The Widow and Her Hero

by Thomas Keneally

  Mark Lydon and government documents tell us that the submarine got them to NE1, Serapem, east of Singapore, in a little over two weeks. Rufus and a sailor went ashore at night in a dinghy and stayed there throughout the next day. Orca had gone off into deeper water, but now returned in the dark to signal to the shore by lamp and so to pick Rufus and the sailor up. Coming aboard again, Rufus declared NE1 was perfect – a good landing beach to the east, a hill for watching and a swamp for concealment, and deserted except for a few structures on the west side.

  During the rest of the night the Memerang group and the sailors of the watch transferred loads of supplies up through the forward hatches to the deck and onto a large inflatable raft which the Memerang men then rowed ashore. Well before dawn, canisters of food and equipment were safely concealed on the flanks of the island's hill and, as he always planned, Doucette left one officer at NE1, Serapem, to dig in the supplies and await the return of the raiding party for Singapore. The officer he had chosen was my cousin Captain Melbourne Duckworth, son of a devout admirer of that southern city.

  Everyone else boarded Orca again and went hunting for a suitable junk. On the coast of Borneo, Moxham sighted a junk named Nanjang, and invited Doucette and Rufus to inspect it through the periscope. They both declared it perfect for their needs. When Orca surfaced, the Malay crew of the 40-ton junk thought them a Japanese submarine and so merely prepared for inspection. The junk was boarded and the fairly amiable crew were transferred to the submarine and made secure, taking the place of the Memerang men who were getting ready to board the Nanjang, with its rather spectacular feature of a Japanese flag painted across its stern. Over a frantic night, as a nervous Moxham fretted on his conning tower, all that was needed to raid Singapore with Silver Bullets and perform great warrior endeavours was loaded on the junk. The Nanjang crew would be delivered back to Western Australia and interned. Orca would then return to collect Doucette and his men.

  At dawn, the submarine departed and submerged, leaving over twenty men on the junk, whose marine master was lantern-jawed Rufus Mortmain. The junk was turned for Singapore and the trades filled its lateen sails.

  Throughout the rest of the winter of 1944, Dotty and I were still working and living in the communal flat. We had the comfort of knowing that Foxhill would tell us what was happening if he learned anything, since he'd done that in the case of Leo's father. I found it hard to discipline myself – not to call him every day, to check, especially since at the end of August Creed had whispered to Dotty in the office, Your husband's on his way.

  We both had a date in mind as the longest we'd have to wait. It was December 10. Independently of each other, Rufus and Leo had told Dotty and me that by then at the latest they'd be back.

  It was a rainy Melbourne winter and at night Dotty and I soothed ourselves with gin because it was hard to sleep. Dotty was writing a lot but was secretive about it all. I wrote a fair amount myself, but it was sporadic, it took many stages of concentration for me to get started. And often I'd be just started when Dotty would insist, as if our sanity depended on it and in a way it was hard to refuse, that we had to go out to the Albert Palais or one of the canteens to dance with soldiers. I thought she would be very selective about rank, being British, but while I sat on the balcony drinking a shandy, she proved that sergeants and corporals were not unworthy of her company. I could not have a good time on a dance floor, I decided. It was as if all my sensuality was bundled up with Leo, and was suspended pending his return. (Sometimes these days I fear it's been bundled up all my life. I hope my second husband got a return on his desire and devotion.)

  Anyhow, we didn't analyse those things then – we acted them out, and as it was obvious that I was a sort of icy widow-for-the-duration on the balcony, it was obvious too that Dotty was available for comforting. Again, I didn't blame her. I envied her the distraction.

  Every day I went off to the military transport office job I had, and deadened myself with routine work and small office filing confusions. The Melbourne football Grand Final came and went as a marker between seasons, and Foxhill could tell us nothing. We found this a bad sign because we believed that however confident he insisted on sounding, there was an edge of bemusement to him too. The weather turned warm, but it was an empty, anxious warmth to Dotty and me. Captain Foxhill organised for us to attend the Members Enclosure for that year's Melbourne Cup, and gin and expectation gave us a few hours' respite until a horse named Sirius galloped over the line and we tore our betting tickets up and the vacuum returned.

  I remembered that Jesse Creed, the American, had been involved in some way too. But Dotty assured me she had heard nothing from him. Sometimes, she said, I get the impression they're all keeping some big secret. And I suppose the bastards are. But I think Jesse would tell me if he knew anything.

  December arrived. When I felt hope it was feverish. Plain, flat, humid days set in, carrying no omens and dry of promise. Thunderstorms and dust swept down from the north onto the city. Foxhill and his wife visited us for a drink on December 2. I tried to gauge whether he knew anything he wasn't telling us, but he seemed just as uncertain as we were. He did not promise us quick news or mention dates. But he did say, When we hear, it will be sudden. Like a thunderclap.

  Four days later, on the proposed date of their return, he was back with the news that they were missing. He stood bald-headed and genuinely saddened under the tatty, crepe Christmas streamers and Christmas bells we had hung in the flat. They're all military personnel, he assured us, so if captured they'd be POWs, every chance of survival.

