The captain called Denis, and he visited the ship and talked with the men. He told them that recent sinkings and acts of terrorism by the Japanese had been intended to achieve just this result, to stop supplies getting to New Guinea. He told them that if that happened the lives of those fighting on New Guinea would be put at greater risk. But the two ringleaders were obdurate, and the talks ended in stalemate. That night, the two ringleaders – Dixon’s ‘God-fearing, decent men sticking up for their mates’ – had somehow been lured ashore and had disappeared. The next morning Denis and his assistant, Lieutenant King, had called the crew of the Baralaba back together and presented them with a letter, jointly signed by the two ringleaders, urging them to carry on with the trip to Marauke.
The Baralaba had sailed on the 20th of March and delivered its ordnance to Marauke Force. A dozen other ships which had been watching proceedings with interest also carried on with their schedules. ‘Denis got a lot of credit for that,’ Dixon said bitterly. ‘But the two men had disappeared. A week later the story came out. They had been tricked into going ashore, and then tortured into signing the letter. After that they had been fed to the sharks. That’s your precious Denis for you.’
‘A truly dreadful story,’ I smiled. ‘And it had a salutary effect, didn’t it? No other ships mutinied, did they? The truth was, Mr Dixon, that the two God-fearing men you admire so much were found to be Japanese agents. They disappeared because they went to gaol – and as far as I know they are still there.’ It was the best I could do at such short notice, but it impressed Dixon. I led him back to the table and curtseyed ironically. ‘You said you needed to leave us, didn’t you Mr Dixon?’ I said sweetly.
And he duly nodded, and left the table.
I felt no sense of triumph. In fact I felt nothing at all. I was completely numb, my mind a desolate blank. Dixon’s scenario was much more likely than the one I had invented. Of course the men had been killed. But how could Denis – my sweet, gentle Denis – have been so cruel?
They were, when all was said and done, God-fearing decent men who were sticking up for their mates. They had not deserved to die. In a way, their fate was no different to Rajeev Srinivasan’s fate. Rajeev had died to further ‘our’ cause. The two seamen had died, it seemed to me, for precisely the same reason.
I looked at Denis, still toying with his melted ice-cream. I had thought we had a pact. To play the game on the side of the angels, whatever the odds.
All night, the thought of Denis being involved in the death of two innocent men pressed against my heart. Thank God I didn’t dream, but my waking thoughts were bad enough. When the morning light finally stole though the portholes, I got up and dressed, then sat in one of the cabin chairs waiting for the steward to bring in our tea.
Denis slept like a baby, his face relaxed, youthful in the soft morning light. There was a strange, twisting pain in my breast. Love, and horror, all bound up together so that the one reacted with the other to increase the pain. I ached to shake him awake, to pound on his chest, demanding that he tell me that it was not true that he had killed innocent men.
Suddenly I realised that he was awake, looking at me as I bent towards him, my eyes blinded by my thoughts.
‘Penny for your thoughts?’ he asked, and I couldn’t help recoiling, my mouth opening in shock.
Denis sprang up and gripped my shoulders fiercely. ‘Whatever is the matter?’ he demanded, staring into my face. ‘You look as if you have seen a ghost.’ And then, when I couldn’t answer, his voice softened and he took me in his arms. ‘What is wrong, darling? Please tell me. You look absolutely stricken.’
Of course I broke down. All my good resolutions fled like shadows before the sun and the tears welled in my eyes. ‘I’m so unhappy!’ I wailed. ‘That man Dixon told me what you did to the people on the Baralaba. I know that you had to kill them. It was war and you had to get the ships moving again. But they were just trying to help their mates. And what about their wives? It would have been so awful, because nobody could tell them anything. Only that their husbands were dead . . .’ I was babbling incoherently, hardly aware what I was saying, but I did feel Denis stiffen and I braced myself for the confession.
But there was no confession. Instead, Denis pushed me to one side and stood up. Laughing. At first just a gentle, almost silent laugh, but as I sat there staring at him it became a healthy, rumbling belly laugh. Denis was literally shaking with mirth, his eyes dancing, his hands outstretched to me in a gesture of happy helplessness.
