The Daughters of Mars (30 page)

Drowsy Carradine told Naomi she had met Lieutenant Shaw while he was undergoing a strenuous massage of his upper leg and hip in the room off the officers’ medical ward. He had promised them a stroll around the deck but he wanted to get his leg fit so he did not hold them up. Though she wished him a normal gait, Naomi was pleased to be free of social duties. The literary ones were enough for the moment. Kiernan’s request for an account of the
Archimedes
had unexpectedly started in her a compulsion to set down the whole business in ink without exaggeration or vainglory. It was an imperative that came from within her—not from Kiernan. She still had time and space for dutiful strolling with blinded or lamed soldiers. But not yet for Shaw’s bush whimsy and flirtatious chat.

Two days’ sail from the equator—when both the starboard and port decks seemed open to the withering sun, and the tar in the deck became liquid—Naomi went into the officers’ library. Here nurses were permitted amongst all those writing letters home and reading bound volumes of
Punch
, and it was here she continued her account.

“The Sinking of the
Archimedes,
” she wrote after she’d chosen a desk.

Whether nurses or doctors or orderlies, we had all come to think of the
Archimedes
as our full-time home. It was also our post of duty from the first time a barge from the beach at Gallipoli came alongside with wounded men on its decks. Some of the men on the
Demeter
might even have been nursed on the
Archimedes
at one stage or another. We were not to know that our ship—which seemed as solid as a town or as a hospital in a city—would soon be taken from us. But not before it had brought many damaged men to Alexandria and to the harbor of Mudros.

What a delight it all at once was to write of this—even in the plainest terms. But the horses and their terror. How could that be conveyed? And the boyish apathy of those who slipped away and yielded themselves up? And Nettice—the layers of ocean through which she sank and rose. The horror of men hitting the propellers—as if they preferred to be obliterated quickly by the mechanical instead of slowly by the weight of water. Could all this be put down?

As she went on, Kiernan drifted into her imagination, grabbing on to his copper cube. He had been a full partner in her command of the raft. She remembered having been loud and high-handed. For the torpedo had strangely restored her authority when it took down the
Archimedes
. (That was something not to be included in the account.) The
Archimedes
had taught her about her weakness and yet educated her in the nature of the woman she was.

As she was writing, too, the idea of Kiernan having been admirable—of his proving he’d probably be admirable anywhere he was put—took hold of her imagination. The word itself seemed lodged in her brain for the two days she was engaged on the task. When she later saw him on duty, he seemed to her to be placed in the midst of people with a special distinctness other figures lacked. This sharpness of outline was not a form of infatuation but rather a new version of seeing things. It was more akin to identifying a prophet.

The captain recommended that they be at the railing to see the coast of South Africa and the approach to Cape Town.

Naomi and Carradine caught a grimy little train to town. The city was comparable to towns they had known in girlhood—with the strangeness, though, of African women in their swathes of wildly colored cloth selling flowers and fruit from baskets on the footpaths. Black children harried Naomi for money, shouting, Australia! Rich Australia. Give us some.

They were treated with reverence by shop girls as they browsed in Cape Town’s emporiums.

A climbing party met up on the quay the next morning with robust young women who were members of the Cape Town mountaineering
club. Naomi was a member of the group and suffered a phase of guilt. Given she’d felt obliged to walk the deck with Shaw for more than an hour last evening, she had deliberately chosen an outing Shaw certainly could not embark on. From the middle of the barely woken city—occupied only by black street sweepers—they caught a train which took them around the base of the mountain. The party walked upwards through scrubland and wildflowers, at the end of which great rock platforms presented themselves. Nurses and soldiers were helped upwards by young black men who climbed ahead and reached a hand down with unpredictable strength. They were not permitted to eat or swim with whites, but were essential for scaling a mountain. From massive platforms of rock along the way the local mountaineers pointed out Simonstown and—out to sea—Robben Island, where lepers were kept. At the summit of great, split-apart boulders from which grew wildflowers and shrubs, they looked down at the city and bay and could identify the
Demeter
—rendered minute by distance. They were exhilarated and distracted to happiness by the utterly physical demands of getting here.