  At what point of things did they go missing? I asked.

  I can't say, Foxhill claimed. I don't know myself.

  But radio messages? asked Dotty. They would have sent a radio message if they were in trouble.

  No, Foxhill insisted. They haven't. Look, for all we know they might have taken some native vessel and be on the way home as we speak.

  Don't play us for fools, Dotty warned him, her eyes blazing.

  But I was rather taken with Foxhill's scenario.

  Of course, he said, he would tell us as soon as he got any more definite news. He invited us both to his place for a lunch, and I said how kind that was and that we would see if we were free, but when he left Dotty told me, with tears in her eyes, Bugger playing happy families! Did you sense this would happen? I could sense it. Bloody Rufus! I knew it!

  We stayed in that night talking and comforting and sobbing and all the hopeless rest. I felt a mad urge to go out looking, as if he could be found in quiet streets running back from the Yarra. Next day we went to work, and kept our news secret. Dotty arrived home after me and cried out, To hell with staying in and moping. Let's just go out to the Windsor for dinner.

  For some reason it seemed exactly the right thing. We dressed, and made ourselves up and called a taxi.

  As we walked up the stairs of the hotel we could hear the festive buzz from within the dining room. The Windsor had that pleasant young woman in black who met us at the doorway of the restaurant and told us there that sadly there was no table available until a quarter to nine. Indeed the tables seemed all taken, by military men and well-dressed women. Dotty obviously felt a primal rage at this unknowing girl, because I felt the same. Dotty told her in a voice thin as a skewer to fetch the head waiter. She fled and got him. He sailed up, a tall man, with his forced smile on his lips, and asked dubiously whether he could help us.

  Dotty said in the same thinned-out, furious voice which had compelled the young woman, Our husbands have just been reported missing in action. All we want is a meal. Just get us a table. And not one in a broom cupboard somewhere. A decent table. Otherwise we'll yell the roof in.

  He looked at me for help, as the one with the less turbulent features.

  We're fed up, I confirmed. Why aren't half these home front warriors missing in action, and not our husbands?

  As I spoke I saw a change come over his face. No longer the bland bestower of tables, he nodded
at me and a weariness of grief entered his own features. He too had been the receiver of frightful news. He had dead or lost children. He said he sympathised with us, and of course he would try to find us a table. Just give him a minute.

  I thanked him. But I was not the same woman as before. I was unabashed by Dotty's act, and by my own. But it had taken a lot out of us. Dotty dealt with every suggestion of the elderly waiters with a high, clipped voice, whereas I wasn't sure what anyone was saying to me. Two British naval officers seated nearby were quick to move in and ask if they could join us. The wifely primness, if that was what it was, that had sustained me up to the point of knowing Leo was actually officially missing, not merely hiding somewhere in some archipelago, seemed to have simply run out. I could not be bothered telling them to go away, not in the face of Dotty's manic, serial-smoking, serial-drinking eagerness for the diversion they offered.

  They were from a British cruiser presently in Melbourne, and the elder of the two did not seem to be able to believe his luck in finding a sparkling-eyed Dotty, full of a stored energy he hoped was sexual. He wasn't as good as the younger officer in sensing that there was really something demented about us. This time, I could tell, Dotty would find comfort in repelling and punishing him in the end. The younger one held junior rank to the other but possessed immensely more sensibility. It would count against his ever becoming an admiral, I suppose, though I doubt he ultimately wanted that anyhow. My young officer was so lacking in expectation that I was able to talk to him about real things, and it was pleasant.

  And then we saw the Enrights. They came from a table at the back of the dining room to the dance floor. They began dancing with an easy, casual grace, Major Enright light on his feet. Mrs Enright had stayed in Melbourne with him and had won her battle and was in clear, quietly triumphal possession.

  Excuse me, gentlemen, Dotty told our two officers. I've just seen the man who might have killed my husband.

  This had the mouth-gaping effect on them that she wanted. She stood and advanced onto the dance floor. She could handle her drink well, Dotty, in fact she would later write a poem to gin. 'My constant lover and traducer,/ noble in promise, squalid in effect,/companion of verse and bedrooms . . .'

  The Enrights' dance-floor connubiality was about to be dive-bombed, and I'm ashamed to say it was fascinating to watch. Dotty reached out and tapped Major Enright's shoulder playfully. He responded just as she wanted. He backed away from his wife, who still nonetheless carried a lacquered smile.

  I could see Dotty ask him for a dance. How could a desk-born warrior respond when he had made the plans, as willingly as Rufus and Leo had gone along with them? He obviously wished this was not happening, but he turned to his wife and asked her to wait for him at their table.

  In Enright's suddenly stiff hands, Dotty grew loose- haired and sinuous and eager. With the threat she might become shameless, she swung herself with a lover's confidence in his arms, fell back on his breast, twirled back to face him. She nibbled his ear, pulling languorously on the lobe. She cut off any impulse on his part to turn and explain to his wife that he was dealing with a mad woman; she whispered in his ear, hung her head back and laughed at the dance-floor lights, lowered her head onto his campaign ribbons, the strands of her hair becoming mixed in with the vivid flashes of his merit and service awards.

