Constable and his ironic distance from his frightful wound and from the regimen of face-remaking operations that he had endured was as much a tonic to her and Slattery as they had once tried to be to him.
Unexpectedly but in view of a further improvement at the numbers brought up by the algebraic formula applied to clearing stations by headquarters, Freud and Sally and a few others received orders signed by Bright to take leave. Without Charlie, Paris would not offer enough. So Sally decided to try to get to Amiens and north to Boulogne to visit Naomi at the Australian Voluntary before taking the Blighty ship. She had a hankering to visit Captain Constable and to see one of the fatuous West End shows. But on the way she wanted to talk to Naomi about Charlie, and the swiftness of Leo’s death as a sign of the imbalance of things.
The truck journey to Amiens took two of her available hours, and the train for Boulogne left on time since it fed the arteries of the war. In the train she slept almost without interruption in a near-empty first-class compartment of comfortable velvet. She reached the Gare Centrale and signed herself in to the Red Cross nurses’ home and found she could send a messenger by bike to Château Baincthun. Waiting to hear from Naomi, she walked towards the port and managed to reach a lookout on the ancient walls, from which she could see the entire drama of the place. Camouflaged troopships were arriving with soldiers and leaving with wounded and men on leave. Along the beaches bathing cabins weren’t disgorging many swimmers but she saw a man with one leg emerge and hop across the wet sand, determined to encounter the late summer sea.
She made her way back to the hostel along narrow workers’ streets where barefooted boys played rough games and looked up from their little brutalities to see her pass. Future poilus, she thought, who would be sent to fight for the right to their squalor.
By the time she got back from her walk Naomi was outside the hostel looking peaked and concerned. Her face was transfigured when she saw Sally, and the sisters embraced without any complications or reticence or subtle suspicion or begrudging. Now—with all distance between them vanished—they went looking for a café. Naomi, Sally could see, had been altered by the loss of Mitchie and Kiernan to something simpler, more intense and direct. Sally had once thought her complexity would baffle all science. Now Naomi carried on her face a look of the most straightforward joy at reunion, of happiness unanalyzed and unapologized for. She also looked older—or at least ageless—and still thinner. As much as any soldier, she too needed a peace.
I had an idea, said Naomi, once they had ordered their coffee. It’s a beautiful afternoon and the hospital is just five miles inland. Are you well enough to walk?
Sally was tired, but nonetheless felt exhilaration at the idea of a hike. They set off with the sun high and mists of insects tumbling in the air above the crops of wheat and barley that the sisters would see through gaps in hedges and over farm gates. Fields of flax bloomed pale-blue and blowflies troubled the hindquarters of cattle. This country was not as flat as the battle areas—the hedgerows climbed genuine slopes that were steeper than the mere slight ridges for which tens of thousands had died further east.
It seemed to Sally it was a time as far off as childhood since they had walked like this together in country roads. She spoke briefly of Charlie and more of Leo and the untowardness of all that. Naomi talked of the campaign she and Lady Tarlton were engaged in for liberating Kiernan. The many eminent people they’d written to. He had now been sent to Aldershot Military Prison—the Glasshouse, whose inmates were considered unfit for visits. Still, Naomi was trying to organize one. Trying to imagine what his life was like plagued her imagination. What sort of men might guard and bully him? she asked Sally, not expecting an answer. Certainly men who gave him no credit for the Archimedes or Lemnos or service in France.
In any case Lady Tarlton had told her—as Naomi further explained to her sister—that it was likely that, should war end, civil lawyers could be introduced into the equation, men who could argue a case like Ian’s all over again in a world where reinforcements were no longer the constant cry of generals. Lady Tarlton said she knew a number of such lawyers—fellows who’d represented suffragettes. How they would be paid, Lady Tarlton did not say.
Of course, I’m willing to spend my savings, Naomi continued, and Ian’s father is—I think—affluent. And certainly devoted to his son. And I’ve never found that Lady Tarlton makes a boast on which she does not come good. So I have champions and I have possible resources. Well, that’s my rave and I apologize it takes so long. But now, your Charlie. What of him?
