In Falling Snow

by Mary-Rose MacColl

  “Good idea,” I said.

  “And I’ll pop by this afternoon and take him out to uni.”

  “We’ll see how we go.”

  When I’d sold Sunnyside, Grace and David helped me buy a house two blocks from theirs in Paddington. Grace asked if I wanted to move in with them but I’d said no, I liked my independence, and I do. Then she suggested I should buy a unit but I couldn’t stand the thought of living in a box within a box. I was happy to move, though. All those I knew in the Valley had died or moved away, making way for shops. Even Al’s practice had gone, now a café.

  Old memories are so clear in my mind now. I see things from the past and it’s almost as if they’re happening in front of my eyes. They come back so fresh, with a taste and smell, whereas the recent past is simply gone. The day Grace was born, John Henderson coming out of the theatre, his mask down, his cap half-off, knowing something was wrong from his gait, his right leg resisting, him telling us it’s a girl, trying to smile, looking down at his leg, me thinking of course it was the baby, something wrong with the baby, only to learn it was Rose, gone in those moments, the smell of his aftershave, the strange metallic taste on my tongue when he said they’d been unable to save her. Al fell back as if the wind had been taken out of him and John had to hold him up. It might have happened just a moment ago. There’s that taste now of metal, that smell of aftershave. I remember these things but I forget the children’s names. I forget where I put my purse. I said this to David last time he came to mow the lawn. It had been worrying me and I didn’t want to talk to Grace, who would have me seeing a brain surgeon quick as look at me. “I don’t remember what grade any of the children are in, or even if Henry’s at school yet. He is, isn’t he?” David shook his head. “See? But I remember a grapevine we grew up a trellis at Risdon, the sour taste of those grapes, Daddy calling the sheep, the strong smell of the rye bread we used to get from the German baker. Those memories are clearer than ever. I talk to people who’ve been dead for years.”

  “I think that’s how memory works,” David said. “You remember the important things.”

  “Not just important. It’s the old things. Last week I was just about to post a letter to a woman I’d known fifty years ago in Stanthorpe when I remembered she’d died. I’d gone to her funeral here in Brisbane three years ago but it completely slipped my mind. It’s as if not just memories but the capacity to remember is going. One day I won’t know who you are, David.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But if that happens, I’ll just tell you who I am again, Iris. You’re doing well. I don’t think it’s your mind that will go first.” He looked at me.

  “Heart?” He nodded.

  “Good.”

  David is like the heart doctor Grace took me to, except David’s kinder. “I’ll die soon,” I’d said to the heart doctor, after Grace had left the room to take a call at the desk, and he’d nodded yes and raised his blond eyebrows with what I like to think was a tinge of sadness, even if it was contrived. I suppose that’s why he gets paid so much, for being able to contrive a tinge of sadness as he nods. With David, there was such genuine sadness in his eyes. It was nice to know he’d mourn my passing.

  “I’ll call by this afternoon,” Grace said as she backed out of the driveway.

  “Only if you’ve got time,” I said and waved her off. I hoped she wouldn’t come back. I love Grace dearly but it always feels like there’s too much electricity in the room when she’s here, like I need to be careful and behave well. I’m not sure what might happen if I don’t, but I don’t want to find out either.

  I called the surgery to make an appointment with my doctor. The woman who answered made me spell my name twice. In Al’s surgery, I knew the name of every patient, their children, their medical histories.

  After I got off the phone, I realised I was still holding the invitation in my hand. Water under the bridge, I’d told Violet. What a stupid thing to say.

  We worked with three orderlies to unload the mattresses from the truck and carry them up the two flights of stairs to the room in which we would all sleep. Miss Ivens had offered any who wanted it their own room but everyone felt there was safety in numbers. Who knew what ghosts lurked in the dark corners of an old abbey? Violet and I went back down to the kitchen and talked for a while longer with Marjorie Starr and Vera Collum. By the time the other three girls were ready to retire, I could barely keep my eyes open and make it up the stairs to bed.

  I woke with a crescent moon through the long window above us and Violet kicking me in the head in her sleep. There hadn’t been enough mattresses to go around and so while the seven doctors and Cicely Hamilton each had their own mattress at one end of the large room the rest of us doubled up at the other. I say mattress but really they were no more than mats, calico roughly sewn around straw. Compared to the prospect of another night on the cold stone floor, they were heaven, according to Miss Quoyle, who confided in me she suffered from chilblains and piles, neither of which was aided by the cold.

