The Daughters of Mars (65 page)

Hello, Sister, he said exuberantly. I wondered, might I take you to tea in the high street? It isn’t far.

She agreed. They set off on the gravel drive with her arm in his. Reaching the gate and walking down leafy streets he pointed out the grandeur of the distant race track.

That’s where that suffragette threw herself under the hooves of the King’s horse, he said. Just like the boys who’ve thrown themselves under the hooves in the last four years.

You needn’t have dressed for me, she said. If that was what you did.

Oh, he said, after all this time, I’m sick of those rotten pyjamas. They look ridiculous with a slouch hat.

She noticed the wound stripe on the left forearm of his jacket. She thought it underexplained what he had suffered.

They’re sending me home very soon anyhow, he said. So I’ve had to clean up the old kit.

She wondered if the mayor of his municipality would bestow honors on this drastically altered young man, and remembered her sister’s story of the epidemic of suicide on the ship Naomi had taken home long ago. But he was too strong a man for that.

In a teashop in the high street they ordered tea and cream puffs. English cakes were sludge beside French. Yet this big, jolly lump of dough and sugar was somehow the right thing. The waitress did not
seem surprised by his appearance. She might have become used to serving such men.

Do you know, said Sally when the tea arrived and the fragrant steam began to have its effect on both of them, if I had to give a prize for my best patient of all, it would be you. It would
really
be you. I’m not trying to butter you up. I doubt I could have borne what you have.

He laughed a rueful laugh and drank some tea. She wondered if there were nerves in those lips to feel the heat of the drink.

I’m not so good now as I was earlier, he asserted. I’m getting churlish. The thing’s settled now. I’ve got what I’ll have forever. I could handle the disease but I don’t know how I’ll go—if I tell you the truth—with the cure.

You are entitled to be a bit churlish, as long as you don’t overdo it.

She could feel though, very clearly, that he was in a new struggle.

I’ve decided to stay in the old town. Narromine. I’ll work with my father on the station—we run sheep and stud rams. People can get used to me, I reckon, in a small place, where there’s only so many you can shock. That makes sense. To me at least.

But you could go anywhere, she said. I would hate it if you thought you must limit your life somehow.

No, I think I’ll start out at home. I just want to shy clear of the pity merchants for a while. And any special medallions and speeches. The old man will need to fight all that off too—I’ve told him. I don’t want any band at the platform.

They walked back under a pleasant autumn sky that was the color of duck eggs. When the northern European weather took it into its head to be subtle and yet vital at once, it was able to do it with extreme craft, with fifty or so variations of blue and a hundred of yellow.

And so, he said, it looks like it’s going to be at an end—everyone’s saying so, hard as it is to believe. Fritz’s line’s gone.

But he’ll make another, Sally said. There’ll still be no shortage of wounded.

He considered this and then began to stutter with laughter.

What is it? she asked.

When they ask me to write my war memoirs, they’ll consist of one thing. Standing in the wrong place.

This sounded like self-pity at last to her. Though she did not believe he could avoid it forever, she was disappointed.

She told him, I came to England especially to see you. I have to say honestly that when I think of a hero, I think of you. And you know I would not easily say that.

But with me you’re also satisfying curiosity, aren’t you? he asked, half amused. We’re old friends—yes. But you’re partly a tourist, aren’t you? See what the joker looks like now! I’d be the same in your position.

You could drive people off saying that sort of thing, she warned him. I’m far too busy to be a tourist and I’m in a constant state about an infantryman I love who’s still in the center of the storm. And on top of that, I have to try to visit my sister’s fiancé, who’s in prison in Aldershot for mutiny. But, listen, if your position ever seems to be too much for you, you write to me and I’ll write back and come and visit if I can.

And on that basis, back at the hospital they exchanged addresses. Sally wrote down her father’s farm—Sherwood via Kempsey, Macleay Valley, New South Wales—and found it was an address she could not imagine herself ever having occupied or inhabiting in the future. But there a letter would find her.