There was less Sally could say. She couldn’t broach the adventure in the hotel at Ailly. And the rest was all tedious and uninterrupted anxiety. There was no earthly power to whom she could write on Charlie’s behalf.
He never seems to be my Charlie, she said. First he’s the army’s. Then he’s his own man. It’s because he’s unownable, I think, that I love him.
Naomi laughed. Well, now, she said. That’s you, that’s Sally exactly.
Sally stared ahead, shielding her eyes so that she could scan the road for potential perils. Naomi reached and enclosed Sally’s hand in her own.
Look, she said, as if to distract her sister. It was along here—in that little dip in the road—that the limousine was thrown on its side and went careering. And poor Mitchie . . .
This kindly and shady summer stretch—with a slight kink before the trees around the château—hove into view. They both inspected the patch of road as if its tragedy could be reread and perhaps adjusted.
Naomi said, I had a visit from Mrs. Sorley’s son. He seems a big, handy boy. Another one to worry about though.
Sally privately thought she would swap Mrs. Sorley’s son for Charlie’s safety any day. Of course there was guilt attached to doing the deal in her head—Charlie for the other boy. As if there was in fact someone to make the contract with.
It was strange when I met young Sorley, said Naomi. We were trying to feel as if we were stepbrother and stepsister—he made the bravest attempt at it, poor boy. He took the trouble to come here in the first place. I hope we can sit down at some time and have real conversations.
Sally took thought and then said, It used to take us Durance girls a long time to get to know people like that. But we’re getting better at it, I think.
Yes. Taciturn, that’s what they call us. Standoffish. Were you aware people called us that?
Not you, insisted Sally.
Oh yes, said Naomi. Me more than you. They never used the word “shy.” Well, I suppose people think, why use a good word when you can use a bad. I think that on balance you’re much better at being social than I am. I felt you got on quicker with girls like Leo and Freud and Slattery.
You must be really bad then, said Sally, and they laughed together at the affliction of their genealogy.
Sally stayed at the château for two days—meeting Airdrie and the English Roses and the military surgeon and the young ward doctors, and sharing Naomi’s room. Sometimes she went with Naomi into the wards to do dressings and irrigations and to make beds. Otherwise she walked men around the garden. The English Red Cross nurses were awed to see an army sister descend to a menial level, and one said, You Australians—you’ll do anything! as if the Durance girls were exceptionally free-spirited colonials.
As they sat in bed, Naomi told her the story of Major Darlington who—went the authorized version—had chosen between the respectability of base hospitals and the favor of other surgeons over Lady Tarlton’s company.
She seems, said Sally, unshaken.
She can’t be defeated. When all this started I didn’t expect her to be here all the time like this. I thought she would just set it going, like God starting the world, and then go back to London to her accustomed life. But she’s labored with us. And when she’s not here, she’s in Paris visiting the club she’s got going there. She belongs to whatever she begins. But after the war—so she says—she’s not sure she won’t just go back and put up with Lord T
arlton and make an end to all the blather and mess of the whole love business. I doubt she’ll be able to though. It’s always going to be in her nature to do exceptional things.
Naomi took her down to the docks when it was time for her Blighty ferry. They kissed like two children reunited in play. An old French paddlewheel ferry painted in its war patterns of gray waited like a cross between a Dickens-style Channel packet and an antique battleship.
I’ll ask at Horseferry Road if I can see Ian, Sally promised her.
It would be marvelous. I’m afraid you’ll be refused, but please try if you can.
A line of soldiers stood back to let Sally—her travel warrant in hand, and Naomi as escort—advance to the gangway. A military policeman checked and approved her documents and she went up the plank, turning partway to see Naomi’s face streaming with tears. So the entente proposed in a palm court in Alexandria three years before was in full operation. Cherishing her sisterhood, she saw to the west the promise of a long twilight in rouged clouds yellow at the edges. It felt to Sally a good and decent thing to live. Even now. Rapture could not be postponed until a more perfect day. Not when a person had a lover and a sister.
