The Widow & Her Hero (10 page)

Up to you, I said, a bit surprised. I can't go. I don't want to.

No need to bother Dotty with the details, he told me. I don't
think Dotty likes her.

I thought I knew him. I didn't think he was an altar boy. But
I didn't know he'd compromise me like that. For a drink and
God knows what else with a good-looking mad woman. On
our operations, life is so simple, and we all know everything
we need to know about each other. Now, on the way to knife
pigs, he was making the world complicated again. I wanted to
go home and hug Grace. But I had to cover myself with pigs'
blood before they'd let me.

During our joint tenancy, Dotty and I liked to get ready
for the return of our men by cooking a communal
dinner – a pleasant exercise of sisterhood. Talking, talking,
we cleaned and mashed the spuds, debated how much
butter we could spare to make them appetising, and shelled
heroes' quantities of green peas. Occasionally, as we
chatted, she might go and find a book from the bedroom,
stand with a frown thumbing through it and, finding the
page, hand it to me to read while she went back to stirring
the vegetable pot or reducing the flame beneath it.

I have said this before, in one or two literary magazine
interviews, that Dotty was my chief educator. I thought
Spender's poetry, which I read at Dotty's urging, astounding.
That's putting it mildly. Spender, with his talk of the
treachery of banks and cathedrals and the insanity of
rulers, had nothing in common with me, and my innocent
father, a good servant of society and a survivor of
the world Depression, would have found his socialism
offensive.

Spender also had little time for punctuation. He was too
busy educating the reader in the space of one poem.

Before the war, before her travels, Dotty had met Louis
MacNeice at a party in Bloomsbury. Evelyn Waugh, of
whom until then I had never heard, had told her offhandedly
that he disliked stringy women like her, that they
generally had narrow opinions and tendencies to 'improve'
men. That was after she had published her novel, and was
ripe to be put in her place by other writers. Breaking away
from such posturers, she had begun her rough travels in
Turkey and the Middle East, and met Mortmain on the
beach in Penang.

Let's have a gin before the men get home, she always
suggested, and I agreed to the idea as if it was something
daring and revolutionary, which indeed it still was in my
terms.

On my second afternoon in Melbourne, we hadn't
finished it when Leo let himself in. Seeing me evoked such
a frank joy in his face that I felt myself instantly exempt
from the wistfulness of Dotty's earlier poem. Cooking's
afoot! he yelled, and lifted me and carried me around the
living room and back to the kitchen. Dotty was smiling
too at this demonstration of exuberant love. He put me
down.

You're stacking on the weight, old girl, he said, imitating
a husband of greater age, a Braidwood pastoralist, say.
Then he frowned. Rufus won't be back for a while, he told
Dotty, and her face clouded.

Where is he?

Leo said uncomfortably, I'm not sure. I think he might
have gone down to Port Melbourne to inspect something,
a vessel, you know. He can't always tell what they might
expect of him.

How long is this inspection to take? asked Dotty.

Leo made a pained face.

Dotty asked again, Will he be home for dinner?

Leo told her, Well, he didn't actually tell me he wouldn't
be.

We turned down the stove and waited, and Leo kept on
apologising to Dotty as if it were his fault.

He said, Grace and I might go to the pictures. If Rufus is
back in time, perhaps you and he would like to come too.
It's Errol Flynn.

Then you'll be looking at yourself on the screen, I joked.

Wasn't he arrested this year for rape? asked Dotty, as if
our happiness bothered her.

I'm not sure, said Leo. I hope not. He's a Tasmanian,
you know.

Leo and I were pleased to eat dinner hurriedly while
listening to the ABC news and then get away to the
pictures. Errol Flynn was a Norwegian villager who stood
up against the Nazis. He was starting to look older than
Leo, like an elder brother. But his eyes still glittered on
the screen and I was sure he couldn't possibly be guilty of
rape.

When we got home at eleven, the flat felt cold and we
heard a shrill question from Dotty in the Mortmain
bedroom and the appeasing rumble from Rufus.

Let's go to bed, said Leo, looking very grim but then
smiling broadly.

