Well, I have a stepmother at home who though a pleasant woman can’t be bursting to see me, she admitted. I suppose . . .
Two days, he told her. Two days’ leave in Sydney. Delightful. The Australia Hotel—a fine dining room, that one.
I’ll stay at the Young Women’s Temperance Hotel.
That sounds severe.
And I’ve nothing to wear except a uniform.
The same with me, he said.
All right, she said.
If a man went to the trouble of suggesting something as eternal as a marriage then you owed yourself a few days in a place away from masses of nurses and soldiers to study him.
In Port Adelaide—where the ship moored on a bright Australian spring day and the band was close and the wharf triumphantly decked with flags—Rosanna Nettice helped Lieutenant Byers down the gangway to the brass exuberance of “The British Grenadiers.” Nettice herself was leaving the ship and had volunteered to join the staff of the Keswick Military Hospital. She left their company promising to write letters and shedding a few tears but with no apparently profound regret. She took Naomi apart for a special show of thanks—plainly uttered—but her objective to marry Byers overrode all other issues and affections. In her mind it was not for exchanging letters with them that the artillery pony had saved her. It was for Byers.
From the railing of the Demeter, Naomi saw a solidly dressed man and woman and a number of near-adult children greet their blinded son and brother. The mother began to weep on his shoulders despite the grin of reassurance that Byers wore. The father looked on from under his homburg and over his European-style, pointed moustache. He studied his blinded son with his trained jeweler’s eyes. Naomi saw Byers turn to Nettice and introduce her to his family. Was he telling them the entire story? That Nettice would devote herself to Lieutenant Byers’s battle with the seeing world? In any case, Naomi saw his mother extend her hand to Nettice and the father kiss her hand by way of courtly but uncertain thanks. But what were the clan dramas to be worked out? If the father had changed his name from Myers to Byers he was probably open to the concept of his son marrying a gentile. Nettice was conscious her friends were watching from above and as she moved away with the Byers family—a porter behind pushing his luggage and hers—she looked up. She had faced out the parents. Who—in fact—could set a test for Nettice that would defeat her purpose?
In Melbourne two mornings later, Naomi saw some of the men from the syphilis ward go down the gangway to a reunion with families who must not be told—with girlfriends who must not be caressed and wives who must not be penetrated. The homecoming wharves—where people met their variously damaged men, whose minds had been licked as with fire by the daydream of suicide—creaked with laughter and smiling which might yet prove friable. The overearnest band music was doomed to fail everyone as soon as the players stopped for breath. Carradine landed happy on her way to disqualify herself from further official duty by giving the authorities proof of marriage. And then to return as a self-funded volunteer to England.
On their one night in that city, Lieutenant Shaw took Naomi to dinner at the Windsor Hotel—once a temperance palace but now the “flashest pub in town.” He insisted on a bottle of red wine and when it was decanted, he told her he thought it delightful on his palate—though she secretly thought it was sour. Yet under its warm influence she told him about Mrs. Sorley—this woman she must visit in visiting her father.
Easier for me, he said. My family aren’t complicated. My parents are just my parents. My sis and the brothers . . . quarrelsome beggars. But no grievances. It makes life easy. Quarrels get settled on the spot.
My sister and I, she confessed, are just learning to do that. And making some progress.
Good girl, he said. You’ll need to be forgiving if you’re married to me.
But nothing’s been decided, she warned him. I don’t know that you’re a man for a long engagement, in any case. There’s too much life in you. And there’s no chance of it being a short one.
He shook his head. My God! Until now I’ve only met girls who are busting for marriage. I can’t imagine myself not waiting for such a noble girl though. When will this war end—next year, 1917, 1921, 1925?
Noble, she snorted. That’s you throwing a light on me. Like the Egyptian who used to stand under the chin of the Sphinx with a flare. But the flare burns out and the Sphinx stays the same.
Well, he said, the Sphinx part is right. You don’t give a lot away.
