I have had a dose of dengue fever. Dengue is a dreadful business that saps every ounce of energy and makes one feel absolutely rotten. But I am getting over it now and looking forward to a spot of leave. Your last four letters arrived together, my darling, so I have just spent a very happy hour with my family, catching up with all your doings. I am so proud of you for the way you dealt with the unruly soldiers, but next time please ring Hutch or John Batten. They are only minutes away from you by car and I know they would pop round and put a stop to any nonsense.
He arrived out of the blue on a glorious day in mid-November, emerging from a taxi with his greatcoat over his arm and that familiar half grin on his tanned face. Our separation had been by far the longest since we had met and I had suffered a secret fear, which I hardly admitted even to myself, that we might be awkward in each other’s company. I’d even had the odd ignoble thought that he might have fallen out of love with me. His letters had seemed stiff and slightly distant – I didn’t know at that stage about military censorship, and the effect it had on every serviceman’s correspondence. But when Denis wrapped me in his arms I knew immediately that nothing had changed. We were one again, two halves of a single entity.
Finally, he put me at arm’s length and looked at me critically. ‘You look well, Norma. There are roses in your cheeks.’
‘Cornwall’s Malt Extract,’ I said mysteriously, then surrendered him to the whooping boys.
He had brought chocolate and lemonade from the American PX store in Townsville, and the whole family gathered in the front bedroom to feast on these rare luxuries. Frances behaved, reaching respectfully for her father’s nose, the boys were more or less under control, and even Shirley remembered her manners well enough to let Denis finish his sentences. For my part, I sat back on the bedroom chair, looking from shining face to shining face and loving every minute. Occasionally, Denis would look at me across the scrum of heads around him and convey his love without uttering a word.
I didn’t ask Denis what he had been doing until we were safe in bed, chatting in half-whispers in the darkness. ‘Nothing too dangerous,’ he said quickly. ‘I’ve been more or less a taxi driver, darling. They gave me a Fairmile and I used it to pick up the odd coastwatcher when things got too hot for them on their islands.’ I knew about the coastwatchers, brave men who lived for months at a time on islands deep behind Japanese lines, broadcasting information about enemy movements and impending attacks. The thought of Denis dashing to and fro in seas stiff with Japanese ships and under skies stiff with Japanese planes made me shudder.
‘Haven’t you done enough?’ I asked. ‘Can’t they find someone else to do that sort of work? You did your share up in Singapore. For heaven’s sake, you’ve already had one ship sunk from under you.’
Denis lifted the curls gently from my forehead in an old, familiar gesture. ‘I’m just glad I’m not one of the poor devils stuck on an island,’ he said quietly. ‘I had a small dose of that sort of life, and I can tell you it’s no joke. On the qui vive every second, just waiting for a Jap patrol to stumble on you, or for a local to give you away for a fistful of Japanese notes. No, I’m very happy to be the pick-up boat. You are out for a night or two, then home to a decent bed.’
We didn’t make love that night. I think we had both expected to, and had looked forward to the moment of union with an almost physical ache. But instead we talked until dawn. About the children. About films we’d seen – silly American dramas full of music and always ending in happy tears. And we talked about Singapore and Whitelawns for the first time since the Empire Star. We fell asleep in each other’s arms so that I woke with my left hand numb because of Denis’s weight on my arm. But I didn’t move. I just lay there, wishing we could wake up like this every day for the rest of our lives.
Picnics were a popular Australian tradition in those days, and we embraced the tradition with enthusiasm during the glorious sunny days of early summer. We didn’t have a car so all our picnics were within walking distance of home, but that still gave us quite a choice. We found several spots on the foreshores of the Swan River, and there were delightful glades in the bushland behind our house. Shirley and I would make a cake the night before, and then get up early to cut the sandwiches and pack the basket ready for a quick getaway.
It was on our last picnic, before he was due to return to duty, that Denis took my hand. ‘How would you like to live in Melbourne?’ he asked.
I could think of nothing nicer. Mrs Batten had painted such a delightful picture of the city, with its broad streets and fine stone buildings, its parks, the Yarra River curving gracefully through its centre, that I knew I would fall in love with it immediately. ‘Is there any chance?’ I asked.
