The wretched nag hadn’t won, and the surgeon had to break the news in the recovery room while a nurse wiped anguished perspiration from Uncle Batten’s brow.
The Battens lost everything including their home. ‘But it was God’s will, and a blessing in disguise,’ Aunt Batten told me in her trusting, wide-eyed way, her Royal Albert cup poised dramatically in mid-air. ‘Charles has never laid a bigger bet than ten bob since that day. Now he goes to the races only for the love of the sport. He is a wiser and a better man for the experience.’ By the summer of 1942–43, he had completely recovered the family fortunes – and then some, as the Americans say. He had busy, comfortable rooms close to Flinders Street station, an even bigger family home than the one they had lost, and a beautiful black Buick parked in the garage.
The Buick was Uncle Batten’s Great Escape. He had installed a charcoal burner at the back of the car to overcome petrol rationing, and took delight in taking elaborate excursions out of Melbourne virtually every weekend. He would light up the burner just after breakfast on Saturday morning, and half an hour later we would be on our way, warm and dry under the hood if it were raining, enjoying the sunshine and cooling breeze if it were fine. Our excursions took us for miles. A favourite destination was the Log Cabin Restaurant up in the Dandenong Ranges, an hour’s drive out of the city. We would park beside the rustic timber restaurant and the children – including Frances, stumbling along determinedly behind the boys – would race for our usual table in the inglenook. The waitresses all knew us and took for granted that we were a single family. ‘You are very lucky to have such nice grandparents’’one of them once said to the children, and while Shirley looked up sharply I was pleased that the children did not demur.
Aunt Batten and I did have our disagreements, but they were few and far between and invariably disposed of with civility and grace. One of our disagreements was over the boys’ education. Aunt Batten hoped that I would send them to Xavier College, a Catholic school minutes away from Glenferrie Road, which had just opened a kindergarten. We ‘stumbled’ on the kindergarten during an afternoon ramble just after it had been opened, and Aunt Batten turned innocent eyes on me. ‘Goodness me,’ she said ingenuously. ‘Such a good school and so close to home! How absolutely perfect for mes enfants!’
‘Denis was brought up in the Church of England,’ I said. ‘I really don’t think I could put his sons into a Catholic school without discussing the matter with him.’
‘Oh what nonsense, Norma!’ Aunt Batten had almost snapped. ‘You went to a convent yourself, my dear. Put your foot down. Immortal souls are at stake.’
The argument lasted all afternoon, but I stuck to my guns. Even at dinner, Aunt Batten was silent, almost sulky. It was only when I said an early goodnight that she leapt up from her chair and put her arms around me. ‘You are of course quite right,’ she said quickly. ‘Denis’s wishes must be respected. Why don’t we agree that the boys go to Trinity Grammar until he comes home, and then you two can discuss the matter? Trinity is right next door to Xavier, and the boys could change to Xavier next year.’
Tony and Bobby started in kindergarten at Trinity at the beginning of February, and my days fell into the most delightful pattern. I would walk the boys to school, then spend the rest of the morning gardening or playing with Frances in the nursery. Shirley would collect the boys while Aunt Batten and I prepared lunch, and after the meal we would more often than not go out for the afternoon. We would take the tram to town, or catch a taxi to Albert Park so that the children could sail their model boats, or perhaps would walk up to the sports grounds at Xavier where the children could run and gambol to their hearts’ content.
I loved the evenings in particular. Once the children were in bed I’d join Aunt Batten in the den. We poured ourselves little glasses of sherry and sat at ease, talking about anything and everything under the sun. Art and politics, the countries we had visited, the latest films or plays, the latest scandals. Even, occasionally, the war. One thing we never touched on was the future, because we both knew that circumstances had given us an interlude from real life, a bubble of fantasy that would eventually have to burst. And when it did burst Aunt Batten would lose her daughter and her beloved enfants, and I would lose the mother I had come to adore.
