The Daughters of Mars: A Novel

by Keneally, Thomas

  But Nettice? said Naomi again.

  Obviously sane as you and me. And a great help.

  It’s too much, said Naomi, rendered reasonable by the geniality of the English nurses, to ask you to let us visit. But if we gave you letters for her—letters to cheer her, I mean . . .

  Bea laughed. It was a lyrical laugh. I’m in enough trouble myself, she said.

  But she had not said no. It was because she had an excess of good nature—a tendency not without danger on Lemnos.

  Maybe just one, she conceded.

  She and Angela provided the pencil and some British Red Cross notepaper.

  You write first, Naomi said to Sally, offering her the pencil.

  For Lord’s sake, said Bea, don’t mention me.

  Sally wrote,

  Dear Nettice,

  I hope you know we are all thinking of you and we will send you some comforts if we can. It goes without saying you should not be in this position. Our minds are set on finding an answer to your situation. It must be hard to get by in the compound. Lt. Byers is well and says that he looks forward to seeing you again. So do we all.

  Your loving friend,

  Sally Durance

  Sally passed the pencil to her sister who took it up with energy and wrote in a conspiratorial, certain, fast hand.

  Just keep it brief, said Bea, brushing aside one of her ringlets.

  Naomi produced from the pocket of her coarse dress a little slab of chocolate.

  Is it too much to ask that you give her this too?

  Bea laughed in disbelief. But she said, In for a penny, in for a pound. Don’t worry. I slip them all a few extras myself.

  They could believe in this beautiful innocent who tended the supposedly mad.

  • • •

  Sally would stop on her rounds and talk to Lieutenant Byers, who had been moved from the general medical ward to a more sparsely populated tent. It was as if he had incurred isolation too. Her conversations with Byers needed to be discreet. There was an embargo on talking to men unless it was to ask them symptomatic questions or order them to lift an arm or a leg or open a mouth. The rules had been reiterated after the Nettice matter. After a time, the wounded themselves became parties to the discipline of the wards rather than land nurses in trouble. But Byers wanted to know everything about Nettice.

  They’ve taken her off duty, said Sally. She’s having a good rest. She’s needed a good rest since the ship.

  She said a horse brought her back to the surface.

  Yes, it’s true. A pony. I saw it.

  Thank God for ponies is what I say. Wonderful creatures! Rosie is a real brick.

  I’d say so.

  Yes, he said. She believes in a divinity that shapes us. And she doesn’t worry about my background in the least, you know. My father sent me to a school for Presbyterians but we were Jewish—changed our name from Myers. The other kids could tell—I don’t know how. But the young have a high degree of discrimination in some things. Is it safe to talk?

  Indeed the matrons were not in sight so she said it was.

  I’ll tell you something about city people who declare their belief in God too easily, he said. They’re not like Nettice, to start with. Their morality is really a kind of fussiness. Maybe jewelers attract these sorts of people. People who depend on their name and profession to avoid paying their bills. How many gold rings and brooches bought on deposit from Byers and Sons, and we’re still chasing up the full payment. And the problem is that if my father took a writ and summoned them to petty sessions, they’d say, Don’t go to Byers’s place. Why pay the avaricious Jew? So there it is. I’m Jewish as Paddy’s pigs—as a comedian once said. And Rosie doesn’t mind. I’m blind, too, and Rosie doesn’t mind that either.

  She heard him give a sudden snort of grief. These humiliations of his childhood—and his father’s humiliations—seemed closer and less bearable to him than the damage to his eyes.

  Well, he said, I won’t be worried that way anymore. The “Son” in Byers and Sons isn’t accurate now. I won’t be making much jewelry hereafter.

  In the dark she often found a chance to talk with Byers. The more frequent her visits the more his concern for Nettice emerged.

  You say she is resting? he asked one night. Where is she resting? Is she ill?

  Perhaps a little influenza, said Sally. She’ll be back soon.

  You’re not hiding something? Nothing’s happened?

  No, said Sally. An energetic liar.

