The Widow and Her Hero

6

At morning tea time during that day’s meeting, I approached Major Enright to make the normal speech, which would have consisted of: Sir, I don’t care who you are. I don’t intend to stay in the army after the war, and so I don’t have to kowtow to anyone. I’m surprised a regular officer would come to other officers’ doors making the accusations you did. And I won’t have my wife upset by outbursts.

I had to queue – I saw Rufus giving him a bit of a shellacking too. But Enright’s face remained set though he was very pale. He was probably copping mullock from his girlfriend as well, and so he should.

Later, he came to Rufus and me voluntarily. He said, Unfortunate scene this morning. That bloody woman has the power to put everyone in the wrong. Sorry for anything untoward I said. The woman knows I’m seeking a divorce, and that’s that. Divorce is a big enough disadvantage for a professional officer, though many colleagues have remarked to me how inappropriate a soldier’s wife Susan makes. And of course, I overlook anything extreme you might have said. Can we all be men about this? And gentlemen as well?

That was as good as we could hope for. Rufus nodded with a half-smile on his face. Later, at lunch, he said to me, The bugger only learned to talk like that from a West End play, on secondment to British regiments in India. He gets it all out of sequence, anyhow, and he gave himself away at the end by pleading.

I wondered where he thought I learned to talk. But I think he was saying the major’s utterances were only skin deep. In any case, we agreed, it was as good an apology as we would get from Enright.

After Leo and Rufus had gone to work on the morning of the confrontation between Major Enright and Leo and Rufus, I decided to go into town by tram to look at Myers and other department stores of Melbourne renown. You cannot imagine the attraction of such an idea to someone raised in the Braidwood and Canberra of the time. Captain Foxhill had lined up a part-time job for me doing filing for the Transport Corps at Victoria barracks, where Leo frequently did his afternoon gymnastics. But I did not have to start for a few days.

I was thus able to leave Dotty to work on her mysterious book, and would be able to return in the afternoon and ask her, as if I routinely asked people this, How is your book coming along?

Susan Enright, still on the premises, complicated all this in a peculiar way. She asked if she could come to town with me. She seemed quite cheery, ready for a day’s window-shopping after the scene with her husband that morning. I couldn’t say no, but from her typewriter, Dotty asked, Didn’t you say you intended to book into the Windsor?

Susan said she would collect her luggage after lunch.

I had expected to catch the tram, but as, wearing our finest, we left the block of flats, a taxi appeared bearing its great bladder of coal gas in a bracket on its roof. She insisted we catch it, and when we reached Collins Street and I offered, like the bumpkin I was, to pay the driver, she cheerily permitted me to. In Myers, Buckley and Nunn, Foy and Gibson, she entered into crazily jolly conversations with girls in the jewellery and cosmetic departments about what her habitual choices were in all these matters. It was as if she hadn’t been rebuffed by her husband at all. Or else she was confident her husband would take her back. Again, girls from Braidwood didn’t behave like that in shops. You’ve got no idea what a constrained bunch of people we country girls were, terrified that someone would think us flash, or skites, or having tickets on ourselves, all of which were the greatest crimes a person could commit in the bush. But Mrs Enright was free of all such fears.

At lunchtime, she tried to talk me into a hotel dining room instead of the cafeteria at Myers. She was rather depressed that you couldn’t get a drink at Myers. At least the Windsor has a bar, she said.

We got home by tram at mid-afternoon and could hear from the stairs Dotty still working, like a real writer in Hollywood pictures, with a quite feverish clatter of keys. I wondered whether we should go back and sit in the parkland a while, lest we interrupt her. We’ll just creep in, Susan insisted. I must pack and get going.

That prospect of her going was so pleasant that I let myself be talked into opening the door to our half of the flat. Dotty, of course, looked up from her work. I’m just creeping in to pack, Susan explained, moving in a stagy creeping gait.

I said, Please don’t let us disturb you, Dotty.

