At lunchtime, she tried to talk me into a hotel dining room instead of the cafeteria at Myers. She was rather depressed that you couldn’t get a drink at Myers. At least the Windsor has a bar, she said.
We got home by tram at mid-afternoon and could hear from the stairs Dotty still working, like a real writer in Hollywood pictures, with a quite feverish clatter of keys. I wondered whether we should go back and sit in the parkland a while, lest we interrupt her. We’ll just creep in, Susan insisted. I must pack and get going.
That prospect of her going was so pleasant that I let myself be talked into opening the door to our half of the flat. Dotty, of course, looked up from her work. I’m just creeping in to pack, Susan explained, moving in a stagy creeping gait.
I said, Please don’t let us disturb you, Dotty.
While Susan packed, I sat in a chair reading Smith’s Weekly and its rollicking attacks on Generals MacArthur and Blamey. To them MacArthur was a poseur playing to the American press in hope of the Republican Party nomination for the Presidency. The Australian General Blamey was a well-connected tippler. Satire is its own reward, and often it is outdone by reality itself – I realise all that now. But Smith’s Weekly was considered rather seditious in the household I had grown up in, so I enjoyed it all the more now. I was a little disturbed that with Susan and me in the house, the pace of Dotty’s typing had fallen off. I began to doze and woke to see Dotty standing over me.
How’re the shops this dreary season?
They’re flourishing, I told her. At least that’s the impression of a woman who’s visited only two cities in her entire life.
She smiled and yawned, and sat in the neighbouring lounge chair.
Have you ever written any poetry? I don’t mean about flowers, or some ballad about rounding up cattle. I mean, poetry. I mean about loss and fucking and the misery of children, and why chaps love war and are such deadbeats in bed? Have you read The Waste Land?
Trying to appear at ease with her earthiness, I said no. She tramped into her half of the apartment and came back with a Penguin book.
Read that, Grace, she advised me. Image is everything, so I’m afraid I’m not much of a poet myself. I’m good at outrage, of course. I feel a lot of that. But when I was young in London, and hanging round writers, I always thought my style was pretty thin. A reviewer described my novel as understated, as if it were a virtue.
What was your novel called?
Sweat. It was about the lives of women in Malaya, or a colony like it anyhow. They weep sweat from every pore, I said. They shrivel and pretend it’s a life. A film company showed some interest in it, but then the war came.
I was fascinated by this.
Writing poetry is wonderful, she assured me. If the beloved is away for a time, it’s a sort of vengeance.
Against who? I asked.
Against the loss of time and beauty, Dotty told me. Or if you want to look on it positively, you could say it was a prayer for a golden world in which men loved women as much as they say they do, and the other way round, in which all wars are merry, and all children loved with equal ardour. You are a sweet and beautiful child, Grace, full of rejoicing. Poetry’s about that too. But you haven’t been betrayed yet.
She sounded remarkably like Susan.
Surely you haven’t been? I asked. Betrayed, I mean.
By Rufus? Oh yes. He does that, poor fellow, but men are like dogs. When an arse is proffered, they can’t turn away. Pardon my putting it so simply. It is simple for them, I’m afraid.
She lowered her voice. The sooner that tart gets out of here, the better. Look, I don’t mind showing you something I dashed off today – it’s not perfect, but it helps me stay sane. Like some gin?
Surprisingly I found I would like some. But something in me didn’t want Susan to have any with me.
Maybe after our guest’s gone.
Quite! Dotty whispered emphatically.
She went to her table and brought a page back. Officially, she told me, I’m supposed to be writing a novel. Really, I want to write about what a shambles the whole fall of Singapore thing was, but the publisher says it would not be looked on very kindly. So I’m trying to write simply about Englishwomen on one of our overcrowded steamers to Australia. Chaucer should have been there. He could have done justice to it. In between, when the thing is seeking its way out of me, I write about Rufus and myself. Despite what I say about men and dogs, he does love me, you know. As far as his sort of fellow possibly could.
She gave me the sheet. Don’t feel you have to tell me anything – whether it’s good or bad. I know exactly how good and how very bad it is.
What she gave me was entitled ‘Mercator’s Projection’. It read:
I don’t know why I was impressed. I thought until then that poetry had died with Tennyson. And the remarkable thing is, I remember understanding the meaning. I must have felt the same thing she did, without knowing it. I knew at once I wanted to write something like this myself.
At last, Susan emerged with her suitcase, and we saw her into a cab, which Dotty was forced to ring for, using the shared phone. We were delighted when she left, and then, as if we’d known each other for years, we broke out the sisterly gin.
I did not have an exact idea of the work Leo did at the requisitioned boarding house and temperance hotel, and at Victoria barracks. Women were of course counselled even in the Women’s Weekly that they should not ask too much. The women’s papers, the motion pictures, novels, and even the traditions inherited from mothers all underlined the idea that we lacked a right to be too inquisitive.
I knew, though, that Leo and Rufus worked together literally, having desks in the same room at Radcliffe House. While in that office, they were supposed to read the latest files on new equipment, from ground sheets to spirit stoves to weaponry. Leo told me this made pretty dry study, worse – he said – than contract law. So Rufus and he developed office games. Samples of commando daggers lay about the office, some of them in filing cabinets. Leo or Rufus would close and lock their office door and compete at hitting the door frame with knives. Only embeddings counted. Bounce-offs were a crime. If a thrower hit either the surrounding plaster wall or the door itself, he lost all his points acquired to that stage.