The Daughters of Mars (43 page)

I am not enchanted by men, she confided, though I like their company. I am enchanted by women. I’m enchanted by you.

Listen, said Naomi. You’re a good surgeon and the men respect you. And so they should. But I don’t want you to be in love with me—if
you are in fact in love, and not just lonely. Saying what you said bewilders me. It shames me too.

Airdrie’s brown eyes showed a flare of anger.

You’re shamed by love? If that’s the case, I pity you.

Maybe you’re right to.

The fury died in Airdrie. It had been perhaps just a product of the rebuff and of her discomfort. Both of them took off their ridiculous burghers’
moules
-eating bibs. Their meal was finished.

We can work together, said Airdrie flatly, whatever you think of me. That should be a given.

Of course, said Naomi. We’ll work together as usual.

Any edge of complaint in Airdrie had now been utterly blunted and more as exposition, she murmured, If a man declares love for a woman, that’s romance. But if a woman declares love for a woman, the heavens fall in. It’s worse still for men who love other men. But I’m of normal Presbyterian stock and I fear that in the eyes of most people, and in yours, I’ve committed some crime.

No, no, said Naomi. I know by now that all the crimes are up at the front.

It would actually be easier to deal with my feelings of the moment, Airdrie confessed, if you were outraged. If you picked up your skirts and called down God’s judgement and flounced out.

Once I would have condemned you to hell. Because I didn’t know the scope of things.

Airdrie sighed. So, you won’t give off an air of contempt when we’re working at the Tarlton convent, eh? You won’t flinch when I appear?

Don’t be ridiculous, said Naomi. It was difficult when Airdrie—a surgeon who was meant to maintain remoteness—behaved like some anxious schoolgirl. It was also endearing.

They picked up their glasses of wine. Naomi looked her in the eye as if it was the best method of rebuff. She saw that though this doctor was a year or two older than she was, in some ways she was clearly younger than that.

Did you know I have a sister? Naomi asked. I have a real sister just down the road in Rouen.

You do? said Airdrie. You are not offering her as a substitute sacrifice, are you?

That’s not worth answering.

Younger than you?

That’s right. And we never got on until this war. It is stupid and vain to think that all this . . .

She waved her hand to imply not just the restaurant but the fiasco out there in the gale, where men stood in streams of water beneath parapets waiting to go on some useless patrol or for a stupefying barrage to descend on them.

It’s stupid to think of this, Naomi persevered, as if it was a machine to make us true sisters. But that’s the way it’s happened. It won’t be any consolation to the wives and mothers of the men. I may one day have a husband—though I can’t exactly imagine it. But if I don’t have a husband, I’ll have my sister. Perhaps we’ll get old living in the same house in the same town. It is possible now where it wasn’t before. While we were at Lemnos we used to say that France and Belgium couldn’t be worse than Gallipoli. But it is worse by multiples! We’re so accustomed to dreadful things now that we might need to live together because no one else will understand the things we’ve seen.

The two finished their wine as equal partners, and beyond the window the malicious gale—mirror to the conflict itself—refused to abate.

• • •

After Naomi had rebuffed Dr. Airdrie—after her relief at surviving the lunch with something like aplomb—it was nonetheless as if through Airdrie’s proposal Naomi’s own loneliness had been proven. Her room was at the back of the house. It had been a little too warm through the summer—it missed the sea zephyrs and picked up any hot breeze from the south. Now it was so cold that it needed a stove, but she hesitated to ask for one because there was always a shortage. She used
canvas from a torn tent to plug the gaps between the window and its frame. But the cold still seemed to her not a condition but a diabolic presence—like her own solitude made flesh.

As she lay there at night she began to understand that what Dr. Airdrie had spotted in her—and seen as an opportunity—was this unrealized need for warmth, for a body to interpose itself between her and the ruthless cold. Lady Tarlton complained that in the unheated offices overnight, hospital fountain pens broke open when the ink turned to ice. The water pipes froze, and nurses had to melt ice to make cocoa for the patients. And when the cold—despite blankets and a military long coat, army socks, long underwear, even a balaclava—threatened to split Naomi open, she understood the need to be held, flesh on flesh and blood against blood. The past freezing nights had brought her to this conviction—that she might meet Airdrie partway. There might be closeness without passion—embrace of one kind and not of another. Each morning she was pleased she had not yielded to this idea. Each night—under extracoarse blankets—she feared the entry of the perfidious cold into her core.

