The Widow & Her Hero (15 page)

Home on leave in early 1943, like a god descending, he
proposed to Rhonda. Her parents didn't like Catholics but
they liked Pat, who was still robustly teetotal and non-
swearing. She began taking instruction in the Catholic
religion from the local parish priest. She was willing to
cross any barrier and bridge any gap to be his mate. He
became a weapons instructor at the Canungra jungle
training school, and so was safe from battle, and Rhonda
could not overcome her astonishment that, all that time, he
had watched and admired her. She was disappointed when
he did not want to settle in the instructor's job. She was
aware of and a bit frightened by a restlessness in him. Like
the blokes who came back from World War I, her father
said. They were the only blokes who could understand
themselves.

They intended to get married in January 1945. But of
course . . . her trousseau waited until 1949, when a man
named Ron Garnish came back from serving in the army
occupying Japan, started a tyre business in town, began by
taking her out and then asked for her hand.

She had been married a year or so, and had a miscarriage,
very sad, but the doctor up in Grafton reckoned there was
no reason she wouldn't bear healthy children. And then she
had opened the door of her little house one morning and Pat
Bantry was standing there, looking just a bit dazed. Where's
the reward, Rhonda? he asked her, and then he was gone.
She knew he was dead, of course, but she would have known
anyhow, because he was talking with great effort over a great
distance. She said she knew she should have been embarrassed
to say she had seen and heard from the deceased,
except that would be to deny the effort she believed Pat had
made to speak to her. She told her husband as early as
lunchtime that day. We don't hide things from each other, she
said. In any case there were still mothers and wives all over
the Clarence River who had confusing visits from the war's
dead sons and husbands. Mrs Bantry was rumoured to have
had a visitation from Sergeant Bantry too.

Ron Garnish proved such a tolerant and understanding
fellow that he took her seriously. Many husbands wouldn't
have, would have talked about old flames and so on. She
assured her husband of her full loyalty to him, but she
hoped he would not stop her from seeing the Minister of
Defence about a reward for Pat Bantry, who could have
been safe in Queensland for the duration if he hadn't been
such a convinced man of action. She didn't speak to the
aging Bantrys, who were still inconsolable about their son.
(Indeed, they sounded more or less like me, in terror of
more information than could be accommodated.) It was up
to her, as Pat's former fiancée, to put the matter to rest.
What if we went as a delegation? she suggested. You and
me and Mrs Danway, if she'd be in it? The Minister
couldn't refuse to receive the spokeswomen for three
heroes. Especially since one of them had written a famous
poem about a lost husband.

I knew, of course, I had to go. I had had so many dreams
myself that I was in no position to laugh at the idea of Pat
Bantry's spirit turning up thirsty for merit at Rhonda's
door. She told me one of the support troops, the Beta men
who worked on getting the expedition away from Western
Australia, had told her after the war that Pat always kept
her picture upright on his boot box, and when some of the
other men began talking about their adventures with
women, he would say, This isn't for your ears, dear, and
turn her picture face down. The more she talked about it,
the more I thought it was this tale, as much as the appearance
of Bantry's ghost, which had her by the throat.

She'd gone to the trouble of looking up the train
timetable for us, Sydney to Canberra, and the names of
Canberra boarding houses. I told her about the Kurrajong,
where I used to stay. They knew me there.

How could I refuse to get on a train to Canberra when
Leo had walked under his own power onto that murderous
weed-bed at Reformatory Road?

We weren't able to see Mrs Danway until the following
Saturday afternoon. Laurie had a vehicle and would have
happily taken Rhonda and me across the city to Kogarah,
where Mrs Danway lived in a flat. But I did not want that.
My affection for him was still not of the kind that looked
to acquire debts of kindness, not yet, and as he would say
later, even after five years I hadn't cleared my slate of the
war. Indeed, there were a lot of people like me, a whole
sub-class of women in the world, invisible except to each
other, who were making their dazed way amongst a society
obsessed with housing shortages and electricity strikes,
with horse-racing and football, and who were being told
against their own instincts that the war was over and
suddenly remote, and the dead to be referred to only at
ceremonial moments.

