The Widow and Her Hero

5

Dotty Mortmain, black-haired, pretty, watchful and lithe, came up with her monocled husband Rufus Mortmain to the wedding, all the way from Melbourne. She was tall for a woman, coming to Rufus’s shoulder. Other visitors included Major Doxey and Foxhill in his tartan pants, and above all Doucette. Thus I clapped eyes on the man, not as egregiously handsome as Leo, far more compact and neat-featured but endowed with an extraordinary presence, a teasing mixture of reticence and command that even I noticed. They were all in dress uniform and had brought their swords to make an archway for us from the door of the Anglican Church in Braidwood when we emerged married. There was a reception at the Braidwood School of Arts, with a keg of beer laid on by the owner of the Commercial Hotel to honour my father’s local importance. I was in a daze but remember pretty Dotty Mortmain, smelling of cloves, lavender and gin, asking me softly what I thought of Doucette. Dotty Mortmain seemed an exceptional woman to me, from a wider and more diverse world, and such a couple as she and monocled Mortmain did not exist in Braidwood or in any other place I had ever been. You’ll have no trouble from other women, Dotty told me, with that connubial knowingness I had seen in some wives. Leo is utterly under an enchantment. Just remember bloody Doucette is your rival. Look at him smile. He’s quite a smiler. I’ve known the bugger since Singapore.

Leo and I travelled to Sydney and stayed at the Commonwealth Hotel, where I put into action without fear the tenets of my mother’s manual. I thought I’d be the master, Leo told me with a lusty smile. I find I’m the pupil. We visited all the sights, catching the Manly ferry, and then going by train to the Carrington in the Blue Mountains, the traditional hotel of the newly married then. It was all marvellous. I can say that without quaver even to my knowing, slightly mocking granddaughter, although the sex was not utterly without fear. As in all great arenas, courage had to be acquired through repetition. But we were set on an excellent, happy marriage. I suppose that part of the test is I barely remember the conversations we had. All was a golden, unified sphere of delight and very ordinary reassurances to each other that we had never been happier.

One day when we could contemplate being on less than intimate physical terms for some hours and went walking in the luxuriant dampness of the Jamison Valley, Leo told me that he might be sent on operations again, and suggested therefore that we should try stratagems to avoid the conception of a child. He felt that was only fair to me, he said. There were moments when, swept away, we risked conception anyhow. Within nine days of the wedding however, he went to Melbourne, and I prepared to follow him.

It was Dotty Mortmain who told me after I arrived in Melbourne as a young bride that the wondrous Doucette had gone to look at new gear and wonder-weapons in London. She said that we could enjoy our husbands’ company as long as he stayed there, so she did not wish him a speedy return.

But more of her in a while, because what happened to me on my train journey down would have something to do with Dotty. For a country-girl like me the journey from Sydney to Melbourne was considered significant travelling. It was, after all, nearly 600 miles, a distance which in Europe would have placed the traveller in another country. The trains were crowded with troops, American and Australian. But I, being an officer’s wife, had a sleeping compartment, which I shared with another wife, seemingly unhappy and older, who had obviously, like Dotty, passed through the veil I had not yet breached between girl- and womanhood. She was probably in her mid-to-late thirties, and I noticed she was very pretty in a slightly hawkish way. I knew her husband was a major from the fact that the nameplate on her bunk said Mrs Major Enright, in the same way that mine said Mrs Captain Waterhouse.

As the train rollicked south-west through endless pastures, I could hear her weeping during the night in the bunk above me. I was very grateful that I was married to Leo, because I knew he would never give me any need to weep the sort of tears Major Enright’s wife was shedding loudly and without any embarrassment.

For lack of a standard rail gauge between Victoria and New South Wales, we all had to be dragged from our bunks in the small hours, and given a cup of tea, and then told to get down on Albury Station and sit in the first-class lounge. This was a primitive room – hard benches around a coal fire even in summer. Or else we could go to the refreshment room, while the broad-gauge (5 foot 3 inch) train from New South Wales was emptied and shunted out, and the standard-gauge (4 foot 8½ inch) train from Victoria took its place.

My cabin companion took neither of the proferred options, and I found the waiting room very uncomfortable, and the refreshment room full of soldiers calling for beer at 4.30 in the morning. She sat on one of the station’s benches and began smoking with a vengeance. Innocently, I asked her was she well. Once I did, the tears dried, as if she had been waiting all night for me to say something like this. She set her face as if she had at last decided on some solution to her grief.

I was just making up my mind to start a plain conversation with her, something about, It’s an endless journey, isn’t it? when she offered me a cigarette from her silver case.