  Out of shyness on my part, Violet and I had gone to sleep end to end. When I moved to the other end to avoid her kicking feet, I faced my back to her back, but the mattress was small, hardly a single, and the cold . . . I’d dressed in everything I had, only drawing the line at boots because they were so filthy, and still I was cold. Stanthorpe might frost in the middle of winter and we’d keep a fire burning all night but Royaumont had decades of cold in its stone walls, the sort of cold that eats through skin and muscle and bone to your marrow. Even my hair was cold. I woke again when I rolled over onto the icy floor. I moved back onto the mattress, curling in behind Violet this time, warmer as two halves than two singles, and fell into a deep sleep.

  I dreamed I was at Risdon and Tom had climbed into my bed like he used to when he was small. I woke some time later and found my arm around Violet. She slept on and I lay there, warm and snug. Suddenly I thought of Tom as he might be now, without a mat to lie on or roof over his head. I shuddered.

  The first time I got up to tend to Tom in the night he would have been just a few months old, crying loud enough to wake the neighbour’s rooster and set it crowing. I lay in bed a few minutes more, expecting Daddy to get up as he had the other nights, but the crying went on. I went into Daddy’s room where we’d put Tom’s crib. Daddy and I hadn’t known much of what to do with him when we brought him home and Daddy said that’s what my mother had done with me and it had worked all right. It was the first time since she’d passed that he’d mentioned her name without leaving the room immediately, which I took for a good sign.

  I stood by the crib for a moment, still thinking Daddy might wake, but he’d been up since four that morning working at the far edge of the property and he remained asleep despite Tom’s wailing, which was getting louder now that he sensed me nearby. I peered into the crib. Tom was concentrating pretty hard on crying. I tried patting him on the belly but that just made it worse. I stroked his little bald head and on he wailed. So I picked him up and spoke softly and that calmed him somewhat, which gave me confidence. But then he was wide awake and his eyes remained open despite my singing “Go to sleep little baby” as I’d heard Daddy do in the evenings. Tom was making a kind of sucking noise with his mouth and so I figured he must be hungry. I carried him out to the kitchen, thinking to warm some milk. I lit a lamp and went to put him in his little crib by the stove but as soon as I put him down, the cries resumed, so I picked him up again. Holding him in one arm I managed to get the stove lit—Daddy had fuelled it before going to bed—to heat the water to warm the milk. I put the warm milk in a cup—we had no bottles with nipples in those days. He guzzled it down, burped so loudly I thought I must have killed him, then relaxed into a drowse.

  Every time I tried to put him back in the crib, by the stove first and then in Daddy’s room, he cried again. I knew it was the middle of the night although I hadn’t looked at the clock. I’m not even sure I knew how t
o tell the time. I sat with Tom awhile in the kitchen chair. I was tired myself and cold but the only place he was content was in my arms. Finally, I took him back to my bed and he nuzzled down beside me and went off immediately into a deep sleep and then so did I and neither of us woke until late the next morning.

  The morning after that, Daddy helped me move Tom’s crib into my room. It was a mistake, I soon realised, for after our mother died, if Daddy was moving forward at all, it was only Tom needing him that kept him on his feet, and once he saw that Tom had me and I had Tom, he drifted into a deep despondence. He still got up in the morning and went off to work as he always had. But he worked and ate and slept like a man condemned. When he spoke, it was as if he was a long way away, talking to a stranger. In the night, I’d hear him talking softly to himself in his cups. One night, after I’d settled Tom, I crept down the stairs and listened. He wasn’t talking. He was singing, “Put on your red shoes, put on those red shoes I know so well.” I knew nothing of the world, but I knew he was the only one left and I’d lost him, and I didn’t know quite how to get him back.