She warned him she could not sponge on him because that assumed some degree of consent she hadn’t given. He won the argument at dinner. For heaven’s sake, he said, women never pay for dinner there. Don’t show me up.
On Sydney Harbour—amidst ferries and pilot boats and launches—they enjoyed a sailing expedition with an associate of Shaw’s father who owned a wonderful clinker-built yacht. His slight limp looked gallant in the lobby and created military fables about him amongst those who still believed that war’s chief duty was to lightly mar the brave.
She found the kisses they exchanged that night before she left the Australia Hotel—and the next morning when his coastal ship left Darling Harbour—were the more arousing because she was kissing her possible partner for life. These might be the opening gestures of the solemnities and fevers of the flesh for both of them. She felt enlivened and her blood churned pleasantly. She found them less than ecstatic. Were they meant to be otherwise? Last night they had not delayed her in getting ready for bed nor very much in falling asleep. He had no part in dreams. In fact, if anyone ever featured, it was Kiernan—though not in that sense. But as a kindly quantity he spoke like a sage in a dream of sun-drenched spaces. He was not forgotten.
The End of Lemnos
On bitter Turks Head on Lemnos the gales became near continuous, and rain was honed to sleet and crystallized to snowfall during nights. It was easier to keep warm in the wards than in the women’s tents. Now the moles stayed under the bitter ground. Come daylight, the women rushed across ice to their breakfasts—better breakfasts though than had been the case under the old regime.
Typhoid burned on in the infectious wards and pneumonia began to fill the medical wards. The wounds that arrived now often seemed to be bullet wounds to the head—from places where men had accidentally given away their presence at a low part of a parapet. Or else shell damage. It was apparent though—as the winter bit and ice formed on water buckets—that divisions were no longer going forth from their trenches looking for trouble at Anzac Beach and Cape Helles. Their gambits would have to be renewed at a more clement time.
Outside the mess tent the orderlies were unloading Christmas billy cans—stamped with a kangaroo and a boomerang and full of chocolate and minute puddings in cloth. A letter inside was addressed to “Dear Soldier of Australia.” Ten days to Christmas, and intact men were landing on Lemnos each day in numbers suddenly too big for the rest camp. Sally and Slattery—shopping from peddlers—watched them march by. Their faces were gaunt and stained with weariness. The eyes seemed not yet aware that they had been brought back into the living world. There was too much continuance of geography between Gallipoli and here.
As they went past they could be smelled—not just filthy flesh but fermentations of the skin and uniform. They still carried the trench-fever lice. For the louse it was always summer in the clefts and crevices of the body. From these men a faint rumor arose. They’re pulling soldiers out of Gallipoli, one of the senior nurses heard and passed it on. Don’t mention a word of it to any Greek peddler around Mudros. As Sally had learned, the Greeks hated the Turks. But one of them might be on the Turkish payroll, people said.
As Christmas ribbons went up to decorate the YMCA hut at Mudros, the number of wounded diminished for one day—which might have been luck. Then it stayed the same the next day, and a third. The diminution in wounded and sick began to look like the result of some human cleverness.
Walking-wounded officers and orderlies and nurses were now openly strolling or
riding down to the wharf to greet the morning arrivals who had been spirited off Gallipoli at night. But all conversations were almost in code. It was as if every sentence might be listened to by an unseen party and the ruse which would redeem the Gallipoli folly would be thwarted.
The air around the hospital was pensively triumphant. There had been that night-after-night escape better planned than anything else had been in all this calamity. Yet the last wounded were still there. And so were the many dead, or in the snowy cemetery below Turks Head—both places impossibly located for devout flower bearing or grave visitations by relatives.
Sally and Honora took a cup of tea each and drank it with Leo—that girl whose temperament had never betrayed her. But later in the morning—amidst shouts along pathways and whispered messages in wards—it became known that two last ships had come from the black peninsula. Honora and Sally—due to go to sleep after night duty—were amongst the rush of people who got to the pier where the very last of Gallipoli’s harmed were being unloaded into motor ambulances.