• • •
The Epsom Hospital in Surrey was enormous and branched out—in grounds that were once the private garden of a rich family. The grounds held a number of huts and a space where men in hospital uniform—the baggy, pyjama-like tops and bottoms with various-colored lapels—were playing cricket. There was something about the energy of the game and the way hands were thrown up when a man was caught out from whacking a ball impossibly high that made her hope Captain Constable had not been hurled with his one eye into the deep end of a game just yet. She followed the driveway to the main house, where they knew she was coming—Captain Constable and she had exchanged mail about it.
A volunteer was sent to fetch him and he came down the stairs wearing military uniform, his soldierhood taken on again. She saw the sutures across his jaw, the not-quite-formed nose, the unnatural glossiness and tightness of the upper lip and cheek. Though she could see something of what he might have been before, what was there was both little and at the same time an undeniable cure. The scale of his bravery regarding the damage to his face had driven her to expect more than this. The surgeons had forced his facial items back in place. The surfaces they had restored were correct in a technical sense but were somehow unmoving and incapable of expression. His visage was doomed to be an artifact rather than a natural phenomenon. Except for the left eye, this face was dead. It had taken two years to achieve this, and this was all that could be achieved.
Hello, Sister, he said exuberantly. I wondered, might I take you to tea in the high street? It isn’t far.
She agreed. They set off on the gravel drive with her arm in his. Reaching the gate and walking down leafy streets he pointed out the grandeur of the distant race track.
That’s where that suffragette threw herself under the hooves of the King’s horse, he said. Just like the boys who’ve thrown themselves under the hooves in the last four years.
You needn’t have dressed for me, she said. If that was what you did.
Oh, he said, after all this time, I’m sick of those rotten pyjamas. They look ridiculous with a slouch hat.
She noticed the wound stripe on the left forearm of his jacket. She thought it underexplained what he had suffered.
They’re sending me home very soon anyhow, he said. So I’ve had to clean up the old kit.
She wondered if the mayor of his municipality would bestow honors on this drastically altered young man, and remembered her sister’s story of the epidemic of suicide on the ship Naomi had taken home long ago. But he was too strong a man for that.
In a teashop in the high street they ordered tea and cream puffs. English cakes were sludge beside French. Yet this big, jolly lump of dough and sugar was somehow the right thing. The waitress did not seem surprised by his appearance. She might have become used to serving such men.
Do you know, said Sally when the tea arrived and the fragrant steam began to have its effect on both of them, if I had to give a prize for my best patient of all, it would be you. It would really be you. I’m not trying to butter you up. I doubt I could have borne what you have.
He laughed a rueful laugh and drank some tea. She wondered if there were nerves in those lips to feel the heat of the drink.
I’m not so good now as I was earlier, he asserted. I’m getting churlish. The thing’s settled now. I’ve got what I’ll have forever. I could handle the disease but I don’t know how I’ll go—if I tell you the truth—with the cure.
You are entitled to be a bit churlish, as long as you don’t overdo it.
She could feel though, very clearly, that he was in a new struggle.
I’ve decided to stay in the old town. Narromine. I’ll work with my father on the station—we run sheep and stud rams. People can get used to me, I reckon, in a small place, where there’s only so many you can shock. That makes sense. To me at least.
But you could go anywhere, she said. I would hate it if you thought you must limit your life somehow.
No, I think I’ll start out at home. I just want to shy clear of the pity merchants for a while. And any special medallions and speeches. The old man will need to fight all that off too—I’ve told him. I don’t want any band at the platform.
They walked back under a pleasant autumn sky that was the color of duck eggs. When the northern European weather took it into its head to be subtle and yet vital at once, it was able to do it with extreme craft, with fifty or so variations of blue and a hundred of yellow.
