The Daughters of Mars: A Novel Read online

  How the men and women buried today must have celebrated at finding their lifeboat. Had they needed to right it—and then congratulated themselves on achieving this and climbed aboard its hollow promise? To perish in an excess of air, Sally believed, was worse than to drown in water.

  Nonetheless, the solemnities of the padre and the trumpeter did release the pressure of grief. After it was done, Sally was pleased to go back up to the tents from this field of putrefaction of young flesh—from this ground which lacked aged souls—to counsel the bewilderment of the lost young spirits.

  In the night—under the black canvas—Sally was awakened by a hand eagerly exploring her stomach. She screamed at the outrage. She thought of one of those terrifying, sneering, venom-dripping, slash-mouthed orderlies. All the other girls rose up. Half of Freud’s face was seen as she lit the hurricane lamp which hung from the pole. Light was shed. It caught a furious rodent scurrying across the earth floor. A patch of ground was rubbled and into the rubble black fur disappeared.

  Oh God, cried Freud. Remember? We were warned. Moles.

  Sally covered her eyes. I was scared it was an orderly, she confessed.

  Maybe the colonel, suggested Freud to make them laugh. They all gagged with mad hilarity.

  I vote we leave the lamp on, Honora said.

  I vote with you, said Rosanna Nettice with her weightiness. A considered vote.

  A hailstorm came over the island on that same night of the mole. Its edged ice slashed the tent canvas. In the morning Naomi solemnly repaired the hole with sticking plaster inside and out. They would stir at night now and see by the lowered flame of the hurricane lantern small dark shapes scurrying or hear them shuffling rubble on the earthen floor and being busy with their nightly animal duties.

  • • •

  A scatter of mail always lay on a card table by the inside door of the mess tent. Sometimes a parcel dutifully sewn in cloth. The parcels created tremors and cries of joy. People ran to get scissors to undo the stitching. The Durance sisters never looked at this table. In their own minds they had passed through a veil into country that the normal postal arrangements could not reach. Oh, they could write out to others. But others, they presumed, could not write in.

  So one morning they needed to be told by some other women that there were parcels for them on the table. When people rushed to put them in their hands, the Durances frowned at each other. Their parcels had been addressed to the Australian Army Nursing Service, Mena House, Egypt, and then sent on to Alexandria, where they had acquired a label on which someone had written, ON THE ARCHIMEDES—ON LEMNOS IF LIVING.

  Naomi assessed her parcel and read the writing on its sewn cloth wrapping. Sally took out her penknife from her pocket and began to cut at the fabric of hers. Inside lay a rough wooden box. It looked homemade. She could see her father running it up from grocery boxes. She could as good as hear the scrape of his saw. Inside that box lay so many good things that other nurses gasped with wonder. Condensed milk, delicious in tea. Jugged ox tongue—which they had stated a taste for early in their girlhoods. Their mother had been an expert bottler and pickler of all the earth’s fruits—whether vegetable or animal—but it had been some years before her death that she had given up the effort. The girls themselves had failed to pick up the skill. So their father must have been given the tongue by a neighbor, as well as the other preserves of fruit and jam and the cloth-wrapped fruitcake. The two of them placed the jars and packages side by side and smiled at each other and at the other nurses smiling back.

  Inside each package was an envelope. Naomi opened hers while Sally was still showing off her delicacies. Naomi’s lips pursed as she opened the envelope—she seemed ready for dubious tidings. Sally at last opened her own. It had a number of pages and began with “My dearest girls” in her father’s hand. It was dated 30 April 1915. Naomi and Sally compared their mail. The two letters were identical. And so they each read in silence while the other women drifted away to talk and drink tea.

