In Falling Snow

by Mary-Rose MacColl

  “He has a rash,” his mother said.

  “Show me,” I said. There were serious illnesses that started with fevers and moved to pox. The mother cradled the child in her left arm and lifted the nightdress with her right hand. I pulled up a little vest. The skin was red with raised white papules, all around the child’s torso. It wasn’t chickenpox, which came out everywhere, nor shingles in a newborn. Nor measles; the spots were too small. And then I knew it. It was false measles. A high fever resolves into a rash like this that spreads. Roseola was the name. It used to be confused with measles, thus the common name of false measles.

  “I’m pretty sure it’s harmless,” I said. “The fever has worn him out. Exhausted, needs fluid.” I was talking more to myself now. The little boy’s lips were as dry as his mother’s. “And so do you. You must look after yourself to keep your milk. Have you expressed?” I didn’t know the word and made a pumping action with my hand on my own breast. The girl smiled for the first time and she was beautiful suddenly. She had, she said. “Good. He’ll wake soon, I hope, and be ravenous. Feed him as often as he likes. The rash should move out from his middle before fading in a day or so. If it does anything differently, you should find a doctor.” The girl looked worried again. “I’m a nurse,” I said, “not a doctor.”

  The other nurse I’d noticed when I’d arrived at the station earlier was talking to the little porter. I wondered if I should ask her advice. I caught snatches of the conversation. The porter was rocking from the balls of his feet to his heels as she spoke. I’m sorry, madam, he said in French, then, there are no sleeping cars on account of the war. You will have to sit up like everyone else. The journey is not long. Oh for God’s sake, man, she replied, can’t you speak English? She made a pillow of her hands and put her head there in a mock sleep. She even snored gently. The porter told her again that there were no berths because the journey was too short. She wouldn’t need sleep. Her cheeks were flushed with exasperation. She looked straight at me then and called over. “Can you help me?” she said. “He doesn’t seem to understand.”

  “Mattresses,” I said in French to the porter. “She has mattresses she wants you to put on the train.”

  “Oui,” said the little porter. “Of course. Why didn’t she say so?” The porter went off to get help with the mattresses, and the woman came over. I stood. We were about the same height, a rare enough experience for me. I had been the tallest in my class all through school.

  “You’re a marvel,” the woman said. “If I don’t get their beds on the train, my girls will have another rough night of it. Frances Ivens.” She held out her gloved hand, which I took.

  “Iris Crane.”

  “You’re not English.”

  “Australian.”

  “Where on earth did you learn to speak French?” Before I could answer she was looking beyond me to the mother and child.

  “Have you nursed babies? This child is sick,” I said. “I didn’t look after children very much in my training.”

  “You’re a nurse to boot,” she said. “Why don’t you come with me?”

  “What?” I said. “Where?”

  But Miss Ivens had moved on to the child and his mother. She smiled and I felt a great sense of relief. “My bag’s over there, dear one,” she said, placing a hand on the young woman’s shoulder. “I’ll be back,” and she strode off, returning directly with a little leather case. When she opened it up, I saw the stethoscope and instruments, and that was when I realised she was a doctor, not a nurse.

  “I really didn’t expect to see a woman doctor,” I said to Violet now.

  “You’re lucky Frances didn’t bite your head off. I shouldn’t think she’d like being mistaken for a nurse. She’s even particular about women doctors being employed as nurses. That’s what they do at some of the hospitals, employ women doctors but only to nurse. Frances says we’ll never do that at Royaumont.”

  Miss Ivens sat down beside the mother and confidently took the sleeping boy into her own arms and examined him while I recounted the symptoms.

  “And what did you conclude?” she said, looking at me so intensely I felt nervous and unsure.

  I told her what I’d told the couple. “The rash,” I said.

  “Well done. It’s roseola. Reassure this poor woman her child will live.” Miss Ivens smiled at the mother. “She must make sure he takes in fluid while he has the diarrhoea. She should give him sugar water. Where are they from?”

  I asked the woman. “Senlis,” she said.

