The Daughters of Mars (33 page)

The Durances were delivered home—down the hill from West Kempsey and over the bridge to Sherwood—in a car driven by the town clerk.

You do whatever you like, Mrs. Sorley whispered to her in the wide backseat. You rest if you wish to or go riding a horse. It was your home before it was mine.

Naomi kissed her and Mrs. Sorley beamed with pleasure. Naomi couldn’t depend on Mrs. Sorley to drive her away from home. Her father asked with an edge of concern about Egypt and Lemnos.

I could have lost both daughters, he said.

She could tell he had taken the
Sydney Morning Herald
and the mayor to heart. But he had accommodated himself also to having bred a heroine.

As they ate roast lamb on the Sunday of her visit home and as her father applied himself with earnestness to his plate and Mrs. Sorley beamed at her, Naomi thought of her stepmother, You will weep at his graveside but you’ll be there foursquare. You will live easily but earnestly with the grief.

She stayed on a week at the farm amidst the blackbutt walls of the bedroom she and Sally had shared. The creosote of the foundation posts—and some natural form of turpentine the timber foundations themselves imbued the soil with—still created the faint and familiar and forgotten odor of this place where she had been a sister to Sally and where she had abandoned her. And of course in which she now with mere justice did her duty under the added weight of her reported heroism. Despite all—love of father, kindness of stepmother—she merely observed the pieties of gratitude and of chatting with her half-brothers and -sister. And when awake at night she would be seized by the thought of her uneven-legged and eager captain. Sometimes she thought of admirable Kiernan. Kiernan had left the ship in Melbourne to go to his unimaginable Quaker family. There was pleasure and yet little desire of more than a general kind in her memory of either man.

Before she left—that morning at breakfast—she suddenly grabbed her father’s chapped, leathery hands and kissed them. The sight of them reminded her that Eric Durance had hired labor to prevent his daughters’ hands becoming leathery. When they saw her to the East
Kempsey dock and to the
Currawong
steamer, Mrs. Sorley embraced Naomi and whispered, You kissing his hands. It meant the whole world to him.

• • •

She was bent on using her eminence as a
Herald
correspondent to her benefit. She had not forgotten to include that cutting—admiringly published and just a little edited by some censor to take the blame for the
Archimedes
’s death from the army—amongst her documents. She presented all of it now to the senior matron who interviewed her in Sydney. She could see there was some hope. She blessed the bush impishness in Shaw that had possibly released her creation to the newspapers. She realized she had two things that could not be found in any nurse out of a civil hospital. She had experience of terrible wounds. And she had stayed afloat after being sunk.

So there was to be a further interview—she read that as progress. Now it was the senior matron and a very elderly colonel who told her he had been in Egypt but repatriated. You’re not dealing with a doctor of any distinction in me, he told her frankly. My work is pure administration.

He studied her file and seemed impressed she had been a triage nurse. It was an asset she was willing to grab at that summer morning.

And your sister is nursing, I see.

Yes, Naomi asserted. She’s on Lemnos in the stationary hospital there.

Sally could serve as another argument for a return.

I should warn you that your intractability which is noted here is of some concern. But my God—this was under Spanner. I see that Colonel Leatherhead believed there existed extenuating circumstances. Still, your acts of rebellion will not be tolerated in future. Do you understand?

Naomi assured him she did.

He turned to the matron. An Old Testament God, this Spanner chap.

She had an exhilarating expectation now. They would send her back. She would not need to share a continent with Mrs. Sorley.

There is a ship due to leave Melbourne in two weeks, the colonel told her. You will be notified with the details and issued with a travel warrant closer to the time.

Her impulse was to kiss his hand like some feudal woman. But that would have convinced him that she was unreliable.

Should I say congratulations? asked the senior matron.

• • •

From a form of politeness rather than passion, she had written to Robbie Shaw. News—that was all. No false feeling. And she heard from him in return.

Dearest Naomi,

There’s some hope they’re going to put me with a transport unit. Organizing freight trains and so on. Better there than here. Would like to say more but am between interviews. I think of you all the time.

