In the Mouth of the Tiger (79 page)

Denis didn't say anything. He just gripped my elbows and put me at arm's length, looking at me as if trying to imprint me on his mind. And then he let me go, and turned towards the train.

He was going into hell, and I think he knew.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

T
he time we lived with the Battens in their home in Glenferrie Road, Kew was a period of great happiness. For a start, I didn't have to worry about Denis. As a staff officer, I reasoned, he would be kept as far away from any fighting as possible. My fear that Denis might be killed had pressed on me so heavily and for so long that when it lifted I seemed to step more lightly upon the earth, as if gravity itself had somehow diminished.

The other factor that made life so happy was the affection that Roberta Batten offered me in such generous proportions. I became the daughter she had always wanted, and she became the loving mother I had always yearned for. The change in our relationship, from hostess and guest to mother and daughter, came about in the first week of our stay. We were standing in the hallway admiring an arrangement of flowers we had worked on together when she took each of my hands impulsively in hers. ‘It is so nice to have you here, Norma,' she said. ‘It is like having a daughter in the home. Do you mind if I treat you as a daughter? That means I can do things for you, and you aren't allowed to feel obligated, or to think I'm interfering.'

I was caught by surprise for a moment, but then smiled. ‘Only if you let me treat you as a mother, and spoil you rotten.'

‘Then it's agreed,' Roberta said briskly. ‘Well, the first thing you are going to let me do is to take you in to Myer's Emporium tomorrow morning so we can get you some decent clothes. I'm afraid the stuff you bought in Perth went out of fashion here twenty years ago.'

So we went into Myer's, Melbourne's biggest department store, and Roberta did what loving mothers do for their daughters all over the world. She made me try on dresses, and sweaters, and skirts, and the odd coat until my head spun and my feet ached, and each time she either stood back and
clicked her tongue, or nodded approval and reached for her chequebook. Then she asked me for my opinion on shoes, and hats, and belts, and handbags which she was considering buying for herself, and tut-tutted each time my judgement didn't coincide with hers. Finally, we bundled all the bags and boxes into the back of a taxi and arrived home in time for a long cup of tea in the den, and a detailed post-mortem on our shopping spree. Halfway through the expedition, we had agreed that ‘Roberta' was not an appropriate term of address given our new relationship, and after that I always called her ‘Aunt Batten', with its connotation of family and gentle authority.

Aunt Batten's acceptance of me as a grown-up daughter was only one of many whole-hearted gestures of friendship she had made throughout her life. Her strong Catholic faith was obviously one factor in her compulsion to do good works, but I believe that an even stronger factor was her sheer love of humanity. She loved people, and loved helping people. She had her frailties, of course, but they were good-hearted frailties. She loved to gossip, and she had a fund of stories of early Melbourne, picked up during a lifetime of afternoon teas with other Melbourne matrons at Buckley & Nunns. But none of her stories was unkind and none of them showed anybody as anything but idiosyncratic and lovable. She liked a good glass of sherry (‘I simply won't drink Melbourne water, Norma') and her struggle against the blandishments of French pastries had been a lifetime's battle. Occasionally, just occasionally, she could be a snob, but afterwards she would be inevitably contrite. ‘I suffer the sin of pride, my dear,' she would say. ‘Please don't judge me too harshly. But you know, the truth is that the Myers might be a very grand family
now
, but they did once trundle a barrow of clothes around Melbourne to earn a living . . .'

Uncle Batten (he accepted the title with a discreet wink in my direction) was a strange amalgam of larrikin and crusader. Roberta had fallen in love with him when he'd been a knockabout student with an idealistic bent, keen to help the ‘working classes'. While his classmates had aspired to plush practices in the city, he had planned on a ‘shopfront' clinic in one of the working suburbs. His altruism, by one of those quirks of fate that can occasionally encourage the belief that there may be a benign God after all, had led to fortune. His modest practice in Collingwood, where his patients paid only as much as they could afford, survived the Great Depression while his colleagues in Collins Street were wiped out by high rents and the collapse of their clients' fortunes. Towards the end of the nineteen-thirties, Uncle Batten had a huge
circle of loyal patients, all with cash in their pockets and debts of gratitude in their hearts. By the time the war started he was a wealthy man with a gracious family home and three sons training for the professions.

