The Daughters of Mars (64 page)

Without warning—and like a public announcement not of professional intentions but of the end of the alliance with Boynton—and without waiting for all the doctors to define their plans, Freud spoke up. Well, she said, should the war ever end, I think I’ll stay on in Europe. The reports from Germany—all the illness brought about by the blockade—make me think I might go there.

Dr. Boynton regarded the surface of the sheet on which the picnic
items were spread. He knew, Sally assumed, that Freud was wounded in some way and that her goodwill towards him fluctuated. The corners of his mouth turned up in a semirictus that combined regret, bewilderment, and embarrassment.

I am sick of seeing Europe in this particular way, Freud added. I feel I haven’t seen the true Europe at all.

Honora surprised everyone—not least Major Bright—by agreeing it was a good idea. It was as if she did not see Freud’s statement in its real terms but only in terms of a desire for peaceful tourism.

I reckon, Honora went on, that whenever it ends, a woman could live for a year in France on the savings she makes working here.

A glaze came over Major Bright’s eyes too. Was Honora—after all those demented months of hers—unable to read what Freud meant? He had his career to pursue in Australia—he would not be permitted to pursue it here once there were no more wounds. Professional urgency would not permit him to sightsee for a year in France.

Freud got up suddenly from the picnic. Thank you, Major, she said. If you will excuse me, ladies and gentlemen.

They tried to start a conversation again in normal tones, but it could only sputter along as Freud descended the slight slope which led to the nurses’ tents.

Boynton begged them to excuse him soon after.

Sally had made no pronouncements on her own future. If Leo lacked one, all the more might she. So an instinct of reticence—which would have kept her quiet in normal times—prevented her all the more now. The young wounded who reckoned the enemy was dished might carry a sense of communal triumph to the grave with them. Yet she could not feel it herself. And if it did ever end, she thought, I might simultaneously stop breathing. Only the chance to see the artifices of paint in Charlie’s company gave her a glimmer of the afterlife.

As a mist rose, the Ford and Sunbeam ambulances arrived, full of young Germans—dirty faced and bleeding, deflated and staring. The field-gray somber walking wounded of the enemy advanced with
extreme caution and—as if trained in medical etiquette—soberly visited friends in the resuscitation ward and on nurses’ orders held up bags of plasma and saline and looked down at their sallow comrades whose martial ambitions were reaching a close.

• • •

A letter from England from Captain Constable—the defaced soldier—had chased Sally all over Picardy and now caught up with her.

I have the dressings on my face from what the surgeons say was the last of my reconstructions. What emerges once they’re off will be the final version of me from now on. Naturally I hope to find out what that is and discover it is not as bad as all that. There is hope for all of us now, says the matron. My bandages off will be a sign to her—part of a great global scheme in her head. Though I doubt the future of my dial is a matter upon which princes and prime ministers and parliaments will spend much time.

Despite the complaining flavor of my words, I think always of the boys who’ve been dead two years here and there—all without the option of wondering how things will turn out. How is that Slattery girl I knew? I hope you can tell me she is still young and fresh and impudent.

Well, enough! Enough, I hear you say and a fair thing too. Whatever is waiting behind the dressings I’d happily show you and her because I know you’d recognize me. Others might have a harder time of it.

Constable and his ironic distance from his frightful wound and from the regimen of face-remaking operations that he had endured was as much a tonic to her and Slattery as they had once tried to be to him.

Unexpectedly but in view of a further improvement at the numbers brought up by the algebraic formula applied to clearing stations by headquarters, Freud and Sally and a few others received orders signed by Bright to take leave. Without Charlie, Paris would not offer enough.
So Sally decided to try to get to Amiens and north to Boulogne to visit Naomi at the Australian Voluntary before taking the Blighty ship. She had a hankering to visit Captain Constable and to see one of the fatuous West End shows. But on the way she wanted to talk to Naomi about Charlie, and the swiftness of Leo’s death as a sign of the imbalance of things.

