Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

She seems, said Sally, unshaken.

She can’t be defeated. When all this started I didn’t expect her to be here all the time like this. I thought she would just set it going, like God starting the world, and then go back to London to her accustomed life. But she’s labored with us. And when she’s not here, she’s in Paris visiting the club she’s got going there. She belongs to whatever she begins. But after the war—so she says—she’s not sure she won’t just go back and put up with Lord Tarlton and make an end to all the blather and mess of the whole love business. I doubt she’ll be able to though. It’s always going to be in her nature to do exceptional things.

Naomi took her down to the docks when it was time for her Blighty ferry. They kissed like two children reunited in play. An old French paddlewheel ferry painted in its war patterns of gray waited like a cross between a Dickens-style Channel packet and an antique battleship.

I’ll ask at Horseferry Road if I can see Ian, Sally promised her.

It would be marvelous. I’m afraid you’ll be refused, but please try if you can.

A line of soldiers stood back to let Sally—her travel warrant in hand, and Naomi as escort—advance to the gangway. A military policeman checked and approved her documents and she went up the plank, turning partway to see Naomi’s face streaming with tears. So the entente proposed in a palm court in Alexandria three years before was in full operation. Cherishing her sisterhood, she saw to the west the promise of a long twilight in rouged clouds yellow at the edges. It felt to Sally a good and decent thing to live. Even now. Rapture could not be postponed until a more perfect day. Not when a person had a lover and a sister.

The Epsom Hospital in Surrey was enormous and branched out—in grounds that were once the private garden of a rich family. The grounds held a number of huts and a space where men in hospital uniform—the baggy, pyjama-like tops and bottoms with various-colored lapels—were playing cricket. There was something about the energy of the game and the way hands were thrown up when a man was caught out from whacking a ball impossibly high that made her hope Captain Constable had not been hurled with his one eye into the deep end of a game just yet. She followed the driveway to the main house, where they knew she was coming—Captain Constable and she had exchanged mail about it.

A volunteer was sent to fetch him and he came down the stairs wearing military uniform, his soldierhood taken on again. She saw the sutures across his jaw, the not-quite-formed nose, the unnatural glossiness and tightness of the upper lip and cheek. Though she could see something of what he might have been before, what was there was both little and at the same time an undeniable cure. The scale of his bravery regarding the damage to his face had driven her to expect more than this. The surgeons had forced his facial items back in place. The surfaces they had restored were correct in a technical sense but were somehow unmoving and incapable of expression. His visage was doomed to be an artifact rather than a natural phenomenon. Except for the left eye, this face was dead. It had taken two years to achieve this, and this was all that could be achieved.

Hello, Sister, he said exuberantly. I wondered, might I take you to tea in the high street? It isn’t far.

She agreed. They set off on the gravel drive with her arm in his. Reaching the gate and walking down leafy streets he pointed out the grandeur of the distant race track.

That’s where that suffragette threw herself under the hooves of the King’s horse, he said. Just like the boys who’ve thrown themselves under the hooves in the last four years.

You needn’t have dressed for me, she said. If that was what you did.

Oh, he said, after all this time, I’m sick of those rotten pyjamas. They look ridiculous with a slouch hat.

She noticed the wound stripe on the left forearm of his jacket. She thought it underexplained what he had suffered.

They’re sending me home very soon anyhow, he said. So I’ve had to clean up the old kit.

She wondered if the mayor of his municipality would bestow honors on this drastically altered young man, and remembered her sister’s story of the epidemic of suicide on the ship Naomi had taken home long ago. But he was too strong a man for that.

In a teashop in the high street they ordered tea and cream puffs. English cakes were sludge beside French. Yet this big, jolly lump of dough and sugar was somehow the right thing. The waitress did not seem surprised by his appearance. She might have become used to serving such men.

Do you know, said Sally when the tea arrived and the fragrant steam began to have its effect on both of them, if I had to give a prize for my best patient of all, it would be you. It would really be you. I’m not trying to butter you up. I doubt I could have borne what you have.

He laughed a rueful laugh and drank some tea. She wondered if there were nerves in those lips to feel the heat of the drink.

I’m not so good now as I was earlier, he asserted. I’m getting churlish. The thing’s settled now. I’ve got what I’ll have forever. I could handle the disease but I don’t know how I’ll go—if I tell you the truth—with the cure.

You are entitled to be a bit churlish, as long as you don’t overdo it.

She could feel though, very clearly, that he was in a new struggle.

I’ve decided to stay in the old town. Narromine. I’ll work with my father on the station—we run sheep and stud rams. People can get used to me, I reckon, in a small place, where there’s only so many you can shock. That makes sense. To me at least.

But you could go anywhere, she said. I would hate it if you thought you must limit your life somehow.

No, I think I’ll start out at home. I just want to shy clear of the pity merchants for a while. And any special medallions and speeches. The old man will need to fight all that off too—I’ve told him. I don’t want any band at the platform.

They walked back under a pleasant autumn sky that was the color of duck eggs. When the northern European weather took it into its head to be subtle and yet vital at once, it was able to do it with extreme craft, with fifty or so variations of blue and a hundred of yellow.

And so, he said, it looks like it’s going to be at an end—everyone’s saying so, hard as it is to believe. Fritz’s line’s gone.

But he’ll make another, Sally said. There’ll still be no shortage of wounded.

He considered this and then began to stutter with laughter.

What is it? she asked.

When they ask me to write my war memoirs, they’ll consist of one thing. Standing in the wrong place.

This sounded like self-pity at last to her. Though she did not believe he could avoid it forever, she was disappointed.

She told him, I came to England especially to see you. I have to say honestly that when I think of a hero, I think of you. And you know I would not easily say that.

But with me you’re also satisfying curiosity, aren’t you? he asked, half amused. We’re old friends—yes. But you’re partly a tourist, aren’t you? See what the joker looks like now! I’d be the same in your position.

You could drive people off saying that sort of thing, she warned him. I’m far too busy to be a tourist and I’m in a constant state about an infantryman I love who’s still in the center of the storm. And on top of that, I have to try to visit my sister’s fiancé, who’s in prison in Aldershot for mutiny. But, listen, if your position ever seems to be too much for you, you write to me and I’ll write back and come and visit if I can.

And on that basis, back at the hospital they exchanged addresses. Sally wrote down her father’s farm—Sherwood via Kempsey, Macleay Valley, New South Wales—and found it was an address she could not imagine herself ever having occupied or inhabiting in the future. But there a letter would find her.