I was thus able to leave Dotty to work on her mysterious book, and would be able to return in the afternoon and ask her, as if I routinely asked people this, How is your book coming along?
Susan Enright, still on the premises, complicated all this in a peculiar way. She asked if she could come to town with me? She seemed quite cheery, ready for a day's window- shopping after the scene with her husband that morning. I couldn't say no, but from her typewriter, Dotty asked, Didn't you say you intended to book into the Windsor?
Susan said she would collect her luggage after lunch.
I had expected to catch the tram, but as, wearing our finest, we left the block of flats, a taxi appeared bearing its great bladder of coal gas in a bracket on its roof. She insisted we catch it, and when we reached Collins Street and I offered, like the bumpkin I was, to pay the driver, she cheerily permitted me to. In Myers, Buckley and Nunn, Foy and Gibson, she entered into crazily jolly conversations with girls in the jewellery and cosmetic departments about what her habitual choices were in these matters. It was as if she hadn't been rebuffed by her husband at all. Or else she was confident her husband would take her back. Again, girls from Braidwood didn't behave like that in shops. You've got no idea what a constrained bunch of people we country girls were, terrified that someone would think us flash, or skites, or having tickets on ourselves, all of which were the greatest crimes a person could commit in the bush. But Mrs Enright was free of such fears.
At lunchtime, she tried to talk me into a hotel dining room instead of the cafeteria at Myers. She was rather depressed that you couldn't get a drink at Myers. At least the Windsor has a bar, she said.
We got home by tram at midafternoon and could hear from the stairs Dotty still working, like a real writer in Hollywood pictures, with a quite feverish clatter of keys. I wondered whether we should go back and sit in the parkland a while, lest we interrupt her. We'll just creep in, Susan insisted. I must pack and get going.
That prospect of her going was so pleasant that I let myself be talked into opening the door to our half of the flat. Dotty, of course, looked up from her work. I'm just creeping in to pack, Susan explained, moving in a stagy creeping gait.
I said, Please don't let us disturb you, Dotty.
While Susan packed, I sat in a chair reading Smith's Weekly and its rollicking attacks on Generals MacArthur and Blamey. To them MacArthur was a poseur playing to the American press in hope of the Republican Party nomination for the presidency. The Australian General Blamey was a well-connected tippler. Satire is its own reward, and often it is outdone by reality itself – I realise all that now. But Smith's Weekly was considered rather seditious in the household I had grown up in, so I enjoyed it all the more now. I was a little disturbed that with Susan and me in the house, the pace of Dotty's typing had fallen off. I began to doze and woke to see Dotty standing over me.
How're the shops this dreary season?
They're flourishing, I told her. At least that's the impression of a woman who's visited only two cities in her entire life.
She smiled and yawned, and sat in the neighbouring lounge chair.
Have you ever written any poetry? I don't mean about flowers, or some ballad about rounding up cattle. I mean, poetry. I mean about loss and fucking and the misery of children, and why chaps love war and are such deadbeats in bed? Have you read The Waste Land?
Trying to appear at ease with her earthiness, I said no. She tramped into her half of the apartment and came back with a Penguin book.
Read that, Grace, she advised me. Image is everything, so I'm afraid I'm not much of a poet myself. I'm good at outrage, of course. I feel a lot of that. But when I was young in London, and hanging round writers, I always thought my style was pretty thin. A reviewer described my novel as understated, as if it were a virtue.
What was your novel called?
Sweat. It was about the lives of women in Malaya, or a colony like it anyhow. They weep sweat from every pore, I said. They shrivel and pretend it's a life. A film company showed some interest in it, but then the war came.
I was fascinated by this.
Writing poetry is wonderful, she assured me. If the beloved is away for a time, it's a sort of vengeance.
Against who? I asked.
Against the loss of time and beauty, Dotty told me. Or if you want to look on it positively, you could say it was a prayer for a golden world in which men loved women as much as they say they do, and the other way round, in which all wars are merry, and all children loved with equal ardour. You are a sweet and beautiful child, Grace, full of rejoicing. Poetry's about that too. But you haven't been betrayed yet.
