The Widow and Her Hero

  But I knew there must have been a secret fever in each man. They must have muttered to each other reassurances about some coming invasion of Singapore by the Allies. The Seventh Area Army had grown soft in its occupation of Malaya and Singapore, and was on the verge of losing Saigon. Having condemned them, the court might in any case simply let them stay in Outram Road Gaol or in Changi.

  I would ultimately get more information on what was said amongst them too. They were pleased none of them had begged – I would ultimately find that out. Because Jockey Rubinsky, world traveller, conceived in Harbin, Manchuria, born in Shanghai, raised in Sydney, came up to Leo and said, as if naming the central issue, 'We didn't beg. The bastards didn't hear us beg!'

  How do I know that? Well, that resulted from the Hidaka visit too.

  We had drunk our tea and I could see that Hidaka was as pleased as I was that the visit had got this far without too much discomfort. Before they left, Lydon said, he would like to show Hidaka the garden and the view from it. Laurie jumped up, happy to show him around, and Lydon and I followed. Hidaka was impressed by our jacaranda, by the roses, by the nectar-producing grevilleas which attracted rainbow lorikeets. We were on the gravel path, looking over Middle Harbour, the acres of blue water surging in through Sydney Heads. The day was warm, and it was humid too, though nothing like Singapore. Hidaka, saying, 'Very beautiful', was suddenly gone, vanished from my eyeline. I turned to see him lying flat out on the path, and Laurie and Mark Lydon kneeling to attend to him. As soon as Lydon saw him stir, he lifted the little man in his arms and propped him on the seat of the garden bench.

  My husband went and got some iced water, and Hidaka revived with a rasping dollop of breath, but kept his eyes down as if he had shamed himself in front of us. Maybe to his generation a collapse in front of others from heat or the vagaries of blood pressure was a cause of disgrace. We got him into the house and laid him on the sofa. Mark took Hidaka's shoes off. Laurie suggested we send for our friend the local GP, who even in these days would make a call to the house if he was needed. Lydon relayed the offer to the clenched-eyed Hidaka. The old man shook his bony head. Driven by his frank human friability, I made him green tea, and he sipped it, then he joined his hands, opened his eyes, rose to a sitting position and bowed to me. Then he muttered to Lydon, and Mark turned to us.

  He wants to visit you again, Mark said. And he apologises one more time. But he has something to give you.

  His eyes lowered, the old man declared, It is not a long visit. I wish to give you something.

  Maybe it was another doll. Lydon had brought me one back, a bland, ageless, child-woman doll in the kimono style of some region of Honshu. Its smirk was the smirk of Salome. I had it in a cupboard somewhere. I could not say I wanted to see Hidaka again. The answer caught in my throat, so at last my husband, just out of politeness, said, Of course. When would you like to call in, Mr Hidaka?

  I felt angry at my husband, who couldn't have said anything else in any case. My widowhood had grown primal again, and I just wanted Hidaka to go. But it was organised Lydon would bring him back the following afternoon. This was done with very little more input from me than nods and choked assent.

  From early the next day I was gripped by dread. It seemed to me that people required a repeated disinterment of Doucette's men, Leo not permitted his quiet grave, and I deprived of a fixed and stable widowhood. I always feared that if I confessed this to Laurie, he would despise me. Or if he didn't, he would know too much about me. He knew repeated reference to Leo hurt me in some way that he was willing to take account of and honour, but he probably thought my secret reactions were nobler than the squalid panic I felt. He never complained of the mystification I brought to the whole business.

  In the afternoon, Laurie dutifully put the china out again. He visited a patisserie in Mosman and brought home cakes and petit fours – all just in case anyone had an appetite. When they rang the bell at three, I watched from the living room as Laurie opened the door to them. They both looked strangely hangdog, Mark Lydon as well as Hidaka, whose head was down like a penitent's. From the hallway, Lydon said to Laurie, and over Laurie's shoulder to me, Mr Hidaka does not wish to stay for long. I hope you haven't gone to any trouble, Laurie.

  No, said my husband. No, Mark . . . always a pleasure.

  Mr Hidaka wishes to apologise, Lydon explained.

