The Widow and Her Hero

  It was difficult to get boats in over the sandbars of those eastern rivers, but Doucette and Billy managed to do so, and one day Mortmain had met them drinking tea and practising dialect Malay at a village near the mouth of the Terengganu River. Mortmain, as yet unmarried, had descended from his timber plantation to buy regional daggers, his chief passion. That was how they had met, in an outdoor teahouse in a Malay village. Some military gentlemen were stand-offish even with other Englishmen, in particular with someone like Mortmain, a mere timber estates manager. But that had not been the way of these two. Doucette was always too curious to be aloof.

  Mortmain himself would have been a military man, as was his older brother, if his parents could have afforded two regimental sons, but they couldn't. Rufus too liked to sail, and they sat over tea talking about the testing sandbars of all those north-eastern Malayan rivers. It was up here, Doucette already believed, that the Japanese would one day land, now they had China by the throat. Why not? There was a good highway all the way south to Johore. Mortmain agreed and advised Doucette to tell the blighters in Singapore. They think they're protected by the Malay jungles. In reality, the roads they built themselves lead right to their front door.

  Doucette liked Mortmain and invited him down to Singapore for weekends. On a typical weekend, they might sail from Changi to the Singapore Yacht Club, and begin their drinking and discussions there, chatting with other boat enthusiasts. It became apparent to Mortmain that Doucette had made an intelligence report on his journey up the east coast.

  As their Saturdays waned, they would sail round to the west coast, to the Coconut Grove nightclub. Both the soldiers had their pipe dress uniforms and shoes with them in duffel bags, and Mortmain similarly had his dinner suit from up-country. They changed and rowed ashore in their dinghy, overcrowded as it was with a beanpole civilian and the two more compact but sturdy officers. Their shoes hung around their necks, they climbed the sea wall, brushed the sand off their feet, tied their laces, and selected girls to dance with. Infiltration was already their style.

  It was clear to me early in my Melbourne days, Dotty did not have the same gleaming view of Doucette as Rufus and Leo did. During the afternoons in the flat, when we were both trying to write, an activity which if communally attempted always leads to conversation, she would tell me about her contacts with Charlie Doucette in pre-war Singapore.

  There had been a six-month period, before Minette consented to marry him and join him in Singapore, during which he used to confide in Dotty a great deal. He knew Minette was torn two ways. She was used to living in style in Macau. But there she was a Belgian Catholic divorcee – though she had some sort of Papal document of separation, she could not talk in any real way to the men of the colony.

  Dotty said she didn't know whether in those months of waiting Doucette saw her as a sister or as a potential lover, a solace for his bewilderment. Dotty spoke to me about all this with a characteristic frankness I did my best to pretend was normal to me too. She said, I found him very attractive in all sorts of wrong-headed ways women are fools for. Of course, he respected Rufus too much, and so did I, but I'd be lying if I said there wasn't some sort of magnetism there.

  Minette was always worried about Doucette, you know, Dotty further confided. He'd taken her by storm. I mean, to sail the South China Sea from Singapore to Macau in a 19-footer just to see her face . . . that would have an impact on any woman. And when she asked him why he did it, he didn't tell her one of the reasons was intelligence gathering. He told her, I had to see you because I was deteriorating into nothing in the East.

  And so he was, Dotty told me. Doucette once showed me a letter he'd written to Minette – this was before they got married, and he wanted to ask me should he send it off because he was worried by its frankness. On one hand, he compared himself favourably to his hidebound senior officers and felt sorry for them, poor old men who would never know the sort of love he and Minette had. In the next sentence, though, he was warning her he was unreliable and a bad man, but that she was a superior enough soul to ignore that. Minette didn't find out that in everyday life he was a hopeless boozer until she moved into married quarters at Selarang Barracks. I heard her express her anxiety about all this while the boys were out sailing, and Minette and I would be stuck in the clubhouse waiting and trying to space out our gin slings. Minette hated his drinking. She thought it was because he was so torn between sailing and garrison life. And the big boys in Singapore laughed off all his intelligence, you know. The only person who read his reports on how easy it would be to take Malaya was a chap we knew in the civilian administration. But he couldn't influence the stupid soldiers. That also drove Doucette to drink, the fact that some officers were actually looking forward to taking on the Japanese and, since they were missing the European war, could hardly wait. Minette told me that one day when they were sailing he looked at her and said, I'd go to the depths of hell to escape ordinary soldiering in barracks.

  Doucette's now-widowed mother, Lady Doucette, was a renowned dragon, said Dotty, and Charlie was the favourite son. He sometimes said he had become a soldier for her sake – she wanted him to follow in the tracks of his father, the late Major-General Sir Walter Doucette. At a party in Singapore, he said something like, I dread the time I go home and she has to realise I don't resemble the small, model boy she thinks she's been writing to. He was, as he said, a frightened six-year-old scared of his mother.

  He also confessed to Dotty that he felt like a fraud with Minette, because she was so generous and rated him at a higher moral level than he deserved.

  To Rufus, said Dotty, Doucette has always been the King of Ulster, but I think he's always been a mess. Sometimes he'd go to pieces and smoke opium in Chinatown, and Billy Lewis or Rufus would have to nurse him back. He hated himself for that, and his drinking. And then Chinese boys, one in particular, in his bachelor years. Not that he was alone in that. But he really hated himself for that as well. It was as if he really believed his terrible mother would find out.

  I was not shocked so much as scared for Leo. Does Leo know these things?