They said good-bye in the lobby and she was already at the door when he called out to her, You’re too thin, you know. You’re much thinner than you were at Rouen. Don’t let them work you too hard.

Beyond the gate there was a line of tall shrubs. She stepped amongst them and let out a cry like a crow and then stood there while the river of tears flowed out of her, a grieving torrent. After ten minutes of it, she was well enough again and composed herself and went off to catch the early evening train to Victoria.

At Horseferry Road, Sally visited the provost marshal’s office. The clerk at the desk led her into the office of a middle-aged captain, who listened with an open face—neither pretending too much sympathy nor sour with condemnation—as she made her case to visit Kiernan in Aldershot. When she was finished he laid out his hands palm-up on his desk. It’s no use, he said. Aldershot is a British camp, and they play by their rules. We agreed to that so they wouldn’t keep pestering us to shoot our boys.

Numbed by failure, that evening she went to a West End farce with Freud and Freud’s American doctor. At the interval, as Captain Boynton queued to buy champagne for them, Freud said, He’s always taking it for granted we’ll live in Chicago. I’ve even been foolish enough to argue the surgical claims of Melbourne with him, as Bright does. But it seems the end of the earth to him.

It is, said Sally. Believe it or not, it is.

It could be cause for a rift. Or I could make it that. No one need think I’m that desperate to have a man.

That’s not a good reason to get rid of a decent one.

It was interesting that as always Freud would say “have a man” when others would say “get married.” But when Boynton arrived with the champagne, there seemed to be no chasm between them. The American was more exuberantly entranced than Fellowes would ever have admitted to being by Leo. They all chatted briskly and honestly, bantering away.

Do you think the characters in this play know there’s a war on? Boynton asked.

That’s the charm, said Freud. They live in a play where there never was a war.

Sounds like America, he said. But these characters? Their heads are empty of history.

Sometimes, Freud argued, people need a history enema.

The playwright’s succeeded then, said Boynton. He’s a real benefactor of humanity. Give the man a prize.

Whatever in God’s name that is, said Freud.

At which the American hugged her by the waist.

Listen to this kid! he invited Sally.

• • •

She was back at Vecquemont within five days. As well as Captain Constable at Epsom, in London Sally had seen at a superficial level sights missed last time. But getting back was what she profoundly desired. First thing, she went looking for Slattery and found her standing at the far end of the gas ward coughing and watching as two nurses applied blister cream to a soldier’s flesh. Honora saw her and—her boots clopping on the board floor—moved fast to meet her.

Is there a chance for a tea? Sally whispered. As she petitioned Honora she leaned down almost automatically and adjusted an oxygen mask on the face of a soldier. His mustard-gas rash called out for ointment. But oxygen was more important. The patient frowned up at her.

It’s the horses, he said.

The man in the next bed—not as desperate for breath—said his companion was right.

The way they begin to neigh and bray and plunge about once those gas shells come landing with a little
thud
,
thud
.

He was exhausted by this speech and for what the gesture was worth Sally drew her hand over his shoulder as if she had some power to command his violated organism to operate the right way.

Sally, murmured Honora, Major Bright wants to see you.

Honora led her out of the ward and along duckboards to Bright’s office near the theatres. He was attending to forms and letters. He got up from his desk, and it was by his demeanor—not by Slattery’s earlier—that she understood the news and feared her existence was now void.

It’s Charlie, she said.

Bright held up his hand. Be assured. Alive but wounded. He was at Franvillers but they’ve moved him to the big hospital at Étaples.

But I’ve had my leave, she said. She realized she must sound like a schoolkid.

No. That doesn’t matter. You can see him. It’s been arranged.

What sort of wound?

Bright looked at the floor.

I’m afraid I can’t say. I don’t know anything further. I’m sure it’s minor . . . He must have been well enough to tell them to reach us here.

