He closed his eyes briefly. Opening them again, he said, All right, you’ve told me. And I’ve told you. There’s an end to it for now. I can’t guarantee what I’ve told you might not sometimes seep through and poison an hour. But it won’t poison my life.
Nor mine, said Sally. Neither of our tales will.
Bitterly amused now, he said, If I’d known you were going into all this stuff I would have insisted on wine.
It’s not too late. You could have brandy.
And then their croque-monsieur arrived. They fell to it with all the ravenousness of the redeemed. They said little as they ate, his head frequently down, though once he raised it and smiled broadly at her and shook his head just a fraction one way or another. Cognac, he asked the waiter then. It came quickly. He reached out and held her hand as he downed it. He shook his head.
I’m very slow, he confessed. You wouldn’t have told me about all that unless . . . Well, unless.
He waved his free hand in the air a little, trying to define the word.
I’m so very flattered. That’s what I should have said straight off. Instead of all that stuff about men on the wire.
He finished the cognac with a gulp. He smiled.
You’ll come with me this afternoon then? he asked.
Yes. With a lot more ease than this morning. Not that I didn’t . . .
I know. You liked it. This morning we saw the world as it would like to be seen. This afternoon we have the reality of the world. We’ll see the world as it is and the way it will become. When you see some of the work of these new chaps, you’ll wish you were born French or Spanish.
• • •
During their exhilarating afternoon at the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Indépendants, whose motto was “No juries, no prizes,” Charlie declared himself nervous that Kiernan would at dinner prove a temperance man and exhibit piety. Sally was able to reassure him. The dinner at L’Arlésienne went delightfully—with Ian himself drinking red wine for the special occasion. Sally and Naomi spoke to each other in an easy way that made Sally remember conversation between them could be blessedly ordinary. The acrid, murderous weight—capable of souring a lifetime—was gone in a day to be replaced by something that could be borne through a lifetime. None of them talked about their particular work—though Kiernan did digress into the organization of clearing stations. Some aspects, he argued, could be better arranged. The stores hut should instead be dug into the earth because without that . . . well, they got the message. One hit by a Taube and nothing for the wards. And in some of the stores there were—yes, even in these terrible times—signs that a few officials were in the business of war procurement, who were either asinine or had done special deals with suppliers. How rich some people were getting from all these dressings and pharmaceuticals and equipment! he said. How rich from syringes that sometimes fell apart.
But how far it had all progressed since Egypt and the Archimedes, Naomi asserted.
Under the influence of unaccustomed wine, it came to Sally as a fancy that the three of them had been cast into the sea and delivered just for this dinner and as company for glorious Charlie.
Meanwhile Naomi reported on the Committee of Clarity and the enduring suspicions of Madame Flerieu, and explained who “dear old Sedgewick” was.
Hungrier than she ever had been since she went to the clearing station—hungry as the reprieved always are—Sally ate liver and pork like a woman who might one day get plump.
• • •
Lady Tarlton’s château was decked for Christmas and kept warm at least in patches by army stoves. Naomi and the nurses made up Christmas boxes for each patient—simple things such as chocolate and tobacco, shortbread, a writing pad. Symbols of homely renewal. She had bought Matron Mitchie some lace in Boulogne. This was one of those Christmases Naomi had read of—when joy is a simple achievement. Her sister now wrote to her weekly and Ian at least each second day. Yet even with the Americans now in France, no one dared speak anymore of the coming year as the conclusive one.
Two days after Christmas, Matron Mitchie got a telegram. Her son was in the hospital at Wimereux with gas inhalation and pneumonia. Mitchie struggled upwards without anyone knowing and was largely dressed and—with prosthesis strapped on—ready to travel when Lady Tarlton found her grinding her way along the corridor.
Lady Tarlton knew by now that she should not thwart Mitchie. She pressed an extra comforter on her and adjusted the collar of her coat and summoned Carling. He was to get the Vitesse Phaeton ready to go to Wimereux. When that was settled, Mitchie asked Naomi to come with her. With difficulty Mitchie was helped downstairs and into the vehicle. She had the idea, she told Naomi once they were inside the great car—where even the smell of the aging leather was a cold exhalation—that she might get her son transferred to the Voluntary once his symptoms eased.
