The Widow & Her Hero (11 page)

In the office we congratulated the Boss on the news about his
wife and son. Rufus and I noticed how hollowed-out he
looked though, but he was excited too. When he smoked
he left his cigarette unlit for a time and jabbed the air with it,
telling us about the Silver Bullets, the new submersibles he
had ridden in England. He showed us photographs and plans
of them. He had a feverish light in his eyes which picked us
up too.

We realised, I think, that we'd got a bit flabby in his
absence. Our dagger-throwing skills improved marginally, so
that maybe we could have got a job in a sideshow. But we had
been drifting. Now we could feel the current was back, and the
current was Charlie Doucette, the Boss.

He told us the submersibles would be testing for some chaps.
Some of them wouldn't like this new device, there'd be cases of
claustrophobia and panic, since you could lose all sense of up
and down when riding them. I knew I was going to find it hard,
just from the description of the tight mask, but I can't imagine
that Rufus or Rubinsky or Blinkhorn or Doucette's old bowman
Pat Bantry will have any problems. And we were exhilarated
to think of as many as twenty of these near invisible craft
creeping into anchorages with loads of limpets.

At calmer times, the Boss said that he had been rather
comforted to see that reconnaissance photograph of his wife's
prison.

Good old Jesse Creed provided that, Rufus reminded him.

Kind of him, the Boss admitted. The place, he said, certainly
didn't look like a hellhole, and the good thing was in that
climate Minette and the boy were a long way from the risk of
malaria and dengue fever and beri-beri. He didn't make much
of it in military terms, he didn't make the news the basis
for any 'once more unto the breach, dear friends' speech. So
we were a bit surprised by his intensity in the next overall
planning meeting.

We were all in the conference room with its empty fireplace
and a late afternoon hot wind from the Western District was
blowing in at the door to the balcony. Everyone seemed awed
by Doucette for a number of reasons – the submersibles as well
as everything else. That stale old bugger Doxey had the chair
of course, and there was Foxhill, Enright, D/Plans, the head of
Navy Plans as well, then the head of IRD intelligence, and
Colonel Jesse Creed. Rufus reported on the junks a shipyard in
Melbourne was making for us, and the fact that the shipwrights
thought the war was as good as over, and had no
inhibitions about going on strike. It couldn't be predicted, said
Rufus, whether the junks would be ready in time for use before
that year's monsoon. Jesse Creed reported that the proposed
base on Great Natuna would be equipped with Bolton longrange
radios, but that operatives would be fitted out and
trained in the use of the new hand radios called walkie-talkies.
The Boltons would enable contact with IRD and the Melbourne
Ultra signal centre, of which Jesse Creed was supervisor.

All at once, the Boss said, That's all very well, nice equipment
I'm sure, Colonel Creed.

He was punching at the air with an unsharpened pencil.
There was blueness round his eyes and I don't think he'd been
sleeping well since coming back.

But, he said, I'm a little disappointed to find that no US
submarine reconnaissance reports on the Natunas grace our
agenda.

Creed said, I too am disappointed by that fact. I hear from
General MacArthur's office that the combat demands on our
submarines are delaying all that. I can assure you that I have
labelled all my requests URGENT.

The Boss looked away towards a far corner of the room. He
asked, But will we be waiting this time next year, and fobbed
off indefinitely with the same excuses?

Creed told him he would certainly not expect that and
would be personally disappointed if that were the case.

Well, said the Boss, I can only judge from results. I
proceeded to SOE in London on the basis that something
pressing had to be done, and that I must find some device to
achieve that end. I have returned, the equipment has been
loaded on a freighter and is on the way to us, and both the
engineer-cum-inventor and the instructor from SOE are also
on their way to take their role in the enterprise. I can't do any
more, but you have not done what has to be done.

Creed said he was not the final authority on sub deployment.
He said it was a matter of negotiation between himself
and General Willoughby, his boss.

Our Boss said, Oh, General Willoughby! That very good
friend of all British enterprises!

Creed got angry at that. He hoped the Boss wasn't accusing
him of insincerity. That would be a serious hindrance to our
new relationship, he declared.

But the Boss really put it to him, and not for the first time I
began to feel sorry for the American, who didn't seem such a
bad fellow. That's the whole point, the Boss told him. There's
been no cooperation. You sit in on our deliberations, while
yours remain undisclosed and mysterious and inconclusive.