She sounded remarkably like Susan.
Surely you haven't been? I asked. Betrayed, I mean.
By Rufus? Oh yes. He does that, poor fellow, but men are like dogs. When an arse is proffered, they can't turn away. Pardon my putting it so simply. It is simple for them, I'm afraid.
She lowered her voice. The sooner that tart gets out of here, the better. Look, I don't mind showing you something I dashed off today – it's not perfect, but it helps me stay sane. Like some gin?
Surprisingly I found I would like some. But something in me didn't want Susan to have any with me.
Maybe after our guest's gone.
Quite! Dotty whispered emphatically.
She went to her table and brought a page back. Officially, she told me, I'm supposed to be writing a novel. Really, I want to write about what a shambles the whole fall of Singapore thing was, but the publisher says it would not be looked on very kindly. So I'm trying to write simply about Englishwomen on one of our overcrowded steamers to Australia. Chaucer should have been there. He could have done justice to it. In between, when the thing is seeking its way out of me, I write about Rufus and myself. Despite what I say about men and dogs, he does love me, you know. As far as his sort of fellow possibly could.
She gave me the sheet. Don't feel you have to tell me anything – whether it's good or bad. I know exactly how good and how very bad it is.
What she gave me was entitled Mercator's Projection. It read:
And in love's bed, caresses seemed
a holy vacuum.
Since lovers seek to force the air
from every cavity and intervening space.
Love's pressure is enormous,
the normal terms of gravity becoming trite.
But then, I catch his eye
and see the shoals and surfs
and archipelagos
which fill the other mind,
the tides that go on running
when his tide is spent.
The Projection of Mercator cannot save me
from concluding:
Love is the longest distance between two bodies.
I don't know why I was impressed. I thought until then that poetry had died with Tennyson. And the remarkable thing is, I remember understanding the meaning. I must have felt the same thing she did, without knowing it. I knew at once I wanted to write something like this myself.
At last, Susan emerged with her suitcase, and we saw her into a cab, which Dotty was forced to ring for, using the shared phone. We were delighted when she left, and then, as if we'd known each other for years, we broke out the sisterly gin.
I did not have an exact idea of the work Leo did at the requisitioned boarding house and temperance hotel, and at Victoria Barracks. Women were of course counselled even by the Women's Weekly that they should not ask too much. The women's papers, the motion pictures, novels, and even the traditions inherited from mothers all underlined the idea that we lacked a right to be too inquistive.
I knew, though, that Leo and Rufus worked together literally, having desks in the same room at Radcliffe House. While in that office, they were supposed to read the latest files on new equipment, from groundsheets to spirit stoves to weaponry. Leo told me this made pretty dry study, worse – he said – than contract law. So Rufus and he developed office games. Samples of commando dagge
rs lay about the office, some of them in filing cabinets. Leo or Rufus would close and lock their office door and compete at hitting the doorframe with knives. Only embeddings counted. Bounce-offs were a crime. If a thrower hit either the surrounding plaster wall or door itself, he lost all his points acquired to that stage.
That was part of their éclat as well. Officers in D/Navy's office or Major Enright's D/Plans were not permitted to waste time on such knife play. They had to keep writing reports and coming up with the correct admixture between destination and plan and technology. But then they had not personally invaded Singapore. They would tolerate the heroes' games at great length, whatever spririt stoves or groundsheets waited to be assessed and initialled.
When not employed on their files or their knife practice, Leo and Rufus attended roundtable meetings at which questions of equipment, transportation, tactics and strategy to do with the coming huge operation in the Natunas were discussed. These meetings were attended by Colonel Creed, who remained an advocate for the idea of many well- equipped operatives, landed from many US submarines, undermining Japanese structures and lines of communication, ships and airfields, transit of supplies, etc etc, in Southeast Asia – which to us, of course, was Northwest Asia.
