The Widow and Her Hero

by Thomas Keneally

  Even Doucette was impressed and excited, though warily so. He was still distracted, trying to reconcile his mistrust of Creed with the golden idea that had been held out to him. The idea that he could be a pirate chieftain!

  When Doxey told Doucette then that first the British wanted to see him in London at SOE headquarters, they had a few things they wanted him to look at, Doucette said, That's good. I can go and visit Mother.

  They put Doucette and Leo up at the Windsor, the flashest of old gold rush hotels. A pressed uniform with captain's pips on the shoulder sat on Leo's bed, so he went to Doucette's room to report a mistake had been made. It appears not, said Doucette. Doucette had just discovered he was a lieutenant-colonel as well, and Rufus Mortmain was lieutenant-commander. Doxey said Mountbatten's headquarters in India were so impressed that they intended to recommend decorations. Doucette said, Makes my rant to the men look pretty silly.

  At the time, Leo wrote to me a letter which was an account of that heady afternoon. I have to say, Leo would write, I feel a bit of the vanity of it all. There's something intoxicating about getting an extra pip on your shoulder. Stupid, I know. Gives you ideas of military self- importance. I wish you were here, to see how seriously we're being taken.

  In the dusk that afternoon, they were driven by a staff car up the long botanic garden-like grounds of Government House to the front door, where a fellow in a frockcoat opened the car door for them, and another with an umbrella led them into the portico and told them he hoped they had not got too wet, sir. They were taken into a great hall lined with portraits of former governors, whose names adorned rivers and mountain ranges in the great State of Victoria and the immensity of the Commonwealth of Australia.

  Inside a ballroom, a waiter asked Leo would he like sherry. He didn't like it, but equally, he didn't fancy his chances of getting a beer. He saw Foxhill across the room in his tartan pants and started to cross to him, but was all at once taken by the elbow by a young English captain in dress uniform who steered him directly to the centre of the room, into the open veldt of the place, away from paintings and ferns and other items of protection. Here in the middle of the floor, where the more important dancing couples would have danced had this been a wedding or a state ball, Doucette was speaking like an equal with three men, two of whom Leo knew from newspaper pictures. One, dressed in a morning suit, was the Governor-General Lord Gowrie, a lean man, popular for having toured the troops in northern Australia and New Guinea. The other was a very portly fellow, famous General Blamey, former Commissioner of Victoria Police, pudgy and yet somehow commanding, and swaying a little, toe to heel, with a glass of Scotch in his hand.

  Some of our boys like the fact he's a bit boozy, Leo would write, and that he looks such a man's man. I think he could have been a bit less so. He had interesting, crinkled-up eyes full of roguery, and all up reminded me of a cross between Santa Claus and a pub-owner.

  Tall Lord Gowrie extended his hand to Leo and spoke, thus condemning him to further danger. Easy for Lord Gowrie, in his vice-regal serge. And what he said would draw hoots of laughter now, if it didn't cause widespread incomprehension. He said to Leo, Captain, may I express the admiration of the British Empire.

  The admiration of the British Empire!

  All the grandiloquence of one age becomes one-liners for a later generation, before becoming utterly incomprehensible to the next.

  And General Blamey was muttering his version of the same thing. Bloody fine, said Blamey. Bloody fine.

  Lord Gowrie said that his friend, the governor of Victoria, who had so kindly loaned him these digs, possessed some excellent maps in his library. He turned to Doucette and asked him whether he and his young friend Waterhouse could perhaps show him, after the party, their operational movements on an atlas.

  General Blamey was pleased with the idea and passed his glass to a waiter for a refill. Leo decided not to judge him for that. He was, after all, one of the fellows who beat Rommel. But then Doucette adopted a solemn air which confused Leo. Doucette said, I was so distressed to hear about Patrick, Leonard.

  That's most kind of you, said Lord Gowrie, and I wish I was a rarity amongst parents who've lost sons in the Desert campaigns, but I fear I am not. He knew General Blamey here, by the way.

  Yes, said Blamey solemnly. He was a very fine young man, Lord Gowrie's boy.

