The Daughters of Mars: A Novel Page 16

  May I point out, called Kiernan, that it’s your crowd who want us here, beating our heads against the Turks. We are doing your Empire a favor.

  There was another communal outcry from men on and attached to the raft.

  Nettice leaned over the side and confided to Naomi, I’m finished now. I lost too much air. I went too deep.

  She slid like a dolphin and was in the water, but Naomi gathered her in with a long arm and attached one of Nettice’s small blue hands to the rope. Nettice slumped there with a disappointed weariness.

  Sally wondered why others were not so incarnately cold as she was. They complained in terms she knew were understandable. They spoke of the false current. They cursed a passing ship. But no one spoke of cold. Naomi was in the water but superior to it. Certainly she had lost all her authority on the Archimedes. Triage had chastened her. Ellis Hoyle’s watch was an albatross. Yet now she had not only resumed control but done it in a particular way—by becoming the jolliest girl and the best camping companion. Sally was pleased for it since it was the accustomed arrangement which she welcomed at the moment. It was a grateful wonder. It was a light shining through ice.

  There was another gray ship appearing up north and from the populace of the raft more waving and shouting and hooting and whistling in which Sally took part, but only by reflex.

  Nurse Slattery, called Kiernan from the water, is there a box there, on board? One end of the raft or the other?

  A box? There is a box, said Slattery. A young man has his head on it. Move him a little to the side. That’s right. So you want it, Mr. Kiernan?

  Open it up, said Kiernan.

  Honora said it was locked. Kiernan asked who had a knife.

  Slattery inquired of the now mute sergeant if he had a knife. It seemed he produced something appropriate. Unskilled metal sounds were heard of Slattery working at the box. Fingers hopeless, she admitted. Then, Dear God, she cried. Broke the blade.

  Keep working on it, said Kiernan. You see, there might be a flare.

  Sally could hear Slattery battering at the box with the broken blade. She grunted, God, if you ever loved a poor girl, help me open this damned thing.

  It amazed her by opening. A papist miracle of which none of the Ulstermen around and on the raft were heard objecting. Well, said Slattery, a jug of water here. Just right for Matron Mitchie.

  I’ll have a sip of that too, said the sergeant aboard with a clotted voice.

  In hearing that plea Sally discovered her own thirst. Dryness and ice. She was a cold desert no living water could redeem. She was not surprised to see her mother floating at her side where Honora had been. Life is sweet, said her mother but with the famed Durance frown which raised the chance that death was sweet too. Sally felt with a strange loathing pride what she had achieved—the lethal hoard of morphine gathered in as honest girls gather in . . . what? Linen, blackberries, peaches? Time to put her money down on the chance death was sweet. Time to discover the infinite space of what she had done. The space lay beneath her and could be explored without limit.

  A bandage and this stick thing, said Honora, further reporting the contents of the box.

  The flare, said Kiernan. Hang on to it and keep it dry.

  But there’s nothing dry here, said Slattery.

  Kiernan redefined the objective. Well, don’t let it get too sodden. And pass it to me when another ship appears. It can give you phosphorus burns so don’t let it off yourself.

  I wouldn’t know how to, Slattery reflected. She sounded a bit amazed that she had neglected this section of her education.

  Go aboard when the time comes, Naomi advised him. Else you’ll drop it in the sea.

  Sally saw another soldier slip away and no one but she seemed to take notice or be able to afford to. She could see him floating—she believed—towards Egypt.

  Does anyone here have a red handkerchief? Naomi called.

  Aboard, Honora repeated the request. Then she seemed to go about rifling pockets. We’ve got gray, she announced.

  Use that too! said Kiernan.

  For he and Naomi spoke and thought with one mind.

  We’re as good as rescued, Naomi told everyone.

  Men dangling on the sides of the craft were calling for their sip of the water. Naomi handed it over the far side of the raft. It had gone to only a few men when someone—according to the yells and reproofs of men—dropped it so that it half sank before it could be retrieved, already useless and tainted with salt. There were groans and curses all around the raft. The treasure was gone. That was the conclusive disaster. And the light was growing conclusive too, the sun getting low. In dark—it came to Sally—no one can stop me going to explore. Her forgiving mother said, We’ll slip off alone. Sally looked forward to it, rejoicing. The pain of her hooked arm and the ice at her heart would be relieved.