When—through an icebound landscape and out on to the coastal road—they reached the hospital at Wimereux, it looked huge and deliberately ugly under a foul sky. Its grounds were littered with patches of dirty snow, the decay of a glittering Christmas snow of two days before. Carling left them in the car as he made inquiries as to where the boy could be found, and then they rolled down the long and frozen streets between huts—no boys brought out to be exposed to the sun today—until they arrived at the gas ward where young Mitchie was located.
Naomi watched for ice patches as she aided Mitchie from the car into the ward. It was at least warm in there. Nurses had insisted on the season and strung tinsel around the walls. They found Private Mitchie with pads dipped in sodium bicarbonate on his eyes. His skin looked reddish and the ward sister mentioned edema in the lungs and a temperature so high that he had been very deluded—even leaving his bed sometimes.
When Mitchie sat beside him he did not seem to hear the scrape of the chair. He had a square face that was slightly smaller than one would expect for the spacious head behind it. Mitchie began stroking his red, gas-stippled hand with one finger. To Naomi his situation did not look or sound good. Oxygen was wheeled up to him and the mask was put on his face and, for some reason—perhaps because of the way oxygen forced itself into him—the rasping of his breath seemed more intense now than it had before. A nurse took the pads from his eyes in the hope he could see and converse. But he seemed to recognize nothing.
When the young ward doctor came around, Mitchie identified herself as the patient’s mother and calmly discussed his case further, raising the matter of a tracheotomy and warm ether vapor being pumped into his lungs by way of it. A nurse arrived while they talked and further bathed his eyes with the pads before replacing them with new ones. He flinched and waved his head. He had presented himself at an aid post later than he should have, the doctor told her, and had done so while already suffering pulmonary distress. The combination must have been an alarming experience. But—the ward doctor said—he had his youth and robustness to fall back upon. This was exactly the sort of medical commonplace Matron Mitchie would have uttered to parents in the same situation as she was now. Naomi noticed she invested her attention in every word as if it would need to be subjected to a later analysis—as if there were subtleties of meaning there.
When the doctor was gone, she had a further conversation with the ward sister, during which she suppressed her cough as best she could. The handkerchief she held before her face was doused with eucalyptus oil and she interposed the saturated fabric between herself and anyone else, in case they read the telltale pallor, rose-petal cheeks, the stain of blood on the lips, and sent her away.
From that afternoon Naomi alternated with one of the English Roses in accompanying Mitchie to Wimereux every second day. Naomi was with her on the third afternoon when Private Mitchie’s temperature began to fall. He was sleeping when they arrived but woke when the nurse came to give him oxygen. Through cracked lips and with breath he did not really have, he said, Big Sister. It can’t be you.
Well, it is, she said, standing up and kissing his blistered fore
head. But you know, don’t you, it isn’t Big Sister anymore?
He frowned. There was no complaint there, however.
He said, Force of habit. I’m feeling better.
You weren’t taking care of yourself up there, Mitchie reproved him.
I was, he said and then winked, but I gave the servants a day off and they left the gas on. Buggers!
He laughed—choking—and his eyes watered so that he needed to close them. Mitchie had been laughing with him—crying also—and the shared jollity threatened to strangle her too.
That doesn’t sound good, said the boy, nodding towards her.
Don’t you worry about me, she said. It’s just a winter cold.
He fell asleep again and after a while Mitchie and Naomi left.
The next time they went there, Mitchie asked Naomi—with more apology than Naomi was used to—if she would mind having tea in the nurses’ mess while Mitchie went alone to the ward.
Naomi sat there for an hour and a half, reading Punch and being interrupted by jovial questions from other mostly Australian nurses, who wanted to know about the Château Baincthun—of which they had heard all manner of rumors. That it was a club for officers really, and that it was somehow a loose place. They didn’t mean her, but by and large . . .
