The Widow and Her Hero

by Thomas Keneally

  Why? I asked.

  Because he was a terrier dog. And without our help, he should never have been encouraged to go again, you know. I'm sorry to say that, it must be painful for you. Cornflakes didn't prove that the thing could be done again. It proved that the thing could be done once.

  It seems you were right about that, I told him.

  A silence grew and although I understood that the longer it went the more we'd be landed back with the business of cleaning his slate, I could not think of a word to utter.

  Suddenly, he said, My superiors, General Willoughby, General MacArthur. They believed Doucette's attempt to go back to Singapore was an imperial gesture, to set up a British claim for the place after the war. I know that from the standpoint of the present, their attitude might seem hypocrisy, but we Americans were genuinely all in favour of the Malays getting their self-determination, and Churchill and Mountbatten wanted back that which was theirs.

  None of that mattered to Leo, I said. He just wanted to smite the Amalachites. He would have gone anywhere.

  I know that, he conceded. But I was aware of one big problem I couldn't tell Doucette about. That was, if he kept Memerang to its timetable, it would coincide with General MacArthur's invasion of the Philippines. And the Philippines would take up all our attention. And that's exactly what happened, Grace.

  Creed seemed to have been parched by a few minutes' conversation and drained his tea to moisten his tongue.

  I was still in Melbourne in late October 1944, he said. I hadn't been moved forward to the Philippines because I was fielding all the interceptions of Japanese radio traffic. You must know by now that early in the war we'd captured Ultra, the Japanese code, and we'd been intercepting all major signals and orders since mid 1942 onwards. These intercepts were absolute gold, Grace. Ultra. The absolute standard. And we needed to be careful how we reacted to the messages we intercepted. We couldn't react, for example, in a manner that showed we had the code. Because we needed them to go on using it. So we could afford to take actions that looked to the enemy like skilled guesswork or good luck, but we couldn't take action which indicated foreknowledge. You understand that?

  Of course I understand that, I told him, but my jaw was set, like the jaw of an unbreakable instead of a friable woman.

  Okay, he said. The recital of this triumph of intelligence now, decades after, seemed to cause him as much melancholy as it did me.

  So every day, he continued, as you might imagine, the Ultra intercepts were argued about, and as a mere lieutenant-colonel I had an advisory role in that. Some intercepts had to be ignored – we could have swooped in and saved this or that endangered officer, say, but that would have shown foreknowledge. That was the point, the intercepts dealt sometimes with local matters, with the movement of prisoners, say. Then at other times with considerable tactical issues, and then the entire strategic plans of the Japanese.

  Look, I said. I've read the appropriate spy books. I'm up on my le Carré. None of this astonishes me, Jesse.

  He looked me in the eye and spoke flatly. By way of Ultra intercepts, he told me, I knew by late October that Memerang was in trouble.

  I felt that prickling sensation, like the soul breaking out in hives.

  You're saying you knew, Jesse?

  There was an intercept from the Seventh Area Army in Singapore that more than twenty Caucasian people had been engaged in a defensive stand on a junk in the northern part of the Riau Archipelago. The message said they had dispersed using sampans and canoes, and had infiltrated many islands of the archipelago. Even though the Kempei Tai hoped for cooperation from its network of agents, strict watch was to be maintained. And as we sat round the table in Melbourne, orders came from the Philippines, from General Willoughby's office, to say nothing to IRD yet.

  It meant they could have signalled the submarine to pick them up at once.

  You were sleeping with Dotty . . . and you wouldn't save Rufus.

  The old general covered his eyes with his hands.

  I was tempted to call Foxhill, but I was also inhibited . . . Next day or so we intercepted a Seventh Area Army message that four of Doucette's people were dead in combat and the others being hunted. Now I know what should have happened in an ideal world – we ought to have made up our mind to release the information to IRD so they could get a signal to the British submarine, that character Moxham, to move into the pick-up island with all speed. But there were risks in warning IRD. So we were coming to a decision. We didn't have any idea then that Moxham would dawdle criminally round the South China Sea trying to find targets, or that he'd only visit the pick-up island once . . .