  Lord Gowrie found even this much reflection on Blamey's part painful and changed the subject, asking after Doucette's wife and son. Any word?

  No news, Leonard, said Doucette. Thank you for asking.

  Lord Gowrie said he didn't want to offer false comfort. But it takes ages for the Red Cross to get news . . .

  Doucette declared that a kindly thought. In a half- embarrassed voice, Lord Gowrie explained to the other generals that Mrs Doucette and the little boy were missing. They'd been on the Tonkin.

  Doucette, perhaps to distract attention, nodded in Leo's direction. Captain Waterhouse . . . his father is a POW of the Japanese.

  General Blamey looked solemn and said something Leo quoted to me occasionally, sometimes half joking in boastfulness after sexual athleticism, for like many he thought Blamey ludicrous. Well, he said, they've felt the sting of the family, son. They've felt the sting.

  The British general who had till now been silent, whose red tabs looked so much more vivid than Blamey's desert- bleached ones, now joined the conversation. He seemed to address Doucette and Leo. He hoped that his own journey from London, specifically to visit General MacArthur, had broken down the American resistance to cooperation and the use of MacArthur's submarines. MacArthur was very worried that the British and Australians would use their occasional special operations as the basis to claim back the whole region when the war ended. Now according to the Americans, that couldn't be permitted, because it was imperialism. But, complained this general, it's not imperialism when he declares he will return to the Philippines.

  Lord Gowrie murmured, Well, of course, we'd expect Malaya back. I mean, after all, it was taken from us without benefit of international law.

  The tall English general turned out to be General Durban, the head of the Special Operations Executive in London. He said that with a bit of American cooperation, he could see the whole of the Southeast Asian zone busy as a church fete with airfields and ports blown to pieces by Australians and Free French and wandering Britons like Charlie Doucette.

  Later, after everyone had left, Lord Gowrie got one of the Asian atlases from the Government House library, and Lord Gowrie and Charlie Doucette and Leo ended up with it spread on the floor, recounting their dartings back and forth, Subar to Bukum, Pandjang to Pompong.

  By the time we were finished, Leo told me, we'd pretty well managed to amaze even ourselves.

  How I loved him for choosing a sherry at Melbourne's Government House instead of asking for beer. He really was just a boy from the bush, a Grafton boy, despite the fact that he also lived in the Solomons amongst the colonial administrators and their children. They were the bush gentry in places like that, their civic dignity paper-thin and under threat from marital or alcoholic scandal. Leo was therefore fascinated by real gentry, the members of English or Anglo-Irish ennobled clans who produced a governor- general in the family like the king of spades out of the magician's hat, yet who had never mentioned it before.

  I'm sure if I showed Rachel some of Leo's occasional scribblings on events like the first wonderful day back in Melbourne, she would point out that I get one mention from Leo and Doucette gets so many. I notice it myself. But this was a statement of the preoccupations of that day of glory, that hour, that martial – not marital – moment. Doucette was there, and so was triumph, and triumph is a two-dimensional condition. That's why Leo wanted me there, to add an element. A man, a woman and a hotel room, the simplest joy. The young Leo would not have wanted to hear me talking like that, of course. But it's longing and misery that are three-dimensional.

  Even as he remembered the evening, and relayed it to me (witho
ut any of the geographic details of the mission) during our honeymoon, Leo runs the risk of looking from the perspective of the present like a stooge of Empire. But it was not about Empire. It was about Doucette and Rufus. And apart from that, it was his region the Japanese had taken, his island childhood in the Solomons they'd tried to annul. Yet it has to be admitted that the concept of Empire was not offensive to him, or to any of us. He – like me – had made our school procession to country showgrounds to celebrate Empire Day. The Empire was a system as eternal and fixed in structure and God-ordained as the solar system. Besides, nine-tenths of all we made went to feed, clothe and steel the Empire. But that aside, it was something more ancient and eternal still that drove Leo. Something mythic or chemical or cellular or all three in Leo and his friends. The summit of their lives had so obviously been that liquid darkness in which they had affixed their limpets!