  My dearest girls,

  I have made two copies of this letter and put one in each of your hampers since others tell me that not all things reach their intended destinations in the area you are in. This letter carries your father’s love. To be honest with you both I miss you a great amount. It has been heavy rain this week. How often Easter is like that! I thought we were for it with a flood again—you know. So I got the cattle into the upper paddock. They’re not happy since the grass is ranker there but not much. Not like pasture the other side of the Great Divide but you would think it was like that to see them mooning and sulking. Anyway, I thought we’d be sitting on the roof pretty soon. But the level of water fell then and some good upriver mud has landed on our lower paddock. Jolly good is what I say. Delivered by nature.

  But the main issue—I have very large news to tell you both and my hope is that you will be pleased at it. For I think it first-rate though I understand your feelings for your dear late mother which are as strong as mine still remain. Mrs. Sorley and I have got married by Presbyterian rites. I know we are Methodist but she is firm Presbyterian. No harm done—or so I thought. You girls know her well enough. The widow Enid Sorley. And her husband was killed earlier than his time in that timber-felling accident, poor fellow. Mrs. Sorley helped me put together this hamper which I hope you find pretty A1 and a reminder of your home in the bush. Enid Sorley pickled and bottled the tongue which I know you both used to like and we packed it in amongst the cans so it wouldn’t break too easy.

  So now with Mrs. Sorley to look after me I feel a lot flasher than I used to. As for my girls—I pray you are well and in powerful form. I am proud as I read the papers that you are looking after our heroic young fellows. It came through that the Andrews’ son just died of typhoid in Egypt. Such a big fellow, you wouldn’t believe it.

  It is your father here then who hopes you are well and happy and that the news is all jake by you. Mrs. Sorley has written you a letter too. I should say Mrs. Durance but am still getting used to the change. So I still say Mrs. Sorley all the time.

  With all my fond love,

  Your father

  Once she had finished reading, Sally looked up. Naomi’s eyes were on her. The murderous children honest with each other now. And their lesser crime—the abandonment of the father. Leaving a vacuum into which Mrs. Sorley had rushed. That reflection made them both hesitate in irrational anger. Naomi raised her eyebrows. It couldn’t be avoided.

  So, she said, Mrs. Sorley has become our stepmother. The old man says that in yours?

  Sally nodded. She knew there was another letter enclosed behind her father’s and whose it would be, but did not want yet to read it. She heard Naomi murmur, If I were a better daughter I’d be entitled to say, she didn’t waste much time.

  Sally said, I feel exactly like that.

  But it was two years and nine months, after all, since their mother was gone. An argument could be made that such a delay was just about close enough to the approved-of three years’ mourning not to matter to a reasonable observer.

  The envelopes each turned to now were addressed to Misses Naomi and Sally Durance.

  Dear Miss Sally and Miss Naomi,

  I feel I must call you by formal names because this news will be a shock to you one way or another. I cannot say it more plainly than that your father and I have chosen each other in the eyes of God and I will be to him as good a helpmeet as in my power. I thought a lot about whether you would like to hear this news from me in that distant place where you are and knowing your fondness for your mother who was such a dear woman the whole district loved her. But now that I have had to get the courage to write this letter I hope that you can accept me not as a new mother—which I would dearly love to be considered—but at least as a new friend. It might be happy for you to know that my two sons are helping Mr. Durance a lot though one has just turned seventeen and has his eyes on the army which makes me anxious of course. I cannot think of what else to say but that I beg kind thoughts
from you both since I have plenty of them for you and pray for your welfare daily since I know that Egypt is a place of diseases. I hope you like what is in this parcel. I put it together with your father not to be some sort of a softener but as what it is—a sincere gift. I send you all my affection and best wishes.

  Enid Durance, formerly Sorley

  Enid Durance! Sally thought and was resistant to the title. Her two big boys, said Naomi when Sally had finished reading. I imagine now she’ll combine her farm with ours. Quite a fancy piece of land it will make. And she—being younger than the old man—well, she’ll get it. And her “two big boys” too, I suppose.

  Do we want any of it? asked Sally.

  No. We left it behind, didn’t we?

  Damn her though, said Sally. Damn her for writing a nice letter.