‘You silly girl,’ he managed eventually. ‘Oh, woman of little faith. Did you really believe that I would kill a couple of chaps just to get a miserable little cargo ship moving?’
‘The two ringleaders disappeared,’ I said, a little affronted. ‘What did you do with them?’
‘What did I do with them? I put them both on a seaplane for Brisbane, where they joined an American ship bound for San Francisco at four times their existing wages. The Yanks owed me a favour, and I took them up on it. All they had to do was sign our letter to their shipmates, imploring them to carry on.’ Denis subsided on the berth beside me. He could see how unhappy I had been and put an arm around me. ‘We let the story run about them disappearing,’ he said gently. ‘It did no harm, reminding those fellows what their duty was. But I’m sorry it caused you pain. And it was very naughty of Jan Dixon to tell you such a silly tale.’
‘Don’t say anything to Dixon,’ I pleaded. ‘I virtually forced the story out of him after he made a couple of insinuations. I was upset last night, but I’m well and truly over it.’ In fact, I was suddenly feeling quite terrific. Denis had been reinstated as the man he had been before the war. Gentle, and thoughtful, and caring. I chuckled gently. And devilish clever into the bargain.
A storm hit the Marella the next day, with howling winds and long, steep swells. By mid-morning we were rolling so badly that there was flooding on the lower decks and some passengers had to be moved from their cabins. But I loved every minute. Denis and I walked on the top deck, riding the ship’s motion as one would ride a horse, enjoying the tumult and the stinging rain in our faces. I had the man I loved back beside me, and I couldn’t help reaching out and touching him. ‘Stay as sweet as you are,’ I kept saying, knowing that the words would be whipped away by the wind but also knowing that Denis understood.
The happiness of the voyage spilled over into our two weeks in Melbourne, making what we had thought might be something of a trial into the most glorious holiday imaginable. We had missed the first few days of term, but Aunt Batten had already arranged the boys’ admission so that all that was required was kitting them out and saying goodbye. Kitting-out was a pleasure. Aunt Batten and I spent a delightful couple of days in town, buying uniforms from Kennedy’s in Little Collins Street, school and sports shoes from Jeffery & Co., and all incidentals and extras from Myer’s.
Saying goodbye to the boys wasn’t quite so nice. We said our farewells in the headmistress’s study, a Dickensian room with oak-panelled walls and leaded windows overlooking a rose garden. The headmistress herself, Miss McComas, was something of a legend in Victorian educational circles. McComas (her Christian name was known only, I am sure, to God and the Victorian Premier) was a thin, severe-looking woman who had already educated a brace of future Australian prime ministers and who could afford to suffer parents as necessary evils in the education system. ‘In the first term you will communicate with your sons only if absolutely necessary,’ she said almost before we had shaken hands. ‘I find that contact unsettles them. In second term, one letter per month. No more, but also no less. Your sons will be well looked after but they are here to be educated in the fullest sense of the word, and that means learning to stand on their own two feet.’
I looked at little Robert, only six and half years old, and suddenly found a catch in my breathing. God no! I told myself. Do not cry, Nona – above all else do not cry!
‘I will want to know how they are settling in,’ Denis said crisply. I
could see he was not impressed, and his eyes were dangerously blue.
‘The boys will be in the charge of a housemaster who will report to me daily on how they are settling. I will also satisfy myself that they are fitting in. If you are at all concerned, you may phone me. I assume there are telephones in Malaya?’ Miss McComas’s voice softened slightly. ‘Of course they will be very homesick for the first day or so. But this is a happy school, Mr Elesmere-Elliott. If both boys are not settled within a week or so, I will be very surprised indeed.’ She flashed a look at me. ‘I know you will be a long way away but please do not worry overmuch. There have been several young men from Malaya boarding here, and I know of none of them who did not settle in perfectly well.’