We could all see that Creed was very angry now. But the
Boss did not let up. For all I know, you might go off to General
Willoughby and say, This and this are what that curious
Doucette and his Australian chums are up to. So let's keep
them busy with great dreams and promises.

Major Doxey ineffectually called for peace, gentlemen.

Doucette declared, I have an entire regiment of friends, and
my own flesh and blood, not to mention eighteen thousand
Australian prisoners, held by the enemy. I resent the Americans
depicting my motives as empire-reclaiming.

Order! cried Doxey, and reminded the Boss that in his
absence we had all managed these meetings without any
rancour.

Then I have to tell you, said Doucette, that I'm appalled by
the lack of progress you've made. We might as well have rented
out the work to the British submarine flotilla on the other side
of the country.

Major Enright shook himself like a dog who has just woken
up to find there's a bone of interest to him in the room, and he
put in his tuppence worth to cover his posterior. He said, You'll
see in the minutes I've put a request in to the air force chaps to
see if they can do a reconnaissance of the Natunas for us. I've
also been onto D/Plans at MacArthur's HQ in Brisbane, and
they report there has certainly been an unavoidable delay with
submarine reconnaissance.

This did nothing to soothe either of the combatants. Creed said
he didn't need to prove to Doucette that he was trying as hard as
he could to get the joint endeavour off the ground. You treat
everything I do, Doucette, like an arrogant Limey eccentric.

I happen to be an arrogant Irish eccentric, the Boss
reminded him again, just for the sake of contradiction.

Doxey ended up clapping his hands, demanding that both
gentlemen desist from further insult and innuendo. The Boss
managed merely an icy imitation of being polite. He said that
submarine reconnaissance will be essential to the Natunas
plan. But he hadn't seen any indication that our friend
Colonel Creed was as anxious as we were to get things in
place.

Creed did a more diplomatic job, speaking about how he
could understand that after the stress of a journey to Britain,
and a long airborne return to Australia, anyone might be a bit
edgy. And he himself wished he had made more progress.

I think Rufus and I felt a bit guilty. We knew as well as
anyone that there'd be no running of a junk into Singapore
once the monsoon turned against us. Yet although Rufus had
visited the shipyard, to see the craft being built, we had personally
placed no urgency on American reconnaissance. The Boss,
coming back, had clarified everything, had got us all out of our
file-skimming stupor, all our lazy initialling of memos and
reports. It was like Peter Pan coming back to Neverland and
straightening out the boys.

Back in our office after the meeting, the door with our knife
scars in it firmly closed, Doucette sat behind his desk and
made a gesture that Rufus and I should grab a chair each
and pull up to it. The Boss's calm had returned. It was as if he
had never lost it in the first place.

You're the pair whose opinion means something, he said.
What do you think of Creed?

Rufus told us Dotty thought he was a decent fellow. She said
he really liked that last jaunt of ours, Boss.

The Boss thought about this and remarked that Dotty's
loyalty to all of us was exemplary.

Oh yes, Rufus agreed, but he reminded the Boss she saw
through people pretty easily too, and she'd see through Creed
if he meant us any malice.

The Boss thought and then declared, Doxey and the others
will never understand my position. In some ways I don't blame
Creed because he's been put in place in this committee to spy
for General Willoughby. A fellow has to do what his superiors
tell him. But I blame him for the hypocrisy of pretending to be
a friend and supporter while he's doing us in.

Rufus said, I wouldn't have thought it was all pretence, Boss.

But again the Boss said Rufus was a kind man. Creed might
amaze everyone by coming up with a reconnaissance of Great
Natuna in the next few weeks. But the Boss didn't think that
likely. So he wanted us to start planning a mission of our own.
Back to where the Japs and MacArthur both don't want us to
go, he said. We'd have to build up some records and files but
we'd keep them amongst ourselves till it became clear Creed
was useless. We wouldn't be left high and dry without a plan
when Creed fails us.

Rufus asked him, Back to Singapore?

The Boss said, That's the neighbourhood we know. We'll call
it Memerang. Remember those Malayan otters that we swam
with that afternoon at Pandjang? Charming little blighters,
but you can't see them coming in the water, and with these
submersibles . . .