‘I’ve been made Staff Officer Intelligence for the Torres Straits,’ he said. ‘As an SOI, I report directly to the Director of Naval Intelligence in Melbourne, which makes Melbourne my home base. So how would you like to give the place a try? I have to return to duty after I meet up with Bill Reynolds, who arrives from India with the Krait tomorrow, and I’m afraid, after all this leave, that I won’t be able to get back for Christmas.
I must have looked very crestfallen at the prospect of no Denis at Christmas, because he gave me a big hug and said, ‘But the DNI has promised me a few days off at the end of December to help you pack up and organise the children. And we’ll all celebrate the New Year together, in Melbourne.’
Things happen quickly in wartime and it was less than a month later that we were pulling into Melbourne’s Spencer Street station on the Transcontinental Express, the boys tired and fractious after five days of travel, Shirley wide-eyed at the grandeur of a major city.
Melbourne did not disappoint me. It was exactly as Mrs Batten had described, spacious and full of old-world charm. On our first evening, after booking into the Victoria Hotel and putting the children to bed, Denis and I went exploring. It was a Sunday night and there was hardly anyone about so that the place had a gracious, unhurried look. Virtually the only vehicles moving on the broad streets were trams, tall, archaic-looking vehicles glowing with lights which added to the air of Edwardian splendour. We strolled down Swanston Street to the Yarra River and smoked a cigarette leaning against the parapet of Princes Bridge, the stone still warm under our arms after the heat of the day. On the far bank a band was playing, its music sweet and plaintive on the evening air.
‘I know I’m going to like Melbourne,’ I said. ‘It’s got a civilised feel about it. Almost European. It is so different from Perth that I don’t feel I’m in Australia at all.’
‘Don’t judge the whole of Australia by your experience of Perth,’ Denis said. ‘This is a huge country, darling. Each of the major cities has its own unique character. Sydney is different again. It has little graciousness about it, but one can’t deny its charm. Vibrant and cosmopolitan – rather like a newer, cleaner version of San Francisco.’
‘And what about Brisbane?’
Denis rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. ‘Rather gracious, but in a distinctly shabby sort of way. At the moment it’s chock full of Yanks, so one can’t really judge. It’s awfully hot and sticky.’
When we got back to the hotel there was a message from the Battens waiting for us:
John has let the cat out of the bag and told us you have arrived. Please come for dinner tomorrow night, and bring Shirley and the children. We will be splashing out with our coupons and having roast lamb. Come early so that the children can have a play. About five? God bless you all.
It was a lovely evening. Charles and Roberta Batten were as nice as I thought they would be, and we got on famously from the start. Shirley and I put Frances to sleep in her cot while the boys played in a nursery upstairs, then we gathered around the mahogany dining table for an early meal.
‘It is so nice to see a family around this table again,’ Roberta said after grace had been said and Charles began carving the roast. ‘We eat in the den now the boys have left – it’s so empty with only the two us in he
re.’ Then she looked at me with raised eyebrows. ‘I do hope you will come and stay with us, Norma. Denis will be off up north in a week or so, which won’t give you any time to find a place of your own. It would be awful for you all to stay in an hotel, and we’d love to have you here.’
I glanced inquiringly at Denis.
‘Don’t look at Denis,’ Charles cut in severely. ‘It’s your call, Norma. You know it would be sensible, and it would do Roberta a power of good to have young people around the place once again.’
‘There are a lot of us and we wouldn’t want to put you out at all . . .’ I began, but Tony interrupted. ‘Please can we live here, Mummy?’ he said. ‘There’s a skeleton upstairs, and Bobby and I want to see if it comes alive in the middle of the night.’
‘Jeff is studying medicine,’ Roberta put in quickly. ‘He does have an articulated skeleton in his room. We’ll lock it up if you think it might frighten the boys. But please do come. I’d be so disappointed if you didn’t.’
‘The skeleton doesn’t frighten us,’ Bobby said boldly. ‘If it moves we’ll smash it. Tony said it comes alive at midlight.’
