The Women’s Pages

by Victoria Purman

‘Not too close there, Mrs Galloway. Wouldn’t want you ending up in the drink. Not after all that gin.’

  She laughed at him. ‘You don’t think I can swim?’

  ‘I’m sure you can. But damned if I’m diving in to rescue you.’

  ‘I’m a Millers Point girl, Cooper. I’m a water rat from way back.’ She sat and dangled her legs over the edge and breathed in the scent of oil and salt and sulphur. When she closed her eyes, she was ten years old and the sounds of her young life were as fresh in her mind as if they were being broadcast from a wireless somewhere nearby. The squeak and scratch of billycarts on the road, filled with wood for the fire in the mornings and then transformed into racing cars after school, thundering along Munn Street, all the way down to Dalgety’s Wharf and into Sussex Street. The echoing shout and then the splash of diving into the harbour from the wharves on hot summer days. The symphony of ships’ horns announcing their arrival into Australia’s busiest port, the engine of industry and agriculture, employer and exploiter of men. And a sound so familiar to her it was one she would never forget: the silent shuffling footsteps of men along the Hungry Mile.

  Cooper stood behind her, his hands loose at his sides, as if expecting at any moment to have to yank her back from the edge. She patted the spot next to her. ‘Come sit with me. I promise I won’t push you in.’

  He grunted and the familiar, wry sound of it echoed in the spaces between the buildings. He manoeuvred his long legs over the side with a groan.

  Tilly bumped her knee against his. ‘You’re sounding like an old man, Cooper.’

  He sighed, reached inside his jacket for his cigarettes, thought about it, and then left them where they were. ‘War injury, Mrs Galloway.’

  ‘You were hurt? You didn’t tell me. What—’

  ‘Don’t fret. I fell off a bar stool in an army mess in Singapore and bunged up my knee. I was blind drunk and it was all my fault. That’s what happens when you get into a drinking game with a group of Scotsmen.’ He fell silent for a moment. ‘It hardly compares, does it?’ His words hung in the silence between them. He didn’t explain any further and didn’t have to.

  ‘How was Singapore really?’ she finally asked in the quiet.

  ‘Hot.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Full of troops. Military brass. Nurses.’

  ‘Nurses? I’m surprised you didn’t bring one home with you.’

  He glanced at her before looking back out across the water. ‘Nurses aren’t my type, Mrs Galloway. Too much of the Florence Nightingales about them.’

  ‘As I recall, you haven’t had a type for a long while.’

  ‘You keeping notes?’

  ‘I notice. I observe. I ask questions. You taught me that.’

  ‘Remind me not to be such a good teacher, will you?’ A seagull squawked above them in the dark, circling. ‘How’s Bert?’

  ‘Doing well, I think. It’s a big change to be home. It’ll take time.’

  ‘Changi was … brutal.’ Cooper swept a hand over his face and his knee, still pressed against hers, shook.

  Tilly wrapped her arms around herself. ‘You don’t have to protect me. I’ve read the stories. We’ve been running them endlessly. I can hardly bear to read them but I can’t bear the not-knowing, either. There’s so much detail about what the Japanese did to our boys. Beatings, bayonets, starvation. The unbearable cruelty. And those nurses from Singapore on the Vyner Brooke.’ Her voice fell to a whisper, belying her rage. ‘Nurses, Cooper. They weren’t even bearing arms. They were there to tend to the sick and wounded and they were executed, too.’

  ‘He’s settling back in, do you think?’

  She paused, feeling strange about what she was about to say, about sharing such a private story, but she needed to talk to someone about it and if anyone would understand, it would be Cooper. ‘He sleeps on the floor beside Mary’s bed. That’s peculiar, isn’t it?’

  Cooper listened intently, his gaze focussed on her.

  ‘He’s barely ever home with his wife. So far he’s spent most of his time out drinking with the boys he served with. I can’t make sense of it. If you’d been away all those years, barely able to get a letter home, or receive any news yourself, wouldn’t you want to spend every waking moment with the one you love and not the blokes you’ve been locked up with? Wouldn’t you want to hold tight to your wife and never, ever let her go?’ Tilly’s heart thudded and she felt breathless and skittish. ‘She’s trying to put on a brave face, of course. I’ve given them as much privacy as I possibly can. I’ve seen every movie under the sun and I even tried ice skating at the Glaciarium to keep out of their hair. But more than once I’ve come home to find Mary all alone and sobbing in her room. I’m not sure what to do. I’ve felt utterly helpless.’

