The Widow and Her Hero Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise for

  By the Same Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Copyright Page

  Author's Note

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  About the Author

  Voted as one of Bulletin magazine's Best Books of 2007

  'The Widow and Her Hero reveals a writer who has lost none of the skill and talent he has been demonstrating for decades . . . [it] is distinguished by its memorable portrait of two women: the quiet and thoughtful Grace and the fiery Dotty. They, offspring of Goethe's Eternal Feminine, raise Keneally's new novel to an admirable height of achievement . . . accomplished and highly readable book.'

  Andrew Riemer, chief book reviewer, Sydney Morning Herald

  'Prolific author Tom Keneally's new novel gives a fresh perspective of World War II through the eyes of one left behind . . . an inspiring story.' Brisbane News

  '. . . one of Australia's most versatile and interesting literary figures.' Courier Mail

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Fiction

  The Place at Whitton

  The Fear

  Bring Larks and Heroes

  Three Cheers for the Paraclete

  The Survivor

  A Dutiful Daughter

  The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith

  Blood Red, Sister Rose

  Gossip from the Forest

  Season in Purgatory

  A Victim of the Aurora

  Passenger

  Confederates

  The Cut-rate Kingdom

  Schindler's Ark

  A Family Madness

  The Playmaker

  Towards Asmara

  By the Line

  Flying Hero Class

  Woman of the Inner Sea

  Jacko

  A River Town

  Bettany's Book

  An Angel in Australia

  The Tyrant's Novel

  Non-fiction

  Outback

  The Place Where Souls are Born

  Now and in Time to Be: Ireland and the Irish

  Memoirs from a Young Republic

  Homebush Boy: A Memoir

  The Great Shame

  American Scoundrel

  Lincoln

  The Commonwealth of Thieves

  For Children

  Ned Kelly and the City of Bees

  Roos in Shoes

  TOM KENEALLY

  The Widow and Her Hero

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  The Widow and her Hero

  ePub ISBN 9781864715439

  Kindle ISBN 9781864718089

  To the Coverdales – Alex, Rory, Craig, Margaret.

  With the author's love.

  Original Print Edition

  THE WIDOW AND HER HERO

  A DOUBLEDAY BOOK

  First published in Australia and New Zealand in 2007

  by Doubleday

  Copyright © The Serpentine Publishing Co. (Pty) Ltd, 2007

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording orotherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry

  Keneally, Thomas, 1935–.

  The widow and her hero.

  ISBN: 9781864711028

  I. Title.

  A823.3

  Transworld Publishers,

  a division of Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060

  www.randomhouse.com.au

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Printed and bound by Griffin Press, Netley, South Australia

  Author's Note

  Incidents which occur in this tale bear a debt to two real wartime operations against Singapore, named Jaywick and Rimau. But, though the real issues of Operation Rimau and the beheading of its operatives provide a spark for this tale, this narrative is not meant to be a roman à clef of those times and characters.

  The characters here presented, their motives and their inner souls, are, therefore, not meant to reflect the actions, motives and inner life of any person who lived or died. There was, for example, no World War body named IRD (though similar organisations did exist). Nor were any battalions of the Royal Ulster Fusiliers part of Singapore's garrison. And so on.

  Just the same, for their depiction of secret operations from Australia at that time, I have a great debt to the following dedicated authors and sources:

  Ronald McKie, The Heroes, Sydney 1989;

  Lynette Ramsay Silver, The Krait: The Fishing Boat That Went to War, from the research of Major Tom Hall, Sydney 1992;

  Lynette Ramsay Silver, The Heroes of Rimau, from the research of Major Tom Hall, Singapore 2001;

  Peter Thompson and Robert Macklin, Kill the Tiger, The Truth About Operation Rimau, Sydney 2002;

  The Transcript of the Trial of the Rimau men, Australian

  Archives, Victoria.

  Other correspondence, including interrogation of the Japanese interpreter Furuta, and Special Reconnaissance Force documents and reports, can be found in the Australian Archives, Canberra.

  Leo, as I dream of him. His last consciousness is written not on toilet paper supplied by Hidaka but on the yellow ether there, in Reformatory Road. He knows something enormous has fallen on his neck, but mercifully not much more, no focus, no subtle thought. So I'm assured. The subtlety is bleeding out of him. Perhaps he thinks of it as a bludgeon, a mallet, something ponderous. He had been expecting something more exact than that.

  Had he remembered the hymn from our wedding? He chose it himself, you see. It was one he sang at idle seconds: oh Lord of all Being throned afar, thy glory flames from star to star, and so on.

