The Widow and Her Hero

by Thomas Keneally

  I remember old Mr McBride, the Minister of Defence who more than forty years ago gave us a miserable day in Canberra. I refuse to quote directly what Leo says in case this little memoir addressed to no one but my granddaughter should by evil chance, however remote, become public and the McBrides of this earth seize on it. Hidaka and Lieutenant Sunitono knew the prisoners were hiding something, for there were references in both Filmer's captured journal, and in Rufus's, to something named SBs.

  This is the story Hidaka told Lydon. It had been noticed that Jockey tried to talk in Mandarin to one of the Chinese orderlies. The orderly was authorised by Lieutenant Sunitono to pass on the details of the deaths of Doucette and Rufus – Sunitono guessed it would put Leo and the others in a depressed and less guarded state of mind.

  Jockey's been talking to this Chinese orderly who takes us back to our cells. He told Jockey the Boss was killed by grenades and is buried on one of the islands.

  The Chinese guard wouldn't risk telling us if it's not so, and a pall is over us. I'm certain the Boss let himself be killed so there'd be no retaliation against his wife and stepson. We knew something must have happened to him and Rufus, but to get the final news . . .

  So the next day, Sunitono told Hidaka to ask Leo, What about these SBs? It was shallow where you sank the junk. And so our divers have found the wreckage of them. They're no secret anymore, Captain Waterhouse.

  That's the lie Leo fell for. And if he fell for it gratefully, who would not gratefully fall for it? But it meant that fat sleek men who never knew danger would forever refuse him posthumous honour.

  The next day, as a further grace note, Hidaka told Leo and the others that there were twenty Malays under death sentence for the Cornflakes explosion. Leo spoke to the other veterans of Cornflakes, and they offered to make a joint confession to Hidaka, to which they appended an appeal for the release of the Malays.

  Hugo Danway and a sickly, shrunken officer named Dinny Bilson also turned up at the YMCA now. Bilson was sadly depleted and had only a few tufts of his fair hair left. They had tried to capture a Chinese prahu but the crew had sold them to the Japanese. They reported that Private Appin, who had hurled grenades for Doucette, had been captured too, but was very ill when they saw him in the gaol at Surabaya.

  There were two left, including Dignam, the old Foreign Legion veteran, out there heading south-east for Australia.

  There had been one small success for Memerang. A particular Japanese naval officer who had failed to have any success interrogating Hugo and the others sat down in a Surabaya restaurant and blew his brains out. But they would never know that.

  So Memerang were interrogated and, when the naval prosecution considered its evidence was complete, they were moved to Outram Road Gaol, a huge old British prison which would not have been out of place architecturally in the Home Counties of Britain. And they were tried, and condemned, and came back to Outram Road, which they called the Grand Hotel because there the torture was at least random, not structured.

  Sixteen

  You wouldn't believe, Grace, how calm I am now, here in Outram Road. The way I see things, I've got two people to be thankful to. One's Hidaka and the other's mad old Filmer. He's such a character. I've got to say it's just as well we've got him here. Hidaka's brought Filmer some books from the Raffles College Library, and they're PG Wodehouse stories which Filmer reads us at night in all the right Pommy accents and gets us laughing. Could have been an actor, Filmer, and he might be, he says, if he gets out of here. He says he knows some fellows in the Royal Marines that have got connections at the BBC. He also says that he's related through his mother to one of Bernard Shaw's Irish brothers. Filmer says they were all drunks, except George Bernard Shaw, who was a vegetarian, but he was just as mad as them without taking to drink. Filmer can do all the accents in Shaw too, this book of plays, Plays for Puritans, Hidaka gave him. The Devil's Disciple is the best one of the three plays for us, because it's like our situation, men under sentence, etc. In fact we've started calling ourselves the DD's – the Devil's Disciples. We like the chief character's gumption. None of us are really keen on Caesar and Cleopatra, but Captain Brassbound's Conversion has a whole range of accents in it.