Guilt made her seek out Shaw in the officers’ lounge that evening. She talked about the climb as if she had done it for its own sake—for its enlivening enthusiasm. She was pleased to see that his face as yet was the face of Shaw the Joker and not of Shaw the Tragic Lover.

He said, Lucky girl. Of course, I can fall off the donkey with the greatest of ease but I haven’t mastered Table Mountain yet. Spent all morning with massage and exercise. And it pays off, you know.

She found she liked the ease of his company. He never said anything that would make a person sit up and see the world afresh. He therefore gave her a rest from her own unchosen gravity of soul.

He said, It’s not as if I’m less a man. A man’s whole life can’t rise or fall by a few inches of bone this way or that. I’ll be able to ride a horse as good as ever if I balance out the stirrups. And my old man has a motor anyhow. But it’s true a stock and station agent ought to be able to ride. You wouldn’t want to take a motor over some of the tracks
up there. Anyhow, I’m well set. And I reckon we should change the subject. We’re getting morbid.

It was to his credit that he thought these modest detours into discussing his condition were morbid. But there was another thing besides the unwillingness to look distress in the face, and that was the inability to see it in the first place.

Look, you don’t have to hang around talking to me. Like a duty to the sick and the lame.

No, please. You are a good and kindly friend and despite the wound and all the rest—despite all that—you seem to live in the sun. So you’ll always attract friends. It’s not a duty for me.

Anyhow, he said, leaning forward and keeping a half-inch or so greater closeness than was preferable, I was off on a jaunt while you were climbing mountains.

He and others had been taken to Cecil Rhodes’s home and seen the grand library with Rhodes’s bust and his last words, “So little done, so much to do,” and then his bedroom full of lives of Napoleon. Robbie Shaw said he couldn’t get over those words.

I’ve never heard a better argument for leading an easy life, he told Naomi. I mean, he ran round Africa like a demented being—diamonds here, gold there, land somewhere else. And still . . . he was disappointed.

This—she could sense—was like an argument for a pleasant life in a Queensland town and children running in the garden. He did not understand that a person had to possess a gift for contentment to take up what he was offering.

From the decks outside, they could hear the sounds of the
Demeter
unmooring. No announcement of sailing time had been made earlier. It departed of its own will. There was a rush to the deck now. Robbie Shaw insisted on taking part.

• • •

Some nights the nurses dined in their mess. But they were frequently invited to the dining room where Robbie Shaw remained one of the officers
who paid them special attention in the Lemnos way. And always that glint—directed at Naomi—that suggested some shared and indefinable secret. At one of the chief tables sat Padre Harris with crosses on the lapels of his uniform. He was a harmless case Naomi had met when she worked in that small section of cabins set aside for the officers with mental concerns. There was a little cabin with a Primus stove in that part of the ship where nurses made tea and cocoa for themselves and the patients. Whenever she gave the Reverend Harris a cocoa he responded with the remotest politeness—one transmitted over a vast and disabling space. Or a display of etiquette remembered by the cells but not by the man. No doubt he had been shocked and became burdened by the men whose hands he’d held for a last “thine is the glory.” His features—which were long and lean—seemed always in false repose. Parsons had a duty to adopt the smugness of possessing the truth on free will and sin and the mind of God. That look seemed long vanished from him.

There were two other padres on board to serve the Anglicans and Catholics. So Harris was not called upon for any duties and was allowed to take his time to find his way back to sureness and solid ground. In the meantime, he was likely to say extreme things suddenly. There was no small talk in him. One evening Naomi delivered him in the officers’ salon his evening mixture of ethanol and laudanum. Other nurses were similarly dispensing pills and mixtures across the room. And after he had drained the mixture, he told her, Two of the boys from the venereal section have jumped overboard, you know. It’s been kept quiet. But shame, you see. Shame killed them.

And then he returned again to his remote self.

Naomi did not know whether this was reliable news or not. At the first chance she asked Carradine whether any men from the syphilis ward had jumped overboard.

Not that I’ve heard, said Carradine. But then they wouldn’t tell anyone, would they, in case the idea came to others.

The next evening Naomi approached the matron of the
Demeter
and asked the question—whispering it so that the infection did not rise into the air.

