That was part of their éclat as well. Officers in D/Navy’s office or Major Enright’s D/Plans were not permitted to waste their time on such knife play. They had to keep writing reports and coming up with the correct admixture between destination and plan and technology. But then they had not personally invaded Singapore. They would tolerate the heroes’ games at great length, whatever spirit stoves or ground sheets waited to be assessed and initialled.
When not employed on their files or their knife practice, Leo and Rufus attended roundtable meetings at which questions of equipment, transportation, tactics and strategy to do with the coming huge operation in the Natunas were discussed. These meetings were attended by Colonel Creed, who remained an advocate for the idea of many well-equipped operatives, landed from many US submarines, undermining Japanese structures and lines of communication, ships and airfields, transit of supplies, etc., etc., in South-East Asia – which to us, of course, was North-West Asia.
The idea that the Independent Reconnaissance Department should build its own Indonesian, Malaysian or Borneo junks was still being discussed, and Mortmain in particular made suggestions about the way that should be done, on everything from the contour to fitting-out and the supply of drinking water. I know now that the building of a number of junks was begun in a Melbourne shipyard, which was then afflicted with strikes, so that they would never be finished.
In the afternoons, a succession of hefty NCOs kept up the fitness of Leo Waterhouse and Rufus Mortmain and others, introducing them to new methods of tripping, knifing and incapacitating mortal flesh; and causing them to climb ropes, run through mud and surmount improbable barriers. They came back home to Dotty and me full of tonic vigour, or as Leo said, absolutely buggered.
They were about to truck us to a private abattoir in Fitzroy, so that we could practise slitting throats on pigs, when a corporal came running to us from a nearby office. There was a call for Commander Mortmain. Rufus jogged double-time across the parade ground to take it. By the time he got back the truck was ready to leave for the abattoir. I was sitting in the back with a group of soldiers and sailors who were going through the same training for perhaps the same purpose. His monocle was glistening when he crawled aboard and sat beside me. Aussie soldiers and ratings who hadn’t seen him earlier nudged each other and whispered, Cop the bloody monocle on the Pom.
That was Mrs Enright, he whispered to me. Wants to shout you and me a drink. To repay us for our kindness. Windsor bar, 5.30.
He inhaled and the eye which did not have the duty of bearing the monocle, arched.
She wants us to bring our wives? I asked.
I don’t think that’s the purpose, said Rufus, looking ahead. I also think she knows you won’t come, Dig. I feel I should go out of politeness, don’t you think?
Up to you, I said, a bit surprised. I can’t go. I don’t want to.
No need to bother Dotty with the details, he told me. I don’t think Dotty likes her.
I thought I knew him. I didn’t think he was an altar boy. But I didn’t know he’d compromise me like that. For a drink and God knows what else with a good-looking mad woman. On our operations, life is so simple, and we all know everything we need to know about each other. Now, on the way to knife pigs, he was making the world complicated again. I wanted to go home and hug Grace. But I had to cover myself with pigs’ blood before they’d let me.
7
During our joint tenancy, Dotty and I often liked to get ready for the return of our men by cooking a communal dinner – a pleasant exercise of sisterhood. Talking, talking, we cleaned and mashed the spuds, debated how much butter we could spare to make them appetising, and shelled heroes’ quantities of green peas. Occasionally, as we chatted, she might go and find a book from the bedroom, stand with a frown thumbing through it and, finding the page, hand it to me to read while she went back to stirring the vegetable pot or reducing the flame beneath it.
I have said this before, in one or two minor literary magazine interviews, that Dotty was my chief educator. I thought Spender’s poetry, which I read at Dotty’s urging, astounding. That’s putting it mildly. Spender – with his talk of the treachery of banks and cathedrals and of the insanity of rulers – had nothing in common with me; and my innocent father, a good servant of society and a survivor of the world Depression, would have found his socialism offensive. Spender had little time for rhyme and punctuation. He was too busy educating the reader in the space of one poem.
Before the war, before her travels, Dotty had met Louis MacNeice at a party in Bloomsbury. Evelyn Waugh, of whom I had until then never heard, had told her offhandedly that he disliked stringy women like her, that they generally had narrow opinions and tendencies to ‘improve’ men. That was after she had published her novel, and was ripe to be put in her place by other writers. Breaking away from such posturers, she had begun her rough travels in Turkey and the Middle East, and met Mortmain on the beach in Penang.
Let’s have a gin before the men get home, she always suggested, and I agreed to the idea as if it was something daring and revolutionary, which indeed it still was in my terms.
On my second afternoon in Melbourne, we hadn’t finished it when Leo let himself in. Seeing me evoked such a frank joy in his face that I felt myself instantly exempt from the wistfulness of Dotty’s earlier poem. Cooking’s afoot! he yelled, and lifted me and carried me around the living room and back to the kitchen. Dotty was smiling too at this demonstration of exuberant love. He put me down.
You’re stacking on the weight, old girl, he said, imitating a husband of greater age, a Braidwood pastoralist, say. Then he frowned. Rufus won’t be back for a while, he told Dotty, and her face instantly clouded.
Where is he?
Leo said uncomfortably, I’m not sure. I think he might have gone down to Port Melbourne to inspect something, a vessel, you know. He can’t always tell what they might expect of him.
How long is this inspection to take? asked Dotty.
Leo made a pained face.
Dotty asked again, Will he be home for dinner?
Leo told her, Well, he didn’t actually tell me he wouldn’t be.
We turned down the stove and waited, and Leo kept on apologising to Dotty as if it were his fault.
He said, Grace and I might go to the pictures. If Rufus is back in time, perhaps you and he would like to come too. It’s Errol Flynn.
Then you’ll be looking at yourself on the screen, I joked.
Wasn’t he arrested this year for rape? asked Dotty, as if our happiness bothered her.
I’m not sure, said Leo. I hope not. He’s a Tasmanian, you know.
Leo and I were pleased to eat dinner hurriedly while listening to the ABC news and then get away to the pictures. Errol Flynn was a Norwegian villager who stood up against the Nazis. He was starting to look older than Leo, like an elder brother. But his eyes still glittered on the screen and I was sure he couldn’t possibly be guilty of rape.
When we got home at eleven, the flat felt cold and we heard a shrill question from Dotty in the Mortmain bedroom and the appeasing rumble from Rufus.
Let’s go to bed, said Leo, looking very grim but then smiling broadly.
The next morning, Leo and I encountered all the worst aspects of sharing the flat. Dotty was thunderously silent, and Rufus behaved like someone in a play, the breezy fellow who enters towards the end of act one, tennis racket in hand, sweater over shoulders, oblivious to the crisis that’s overtaken all the other characters. In as far as he could dance, he danced around Dotty, his comedic glass in his eye, trying too hard. Could I pass you the milk, dear? Try this marmalade a Yank gave me. And so on.