Well, Mitchie explained, Lady Tarlton asked me to help her set up a nursing service in the bush—for women, you understand. She’d traveled in the bush with her husband when he was governor-general and living proof any fool can do the job, and while he looked at horses and girls, she looked at the way real women lived and gave birth on the farms further out. She also tried to go up into the tropics to see what was happening there. But the prime minister told her it would cost too much for a naval ship to take her. Really, he was just trying to hurt her husband. Mind you, she’s disapproved of. People call her “spirited.” And you know what they imply by that? Immorality, that’s what.
Mitchie snorted at that trick of words.
And did you set up this scheme of nurses in the bush?
She set it up. She gave her own money for it. Oh yes, she might seem a long way removed from your ordinary shearer’s or selector’s wife. But you’ll see she has this sympathy. It’s in her nature.
Naomi dropped her voice. And is it in Lord Tarlton’s nature?
She wanted to hear a mischievous answer and got one.
Very little you could put a reasonable name to is in his nature.
Within herself, Naomi was dizzied at this conversation. I am talking, she realized—or at least being spoken to—like a worldly woman in a play. She was warily delighted with it but would have been happy to be free from the stiffness and furtiveness this house imposed on her and go back to Paddington.
Mitchie said, They don’t really live together as husband and wife, and it’s just as well, since Tarlton doesn’t deserve her. Look at her! See the loose hair? The ribbons? Posh people don’t like that at all. Some of the Melbourne snobs didn’t like it either. They said she was “untamed.” As for him, I’ve got to admit he was in Gallipoli for a while. But he’s the sort of man who always comes through, or—more likely—gets out in time. Probably by being sacked.
Mitchie shook her head to clear it of Lord Tarlton. She sipped her sherry a while. Now, the point is, she said then, Lady Tarlton has visited every rich Australian in London. And likewise the English who have Australian connections and are making a slap-up fortune from Australian copper and iron and so on. With the blessing of that chap over there—recognize him, the slightly portly fellow? Fisher, our former prime minister. The very chap Tarlton annoyed. He’s here out of respect for Lady Tarlton. No other reason.
Naomi glanced. So I am also looking at prime ministers as if they were mere bank managers. Mr. Fisher was certainly portly, though his face bespoke good intentions.
She wants to create an Australian voluntary hospital in France, Mitchie continued. The military people hate her for the idea—maybe they’re frightened she’ll do a better job than them. But she is very powerful and they have to take her seriously, and even give her nurses from the army nursing services.
You don’t mean us? asked Naomi.
If you like. She wants me to be matron of her hospital, and I can offer a post to you, Naomi—a means to get away from all the army stuffiness.
I promised I’d join my sister.
I know Sally. She’d understand. Look, I’m not pretending it won’t be hard. You’ll be helping to run the place, as well as nursing. And there’ll be a lot of paperwork for us to do. We’ll be working with Red Cross volunteers who might come and go for all I know. Do you think you might like to work with me on such a scheme?
A rosy feeling of both deliverance and promise swept through Naomi. And Sally would be within reach. France was not immense.
In fewer than two weeks, said Mitchie, you and I would be off to Boulogne with Lady Tarlton to find a site that might serve for the hospital. When I say the hospital, I should tell you that she would not have her name formally attached to the nurses in the bush, and she intends in the same spirit to call her hospital not Lady Tarlton’s but simply the Australian Voluntary Hospital.
Barely knowing it was happening, Naomi began to weep softly.
Oh, my dear, said Matron Mitchie. Is that grief?
It’s that you trust me.
Oh yes? asked Mitchie. I give you an impossible job and you shed tears of gratitude. See what you think in six months!
The portly, tall man with the long, benevolent face and the soft eyes—that is, the man who was once prime minister of the Commonwealth—had begun to look over and now excused himself from men and women around him and advanced on them. Naomi could barely grasp what he was saying. Mitchie displayed her easy worldliness by calling him “High Commissioner,” because he’d given up his life in Australian politics to take up that role in London—not bad work for an old coal-miner, as Mitchie would later remark. He talked of their dedication and how Australia honored them. He uttered the normal hope about the war ending with any luck by the autumn of this year of Our Lord 1916. He even quoted generals—British and French—who had assured him of it. Across the room, people were beginning to leave the reception, and when nearly all had done so, the high commissioner shook their hands and went too. Lady Tarlton—smiling and tall with her hair having further escaped her ribbon—approached them from across the room.
• • •
Charlie Condon turned up overcoated one chilly morning at the Rouen racecourse to see Sally. When he took his slouch hat off, she could see how carefully he had combed his brown hair during the journey. His eyes still had the same enthusiasm as they had shown in Sakkara, his nose was flared as if he were anxious to breathe in the encounters he was about to experience, and the V of his well-shaven jaw ended in a bulb of chin which shone with what she thought of as boyish inquiry.
He had set out early from a rest area near Amiens and found a truck that was coming to Rouen, and had been on the road for five hours—even though he had needed to travel barely sixty miles. He would need to leave by three o’clock—when a truck would come to get him again.
