In Falling Snow

by Mary-Rose MacColl

  “I decided I was too old,” Iris said. “And too happy doing other things.”

  But some part of her must have watched Grace and wondered what her own life might have been like. How could I have been so unthinking, so selfish? she thought now.

  In the town, Grace stopped at the tabac, ordered an espresso as Iris might have, bought a croissant from the baker, took a few bites. If Grace had ever thought her generation faced constraints, these women had faced many more. Constraints had shaped their whole lives.

  As she came along the drive back to the abbey, Grace saw it with new eyes, Iris’s twenty-one-year-old eyes. What hope Iris must have held in her heart. She’d had a chance to become a doctor. And yet she’d given that up, she’d given all that up for Rose and then for Grace. David was right. It had been an enormous sacrifice. And to her shame now, Grace realised, she had always felt slightly superior to Iris. Iris was uneducated. When Grace and Al would discuss a new finding in medicine, Grace wouldn’t include Iris in the conversation. The arrogance, she realised now. Iris wasn’t inferior. She’d just never been able to take up the opportunities Grace had.

  Grace understood now why Iris could never speak of her time at Royaumont, how she’d carried guilt for all those years, had taken her brother’s child and then his grandchild and raised them as her own and never once complained about the life she might have lived. It should make her love Iris more, not less. Poor Iris, blaming herself for Tom’s death. Violet had told Grace what had happened, that Tom had been shot by his own army for cowardice. Iris must have spent her life blaming herself.

  When she returned to the abbey, after packing up and checking out of her room, Grace wandered around alone, the cloister, the chapter room, the second floor that was now guest rooms but had once been a ward. And finally, the top floor, which had been the laboratory. It really was extraordinary. “Oh Iris,” Grace said. “I just wish I’d known.”

  Violet spoke well at the reception, managing to mention by name all of those who were present and many who had passed on. There were around a hundred people there, mostly daughters or sons of those who’d served at Royaumont, themselves old now. They’d set up chairs in the monks’ refectory, a beautiful space with full-length stained-glass windows.

  Violet said it was sad their chief, Miss Ivens, hadn’t seen the day they’d come together again, that Cicely Hamilton too had passed on, along with many others, Dr. Courthald, Dr. Dalyell, and Dr. Savill.

  Violet became teary when she spoke of Iris. “Of course there was one person who we would agree was the embodiment of all that Royaumont aspired to be. Our dear colleague Iris Crane has passed on.” She paused and composed herself. “She was not only the best friend anyone could have had. In her quiet way, she ran Royaumont. We all know she ran the chief.” Laughter. “She was the best of Royaumont, its heart and soul, a perfect expression of its philosophy and essence. She lived her life here with us in service. And I’m very honoured that we have with us today her granddaughter, Grace Hogan, who is herself a doctor. Grace?” Grace waved weakly to smiles and applause.

  “Iris had been planning to come here to be with us, and I’d like you to raise your glasses and toast dear Iris, who made all our lives better.”

  The women stood and called hear, hear. Grace felt overwhelmed with emotion she couldn’t at first put a name to. Pride, she realised. She was so proud to be Iris’s granddaughter.

  She felt awkward saying good-bye to Violet. “I need some time to think about all this.”

  “There’s nothing to think about,” Violet said. “Iris was your grandmother. You know the truth now, but Iris was still your grandmother. Let’s leave it at that.” But when they embraced, Grace sensed Violet holding on. Grace couldn’t promise to see Violet again, or bring the children. Grace didn’t know what she wanted. But she let Violet hang on to her until she was ready to let go. “Thank you,” Grace said. “Thank you for telling me the truth.”

  Grace flew from Paris back to Heathrow. As they approached, she asked the flight attendant if she could sit farther forward in the plane. There were many empty seats. “I haven’t seen my family for a while,” she said. It was only a few days. It felt like an age. She realised she was crying.

  “Of course,” the attendant said, and just before they descended, she came and took Grace to the front of the plane.

  As she came through the gate, she saw them. Mia and Phil were holding up a sign, WE LOVE MUMMY!!!!, decorated with red hearts. They were wearing their new red woollen coats and berets, high white socks and black boots. Next to them was David, big jacket undone, cap askew, curls still needing a cut, glasses crooked on his nose. In his arms was Henry, looking at her and waving, a grin on his face. David put him down and he ran to her.