And then Miss McComas did something quite extraordinary. We were sitting around her table drinking tea, with the boys sitting demurely by a bookcase with encyclopaedias on their laps. Miss McComas rose from the table and went over to them, taking one beneath each arm. ‘I’m going to take you to meet your housemaster,’ she said, kneeling for a moment with them, the sweetest smile on her face. ‘But before we go, you will want to say goodbye to your parents.’
The boys gave us each a restrained peck on the cheek, and then they were gone, and Denis and I were left staring at each other in the empty room. It was the first time we had ever been parted from our sons, but it had been done so quickly, so cleanly, that it had seemed almost routine.
‘Do you think they will be all right?’ I asked, and Denis nodded slowly.
‘She frightens the dickens out of me,’ he said. ‘But I noticed that all the students seem to love her. But do you honestly think they were taking in those encyclopaedias she gave them?’ I though perhaps they hadn’t understood a word, but I sensed the point Miss McComas had been making. That they were grown-up now.
We had a week to ourselves before the Himalaya sailed for Singapore, and we thoroughly enjoyed it. We had taken rooms at the Nangunya Private Hotel on St Kilda Road, and hired a Humber car to make ourselves mobile. Uncle Batten took a week away from the surgery, and we spent every day together. We went up to the Dandenongs and had tea at the Log Cabin, we spent a day on the beach at Rosebud, and – on the second last day in Melbourne – we bought a racehorse. Culver King was a big chestnut colt who had already proved himself at several provincial meetings, and Uncle Batten could not believe his good fortune when Denis asked him to supervise his training and racing program. The rough plan was to set him for the big spring races, when Denis and I expected to be back in Melbourne to collect the boys.
The Battens gave us a surprise send-off party on board the Himalaya. It was a complete surprise, and its start was not promising. Denis was not pleased, I could see that, and tiny Frances took fright at all the strangers in our cabin and had one of her shouting sessions. But once things settled down I have to say I had a really good time. There were flowers and boxes of chocolates all around the cabin, a waiter had been laid on to serve canapés and champagne. The DNI was there, looking strange out of uniform, Rye and the new Mrs Ryecroft (there had been a wartime romance), and the Brookes. I’d only met the Brookes once or twice, but Denis had known Sir Norman for years and we all got along famously. In fact, after the third or fourth champagne Lady Brookes led me into a corner and gave me an outrageous wink. ‘We are two of a kind, you know my dear. Spies!’
I had had a champagne or two myself at that stage, but I merely smiled back enigmatically. ‘It beats reading Woman’s Weekly,’ I said.
We talked together like close sisters after that. Or rather Mabel talked and I listened, and pretended to know more than I did. Because the Brookes – Mabel, Norman and Norman’s brother Herbert – were in the thick of the spying game and had been for years. And in our own particular league of the spying game as well. Sir Norman had beaten Maxine Elliott’s beloved Tony Wilding for the Wimbledon crown just before the Great War and become a close friend. At long, sunlit afternoons at Heartsburn, Maxine Elliott’s English manor house, he and his industrialist brother Herbert had been courted by Stewart Menzies and been drawn inexorably into the ranks of the Linlithgow Hunt. Herbert had run Australia’s first Intelligence bureau, and other members of the Brookes family had also played their parts. Elaine, Mabel’s pretty, dark-haired daughter, had actually worked as a receptionist for General MacArthur, and reported daily to her MI6 contacts on who the great man saw – or refused to see.
‘Oh, my dear, but it was at Elm Tree House that we were at our clever best,’ Mabel boasted. She put a hand theatrically across her mouth but then removed it. ‘I can tell you because you are one of us. We had all the most important Americans dancing to our tune. American Intelligence looked down their collective nose at poor Australia, but we knew their secrets before they did!’ She was not exaggerating about the important Americans whose spiritual home in Australia was Elm Tree House: one of them, Lyndon Johnson, was to become an American president.
Finally, visitors were ordered ashore, the streamers were thrown, the sirens blown, and then we were at sea. Denis and I sat with a weary Frances on the Boat Deck until the sky began to darken and the evening star appeared.
