“How long have I been out?”
“Two days.”
“You let him go two days without feeding?”
“I’ve put him on the breast now and then. You wouldn’t be producing milk before now anyway.”
“I need to see the girls.”
“Yes,” David said. “We’ll get them today. You’re all right. That’s what I can’t get over. You’re all right.”
Grace had recovered fully and Henry had been fine. They’d escaped potential tragedy, both of them, she’d thought later. And then at two, Henry had fallen off their first-floor verandah onto the driveway. Grace had seen it happen, had seen him climb up the balustrade and was going out to stop him when he went over. He’d fallen face up and been knocked unconscious. Grace saw immediately that he’d stopped breathing. Looking back, she couldn’t say how she’d done what she’d done. She rushed down to him, cleared his airway, and started to breathe air into his tiny lungs, counting out the seconds. A neighbour emerged from his house. “Get an ambulance!” Grace called. “Get an ambulance now!” She kept count of the breaths, remembered exactly how to perform CPR on a young child, how often and how much pressure on the chest, how much breath into the lungs. By the time she heard the ambulance siren in the distance, her little son was breathing. His eyes were wild with pain. We need to stay very still, she was saying, not knowing if he’d broken his spine. We’re going for a ride in an ambulance. But right now, we need to stay very very still, nodding as she held him down. Grace heard something behind her and looked up and around. There was Mia, all of six, looking terrified. “It’s all right, honey,” Grace said. “Henry fell over. He’s going to be all right,” as if saying it would be enough. It wasn’t until she’d seen Mia’s face that she realised she’d just resuscitated her own son and felt the terror.
Henry had surgery to repair a kidney—he’d hit a wooden garden stake on the way down. It had probably saved his brain by breaking the fall. Ian Gibson had been the paediatrician. He’d come across to the hospital specially. Grace liked that he didn’t pull punches on that occasion, told them the truth that even the surgeon had been unwilling to tell them, the blow to his kidney, the possibility it wouldn’t heal. But it had healed and Henry had been fine.
She thought of these things now as a fog settled over the city. What if she’d harmed Henry, when she fell, when she let him fall? What if there had been some damage to his foetal or two-year-old brain that was only now coming to light? She realised that this was what she was dreading, why she hadn’t wanted to take Henry to see Ian Gibson. She would blame herself. This is what she was avoiding. It wasn’t enough.
She went into the house and telephoned Ian Gibson’s rooms from downstairs, leaving a message. “Ask Ian if he can fit Henry in.” She was about to hang up when she realised she hadn’t given a name. “It’s Grace Hogan here, I’m Henry Ravenswood’s mother. We need to see Ian as soon as possible.”
Iris
It was before seven o’clock in the morning when Grace turned up at the door, knocking loudly enough to wake the entire neighbourhood and calling my name. I hadn’t slept well, having fallen off the afternoon before and then up half the night with my silly old thoughts. When I heard her calling, I closed my bedroom door—the contents of the box still spread all over the floor—and went out.
Grace charged in and said she wanted to know what the GP had said about travelling but she was agitated, couldn’t sit still.
“She says I’m fit for anything,” I lied, but my heart wasn’t in it. I was exhausted. I couldn’t even muster the energy for the shop, and the idea of fixing breakfast was impossible. I wasn’t hungry anyway, I felt as if I hadn’t been hungry for months.
“I found some two-for-one flights to Paris in November,” Grace said, walking from the kitchen to the dining room and back. Where did she get the energy? “If I came with you, we’ve got a better chance of getting you there and back alive.”
“Have a cup of tea, dear, for goodness’ sake. You’re making me nervous.” And then a strange thing happened. Grace burst into tears. And not just tears. She started sobbing, rather loudly. “Oh my Lord, Grace, whatever’s the matter?” I couldn’t remember a time she cried like this, not since she was small.
She continued to pace around the kitchen sobbing. I’d have got up to her if I could but I was just too tired. “Iris, I think I killed a child.”