  She took him in her arms. “Well, you must be Superman in disguise,” she said, kissing him.

  “I’m not in disguise,” he said. He opened his jacket. Under it was his suit, something resembling scrambled eggs spilled down the front.

  “No you’re not,” she said. “And I love you for it.”

  On the plane home, David sat with the girls, reading them The Hobbit. Grace sat with Henry. He fell asleep on her lap. She put the seat belt around the two of them and held him to her. She could smell his sweet nutty hair, feel his breath, his heart beating strongly.

  Iris had been Grace’s mother. Grace had no doubt about that now. Iris had made such a sacrifice for Grace and for Rose before her and had been a wonderful mother. Violet had made a sacrifice too, although she might not have known it at the time. She might not even know it now, Grace thought. These last months had been the worst of Grace’s life. Henry, her Henry, who she held in her arms, was going to be very sick. The person Grace thought she was didn’t exist. She was someone else entirely. Her heart had been smashed open, as if God, if he existed at all, was trying to make her see that nothing we think is true is really true at all. Violet had said that a deep seam of truth runs under the world and you could find it. Grace didn’t believe that. Nothing she’d thought true had been true. The world wasn’t as she’d been led to believe. All she had was the moment she was in, this moment with Henry, as his mother.

  She knew there were challenges ahead, some she couldn’t yet dream of, a drug trial that looked promising for DMD with unknown risks, in later years blood tests for the girls to see if they carried the gene, Henry’s slow but inevitable deterioration. There was Violet and whether she fitted into Grace’s life at all, or whether they could ever bridge the gap of all those years. There was work and the report on her performance that was coming. None of it mattered compared with this moment, Henry breathing softly on her breast.

  Grace looked out the window of the plane. There in the sky outside her window was a single star. She had the strongest feeling, a familiar feeling, of being mothered.

  Creil 1917

  It was a warm day; a month ago in Paris she’d worn a coat but now she was in short sleeves. The car seat was hot to her touch.

  A tall soldier was walking towards her, British, not French. He walked slowly but with purpose. At the last minute he raised his head and she saw under the hat who it was. His face glowed. He was so alive, that was what she’d noticed. He was so alive.

  What are you doing here? he said.

  I’m waiting for wounded. What are you doing here?

  I’m the postie. Want a French letter?

  She smiled despite trying not to. A breeze was building from the north. She felt the sun warm on her face. He was staring at her. What are you looking at? she said.

  I should ask you that question. You are so beautiful.

  He moved forward and she thought he might kiss her but he took a curl of her hair and pushed it back behind her ear and smiled. She took him in. He had a cowlick on the left side and his hair kicked up there usually, but it was straight and cropped short now. Tom, she said. Violet, he said. He stepped back. Saturd
ay, she said. Chantilly. The picnic spot near the river. We’ll walk over. She looked purposefully at him. I’m bringing Iris.

  You can bring whoever you like so long as you’re there. But Saturday’s too long away, he said, and smiled. She shook her head. I’ll be there, he said. I’ll surely be there.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I think it was Grace Paley who said that any story told twice is fiction. I was in the wrong aisle at the University of Queensland Central Library in 1997, having transposed two digits in a call number, when I noticed a title, Women of Royaumont: A Scottish Women’s Hospital on the Western Front. Published earlier that year, Dr. Eileen Crofton’s excellent history recounts the experiences of the doctors who went to France at the start of World War I and established a field hospital in the thirteenth-century Cistercian abbey of Royaumont, north of Paris.

  Anyone writing about Royaumont Hospital stands on the shoulders of the women who served there, the doctors and nurses and orderlies and ambulance drivers who gave their time, took enormous risks, and were forever changed. I have meant to honour these women, and I have valued fidelity to history as reported. But Grace Paley is right. I am at least three steps removed from the people and events of Royaumont; I cannot know them.

  Moreover, my main task has been to imagine a story. While characters of the novel, including Miss Frances Ivens, share names and backgrounds with women who served at Royaumont, and while events match events at Royaumont as reported, my novel is certainly fiction. On occasion, I have even altered history as recorded to suit my story and I have included characters who have no historical doppelgänger. There may have been no British soldiers in some places I’ve put them, and the Australians probably arrived in Europe later than I have them involved. Most important, Iris Crane and her family and Violet Heron and hers are creations entirely of my imagination.

