The Daughters of Mars (55 page)

There’s something I have to tell you, Charlie, before we go any further. Because it’ll change what you think about me. And it’d be cruel to wait till later. I will not put forward any special pleadings in all this—I’ll tell you how things happened. My mother was ill. It was cervical cancer. Do you know the disease, Charlie?

No, he said. I haven’t even heard . . .

It’s a vicious thing.

Yes? asked Charlie. He looked confused. After all his certainty in the gallery, he was for the moment lost.

The simple truth is—my mother told me she wanted to die. It was something she repeated and that was very unlike her. In the end, when it had all got beyond bearing and she was pleading with God and me to let her die, to
make
her die, I stole enough morphine to put her to rest. But she died, you see, anyhow. Of her own accord. Without me having to use it. Just the same, you’re with a woman who intended to murder her mother. I could say it was mercy. And others could say it too. Naomi says it. But that’s it. How does that match up against Delacroix? Or how does it match up with whatever picture you have of me? But you must know if you want to know me.

He had been frowning through this.

What do you want me to say? he asked. Do you want me to stamp out of here in outrage? You want me to recoil in horror? Is that it? To flog you out of the temple or something?

I was hoping you wouldn’t.

But you were a merciful daughter, for God’s sake, he murmured.

Well, you had to be told, that’s all. Because I am sure you’ve never even dreamed of doing what I had plans of doing in those days.

He shook his head. Then he started kneading his cheek as if he had a toothache.

O Jesus, he said privately. O Jesus Christ.

She didn’t know what this invocation meant.

Let me tell you something, Sally, he said suddenly and in a colorless voice. She could see his teeth. They were not quite locked together but seemed for the first time ready to bite. And there was a rictus.

Imagine this. Imagine a man who went out on a patrol last night and got somehow stuck out there, wounded, thirsty beyond belief, in pain without morphine, hanging on the wire and calling to us in our trench. Calling, “I’m here!” Calling, “Help me, cobber!”

Say we go out before dawn and try to reach him, but we can’t—indeed some of us are killed and wounded trying. And the enemy in
their trenches lets the poor bastard hang there through the early morning and they call out to us in primitive English to come and get our friend. If we tried it, of course . . . Well, you can imagine. A feast for the machine-gun nests. And our mate out there is still calling to us. “Just need a bit of help,” he might call. Do you think we let him hang forever? Do you think we don’t do what I would like to have done to me if I were there crucified on the wire? Do you think we go on listening to him plead forever?

I’m sorry, she told him. It’s shocking. Even so, I have to say this and you have to hear it. That man is not related to you by blood.

No, he insisted. She was suddenly astonished that he was close to tears. But he’s the one we’ll always remember. Even if we get to be old men, we’ll never shake him off. And I say “him” even though it’s really “them.” So why shouldn’t I be angry when what you are telling me is a . . . Well, not a little thing . . . but nothing done. An unfired bullet, for dear Christ’s sake?

She watched his anger. In part, it fascinated her.

There may come a time, he said, when you will need to reassure me that what I have confessed was nothing at all. That it was compassion, not murder. For Christ’s sake, you must take that same medicine now.

I told you because I can live with the thing if you can. The murders and the killings of mercy have both brought it down to size. But the size is still big. It can be borne though. I can be a happy woman for you. It’s my ambition.

She was in fact feeling exalted. She barely doubted she could fly above the cold river.

He closed his eyes briefly. Opening them again, he said, All right, you’ve told me. And I’ve told you. There’s an end to it for now. I can’t guarantee what I’ve told you might not sometimes seep through and poison an hour. But it won’t poison my life.

Nor mine, said Sally. Neither of our tales will.

Bitterly amused now, he said, If I’d known you were going into all this stuff I would have insisted on wine.

It’s not too late. You could have brandy.

And then their croque-monsieur arrived. They fell to it with all the ravenousness of the redeemed. They said little as they ate, his head frequently down, though once he raised it and smiled broadly at her and shook his head just a fraction one way or another. Cognac, he asked the waiter then. It came quickly. He reached out and held her hand as he downed it. He shook his head.