  They've given us a mess room, and during meal times Filmer organises us into parts and goes through our lines with us, and then after lock-up we've got Blinkhorn, who has got better quicker than we could have hoped, doing Cockney from one cell and Hugo Danway doing the Yankee Captain Kearney from another, and Filmer doing Lady Cecily from a third, and prompting us, and it's all great for our spirits. I'm doing a couple of Captain Brassbound's sidekicks at the moment, but I'm going to take over the role of Brassbound from Jockey in a week or so. Jockey can do an English gentleman's accent, you wouldn't believe it. I really take back everything I ever might have said about Filmer.

  There's a heavy-lidded guard we call Sleepy. He lets us make a fair bit of noise. It must be okay with his superiors. He looks like a fellow who's in the army by mistake, shows a lot of patience, but when his temper goes, he's frightful. We saw him beat a poor Dutchman dreadfully a week back. As the fellow stood outside his cell. He must have smiled or something – Sleepy can do that to you, sadder than a donkey in a cartoon one moment and the angel of death the next. I took a risk one day with him – he was putting Mel and Filmer in the same cell, as usual, and I knew they had something gnawing between them, so I said, No, not him, pointing to Mel. Him. And I pointed to Jockey. And to my surprise he let me nominate who went in with who, so everyone gets variety, a good thing for them and me, and it's easy for us to pass on messages. Sleepy must know that, but I suppose he knows too we've got nowhere to go and no more harm to do. And that added to the play rehearsals – we were able to rehearse each other's lines very closely – I suppose we're getting a bit obsessed with it all. I almost got to consider I want to be an actor instead of a lawyer.

  As for Hidaka, he brings us bags of these little Chinese lollies, and they're delicious – it's amazing how much like heaven sugar is when you haven't had any for a long time.

  The DD's, the Devil's Disciples. If we have to face the penalty, old GBS has shown us how it can be done with as much style as possible. We're determined to have style like Richard Dudgeon, the central figure in the play.

  Filmer's talked to Hidaka about how the prison boss Matsasuta ought to let us do a performance of The Devil's Disciple, with your dear husband in the starring role of Richard Dudgeon, and Filmer himself playing General Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne, and Jockey Rubinsky playing the clergyman Anderson.

  Hidaka said to him, But the play concerns a great defeat for the British.

  And Filmer said, like a true Pom, Yes, like Singapore. It can happen in the best of empires.

  I think we've got Buckley's of the Japs letting us put it on, but rehearsing it is great work, and so is just reading the parts at night, from cell to cell. We get away with it!

  There's another thing I ought to tell you about Filmer, so you don't blame him for anything. He's been pretty happy just as theatrical director. He has left the command of the blokes to me. You are Doucette's successor, he tells me, and, he says, You know how to handle Aussies. It isn't an art everyone has.

  I always assumed he was a fairly toffee-nosed character, but you can't judge the Poms as easily as that. And I tell you what, I wish he'd been my English teacher at school . . .

  I had thought that Leo's journal was the last item I would need to adapt to. Yet there was one side of me that quite correctly believed that Leo's story would only be settled by my own death.

  Now my husband Laurie had a stroke which cruelly paralysed his left side and made it difficult for him to speak. The poor fellow was embarrassed by the impact his deadened lips had on his diction. He now lived in a home, quite an elegant one, but in permanent care, where I visited him daily. He was not disgruntled – he has always had a positive frame of mind, and the stroke, instead of souring him, seemed to have confirmed him in his best temperamental
habits. Our son took him out for drives and to concerts at the Opera House in a wheelchair. Except he didn't want too many of his old friends to see him like this.

  I visited Laurie every afternoon and read to him, and I thought that was the way his and my life would go, with no surprises but the expected ones of deterioration and sudden, perhaps fatal crisis for both of us. To extend our lives I read long books, like Great Expectations and Quiet Flows the Don, because I'd read somewhere that having a book to finish actually helped keep people alive.

