The Daughters of Mars (48 page)

Yes, said Leo, whose beloved Fellowes was working at a clearing station thirty miles off. And he’ll have more monuments in the end.

At this time Germans were being brought in. Some walked. One of them—Sally would remember amidst the flux of cases—had a pitiable bayonet wound to the sternum. It crossed Sally’s mind to wonder if Honora might be vengeful with them. But from what anyone saw she was businesslike and attentive in a normal sense. Why would you expect otherwise? Sally asked herself. But then she noticed that with the German walking wounded Honora sometimes briskly removed their jackets and exhaustively searched their pockets—almost as if there might be something sewn in the seams. She did not ask their permission, and they submitted to her search with a frown. She would obviously search the entire German army—all without hatred—to find the one who had her letter and thus knew Captain Lionel Dankworth’s place on or beneath earth.

• • •

Naomi had not expected or wanted a reply from Robbie. But one arrived, in a Comforts Fund envelope from which she could tell it had come through the army postal services in France. Her impulse was to leave the thing unopened, but there was a sense in which she was too busy to develop any habit of delay.

Miss Durance,

Your letter followed me from Australia from where I was finally despatched to France to be an RTO—Railway Transport Officer—and where I hoped to visit you at your posting. To say that I am disappointed is to put it very light. What I am most disappointed in is your delay in telling me to give up hope of your affection. I can only believe you when you say that my damaged gait has nothing to do with it. It is that you put off so long letting me know where
I stand that I can’t respect. You always seemed to me to be made of more forthright material. You did warn me that when I saw something in you I was fooling myself. So I can’t say that you missed out on telling me to use caution.

But I must say once more—so many months! On the transport I daydreamed how we would meet up in France. Well, I was a fool. And you were not genuine with me. Since there is nothing more to be said,

I remain,

Robbie Shaw (Capt.)

There was first a rush of shame when Naomi read this. It was followed by anger at Lieutenant Shaw’s moral haughtiness. He wrote as if she had as good as been engaged to him. That was his delusion. She walked the wards directing the work of the English Roses but rage would take her in the midst of sentences and she would forget their purpose.

What dosage did you say? an English Rose would ask, and Naomi would need to begin again.

But within a mere handful of hours, she was overtaken by a sense of reprieve. She had sidestepped the obvious but most lethal marriage. Kiernan had helped her do it.

As Naomi savored freedom from poor Robbie and anticipated a letter from Kiernan, Matron Mitchie had caught a cold which developed very swiftly into pneumonia. She gasped and became distressed about some jangled, fearful terror of childhood or girlhood. Or even of the
Archimedes
. The
Archimedes
must be there, Naomi was sure, in Matron Mitchie’s delirium, since Naomi hadn’t been able to eradicate it from her own dreams.

Doctor Airdrie was the one who diagnosed Mitchie’s condition. Major Darlington also visited Mitchie and took her vital readings and weighed her general condition. Lady Tarlton sat by her bed reading softly to her while—in her own fevered privacy—Mitchie rattled away
at phantoms. Even while levering herself about on walking sticks, Mitchie had mesmerized them into the belief that her energies had never been diminished. After this, Lady Tarlton muttered to Naomi, she should be sent at least to England to be built up. She should then go home, wouldn’t you say?

Lady Tarlton looked like a woman due for a collapse herself. Her face had been pinched to thinness by the winter. The spring had not yet fully restored her. She remained recklessly devoted and palely beautiful. Her gloriously disordered hair flowed from the French mountaineer’s cap she wore for warmth. Her arguments with generals had still taught her no subservience. She was talking about starting an Australian Club in Paris this coming summer. Because whenever the boys went to the capital from the trenches, they had to hunt around for accommodation. They were left to the mercy of the YMCA, she said, and hung around on the pavements outside estaminets and the tourist sites trying to convince themselves they were having a good time.

Lady Tarlton had been to Paris looking at buildings, seeking help from generals and making small progress. Her contempt for some of them was probably mutual, but her certainty she would override the generals of the rear was still girlish and bracing.