  She could not see more than the upper structure of one of them but it happened the sea was all at once full of ships. Two large shapes—Honora reported—and a smaller, faster one. The flare, called Kiernan, and Slattery passed it over the side like a baton without it being lost in the sea. Sally saw Kiernan—frowning like a prodigy of care—pull some string from it and hold it as high as he could. It blazed brighter than suns in his hand. He waved it while Slattery dared to stand in the raft and wave the gray handkerchief. One of the larger ships veered towards Kiernan’s light and Honora’s cloth. Around the raft ran a sudden, hoarse conversation.

  They bloody seen us, cried the sergeant. They’ve got some gobshite there that isn’t total blind. Seen us! Seen us!

  But after small hesitancy it turned broadside on, then stern on. Renouncing them.

  No excuse to let go, cried Naomi at once. Everyone stay. He’s lowering boats.

  A British naval launch—the smallest of the three vessels—presented itself and swept past them making a wave. They could hear the reverberations of its braked engine as it sat by a distant overturned boat to which some still clung. From the raft they could see people lifted and laid down or allowed to limp on its deck. A brisk pennant flapped above them from the mast. Then—instead of to them—it turned to another unseen raft to take its living aboard. The deck seemed to bristle with the rescued as it came onwards to their raft.

  Hold on, called a fine, casual, polished voice through a loud-hailer. Hold on there. The French will get you. We have signaled them and they replied.

  Their powers of reason were dimmed, but the people of the raft could see that it was so, and the launch was so crowded that its stern dipped. Sally felt a murderous hatred for those who were already on board. The raft swung in the launch’s wake, and they beheld a launch and cutter being lowered as promised from a dusk-lit naval shape. A destroyer—someone said. As the raft swirled in the vortex made by the ship’s displacement of water, they could see the tricolor on the high mast.

  Boats were being lowered from a suddenly apparent second French destroyer too. Substantial rescue was about to occur.

  • • •

  The French destroyer held on its deck and within its bulwarks dozens upon dozens of the Archimedes’s children. After being lifted up to the deck each of them had been wrapped in a blanket by sailors with pompoms on their hats like in a play. The thoroughly dry, thick texture of the blanket was a mercy so vast that Sally—laid on the deck beside Nettice—thought the men’s foreign names should be taken by someone so that they could be the recipients of regular thanks. Matelots. They were rubbing men’s bodies but were inhibited as yet from rubbing the bodies of nurses. Nettice shivered, eyes closed—encased in her blanket, beside Sally—on the tender surface of steel reminiscent of the Archimedes’s lost bulk.

  Below a hung sail was separated off part of a sailors’ mess as a women’s ward. They were each lifted onto tables and now their life jackets were cut away with their blouses and remnants of clothing. The water had made the women neuters. Sally was washed with wine-tinted hot water and was given a towel to manage her own drying. She just about could. Then a Fr
ench orderly helped to dress her in the undershirt of a tall sailor. In an officer’s cabin—Honora already asleep in the officer’s bunk—Sally was given a palliasse on the floor. The hot breath of the ship’s engines entered through a vent somewhere.

  She quaked with remembered and not yet dispelled terror, and found herself concerned above all with her mind. She tested it and thought she found it a stranger’s mind. Her own having dissolved in the sea, she had picked up someone else’s drifting and bobbing mind. She saw herself now not as a continuous thing. She was no more than a mute core—or a pole on which rings of a particular nature could be placed. Each ring was a successive self—that was it. Her self was utterly new and needed to be learned all over. The childhood ring of self was not connected or continuous with the morphine-stealing one. Nor did the morphine-stealing one share any fragment with the Pyramid gawker. And now she was utterly new again, she found herself alarmed to be so. The latest hard little hoop—being taken out of the water—could just as easily be lifted off and replaced by another as accidental, whose description was: drowned in the Mediterranean. Since she was so tenuous, she might still swerve at any second from her rescued state and into oblivion. There was no such grand connector as destiny at work in her and never had been. Such a thin skin existed between parallel states and chances that they could leak or bleed or be welded into one another.