The idea that the Independent Reconnaissance Department should build its own Indonesian, Malayan or Borneo junks was still being discussed, and Mortmain in particular made suggestions about the way that should be done, on everything from the contour to fitting-out and the supply of drinking water. I know now that the building of a number of junks was begun in a Melbourne shipyard, which was then afflicted with strikes, so that they would never be finished.
In the afternoons, a succession of hefty NCOs kept up the fitness of Leo Waterhouse and Rufus Mortmain and others, introducing them to new methods of tripping, knifing and incapacitating mortal flesh; and causing them to climb ropes, run through mud and surmount improbable barriers. They came back home to Dotty and me full of muscular vigour, though, as Leo said, absolutely buggered.
They were about to truck us to a private abattoir in Fitzroy, so that we could practise slitting throats on pigs, when a corporal came running to us from a nearby office. There was a call for Commander Mortmain. Rufus jogged double-time across the parade ground to take it. By the time he got back the truck was ready to leave for the abattoir. I was sitting in the rear with a group of soldiers and sailors who were going through the same training for perhaps the same purpose. His monocle was glistening when he crawled aboard and sat beside me. Aussie soldiers and ratings who hadn't seen him earlier nudged each other and whispered, Cop the bloody monocle on the Pom.
That was Mrs Enright, he whispered to me. Wants to shout you and me a drink. To repay us for our kindness. Windsor bar, five thirty.
He inhaled and the eye which did not have the duty of bearing the monocle, arched.
She wants us to bring our wives? I asked.
I don't think that's the purpose, said Rufus, looking ahead. I also think she knows you won't come, Dig. I feel I should go out of politeness, don't you think?
Up to you, I said, a bit surprised. I can't go. I don't want to.
No need to bother Dotty with the details, he told me. I don't think Dotty likes her.
I thought I knew him. I didn't think he was an altar boy. But I didn't know he'd compromise me like that. For a drink and God knows what else with a good-looking mad woman. On our operations, life is so simple, and we all know everything we need to know about each other. Now, on the way to knife pigs, he was making the world complicated again. I wanted to go home and hug Grace. But I had to cover myself with pigs' blood before they'd let me.
Seven
During our joint tenancy, Dotty and I liked to get ready for the return of our men by cooking a communal dinner – a pleasant exercise of sisterhood. Talking, talking, we cleaned and mashed the spuds, debated how much butter we could spare to make them appetising, and shelled heroes' quantities of green peas. Occasionally, as we chatted, she might go and find a book from the bedroom, stand with a frown thumbing through it and, finding the page, hand it to me to read while she went back to stirring the vegetable pot or reducing the flame beneath it.
I have said this before, in one or two literary magazine interviews, that Dotty was my chief educator. I thought Spender's poetry, which I read at Dotty's urging, astounding. That's putting it mildly. Spender, with his talk of the treachery of banks and cathedrals and the insanity of rulers, had nothing in common with me, and my innocent father, a good servant of society and a survivor of the world Depression, would have found his socialism offensive.
Spender also had little time for punctuation. He was too busy educating the reader in the space of one poem.
Before the war, before her travels, Dotty had met Louis MacNeice at a party in Bloomsbury. Evelyn Waugh, of whom until then I had never heard, had told her offhandedly that he disliked stringy women like her, that they generally had narrow opinions and tendencies to 'improve' men. That was after she had published her novel, and was ripe to be put in her place by other writers. Breaking away from such posturers, she had begun her rough travels in Turkey and the Middle East, and met Mortmain on the beach in Penang.
Let's have a gin before the men get home, she always suggested, and I agreed to the idea as if it was something daring and revolutionary, which indeed it still was in my terms.
On my second afternoon in Melbourne, we hadn't finished it when Leo let himself in. Seeing me evoked such a frank joy in his face that I felt myself instantly exempt from the wistfulness of Dotty's earlier poem. Cooking's afoot! he yelled, and lifted me and carried me around the living room and back to the kitchen. Dotty was smiling too at this demonstration of exuberant love. He put me down.