Floating about the wards, she was willing to talk about her battles with generals in front of anyone, and the Australians loved it—all her lambasting of the heroes of the desk. You’d think, she complained one day in that airy, nose-high, chin-jutted way of hers, I had asked them to open an Indian brothel.

Darlington remained her helpmeet. Not only did he serve his long hours in wards and perform surgery as sepsis bloomed in wounds or limbs were deformed in their healing, but he filled in forms, wrote letters, and then spent time examining tissue from the living and the dead in his pathology laboratory downstairs.

Naomi continued to meet now and then English nurses in Boulogne or Wimereux who had heard of Lady Tarlton’s Australian hospital and thought of it as an amateur affair run by eccentrics. The
place was rendered more laughable because gossip of the rumored love affair between Lady Tarlton and her senior surgeon was no longer confined to the château. The fact was that their own surgeons and doctors encouraged their nurses to believe Château Baincthun a farce. A nurse she met in Boulogne asked her, Isn’t there a crackpot doctor there who wants you to wear a mask all the time?

It was the sort of question which called up instantaneous loyalty in Naomi. I’m sure it would be interesting for you, she said, to see his figures on sepsis.

But it had to be admitted he had the cranelike gait and the fixed eye of at least a highly argumentative fellow. He and Lady Tarlton shared that same air of having to push down walls to make the world see the self-evident things
they
saw.

Soon after Airdrie’s diagnosis, Matron Mitchie’s breathing grew very labored and her temperature went to a hundred and four degrees. The struggle reached a level where she should have surrendered—but of course she would not. This did not mean at all—Naomi knew—that she would live. It meant only that she was willing to endure a terrible death. There would be no sliding forth beneath an easeful cloud of morphine for Mitchie.

By the end of May, her pneumonia had broken. Now she appeared elderly. Her wrists were purple and thin and her fingers trembled as she reached for a teacup by her bed. Naomi could not be spared to sit by her for long. She was now their chief ward sister and—in fact if not in title—their matron. The idea that she should be in receipt of a matron’s instead of a staff nurse’s pay fortunately amused her rather than rankled. All industrial unease of that sort had been somehow washed from her soul. The reward of being prized by Lady Tarlton and trusted by Major Darlington—that’s what she looked for.

At last, a letter from Kiernan!

You must forgive the delay—or at least I hope you might. I received your news about Robbie Shaw with a delight I won’t disguise. I
feel a devotion to you that is total. We were in the mist but utterly identified each other. Is that your impression too? If it’s not, please ignore me. Here I am talking to a woman who has just liberated herself and I’m suggesting new shackles.

He then nominated dates on which he would have leave in Paris.

If my letter is not an utter mystification, would you consider the following: that we undergo a betrothal ceremony—the first step to marriage should you desire that—at the Friends’ chapel in Paris? There is one, as it turns out. You may seek some other secular gesture we could make, and if that is what you would like then that is what we shall do. But the reason I suggest the Friends is because the process is thoughtful yet not binding, sensible and not loud. It strikes me that those qualities suit you. You are not a Friend, nor need you to be, nor am I attempting to make one of you. You are dearer to me than that.

If this letter is craziness in your eyes, don’t feel you need to reply . . .

It was instantly apparent to Naomi that what Kiernan wanted was what she wanted. She believed in that formula—“thoughtful yet not binding, sensible and not loud.” It was easy to tell Lady Tarlton she wished to meet her fiancé (the term “boyfriend” was fatuous) in Paris and that it was important to his religion that there be a ceremony of betrothal.

You have a fiancé? asked Lady Tarlton.

I’ve just received the suggestion by mail, said Naomi.

A ceremony? Is he Jewish? asked Lady Tarlton.

He’s a member of the Society of Friends.

Quakers, she said. How fascinating. My family, of course, were Friends. I, however . . . I’m afraid I let it go. But, though human, they’re not given to as much hypocrisy as the others, you understand.