  The new situation put their mother a degree further from them now. She was growing dimmer and less plaintive out there in the space where the dead floated and wavered in memory. Yet she had the capacity always to come back to them sharper than a knife’s edge and keener than the apparent world.

  In the meantime they couldn’t say too much that was snide against the Presbyterian seductress—honest and unfussed and philosophic as she’d proven to be. The size of the campaign—and the scale of stupidity at whose altar the colonel was but one regional bishop—had shown them the size of the world’s sins. Mrs. Sorley seemed minor in that regard. She was crowded out by the sequence of amazing, cruel things, by that compounded element in which time and horror occupied the same line and time’s arrow was horror’s arrow too. And all else in life was hazy as infancy.

  Naomi said suddenly, You could have cooked him all the meals in the world and stayed at home and still he would probably have married her!

  The thought of her father and Mrs. Sorley lying together in the bed where they had finished their mother was best not to be entertained.

  Well, it is done now, Naomi said.

  The Violation on Lemnos

  Freud had her stylish and knowing air that was above mere fashion. She could also elegantly pass on the sort of gossip about Melbourne in 1914 which passed for knowledge with most of them. Melbourne was so despised in New South Wales and Sydney that contempt sent its way by Sydneysiders was itself a sort of awe—a kind of applause and a suspicion of undue sophistication. And Freud seemed to stand for the Melbournianism which people from elsewhere condemned but envied.

  When they found her in the mess at dawn, however, all that was gone. She sat hunched with a blanket across her shoulders. Leo and Sally came in together from their night duty and paused when they saw her.

  Are you tired? asked Leo.

  Leo was a member of the blessed for whom sleep remedied all fret. Freud raised a tear-muddied face. A blue-black brow and blood-engorged eye and bloodied and swollen lip were obvious. Sally and Leo swooped in with consolation—hugging and assuring her and asking her what had happened. But she howled and they couldn’t get her to say anything. Other women arrived—Naomi too. Freud still answered no inquiry. It was Naomi who went to get brandy for her and who made her drink it. Freud choked on it and then vomited on the floor. At this manifestation they realized there were too many of them offering too much help. Some stepped back and hovered by the tent flap and others cleaned the mess with towels and fetched a bucket of water and ammonia. Freud gasped and composed herself, turning inward as Leo tended to her lip with a swab, saying, Sorry, Freud, whenever Freud flinched. Naomi bent towards Freud’s blanketed shoulder and Freud reached her hand across her body and—shivering with grief—took Naomi’s wrist.

  It was to the few nearest that she confided she’d been attacked. She’d been attacked not only in the face but afterwards by penetration. It could not have been a patient. The man was strong and angry in the predawn—it had happened after she left her ward and while it was still dark. She had been punched and had fallen. From behind, her blouse was dragged up and her undergarments down. She was penetrated violently while the man talked and hissed. Yes, an Australian.

  One of the orderlies then, it was decided amongst the women on the basis that Freud had said he was healthy and his body had a strong odor but not that of the Dardanelles. At the memory of his smell she was ill again.

  How the news of her having suffered this ultimate ordeal got around was not known. Naomi and the others who heard Freud speak swore it was too important and unhinging a matter to pass on. But the details emerged like smoke from a flame and entered the air under the force of their viciousness. It was obvious straight off that if the colonel so beloved of orderlies should declare Freud was lying—or that if the orderly’s crime were lessened or dismissed by him—then Freud would be brought to madness.

  Naomi, Honora, and Sally went to speak first to their too-timid Australian matron. They found her in the shadow of the postoperative ward. They were pleased to see that this was not a matter on which she had to call on the colonel to approve her sense of outrage. She said it couldn’t be tolerated for a second. She wanted to interview Freud. En masse—in probably too many sisterly numbers—they accompanied Freud to the matron’s tent. She balked at the idea of going inside, so Naomi offered to accompany her. Naomi was somehow up to her gravity.