Someone could see her on her way to Airdrie’s room though—that would be the trouble. Or Airdrie would be called on to operate at some frigid hour while Naomi was there. But one night her coldness could not be endured alone anymore, and she took to the corridor. She had excuses if encountered—she was on her way to a particular storeroom where perhaps there were spare hot-water bottles. She rehearsed the contract she would make with Airdrie.

But as she got close to the surgeon’s door and stooped to knock secretively, she heard conversation inside. It was nothing too loud but was definite discussion of some kind. She could hear the piping voice of a particular tone and rhythm. It was one of the English women—one of Lady Tarlton’s elegant young suffragist women of good family.

At once Naomi lost all sense of cold. Astonishment created its own friction in her blood. Surprisingly, she was amused. This was Dr. Airdrie’s version of love! She had grieved Naomi’s refusal—if at all—a
week at most. Or maybe she was just cold too and had found another girl who possessed the desire for warmth. But if Airdrie had been in love with Naomi, she had found new consolation pretty quickly. Alone and in an army coat and socks—unlovely and freezing and shamed and amused by her own innocence in believing Airdrie—she turned around. Remorse and hilarity had both begun to warm her and to prickle along her veins.

Though she was grateful to reach her room and be taken in by its particular freezing air, once she lay down in cold sheets the idea she’d been infected by after the
Archimedes
came to her again with new certainty. I am not a complete or sealed person. If I was, why did I set out for Doctor Airdrie’s room? Why did I find cold unbearable then and now find it tolerable? I am a string of recoils from circumstance. It was a matter of a mere filament whether I went to be warmed by Airdrie or not. If I had stayed in my room I would not have known why. And I don’t know why I went.

So there was the Naomi who stayed in her room with the threat of ice, and the parallel Naomi who crept down the hall to be warmed by a surgeon. This was simply an echo of her suspicion that there was the Naomi who fell deep down with the
Archimedes
living in the same flesh as the Naomi who refused to. And so—with her parts and actions scattered all over the atmosphere and cold earth—she could not but deny the glacial night and fall into a profound, accepting sleep. There are men in frozen trenches tonight, she mumbled as a last conscious reproach. They all lacked an Airdrie.

M
ajor Darlington became exercised by the number of men at the Château Baincthun taking up beds in summer and winter because they had been disabled by trench foot or frostbite. Around the bed of a trench-foot–afflicted Australian private who had lost toes to surgery, he gathered Dr. Airdrie and all the nurses—both the half-dozen Australians and the English Roses.

Cripes, a man might as well be onstage, the Australian mumbled as they all gazed at him.

Here is a case, Darlington told them, of quite needless damage—though not, I hasten to say, through the fault of the man involved.

He addressed the Australian, who was clearly embarrassed by this jury of nurses.

Not your fault, eh, old man?

I wouldn’t say so, said the soldier. I mean, sometimes a man got distracted with everything that was happening. Gas was more important. And no use changing your socks if your legs are likely to be blown off pretty soon.

I am sure, said stork-like Darlington, nodding and nodding again. Now, if we want to prevent this sort of thing, we simply must provide a dry, warm place in the trench where men will attend to the problem, have leisure to rub whale oil into their feet and change their socks and—if necessary—boots. For want of such precautions, this will happen, he said, nodding to an orderly, who removed the private’s
dressings and exposed the scabbed stumps and blackened flesh of his feet.

Did you use whale oil, my good man?

Everyone just gives up on the whale oil, the private told him. Five minutes after we do it, we’re back up to our hocks in mud again.

You see? Darlington asked his audience. You see what happens?