  So where are we? Pitiably undistinguished ground to which I have been once since, on a trip to Singapore, and hope never to see again. It is dead earth baked solid that has never been built on, perhaps for fear of spirits, I don't know. Near Reformatory Road. Scattered over with the tube-shaped weeds they call Dutchman's pipe. They eat insects, those weeds. I remember mites and flies stuck half digested in their mucus. Plants which grew all over this ground and came not from the hand of the God of mercy.

  They picked this and that man up after unsuccessful blows. I know that. Those clumsy, effete swordsmen. They who postured about being knights of the blade! They had, engraven on the haft of the sword, a quotation-cum-prayer invoking the divine wind. No such wind honoured this. Yet at least one of the Outram Road samurais had done well, because Pat Bantry's
head had rolled near Hidaka that day, and Hidaka claimed he could see some light still there.

  Captain, said Pat Bantry's severed head, since the heads of the saints and martyrs certainly talk when sundered, and since the heads of priests and noble folk still spoke after decapitation in the French Revolution. Then, Mother of mine! he said.

  Judicial Sergeant Abukara, however, was not a knight but a butcher. But at last he extinguished Leo Waterhouse. All confusion ceased. The cloud of unknowing came down for my beautiful captain, Leo. It was a lost mother's kiss.

  As Leo quoted from The Devil's Disciple: All I can tell you is that when it came to the point whether I could take my head out of the noose and put another man's into it, I could not do it.

  Lovely words make it just about OK, Leo wrote.

  One

  Iknew in general terms that I was marrying a hero. The burden lay lightly on Leo, and to be a hero's wife in times supposedly suited to the heroic caused a woman to swallow doubt or to understate her demands. Although, as much as women now, we suspected men might be childish or make mysterious decisions, it wasn't our place to say it for fear of damage to the fabric of what we had. The Japanese had barely been turned back and had not abandoned the field of ambition. It was heresy and unlucky to undermine young men at such a supreme hour.

  But with the confidence of near-on nine decades I can talk about doubt now. I would as least ask, what is so precious about the heroic impulse? Why do ordinary lusty boys love it better in the end than lust itself, and better than love? Why did Leo – judging by his actions – love the Boss, Charlie Doucette, in a way that rose above love of any woman, me included?

  There's a documentary on television every second night these days about the end of World War II and the kamikaze pilots, avatars of self-immolation. The voice-over commentators are bemused by it all, as if self-immolation were alien to us. And that annoys me. Because self-immolation was a respectable fashion with us too then, in the early 1940s. Every man and woman put their love on the altar of the war, and that's just the way it was. We didn't reflect on or criticise the impulse. We never really believed till it happened that it was our marriage which would be picked up and hurled into the fiery pit. We believed excessively in the fatherly wisdom of generals and statesmen. Every picture we saw and every song we sang approved of what was happening, approved of the risks, celebrated the immolations, and saw the hero return grinning and unaltered by the stress of events.

  I believed I began to write this for the sake of my granddaughter Rachel, and for her daughters, but it grows to have a vaguer, more general audience than that. It is the manuscript I always fancied I could write. I am not averse to their finding it amongst what I leave behind, and I don't think anyone else but the girls would be interested. But the act of addressing one includes the vain ambition to address a million. And to address to the unheeding millions what Leo in his innocence and martial mode wrote of it all.

  Anyhow, let me get down to the case. Leo Waterhouse was the most beautiful adult boy I have seen in nearly ninety years of life on earth. I first met him when my cousin Melbourne Duckworth brought him home on leave to the New South Wales town of Braidwood in the warm December of 1942. My father came from Melbourne, like his brother, who had labelled his son with the city's name. My father had moved north of the Murray River for his career's sake and he was the Braidwood National Bank manager, which counted for a lot in a bush town at the end of a long drought, an endless succession of dry skies over eastern Australia. A bank manager's discretion with credit was either cursed or blessed by farmers as the pastures became threadbare, and fissures of erosion afflicted the soil. We girls liked to think our dad was seamlessly blessed and thanked by everyone in town and from the farms about. It might have been so. He did have some sense of social justice.

  When Leo Waterhouse, our house guest, was not around, my cousin Mel told me that Leo's father had been a farmer somewhere up on the North Coast, but had lost his wife and taken a job in the administration of the Solomon Islands. Leo had grown up partly under the care of an aunt in Grafton, and in Malaita. He certainly looked to me as if he had spent his childhood in places which did not inhibit growth. He had already done some law at Sydney University.

  From the kitchen window of the bank manager's residence, I saw my cousin Mel and the tall visitor creep up on each other in the backyard, practising falls, occasionally miming slitting each other's throats with a swipe of the hand. I saw Mel land, after one encounter like that, in an oleander bush. They were both playful and serious, those tussling young men. Some of my girlfriends who called in from around the town were hopelessly and frantically attracted to them, as women were to beautiful doomed boys then. He looks like Errol Flynn, all the girls said of Leo. I thought he was more of a young Ronald Colman, the moustache, the tropic-weight uniform, and the big secrets he carried lightly. His mother had died when he was ten. When seen as a motherless child, his appeal was more intense still.