  Some nights, after he’d graduated to his own little bed, Tom would come into my bed after a bad dream. By the time he climbed in and warmed up, he’d be well and truly awake and we’d lie there facing one another in the dark and he’d tell me things to try to wake me up too. I still remember the outline of his face in the dark, moonlight showing his smile, his hand on my head, pulling my ear around to his mouth to “tell me a secret.” It would be something nonsensical, something designed to get my attention, generally involving poos or wees. And we’d remain like that and sometimes he’d fall back asleep in mid-conversation and sleep on for hours while I lay awake. Other times he’d chat until we’d hear the kookaburras on the water tank and I’d give up on my efforts to get him back to sleep and we’d climb out of bed and start the day.

  Tom and I managed as well as could be expected. In a way, losing my mother so young, which everyone said was a terrible tragedy, especially for a girl—imagine when she’s older—was softened by being needed for some task other than grief, that of caring for Tom. And he was a grand boy, never bothered by my many incapacities, never even noticing the failure on my part to impose a routine, as Mrs. Carson had told me to do on her first visit to the house, and sooner rather than later, she said through a small mouth. She was good to me, Mrs. Carson, and I don’t mean to sound ungrateful for her advice. She did her best in those first weeks to call in. She showed me the basics, changing a nappy, bathing, and burping a baby. She had strong views about the discipline needed to raise children successfully. She even went as far as to say to Mr. Carson, within my hearing, that how could I be expected to discipline a child when I’d been allowed such free rein myself for so long, without meaning to speak ill of the dead, but really, that woman had no idea.

  After a time, I had no memory of my mother, although I often told people I remembered her well, repeating others’ stories about her, because I felt disloyal forgetting her. But I had forgotten her. I looked at the photograph we had, the one I’d seen a thousand times, taken the day she married Daddy at Risdon—she’s sitting at the dresser smiling up to the camera like she knows a big secret—and it was as if I was looking at a beautiful stranger, her red hair and lips coloured in after the photograph was taken, her dress sheeny in black and white. It was a most unbalancing experience to see someone I knew so well and not know her at all.

  Mrs. Carson’s suggestions were beyond my understanding or experience. All the boys had tasted their daddy’s belt, Mrs. Carson said, and it did a power of good. Perhaps because it was foreign to me, the notion of beating or being beaten, I didn’t take any notice. Over time, Mrs. Carson stopped visiting. The house became more of a mess, she seemed less inclined to stay long and Daddy didn’t much like her coming, and had a way of making it known. To be honest, I was relieved. I didn’t understand much of what she told me I had to do, but when I did understand, I was horrified at the thought of purposely inflicting pain on little Tom. We struggled on as best we could. And now Tom had grown into a fine boy who could decide on his own to go to war.

  My thoughts were interrupted when I heard someone get up at the other end of the room, the big door creaking open. As gently as I could, I rose from the mattress, pulled on my boots, and followed, using the coming light of dawn through the windows to guide me. I descended the great staircase. I couldn’t see where the other early riser had gone but I managed to find my way to an unlocked door. Out in the cloisters, the world had turned to white. The snow had stopped falling now but that just made its presence on the ground more extraordinary to my eyes. I spoke my name and it came back to me changed, deeper and more resonant. The world was indeed quieter and louder all at once, just as Miss Ivens said it would be. I ran out into the centre of the yard where there was a fountain, frozen now, surrounded by stone benches. All was covered in snow. I picked up handfuls of the stuff, tasted it on my tongue. One or two songbirds braved the cold.

  I took the route Violet had taken the night before to the abbey lawns and found the stables, Violet’s car in its spot, two others besides. I ran along the outside of the abbey, the path now covered in snow, snow up to my ankles, the sun appearing and turning everything gold. I looked back at the abbey buildings and was touched once more with a sense of something beyond me. Surely if God was anywhere, I thought, He was here. I knew no French history then, none of poor Royaumont’s vicissitudes, but if you could have seen the dawn cradling that beautiful stone structure in its soft fat arms, you’d know what I mean. I was filled with the spirit of Royaumont and just for a moment experienced myself as nothing more or less than a tiny part of that holy morning.

  I realised I was shivering with cold. I ran back the way I’d come, kicking up snow with every step, ran a circle about the cloister to warm up, leaving mine as the first footprints on the world that day.

  In the kitchen, I found Miss Ivens, her hair messily pinned up, her greatcoat not quite covering a floral nightgown. She turned to me. “Thought I’d get some tea on for the girls,” she said. “They’ve not had an easy time of it these last few days. Do you know much about fires?” She’d stuffed the stove so full you couldn’t fit in another thing. She was about to set alight the mess she’d made.

