Томас Кенэлли - The Widow and Her Hero

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.

Living with Leo but also with the Mortmains, I had learned a great deal about life in Malaya before the war, and of how Rufus had had his first meeting with 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 Terengarru 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 upcountry. 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 career that 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. Doucette once showed me, Dotty told 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. 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 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 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, Constance 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 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.