The Daughters of Mars (25 page)

Yes, Sally admitted.

The two men seemed to welcome the idea, as if it were some sort of souvenir of home. On their way out, Dankworth paused by the tent flap. Remember that we are willing to protect you, he growled with his eyes lowered. But the shield he offered them was not the right one for the time.

• • •

Honora was outraged they had not woken her to meet Dankworth, but she was half pretending—she seemed invigorated to know he was on
the island. Soon they’d be promenading the foreshores together, and that would restore something that had been lost here.

It was raining when the military police officer and his sergeant came to the mess tent to collect Freud. Nurses had till now been muttering about how well she seemed to be taking things. Nursing—Sally knew—was a great if temporary distraction from all memory. The two provosts shone like deliverance in their slicked waterproofs. The Australian matron also appeared in an overcoat and was a fellow authority. The provost officer asked Freud to come with them, and the matron said Naomi could come too.

When Naomi and Freud set out with the military policeman and the matron, they were themselves bulky in khaki overcoats and as good as disguised under sou’westers. Their gum boots robbed them of all grace as they tripped through puddles to the hut down the hill which served as a police station. Naomi was later spare with details about what had happened there. Freud could not be asked for fear of what the question would bring on in her. The man imprisoned and identified by Freud as the rapist was an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old who was wide-faced and fair-haired—an orderly from the medical wards and the circus tent. Freud was asked to swear that this was the criminal. She gathered herself and—as Naomi recounted it to Sally later—it was already apparent that she
could
swear. But the forces working on Freud for denying it were potent. The provosts and others would be pleased if she did refuse to point to the attacker.

The young man brought in front of her was blushing. Freud snorted at this—as if it were a plea of innocence.

Did you say something? the officer asked.

That’s him, Freud answered. She looked at the boy full-on. He would not look at her. At the moment of identification the boy’s mouth hung in a way which almost made Naomi pity him. He’s not clever, she thought. He’s a muscular child. Those who recruited him carry their barbarous portion of the blame. But suddenly Freud needed to be restrained by Naomi and the matron from attacking
him. She managed only to spit at his face. After a second—held by the arms—she went peacefully. There was no answer for what this blundering kid had taken. The young man was charged in front of her with rape and marched away hatless. Afterwards Naomi and the matron guided Freud back to the tent and suggested they would need to call the doctor again with his benevolent sedatives. No, said Freud—upright in their hands. Whatever he gives me, I still have to wake up in the end.

She wanted to go on duty with Naomi, so Naomi was promoted to post-operative. Dysentery was declining anyhow as autumn came to the Gallipoli Peninsula and to Lemnos. The medical wards were not as full, as the armies on the peninsula dug deeply rather than raged forward. Freud worked with a neutral and measured air. She took temperatures and blood pressures and encouraged young men to wake from chloroform. She had the power now to call on orderlies to help her move patients onto their sides. They obeyed her with their own neutrality or with a strangely shy sullenness. Naomi heard one man who worked with them—an orderly who must have been near forty years of age—bend forwards and tell Freud he was sorry and that he hoped she understood they weren’t all like that, et cetera. Freud said nothing to him.

The entire nurses’ mess felt a certain solace to know the evildoer had now been arrested—and identified as barely more than a child and not a very clever child. They could not help feeling it reduced the scale of menace which had hung over them. Now—more than in the interim—it became clear to them that they had been frightened of someone satanically astute and not to be appeased. They were relieved by the anticlimax of an arrest to which one plain face belonged.

Dankworth had been back to stroll down the headland with Honora—that was a token of the normal. But the women as a group acted in Freud’s company with the false breeziness appropriate to a fatal condition. Her fatal condition was that the trial of the rapist was still ahead of her and he might get exonerated.

• • •

Lieutenant Robbie Shaw and his newly promoted friend Captain Lionel Dankworth did help ease the weight of such questions by calling at the mess again one evening. They found a small group of nurses ready to go on night duty—Sally, Naomi, Honora, Nettice, Leonora. There are thermal baths on the other side of the island, Shaw told them. We’re going to try to get a car on Sunday to take us over there. Would you like to go?

