That’s the sort of thing Honora might say at table now. Promising MOs—as everyone called the doctors—that none of them was human enough nor the right kind for her.
• • •
To mark their transit over the equator, the captain and ship’s officers ordered the creation of a big swimming pool of canvas on the open lower deck aft and filled it with seawater. It was to be the center of the initiation into equator hopping. Some of the others had already been across the line going to or coming from the northern world: a number of the doctors had come to Australia in the first place from Edinburgh or Dublin or the great hospitals of London and were returning to the hemisphere of their birth. But most medical officers and orderlies and nurses had been born in Australia and had thought—as Sally had—that the train between Melbourne and Sydney or the coastal steamer from Brisbane might be the greatest journey the world would ever offer them. Yet now here was the equator—the burning and uncon-sumed filament that divided the world of southern innocence from the world of northern gravity of intent, and the hemisphere of colonists from the hemisphere of the owners.
Around the pool men and nurses dressed as gypsies and pirates had water thrown on them and were ducked under and made to suffer other rituals. The nurses had actually sat in their cabins making costumes for this. When Sally, feeling that she was disqualified from this flippancy both by nature and the serious shadow of her mother’s death, failed to apply herself to that business, Honora presented her with a passable Queen of Hearts costume in any case, the red hearts applied to the puff-sleeved blouse with small, expert stitching. The casual, rapid-working love that had gone into this fancy dress frightened Sally.
On the ceremonial day she dressed with the others and moved aft. But a companionway presented itself and she took the risk of swinging herself down it to the hospital level, the level on which—much further astern—the jollity would be staged. If she was seen, the others knew she had been seasick before, so she was entitled to a little flash of nausea. She excused her way past a number of wide-eyed orderlies, opened the double doors into the hospital and rushed through the empty spaces to the nurses’ pan room a little way forward. Facing it was a further cabin which was unlocked. She entered it. This was meant to be a pharmacist’s office. But wherever the ship’s stocks of medicines were, they were not here. The empty shelves made it even more a hiding space. The Queen of Hearts closed the door. She could hear running on the deck above her. From aft arose mocking, willfully farting bugle sounds and shouts and the profound echo of men’s laughter. There was no chair to sit on in here. But she stood willingly in her vivid dress amongst the blank shelves.
Someone was passing. She heard the door open. Mrs. Carradine was there. Her reddish hair tumbled out of an eighteenth-century sea captain’s tricorn.
I thought I saw you creep down here, she whispered. Are you all right, dearie? Can I fetch your sister?
Sally’s face blazed. No, thanks, she said, surly. Look, it’s just I’m not good at all these geographical hijinks.
Carradine raised her bony nose and hooted, and Sally began gratefully to laugh with her.
I’ll get up there and endure it for Eric’s sake, Carradine admitted. He’s three weeks ahead of me in his convoy. He’s gone through something like it. Or maybe they won’t even let them have a ceremony in the convoy. But I’ll go through it anyway.
Could I ask you a favor? said Sally. Let me stay in here. I’ll be brave next time. I’m sure Naomi will be up there anyhow.
Of course, said Mrs. Carradine. Naomi seems confident in all things.
Carradine stepped up, smoothed Sally’s locks, and suddenly kissed her forehead through them.
You have lovely black hair, you know, she said. I wish I did, instead of this carrot mop. Just as well I’m married. I never thought I’d get away with it, given this head of hair.
She stepped back. Okay, Queenie, she said and then winked. She closed the door like a friend and was gone. Sally would say to Honora, I felt sick. There’ll be other fancy-dress balls, Honora, where I can wear the dress.
Naomi indeed seemed confident in all things. Taller than Sally. Tallness often imbued confidence. Even before high school Sally felt subject to bemused comparisons with Naomi by teachers and other girls. Some of it was her own sense of being less. Some of it was real. Naomi was good at the outside world. It was only with the inner world of the family that she took on an air of distance and exile. She would have no trouble with a “crossing-the-line” party. Things would falter only the next time she and Sally met up.
Across glittering, tepid seas they put into Colombo. With sailors and non-officers confined to the ship, unruly orderlies climbed down the anchor chain at night to steal launches and go ashore. The nurses and medical officers were permitted to land. Met at the wharf by various British middle-aged gentlemen, who assured them that they were in the most beautiful segment of the world and that the Singhalese people were the most handsome on earth, they were taken through a city of stalls and temples and giant Buddhas rising above shops at the end of thoroughfares, and then out along a lovely coast, where women in vivid fabric and brown-faced compact men—machetes in hand—watched them pass. They walked on the ramparts of Galle as the middle-aged men expanded on the subject of the Portuguese, the Dutch, and now the British ownership of the bright-though-hazed reaches of the harbor, and drove away some poverty-grimed members of the most beautiful race on earth, who were trying to sell the nurses fake coins from Dutch wrecks. Lemonade on a hotel veranda of the Amangalla Hotel beside a Dutch church was different from Macleay lemonade—redolent of an extra layer of spice and strangeness.
Oasis
Sally wrote to her father every four days or so, letters replete with a relentless newsiness designed to mask any shame at marooning him on his farm. Now he could be charmed awhile—her theory went—by stories of alien marvels and puzzles.