We talked away with each other, spinning theories. One
idea was that Rufus could captain one of those junks they were
building in Melbourne, and take it up off Sumatra to Pompong
Island, say, while the rest of the party travelled by sub with the
submersibles aboard it in the mine tubes, meeting up with him
within reach of Singapore. There was that group of British
subs operating from Western Australia, and the Boss knew
the flotilla commander, Shadwell. So after junk and sub met,
everything could go over to the junk which could take us right
up into the Singapore roads. We'd use twenty of the little
submersibles, the Silver Bullets, said the Boss. Imagine the
mayhem. Whereas I'm sure that this big pirate show they're
talking about now has as much reality as the Wizard of Oz.

So you don't want to involve D/Plans? asked Rufus.

For God's sake not yet, Rufus, said the Boss. He's hopeless.

Rufus murmured, Yes. I can't say I'm sorry I tupped his wife.

This confession Rufus made wasn't up for discussion by
anyone. The Boss asked for no further information on this, and
as for me, I knew enough to confuse me already. I didn't like it,
the fact Rufus took his chances with other women. To tell the
truth, I'm a bit scandalised about the whole thing. For poor
Dotty's sake as much as anything. And even though I know he's
the bravest man there is, I have this permanent suspicion that
it might affect the way he behaved, way out in some archipelago
somewhere.

Ilearned a great deal through the Mortmains about life in
Malaya before the war, and of how Rufus first met
Doucette.

Doucette, and a friend of his from his garrison life in
Belfast, Billy Lewis, owned a 19-foot yacht. They used to
sail up the east coast of Malaya on the south-west
monsoon. The east coast was not much used for recreational
sailing, because it took some doing to get out there
on the south-west monsoon, and during the north-east
monsoon it was impossible.

Billy Lewis and Doucette shared a similar hatred of
peacetime garrison work in Selarang Barracks. Rufus
seemed to think that Billy and Doucette also had problems
keeping up with the mess expenses, and living cheaply on
the boat was a great saving as well as a great relief. In a
'good' British regiment, an officer might need hundreds of
pounds a year to keep up with mess and sporting activities,
and the Doucettes sent their son only a modest yearly
allowance.

It was difficult to get boats in over the sandbars of those
eastern rivers, but Doucette and Billy managed to do so,
and one day Mortmain had met them drinking tea and
practising dialect Malay at a village near the mouth of
the Terengganu River. Mortmain, as yet unmarried, had
descended from his timber plantation to buy regional
daggers, his chief passion. That was how they had met, in
an outdoor teahouse in a Malay village. Some military
gentlemen were stand-offish even with other Englishmen,
in particular with someone like Mortmain, a mere timber
estates manager. But that had not been the way of these
two. Doucette was always too curious to be aloof.

Mortmain himself would have been a military man, as
was his older brother, if his parents could have afforded
two regimental sons, but they couldn't. Rufus too liked to
sail, and they sat over tea talking about the testing
sandbars of all those north-eastern Malayan rivers. It was
up here, Doucette already believed, that the Japanese
would one day land, now they had China by the throat.
Why not? There was a good highway all the way south to
Johore. Mortmain agreed and advised Doucette to tell the
blighters in Singapore. They think they're protected by the
Malay jungles. In reality, the roads they built themselves
lead right to their front door.

Doucette liked Mortmain and invited him down to
Singapore for weekends. On a typical weekend, they might
sail from Changi to the Singapore Yacht Club, and begin
their drinking and discussions there, chatting with other
boat enthusiasts. It became apparent to Mortmain that
Doucette
had
made an intelligence report on his journey up
the east coast.

As their Saturdays waned, they would sail round to
the west coast, to the Coconut Grove nightclub. Both the
soldiers had their pipe dress uniforms and shoes with them
in duffel bags, and Mortmain similarly had his dinner suit
from up-country. They changed and rowed ashore in their
dinghy, overcrowded as it was with a beanpole civilian and
the two more compact but sturdy officers. Their shoes hung
around their necks, they climbed the sea wall, brushed the
sand off their feet, tied their laces, and selected girls to dance
with. Infiltration was already their style.

It was clear to me early in my Melbourne days, Dotty did
not have the same gleaming view of Doucette as Rufus and
Leo did. During the afternoons in the flat, when we were both
trying to write, an activity which if communally attempted
always leads to conversation, she would tell me about her
contacts with Charlie Doucette in pre-war Singapore.

There had been a six-month period, before Minette
consented to marry him and join him in Singapore, during
which he used to confide in Dotty a great deal. He knew
Minette was torn two ways. She was used to living in style
in Macau. But there she was a Belgian Catholic divorcee –
though she had some sort of Papal document of separation,
she could not talk in any real way to the men of the
colony.