By now Naomi had learned to talk like other gossipy women in situations like this—she became an imitation girl, even though she’d barely been able to handle such impersonation in her earlier life.
I wish it was an officers’ club, she told them, and we were all club floozies. But it’s like any hospital. It has all the normal wards and departments. The work is just as long-winded as yours. We have surgeons, ward doctors, nurses, and orderlies and a pathology lab. All you’ve heard is nonsense. As for Lady Tarlton, the Medical Corps had to build your hospital. But she built the Australian Voluntary out of pure kindness.
Ah, said the women of Wimereux, it’s good to get that cleared up.
And then they began to decry the failure of the conscription referendum, which would have forced new men into the frontline. Naomi knew all the arguments both ways. Could conscripts be trusted? Could the unwilling? And the contrary arguments. The British and Canadians have conscripts. And conscripts would allow our fellows longer to recover and longer leaves. Naomi’s secret argument in response was that all those who arrived would anyhow be fed into the furnace, without any break for the ones already there.
She was rescued by Carling’s arrival at the door telling her that Matron Mitchie was already in the Phaeton and ready to leave.
She followed Carling, the ice crunching beneath their boots. The light was nearly gone, and a high wind rattled the slimmer branches of the leafless trees around the hospital perimeter. She found Mitchie in the backseat sobbing without pause and taking jerking breaths between furies of grief.
He began to choke, she said. It’s unfair. The pneumonia’s gone and now this bloody mustard gas! The doctor came—they used the hot ether device. It was horrifying. Poor boy. Breathing again though.
It will take him a day or two, said Naomi meaninglessly. Then he’ll be all right.
He called out for my mother to tell him he’d be all right. His eyes were searching for her. He didn’t call for me.
Naomi embraced her and pulled her into her own shoulder. He’s still getting used to it, Naomi said.
Matron Mitchie could not however rest there in Naomi’s caress. Coughs racked her, and she turned her head away. The coughing grew cruel—as was the norm for Mitchie. In her desperation she near shoved the eucalyptus handkerchief into her mouth—as if its vapors could choke her disease.
They were partway home, amidst meadows and copses where ice delineated every bare branch. As they entered a dip in the road quite close to the château, Naomi felt the iron fabric of the car take up a new kind of motion, a glissade which the wheels seemed to her to follow—as if the chassis would otherwise tear itself away from its axles. As she watched, the hedges on her right-hand side slid away at angles and almost graciously the limousine turned its nose into the hedge on the left, pitched itself on to its side with a frightful steel whack and then, with a terrible howling and grating, slid endlessly on its side along the road. The glass of the window below her was shattered and road replaced open air, and Naomi hung by a leather strap for an instant before she was flung forward and downwards beyond all control. In her own gyrations she saw Matron Mitchie flying also and at one moment Naomi collided—brow forward—into the heel of Mitchie’s unyielding prosthetic foot. Then Naomi’s head found a sort of permanent harbor in a fixed bolster on the seats that had been opposite her. Far too late the shrieking slide ended. At last—in stillness—she moved her head from between the seat and arm bolster, within which she had been expecting her neck to break, and looked at the skywards door and at that side of the car which had now become the roof. A grudging light was still in the low clouds and she yearned to climb out and greet it. But she turned her head and saw Matron Mitchie. Her feet—the true and the false—were both now unshod. She was head down to the shattered window and—through it—to the road. Carling climbed over into the passenger compartment. His face was bloodied but he was frantic to bring rescue.
He reached down past Matron Mitchie’s disordered skirts and lifted her by the waist. Naomi helped him pull her upwards. There was copious blood, of course. But what was worse was that her brow had been flattened and seemed to have become part of her skull.
Do you think you could climb up there, Miss Durance? Carling asked, pointing to the sky, and push the door open? Yes, use the bolster to stand on.
It was the same bolster that had saved her head.
She dug her remaining boot—the other had disappeared—into a cleft in the wall of upholstery, and turned the door handle and pushed with as much power as she could from such a purchase. But the door was heavy and it reclosed itself.