  An officer with a molded beard came along, bowed to her and tenderly called her Mademoiselle. A blanketed, streak-haired Naomi appeared in the doorway. Her half-demented certainty and her zest astounded her sister. She held up Ellis Hoyle’s watch which must have been attached beneath her life jacket to her blouse. She looked joyful and still in command in a way that sidestepped the command of the French officers. The sea’s finished it, she explained. It’s seized it up. It’s just an empty case now.

  With her half-mad and all-commanding sister above her, she felt it safe to fall into sleep and did without further thought.

  She awoke to a bright evening world and sailors carrying her on a stretcher through places full of glaring electric light. On deck a launch hung in the air and she was loaded on when it was level with the deck. She had an impression they were in a harbor—Mudros, she decided. On Lemnos. From the deck of the descending launch she could see Naomi—a blanket on her shoulders—walking the destroyer’s rail and looking seraphic. No eye had ever been clearer or readier for this place than hers. The Argonauts landed blind compared to Naomi.

  Bitter Lemnos

  Sally and others were carried down a cramped laneway that smelled of earth and urine and into a large tent. Naomi passed Sally’s stretcher on foot and scouted ahead. She felt canvas brush her elbow as she was brought into a tent and placed on a cot. Here she fell asleep and—after not one dream—woke in gloom lit by a hurricane lamp hanging from the central pole.

  She heard a significant voice and struggled to identify who it was by the dim lamp and an early morning glimmer of light through the canvas. Carradine bent down to pull back her blanket. A band was playing in the distance, orderlies shouting—for its own sake, it seemed—and a few blowflies buzzed in the tent.

  Look, said Carradine. The blanket says “RF” and then down here République Française. A bit of the old parlez-vous, eh?

  Sally reached up and took her by the elbows. She found them solid and present. She gazed into Carradine’s face.

  I was hoping you were all safe, said Carradine.

  But we left you with your husband, Sally protested. You’re with him, not me.

  Ah, said Carradine. Well, that’s a tale for later.

  That awful hole in his head . . .

  He’s well. He speaks well. He’s fit to get elected to parliament like his father.

  Sally let Carradine loosen the sailor’s shirt she still wore and wash her shoulders and her breasts, and then her belly and genitals and rump and legs. All of it was the sweetest friction.

  You’ve washed the others? she asked with feverish democratic concern.

  Oh, yes, said Carradine. They’re all clean. And fit to talk to.

  Oh, said Sally. But Eric?

  Carradine said in her nurse’s whisper, The doctor in England—at Sudbury Hospital—said I was holding up his recovery. The terrible thing is that he’s probably right. Eric’s depended on me so much. But he cried when I was sent off here. He cries easily, then gets angry and afterwards never stops apologizing. It’s the nature of the wound. He gets periods of delirium when he thinks the world’s out to get him. I’ve seen more men weep in the head-injury ward in the last four months than I’ve seen in my whole life before.

  The feel of the towel remained exquisite. Had such a fabric existed before the torpedo?

  The problem, Sally assured Carradine, is that men are not strong. It was men who drifted away from our raft. Whereas Mitchie . . .

  Carradine nodded—assenting to the proposition that Mitchie had endured.

  Well, she’s had surgery but I haven’t heard any more . . . Most of the time I work as a dresser. I have a fine tent. Or if it’s possible to have a fine tent here, mine is. And everything I need—and two orderlies who treat me with contempt, the buggers.

  There were suddenly tears on Carradine’s face. My God, she said, I’m as bad as the fellows at Sudbury.

  She rose. Another nurse had finished bathing Honora, who had barely stopped talking in a hushed voice.

  Carradine! hissed Honora, Carradine being the icing on survival’s cake.

  Honora was sitting up. Sally saw an apparition of Freud stirring and settling in a sailor’s shirt on a camp cot across the tent.