While Susan packed, I sat in a chair reading Smith’s Weekly and its rollicking attacks on Generals MacArthur and Blamey. To them MacArthur was a poseur playing to the American press in hope of the Republican Party nomination for the Presidency. The Australian General Blamey was a well-connected tippler. Satire is its own reward, and often it is outdone by reality itself – I realise all that now. But Smith’s Weekly was considered rather seditious in the household I had grown up in, so I enjoyed it all the more now. I was a little disturbed that with Susan and me in the house, the pace of Dotty’s typing had fallen off. I began to doze and woke to see Dotty standing over me.

How’re the shops this dreary season?

They’re flourishing, I told her. At least that’s the impression of a woman who’s visited only two cities in her entire life.

She smiled and yawned, and sat in the neighbouring lounge chair.

Have you ever written any poetry? I don’t mean about flowers, or some ballad about rounding up cattle. I mean, poetry. I mean about loss and fucking and the misery of children, and why chaps love war and are such deadbeats in bed? Have you read The Waste Land?

Trying to appear at ease with her earthiness, I said no. She tramped into her half of the apartment and came back with a Penguin book.

Read that, Grace, she advised me. Image is everything, so I’m afraid I’m not much of a poet myself. I’m good at outrage, of course. I feel a lot of that. But when I was young in London, and hanging round writers, I always thought my style was pretty thin. A reviewer described my novel as understated, as if it were a virtue.

What was your novel called?

Sweat. It was about the lives of women in Malaya, or a colony like it anyhow. They weep sweat from every pore, I said. They shrivel and pretend it’s a life. A film company showed some interest in it, but then the war came.

I was fascinated by this.

Writing poetry is wonderful, she assured me. If the beloved is away for a time, it’s a sort of vengeance.

Against who? I asked.

Against the loss of time and beauty, Dotty told me. Or if you want to look on it positively, you could say it was a prayer for a golden world in which men loved women as much as they say they do, and the other way round, in which all wars are merry, and all children loved with equal ardour. You are a sweet and beautiful child, Grace, full of rejoicing. Poetry’s about that too. But you haven’t been betrayed yet.

She sounded remarkably like Susan.

Surely you haven’t been? I asked. Betrayed, I mean.

By Rufus? Oh yes. He does that, poor fellow, but men are like dogs. When an arse is proffered, they can’t turn away. Pardon my putting it so simply. It is simple for them, I’m afraid.

She lowered her voice. The sooner that tart gets out of here, the better. Look, I don’t mind showing you something I dashed off today – it’s not perfect, but it helps me stay sane. Like some gin?

Surprisingly I found I would like some. But something in me didn’t want Susan to have any with me.

Maybe after our guest’s gone.

Quite! Dotty whispered emphatically.

She went to her table and brought a page back. Officially, she told me, I’m supposed to be writing a novel. Really, I want to write about what a shambles the whole fall of Singapore thing was, but the publisher says it would not be looked on very kindly. So I’m trying to write simply about Englishwomen on one of our overcrowded steamers to Australia. Chaucer should have been there. He could have done justice to it. In between, when the thing is seeking its way out of me, I write about Rufus and myself. Despite what I say about men and dogs, he does love me, you know. As far as his sort of fellow possibly could.

She gave me the sheet. Don’t feel you have to tell me anything – whether it’s good or bad. I know exactly how good and how very bad it is.

What she gave me was entitled ‘Mercator’s Projection’. It read:

I don’t know why I was impressed. I thought until then that poetry had died with Tennyson. And the remarkable thing is, I remember understanding the meaning. I must have felt the same thing she did, without knowing it. I knew at once I wanted to write something like this myself.

At last, Susan emerged with her suitcase, and we saw her into a cab, which Dotty was forced to ring for, using the shared phone. We were delighted when she left, and then, as if we’d known each other for years, we broke out the sisterly gin.