I said no thanks. She told me to take a seat beside her if I wished to.

She said, I’m sorry I was such a grump at the start of the trip. You would have guessed. It’s always men. Those absolute buggers. Enjoy being young, anyhow. Once you show the slightest flaw, you can expect to weep a great deal.

It’s just as well I have flaws to start with, I told her. I was probably annoyingly blithe, like most people in love. I was amazed myself about the perfection of things with Leo, what a bright companion he was, what a dazzling man.

Oh, we’re all amazed, dear. At first, they mimic our needs, but they don’t really feel them, or meet them or give a damn.

These were, I realise, not particularly original ideas about men, but you have to remember the time. I had never heard them uttered before except by racy, world-weary women in films. They weren’t the sorts of things my mother had ever said – somehow I felt naively certain of that. She pulled out a silver flask and unscrewed the cork with the hand which held the cigarette. Gin, she told me. Do have some.

I smiled so that she wouldn’t think me rude. Look, thanks. I’ve had gin once before, and I don’t think Albury Station’s the right place for a second try.

Fair enough, she said. She took a long swig herself. But the time might come, she said, gasping with pleasure, when you’ll find it’s good at any hour, and absolutely anywhere. You see, I have to brace myself for a fight. My husband wrote me a letter a week ago, telling me that there was no place for me in his flat in Melbourne, that another woman has taken occupation. He was so sorry. He intends to marry this other tart. I sent him a telegram, telling him to cut out the nonsense and that I was coming anyhow. He sent me a reply that addressed nothing. If you have to come, I’ll meet you at the station. That’s the other thing I didn’t mention. They’re bloody cowards. Oh, they’ll charge a machine-gun for you. But the idea of a scene, especially a scene witnessed by other men… that’s what terrifies them.

She adopted a gruff male voice. I can stand anything except screaming women, she mimicked.

She snorted. Well, all that rough soldiery hanging round the refreshment room are going to see a major subjected to quite a scene at Swanston Street Station.

I thought, Leo and I will have to be subjected to that as well.

The woman looked up at me with her stricken eyes. I apologise in advance, she told me. But I’m a woman fighting for her life.

I’ve got very little experience at any of this, I said, but it might shame him if you appealed to him. To his better nature.

No, she told me. None of us must ever do that. That puts you at their mercy. Look, I’m sorry to load you up with this utter shit!

I told her not to worry. A new train came into the station to take us on to Melbourne, and Victorian Government Railways conductors began yelling at the soldiers in the refreshment rooms to leave their beer and get aboard. Mrs Enright and I had to sit up, in an admittedly comfortable carriage, all the way to Melbourne, as the summer sun came up over the mountains to the east of the rail line. We were not alone. There were three officers in our compartment. Everyone tried to sleep, but only Mrs Enright, helped out by her gin, managed it. It was not a graceful nap, however, for her mouth opened and she began snoring. I gave her a nudge to save her from unconscious embarrassment. You might well say I was a bit priggish to do that. I had an innocent assumption that decent women were too angelic to snore. Again, that’s the way we were. We were closer to Jane Austen than to Madonna or Julia Roberts.

When Mrs Enright woke up properly, and everyone definitely abandoned their attempts at sleep, the youngest of the officers, a freckled young man of about twenty-one years, spoke to her across the compartment.

Mrs Enright. I’m Lieutenant So-and-So. I attended a party at your place in Sydney. How is your husband?

Mrs Enright gave him a washed-out, How are you?

That was one of the best parties I’ve ever been to, the young officer said like a schoolboy.

She nodded. He could tell she didn’t want to talk.

I hope I didn’t interrupt your sleep.

It’s quite all right, she said. But she closed her eyes again.

Later, when our train came seething into Melbourne, and I got down onto the long platform, I saw Leo running towards me, and from the corner of my eye snatched a glimpse of Mrs Enright met by an older-looking officer. She allowed him to scrape his lips across her cheek, and she went off unhappy-looking, but without creating the scene she had promised. I think it was the meeting with the young officer, who’d been to her party, which made her think how momentous and final it would be to stage a brawl in front of officers. Yet I did ask myself why she had made my journey miserable and had not then punished the cause as promised.

I walked that platform with Leo, the blue and red ribbon of the Distinguished Service Order on the chest of his lightweight uniform, like the most blessed woman at the centre of the warring world. Now that he had grown a moustache, he looked like the film actor Errol Flynn, everyone said so, except younger, and somehow more serious. He was also heavily tanned, in exactly the way that made it seem he’d faced danger in places none of the other soldiers on the platform could imagine. For women have our part in relishing the warrior myth, the place in the legend that, although I did not know the details, I knew Leo had achieved.