  When the music stopped, Dotty kissed him fulsomely, and I looked to Mrs Enright's table, but she was gone. Our officers had sat through this display, but it convinced them that we were unreliable goods, and they were pleased to find a taxi for us soon after and send us home.

  I didn't try to chastise Dotty. I'd lost the confidence for that. And I was too much in awe of her work. It had been a calamitous night, yet I delighted in her irrational vengeance on the safely wed, clad and housed Enrights. When we got out of the taxi at our block of flats, she sat on the brick wall in front of the building and looked up and down the empty street, as if at any moment Rufus and Leo and Doucette might roll by, yelling greetings to us.

  I'm a bitch, she admitted. But I can't take this. I'm not as game as you. I'm going back to England. And then we'll see. Won't we, Gracie? We'll see.

  Eleven

  It would turn out that Foxhill had been planning a rescue operation, Memexit. But it had not got support from others in IRD, who secretly believed the entire party were dead or captured by Christmas.

  It was all distressingly vague, and the bereaved hate vagueness, especially if they don't know whether they're really the bereaved or not. Dotty and I spent a miserable Christmas together in the flat. My parents had invited me home, the Foxhills had invited us to their table. But we wanted to get it done with in our own company. I relieved my depression by writing the poem To the Beloved Missing in Action, but I didn't show it to Dotty, not then.

  The New Year was a relief. Whether the war ended or not, it would be the year in which something more definite would emerge. The Germans surrendered as expected, but no surrender was predicted for the Japanese. Dotty went out with Colonel Creed now and then, and I'd learn there was an affair. In a way, I envied her the option.

  Dotty and I were both working the morning the fiery end to Japan's war came. Dotty called me and asked me to a party at Colonel Creed's office, where – I discovered when I arrived – the gin and Scotch flowed copiously, and everyone kissed and did the hokey-pokey, the latest brainless dance craze. Dotty and I were both edgy with hope and dread. We would soon hear of our loves missing in action, but we said nothing about it. That would have been to provoke the savage gods who, for some, hung over the coming of peace.

  News did not come quickly. It was the Chinese driver of one of the Japanese judicial officers who told an investigating Australian that he had driven his master to the place where the executions took place, a nondescript field of weeds along Reformatory Road. He also said he had exchanged a brief conversation in Mandarin with one of the condemned men while they were still sitting and standing near the bus which had brought them, and told him to prepare himself for death, and that he should consider telling the others the same. No, said the condemned man – certainly Jockey Rubinsky – I know already and they more or less know. The condemned man was very brave, said the Chinese driver. They all were. When the truth became apparent there was no pleading, though a few of them retched from the smell of blood as they were led blindfolded to the edge of one of the three pits in which the earlier slaughtered lay. A month after the end of the war, the Australians found the rough graves. Six crosses had been put there – it seemed more as stage- dressing and for appeasing effect rather than from true respect.

  The bodies were exhumed the next day. Two days later and I knew. Rufus was not among the dead there. Leo and my cousin Mel were. But another three days passed before a Malay led the British to where Rufus had perished, it seemed at first of wounds. I, half a week widowed myself, became the consoler then.

  We could have kept the flat in Melbourne indefinitely, and we did stick on in that place booby-trapped by memory until October, when Dotty used her influence to get on one of the troopships returning to Britain after delivering Australian soldiers home. There was a not quite rational sense in which she was abandoning me, and although neither of us raised the idea, it would sometimes enter between us and make us awkward. I saw her off on her troopship from Port Melbourne, and then packed up quickly and went to Sydney, since it was to me a city unsullied by events.

  I was lucky to find a small flat and there, before Christmas, I received a visit from a thin young officer named Captain Gabriel, a survivor of Japanese imprisonment who had now been given the duty of investigating the enemy's crimes against Leo's party.

  At the time I was trying to be brave for Leo's sake – Leo's presence still so strongly abided that I would sometimes forget that I had joined that venerable category known as War Widow.

  The first visit Captain Gabriel made was to tell me the Japanese court martial that condemned Leo and the others was specious, and investigations were
afoot into its legality. The general responsible, Okimasa, had suicided, and others involved were under investigation for a number of crimes as well as the killing of Leo and the rest of his party. And I was nervous of Captain Gabriel, of how news he gave me, and questions he asked, would impose on me revised duties of grief and vengeance when I found it hard enough still to bear the initial grief and anger of discovering Leo had been executed. Gabriel himself remained earnest, dedicated and analytical, seeming more haunted than angry. I was outraged and consoled by one detail in particular. He told me that he had interviewed a man named Hidaka, an interpreter who seemed to have made friends with Leo and the others, and had brought them sweets and tobacco right up to the end. I could see them all sitting around, their jaws swollen with Chinese lollies Hidaka gave them, Amanetto, Yokan, Daifuku. This stood as a substantial item of mercy in opposition to the blades of the Japanese NCOs' swords.