The Daughters of Mars (14 page)

Mitchie let it go—it was just a kind of frankness minus eight hours’ sleep. They were familiar, said Mitchie, with the arrival of a mass of wounded men, and had been through the same thing themselves on the
Archimedes
hospital ship. They didn’t want to take her time. They knew where Lieutenant Carradine was. What if she took Staff Nurse Carradine up there and introduced her to the ward sister. All the paperwork, she said, had already been handed in at the office.

The four nurses waited like applicants for a job inside the door. They felt superfluous and tried to make themselves small and—but for Carradine—thought of leaving.

Matron, said an English nurse coming up and addressing the British matron. She wore no red cape. General Archibald has arrived.

A group of officers, one of whom wore the red tabs appropriate to a general—his uniform and those of his entourage without stain and their leathers from Sam Browne to boots unscathed by the fracas across the Mediterranean—entered the hospital and the British matron nodded to them and led them up the steps. General Archibald was—as they would discover—a legend in British neurology, and on his way by request of the Foreign Office to inspect Lieutenant Carradine’s head wound.

In his wake—discreetly—followed Mitchie and Carradine.

• • •

It came to Sally’s turn to visit Lieutenant and Staff Nurse Carradine on the balcony. It happened that though he slept, his dressings were temporarily off and the ripe wound discharged pus. Carradine sensed Sally’s shadow and turned and with a small raise of her gloved left fingers indicated the hole in her husband’s—or as the British matron possibly thought, her brother’s—head.

It was a very dirty wound, said Carradine in a low voice. But Sir Geoffrey Archibald says he will talk and walk again.

The foulness of the wound cast its doubt over the blithe opinion of Sir Archibald.

Help me dress it, will you? There are gloves on the trolley.

Sally fetched and donned the gloves and rejoined Carradine and her husband. She lifted the head a little from the pillow as Carradine began to swaddle it in fresh bandages. A young man in a halter of bandages and one arm in a sling emerged from the door to the veranda. Over his shoulders he wore a lightweight officer’s jacket with one pip on it and “Australia” on the shoulders. He had a precocious moustache, grown before the rest of the face had achieved the seniority to justify it. He looked feverish as so many did.

Miss Durance? he asked in familiar accent. I found out by accident you were here.

She faced him and said hello and asked how he was.

Have to say I felt a bit chirpier a year back, said the young man.

His eyes looked as if they were rimmed with soot. He told her, I regret to say . . . you might have heard . . . Captain Ellis Hoyle took a knock on the second day. Did you know? I’d hate to be the bearer . . .

She kept her hold on the back of Lieutenant Carradine’s head. Carradine kept briskly winding the bandage.

I didn’t know, Sally said. But my sister . . .

He was clear-headed to the finish, you know. He gave me something he wanted you to keep.

He reached into his pocket and produced a silver watch.

It has his name, you see, on the back.

He had the look of a man who was already looking forward to a rest after this task was done. It was painful to tell him it wasn’t.

Oh, she said. But it isn’t me—I’m sorry. It’s my sister who knew Captain Hoyle. She’s somewhere in this building. If you’re tired I’ll hand it on to her.

A shadow came over his face. He lowered his eyes. Look . . . kind of you. But he asked me to do it and I reckon I should.

He seemed to consult himself again on this proposition.

Yes, he concluded. That seems to be the fair thing.

And he nodded and drifted through into the ward, looking for a corridor to take him to Naomi.

Carradine murmured, Poor Hoyle. Half of them gone in a few days! You know—the teatime group. The Sphinx group. Maclean’s dead too. The lieutenant.

Sally went on supporting Eric Carradine’s neck. A child is dead, she thought. None of Maclean’s earnest boyish theorems would ever be tested. She considered yielding to tears on his behalf. But there was nowhere to put them. Both her hands were full of Eric Carradine.

Carradine finished the dressing and pinned it and Sally gently lowered the head. Lieutenant Carradine woke and said,
Aag. Bewl.
Carradine hushed him and touched his cheek. He gave one bleat and sank asleep again.

Carradine said, Did Maclean . . .?

No, honestly. But Maclean was a boy. He hadn’t worked out what he knew. That makes it sadder.