The next morning, Leo and I encountered all the worst
aspects of sharing the flat. Dotty was thunderously silent,
and Rufus behaved like someone in a play, the breezy
fellow who enters towards the end of act one, tennis racket
in hand, sweater over shoulders, oblivious to the crisis
that's overtaken all the other characters. In as far as he
could dance, he danced around Dotty, his comedic glass in
his eye, trying too hard. Could I pass you the milk, dear?
Try this marmalade a Yank gave me. And so on.

I now know what was happening with Charlie Doucette in
England at that time. He had fallen in love with an appliance
of war, a sort of sub-submarine, a little boat piloted
by one man. This vessel could proceed on the surface by
battery power, it required no paddles. It could also
submerge, so that only the driver's head was visible, or it
could go underwater entirely, the driver wearing goggles,
and with an oxygen supply device clamped between his
lips. The record shows it was an Englishman, Major
Frampton, who introduced him to it and to a young
instructor named Sub-Lieutenant Lower who could do the
loop-the-loop with it underwater. Doucette wanted a go at
it. If he could handle it, it would be very suitable for his
buccaneering plans.

I believe that, when he practised aboard the submersible
in the deep, dark water of a reservoir outside London,
Doucette dealt easily with the normal human problems of
fear of drowning, of underwater claustrophobia in water
greyer and dimmer than the greyest, dimmest English sky.
Doucette was first of all a creature of water, and I doubt he
had too many of the normal phobias. Doucette had to be
lived up to by other men who knew normal, pedestrian
fears. A man who would know fear, the Englishman
Frampton, the inventor of the little submersibles, reacted
to Doucette's enthusiasm for the machine and pleaded to
be allowed to come with Doucette and have a role in
Doucette's new enterprise. Doucette said, I'll fix it! From
some of his men he required months of punishing training.
With others, a burst of enthusiasm was enough.

On his English journey, Doucette also visited a British
mine-laying submarine, and found out that if you built
special containers for the submersibles, a number of them
could be transported in the compartments generally
devoted to mines.

His mother, Lady Doucette, was living with her English
relatives in Wiltshire. She had left Dublin for the time being
as a protest against de Valera's insistence that Ireland
remain neutral. She was the descendant of those hard-up
English gentry who had married into the Doucettes' ready
cash, giving the Doucettes social cachet while the Doucettes
paid the bills. For whatever reason, Doucette had given
SOE her address as his care-of address in Britain. Lady
Doucette was a robust woman, but she later told Mark
Lydon she sought the normal reassurances from Charles
that a mother should. In his book, Lydon sets down, accurately
or not, a standard mother–son conversation:

How are your quarters?

Quite comfortable, thanks, Ma.

And you wouldn't do anything ill-advised?

Of course not, Ma. I intend to come back and take you
dancing.

The conversation sounds credible. Though it's dying out,
that understated language is still used by the sort of British
gents my second husband, Laurie Burden, had business
with. But in Doucette's day, it was a sort of safety net
thrown over the cruelties that young men could inflict, and
have inflicted on them.

The evening of his visit to his mother and aunt, Doucette
caught the village taxi to the local railway station. He
was about to be returned to Australia by a succession of
military aircraft. A quarter of an hour after he left, an
urgent telegram arrived for him. After some discussion,
Lady Doucette and her stepsister called the police to come
and collect the telegram and rush it to the station. The train
had already left for London by the time they got it there, so
they brought it back to Lady Doucette. They must open the
telegram, the two women decided, so that its contents
could be relayed to a number at SOE in Baker Street,
London.

The telegram, from the International Committee of the
Red Cross, begged to inform that Doucette's wife and son,
Minette and Michael, were alive, and prisoners of the
Japanese. They were presently held in Satsuoka internment
camp in Japan, and were in moderately good health. The
SS
Tonkin
, on which they had been travelling to join
Doucette in India, had been intercepted in the Indian
Ocean by the German raider
Jaguar
. Its commander gave
Tonkin
's captain a choice between capture and being blown
to pieces. For the sake of his passengers, the captain chose
capture. The Germans put a crew aboard
Tonkin
and sailed
it to the Japanese port of Yokohama. From there, the one
hundred and thirty passengers were taken by train to the
upland town of Satsuoka and internment in a convent
building.

