparatus for the Seventh Area Army, wanted to see the process through. He must have had a glimmering, given all his robust activities in Saigon and Singapore, that his own future might contain a suicide by blade, or else a scaffold. In Indochina and Malaya he had been a monster for his gods. I would like to think his foreshadowings of fear were unmanning him even then, but I do not believe they did. He certainly seemed to feel a kind of administrative urgency to get this trial settled.

Each of the prisoners was asked to state, one by one, his birthplace, his unit, rank, name and age. To what extent the not yet identified Stockholm syndrome was at work in Leo and the others, I have no idea. They were human, after all. That growth of solidarity between captor and captive, particularly when exalted by the solemn ritual of a trial and the prospect of a formal execution, probably works even on heroes. Was Leo still looking for, grateful for, signs of humanity even in Sakamone the presiding judge or in Minatoya the prosecutor, or perhaps even from the real presiding presence of the general in the gallery?

Lydon later told me that the Japanese came to trial only when they felt the case was eminently provable against the accused. Their inquisitorial process was begun that afternoon, and to match the prosecutor, Minatoya, there was no corresponding defence counsel.

Minatoya, I also knew from briefings by Tom Lydon, had set out to prove the men were both perfidious and heroic – that was always Hidaka’s claim, anyhow. The ‘stratagem’ of which they were guilty was that except for a few commissioned officers, the party willingly refrained from wearing badges or caps to show their ranks, so that they could not be recognised as fighting members of the armed forces to which they belonged. They had used camouflage dye on exposed skin surfaces. Doucette and Leo and six other members had worn sarongs! A Japanese national flag was flown by them, and a further Japanese flag was painted on the stern of Nanjang.

On October 10th of the previous year, the party under Lieutenant Colonel Doucette had launched a sudden and heavy fusillade at a Kaso Island police boat containing five Malay policemen. Four of the crew of the police boat were killed. By December 1944, the time of apprehension of all the accused persons standing before the court, they had confronted Japanese garrisons on a number of islands and killed Captain Matsukata, Lieutenant Hiroshi, along with some fifty-five other army personnel. Thus they had engaged in hostile activities without wearing uniforms, and had also used the vessel as a stratagem of offence and penetration.

The second charge was espionage, the accusation that various of the party had collected intelligence to take back to Australia, information on the strength of garrisons, movement of shipping, docking arrangements at Bintang and Bukum, bauxite mining at Lingaa Island, etc., etc. While waiting for the party to return to NE1, my cousin Mel Duckworth had made notes on the passage, frequency of military aircraft, anti-aircraft defences and shipping. Now they brought these forward and questioned the Englishman Filmer, the man who had landed on D-Day but then blundered into Memerang.

The prosecutor held up one Japanese flag, one notebook, one sketchbook, one camera, seventeen negatives. Yes, all that property belonged to Memerang, said Filmer. The flag had been waved, the photographs taken.

In lonely years I would complain savagely to myself about Filmer. I had thought him a dupe – he reminded me of the British commander at Singapore, Perceval, who was foxed into surrendering by the Tiger of Malaya, Yamashita, even though many officers under him wanted to fight on. The pattern, I believed, was repeated in a modest but terrible way by Filmer. My thesis had been that Filmer, the professional officer, blinded by fatuous codes of military behaviour – or, to invoke it again, the Stockholm syndrome – failed to attack the charges head on. In a strange way the fool felt honoured by them. Combine this with the fact that he was probably the one who opened fire on the Malay police boat off Kaso, and thus gave their presence away, and you have the reason why, whenever I’ve encountered Major Filmer in dreams, I’ve torn the flesh from him and flayed him with bitter Australian insult. Basically, my grievance against him was that he was the first to accept the Japanese charges, and he laid down the pattern for his men to do the same. Major Minatoya asked him, Did you commit these crimes, and Filmer said yes without qualification. When he was asked how long his group had plotted their attack, he said he only knew the details of it a few days before he left Australia, a statement which shows that compared to Leo he was one of those ring-ins Doucette had a weakness for, that he was brought along by Doucette on impulse, or because he pleaded. And yet here he was talking on behalf of the whole party, and impervious to the wrongness of that, as only a professional officer could be. He agreed with Minatoya that rank should always be worn, so that the enemy could identify officers. That was an asinine thing to say, as our side had little training in their badges of rank, and I bet their side had little training in ours.

