And then we saw the Enrights. They came from a table at the back of the dining room to the dance floor. They began dancing with an easy, casual grace, Major Enright light on his feet. Mrs Enright had stayed in Melbourne with him and had won her battle and was in clear, quietly triumphal possession.
Excuse me, gentlemen, Dotty told our two officers. I’ve just seen the man who might have killed my husband.
This had the mouth-gaping effect on them that she wanted. She stood and advanced onto the dance floor. She could handle her drink well, Dotty, in fact she would later write a poem to gin. ‘My constant lover and traducer,/ noble in promise, squalid in effect,/ companion of verse and bedrooms…’
The Enrights’ dance floor connubiality was about to be dive-bombed, and I’m ashamed to say it was fascinating to watch. Dotty reached out and tapped Major Enright’s shoulder playfully. He responded just as she wanted. He backed away from his wife, who still nonetheless carried a lacquered smile.
I could see Dotty ask him for a dance. How could a desk-born warrior respond when he had made the plans, as willingly as Rufus and Leo had gone along with them? He obviously wished this was not happening, but he turned to his wife and asked her to wait for him at their table.
In Enright’s suddenly stiff hands, Dotty grew loose-haired and sinuous and eager. With the threat she might become shameless, she swung herself with a lover’s confidence in his arms, fell back on his breast, twirled back to face him. She nibbled his ear, pulling languorously on the lobe. She cut off any impulse on his part to turn and explain to his wife that he was dealing with a mad woman; she whispered in his ear, hung her head back and laughed at the dance floor lights, lowered her head onto his campaign ribbons, the strands of her hair becoming mixed in with the vivid flashes of his merit and service awards.
When the music stopped, Dotty kissed him fulsomely, and I looked to Mrs Enright’s table, but she was gone. Our officers had sat through this display, but it convinced them that we were unreliable goods, and they were pleased to find a taxi for us soon after and send us home.
I didn’t try to chastise Dotty. I’d lost the confidence for that. And I was too much in awe of her work. It had been a calamitous night, yet I delighted in her irrational vengeance on the safely wed, clad and housed Enrights. When we got out of the taxi at our flats, she sat on the brick wall in front of the building and looked up and down the empty street, as if at any moment Rufus and Leo and Doucette might roll by, yelling greetings to us.
I’m a bitch, she admitted. But I can’t take this. I’m not as game as you. I’m going back to England. And then we’ll see. Won’t we, Gracie? We’ll see.
11
It would turn out that Foxhill had been planning a rescue operation, Memexit. But it had not got support from others in IRD, who secretly believed the entire party were all dead or captured by Christmas.
It was all distressingly vague, and the bereaved hate vagueness, especially if they don’t know whether they’re really the bereaved or not. Dotty and I spent a miserable Christmas together in the flat. My parents had invited me home, the Foxhills had invited us to their table. But we wanted to get it done with in our own company. I relieved my depression by writing the poem ‘To the Beloved Missing in Action’, but I didn’t show it to Dotty, not then.
The New Year was a relief. Whether the war ended or not, it would be the year in which something more definite would emerge. The Germans surrendered as expected, but no surrender was predicted for the Japanese. Dotty went out with Colonel Creed now and then, and I’d learn there was an affair. In a way, I envied her the option.
Dotty and I were both working the morning the fiery end to Japan’s war came. Dotty called me and asked me to a party at Colonel Creed’s office, where – I discovered when I arrived – the gin and Scotch flowed copiously, and everyone kissed and did the Hokey-Cokey, the latest brainless dance craze. Dotty and I were both edgy with hope and dread. We would soon hear of our loves missing in action, but we said nothing about it. That would have been to provoke the savage gods who, for some, hung over the coming of peace.
News did not come quickly. It was the Chinese driver of one of the Japanese judicial officers who told an investigating Australian that he had driven his master to the place where the executions took place, a nondescript field of weeds along Reformatory Road. He also said he had exchanged a brief conversation in Mandarin with one of the condemned men while they were still sitting and standing near the bus which had brought them, and told him to prepare himself for death, and that he should consider telling the others the same. No, said the condemned man – certainly Jockey Rubinsky – I know already and they more or less know. The condemned man was very brave, said the Chinese driver. They all were. When the truth became apparent there was no pleading, though a few of them retched from the smell of blood as they were led blindfolded to the edge of one of the three pits in which the earlier slaughtered lay. A month after the end of the war, the Australians found the rough graves. Six crosses had been put there – it seemed more as stage-dressing and for appeasing effect rather than from true respect.
The bodies were exhumed the next day. Two days later and I knew. Rufus was not among the dead there. Leo and my cousin Mel Duckworth were. But another three days passed before a Malay led the British to where Rufus had perished, it seemed at first of wounds. I, half a week widowed myself, became the consoler then.
We could have kept the flat in Melbourne indefinitely, and we did stick on in that place booby-trapped by memory until October, when Dotty used her influence to get on one of the troop ships returning to Britain after delivering Australian soldiers home. There was a not quite rational sense in which she was abandoning me, and although neither of us raised the idea it would sometimes enter between us and make us awkward. I saw her off on her troopship from Port Melbourne, and then packed up quickly and went to Sydney, since it was to me a city unsullied by events. I was lucky to find a small flat and there, before Christmas, I received a visit from a thin young officer named Captain Gabriel, a survivor of Japanese imprisonment who had now been given the duty of investigating the enemy’s crimes against Leo’s party.
At the time I was trying to be brave for Leo’s sake – Leo’s presence still so strongly abided that I would sometimes forget that I had joined that venerable category known as War Widow.
The first visit Captain Gabriel made was to tell me the Japanese court-martial that condemned Leo and the others was specious, and investigations were afoot into its legality. The general responsible, Okimasa, had suicided, and others involved were under investigation for a number of other crimes as well. And I was nervous of Captain Gabriel, of how news he gave me, and questions he asked, would impose on me revised duties of grief and vengeance when I found it hard enough still to bear the initial grief and anger of discovering Leo had been executed. Gabriel himself remained earnest, dedicated and analytical, seeming more haunted than angry. I was outraged and consoled by one detail in particular. He told me that he had interviewed a man named Hidaka, an interpreter who seemed to have made friends with Leo and the others, and had brought them sweets and tobacco right up to the end. I could see them all sitting around, their jaws swollen with Chinese lollies Hidaka gave them, Amanetto, Yokan, Daifuku. This stood as a substantial item of mercy in opposition to the blades of the Japanese NCO’s swords.