  Cooper’s voice was gruff. ‘Don’t judge him. You can’t know what he’s seen. Or done.’

  Tilly turned to him. ‘How much worse was it really? What did you write that didn’t pass the censors’ pen?’

  It was a long while before George spoke. He seemed to be collecting memories in his head as if he were sorting photographs and deciding which ones to show her.

  ‘It was completely and utterly terrible. A mess. Those men, the ones who survived, held their best mates in their arms while they died. Imagine what that does to a man?’

  Tilly held her breath.

  ‘In Singapore, I went from hospital to hospital, taking lists and lists of names and ranks. And I promise I looked out for Archie. I asked over and over if anyone knew him, but nothing.’ Cooper sounded as defeated as Tilly felt. ‘Who the hell knows where the diggers I interviewed found the energy to talk to me. I’ve never written so bloody fast in my life trying to get every single word down. The blokes … they were all bones. You know,’ he paused, trying to find the words. ‘Some of them had lost all their teeth and their hair from being starved for so long. I don’t know how they even managed to stand up. They must have been days from death. Some of the poor bastards were liberated from the camps only to die in hospital in the weeks after. It was exceedingly cruel.’ Cooper spoke slowly, deliberately. ‘And the nurses, the ones who’d been POWs too.’ He blew out a deep breath. ‘They were the walking dead, Mrs Galloway.’

  His face contorted in an expression of defeat, disgust, despair.

  ‘But …’ she started, willing what he’d said not to be true. For herself, for Archie. ‘Not all of them, surely. I saw them with my own eyes. The first POWs from Singapore, when they came home on the Catalinas. They looked … they didn’t look like that. Thin, yes, but not skeletal. Or dying. And Bert? Well, he’s scrawny but not that bad.’

  ‘And do you know why? The army carefully chose the healthiest ones to come home first. And even then, they’d already had weeks in hospital to get some meat on their bones. To get treated for what was ailing them. To find new uniforms to cover up what lies underneath. There’s still not much more than skin and bone under all that khaki. That whole thing was a public relations exercise and the paper fell for it, we all fell for it, because that’s what Australians want to see. We want to see our brave, victorious diggers. Don’t you think every newspaper in the country has a thousand photographs of what those blokes really look like? Have you seen any in the press?’

  ‘No.’ There were suddenly tears in her eyes. ‘And I don’t know if I’d want to. Sometimes the truth is too hard to bear.’

  ‘Amen to that,’ Cooper said quietly. ‘We reporters want the truth. We dig for it. Fight for it. We cross the globe to find it but I don’t know if our readers do. Even if we print it, I don’t know if they’re reading it. There’s been way too much truth these past six years. People want to think about Christmas and shopping and next year. And who can blame them?’

  Tears pooled in Tilly’s eyes and made her cheeks wet. She looked away. She didn’t want Cooper to see her crying, didn’t want to admit how painful it was to hear his stories. She hadn’t thought about the possibility that even if Archie was found, he might die
in hospital. It was too cruel to imagine.

  Cooper turned his left wrist and angled it towards the moonlight. ‘It’s almost midnight. Shall I walk you home?’

  ‘Not yet.’ She listened to the water lapping, as softly as a cat at a saucer of milk. ‘This is the place where troops embarked on ships to sail away to the Great War. Did you know that?’

  ‘My mother’s brother, Uncle Vance,’ Cooper said. ‘He died in Ypres in 1917.’

  ‘My mother’s brother, Herb. Gallipoli.’

  All around the harbour, ships’ lights blinked in time with Tilly’s breathing.

  ‘My mother never got over losing Vance. I’ve got his name, you know. George Vance Cooper. He was the only boy in her family. I was a child when he died. I didn’t really understand death back then. All I knew was that my mother was sad for a long, long time.’

  Till brought a hand to rest on his thigh. He lifted it, kissed the back of it. His lips were warm and soft and they lingered on her skin. She gripped his fingers, didn’t let him release hers.

  ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do, Cooper.’

  For once, the wordsmith had no words.

  Chapter Eighteen

  In the kitchen at Potts Point, Tilly was carefully spreading some of her rationed butter—a measly one pound a fortnight—on the black bread she’d bought in Kings Cross on her way home from work that evening. It was Friday night and she and Mary had planned a special meal for Bert: something they hoped he might not have seen before that might encourage his appetite. There was black bread and frankfurt sausages and cucumbers in vinegar called gherkins.

  Tilly still hadn’t really got to know Bert. He was rarely there in the evenings when she came home from the newspaper. In the mornings when she rose, he was usually asleep, and on the weekends he was out spending time with boys from the army.

  Tilly had tiptoed around the subject with Mary, casually asking how he was, how Bert’s job hunting was progressing, but Mary had brushed off her questions. ‘He’s wonderful, Tilly.’ And she’d presented her best smiling face.

  ‘No work then?’ Getting the boys back to work was all anyone in authority talked about. It had become a national imperative to find jobs for the men who’d courageously saved Australia so they could once again provide for their families and help build Australia’s future.

  ‘Not yet,’ Mary had replied with a happy shrug. ‘We’ll be fine. He’s got his army pay and three months’ holidays. We’re talking about going to Melbourne to see his brothers.’

  ‘That sounds wonderful. You might be there in time for the Cup. You’ll have to buy a new hat.’

  Where Mary’s eyes might once have sparkled at the idea, they were flat. ‘He’s enjoying the fresh air and his freedom,’ she said, answering the very question Tilly was too afraid to ask. ‘That’s why he’s walking so much. It’s nothing to worry about, Tilly. Truly.’

  Tilly hadn’t wanted to admit that she knew the exact opposite to be true. She’d heard their late-night arguments, during which Bert’s drunken and angry words and accusations had come bleeding through the thin walls of the flat. It was a rare night when he wasn’t up in the middle of it, the kitchen light blazing, the sound of his pacing footsteps like a metronome in Tilly’s wide-awake ears. Tilly was torn between respecting Mary’s desire for privacy in matters concerning her husband, and her concern for her dear friend. Mary and Bert had wanted to find a place of their own, but with so many men being demobbed competition was stiff, and the government’s prediction of looming housing shortages was creating panic and the emergence of all sorts of underhand deals to secure whatever was available by whatever means necessary. The entire country’s manufacturing effort during the past six years had been directed to the war and housing construction had stalled. All the signs were that the three of them were to be together in the Potts Point flat for a while longer.

  At the sound of a knock at the door, Mary looked at Tilly, her eyes wide and hopeful. ‘Bert must have forgotten his key,’ she said with such an expression of happiness in her voice that Tilly felt a surge of hope for Bert and Mary, that they would get through this trying time. Bert was home from the war and Mary was doing such an ordinary thing, opening the door at the end of the day for her husband, welcoming him and ushering him inside their home and haven. That was all she had ever wanted. They were ordinary dreams rendered extraordinary after so much upheaval, to be able to share small talk about the day, the characters in the office, the push and shove on the tram to and from work. Whose birthday they’d celebrated and how that person had been overwhelmed by a cake and a rousing office rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’. What they might listen to on the wireless that night and whether they had any plans for the weekend. Perhaps a picnic or a walk. Church or a horse race. Tilly ached with a traitorous envy that Mary and Bert had it and she didn’t.

  ‘Tilly,’ Mary called. ‘It’s George Cooper.’

  Tilly picked up the slice of black bread, wiped her free hand on the apron tied at her waist, and walked through to the living room with a smile.

  ‘Hello. This is a surprise. Would you like a taste?’ She smiled at him, waiting for a retort but the expression on his face made her slow, then stop. There it was, as easily seen as if it had been written on his face: defeat, disgust and despair. It was in his hooded eyes, in the grim line of his lips and in the clench of his jaw. The blood drained from her face and she felt cold. A chill up her spine made her shiver and then shake.

  ‘Cooper?’ Her breath jammed in her throat, choking her.

  He held on to the brim of his hat and his lips fell open but he didn’t utter a word for what felt like an hour.

  ‘I have some news.’

  Behind Cooper, Mary covered her mouth with her hands.

