Look, said Mrs Enright, you’re both very kind. But you must please leave me free to humiliate the mongrel.
Perhaps because of the gin, the tension of my own happiness, and certainly because of lack of experience, I was suddenly moved to tears.
Please don’t put yourself through this, I begged.
But in the end, we had to leave her there, and were both very uncomfortable about it as we re-entered the lobby. Leo kissed me on the forehead. Let’s go to bed then, he whispered.
Upstairs, abashed at the brush-off Mrs Enright had given us, we said goodnight to the Mortmains, who intended to stay up a little longer. We were half-undressed when our doorbell went. Leo put on a dressing gown and answered it. It was Mrs Enright. I saw her over Leo’s shoulder. She was crying. I’m a weak woman. I will take that spare room your dear wife mentioned.
I found some sheets and blankets, as she stood in the kitchen being introduced to the Mortmains. I quickly made a bed for her on a settee. When I re-emerged, I found that she had been induced to comfort herself with some gin.
Rufus told her, We’ll point Mrs Enright in the right direction. You must be tired after travelling last night.
I was awakened in the morning by the sound of angry voices at our opened front door. Putting on a dressing gown and going to check, I saw both Leo and Rufus in shirt sleeves arguing with a man similarly half-dressed in uniform but very angry. It was of course Major Enright.
Mortmain was saying, You surely couldn’t expect us to leave the poor woman in the open.
That’s exactly what I expected you to do. She would have got sick of it. As it is, you played right into the hands of that mad woman. But you knew what you were doing, too. I know you understood exactly what you were doing.
Leo said he resented the accusation.
The woman had a perfectly fine room at the Windsor, paid for by me. But you look out your window and you think, Let’s make a fool of old D/Plans. In civilian life, you fellows would be little better than criminals, and I know the way you think. God knows what your purpose was in introducing that woman into your flat.
Mortmain declared with the calmest authority, and with a certainty Dotty must have relished, that he and Leo were both married men. I’d knock you down for what you have said, he told the major, except you’re beyond yourself. I ask you to show a little restraint and dignity. We all have to sit at the same planning tables for weeks and months yet, and Colonel Doucette isn’t even back.
Leo, of course, despite his role as an official hero, had a temperament which would go a long way to make peace. He said, My wife has just arrived from Sydney – by the same train as your wife, in fact. I have to ask you not to make a scene, sir.
I felt silk brush by me in a hurry. It was Susan Enright, coming from the bathroom to join the conflict. She took up a position in the middle of our living room, from where she could lob her own high-calibre commentary over Leo’s and Rufus’s heads onto her mad-eyed husband.
How dare you find fault with these decent men! she raged. You’re just embarrassed to be shown up as a skirt-chaser in front of your brother officers. Yes, both their wives are here, and you’re offensive to them too. As for your room at the Windsor, take your tart there and leave me the flat. By the way, any chance of your being sent on a suicide mission? I don’t suppose so. Far too flabby compared to these two.
You’re making a fool of yourself, Susan.
Good. And you’re playing me for one.
Suddenly, Enright began appealing to Leo and Mortmain. You see, she doesn’t mind using your flat as an arena of battle. Well, I’m not biting today, Susan. Excuse me. I shall see you at the office, gentlemen.
He turned on his heel, in a way which implied not a retreat but a dignified withdrawal.
Coward, Susan yelled. Craven bastard! Back to your whore.
His retreating steps could be heard on the stairs, and Leo closed the door, shaking his head.
Mortmain said, The bugger needs a broken nose. I don’t think we should take that from anyone, Leo.
Leo looked at me. I’m sorry, love, he told me, as if the madman at the door had soured everything.
Susan turned, taken out of herself by Leo’s concern, and came and hugged me. At that second, I began to resent her.
She said, I’m not going to risk that you’ll be bothered any further. I’ll go to his bloody room at the hotel.
We told her to stay for breakfast first. But Dotty was not as warm towards her as the men. And later Dotty would tell me she believed that from that day, Major Enright, despite all conscious professionalism, at some level wished them ill, and even wished them dead.
6
At morning tea time during that day’s meeting, I approached Major Enright to make the normal speech, which would have consisted of: Sir, I don’t care who you are. I don’t intend to stay in the army after the war, and so I don’t have to kowtow to anyone. I’m surprised a regular officer would come to other officers’ doors making the accusations you did. And I won’t have my wife upset by outbursts.
I had to queue – I saw Rufus giving him a bit of a shellacking too. But Enright’s face remained set though he was very pale. He was probably copping mullock from his girlfriend as well, and so he should.
Later, he came to Rufus and me voluntarily. He said, Unfortunate scene this morning. That bloody woman has the power to put everyone in the wrong. Sorry for anything untoward I said. The woman knows I’m seeking a divorce, and that’s that. Divorce is a big enough disadvantage for a professional officer, though many colleagues have remarked to me how inappropriate a soldier’s wife Susan makes. And of course, I overlook anything extreme you might have said. Can we all be men about this? And gentlemen as well?
That was as good as we could hope for. Rufus nodded with a half-smile on his face. Later, at lunch, he said to me, The bugger only learned to talk like that from a West End play, on secondment to British regiments in India. He gets it all out of sequence, anyhow, and he gave himself away at the end by pleading.
I wondered where he thought I learned to talk. But I think he was saying the major’s utterances were only skin deep. In any case, we agreed, it was as good an apology as we would get from Enright.
After Leo and Rufus had gone to work on the morning of the confrontation between Major Enright and Leo and Rufus, I decided to go into town by tram to look at Myers and other department stores of Melbourne renown. You cannot imagine the attraction of such an idea to someone raised in the Braidwood and Canberra of the time. Captain Foxhill had lined up a part-time job for me doing filing for the Transport Corps at Victoria barracks, where Leo frequently did his afternoon gymnastics. But I did not have to start for a few days.
I was thus able to leave Dotty to work on her mysterious book, and would be able to return in the afternoon and ask her, as if I routinely asked people this, How is your book coming along?
Susan Enright, still on the premises, complicated all this in a peculiar way. She asked if she could come to town with me. She seemed quite cheery, ready for a day’s window-shopping after the scene with her husband that morning. I couldn’t say no, but from her typewriter, Dotty asked, Didn’t you say you intended to book into the Windsor?
Susan said she would collect her luggage after lunch.
I had expected to catch the tram, but as, wearing our finest, we left the block of flats, a taxi appeared bearing its great bladder of coal gas in a bracket on its roof. She insisted we catch it, and when we reached Collins Street and I offered, like the bumpkin I was, to pay the driver, she cheerily permitted me to. In Myers, Buckley and Nunn, Foy and Gibson, she entered into crazily jolly conversations with girls in the jewellery and cosmetic departments about what her habitual choices were in all these matters. It was as if she hadn’t been rebuffed by her husband at all. Or else she was confident her husband would take her back. Again, girls from Braidwood didn’t behave like that in shops. You’ve got no idea what a constrained bunch of people we country girls were, terrified that someone would think us flash, or skites, or having tickets on ourselves, all of which were the greatest crimes a person could commit in the bush. But Mrs Enright was free of all such fears.