  “That’s near enough,” Miss Ivens said. She took out a pen and scrap of paper and wrote down an address. “Tell them that’s a hospital where they’ll always find a doctor who can help them.” I told the woman, who thanked us both, tears streaming down her face. “Tell her she must bring him when he’s well so we can see if he needs extra care. The seizure has probably done no harm, but . . . we don’t need to worry about that just yet.”

  I interpreted as confidently as I could. “You need to bring your baby to the hospital when he’s better,” I said. “No urgency.”

  “Where did you say you were going?” Miss Ivens asked me when the couple left us.

  “Soissons,” I said. “My train has just arrived.” I was disappointed, to be honest, to see the Soissons train running. I’d hoped for another day in Paris.

  “That’s no good,” Miss Ivens said. “I need an interpreter. Come to Royaumont.”

  “Where’s Royaumont?”

  “That way,” Miss Ivens said, pointing north. “Not far. And much more exciting. Where are your things? Here’s the porter with the mattresses and the train will be off soon. Hurry now or we’ll miss it and I don’t know when there’s another.”

  “But I have orders.”

  “I’ll take care of those.”

  “And so, here I am,” I said to Violet. We’d arrived at the station in Viarmes. Violet pulled around and brought the car to a sudden stop next to the platform. Our bags and chattels were just as we’d left them, the straw mattresses piled against the back wall, our luggage supporting them on one side, my own portmanteau, everything I owned in the world, standing bravely against its first French snow. The station remained deserted. We worked together quickly in the cold to pack the truck. Violet left the headlamps burning so we could see what we were doing.

  When we’d finished loading the truck, we climbed back in and set off for Royaumont. “I’ve still seen no sign of this war they keep talking about,” I said. “And for all I know, Matron is writing to my father right now to say I’ve gone missing in Paris.”

  “I doubt they’ll even notice,” Violet said. “And if they do, Frances will speak to someone who knows someone and the orders will disappear. She has a way. I know what you mean about the war, though. Royaumont’s so strange. You don’t imagine the war could ever touch us there.”

  Violet told me she’d grown up in Cornwall, where her family had lived for generations. “We’re the Cornwall Herons,” she said, with a hint of mockery in her voice. “My father’s father, Duxton Digby Heron, had an extensive collection of stamps, inherited by my father, Digby Duxton—the names are not a joke, by the way. My father sold the stamps to pursue his own hobbies of gambling and drink. Gets me where I live, he used to say. It certainly did. He died of liver failure at forty-four, no mean feat.

  “My mother, from a less wealthy and less unhappy Scottish family, tolerated my father until his untimely death, and inherited the estate. No love lost, that’s for sure, although the cousins are not happy about the estate falling to the Scots, and my mother does tend to rather rub their noses in it by inviting her family to stay. There’s no money left, of course, so the place is slowly falling apart.”

  “How old were you when your father died?”

  “Sixteen,” Violet said. “Away at school. I went home to make sure there was no mistake, that Digby wasn’t lurking in some
corner of the house. He was always a bit of a lurker. My mother thought me ghoulish when I insisted on viewing the body.” Violet had lost a brother too, she said, to pneumonia, when she was eight.

  Violet told me her family’s story as if it was all a big joke, and it was funny, the way she put it, and I even found myself laughing, but later I couldn’t help thinking how unhappy she must have been growing up in a house like that. When I told her about my own family, it seemed much happier, despite the fact my mother had died when I was only six.

  “My father remarried, a woman from a farm near us,” I told Violet. “Claire’s French. Thus my competence in the language,” I said in French.

  “Ah, the wicked stepmother,” Violet said, in the same tone she’d told me about her own life, “with a French twist.”

  “I’m afraid not,” I said. “More like I was the wicked stepdaughter.”

  The year I turned nine, my mother’s sister Veronica visited us from Scotland. Until then, the three of us—me and Daddy and Tom—had muddled on together, but Veronica had put an idea into Daddy’s head I should be among women and girls. So he packed me off to All Hallows’ in Brisbane to board. I felt completely at sea among those girls with their girls’ games and perfect hems on their tunics. When I went home for the Easter holidays in that first year, I said I hated school and didn’t want to go back but Daddy made me. Two weeks later he came to town and brought Claire.