‘Happy?’ Denis asked, and I just smiled in the shadows. I knew I would miss the boys, but Lady Mabel’s babbling friendship had somehow made the work we were involved in – the secret work ahead in Singapore – seem familiar and worthwhile. I felt as though I were a member of a band of brothers, and perhaps not the most unsuitable member for our work. After all, I’d learnt a lot about the Brookes, and given away not a single thing about the Elesmere-Elliotts.
Our secret work began almost from the day we returned to Singapore. John Galvin had established an office just along Collier Quay from Elesmere-Elliott and Co., and we met him there on a dark, rainy afternoon. The furniture had not yet arrived so we sat on folding chairs around a packing case while John extracted some papers from his briefcase and spread them out in front of him.
‘Basically, what we’ve got here,’ John said rather complacently, ‘is about ninety million pounds worth of confiscated Japanese goods and chattels. It’s documented and safely stored, and it’s all ours to dispose of to whom we choose. We pay the War Reparations Commission their percentage only after we’ve been paid by the middlemen, so it’s virtually a ticket to print money. If it wasn’t all quite above board it would be downright criminal.’
‘Why don’t the Reparations people sell the stuff to the highest bidder instead of selling it through us?’ I asked reasonably.
Both men looked at me, and then John tapped the papers in front of him. ‘Because the resources of the War Reparations Commission aren’t on the public record. And because information – intelligence – has to be paid for somehow, and paying for it this way means we escape the eagle eye of the auditors and the self-righteous do-gooders who want our Government to know what’s going on, but don’t want to know how they know.’
So that afternoon, in a rather dingy room with a sumatra rattling the windows, we divided the distribution rights to ninety million pounds worth of confiscated tin and rubber, tea and rice, steel and manufactured goods. My job was to keep track of who was going to sell what, and I did it by the simple expedient of ruling a page in an exercise book in half and listing what Denis would sell on one side of the line, and what John would sell on the other. It really was as simple as that.
And then we drove around to the Cricket Club for dinner, and dined on cold sandwiches washed down by lukewarm stengahs because the generators had failed yet again and Singapore was without electricity.
Chapter Thirty-One
Casuarinas was no substitute for Whitelawns, but we did come to love it for its own unique if awkward charm. It was rather badly designed, with the bedrooms strung out in a long row with our room at the end so that it took an age to fetch a wrap from the wardrobe if the evening cooled, or to come up to find a drink in the middle of the night. The house was also curiously oriented in its acre of garden so that even though we were virtually on the bea
ch we could hardly see the sea from any of the windows. And our own bedroom, large and airy though it was, opened over a fern-choked stream that looked picturesque but hummed with mosquitos all night long. But we had Amah, and Chu Lun, and half the Chu clan to look after us, and sometimes I’d wake up to a hot clear morning and hear the waves lapping on our beach, and feel totally at home.
Denis was immensely busy that first year, setting up his company and establishing his ring of secret agents. ‘Establishing his ring of secret agents’, said in cold blood after so many years, sounds bizarre even to my ears. But that was precisely what Denis was doing. Cheng Swee recruited fellow towkeys into his growing circle with offers of credit and cheap goods from the Reparations Commission stocks, and then slowly turned them into agents. At first they were friends and sounding boards, and then, as their obligations and commitments grew, they became loyal sources of information and influence. The tentacles of the organisation spread all over Malaya, with local rings being established in all the commercial centres – KL, Penang, Johore Bahru and Seremban. We even established contacts in Sumatra, both amongst the emerging Indonesian elite and also with the leaders of the various rebel groups. Those were exciting, heady days, and though I didn’t actually do anything, Denis kept me so completely in the picture that I felt part of a great adventure. I would preside at gracious dinner parties, all innocence, cool charm and elegance, and lift a silent toast to my fellow-conspirator through the cigar smoke. We two knew precisely what we were toasting – romance, and secret danger, and duty done.
At night after such a dinner party Denis and I would chatter together in bed like children, happy winners in the game we had chosen to play. And I would feel quite sorry for all those outside our magic circle, decent men and women leading decent, humdrum lives in a banal, predictable world, unaware of the dance of colours just beneath their noses.
In the Mouth of the Tiger Page 66
