As their Saturdays waned, they would sail round to the west coast, to the Coconut Grove nightclub. Both the soldiers had their pipe dress uniforms and shoes with them in duffel bags, and Mortmain similarly had his dinner suit from upcountry. They changed and rowed ashore in their dinghy, overcrowded as it was with a beanpole civilian and the two more compact but sturdy officers. Their shoes hung around their necks, they climbed the sea wall, brushed the sand off their feet, tied their laces, and selected girls to dance with. Infiltration was already their style.
It was clear to me early in my Melbourne career that Dotty did not have the same gleaming view of Doucette as Rufus and Leo did. During the afternoons in the flat, when we were both trying to write, an activity which if communally attempted always leads to conversation, she would tell me about her contacts with Charlie Doucette in pre-war Singapore.
There had been a six-month period, before Minette consented to marry him and join him in Singapore, during which he used to confide in Dotty a great deal. He knew Minette was torn two ways. She was used to living in style in Macau. But there she was a Belgian Catholic divorcee – though she had some sort of Papal document of separation, she could not talk in any real way to the men of the colony.
Dotty said she didn’t know whether in those months of waiting Doucette saw her as a sister or as a potential lover, a solace for his bewilderment. Dotty spoke to me about all this with a characteristic frankness I did my best to pretend was normal to me too. She said, I found him very attractive in all sorts of wrong-headed ways women are fools for. Of course, he respected Rufus too much, and so did I, but I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t some sort of magnetism there.
Minette was always worried about Doucette, you know, Dotty further confided. He’d taken her by storm. I mean, to sail the South China Sea from Singapore to Macau in a 19-footer just to see her face… that would have an impact on any woman. And when she asked him why he did it, he didn’t tell her one of the reasons was intelligence gathering. He told her, I had to see you because I was deteriorating into nothing in the East.
And so he was. Doucette once showed me, Dotty told me, a letter he’d written to Minette – this was before they got married, and he wanted to ask me should he send it off because he was worried by its frankness. He compared himself favourably to his hidebound senior officers and felt sorry for them, poor old men, who would never know the sort of love he and Minette had. In the next sentence he was warning her he was unreliable and a bad man, but that she was a superior enough soul to ignore that. Minette didn’t find out that in everyday life he was a hopeless boozer until she moved into married quarters at Selarang Barracks. I heard her express her anxiety about all this while the boys were out sailing, and Minette and I would be stuck in the clubhouse waiting and trying to space out our gin slings. Minette hated his drinking. She thought it was because he was so torn between sailing and garrison life. And the big boys in Singapore laughed off all his intelligence, you know. The only person who read his reports on how easy it would be to take Malaya was a chap we knew in the civilian administration. But he couldn’t influence the stupid soldiers. That also drove Doucette to drink, the fact some officers were actually looking forward to taking on the Japanese and, since they were missing the European war, could hardly wait. Minette told me that one day when they were sailing he looked at her and said, I’d go to the depths of hell to escape ordinary soldiering in barracks.
Doucette’s now-widowed mother, Constance Doucette, was a renowned dragon, said Dotty, and Charlie was the favourite son. He sometimes said he had become a soldier for her sake – she wanted him to follow in the tracks of his father, the late Major General Sir Walter Doucette. At a party in Singapore, he said something like, I dread the time I go home and she has to realise I don’t resemble the small, model boy she thinks she’s been writing to. He was, as he said, a frightened six-year-old scared of his mother. He also confessed to Dotty that he felt like a fraud with Minette, because she was so generous and rated him at a higher moral level than he deserved.
To Rufus, said Dotty, Doucette has always been the King of Ulster, but I think he’s always been a mess. Sometimes he’d go to pieces and smoke opium in Chinatown, and Billy or Rufus would have to nurse him back. He hated himself for that, and his drinking. And then Chinese boys, one in particular, in his bachelor years. Not that he was alone in that. But he really hated himself for that as well. It was as if he really believed his terrible mother would find out.
I was not shocked so much as scared for Leo. Does Leo know these things?
Don’t worry too much, said Dotty. He’s an extraordinary commando. That’s how he punishes himself for his sins.
I’d rather he didn’t have any sins, I admitted.
In Rufus’s eyes he doesn’t, said Dotty.
After the Boss’s argument with Creed, we all started on the new plan, Memerang, but for a while the Boss seemed down. As the Americans delayed and Memerang became more official, at least as an idea Doxey tolerated, we had to work with Major Enright. He was good at many things – working out the number of Compo and Rompo rations that should be dropped off, and where, and when. I have to say I got a tinge of respect for him. He was earning his keep now by writing into the plan such easily forgotten items as waterproof containers for wireless equipment. He had himself designed new packing methods. Every given load we took on our adventures was to be limited to 35 pounds, what an operative could easily carry. Enright himself designed the sealed kerosene tin-like containers, which had special lever lids and rope carrying handles, so that they could easily be moved in the confines of a submarine. Boot A. B. Australian No. 2, Tropic Studded, was decided on as most suitable for us, and it had been designed by a committee on which Enright had served. He had also designed the marspikes with which explosives could be stuck to wooden hulls – the device silently released a spike into wood through a bracket on the charge. And so on. He had talents. If I didn’t already know it, I began to realise you had to have people like him.
It looked likely that the training for Memerang, on Doucette’s wonderful machines which were still on their way to us, would happen on the other side of the country, where the British submarine flotilla was, at Garden Island, just off the coast at Fremantle. I was disappointed, for no wives were permitted, but I suppose it had to come to that.
The Boss remained silent and edgy and suspicious of Creed. He definitely has the blues, Rufus told me. He was like this sometimes in Singapore, he’d work himself into a black hole, the deep dumps. After he came back from a long sail he was always mopey. Can’t say I ever blamed him.
I hadn’t seen much of that before. I was a bit surprised. As for Rufus himself, he never seemed to feel entitled to be down.
There was a party at Foxhill’s Grace and I had gone too, but we’d come home a little early. We wanted our own company above all. And when we left Foxhill’s, the Boss seemed much better, and the life of the party. He was playing a ukelele he’d picked up on his long trip back from Britain. He’d learned to play it in the bellies of bombers and DC-3s, where he couldn’t be heard over the noise of engines. And that night he’d played for us ‘The Umbrella Man’, ‘Paper Moon’, ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’. He’d stretched his mouth comically and done George Formby, then a tinkly Arthur Askey, and a Cockney Stanley Holloway, followed by some Noël Coward. He’d been full of the joy of life when Grace and I got our coats and left, and through the blacked-out streets on the way to the tram we laughed about his performance.