These were the polished feats which had enchanted the young Rhonda. Everyone, Rhonda included, had been astonished when Pat volunteered early in the war. There was a story that a recruiting sergeant managed to get abstemious Pat full of bombo in Grafton (Leo’s home town, by the way). It might have been a version Pat wanted spread, since old Mr Bantry was not a lover of the British Empire in itself. When Pat vanished to North Africa, Rhonda hung on news of him. He was a member of the Sixth Divvy, that fabled division. After defeating the Italians, they moved up to Syria and beat the Vichy French, before returning to Libya to face Rommel.
Home on leave in early 1943, like a god descending, he proposed to Rhonda. Her parents didn’t like Catholics but they liked Pat, who was still robustly teetotal and non-swearing. She began taking instruction in the Catholic religion from the local parish priest. She was willing to cross any barrier and bridge any gap to be his mate. He became a weapons instructor at the Kunungra jungle training school, and so was safe from battle, and Rhonda could not overcome her astonishment that, all that time, he had watched and admired her. She was disappointed when he did not want to settle in the instructor’s job. She was aware of and a bit frightened by a restlessness in him. Like the blokes who came back from World War I, her father said. They were the only blokes who could understand themselves.
They intended to get married in January 1945. But of course… her trousseau waited until 1949, when a man named Ron Garnish came back from serving in the army occupying Japan, started a tyre business in town, began by taking her out and then asked for her hand.
She had been married a year or so, and had a miscarriage, very sad, but the doctor up in Grafton reckoned there was no reason she wouldn’t bear healthy children. And then she had opened the door of her little house one morning and Pat Bantry was standing there, looking just a bit dazed. Where’s the reward, Rhonda? he asked her, and then he was gone. She knew he was dead, of course, but she would have known anyhow, because he was talking with great effort over a great distance. She said she knew she should have been embarrassed to say she had seen and heard from the deceased, except that would be to deny the effort she believed Pat had made to speak to her. She told her husband as early as lunchtime that day. We don’t hide things from each other, she said. In any case there were still mothers and wives all over the Clarence River who had confusing visits from the war’s dead sons and husbands. Mrs Bantry was rumoured to have had a visitation from Sergeant Bantry too.
Ron Garnish proved such a tolerant and understanding fellow that he took her seriously. Many husbands wouldn’t have, would have talked about old flames and so on. She assured her husband of her full loyalty to him, but she hoped he would not stop her from seeing the Minister of Defence about a reward for Pat Bantry, who could have been safe in Queensland for the duration if he hadn’t been such a convinced man of action. She didn’t speak to the aging Bantrys, who were still inconsolable about their son. (Indeed, they sounded more or less like me, in terror of more information than could be accommodated.) It was up to her, as Pat’s former fiancée, to put the matter to rest. What if we went as a delegation? she suggested. You and me and Mrs Danway, if she’d be in it? The Minister couldn’t refuse to receive the spokeswomen for three heroes. Especially since one of them had written a famous poem about a lost husband.
I knew, of course, I had to go. I had had so many dreams myself that I was in no position to laugh at the idea of Pat Bantry’s spirit turning up thirsty for merit at Rhonda’s door. She told me one of the support troops, the Beta men who worked on getting the expedition away from Western Australia, had told her after the war that Pat always kept her picture upright on his boot box, and when some of the other men began talking about their adventures with women, he would say, This isn’t for your ears, dear, and turn her picture face down. The more she talked about it, the more I thought it was this tale, as much as the appearance of Bantry’s ghost, which had her by the throat.
She’d gone to the trouble of looking up the train timetable for us, Sydney to Canberra, and the names of Canberra boarding houses. I told her about the Kurrajong, where I used to stay. They knew me there.
How could I refuse to get on a train to Canberra when Leo had walked under his own power onto that murderous weed-bed at Reformatory Road?
We weren’t able to see Mrs Danway until the following Saturday afternoon. Laurie had a vehicle and would have happily taken Rhonda and me across the city to Kogarah, where Mrs Danway lived in a flat. But I did not want that. My affection for him was still not of the kind that looked to acquire debts of kindness, not yet, and as he would say later, even after five years I hadn’t cleared my slate of the war. Indeed, there were a lot of people like me, a whole sub-class of women in the world, invisible except to each other, who were making their dazed way amongst a society obsessed with housing shortages and electricity strikes, with horse-racing and football, and who were being told against their own instincts that the war was over and suddenly remote, and the dead to be referred to only at ceremonial moments.
When these women visited each other, they usually travelled by ferry, bus and train, as did Rhonda and I. They had generally been left short of the means to hire taxis, or buy a car. Mrs Danway met us at Kogarah Station and walked with us back to her little flat. She was a thin woman, older than Rhonda or me by as much as five years. I was a little ashamed I had not sought her out earlier. It seemed now the most obvious thing I should have done. I should have contacted all of them. I told her I was sorry we hadn’t met previously.
Oh, she said, as if it forgave me, Hugo was a late inclusion.
She told us at some stage that afternoon that she had lost Lieutenant Danway’s child after the men disappeared to Western Australia, so that between her and Rhonda there were two lost children. She told us Danway loved the training camp over in the west. Doucette had taken him on rather late in the process, so that he had to endure long training sessions to catch up with the others. She showed us a letter he had written. Rufus had him climbing hills and canoeing by the mile from 8.30 in the morning till two the next afternoon. On that coastline, the tent accommodation was very cold at night, said Lieutenant Danway. But it was the same for everyone, he said, and Doucette had infused everyone with a wonderful sense of unity. Everyone pitched in, officers and men, all equals in Doucette’s eyes, and so all very energetic and in an inventive frame of mind. She raised her eyes as she read that, as if it showed some kind of innocence, which it did. Doucette is a particular kind of Englishman, Danway said. The other Poms aren’t like him at all.
Hugo Danway had been a great canoeist, Mrs Danway said, attributing it to his Islander blood – his mother had been a woman from the Marianas Islands, and his father an Australian missionary. And yet his whole leave time he would spend with her, with Sherry Danway, on the block of land he’d bought by the harbour. He had made drawings of the house he intended to raise there after the war.
We didn’t have to ask. Rhonda and I knew that she had had to sell the land. With it and what he had put in his building account she had bought this little flat, she said. I keep busy, she claimed, and then she raised her stricken eyes. Isn’t it heartbreaking, she asked, when a fellow is so young and full of life and hope and skill, and then the axe? An obscene death for very little purpose.