  They decided they needed to call as the first male ally the ward doctor—the doctor who had shown himself more than a cipher when he spoke low to the colonel about chlorinated lime. After a while those not on duty and still waiting outside the matron’s tent saw the ward doctor arrive, glum-faced, for the obligatory inspection. This would be the worst aspect of it, Sally believed—that so soon after being mishandled and possessed by the form of man, the victim must face a magistrate of the body who inspected with a purely clinical interest the same flesh that had been attacked with raw, savage force.

  When he emerged he would not answer any questions. The details—I’m afraid—are for the colonel, he told them.

  They were frazzled by the idea that the colonel was the sole possible punisher of the crime.

  Naomi escorted the shattered Freud back to their tent and sat by her camp cot grasping her right hand. Provosts arrived at eight o’clock. An officer and a sergeant-major. Freud was sleeping—the doctor had given her barbital. But the officer told Naomi that she must be awoken. Like the ward doctor they were not unkind. If there was a small tinge of hostility, it seemed to Naomi to be related to embarrassment. This was an alleged crime of the kind they thought they’d left behind on the streets of cities.

  They stood back from the cot. Naomi was permitted to rouse Freud. Karla, she whispered. These gentlemen . . .

  The gentlemen moved in. The officer dragged a stool into place and sat at a distance from Freud’s thunderous dark eyes. They seemed—the clear one, the bloodshot—engorged with imminent tears. But Freud refused to let them flow in front of these men. She would await a private hour.

  The officer asked her, would she know the man who attacked her if she saw him again?

  Yes, she said after a wary consideration. Yes, she could tell him again. By some light from the ward she glimpsed aspects of him as he first hit her. Then—at the end—he stood over her for a second and she turned her shoulders and saw him. The rest of the time, nothing but earth.

  When they asked if she could tell them about him, Naomi hoped Freud would keep silent. What if Freud surrendered these toxic details and nothing was done? Or the man was proclaimed not to exist on Lemnos? The risks seemed gigantic at that second.

  He was young, said Freud. She rushed to get it over. Maybe as young as eighteen. He had a broad face. What people call moon-faced. He had not washed lately.

  She half-gagged on this remembered odor.

  His hair seemed to be fair, she concluded.

  The officer made notes and then looked up wanly at her.

  Aren’t you pleased? she asked frantically. Aren’t you pleased I saw all that in the light there was? His damned animal face.

  And you had not agreed to meet him?

  Freud’s fa
ce showed the purest contempt combined with a fear of powerlessness. What do you think? she asked with a dangerous insistence.

  All right, said the military police officer. Please . . . Did he say anything to you?

  He said, “The blokes said!”

  “The blokes said?”

  “The blokes said. The blokes said. The blokes . . .”

  The officer looked at his sergeant major.

  A funny thing to say.

  Yet you could see he believed—given its oddity—that it was the truth.

  The provosts left. Naomi led her—still stupefied with sedative—to the mess tent and they drank tea. Here the colonel found her. He paused beside the flap and said, Knock! Knock! with a rusty air of geniality. Naomi got to her feet but Freud still sat. In her world all rank had been canceled.

  Just to say, Staff Nurse Freud, that I have read the report and am appalled. Appalled. That one of my men should . . . “The blokes said.” Sure of that, are we?

  Freud did not answer.

  I’ll give him “The blokes said”! Now, my dear, you enjoy your tea and I’ll . . .

  He shunted one of his arms to indicate firm punishment. When he had gone, Freud lowered her head on her hands and drowsed for two hours. At the tea table that night there was a fraudulent cheeriness as Freud sat at Naomi’s side. In the midst of it Captain Fellowes arrived from the other hospital. But, like everyone else, he was at a loss when it came to what service he might perform. At last he and Leonora went out for an evening stroll. This would have been in the past a subject for Honora’s irony. But now no comedy could be borne. All the available breath needed to be spent on comfort for Freud and the hope of punishment.