You're stacking on the weight, old girl, he said, imitating a husband of greater age, a Braidwood pastoralist, say. Then he frowned. Rufus won't be back for a while, he told Dotty, and her face clouded.
Where is he?
Leo said uncomfortably, I'm not sure. I think he might have gone down to Port Melbourne to inspect something, a vessel, you know. He can't always tell what they might expect of him.
How long is this inspection to take? asked Dotty.
Leo made a pained face.
Dotty asked again, Will he be home for dinner?
Leo told her, Well, he didn't actually tell me he wouldn't be.
We turned down the stove and waited, and Leo kept on apologising to Dotty as if it were his fault.
He said, Grace and I might go to the pictures. If Rufus is back in time, perhaps you and he would like to come too. It's Errol Flynn.
Then you'll be looking at yourself on the screen, I joked.
Wasn't he arrested this year for rape? asked Dotty, as if our happiness bothered her.
I'm not sure, said Leo. I hope not. He's a Tasmanian, you know.
Leo and I were pleased to eat dinner hurriedly while listening to the ABC news and then get away to the pictures. Errol Flynn was a Norwegian villager who stood up against the Nazis. He was starting to look older than Leo, like an elder brother. But his eyes still glittered on the screen and I was sure he couldn't possibly be guilty of rape.
When we got home at eleven, the flat felt cold and we heard a shrill question from Dotty in the Mortmain bedroom and the appeasing rumble from Rufus.
Let's go to bed, said Leo, looking very grim but then smiling broadly.
The next morning, Leo and I encountered all the worst aspects of sharing the flat. Dotty was thunderously silent, and Rufus behaved like someone in a play, the breezy fellow who enters towards the end of act one, tennis racket in hand, sweater over shoulders, oblivious to the crisis that's overtaken all the other characters. In as far as he could dance, he danced around Dotty, his comedic glass in his eye, trying too hard. Could I pass you the milk, dear? Try this marmalade a Yank gave me. And so on.
I now know what was happening with Charlie Doucette in England at that time. He had fallen in love with an appliance of wa
r, a sort of sub-submarine, a little boat piloted by one man. This vessel could proceed on the surface by battery power, it required no paddles. It could also submerge, so that only the driver's head was visible, or it could go underwater entirely, the driver wearing goggles, and with an oxygen supply device clamped between his lips. The record shows it was an Englishman, Major Frampton, who introduced him to it and to a young instructor named Sub-Lieutenant Lower who could do the loop-the-loop with it underwater. Doucette wanted a go at it. If he could handle it, it would be very suitable for his buccaneering plans.
I believe that, when he practised aboard the submersible in the deep, dark water of a reservoir outside London, Doucette dealt easily with the normal human problems of fear of drowning, of underwater claustrophobia in water greyer and dimmer than the greyest, dimmest English sky. Doucette was first of all a creature of water, and I doubt he had too many of the normal phobias. Doucette had to be lived up to by other men who knew normal, pedestrian fears. A man who would know fear, the Englishman Frampton, the inventor of the little submersibles, reacted to Doucette's enthusiasm for the machine and pleaded to be allowed to come with Doucette and have a role in Doucette's new enterprise. Doucette said, I'll fix it! From some of his men he required months of punishing training. With others, a burst of enthusiasm was enough.
On his English journey, Doucette also visited a British mine-laying submarine, and found out that if you built special containers for the submersibles, a number of them could be transported in the compartments generally devoted to mines.
His mother, Lady Doucette, was living with her English relatives in Wiltshire. She had left Dublin for the time being as a protest against de Valera's insistence that Ireland remain neutral. She was the descendant of those hard-up English gentry who had married into the Doucettes' ready cash, giving the Doucettes social cachet while the Doucettes paid the bills. For whatever reason, Doucette had given SOE her address as his care-of address in Britain. Lady Doucette was a robust woman, but she later told Mark Lydon she sought the normal reassurances from Charles that a mother should. In his book, Lydon sets down, accurately or not, a standard mother–son conversation:
The Widow and Her Hero Page 9
