The Daughters of Mars (42 page)

Major Darlington’s slightly dazed belief in the uses of pathology was unshakeable and he promoted it even—or perhaps especially—in conversing with nurses and orderlies. He had quarreled with his superiors over the wearing of face masks in the treatment of wounds. The Australian Voluntary and its little pathology lab—which he equipped
at his own expense—was his chance to manage experiments on the issue. To it he summoned nurses and orderlies and took swabs from their throats. He ordered that in certain wards nurses and orderlies dressing wounds should wear masks—a prominent placard marked
MASKS
was placed at the doorway of two wards. A
NO MASKS
sign was posted at the door of the other two. The wards in the newly built huts in the garden were not included in the experiment because that might make the numbers too hard for him to get his work done, either as pathologist or as surgeon. He came around the wards—himself wearing a mask—to take samples of wound tissue. He put them in a glass dish and bore them away. As he worked he told nurses in wafting and often broken sentences that he suspected streptococci in their throats were a peril to wounds. Not that, he laughed—in one of those near-silent laughs uttered with lowered chin and like a series of nods—their having streptococci was in any way a jailable offense. Streptococcus likes us, he told Naomi and some of the other nurses. He likes to take us dancing.

At this he uttered coughs of laughter.

His lean face—sallow on his arrival, and watchful and sour—then composed itself into an expression of calm purpose.

The masses of wounded and gassed of the bloodiest and most chemical-doused summer in human knowledge continued to arrive. They were at least two-thirds Australian—to justify the establishment’s name—but frequently more. The hospital did not receive the shell-shocked, even though there were men with wounds who woke at night hyperventilating or screaming. But the Australian Voluntary was not equipped with alienists.

At the Voluntary there were separate messes for officers and men who were well enough to sit at tables. As summer progressed the tables were sometimes put out on the pavement in front of the château, where officers and men began to mingle as they had in the battles which brought them here. At Lady Tarlton’s insistence a glass or two of wine was served with dinner for anyone fit to desire it. She had put
together a subcommittee in London who put up the money for such delicacies. These seemed to be placed democratically on the tables without discrimination—preserves and condiments and shortbread from Fortnum & Mason were made available to the officers and men alike. It honored the reality, Lady Tarlton said to Naomi one day as they looked across the terraces at the walking wounded and recuperants at the sunny tables, of a citizen army in which some privates were schoolteachers, religious ministers, and journalists. She did not mention the hard-fisted country boys and the worldly innocent children of the slums. Yet—contrary to normal military credos—the firmament did not crack open when Lady Tarlton permitted this mingling.

Faster than Naomi could have believed, the days began to shrink and leaves reddened and withered to warn generals of their failed summer. The wildflowers of the hospital grounds of the Australian Voluntary Hospital—hyacinths and primroses—closed up. The sky turned a stubborn gray and descended on the château so that it seemed within reach of the gray slates of the roof. The mornings were misty with vapors the sun could not always burn off. Heaters were moved into the wards. The rain grew colder and even more slanted than on Lemnos—driven before a wind that swept in from the Channel and froze puddles overnight on the doorsteps of the château and in murderous little patches on the pathways to the huts. An English nurse broke her ankle in a journey between the reception wards in the garden and the house. Another scalded herself carrying cocoa across an open stretch. But the volunteers did not leave—as they had every right to. Lady Tarlton was a magnetic figure and the English Roses proved strong-willed young women who stuck. And where else would they go on the Western Front to see their suffragist principles in practice?

In the first onset of cold—the rehearsal for the winter that would ultimately take the unconcluded war to Christmas and into 1917—the young Scottish surgeon Dr. Airdrie would visit the wards in a wool-lined skin-and-fur jacket of the kind worn by officers and men. She sported stylish stalking boots which seemed to imply that she was ready to go
hiking or hacking or hunting stags in the Highlands. Penelope was her first name—so it emerged—but no one used it. Perhaps because she had not encountered many other women doctors and had contempt for the hauteur of male physicians, she was familiar with the nurses and seemed to talk to them as if no veil of wisdom separated her from them. When—if ever—the war’s giant wheel ceased to turn, she would be taught how to behave—at peril of her career—in a civilian hospital.