‘Midnight,’ I corrected automatically. ‘And you will not smash it, do you hear? Even if it does move.’ I turned to Roberta. ‘We would love to accept your invitation. It is very, very gracious of you to offer.’
‘If that damned skeleton moves so much as an inch I’ll smash it myself,’ Charles said, winking at the boys. Then he turned to Denis. ‘Sensible woman, that wife of yours. We will look after them, I promise you.’
It was arranged as easily as that, and we moved in the next day. Denis and I had the downstairs guest room, the boys shared Jeff’s room on the second floor (complete with skeleton on a stand in one corner, which worried them not in the least), while Shirley slept in the large, old-fashioned nursery with little Frances.
Denis’s new appointment meant a promotion to acting lieutenantcommander, and he came home that night with the extra half-ring of gold on his sleeves and a briefcase full of material about Thursday Island, where he was to establish his headquarters. ‘It looks rather exciting,’ I said, trying to sound enthusiastic as I leafed through a book of photographs of the place. In fact, the settlement on Thursday Island looked small and squalid, hardly more than a collection of tin sheds on a dusty street.
‘Somerset Maugham called the place a shantytown full of dreamers and rogues,’ Denis said. ‘It also has one of the largest breeds of mosquito known to man.’
‘Oh, it might surprise you,’ Roberta said. ‘Thursday Island has an extraordinary history, and it’s produced some of the finest pearls in the world. You know they once thought it would be the next Singapore?’
‘I won’t be on the island much of the time,’ Denis said. ‘They’ve given me a boat, the Alvis, and I suspect I’ll spend most of my time on her.’
‘What will you be doing?’ Charles asked.
Denis grimaced. ‘Not a great deal, as I understand it. We’re putting a lot of supplies through the Straits at the moment, so no doubt I’ll be involved controlling shipping movements, and perhaps getting to know how things tick in the area. Rather tame stuff, really. The fighting is being done further north, on New Guinea itself. TI, as I understand the locals call it, is a bit of a backwater.’
It was music to my ears. We were sitting in comfortable chairs in the Battens’ lounge, surrounded by Roberta’s antique furniture, and the soft, well-bred ticking of her collection of French clocks. I lifted my own glass in a silent toast: Long may Denis remain in the quiet backwater of TI.
Two days later, the Battens joined us to see Denis off at Flinders Street station, the children leaping on him for last goodbyes, the adults restrained in the face of this important-looking man in his newly tailored tropical whites, with his two-and-a-half rings gleaming on his epaulettes. I kissed him almost shyly. ‘Try and visit Quetta Cathedral,’ I said, sounding prissy and banal even to my own ears. ‘I know there are some good books about TI, and I’ll send them up to you if I can.’ I wasn’t used to this formal sort of farewell, and I remember that I gave an awkward little laugh.
Denis didn’t say anything. He just gripped my elbows and put me at arm’s length, looking at me as if trying to imprint me on his mind. And then he let me go, and turned towards the train.
He was going into hell, and I think he knew.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The time we lived with the Battens in their home in Glenferrie Road, Kew was a period of great happiness. For a start, I didn’t have to worry about Denis. As a staff officer, I reasoned, he would be kept as far away from any fighting as possible. My fear that Denis might be killed had pressed on me so heavily and for so long that when it lifted I seemed to step more lightly upon the earth, as if gravity itself had somehow diminished.
The other factor that made life so happy was the affection that Roberta Batten offered me in such generous proportions. I became the daughter she had always wanted, and she became the loving mother I had always yearned for. The change in our relationship, from hostess and guest to mother and daughter, came about in the first week of our stay. We were standing in the hallway admiring an arrangement of flowers we had worked on together when she took each of my hands impulsively in hers. ‘It is so nice to have you here, Norma,’ she said. ‘It is like having a daughter in the home. Do you mind if I treat you as a daughter? That means I can do things for you, and you aren’t allowed to feel obligated, or to think I’m interfering.’
I was caught by surprise for a moment, but then smiled. ‘Only if you let me treat you as a mother, and spoil you rotten.’