I did not have an exact idea of the work Leo did at the requisitioned boarding house and temperance hotel, and at Victoria barracks. Women were of course counselled even in the Women’s Weekly that they should not ask too much. The women’s papers, the motion pictures, novels, and even the traditions inherited from mothers all underlined the idea that we lacked a right to be too inquisitive.

I knew, though, that Leo and Rufus worked together literally, having desks in the same room at Radcliffe House. While in that office, they were supposed to read the latest files on new equipment, from ground sheets to spirit stoves to weaponry. Leo told me this made pretty dry study, worse – he said – than contract law. So Rufus and he developed office games. Samples of commando daggers lay about the office, some of them in filing cabinets. Leo or Rufus would close and lock their office door and compete at hitting the door frame with knives. Only embeddings counted. Bounce-offs were a crime. If a thrower hit either the surrounding plaster wall or the door itself, he lost all his points acquired to that stage.

That was part of their éclat as well. Officers in D/Navy’s office or Major Enright’s D/Plans were not permitted to waste their time on such knife play. They had to keep writing reports and coming up with the correct admixture between destination and plan and technology. But then they had not personally invaded Singapore. They would tolerate the heroes’ games at great length, whatever spirit stoves or ground sheets waited to be assessed and initialled.

When not employed on their files or their knife practice, Leo and Rufus attended roundtable meetings at which questions of equipment, transportation, tactics and strategy to do with the coming huge operation in the Natunas were discussed. These meetings were attended by Colonel Creed, who remained an advocate for the idea of many well-equipped operatives, landed from many US submarines, undermining Japanese structures and lines of communication, ships and airfields, transit of supplies, etc., etc., in South-East Asia – which to us, of course, was North-West Asia.

The idea that the Independent Reconnaissance Department should build its own Indonesian, Malaysian or Borneo junks was still being discussed, and Mortmain in particular made suggestions about the way that should be done, on everything from the contour to fitting-out and the supply of drinking water. I know now that the building of a number of junks was begun in a Melbourne shipyard, which was then afflicted with strikes, so that they would never be finished.

In the afternoons, a succession of hefty NCOs kept up the fitness of Leo Waterhouse and Rufus Mortmain and others, introducing them to new methods of tripping, knifing and incapacitating mortal flesh; and causing them to climb ropes, run through mud and surmount improbable barriers. They came back home to Dotty and me full of tonic vigour, or as Leo said, absolutely buggered.

They were about to truck us to a private abattoir in Fitzroy, so that we could practise slitting throats on pigs, when a corporal came running to us from a nearby office. There was a call for Commander Mortmain. Rufus jogged double-time across the parade ground to take it. By the time he got back the truck was ready to leave for the abattoir. I was sitting in the back with a group of soldiers and sailors who were going through the same training for perhaps the same purpose. His monocle was glistening when he crawled aboard and sat beside me. Aussie soldiers and ratings who hadn’t seen him earlier nudged each other and whispered, Cop the bloody monocle on the Pom.

That was Mrs Enright, he whispered to me. Wants to shout you and me a drink. To repay us for our kindness. Windsor bar, 5.30.

He inhaled and the eye which did not have the duty of bearing the monocle, arched.

She wants us to bring our wives? I asked.

I don’t think that’s the purpose, said Rufus, looking ahead. I also think she knows you won’t come, Dig. I feel I should go out of politeness, don’t you think?

Up to you, I said, a bit surprised. I can’t go. I don’t want to.

No need to bother Dotty with the details, he told me. I don’t think Dotty likes her.

I thought I knew him. I didn’t think he was an altar boy. But I didn’t know he’d compromise me like that. For a drink and God knows what else with a good-looking mad woman. On our operations, life is so simple, and we all know everything we need to know about each other. Now, on the way to knife pigs, he was making the world complicated again. I wanted to go home and hug Grace. But I had to cover myself with pigs’ blood before they’d let me.