  We met in the parlour of the convent, a neat room with heavy drapes and the smell of wood polish. Claire was a small, slight woman with straight brown hair surrounding a heart-shaped face. Much later I learned she’d married into a family on the Italian side of the French–Italian border and she and her husband had come to Australia to run an orchard. He’d been killed when he fell from a ladder five years earlier. After his death, everyone had expected Claire would go home. But instead she stayed on and engaged a manager to run the orchard. She and Daddy met when Daddy took our bull over to service her cows.

  I liked Claire instinctively, although I had no idea why they were there until they were taking their leave and Daddy put a hand to the small of her back to usher her out. “Do you hate it here very much?” she said to me in strongly accented English. “Would you rather be back home?” I nodded yes, unable to speak for fear of crying.

  The next week they married and the week after that, I was brought home.

  “I should have been grateful she got me a reprieve from boarding school,” I said to Violet. “And she worked so hard to win our love, Tom’s and especially mine, even after the twins were born. But for a long time, I just felt angry. I hated her.”

  Claire never tried to be a mother to Tom and me but she was kind and interested and we came to love her almost in spite of ourselves. I was worse than Tom, loyal to a mother I thought I could remember that he could never have known—she’d died of toxemia just after he was born. To her credit Claire ignored my seething anger. She played to my finer feelings and eventually dragged them out of me. When I think back, she was one of the most truly good people I ever knew, willing to raise someone else’s children and even to love them. I came to love her too. By the time I went back to boarding school, the twins, André and René, were born. It was so different for me to be a half sister rather than the child mother I’d had to be to Tom. Claire welcomed whatever help I offered but never made me do more than that. She taught me French and made me love the Paris she conjured for me. She also taught me how to sew and cook, which I never would have learned otherwise. I’d been blessed really and knew it.

  As Violet drove, I watched the snow fall lazily to earth in the beams of light in front of us. Something niggled at the edge of my consciousness, vague, indefinable, as though I was doing a jigsaw puzzle and I’d just put a piece in the wrong place. It hadn’t worried me at all, what Violet had said about remaining at Royaumont instead of going to Soissons. In fact, it made me feel valued. Of course, it should have worried me. I was young, so young, I think now, not yet an adult, not truly, but with an adult responsibility that had been mine since I was six, that of caring for my brother. And it wasn’t as if I was deciding to abandon Tom. I wasn’t deciding anything really. Violet was right. Royaumont was as good as anywhere to stay while I searched for Tom, and there was something about Miss Ivens that made a person want to muck in and help her. All those things were true. But as I look back, it was that point, the point I met Violet, so worldly and yet so welcoming, so convincing about how much fun it would all be, that was the point at which I went horribly horribly wrong.

  Grace

  It was 2:36 a.m. on the bedside clock. She picked up on the second ring. “Grace, come now.” It was the night midwife, Alice Jablonsky. Grace was about to respond when she heard the click, the phone disconnecting. “Grace, come now.” Grace knew what that meant. Don’t ask questions, don’t have coffee, just get in the car. She pulled the sweats on the floor over her pyjamas, slipped on socks, sneakers, grabbed a toothbrush out of the bathroom, smeared it with paste, stuck it in her mouth, and chewed. David woke as she fumbled for her watch. “On call,” she said through the toothbrush. “Go back to sleep.”

  On the way out she went into the kids’ rooms. Mia wasn’t there; a moment’s panic until she remembered her eldest daughter was sleeping across the road at her friend Julie’s. She went on to Phil, who was talking nonsense in her sleep, light still on, Tolkien on the floor beside her, snoring quietly, a single tail thump when he saw Grace. Then Henry, on his back, arms splayed, covers off. Grace went in, replaced the covers, took in his little-boy smell, and turned and headed out, dumped the toothbrush in the kitchen sink and grabbed a sip of water from the tap to rinse.

  By 2:41 a.m. she was in the Citroën, David’s car; he’d parked her Honda in, she didn’t much like the symbolism but didn’t have time to address it now. She drove over the Paddington hill and down through the floodplain of Milton as the moon came up over the city. She came in the back gate and pulled into her space outside the maternity unit. She heard a storm bird somewhere down near the river but the night was clear as glass. She went straight to the labour ward and found an enrolled nurse who looked about fifteen at the desk.