Did Leo resent him giving it all away like this, or was he resigned, or was he stuck by now into some grotesque officer code of honour too? Had all the Bushido nonsense got to both of them, so that they were competing for honour with the Japanese? I don’t want to mock that, since they were willing to die for it. But men become dupes for codes of honour which any sensible woman could see through in a second. Yes, said Filmer, they had a Japanese flag on the junk and were thus sailing under false colours. But no, they had not themselves painted the Japanese flag on the stern of the junk. It had already been put there by the Malay owner. At least five silenced automatic weapons on the junk opened up on the patrol boat at Kaso, he admitted. He didn’t mention it was almost certainly he who first pulled the trigger. He began shooting because others did, he said. As the police vessel approached, everyone thought it was Japanese, he said, not Malay police, and they yelled, Patroller, patroller! They did not know it was an unarmed vessel. No, no British or Australian flag was hoisted on the junk before they opened fire. There was barely time. Doucette did not directly order them to open fire.

The affidavit of the surviving Malay policeman from the patrol boat was read to Filmer. Poor fellow, a local mixed up between two powers, seeing his fellows on the launch cut to pieces, and then himself diving, bleeding copiously, into the water. But it strikes me that, abstracting from race, Leo and all the other Australians had a lot in common with that Malay cop. Like the policeman on the patrol boat who was a servant of the Japanese, they were also caught up in other people’s Imperial dreams, doing for Churchill what Churchill never did for us, with all his talk of Australians being of bad stock and bound to cave in to the Japanese anyhow.

Leo was the next brought forward before the court, and he accepted the charges just as Filmer had. He offered the information that Doucette had worn his badge of rank while on the junk but he himself had not. He had shot at the patrol boat, and had also resisted the landing by the army at Serapem, but he was not sure if he had killed any Japanese soldier. He admitted he had sketched and photographed islands and shipping, and made notes. That is all that’s in the record – no pleading, no mention of a young wife and of her hopes and rights and expectations. In that regard, I suppose, he had nothing exceptional to plead. He had worn commando grease to colour his face and had stopped wearing a beret after they all got on the junk.

In turn, each of the other men admitted the same, in their peculiar and grievous honour.

The afternoon showers stopped, Hidaka told Lydon, and the sun came out with its afternoon intensity, and then yielded to shadows from the foliage of the Raffles College garden. The cocktail hour. All the accused were asked to stand. Each one was asked did he have anything to say in his defence. The judge urged each of them to point out anything in their evidence which was to their advantage. None of them said anything. The silence of honour locked the tongues of Leo, Hugo Danway, Jockey Rubinsky, Chesty Blinkhorn, Sergeant Bantry, the naval rating Skeeter Moss, Mel Duckworth, Major Filmer. Each of the accused was asked if he had any objection to the statement of any other member of the party. One by one they said they didn’t. You can imagine a robust fellow like Chesty Blinkhorn thinking, Wouldn’t give the bastards the satisfaction. Each was asked if he wanted to alter any part of his statement to the Suijo Kempei Tai or the prosecuting attorney, and they all said no. Thus, bridges burned, they all turned their inner eye to the sword’s edge.

Hidaka, in his white suit, hung his head. Prosecutor Minatoya then went into his fancy arguments as the air thickened around the heads of the accused. The Hague Convention 1907 required that all ships other than warships, entering an attack, must affix to themselves a true representation of their nationality. Hostilities conducted under false or no colours were a crime under international law. The junk flew a Japanese flag, and hence no British flag was flown, and commando dye and sarongs were deliberately used to make the junk look civilian. They should also have worn badges of rank or unit to identify them as belligerents. The fact that they were wearing Australian jungle fabric, very much like that which the Japanese used, was no adequate warning that they would attack the patrol boat.