These two had a wonderful air of unstoppability about them. They walked on the island on their own terms. And behind their joking, their casual watchfulness, and their unspoken sense of affront at what had been done to Freud, Sally could tell that they were by their very instincts assessing and weighing the women as men customarily did. Is my wife here? they asked themselves. Is she amongst these gravel-dwellers with their mixed clothing and their harrowed looks?

Speaking of the coming excursion, Robbie Shaw said, Why not invite the girl who had the problem too? It’ll be good for her.

Ah, said Dankworth—sidestepping that noxious subject. That girl Carradine, is she here? We have a truckload of bedpans outside.

They went outside and there was the improbable truckload. As they carried canisters of tea and tins of fruitcake indoors under Shaw’s rowdy orders, Naomi went urgently to find the right orderly to get the bedpans unloaded. It seemed to her that these two young men of no great gifts were angels of efficacy on an island whose masters sought to forbid every gesture of cleverness and grace.

Naomi told the men that there would be at least eight women free to make the journey.

Will you be one of them? I mean, the ones who come? asked Shaw confidentially—and out of Dankworth’s hearing.

It depends. I would like an outing. If Freud comes, then I’ll go too.

He lowered his voice. Lionel likes the brunette with the eyes. And all the impudence. Could you get her to come?

I doubt she could be stopped.

It was agreed amongst the women that if anyone should have a holiday from the general hospital—assuming she could be persuaded—it must be Freud. And so Naomi must—of course—go too. Apart from that, names would be drawn from a hat.

That night in the darkened wards Sally moved amongst fevered amputees, those whose wounded arms lay in cock-up splints and legs in long splints. Taking temperatures and pulses, she was a meek inspector of frantic dreams and listened for pain and anguish in those whose sleep was shallow. She saw the English matron loom out of darkness. Her torchlight skimmed the beds and bounced off her white bosom.

Sister Nettice? the matron asked Sally. Nettice was somewhere in this darkness and still to be found. The matron’s torchlight went probing into corners. It brushed over faces in repose and eyes starkly awake.

Accompany me, Nurse, said the matron. Sally walked in her wake and they moved down the chicanes formed by army cots and came on something extraordinary. The torch beam discovered Nettice standing by a cot. Sitting on the floor in blue hospital pyjamas was a young man whose eyes were still bandaged but who cocked his head inquiringly towards the light. Nettice had been only partially successful in putting a distance between herself and the patient. The matron-in-chief hissed at Nettice and asked what she had in her hand. Nettice slowly produced something from the folds of her lumpy skirts. It was—Sally recognized—one of the chocolate slabs Shaw and Dankworth had brought them from the depot ship.

The matron gave the appearance of understanding this scene—at least in her own terms. Nonetheless, she breathily called on God to shed light on what was happening here. The young officer—a little smear of chocolate on his left cheek, a childlike and forgivable smudge—turned and began haltingly to feel the edges of his mattress. Unaccustomed to his dark within the dark, he levered himself slowly up. He intended to stand upright in Nettice’s defense. Nettice, however,
reached out with authority and put her hand on his shoulder—exerting pressure so that he sat down on his cot.

What’s the problem, Rosanna? he asked.

I was taking some time, Matron, said Nettice—low but without apology—to give Lieutenant Byers some chocolate. In my estimation, it does him good and lets him know he still has a name and a future.

“Let him know?”
Of course he has a name.

He had forgotten it with the blow to his face. I have had to school him in it and now he knows it again. But his memory must be fortified.

Must it be fortified with chocolate and on the floor? I would imagine not.

Nettice’s face was set. It would not change to mollify the matron. It refused to take on any trace of shame or contrition or justification. Nettice said reasonably, It’s so big here with voices coming and going. He would have forgotten who he was without me telling him. And a bit of chocolate.

Come, said the matron. We can’t go on hissing and whispering here. Come to my office.

Matron, Lieutenant Byers called out in a voice firm and loud enough for the daylight, if you are suggesting that there was anything untoward . . .

He stood again, as if with the intention to follow the matron and Nettice.

Here, said Sally, taking one of his shoulders and then the other. Nettice will handle it. Don’t worry.

She helped him sit once more on the side of his bed, a slight figure in his large drill pyjamas—the uniform of those lost in that confused space between soldierhood and the lesser life arising from the scale of the harm done them.

