Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

Honora: You can have any man. They all sit at your feet. Leo has the one who’s fixed as the pole star. And you’re trying to unfix it.

To hell with you, Freud told her.

She had a fine rage, Sally thought. Her stark eyes showed she was no average opponent. Do you know where I’ve been the last two days?

Same place as all of us, said Honora. Except you’ve been serenading blokes blown to pieces.

What if I were asked to sing, to calm the patient?

Naomi stood up all at once. She was rigid and intent.

Bloody well stop it! she yelled.

It was not typical. Sally had never heard from her such a roar and even for the others it had total authority. Freud and Honora were brought to a stop by this fury.

Don’t you remember? There are men hemorrhaging—internal and external—while you squeal at each other. There are men hemorrhaging, for dear God’s sake!

Honora’s high feelings were all at once punctured. The anger she had accumulated on Leo’s behalf seemed to drain from her, and the chance of tears of regret or repentance arose. Freud took her own dark-faced, unappeased place at the table.

If only you knew about me, Freud told Honora.

But Honora looked like a person who has just woken up to the fact she’s betrayed herself. She was willing now to let Freud be whatever she chose. She could not concede it, of course. That wasn’t her nature.

Sally slept two hours in the early morning and—wide awake then—put on a fresh white blouse and skirt and shoes without stockings and went on deck. It was a brilliant, kindly, salmon dawn. It did not seem to deny any of its children its even blessing, and there was no other ship and no spine of land in view. The rest of the world had made such a claim for so long that it was hard at a level beyond reason to work out where it’d all gone to. A man at the railing—tall, in loose uniform—stood upright as a courtesy to the new presence. He was smoking a Turkish cigarette. At home they had changed enemy names. But—as far as she knew—Turkish cigarettes were still Turkish.

Now—seeing it was a nurse—he yielded up the railing, even though there was no one else there to compete for its entire length. He was getting ready to walk off.

Sergeant Kiernan, she said.

That’s right, Nurse. Caught smoking. Don’t tell my parents.

He had dark hair, wind raked and so a little unmilitary. And his gaze was direct, as if there was still a lot of civilian in him. He had even, long features, no Irish or Scottish freckles. It was the sort of face people described as “honest” when they meant it didn’t quite manage to be handsome.

So, she said, Alexandria then? Someone said Malta, though, because Alexandria’s full.

No, Alex, he nodded.

He turned only his head to scan the deck. He knew that at the official level he was not supposed to fraternize with nurses. But the scales that measured infraction were missing for the moment.

He said, I don’t like to call an ancient place like that by a short name, “Alex.” Almost an insult. Such an old, old city. It deserves its title.

She admitted she was fussy herself about using short forms. I hate it when they call a surgical operation an “op,” she said. And the Mediterranean is much too deep and wide to be the “Med.”

I’d say it was, he agreed. Your name is Durance, Nurse, isn’t it?

He crushed out his cigarette but placed its remains in his jacket pocket. So he hadn’t repented of it yet. Also—she was sure—he was embarrassed to toss it into the fabled Mediterranean.

I think that’s a pretty fine name, he said. I mean, if you put an “en” in front of it, you have one of the most flattering of words.

He saw at once that “flattering” was going too far for her tastes.

Well, if not flattering, he admitted, then at least sturdy.

She smiled. It was, after all, a soother of a word. En-durance. This wasn’t the first time the obvious point had been made, of course. Old Dr. Maddox was just one who’d noted it. A few teachers had played on it too when she didn’t understand mathematics or got the order of the coastal rivers of New South Wales wrong.

I doubt I want to carry a motto for a name, she confessed. It’s better to have something people can just take or leave.

Like Kiernan, he said and smiled. Common Irish name. Slides right past people. Australia’s full of Kiernans. Hordes in America too. I mean the family is Irish. But my grandfather became a Friend—I mean a capital F Friend—when he saw the work the Quakers were doing in the west of Ireland.

She could not comment. There were no Quakers in the Macleay.

I have taken to filthy tobacco, he said, only since Egypt. I intend to renounce it though. I have, thank God, stayed teetotal. When I’ve been most tempted there hasn’t been anything around except surgical alcohol—which isn’t a good place to start. But that has sometimes been a near thing. I was amazed. No brandy on the Archimedes . Not this trip. They should rectify that for the next trip. I saw a few fellows who needed it.

Then he turned his face back to the sea and made up his mind to go silent. He clearly thought he might have traveled too far in conversation.

Just to keep things going—as she wanted to—she herself played the geography game. He had mentioned the University of Melbourne earlier. Was he from that city? she asked.

Like all people from Melbourne, he rushed to say he was. Melbourne, he affirmed. South Yarra. A city boy. No hardihood at all. You can tell the hardy people. I bet you’re from the bush. The land doesn’t always sustain people but it does teach all its children to have a certain robust air.

That’s city talk, she told him. There’s no nobility in milking cows. And they would pretty soon complain, the farmers and their wives, if they thought they’d be listened to. It’s the lack of a complaints department that makes people look hard. And it ages people as well. South Yarra. Is that nice? Broad streets? Trees?

Copper beeches, he said. And the river near where we live.

We have a river too. But it floods.

And so it does test you, after all.

It makes us take the cattle uphill. It makes some people sit on their roofs, and sometimes it drowns people. And so they fail the test you’re raving about, Sergeant. En-durance!

Struth, he said like a non-Quaker. You know how to wing a man.

She laughed. That sounds like another girl altogether, she thought. So she decided to go easier.

Now, where did you learn about these places? I mean these around here.

School, he said.

Well, she told him, I left at the end of my third year of the high school. I learned a tiny piece of French. Plume de ma tante . And the angles on the square of the hypotenuse. That was about the lot. So where did you get all your knowledge?

All my knowledge? There’s no all about it. There could be more, if I hadn’t been such a clown when I was thirteen, fourteen. A wildness came out in me. My father blamed an uncle who was a drunk. However, there was a Classics master, wonderful fellow, splendid cricketer, all boys adored him—you’ve heard the story. He taught me to read Latin and Greek. And, you know, I fought him but loved it at the same time. Greek I was lazy at, but I relished knowing the alphabet, and it worked pretty well as a code for messages I wrote to other subversive boys. So I was much taken with the Greek world. And here we are in it. But I never thought it would contain what is on this ship.

Then university? she asked.

I’ll admit to that, as long as you don’t make much of it when there are all these doctors aboard. They’ve graduated, some from Guy’s Hospital or Trinity or Edinburgh. High-school scholarship isn’t a lot of use here. It’s my honor to be a carrier of water—boiled if I can manage it—and a bearer of stretchers and linen.