  • • •

  Sally knew that Nettice had become her sister’s mania as she had become Byers’s. She had let herself grow dour and hardened. But Naomi had become a fury. Her eyes darted as she looked about her for the right gestures to help rebalance the earth. Through a further visit to the good-natured English nurses’ mess, Naomi began to work at poor Bea to take her in to see Nettice. Sally could tell Bea’s general goodwill would be no protection against her sister’s tigerish resolve. Naomi planned to go down to the rest compound with Bea as a junior nurse getting an education.

  Naomi recounted to her sister her persuading of Bea.

  You can say, Naomi had argued, that I told you I was rostered on to the compound. You had no reason to suspect it wasn’t true. And I’ll only stay a while, I promise. But she has to know she’s not been given up.

  Poor, susceptible Bea took Naomi one morning, therefore, through the outer wire. She greeted guards whose faces lit to see her and who unlocked the gate which led down a raceway contained by barbed wire on either side. The male patients’ wards were beyond the wire to the south, said Bea, but the violent ones were behind the wire to the north. They progressed between these two. After two hundred yards, they came to the small compound for women. The outlook from this part of the headland, Naomi thought, was not very curative. It was blocked off from the harbor and from at least the notion of escape by a rock outcrop.

  Bea’s task—after she said good-morning to the sentry on the gate and asserted airily that this morning she had brought along an apprentice—was first to relieve the night nurse. Naomi was to watch from the tent flap as Bea went in. The night nurse proved to be a Canadian. She was writing case notes at a little table and seemed tired enough not to pay much attention to Naomi as she rose and brushed past. She went to wake up her orderly, who had been on call and who rested in a small watch house in the corner of the compound. Peering into the dim tent Naomi saw first a region with a few soft chairs and a table with magazines. There was a rough bookcase with maybe a dozen titles. On top of it lay a pack of cards and boxes containing draughts and other games. Bea—scanning the notes—mentioned to Naomi that two orderlies she called her “boys” would be along soon with a bucket of porridge and another of water and some loaves of bread. Her reference to them was nearly affectionate. This was a place where it was possible for orderlies to work with women in a manner that was not poison. Bea then left the little table and the notes and cried good-morning to the stirring patients. Her cheery voice would itself be a kind of poultice on the day.

  Advancing behind Bea, Naomi saw Nettice sitting on a tousled bed beside a woman who chattered or—more accurately—spoke in tongues.

  Bea said, Nettice has become her friend and is very handy to me. Keeps the poor girl less excited. And then the Sapphist is very good, too, trying to get poor Lily talking. Between us we’re a well-rounded crew.

  Nettice reserved her most clenched and characteristic frown for the sight of Naomi. She rose upright in her shift but kept one hand on the chatterer’s wrist. While Naomi embraced her with two arms, Nettice had only one free hand for the task. Naomi was surprised to find there was almost something grudging in this welcome and in the pressure of Nettice’s one hand on her back. Nettice explained to her murmuring fellow patient that she was going to sit with her friend for a while. Naomi and barefooted Nettice went and sat together in the soft chairs at the recreational end of the tent.

  What are you doing here, Durance? Nettice asked first of all.
You could get yourself in the deepest trouble.

  We thought it was important to let you know that you have not been forgotten or anything like it. They want us to forget you, but we refuse.

  I already knew that, said Nettice plainly. I knew you were all my good friends. But I didn’t want you to put yourself in such danger as this.

  It’s right I should be the one to visit you, said Naomi.

  Nettice—as if implying she might as well ask questions while she had Naomi there—wanted to know how Lieutenant Byers was and whether he knew where she was.

  Naomi reported they hadn’t told him more than she’d been suspended. But he asks after you endlessly, said Naomi.

  Does he ask after me endlessly? asked Nettice. It’s not something you should say casually unless it’s really happening.

  Given the trouble Naomi had taken to be here, it appeared Nettice had only a middling respect for her visit and now seemed to suspect her of deception.

  Well, it is the absolute truth, Naomi insisted.

