She liked to gossip and that was always welcome. Lord Tarlton owned half of Banffshire, she claimed—his grandfather, an English interloper, as described by Airdrie, had cleared out the population of the estates to Australia and New Zealand.
My uncle knows the present Tarlton remotely, she said, and a cousin was his land agent at some stage, though I haven’t bothered Lady Tarlton with that news. As for Lady Tarlton herself, her name is Julia Henning and she’s English—Manchester-born in fact. She owned her own millinery shop in the West End, with very blue-blooded ladies as her customers. But still, in the eyes of that group, a hatmaker—however fine a hat she might put together—is subhuman. My mother says it was murder for them when they married. Lady Hatshop, everyone called her. You see, there was many a mammy with a plain daughter had her eye on wee sawney Lord Tarlton. So there was an unco scandal when he bespoke beautiful Miss Henning. At first glance he might seem attractive—in a bit of a dither like Major Darlington—but there are no depths behind it. A high Tory messenger boy.
I mean, she continued, even the army dispensed with him. And I believe he didn’t cover himself with glory in your country either. His wife’s politics helped drive them apart from the beginning. So why did they marry? Well, a title’s a title and a beautiful hatmaker is a beautiful hatmaker. And Miss Henning might have thought she could influence him and make something of him. But no sooner did he have her locked up than he started tomcatting his way around London. They have no children but he has bastards everywhere—I know one he’s supporting in Putney. Though the Australians hated him, he has a certain charm and has wee bastards there as well—the daughters of the big graziers. He made himself persona non grata with all the big . . . What do you call them?
Squatters, Naomi supplied.
Yes, them.
You must be exaggerating, Doctor, Naomi suggested.
I don’t think I am very much, said Airdrie after a pensive assessment. I would say that Lady Tarlton is the woman with the best excuse in the Empire for taking a lover.
Taking a lover? asked Naomi.
Taking a lover? asked the English Roses. Who?
Well, said Airdrie, let those with eyes to see . . .
Naomi was surprised by how quickly the initial shock of the idea faded in her and was replaced by annoyance at Airdrie and her supposed knowledge of Lady Tarlton.
You’re a good, loyal girl, said Dr. Airdrie with conviction not mockery. You’re standing up for Lady Tarlton, aren’t you? Defending her repute? I don’t think you need to. In my eyes, her repute stands.
Even then, Naomi saw some of the English Roses avert their eyes as if they knew something Naomi didn’t.
And I thought you were being tolerant too, Durance. Of this Lady Tarlton and Major Darlington matter. Good luck to her, declared Airdrie. Funny though, that she goes for those slightly dazed sort of fellows. But you didn’t know? Don’t be ashamed. It speaks well of you.
Naomi set to in her mind to remodel the Lady Tarlton she knew to the possibility Airdrie was right. It was easier to do than she had thought. She would have been shaken a year or so ago—or, say, before the Archimedes. Now it was such a small matter. The front dwarfed all.
Airdrie approached her as she left to go back on duty.
I’m sorry, she said. I was mischievous in general but it was not aimed at you. You probably think I am a mere gossip too, and I am. Love it, I do. Can’t help it. Forgive me.
Naomi walked away and didn’t care what Airdrie thought of people who were brusque.
That evening she got an apologetic note from Airdrie, inviting her to lunch in Wimereux—they could get a lift in there with Carling the following Saturday. This would of course be dependent on a convoy coming in. But moules and pommes frites were a specialty of the Pas de Calais, wrote Airdrie with gusto. Yummy! And all you say to me—I swear—will be kept secret.