“What do you mean?” And I was confused then. I thought she was talking about Tom. “You didn’t do anything to him.”
“What? No, at the hospital. I missed something I shouldn’t have missed. It led to a baby’s death. And then Mia broke her arm, and I wasn’t even there.”
“Mia?” It took me a moment to remember who Mia was.
“Yes, she fell off a verandah at school. She was all right but I wasn’t there. And the baby. I should have seen . . .” She looked as if she might fall over on the spot.
“You come here,” I said. I must have said it loudly and sternly, for she came immediately and sat down opposite me, sobbing all the while. I put out my hands and waited until she gave me hers. “Grace, one thing I know for sure. You’ve always been too hard on yourself, right from when you were little. If something didn’t go your way from the beginning you threw it across the room and called yourself stupid. I never knew how to help you develop patience and compassion towards yourself and I still don’t know.
“But one thing I do know better than you is that doctors make mistakes just like everyone else. Even Miss Ivens, Grace. Now, did you mean to kill a baby?” I thought that’s what she said she’d done. She shook her head between sobs. “Will you know next time?” She nodded yes. “Then stop your silly crying. Won’t do you any good anyway. I’m certainly not having tears if you’re coming to Royaumont with me.”
She sniffed and wiped her nose with her arm. “Do you mean it, Iris? Do you mean I can come?” She was taking the short breaths of a child.
Get ahold of yourself, I wanted to say. “I suppose,” I said. “As long as you let me do what I need to and don’t organise me and as long as we don’t have any more outbursts like that.”
“Of course,” Grace said. She wiped her face, produced a tissue from somewhere deep in her jacket, blew her nose loudly, and proceeded to do exactly what I’d asked her not to do. She was organising me. “We’ll fly first-class so you’ll be more comfortable. And we’ll have a stopover on the way. It’ll be fun—and I can find out what you were like when you were young.”
Here was Grace crying about a death for which I was almost sure she couldn’t be held responsible no matter what had happened, cheered by the fact she could chaperone an octogenarian on a trip to France. The poor girl needed an easier life.
And then it hit me. If Grace came with me to Royaumont, I would have to tell her the whole story. I would have to tell her everything. I wasn’t sure I’d have the courage to do that. For if she was unforgiving when it came to herself, Grace had always been even more unforgiving when it came to me.
Paris 1918
He looked up towards her. The tilt of his head, his grin, the way the light shone in his hair; she felt as if her heart would burst. She breathed in sharply. What? he said.
Nothing, she said, letting the breath out slowly.
What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done? he said, leaning back on the bed, one hand behind his head, the other holding a cigarette.
The worst . . . She screwed up her nose in thought. She went and sat on the end of the bed and had to look back to him. You, she said finally, I think you’re the worst thing, but maybe losing my school blazer? I don’t know. Hard choice.
Seriously, he said.
Ah, seriously. She stood up and walked over to the window, pulling the robe around her. Let’s not talk seriously.
The war? he said. Is the war what’s too serious? She could see he really didn’t understand. But she nodded.
The war, yes, now that you mention it. And the drapes. The drapes are just too serious.
He looked even more confused. I have never met anyone like you, he said. I thought I was in love once. But you’re like another language.
She turned away from him, looking past the serious drapes out at the Luxembourg Gardens. We shouldn’t talk like this.
Why not?
Because. Because we don’t know how we feel really. It’s all so fraught.
Fraught. How?
The war. That’s what I was trying to say. I don’t know what I think or feel. And there are complications. I ought to tell you.
I know what I feel, he said. I’ve known since the very first time I met you.
We live worlds apart.
Only if we decide we do, he said. He got up and went over to where she stood, put his hands on her shoulders. He swept her hair aside and kissed her neck softly. Slowly she turned around to face him. She saw there were tears in his eyes again.
Oh my heart, he said. Oh my heart.
