Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

Outside the office, Mitchie suggested only she and Carradine should go on upstairs to conclude the search. The rest should wait down here in the smell of new paint. Young nurses rushed by on their way into the garden or from the garden into the house. The women left behind felt odd and superfluous and lost for somewhere to stand.

They would find out that for Mitchie and Carradine it concluded thus: Carradine found her husband on the wide upper balcony above the garden, lying in clean linen but with a stained dressing on his head. A young doctor was leaning over him inspecting his eyes and pulling a lower eyelid down. This is my husband, Carradine told him.

Aug, said Lieutenant Carradine at the sight of her. Aag gaut nair .

They would all—when they eventually visited him—hear him speak in these terms. Oh be quiet, Eric, she said, falling down on her knees beside his bed and kissing his chin. But he would not. His brain had been roused and sent on the wrong tangent and he refused to cease speaking in tongues.

It’s normal, the young medical officer told her, as if he’d seen this phenomenon through a long clinical life. It’s normal for head wounds.

Yes, it is, said Mitchie at Carradine’s shoulder.

Daug ack raga, said Lieutenant Carradine and began to weep.

No, said Carradine. No. Don’t cry.

Mitchie went and at Carradine’s urging let the other women come in one at a time. When Sally’s turn came, the lieutenant was sleeping uneasily and with a face utterly pale. He pleaded once in his sleep. Au rog, he said.

None of them stayed long. Nothing could be said. They left Carradine there with her husband.

There were other nurses who lived splendidly at the Beau Rivage Hotel. But the Archimedes remained the home in port of Mitchie’s women. They were meant to do their routine work and have their siestas and go ashore to take a cab and see those things they’d flitted by in their seach for Lieutenant Carradine—the Caesarium, which Cleopatra was said to have built out of love, and Pompey’s Pillar and all the rest. Nurse Carradine had other urgencies. Mitchie was stuck between not mentioning Carradine’s marriage to those in power while getting her privileges because her husband was wounded and uttering gibberish. Somehow—during the previous night—the permission had arrived for Carradine to special her husband—to devote herself to his care. She wanted them to visit him, she said, and speak to him so that his brain reaccustomed itself to normal talk. She packed a bag and rushed with Mitchie to take an ambulance to the Sacré Coeur.

From the mess table, where oatmeal and tea and peacetime crockery steamed amidst dishes of boiled eggs and French-style rolls of a kind no baker in Australia made, four of them—Naomi, Nettice, Freud, and Sally—descended the gangway. That day the air was suddenly clear and pleasantly cool, and the city defined itself in sharper lines beyond the mole. With the help of a British military policeman they found a taxi, and told the driver their destination. It was the Sacré Coeur. For they felt they must accede to Carradine’s call to speak to her confused husband before they did anything else.

They got there and entered the garden where the marquees did not now seem quite the sight of confusion they had been yesterday. In the lobby they saw Mitchie introducing herself to an exhausted-looking and restive matron. Mitchie declared that one of her nurses was here specialing a relative, a Lieutenant Carradine, whose father was known throughout the Empire as a notable statesman of the Commonwealth.

The Commonwealth? asked the matron. Do you have Cromwell down there in Australia or something?

Mitchie let it go—it was just a kind of frankness minus eight hours’ sleep. They were familiar, said Mitchie, with the arrival of a mass of wounded men, and had been through the same thing themselves on the Archimedes hospital ship. They didn’t want to take her time. They knew where Lieutenant Carradine was. What if she took Staff Nurse Carradine up there and introduced her to the ward sister. All the paperwork, she said, had already been handed in at the office.

The four nurses waited like applicants for a job inside the door. They felt superfluous and tried to make themselves small and—but for Carradine—thought of leaving.

Matron, said an English nurse coming up and addressing the British matron. She wore no red cape. General Archibald has arrived.

A group of officers, one of whom wore the red tabs appropriate to a general—his uniform and those of his entourage without stain and their leathers from Sam Browne to boots unscathed by the fracas across the Mediterranean—entered the hospital and the British matron nodded to them and led them up the steps. General Archibald was—as they would discover—a legend in British neurology, and on his way by request of the Foreign Office to inspect Lieutenant Carradine’s head wound.

In his wake—discreetly—followed Mitchie and Carradine.

It came to Sally’s turn to visit Lieutenant and Staff Nurse Carradine on the balcony. It happened that though he slept, his dressings were temporarily off and the ripe wound discharged pus. Carradine sensed Sally’s shadow and turned and with a small raise of her gloved left fingers indicated the hole in her husband’s—or as the British matron possibly thought, her brother’s—head.

It was a very dirty wound, said Carradine in a low voice. But Sir Geoffrey Archibald says he will talk and walk again.

The foulness of the wound cast its doubt over the blithe opinion of Sir Archibald.

Help me dress it, will you? There are gloves on the trolley.

Sally fetched and donned the gloves and rejoined Carradine and her husband. She lifted the head a little from the pillow as Carradine began to swaddle it in fresh bandages. A young man in a halter of bandages and one arm in a sling emerged from the door to the veranda. Over his shoulders he wore a lightweight officer’s jacket with one pip on it and “Australia” on the shoulders. He had a precocious moustache, grown before the rest of the face had achieved the seniority to justify it. He looked feverish as so many did.

Miss Durance? he asked in familiar accent. I found out by accident you were here.

She faced him and said hello and asked how he was.

Have to say I felt a bit chirpier a year back, said the young man.

His eyes looked as if they were rimmed with soot. He told her, I regret to say… you might have heard… Captain Ellis Hoyle took a knock on the second day. Did you know? I’d hate to be the bearer…

She kept her hold on the back of Lieutenant Carradine’s head. Carradine kept briskly winding the bandage.

I didn’t know, Sally said. But my sister…

He was clear-headed to the finish, you know. He gave me something he wanted you to keep.

He reached into his pocket and produced a silver watch.

It has his name, you see, on the back.

He had the look of a man who was already looking forward to a rest after this task was done. It was painful to tell him it wasn’t.

Oh, she said. But it isn’t me—I’m sorry. It’s my sister who knew Captain Hoyle. She’s somewhere in this building. If you’re tired I’ll hand it on to her.

A shadow came over his face. He lowered his eyes. Look… kind of you. But he asked me to do it and I reckon I should.

He seemed to consult himself again on this proposition.

Yes, he concluded. That seems to be the fair thing.

And he nodded and drifted through into the ward, looking for a corridor to take him to Naomi.

Carradine murmured, Poor Hoyle. Half of them gone in a few days! You know—the teatime group. The Sphinx group. Maclean’s dead too. The lieutenant.