  I have wanted most of all to capture in the novel what I believe is the spirit of Royaumont. It’s there in Crofton’s history and in others written about the women and the hospital, especially Antonio de Navarro’s 1917 The Scottish Women’s Hospital at the French Abbey of Royaumont, which I found most illuminating. It’s there in the papers left at Royaumont and the words the women have spoken and written about their experiences. It’s in the abbey itself, I believe. And it’s summarised almost perfectly in the following unsigned quotation, written in 1915 by a woman who served at Royaumont, which I found in the British Library while researching the novel:

  We are a ship’s company on a vessel that voyages always in mid-ocean, calling at no ports, speaking to no ships in passing. We are a cosmos complete in ourselves. Our past lives “before the war” slip from off our memory like reality from the minds of those that dream. Our future—when the war is over—the mind refuses to grasp. There seems no other life. And though we may be quartered in a cloistered abbey, with the ruins of a religious age around us, there is nothing of the institution about us. We are not patterned out to a set of rules and regulations laid down for us. We have grown.

  Fondation Royaumont offered me space at Royaumont Abbey to research and imagine, funded by a grant from the Australia Council. The Banff Centre in Canada provided me with a place in the snow to write and edit. I am indebted to these centres for the arts.

  The Australian Medical Council protects medical education in Australia, and its senior staff and the clinicians and medical educators with whom they work have contributed in no small measure to this novel.

  Readers David Mayocchi, Kris Olsson, and Kim Wilkins made helpful suggestions, and Cherrell Hirst did her best to correct my medical errors—any lingering morbidity is mine. My agent Fiona Inglis from Curtis Brown Australia, another reader, is all heart, and I love her for it. North American publication was ably assisted by Curtis Brown’s Annabel Blay and by Daniel Lazar from the Writer’s House, both of whom I owe a debt of gratitude as they found In Falling Snow a happy home.

  Annette Barlow from Australia’s Allen and Unwin acquired In Falling Snow in faith and editor Catherine Milne helped me reward that faith, with Christa Munns managing a very good process. In Falling Snow has now landed happily with Tara Singh from Penguin US and Adrienne Kerr from Penguin Canada, who have steered such a clear course to North American readers. I am in their debt.

  Thanks to Australian and Canadian friends and family who helped on the journey, especially Antonia Banyard and Clinton Swanson (and Suzanna and Brigita), Debra Bath, Lisa Borin, Karyn Brinkley, Stace Callaghan, Lenore Cooper, Fumie Craven (and Kyle), Nancy DaDalt (and Robson), Kerri Dance (and Owen and Ada), Sharon Doupe and Doug Bell (and Jaden and Mercedes), Dennis Gibson and Catherin Bull, Cherrell Hirst, Nan Hughes and Peter Poole (and John and Irene), Gail Intas and Adrian McGregor, Suzette Jefferies, Tony and Jill Lynch, Jill McAulay, Andrée MacColl, Andrew MacColl, Lachlan MacColl, Ian MacColl and Buffy Lavery (and Cate and Ellen), Christine Maher and Eddie Scuderi (and Benjamin), Wayne McLeod, Laurie MacPhail (and Freddie), Kris Olsson, Ros Petelin, Mary Philip, J. Jill Robinson and Steven Ross Smith (and Emmett), Louise Ryan and Gerard Ryan (and Josh, Ben, Will, and Gabe), Cathy Sinclair and Peter Forster, Fiona Stager, Theanne Walters, Alison Watt and Kim Waterman (and Lindsay and Sophie), and Kim Wilkins and Mirko Ruckels (and Luka and Astrid). The team at WildFlour Bakery Café fed my habit while in Canada, and Merlo Paddington provide ongoing supply.

  My grandmother Marguerita Lynch (née Crane) never went to war but might have. My cousin Margie Cassidy gave me an idea that grew. My mother, Rosemary MacColl, led me to believe there were no limits, and she was right.

  David Mayocchi and Otis Mayocchi have contributed more to this book and my life than anyone else and I thank them with all my heart.