Naomi came to see that Airdrie had no other choice than to chat over tea with them. For she was in many ways the most isolated person in the château—potentially separated from nurses by her university education, but inevitably seen even by the distracted Major Darlington as a medical anomaly. She told Naomi and others that she found the two former consumptives who worked as ward doctors very plain company. They were the sort of men, she said, who’d studied their wee medicine rather than grow up and become human beings. Mammy so wanted her little boy to be a doctor! she mocked.

She liked to gossip and that was always welcome. Lord Tarlton owned half of Banffshire, she claimed—his grandfather, an English interloper, as described by Airdrie, had cleared out the population of the estates to Australia and New Zealand.

My uncle knows the present Tarlton remotely, she said, and a cousin was his land agent at some stage, though I haven’t bothered Lady Tarlton with that news. As for Lady Tarlton herself, her name is Julia Henning and she’s English—Manchester-born in fact. She owned her own millinery shop in the West End, with very blue-blooded ladies as her customers. But still, in the eyes of that group, a hatmaker—however fine a hat she might put together—is subhuman. My mother says it was murder for them when they married. Lady Hatshop, everyone called her. You see, there was many a mammy with a plain daughter had her eye on wee sawney Lord Tarlton. So there was an unco scandal when he bespoke beautiful Miss Henning. At first glance he might seem attractive—in a bit of a dither like Major Darlington—but there are no depths behind it. A high Tory messenger boy.

I mean, she continued, even the army dispensed with him. And I believe he didn’t cover himself with glory in your country either. His wife’s politics helped drive them apart from the beginning. So why did they marry? Well, a title’s a title and a beautiful hatmaker is a beautiful hatmaker. And Miss Henning might have thought she could influence him and make something of him. But no sooner did he have her locked up than he started tomcatting his way around London. They have no children but he has bastards everywhere—I know one he’s supporting in Putney. Though the Australians hated him, he has a certain charm and has wee bastards there as well—the daughters of the big graziers. He made himself persona non grata with all the big . . . What do you call them?

Squatters, Naomi supplied.

Yes, them.

You must be exaggerating, Doctor, Naomi suggested.

I don’t think I am very much, said Airdrie after a pensive assessment. I would say that Lady Tarlton is the woman with the best excuse in the Empire for taking a lover.

Taking a lover? asked Naomi.

Taking a lover? asked the English Roses. Who?

Well, said Airdrie, let those with eyes to see . . .

Naomi was surprised by how quickly the initial shock of the idea faded in her and was replaced by annoyance at Airdrie and her supposed knowledge of Lady Tarlton.

You’re a good, loyal girl, said Dr. Airdrie with conviction not mockery. You’re standing up for Lady Tarlton, aren’t you? Defending her repute? I don’t think you need to. In my eyes, her repute stands.

Even then, Naomi saw some of the English Roses avert their eyes as if they knew something Naomi didn’t.

And I thought you were being tolerant too, Durance. Of this Lady Tarlton and Major Darlington matter. Good luck to her, declared Airdrie. Funny though, that she goes for those slightly dazed sort of fellows. But you didn’t know? Don’t be ashamed. It speaks well of you.

Naomi set to in her mind to remodel the Lady Tarlton she knew to the possibility Airdrie was right. It was easier to do than she had thought. She would have been shaken a year or so ago—or, say, before the
Archimedes
. Now it was such a small matter. The front dwarfed all.

Airdrie approached her as she left to go back on duty.

I’m sorry, she said. I was mischievous in general but it was not aimed at you. You probably think I am a mere gossip too, and I am. Love it, I do. Can’t help it. Forgive me.

Naomi walked away and didn’t care what Airdrie thought of people who were brusque.

That evening she got an apologetic note from Airdrie, inviting her to lunch in Wimereux—they could get a lift in there with Carling the following Saturday. This would of course be dependent on a convoy coming in. But
moules
and
pommes frites
were a specialty of the Pas de Calais, wrote Airdrie with gusto. Yummy! And all you say to me—I swear—will be kept secret.

