And then Viarmes itself, at the base of the hill, a main street, a few shops, already shut up tight although it was barely 4 p.m., a little stone square defined by the church and town hall, the smell of incense—benediction or death—and we soon saw which. There was a funeral procession ahead of us. A boy had died, we learned from some stragglers. His leg went under a plough and no one knew to stanch bleeding. Miss Ivens was furious at that. Knowledge was something the whole world had a right to and how could they not be told? We turned off the main road, watched the funeral at its slow march behind a black motor vehicle—Monsieur Bousier, our taxi driver, was also the undertaker—heading across a cold field towards the little cemetery in the nearby town of Asnières-sur-Oise. We took a narrow road out of town, more a path really, which was flanked on either side by pine trees. “Blanche de Castille rode her horses through here,” Miss Ivens said. Perhaps I looked perplexed. “Her son built the abbey, Royaumont. Louis IX, the saint.” She sniffed the air. “They were all white—the horses I mean. But Blanche was marvellous. Such an example to women. I’d love to have known her, just for an hour.”
We passed a grand house that at first I took for the abbey Miss Ivens had told me about. “No no,” Miss Ivens said, “that’s the palace, built by the last abbot. Absolute indulgence. Monsieur Gouin lives there now. Delightful fellow but completely impractical,” as if I should know who Monsieur Gouin was or why we might wish he were practical.
It began to snow. Miss Ivens took no notice, walked on ahead, asked me, without turning back, what I knew about drains. Drains were a problem. I must talk to Mrs. Berry. Berry knew something but not enough; we needed a plumber. I should go into Asnières tomorrow and arrange it. I should take Berry although she didn’t speak the language. “Berry is a brick, though, she’s good for me. Don’t know what I’d do without her.” And then forging ahead, failing at first to notice that I’d stopped, turning, seeing me, laughing, for I was looking straight up, my mouth wide open. “Snow,” she said matter-of-factly. I must have looked blankly at her. “You’ve never seen snow?”
“No,” I said. “Frost in the winter, but nothing like this.”
“Wonderful stuff. We’ll make angels tomorrow.”
By the time we turned into the abbey grounds, the day was almost gone. The pines of the long drive were newly dusted with the snow which also dotted our coats and Miss Ivens’s hair. She looked wild, a little mad even. She charged ahead once more, the gravel along the drive crunching with an alarming efficiency under her boots. Snow makes the world quieter and louder at the same time, she said quite loudly. Imagine never having seen snow, she said more softly, so softly I had to strain to hear. I’d stopped again and was standing still, for when you round that last bend and begin along that long drive, you see Royaumont Abbey for the first time, and you never forget it. You must stand still, or you’ll miss the chance. Even at the end of that cold amazing day, even with the wonder of my first snow at hand, the abbey took my breath away. And the feeling in my heart? That feeling surprised me, for it was joy, joy and fear in about equal measure.
Until three months before, I’d only ever travelled between Stanthorpe and Brisbane, less than two hundred miles, the towns at each end with their proud little post offices and hotels as their architectural achievements, the space between them mostly bush. Royaumont Abbey was some other order of place, a feat of engineering or evidence of God, depending on how you saw the world. To one side were the remains of the chapel, recollecting a structure that once nudged the spires of Paris’s Notre Dame in size but was now just one tall tower looking as if it might topple over. Next to the church tower were the monks’ buildings, menacing in the winter twilight. I could just make out the window recesses along the front wall.
I know I was exhausted. My life at home had been simple, divided between Risdon and the Mater nursing quarters, with the occasional train trip to St. Joseph’s to see one of Tom’s teachers about something he’d done or hadn’t done. I knew from one day to the next what lay in front of me and mostly it was much like what lay behind me. And now this, where every day was full of the strange. And through it all—the ship journey from Australia, the days in London, the Channel crossing, the days in Paris—in the back of my mind was that other thought that could creep up on me when I least expected, as it did now, the thought of my brother Tom, telling me of his plan to run away, me agreeing, letting him go when Daddy said I should have stopped him. Tom now, just fifteen years old, somewhere out there in this cold, fighting the wicked Germans.