  I deserve to be here you know, Nettice confessed. I had in a way gone a little mad, you have to understand. I can’t think what got into me.

  But you don’t deserve to be in an asylum, for God’s sake.

  The punishment is appropriate, said Nettice with a certainty Naomi hated. It was my lunacy. It’s certainly not Lieutenant Byers’s fault.

  It is all someone else’s fault, insisted Naomi. Maybe not all, but whatever you did were minor crimes. If we are ratty and berserk, they have made us that way. We didn’t invite a battalion of troops onboard the Archimedes. We didn’t invent the brainlessness of the colonel and the slavishness of the matrons. Some would say that my being here was criminal. But I say that your being here is the crime.

  Anyhow, she argued, you can see I have some nursing to do here day and night. So I am not empty of all purpose. If a person were to mention God, he could say that God sent me here for the sake of the mute and the babbling. We have one each of those.

  Naomi should have been pleased to find Nettice so sturdy and very nearly content. And yet there was still a certain disappointment too.

  In any case, Nettice conceded, please give Lieutenant Byers my warmest respects. You needn’t tell him—because he already knows—that I might have mistaken friendship and our mutual chattiness for something of a profounder nature.

  Are you certain it wasn’t more serious than that? He appears to hope it was.

  It is true that if you’ve been rescued by a pony from the bottom of the sea, you get ideas about yourself. Delusions, you know. They evaporate when you’re somewhere like this. As for him, tell him I won’t tolerate any palaver about him being at all to blame. If he starts hogging blame, it is actually selfishness on his part.

  Bea’s “boys” could be heard exchanging greetings with the guard and came just then through the door with their buckets. Naomi got up and kissed Nettice good-bye. Then she went to embrace the generous Bea, who had been making beds and was now talking to the thin mute girl.

  You’re the kindest girl in the world, Naomi told her. And I’ve taken advantage of you.

  After another doubtful look and wave in Nettice’s direction, Naomi left the tent. The sentry opened the gate wide for her. At the main gate at the end of the raceway she began the ascent up Turks Head. She kept to the verge—a pathway by the white-painted stones—to make room for ambulances and supply trucks and the wagons of timber driven by Greeks. She assessed the morning and found she felt a modest sense of triumph to have broken into Nettice’s place of detention. Coming down the road as she rose was a party of people for whom even the trucks and wagons themselves pulled to the side to make clearway. A British matron in a red cape and an older man in a tailored uniform, red tabs, and gleaming boots were attended by two young aides. She stopped out of a reflex respect to let them pass in the certainty of their own authority. She moved on and only the matron glanced briefly in her direction.

  That evening—when Naomi was woken by the clanging of a bell—the matron-in-chief was waiting at the door of the officers’ ward. She strode up as Naomi approached and without introduction asked what she had been doing in the rest compound. A British matron accompanying the deputy inspector had seen her leave the place and—knowing that only her own nurses were employed there—had been mystified. And—indeed—was further affronted by her surly lack of respect towards the passing brigadier general. The mention of surliness nonplussed Naomi. She had not taken any surliness she was aware of into the encounter. Had the British matron accompanying the general misread her? Or had events imbued her with that quality? The matron-in-chief now told her that she—Durance—had been at the center of all disorder since she had arrived on Lemnos. She had been grievance incarnate, the matron intoned.

  I cannot see you have any future in the nursing service. You are suspended from all duty, and I do not trust you with my patients.

  Aren’t you getting short of nurses? Naomi asked with a layer of genuine concern that momentarily submerged her rage and contempt.

  But there was no arguing with that austere woman who spoke for the colonel and was wedded to his berserk medical creeds.

  • • •

  The idea of being on Turks Head, and of having no purpose to fulfill, seemed to Naomi to be a fair definition of hell. She took her sentence dry-eyed. If they wanted to see tears they’d have a long wait. Ditto repentance. There was a temptation to go and lose herself amongst the villagers on the Thracian side of Lemnos. There the landscape and the light had seemed richer.

