I’m sure if I showed Rachel some of Leo’s occasional scribblings on events like the first wonderful day back in Melbourne, she would point out that I get one mention from Leo and Doucette gets so many. I notice it myself. But this was a statement of the preoccupations of that day of glory, that hour, that martial – not marital – moment. Doucette was there, and so was triumph, and triumph is a two-dimensional condition. That’s why Leo wanted me there, to add an element. A man, a woman and a hotel room, the simplest joy. The young Leo would not have wanted to hear me talking like that, of course. But it’s longing and misery that are three-dimensional.
Even as he remembered the evening, and relayed it to me (without any of the geographic details of the mission) during our honeymoon, Leo runs the risk of looking from the perspective of the present like a stooge of Empire. But it was not about Empire. It was about Doucette and Rufus. And apart from that, it was his region the Japanese had taken, his island childhood in the Solomons they’d tried to annul. Yet it has to be admitted that the concept of Empire was not offensive to him, or to any of us. He – like me – had made our school procession to country showgrounds to celebrate Empire day. The Empire was a system as eternal and fixed in structure and God-ordained as the solar system. Besides, nine-tenths of all we made went to feed, clothe and equip the Empire. But that aside, it was something more ancient and eternal still that drove Leo. Something mythic or chemical or cellular or all three in Leo and his friends. The summit of their lives had so obviously been that liquid darkness in which they had affixed their limpets!
That was so clear that I did not question or feel particularly threatened by it. It would be Mortmain’s wife Dotty who would try to make me more discontented at that reality than I had so far thought to be.
5
Dotty Mortmain, black-haired, pretty, watchful and lithe, came up with her monocled husband Rufus Mortmain to the wedding, all the way from Melbourne. She was tall for a woman, coming to Rufus’s shoulder. Other visitors included Major Doxey and Foxhill in his tartan pants, and above all Doucette. Thus I clapped eyes on the man, not as egregiously handsome as Leo, far more compact and neat-featured but endowed with an extraordinary presence, a teasing mixture of reticence and command that even I noticed. They were all in dress uniform and had brought their swords to make an archway for us from the door of the Anglican Church in Braidwood when we emerged married. There was a reception at the Braidwood School of Arts, with a keg of beer laid on by the owner of the Commercial Hotel to honour my father’s local importance. I was in a daze but remember pretty Dotty Mortmain, smelling of cloves, lavender and gin, asking me softly what I thought of Doucette. Dotty Mortmain seemed an exceptional woman to me, from a wider and more diverse world, and such a couple as she and monocled Mortmain did not exist in Braidwood or in any other place I had ever been. You’ll have no trouble from other women, Dotty told me, with that connubial knowingness I had seen in some wives. Leo is utterly under an enchantment. Just remember bloody Doucette is your rival. Look at him smile. He’s quite a smiler. I’ve known the bugger since Singapore.
Leo and I travelled to Sydney and stayed at the Commonwealth Hotel, where I put into action without fear the tenets of my mother’s manual. I thought I’d be the master, Leo told me with a lusty smile. I find I’m the pupil. We visited all the sights, catching the Manly ferry, and then going by train to the Carrington in the Blue Mountains, the traditional hotel of the newly married then. It was all marvellous. I can say that without quaver even to my knowing, slightly mocking granddaughter, although the sex was not utterly without fear. As in all great arenas, courage had to be acquired through repetition. But we were set on an excellent, happy marriage. I suppose that part of the test is I barely remember the conversations we had. All was a golden, unified sphere of delight and very ordinary reassurances to each other that we had never been happier.
One day when we could contemplate being on less than intimate physical terms for some hours and went walking in the luxuriant dampness of the Jamison Valley, Leo told me that he might be sent on operations again, and suggested therefore that we should try stratagems to avoid the conception of a child. He felt that was only fair to me, he said. There were moments when, swept away, we risked conception anyhow. Within nine days of the wedding however, he went to Melbourne, and I prepared to follow him.
It was Dotty Mortmain who told me after I arrived in Melbourne as a young bride that the wondrous Doucette had gone to look at new gear and wonder-weapons in London. She said that we could enjoy our husbands’ company as long as he stayed there, so she did not wish him a speedy return.
But more of her in a while, because what happened to me on my train journey down would have something to do with Dotty. For a country-girl like me the journey from Sydney to Melbourne was considered significant travelling. It was, after all, nearly 600 miles, a distance which in Europe would have placed the traveller in another country. The trains were crowded with troops, American and Australian. But I, being an officer’s wife, had a sleeping compartment, which I shared with another wife, seemingly unhappy and older, who had obviously, like Dotty, passed through the veil I had not yet breached between girl- and womanhood. She was probably in her mid-to-late thirties, and I noticed she was very pretty in a slightly hawkish way. I knew her husband was a major from the fact that the nameplate on her bunk said Mrs Major Enright, in the same way that mine said Mrs Captain Waterhouse.
As the train rollicked south-west through endless pastures, I could hear her weeping during the night in the bunk above me. I was very grateful that I was married to Leo, because I knew he would never give me any need to weep the sort of tears Major Enright’s wife was shedding loudly and without any embarrassment.
For lack of a standard rail gauge between Victoria and New South Wales, we all had to be dragged from our bunks in the small hours, and given a cup of tea, and then told to get down on Albury Station and sit in the first-class lounge. This was a primitive room – hard benches around a coal fire even in summer. Or else we could go to the refreshment room, while the broad-gauge (5 foot 3 inch) train from New South Wales was emptied and shunted out, and the standard-gauge (4 foot 8½ inch) train from Victoria took its place.
My cabin companion took neither of the proferred options, and I found the waiting room very uncomfortable, and the refreshment room full of soldiers calling for beer at 4.30 in the morning. She sat on one of the station’s benches and began smoking with a vengeance. Innocently, I asked her was she well. Once I did, the tears dried, as if she had been waiting all night for me to say something like this. She set her face as if she had at last decided on some solution to her grief.
I was just making up my mind to start a plain conversation with her, something about, It’s an endless journey, isn’t it? when she offered me a cigarette from her silver case.
I said no thanks. She told me to take a seat beside her if I wished to.
She said, I’m sorry I was such a grump at the start of the trip. You would have guessed. It’s always men. Those absolute buggers. Enjoy being young, anyhow. Once you show the slightest flaw, you can expect to weep a great deal.