I did nothing, said Naomi calmly. She had taken Sally’s hand again. Our mother just died. That’s all. I don’t know why it was that night of all possible nights. But—pure and simple—she died.
That can’t be true. You took the weight of it off me.
No. I came on your secret supply amongst the linen—it was exactly where I’d hide such a thing. And I could have used it if I had your bravery. And your love—let’s not deny that. But she just died. And when I made my fire that morning, I ground in the morphine with the rest—with the rhubarb tonic and the bromide and every other bottle and useless cure.
At this claim Sally covered her face with her free hand. Naomi said with a sort of unanswerable emphasis, Listen to me. I told you the way she died and that I was there. I’ll tell you again. Mama died, pure and simple.
Sally began shuddering. It was like the shaking out of devils in camp meetings.
My God, I should have told you, Naomi admitted. I didn’t know how it weighed on you. I could tell you stories . . . a kid who collided with a tram . . . The thing is, they insist in certain cases we maintain life whatever the pain—as if that isn’t a sin and taking action is.
If their mother died—just expired of her own free right, the organism itself renouncing further pain—Sally was not an accomplice except by desire. That awareness—if Naomi could be trusted, of course—shrank the tumor. It did not excise it though.
Have you ever thought of doing something like that here in France? asked Naomi.
But these men are strangers.
One of your closest friends—I won’t say who—told me when I was at my lowest on the Archimedes that she solved a fatal hemorrhage on the operating table with a lethal chloroform dosage. It’s easier to do than with ether. I’ve often thought of doing something like that here. But amongst all the damaged boys we’re faced with, I’ve never had that certainty I had back then with that case involving the tram . . .
Further down the room the Canadians had got up from the table. They called a cheery good-night. They realized, of course, that something of moment had been argued between the sisters. They wanted to let them know it didn’t matter to them and also to reassure them falsely that it hadn’t been noticeable. When they left, the Durance sisters also got up and clung to each other. They grabbed each other’s shoulders with the pressure of crimes committed or projected and now confessed.
Later—when they were going upstairs themselves—Naomi helped Sally along and held her by the shoulder as if she were an invalid.
Now, Naomi ordered her, put your mind on the normal things. Go round town with Charlie Condon, have a meal, have a drink. Would you like to sleep in my room tonight?
No, Sally told her. She could think of nothing worse than fitting her new set of confusions and certainties into the one bed with her sister. They stopped in front of Sally’s door.
Sally said, I think I believe you.
Naomi took her by the chin. Have no doubt about it, she commanded in a lowered voice. There are only two choices, you know. Either die or live well. We live on behalf of thousands who don’t. Millions. So let’s not mope about it, eh?
In the end Naomi went in and sat with Sally until she was asleep.
Yet when Sally woke in the morning and found herself alone and weighed whether she would flee from the capital, she found that even more she wanted to meet up with Charlie on any terms. The things Naomi had told her altered to a near-tolerable level her own truth and her accepted version. There was no doubt that something had healed in her during her profound night’s sleep, as she lay deeper than the Archimedes for hours on end—looking up to a descending hull and horses and bandaged men from her finally ascendant angle. As she washed herself that morning she felt that she was simply one more woman of distinct crimes and valors. She thought, Yes, I shall have breakfast with my sister.
• • •
Charlie Condon—arriving from the Métro and presenting himself at the front desk in his trench coat—was much enthused to meet Naomi when Sally introduced her. He still had that look of unbreakability and had taken on the same kind of agelessness as Naomi.
I remember you, he said, when you seemed so much older and grander at school.
Again, plain conversation shone in the air. Charlie asked if Naomi and Ian—who had not yet arrived—would like to come with them to the galleries. First stop, the Louvre, he said, and then a few other places after lunch. We’ll have buckets of fun.
Naomi explained that there was an appointment they had to get to. Charlie said then he had made a dinner reservation at a restaurant another officer had recommended to him.
He’s good at reservations, said Sally.
