Томас Кенэлли - The Widow and Her Hero

I was not shocked so much as scared for Leo. Does Leo know these things?

Don’t worry too much, said Dotty. He’s an extraordinary commando. That’s how he punishes himself for his sins.

I’d rather he didn’t have any sins, I admitted.

In Rufus’s eyes he doesn’t, said Dotty.

After the Boss’s argument with Creed, we all started on the new plan, Memerang, but for a while the Boss seemed down. As the Americans delayed and Memerang became more official, at least as an idea Doxey tolerated, we had to work with Major Enright. He was good at many things – working out the number of Compo and Rompo rations that should be dropped off, and where, and when. I have to say I got a tinge of respect for him. He was earning his keep now by writing into the plan such easily forgotten items as waterproof containers for wireless equipment. He had himself designed new packing methods. Every given load we took on our adventures was to be limited to 35 pounds, what an operative could easily carry. Enright himself designed the sealed kerosene tin-like containers, which had special lever lids and rope carrying handles, so that they could easily be moved in the confines of a submarine. Boot A. B. Australian No. 2, Tropic Studded, was decided on as most suitable for us, and it had been designed by a committee on which Enright had served. He had also designed the marspikes with which explosives could be stuck to wooden hulls – the device silently released a spike into wood through a bracket on the charge. And so on. He had talents. If I didn’t already know it, I began to realise you had to have people like him.

It looked likely that the training for Memerang, on Doucette’s wonderful machines which were still on their way to us, would happen on the other side of the country, where the British submarine flotilla was, at Garden Island, just off the coast at Fremantle. I was disappointed, for no wives were permitted, but I suppose it had to come to that.

The Boss remained silent and edgy and suspicious of Creed. He definitely has the blues, Rufus told me. He was like this sometimes in Singapore, he’d work himself into a black hole, the deep dumps. After he came back from a long sail he was always mopey. Can’t say I ever blamed him.

I hadn’t seen much of that before. I was a bit surprised. As for Rufus himself, he never seemed to feel entitled to be down.

There was a party at Foxhill’s Grace and I had gone too, but we’d come home a little early. We wanted our own company above all. And when we left Foxhill’s, the Boss seemed much better, and the life of the party. He was playing a ukelele he’d picked up on his long trip back from Britain. He’d learned to play it in the bellies of bombers and DC-3s, where he couldn’t be heard over the noise of engines. And that night he’d played for us ‘The Umbrella Man’, ‘Paper Moon’, ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’. He’d stretched his mouth comically and done George Formby, then a tinkly Arthur Askey, and a Cockney Stanley Holloway, followed by some Noël Coward. He’d been full of the joy of life when Grace and I got our coats and left, and through the blacked-out streets on the way to the tram we laughed about his performance.

For the next day Major Doxey had called the first big minuted meeting for the Memerang plan. Even he believed Creed was no longer of use to us. D/Sigs, D/Navy, D/Plans were all there at Radcliffe House for the meeting, and Rufus and I, but the Boss didn’t turn up. It was strange. The Boss was winning his argument with Creed and Doxey, so I thought only something severe or unexpected had delayed him.

Nonetheless Rufus waited until the afternoon before he called Doucette’s flat. No answer. He called Foxhill, who was at home, about it, and Foxhill told us Doucette had drunk quite a bit later in the night, and got a little bit weepy very late, after Mrs Foxhill had gone to bed. The Boss had said something about he should have felt greater excitement about Minette being safe. And that he would hate anything he did to hurt her – if he caused the Japanese to get revenge on him by punishing her or his stepson.

It was later still, apparently, when the Boss began to plummet a bit. He got on to the whole thing of it being his fault Minette and young Michael were on that ship, on their way to India. They could have stayed in Melbourne all the time, as it turned out. And he began to say again how he thought he wasn’t pleased enough to find they were alive.

Before Foxhill went to bed, he set the Boss up in the spare room because it was too late for him to be driven home. Foxhill was woken towards dawn by a racket from the Boss’s room. He found the Boss tangled in the sheets and fighting them. It turned out he had a sort of waking nightmare, something about guards taking blankets away from Minette.

I know what that is like, the nightmares. I have this nightmare where my father and I are in the same camp and he’s asking me for food, and I keep on saying, of course, I know a barracks where there is some, and I wander off to get it, but I keep on being delayed, and I always find myself at the opposite end of the camp to the hut where the nourishment is. I have conversations with other men who try to put me off the search too, and I’m bullied by guards with indistinct faces who tell me that I have to do certain duties, including latrines and unloading trucks, and I’m fretful to get to the supply hut and then back to my father. I explain to everyone, The thing is that my father doesn’t know I’ll be so long, and there’s the risk he’ll start to believe I’m not coming back. So I know why the Boss might have a nightmare, particularly when he’d drunk a lot.

Foxhill himself came to the office later, looking white and shattered. He had totally forgotten the meeting, and apologised and said he had felt bound to stick around the house until the Boss woke. Doxey was censorious about it. You could have called us, Captain, he told the Scot. Foxhill told us the Boss had said when he woke up that all he needed was a few days by himself, somewhere in the Dandenongs or a beach house where he could fish and go on long walks. He obviously needed a few days off, said Foxhill – he’d come straight off the plane from England and got to work, and he’d had a shock he hadn’t absorbed yet. Foxhill’s wife’s family – as it turned out – had a nice beach house on the Mornington Peninsula, and Mrs Foxhill would get the keys from her brother that day and drive him down to the place with his ukelele, his fishing line and some books.

At the meeting, Foxhill turned to Rufus. Actually, I don’t want to barge in at the beach house and check all the time on how he is. But I’m sure he’d accept a visit from Leo and you over the weekend, since you’re his golden boys. You could take the girls down there and have a picnic. Just let me know by telegram or phone how he is.

We were even able to get a car from the office to pursue that task On Friday night, though, Dotty said she would not go. I’ve dragged the bugger up by his miserable puppet-strings too often, she told us. We knew her well enough by now to understand she wasn’t likely to change her mind. Grace said in that case she wouldn’t go either, because she didn’t want to cramp Rufus and me. But I wanted her to come. I wanted to sit in the sand dunes with her and drink beer. As for the surf, it was getting a bit cold for that, but I imagined that we would dare each other into it.

Dotty stayed abrasive overnight about everything, spiky about Rufus and the Boss. Tell him to have a nervous breakdown once and for all, she advised us while we packed a picnic basket the next morning. I said, I don’t think the Boss is crack-up material.