What puzzled Naomi and the nurses was the question of what—at this distance from the front—they could do about the issue except adopt a stance of impotent protest. But Darlington had not finished.

On the front line, he intoned, men are allowed to stand for days in glutinous muck. Until a chap inevitably becomes a casualty. And sometimes staff officers in clean socks and polished shoes want to punish men, you see, to punish and harangue them for their functional disablement, for a condition which is the fault of the generals. But this, you know, this disablement takes beds from other wounded. No offense intended, old chap. But obviously someone must bear responsibility for the condition of the trenches.

This is not so much a military matter, declared Darlington, as an industrial outrage.

But, Major, asked Airdrie, in what way could we do anything to amend the mistakes of the front? We seem to be a wee bit removed from it.

Major Darlington was in no way aggrieved but raised a finger in the air.

Well, Doctor Airdrie, I intend to frame a letter on the matter which I would be obliged if those of you who felt so inclined could see your way to sign. The letter will assert the necessity of a boots-and-socks officer, to whom a section of men in every company will be assigned with the objective that they will deliver fresh boots and socks every two days to the men in the front. I admit that this might seem at first glance a comic suggestion, or one which is uneconomic. Well—if so, let them come to the rear and count the beds devoted to this curse. What will be done with the boots and socks replaced? Let our chaps
throw them at the Huns if they care to. Money can be squandered on high explosive but not—so it seems—on footwear. Ah, now I think I have reached the end of my peroration on the matter. I must thank you for your attendance. And a round of applause, please, for our demonstration soldier.

All felt compelled by Darlington’s zeal and gave a spatter of applause.

Mitchie murmured to Naomi as they left, None of that is as mad as it seems. Can you see any of the young lieutenants you know wanting to be appointed boots-and-socks officer though? Doesn’t sound heroic, does it?

Naomi saw a second’s contact between Airdrie’s hand and the wrist of a handsome English Red Cross nurse whose name she was uncertain about. She would not have welcomed such a touch herself. So why was there a second’s strange envy?

• • •

In the autumn Sally heard rumors running around Rouen that nurses might be put in casualty clearing stations located in the region of peril called “up the line.” These were not quite believed at first. Yet the matrons came around the wards that November asking for volunteers for such places. Nurses had not been permitted to work in them before. So there were many applications. Sally, Honora, and Leonora Casement nominated themselves and were accepted almost automatically because of their long experience of wounds. There was the attraction as well that appointment to a casualty clearing station brought with it an immediate ten-day leave pass for England. This—pleasant in prospect—did not count with Sally. In so far as she understood motives, she realized that there had arisen in her a curiosity like Charlie Condon’s before he knew what it would be like. Women too—she realized—might want to be sucked closer in to the fire.

The news had to be broken to their long-standing patient Captain Constable. Sally and Honora still worked regularly on the crater of his face, the screens drawn around to save him embarrassment. Yet he
was ambulatory now and sometimes went out for walks bandaged—moving at a processional pace but without a stick along the streets of the Australian general hospital. The matron had at first an eye out for the growing friendship between Slattery and Sister Durance and the unreplying Captain Constable. But it was as if his injury was considered to have unmanned him. Since it was reasoned a nurse was unlikely to be infatuated by a faceless and wordless man they were permitted to become his friend. And they knew that as they were going elsewhere, so was he—earlier perhaps than they. For the wound—considered purely as a wound—was healing over. Easing the packs of gauze out of the mess after one dressing, Honora said, You’re as clean as a whistle these days.

Honora, however, was chary of telling him they were going. Sally did it straight out.

Honora and I have been appointed to a casualty clearing station. We’ll be leaving the racecourse.

Constable shook his head a little in spite of his massive wound.

Honora told him, You’ll be off to Blighty yourself soon—I’d say within a week.

He reached for pencil and paper. “Clearing stations are too close to things,” he wrote.

He passed it to Sally since Honora had the irrigation syringe suspended in her hand. Well, that’s part of the attraction, Sally told him. You know what I mean.

He wrote and then displayed. If you had seen me there—when I first came in, filthy and all—you would have left me for dead.