Your devoted friend (I know you don’t want me to be called more than that),

Robbie

S
ally near collided with Honora Slattery in the corridor of the Heliopolis Palace Hotel. Through double doors nearby they could hear the hubbub of conversation from the grand ballroom, where beds were laid out ten across the width of the room and in God-knew-how-many ranks—she hadn’t had time to count. Above the ballroom floor were galleries, and these too were loaded with beds—so fully that their creaky floors and the ornate Moorish columns which attached them to the roof seemed too frail to take the weight.

The officers’ lounge, midnight, Honora said. Come on, we’ve got to have a drink to get rid of this bloody year. Lionel Dankworth will be there.

Dankworth was wounded?

He had an ear shot off. His hearing’s intact.

As narrated by Honora, it sounded less than threatening. She did not seem tormented by the quarter inch which dictated Dankworth had lost an ear rather than a head.

Mudros was gone and there seemed too much life at the Heliopolis for anyone to be wistful. The huge rooms pulsed with it—the strident outnumbered the shy and the convalescent the sick.

It turned out that Lionel Dankworth had been enchanted with Honora Slattery to the extent that he had accompanied her to mass in the chapel of the Heliopolis Palace. Catholics were like that, people said—ruthless with using love as a lever to shift people.

Sally knew that—unless it was for a purely ceremonial event—no one could inveigle her to church. God had left the earth by now and was hidden amidst stars. Good for him! A first-class choice, the way things were. Yet she also knew that even in her disappointment with the deity, behind her failure to believe any further, lay a soul designed for belief. Under different stars she could have been a dour votary. It was Honora who seemed designed for raucousness and fun and a kind of frank sensuality. The tension in Honora between jokiness and devotion seemed to hold Dankworth in wonderment. He’d never met it before.

There were the tents of a new camp beyond the town of Heliopolis and in the desert. The streets were full of new boys—reinforcements. They were as amazed by where they’d ended up as their forerunners had been a year ago. They caught the tram outside the Palace to go into the center of Cairo. There they would repeat—as if they were newly discovered and their own invention—the japes of those who were now too mangled for levity and whose sportive pulse had been quelled on Gallipoli.

There was little to make Sally go to town. One night Lionel Dankworth and another officer took Honora and her to dinner in the piazza on the Nile embankment outside Shepheard’s—the hotel having now been elevated to the status of Allied headquarters. Dankworth’s ear wound was barely visible and well healed. Honora’s clear hope was that Sally and the other officer would
take—
as Lionel Dankworth and Honora had
taken
. Though she was not against the idea of infatuation and the life it might give to banal hours, she could not seem to achieve it when a specific man was presented.

As for the antiquities . . . well, the idea of looking again at the pyramids was painful when so many of the company she had visited them with were gone. It was a good time of year for it though, Lieutenant Dankworth said. You could get to the top of the pyramid of Cheops without any heat exhaustion and see forever in all directions in a clear atmosphere. So Honora and Lionel went—scooting diagonally across
the length of Cairo and even visiting the army camp at Giza for drinks with some other Gallipoli chaps.

Time to toast 1916, said Honora—extending her invitation for New Year drinks. It has to be better than this because it couldn’t be worse.

May we, or at least some of us, said Lionel—making his toast that night—punish John Turk in Palestine for anything he might have done to us in Gallipoli.

There was quite a crowd of men and nurses present. One of them had visited an aerodrome in Sinai and, seeing the airmen take off over the desert, had decided that was what he would dearly love to do. There were so many fellows applying, but the infantry and even the light horse lost their shine when compared to climbing into the air like that.

You see, he said, we’ve never had an eagle-eye view. Napoleon didn’t. Imagine if Wellington at Waterloo is wondering what to do, how long to hold out before retreating, say, and Napoleon is pouring the Imperial Guards in and the future all depends on Blücher’s Prussians turning up in time. Just imagine if Wellington had been able to say, “Lieutenant Fortescue, can you hop in your B.E. and go up four thousand feet and tell me if Marshal Blücher is on his way?” Now I’d say that’s true power. An ordinary soldier with greater power to see—to get a grasp of things—than any general.