Minatoya then argued with less legal validity that military personnel lose their right to be treated as prisoners of war if they disguise themselves. The green military shirts most of the men wore were not enough. Then, tying himself in a knot, he further claimed that international law in any case gave way to the law of the capturing country, and so whether under international convention or Japanese occupation law, the men were doomed. The occupation law involved, he said, was the Martial Law of Japanese Southern Expeditionary Force, Section 2, Clause 1, Paragraph 1 (iv).

Minatoya made mention of the poison they carried, the capsules which would come as a surprise to us women when we first heard of them from Mr McBride. Their possession of such poison demonstrated that they could countenance death with composure (a supreme virtue in his eyes), just like the sailors involved in the Japanese midget submarine attack on the Chicago in Sydney Harbour three years past. The Australians had treated those heroes with full honours, and now it was the chance of the Japanese to treat Australian heroes with equivalent honour.

Have you ever heard such utter horse-feathers? the ageing Dotty had once asked me in a letter. With one sentence he says they’ve violated international law, and with the next he deifies the poor sods. For Lydon had sent her the transcript too, including the peroration of Minatoya’s address to the court. It went this way, or was later doctored to go this way:

This Let’s give ’em the send-off they deserve argument included the rider Even if it kills them. As Dotty said, utter horse-feathers. And before sentencing, as sudden darkness closed the day, that fool Filmer thanked Minatoya for saying his bravery was likely to be remembered in Britain and Australia. He did at least make the point that at the time they captured the junk, flew the flag and attacked the patrol vessel, he had not believed he and his fellow soldiers were engaged in any unfair or illegal combat. At the time he and the others had not realised, he confessed, that these were such grave crimes. Now he was willing to face the punishment that was due.

Some of the hobbyists and researchers think Hidaka was later given the job not only of translating the trial into English but of prettifying it as well – if any of it could be called pretty. That his job was to make it all seem less a show trial, something decided before Leo and the others even entered the court. Some researchers have told me too that the Memerang men were tried and liquidated entirely for the sake of the Oriental value of face, and that they were to die not for their efforts in Memerang but for the earlier success of Cornflakes. After that previous raid, it turns out that the Japanese brought into Singapore from Saigon a special investigative unit of the Kempei Tai, the Japanese equivalent of the Gestapo, to investigate the blowing up of the port’s tonnage. The Kempei Tai were convinced that the ships destroyed in Singapore by Doucette’s Cornflakes in 1943 had been targeted not by raiders but by local saboteurs working with some influential civilian prisoners of war at Changi, whom they accused of being in communication with the Allies by radio. They arrested former executives of British oil companies, wealthy Chinese they suspected of belonging to sabotage cells, and humbler Chinese – a woman who ran a soup stall at Keppel Docks. Many of the people arrested were killed. The arrests also extended to Malays, twenty of whom were still in prison that afternoon Leo’s trial began. They were under sentence of death for their nonexistent roles in the sabotage really created by Cornflakes. As Tom Lydon says in his book, ‘Hidaka would early let Leo Waterhouse’s group know that other men were under the death sentence for a supposed part in Cornflakes, and that seems to have influenced the way the Memerang men behaved at their trial.’

Now the Kempei Tai knew who the culprits were, since they had captured Rufus’s diary, and they thus found out that all the questioning and torture, water treatment, beatings and electrodes on the genitals of last year’s local captives had produced false confessions and unjust executions.

On the question of face, General Okimasa and Court President Sakamone and the Kempei Tai officers asked themselves with a fractured but potent logic: How could the twenty Malays, men in their prime, fathers of families, a humourist here, a balladist there, a sketcher here, a teller of profane jokes there, be under death sentence, and the ten Memerang men not? But it meant, as the hobbyists and researchers have frequently assured me, that for some periods of time during their capture, the limitations of torture having been proven the year before, Leo and the others had it easier than the locals, Chinese, Malay and Britons, who had been arrested the year before.

So I had assimilated all that, and stowed it away within me the way people do. The rivers of our blood flow and flow, and grind what is too sharp to be known down into smoothness, into a sort of habitable geology. I knew the details of the trial from the late 1960s on. I had the English language transcript provided to me by Lydon, and from then until the present it lay in my desk drawer at home, where I would frequently encounter it and flinch, a duty of pain I felt I owed it. I was familiar with the names of Okimasa, Sakemone the fanatic, Minatoya the prosecutor, and above all with that of Hidaka.