The truck journey to Amiens took two of her available hours, and the train for Boulogne left on time since it fed the arteries of the war. In the train she slept almost without interruption in a near-empty first-class compartment of comfortable velvet. She reached the Gare Centrale and signed herself in to the Red Cross nurses’ home and found she could send a messenger by bike to Château Baincthun. Waiting to hear from Naomi, she walked towards the port and managed to reach a lookout on the ancient walls, from which she could see the entire drama of the place. Camouflaged troopships were arriving with soldiers and leaving with wounded and men on leave. Along the beaches bathing cabins weren’t disgorging many swimmers but she saw a man with one leg emerge and hop across the wet sand, determined to encounter the late summer sea.

She made her way back to the hostel along narrow workers’ streets where barefooted boys played rough games and looked up from their little brutalities to see her pass. Future poilus, she thought, who would be sent to fight for the right to their squalor.

By the time she got back from her walk Naomi was outside the hostel looking peaked and concerned. Her face was transfigured when she saw Sally, and the sisters embraced without any complications or reticence or subtle suspicion or begrudging. Now—with all distance between them vanished—they went looking for a café. Naomi, Sally could see, had been altered by the loss of Mitchie and Kiernan to something simpler, more intense and direct. Sally had once thought her complexity would baffle all science. Now Naomi carried on her face a look of the most straightforward joy at reunion, of happiness unanalyzed and unapologized for. She also looked older—or at least
ageless—and still thinner. As much as any soldier, she too needed a peace.

I had an idea, said Naomi, once they had ordered their coffee. It’s a beautiful afternoon and the hospital is just five miles inland. Are you well enough to walk?

Sally was tired, but nonetheless felt exhilaration at the idea of a hike. They set off with the sun high and mists of insects tumbling in the air above the crops of wheat and barley that the sisters would see through gaps in hedges and over farm gates. Fields of flax bloomed pale-blue and blowflies troubled the hindquarters of cattle. This country was not as flat as the battle areas—the hedgerows climbed genuine slopes that were steeper than the mere slight ridges for which tens of thousands had died further east.

It seemed to Sally it was a time as far off as childhood since they had walked like this together in country roads. She spoke briefly of Charlie and more of Leo and the untowardness of all that. Naomi talked of the campaign she and Lady Tarlton were engaged in for liberating Kiernan. The many eminent people they’d written to. He had now been sent to Aldershot Military Prison—the Glasshouse, whose inmates were considered unfit for visits. Still, Naomi was trying to organize one. Trying to imagine what his life was like plagued her imagination. What sort of men might guard and bully him? she asked Sally, not expecting an answer. Certainly men who gave him no credit for the
Archimedes
or Lemnos or service in France.

In any case Lady Tarlton had told her—as Naomi further explained to her sister—that it was likely that, should war end, civil lawyers could be introduced into the equation, men who could argue a case like Ian’s all over again in a world where reinforcements were no longer the constant cry of generals. Lady Tarlton said she knew a number of such lawyers—fellows who’d represented suffragettes. How they would be paid, Lady Tarlton did not say.

Of course, I’m willing to spend my savings, Naomi continued, and Ian’s father is—I think—affluent. And certainly devoted to his son. And I’ve
never found that Lady Tarlton makes a boast on which she does not come good. So I have champions and I have possible resources. Well, that’s my rave and I apologize it takes so long. But now, your Charlie. What of him?

There was less Sally could say. She couldn’t broach the adventure in the hotel at Ailly. And the rest was all tedious and uninterrupted anxiety. There was no earthly power to whom she could write on Charlie’s behalf.

He never seems to be my Charlie, she said. First he’s the army’s. Then he’s his own man. It’s because he’s unownable, I think, that I love him.

Naomi laughed. Well, now, she said. That’s you, that’s Sally exactly.

Sally stared ahead, shielding her eyes so that she could scan the road for potential perils. Naomi reached and enclosed Sally’s hand in her own.

Look, she said, as if to distract her sister. It was along here—in that little dip in the road—that the limousine was thrown on its side and went careering. And poor Mitchie . . .

This kindly and shady summer stretch—with a slight kink before the trees around the château—hove into view. They both inspected the patch of road as if its tragedy could be reread and perhaps adjusted.

Naomi said, I had a visit from Mrs. Sorley’s son. He seems a big, handy boy. Another one to worry about though.