  That was so clear that I did not question or feel particularly threatened by it. It would be Mortmain's wife Dotty who would try to make me more discontented at that reality than I had so far thought to be.

  Five

  Dotty Mortmain, black-haired, pretty, watchful and lithe, came up with her monocled husband Rufus Mortmain to the wedding, all the way from Melbourne. She was tall for a woman, coming to Rufus's shoulder. Other visitors included Major Doxey and Foxhill in his tartan pants, and above all Doucette. Thus I clapped eyes on the man, not as egregiously handsome as Leo, far more compact and neat-featured but endowed with an extraordinary presence, a teasing mixture of reticence and command that even I noticed. They were all in dress uniform and had brought their swords to make an archway for us from the door of the Anglican Church in Braidwood when we emerged married. There was a reception at the Braidwood School of Arts, with a keg of beer laid on by the owner of the Commercial Hotel to honour my father's local importance.

  I was in a daze but remember pretty Dotty Mortmain, smelling of cloves, lavender and gin, asking me softly what I thought of Doucette. Dotty Mortmain seemed an exceptional woman to me, from a wider and more diverse world, and such a couple as she and monocled Mortmain did not exist in Braidwood or in any other place I had ever been. You'll have no trouble from other women, Dotty told me, with that connubial knowingness I had seen in some wives. Leo is utterly under an enchantment. Just remember bloody Doucette is your rival. Look at him smile. He's quite a smiler. I've known the bugger since we met in Singapore.

  Leo and I travelled to Sydney and stayed at the Commonwealth Hotel, where I put into action without fear the tenets of my mother's manual. I thought I'd be the master, Leo told me with a lusty smile. I find I'm the pupil.

  We visited all the sights, catching the Manly ferry, and then going by train to the Carrington in the Blue Mountains, the traditional hotel of the newly married then. It was all marvellous. I can say that without quaver even to my knowing, slightly mocking granddaughter, although the sex was not utterly without fear. As in all great arenas, courage had to be acquired through repetition. But we were set on an excellent, happy marriage. I suppose that part of the test is I barely remember the conversations we had. All was a golden, unified sphere of delight and very ordinary reassurances to each other that we had never been happier.

  One day when we could contemplate being on less than intimate physical terms for some hours and went walking in the luxuriant dampness of the Jamison Valley, Leo told me that he might be sent on operations again, and suggested therefore that we should try stratagems to avoid the conception of a child. He felt that was only fair to me, he said. There were moments when, swept away, we risked conception anyhow. Within nine days of the wedding, however, he went to Melbourne, and I prepared to follow him.

  It was Dotty Mortmain who told me after I arrived in Melbourne as a young bride that the wondrous Doucette had gone to look at new gear and wonder-weapons in London. She said that we could enjoy our husbands' company as long as he stayed there, so she did not wish him a speedy return.

  But more of her in a while, because what happened to me on my train journey down would have something to do with Dotty. For a country girl like me the journey from Sydney to Melbourne was considered significant travelling. It was, after all, nearly six hundred miles, a distance which in Europe would have placed the traveller in another country. The trains were crowded with troops, American and Australian. But I, being an officer's wife, had a sleeping compartment, which I shared with another wife, seemingly unhappy and older, who had obviously, like Dotty, passed through the veil I had not yet breached between girl- and womanhood. She was probably in her mid-to-late thirties, and I noticed she was very pretty in a slightly hawkish way. I knew her husband was a major from the fact that the nameplate on her bunk said Mrs Major Enright, in the same way that mine said Mrs Captain Waterhouse.

  As the train rollicked south-west through endless pastures, I could hear her weeping during the night in the bunk above me. I was very grateful that I was married to Leo, because I knew he would never give me any need to weep the sort of tears Major Enright's wife was shedding loudly and without any embarrassment.

  For lack of a standard rail gauge between Victoria and New South Wales, we all had to be dragged from our bunks in the small hours, and given a cup of tea, and then told to get down on Albury station and sit in the first-class lounge. This was a primitive room – hard benches around a coal fire even in summer. Or else we could go to the refreshment room, while the broad gauge (5 foot 3 inch) train from New South Wales was emptied and shunted out, and the (4 foot 8½ inch) standard gauge train from Victoria took its place.