The severest test occurred in the early 1990s, when Hidaka, reconciled to having been discovered, was brought to Australia by the now middle-aged Tom Lydon and by an Australian film producer who wanted to have his technical advice for a proposed film. Lydon called us and said Hidaka would very much like to pay his respects to me. I shouldn’t have gone along with it – what could the meeting mean and how could I balance his part in the trial and execution, and his undoubted kindnesses, into one feasible greeting and one safe little discourse? But then how could I ignore the half-century of transformation, which made us fortunate participants in the business of our region, which made Japan ‘our major trading partner’. After discussing it with Laurie, I suggested to Tom Lydon he bring Hidaka to our place for afternoon tea.

I was still full of that terror which had lasted nearly fifty years. Every time I approached Leo’s death I was repelled by the temperature of the event itself and saw refracted through its heat a new version to which I had somehow to adjust. I remembered Doucette’s guilt about his inadequate rejoicing at news of Minette’s survival, which was paralleled by my sense that I had never adequately mourned. Now that Tom Lydon was bringing Hidaka to my house, the whole file was open again, nothing was settled, I might hear anything. The fear that there were limitless versions of the thing to absorb was, despite what I thought of as my good sense, acute and like a form of madness. Combined with that, I suspected that a good, brave wife would have sought Hidaka out years since, would have been frantic to meet him earlier.

Laurie was wonderful at such times. He had not yet suffered his stroke, and he attended to everything, meeting the guests at the door, making the tea. As Hidaka came into the living room, nodding, bowing to me, not yet daring to smile, he proved to be a lean old man of average height whose mouth was beginning to slacken with age. He seemed to have a respiratory disease, and I noticed his fingers were nicotine stained and his nails blue-ish from lack of oxygen. I could tell at once that he and I were both playing this for Lydon, Hidaka playing along with Tom who had set up his air ticket Tokyo to Sydney. At a moment like this one, I was sure, Hidaka was asking himself whether he should have taken the trip, despite the honour he received in the Australian tabloids under the film-company generated headlines such as, JAPANESE TRANSLATOR BEFRIENDED DOOMED AUSSIES.

Under Laurie’s understated stage management, we sat down to drink tea, and began to talk about Hidaka’s flight and whether he was able to rest properly here. And yet in no time the matter of the trial came up as if by its own force. I don’t even remember the sequence of sentences, but there it was, amongst us. Like a slaughtered beast on the carpet, it demanded comment, and I could see Tom Lydon sitting forward, eager to assess what Hidaka and I would say in each other’s company.

My superiors ordered me to dress immaculately, the old man told us, with his chronic wheeze.

This was the most important and portentous trial he had ever seen, but he was not required as a translator – a translator of military rank sat with the judges. He wondered what his superiors would think when the prisoners who were brought in winked at him and smiled at his posh suit. And the prisoners did, one of them, Sergeant Bantry, unleashing a little sharp, almost unhearable whistle.

As Laurie made unconscious affirmative and comforting sounds deep in his throat, at Lydon’s request Hidaka went through the order they stood in. It is engraved on my soul, said Hidaka.

That was a sentiment I believed, and I heard my husband Laurie also give his accepting growl. At the end of the line, on the left, No. 10, was Jockey Rubinsky, twenty years old. Big Chesty Blinkhorn beside him, same age. Sergeant Bantry, the non-swearer. No. 6 was the young naval rating Moss, a now sickly and much-beaten young army lieutenant named Dinny Bilson was No. 5, and Lieutenant Danway stood at No. 4 in the line. At the other end, Nos. 3, 2 and 1 from the left, Melbourne Duckworth, Leo and Major Filmer. They all wore Japanese army boots, and their hair was close-cropped. I try to imagine Leo thus, very thin, with cropped hair.

And General Okimasa was there the whole time, wasn’t he? Lydon asked Hidaka, as if I did not know that.

All the time, Hidaka confirmed. He did not leave for a minute. So it was… the important trial.