‘Then it’s agreed,’ Roberta said briskly. ‘Well, the first thing you are going to let me do is to take you in to Myer’s Emporium tomorrow morning so we can get you some decent clothes. I’m afraid the stuff you bought in Perth went out of fashion here twenty years ago.’
So we went into Myer’s, Melbourne’s biggest department store, and Roberta did what loving mothers do for their daughters all over the world. She made me try on dresses, and sweaters, and skirts, and the odd coat until my head spun and my feet ached, and each time she either stood back and clicked her tongue, or nodded approval and reached for her chequebook. Then she asked me for my opinion on shoes, and hats, and belts, and handbags which she was considering buying for herself, and tut-tutted each time my judgement didn’t coincide with hers. Finally, we bundled all the bags and boxes into the back of a taxi and arrived home in time for a long cup of tea in the den, and a detailed post-mortem on our shopping spree. Halfway through the expedition, we had agreed that ‘Roberta’ was not an appropriate term of address given our new relationship, and after that I always called her ‘Aunt Batten’, with its connotation of family and gentle authority.
Aunt Batten’s acceptance of me as a grown-up daughter was only one of many whole-hearted gestures of friendship she had made throughout her life. Her strong Catholic faith was obviously one factor in her compulsion to do good works, but I believe that an even stronger factor was her sheer love of humanity. She loved people, and loved helping people. She had her frailties, of course, but they were good-hearted frailties. She loved to gossip, and she had a fund of stories of early Melbourne, picked up during a lifetime of afternoon teas with other Melbourne matrons at Buckley & Nunns. But none of her stories was unkind and none of them showed anybody as anything but idiosyncratic and lovable. She liked a good glass of sherry (‘I simply won’t drink Melbourne water, Norma’) and her struggle against the blandishments of French pastries had been a lifetime’s battle. Occasionally, just occasionally, she could be a snob, but afterwards she would be inevitably contrite. ‘I suffer the sin of pride, my dear,’ she would say. ‘Please don’t judge me too harshly. But you know, the truth is that the Myers might be a very grand family now, but they did once trundle a barrow of clothes around Melbourne to earn a living . . .’
Uncle Batten (he accepted the title with a discreet wink in my direction) was a strange amalgam of lar
rikin and crusader. Roberta had fallen in love with him when he’d been a knockabout student with an idealistic bent, keen to help the ‘working classes’. While his classmates had aspired to plush practices in the city, he had planned on a ‘shopfront’ clinic in one of the working suburbs. His altruism, by one of those quirks of fate that can occasionally encourage the belief that there may be a benign God after all, had led to fortune. His modest practice in Collingwood, where his patients paid only as much as they could afford, survived the Great Depression while his colleagues in Collins Street were wiped out by high rents and the collapse of their clients’ fortunes. Towards the end of the nineteen-thirties, Uncle Batten had a huge circle of loyal patients, all with cash in their pockets and debts of gratitude in their hearts. By the time the war started he was a wealthy man with a gracious family home and three sons training for the professions.
His career had not been without its hiccups, perhaps due to the larrikin streak that so worried Roberta. The main problem was a love of gambling. Not common or garden gambling as practised in the two-up schools of North Carlton or in the smoky Greek back-room casinos of Coburg, but gambling in the regal manner. Gambling on the Sport of Kings. Almost every Saturday he attended one or another of the great Melbourne racetracks – Caulfield, Flemington, Mentone – chancing his arm against the great rails bookies of the times. He was, naturally, a member of the Victorian Jockey Club and would spend the day dressed to the nines, drinking single malt whisky and talking horseflesh with his friends. Each Saturday evening a taxi would take him home cheerful and slightly sloshed, sometimes a winner, more often not. In 1936, just as he was achieving everything a man could wish for in terms of wealth and position, he had plunged everything on an alleged certainty. ‘Everything’ on this occasion meant literally everything – all his assets, a mortgage on the family home, even a substantial personal loan. On the night before the race he had been struck down with acute appendicitis. A friend operated on him on the afternoon of the race, and Uncle Batten came out of the anaesthetic with one question on his lips: ‘Did he win?’
In the Mouth of the Tiger Page 60
