In Falling Snow (8 page)

I woke with a crescent moon through the long window above us and Violet kicking me in the head in her sleep. There hadn't been enough mattresses to go around and so while the seven doctors and Cicely Hamilton each had their own mattress at one end of the large room the rest of us doubled up at the other. I say mattress but really they were no more than mats, calico roughly sewn around straw. Compared to the prospect of another night on the cold stone floor, they were heaven, according to Miss Quoyle, who confided in me she suffered from chilblains and piles, neither of which was aided by the cold.

Out of shyness on my part, Violet and I had gone to sleep end to end. When I moved to the other end to avoid her kicking feet, I faced my back to her back, but the mattress was small, hardly a single, and the cold . . . I'd dressed in everything I had, only drawing the line at boots because they were so filthy, and still I was cold. Stanthorpe might frost in the middle of winter and we'd keep a fire burning all night but Royaumont had decades of cold in its stone walls, the sort of cold that eats through skin and muscle and bone to your marrow. Even my hair was cold. I woke again when I rolled over onto the icy floor. I moved back onto the mattress, curling in behind Violet this time, warmer as two halves than two singles, and fell into a deep sleep.

I dreamed I was at Risdon and Tom had climbed into my bed like he used to when he was small. I woke some time later and found my arm around Violet. She slept on and I lay there, warm and snug. Suddenly I thought of Tom as he might be now, without a mat to lie on or roof over his head. I shuddered.

The first time I got up to tend to Tom in the night he would have been just a few months old, crying loud enough to wake the neighbour's rooster and set it crowing. I lay in bed a few minutes more, expecting Daddy to get up as he had the other nights, but the crying went on. I went into Daddy's room where we'd put Tom's crib. Daddy and I hadn't known much of what to do with him when we brought him home and Daddy said that's what my mother had done with me and it had worked all right. It was the first time since she'd passed that he'd mentioned her name without leaving the room immediately, which I took for a good sign.

I stood by the crib for a moment, still thinking Daddy might wake, but he'd been up since four that morning working at the far edge of the property and he remained asleep despite Tom's wailing, which was getting louder now that he sensed me nearby. I peered into the crib. Tom was concentrating pretty hard on crying. I tried patting him on the belly but that just made it worse. I stroked his little bald head and on he wailed. So I picked him up and spoke softly and that calmed him somewhat, which gave me confidence. But then he was wide awake and his eyes remained open despite my singing “Go to sleep little baby” as I'd heard Daddy do in the evenings. Tom was making a kind of sucking noise with his mouth and so I figured he must be hungry. I carried him out to the kitchen, thinking to warm some milk. I lit a lamp and went to put him in his little crib by the stove but as soon as I put him down, the cries resumed, so I picked him up again. Holding him in one arm I managed to get the stove lit—Daddy had fuelled it before going to bed—to heat the water to warm the milk. I put the warm milk in a cup—we had no bottles with nipples in those days. He guzzled it down, burped so loudly I thought I must have killed him, then relaxed into a drowse.

Every time I tried to put him back in the crib, by the stove first and then in Daddy's room, he cried again. I knew it was the middle of the night although I hadn't looked at the clock. I'm not even sure I knew how to tell the time. I sat with Tom awhile in the kitchen chair. I was tired myself and cold but the only place he was content was in my arms. Finally, I took him back to my bed and he nuzzled down beside me and went off immediately into a deep sleep and then so did I and neither of us woke until late the next morning.

The morning after that, Daddy helped me move Tom's crib into my room. It was a mistake, I soon realised, for after our mother died, if Daddy was moving forward at all, it was only Tom needing him that kept him on his feet, and once he saw that Tom had me and I had Tom, he drifted into a deep despondence. He still got up in the morning and went off to work as he always had. But he worked and ate and slept like a man condemned. When he spoke, it was as if he was a long way away, talking to a stranger. In the night, I'd hear him talking softly to himself in his cups. One night, after I'd settled Tom, I crept down the stairs and listened. He wasn't talking. He was singing, “Put on your red shoes, put on those red shoes I know so well.” I knew nothing of the world, but I knew he was the only one left and I'd lost him, and I didn't know quite how to get him back.

Some nights, after he'd graduated to his own little bed, Tom would come into my bed after a bad dream. By the time he climbed in and warmed up, he'd be well and truly awake and we'd lie there facing one another in the dark and he'd tell me things to try to wake me up too. I still remember the outline of his face in the dark, moonlight showing his smile, his hand on my head, pulling my ear around to his mouth to “tell me a secret.” It would be something nonsensical, something designed to get my attention, generally involving poos or wees. And we'd remain like that and sometimes he'd fall back asleep in mid-conversation and sleep on for hours while I lay awake. Other times he'd chat until we'd hear the kookaburras on the water tank and I'd give up on my efforts to get him back to sleep and we'd climb out of bed and start the day.

Tom and I managed as well as could be expected. In a way, losing my mother so young, which everyone said was a terrible tragedy, especially for a girl—imagine when she's older—was softened by being needed for some task other than grief, that of caring for Tom. And he was a grand boy, never bothered by my many incapacities, never even noticing the failure on my part to impose a routine, as Mrs. Carson had told me to do on her first visit to the house, and sooner rather than later, she said through a small mouth. She was good to me, Mrs. Carson, and I don't mean to sound ungrateful for her advice. She did her best in those first weeks to call in. She showed me the basics, changing a nappy, bathing, and burping a baby. She had strong views about the discipline needed to raise children successfully. She even went as far as to say to Mr. Carson, within my hearing, that how could I be expected to discipline a child when I'd been allowed such free rein myself for so long, without meaning to speak ill of the dead, but really, that woman had no idea.