• • •
By Christmas Naomi had returned from her brief Macleay Valley homecoming and had been working some weeks at the military hospital at Randwick—not far from her Aunt Jackie’s place. She had dutifully visited her aunt and chattered tentatively with her about the new Mrs. Durance.
Randwick Hospital was an orderly place. Patients were admitted not in a calamitous flood but one at a time. The food was regular and of the wholesomely plain ilk. Hours of rest could be banked on. But restlessness plagued Naomi. The war had made a misfit of her.
Every two days she got a fervent letter from Lieutenant Shaw about his efforts to be returned to Egypt. He had written to the adjutant-general in Melbourne, had garnered reference letters from a bishop, a member of the Legislative Assembly of Queensland, a federal senator. She too had gathered letters to help her own cause of getting back—one of them from Matron Mitchie—now returned to Victoria—and another from the chief medical officer on the Demeter. It was not only the sedateness of nursing life she found hard. Above all and beyond reason she wanted to put a great mileage between her and home ground.
Why did she hate it? That beautiful place, that river brown with fertile mud, the sweet pastures of Sherwood? And the blue Kookaburra Ranges full of plentiful native cedar—a stalk of which had killed Mr. Sorley and gained the Durance girls a stepmother. Weighing her home element by element, she had seen few places more well-made by nature and more temperate in her journeys. She had no excuse in her stepmother. Mrs. Sorley—as she remained in Naomi’s mind—was an enthusiast. As a result of Naomi informing her father and his wife of her arrival by Currawong, Naomi found the town mayor welcoming her to the landing dock in East Kempsey. He was attended by journalists and photographers from the Macleay Argus, and her proud father in his Friday suit and with his wife and her children. There was a procession of cars from the landing dock to the mayoral chambers. A ceremonial breakfast was held with Naomi in her gray uniform at the mayoral side. Naomi envied Kiernan who would not have to go through such ceremonies or be greeted by flatulent speeches. The mayor saw Mrs. Sorley along the table and called congratulations to her. But she said she could take no credit for this brave girl. Naomi was the product of the breast and influence of another woman. Unlike her mother, though, Mrs. Sorley seemed a woman in command and confident in the fruits of marriage. Her pride for her new husband’s sake and her renouncing of any credit on her own part were both disarming.
From the mayor’s speech it was apparent they had heard about “The Sinking of the Archimedes.” She did not know how. She discovered then that it had been published in an Adelaide paper and copied by the Sydney Morning Herald before the Demeter itself had reached Sydney. Who was to blame for that? Shaw or Kiernan? Shaw, she decided. A ceremonious man like Kiernan would have sought permission.
She was asked to speak at the breakfast. You become another person when you see the faces turned and the ready ears. The keenness to be heard and an electric curiosity ran through the speaker and jumbled and altered her. She heard herself say that the men were “Christlike,” that there was never a complaint, that it was her life’s privilege to nurse their wounds. She did not mention the dysentery ward and its shitty mattresses and its atmosphere claimed by flies. At last the breakfast ended. Women presented themselves who said they had been to school with her. Some of them said they had children. Of course, one of them said, our little Clarrie was killed last September. Mum can’t ever get over it.
The Durances were delivered home—down the hill from West Kempsey and over the bridge to Sherwood—in a car driven by the town clerk.
You do whatever you like, Mrs. Sorley whispered to her in the wide backseat. You rest if you wish to or go riding a horse. It was your home before it was mine.
Naomi kissed her and Mrs. Sorley beamed with pleasure. Naomi couldn’t depend on Mrs. Sorley to drive her away from home. Her father asked with an edge of concern about Egypt and Lemnos.
I could have lost both daughters, he said.
She could tell he had taken the Sydney Morning Herald and the mayor to heart. But he had accommodated himself also to having bred a heroine.