  Sally drowsed further now and was awakened by her sister’s lips on her cheek. Naomi was in her long sailor’s shirt and shivering beneath the blanket around her shoulders.

  Imagine what it would have been like for Papa, she said. If we hadn’t been lucky. We wouldn’t have lasted the night. The night would have done for us.

  I think you would have lasted, Sally insisted.

  She heard a sudden wind blow grit against the side of the tent. An officer and a matron entered with an orderly. The officer was a man of middling years who held himself with that certainty peculiar to a particular kind of surgeon. He had not made any notable noise in entering, yet the women roused themselves and looked up, wan faced, and Sally swung her legs to the dirt floor and sat.

  Ladies, he said, Colonel Spanner here. Welcome to Lemnos. May I present my congratulations on your survival.

  Their survival, however, did not make him smile. Something in his greeting made Honora turn a mad, mocking face in Sally’s direction. Nettice frowned from the far side of the tent with that vehemence with which she had yesterday risen out of the ocean on the pony. There was something improper in his dominance of them—with them prostrate or lolling.

  Are there any problems then? he asked. Concussion, abrasions, contusions, lesions of any kind?

  The women all chorused their No’s and felt foolish because they sounded like a class of schoolgirls. The colonel—responding like a headmaster—asked, were they sure? The matron said there was no mention on their charts of anything beyond exposure. So the colonel turned to the orderly. Private, you are my witness that they have vouchsafed no information indicative of trauma.

  Yes, sir, said the orderly and smirked.

  So, said the colonel like a jolly uncle but one who could not hereafter be blamed, no grounds for a long delay in returning to work then.

  Carradine stood there with narrowed eyes.

  Orderly, will you see that the women are issued some clothing? Chemise, blouse, skirt, or pants . . . Yes, and shoes and Wellington boots.

  Doctor, said Naomi suddenly, with a sort of impetus. There were more than twenty nurses on the Archimedes.

  Yes, said the colonel. Six of them are missing. Please accept my condolences.

  Naomi—the one nurse standing—declared, How dare they put soldiers and military equipment on our ship! And apart from the painted-over red crosses, men w
ere visible on deck, exercising when they should have been below, hiding. It gave the U-boat its reason to sink us. I would ask you on behalf of all of us here to protest to the military command.

  These are arguable points, said the colonel, but moot. Damage done now, wouldn’t you say? And don’t you normally address officers as “Sir”?

  If we had a military status then we would, said Naomi with her eyes full on him.

  Ah, said the colonel. A barrack-room lawyer here. You should feel free to write your own letter of complaint, if you choose. But may I say this is a small matter in a landscape of huge matters. Perhaps best forgotten in light of your deliverance.

  The English matron read the names of the missing. Egan, Weir, Stanmore, Keato, Delamare, Fenwick. They were Sally’s acquaintances, but belonged to other cabins and another clique. All these lost women had sat generally at the other table of the two in the mess. So they had stuck together in the water—just as her clique had—and been unfortunate together. Someone in the tent began to grieve and her frank tears could be heard. Freud mourned Keato as a fellow Melbourne girl. Sally felt her kinship with them too. She felt nine-tenths saturated by the Mediterranean and that she might carry its weight around in her for good.

  And our matron? Honora asked.

  Since the question has been asked, I can tell you that Matron Mitchie has undergone an above-the-knee amputation. The second leg remains, for the moment. That is it, then.

  He nodded to the matron and orderly. They left. Carradine was left gazing at the women in the tent with her mouth set.

  Is he really in charge here? Honora asked her.

  Carradine conceded he was.

  The orderly put his head in again.

  Nurse, he said as a command, and Carradine—after a pause that counted for minor rebellion—followed him out.

  Holy Virgin, said Honora. Do you think that colonel creature has a wife?

  Dr. Fellowes isn’t gone, Nettice assured them. I saw him on the deck of the Tirailleur, the destroyer.

  Sally saw tears on Freud’s face and felt them pushing at her eyes—a little of her saturation rising. Those pitiable girls who had yelled fear and encouragement to each other in the ocean, and it had smothered them. They had howled and the water took its opportunity.