I never thought I would see the strange things I’ve seen and it goes to show how many ways there are of being a human.
She used all powers of language and scene-making she could—casting Port Suez as a town of many-storeyed buildings and pink hills in the background.
The great Canal shone so sharp and blue in the midst of sand and all along encampments of Tommies and Indians—wandering amongst tents—who looked pretty bored and cheered us. In the Bitter Lakes in the middle of the Canal there was a crowd of ships moored there. Then we were back into the arrow-straight canal and came to the shady town of Ismaïlia—shaded by palm trees, of course I mean. There we moored and came ashore for the first time. A lot of good-looking Arab houses of stone, and mansions people in the know tell me look French. Older Egyptian women dressed in black but urchin girls running around barefoot in orange and yellow and blue tatters. Some women carry big bundles on their heads. You can’t help thinking, what’s your life like, Mrs. Egypt? How does it match up to a farmer’s life in the Macleay?
The train carriages look cranky old affairs with not enough windows, but once you’re inside they’re comfortable. The village houses on the way to Cairo are all mud-walled. They look flat and unfinished as if they’re waiting for another floor to go on top. People laboring on green patches of earth—they have irrigation from the Sweetwater Canal that winds for miles and into Cairo. The camels mince along with lowered heads and when they rest in shade you see their owners asleep on top of them.
You ought to see Cairo station! It has a great glass roof and is very grand in an Arabic sort of way—though British built. Orderlies carry everything for us except our valises. This is pretty flash. They’re like porters but you don’t have to slip them a shilling a bag!
Many beggars and it is a shock to the system. Blind children—some tell me that their own parents get them blinded in one eye by a hot needle when they are just babies—all so they can beg. And this in what they call the British Empire.
More soon, dear Papa. I hope the Sorley girl is looking after you.
That last sentence writt
en with edginess and with eyes half-closed.
• • •
She could barely make a stab at writing letters about Cairo. It overflowed the borders of any possible letter. Here at the railway station they were loaded by a transport officer—four at a time—into open gharries, each one driven by a soft-speaking brown man in a tarboosh and wearing a crisp white jacket over a jalabiya. They were carried out in late afternoon into a frenzy of people and traffic. A city that was everything, too many people moving with too many ambitions, too many hopes and destinations. It was at the same time a glimpse of moored riverboats on—could it be?—the Nile. (These were officers’ clubs where Nubian waiters in red tarbooshes and long white robes glided along with drinks trays held high.) It was people carrying all possible items on their heads—a child’s coffin new-bought, a lounge chair, a haunch of camel meat, a bed. It was camels and donkeys on pavements and the smell of their urine, and men seated by them on mats working with sewing machines or turning furniture legs on little lathes. It was car horns of the army and of the rich blaring at one time with the clang of trams and the trumpet blasts of tram conductors. It was street sellers leaning into your gharry trying to sell flyswatters and whisks, scarabs and lottery tickets, and passing British soldiers telling them darkly to clear out—imshi!—and leave the ladies alone. It was raucous native bands in unexplained processions booming and howling—brass and trumpet—and shoe shiners crying, “’Allo, George” to the soldiers, and the soldiers with cockney accents calling, “’Ello, sweetie” at the nurses’ gharries. Whistles from Australian soldiers—wandering the streets like men used to the place—frosted the hubbub with levity. And then the strange sight of the dragoman—who could translate a letter into English or Arabic or Greek or French—trudging along with his portable desk, pens, and ink and looking for business without business looking for him. Effendis—Egyptian gentlemen in well-cut suits and tarbooshes—sat at café tables talking at an impossible pace yet like centers of calm in all the fury. There were acrobats, fire-eaters, snake charmers—all yelling out at passing Australian and British soldiers for baksheesh. Shocking beggars—young girls with infants, crippled crones, their hands stained pink and yellow, and every kind of blindness and crookedness of body and amputation—as if these people themselves were the ones who’d taken part in a recent and very savage war. And if you looked at the sky you saw kites circling above the putrid streets, waiting to descend to their abominable yet cleansing meals of flesh. Even amongst the more talkative women in the gharries making for their hospital across the city at Mena the chatter stilled a little.
All this just the surface anyhow, the visible part of the crammed ocean of life here that you were not equipped to deal with in any way other than by looking at it—if at all—at a tangent.
Dear Papa,
How can I tell you of what Naomi and I have seen . . .?
As the city was crossed, the peaks of the pyramids showed up ahead in a dust-tainted twilight. They had been heavenly creatures from picture books, gigantic entities in everyone’s imagination, and it was hard now to believe they were tethered to a specific patch of earth—that they could be casually seen and perhaps approached and then passed by as you’d pass a town. Sweat ran down the sides of Sally’s face and she could hear girls even from other gharries swearing they would wear their straw hats full-time. Bare, hard ground led to groves where their hospital lay with the pyramids blue now and pressing closer, pushing their reality on the women. The palmed oasis ahead seemed flat as a stage painting and defied belief too. The road took them into the trees to a flat-roofed mansion with a red cross on its veranda-ed wall. Once a hunting lodge—they’d been told—where the kings of Egypt invited their friends to shoot gazelles. More recently a hotel. Now a hospital.