Charlie thought he and Sally might go there and dine in the officer’s honor, for the poor fellow had “taken a knock,” as soldiers said—had been lethally wounded. Charlie sat down at a table just inside the door of the nurses’ hostel, pulled out his fountain pen and wrote the name of the restaurant. L’Arlésienne.
Within walking distance, he said, scrawling the address.
He and Sally emerged into the street now. On the walk towards the Palais Royal and on to the Louvre, he told her, We’re going to see the old rebels before lunch. After lunch we’ll see the young rebels.
He hoped aloud that it was possible to get at least a sense of the place in three hours or so. Fra Filippo Lippi first. Titian and El Greco—Titian born earlier and a breaker of the mold. In this place Condon reduced them to something like acquaintances who happened to dispense their thunderbolts of color and light. And that was it, as he pointed out. Yet he had read a tract about art being tone and said he’d been annoyed by it and felt that if he’d followed it he would be hamstrung. But light. To transform color into light—that remained the chief doctrine.
They went to Velásquez and Goya. There was one more recent artist he loved—Delacroix. Sally did not tell him that—with other nurses—she had once walked past Delacroix with barely a glance. She wondered if she would ever get sick of his discourses. Why would she when she wanted him to have the chance to continue them for a lifetime? He didn’t preach or lecture though. He carried his knowledge with a sort of boyish excitement instead of with vanity. He was an enthusiast. His eyes shone. If there was a percentage of vanity it was the appropriate one. The major percentage was of delight.
He took her to a room she had not known existed, and in it they found the world encompassed in the space of a small meadow. Entranced, Charlie pointed to the way yellow was applied throughout the compass of the huge Delacroix canvas called The Women of Algiers. She saw then The Shipwreck of Don Juan. It gave her pause. Yet it was somehow a consolation for the Archimedes. At the one time it reduced the Archimedes to the scale of other tragedy while expanding it to the size of the globe. Delacroix’s self-portrait looked out at her with certainty and penetration. Charlie and Delacroix and the rest—she believed—were conspirators at the business of rescuing her as they had rescued others as well—unworthy and lucky people had walked this trail, salon to salon.
From them she was fortified for a momentous lunchtime.
• • •
At this hour of Sally’s highest eagerness, Naomi and Ian sat again on facing benches in the plain Friends meeting house with Mr. Sedgewick and his committee members, the meeting having begun with the usual period of silent prayer and reflection. Was it that her sense of the world had swung so thoroughly in the same direction as that of Ian, or was it a genuine spiritual instinct of her own, which made her feel that she could inhabit this silence very comfortably and that God—who was not in the war—was in the silence? Other religions began with certainties and pronounced them from the start of their rituals. The Friends seemed to have no certainties and humbly waited for the voice to emerge. These people did not seem to anticipate or even feel sure that anything would grace them with a visit. That attracted her. She had never been in an uncertain church before.
It had then been like last time. Madame Flerieu spoke first
, addressing God—as Naomi could now both sense and tell from the French she knew—and then beginning to discuss “these two young persons.” Then Mr. Sedgewick spoke—also in French. He remained sitting with his face forward, his eyes placid and fixed on no one at first. Then his gaze settled wistfully on Naomi before moving across the room to take in Ian.
He said to Ian, Forgive us for speaking in French. Madame Flerieu wishes you to know that she does not ask these questions out of malice or judgement. She wishes to know more clearly than last time whether Friends are granted military exemption from conscription in Australia, and if they are granted exemption, then—so to speak—why you find yourself here?
Ian showed no irritation, though even Naomi could see there had been an edge to Madame Flerieu’s earlier speech and was not convinced there was no judgement there.
He had made his religious position known to the recruiters, he said, but he must also make one other thing clear—he had not been conscripted. The Australian army did not have conscription as a policy. The idea of compulsory enlistment had been twice voted down by the people. So he wore this uniform voluntarily. He and Miss Durance, he said, had earlier discussed the question of whether they succored men who were finished with fighting and were forever on their way out of battle, or whether they helped repair them so they could be sent back into the field. The generals wished the latter. But the horror of wounds ensured that to a large extent their work was with the former—healing those who would never be able to soldier again.