  I could guess everything he was going to tell me. That their plight had been known. That they had been written off. Someone as precious and complex as Leo written off by people in temperate, secure Melbourne, just for policy's sake. I stood up. All the blood had raced to my brain. I could feel the inner pressure against the bone of my skull. The room swayed promisingly. So I'll die, I thought. I won't have to listen.

  I am sorry, said Jesse Creed.

  He stood too. He wanted to hold my shoulders but I backed away.

  That's been a weight on me for years, he said.

  He was distressed, sure enough, but now he implied he had transferred the weight. When I could think again, I found that for reasons I couldn't understand I did not want him to claim too much responsibility in front of me. I wanted to curse him after he'd gone. It was as if the normal denunciations just weren't adequate for dealing with him.

  Well, you said you had a merely advisory role, I told him through my teeth, as if it was my job to comfort him.

  No, not exactly, he said, refusing to be silent. I had the power to change decisions. With some danger to Ultra, sure. But of a very low order. I was asked my opinion. I felt I could have persuaded the committee. I believe I could have. But at the moment I should have spoken, I remembered Doucette, and all I felt was annoyance at him for getting himself in this mess. If you'll excuse me, I thought, let that British bastard stew in his juice. He'd sneered at every gesture of friendship and cooperation I'd made. He'd pushed ahead with his Gilbert and Sullivan, tally-ho trapeze act. To hell with him! To hell with him! Then by the time I'd got over my rancour, I thought, Jesus, you have to raise it again tomorrow. But by then there was another flood of Ultra intercepts which kept me up all the following night, and it would have looked strange for me to revisit yesterday's business when thousands of men were dying in the Philippines. Basically, I lacked the moral courage to do it. I consider it the great dishonour of my career.

  His dishonour. He might boast of that, but he still retained his remarkably robust face, and any torment he felt had not halted him from dressing his old bones in a camelhair jacket and golf shirt and cream slacks and loafers. I felt my newly calm anger working along with my old familiar bewilderment, and a sense of being stung into brutality. Who did he think he was to make this confession to me? But fortunately I now lacked the physical endurance to beat him with fists, just as he lacked the endurance to receive such a beating. I felt affronted though, and this might have been the greater part of my anger, that I was being made party to nothing more than some sort of spiritual bookkeeping on Creed's part. And I felt for him too some of Leo's anger for the desk soldier, the ones who drew up plans for jungle forays, or supplied the gear of champions.

  The thing is, I told him, you weren't condemning Doucette. You were condemning Leo. Doucette had chosen to throw himself on the first bonfire he found.

  He made a concession with his hands. Remember Foxhill? he asked me. In the tartan pants? He was organising a group to go in by sub and fetch the survivors. Well, by that stage we knew it wasn't much use. They were all dead or captives by Christmas, except two, and we thought they'd probably drowned.

  And you were wrong about that too.

  Maybe. Anyhow, telling Foxhill to call off Memexit didn't involve any chance of jeopardising Ultra, and so I let him know.

  Jess
e Creed spread his hands further. He seemed to be expecting something more from me now. He was lucky that I did not know which viper of a sentence to sting him with first. The great dishonour of my career. How sad for you, that you discovered you were a bastard! It didn't stop you breathing, progressing, mating, breeding and aging and finding travel insurance at the age of ninety-two. I certainly didn't intend to absolve him, and I itched to attack him as I had Hidaka. And then it struck me. As I was ready to curse and whack him, I thought, You poor old bitch! What are you about? Doing what you could, and inadequate to Leo. But they all were inadequate to Leo. Foxhill, Doucette, Rufus. All of them. Eddie Frampton, Captain Moxham, Jesse Creed. At eighty-four, why not just let yourself go in peace? The ghost is satisfied, the ghost has had its explanations, the ghost has departed the scene. Just ease up now, you foolish crone. And be Leo's widow from this point only in honourable name.

  Never mind, I suddenly told him, conceding nothing, dismissing him. I had scorn, too. All the stuff you try to lay at my door, you'll have to take all that with you when you leave. I'm going to get a bottle of gin. You and I will drink a health to the men you let down. Then you can go off in your car and make of it whatever you want. I'm not here to help you feel easy about 1944. You can go to hell for all I care.

  He nodded. That's a good Australian curse, he said. And I deserve it.

