Sherry Danway said, I wish I’d never seen you. You’ll go home to your husband. Nothing’s lost to you. Grace and I go home knowing our husbands are blamed, and the blame will always be there, in some file. I thought I was as lonely as a person could be. But you’ve managed to make it worse. I have a different picture of Hugo I have to live with now.
She covered her eyes with a web of fingers. Poor bloody Danway, she said. Wanting to build his house. Poor helpless big bugger!
I went up to her and held her, and began to feel her inner collapse and the release of tears. It was as if the impact of the original news of execution had occurred all over again. It was exactly as Sherry had said. The minister had given us a new dimension to the version of their deaths we had become accustomed to and managed to live on with. We both doubted we had the strength to absorb new versions.
Rhonda moved to join us in our mourning, but I dissuaded her with a severe look. I felt Sherry Danway’s crazy, unstoppable anger too.
Rhonda’s face filled with colour. You blame me for this? she asked. Do you?
Yes, I admitted. Don’t worry. We can’t help it. But it was never your business!
On the way back to Sydney on the train, we all read and moped. Rhonda knew that whatever she said it could call up a fury in us. I went especially to get a cup of tea with her in the buffet car, and I was able to summon the grace to say to her again, Don’t worry. It’s not your fault.
If I were married to Bantry, she said, I wouldn’t blame him for anything he gave away.
Do you really think we blame our husbands? Of course, we bloody well don’t.
I felt a desire to hurt her badly – even with a blow. But it had to be suppressed. I warned her though. You’re in no position to understand it or be impatient with us.
She sighed and looked out the window. She was a good woman, slow to take offence.
I realise I shouldn’t have come, she said, only partly in chagrin.
12
It was not easy of course, but I adjusted to the new terms of Leo’s death because people do that, changing the course of their thinking even while believing it can’t be done. In some ways I didn’t want to examine too closely, the new version of Leo, once painfully digested, made it easier for me to enter a new phase. I married Laurie Burden in 1953, and – in defiance of doctors and nurses who considered me an ‘elderly primaparens’, a first-time mother of advanced age, an opinion they expressed in terms such as my making ‘a late run’ or ‘leaving things a bit late’ – I gave birth to a healthy boy, Alexander. Alexander was one of those children who carry an air not of being a stranger visiting the earth but of having the ways of the world worked out. He was what we sometimes called a happy warrior, perpetually engaged in cricket, rugby and surfing, an adequate scholar but not to an extent that interfered with his social life. His father considered him not adequately serious. I blessed the kindly star under which he’d been born.
We were suddenly a sanguine and fortunate family, living above Balmoral Beach, sailing every second Saturday on Laurie’s boat, opening up Laurie’s house and garden to a tide of visitors, contacts of Laurie’s, many of whom I found myself liking.
Dotty also seemed to have remade her life. I got letters from her. About 1948 she had published a brilliant novel about East End women. It had been made into an angry little film everyone considered a classic. She was poetry editor of two magazines, and a literary figure, and she was tossing up whether to join a new publishing company as senior editor. She had not remarried.
Occasionally a Memerang story would surface without warning in the press – brave Doucette, brave everyone, the gallant Captain Leo Waterhouse. A tale of confrontation, escape, betrayal and tragedy, etc. I knew by some instinct I had not heard the last of any of it.
In the 1960s, Memerang came to a head again through the researches of a young man named Tom Lydon. He was one of those Australian journalists who heavily populated the British press in the days when Fleet Street was a name synonymous with newspapers. A handsome, mannerly young fellow whose clothes had the appropriate scuffed look of a graduate student, he worked for the Observer in England and was contemplating a book on the history of Memerang. From the way he carried himself when he came to see me on a journey home to Sydney, I noticed in him a doggedness which might raise awkward questions all around. The Beatles had just become big, and I wished his mind was set on them rather than the 1940s. But he was easy to talk to, and I did enjoy revisiting such subjects as what an extraordinary pair Dotty and Rufus were.
The submarine? he asked me at last. You know, it came back late to the meeting place, this NE1, Serapem. But it did come back in the end. And Eddie Frampton, their conducting officer, landed there but decided they weren’t there to be picked up. He landed once. And that was it.
I said, He landed once? To look for them?
Yes, I regret that’s the situation.
For the moment, I felt impaled.
Look, that’s all it seems from the documents I have.
But if you want to pick men up, you have to look more than once.
When I go back to England, said Tom Lydon, I’ve got to try to see Frampton. He invented the Silver Bullets, you know. But why did he land on the pick-up island just once.
He certainly had a hunger to question Major Frampton. Look, I said, I’m sure he did all he could. I was almost tempted to say, Leave Eddie Frampton in peace.
Is it possible, I asked myself, for the dead to appoint their archivist? For Lydon was as relentless and painstaking as a brother. Maybe more so.
A year or so later I received a letter from Dotty, and enclosed in it a suicide letter from Eddie Frampton addressed to Dotty and Minette and none of the rest of us. Eddie Frampton had been found dead in his car at Doncaster Station.
This applies to you as much as it does to myself and Minette, wrote Dotty. In fact, more so. I think old Frampton expected we’d send it on to other involved parties, and though I hate to subject you to this stuff, Grace, I also feel it would be criminal not to.
The letter was written on the stationery of Frampton Engineering, Single Girder, Double Girder, Torsion Girder with Cantilever, Gantry Portal Cranes, and Traverser Cranes. It was an excruciating document, occasionally falling away into self-pity, but ruthless as well.
February 20th, 1966
NOT TO BE SHOWN TO MY FAMILY
To be sent under CONFIDENTIALITY instead to Mrs Minette Doucette, England; Mrs Dotty Mortmain, London.
Dear Ladies,
This is told you in confidence. A simple rough letter full of the blunt sentiments of a man who’s dying, and if I offend you with that you’ll just have to forgive it. I have to let you know straight what I can’t tell my wife, and beg you in decency not to disturb her or visit her.
I’ve been questioned by this Tom Lydon fellow, and I always knew it would happen. If I’d stayed on at SOE in Baker Street and not gone gallivanting off to the Indian and Pacific, I could have had an honoured career. Everyone knows the letters SOE these days. Books coming out. Special Operations Executive. The letters are an adequate explanation of a life to those chaps in bars who still ask what you did in those days. And who were you with, old chap? SOE does the trick. Sworn to discretion. They imagine parachute drops and explosions and being bound not to reveal anything.