Iris
There’s a knock on the door. I seem to have fallen asleep on the floor, the contents of the wooden box around me. His letters are spread over the floor, that sure hand I’d never forget. I pick them up quickly and put them back in the box. There’s a line of spit from one corner of my mouth that I quickly wipe off my cheek.
Did Grace come this morning? Is she still here? The sun is streaming in through the window. “Coming,” I call as sensibly as I can. But when I go out there’s no one there.
I am still half in a dream I have just had, where Tom came and spoke to me, like the waking dream but I’m sure I’ve been asleep this time. Not Tom as he was in France but as a boy, perhaps eight. There’s a photograph of him at that age, standing at the side of the house holding a dead snake he and Daddy have just pulled from the water tank. Tom’s head is at an angle, and while his eyes are as bright as ever and shine straight out at you, it’s this tilt of his head that lends him an air of uncertainty, impermanence, as if perhaps he knows he’s not here forever. I look and want him to tell me, did he know, did he know he would die so young? And was life, the life he had, enough? That’s what you come to eventually. When you’ve got through the guilt and the rage and the blaming. You just want them not to have suffered, to have lived enough. The snake is longer than Tom and he holds it up to show it off, and perhaps it’s this rather than some deep life knowledge that tilts his head. “Wasn’t it grand, Iris?” he says in the dream. “And didn’t we have fun? Don’t you think, Iris? Well, don’t you?” I can never answer. I try but my voice fails me.
In my groggy state, I see Tom again, as large as life, standing in the hallway, Tom as the young man I knew just before he died. But when he speaks, I realise it’s only Geoffrey. He must have been down getting my spare key from under the house when I went to open the door. He looks worried. “Where were you, Iris? I’ve been knocking for ages.”
“Oh, I was out the back,” I lie, my face all bent out of shape—I could feel it—and my hair all over the place when I touch it.
In June of 1916, we received word to evacuate as many patients as were ambulatory and expect severe casualties. For three days, the hospital was almost empty. We’d already increased our capacity again in response to requests from the Croix-Rouge and now we had four hundred beds, including an emergency ward we set up in the refectory, originally intended to be temporary, moving the staff dining room out into the cloister. Goodness knows what we’ll do when winter comes back, Miss Ivens said about our new dining arrangements, but we can’t worry about that now. We knew the wounded would come soon as the pounding of guns grew more frequent. We remained twenty-five miles from the front and unlikely to be attacked at Royaumont, but we were near enough to Paris—a key target for the Germans—that Miss Ivens continued to make us carry out occasional drills, blacking out the hospital and moving patients and staff to the cellars under the abbey.
I’d seen Tom every few months. Either he came to Royaumont or I went to Chantilly on an errand. He’d remained in the postal service and seemed to have resigned himself to his role, much to my relief. He lost weight as he grew even taller, so much so I worried at times he wasn’t eating enough. When I could, I took something from Royaumont, biscuits, cakes, a lemon tart. He told me I had to stop worrying. He was fine, he said. Violet said she thought I was driving him mad.
As soon as we received the advice from the Croix-Rouge I went to the kitchen to let Miss Quoyle know we were expecting more wounded and we should check our stores and reorder whatever might be needed. When I walked in she and Cicely were arguing. I knew what it was about before I heard their words. A new doctor, Louisa Martindale, had joined us that week. When she’d offered her services to the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, Miss Ivens had snapped her up. But Dr. Martindale had brought her husband across with her and she wanted a job for him. Miss Ivens had said he could be a driver. Some of the drivers were happy enough—as happy as they ever were about anything—but because he was a man some of the others were incensed about it. They’d been the same about Tom. Whenever he visited, he helped out in the kitchen—he was a favourite with Quoyle—or shifted furniture for the sisters. He worked on the cars too, for any of the drivers who let him. Most of them were used to him now. But to hear Cicely on the subject of men working at the hospital, you’d think Dr. Martindale had brought the devil himself to work with us at Royaumont.
“Listen to yourself,” Quoyle was saying to Cicely now. “What’s he ever done to you?”
