The Boss writhed and began crying, and that and the sweaty and shitty stink of him made me feel embarrassed as I held him fast. I was discovering he was more human than I wanted him to be. I hoped I could forget the raving, stinking imbecile he was at the moment. I took comfort from the fact that all this didn't seem to shock or come as a surprise to Rufus.
The Boss began to work his jaw where Rufus had hit him. Well done, old chap! he screamed. But watch out for Round Four. I'll eat your guts hot.
Okay, Boss, said Rufus, turning the tap off. Are you going to be good for me?
Can you imagine, the Boss asked, weeping, they take her blankets away?
No, I think you're dreaming that, Boss, said Rufus, removing his uniform jacket and rolling up his sleeves. Grace knocked on the door to tell us she and Dotty had started on a lunch and the clean-up in the kitchen. Are salmon sandwiches okay?
I called out, Yes, and we'll be out to eat them soon.
Ah, cold blankets, said the Boss as we stripped him off and smelt the full staleness of his opium and whisky sweats and his urine and shit, and lowered him into the water. The cold water did not seem to worry him, but he argued with himself and the Japanese and God and Rufus and me as we washed him down with soft cloths. As he began to cool off and shiver he started abusing Belfast weather, blaming another country for what he was feeling in Australia's cold tank water.
When the bath was over, we towelled him and dressed him in a fresh singlet and shorts I got from his kit in the melee and fug of the Boss's bedroom. As he briskly dried the Boss's under- groin Rufus dared to make a joke about the Boss's penis, saying, You don't exactly own a love truncheon, do you, Boss? For such a charmer?
Get fucked yourself, Mortmain. Women don't want a bloody elephant.
Ah, said Mortmain. It speaks!
In the kitchen, Rufus sat him down and hand-fed him salmon off a spoon, as Grace and Dotty and I looked on, awed and frowning. After getting a little food into him, Rufus and I put him into bed, and then we ate our own sandwiches and drank our tea. Hearing an occasional yell from his bedroom, we knew we couldn't leave him alone, and Rufus asked if Grace and I would like to drive into the seaside village of Flinders and call Foxhill at the office – he was waiting there all day for a report – and tell him the Boss was still a little indisposed and Rufus would stay with him here overnight, but he should send a car and driver for the rest of us. Rufus would bring the Boss home to Melbourne the following afternoon.
You're not staying alone with that maniac, said Dotty.
My dear, no need for you to spend a night here.
I bloody will. If he comes at me with a bloody machete, I'll shoot the fucker dead.
Grace and I were pleased to get away from the house and drive amongst the melaleucas and she-oaks on the sandy road to Flinders. I was not an accomplished driver, but Grace wanted me to drive. This was a little adventure we both could cherish. She was silent for a while. It was almost superstitious. We both wanted to get well away from the house before we started talking full voice, as if we were afraid of waking the Boss, though I knew that wasn't it. I was edgy about what impression everything we'd seen had had on Grace.
The sandy back road met some bitumen and took us into the village of Flinders. I got out and made the call to Foxhill, who said, Oh dear! and promised to send another car the next day.
I got back in the car and started the engine. But Grace put a hand on top of mine as I reached for the gear-stick.
Will you be going on any more operations with that man? she asked.
I said, He's just a bit ill at the moment. He's not like that when we've got something to do. They're just messing him about, that's all. The Yanks and the desk boys.
It seems as if he ought to be in hospital.
No, I said, look, he's found out about his wife and the little boy, and he feels pretty powerless about that too. I know how he feels. I have the occasional bad dream about my old bloke. And as well as that everyone's been frustrating him, trying to scale things down . . .
Grace grabbed my hand harder. But it wasn't in her nature to be sharp like Dotty. She said, I hope they scale him down all the way, to be honest. I don't like sending you off far with a man like that.
I begged her to suspend judgement. I told her he was a different man when we had something on. His face shone. He never touched liquor then, even if it was available. It was the first time, though, that I thought I'd need to go along next time, whether it was Memerang or the Great Natuna plan, to keep an eye on the Boss, instead of doing things under his gaze.