He was not evading the question or the responsibility, he said. But many Friends were merchants, engaged in shipping and purchase and sale. Were they sure that all their contracts were with men not engaged in business to do with the war? In matters of business, any Friend would do his utmost to ensure the probity of their dealings, but it could not always be proven. Is the help that those Friends who are not in uniform give to the unfortunate throughout the world not influenced by the same uncertainty? That they might—by their compassionate service of food and other forms of succor—help strengthen soldiers for the fight and preserve unjust governments from the discontent of the populace?
Madame Flerieu had seemed to an anxious Naomi near unanswerable. But in the field of discourse—as strange an image as it might be—Naomi thought he was putting Madame Flerieu to the sword. And he was not finished.
Our work cannot always be perfected, he continued. Did I become a medical orderly from vanity? It is possible, since the vain always deny their conceit. But I became one as a Friend too. As for Miss Durance—though as shocked by war as I am—she was not a Friend when this war began and may not ever become one. She was not in her soul in 1914 subject to the same restrictions as I was. She operated within her conscience. What more can be asked?
She was shocked by the phrase, “She was not a Friend.” She was shocked by his extolling of her conscience when she’d embarked on her war nursing not on principle, as Ian had, but with insolent self-regard. Sedgewick summarized what Ian had said for Madame Flerieu’s sake in French which was more exuberant and swift than his careful English. A lot of Englishmen Sedgewick’s age would have cleared out of Paris, she thought—during the Battle of the Marne so many months before. But he’d stayed here—in this capital which was never quite safe from the enemy’s ambitions—with his Friends.
Madame Flerieu remained uncertain, it was clear. But it must be said that she looked at them with intelligent rather than rancid eyes. It was as if she had asked what vanities moved her? But in the end she did not seem to wish to be the obstacle, the religious harpy. If empowered by some more hating and embattled creed, one could imagine her becoming so. Hence the impulse arose in Naomi to tell Kiernan, To hell with Flerieu! Let’s just get married by an army padre.
Mr. Sedgewick yet again consulted his fellow committee members in French. It was agreed between them that as was normal—when they could all next meet together—Naomi and Ian would merely be asked to announce their fixed intentions as a formality and could then be married by Mr. Sedgewick. On the same day, if they chose.
At the door Mr. Sedgewick seemed to want to let the others go on their way and keep Naomi and Ian back. Indeed the others did go. You understand, he said then, Lieutenant Kiernan, that you are not being subjected to some abnormal scrutiny? But you answered well, I must say. We can behave as perfected men and women in a perfected world. The perfected world seems far off now. May I take you for tea?
He led them two blocks to an apartment building and—having spoken jovially to a concierge—ascended three flights of stairs with them and led them into a large apartment with a view over rooftops to the ÎIe de la Cité with the cathedral set on it. He said, as he brought them tea that Naomi considered to be rather pallid, It is as well, isn’t it, that this is the war to end all wars? According to the American president you will never be faced again with the choice you faced four years ago.
That reminder of war’s end combined with the pale tea became like intoxicants and she smiled across at Ian to hear this global promise uttered by their friend Mr. Sedgewick.
• • •
After Charlie and Sally emerged from the Louvre, they walked south to the icy river, which seemed to threaten to freeze solid, and stopped at a café and decided to sit inside by a window. The air had cleared to a silveriness beneath which Sally was sure many utterances not normally plausible could be made. They both ordered tea, though Charlie felt—like Naomi—that the French didn’t make it properly. But Sally had suggested they wouldn’t touch wine until that evening—for fear it would blunt the sight, she said. This seemed to be no problem for Charlie. He did not drink today as he had when he visited her at Deux Églises. Having delivered the tea, the waiter took their lunch orders.
Sally was ecstatic and frantic at the one time. As soon as the waiter left she felt she had to speak to him, as if it would be impossible once the table was cluttered with food, cutlery, cups, glasses.
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 o
n 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.