After a time, I had no memory of my mother, although I often told people I remembered her well, repeating others' stories about her, because I felt disloyal forgetting her. But I had forgotten her. I looked at the photograph we had, the one I'd seen a thousand times, taken the day she married Daddy at Risdon—she's sitting at the dresser smiling up to the camera like she knows a big secret—and it was as if I was looking at a beautiful stranger, her red hair and lips coloured in after the photograph was taken, her dress sheeny in black and white. It was a most unbalancing experience to see someone I knew so well and not know her at all.

Mrs. Carson's suggestions were beyond my understanding or experience. All the boys had tasted their daddy's belt, Mrs. Carson said, and it did a power of good. Perhaps because it was foreign to me, the notion of beating or being beaten, I didn't take any notice. Over time, Mrs. Carson stopped visiting. The house became more of a mess, she seemed less inclined to stay long and Daddy didn't much like her coming, and had a way of making it known. To be honest, I was relieved. I didn't understand much of what she told me I had to do, but when I did understand, I was horrified at the thought of purposely inflicting pain on little Tom. We struggled on as best we could. And now Tom had grown into a fine boy who could decide on his own to go to war.

My thoughts were interrupted when I heard someone get up at the other end of the room, the big door creaking open. As gently as I could, I rose from the mattress, pulled on my boots, and followed, using the coming light of dawn through the windows to guide me. I descended the great staircase. I couldn't see where the other early riser had gone but I managed to find my way to an unlocked door. Out in the cloisters, the world had turned to white. The snow had stopped falling now but that just made its presence on the ground more extraordinary to my eyes. I spoke my name and it came back to me changed, deeper and more resonant. The world was indeed quieter and louder all at once, just as Miss Ivens said it would be. I ran out into the centre of the yard where there was a fountain, frozen now, surrounded by stone benches. All was covered in snow. I picked up handfuls of the stuff, tasted it on my tongue. One or two songbirds braved the cold.

I took the route Violet had taken the night before to the abbey lawns and found the stables, Violet's car in its spot, two others besides. I ran along the outside of the abbey, the path now covered in snow, snow up to my ankles, the sun appearing and turning everything gold. I looked back at the abbey buildings and was touched once more with a sense of something beyond me. Surely if God was anywhere, I thought, He was here. I knew no French history then, none of poor Royaumont's vicissitudes, but if you could have seen the dawn cradling that beautiful stone structure in its soft fat arms, you'd know what I mean. I was filled with the spirit of Royaumont and just for a moment experienced myself as nothing more or less than a tiny part of that holy morning.

I realised I was shivering with cold. I ran back the way I'd come, kicking up snow with every step, ran a circle about the cloister to warm up, leaving mine as the first footprints on the world that day.

In the kitchen, I found Miss Ivens, her hair messily pinned up, her greatcoat not quite covering a floral nightgown. She turned to me. “Thought I'd get some tea on for the girls,” she said. “They've not had an easy time of it these last few days. Do you know much about fires?” She'd stuffed the stove so full you couldn't fit in another thing. She was about to set alight the mess she'd made.

“As a matter of fact,” I said, “I know an awful lot about fires.”

“Oh good. Well, let's get it started.” She gave me the matches. “You're bright this morning.”

“I've been in the snow,” I said. I must have been grinning because Miss Ivens smiled too, as if she understood, or found my joy infectious. I set the matches down and removed the larger pieces of wood. I spread the kindling out as I'd learned, leaving room for breath. I lit a fire whose flame quickly grew. I fed it well and it kicked the room into life.

We sat down at the long table together while we waited for the kettle to boil. “I didn't quite tell you the truth about the abbey, did I?” Miss Ivens said. She looked tired this morning, as if she hadn't slept well. “It needs a lot of work. Thank God you've joined us, Iris. I'd be lost without language.”

“Well, you see, the thing is, Miss Ivens, I'm not sure I'm quite the person to help you. I'm . . .” I'd fully intended to tell Miss Ivens the truth, that I shouldn't stay at Royaumont, that I was really here to find my brother, but in her floral gown and with her messed-up hair, I felt sorry for her. I found I couldn't tell her, not quite yet. “I'm not sure I can help you. I've never built a hospital.”

“Do you think I have? I need your French, Iris, not your building skills. None of us would have chosen it this way, but it's what we have and we must do our best.”

Miss Ivens and the first contingent—the other doctors as well as the nurses, orderlies, and drivers—had been at Royaumont three days, she told me. When he'd offered his abbey to the Croix-Rouge for use as a hospital, the impractical Monsieur Gouin was not entirely forthcoming about its state. Then, in December, with the staff already embarked, Monsieur Gouin wired Edinburgh to inform the committee that the abbey wasn't ready for them.

“We were well on the way by then,” Miss Ivens said, “and I felt it impolitic to delay. It was rash, I realise now. From Dieppe, I wired Monsieur Gouin that I would come straight to Royaumont from Paris.