Томас Кенэлли - The Widow and Her Hero

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

Mrs Enright gave him a washed-out, How are you?

That was one of the best parties I’ve ever been to, the young officer said like a schoolboy.

She nodded. He could tell she didn’t want to talk.

I hope I didn’t interrupt your sleep.

It’s quite all right, she said. But she closed her eyes again.

Later, when our train came seething into Melbourne, and I got down onto the long platform, I saw Leo running towards me, and from the corner of my eye snatched a glimpse of Mrs Enright met by an older-looking officer. She allowed him to scrape his lips across her cheek, and she went off unhappy-looking, but without creating the scene she had promised. I think it was the meeting with the young officer, who’d been to her party, which made her think how momentous and final it would be to stage a brawl in front of officers. Yet I did ask myself why she had made my journey miserable and had not then punished the cause as promised.

I walked that platform with Leo, the blue and red ribbon of the Distinguished Service Order on the chest of his lightweight uniform, like the most blessed woman at the centre of the warring world. Now that he had grown a moustache, he looked like the film actor Errol Flynn, everyone said so, except younger, and somehow more serious. He was also heavily tanned, in exactly the way that made it seem he’d faced danger in places none of the other soldiers on the platform could imagine. For women have our part in relishing the warrior myth, the place in the legend that, although I did not know the details, I knew Leo had achieved.

Indeed, women could feed the immolatory furnaces too. In Braidwood in 1916, my mother confessed to me once, one night on a dare she had handed a white feather to a farmer’s son who had not yet volunteered. He had gone to France in 1917 and not survived the year. It was her greatest sin, she said, and she told me lest I repeat it. My adoration on Swanston Street Station might itself have contributed an ounce more to Leo’s willingness to extend the range of his heroism and the scope of the Doucette legend.

Ahead I could see sallow-looking Major Enright, talking hard to his wife and trying to hurry her off the platform and away to a sullen breakfast somewhere. Mrs Enright hung back like a four-year-old being dragged. It was true what Susan Enright had said. An army major was frightened of a scene, and the bodies of both Enrights were full of tension. Whereas Leo and I were side-by-side, walking in casual lockstep, my shoulder against his upper arm, hip to hip, at prodigious, godlike leisure. I was amazed and delighted at how bodies could send a promise to each other through fabric. Also, I felt beautiful at his side. Effortless Jean Tierney and the inwardly radiant Merle Oberon had nothing on me. And I had no sense at all that I would ever be punished for the glory of that instant. That’s why ecstasy is ecstasy – it carries with it the idea that it will easily outlast all the rest.

On our way to the car and driver Major Doxey had loaned him, Leo told me again – as if it might be a problem – that we were billeted to share a big apartment with the Mortmains. It would prove to be a pleasant, white, art deco block of flats just by the river in South Yarra. Our place had plenty of space, considering the way people were living then. As Leo had promised by letter before my move, there were two smaller flats between which the wall had been knocked down, so that you could move from living room of one to living room of the other, and each half-flat had its bedroom.

The Mortmains were easy to live with, he reported. Dotty Mortmain had published a novel and travelled a lot, so was very interesting. I had never before met anyone who had published a novel. The only trouble was, Leo reported, that sometimes she gave Rufus the rounds of the kitchen, and Lieutenant Commander Mortmain might come creeping into our side of the flat begging for sanctuary and a drink. Leo hoped I wouldn’t find that a problem.

Nothing was a problem that morning. It was a late summer’s day, the humidity was low, and even that contributed to the perfection of things.

On arrival, I saw that the table in our living-dining room had nothing on it, but I could see through the archway the Mortmain table on which lay two dumb-bells, newspapers, a number of stacked books, and a big typewriter. Leo saw my glance and said, Dotty works for the Yanks three days a week. The rest of the time, she does her own work. Something literary. They’ll be in later today. Look at the knife.

On their dresser lay a large Malay-style knife beside an empty teacup. Rufus has knives of all kinds spilling out of drawers, Leo explained. He grinned and his eyes glittered. Australian eccentricity was not like the worldly eccentricity of the Mortmains. And again, the idea of someone doing something literary on an extended basis was new to us as well.

Our bedroom looked out across a tree-lined street to the grassy embankment parkland and the narrow water of the Yarra itself. For people from New South Wales, and particularly from the great harbour of Sydney, the little Yarra is considered a joke, a river which runs with its bottom mud on top of the current. But its water was a pleasant blue that day, and when we arrived, eights and fours and scullers were practising on its surface, cutting even wakes as sharp as joy itself.

By the time the first of the Mortmains got home hours later, Leo and I were sitting, decorously reading books. It was Dotty, the sinewy Englishwoman, with her remarkable, slightly doleful green eyes and lustrous black hair. In ordinary weekday gear, she looked even more like an outdoors woman who had been rendered sinewy, as I would find, by a life of trekking and sailing far from Britain. Oh, she cried, setting down the string bag with groceries in it by her typewriter. This is your young wife, Leo? I couldn’t get enough time with her at the wedding.

Leo and I both stood up and advanced to the archway. She embraced me like a sister and asked us to sit down with her and have tea. We were drinking it when the front door opened, apparently of its own accord. We could see nobody there from where we sat, but Leo started chuckling. Come off it, Rufus! groaned Dotty Mortmain. But still no one appeared. Then there was a blur of white, which I worked out later was Lieutenant Commander Mortmain, in white shirt, shorts, socks and black shoes somersaulting into the room and ending on his knees at his wife’s chair. Instantaneously, he leapt from the floor to his feet, grabbed her black hair and improbably lifted her from her sitting position into the air, her feet off the ground, as he and she laughed wildly. It amazed me by being more like a circus act than something done by people sharing a flat, but Leo seemed used to this kind of behaviour, and laughed heartily at it. I suppose, by contrast, my own hilarity was a bit shocked.

Rufus Mortmain lowered his wife to the ground again. He bowed. And for the next trick, he announced, I shall throw a series of native knives at Captain Waterhouse and pin him to the wall by the hems of his shirt and pants. But maybe, first, let’s have a real drink to welcome Errol Flynn’s handsome bride!

I was naively delighted Leo’s colleagues saw the resemblance to the movie star too, and I found that strangely reassuring, a sign that the Mortmains and Doucette were not as different in perception from me as I had feared.

Rufus Mortmain – the name still amazes me with its wrong-headed exuberance – extracted a bottle of gin and one of whisky from the cupboard. Glasses were fetched, Leo going back to our kitchen to collect a couple. That was merely fair in terms of our semi-communal living. Dotty began clearing up some papers by her typewriter to make room for our drinking session.