I’m very slow, he confessed. You wouldn’t have told me about all that unless . . . Well,
unless
.

He waved his free hand in the air a little, trying to define the word.

I’m so very flattered. That’s what I should have said straight off. Instead of all that stuff about men on the wire.

He finished the cognac with a gulp. He smiled.

You’ll come with me this afternoon then? he asked.

Yes. With a lot more ease than this morning. Not that I didn’t . . .

I know. You liked it. This morning we saw the world as it would like to be seen. This afternoon we have the reality of the world. We’ll see the world as it is and the way it will become. When you see some of the work of these new chaps, you’ll wish you were born French or Spanish.

• • •

During their exhilarating afternoon at the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Indépendants, whose motto was “No juries, no prizes,” Charlie declared himself nervous that Kiernan would at dinner prove a temperance man and exhibit piety. Sally was able to reassure him. The dinner at L’Arlésienne went delightfully—with Ian himself drinking red wine for the special occasion. Sally and Naomi spoke to each other in an easy way that made Sally remember conversation between them could be blessedly ordinary. The acrid, murderous weight—capable of souring a lifetime—was gone in a day to be replaced by something that could be borne through a lifetime. None of them talked about their particular work—though Kiernan did digress into the organization of clearing stations. Some aspects, he argued, could be better arranged. The stores hut should instead be dug into the earth because without
that . . . well, they got the message. One hit by a Taube and nothing for the wards. And in some of the stores there were—yes, even in these terrible times—signs that a few officials were in the business of war procurement, who were either asinine or had done special deals with suppliers. How rich some people were getting from all these dressings and pharmaceuticals and equipment! he said. How rich from syringes that sometimes fell apart.

But how far it had all progressed since Egypt and the
Archimedes,
Naomi asserted.

Under the influence of unaccustomed wine, it came to Sally as a fancy that the three of them had been cast into the sea and delivered just for this dinner and as company for glorious Charlie.

Meanwhile Naomi reported on the Committee of Clarity and the enduring suspicions of Madame Flerieu, and explained who “dear old Sedgewick” was.

Hungrier than she ever had been since she went to the clearing station—hungry as the reprieved always are—Sally ate liver and pork like a woman who might one day get plump.

• • •

Lady Tarlton’s château was decked for Christmas and kept warm at least in patches by army stoves. Naomi and the nurses made up Christmas boxes for each patient—simple things such as chocolate and tobacco, shortbread, a writing pad. Symbols of homely renewal. She had bought Matron Mitchie some lace in Boulogne. This was one of those Christmases Naomi had read of—when joy is a simple achievement. Her sister now wrote to her weekly and Ian at least each second day. Yet even with the Americans now in France, no one dared speak anymore of the coming year as the conclusive one.

Two days after Christmas, Matron Mitchie got a telegram. Her son was in the hospital at Wimereux with gas inhalation and pneumonia. Mitchie struggled upwards without anyone knowing and was largely dressed and—with prosthesis strapped on—ready to travel when Lady Tarlton found her grinding her way along the corridor.

Lady Tarlton knew by now that she should not thwart Mitchie. She pressed an extra comforter on her and adjusted the collar of her coat and summoned Carling. He was to get the Vitesse Phaeton ready to go to Wimereux. When that was settled, Mitchie asked Naomi to come with her. With difficulty Mitchie was helped downstairs and into the vehicle. She had the idea, she told Naomi once they were inside the great car—where even the smell of the aging leather was a cold exhalation—that she might get her son transferred to the Voluntary once his symptoms eased.

When—through an icebound landscape and out on to the coastal road—they reached the hospital at Wimereux, it looked huge and deliberately ugly under a foul sky. Its grounds were littered with patches of dirty snow, the decay of a glittering Christmas snow of two days before. Carling left them in the car as he made inquiries as to where the boy could be found, and then they rolled down the long and frozen streets between huts—no boys brought out to be exposed to the sun today—until they arrived at the gas ward where young Mitchie was located.