  “As a matter of fact,” I said, “I know an awful lot about fires.”

  “Oh good. Well, let’s get it started.” She gave me the matches. “You’re bright this morning.”

  “I’ve been in the snow,” I said. I must have been grinning because Miss Ivens smiled too, as if she understood, or found my joy infectious. I set the matches down and removed the larger pieces of wood. I spread the kindling out as I’d learned, leaving room for breath. I lit a fire whose flame quickly grew. I fed it well and it kicked the room into life.

  We sat down at the long table together while we waited for the kettle to boil. “I didn’t quite tell you the truth about the abbey, did I?” Miss Ivens said. She looked tired this morning, as if she hadn’t slept well. “It needs a lot of work. Thank God you’ve joined us, Iris. I’d be lost without language.”

  “Well, you see, the thing is, Miss Ivens, I’m not sure I’m quite the person to help you. I’m . . .” I’d fully intended to tell Miss Ivens the truth, that I shouldn’t stay at Royaumont, that I was really here to find my brother, but in her floral gown and with her messed-up hair, I felt sorry for her. I found I couldn’t tell her, not quite yet. “I’m not sure I can help you. I’ve never built a hospital.”

  “Do you think I have? I need your French, Iris, not your building skills. None of us would have chosen it this way, but it’s what we have and we must do our best.”

  Miss Ivens and the first contingent—the other doctors as well as the nurses, orderlies, and drivers—had been at Royaumont three days, she told me. When he’d offered his abbey to the Croix-Rouge for use as a hospital, the impractical Monsieur Gouin was not entirely forthcoming about
its state. Then, in December, with the staff already embarked, Monsieur Gouin wired Edinburgh to inform the committee that the abbey wasn’t ready for them.

  “We were well on the way by then,” Miss Ivens said, “and I felt it impolitic to delay. It was rash, I realise now. From Dieppe, I wired Monsieur Gouin that I would come straight to Royaumont from Paris.

  “I think he was afraid I’d turn up on his doorstep with the whole group—I had half a mind to—and he told me the worst, no water, no electricity, no drainage, the first-floor rooms are filled with rubbish and the horses have been here. What’s more, he said, I have no bedrooms and no beds for your women.

  “I told him not to worry. Our equipments were expected any day and my colleagues and I were of stout heart. I didn’t talk to them too much about my discussion with Monsieur Gouin. I saw no point. Instead, I got the rest of them here, thought that was best.”

  Each day the equipments didn’t arrive and each day they found some new way of accommodating their circumstances. Quoyle with the borrowed cutlery and crockery and utensils. Miss Ivens with the straw mattresses. Cicely Hamilton with the makeshift lamps.

  As if I’d said something to ameliorate her concerns, Miss Ivens was soon cheering herself with the list of jobs for the day. We had to see the architect, she said. “Did I tell you about the inspection?” She hadn’t. We couldn’t be accredited as a field hospital until the abbey was inspected by the health service of the French military and the Croix-Rouge. This would happen some time before Christmas, Miss Ivens said.

  “But today is the fourteenth of December,” I said. “How can you be ready? You don’t even have beds for patients.”

  “We, Iris,” she said. “How can we be ready? Of course we’ll be ready. We’re women. We do things.”

  I looked up from my little fire and saw, out the window beyond us, the heads of pines poking through the snow that now covered the abbey grounds. Back in the kitchen was Miss Ivens in that silly floral gown she’d probably carried all the way from her Warwickshire youth. It was a champion fire I’d set, even Daddy would have said as much. I could be useful here, I thought. I could help. Suddenly, in my deepest heart, I knew I would have to stay at Royaumont, at least a little while. Violet was right. I could write to Tom from here as well as anywhere. The war, as much as I’d seen of it, wasn’t as Daddy had described it at all. If he’d been wrong about that, perhaps he was wrong in worrying so about Tom. If Miss Ivens really did need my help, it couldn’t hurt to be useful while I searched. Lord knew it could take weeks to find one fifteen-year-old boy among all those soldiers who’d come to France. At least I could feel I was doing something while I waited.