Indeed, women could feed the immolatory furnaces too. In Braidwood in 1916, my mother confessed to me once, one night on a dare she had handed a white feather to a farmer’s son who had not yet volunteered. He had gone to France in 1917 and not survived the year. It was her greatest sin, she said, and she told me lest I repeat it. My adoration on Swanston Street Station might itself have contributed an ounce more to Leo’s willingness to extend the range of his heroism and the scope of the Doucette legend.

Ahead I could see sallow-looking Major Enright, talking hard to his wife and trying to hurry her off the platform and away to a sullen breakfast somewhere. Mrs Enright hung back like a four-year-old being dragged. It was true what Susan Enright had said. An army major was frightened of a scene, and the bodies of both Enrights were full of tension. Whereas Leo and I were side-by-side, walking in casual lockstep, my shoulder against his upper arm, hip to hip, at prodigious, godlike leisure. I was amazed and delighted at how bodies could send a promise to each other through fabric. Also, I felt beautiful at his side. Effortless Jean Tierney and the inwardly radiant Merle Oberon had nothing on me. And I had no sense at all that I would ever be punished for the glory of that instant. That’s why ecstasy is ecstasy – it carries with it the idea that it will easily outlast all the rest.

On our way to the car and driver Major Doxey had loaned him, Leo told me again – as if it might be a problem – that we were billeted to share a big apartment with the Mortmains. It would prove to be a pleasant, white, art deco block of flats just by the river in South Yarra. Our place had plenty of space, considering the way people were living then. As Leo had promised by letter before my move, there were two smaller flats between which the wall had been knocked down, so that you could move from living room of one to living room of the other, and each half-flat had its bedroom.

The Mortmains were easy to live with, he reported. Dotty Mortmain had published a novel and travelled a lot, so was very interesting. I had never before met anyone who had published a novel. The only trouble was, Leo reported, that sometimes she gave Rufus the rounds of the kitchen, and Lieutenant Commander Mortmain might come creeping into our side of the flat begging for sanctuary and a drink. Leo hoped I wouldn’t find that a problem.

Nothing was a problem that morning. It was a late summer’s day, the humidity was low, and even that contributed to the perfection of things.

On arrival, I saw that the table in our living-dining room had nothing on it, but I could see through the archway the Mortmain table on which lay two dumb-bells, newspapers, a number of stacked books, and a big typewriter. Leo saw my glance and said, Dotty works for the Yanks three days a week. The rest of the time, she does her own work. Something literary. They’ll be in later today. Look at the knife.

On their dresser lay a large Malay-style knife beside an empty teacup. Rufus has knives of all kinds spilling out of drawers, Leo explained. He grinned and his eyes glittered. Australian eccentricity was not like the worldly eccentricity of the Mortmains. And again, the idea of someone doing something literary on an extended basis was new to us as well.

Our bedroom looked out across a tree-lined street to the grassy embankment parkland and the narrow water of the Yarra itself. For people from New South Wales, and particularly from the great harbour of Sydney, the little Yarra is considered a joke, a river which runs with its bottom mud on top of the current. But its water was a pleasant blue that day, and when we arrived, eights and fours and scullers were practising on its surface, cutting even wakes as sharp as joy itself.

By the time the first of the Mortmains got home hours later, Leo and I were sitting, decorously reading books. It was Dotty, the sinewy Englishwoman, with her remarkable, slightly doleful green eyes and lustrous black hair. In ordinary weekday gear, she looked even more like an outdoors woman who had been rendered sinewy, as I would find, by a life of trekking and sailing far from Britain. Oh, she cried, setting down the string bag with groceries in it by her typewriter. This is your young wife, Leo? I couldn’t get enough time with her at the wedding.

Leo and I both stood up and advanced to the archway. She embraced me like a sister and asked us to sit down with her and have tea. We were drinking it when the front door opened, apparently of its own accord. We could see nobody there from where we sat, but Leo started chuckling. Come off it, Rufus! groaned Dotty Mortmain. But still no one appeared. Then there was a blur of white, which I worked out later was Lieutenant Commander Mortmain, in white shirt, shorts, socks and black shoes somersaulting into the room and ending on his knees at his wife’s chair. Instantaneously, he leapt from the floor to his feet, grabbed her black hair and improbably lifted her from her sitting position into the air, her feet off the ground, as he and she laughed wildly. It amazed me by being more like a circus act than something done by people sharing a flat, but Leo seemed used to this kind of behaviour, and laughed heartily at it. I suppose, by contrast, my own hilarity was a bit shocked.