As we drew closer, I made out two large wooden doors. Darkness would soon be with us but no light shone inside the abbey. I looked to Miss Ivens, her hair flecked with snow, her arms out to the sides, hands not touching anything, those enormous boots. It was so cold now my breath caught in my throat. The doors looked as if they hadn’t been opened for years. Miss Ivens knocked, waited, said, more to herself than to me, “Where the devil are they?” I still heard no sound nor saw a light within. A notion lodged in my brain that there was no one here but us. It took hold quickly, the cold feeding my imagination. Miss Ivens was mad. She’d led me here to the pixie twilight on a merry chase, and her talk of drains and equipments and hospitals was nothing but a product of her madness. Oh Iris, you fool, now look what you’ve done, acted impulsively, followed your most wrongheaded instincts, followed this mad Englishwoman, and here you are in the middle of a dark forest with no way back.
I was not given to hysterics, but the cold, exhaustion, the newness of it all, Miss Ivens herself so much larger than life, like a character from Dickens, made me less than logical. My excited mind worked quickly. What would we do? We had no lamp to walk by, and the road was rough in parts. There had been a light in the window of the last house, the Gouin residence; Miss Ivens had pointed it out. He might be impractical, he might be Mr. Ivens for all I knew, but if we could make it back we might be able to beg a room. There was sure to be a train to Paris in the morning. I could be in Soissons by nightfall. I could be back at what I was supposed to be doing. Daddy need never know. And Miss Ivens could . . . Miss Ivens rapped on the door a second time. Just as I was about to suggest that we go quickly to try to reach somewhere before dark, the door swung open with a whine.
My thoughts were interrupted by the telephone and at first it sounded exactly like the porter’s horn at Royaumont. How we came to dread that sound. Of course, the porter’s horn was nothing like a telephone but it took me a moment to come back to my senses and realise where I was, in my house in Paddington, not at Royaumont waiting for wounded. I got up slowly, felt a little dizzy in the bright sun. I stood there until it passed, using the railing to keep from falling. The phone was still ringing. I bent down and picked up my teacup and saucer and went inside. I walked carefully.
They say that our greatest sense for memory is the sense of smell, but it was the sound of that horn I couldn’t get out of my mind now. I can just imagine what Miss Ivens would say to me. “Oh for goodness’ sake, Iris, who cares a fig for a silly horn?” But I know she’d have remembered it too, after we left. That horn ruled our lives. You’d hear it in your sleep, over and over. The phone stopped before I reached the kitchen. Then it started again. I caught it this time. “Hello?” I felt like my voice was coming from somewhere else.
“Iris, is that you? Are you all right?”
“Grace. Yes, I’m fine. I was just out the front in the sun and I dozed off.” My lips wouldn’t work properly and I could still hear that porter’s horn, in the distance now, as if I were one of the patients approaching in the ambulance along the drive. I wonder did it reassure them that someone knew they were coming, that someone would help them now, ease their suffering?
“I just rang to say I’ll drop in on my way to work,” Grace said.
“You don’t need to do that. I’m fine really.”
“I’ve got time. David’s taking the girls to school and he said he’ll take Henry to day care
. I’ll just pop in.”
Grace had started “popping in” a lot over recent months, ever since the appointment with the heart doctor. But I didn’t want to see her today. The invitation had unsettled me. Violet Heron. Violet Heron, after all these years. “The flower bird girls,” she called us, Iris Crane and Violet Heron, the flower bird girls. What young fools we were.
The door swung all the way open and there was a woman, dressed like Miss Ivens, in a long grey skirt, black boots, and a coat, brandishing a candle lantern. “Oh Frances, thank God it’s you. We had no idea what had happened.” The woman was considerably smaller than Miss Ivens and me. She held the lamp high to guide Miss Ivens in. Around her everything was blackness.
“I missed the morning train,” Miss Ivens said. “And there shouldn’t have been another. They ran two today because there was none yesterday.” Miss Ivens started making her way inside, and the woman moved to close the door. “Wait, wait,” Miss Ivens said. “Come in, Iris, quick, before Cicely shuts you out.”