  Please, said Laurie. Come into the living room.

  It was only with a lot of nudging from Lydon that Hidaka came into the core of the house. He bowed deeply to me and I stood up, and before I could invite everyone to sit again, I saw he had an aged folder in his hands and held it out to me. I'm very sorry, Mrs Waterhouse, he told me carefully.

  Lydon said, He showed me this last night – I swear it was the first time I knew it existed.

  Still stooped, Hidaka opened the manila folder and held it two-handed, like a dish he was offering me with the most sincere apologies of the house. It contained a series of brown, square slabs of paper connected up at their top left hand corners with a ring of twine.

  Hidaka said, Captain Waterhouse asked me to give.

  Mark Lydon explained, It's a journal Captain Waterhouse wrote in pencil on slabs of toilet paper. You see, if it was in danger of being discovered, he could just dump it in the nearest waste bucket or latrine.

  Hidaka bowed even lower, like a man inviting punishment.

  This is the diary Captain Waterhouse asked me to give you. I was shamed by it and I did not give it until now.

  He's had it for some years, Lydon told us. I think it's psychologically understandable . . . Now, he has emphysema and wants you to have it.

  Hidaka closed the folder and pressed it more insistently on me. I took it. I saw his suppliant shoulders. I began howling and punching him on both shoulders. His deep bowing to me was too easy a gesture, and I wanted to show him that. If he was a man, I thought, like some bigot I would normally have hated to meet, he would look me in the eye now. I was punishing him both for having retained the grubby squares of pages for so long, and for presenting them to me now, years after I hoped everything had been settled.

  Until stopped by Laurie, I went on beating the neatly made Japanese man in a raw-boned, tall Caledonian Australian fury. Arthritic problems which normally inhibited the proper making of a fist were not an issue now. Anger made me a harridan. My husband moved in and clasped me by the elbows. I realised I had no breath, but it returned as I settled.

  Get him out, I ordered Lydon, and don't bother me again. Get him out. I'm sick of witnesses. I'm sick of new evidence. Everyone who comes to me is self-interested!

  Mark Lydon's face had gone a terrible, abashed red. I assure you, Grace, I didn't know it would cause you . . . I have your best interests –

  I cut him off. Best interests? Best interests of the Memerang men? They're all dead. I bet you looked through the file as soon as he gave it to you.

  No, said Mark. No, Grace. I won't say I wasn't tempted. But it wouldn't have been right.

  Just take him back to his hotel! I roared.

  Mark and Laurie tended to the old man, whose face was covered with tears and who needed to be restored with water. Given Hidaka's weakness he and Lydon went very briskly, and I felt the deepest shame I could, knowing Leo would not have approved of my behaviour. As they turned to leave, Laurie called, I'll be in contact, Mark. Grace is understandably upset.

  He saw Lydon and Hidaka to the door, and muttered something conciliatory I wouldn't have approved of to them as they went. Then he came to where I stood shaking frantically in rage and shame, and he embraced me.

  Now I'll have to apologise to Mark and Hidaka, I said.

  Laurie kissed my forehead. No, he said, let it slide. They understand well enough.

  It was from these pages written in pencil on Japanese toilet paper that I ultimately learned that while they waited in the garden for the sentence, Jockey Rubinsky said to Leo, The bastards didn't hear us beg!

  Fourteen

/>   From the Outram Road prison journal of Captain Waterhouse

  When it happened, it was a bloody calamity. It was the last afternoon, and we were at a fever pitch and ready to go. Very ready to go. The Boss had already sent two of the blokes ahead to watch Singapore from NC1. When we got there, they'd be able to brief us on the day's shipping news and naval movements. From the junk Nanjang we could see through the binoculars a lot of naval shenanigans way out in the Phillip Channel to the east of Singapore – Rufus reckoned it looked like exercises. He said we'd better stick close in to shore. The bow waves of destroyers could just about sink an old junk like this.

  There'd just been one of those Sumatras – blinding rain. But now the sun had come out, and we were between two hummocky islands. Kaso and Sambu.