Sally privately thought she would swap Mrs. Sorley’s son for Charlie’s safety any day. Of course there was guilt attached to doing the deal in her head—Charlie for the other boy. As if there was in fact someone to make the contract with.

It was strange when I met young Sorley, said Naomi. We were trying to feel as if we were stepbrother and stepsister—he made the bravest attempt at it, poor boy. He took the trouble to come here in the first place. I hope we can sit down at some time and have real conversations.

Sally took thought and then said, It used to take us Durance girls a long time to get to know people like that. But we’re getting better at it, I think.

Yes. Taciturn, that’s what they call us. Standoffish. Were you aware people called us that?

Not you, insisted Sally.

Oh yes, said Naomi. Me more than you. They never used the word “shy.” Well, I suppose people think, why use a good word when you can use a bad. I think that on balance
you’re
much better at being social than I am. I felt you got on quicker with girls like Leo and Freud and Slattery.

You must be really bad then, said Sally, and they laughed together at the affliction of their genealogy.

Sally stayed at the château for two days—meeting Airdrie and the English Roses and the military surgeon and the young ward doctors, and sharing Naomi’s room. Sometimes she went with Naomi into the wards to do dressings and irrigations and to make beds. Otherwise she walked men around the garden. The English Red Cross nurses were awed to see an army sister descend to a menial level, and one said, You Australians—you’ll do anything! as if the Durance girls were exceptionally free-spirited colonials.

As they sat in bed, Naomi told her the story of Major Darlington who—went the authorized version—had chosen between the respectability of base hospitals and the favor of other surgeons over Lady Tarlton’s company.

She seems, said Sally, unshaken.

She can’t be defeated. When all this started I didn’t expect her to be here all the time like this. I thought she would just set it going, like God starting the world, and then go back to London to her accustomed life. But she’s labored with us. And when she’s not here, she’s in Paris visiting the club she’s got going there. She belongs to whatever she begins. But after the war—so she says—she’s not sure she won’t just go back and put up with Lord Tarlton and make an end to all the
blather and mess of the whole love business. I doubt she’ll be able to though. It’s always going to be in her nature to do exceptional things.

Naomi took her down to the docks when it was time for her Blighty ferry. They kissed like two children reunited in play. An old French paddlewheel ferry painted in its war patterns of gray waited like a cross between a Dickens-style Channel packet and an antique battleship.

I’ll ask at Horseferry Road if I can see Ian, Sally promised her.

It would be marvelous. I’m afraid you’ll be refused, but please try if you can.

A line of soldiers stood back to let Sally—her travel warrant in hand, and Naomi as escort—advance to the gangway. A military policeman checked and approved her documents and she went up the plank, turning partway to see Naomi’s face streaming with tears. So the entente proposed in a palm court in Alexandria three years before was in full operation. Cherishing her sisterhood, she saw to the west the promise of a long twilight in rouged clouds yellow at the edges. It felt to Sally a good and decent thing to live. Even now. Rapture could not be postponed until a more perfect day. Not when a person had a lover and a sister.

• • •

The Epsom Hospital in Surrey was enormous and branched out—in grounds that were once the private garden of a rich family. The grounds held a number of huts and a space where men in hospital uniform—the baggy, pyjama-like tops and bottoms with various-colored lapels—were playing cricket. There was something about the energy of the game and the way hands were thrown up when a man was caught out from whacking a ball impossibly high that made her hope Captain Constable had not been hurled with his one eye into the deep end of a game just yet. She followed the driveway to the main house, where they knew she was coming—Captain Constable and she had exchanged mail about it.

A volunteer was sent to fetch him and he came down the stairs wearing military uniform, his soldierhood taken on again. She saw
the sutures across his jaw, the not-quite-formed nose, the unnatural glossiness and tightness of the upper lip and cheek. Though she could see something of what he might have been before, what was there was both little and at the same time an undeniable cure. The scale of his bravery regarding the damage to his face had driven her to expect more than this. The surgeons had forced his facial items back in place. The surfaces they had restored were correct in a technical sense but were somehow unmoving and incapable of expression. His visage was doomed to be an artifact rather than a natural phenomenon. Except for the left eye, this face was dead. It had taken two years to achieve this, and this was all that could be achieved.