When these women visited each other, they usually travelled
by ferry, bus and train, as did Rhonda and I. They had
generally been left short of the means to hire taxis, or buy
a car. Mrs Danway met us at Kogarah station and walked
with us back to her little flat. She was a thin woman, older
than Rhonda and me by as much as five years. I was a little
ashamed I had not sought her out earlier. It seemed now the
most obvious thing I should have done. I should have
contacted all of them. I told her I was sorry we hadn't met
previously.

Oh, she said, as if it forgave me, Hugo was a late inclusion.

She told us at some stage that afternoon that she had lost
Lieutenant Danway's child after the men disappeared to
Western Australia, so that between her and Rhonda there
were two lost children. She told us Danway loved the
training camp over in the west. Doucette had taken him on
rather late in the process, so that he had to endure long
training sessions to catch up with the others. She showed us
a letter he had written. Rufus had him climbing hills and
canoeing by the mile from eight thirty in the morning till
two the next afternoon. On that coastline, the tent accommodation
was very cold at night, said Lieutenant Danway.
But it was the same for everyone, he said, and Doucette had
infused everyone with a wonderful sense of unity. Everyone
pitched in, officers and men, all equals in Doucette's eyes,
and so all very energetic and in an inventive frame of mind.
She raised her eyes as she read that, as if it showed some
kind of innocence, which it did. Doucette is a particular
kind of Englishman, Danway said. The other Poms aren't
like him at all.

Hugo Danway had been a great canoeist, Mrs Danway
said, attributing it to his Islander blood – his mother had
been a woman from the Marianas Islands, and his father
an Australian missionary. And yet his whole leave time he
would spend with her, with Sherry Danway, on the block
of land he'd bought by the harbour. He had made
drawings of the house he intended to raise there after the
war.

We didn't have to ask. Rhonda and I knew that she had
had to sell the land. With it and what he had put in his
building account she had bought this little flat, she said. I
keep busy, she claimed, and then she raised her stricken
eyes. Isn't it heartbreaking, she asked, when a fellow is so
young and full of life and hope and skill, and then the axe?
An obscene death for very little purpose.

Those words,
very little purpose
, hung nakedly in the air.
I did not like their presence. Dotty Mortmain had been
very angry with Rufus for not reappearing by the New Year
of 1945, but she said it was due to his desire to keep
Doucette out of trouble by following him into it. That
axiom or mantra – or whatever you'd call it – took up a
solid residence in my mind too, but applied to Leo instead
of Rufus. But the words
very little purpose
threatened to
reopen the issue and to revisit the flimsy story I consoled
myself with.

They were brave men, Rhonda insisted.

But what for? asked Sherry Danway. After all? What for?

Rhonda said, Men believe they're born to be brave, and
you see hollow men walking round who've never had a
chance to try it. Or else they failed. But your husband . . .
braver than MacArthur for a start. Braver than any politician.
Braver than that old soak Blamey.

And I thought there was something to that, too. To men
of a certain kind, not to all men, but to some men in certain
circumstances and under the force of certain ideas, bravery
was its own end. That comforted me a little when put up
against
very little purpose
. The purpose was to be brave,
the purpose was even to be doomed.

Mrs Danway said, I don't think I want to go to
Canberra. I'm sorry. The truth is, I couldn't care two bob
whether they give my husband a medal or not. It has no
effect on me or my memory of my husband. It's certainly
not worth risking going to Canberra to hear his name
rolled round the mouth of some shitty old official.

She was very firm about that, and I felt embarrassed that
I didn't know my own mind, that I had been shamed into
going with Rhonda. Rhonda gave up and said to me, The
train into Central's due in twenty minutes, Grace. We
ought to start out.

In fact, the station was in sight when Sherry Danway
came running after us. I'll go, she called to Rhonda. What
time should I meet you at Central?