His arrival at the door of the nurses’ mess was the sort of thing that got fatuous talk going, but by good fortune she did not need to swap shifts and go to the matron for permission to rearrange the roster. She had, in fact, just finished the night shift in the surgical ward which contained Captain Constable. Charlie Condon’s eyes glittered in the doorway of the hut which had now been put in place by Australian carpenters and German prisoners to accommodate the nurses at mealtimes and during recreation.
After she’d got him some tea, they were able to go into Rouen—there were always trucks and cars and ambulances going there. They squeezed into the front seat of an ambulance and walked from the dock—where it was going—to the cathedral square. About the cathedral, Charlie Condon had—as Sally knew beforehand he would—absorbed a great deal. Would his continual enthusiasm ever become tedious? It was not yet. Knowledge was for joy with Charlie and not for showing off. There were newly famous paintings by an artist named Monet, he said. Done some years back, but the world was just starting to catch up with them. About twenty paintings of the great cathedral, he said, the façade and towers in all hours and every degree of light.
She liked the majesty of that phrase: “every degree of light.”
What gives me hope, said Charlie, is that’s what we have back home. Light, light, and more light. Light to burn. Light to waste. But you’ve heard me go on about all that.
He had no idea of the scale to which everything was news to her. He told her of the stained glass seven hundred years old which had a unique turquoise that modern glassmakers couldn’t reproduce. She sensed that the fact there were such things made the world liveable for him.
He listed Rouen’s relics which had brought in pilgrims from all over Europe. And they weren’t all pious pilgrims. It was because they were sinners that they went on pilgrimage and hoped that the sight of the body parts of saints would save them from their crimes. Of course now, he said, it seemed there was no end to body parts of saints and sinners strewn across France and Flanders.
After a few hours a cathedral wanes in interest—something infinite gluts the finite taste. He took her to lunch. It was
an auberge called La Couronne which claimed to be the oldest in France—a gabled house, with balconies and leadlight windows and a certain droop to it from the long-running work of gravity. The landlord seemed to expect them. Charlie confessed he had sent a telegram to make a reservation. All without knowing whether he might be eating on his own. The scale of that act of daring impressed her.
Later, she found that the sauce for the duck they ate was made from blood. Because she was a farmer’s daughter, the concept did not repel her. They drank Bordeaux wine—though her hayseed palate took no special delight in it except in its worldliness. But the subsequent feeling of lightness combined with the idea of the telegram and with turquoise glass and the ageless recipes contained in this old house all made an entrancing hour.
What are they like? he asked then. They were eating an apple tart with fresh cream. It was improbably laced with a brandy named Calvados. The fellows you nurse?
He still had that unrequited curiosity about it all.
There’s the new element, Charlie, she told him. There’s gas. We’re shipping a lot of men with gas damage back to Blighty. Which means they’re almost certainly finished as soldiers—and maybe as men. So you must always keep your mask handy. The foul stuff seems to be everywhere up there.
They sent us through a training field full of gas with our masks on. It isn’t the most comfortable experience.
Captain Constable occupied the center and forefront of her imagination. She wouldn’t mention him to Charlie, for there was a fear of infecting him with this reported ill fortune.
Are the Germans shelling you where you are?
No, said Charlie, the shelling’s pretty mild. Sometimes one comes over. It almost seems an accident. There’s a story that can’t be true—but it goes that the Germans have made a deal with us that if we don’t shell Steenbecque, they won’t shell Hazebrouck. Anyhow, that’s how it’s working at the moment. But when we’re considered fit for blooding, off we’ll go to somewhere less cozy.
She sipped wine as a sort of necessary tribute to the day.
Charlie talked about a farm family he and other officers had been billeted with for a while in a small house near Steenbecque. The family had been sullen at first. It had been roughly treated early in the war by German officers and then fairly contemptuously by some British ones from a highfalutin regiment. But Charlie helped with chopping wood and even with milking the family cow—doesn’t hurt to do one cow, he said—and the French family warmed and were astonished. The farmer’s wife asked him how he could actually be an officer and chop wood?
They walked the streets afterwards and Charlie was willing to look in the windows of boutiques—what in Australia they delighted in calling “frock salons.” Charlie was not uninterested in fabric and in the lines of garments. After all, he explained, it was just an extension of his interests. In Rouen it drew no remark at all to go looking at fabrics on the arm—for she had taken his arm—of a man. It seemed to be considered that a woman was fortunate still to have an ambulatory soldier to promenade with on a quiet afternoon.
At two or so Charlie said that he meant to see where Joan of Arc had been burned. She had seen it before—in town with Honora and Leo.
But you must have been there before? he asked. No, she said.
They progressed down the cramped medieval streets to a little square—a church stood there and a monument with fleur-de-lis engraved—topped by a cross to mark the place Joan had died.
Imagine how scared she was, said Charlie.
None of them had thought of that on her earlier visit. They’d marveled at her gameness—a French foreshadowing of Ned Kelly. She was a creature from a valiant tale rather than a girl really tethered and planted in the midst of a burning terror. But Sally could all at once now feel panic in the air.