Ten
As Rufus and Leo had promised, Doucette came back to his best. Charming at parties, he was again forthcoming with the ukelele, and sang 'When I'm Cleaning Windows' in a range of regional accents. Uncertainty was over for him now, and a course had been set. Leo devoted a lot of energy to persuading me that what came next would be the climacteric of clever endeavours, beyond which we would have earned the right to breed children and live tranquilly.
One Saturday that winter, Leo was given two tickets to the stand at the Melbourne Cricket Ground for an Australian Rules game between Carlton and Collingwood, which the newspapers said would be the game of the season. Under a severe Melbourne sky we went off on the tram, carrying all that had happened and what was to come on our shoulders with apparent ease. I was unversed in Victorian football, and so to an extent was Leo, but he reacted to the contest between leaping and kicking men with an excitement that flowed into me when he grabbed my shoulder as if to protect it against the cold at moments of high sporting tension.
A chill wind was dimpling the surface of the river when we got home. Coming inside, we found a very sombre Foxhill drinking with the Mortmains. We could see the traces of tears on Dotty's cheeks, so that at first we thought there might have been an almighty row between her and Rufus.
Foxhill rose. Leo, he said.
Dotty and Rufus had also risen. Dotty said, Please, Foxy, let us get out of your way. And she and Rufus disappeared to the interior of their side of the flat. I felt a distinct pulse of fear at that moment. What could be so bad that Rufus and Dotty needed to make a space for it?
Foxhill said, Jesse Creed has access to a lot of information, you understand, Dig.
But we knew that already. How do you mean? asked Leo.
Well, you'll be getting notification from the Red Cross. But I'm afraid your father . . . he's been killed, Leo. After he was taken prisoner in Honiara they shipped him to a camp in the Philippines, and a month ago he was put with two hundred others on a ship for Japan, the Terasao Maru. It was torpedoed by an American sub. The only survivors were a handful of crew members. Both Japanese and Red Cross sources concur.
I felt that primal convulsion of grief and the surge of tears, and began clumsily hugging Leo, trying to make hard contact with his flesh despite the fact that he was sheathed in an army overcoat still.
We have independent confirmation of it, Foxhill told us, to ward off any argument of hope. Of course, the American sub commander had no idea the ship was full of POWs.
Leo had not shed a tear but his mouth was open as if he was pathetically rolling probabilities around in his jaw. Let's sit down, he said. I insisted I take his coat off, as if that would ease the hour. Then we both sat down. I held him. Foxhill fetched him some whisky.
They were all below, of course, Leo reasoned with himself. The prisoners. The sub commander couldn't have known.
Foxhill said, That's right.
So he's with my mother now, said Leo in a burst of primitive faith. Foxhill nodded earnestly, encouraging this sudden theology in Leo. That's right, Dig. That's exactly right.
Well, said Leo, blinking. He was a very skilled man. Never got over my mum dying like that. It changed the whole direction of his life.
The thing would have been sudden, I guess, Dig, Foxhill insisted. The commander said the thing just exploded amidships. One great explosion, no, two actually. The ship went up and then settled in an insta
nt.
The sub commander said that? asked Leo.
Pretty much, said Foxhill. Just one thing – we can't say anything yet, or have any public memorial service. I mean, for the moment can you just keep it in your own circle, Dig? It shouldn't be in the paper or anything.
Leo looked at him, but dully.
What I mean is, said Foxhill, we're not supposed to know about this yet. The Japanese don't know we know. You understand, Dig? After the Red Cross tells you officially, by all means go ahead. But I suppose you'll be off . . . on your adventure by then. If you're up to it.
Leo shook his head. No, of course I'm up to it. No. This alters nothing.
But my fear was that it might alter a great deal, not least in Leo himself.
Eventually Dotty and Rufus reappeared. Foxhill informed Leo, I did tell the Mortmains why I was here. I hope you don't mind that, Dig.
Leo stood up to receive Dotty's embraces. This bloody, bloody war, she said.
Yes, said Leo. But it will end, you know, Dotty.
Rufus muttered, a sort of melodious condolence, and poured more drinks. We all sat down. Leo began speaking spontaneously about his father. He had a hard life, you know. We have a good farm, but dairy farming's tough. We were better off than most. Landed gentry.
He laughed at the idea.