Naomi took the afternoon train from Boulogne to Paris and found her way to the British Nurses’ Home, which was an ornate place facing the ordered spaces of the Champs de Mars. For the purpose of betrothal, Lieutenant Kiernan had been given one day’s leave and collected her—as a telegram had promised—at nine o’clock on the Sunday morning from the front of the nurses’ home. She felt the unsullied and irreplaceable joy of seeing him. There was no sense in her of being conscripted for some alien ceremony. He wore a brown suit—it was the first time Naomi had seen him in civilian mode. So dressed he seemed a novelty and—even more—as if a dimension had been added to him.

I wouldn’t impress them if I turned up in uniform, he told her.

Should I have worn something else?

Oh, no. Nurses are obvious noncombatants.

Their cab took them across the river. It was starting to be a splendid, still morning and the river swept away silver-green as the taxi made for the region named Montparnasse. The cab driver was not certain of which alley off the Rue de Vaugirard to drop them, but at last a point was selected and Ian helped her forth onto the pavement and paid the driver.

I think it’s just along here, he reassured her when the cab was gone. This is it, I’m sure, he said, pointing down a cobbled entryway. My informant told me a double wooden door painted black.

They found such a wooden door where Ian Kiernan had expected it to be. But the rooms above it showed no sign of life. Naomi was content with the hour, and delighted simply to occupy the place beside him. They smiled at each other. She took off one of her leather gloves just because it was a warm enough day, and he lifted her bare hand and put his lips to it.

Be careful you don’t catch anything, she said.

Right you are, he said, but shook his head. It’s very Australian, he said, to debunk a man’s kiss. I hope you won’t feel obliged to do it in subsequent instances.

A spry little man of about sixty years, wearing a good-quality alpaca suit, an upright collar, a somber tie, but with kid gloves on his hands and a fashionable cane under his arm, came down the alley. He had already seen them and adopted a smile and increased his pace.

He looks like Billy Hughes, she whispered to Ian.

Sedgewick, the man said as introduction. You must be Brother Kiernan. How amazing that there are Friends in a place like Melbourne.

Naomi thought the same could be said for Paris.

I am the registering officer and the clerk for today’s session. We have perhaps twenty-eight members. But sometimes we have surprise arrivals—Red Cross people who are Friends. There are also some Quaker ambulances . . . You have both brought your records? Good. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind my keeping them until after the meeting.

Sedgewick unlocked one leaf of the double doors and they followed him up a steep staircase to a bare room where benches faced each other. There was no altar, no pulpit, and no enforced or pious silence. Sedgwick continued to converse. I’m afraid most of us are French, so the meeting will largely be in French. But the Committee of Clarity are all Anglophones, and obviously I include myself.

And this Committee of Clarity? asked Naomi.

Kiernan put a reproving hand to his forehead. Heavens above, he said, I didn’t explain that.

He turned to Sedgewick. It sounds like the Committee of Public Safety in the French Revolution.

Sedgewick uttered a small sequence of sounds that added up to a laugh. It is a group of three, he said, who ask you merely if you are interested in each other as partners for life.

The other Friends began to arrive—modern-looking men like Ian, some older men, a number of women soberly but not unpleasantly dressed. Women’s hands were kissed in the French manner. Men kissed each other on the cheek. They all welcomed Ian and Naomi in that manner and sat them on facing benches on either side of the room. Thus Naomi expected that when the service began the other
women would be separated from the men. But men and women were mixed on the benches. In hers and Ian’s case it was therefore a symbol of apartness—their betrothal had not become formal. There was to be a ritual distance between them.

Suddenly—and by some signal Naomi did not see—there was a silence for inner prayer.

O great God, Naomi intoned within herself, who is far beyond the battlefield, too kind to be close to it, too far to be blamed for it, take my thanks that I’ve been brought here by this noble man.

Someone began to speak in French. It was a man, but not Sedgewick. He went on praying for peace and brotherhood in a calm voice. A woman took up immediately after him. And then another woman—and so it went. Apart from hymn singing, she had never heard women make so much noise in church. An hour passed and betrothal had not been mentioned. At last Ian was nudged by Mr. Sedgewick and rose to progress to the middle of the floor, holding out a hand for Naomi to join him. She did so. She felt that her face blazed before these strangers.