The personnel at SOE failed to get the news to Doucette
before his plane took off from Croydon airfield, but it was
waiting for him when his plane touched down in Malta.
Immediately, he sent a message to IRD, and Captain
Foxhill passed the welcome news to Mortmain and Leo,
who brought it home to Dotty and me.

By now, Dotty had forgiven Rufus for whatever had
happened earlier. She and I had become firmer friends still,
and on the days we didn't work, she showed me things
to read – Auden, and TS Eliot's
Prufrock
verses and
Mrs
Dalloway
,
Sons and Lovers
, and Stella Gibbon's
Cold
Comfort Farm
. I began to write a few tentative verses
myself, a sign that Dotty was having a potent influence on
me. The other thing about her was that she spoke with
great frankness, to the point that would actually be considered
impoliteness in my own painfully polite family. In a
bush town, a bank manager like my father was considered
one of the gentry, and although the children of undistinguished
English and Scottish immigrants, my parents did
their best to behave in the manner in which they thought
the British privileged classes did. With only an occasional
etiquette guide, and tips on good behaviour in the weekend
papers and the
Women's Weekly
for directions, they
avoided uttering bruising truths. Dotty didn't. Thus the
morning after Leo and Rufus brought Doucette's good
news home, I found Dotty very depressed and, over tea, she
was quick to tell me why.

This will make Doucette even more unstoppable, she
told me. I'm glad the woman and her bairn have been
saved, of course. But Jesse Creed showed me a report about
how short the Japanese are of steamships. Doucette will
want to blow up the entire Japanese merchant fleet now,
and end the war. And he'll want Rufus and Leo with him.
And Rufus will go of course.

I felt a pulse of fear too, and for the first time. Leo was so
much part of my world that I had never doubted his survival.
To an extent this was a symptom of my innocence. Young
captains bearing the DSO and resembling Errol Flynn
weren't in any real danger, were they? Leo had told me he
and Rufus were chiefly advising IRD on equipment, and they
kept fit because at any stage they might be needed as instructors.
Leo had also mentioned that he and Rufus might be
sent by sub on a non-attack run to lay a depot here or there
in the islands, but would I keep that to myself. I asked him
was he comfortable in a submarine, and he said, No reason
why not. I mean, they've got air down there.

It was partly Dotty's unconscious demeanour of
knowing so much more than I did. If she, a novelist and a
poet, had grounds for alarm, then alarm must be the
proper mode. I wanted Leo to be like Major Enright, stuck
to a desk in Melbourne, going out to Essendon now and
then to practise putting wing charges on military aircraft,
so that he could in turn instruct commandoes on how it
was done.

The simple truth was that I found it easier to believe in
my own death than in Leo's. Earlier in the war he had come
through the bombing of Darwin, and through whatever he
and Rufus and Doucette had done. And in fact, the main
lesson he took from the good news about Doucette was
that
he
might now learn something about his father. From
his contacts in intelligence, he told me, he suspected his
father had also been shipped to Japan. But at least I had not
got from him any sense that he intended to blow up
Japanese fleets as a way of personally liberating his father.
His father's capture was a phenomenon locked up in the
giant nature of the war, beyond any individual input.

But Dotty's concern about Doucette and his plans put
the first shock of panic into me.

As Doucette himself approached Australia, aircraft by
aircraft, outpost by outpost, it seemed that the entirety of
IRD devoted itself to interpreting Mrs Doucette's and her
son's imprisonment. And Captain Foxhill had acquired
through Colonel Jesse Creed a remarkable American aerial
reconnaissance photograph, taken from a few hundred
feet, of the building and its grounds, a photograph which
Leo would show me one lunchtime when I came to his
office. It was of a convent like any Catholic convent
anywhere, but surrounded by rich farmland. The letters
PW were hugely visible in the front garden of the place.
The weather on that plateau, Foxhill had ascertained,
ranged between 0° F and 75° F.

It struck me as very strange for the returning Doucette
that he should know exactly where and at what temperature
his wife and child were held captive. It doesn't seem so
bad, said Leo of the place in the photograph. You could see
in him the hope that his own father was held somewhere
equally unthreatening.

One evening, Leo and Rufus came home with a gleam in
their eyes. Doucette had returned. There would be a party
at the Foxhills'.