I’ve got her into trouble with the ogre, said Lieutenant Byers. Are women ogres or ogresses? Poor little Rosie.

She’ll just get a talking-to. We’re all used to talkings-to. Don’t worry.

A hiccough of sorrow came from him. She patted his shoulder.

It’s nothing at all, she said. That woman disapproves of people breathing.

He shook his head. Rosanna’s right, you know. Living here is like living in a factory.

Oh, will you get some sleep? asked or commanded a voice from across the room.

Sorry, mate, Byers called lowly. Sorry, all. No sweat. Can’t keep my eyes open a minute longer.

He gave Sally a little stutter of laughter.

• • •

That Sunday forenoon the two omnipotent artillery officers arrived in a car and a truck and with a young Greek guide to take them to the promised baths.

Listen, said Robbie Shaw, limping around the car, I hear different reports of these hot springs. But let’s give it a go, anyhow. By the way, this young bloke’s called Demetrios.

Four of them—Sally, Naomi, Honora, and Freud, who Naomi had somehow persuaded to come along—were able to sit in the car. Dankworth drove, with Honora in the middle of the front and Shaw with his legs stuck out as the window-side passenger. The truck—driven by one of the artillerymen—followed with the other women.

But Nettice was not there. Nettice had been suspended, which, in this windy island on a headland of gravel and with no place of entertainment but the mess, was a severe test of the soul. She was forbidden to enter the wards or speak to Lieutenant Byers. She amused herself by playing Patience with a dog-eared pack. She gave Sally a daily note for delivery to Byers. She seemed to look calmly on the possibility of further discipline.

Now the expeditionary path took her off-duty sisters jolting north away from the sea—from the place of ships and hutments and encampments—and upwards amidst fields in which green pasture grew. Scrawny cattle and plump goats availed themselves of this. On the hills, the lines of olive trees seethed in a brisk wind. Here, without
warning, the colonel’s Lemnos gave way to Sergeant Kiernan’s. The gods
were
here, Sally thought, though she could not have named them. A long white wall contained a patch of hillside in which there stood a white Greek chapel and its gravestones. In the backseat of the car, Naomi pointed it out to Freud, who took polite interest. But the dazzle of Greek white walls wasn’t enough to soothe her. Most of her could not be reached by light.

They threaded between hills and exclaimed to see wildflowers on hillsides and speculate what they were. In a village of white walls and houses, Demetrios and Dankworth had a loud discussion on directions before continuing on and passing an ancient amphitheatre beyond. Before Christ? shouted Dankworth. Demetrios nodded his head emphatically. Far before Christos. Greco-Roman, he said.

The road began to wind, and the truck stopped to allow Carradine to be sick. They all got out for the occasion and picked wildflowers and looked down the long ribs of the island towards the brilliant sea. Sally demanded that Carradine take a seat in the car, and she joined the girls on the benches at the back of the truck where the wind blew their veils horizontal. Rising up a hill now, they saw the sudden apparition of mountains beyond a whitecapped sea. For that instant they were utterly released from earth and absorbed by the company of those mountains across the water and their remnant snow. The car stopped, and at Dankworth’s order Demetrios came back to the truck and pointed at the mountains for the benefit of the nurses aboard.
Thrakya
, he said, and ultimately the word “Thrace” was suggested and Demetrios agreed. Then earth dragged them back again and down a stony hill and into another glittering white village, where clothes blew on lines like regatta flags.

The road beyond the town ended above a bay. They gathered their bags and their bathing costumes—borrowed from the Canadians—and accompanied Dankworth and Shaw down a pathway over which sheltering trees cast shade. So they came to a long white building with a tiled roof and a disused-looking open-air café to one side of it. The
bathing party milled inside while Demetrios bought tickets from an old man in a glass booth and—in a heavy atmosphere of sulphur from the baths—feverishly distributed them while pointing to the doors for men and women. Shaw apologized for the smell. I believe, he said, it’s not your normal baths. Demetrios told me it’s about smearing on mud. Some Greek saint used to do it and it cured his gammy leg or some such. I suppose it all adds up to an experience, anyhow.