  My cabin companion chose neither of the proffered options, and I found the waiting room very uncomfortable, and the refreshment room full of soldiers calling for beer at four thirty in the morning. She sat on one of the station's benches and began smoking with a vengeance. Innocently, I asked her was she well. Once I did, the tears dried, as if she had been waiting all night for me to say something like this. She set her face as if she had at last decided on some solution to her grief.

  I was just making up my mind to start a plain conversation with her, something about, It's an endless journey, isn't it? when she offered me a cigarette from her silver case. I said no thanks.

  She told me to take a seat beside her if I wished to. She said, I'm sorry I was such a grump at the start of the trip. You would have guessed. It's always men. Those absolute buggers. Enjoy being young, anyhow. Once you show the slightest flaw, you can expect to weep a great deal.

  It's just as well I have flaws to start with, I told her. I was probably annoyingly blithe, like most people in love. I was amazed myself about the perfection of things with Leo, what a bright companion he was, what a dazzling man.

  Oh, we're all amazed, dear. At first, they mimic our needs, but they don't really feel them, or meet them or give a damn.

  These were, I realise, not particularly original ideas about men, but you have to remember the time. I had never heard them uttered before except by racy, world-weary women in films. They weren't the sorts of things my mother had ever said – somehow I felt naively certain of that. She pulled out a silver flask and unscrewed the cork with the hand which held the cigarette. Gin, she told me. Do have some.

  I smiled so that she wouldn't think me rude. Look, thanks. I've had gin once before, and I don't think Albury station's the right place for a second try.

  Fair enough, she said. She took a long swig herself. But the time might come, she said, gasping with pleasure, when you'll find it's good at any hour, and absolutely anywhere. You see, I have to brace myself for a fight. My husband wrote me a letter a week ago, telling me that there was no place for me in his flat in Melbourne, that another woman has taken occupation. He was so sorry. He intends to marry this other tart. I sent him a telegram, telling him to cut out the nonsense and that I was coming anyhow. He sent me a reply that addressed nothing. If you have to come, I'll meet you at the station. That's the other thing I didn't mention. They're bloody cowards. Oh, they'll charge a machine-gun for you
. But the idea of a scene, especially a scene witnessed by other men . . . that's what terrifies them.

  She adopted a gruff male voice. I can stand anything except screaming women, she mimicked.

  She snorted. Well, all that rough soldiery hanging round the refreshment room are going to see a major subjected to quite a scene at Spencer Street Station.

  I thought, Leo and I will have to be subjected to that as well.

  The woman looked up at me with her stricken eyes. I apologise in advance, she told me. But I'm a woman fighting for her life.

  I've got very little experience at any of this, I said, but it might shame him if you appealed to him. To his better nature.

  No, she told me. None of us must ever do that. That puts you at their mercy. Look, I'm sorry to load you up with this utter shit!

  I told her not to worry. A new train came into the station to take us on to Melbourne, and Victorian Government Railways conductors began yelling at the soldiers in the refreshment rooms to leave their beer and get aboard. Mrs Enright and I had to sit up, in an admittedly comfortable carriage, all the way to Melbourne, as the summer sun came up over the mountains to the east of the rail line. We were not alone. There were three officers in our compartment. Everyone tried to sleep, but only Mrs Enright, helped out by her gin, managed it. It was not a graceful nap, however, for her mouth opened and she began snoring. I gave her a nudge to save her from unconscious embarrassment. You might well say I was a bit priggish to do that. I had an innocent assumption that decent women were too angelic to snore. Again, that's the way we were. We were closer to Jane Austen than to Madonna or Julia Roberts.

  When Mrs Enright woke up properly, and everyone definitely abandoned their attempts at sleep, the youngest of the officers, a freckled young man of about twenty-one years, spoke to her across the compartment.

  Mrs Enright. I'm Lieutenant So-and-so. I attended a party at your place in Sydney. How is your husband?