So—in a lather and ferment this time—she made ready to travel again and without unpacking caught one of the buses that brought troops from the great depot at Étaples, which the soldiers—distanced by a language from the place—called “Eatables,” up to the rear lines beyond Corbie, and returned with soldiers going on leave. She traveled at the front of the crowded vehicle with blinkered sight, refusing to start conversations, though the officer beside her did his best. She both expected minor damage in Charlie and mourned his death. They traversed through a countryside of townships still rubbled from the battles of March and April and in a landscape chiefly populated—it seemed—by the aged, by hungry children, and, above all, by soldiers. Sometimes as she endured her frenzy in the front seat, the driver would let himself be hailed down by soldiers with leave papers, and after long discussion they would be let aboard. They all moved along the bus and passed the desolate girl in the front seat without knowing that the driver’s slow braking and slow starts made her murderous towards him.

It was late afternoon when they reached the hospital in the base outside Étaples. In the summer evening light—just as at Rouen ages back—German prisoners worked on erecting new huts with all the energy and attention of men brought in on contract. Beyond the hospital lay a terrible immensity of camp, and over all of it a dismal air—a feeling of something ugly getting out of hand. A general look of depression, she thought, was apparent in the guards and the off-duty orderlies walking the streets of the hospital.

She reported to a guardhouse and was directed to the main office of the hospital to find out where Charlie was. Now and then as she waited for the records to be consulted, hope surged in her, and then receded to leave desolation. Once an orderly was called on to lead her, it was a long trudge down laneways. She found the ward, climbed the few stairs, presented herself at the nurses’ station, and asked for Charlie Condon.

Oh, said a young Australian nurse, I’ll take you there.

Is it bad? she asked.

You’re trembling, said the girl. She seemed viciously determined to keep Sally in ignorance. She led Sally down the aisle between beds. Before Charlie could be reached they encountered the ward sister to whom the nurse introduced her. Sally saw on her a particular expression, something, she thought, which did not suggest the utter worst.

The sister led her down the aisle and with a shock she saw Charlie amongst all the unknown faces. He was asleep with a slight frown.

Some shrapnel wounds in the side and hip, the sister explained. But gangrene has set in in the arm. He’s due for surgery.

The arm?

Surely it would be too melodramatic—even for this mongrel war—for an artist to lose his arm? It was a coincidence suitable to the stage but surely not to real tragedy. But on top of that, gangrene.

The sister took his pulse and the nurse found a chair for Sally to sit on. Sally put a hand on his forehead and the pulse-taking woke Charlie. He looked at the ceiling, and then lowered his head and with a slight effort of focus saw her.

Sally, he said wonderingly. He asked the sister, It’s not the fever, is it?

No, said the sister. She’s here, all right.

Aren’t I lucky? he said but without the boyish exhilaration which often took over young men with disabling but not mortal wounds. A Blighty wound, he told her,
and
the left arm. All I need to paint is the right. Best of both worlds.

His eyes were fevered from the gangrene.

I mean, he told her, I can open the tubes of paint with my teeth.

Sally leaned and kissed him on the mouth—a lover with a lover. The sister did not object.

The sister said, The surgeon has him down for a below-elbow amputation, but it depends on nerve and tendon and the ability to get a good flap. And on the infection. Either way, he’ll still have a stub of wing to wave with, won’t you?

Precisely, Charlie slurred.

She waited until he was taken away and they brought her cocoa heavily laced with sugar—the way at Deux Églises and other places she had fed it to the casualties. After an hour and a half Charlie was carried back stupefied and when the surgeon visited and inspected him, he murmured to Sally that they’d done an above-elbow amputation to save him from the threat of the gangrene. The state of the brachial artery and the tendons—together with the sepsis—warranted above the elbow, said the surgeon.

She sat with him into the evening as they fed him morphine as regularly as she would have and dressed and irrigated the wound, which she wanted to do but was not permitted to. She felt an abounding thankfulness. They were no less prompt or less expert than she would have been. He was an utterly standard case, except that he was Charlie. The nurses found a bed for her in their quarters and at last persuaded her to go to it.

S
ally left Étaples the following afternoon, with everyone assuring her Charlie was coming on well and already showing himself a robust recuperant. His temperature was down. They boasted they had “caught” the gangrene in time. She would be contacted if there was any change.