Denis came home in the middle of winter looking thin and dreadfully ill, and the bubble burst. Suddenly I was no longer a cared-for, cherished daughter but a responsible wife and mother whose man needed her. The transformation occurred in just the few minutes it took me to help Denis out of the Navy car and into our bedroom. He had suffered dysentery and then dengue fever up on Thursday Island, and been evacuated by air to Brisbane, where the doctors had immediately sent him south. He was so weak that I had to help him change into his pyjamas. He was asleep the instant his head hit the pillow.
Sitting with him in the darkened bedroom, I decided that I had to make plans for both of us. For a start I’d have to do something about accommodation. Denis hated being beholden to anyone, and I realised that even though he got on famously with the Battens it would irk him to be their guest for more than a day or so. That meant I would have to arrange for us to rent somewhere, and as quickly as possible.
I went looking for the previous Saturday’s copy of the Age. Aunt Batten had taken the children into the den and when I popped my head in, looking for it, she immediately put two and two together and followed me out into the hall. ‘Denis wants you to find a place of your own?’ she asked, her wide eyes on my face.
‘I know he would want us to get a place of our own,’ I said gently. ‘He’s very sick, Aunt Batten. I will need to move things along myself while he is unwell. I will be awfully sorry to leave.’
We stood together in silence for a moment, holding hands. The lovely interlude was over, and just for a moment we paused to grieve its passing.
The war touched me that night as it hadn’t touched me for nearly a year. Denis developed a fever and as I sponged his face and chest, and propped him up against the pillows, he struggled to tell me something important. ‘The Mamutu,’ he said. ‘They machine-gunned everyone, even the babies. But she was only the first. They got the Patricia Cam as well. They came back and tried to machine-gun the lot. It is all quite deliberate, Nona, and you’ve got to tell someone. They mean to scare our civilian crews, to keep our supply ships out of the Torres Straits.’ By about four o’clock in the morning he was rambling incoherently. When I took his temperature it was over one hundred and Uncle Batten called the doctor. The ambulance came for him at five, and as I stood in light Melbourne drizzle helping to lift his stretcher aboard, I promised God I’d have a place of our own for him to come home to.
Just before they closed the ambulance doors he called out to me. ‘I killed him in cold blood, Nona,’ he said, suddenly frighteningly coherent. ‘There was nothing in the bundle at all. Just the cigarettes. And I blew off the top of his head.’
It was full-blown malaria, and coming on top of dysentery and dengue fever it was nearly fatal. But a week later he was on the mend, and I could tell him that we had a home arranged. It was an attractive timber bungalow in Alto Avenue in Croydon, one of Melbourne’s prettier outer suburbs.
Denis was discharged from hospital in early May and after that it took only a couple of weeks for him to recover his strength, which I put down to Cornwall’s Malt Extract and the fact that I could look after him properly in our own home. Winter that year was settled and warm, giving us still, sunny days during which we could sit outdoors on deck chairs in our leafy back garden. Later on we began to take long, slow walks through the beautiful Victorian countryside and I could almost see the fresh air doing him good. The yellow leached from his face to be replaced by a healthy pink, and the small frown that had taken possession of his brow faded day by day.
But while his physical health was returning, Denis was still a long way from being himself. He was unusually quiet, often almost taciturn, and never spoke of what he had been doing up north. In fact, if
I asked anything about Thursday Island he would turn away abruptly, his lips compressed. ‘Don’t harp on things, Norma,’ he would snap, quite unfairly. I became convinced that something had happened which still distressed him, and that he would never be free of it until he had got it off his chest. I was sure that Dr Lawrence would have been able to help, but of course Dr Lawrence was thousands of miles away and his type is desperately hard to find. The Repatriation Hospital in Heidelberg might have fixed up my husband’s body but they obviously didn’t have a clue how to fix his mind.
The weather broke on the first day of spring, and the storm that night kept us all awake. The children couldn’t sleep as the wind howled around the bungalow and hail rattled on the roof. In the early hours the boys, and then even Shirley, joined us in our bedroom. Shirley’s excuse was concern for Frances: ‘The little kid needs me,’ she said earnestly, Frances asleep and quite oblivious in her arms. The boys slept with us while Shirley made up a bed of eiderdowns to share with Frances in the corner of the room.