Carradine nodded. Sally collected herself. Carradine said, I didn’t know Naomi was so . . . you know . . . so keen on Hoyle.

Sally didn’t either.

A sly one, said Carradine. We’re joining some of the other girls at five, for tea at the Beau Rivage. Will you be in it?

Sally was there—but not Naomi. Officers came up and offered to take them to dinners. Some of the nurses consented. There was something too Maclean-ish about these men, and Sally made her excuses. Freud took up an invitation from a major and did not insist he take others with him for her protection. She was her own protector—that was the air she gave off.

As if to amuse them Freud said, Not to raise our little quarrel again. But you might be interested to know I
was
nearly stuck with a surgeon. I was about to marry a surgeon from Melbourne. Bornstein—you can look him up. My whole family was in an ecstasy apart from me. Thank God for the war, that’s what I thought. No more listening to my aunties’ Yiddish lamenting. “A girl who can spurn such good fortune . . .”

So, might she be really telling them, I do not intend to get easily tangled with any surgeon again, or with stray majors taking me to dinner?

• • •

Now they were going back—without Carradine—on a sea that had chosen to be rough and under a steel-gray canopy of cloud. These deeps no longer beckoned either to heroes of history or to boys from the bush or anywhere else. Sally was on deck because Naomi had asked her to meet up there in a squall when even the orderlies had
given up the effort of keeping their fags alight and gone below. Naomi must have had to struggle with the door onto the deck, yet was all at once silently there. Her hair was blowing out from under her cap. She had not been at the tea party at the Beau Rivage. Everyone knew she had chosen not to be there because of the Ellis Hoyle news.

So, I have Ellis’s watch, Naomi announced into the wind. I believe, she continued, the young fellow offered it to you first.

Yes, said Sally.

Naomi’s lips began to work like an older woman’s—accommodating such an intimate and unlikely gift from the dead.

I don’t have any idea, said Naomi, why he’d want me to have it. There are even nods and winks. He’s dead. He’s killed. And yet girls say things like, You two were sly, weren’t you? As if he was still here and sticking around as a quiet mover. And if poor old Ellis and I
were
sly and were secretly set for each other, then they know I must be pretty upset. They get solemn and creep around me. Which I can’t stand.

Sally reached out to put a hand on Naomi’s shoulder. Naomi looked her full in the face in return but all the airiness of an innate seniority had gone from her. She asked, Why would he do it? Send me a watch? And a watch with a gold chain on it too. All that stands for. And . . . poor man . . . who am I to say no to it anyhow? But we weren’t . . . we just weren’t . . . And that’s flat.

Maybe men aren’t clear in the head when they’re shot, Sally offered.

Naomi set her eyes on the middle air. She said, A machine-gunner killed him and the others, I hear, but the watch is running on. Not a dent.

This was a strangeness that weighed on her.

Don’t read too much into it, eh, Sally urged her. He just thought of it. A gift for a friend. That’s all. It’s not as if it weighs a ton. And you can put it in your kit and forget it. Or send it to his parents.

Where are they? Naomi asked petulantly. I don’t know.

We can find out when we’re next in Alexandria. There’d be military records.

He talked to me no more than he did to Honora, murmured Naomi. He might’ve decided he wanted to be closer. But I didn’t choose he should.

When you’re a dying being, God knows what will come to your mind. And what seemed little beforehand might all at once seem large. Anyhow, don’t you think the poor fellow’s entitled to send you his effects? The dying have their rights . . .

Naomi did not believe it and put her long splayed hand to the side of her face as a kind of denial.

Then if you don’t want it, Sally said in a half-annoyed way, why don’t you toss it over the side? Give it a burial at sea?

You know I couldn’t do that.

Sally imagined the ticking mechanism tumbling over itself in the famous water. They both stared at the uneven, blank waves. But it was clear to Sally that what seemed easy to her was a mountain to Naomi.

T
here was a tentative feeling in the nurses’ mess, a different air than on the first journey. The women had no reason to think that on Gallipoli, off the Dardanelles, the Hellespont, and all the other names that hung over the geography of the murders and manglings, the abattoirs had closed down for a second. It was normal hospital shifts and bed-making with unspotted linen while the orderlies scrubbed and Leonora watched Captain Fellowes walk slowly through—casually inspecting—as much calculation in her face as longing. Leo was too strong-minded or practical a girl to pine.