  Yet even as the century ended, I got an unexpected call from California, from a heroically aged Jesse Creed, the American who used to hang around the boys and whom Dotty worked for. Doucette had always been contemptuous of him, though I had found him very urbane and sensible. But I was rather surprised to hear he was still alive. He was coming to Sydney with his wife and wanted to see me. I'm ninety-two years, he admitted, and I had to get all manner of medical clearance to do this trip. Finding travel insurance was a hell of a business. But it seems my vascular system is that of a forty-year-old. And I have a wife to help me round – she's barely seventy.

  I asked him why he wanted to come back. Well, he said, the claim of memory. And in any case he remembered and thought often about Doucette and Mortmain and Leo – in fact, of all the wars he had since been involved in, he said, he remembered Doucette, such a character, and still felt uneasy about him.

  I did not like to hear phrases like that. They possessed all the danger signs. Hidaka had felt uneasy too, and been full of surprises.

  Why uneasy? I asked. Dotty doesn't blame you. She blames Doucette fair and square.

  I'd like to come and discuss that with you, Grace, he said.

  You're very welcome to come, I told him. But is there anything more to be said?

  I hoped there was not, but I felt the same fear I'd had before Hidaka visited me.

  There are a few things, he assured me.

  Damn him.

  Bring your wife with you, I suggested. Safety in numbers, I thought.

  Well maybe, Grace. We'll see.

  I agreed to talk to him, of course, for Leo's sake. Because I visited the retirement home in the afternoons, I asked him to call in one morning at ten. I gave him the address and directions but he told me not to bother with those – he would have a local driver, he said.

  The old man who presented himself at my door ten days later was indeed on his own, and wearing slacks and a fawn jacket. Despite his age, he still possessed those ruby- cheeked boyish features rather reminiscent of President Reagan's face, a particular sort of glow Americans retain through tennis, golf and watchful dieting. I had expected him to bring his wife. When I said so, he told me that she was still jet-lagged and had begged off. She gets jet lag real bad – always has.

  He laughed benignly.

  And the poor old thing doesn't have the stamina she once possessed.

  Something told me that was just his story, and he had not wanted her here. We sat a while swapping life histories. He had married twice, been widowed once, had an abundance of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He sometimes got breathless and they'd shipped extra oxygen aboard the plane in case he became short of breath, but he hadn't needed it – he'd known beforehand he wouldn't, but you couldn't convince wives and doctors.

  I could see he was not utterly at ease telling me this, and so I was not utterly at ease hearing it. I created detours in the conversation. I asked him when he'd retired from the army. He'd hung on a long time, he said – until the late 1970s. He told me that he'd ended up his military career a majorgeneral – a prince of the Pentagon. You know the saying about how behind every great fortune there's a crime? he asked. The same could be said of high military rank.

  After retirement he served on the board of a staff college and took two quarters a year as an adjunct professor teaching politics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

  Underlying all we said, I think, was the awareness in both of us that he was the blessed warrior, always marked by himself and others for survival amidst the reckless. That was something I refused to blame him for, but even such a reasonable attitude called up its opposite, a little cloud of possible widowly rancour in the room. We were therefore happy when we found ourselves talking about Dotty. He'd read her half-dozen novels. She was very British, you know, he told me. I don't think all that postwar British squalor she wrote about is as interesting to Americans. The Brits go for squalor, but we try to ignore it.

  I told him a bit shortly I thought squalor was inescapable for war widows, and inevitably influenced Dotty's novels.

  I suppose that's true, he conceded, with careful grace.

  But she had never remarried, which rather surprised him. She was a lusty girl, Jesse Creed said fondly. I imagine you've heard I was in a position to know. We had an affair, as the rumours said.

  Before or after Rufus vanished? I asked.

  Creed said, Both, I'm afraid. I don't expect you'd approve. To an extent I took advantage of her loneliness. So there, I can't be franker.

  That's Dotty's business, I told him sharply. I've got other things to live with.

  I hoped nonetheless that this was the chief of his old man confessions.

  He said, When she had anything to do with other men, it was always really to do with Mortmain anyhow, that crazy monocle-wearing Limey.