Dotty said she didn't know whether in those months of
waiting Doucette saw her as a sister or as a potential lover,
a solace for his bewilderment. Dotty spoke to me about all
this with a characteristic frankness I did my best to pretend
was normal to me too. She said, I found him very attractive
in all sorts of wrong-headed ways women are fools for. Of
course, he respected Rufus too much, and so did I, but I'd
be lying if I said there wasn't some sort of magnetism there.

Minette was always worried about Doucette, you know,
Dotty further confided. He'd taken her by storm. I mean,
to sail the South China Sea from Singapore to Macau in a
19-footer just to see her face . . . that would have an impact
on any woman. And when she asked him why he did it, he
didn't tell her one of the reasons was intelligence gathering.
He told her, I had to see you because I was deteriorating into
nothing in the East.

And so he was, Dotty told me. Doucette once showed
me a letter he'd written to Minette – this was before they
got married, and he wanted to ask me should he send it off
because he was worried by its frankness. On one hand,
he compared himself favourably to his hidebound senior
officers and felt sorry for them, poor old men who would
never know the sort of love he and Minette had. In the next
sentence, though, he was warning her he was unreliable
and a bad man, but that she was a superior enough soul to
ignore that. Minette didn't find out that in everyday life
he was a hopeless boozer until she moved into married
quarters at Selarang Barracks. I heard her express her
anxiety about all this while the boys were out sailing, and
Minette and I would be stuck in the clubhouse waiting
and trying to space out our gin slings. Minette hated
his drinking. She thought it was because he was so torn
between sailing and garrison life. And the big boys in
Singapore laughed off all his intelligence, you know. The
only person who read his reports on how easy it would be
to take Malaya was a chap we knew in the civilian administration.
But he couldn't influence the stupid soldiers. That
also drove Doucette to drink, the fact that some officers
were actually looking forward to taking on the Japanese
and, since they were missing the European war, could
hardly wait. Minette told me that one day when they were
sailing he looked at her and said, I'd go to the depths of hell
to escape ordinary soldiering in barracks.

Doucette's now-widowed mother, Lady Doucette, was
a renowned dragon, said Dotty, and Charlie was the
favourite son. He sometimes said he had become a soldier
for her sake – she wanted him to follow in the tracks of his
father, the late Major-General Sir Walter Doucette. At a
party in Singapore, he said something like, I dread the time
I go home and she has to realise I don't resemble the small,
model boy she thinks she's been writing to. He was, as he
said, a frightened six-year-old scared of his mother.

He also confessed to Dotty that he felt like a fraud with
Minette, because she was so generous and rated him at a
higher moral level than he deserved.

To Rufus, said Dotty, Doucette has always been the King
of Ulster, but I think he's always been a mess. Sometimes
he'd go to pieces and smoke opium in Chinatown, and Billy
Lewis or Rufus would have to nurse him back. He hated
himself for that, and his drinking. And then Chinese boys,
one in particular, in his bachelor years. Not that he was
alone in that. But he really hated himself for that as well. It
was as if he really believed his terrible mother would find
out.

I was not shocked so much as scared for Leo. Does Leo
know these things?

Don't worry too much, said Dotty. He's an extraordinary
commando. That's how he punishes himself for his
sins.

I'd rather he didn't have any sins, I admitted.

In Rufus's eyes he doesn't, said Dotty.

After the Boss's argument with Creed, we all started on the new
plan, Memerang, but for a while the Boss seemed down. As the
Americans delayed and Memerang became more official, at
least as an idea Doxey tolerated, we had to work with Major
Enright. He was good at many things – working out the
number of Compo and Rompo rations that should be dropped
off, and where, and when. I have to say I got a tinge of respect
for him. He was earning his keep now by writing into the plan
such easily forgotten items as waterproof containers for
wireless equipment. He had himself designed new packing
methods. Every given load we took on our adventures was to
be limited to 35 pounds, what an operative could easily carry.
Enright himself designed the sealed kerosene tin-like containers,
which had special lever lids and rope carrying handles, so
that they could easily be moved in the confines of a submarine.
Boot A. B. Australian No.2, Tropic Studded, was decided on as
most suitable for us, and it had been designed by a committee
on which Enright had served. He had also designed the
marspikes with which explosives could be stuck to wooden
hulls – the device silently released a spike into wood through
a bracket on the charge. And so on. He had talents. If I didn't
already know it, I began to realise you had to have people like
him.