Lydon loves all this straight-from-the-horse’s-mouth stuff. The order in which people stood, and so on. Did Okimasa sit on a rattan chair or an armchair? The reason Memerang’s supposed crime under Japanese military law was translated by him as ‘perfidy’, an old-fashioned and stately word, is that Mr Hidaka had learned his English from Shakespeare, Tennyson and P. G. Wodehouse.

But I could see old Hidaka was gasping, even after such a short time, and so, secretly, was I.

I smiled and said to Lydon, Listen here, Tom, curb your enthusiasm. I think Mr Hidaka is tired.

Of course, Tom admitted. One thing though. Mr Hidaka saw them while they were waiting for the verdict. To paraphrase him, without putting him to the trouble of telling it all again…

As the afternoon-long trial ended, said Lydon, the accused were taken away by their guards, to wait in half-darkness on benches in the garden. Hidaka had not been stopped from visiting them. Their spirits were high, and they spoke quite loudly and in lively terms, and Hidaka had organised cigarettes to be handed round.

Thank you, Mr Hidaka, I said, as earnestly as I could.

But I knew there must have been a secret fever in each man. They must have muttered to each other reassurances about some coming invasion of Singapore by the Allies. The Seventh Area Army had grown soft in its occupation of Malaya and Singapore, and was on the verge of losing Saigon. Having condemned them, the court might in any case simply let them stay in Outram Road gaol or in Changi.

I would ultimately get more information on what was said amongst them too. They were pleased none of them had begged – I would find that out. Because Jockey Rubinsky, world traveller, conceived in Harbin, Mongolia, born in Shanghai, raised in Sydney, came up to Leo and said, as if naming the central issue, ‘We didn’t beg. The bastards didn’t hear us beg!’

How do I know that? Well, that resulted from the Hidaka visit too.

We had drunk our tea and I could see that Hidaka was as pleased as I was that the visit had got this far without too much discomfort. Before they left, Lydon said, he would like to show Hidaka the garden and the view from it. Laurie jumped up, happy to show him around, and Lydon and I followed. Hidaka was impressed by our jacaranda, by the roses, by the nectar-producing grevilleas which attracted rainbow lorikeets. We were on the gravel path, looking over Middle Harbour, the acres of blue water surging in through Sydney Heads. The day was warm, and it was humid too, though nothing like Singapore. Hidaka, saying ‘Very beautiful’, was suddenly gone, vanished from my eyeline. I turned to see him lying flat out on the path, and Laurie and Tom Lydon kneeling to attend to him. As soon as Lydon saw him stir, he lifted the little man in his arms and propped him on the seat of the garden bench.

My husband went and got some iced water, and Hidaka revived with a rasping dollop of breath, but kept his eyes down as if he had shamed himself in front of us. Maybe to his generation a collapse in front of others from heat or the vagaries of blood pressure was a cause of disgrace. We got him into the house and laid him on the sofa. Tom took Hidaka’s shoes off. Laurie suggested we send for our friend the local GP, who even in these days would make a call to the house if he was needed. Lydon relayed the offer to the clenched-eyed Hidaka. The old man shook his bony head. Driven by his frank human friability, I made him green tea, and he sipped it, then he joined his hands, opened his eyes, rose to a sitting position and bowed to me. Then he muttered to Lydon, and Tom turned to us.

He wants to visit you again, Tom said. And he apologises one more time. But he has something to give you.

His eyes lowered, the old man declared, It is not a long visit. I wish to give you something.

Maybe it was another doll. Lydon had brought me one back, a bland, ageless, child-woman doll in the kimono style of some region of Honshu. Its smirk was the smirk of Salome. I had it in a cupboard somewhere. I could not say I wanted to see Hidaka again. The answer caught in my throat, so at last my husband, just out of politeness, said, Of course. When would you like to call in, Mr Hidaka?

I felt angry at my husband, who couldn’t have said anything else in any case. My widowhood had grown primal again, and I just wanted Hidaka to go. But it was organised Lydon would bring him back the following afternoon. This was done with very little more input from me than nods and choked assent.