All right, said Lionel, but then you’ve got to come down. Remember that bloke Icarus?

The men were drinking whisky and ale, the women champagne and orange and—for those who had not essayed liquor yet—fruit juice with chipped ice. And a quiet voice speaking not of vast pictures of desert or sky-highs but of earthbound things asked, Excuse me, aren’t you one of the Durance girls?

Sally had been talking to some of Lionel’s friends and saw the face of a grown boy when she turned—the features in the suntanned face had a delicate neatness a mother and aunts would cherish. A choirboy face, people said, and also, in common wisdom, that they were the most dangerous.

Charlie Condon, said the young man. East Kempsey.

Your father was the solicitor? she asked.

Yes. That’s it.

The Condons were part of the ruling class of the town in reputedly classless Australia. The gentry were the solicitors and the accountants and the bank managers whose children played together and whose wives spoke to each other. Yet this young man was shy about talking to her. She thought he did not look like a veteran. He lacked that dark pulse in the eyes.

Didn’t you go away to Sydney to study? she asked.

He said he had.

One of the boarding schools, she surmised. Then . . . was it the law?

Heavens no, he said. A stab at law maybe. But other things interest me. By the way, you were a year ahead of me at school. To a bit of a kid, that’s an age.

Thank you, she said and was willing to smile. You make me sound like a maiden aunt.

I’m so pleased I saw you. It’s ridiculous, but we spend all our time looking for faces from home, our part of home. And I don’t even like the place.

But we want to know, don’t we? Like it or not.

What about you? Were you nursing there? In the Macleay, I mean.

Yes, she told him and then it recurred—that she’d nursed her mother to death. In his presence it was something she wanted to suppress—to the point of oblivion.

My sister left as soon as she could, she told him—as a matter of history and not grievance. She’s back there right now, but she says she’s coming back here. She’s visiting my father at Sherwood. And my stepmother. You remember a Mrs. Sorley?

I remember a boy called Sorley, Condon admitted. I remember the widow, but only dimly. Wasn’t her husband killed by a tree?

That’s right.

Oh, he said, a famous Macleay tragedy. I always thought she looked pretty jolly for a widow. Not that I’m saying . . .

No, she said, I know you’re not saying . . .

He developed an even smile. She had for some reason expected him to grin crooked and to show the devil beneath the pretty features.

A funny place, he told her confidentially. There are a lot of people in that valley who think they’re the ant’s pants—as if Kempsey and the Macleay were Paris or London or Moscow. And when you come back from Sydney everybody’s trying to land you with their daughter—as if it’s the only place you could possibly meet a girl. Crikey, I am being critical, aren’t I? You must have brought out the moaner in me.

That unblooded look emerged in his face again. It was still a serious matter for him—his boyish rebellion against the Macleay River and its valley and its principal town.

He didn’t give off that almost chemical mixture of fatalism and bloody remembrance and tired ruthlessness the survivors did. Some of the veterans were courtly and polite because it was a railing to cling to, and to save them from the pit. The new men were polite to and courtly towards women and the world because they thought they had a life to pursue and had not yet faced the force that so utterly overpowered politeness. It wasn’t his fault—after all, he was a year younger than her. It was simply obvious.

They spoke for the rest of the evening—she broke away only when she saw Honora smiling in her direction and presuming that her conversation with Lieutenant Condon stood for some outburst of magnetism. It would be useless later saying that she had found it pleasant talking to him, since because of Honora’s own infatuation with Lionel Dankworth—deformed ear and all—she was geared up to read intense attachment everywhere and even in the mildest friendliness.

At three o’clock in the morning everyone went up on to the roof. There was a resolve to stay up there and see the first light of the year come out of Sinai—it would happen about half-past five. It must be seen—went the proposition—because this would be the year of victory
and peace. Sally decided not to share the experience. As the party took to the stairs, Sally called from below, Honora, I’m going now. Thank you, it was very pleasant.