Томас Кенэлли - The Widow and Her Hero

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 South-East 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 Government House instead of asking for beer. He really was just a boy from the bush, a Grafton boy, despite the fact that he had 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 clans who produced a governor-general in the family like the king of spades out of the magician’s hat.

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 (without 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 equip 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.

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 Singapore.