And so, he said, it looks like it’s going to be at an end—everyone’s saying so, hard as it is to believe. Fritz’s line’s gone.
But he’ll make another, Sally said. There’ll still be no shortage of wounded.
He considered this and then began to stutter with laughter.
What is it? she asked.
When they ask me to write my war memoirs, they’ll consist of one thing. Standing in the wrong place.
This sounded like self-pity at last to her. Though she did not believe he could avoid it forever, she was disappointed.
She told him, I came to England especially to see you. I have to say honestly that when I think of a hero, I think of you. And you know I would not easily say that.
But with me you’re also satisfying curiosity, aren’t you? he asked, half amused. We’re old friends—yes. But you’re partly a tourist, aren’t you? See what the joker looks like now! I’d be the same in your position.
You could drive people off saying that sort of thing, she warned him. I’m far too busy to be a tourist and I’m in a constant state about an infantryman I love who’s still in the center of the storm. And on top of that, I have to try to visit my sister’s fiancé, who’s in prison in Aldershot for mutiny. But, listen, if your position ever seems to be too much for you, you write to me and I’ll write back and come and visit if I can.
And on that basis, back at the hospital they exchanged addresses. Sally wrote down her father’s farm—Sherwood via Kempsey, Macleay Valley, New South Wales—and found it was an address she could not imagine herself ever having occupied or inhabiting in the future. But there a letter would find her.
They said good-bye in the lobby and she was already at the door when he called out to her, You’re too thin, you know. You’re much thinner than you were at Rouen. Don’t let them work you too hard.
Beyond the gate there was a line of tall shrubs. She stepped amongst them and let out a cry like a crow and then stood there while the river of tears flowed out of her, a grieving torrent. After ten minutes of it, she was well enough again and composed herself and went off to catch the early evening train to Victoria.
At Horseferry Road, Sally visited the provost marshal’s office. The clerk at the desk led her into the office of a middle-aged captain, who listened with an open face—neither pretending too much sympathy nor sour with condemnation�
�as she made her case to visit Kiernan in Aldershot. When she was finished he laid out his hands palm-up on his desk. It’s no use, he said. Aldershot is a British camp, and they play by their rules. We agreed to that so they wouldn’t keep pestering us to shoot our boys.
Numbed by failure, that evening she went to a West End farce with Freud and Freud’s American doctor. At the interval, as Captain Boynton queued to buy champagne for them, Freud said, He’s always taking it for granted we’ll live in Chicago. I’ve even been foolish enough to argue the surgical claims of Melbourne with him, as Bright does. But it seems the end of the earth to him.
It is, said Sally. Believe it or not, it is.
It could be cause for a rift. Or I could make it that. No one need think I’m that desperate to have a man.
That’s not a good reason to get rid of a decent one.
It was interesting that as always Freud would say “have a man” when others would say “get married.” But when Boynton arrived with the champagne, there seemed to be no chasm between them. The American was more exuberantly entranced than Fellowes would ever have admitted to being by Leo. They all chatted briskly and honestly, bantering away.
Do you think the characters in this play know there’s a war on? Boynton asked.
That’s the charm, said Freud. They live in a play where there never was a war.
Sounds like America, he said. But these characters? Their heads are empty of history.
Sometimes, Freud argued, people need a history enema.
The playwright’s succeeded then, said Boynton. He’s a real benefactor of humanity. Give the man a prize.
Whatever in God’s name that is, said Freud.
At which the American hugged her by the waist.
Listen to this kid! he invited Sally.
• • •
She was back at Vecquemont within five days. As well as Captain Constable at Epsom, in London Sally had seen at a superficial level sights missed last time. But getting back was what she profoundly desired. First thing, she went looking for Slattery and found her standing at the far end of the gas ward coughing and watching as two nurses applied blister cream to a soldier’s flesh. Honora saw her and—her boots clopping on the board floor—moved fast to meet her.
The Daughters of Mars Page 50