As they ate roast lamb on the Sunday of her visit home and as her father applied himself with earnestness to his plate and Mrs. Sorley beamed at her, Naomi thought of her stepmother, You will weep at his graveside but you’ll be there foursquare. You will live easily but earnestly with the grief.
She stayed on a week at the farm amidst the blackbutt walls of the bedroom she and Sally had shared. The creosote of the foundation posts—and some natural form of turpentine the timber foundations themselves imbued the soil with—still created the faint and familiar and forgotten odor of this place where she had been a sister to Sally and where she had abandoned her. And of course in which she now with mere justice did her duty under the added weight of her reported heroism. Despite all—love of father, kindness of stepmother—she merely observed the pieties of gratitude and of chatting with her half-brothers and -sister. And when awake at night she would be seized by the thought of her uneven-legged and eager captain. Sometimes she thought of admirable Kiernan. Kiernan had left the ship in Melbourne to go to his unimaginable Quaker family. There was pleasure and yet little desire of more than a general kind in her memory of either man.
Before she left—that morning at breakfast—she suddenly grabbed her father’s chapped, leathery hands and kissed them. The sight of them reminded her that Eric Durance had hired labor to prevent his daughters’ hands becoming leathery. When they saw her to the East Kempsey dock and to the Currawong steamer, Mrs. Sorley embraced Naomi and whispered, You kissing his hands. It meant the whole world to him.
• • •
She was bent on using her eminence as a Herald correspondent to her benefit. She had not forgotten to include that cutting—admiringly published and just a little edited by some censor to take the blame for the Archimedes’s death from the army—amongst her documents. She presented all of it now to the senior matron who interviewed her in Sydney. She could see there was some hope. She blessed the bush impishness in Shaw that had possibly released her creation to the newspapers. She realized she had two things that could not be found in any nurse out of a civil hospital. She had experience of terrible wounds. And she had stayed afloat after being sunk.
So there was to be a further interview—she read that as progress. Now it was the senior matron and a very elderly colonel who told her he had been in Egypt but repatriated. You’re not dealing with a doctor of any distinction in me, he told her frankly. My work is pure administration.
He studied her file and seemed impressed she had been a triage nurse. It was an asset she was willing to grab at that summer morning.
And your sister is nursing, I see.
Yes, Naomi asserted. She’s on Lemnos in the stationary hospital there.
Sally could serve as another argument for a return.
I should warn you that your intractab
ility which is noted here is of some concern. But my God—this was under Spanner. I see that Colonel Leatherhead believed there existed extenuating circumstances. Still, your acts of rebellion will not be tolerated in future. Do you understand?
Naomi assured him she did.
He turned to the matron. An Old Testament God, this Spanner chap.
She had an exhilarating expectation now. They would send her back. She would not need to share a continent with Mrs. Sorley.
There is a ship due to leave Melbourne in two weeks, the colonel told her. You will be notified with the details and issued with a travel warrant closer to the time.
Her impulse was to kiss his hand like some feudal woman. But that would have convinced him that she was unreliable.
Should I say congratulations? asked the senior matron.
• • •
From a form of politeness rather than passion, she had written to Robbie Shaw. News—that was all. No false feeling. And she heard from him in return.
Dearest Naomi,
There’s some hope they’re going to put me with a transport unit. Organizing freight trains and so on. Better there than here. Would like to say more but am between interviews. I think of you all the time.
Your devoted friend (I know you don’t want me to be called more than that),
Robbie
BOOK II
Rare Pyramids
Sally near collided with Honora Slattery in the corridor of the Heliopolis Palace Hotel. Through double doors nearby they could hear the hubbub of conversation from the grand ballroom, where beds were laid out ten across the width of the room and in God-knew-how-many ranks—she hadn’t had time to count. Above the ballroom floor were galleries, and these too were loaded with beds—so fully that their creaky floors and the ornate Moorish columns which attached them to the roof seemed too frail to take the weight.
The officers’ lounge, midnight, Honora said. Come on, we’ve got to have a drink to get rid of this bloody year. Lionel Dankworth will be there.