For the next day Major Doxey had called the first big minuted meeting for the Memerang plan. Even he believed Creed was no longer of use to us. D/Sigs, D/Navy, D/Plans were all there at Radcliffe House for the meeting, and Rufus and I, but the Boss didn’t turn up. It was strange. The Boss was winning his argument with Creed and Doxey, so I thought only something severe or unexpected had delayed him.
Nonetheless Rufus waited until the afternoon before he called Doucette’s flat. No answer. He called Foxhill, who was at home, about it, and Foxhill told us Doucette had drunk quite a bit later in the night, and got a little bit weepy very late, after Mrs Foxhill had gone to bed. The Boss had said something about he should have felt greater excitement about Minette being safe. And that he would hate anything he did to hurt her – if he caused the Japanese to get revenge on him by punishing her or his stepson.
It was later still, apparently, when the Boss began to plummet a bit. He got on to the whole thing of it being his fault Minette and young Michael were on that ship, on their way to India. They could have stayed in Melbourne all the time, as it turned out. And he began to say again how he thought he wasn’t pleased enough to find they were alive.
Before Foxhill went to bed, he set the Boss up in the spare room because it was too late for him to be driven home. Foxhill was woken towards dawn by a racket from the Boss’s room. He found the Boss tangled in the sheets and fighting them. It turned out he had a sort of waking nightmare, something about guards taking blankets away from Minette.
I know what that is like, the nightmares. I have this nightmare where my father and I are in the same camp and he’s asking me for food, and I keep on saying, of course, I know a barracks where there is some, and I wander off to get it, but I keep on being delayed, and I always find myself at the opposite end of the camp to the hut where the nourishment is. I have conversations with other men who try to put me off the search too, and I’m bullied by guards with indistinct faces who tell me that I have to do certain duties, including latrines and unloading trucks, and I’m fretful to get to the supply hut and then back to my father. I explain to everyone, The thing is that my father doesn’t know I’ll be so long, and there’s the risk he’ll start to believe I’m not coming back. So I know why the Boss might have a nightmare, particularly when he’d drunk a lot.
Foxhill himself came to the office later, looking white and shattered. He had totally forgotten the meeting, and apologised and said he had felt bound to stick around the house until the Boss woke. Doxey was censorious about it. You could have called us, Captain, he told the Scot. Foxhill told us the Boss had said when he woke up that all he needed was a few days by himself, somewhere in the Dandenongs or a beach house where he could fish and go on long walks. He obviously needed a few days off, said Foxhill – he’d come straight off the plane from England and got to work, and he’d had a shock he hadn’t absorbed yet. Foxhill’s wife’s family – as it turned out – had a nice beach house on the Mornington Peninsula, and Mrs Foxhill would get the keys from her brother that day and drive him down to the place with his ukelele, his fishing line and some books.
At the meeting, Foxhill turned to Rufus. Actually, I don’t want to barge in at the beach house and check all the time on how he is. But I’m sure he’d accept a visit from Leo and you over the weekend, since you’re his golden boys. You could take the girls down there and have a picnic. Just let me know by telegram or phone how he is.
We were even able to get a car from the office to pursue that task On Friday night, though, Dotty said she would not go. I’ve dragged the bugger up by his miserable puppet-strings too often, she told us. We knew her well enough by now to understand she wasn’t likely to change her mind. Grace said in that case she wouldn’t go either, because she didn’t want to cramp Rufus and me. But I wanted her to come. I wanted to sit in the sand dunes with her and drink beer. As for the surf, it was getting a bit cold for that, but I imagined that we would dare each other into it.
Dotty stayed abrasive overnight about everything, spiky about Rufus and the Boss. Tell him to have a nervous breakdown once and for all, she advised us while we packed a picnic basket the next morning. I said, I don’t think the Boss is crack-up material.
And she replied in her tigress way, Oh, he’s fine when he’s sneaking around and exploding things. It’s just daily life he can’t handle.
And yet, while Rufus picked up the car, she came to Grace and me and said, All right, I’m going, but only for Grace’s sake. And to show you what a lunatic Doucette is.
He’s not a lunatic, I said. He’s been through a lot.
Haven’t we all? Dotty sniffed.
Grace saved me from further arguments by winking at me. The ride south with Rufus – driving through Brighton and Frankston – was very pleasant. Through those suburbs with low-roofed houses behind the dunes and flashes of bright sea seen across vacant plots. At last we got amongst the bush of the peninsula and followed the directions Foxhill had written out for us, from Rosebud on the inner side of Peninsula across red hills to the ocean side. We found the family name on a board hammered to a tree by a stock gate. Beyond the gate a tall timber house with a verandah all around it looked out at the Southern Ocean. Nothing stood between it and the South Pole, and it felt like that. Pleasantly though, not cold but certainly the end of the earth.
We walked up the timber stairs to the house and around the verandah to the front – the sea-facing side. Here there was a slung hammock, and on the verandah boards, an open novel and a bottle of whisky two-thirds gone. Rufus stood by the back door, crying, Boss, are you there? There was no answer, and Grace suggested he might have gone down to the beach. It was a hopeful sort of idea, but I think we could all tell that things were not right.
Rufus said, I’ll just creep in and see if he’s asleep.
We nodded, and Rufus disappeared into the dim house. Grace and I looked out to sea. It was so immense it seemed to promise us settled times. A roar from inside the house took us by shock. A stooped Rufus was retreating to the verandah, his arms spread wide. No, it’s me, it’s Rufus, he was saying. The crazy-eyed Boss, in nothing but shorts and greatly needing a shave, was yelling at him in what must have been Malay and swiping at him with a machete.
Boss, it’s us, I called out, because he didn’t seem to know Rufus.
Have you got malaria? Rufus asked him, but the Boss sliced the air with the machete.
At the end of the Boss’s backswing, Rufus hit him in the face and his legs gave out and he fell sideways onto the verandah boards with his mouth crushed open. I’d never seen him look like this before, and I was shocked by the belt Rufus had given him, and knew I’d have to explain its force to Grace without understanding everything myself about what it meant. Perhaps I could say, Rufus isn’t trained to hit people softly.
In fact Rufus himself seemed appalled to see the Boss flattened like this, looking like a dipso in a gutter.
He said, Let’s put him to bed, Leo. No, better bath him, I think. He doesn’t smell so good.
Does he have malaria? asked Grace. It was obvious she wished we could say yes.