“Who’s this?” Cicely made way for me to walk past her and then quickly closed the door, although there seemed little point; inside was colder than out. I could just make out her face in the candlelight.
“Cicely Hamilton, may I present Miss Iris Crane, recently of Stanthorpe, Australia, come to rescue us from my ineptitude.”
“Charmed, I’m sure,” Cicely said, in a way that suggested she wasn’t at all. “And what will Miss Crane be doing?” I felt like a speck she’d found while dusting.
“She’s a nurse,” Miss Ivens said enthusiastically, ignoring Cicely’s tone. “And she speaks French like a native.” It was the first time I saw the skill Miss Ivens had for ignoring a person’s faults. Initially, I thought she was lacking perception, but it wasn’t that. It was that she always dug deeper to find the better feelings inside people and encourage those. Their petty feelings she simply ignored. I later saw that even the worst of them often rose to her expectations.
“Good for her,” Cicely said. “Do we need more nurses?”
“Nice to meet you,” I said, for something to say. I felt the entire distance between Australia and England, between Cicely Hamilton and me, could be heard in our voices. I hadn’t felt it at all with Miss Ivens, whose Warwickshire accent was warmer. Cicely Hamilton’s voice was deep and melodious, floating above us to the cold ceiling. Next to Cicely’s, my voice was harsh, like the summer sun, you couldn’t escape from under it. With every syllable, she alienated me further. I wanted to remain silent, not hit the walls with my loud flat notes.
“Come through to the kitchen now,” Cicely said warmly to Miss Ivens. “Quoyle’s done up a barley soup. No idea how. And we’ve bread and cheese. Oh, and a knife. Just the one, but a knife all the same. I think Quoyle got it in the village today. She’s charmed the locals, you know, without a word of French.” She continued to ignore me and led the way through the abbey, holding her lamp above her head. At one stage I looked up to try to find the ceiling but the columns disappeared into darkness and then I tripped on the uneven stone floor and decided to keep my eyes on where we were going. I could smell the damp that had made its way up through the floor or down through the ceilings. There was the smell of animal droppings too. Something—rats, I assumed—scurried off as we approached.
After what seemed an age of turns and corridors, we came to a large square room with an enormous wood stove at its centre and oil lamps in makeshift holders along the walls. A dozen or so women were gathered on benches around one of two long tables. Each woman had a plate or bowl of sorts in front of her, none seeming to match any other. Most were empty. Some looked as if they’d been licked clean. In the middle of the table was a large tureen with the dregs of a thick soup beside a wooden board with torn pieces of bread and slabs of yellow butter. As I looked around the group, I was struck by how bright their eyes were.
“Look who I found at the door,” Cicely said. “Here is Miss Ivens, home from Paris but without our beds.”
“That’s not true,” Miss Ivens said, smiling. “I found some mattresses that will do nicely, but we’ll need to send up to the station for them. We’ve had to walk.” Miss Ivens told them about the funeral and Monsieur Bousier’s being the undertaker. “Terrible business,” she said. “You think farmers would have some inkling that we can’t live without blood but apparently not. It’s asparagus they grow around these parts, isn’t it, which likely doesn’t bleed, and perhaps they don’t keep animals. I have no idea where the local doctor was and didn’t feel I should ask.” Cicely continued to watch Miss Ivens, which meant I could study Cicely. Small and slightly built, full of nervous energy, she had a long handsome face, a Greek profile, and dark eyes that now flitted about taking in everything except me. She couldn’t have worked harder at ignoring me if she tried.
“Now what was I talking about?” Miss Ivens said. “Ah yes, mattresses. Before you all go dreaming of feathers, they’re far from that. And we’ll be sharing for now. Cicely, perhaps one of the drivers could go?”
“I’ll see who I can find,” Cicely said.
Although the kitchen was not warm, it was a furnace compared with the corridor we’d come from. Miss Ivens and I peeled off coats and gloves and scarves, dripping our melted snow onto the stone floor. We hung our things over the chairs that lined the wall.
