Томас Кенэлли - The Widow and Her Hero

When these women visited each other, they usually travelled by ferry, bus and train, as did Rhonda and I. They had generally been left short of the means to hire taxis, or buy a car. Mrs Danway met us at Kogarah Station and walked with us back to her little flat. She was a thin woman, older than Rhonda or me by as much as five years. I was a little ashamed I had not sought her out earlier. It seemed now the most obvious thing I should have done. I should have contacted all of them. I told her I was sorry we hadn’t met previously.

Oh, she said, as if it forgave me, Hugo was a late inclusion.

She told us at some stage that afternoon that she had lost Lieutenant Danway’s child after the men disappeared to Western Australia, so that between her and Rhonda there were two lost children. She told us Danway loved the training camp over in the west. Doucette had taken him on rather late in the process, so that he had to endure long training sessions to catch up with the others. She showed us a letter he had written. Rufus had him climbing hills and canoeing by the mile from 8.30 in the morning till two the next afternoon. On that coastline, the tent accommodation was very cold at night, said Lieutenant Danway. But it was the same for everyone, he said, and Doucette had infused everyone with a wonderful sense of unity. Everyone pitched in, officers and men, all equals in Doucette’s eyes, and so all very energetic and in an inventive frame of mind. She raised her eyes as she read that, as if it showed some kind of innocence, which it did. Doucette is a particular kind of Englishman, Danway said. The other Poms aren’t like him at all.

Hugo Danway had been a great canoeist, Mrs Danway said, attributing it to his Islander blood – his mother had been a woman from the Marianas Islands, and his father an Australian missionary. And yet his whole leave time he would spend with her, with Sherry Danway, on the block of land he’d bought by the harbour. He had made drawings of the house he intended to raise there after the war.

We didn’t have to ask. Rhonda and I knew that she had had to sell the land. With it and what he had put in his building account she had bought this little flat, she said. I keep busy, she claimed, and then she raised her stricken eyes. Isn’t it heartbreaking, she asked, when a fellow is so young and full of life and hope and skill, and then the axe? An obscene death for very little purpose.

Those words, very little purpose , hung nakedly in the air. I did not like their presence. Dotty Mortmain had been very angry with Rufus for not reappearing by the New Year of 1945, but she said it was due to his desire to keep Doucette out of trouble by following him into it. That axiom or mantra – or whatever you’d call it – took up a solid residence in my mind too, but applied to Leo instead of Rufus. But the words very little purpose threatened to reopen the issue and to revisit the flimsy story I consoled myself with.

They were brave men, Rhonda insisted.

But what for? asked Sherry Danway. After all? What for?

Rhonda said, Men believe they’re born to be brave, and you see hollow men walking round who’ve never had a chance to try it. Or else they failed. But your husband… braver than MacArthur for a start. Braver than any politician. Braver than that old soak Blamey.

And I thought there was something to that, too. To men of a certain kind, not to all men, but to some men in certain circumstances and under the force of certain ideas, bravery was its own end. That comforted me a little when put up against very little purpose . The purpose was to be brave, the purpose was even to be doomed.

Mrs Danway said, I don’t think I want to go to Canberra. I’m sorry. The truth is, I couldn’t care two bob whether they give my husband a medal or not. It has no effect on me or my memory of my husband. It’s certainly not worth risking going to Canberra to hear his name rolled round the mouth of some shitty old official.

She was very firm about that, and I felt embarrassed that I didn’t know my own mind, that I had been shamed into going with Rhonda. Rhonda gave up and said to me, The train into Central’s due in twenty minutes, Grace. We ought to start out.

In fact, the station was in sight when Sherry Danway came running after us. I’ll go, she called after Rhonda. What time should I meet you at Central?

Rhonda yelled the details as we sprinted for the train. I’ll see you there, she cried, and I asked myself, Who elected you leader? Sherry Danway and I had lost husbands. Rhonda was a wilful, married woman dragging two reluctant widows into a confrontation they didn’t want to have.

The following Tuesday we all met precisely where Rhonda had decided, the country-train indicator board at Central. Rhonda and I had got quite friendly by now. On Sunday, we’d shared a picnic at Bradley’s Point. On Monday, Laurie Burden took us to a five o’clock session of The Third Man at the Regent Cinema. It was a wonderful tale of complexity arising from the war, and was strangely comforting, since it implied we were still stuck in that same territory too, in a land of shadows. I was convinced by then that Rhonda was indeed a splendid woman. I reassured myself she would not let her grief for Pat Bantry trample on my own decisions about grief, or complicate it all for me.

I remember my view of myself in those days with some amusement and with a sense of loss as well. I was at thirty-one considered almost too old to bear a first child. I saw Sherry Danway and myself as already middle-aged, already bowed by history, and as unentitled to girlishness. It was as a coven of senior women that we met by the huge indicator board at Central, and took our reserved seats in a carriage with pictures of the Blue Mountains above the upholstery, and a cut-glass water bottle above our heads, clinking in its brass retainer. We were all nervous and had brought plenty of reading matter of one kind and another. I was reading Evelyn Waugh, his world remote from my experience, and thus a good one to lose myself in.

When we arrived in Canberra, there was no snow on the Brindabellas out to the west, and the town seemed ominously vacant, still mainly populated by eucalyptus foliage, as if everyone who had an answer for us had fled. We caught a taxi to our hotel, and despite enquiries about buses, were forced to take another cab to the Department of Defence in its bark-strewn parkland. Though Parliament was not in session, the minister had agreed to see us here. Mr Philip McBride had been a regular member of the cabinet of Prime Minister Menzies. I had seen his face in the press and on newsreels. His office at the department was a plain big room with a massive desk, for which one or two native cedar trees must have been plundered. The office was heartened with pictures of fighter planes and bombers, an aircraft carrier and a cruiser. The planes in the pictures were at ease with the sky. The ships had the sea where they wanted it.

We three were already seated in there when Mr McBride entered with a young man who carried a number of files. Don’t get up, ladies, said the minister, as he made his way around the desk. We did half stand in honour of his political gravity, but we were not as innocent as we had once been, so did not overdo it.

The minister settled in his chair and the young man sat on a harder one by the corner of the business end of the desk. He began briefing himself on who we were from the notes on his desk.

Rhonda said, Perhaps you remember? We’re the women calling on you about the Memerang men.

Ah yes, ah yes, said Mr McBride. Brave men.

He looked up at us, and caught our eyes. Every one of them, he assured us.

Rhonda explained, I was merely the fiancée of Sergeant Bantry. Mrs Waterhouse and Mrs Danway were married to the officers of those names.