Rufus Mortmain lowered his wife to the ground again. He bowed. And for the next trick, he announced, I shall throw a series of native knives at Captain Waterhouse and pin him to the wall by the hems of his shirt and pants. But maybe, first, let’s have a real drink to welcome Errol Flynn’s handsome bride!

I was naively delighted Leo’s colleagues saw the resemblance to the movie star too, and I found that strangely reassuring, a sign that the Mortmains and Doucette were not as different in perception from me as I had feared.

Rufus Mortmain – the name still amazes me with its wrong-headed exuberance – extracted a bottle of gin and one of whisky from the cupboard. Glasses were fetched, Leo going back to our kitchen to collect a couple. That was merely fair in terms of our semi-communal living. Dotty began clearing up some papers by her typewriter to make room for our drinking session.

Mortmain asked me what I would like. A little gin, I said.

Bravo! Mortmain cried, as if he knew that I wasn’t a drinker. He turned to Dotty. He said, And you? Light of my life, temple of my desire, companion of my mortal days?

Dotty said, Gin-and-it, thank you, sailor. You bloody reptile!

The two men drank whisky, and added a little water from the tap. Then Leo sat and took my hand and raised his glass. Darling Grace, he said, you know I can’t go on with all that palaver Rufus does, but I drink to you.

I sipped my gin and tried to look normal, but as it shuddered through my body, Dotty noticed and offered me some tonic water. That was better. I’ve liked gin and tonic since that day. But it wasn’t to be the only mystery to which Dotty would introduce me.

By the time we got to a second drink, Mortmain announced, To absent friends!

I hope you don’t mean that Irish chancer Doucette, snarled Dotty, her face narrowing and her eyes full of passion. I hope a Number 18 bus runs over that bugger.

Nor did she smile as she said it.

Ahem, murmured Rufus. Charlie Doucette is a sore point in our family.

Dotty shrugged. He is a madman born out of his time, she told me. I hope they’re not filling his mind with rubbish in London. They can dream up all sorts of things behind their desks. They find some eccentric like Doucette to try it out, and expect my husband to go along. It’s just not acceptable. I don’t know where in God’s name you’ve been last time you went…

Rufus interrupted her, and winked, and said to me, Dotty is just saying that out of piety. She knows where we were from her friend the Yank Colonel Creed, who’s quite keen on her.

Dotty took some more gin, shook her head and would speak no further.

Leo turned to me. Dotty… Mrs Mortmain… works for a Yank we know. Colonel Creed. Very smooth sort of bloke.

Rufus said, The Boss gives him a hard time. The Boss has a bit of a thing about Yanks. I have always found Creed one of the better ones myself.

Leo declared, He certainly seems to be trying to work with us now. But better not say any more.

Leo then smiled at me. He told me he had to go into the barracks the next day, and then to meetings, but would be back in the evening with Rufus. Dotty tossed her head. Altogether, she had made a fairly sombre drinking companion, and the more melancholy she became, the more wary Rufus Mortmain looked. It was clear Doucette and the present employment of Rufus himself was an issue of argument between them.

On my way to the toilet, I glanced out of our living room window across the river and the shunting yards to the browned-out city, and on a bench in the parkland across the road, I saw Susan Enright sitting wearing a hat and with her suitcase beside her. I called to Leo to come and see, and the Mortmains came as well. I said, That’s the woman I came down with from Sydney on the train. Mrs Enright.

Not Peter Enright’s wife? asked Mortmain. The poor lady has my sympathy.

What’s she doing down there? Dotty worried.

Rufus said, Obviously she caught Peter with his woman. He lives on the top floor. The almighty Director of Plans.

Leo murmured to me, Perhaps you and I should go down, Grace, and see if there’s anything she needs.

Dotty said, Shouldn’t you leave it to Enright himself? He might be out and she is waiting for him to come back with the key.

She could probably do with a drink while she’s waiting, said Rufus.

In the end, Leo and I insisted on going down together. We crossed the road to the bench she was sitting on by the river, and she turned to see who was coming. Hello, she called with a sort of manic gaiety. It’s Grace. And her gallant husband.

Leo asked could he help her.

No thanks. It’s very kind of you. I’m waiting here till I’m arrested for vagrancy. My husband won’t let me into my apartment, so it’s become a matter of shaming him.

Her voice was high-pitched.

Please let us give you a cup of tea or a drink, Leo suggested.