From early the next day I was gripped by dread. It seemed to me that people required a repeated disinterment of Doucette’s men, Leo not permitted his quiet grave, and I deprived of a fixed and stable widowhood. I always feared that if I confessed this to Laurie, he would despise me. Or if he didn’t, he would know too much about me. He knew repeated reference to Leo hurt me in some way that he was willing to take account of and honour, but he probably thought my secret reactions were nobler than the squalid panic I felt. He never complained of the mystification I brought to the whole business. In the afternoon, Laurie dutifully put the china out again. He visited a patisserie in Mosman and brought home cakes and petits fours – all just in case anyone had an appetite. When they rang the bell at three, I watched from the living room as Laurie opened the door to them. They both looked strangely hangdog, Tom Lydon as well as Hidaka, whose head was down like a penitent’s. From the hallway, Lydon said to Laurie, and over Laurie’s shoulder to me, Mr Hidaka does not wish to stay for long. I hope you haven’t gone to any trouble, Laurie.

No, said my husband. No, Tom… always a pleasure.

Mr Hidaka wishes to apologise, Lydon explained.

Please, said Laurie. Come into the living room.

It was only with a lot of nudging from Lydon that Hidaka came into the core of the house. He bowed deeply to me and I stood up, and before I could invite everyone to sit again, I saw he had an aged folder in his hands and held it out to me. I’m very sorry, Mrs Waterhouse, he told me carefully.

Lydon said, He showed me this last night – I swear it was the first time I knew it existed.

Still stooped, Hidaka opened the manila folder and held it two-handed, like a dish he was offering me with the most sincere apologies of the house. It contained a series of brown, square slabs of paper connected up at their top left-hand corners with a ring of twine.

Hidaka said, Captain Waterhouse asked me to give.

Tom Lydon explained, It’s a journal Captain Waterhouse wrote in pencil on slabs of toilet paper. You see, if it was in danger of being discovered, he could just dump it in the nearest waste bucket or latrine.

Hidaka bowed even lower, like a man inviting punishment.

This is the diary Captain Waterhouse asked me to give you. I was shamed by it and I did not give it until now.

He’s had it for some years, Lydon told us. I think it’s psychologically understandable… Now, he has emphysema and wants you to have it.

Hidaka closed the folder and pressed it more insistently on me. I took it. I saw his suppliant shoulders. I began howling and punching him on both shoulders with my free hand. His deep bowing to me was too easy a gesture, and I wanted to show him that. If he was a man, I thought like some bigot I would normally have hated to meet, he would look me in the eye now. I was punishing him both for having retained the grubby squares of pages for so long, and for presenting them to me now, years after I had hoped everything had been settled.

Until stopped by Laurie, I went on beating the neatly made Japanese man in a raw-boned, tall Caledonian Australian fury. Arthritic problems which normally inhibited the proper making of a fist were not an issue now. Anger made me a harridan. My husband moved in and clasped me by the elbows. I realised I had no breath, but it returned as I settled.

Get him out, I ordered Lydon, and don’t bother me again. Get him out. I’m sick of witnesses. I’m sick of new evidence. Everyone who comes to me is self-interested!

Tom Lydon’s face had gone a terrible, abashed red. I assure you, Grace, I didn’t know it would cause you… I have your best interests…

I cut him off. Best interests? Best interests of the Memerang men? They’re all dead. I bet you looked through the file as soon as he gave it to you.

No, said Tom. No, Grace. I won’t say I wasn’t tempted. But it wouldn’t have been right.

Just take him back to his hotel! I roared.

Tom and Laurie tended to the old man, whose face was covered with tears and who needed to be restored with water. Given Hidaka’s weakness he and Lydon went very briskly, and I felt the deepest shame I could, knowing Leo would not have approved of my behaviour. Laurie said, Grace is understandably upset.

He saw them to the door, and muttered something conciliatory I wouldn’t have approved of to Lydon and Hidaka as they went. I’ll be in contact, Tom, he called. Then he came to where I stood shaking frantically in rage and shame, and he embraced me.

Now I’ll have to apologise to Tom and Hidaka, I said.

Laurie kissed my forehead. No, he said, let it slide. They understand well enough.

It was from these pages written in pencil on Japanese toilet paper that I ultimately learned that while they waited in the garden for the sentence, Jockey Rubinsky said to Leo, At least they didn’t hear us beg.