Now there was more of the necessary things—where on the first journey two Primus stoves had been placed in the sterilizing room, there were now eight of them. Autoclaves were promised. Orderlies were hauling boxes of a new local anesthetic drug named Novocain into the storage forward. “Novo” seemed to bespeak newness. Maybe it had power to change the whole equation when they anchored and the barges and sweepers came alongside.

As on the second afternoon, when they neared the peninsula, the doctors stood in an earnest conference at the forward part of the hospital deck. They had a new ward doctor and were proposing to use Lieutenant Dr. Hookes as a surgeon again if that were necessary. Freud—despite and because of her singing of tunes from “I Won’t Be An Actor No More” to “Little Tommy Murphy”
—
had a strict mind when it came to the surgical theatre and would continue there.

Captain Fellowes was to be looked to as a man unaltered by that first chaotic journey. He and Mitchie approached Sally while she was on an errand to the pan room and she saw calm assessment in his eyes.

I would like you, he said, to be my anesthetist on this trip. Nurse Carradine did it for a time last journey. Have you ever administered anesthetics?

She said she had. But in Macleay District there was no center of the anesthetic arts. She doubted it weighed in the scales of ability. It secretly occurred to her that she and her sister did know how to bring oblivion.

Fellowes told her, I have a copy of Peel’s volume, “On Anesthesia.” I shall send an orderly to you with it. I suggest you go to the nurses’ salon and have a look at its major recommendations which are at the close of each chapter.

She read Peel in the salon. In her accustomed but half-forgotten country hospital—anesthetizing for old Maddox—she had been following simple rules using a simple mask and an ether droplet dispenser. It had all been innocent of the range of chloroform and ether and chloroform dispensers and machines and masks she saw in Peel. The Yankauer mask was very like the one she had used when Dr. Maddox—to give him credit—removed a timber-feller’s leg so neatly. It was at the time presumed by her to be the sole species of anesthetics mask on earth.

But there existed as well an entire zoology. The Schimmelbusch, the Vajnas. The Hewitt airway. The Boxwood wedge. The fanciful de Caux’s inhaler, which was apparently not within the expense range of the Macleay District.

Fellowes and Dr. Hookes passed the door of the nurses’ lounge to go to their own salon forward. Fellowes was working with a pencil and paper and paused to allow Hookes to look at a diagram before they moved on. Hookes’s complexion was blotchy with sunburn. His hair was erratically brushed and his little russet moustache looked spiky. From the medical officers’ lounge they could still easily be heard, Fellowes
saying resonantly against the muted hum of the
Archimedes
’s engines, Look, Ginger, it has to be done. My God, the main danger lies ashore. Not at your hands here.

Hookes’s reply couldn’t be heard in detail. But what he said had the tone of a pleading. She thought, Like Naomi he hasn’t got over the first night.

But you’re needed, Ginger, simple as that. These ships have not been staffed according to the reality of things . . .

They were arguing about his transformation into a surgeon. Dr. Hookes’s should be a man who—whatever his competence—could forget his own bush clumsiness in the same way she was trying to forget hers. He should consider all this a medical education. Doctors, she thought, were generally good with these adjustments of the mind.

From Hookes came something indistinct but still with the intonation of pleading. Fellowes sighed hugely. Then no more was heard. It was as if the two men had settled themselves in chairs to read newspaper reports about battles elsewhere. Hookes’s anxiety hung in the air and reflected Sally’s own.

There was, however, only so much study that was useful. Mind gorged with obscure considerations and chances, she visited her cabin to drop Peel on her bedside table and climbed again to the deck. There were other women there letting the saffron kindliness of these late hours above the ocean soothe them. She saw a group further along the deck. Freud was there, and Naomi, Leo and Honora and Sister Nettice. They seemed utterly restored to harmony. Women did not carry grievances here as long as on land. Sins massive on the earth were venial at sea and even more venial on this sea which had led them to
that
place.