The matron inspected her and then looked at the ceiling. It was a confession in a gesture. Lowering her head she murmured, You must not tell anyone. You might start them off like lemmings.

Lieutenant Shaw seemed innocent of the information when he asked her to go for a stroll on deck. He wanted the exercise before the Roaring Forties set in. For when they did, unsteady men would need to take to their bunks. It was a brilliant morning of fierce sunlight when they met up. There was much promise of future violent seas in today’s choppy ocean. The wired-off section where the women had slept on torrid nights had been dismantled. A small section of a lower deck—where the worst mental patients exercised—had been cooped in by wire to prevent the disturbed casting themselves over the side.

Her problem in walking with Robbie Shaw was that she had entered a stage of her existence in which she could imagine the company of men as endurable and more than endurable. Was this the beginning of delusion which would suck her down into drudgery and weariness? Was it the dawn of wisdom?

Walking on the promenade that morning with Shaw she sighted Padre Harris. He strolled in the fraternal care and company of the uniformed Catholic priest and Anglican minister. He was in the middle of the two. Since—as Naomi knew—his conversation was erratic and prophetic, it was understandable that they tended to talk across him. An impulse arose in Naomi to excuse herself from Shaw and run forward to advise them that—though self-harm was unimaginable in a clergyman—they were coming towards the point in the bows where the steel canted away to become the blade which cut the water. The priest and minister were so involved in some topic now that they moved towards each other behind the Reverend Harris’s back. Whatever they discussed—the Nicene Creed or horse racing—they were distracted and barely ready for the fluid way their friend climbed the crossbars of the railings and stepped onto the polished wood at the top
and let himself fall into the Indian Ocean more or less in the direction of the bows. The two padres threw themselves against the railings and shouted, and then one rushed up a companionway to the bridge. Shaw and Naomi and others who had seen it all also ran to the rail and gazed down.

One might have had a hope of turning back and retrieving him had it happened in the stern. The captain did of course turn the ship and stop the engines. Lookouts were posted and the decks became crowded with unofficial searchers—officers, nurses, and men. On the sea’s brilliant surface a little white froth gave a mimicry of a floating head. Hence, many at various stages yelled, There! No, no. I thought . . .

The idea of suicide was now unleashed. And they all knew that according to the ruthlessness of physics the padre had been drawn straight under by the ship’s motion and bludgeoned and hurled along by its hull and thrown into the sweep of propellers. The idea shook Naomi. She knew what propellers could do.

The ship continued to circle but everyone knew it was futile. Naomi consulted her watch.

I should take you down below, she told Robbie. I’m sorry, my shift’s beginning.

Shaw said almost as a complaint, Do you think I’d do something like that if you left me up here?

No. I know you wouldn’t.

But she insisted he come too. There was nothing he could do for Harris by staying on deck. And the chop was too pronounced for him to stay there alone.

Now a fatal trend was in place. Though two young men afflicted with syphilis had thrown themselves over the railing, it was Padre Harris’s example in particular that confirmed the availability of such a release. Within an hour orderlies armed with rifles had been placed on sentry duty on the decks. Perhaps—as Nettice said with dry humor—to shoot anyone who thought of killing themselves. As for aft, it was
believed that even a halfway-alert orderly could intercept a blinded soldier or a fellow with amputated legs or a man with a ruined face. But two guards were put there anyway.

In the evening the mood in the mental ward was solemn as Naomi handed out the pills which were meant to keep these men equal of soul. Eyes strayed towards a particular lieutenant colonel named Stanwell. He was a man who sat that night smoking on his own but who was not often seen there in the reading room. Like Harris he had been on dosages of ethanol, but even higher ones than those given to the unfortunate padre. Most of the time he could not sit upright or perform the functions of lighting a cigarette. Since there was concern that he might fall asleep while smoking and incinerate himself, his former batman had been assigned to sit in a chair in his cabin and mind him overnight. Naomi understood too that Lieutenant Colonel Stanwell had the respect of young officers—it was apparent in the concentrated concern they radiated towards him. It had a quality very different from the purely professional care Padre Harris’s two fellow clergymen had extended to that unfortunate man.