Bush aristocrats. Seven hundred good acres. Flood plain. An educated man, too, my father. An agronomist. So when my mother died, he turned the farm over to his sister, my Aunty Cass, and her husband. And he took this job with the British administration in the Solomons.
But what was he like? I wanted to ask. This man I had never known. I did not even know if he was gregarious or reserved, loud or quiet. Leo had lapsed into deep thought in our midst. We were not going to find out much more.
That night as I held him, he said, He wasn't without his faults, you know. I wouldn't want to say that. He started drinking too much in the Solomons. But everyone did. And he let me run wild, and he had a woman. My nanny. Delia. A great, full-bodied Melanesian woman. A really jolly sort of person. I loved her. I didn't quite understand that he did too. I can see now why the colonial wives were sniffy about him. Anyhow, most of them probably died on the ship, and Delia is probably still on Guadalcanal, getting by.
After a silence, I thought Leo had gone to sleep but suddenly he said, He was a bloody good fisherman too, you know. And then, It would have been an awful death. Locked in the hold. It would have been hot, about 120 degrees, and it would have been foul and cramped. And then all at once the concussion, and water flooding in.
I could hear a little stutter of tears from him, merely a stutter, the habit of easy tears had been suppressed since his wild Solomon Islands childhood.
I said, You don't have to think about that. Most death is hard. He wouldn't want you to dwell on that.
Leo said, But I have to.
The flat was unheated, and for the first time I felt the malice of the cold of that southern city in winter.
Only two weeks later, Leo and Rufus left by train for Western Australia. It was another dismal night – we had had a last supper at the flat and went across to Spencer Street in a taxi. Rufus had a lot of business to attend to, supervising the loading of gear into the goods vans at the back of the passenger train. I met little Jockey Rubinsky, the young man of many languages who was too awed by the occasion to say anything meaningful to me. I was astonished to meet my cousin Mel Duckworth, the one who had brought Leo home to Braidwood in the first place, amongst the men boarding. Leo had not mentioned his possible membership of the Memerang group, and I thought until then he had a comfortable training job in Queensland. I'm just in support, said Mel. I'm like the lighting man on a student production. He had none of his New South Wales family and no girlfriend to see him off, and he gave the impression of being a little more lost than some of the others.
Leo took me aside. I'll be back for Christmas. It's going to be wonderful. I agreed with him. I'm not making empty promises, he said. The weather conditions mean we've got to be back well before Christmas anyhow. That's between you and me.
I'm pleased to hear that piece of information, I told him.
Look, he said, you're allowed to worry a bit. Just a bit.
I remember saying – wittily, I thought, for a woman doing her best – All right. I'll indulge that luxury.
And listen, he said further, you don't have to worry about other things. I believe there's a searchlight battery of women at our training ground. You don't have to worry about any of that. You're the woman. There isn't any other.
He put his lips to my ear. As for Rufus, he said through crushed lips, I can't give any guarantees.
I'm not worried about women. I'm worried about your father.
I meant the influence his father's death might have on him.
He kissed me. I'm not Hamlet Prince of Denmark, he told me. Don't fret about that.
For some reason, on the cold station, the assurance was a comfort.
Doucette turned up, with bright eyes utterly lacking in doubt or the madness I'd seen at the beach house. He was compact, full of a burning energy. Kissing my hand, he assured me he would look after his young friend Dig, and that I was to live blithely until Leo's return. In the coming months I would remember and cling to Doucette's air of certainty, and I would not tell Dotty about it for fear she would diffuse it with another story of the Boss's Singapore berserkness.
The train was delayed and delayed, and it got to the point where everyone wanted it to be gone, and to have done. We had said every possible version of goodbye and exchanged every consoling promise, and invested ourselves into too many farewells, so that by the time the whistle went there was a sense of staleness in the air. At that second, a revived, mad Rufus did a lanky somersault on the station platform and delivered himself upright into the doorway of the train. A small group of soldiers and sailors further along the carriage whistled and cheered him, and his smile went crooked and toothy beneath his eye-glass.
Goodbye, goodbye. Dotty and I and other girlfriends and wives ran along the platform as the train gathered speed, until the barrier at the end stopped us.