The storm was suddenly over. Denis and I lay warm and snug in the middle of the bed, our family fast asleep all around us and the only sound the reassuring patter of raindrops on the roof above.
Suddenly Denis began to talk, at first lying on his back beside me, then propped up on his elbow to watch my face. ‘We have broken their naval code, you see,’ he said, ‘so we are reading everything they say. The problem is that we can’t let them know we’re reading their signals or they would change the code. It causes us awful problems because sometimes we know something but can’t act on the information or it would give the game away. Sometimes we find out who on our side is spilling the beans to the Japs, but if we did anything to the blighter the Japs would know we were on to them.’
‘Is that why you had to kill someone?’ I asked intuitively.
Denis was silent for a long time. Finally he gave a great sigh. ‘He was a Dutch Eurasian, working for the Japs on an island north of the Coral Sea. When we put in coastwatchers he found out and made contact with the party. He helped them with provisions and so on, and we thought he was on our side. But just when we were about to launch an operation in the area, we found out from Jap naval signals that he had been tipping them off all along.’
Denis sat up quietly and reached for a cigarette, lighting one for me as well. The rain had increased to a steady downpour, drumming loudly on the tin roof while the first glimmers of a grey morning penetrated the chintz curtains.
‘We couldn’t tell the coastwatchers what we knew, so the DNI sent me up to the island with orders to bump the fellow off as quietly as possible.’
Denis drew deeply on his cigarette, allowing the smoke to escape his lips in a long, thin spiral. ‘I liked the man, Norma. He was a small, wiry little fellow, and deuced friendly. He called on the coastwatcher camp just after I arrived. When he was about to set off home I asked if I could walk with him for a while, to have a confidential chat. I think he smelt a rat and didn’t want to be alone with me but I insisted. We walked a mile or so and then I asked to see what he was carrying in his pack. I hoped he had a gun in there. I prayed he had a gun.’
Denis was silent for so long this time that I worried that he might have dried up. ‘Did he have a gun?’ I prompted finally.
‘I pulled my service revolver on him and ordered him off the path. I said I wanted to make sure he didn’t have a gun. I think he guessed the game was up and argued like the blazes. As soon as we were away from the path I made him kneel down and open the pack. He was so frightened that the poor blighter couldn’t get the buckle undone. He tried to duck just as I shot him, so the bullet knocked off the top of his head. It was dreadful, Norma. Dreadful.’
I didn’t know what to say, so I just lay there.
‘Of course there was no gun,’ Denis went on, his voice suddenly steadier. ‘But there were two or three tins of cigarettes, each one labelled with the name of a coastwatcher. He’d obviously brought them along as presents but forgotten to hand them out. My unexpected presence probably scared him from the start. I took the cigarettes back with me and told the fellows he’d asked me to deliver them for him. It added veracity to the story that we had parted as friends.’
‘What did the Japs do when he didn’t get back to them?’ I asked.
Denis drew thoughtfully on his cigarette. ‘When he disappeared the Japs thought he had defected to us. They rounded up his family and shipped them off to a labour camp in Japan. We got the whole story, of course, from their signals.’
The confession seemed to do Denis an immense amount of good. Over the next few days he returned almost to normal. I say ‘almost’ because there was still something different about him. His casual, open nature had been put on hold, replaced by a kind of careful wariness that I had not seen before. He seemed to be waiting for something or someone, and when the phone rang or there was a knock on the door he would give a quite uncharacteristic start. He went into Melbourne for whole days at a time, and though I asked if I could accompany him he refused. ‘I need to get my sea legs back,’ he would say. ‘I need to learn to look after myself again.’
One afternoon – it was a day or so before he was due to return to duty – we were shopping in our little village of Croydon when he gave a little start and gripped my arm. A man had come into the shop, a big man in a raincoat, with a soft hat pulled low over his face.