When it did snow in the meantime, an unusually early fall portending a bad winter, Mitchie’s few Australian nurses danced in its cleanness—never before encountered by them—in the garden. They were watched with amusement by the English Roses. Naomi had by now heard a lightly wounded Australian officer murmuring the news that Major Darlington was getting on a treat with her ladyship. But even the Australians—with a taste for ribaldry—were careful how they displayed their amusement at this. Envy must not be confessed to, and so the male code was to reach for mockery. It would have been more open if Lady Tarlton and Major Darlington had not grown to be so worthy of esteem and veneration. There seemed to be a strong and informal agreement amongst the increasing number of those who knew of their affair that it should no longer be a matter of comment. A trip by the walking wounded into Boulogne, where they talked to other soldiers, proved that rumors that the Australian Voluntary was an eccentric and slapdash place were common. Knowing what they knew, they resented that image. As well as that, the affair had not distracted Lady Tarlton from keeping the meals plentiful and the wards warm in the huge spaces of the château—a house which, as she had feared, invited in a gale each time the main door opened.
Penelope Airdrie and Naomi went into Wimereux for their lunch and were pleased to take shelter in a restaurant from the windy promenade on which—for a freezing half hour or so—they inspected the long stretch of tidal beach and the murky whitecaps of a dismal sea.
Never one for the seaside, me, confessed Airdrie.
A fire blazed in the restaurant. They ordered mulled wine. Then a huge bowl of moules and another of fried potatoes was brought to their table. They donned large bibs and—after opening and devouring the moules—rinsed their hands in bowls of water. Dr. Airdrie looked out through the lace curtains.
Never pretty, never pretty, this time of year.
This gave her an opportunity to ask Naomi details of Australian weather, Australian skies, Australian strands. It was peculiar that weather brought out a tendency to patriotism in a person. Storms and murk were forgotten. Summers were described and frosts unmentioned. As she expanded on the subject of humid days generating thunderstorms, Dr. Airdrie raised her hands to cover her face.
You’re not feeling sick, are you? asked Naomi.
I am not myself, said Dr. Airdrie. Listening to you, I am not myself. I believe I am in love.
Naomi thought this was worth at least rinsing her hands and ceasing to eat. Oh. Who is the most fortunate man?
That’s the thing. I’m not of the fortunate-man persuasion. I love you.
Naomi felt riveted to her seat and something like an electric pulse moved upwards through her body. It was her turn to cover her face. This could not be taken in. It was not a matter of moral bewilderment. It was too strange.
Please say nothing, Airdrie softly urged her. I have studied you and the way you go about your work. This combination you have of intelligence and reserve and grit.
Naomi decided she would flee the restaurant. A kind of panic drove her. The words intelligence and reserve and grit had done it. Her haunches began to move without reference to her conscious mind. She could have been on the street before she knew it. But she knew on some calm plain of her soul that Airdrie would be back at the château by the evening and need to be worked with. She had heard a matron at Royal Prince Alfred warn of “Sapphic tendencies” which sometimes arose in nurses’ quarters and were to be fought and—please, girls!—reported. Yet after all—after Lemnos and Freud’s rape and all the rest—she was more stunned by Airdrie’s gush of affection than by the idea that the doctor was somehow reprehensible and immoral and, as the matron in Sydney had urged, reportable.
She had been in love—or had thought she was—with the French teacher at the high school in the Macleay. A sunny younger woman who broke girls’ hearts by marrying a traveler and moving to Sydney. In her imagination Naomi had imagined kisses exchanged with the French teacher. But that had been a girl’s fantasy and had not lasted to become the currency between a woman surgeon and a nurse.
Please, Dr. Airdrie said—seeing at once she had b
een too rash. I shouldn’t have said anything.
Naomi knew she didn’t want Airdrie. But she also did not want Airdrie shamed—and that in spite of the woman’s recklessness. This is why she talks to the nurses in that fevered way, she thought. She’s uncomfortable with her desire. The “Sapphic tendencies.” They make her chatter away.
Naomi reached and held her wrist—just as a woman would the wrist of another who had suffered a loss. Airdrie’s voice became almost inaudible.
I am not enchanted by men, she confided, though I like their company. I am enchanted by women. I’m enchanted by you.
Listen, said Naomi. You’re a good surgeon and the men respect you. And so they should. But I don’t want you to be in love with me—if you are in fact in love, and not just lonely. Saying what you said bewilders me. It shames me too.
Airdrie’s brown eyes showed a flare of anger.
You’re shamed by love? If that’s the case, I pity you.
