This did nothing to soothe either of the combatants. Creed said he didn’t need to prove to him that he was trying as hard as he could to get the joint endeavour off the ground. You treat everything I do, Doucette, like an arrogant Limey eccentric.
I happen to be an arrogant Irish eccentric, the Boss reminded him again, just for the sake of contradiction.
Doxey ended up clapping his hands, demanding that both gentlemen desist from further insult and innuendo. The Boss managed merely an icy imitation of being polite. He said that submarine reconnaissance will be essential to the Natunas plan. But he hadn’t seen any indication that our friend Colonel Creed was as anxious as we were to get things in place.
Creed did a more diplomatic job, speaking about how he could understand that after the stress of a journey to Britain, and a long airborne return to Australia, anyone might be a bit edgy. And he himself wished he had made more progress.
I think Rufus and I felt a bit guilty. We knew as well as anyone that there’d be no running of a junk into Singapore once the monsoon turned against us. Yet although Rufus had visited the shipyard, to see the craft being built, we had personally placed no urgency on American reconnaissance. The Boss, coming back, had clarified everything, had got us all out of our file-skimming stupor, all our lazy initialling of memos and reports. It was like Peter Pan coming back to the Neverland and straightening out the boys.
Back in our office after the meeting, the door with our knife scars in it firmly closed, Doucette sat behind his desk and made a gesture that Rufus and I should grab a chair each and pull up to it. The Boss’s calm was back. It was as if he had never lost it in the first place.
You’re the pair whose opinion means something, he said. What do you think of Creed?
Rufus told us Dotty thought he was a decent fellow. She said he really liked that last jaunt of ours, Boss.
The Boss thought about this and remarked that Dotty’s loyalty to all of us was exemplary.
Oh yes, Rufus agreed, but he reminded the Boss she saw through people pretty easily too, and she’d see through Creed if he meant us any malice.
The Boss thought and then declared, Doxey and the others will never understand my position. In some ways I don’t blame Creed because he’s been put in place in this committee to spy for General Willoughby. A fellow has to do what his superiors tell him. But I blame him for the hypocrisy of pretending to be a friend and supporter while he’s doing us in.
Rufus said, I wouldn’t have thought it was all pretence, Boss.
But again the Boss said Rufus was a kind man. Creed might amaze everyone by coming up with a reconnaissance of Great Natuna in the next few weeks. But the Boss didn’t think that likely. So he wanted us to start planning a mission of our own. Back to where the Japs and MacArthur both don’t want us to go, he said. We’d have to build up some records and files but we’d keep them amongst ourselves till it became clear Creed was useless. We wouldn’t be left high and dry without a plan when Creed fails us.
Rufus asked him, Back to Singapore?
The Boss said, That’s the neighbourhood we know. We’ll call it Memerang. Remember those Malayan otters that we swam with that afternoon at Pandjang? Charming little blighters, but you can’t see them coming in the water, and with these submersibles…
We talked away with each other, spinning theories. One idea was that Rufus could captain one of those junks they were building in Melbourne, and take it up off Sumatra to Pompong Island, say, while the rest of the party travelled by sub with the submersibles aboard it in the mine tubes, meeting up with him within reach of Singapore. There was that group of British subs operating from Western Australia, and the Boss knew the flotilla commander, Shadwell. So after junk and sub met, everything could go over to the junk which could take us right up into the Singapore roads. We’d use twenty of the little submersibles, the Silver Bullets, said the Boss. Imagine the mayhem. Whereas I’m sure that this big pirate show they’re talking about now has as much reality as the Wizard of Oz.
So you don’t want to involve D/Plans? asked Rufus.
For God’s sake not yet, Rufus, said the Boss. He’s hopeless.
Rufus murmured, Yes. I can’t say I’m sorry I tupped his wife.
This confession Rufus made wasn’t up for discussion by anyone. The Boss asked for no further information on this, and as for me, I knew enough to confuse me already. I didn’t like it, the fact Rufus took his chances with other women. To tell the truth, I’m a bit scandalised about the whole thing. For poor Dotty’s sake as much as anything. And even though I know he’s the bravest man there is, I have this permanent suspicion that it might affect the way he behaved, way out in some archipelago somewhere.
9
Living with Leo but also with the Mortmains, I had learned a great deal about life in Malaya before the war, and of how Rufus had had his first meeting with Doucette.
Doucette, and a friend of his from his garrison life in Belfast, Billy Lewis, owned a 19-foot yacht. They used to sail up the east coast of Malaya on the south-west monsoon. The east coast was not much used for recreational sailing, because it took some doing to get out there on the south-west monsoon, and during the north-east monsoon it was impossible.
Billy Lewis and Doucette shared a similar hatred of peacetime garrison work in Selarang Barracks. Rufus seemed to think that Billy and Doucette also had problems keeping up with the mess expenses, and living cheaply on the boat was a great saving as well as a great relief. In a ‘good’ British regiment, an officer might need hundreds of pounds a year to keep up with mess and sporting activities, and the Doucettes sent their son only a modest yearly allowance.
It was difficult to get boats in over the sandbars of those eastern rivers, but Doucette and Billy managed to do so, and one day Mortmain had met them drinking tea and practising dialect Malay at a village near the mouth of the Terengarru River. Mortmain, as yet unmarried, had descended from his timber plantation to buy regional daggers, his chief passion. That was how they had met, in an outdoor teahouse in a Malay village. Some military gentlemen were stand-offish even with other Englishmen, in particular with someone like Mortmain, a mere timber estates manager. But that had not been the way of these two. Doucette was always too curious to be aloof.
Mortmain himself would have been a military man, as was his older brother, if his parents could have afforded two regimental sons, but they couldn’t. Rufus too liked to sail, and they sat over tea talking about the testing sandbars of all those north-eastern Malayan rivers. It was up here, Doucette already believed, that the Japanese would one day land, now they had China by the throat. Why not? There was a good highway all the way south to Johore. Mortmain agreed and advised Doucette to tell the blighters in Singapore. They think they’re protected by the Malay jungles. In reality, the roads they built themselves lead right to their front door.
Doucette liked Mortmain and invited him down to Singapore for weekends. On a typical weekend, they might sail from Changi to the Singapore Yacht Club, and begin their drinking and discussions there, chatting with other boat enthusiasts. It became apparent to Mortmain that Doucette had made an intelligence report on his journey up the east coast.