Томас Кенэлли: The Widow and Her Hero

The DDs, the Devil’s Disciples. If we have to face the penalty, old GBS has shown us how it can be done with as much style as possible. We’re determined to have style like Richard Dudgeon, the central figure in the play.

Filmer’s talked to Hidaka about how the prison boss Matsasuta ought to let us do a performance of The Devil’s Disciple, with your dear husband in the starring role of Richard Dudgeon, and Filmer himself playing General Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne, and Jockey Rubinsky playing the clergyman Anderson.

Hidaka said to him, But the play concerns a great defeat for the British.

And Filmer said, like a true Pom, Yes, like Singapore. It can happen in the best of empires.

I think we’ve got Buckley’s chance of the Japs letting us put it on, but rehearsing it is great work, and so is just reading the parts at night, from cell to cell. We get away with it.

There’s another thing I ought to tell you about Filmer, so you don’t blame him for anything. He’s been pretty happy just as theatrical director. He has left the command of the blokes to me. You are Doucette’s successor, he tells me, and, he says, You know how to handle Aussies. It isn’t an art everyone has.

I always assumed he was a fairly toffee-nosed character, but you can’t judge the Poms as easily as that. And I tell you what, I wish he’d been my English teacher at school…

I had thought that Leo’s journal was the last item I would need to adapt to. Yet there was one side of me that quite correctly believed that Leo’s story would only be settled by my own death.

Now my husband Laurie had a stroke which cruelly paralysed his left side and made it difficult for him to speak. The poor fellow was embarrassed by the impact his deadened lips had on his diction. He now lived in a home, quite an elegant one, but in permanent care, where I visited him daily. He was not disgruntled – he had always had a positive frame of mind, and the stroke, instead of souring him, seemed to have confirmed him in his best temperamental habits. Our son took him out for drives and to concerts at the Opera House in a wheelchair. Except he didn’t want too many of his old friends to see him like this.

I visited Laurie every afternoon and read to him, and I thought that was the way his and my life would go, with no surprises but the expected ones of deterioration and sudden, perhaps fatal crisis for both of us. To extend our lives I read long books, like Great Expectations and Quiet Flows the Don , because I’d read somewhere that having a book to finish actually helped keep people alive.

Yet even as the century ended, I got an unexpected call from California, from a heroically aged Jesse Creed, the American who used to hang around the boys and whom Dotty worked for. Doucette had always been contemptuous of him, though I had found him very urbane and sensible. But I was rather surprised to hear he was still alive. He was coming to Sydney with his wife and wanted to see me. I’m ninety-two, he admitted, and I had to get all manner of medical clearance to do this trip. Finding travel insurance was a hell of a business. But it seems my vascular system is that of a forty-year-old. And I have a wife to help me round – she’s barely seventy.

I asked him why he wanted to come back. Well, he said, the claim of memory. And in any case he remembered and thought often about Doucette and Mortmain and Leo – in fact, of all the wars he had since been involved in, he said, he remembered Doucette, such a character, and still felt uneasy about him.

I did not like to hear phrases like that. They possessed all the danger signs. Hidaka had felt uneasy too, and been full of surprises.

Why uneasy? I asked. Dotty doesn’t blame you. She blames Doucette fair and square.

I’d like to come and discuss that with you, Grace, he said.

You’re very welcome to come, I told him. But is there anything more to be said?

I hoped there was not, but I felt the same fear I’d had before Hidaka visited me.

There are a few things, he assured me.

Damn him.

Bring your wife with you, I suggested. Safety in numbers, I thought.

Well maybe, Grace. We’ll see.

I agreed to talk to him, of course, for Leo’s sake. Because I’d be at the retirement home in the afternoon, I asked him to call in the morning at ten. I gave him the address and directions but he told me not to bother with those – he would have a local driver, he said.

The old man who presented himself at my door the following morning was indeed on his own, and wearing slacks and a fawn jacket. Despite his age, he still possessed those ruby-cheeked boyish features rather reminiscent of President Reagan’s face, a particular sort of glow Americans retain through tennis, golf and watchful dieting. I had expected him to bring his wife. When I said so, he told me that she was still jet-lagged and had begged off. She gets jet-lag real bad – always has.

He laughed benignly.

And the poor old thing doesn’t have the stamina she once possessed.

Something told me that was just his story, and he had not wanted her here. We sat a while swapping life histories. He had married twice, been widowed once, had an abundance of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He sometimes got breathless and they’d shipped extra oxygen aboard the plane in case he became short of breath, but he hadn’t needed it – he’d known beforehand he wouldn’t, but you couldn’t convince wives and doctors.

I could see he was not utterly at ease telling me this, and so I was not utterly at ease hearing it. I created detours in the conversation. I asked him when he’d retired from the army. He’d hung on a long time, he said – until the late 1970s. He told me that he’d ended up his military career a major general – a prince of the Pentagon. You know the saying about how behind every great fortune there’s a crime? he asked. The same could be said of high military rank.

After retirement he served on the board of a staff college and took two quarters a year as an adjunct professor teaching politics at University of California, Santa Barbara.

Underlying all we said, I think, was the awareness in both of us that he was the blessed warrior, always marked by himself and others for survival amidst the reckless. That was something I refused to blame him for, but even such a reasonable attitude called up its opposite, a little cloud of possible widowly rancour in the room. We were therefore happy when we found ourselves talking about Dotty. He’d read her half-dozen novels. She was very British, you know, he told me. I don’t think all that post-war British squalor she wrote about is as interesting to Americans. The Brits go for squalor, but we try to ignore it.

I told him a bit shortly I thought squalor was inescapable for war widows, and inevitably influenced Dotty’s novels.

I suppose that’s true, he conceded, with careful grace.

But she had never remarried, which rather surprised him. She was a lusty girl, Jesse Creed said fondly. I imagine you’ve heard I was in a position to know. We had an affair, as the rumours said.

Before or after Rufus vanished? I asked.

Creed said, Both, I’m afraid. I don’t expect you’d approve. To an extent I took advantage of her loneliness. So there, I can’t be franker.

That’s Dotty’s business, I told him sharply. I’ve got other things to live with.

I hoped nonetheless that this was the chief of his old man confessions.

He said, When she had anything to do with other men, it was always really to do with Mortmain anyhow, that crazy monocle-wearing Limey.

Dotty had been moderately successful with her novels, and her poetry was anthologised. She was a bit of a cult feminist writer, and had made her mark in London until emphysema and diabetes in combination had brought her down suddenly in the early 1990s.