Naomi watched for ice patches as she aided Mitchie from the car into the ward. It was at least warm in there. Nurses had insisted on the season and strung tinsel around the walls. They found Private Mitchie with pads dipped in sodium bicarbonate on his eyes. His skin looked reddish and the ward sister mentioned edema in the lungs and a temperature so high that he had been very deluded—even leaving his bed sometimes.

When Mitchie sat beside him he did not seem to hear the scrape of the chair. He had a square face that was slightly smaller than one would expect for the spacious head behind it. Mitchie began stroking his red, gas-stippled hand with one finger. To Naomi his situation did not look or sound good. Oxygen was wheeled up to him and the mask was put on his face and, for some reason—perhaps because of the way oxygen forced itself into him—the rasping of his breath seemed more intense now than it had before. A nurse took the pads from his eyes
in the hope he could see and converse. But he seemed to recognize nothing.

When the young ward doctor came around, Mitchie identified herself as the patient’s mother and calmly discussed his case further, raising the matter of a tracheotomy and warm ether vapor being pumped into his lungs by way of it. A nurse arrived while they talked and further bathed his eyes with the pads before replacing them with new ones. He flinched and waved his head. He had presented himself at an aid post later than he should have, the doctor told her, and had done so while already suffering pulmonary distress. The combination must have been an alarming experience. But—the ward doctor said—he had his youth and robustness to fall back upon. This was exactly the sort of medical commonplace Matron Mitchie would have uttered to parents in the same situation as she was now. Naomi noticed she invested her attention in every word as if it would need to be subjected to a later analysis—as if there were subtleties of meaning there.

When the doctor was gone, she had a further conversation with the ward sister, during which she suppressed her cough as best she could. The handkerchief she held before her face was doused with eucalyptus oil and she interposed the saturated fabric between herself and anyone else, in case they read the telltale pallor, rose-petal cheeks, the stain of blood on the lips, and sent her away.

From that afternoon Naomi alternated with one of the English Roses in accompanying Mitchie to Wimereux every second day. Naomi was with her on the third afternoon when Private Mitchie’s temperature began to fall. He was sleeping when they arrived but woke when the nurse came to give him oxygen. Through cracked lips and with breath he did not really have, he said, Big Sister. It can’t be you.

Well, it is, she said, standing up and kissing his blistered forehead. But you know, don’t you, it isn’t Big Sister anymore?

He frowned. There was no complaint there, however.

He said, Force of habit. I’m feeling better.

You weren’t taking care of yourself up there, Mitchie reproved him.

I was, he said and then winked, but I gave the servants a day off and they left the gas on. Buggers!

He laughed—choking—and his eyes watered so that he needed to close them. Mitchie had been laughing with him—crying also—and the shared jollity threatened to strangle her too.

That doesn’t sound good, said the boy, nodding towards her.

Don’t you worry about me, she said. It’s just a winter cold.

He fell asleep again and after a while Mitchie and Naomi left.

The next time they went there, Mitchie asked Naomi—with more apology than Naomi was used to—if she would mind having tea in the nurses’ mess while Mitchie went alone to the ward.

Naomi sat there for an hour and a half, reading
Punch
and being interrupted by jovial questions from other mostly Australian nurses, who wanted to know about the Château Baincthun—of which they had heard all manner of rumors. That it was a club for officers really, and that it was somehow a
loose
place. They didn’t mean her, but by and large . . .

By now Naomi had learned to talk like other gossipy women in situations like this—she became an imitation girl, even though she’d barely been able to handle such impersonation in her earlier life.

I wish it
was
an officers’ club, she told them, and we were all club floozies. But it’s like any hospital. It has all the normal wards and departments. The work is just as long-winded as yours. We have surgeons, ward doctors, nurses, and orderlies and a pathology lab. All you’ve heard is nonsense. As for Lady Tarlton, the Medical Corps
had
to build your hospital. But she built the Australian Voluntary out of pure kindness.

Ah, said the women of Wimereux, it’s good to get that cleared up.