His career had not been without its hiccups, perhaps due to the larrikin streak that so worried Roberta. The main problem was a love of gambling. Not common or garden gambling as practised in the two-up schools of North Carlton or in the smoky Greek back-room casinos of Coburg, but gambling in the regal manner. Gambling on the Sport of Kings. Almost every Saturday he attended one or another of the great Melbourne racetracks – Caulfield, Flemington, Mentone – chancing his arm against the great rails bookies of the times. He was, naturally, a member of the Victorian Jockey Club and would spend the day dressed to the nines, drinking single malt whisky and talking horseflesh with his friends. Each Saturday evening a taxi would take him home cheerful and slightly sloshed, sometimes a winner, more often not. In 1936, just as he was achieving everything a man could wish for in terms of wealth and position, he had plunged everything on an alleged certainty. ‘Everything' on this occasion meant literally everything – all his assets, a mortgage on the family home, even a substantial personal loan. On the night before the race he had been struck down with acute appendicitis. A friend operated on him on the afternoon of the race, and Uncle Batten came out of the anaesthetic with one question on his lips: ‘Did he win?'

The wretched nag hadn't won, and the surgeon had to break the news in the recovery room while a nurse wiped anguished perspiration from Uncle Batten's brow.

The Battens lost everything including their home. ‘But it was God's will, and a blessing in disguise,' Aunt Batten told me in her trusting, wide-eyed way, her Royal Albert cup poised dramatically in mid-air. ‘Charles has never laid a bigger bet than ten bob since that day. Now he goes to the races only for the love of the sport. He is a wiser and a better man for the experience.' By the summer of 1942–43, he had completely recovered the family fortunes – and then some, as the Americans say. He had busy, comfortable rooms close to Flinders Street station, an even bigger family home than the one they had lost, and a beautiful black Buick parked in the garage.

The Buick was Uncle Batten's Great Escape. He had installed a charcoal burner at the back of the car to overcome petrol rationing, and took delight in taking elaborate excursions out of Melbourne virtually every weekend. He would light up the burner just after breakfast on Saturday morning, and
half an hour later we would be on our way, warm and dry under the hood if it were raining, enjoying the sunshine and cooling breeze if it were fine. Our excursions took us for miles. A favourite destination was the Log Cabin Restaurant up in the Dandenong Ranges, an hour's drive out of the city. We would park beside the rustic timber restaurant and the children – including Frances, stumbling along determinedly behind the boys – would race for our usual table in the inglenook. The waitresses all knew us and took for granted that we were a single family. ‘You are very lucky to have such nice grandparents''one of them once said to the children, and while Shirley looked up sharply I was pleased that the children did not demur.

Aunt Batten and I did have our disagreements, but they were few and far between and invariably disposed of with civility and grace. One of our disagreements was over the boys' education. Aunt Batten hoped that I would send them to Xavier College, a Catholic school minutes away from Glenferrie Road, which had just opened a kindergarten. We ‘stumbled' on the kindergarten during an afternoon ramble just after it had been opened, and Aunt Batten turned innocent eyes on me. ‘Goodness me,' she said ingenuously. ‘Such a good school and so close to home! How absolutely perfect for
mes enfants
!'

‘Denis was brought up in the Church of England,' I said. ‘I really don't think I could put his sons into a Catholic school without discussing the matter with him.'

‘Oh what nonsense, Norma!' Aunt Batten had almost snapped. ‘You went to a convent yourself, my dear. Put your foot down. Immortal souls are at stake.'

The argument lasted all afternoon, but I stuck to my guns. Even at dinner, Aunt Batten was silent, almost sulky. It was only when I said an early goodnight that she leapt up from her chair and put her arms around me. ‘You are of course quite right,' she said quickly. ‘Denis's wishes must be respected. Why don't we agree that the boys go to Trinity Grammar until he comes home, and then you two can discuss the matter? Trinity is right next door to Xavier, and the boys could change to Xavier
next
year.'