  Tilly suddenly felt ice cold.

  ‘Why don’t you sit down?’ Cooper crossed the room to her, held her elbow and urged her towards the settee. Mary quickly came around the coffee table and sat next to Tilly on the other side, clutching at her arm. Cooper sat on the coffee table, facing her.

  Was she sitting? Tilly couldn’t feel anything, hear anything, see anything. She looked down in her lap. The piece of bread she’d brought from the kitchen was crushed in her fist and butter oozed between her fingers. She lifted her eyes and met Cooper’s dark stare.

  This is it, she thought. He knows. And suddenly, despite all the years of desperate, despairing ignorance, she wanted to hold on to this moment just a few minutes longer, to this place in her head and her heart in which there might still be some miraculous possibility that Archie wasn’t dead. In this moment, frozen in time, she could let herself believe that he’d staged a fantastic escape or had been rescued by missionaries. That he’d been hiding out on a remote tropical island somewhere in the Pacific. That he’d had amnesia and hadn’t remembered who he was or who he’d married or who he’d loved. That he was alive, somewhere, somehow.

  But she knew. It was finally over. ‘Tell me.’

  Cooper reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a bundle of paper that she immediately recognised as a telex cable, the kind that spewed onto the floor in the newsroom from the machines that typed by themselves all day and night. He unfolded it, studied the type on it and cleared his throat. When he spoke, his voice was husky and quiet.

  ‘It’s the answer to the mystery of what happened to the majority of the garrison that was overwhelmed by the Japanese at Rabaul.’ He stopped and studied her. ‘The External Affairs Minister, Eddie Ward, told Federal Parliament this afternoon some news about those Australians who were in New Guinea in January 1942. Soldiers and civilians. We know that some escaped and made it back to Australia but there has since been no evidence for what happened to the majority of the garrison overwhelmed by the Japanese at Rabaul. Lark Force. Like Archie. I know you’ve tried, Tilly, and so have I.’ He paused. ‘More than once. There’s been an inquiry, and investigations in Japan, and General MacArthur’s people have confirmed the government’s wor
st fears. They were all lost at sea.’

  Cooper stopped and looked at her, clearly deciding whether to go on. ‘It seems that those who were left in Rabaul were forced on to the Japanese ship SS Montevideo Maru. It sailed from Rabaul on the twenty-second of June, carrying eight hundred and forty-five prisoners of war and two hundred and eight civilians. One thousand and fifty-three people.’

  Mary began to softly pray. ‘Our Father, who art in heaven …’

  ‘Tell me,’ Tilly said firmly. ‘Everything.’ For nothing could be as bad as the things she’d imagined or the nightmares that had tormented her all these years.

  ‘The Montevideo Maru was torpedoed on 1 July near Luzon in the Philippines with the loss of all the prisoners of war and the internees who were aboard. The Japanese have a manifest of names and it’s being translated now so next of kin can be notified.’ Cooper’s gaze dropped to the cable. ‘“The Commonwealth Government extends its deepest sympathy to the next of kin of all those who died in such a tragic manner”.’

  Tilly was aware of Mary next to her, her arm around her, but couldn’t feel anything.

  ‘I jumped in a taxi and came right here as soon as I saw the cable. I would have run here if I’d had to. No one wanted you to see it in the newspaper first.’

  Tilly’s heart beat so loud it hurt her eyes. ‘You’re telling me that Archie drowned at sea in July 1942?’

  ‘The Americans have confirmed it. The Japanese are handing over the names.’

  ‘That can’t be right.’ Tilly shook her head. ‘Archie’s last letter to me arrived in September 1942.’ She shook off Mary’s arm and bumped past Cooper’s knees, almost tripping in her haste. She ran to her bedroom, threw open the case by her bedside table and flicked out the cardigan that held Archie’s letters. They flew into the air and scattered onto the rug. She quickly snatched them up. The name on the envelope said Mrs Tilly Galloway. That’s who she was. Archie’s wife. Mrs Galloway.

  ‘Look,’ she yelled and she didn’t recognise her voice. ‘It’s right here.’ A moment later, Mary and Cooper were at her doorway. Tilly thrust the envelope at them and jabbed at the date and the censor’s stamps.