  You’ll have to take the news of Nettice to Lieutenant Byers, she told her sister.

  When Sally at last saw Byers, he insisted—of course—on saying that he was the one who put Nettice there. That was understandable. But Sally felt it as an unnecessary self-indulgence.

  Yes, we’re all to blame, she told him fiercely. Except the stupid generals who sent you to be blinded, and the enemy who obliged them. And those who dreamed up a terrible, oppressing place like this. They are obviously all innocent and you and I are utterly to blame.

  Byers said, How do you expect me to feel though? Blameless? But, yes, to put her in the compound is a mongrel act.

  My one hope, said Naomi to her sister at breakfast the next morning, is that they will ship me back to Alexandria in disgrace. Can you imagine that when I nursed in Sydney I saw myself as a future matron? But I am afraid I am spoiled goods now.

  And she must endure meaningless days—all without the comforts of tending others that Nettice enjoyed. She tried to read as energetically as her sister but found her attention frayed. She was permitted to take exercise on Turks Head and favored the cliffs facing south. Her pride did not allow her to call on other women for company. She felt a long erosion of her spirit, could even sense the risk of madness.

  Two days later, however—when she was dreaming of the Archimedes and of her failure to drown with it—an Australian medical inspector named Colonel Leatherhead arrived on Lemnos. In retrospect it seemed to all of them that Leatherhead’s appearance had the nature of an angelic visitation from the Bible. He placed himself between the world of shadows where they dwelt and a world of possible light. But none of that was clear at first. He was not built on angelic proportions. He was round faced and round bodied and his hips were wider than his shoulders. There was the possibility in his face that in a second it might slide in either direction—mercy or condemnation.

  He appeared in time for morning tea in the sisters’ mess, introduced himself and spoke plainly to the nurses. He had been sent to report on the conditions they worked under. Again, he did not depict himself as some grand spirit of rescue. But he said that certain conditions had been reported by complainants. Mitchie, they thought. Even disabled, she would have chivied—and told her story to—surgeons who possessed military eminence.

  He nonetheless managed to give them a suspicion that their behavior would be as strictly scrutinized as anyone else’s. For a while he did nothing except to move a
bout the wards and make an occasional note. Naomi, however, found that so many of her superiors had their attention fixed on Leatherhead that her movements were not strictly supervised. She used her days to walk down to the peddlers and buy cigarettes and chocolate for the patients or to visit the graveyard and study the tragic names on crosses.

  Leatherhead’s presence did not in the first few days suppress the clique of abusive orderlies who—after behaving better in the shadow of the assault on Freud—had now got back to their habitual braying of commands at nurses. In the meantime, portly little Leatherhead seemed to concentrate on making notes on the theatres and wards and on the dressing and irrigation of wounds. With ward doctors he debated the use of sodium peroxide and asked whether Dakin’s solution might not be better. He came to the nurses’ mess for an evening meal and held one of the girls’ enamel dishfuls of bully beef and rice and found—as far as you could tell—the meal neither tasteful nor distasteful.

  The colonel talked away unabashed whenever he was with Leatherhead. He was proud to have the excellence of the place observed by an inspector from Alexandria.

  Without seeming urgency, Leatherhead had the women one by one to his temporary office in an annex off a hut where a number of medical officers had their desks. Naomi secretly had some hopes for her turn with Leatherhead. But she was nervous of how he would read her. Would he write her off as hectic or sullen? But Leatherhead was in no hurry to relieve her limbo with a summons.

  It was her sister who was called to visit him first. Sally found him as precise as he had so far appeared. He had an ink blotter which he regularly applied to what he wrote. He was not a man to take the lazy way out of letting ink evaporate. His copious papers were not strewn. He had his own typewriter for transforming them into official reports. Sally felt certain in his presence that his chief concern was to expose her flaws. But the questions were not aggressive. Place of origin. Place of training. Places and length of civil nursing. Yes, I see you were on the Archimedes. So of course you lost all your clothing, your uniforms, your nursing kit . . .