“Quoyle,” Miss Ivens said to the woman standing over the stove. “What’s this you’ve made? Barley soup I hear.”
“Yes, Miss, and there’s plenty more. Sit down now and eat.”
I was introduced. I don’t remember now everyone I met but it must have been most of them. There was Quoyle, just mentioned, who’d worked as Miss Ivens’s secretary for fifteen years in Liverpool, she said. She was happy to be the cook for now. “But I’ll turn my hand to anything,” she said. “I’d have learned to be a nurse if it meant I could come here.” Quoyle was not a young woman, perhaps fifty, with spectacles, a substantial bosom, wide waist and hips. She looked as if she might prefer to be kind but with a temper that might at times let her down, like some of the matrons I’d worked for.
Seated at the table was Dr. Agnes Savill, who seemed not much older than me, tiny with curly hair, dark eyes, and high rosy cheeks. Agnes was going to be responsible for the hospital’s radiological equipment, Miss Ivens said. “Responsible’s going just a tad far,” Dr. Savill said to Miss Ivens, and screwed up her nose and smiled at me. I loved her immediately.
And then there was Mrs. Berry, whom Miss Ivens had mentioned on the train. She’d studied with Miss Ivens, although she looked older, long greying hair parted in the middle in two plaits to the side, big brown eyes, beatific smile. She looked like someone you could trust.
I remember the orderlies too, sitting in a group at the other end of the table, Vera Collum from Liverpool, who grinned and bade me welcome, and Marjorie Starr, a Canadian, who started singing a song about bears she thought I might know but didn’t, the others whose names have gone now. They were like excited schoolgirls at a play, giggling and hooting and talking among themselves. They’d come to do whatever was needed, Collum told me. She was a journalist and photographer before the war. “But here I’m happy to be a mere orderly,” she said.
Dr. Savill and Mrs. Berry made room for Miss Ivens and me at one end of the table. I realised I hadn’t eaten since early morning when I’d set out for the station. I was hungry and the soup tasted heavenly. The bread, my first taste of a fresh baguette, was a marvel.
Miss Ivens talked as she ate. She seemed to have boundless energy. “Ruth, tell Iris about the drains. Iris knows about drains.”
At Risdon we had a bore whose water tasted of the earth and showed its red-soil pedigree. I had no experience of drains and hadn’t given any indication that I did.
“I think the cesspits need to be emptied,” Mrs. Berry said, leaning forward to meet my eyes. She had a gentle quiet voice. “Either that or the grease trap’s not
working. We’ve a plumber coming in the morning.”
“Good, well, have Iris with you when you meet him. She can tell him what to do. It’s not the trap. It’s a blockage in the pipe. I’m sure of it.” Mrs. Berry smiled at Miss Ivens and then at me.
“And then perhaps you and Iris should go into town, find out who we should see about letting the locals know we’re here. I’ll warrant they’ll be glad to have a hospital nearby. Make sure you tell them we’re Scottish doctors.”
I must have looked puzzled. “The Auld Alliance. Scotland and France against the English. The French have long memories. I’m perfectly willing to be Scottish if it makes them happy.”
Dr. Savill turned to me, those dark curls framing her pretty face. She asked how long I’d been in France. “Three days,” I said. “I’m actually going to Soissons but Miss Ivens asked if I might come here on the way.”
“She’s going to be my assistant, Agnes,” Miss Ivens said. “The new hospital administrator. She speaks French like she grew up here.”
“Isn’t that my job?” Cicely said. She was standing over at the door and I was surprised she could even hear what we were saying.
“Cicely,” Miss Ivens said, and smiled, “you’re our bookkeeper. You can’t be running round after me all day as well.” Cicely turned and walked out of the room without saying anything more.
“Poor you,” Dr. Savill said to me. “Can you work twenty-three hours a day and keep four million things going at once?”
“Stop it, you’ll terrify the poor girl and we can’t have that,” Miss Ivens said. “Tell me what’s happened about the X-ray machines?” She reached across and tore a piece of bread from the loaf and spread it thickly with butter she’d put on her plate.
In Falling Snow Page 2