He was scanning the eaves of the old houses of the square—as if there was some prayer and cry of fear wedged up there. His jawline was straight and his neck scraped and red in places from an earnest razor.
Simply her and the fire, he murmured. And her conscience and her terror.
He turned his face to Sally and laughed then—the memory of their pleasant day retethered him to air that was tranquil and did not blaze. He consulted his watch. My God, his truck was due at the racecourse in half an hour. They looked around for a motor taxi but saw only the occasional private auto and farmer’s dray. They raced back to the cathedral, where a British ambulance driver—in town on some unstated duty—got them back to the hippodrome. There the two of them stood in the gravel road before the administration buildings. They were both uneasy—they were further embarked on friendship than they quite knew what to do with. His truck rolled up and saved them from their bewilderment. She wondered if he would try a kiss before he boarded it and could see he considered it but found that perhaps the day had been too randomly built by him—too plump with jumbled incident—to justify it.
He’d sent a telegram to the auberge! The idea seemed flamboyant beyond the limits of anything she’d known. People sent telegrams for deaths and weddings and urgent unexpected arrivals. He’d sent a telegram for a table.
• • •
From the time of their visit to the Tarlton townhouse, Matron Mitchie and Naomi had rooms provided for them at the Dorchester. Although Naomi’s was appropriately more modest than that of Matron Mitchie, it still astonished her with its sumptuousness and—by contrast with Lemnos—its vast bed. She had not slept in a room and on her own for close on two years. Yet the luxurious solitude made her edgy. As payment for this high living, Mitchie set her to work immediately, devising a roster for a hospital of two hundred wounded—to begin with anyhow, said Mitchie. So Naomi planned a schedule for phantom nurses not yet recruited from the army nursing service or from the Red Cross volunteers or from civilian hospitals. Forty trained nurses were needed just for the two shifts of twelve hours and the one day’s rest a week initially planned. Nearly as many women would be needed by night as by day since inquiry showed convoys often arrived then.
Occasionally the grand Vitesse Phaeton collected Michie and Naomi and took them to the dazzling house in Mayfair, where Naomi attended to the filing of requisition forms and receipts for all that could be needed for a genuine hospital. The requisition forms represented what Lady Tarlton was asking the army to provide. But the receipts represented what she had bought with her own money or that of the unspecified rich Anglo-Australians whom she held in the palm of her hand. Naomi filed as well letters on hospital rations—right down to the level of salt and mustard and thrice-weekly oatmeal—which Lady Tarlton had exchanged with members of her London Committee. Amongst Lady Tarlton’s personal purchases were autoclaves, arm and leg splints, bedsteads, and two first-class theatre tables. She had elicited from a medical supply company an X-ray machine. The requisitions addressed to the army were for disinfectants, antiseptics, dressings, sutures, surgical instruments, and all that the army should—in good conscience—provide its wounded. One letter assured her that once the voluntary hospital was established in the Boulogne region—where advice from the office of the director of medical services had suggested it should be located—a body named the Advanced Depot of Medical Stores would be ordered to supply said hospital. Supplies and equipment appropriate to a pathology laboratory would obviate the necessity of sending samples to the already busy pathology sections of the army general hospitals.
The range of the letters and forms—the number of folders to which Naomi had to take recourse—was itself a measure of the seriousness of Lady Tarlton. If Naomi had believed that Lady Tarlton was going into the hospital business on a genial whim and as an amateur, her filing of the woman’s letters—sent and received—dispelled it.
On a clear spring morning—when it seemed the entire width of the Channel could be seen with all its shipping and scampering destroyers—Mitchie and Naomi occupied a state cabin along with Lady Tarlton in a troopship on its way to France. They drank tea and were permitted by a lieutenant general—who tou
ched his cap to the viscountess and with his staff made way for her and her two comrades—to descend the gangplank first.
As Southampton had offered so little of ideal Britain, the basin in which they landed at Boulogne offered nothing of France. Though a distant castle could be seen on a rise, it was a mere token. They were separated from it by a vast, squalid railyard, where troops who had arrived fully equipped on earlier ferries waited and smoked by companies and battalions amidst shuttling trains. Here, loneliness in crowds and expectation and fear seemed to create their own odor. Soot lay over all. The absolute khakiness of the mass swamped the few tokens of difference—a group of kilts here, a slouch-hatted Australian there. But chiefly masses of undifferentiated men in steel helmets. And all of them nutriment for cannon.
They watched from the pier as from a shipboard crane onto the wharf of their cross-Channel steamer descended the great white-black Vitesse Phaeton with its driver, Carling, in a military uniform supervising and yelling extraneous advice to the English crew above and the French stevedores below. The Phaeton landed on the wharf with a small mechanical squeak. Carling opened its back door and ushered in the ladies. They sat within and waited for the bags to come—Lady Tarlton’s great traveling trunk and the more modest luggage of Mitchie and Naomi. Carling—Lady Tarlton explained—had been Tarlton’s batman in the Dardanelles. Tarlton himself, she said, had for a time served as a brigadier general there but had been recalled.