  Dotty also seemed to have remade her life. I got letters from her. About 1948 she had published a brilliant novel on East End women. It had been made into an angry little film everyone considered a classic. She was poetry editor of two magazines, and a literary figure, and she was tossing up whether to join a new publishing company as senior editor.

  Dotty had been moderately successful with her novels, and her poetry was anthologised. She was a bit of a cult feminist writer, and had made her mark in London until emphysema and diabetes in combination had brought her down suddenly in the early 1990s.

  What about Mrs Doucette? Creed asked. Do you ever hear?

  Indeed, I could fill him in on Minette, and the scandal of the way Minette was forced to live.

  Last I contacted her, said Creed, before I could answer, she was living with Doucette's mother, Lady Doucette.

  I told him that was right. After the war, Minette and Michael were liberated, hungry but unharmed, from their convent-camp in the hills. She had nowhere to go – she did not want to return widowed to Macau, and she did not come to Australia, though I think a new world would have been her redemption. She made perhaps the worst choice, joining Lady Doucette in her family house in Wiltshire. Since her elder brother had died, Lady Doucette had become the chatelaine of the place. I wrote to Minette a number of times and got back plain letters about life in the countryside and walks she took Michael on along a nearby Roman road cut in a hill of chalk. It was Dotty's letters that told me of the full impotence of Minette's life. During her years under Lady Doucette's thumb, Dotty told me once, Minette and her son took their meals in the kitchen like servants, and soon discovered why Doucette had so feared his mother and flourished in the East, away from her oppressive presence. Dotty said a lot of the fight had been taken out of Minette by her imprisonment by the Japanese. Now Minette suffered the indignity of being the poor relative acquired through an ill-advised marriage, though the old dragon did send Michael Doucette to Eton, where his stepfather had gone.

  A local landowner fell in love with the by-then middle- aged Minette and rescued her from the witch's castle.

  I paused in my recital. Then I decided, Let him hear this, even at third hand, what Dotty told me Minette had experienced. I told him, While she was still at the house in Wiltshire, one day in the kitchen garden, Doucette appeared to her and said, I always wanted to give you something better.

  Oh dear God, Creed murmured, and put his hand to his forehead. He said, A lot of ghosts after that war, weren't there?

  It seems so. Leo had the decency never to trouble me.

  We were drinking our tea
by now. I steered him to that old standby topic of where else he was going while he was at this end of the earth. The winter sun was on his face and enhanced the sense he exuded of a life well lived, and a mind still active.

  Oh, I've already been some places, I've just visited Melbourne again, he told me. It's changed, but it's still Melbourne. I always liked that place. It had a lot of character. And before then, we were up in Cairns. That's changed too since we were there, but you only have to scratch the surface to see the old town, the houses on stilts. There's something about that coast that won't let it be turned into a total Florida. The mountains behind, I suppose.

  And this is your last call? I asked.

  Yes. I don't expect ever to see lovely Sydney again. The truth is, Grace, I discouraged my wife from visiting today. I really wanted to see you alone. To talk about Leo and the others. To clear my slate.

  I really didn't like that sentence.

  Yes, I said, feeling that peculiar flinch. I appreciate that, Jesse. But there's my slate, too. What condition will you leave that in?

  I'll try to be careful, he assured me. I know nothing about Leo but what reflects glory on him.

  I was pleased to hear it.

  He paused. He said, I remember a meeting I had up in Cairns one day with Doucette and Leo and Dotty's husband. I should tell you I was certainly trying to make a bridge with the guy – Doucette, I mean. Dotty's husband was fine. And nothing had happened between me and Dotty at that stage. But I wanted to work with Doucette because I could tell he was a special kind of man, and I could see he and his expedition could be an important business and might get lost in the wash-up. With our help it could be something special. That's what I believed anyhow. But he had a lot of contempt for Americans, that guy. He thought we were fools, an idea easier to argue now than it was then. But even if we were fools, we were the fools that were running the game, and everyone else, even Mountbatten, a fool enough in his own right, had to come to terms with us. Doucette thought I was being sent to clip his wings or spy on him and take his project off him. In fact I was genuinely concerned about him.