Tony and Bobby started in kindergarten at Trinity at the beginning of February, and my days fell into the most delightful pattern. I would walk the boys to school, then spend the rest of the morning gardening or playing with Frances in the nursery. Shirley would collect the boys while Aunt Batten and I prepared lunch, and after the meal we would more often than not go out for
the afternoon. We would take the tram to town, or catch a taxi to Albert Park so that the children could sail their model boats, or perhaps would walk up to the sports grounds at Xavier where the children could run and gambol to their hearts' content.

I loved the evenings in particular. Once the children were in bed I'd join Aunt Batten in the den. We poured ourselves little glasses of sherry and sat at ease, talking about anything and everything under the sun. Art and politics, the countries we had visited, the latest films or plays, the latest scandals. Even, occasionally, the war. One thing we never touched on was the future, because we both knew that circumstances had given us an interlude from real life, a bubble of fantasy that would eventually have to burst. And when it did burst Aunt Batten would lose her daughter and her beloved
enfants
, and I would lose the mother I had come to adore.

Denis came home in the middle of winter looking thin and dreadfully ill, and the bubble burst. Suddenly I was no longer a cared-for, cherished daughter but a responsible wife and mother whose man needed her. The transformation occurred in just the few minutes it took me to help Denis out of the Navy car and into our bedroom. He had suffered dysentery and then dengue fever up on Thursday Island, and been evacuated by air to Brisbane, where the doctors had immediately sent him south. He was so weak that I had to help him change into his pyjamas. He was asleep the instant his head hit the pillow.

Sitting with him in the darkened bedroom, I decided that I had to make plans for both of us. For a start I'd have to do something about accommodation. Denis hated being beholden to anyone, and I realised that even though he got on famously with the Battens it would irk him to be their guest for more than a day or so. That meant I would have to arrange for us to rent somewhere, and as quickly as possible.

I went looking for the previous Saturday's copy of the
Age
. Aunt Batten had taken the children into the den and when I popped my head in, looking for it, she immediately put two and two together and followed me out into the hall. ‘Denis wants you to find a place of your own?' she asked, her wide eyes on my face.

‘I know he would want us to get a place of our own,' I said gently. ‘He's very sick, Aunt Batten. I will need to move things along myself while he is unwell. I will be awfully sorry to leave.'

We stood together in silence for a moment, holding hands. The lovely
interlude was over, and just for a moment we paused to grieve its passing.

The war touched me that night as it hadn't touched me for nearly a year. Denis developed a fever and as I sponged his face and chest, and propped him up against the pillows, he struggled to tell me something important. ‘The
Mamutu
,' he said. ‘They machine-gunned everyone, even the babies. But she was only the first. They got the
Patricia Cam
as well. They came back and tried to machine-gun the lot. It is all quite deliberate, Nona, and you've got to tell someone. They mean to scare our civilian crews, to keep our supply ships out of the Torres Straits.' By about four o'clock in the morning he was rambling incoherently. When I took his temperature it was over one hundred and Uncle Batten called the doctor. The ambulance came for him at five, and as I stood in light Melbourne drizzle helping to lift his stretcher aboard, I promised God I'd have a place of our own for him to come home to.

Just before they closed the ambulance doors he called out to me. ‘I killed him in cold blood, Nona,' he said, suddenly frighteningly coherent. ‘There was nothing in the bundle at all. Just the cigarettes. And I blew off the top of his head.'

It was full-blown malaria, and coming on top of dysentery and dengue fever it was nearly fatal. But a week later he was on the mend, and I could tell him that we had a home arranged. It was an attractive timber bungalow in Alto Avenue in Croydon, one of Melbourne's prettier outer suburbs.

Denis was discharged from hospital in early May and after that it took only a couple of weeks for him to recover his strength, which I put down to Cornwall's Malt Extract and the fact that I could look after him properly in our own home. Winter that year was settled and warm, giving us still, sunny days during which we could sit outdoors on deck chairs in our leafy back garden. Later on we began to take long, slow walks through the beautiful Victorian countryside and I could almost see the fresh air doing him good. The yellow leached from his face to be replaced by a healthy pink, and the small frown that had taken possession of his brow faded day by day.