  When I brought the gin, he sat because I told him to. With the drink in front of him he looked so much like an aged lost boy. He laughed. I'm not supposed to have this. Ruinous to a guy's blood pressure.

  I think you'll get through to tomorrow, Jesse. You always have.

  He shook his head. He looked eroded now, and I was pleased it had gnawed at him, the same thing that had eaten at me. And at a calm level I acknowledged that after the century I had lived through, I wasn't nearly as surprised that day as I would have been had he told me in 1945.

  Here's to Leo, I said. He abashed me by beginning to weep. Tears made his handsome, aging face look more squalid and rheumy. Ah, I thought, good. He should know some indignity.

  Don't think of sending me a Christmas card, I told him.

  He said, I don't think there'll be any more Christmases.

  As if they know they're feeding important theatricals, since the trial the rations have got better – some fish with our rice. Then one day little Hidaka smuggled in a dozen egg tarts in his valise. Succulent. We were groaning with joy like a pack of old ladies. He said, Steamed buns next time. But they haven't turned up yet.

  Yesterday, a week from the trial, we suddenly got called up by Sleepy and told to get our mattresses and mess tins. We were sweating a bit because we didn't know whether it was the final walk, but Jockey talked to a Chinese orderly again and found it was routine after all. Naturally enough, we're hoping to wait the war out. Anyhow, as Sleepy led us to another wing we could hear some poor wretch being beaten somewhere on the lower floor. His screams were bouncing from gallery to gallery. In the end, we found ourselves at a cage, in a corner of the gaol, bars three sides and brick the other. There were bunks in there, some bed-rolls too, and so we were all going to be together till the finish, whatever the finish is. And crazy old Filmer looked at the cell and bed-rolls and said, Well now, chaps, we can really perform the play.

  Leo and the others must have read George Bernard Shaw's preface to the play, The Devil's Disciple. It's GBS at his most tendentious and engaging.

  I read The Devil's Disciple with an appetite for its hidden magic over Leo. I found an unread edition of George Bernard Shaw's Three Plays For Puritans on our bookshelves, a 1962 Penguin edition. When I opened it, I found the outer rims of the pages browned with time – it was as if the book had lain close to a fire, but it was the dull plod of second after second which had done this. I can see why the other two plays did not closely interest Leo and Filmer and the men. In Caesar and Cleopatra and in Captain Brassbound's Conversion, a melodrama set on the coast of Morocco, there isn't the same focus as in The Devil's Disciple – the focus there being provided by Dick Dudgeon's embrace of execution in the place of another man, the Reverend Anderson, in New Hampshire in 1777.

  From my Sunday school days, the phrase 'devil's disciple' still carries with it a whiff of brimstone. In what sense was Dick Dudgeon the devil's disciple? (asked the old English mistress in me). And how did Leo and the others see themselves under that banner too? Sergeant Bantry was a Catholic, and Jockey Rubinsky Jewish. In what sense were they devil's disciples?

  I studied the issue. It wasn't an abstract matter for me. Even though George Bernard Shaw was playing with ideas in his safe study, or else his summer garden in Surrey, and did not have to face the blade himself, there is cogency for me and for Leo in what he wrote. As an introduction to the play, Shaw wrote an essay called On Diabolonian Ethics, and in it he complained that while he was away from London, a theatrical director interpreted The Devil's Disciple's willingness to save the life of Reverend Anderson by dying in his place as motivated by his love for young Mrs Anderson. That was to miss the entire point of the play, said Shaw. A glorious thing, the thing by which the Devil's Disciple transcended Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities, was to die for a man you didn't know, for a man who had a wife you didn't know, and whose features were unknown to you.

  Shaw wrote: 'But then, said the critics, where is the motive? Why did Dick save Anderson? . . . The saving of life at the risk of the saver's own is not a common thing; but populations are so vast that even the most uncommon things are recorded once a week or oftener. Not one of my critics but has seen a thousand times in his paper how some policeman or fireman or nursemaid has received a medal, or the compliments of a magistrate, or perhaps a public funeral, for risking his or her life for another's. Has he ever seen it added that the saved was the husband of the woman the saver loved, or was that woman herself, or was ever known to the saver as much as by sight? Never. When we want to read of the deeds that are done for love, whither do we turn? To the murder columns; and there we are rarely disappointed.'