Rhonda yelled the details as we sprinted for the train.
I'll see you there, she cried, and I asked myself, Who
elected you leader? Sherry Danway and I had lost
husbands. Rhonda was a wilful, married woman dragging
two reluctant widows into a confrontation they didn't
want to have.

The following Tuesday we all met precisely where
Rhonda had decided, the country-train indicator board
at Central. Rhonda and I had got quite friendly by now.
On Sunday, we'd shared a picnic at Bradleys Head. On
Monday, Laurie Burden took us to a five o'clock session of
The Third Man
at the Regent Cinema. It was a wonderful
tale of complexity arising from the war, and was strangely
comforting, since it implied we were still stuck in that same
territory too, in a land of shadows. I was convinced by then
that Rhonda was indeed a splendid woman. I reassured
myself she would not let her grief for Pat Bantry trample on
my own decisions about grief, or complicate it all for me.

I remember my view of myself in those days with some
amusement and with a sense of loss as well. I was at
thirty-one considered almost too old to bear a first child.
I saw Sherry Danway and myself as already middle-aged,
already bowed by history, and as unentitled to girlishness.
It was as a coven of senior women that we met by the
huge indicator board at Central, and took our reserved
seats in a carriage with pictures of the Blue Mountains
above the upholstery, and a cut-glass water bottle above
our heads, clinking in its brass retainer. We were all
nervous and had brought plenty of reading matter of one
kind and another. I was reading Evelyn Waugh, his world
remote from my experience, and thus a good one to lose
myself in.

When we arrived in Canberra, there was no snow on
the Brindabellas out to the west, and the town seemed
ominously vacant, still mainly populated by eucalyptus
foliage, as if everyone who had an answer for us had fled.
We caught a taxi to our boarding house, and despite
inquiries about buses, were forced to take another cab to
the Department of Defence in its bark-strewn parkland.
Though Parliament was not in session, the minister had
agreed to see us here. Mr Philip McBride had been a
regular member of the cabinet of Prime Minister Menzies.
I had seen his face in the press and on newsreels. His
office at the department was a plain big room with a
massive desk, for which one or two native cedar trees
must have been plundered. The office was heartened
with pictures of fighter planes and bombers, an aircraft
carrier and a cruiser. The planes in the pictures were at
ease with the sky. The ships had the sea where they
wanted it.

We three were already seated in there when Mr McBride
entered with a young man who carried a number of files.
Don't get up, ladies, said the minister, as he made his way
around the desk. We did half stand in honour of his political
gravity, but we were not as innocent as we had once
been, so did not overdo it.

The minister settled in his chair and the young man sat
on a harder one by the corner of the business end of the
desk. Mr McBride began briefing himself on who we were
from the notes on his desk.

Rhonda said, Perhaps you remember? We're the women
calling on you about the Memerang men.

Ah yes, ah yes, said Mr McBride. Brave men.

He looked up at us, and caught our eyes. Every one of
them, he assured us.

Rhonda explained, I was merely the fiancée of Sergeant
Bantry. Mrs Waterhouse and Mrs Danway were married to
the officers of those names.

Mr McBride asked, The men were . . .?

His secretary muttered something. Oh yes, said Mr
McBride, dolorously. Terrible, terrible. Members of the
enemy were never charged over it, I've been told, but I
believe that most of the people involved were caught for
war crimes of another stripe.

Rhonda sat back to allow Mrs Danway and myself to
take up the running. We were both guiltily reluctant, but at
last I said, We are all concerned that none of the men have
been honoured for that last operation.

Mrs Danway stepped in, anxious to emphasise she knew
it was no substitute for a husbandly presence. Not that it
will bring them home, sir. But they did something very
adventurous, and it seemed that no one gave them a lot of
credit for it.

Mr McBride turned to his secretary. Was it normal for
men to be honoured for secret operations? he asked. Were
other IRD men honoured?

The young man looked up from his files. Not normally,
sir, he told his master. Only in special circumstances.