As for the rest I had been stopped in place by the news of Leo's execution. The truth I was ashamed of was this: I did not want any minor and peripheral information about it all. What could adjust the fact? When I dared look at the idea of execution, I was dazzled and disabled by its vibrant blackness. Leo's body was irreparably violated. That reality lay in the supposed paths of healing like an unnegotiable boulder. My curiosity was paralysed, and there was something in me that feared new knowledge, even if this state of mind was a disgraceful thing in a widow.
Captain Gabriel visited me twice. The second time, in 1947, was to tell me the execution of Leo and other Memerang men would not be the subject of a war trial, but that various judicial officers, including the president of the court, Sakamone, had killed themselves, and the NCOs who did the work of execution, including the one who made a botch of Leo, Judicial Sergeant Shiro Abukara, were all in prison, Abukara for life, for other acts of cruelty in Outram Road prison in Singapore. What could a war crimes prosecution do about the mess the war had put us in? All this war crimes work, which Gabriel would end up spending three years on, and his superiors a half-dozen years or more, was to me nothing but the sort of pottering around the edge of a cauldron. Even two years after the war, the shameful truth was that I was happy to let it, them, all go. Since I was terrified that the more I heard, the more likely I was to find out some terrible, indigestible reality, I felt a bad wife.
I had been working as a secretary in the office of a hotel broker named Laurie Burden. The business was one his father had founded, and Laurie Burden had taken it over in early 1946, after he returned from England, where he had flown transport planes. He was a pensive young man, and rarely took a drink. I liked working for him. But I was aware of the entitlements of my widowhood, including the chance of a university education. I wanted to teach – it seemed that children, of whatever age, would totally absorb my time. Without Leo, I wanted a new self- definition. I felt that if I were stupefied and hypnotised in place by events, as had happened for the past two years, he would be posthumously displeased. Besides, I had a horror of being stuck without company on that island of widowhood – that description, War Widow, was so inadequate an explanation for the woman Leo had let me become.
Yet in another sense I suppose I unconsciously cultivated widowhood, writing verse about it, some of which Dotty got published in English literary mags. That poem of mine, To the Beloved Missing in Action, became a minor classic, much anthologised.
I did my degree and teacher training. Laurie Burden had remained my friend and attended the graduation. It was not until 1952 when I was teaching English to high school girls at North Sydney that we became lovers, not moving to each other with the certainty which had been the mark of my life with Leo, but more like two wounded creatures trying not to hurt each other. For Laurie, as he ultimately told me, had certain bewilderments too. He had toured Germany with his father in 1935, a busman's holiday during which they had visited all the leading hotels of Cologne, Munich and Frankfurt. Flying into those cities on transport missions, he had been appalled to find all the splendour reduced to such absolute rubble. Earlier in the war, he had had his own brush with heroes when he delivered members of the specially trained leadership groups whose job was to gather Maquis units into powerful garrisons in the countryside. The fortified positions were prematurely taken up and were reduced by the enemy with great slaughter, from which few survivors emerged. Laurie lacked the urge to march through Sydney with his former comrades on Anzac Day because he did not see how it would help or even enlarge the spirits of the doomed fellows he had delivered to France.
I had been at work as a teacher for a few months when a woman named Rhonda Garnish, an angel of great inconvenience, visited me. The dreary and deadly Korean War was still going, nuclear threat pressed down from the sky and challenged our innocence, and the past war, vividly recalled by millions of its victims, was nonetheless on its way to becoming historical, an item of study.
Mrs Rhonda Garnish descended on me from the Northern Rivers mail train. She had called me from the north coast, near Grafton, and said she needed to see me, and we made arrangements. I met her in Spit Road, Mosman, as she got down from the bus from town. She was a small woman, very pretty, with a plumpness which might take over in later years but which had a long way to go before it smudged her good looks. She managed her port tied up by two leather straps with a wiry strength, and when I shook hands with her, I could tell by the raspiness of her palm that she was a dairy farmer's daughter.
But she was smart.
Listen, Grace, she told me on the street, holding me by both wrists, don't let me talk you around. Just because I'm going to Canberra it doesn't mean you have to. This is the right time for me to go, that's all.
All right, I told her. We'll talk about it at home.
Hey, I saw that write-up of your book of poetry in the Herald. Crikey. They thought the world of you. It made me think twice before I wrote you a letter. There's another woman too, Mrs Danway.
I don't know her, I protested.
Rhonda said, Her husband was Hugo Danway. He wasn't on the first one, Cornflakes. He arrived over in Western Australia just in time to join them on the second trip.
Danway. Yes, I recognised the name.
He was one of the group, I said.
Yes, the Japanese beheaded him too. I'm going to visit her, but don't let me drag you along. As my husband says, I'm a bossy cow.
I took her home to my little flat – I had not yet married Laurie and the proprieties were observed. I'd made a cake for her, and she ate heartily, and drank her tea strong and black and with three sugars.
You see, what happened, she told me, was I was engaged to Pat Bantry. Did your husband ever mention him?
Yes, I lied.
I had a crush on him since I was thirteen. I'd be getting ready for school and I'd see Pat drive the old Bantry Hupmobile full-pelt down our hill and over the wooden bridge, and all the timbers of the bridge would slam together in protest. I can't hear that sound to this day without my heart missing a go.
My hands were sweating. What did she want, this young wife from the Northern Rivers, who had a perfectly good husband at home in Aldavilla, and had left him to cook his own meals and patiently keep her bed warm, and all to chase ghosts? I had let her into my house for Leo's sake, for the sake of his honour, for which as a good widow I was supposed to be hungry. Rhonda Garnish went on extolling Pat Bantry as the ultimate cow-cocky and bushman. The corn up on the Clarence River grew eighteen feet tall, she said, but Pat harvested the Bantry crop as well as Rhonda's father's. She and her brother had helped him when he offered to rebuild the floodgate on Sawpit Creek, and he brought along a picnic in a sugar bag – he must have looted the Bantrys' kitchen pantry.
Pat would often go bush, cutting tea-tree, and he'd cart it in for Mr Bantry's distilling plant. Mr Bantry was from Ireland, she told me, and knew all about distilling, but he was a great admirer of tea-tree oil, which he called 'The Australian Panacea', and sold at agricultural fairs up and down the Northern Rivers.
Bantry seemed the ultimate Australian, even though he'd been born in Ireland and come here as a child. On top of all else, he'd gone cutting sleepers and bridge-bearing timbers with Rhonda's uncle, who said he was the most cheerful of company in the bush camp, and never swore but had as much wit as most swearers. Furthermore, this bush paragon had broken in a small team of steers and used them to snig a fence strainer, thus becoming an invaluable friend to every farmer on Sawpit Creek. And when the war brought petrol rationing, Pat had easily converted the Hupmobile into a kerosene burner.
These were the polished feats which had enchanted the young Rhonda. Everyone, Rhonda included, had been astonished when Pat volunteered early in the war. There was a story that a recruiting sergeant managed to get abstemious Pat full of bombo in Grafton (Leo's home town, by the way). It might have been a version Pat wanted spread, since old Mr Bantry was not a lover of the British Empire in
itself. When Pat vanished to North Africa, Rhonda hung on news of him. He was a member of the Sixth Divvy, that fabled division. After defeating the Italians, they moved up to Syria and beat the Vichy French, before returning to Libya to face Rommel.
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 li
ttle 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.