  I continued to watch the two young men too, as Leo Waterhouse became less and less apologetic, tripping my cousin up spectacularly, cutting his throat more ruthlessly. But they were so discreet for young heroes. Returning to the kitchen for lemonade and tea, they told me nothing about their expertise with explosives or knives or folboats, a term I would learn about only later. But I knew then they were involved in something more exotic than ordinary soldiering, even though this tumbling and tripping and ritu- alised throat-slashing was all I saw of what they did for a living.

  And do you still want to go back to your law studies after the war? my tall father asked at the meal table. Certainly I do, said Leo, below his new brushy moustache.

  It was a good summer. I was a wary, reticent girl, too tall and angular to be utterly happy about myself. My reticence was only partly induced by my upbringing as a model child of model parents in a small country town. It was temperamental as well. You will see from the story I tell that I am watchful by nature. Yet without an exchange of many words, within three days Leo and I became totally enchanted by each other. I remember that we conveyed to each other a certainty of the other's perfection. Yet we were so uncorrupted.

  Our few, momentary, stealthy physical contacts would occur when my cousin Mel and Leo and I walked my friends, the daughters of the town solicitor, pharmacist, general practitioner, stock and station agent and headmaster, homewards through the dark, browned-out town of Braidwood. Leo and I would lag behind or go ahead on the broad roads, and if we timed it right would find ourselves in the ultra-darkness between houses under a massive sky on the back streets of the town. The occasional straying of hands was a mere stoking of the fires. How ridiculous given that the war which changed everything was under way. Yet I valued his gallantry. At one stage outside the Braidwood School of Arts, as Leo reached for a kiss, he held my outer thigh to his inner and then repented of it. It all filled me with months' worth of fantasy at the Kurrajong boarding house in Canberra, where I normally boarded between returns home. Nothing as potentially intimate had ever happened to me before. In its way it seemed vaster than the movements of Japanese hosts in the Pacific, of German arms on the steppes of Russia.

  We certainly did not know enough to understand that even in the Independent Reconnaissance Department, that bureau of noblest and most glamorous human endeavours, and amidst the intelligence organisations on which it fed, there were ambitious men who were willing to deny all that brave backyard tumbling of Leo and my cousin if it suited them: older men, soldiers for life, who had administrative gifts and who weren't going back to the field of war, and who could write off Leo's and Mel's valour if it embarrassed them in some way. Who might find it politically inadvisable to defend them even from the enemy. I could not have believed it, and it was probably just as well, since I could not have convinced Leo. And anyhow, that's the burden of my tale.

  Inevitably during that Christmas–New Year period in Braidwood, the question came up one lunchtime. I think it was my mother who asked. And your parents, Leo?


  She too was considered rather unfashionably tall – nearly five feet ten inches – and had not married until she was twenty-five, then considered a fairly late, spinsterish age. But she had seen what had happened and that her daughter was under an enchantment. Leo gave my mother a more explicit rundown than he had given me.

  My poor mother took a drink of milk one day from a diseased cow, he told us. The family had been walking in the Clarence Valley; the farmer had had no malice in offering his milk straight from the cow. But bovine TB had killed her in three short years. My father, said Leo, took up a post in the islands afterwards. He was Superintendent of Agriculture in Malaita in the Solomons, and now I'm afraid he's a civilian prisoner of war of the Japanese. He's been moved on somewhere north, because the Americans haven't found him yet.

  That must be very trying, said my mother.

  It gives me an interest in the region, said Leo.

  In an older man this would have sounded like irony, but in him it was understated purpose. It's very sad, Leo told us. He had a hard time in the first war, and now he's a prisoner . . .

  Leo's aunt in northern New South Wales had got a Red Cross card two months past which said that he was in good health.

  I was not in Braidwood all the time then. My father had not permitted me to join the Land Army or any of the women's military units. The war represented a great chance to escape stringent fathers, but my father saw enlistment as a prelude to becoming fast, wearing trousers, smoking, drinking, and the unutterable. But having attended a secretarial course and learned to touch-type I was permitted to work in Canberra for the Department of the Navy. If I had not taken my holidays when I did I would not have met Leo, since I normally made the long bus journey home to Braidwood only once a fortnight. When I worked there, the capital of the Commonwealth of Australia boasted a population of barely ten thousand, and everyone seemed buffered from the war by the acreages of pasture and the great insulating force of the eternal bush. I'd started work a few years earlier at the age of twenty, and at the time I first saw Leo tumbling with my cousin in the yard at Braidwood, I had risen to the rank of Procurement Officer, Stationery and Office Equipment.