Maybe you’re right to.
The fury died in Airdrie. It had been perhaps just a product of the rebuff and of her discomfort. Both of them took off their ridiculous burghers’ moules-eating bibs. Their meal was finished.
We can work together, said Airdrie flatly, whatever you think of me. That should be a given.
Of course, said Naomi. We’ll work together as usual.
Any edge of complaint in Airdrie had now been utterly blunted and more as exposition, she murmured, If a man declares love for a woman, that’s romance. But if a woman declares love for a woman, the heavens fall in. It’s worse still for men who love other men. But I’m of normal Presbyterian stock and I fear that in the eyes of most people, and in yours, I’ve committed some crime.
No, no, said Naomi. I know by now that all the crimes are up at the front.
It would actually be easier to deal with my feelings of the moment, Airdrie confessed, if you were outraged. If you picked up your skirts and called down God’s judgement and flounced out.
Once I would have condemned you to hell. Because I didn’t know the scope of things.
Airdrie sighed. So, you won’t give off an air of contempt when we’re working at the Tarlton convent, eh? You won’t flinch when I appear?
Don’t be ridiculous, said Naomi. It was difficult when Airdrie—a surgeon who was meant to maintain remoteness—behaved like some anxious schoolgirl. It was also endearing.
They picked up their glasses of wine. Naomi looked her in the eye as if it was the best method of rebuff. She saw that though this doctor was a year or two older than she was, in some ways she was clearly younger than that.
Did you know I have a sister? Naomi asked. I have a real sister just down the road in Rouen.
You do? said Airdrie. You are not offering her as a substitute sacrifice, are you?
That’s not worth answering.
Younger than you?
That’s right. And we never got on until this war. It is stupid and vain to think that all this . . .
She waved her hand to imply not just the restaurant but the fiasco out there in the gale, where men stood in streams of water beneath parapets waiting to go on some useless patrol or for a stupefying barrage to descend on them.
It’s stupid to think of this, Naomi persevered, as if it was a machine to make us true sisters. But that’s the way it’s happened. It won’t be any consolation to the wives and mothers of the men. I may one day have a husband—though I can’t exactly imagine it. But if I don’t have a husband, I’ll have my sister. Perhaps we’ll get old living in the same house in the same town. It is possible now where it wasn’t before. While we were at Lemnos we used to say that France and Belgium couldn’t be worse than Gallipoli. But it is worse by multiples! We’re so accustomed to dreadful things now that we might need to live together because no one else will understand the things we’ve seen.
The two finished their wine as equal partners, and beyond the window the malicious gale—mirror to the conflict itself—refused to abate.
• • •
After Naomi had rebuffed Dr. Airdrie—after her relief at surviving the lunch with something like aplomb—it was nonetheless as if through Airdrie’s proposal Naomi’s own loneliness had been proven. Her room was at the back of the house. It had been a little too warm through the summer—it missed the sea zephyrs and picked up any hot breeze from the south. Now it was so cold that it needed a stove, but she hesitated to ask for one because there was always a shortage. She used canvas from a torn tent to plug the gaps between the window and its frame. But the cold still seemed to her not a condition but a diabolic presence—like her own solitude made flesh.
As she lay there at night she began to understand that what Dr. Airdrie had spotted in her—and seen as an opportunity—was this unrealized need for warmth, for a body to interpose itself between her and the ruthless cold. Lady Tarlton complained that in the unheated offices overnight, hospital fountain pens broke open when the ink turned to ice. The water pipes froze, and nurses had to melt ice to make cocoa for the patients. And when the cold—despite blankets and a military long coat, army socks, long underwear, even a balaclava—threatened to split Naomi open, she understood the need to be held, flesh on flesh and blood against blood. The past freezing nights had brought her to this conviction—that she might meet Airdrie partway. There might be closeness without passion—embrace of one kind and not of another. Each morning she was pleased she had not yielded to this idea. Each night—under extracoarse blankets—she feared the entry of the perfidious cold into her core.