“It’s not him,” Cicely said. “It’s all of them, what they’ve done to all of us. He comes here and we simply let him in. It’s only because he’s the husband, not the wife. If he was a woman, what do you suppose would happen?”
“Well, I imagine you wouldn’t be making such a fuss,” Quoyle said. “You’d put her straight in. I know your type. You hate men, don’t you?”
This was the wrong thing to say to Cicely if Miss Quoyle had hoped to calm the waters. “And I know yours,” Cicely spat. “You’re ignorant.”
Quoyle burst into tears—not an easy thing even for Cicely to achieve—and left the kitchen. I looked at Cicely. “This Cause of yours can’t be much chop if all it does is upset someone like Miss Quoyle. Have you no respect for age?”
“Shut up, Iris,” Cicely said. “You’re so stupid you don’t see what’s right in front of you.”
I thought about Cicely for the rest of the day. She struck out at everything like a cat that had been mistreated as a kitten. Sometimes you just had to wait for it to subside with people like that. Sometimes it never did. But in the evening, I went over to the garages to find Violet. The truth was, even though it had been a frequent topic of conversation during my time at Royaumont, I didn’t really understand what all the fuss was about with the Cause and why it was a source of tension among the other women.
“Suffrage,” Violet said. “They want the vote. Aren’t they doing the same in Australia?”
“Women already have the vote in Australia,” I said.
Violet nodded. “Well, in England there are those who want the vote and those who will go outside the law to get the vote, the Pankhursts and their friends. Royaumont was started by the national union. Elsie Inglis was for the hunger strikes, or at least, she didn’t come out against them. The war’s put a hold on it all anyway and I’ve no idea why Cicely’s so upset about old Jack Martindale. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. And he’s good at poker.”
When Violet mentioned the name Pankhurst, I remembered my aunt Veronica, who visited us from Scotland when I was eight. The first I knew of her was when Daddy showed me the letter saying she was coming “to meet the wee bairns.” I didn’t even know I had an aunt and when I asked Daddy, he said he hadn’t thought to tell me. He’d only met her once before he married our mother. When I asked Daddy what she was like he just said, “She’s like your mother, only younger,” which didn
’t help.
“Your mother’s sister is a suffragist,” Mrs. Carson told me the day before Veronica was due to arrive. She said it delicately, as if I might be offended. I think Mrs. Carson came over especially to warn me, to make sure Tom and I weren’t going to be in any moral danger. “You’d do well to be polite, but not listen to what she has to say. She’s in cahoots with Pankhurst and her crew.” Mrs. Carson left a rhubarb and apple pie, which was kind of her, and then scooted off when she saw Daddy’s horse approaching from the western boundary. I wondered what cahoots were.
Daddy shaved and changed his clothes and told me to bathe Tom. He cleaned up the bottles from the table and helped me wash the linen and make the beds. He swept. Then he took me and Tom to the railway station in the trap. Before the train had quite stopped, a woman jumped down and I knew straightaway it was Veronica. She had a huge grin on her face and red hair like mine that fell down her back like a long rust waterfall, a wild thing, and she had my green eyes and milky skin but not my freckles. She was tall and long-legged and looked as if she might like to get on a horse and ride pretty fast right then. And she wore pants. I’d never seen anything like her before. She was amazing.
Veronica was five years younger than my mother, my father had told me, twenty-eight when she visited us. I was big for my age and awkward. The only models of womanhood I had were Mrs. Carson, who was large and slow moving, and the nuns at the convent, who were impossible to fathom. I knew enough to know that clothes were part of being a woman and that my clothes were never quite right—the hems, the pressing, the combinations—but not enough to know how to fix them.
“You must be Iris,” Veronica said, picking me up in surprisingly strong arms and swinging me around onto her hip, then scooping Tom up in the other arm on the turn. “Aren’t you both gorgeous?” At first Tom held onto my hand as we swung around but soon he was giggling. I’d never seen him as comfortable with a stranger.
In Falling Snow Page 21