  Don't worry too much, said Dotty. He's an extraordinary commando. That's how he punishes himself for his sins.

  I'd rather he didn't have any sins, I admitted.

  In Rufus's eyes he doesn't, said Dotty.

  After the Boss's argument with Creed, we all started on the new plan, Memerang, but for a while the Boss seemed down. As the Americans delayed and Memerang became more official, at least as an idea Doxey tolerated, we had to work with Major Enright. He was good at many things – working out the number of Compo and Rompo rations that should be dropped off, and where, and when. I have to say I got a tinge of respect for him. He was earning his keep now by writing into the plan such easily forgotten items as waterproof containers for wireless equipment. He had himself designed new packing methods. Every given load we took on our adventures was to be limited to 35 pounds, what an operative could easily carry. Enright himself designed the sealed kerosene tin-like containers, which had special lever lids and rope carrying handles, so that they could easily be moved in the confines of a submarine. Boot A. B. Australian No.2, Tropic Studded, was decided on as most suitable for us, and it had been designed by a committee on which Enright had served. He had also designed the marspikes with which explosives could be stuck to wooden hulls – the device silently released a spike into wood through a bracket on the charge. And so on. He had talents. If I didn't already know it, I began to realise you had to have people like him.

  It looked likely that the training for Memerang, on Doucette's wonderful machines which were still on their way to us, would happen on the other side of the country, where the British submarine flotilla was, at Garden Island, just off the coast at Fremantle. I was disappointed, for no wives were permitted, but I suppose it had to come to that.

  The Boss remained silent and edgy and suspicious of Creed. He definitely has the blues, Rufus told me. He was like this sometimes in Singap
ore, he'd work himself into a black hole, the deep dumps. After he came back from a long sail he was always mopey. Can't say I ever blamed him.

  I hadn't seen much of that before. I was a bit surprised. As for Rufus himself, he never seemed to feel entitled to be down.

  There was a party at Foxhill's that Grace and I had gone to, but we'd come home a little early. We wanted our own company above all. And when we left Foxhill's, the Boss seemed much better, and the life of the party. He was playing a ukelele he'd picked up on his long trip back from Britain. He'd learned to play it in the bellies of bombers and DC-3s, where he couldn't be heard over the noise of engines. And that night he'd played for us 'The Umbrella Man', 'Paper Moon', 'The Teddy Bears' Picnic'. He'd stretched his mouth comically and done George Formby, then a tinkly Arthur Askey, and a Cockney Stanley Holloway, followed by some Noel Coward. He'd been full of the joy of life when Grace and I got our coats and left, and through the blacked-out streets on the way to the tram we laughed about his performance.

  For the next day Major Doxey had called the first big minuted meeting for the Memerang plan. Even he believed Creed was no longer of use to us. D/Sigs, D/Navy, D/Plans were all there at Radcliffe House for the meeting, and Rufus and I, but the Boss didn't turn up. It was strange. The Boss was winning his argument with Creed and Doxey, so I thought only something severe or unexpected had delayed him.

  Nonetheless Rufus waited until the afternoon before he called Doucette's flat. No answer. He called Foxhill, who was at home, about it, and Foxhill told us Doucette had drunk quite a bit later in the night, and got a little bit weepy very late, after Mrs Foxhill had gone to bed. The Boss had said something about he should have felt greater excitement about Minette being safe. And that he would hate anything he did to hurt her – if he caused the Japanese to get revenge on him by punishing her or his stepson.

  It was later still, apparently, when the Boss began to plummet a bit. He got on to the whole thing of it being his fault Minette and young Michael were on that ship, on their way to India. They could have stayed in Perth all the time, as it turned out. And he began to say again how he thought he wasn't pleased enough to find they were alive.

  Before Foxhill went to bed, he set the Boss up in the spare room because it was too late for him to be driven home. Foxhill was woken towards dawn by a racket from the Boss's room. He found the Boss tangled in the sheets and fighting them. It turned out he had a sort of waking nightmare, something about guards taking blankets away from Minette.

  I know what that is like, the nightmares. I have this nightmare where my father and I are in the same camp and he's asking me for food, and I keep on saying, of course, I know a barracks where there is some, and I wander off to get it, but I keep on being delayed, and I always find myself at the opposite end of the camp to the hut where the nourishment is. I have conversations with other men who try to put me off the search too, and I'm bullied by guards with indistinct faces who tell me that I have to do certain duties, including latrines and unloading trucks, and I'm fretful to get to the supply hut and then back to my father. I explain to everyone, The thing is that my father doesn't know I'll be so long, and there's the risk he'll start to believe I'm not coming back. So I know why the Boss might have a nightmare, particularly when he'd drunk a lot.

  Foxhill himself came to the office later, looking white and shattered. He had totally forgotten the meeting, and apologised and said he had felt bound to stick around the house until the Boss woke. Doxey was censorious about it. You could have called us, Captain, he told the Scot. Foxhill told us the Boss had said when he woke up that all he needed was a few days by himself, somewhere in the Dandenongs or a beach house where he could fish and go on long walks. He obviously needed a few days off, said Foxhill – he'd come straight off the plane from England and got to work, and he'd had a shock he hadn't absorbed yet. Foxhill's wife's family – as it turned out – had a nice beach house on the Mornington Peninsula, and Mrs Foxhill would get the keys from her brother that day and drive him down to the place with his ukelele, his fishing line and some books.

  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 sh
e 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!