The Widow & Her Hero (12 page)

At the meeting, Foxhill turned to Rufus. Actually, I don't
want to barge in at the beach house and check all the time on
how he is. But I'm sure he'd accept a visit from Leo and you
over the weekend, since you're his golden boys. You could take
the girls down there and have a picnic. Just let me know by
telegram or phone how he is.

We were even able to get a car from the office to pursue that
task. On Friday night, though, Dotty said she would not go.
I've dragged the bugger up by his miserable puppet-strings too
often, she told us. We knew her well enough by now to understand
she wasn't likely to change her mind. Grace said in that
case she wouldn't go either, because she didn't want to cramp
Rufus and me. But I wanted her to come. I wanted to sit in the
sand dunes with her and drink beer. As for the surf, it was
getting a bit cold for that, but I imagined that we would dare
each other into it.

Dotty stayed abrasive overnight about everything, spiky
about Rufus and the Boss. Tell him to have a nervous breakdown
once and for all, she advised us while we packed a picnic
basket the next morning. I said, I don't think the Boss is crackup
material.

And she replied in her tigress way, Oh, he's fine when he's
sneaking around and exploding things. It's just daily life he
can't handle.

And yet, while Rufus picked up the car, she came to Grace
and me and said, All right, I'm going, but only for Grace's sake.
And to show you what a lunatic Doucette is.

He's not a lunatic, I said. He's been through a lot.

Haven't we all? Dotty sniffed.

Grace saved me from further arguments by winking at me.
The ride south with Rufus – driving through Brighton and
Frankston – was very pleasant. Through those suburbs with
low-roofed houses behind the dunes and flashes of bright sea
seen across vacant plots. At last we got amongst the bush of the
peninsula and followed the directions Foxhill had written out
for us, from Rosebud on the inner side of peninsula across red
hills to the ocean side. We found the family name on a board
hammered to a tree by a stock gate. Beyond the gate a tall
timber house with a verandah all around it looked out at the
Southern Ocean. Nothing stood between it and the South Pole,
and it felt like that. Pleasantly though, not cold but certainly
the end of the earth.

We walked up the timber stairs to the house and around the
verandah to the front – the sea-facing side. Here there was a
slung hammock, and on the verandah boards, an open novel
and a bottle of whisky two-thirds gone. Rufus stood by the
back door, crying, Boss, are you there? There was no answer,
and Grace suggested he might have gone down to the beach. It
was a hopeful sort of idea, but I think we could all tell that
things were not right.

Rufus said, I'll just creep in and see if he's asleep.

We nodded, and Rufus disappeared into the dim house.
Grace and I looked out to sea. It was so immense it seemed to
promise us settled times. A roar from inside the house took us
by shock. A stooped Rufus was retreating to the verandah, his
arms spread wide. No, it's me, it's Rufus, he was saying. The
crazy-eyed Boss, in nothing but shorts and greatly needing a
shave, was yelling at him in what must have been Malay and
swiping at him with a machete.

Boss, it's us, I called out, because he didn't seem to know
Rufus.

Have you got malaria? Rufus asked him, but the Boss sliced
the air with the machete.

At the end of the Boss's backswing, Rufus hit him in the face
and his legs gave out and he fell sideways onto the verandah
boards with his mouth crushed open. I'd never seen him look
like this before, and I was shocked by the belt Rufus had given
him, and knew I'd have to explain its force to Grace without
understanding everything myself about what it meant. Perhaps
I could say, Rufus isn't trained to hit people softly.

In fact Rufus himself seemed appalled to see the Boss flattened
like this, looking like a dipso in a gutter.

He said, Let's put him to bed, Leo. No, better bath him, I
think. He doesn't smell so good.

Does he have malaria? asked Grace. It was obvious she
wished we could say yes.

No, muttered Rufus as I helped him lift the Boss. He's just
beyond himself, poor laddy.

There was a sour, acrid smell about the Boss as we carried
him inside, where thank heavens the girls didn't follow us. He
was not heavy, slight as a kid, really. Such a big personality
you forgot he was a squirt. Very sinewy, but very thin legs and
arms. If they weren't so brown, we would have called them
Pommy legs.

We ended up in the primitive bathroom of the beach house.
Two tarantula-like spiders watched us from the ceiling. It was
the sort of place the fauna would always invade – possums and
insects.

Hold him tight, Rufus ordered me as we lowered the Boss to
the floor. He's been on the opium pipe and it always does weird
things to him. You'd think it'd make him docile, but he goes
haywire.

Well, I thought, opium! Of course. Singapore. These two
fellows had a shared history and knew each other well in
places where you pick up exotic habits.

While I held on to the Boss, he had a fair bit to say. He
said, Come to the wedding, Colonel. Come to the wedding,
you fucking fat bigot! He adopted a pompous voice.
Doucette's done it now. Wants to marry some Belgian tart
from Macau!