  “Why am I here?” Grace said. Her voice was gravelly. She wanted coffee.

  “I’m sorry?” The girl looked flatly at Grace.

  “I’m Dr. Hogan. Alice called me. Get her for me, would you?” A question that wasn’t a question.

  “Sorry, Doctor, of course.” She left the desk.

  Alice Jablonsky came down the corridor with that calm, brisk gait of the best midwives and steered Grace back towards the operating theatres. They talked as they walked. “So which one is it?” Grace asked.

  “Margaret Cameri.”

  “Which one was she?” There had been three on the ward when Grace left at 10 p.m.; two who should have been sent home, one a young girl from the hostel in early labour, the other with slightly elevated blood pressure but no need for hospital yet. The third was a multi in established labour, no complications, close to transition. Grace hadn’t even waited. Nothing expected from outlying districts, a good registrar, a good, experienced midwife in Alice. Grace had looked forward to a night of unbroken sleep.

  “Room four, third baby, straightforward, eight centimetres when she came in. Margaret Cameri.”

  The transition one. “And?”

  “Labour stalled for a bit and then sped up again on its own. She pushed the baby out and he’s fine. She had a bleed, maybe four hundred mils. Something not right so I called Andrew. We started some Pitocin thinking PPH but then the fundus was wrong, too low, we couldn’t figure out why, and then her uterus came out. It just came out. She’s lost a lot of blood.” There was a hint of fear in Alice’s voice.

  Take a breath, Grace thought to herself. “Where’s Andrew now?”

  “He’s in theatre with her. We think we’ve controlled the bleeding and we’ve ordered more blood.
”

  “All good.” They’d got her to theatre and stopped the bleeding. It gave Margaret Cameri her best chance. “I’ll need another consultant. Try Lindsay or Frank if they’re in town. And an anaesthetist. You been through one of these before?”

  “No. Anaesthetist already there. I’ll find another ob.”

  “We’ll be fine. Alice?”

  “Yes?”

  “You’ve done very well.”

  By the time her pager went off again, Grace was walking through the double doors into the theatre. Nine minutes, twenty-four seconds, a record. “I’ll be there in a sec,” she said to Andrew through the intercom.

  Once in the theatre, Grace confirmed Andrew Martin’s diagnosis. “You seen one of these before?” she said quietly to him.

  “Nup.”

  “You know what we’re going to do?”

  “Yep.”

  “Good.” She was glad it was Andrew Martin, easy to work with, liked by docs and midwives, didn’t mind taking orders from Grace, something male registrars often had trouble with. “Stay where you are for now.” Andrew was using a towel to compress the bleeding. Another EN was holding Margaret Cameri’s hand at the head end of the bed. She looked about fifteen too, Margaret Cameri not much older and wide-eyed with fear. Grace hoped she’d had plenty for pain.

  The anaesthetist was the new guy, no sense of humour, no one could remember his name, but he was good enough tonight. Frank was still on his way, from somewhere south of the city, his wife phoned to say. He should have passed so they could try someone else. Frank was one of the older consultants who wouldn’t necessarily take a call-in from the likes of Grace seriously. She was never sure if it was her youth or her sex and she didn’t much care. They’d have to start. At any rate, they’d only need Frank if a hysterectomy became necessary and Grace hoped it could be avoided.

  Grace was helped into gloves and went to the head of the bed. She smiled her hello-I’ll-be-the-doctor-looking-after-you-today smile. “Mrs. Cameri, I’m Grace Hogan. I saw you earlier tonight. You’ve pushed out your baby and he’s fine.” She looked across at Andrew, who nodded. “But the placenta hasn’t come away and when you pushed it out it’s pulled your womb out,” as if this was only to be expected, happened every other day. “Once you’re asleep, we’re going to do our best to put it back manually but if that doesn’t work, we’ll have to operate to do it. We may have to remove your womb if we can’t put it back. Do you understand what I’m saying?” What Grace didn’t tell Margaret Cameri was that they might not be able to stop the bleeding, they might make a mistake, they might hesitate too long moving to the hysterectomy, such a young woman, you didn’t want to do it if you didn’t need to, she might haemorrhage, she might die, leaving her new son and two other children motherless. These were things Grace made herself stop thinking about.