Someone could see her on her way to Airdrie’s room though—that would be the trouble. Or Airdrie would be called on to operate at some frigid hour while Naomi was there. But one night her coldness could not be endured alone anymore, and she took to the corridor. She had excuses if encountered—she was on her way to a particular storeroom where perhaps there were spare hot-water bottles. She rehearsed the contract she would make with Airdrie.
But as she got close to the surgeon’s door and stooped to knock secretively, she heard conversation inside. It was nothing too loud but was definite discussion of some kind. She could hear the piping voice of a particular tone and rhythm. It was one of the English women—one of Lady Tarlton’s elegant young suffragist women of good family.
At once Naomi lost all sense of cold. Astonishment created its own friction in her blood. Surprisingly, she was amused. This was Dr. Airdrie’s version of love! She had grieved Naomi’s refusal—if at all—a week at most. Or maybe she was just cold too and had found another girl who possessed the desire for warmth. But if Airdrie had been in love with Naomi, she had found new consolation pretty quickly. Alone and in an army coat and socks—unlovely and freezing and shamed and amused by her own innocence in believing Airdrie—she turned around. Remorse and hilarity had both begun to warm her and to prickle along her veins.
Though she was grateful to reach her room and be taken in by its particular freezing air, once she lay down in cold sheets the idea she’d been infected by after the Archimedes came to her again with new certainty. I am not a complete or sealed person. If I was, why did I set out for Doctor Airdrie’s room? Why did I find cold unbearable then and now find it tolerable? I am a string of recoils from circumstance. It was a matter of a mere filament whether I went to be warmed by Airdrie or not. If I had stayed in my room I would not have known why. And I don’t know why I went.
So there was the Naomi who stayed in her room with the threat of ice, and the parallel Naomi who crept down the hall to be warmed by a surgeon. This was simply an echo of her suspicion that there was the Naomi who fell deep down with the Archimedes living in the same flesh as the Naomi who refused to. And so—with her parts and actions scattered all over the atmosphere and cold earth—she could not but deny the glacial night and fall into a profound, accepting sleep. There are men in frozen trenches tonight, she mumbled as a last conscious reproach. They all lacked an Airdrie.
Casualty Clearing
Major Darlington beca
me exercised by the number of men at the Château Baincthun taking up beds in summer and winter because they had been disabled by trench foot or frostbite. Around the bed of a trench-foot–afflicted Australian private who had lost toes to surgery, he gathered Dr. Airdrie and all the nurses—both the half-dozen Australians and the English Roses.
Cripes, a man might as well be onstage, the Australian mumbled as they all gazed at him.
Here is a case, Darlington told them, of quite needless damage—though not, I hasten to say, through the fault of the man involved.
He addressed the Australian, who was clearly embarrassed by this jury of nurses.
Not your fault, eh, old man?
I wouldn’t say so, said the soldier. I mean, sometimes a man got distracted with everything that was happening. Gas was more important. And no use changing your socks if your legs are likely to be blown off pretty soon.
I am sure, said stork-like Darlington, nodding and nodding again. Now, if we want to prevent this sort of thing, we simply must provide a dry, warm place in the trench where men will attend to the problem, have leisure to rub whale oil into their feet and change their socks and—if necessary—boots. For want of such precautions, this will happen, he said, nodding to an orderly, who removed the private’s dressings and exposed the scabbed stumps and blackened flesh of his feet.
Did you use whale oil, my good man?
Everyone just gives up on the whale oil, the private told him. Five minutes after we do it, we’re back up to our hocks in mud again.
You see? Darlington asked his audience. You see what happens?
What puzzled Naomi and the nurses was the question of what—at this distance from the front—they could do about the issue except adopt a stance of impotent protest. But Darlington had not finished.
On the front line, he intoned, men are allowed to stand for days in glutinous muck. Until a chap inevitably becomes a casualty. And sometimes staff officers in clean socks and polished shoes want to punish men, you see, to punish and harangue them for their functional disablement, for a condition which is the fault of the generals. But this, you know, this disablement takes beds from other wounded. No offense intended, old chap. But obviously someone must bear responsibility for the condition of the trenches.
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