That fit passed and he yelled over my shoulder at Rufus,
Malaria, you say? Good for you, doctor! Malaria! And blood
poisoning. Went crazy, took four damned orderlies to hold me
down. Remember that one. Four fucking orderlies!

Rufus began to fill the bath with the cold tank water which
was all that was available here. He cried out above the noise
of the water splashing into the zinc bathtub, Yeah. I remember
that time, Boss. The tropical ulcer went septic. Lucky you
lived, you mad bugger!

The Boss writhed and began crying, and that and the
sweaty and shitty stink of him made me feel embarrassed as I
held him fast. I was discovering he was more human than
I wanted him to be. I hoped I could forget the raving, stinking
imbecile he was at the moment. I took comfort from the fact
that all this didn't seem to shock or come as a surprise to
Rufus.

The Boss began to work his jaw where Rufus had hit him.
Well done, old chap! he screamed. But watch out for Round
Four. I'll eat your guts hot.

Okay, Boss, said Rufus, turning the tap off. Are you going to
be good for me?

Can you imagine, the Boss asked, weeping, they take her
blankets away?

No, I think you're dreaming that, Boss, said Rufus, removing
his uniform jacket and rolling up his sleeves. Grace knocked on
the door to tell us she and Dotty had started on a lunch and the
clean-up in the kitchen. Are salmon sandwiches okay?

I called out, Yes, and we'll be out to eat them soon.

Ah, cold blankets, said the Boss as we stripped him off and
smelt the full staleness of his opium and whisky sweats and his
urine and shit, and lowered him into the water. The cold water
did not seem to worry him, but he argued with himself and the
Japanese and God and Rufus and me as we washed him down
with soft cloths. As he began to cool off and shiver he started
abusing Belfast weather, blaming another country for what he
was feeling in Australia's cold tank water.

When the bath was over, we towelled him and dressed him
in a fresh singlet and shorts I got from his kit in the melee and
fug of the Boss's bedroom. As he briskly dried the Boss's under-
groin Rufus dared to make a joke about the Boss's penis,
saying, You don't exactly own a love truncheon, do you, Boss?
For such a charmer?

Get fucked yourself, Mortmain. Women don't want a bloody
elephant.

Ah, said Mortmain. It speaks!

In the kitchen, Rufus sat him down and hand-fed him
salmon off a spoon, as Grace and Dotty and I looked on,
awed and frowning. After getting a little food into him, Rufus
and I put him into bed, and then we ate our own sandwiches
and drank our tea. Hearing an occasional yell from his
bedroom, we knew we couldn't leave him alone, and Rufus
asked if Grace and I would like to drive into the seaside
village of Flinders and call Foxhill at the office – he was
waiting there all day for a report – and tell him the Boss was
still a little indisposed and Rufus would stay with him here
overnight, but he should send a car and driver for the rest of
us. Rufus would bring the Boss home to Melbourne the
following afternoon.

You're not staying alone with that maniac, said Dotty.

My dear, no need for you to spend a night here.

I bloody will. If he comes at me with a bloody machete, I'll
shoot the fucker dead.

Grace and I were pleased to get away from the house and
drive amongst the melaleucas and she-oaks on the sandy road
to Flinders. I was not an accomplished driver, but Grace
wanted me to drive. This was a little adventure we both could
cherish. She was silent for a while. It was almost superstitious.
We both wanted to get well away from the house before we
started talking full voice, as if we were afraid of waking the
Boss, though I knew that wasn't it. I was edgy about what
impression everything we'd seen had had on Grace.

The sandy back road met some bitumen and took us into
the village of Flinders. I got out and made the call to Foxhill,
who said, Oh dear! and promised to send another car the
next day.

I got back in the car and started the engine. But Grace put
a hand on top of mine as I reached for the gear-stick.

Will you be going on any more operations with that man?
she asked.

I said, He's just a bit ill at the moment. He's not like that
when we've got something to do. They're just messing him
about, that's all. The Yanks and the desk boys.

It seems as if he ought to be in hospital.

No, I said, look, he's found out about his wife and the little
boy, and he feels pretty powerless about that too. I know how
he feels. I have the occasional bad dream about my old bloke.
And as well as that everyone's been frustrating him, trying to
scale things down . . .

Grace grabbed my hand harder. But it wasn't in her nature
to be sharp like Dotty. She said, I hope they scale him down all
the way, to be honest. I don't like sending you off far with a
man like that.

I begged her to suspend judgement. I told her he was a
different man when we had something on. His face shone. He
never touched liquor then, even if it was available. It was
the first time, though, that I thought I'd need to go along
next time, whether it was Memerang or the Great Natuna
plan, to keep an eye on the Boss, instead of doing things
under his gaze.

As Rufus and Leo had promised, Doucette came back
to his best. Charming at parties, he was again forthcoming
with the ukelele, 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
two hundred 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 in a burst 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 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 is 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 Spencer
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 the 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 station 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 Mark 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, Lieutenant Lower, had also arrived, with Major
Frampton.

After the first Silver Bullet was un-canistered 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 four 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
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 elite 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 commandoes
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.