  The Japanese had this Malay auxiliary police force – we hadn't heard of them before. They called them the Hei-ho. We had three hours before dark and this Malay police chief notices our junk and comes out from shore in his little launch to look at us. Of all the junks in those oceans. The watch saw him coming and started yelling, 'Patroller, Patroller!' We thought it was some bush-week little navy launch. I was on deck under the shade of our tarpaulin, and I found my Sten gun and got down under the gunnels. It changes the world, once you take up arms. The light looks different. Right or wrong, everything that went before that moment doesn't count. All your memories get reduced to this pulse in your ears. Doucette was calling from the wheelhouse, Steady! Steady!

  I don't know who started firing. I know it wasn't me. I think it might have been a certain British officer we took aboard because he'd been at D-Day and came from the Green Howards and wanted an adventure. And now of course we joined in the firing – there were at least five Sten guns and one Bren, all silenced. We saw a man jump over the side of the launch. It was raddled with the holes we made. I think there were dead and wounded on her, but I did not want to look directly at that.

  And it turns out they weren't Japanese, they were these Malay Hei-ho. Pity they didn't have a Japanese officer with them. Sad for all parties. After all our stealth, on the last afternoon we'd let ourselves make too much noise. If the firing hadn't started we could have let them land on us and then taken them prisoner. That's what we discussed as long ago as Melbourne. The junk stank of cordite, a smell we'd hoped to avoid.

  We were appalled – that doesn't begin to speak the truth. We knew we'd made ourselves visible. Ashore, the policemen's colleagues were probably on the phone to the Japanese naval base at Bintan.

  The Boss came out of the wheelhouse. He was the very soul of calm. Rufus Mortmain came up from below, his Sten in his hands. He looked more sad than angry. But the young blokes were really angry, yelling at each other, asking each other who started the calamity. Was it you, Skeeter? Was it you, Chesty? They were eliminating each other loudly like that because they were trying to shame the culprit into confessing. Even Jockey and Blinkhorn and others were saying frankly they'd seen Filmer open fire, and the name, the way they said it, dripped with contempt.

  I was half ready, I have to say, to turn my gun on the poor fellow myself. And what a mistake that would have been. Because we couldn't have got on in prison and at the trial without him. I think Filmer was about to confess too. But the Boss suddenly said it didn't matter who did it, it didn't change anything, and he forbade them to talk about it and point fingers. It had happened. The measure of all of us would be what we did as a result of it happening. All the rest was academic. More rain came up, and gloomy rain clouds. It would help us get away, but had it come five minutes earlier we would have got past Kaso in the murk.

  Of course I already knew the outline of what had happened to them. But I put the pages Hidaka had given me into the desk drawer with the transcript. They would need to be faced, but not yet. After a week, Laurie, aware of the influence they had on my composure and my moods, asked me tentatively whether I wanted him to read them, and he could then tell me whether I needed to bother myself with them or not.

  That won't be necessary, I told him starchily.

  Well, he suggested, whatever's there, you have nothing to reproach yourself with. You've been a good widow to Leo.

  Please don't discuss that, I told him unkindly.

  It was for his sake that I knew I had to approach the rough diary Leo had written and Hidaka had delivered fifty years late. After three weeks of tension, I went to the drawer and took up the pages. I knew about the attack on the police, but not of the subtleties of that afternoon. The details of their behaviour, like so much else in Leo's diary pencilled dimly on yellowish-brown squares of harsh paper, were new to me.

  Throughout it all, as we know from the trial documents, the wounded policeman, Sidek Bin Safar, was hanging on to the stern of the launch, bleeding into the water and too terrified to move. It was clear that Doucette reacted to the calamity with the admirable calm and decisiveness of a leader at the peak of his judgement and adaptability. He declared the junk must be sunk with its Silver Bullets, the submersibles, so they were to bring up the folboats for launching and load the rubber raft with their supplies. Using the marspikes designed by Major Enright, Leo and Rufus attached limpet mines on short timers around the inner hull of the junk. Sadly there were not too many fathoms under the junk's keel, but Eddie Frampton's elegant machines would at least be torn to fragments. All the effort, all the mastery that went into learning to drive them, was for nothing.