We need to smash the window, she told him. He lifted and laid down Matron Mitchie according to the car’s new alignment. She seemed limp still, but the damned war gave one a certain faith in medicine, in resuscitation. She climbed into the front seat and came back with the starter handle which was kept in its own cavity. She smashed the window thoroughly with a number of blows. Glass rained down on them. But it was a lesser peril. Then she hauled herself up and out and knelt down on the flanks of the Phaeton.
She had barely positioned herself on the side of the great auto when a military supply truck appeared and behind it an ambulance on its way to the château with a delivery of wounded. They slowed and stopped. Driver and orderlies got out and climbed up onto the wreckage. Naomi’s hands were bleeding and unsteady, so as two of the orderlies clambered up, she surrendered to them the responsibility of getting Mitchie out of the car. She could smell their sweat and their hair oil even as they did it. They lifted Mitchie out and down to two men below. Then they lifted Naomi herself on to the road. The astounding Carling levered himself free and slid down the roof of the Phaeton to the ground.
Oh, he said to the ambulance driver. There’s a lane back there. Go back and turn right and you can get your men to the Voluntary that way.
He came to Naomi wringing his hands and with his face bleeding considerably. He wept. Forgive me, he said. Forgive me. It was ice. It just took the Phaeton away from me.
My God, you’re knocked about, Miss, someone said as the icy atmosphere bit her wounds. She saw Mitchie lying by the side of the road as the orderlies brought a stretcher.
Oh my God, asked Carling. Have I killed her?
No, said Naomi definitely because she couldn’t believe in Mitchie’s death. And, then, contradictorily, It isn’t your fault anyhow.
It couldn’t be thought that with Mitchie’s motherhood unresolved and yet to be savored, she should suffer too lethal a mutilation.
• • •
There was an Australian piper at the general hospital in Boulogne. He had learned the pipes as a boy in Melbourne and he preceded the funeral party to the gene
ral hospital cemetery. The coffin was carried by six soldiers on leave who had been visiting their girlfriends at the hospital. Most were officers—for what that mattered to Mitchie!
Up the coast—at the other general hospital at Wimereux—young Mitchie was still too ill to process with the others and to honor the woman who had claimed motherhood over him. But a considerable cortege of nurses made their way behind the coffin and the bleating melancholy of the pipes to the pit dug in icy ground for Matron Mitchie. At the head of the procession walked Major Darlington and Lady Tarlton, behind them a brigadier general of the Medical Corps, and behind him Dr. Airdrie and Naomi. Naomi was on crutches from a sprained ankle. Her broken ribs stabbed her as she hobbled over the cold ground, and her head was still bandaged—she had somehow cut it on the glass of the window she’d escaped by. Life was so ridiculous, she knew, that it must be accepted and worshipped as it came. To be saved from the Archimedes as Mitchie was and to find her way back to the world of the walking through all that pain—and then to rediscover her friend Lady Tarlton and a son, and at that point to vanish from the world with her great declaration of motherhood more or less still trailing from her mouth—that was nonsensical! And all just because her skull touched the road during the car’s skid when Naomi’s had been jammed in the upholstery . . . Well, the absurdity spoke for itself. The disparity between their respective injuries was ridiculous. If God were praised it should not be because there was a plan to the absurdity but because there was a divine lack of one.
A Presbyterian padre read the prayer, the honor guard fired into the sky the Allies still possessed, and then—to some old Scottish dirge, by the piper who roamed in the Scottish manner amongst the graves of the heroes—they all watched Mitchie’s grave filled until the coffin had been covered. With Lady Tarlton and Airdrie, Naomi wept while her side howled with pain from her ribs. Lady Tarlton put a calming hand on her shoulder as she had on Carling’s on the night of the accident. Then she and Major Darlington, Naomi and Airdrie waited there to look at the mound. The brigadier came across to where they stood and confided in Naomi.
The Daughters of Mars: A Novel Page 43