It looked likely that the training for Memerang, on
Doucette's wonderful machines which were still on their way to
us, would happen on the other side of the country, where the
British submarine flotilla was, at Garden Island, just off the
coast at Fremantle. I was disappointed, for no wives were
permitted, but I suppose it had to come to that.

The Boss remained silent and edgy and suspicious of Creed.
He definitely has the blues, Rufus told me. He was like this
sometimes in Singapore, he'd work himself into a black hole,
the deep dumps. After he came back from a long sail he was
always mopey. Can't say I ever blamed him.

I hadn't seen much of that before. I was a bit surprised. As
for Rufus himself, he never seemed to feel entitled to be down.

There was a party at Foxhill's that Grace and I had gone
to, but we'd come home a little early. We wanted our own
company above all. And when we left Foxhill's, the Boss
seemed much better, and the life of the party. He was playing a
ukelele he'd picked up on his long trip back from Britain. He'd
learned to play it in the bellies of bombers and DC-3s, where
he couldn't be heard over the noise of engines. And that night
he'd played for us 'The Umbrella Man
', '
Paper Moon
', '
The
Teddy Bears' Picnic'. He'd stretched his mouth comically and
done George Formby, then a tinkly Arthur Askey, and a
Cockney Stanley Holloway, followed by some Noel Coward.
He'd been full of the joy of life when Grace and I got our coats
and left, and through the blacked-out streets on the way to the
tram we laughed about his performance.

For the next day Major Doxey had called the first big
minuted meeting for the Memerang plan. Even he believed
Creed was no longer of use to us. D/Sigs, D/Navy, D/Plans
were all there at Radcliffe House for the meeting, and Rufus
and I, but the Boss didn't turn up. It was strange. The Boss
was winning his argument with Creed and Doxey, so I
thought only something severe or unexpected had delayed
him.

Nonetheless Rufus waited until the afternoon before he
called Doucette's flat. No answer. He called Foxhill, who was
at home, about it, and Foxhill told us Doucette had drunk quite
a bit later in the night, and got a little bit weepy very late, after
Mrs Foxhill had gone to bed. The Boss had said something
about he should have felt greater excitement about Minette
being safe. And that he would hate anything he did to hurt her
– if he caused the Japanese to get revenge on him by punishing
her or his stepson.

It was later still, apparently, when the Boss began to
plummet a bit. He got on to the whole thing of it being his fault
Minette and young Michael were on that ship, on their way to
India. They could have stayed in Perth all the time, as it
turned out. And he began to say again how he thought he
wasn't pleased enough to find they were alive.

Before Foxhill went to bed, he set the Boss up in the spare
room because it was too late for him to be driven home. Foxhill
was woken towards dawn by a racket from the Boss's room. He
found the Boss tangled in the sheets and fighting them. It
turned out he had a sort of waking nightmare, something
about guards taking blankets away from Minette.

I know what that is like, the nightmares. I have this nightmare
where my father and I are in the same camp and he's
asking me for food, and I keep on saying, of course, I know a
barracks where there is some, and I wander off to get it, but
I keep on being delayed, and I always find myself at the
opposite end of the camp to the hut where the nourishment is.
I have conversations with other men who try to put me off the
search too, and I'm bullied by guards with indistinct faces
who tell me that I have to do certain duties, including
latrines and unloading trucks, and I'm fretful to get to the
supply hut and then back to my father. I explain to everyone,
The thing is that my father doesn't know I'll be so long, and
there's the risk he'll start to believe I'm not coming back. So I
know why the Boss might have a nightmare, particularly
when he'd drunk a lot.

Foxhill himself came to the office later, looking white and
shattered. He had totally forgotten the meeting, and apologised
and said he had felt bound to stick around the house until the
Boss woke. Doxey was censorious about it. You could have
called us, Captain, he told the Scot. Foxhill told us the Boss
had said when he woke up that all he needed was a few days
by himself, somewhere in the Dandenongs or a beach house
where he could fish and go on long walks. He obviously needed
a few days off, said Foxhill – he'd come straight off the plane
from England and got to work, and he'd had a shock he hadn't
absorbed yet. Foxhill's wife's family – as it turned out – had a
nice beach house on the Mornington Peninsula, and Mrs
Foxhill would get the keys from her brother that day and drive
him down to the place with his ukelele, his fishing line and
some books.