  I'm sure the twenty condemned Malays for whose lives Leo and others of the Cornflakes gang had petitioned the Japanese were never far from the consciousness of Leo and the other Memerangs as they rehearsed the play. I prefer to believe that it was for those men that Leo was ready to die rather than for some flatulent concept of military honour. That he died neither for some bankrupt British officer code nor for the bankrupt code of his jailors.

  I imagine the play under way in their communal cage, with Leo enacting his part, and Essie the servant girl asks him why he lets them call him the Devil's disciple? And Richard replies, 'Because it's true. I was brought up in the other service; but I knew from the first that the Devil was my natural master and captain and friend. I saw that he was in the right, and that the world cringed to his conqueror only through fear . . .'

  I can imagine Filmer, who had been to Oxford, explaining the meaning if any of the group were theologically timid – that Richard Dudgeon is not really speaking of the Devil, he is speaking of the God of Purposeful Love, a deity unhonoured in the Dudgeon household in the play but honoured by Richard.

  It is touching to think that under Filmer's direction, Leo played the scene in Act II in which he speaks at length with Mrs Anderson, played by Jockey Rubinsky (seriously it seems, and not for the easy laughs that derive from young men playing women). There is something almost consoling about that, the earnestness of two young men who would never touch a woman again, enacting sexual attraction.

  I must curse GBS because he taught them how to do it, to be Devil's Disciples. I must thank him for reinforcing the necessity of the path they were treading, so that they went with a certainty that transcended flags and empires and all that weary dross.

  The reward for a good rehearsal is that Filmer reads us a Jeeves story by Wodehouse. You see behind the men's faces that the more they enjoy that, the more they think: Maybe they'll let us and the Malays live on too. But no one could say it, of course, because that would be a d
eadly bad omen.

  When we read the whole play in our communal cell, Englishmen and Dutch and Chinese we had never seen applauded from their cells. Because by now Memerang fellows knew each other's stories, the play was like the new conversation we had with each other. We were grateful. If George Bernard Shaw had walked along the gallery on the third level of Outram Road Gaol and appeared in front of our cage, we would have cheered him to the echo. So would the poor buggers in all the cells.

  Seventeen

  Hidaka's brought a huge bag of Amanetto sweets, which he knows are my favourites. He did not want to stay though and looked evasive. I wonder is something about to happen.

  There are possibilities other than the worst. They might even take us over to Changi, to the general military camp.

  Just in case though, I put down all the love I can find in this sentence. For you, Grace. It'll be wonderful if we meet again. It'll be a wonderful life.

  Hidaka's sworn he'll get this to you if I can't.

  In a tiny kolek or fishing boat, two private soldiers, including Dignam the Foreign Legionnaire, were still at large in January 1945. They would call at villages but then move on before they could be betrayed. They had travelled 1900 miles through enemy territory, and at Ramang Island off Timor were only 137 miles from an air force pick-up island, and only five hundred from Darwin. By now, however, they needed to rest for days, and a village head man told the Japanese that they were there. They were taken to Dili in Timor where their torture was horrifying, and both, left alone in their cells at last, died of their injuries.

  Then, in Singapore, on the morning appointed by the authorities, some four weeks before the war would end, guards came to the large communal cell at Outram Road prison and tethered the arms of all the Memerang men behind their backs. Sentries went screaming along the galleries telling prisoners, Don't look, Don't look! So there is no record of anyone having seen Leo and his men descend to the ground floor. They were dressed only in their shirts and shorts, and their feet were bare. It might be a move to another prison – they could partly quell their fever of expectation with that idea. But they hadn't been told to bring their mess kits. They probably all noticed that fact. By the time they were put in a small bus with paintedout windows, Jockey probably knew. Did he tell Leo? Did he bespeak death with total clarity? The orderly says no. But surely he'd tell Leo, they were so close. Japanese documents say they behaved coolly, and with the example of Richard Dudgeon before their minds, it was quite possibly so. As well as that, Jockey Rubinsky's attitude of not giving malign forces the satisfaction of showing obvious and reasonable fear was no doubt at play amongst all of them.