When it did snow in the meantime, an unusually early fall portending a bad winter, Mitchie’s few Australian nurses danced in its cleanness—never before encountered by them—in the garden. They were watched with amusement by the English Roses. Naomi had by now heard a lightly wounded Australian officer murmuring the news that Major Darlington was getting on a treat with her ladyship. But even the Australians—with a taste for ribaldry—were careful how they displayed their amusement at this. Envy must not be confessed to, and so the male code was to reach for mockery. It would have been more open if Lady Tarlton and Major Darlington had not grown to be so worthy of esteem and veneration. There seemed to be a strong and informal agreement amongst the increasing number of those who knew of their affair that it should no longer be a matter of comment. A trip by the walking wounded into Boulogne, where they talked to other soldiers, proved that rumors that the Australian Voluntary was an eccentric and slapdash place were common. Knowing what they knew, they resented that image. As well as that, the affair had not distracted
Lady Tarlton from keeping the meals plentiful and the wards warm in the huge spaces of the château—a house which, as she had feared, invited in a gale each time the main door opened.

Penelope Airdrie and Naomi went into Wimereux for their lunch and were pleased to take shelter in a restaurant from the windy promenade on which—for a freezing half hour or so—they inspected the long stretch of tidal beach and the murky whitecaps of a dismal sea.

Never one for the seaside, me, confessed Airdrie.

A fire blazed in the restaurant. They ordered mulled wine. Then a huge bowl of
moules
and another of fried potatoes was brought to their table. They donned large bibs and—after opening and devouring the
moules
—rinsed their hands in bowls of water. Dr. Airdrie looked out through the lace curtains.

Never pretty, never pretty, this time of year.

This gave her an opportunity to ask Naomi details of Australian weather, Australian skies, Australian strands. It was peculiar that weather brought out a tendency to patriotism in a person. Storms and murk were forgotten. Summers were described and frosts unmentioned. As she expanded on the subject of humid days generating thunderstorms, Dr. Airdrie raised her hands to cover her face.

You’re not feeling sick, are you? asked Naomi.

I am not myself, said Dr. Airdrie. Listening to you, I am not myself. I believe I am in love.

Naomi thought this was worth at least rinsing her hands and ceasing to eat. Oh. Who is the most fortunate man?

That’s the thing. I’m not of the fortunate-man persuasion. I love you.

Naomi felt riveted to her seat and something like an electric pulse moved upwards through her body. It was her turn to cover her face. This could not be taken in. It was not a matter of moral bewilderment. It was too strange.

Please say nothing, Airdrie softly urged her. I have studied you and the way you go about your work. This combination you have of intelligence and reserve and grit.

Naomi decided she would flee the restaurant. A kind of panic drove her. The words intelligence and reserve and grit had done it. Her haunches began to move without reference to her conscious mind. She could have been on the street before she knew it. But she knew on some calm plain of her soul that Airdrie would be back at the château by the evening and need to be worked with. She had heard a matron at Royal Prince Alfred warn of “Sapphic tendencies” which sometimes arose in nurses’ quarters and were to be fought and—please, girls!—reported. Yet after all—after Lemnos and Freud’s rape and all the rest—she was more stunned by Airdrie’s gush of affection than by the idea that the doctor was somehow reprehensible and immoral and, as the matron in Sydney had urged, reportable.

She had been in love—or had thought she was—with the French teacher at the high school in the Macleay. A sunny younger woman who broke girls’ hearts by marrying a traveler and moving to Sydney. In her imagination Naomi had imagined kisses exchanged with the French teacher. But that had been a girl’s fantasy and had not lasted to become the currency between a woman surgeon and a nurse.

Please, Dr. Airdrie said—seeing at once she had been too rash. I shouldn’t have said anything.

Naomi knew she didn’t want Airdrie. But she also did not want Airdrie shamed—and that in spite of the woman’s recklessness. This is why she talks to the nurses in that fevered way, she thought. She’s uncomfortable with her desire. The “Sapphic tendencies.” They make her chatter away.

Naomi reached and held her wrist—just as a woman would the wrist of another who had suffered a loss. Airdrie’s voice became almost inaudible.