Томас Кенэлли: The Widow and Her Hero

There was an intercept from Seventh Area Army in Singapore that more than twenty Caucasian people had been engaged in a defensive stand on a junk in the northern part of the Riau Archipelago. The message said they had dispersed using sampans and canoes, and had infiltrated many islands of the archipelago. Even though the Kempei Tai hoped for cooperation from its network of agents, strict watch was to be maintained. And as we sat round the table in Melbourne, orders came from the Philippines, from General Willoughby’s office, to say nothing to IRD yet.

It meant they could have signalled the submarine to pick them up at once.

You were sleeping with Dotty… and you wouldn’t save Rufus.

The old general covered his eyes with his hands.

I was tempted to call Foxhill, but I was also inhibited… Next day or so we intercepted a Seventh Area Army message that four of Doucette’s people were dead in combat and the others being hunted. Now I know what should have happened in an ideal world – we ought to have made up our mind to release the information to IRD so they could get a signal to the British submarine, that character Moxham, to move into the pick-up island with all speed. But there were risks in warning IRD. So we were coming to a decision. We didn’t have any idea then that Moxham would dawdle criminally round the South China Sea trying to find targets, or that he’d only visit the pick-up island once…

I could guess everything he was going to tell me. That their plight had been known. That they had been written off. Someone as precious and complex as Leo written off by people in temperate, secure Melbourne, just for policy’s sake. I stood up. All the blood had raced to my brain. I could feel the inner pressure against the bone of the skull. The room swayed promisingly. So I’ll die, I thought. I won’t have to listen.

I am sorry, said Jesse Creed.

He stood too. He wanted to hold my shoulders but I backed away.

That’s been a weight on me for years, he said.

He was distressed, sure enough, but now he implied he had transferred the weight. When I could think again, I found that for reasons I couldn’t understand I did not want him to claim too much responsibility in front of me. I wanted to curse him after he’d gone. It was as if the normal denunciations just weren’t adequate for dealing with him.

Well, you said you had a merely advisory role, I told him through my teeth, as if it was my job to comfort him.

No, not exactly, he said, refusing to be silent. I had the power to change decisions. With some danger to Ultra, sure. But of a very low order. I was asked my opinion. I felt I could have persuaded the committee. I believe I could have. But at the moment I should have spoken, I remembered Doucette, and all I felt was annoyance at him for getting himself in this mess. If you’ll excuse me, I thought, let that British bastard stew in his juice. He’d sneered at every gesture of friendship and cooperation I’d made. He’d pushed ahead with his Gilbert and Sullivan, tally-ho trapeze act. To hell with him! To hell with him! Then by the time I’d got over my rancour, I thought, Jesus, you have to raise it again tomorrow. But by then there was another flood of Ultra intercepts which kept me up all the following night, and it would have looked strange for me to revisit yesterday’s business when thousands of men were dying in the Philippines. Basically, I lacked the moral courage to do it. I consider it the great dishonour of my career.

His dishonour. He might boast of that, but he still retained his remarkably robust face, and any torment he felt had not halted him from dressing his old bones in a camelhair jacket and golf shirt and cream slacks and loafers. I felt my newly calm anger working along with my old familiar bewilderment, and a sense of being stung into brutality. Who did he think he was to make this confession to me? But fortunately I now lacked the physical endurance to beat him with fists, just as he lacked the endurance to receive such a beating. I felt affronted though, and this might have been the greater part of my anger, that I was being made party to nothing more than some sort of spiritual book-keeping on Creed’s part. And I felt for him too some of Leo’s anger for the desk soldier, the ones who drew up plans for jungle forays, or supplied the gear of champions.

The thing is, I told him, you weren’t condemning Doucette. You were condemning Leo. Doucette had chosen to throw himself on the first bonfire he found.

He made a concession with his hands. Remember Foxhill? he asked me. In the tartan pants? He was organising a group to go in by sub and fetch the survivors. Well, by that stage we knew it wasn’t much use. They were all dead or captives by Christmas, except two, and we thought they’d probably drowned.

And you were wrong about that too.

Maybe. Anyhow, telling Foxhill to call off Memexit didn’t involve any chance of jeopardising Ultra, and so I let him know.

Jesse Creed spread his hands further. He seemed to be expecting something more from me now. He was lucky that I did not know which viper of a sentence to sting him with first. The great dishonour of my career . How sad for you, that you discovered you were a bastard! It didn’t stop you breathing, progressing, mating, breeding and ageing and finding travel insurance at the age of ninety-two. I certainly didn’t intend to absolve him, and I itched to attack him as I had Hidaka. And then it struck me. As I was ready to curse and whack him, I thought, You poor old bitch! What are you about? Doing what you could, and inadequate to Leo. But they all were inadequate to Leo. Foxhill, Doucette, Rufus. All of them. Eddie Frampton, Captain Moxham, Jesse Creed. At eighty-four, why not just let yourself go in peace? The ghost is satisfied, the ghost has had its explanations, the ghost has departed the scene. Just ease up now, you foolish crone. And be Leo’s widow from this point only in honourable name.

Never mind, I suddenly told him, conceding nothing, dismissing him. I had scorn, too. All the stuff you try to lay at my door, you’ll have to take all that with you when you leave. I’m going to get a bottle of gin. You and I will drink a health to the men you let down. Then you can go off in your car and make of it whatever you want. I’m not here to help you feel easy about 1944. You can go to hell for all I care.

He nodded. That’s a good Australian curse, he said. And I deserve it.

When I brought the gin, he sat because I told him to. With the drink in front of him he looked so much like an aged lost boy. He laughed. I’m not supposed to have this. Ruinous to a guy’s blood pressure.

I think you’ll get through to tomorrow, Jesse. You always have.

He shook his head. He looked eroded now, and I was pleased it had gnawed at him, the same thing that had eaten at me. And at a calm level I acknowledged that after the century I had lived through, I wasn’t nearly as surprised that day as I would have been had he told me in 1945.

Here’s to Leo, I said. He abashed me by beginning to weep. Tears made his handsome, ageing face look more squalid and rheumy. Ah, I thought, good. He should know some indignity.

Don’t think of sending me a Christmas card, I told him.

He said, I don’t think there’ll be any more Christmases.

As if they know they’re feeding important theatricals, since the trial the rations have got better – some fish with our rice. Then one day little Hidaka smuggled in a dozen egg tarts in his valise. Succulent. We were groaning with joy like a pack of old ladies. He said, Steamed buns next time. But they haven’t turned up yet.

Yesterday, a week from the trial, we suddenly got called up by Sleepy and told to get our mattresses and mess tins. We were sweating a bit because we didn’t know whether it was the final walk, but Jockey talked to a Chinese orderly again and found it was routine after all. Naturally enough, we’re hoping to wait the war out. Anyhow, as Sleepy led us to another wing we could hear some poor wretch being beaten somewhere on the lower floor. His screams were bouncing from gallery to gallery. In the end, we found ourselves at a cage, in a corner of the gaol, bars three sides and brick the other. There were bunks in there, some bed rolls too, and so we were all going to be together till the finish, whatever the finish is. And crazy old Filmer looked at the cell and bed rolls and said, Well now, chaps, we can really perform the play.