The women were quartered in small rooms with spacious windows on the upper floors. Three beds waited in the room Sally shared with Carradine and Slattery—with Naomi next door, since they still kept their distance. One large lowboy and one deal table and a chair completed the amenities of the room. For bareness, said Carradine, it put a boarding-school room to shame. Yet from these windows could be seen across treetops—in the phenomenal blueness of dusk—the pyramid of Cheops.
Eric Carradine was in the Mena camp out there in the desert and that evening turned up suntanned and handsome to visit his wife. His brow was a bit foreshortened, women said, but he was A1 apart from that. It was apparent that Elsie and Eric Carradine were the least striving, most relaxed of people, with the long frenzy of searching for each other behind them.
One of the senior matrons spoke to the nurses in their mess on the first night and convinced them that in these premises their conversation must not be above a murmur, their laughter suppressed, their talk with patients reduced to the minimum of politeness and information. The chief medical officer—whom they had never seen before but who had come in now—was very elderly, well over sixty. Well, welcome then, ladies, was all he said. Matron will tell you the rest.
He seemed to suggest: since you’ve insisted on presenting yourselves here, we’ll need to have you amongst us.
The matron and colonel seemed at first to be brother and sister in their contempt for nurses. For the girls were set to work scrubbing with carbolic the big rooms which had once been perhaps hotel libraries or ballrooms, while orderlies smoked and mucked about with one another in the shade of trees. Then—more normally—nurses were set to air mattresses and wash down rubber mattress covers and make beds, ready for the brave, shaking out the linen with a thud in the hot, dry air, with a whiplash beneath which their restrained conversation and their muted laughter were permitted. Next they moved out of the house to do similar work in marquees—which the colonel called “brigaded tents”—set in the gardens. A sign, said Honora, that some lunatic thought the huge hotel might not be enough for the wounded.
On a dim path Sally’s shoe slipped off the duckboard laid out to the marquee and her ankle was sprained. In her family little pains like this fell instantly under the dictum: if that’s the worst thing that happens to you . . . But with her mother—she remembered acutely as she limped—the adage had run out of its capacity to help. With their mother the worst thing had happened and set up its nest in her eye sockets.
To attempt forgetting that, she had only to step out of the grove and she was in infinity. She was sure all at once that this was why the pyramids were built. To deal with the infinity the Egyptians saw in all directions. Desert and those towering objects were so simple and triangular and undeniable that they called up memory of other things that were elemental and undeniable—the sisters’ mercy in their mother’s bedroom at Sherwood—but also put them in place. To be an accomplice is sometimes to forget for hours that you were one. Utter guilt couldn’t be maintained nonstop in a distracting place like this.
Within a day or two they had taken to drinking tea on the roof. There you could sit in clear, cool air since this was winter, and take the improbable but giant paper-cutout-looking pyramids for granted. But if it felt at all chilly up there they convened in the officers’ lounge downstairs where Lieutenant Carradine would come visiting with a group of young officers.
The battle was in Europe. There was only a rumor of it in Palestine, where people said the Turks might be on their way to the Canal. But even now the hospital grew fuller than Sally would have expected until—though there were no aged, no children, no women—it took on some of the atmosphere of quiet bustle which was meant to be the mark of a civil hospital. In the absence of conflict men still incurred damage and illness. Because the nights were cold in their desert camps, some had even managed to catch pneumonia. A few were wounded in bayonet drill through clumsiness or the overenthusiasm of a friend they should have parried. There was a young curly-haired man who had broken his leg when a truck full of English soldiers struck him. He was in a plaster cast—the base of his bed raised, the limb hoisted jauntily to match his jaunty demeanor. My own stupid fault, Nurse. You ought to see the dent in
that truck. Sorry, can’t take you to the dance this Sat’day.
Two wounded Turks—an utter novelty in their strange uniforms—were brought in from Sinai and treated while armed guards stood by their beds.
• • •
Beneath a canvas marquee in the garden of Mena House, the phenyl smell of drying duckboards—that cleansing, heavy reek—subdued their conversation. But they were busy too, Carradine and Slattery working elbow to elbow in the canvassed-off pan room advising orderlies on what shelf to put the basins, bed blocks, pans, while they themselves unloaded—from large, immaculate canvas bags—softer things: towels, sheets, pillowcases, rubber undersheets never used before and lacking the normal cloying smells which came to attach themselves to the best-cleaned sheets in normal wards.
Slattery could be heard giving orders. Hold hard, sonny Jim. That corner there. See!
In the similarly draped-off surgical dressing room near the other end of the tent there was no traffic of orderlies and less air. Along with the young Leonora Casement, a sharp-nosed, sallow young woman named Rosanna Nettice from Melbourne, whose body was—despite her sickly look—full of the promise of energy, was unpacking drugs into the drug cupboard and recording quantities on an appropriate sheet. “Leo” they called Casement. She possessed a breezy, unhaunted soul that would never suit a Durance. A woman already at ease—with her own uncomplicated charm and with a zeal for work.