I know from Mark Lydon's book The Sea Otters most of what happened in the training of the group for Memerang on Australia's west coast. Rufus and the Boss instituted a severe regime at the base near Fremantle, on an island connected to the mainland by a spit of sand, Garden Island. The camp was primitive and tented, but the British submarine flotilla was nearby. Here was stationed a mine-laying submarine named Orca. It had been assigned the job of taking Doucette's party to a well-wooded island off Singapore where a pick-up base could be established. Then it was meant to convey them further throughout the region till they found a junk that suited them for their attack on the port of Singapore.
The winter nights were severe, and Leo and the others spent many of them in folboats at sea, between Fremantle and Rottnest Island, named by Dutchmen making for Indonesia. Those men who came down with exhaustion were thereby eliminated by Rufus. Dig – Leo – passed every test of course. Jockey similarly. Old hands. The news came that the submersibles, the Silver Bullets, had arrived in Melbourne by ship and were being flown across. For many of the young soldiers and sailors, they would be the ultimate test for membership of the raiding party. They arrived in specially built canisters designed by their inventor, Major Frampton. By this time their English instructor, Lieutenant Lower, had also arrived, with Major Frampton.
After the first Silver Bullet was un-canistered and displayed to the men, there was enthusiasm and some secret anxiety. Lower warned them that the vehicle proceeded well on the surface, travelling on its batteries at more than four knots, but it was harder to handle in the mode in which the operator's head was just above the surface and the Bullet below, and it also took some skill if the operator drove it down below the surface altogether. The mask had to be breathed into in a particular way. Otherwise carbon dioxide would build up and kill the breather. If any of them got disoriented or
otherwise panicked and abandoned the Silver Bullets, they would be court-martialled, since the vehicles were too precious to be let sink. Make sure the submersibles come to the surface! said Lower, a calm, devout man as it turned out, an Anglo- Catholic. You are free to remain below and drown, he instructed them.
In that rough proving ground off Western Australia, disoriented men drove the Silver Bullets into the silt and came gasping up through murky water to the surface. How I wish one of them had been Leo! But solidarity with the Boss sustained him – even when he found, as he experimented on survival in opaque, churned water, testing the vessel's every gear, that he could get it to rise only by driving it backwards to the surface.
Doucette decided that Major Eddie Frampton, the engineer creator of the machines, must be their conducting officer, their representative on the submarine, the man who would arrange their delivery and pick-up. Frampton began work with the captain of the submarine Orca, a young officer rather strung out by the long war. When he found that Frampton's SB containers were incorrectly dimensioned to easily fit his mine tubes in the aft of Orca, and that when they were jettisoned they fouled against the roof of the compartment, he became very petulant and seemed to have decided that this is what happened once you got into the business of transporting raiding parties.
A lost commando from the abandoned Great Natuna plan also turned up at Garden Island. He was an English officer named Filmer, a member of an elite regiment, the Green Howards. Though a professional officer, a type usually suspect to Leo (apart from Doucette, of course), everyone seemed to like Filmer. He had the status of having been an actor in great events – he was one of the commandoes who went ashore by canoe during the night preceding D-Day to make gaps in the wire of the coastal defences. How could you leave a man like that out, especially if you were Doucette? Even though his arrival in Australia was due to absurd accidents and mixed signals between SOE and IRD, he became one of the party.
By the end of August they had boarded the sub, Orca, going north and largely living, officers and men, in the torpedo room. How does one exist on a submarine so severely overcrowded? How does a person sleep and keep one's energy in the cramped, hot, dim daytimes of a submarine? Mark Lydon gives a brief and superficial picture of their two-week journey to the island named NE1, Serapem. In the first days, within reach of Australian aircraft, they were permitted on deck at night for a quarter-hour of callisthenics while the bosun and messmen were preparing the evening meal. Apart from that, it was the torpedo compartment, where they hunched, did exercises in batches, slept in batches, and ate communally of the normal submarine diet of tinned herring, canned bacon and tomato, powdered eggs and haricots musicales, as the sailors called baked beans. The edgy Commander Moxham, had explained to Doucette that as much as he would have liked to entertain the other officers to his table, he could fit only Doucette himself at the wardroom table. Doucette decided, with appropriate thanks, he would be better to have meals with his own officers and men. That was, he said, the way it would be during the real part of the operation.
The Widow & Her Hero Page 12