You can’t sleep here, Susan, I told her.

Maybe I could do an Ophelia in the waters of the Yarra, she suggested. Don’t worry, Grace. I have a room at the Windsor reserved very kindly for me by my treacherous spouse.

Could I get you a taxi then, Mrs Enright? asked Leo

Please, no! I am not your responsibility, young fellow.

We have a settee, I said, as a girl did if she came from the country, where accommodation was freely offered. Ours is the double apartment, number 5 and 6.

Look, said Mrs Enright, you’re both very kind. But you must please leave me free to humiliate the mongrel.

Perhaps because of the gin, the tension of my own happiness, and certainly because of lack of experience, I was suddenly moved to tears.

Please don’t put yourself through this, I begged.

But in the end, we had to leave her there, and were both very uncomfortable about it as we re-entered the lobby. Leo kissed me on the forehead. Let’s go to bed then, he whispered.

Upstairs, abashed at the brush-off Mrs Enright had given us, we said goodnight to the Mortmains, who intended to stay up a little longer. We were half-undressed when our doorbell went. Leo put on a dressing gown and answered it. It was Mrs Enright. I saw her over Leo’s shoulder. She was crying. I’m a weak woman. I will take that spare room your dear wife mentioned.

I found some sheets and blankets, as she stood in the kitchen being introduced to the Mortmains. I quickly made a bed for her on a settee. When I re-emerged, I found that she had been induced to comfort herself with some gin.

Rufus told her, We’ll point Mrs Enright in the right direction. You must be tired after travelling last night.

I was awakened in the morning by the sound of angry voices at our opened front door. Putting on a dressing gown and going to check, I saw both Leo and Rufus in shirt sleeves arguing with a man similarly half-dressed in uniform but very angry. It was of course Major Enright.

Mortmain was saying, You surely couldn’t expect us to leave the poor woman in the open.

That’s exactly what I expected you to do. She would have got sick of it. As it is, you played right into the hands of that mad woman. But you knew what you were doing, too. I know you understood exactly what you were doing.

Leo said he resented the accusation.

The woman had a perfectly fine room at the Windsor, paid for by me. But you look out your window and you think, Let’s make a fool of old D/Plans. In civilian life, you fellows would be little better than criminals, and I know the way you think. God knows what your purpose was in introducing that woman into your flat.

Mortmain declared with the calmest authority, and with a certainty Dotty must have relished, that he and Leo were both married men. I’d knock you down for what you have said, he told the major, except you’re beyond yourself. I ask you to show a little restraint and dignity. We all have to sit at the same planning tables for weeks and months yet, and Colonel Doucette isn’t even back.

Leo, of course, despite his role as an official hero, had a temperament which would go a long way to make peace. He said, My wife has just arrived from Sydney – by the same train as your wife, in fact. I have to ask you not to make a scene, sir.

I felt silk brush by me in a hurry. It was Susan Enright, coming from the bathroom to join the conflict. She took up a position in the middle of our living room, from where she could lob her own high-calibre commentary over Leo’s and Rufus’s heads onto her mad-eyed husband.

How dare you find fault with these decent men! she raged. You’re just embarrassed to be shown up as a skirt-chaser in front of your brother officers. Yes, both their wives are here, and you’re offensive to them too. As for your room at the Windsor, take your tart there and leave me the flat. By the way, any chance of your being sent on a suicide mission? I don’t suppose so. Far too flabby compared to these two.

You’re making a fool of yourself, Susan.

Good. And you’re playing me for one.

Suddenly, Enright began appealing to Leo and Mortmain. You see, she doesn’t mind using your flat as an arena of battle. Well, I’m not biting today, Susan. Excuse me. I shall see you at the office, gentlemen.

He turned on his heel, in a way which implied not a retreat but a dignified withdrawal.

Coward, Susan yelled. Craven bastard! Back to your whore.

His retreating steps could be heard on the stairs, and Leo closed the door, shaking his head.

Mortmain said, The bugger needs a broken nose. I don’t think we should take that from anyone, Leo.

Leo looked at me. I’m sorry, love, he told me, as if the madman at the door had soured everything.

Susan turned, taken out of herself by Leo’s concern, and came and hugged me. At that second, I began to resent her.

She said, I’m not going to risk that you’ll be bothered any further. I’ll go to his bloody room at the hotel.

We told her to stay for breakfast first. But Dotty was not as warm towards her as the men. And later Dotty would tell me she believed that from that day, Major Enright, despite all conscious professionalism, at some level wished them ill, and even wished them dead.