He looked like every unconvincing spy in every B grade movie ever made.
Denis steered me outside to the pavement. ‘Look, I’ve got to have a quiet word with that chap,’ he said hurriedly. ‘I’m sorry to have to ask this of you, dear, but please shove off home. I’ll be with you in an hour or so.’
He was home in less than an hour, and when I saw him coming in through our front gate I strode out to meet him. ‘I have never been so insulted in my life,’ I snapped. ‘Aren’t I fit company to meet your friend, or are you ashamed to introduce him to me? Whatever the reason, please never put me in that position again.’ Behind my bluster was a sharp edge of concern. My instinct told me that the man in the shop had something to do with the tension Denis had been under, and I didn’t want his newfound peace of mind put to the test too soon.
Denis chuckled, and for the first time in ages I saw a real twinkle of amusement in his eyes. ‘That was a chap called Makarov, a countryman of yours. Makarov is the head of Soviet Intelligence in Australia. I couldn’t introduce him to you because you’re supposed to know all about him. In fact, you are supposed to have urged me to meet him.’ He grabbed my arm and swung me back towards the gate. ‘We need to talk, my dear. Let us take a little stroll.’
I felt the tendrils of Denis’s secret service life touch me, and an involuntary shudder swept through me. I’d almost forgotten that side of our lives. The secrets, the deceptions, the need to appear something you are not. And, I suppose, the thrill. The tingle in the fingertips that comes from having adrenaline in the blood.
We took our usual walk, following White Horse Lane out into the green winter countryside. As soon as we were alone Denis stopped and faced me, his hands on my shoulders. ‘We’ve been given a rather special chance to help win the war,’ he said. ‘I say “we” because you’ve rather been the key to everything.’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’ I asked.
‘We need to pass some information on to the Russians,’ he said. ‘Crucial information that will help them to beat the Germans on the Eastern Front. But we can’t give it to them openly because they don’t trust us and they would think it was a trick. On top of which our own people won’t allow us to give secrets to the Communists. So I’m going to have to “betray” the stuff to them. Take on the role of a well-placed intelligence officer who has turned against his own country. That way they’ll believe it, and the blimps on our side won’t be any the wiser.’
‘What do you mean about being a well-placed intelligence officer?’ I asked.
‘I’m about to start work as the DNI’s personal assistant,
’ Denis said. ‘The chap who handles all his secret signals, a fact the Russians will know all too well.’
I felt the need to sit down, and pulled Denis towards the grassy bank on the side of the road. At that moment some schoolboys came in sight, cheeky little urchins who rolled their eyes at us and made loud kissing sounds, assuming we were a courting couple looking for privacy. I looked at them coldeyed until they had gone and then turned to Denis. ‘And how do I come into it?’ I asked. ‘You said I was the key to everything. I don’t know any secrets, and the Soviets don’t know me from a bar of soap.’
‘They certainly do know you from a bar of soap,’ Denis said. ‘In fact they have a great deal of respect for you. They know you rebuffed Prince Gagarin, who they think of as a traitorous Quisling. It was only when I told them that it was you who had talked me into offering them secret material that they took me seriously. Until then they thought I was a plant, a double agent trying to penetrate their organisation.’
I felt my head spinning. ‘How on earth do they know about Prince Gagarin?’ I asked. ‘And as far as I remember, I didn’t refuse to help the Prince. It’s just that I didn’t get a chance to help him.’
Denis cleared his throat. ‘I told Gagarin that you were opposed to what he was trying to do,’ he admitted, ‘and that you had forbidden him to approach you ever again. Your opposition became a bit of an issue amongst the émigré community in Malaya, which is no doubt how the Soviets came to hear about it. They had penetrated Gagarin’s group from the beginning, of course.’ He looked at me a little apologetically. ‘I hope you’ll forgive me for sticking my oar in, but for all his charm and grace Gagarin was working against us. The Russian Royalists want the Communists to lose this war. That means they want the Nazis to win.’
In the Mouth of the Tiger Page 61