  As the men prepared their packs and took to their folboats, Charlie Doucette was back with what he really liked – the pure human mechanics of the folboat, and reliance on his own sturdy little body.

  The Boss had two men watching Singapore from an island named Subar, or NC11, which he used himself to keep watch on the port the year before. They had their folboat with them but would need to be collected. His, Mortmain's and one other folboat crew would go and get them. Leo was given the secondary job – he had to take a flotilla of six folboats back to Serapem, NE1, the base where Mel Duckworth waited. And I learned for the first time from Leo's slabs of toilet paper that Doucette had his reasons to abandon Leo and, if things went wrong, to court death.

  Leo writes, The Boss was shouting orders from folboat to folboat, and Jockey and I had a complete set of nine mines, and you can imagine how I felt, being told to back away from Singapore. I felt like that fellow Cherry Apsley-Garrard when Scott told him he wasn't going to the Pole. I knew in my water that once the Boss got to Subar he'd go on into Singapore overnight, or the next night, and mine some ships. The Boss rowed up close in his folboat and said, Get rid of your mines. Because you have to look after them all, Leo. Filmer hasn't got the skills for it. I'm sending you away because I don't want you to run the risk of being captured with me. I can't be taken alive, you see, otherwise they'll use Minette and the boy to get at me.

  I said, Boss, why don't we all just come back to NE1?

  After I've collected the team from Subar, he said.

  I said, like a kid, You're coming back though, aren't you? And he said, Certainly. But jettison your mines too, for speed.

  His group rowed off, pulling the inflatable raft behind them. It was packed with ammunition and explosives. Passing us in his folboat, Rufus told me he had the two Japanese flags with him, in case they were able to pirate another junk. So, whichever way one looks at it, I was to have the lesser part. Yet it was a comfort to be back at sea in the old folboat with Jockey and my other fifteen blokes around, and I knew how important each one was to people back in Australia.

  Leo seemed to sense the Boss had become an angel of self-destruction, he was not an angel of return. In the meantime, Leo's world was contained in his folboat's storage places fore and aft – their weapons, their iron rations, their camouflage, the walkie-talkies, malaria tablets. Suicide pills might have been left aboard in some cases. They were not a high priority. Leo and the others, still wearing the camouflage grease they called commando, could not see each other's faces as dark came on.

  We dispersed quickly i
n that late-afternoon sea. I'd say we were pretty confident at that moment – somehow everything had been resolved, we were pretty much in a state where we'd forgotten the question of whoever had shot first.

  When the junk went with two separate explosions, we were a mile distant and nearly out of sight of the Boss and Rufus. We felt the end through the canvas and through the sea itself, our junk going to pieces, and our fine unused SBs, the submersibles. I spent so long trying to fight a sense of drowning and learn to handle the controls of those machines. The helmet over the head was very claustrophobic, the mask, pushing the controls down took some doing at first, with green water everywhere, and you couldn't be sure what was up and down. I got on top of the things, we all did for the sake of not being drummed out. And they were gone now. We were awed, the paddlers in the folboats around us stopped for a few seconds, to let the successive jolts rock them. I called out then in the after-silence, All right, gents. Now we just wait for the sub home. Fremantle's Esplanade Hotel awaits us!

  It's the sort of thing an officer's supposed to say – judging by the war pictures I'd seen. And we all took up paddling again.

  Michael Casselaine, Doucette's stepson, would later write to me declaring how proud he was of the fact that after the crisis with the junk, his father and seven others, including Rufus, stayed around in the centre of the great archipelago south of Singapore. People consoled themselves for losses in various ways, and Michael Casselaine may well be right. He points to three unidentified large wrecks in Singapore Harbour the Japanese did not have time to label on their maps before the war ended. Or more accurately – and, according to Lydon, Hidaka is willing to go along with this hypothesis, the poor fellow would go along with anything for the sake of peace – they did not identify them because they were ashamed they had occurred. Michael Casselaine presumes these wrecks were the work of a last fling by Doucette, and Mark Lydon, with whom I had reconciled, tends to agree.

  I did not say to Michael, Shouldn't your stepfather have stayed with the bulk of his troops? Though it might have changed nothing.