Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

Sally went on supporting Eric Carradine’s neck. A child is dead, she thought. None of Maclean’s earnest boyish theorems would ever be tested. She considered yielding to tears on his behalf. But there was nowhere to put them. Both her hands were full of Eric Carradine.

Carradine finished the dressing and pinned it and Sally gently lowered the head. Lieutenant Carradine woke and said, Aag. Bewl. Carradine hushed him and touched his cheek. He gave one bleat and sank asleep again.

Carradine said, Did Maclean…?

No, honestly. But Maclean was a boy. He hadn’t worked out what he knew. That makes it sadder.

Carradine nodded. Sally collected herself. Carradine said, I didn’t know Naomi was so… you know… so keen on Hoyle.

Sally didn’t either.

A sly one, said Carradine. We’re joining some of the other girls at five, for tea at the Beau Rivage. Will you be in it?

Sally was there—but not Naomi. Officers came up and offered to take them to dinners. Some of the nurses consented. There was something too Maclean-ish about these men, and Sally made her excuses. Freud took up an invitation from a major and did not insist he take others with him for her protection. She was her own protector—that was the air she gave off.

As if to amuse them Freud said, Not to raise our little quarrel again. But you might be interested to know I was nearly stuck with a surgeon. I was about to marry a surgeon from Melbourne. Bornstein—you can look him up. My whole family was in an ecstasy apart from me. Thank God for the war, that’s what I thought. No more listening to my aunties’ Yiddish lamenting. “A girl who can spurn such good fortune…”

So, might she be really telling them, I do not intend to get easily tangled with any surgeon again, or with stray majors taking me to dinner?

Now they were going back—without Carradine—on a sea that had chosen to be rough and under a steel-gray canopy of cloud. These deeps no longer beckoned either to heroes of history or to boys from the bush or anywhere else. Sally was on deck because Naomi had asked her to meet up there in a squall when even the orderlies had given up the effort of keeping their fags alight and gone below. Naomi must have had to struggle with the door onto the deck, yet was all at once silently there. Her hair was blowing out from under her cap. She had not been at the tea party at the Beau Rivage. Everyone knew she had chosen not to be there because of the Ellis Hoyle news.

So, I have Ellis’s watch, Naomi announced into the wind. I believe, she continued, the young fellow offered it to you first.

Yes, said Sally.

Naomi’s lips began to work like an older woman’s—accommodating such an intimate and unlikely gift from the dead.

I don’t have any idea, said Naomi, why he’d want me to have it. There are even nods and winks. He’s dead. He’s killed. And yet girls say things like, You two were sly, weren’t you? As if he was still here and sticking around as a quiet mover. And if poor old Ellis and I were sly and were secretly set for each other, then they know I must be pretty upset. They get solemn and creep around me. Which I can’t stand.

Sally reached out to put a hand on Naomi’s shoulder. Naomi looked her full in the face in return but all the airiness of an innate seniority had gone from her. She asked, Why would he do it? Send me a watch? And a watch with a gold chain on it too. All that stands for. And… poor man… who am I to say no to it anyhow? But we weren’t… we just weren’t… And that’s flat.

Maybe men aren’t clear in the head when they’re shot, Sally offered.

Naomi set her eyes on the middle air. She said, A machine-gunner killed him and the others, I hear, but the watch is running on. Not a dent.

This was a strangeness that weighed on her.

Don’t read too much into it, eh, Sally urged her. He just thought of it. A gift for a friend. That’s all. It’s not as if it weighs a ton. And you can put it in your kit and forget it. Or send it to his parents.

Where are they? Naomi asked petulantly. I don’t know.

We can find out when we’re next in Alexandria. There’d be military records.

He talked to me no more than he did to Honora, murmured Naomi. He might’ve decided he wanted to be closer. But I didn’t choose he should.

When you’re a dying being, God knows what will come to your mind. And what seemed little beforehand might all at once seem large. Anyhow, don’t you think the poor fellow’s entitled to send you his effects? The dying have their rights…

Naomi did not believe it and put her long splayed hand to the side of her face as a kind of denial.

Then if you don’t want it, Sally said in a half-annoyed way, why don’t you toss it over the side? Give it a burial at sea?

You know I couldn’t do that.

Sally imagined the ticking mechanism tumbling over itself in the famous water. They both stared at the uneven, blank waves. But it was clear to Sally that what seemed easy to her was a mountain to Naomi.

There was a tentative feeling in the nurses’ mess, a different air than on the first journey. The women had no reason to think that on Gallipoli, off the Dardanelles, the Hellespont, and all the other names that hung over the geography of the murders and manglings, the abattoirs had closed down for a second. It was normal hospital shifts and bed-making with unspotted linen while the orderlies scrubbed and Leonora watched Captain Fellowes walk slowly through—casually inspecting—as much calculation in her face as longing. Leo was too strong-minded or practical a girl to pine.

Now there was more of the necessary things—where on the first journey two Primus stoves had been placed in the sterilizing room, there were now eight of them. Autoclaves were promised. Orderlies were hauling boxes of a new local anesthetic drug named Novocain into the storage forward. “Novo” seemed to bespeak newness. Maybe it had power to change the whole equation when they anchored and the barges and sweepers came alongside.

As on the second afternoon, when they neared the peninsula, the doctors stood in an earnest conference at the forward part of the hospital deck. They had a new ward doctor and were proposing to use Lieutenant Dr. Hookes as a surgeon again if that were necessary. Freud—despite and because of her singing of tunes from “I Won’t Be An Actor No More” to “Little Tommy Murphy” — had a strict mind when it came to the surgical theatre and would continue there.

Captain Fellowes was to be looked to as a man unaltered by that first chaotic journey. He and Mitchie approached Sally while she was on an errand to the pan room and she saw calm assessment in his eyes.

I would like you, he said, to be my anesthetist on this trip. Nurse Carradine did it for a time last journey. Have you ever administered anesthetics?

She said she had. But in Macleay District there was no center of the anesthetic arts. She doubted it weighed in the scales of ability. It secretly occurred to her that she and her sister did know how to bring oblivion.

Fellowes told her, I have a copy of Peel’s volume, “On Anesthesia.” I shall send an orderly to you with it. I suggest you go to the nurses’ salon and have a look at its major recommendations which are at the close of each chapter.

She read Peel in the salon. In her accustomed but half-forgotten country hospital—anesthetizing for old Maddox—she had been following simple rules using a simple mask and an ether droplet dispenser. It had all been innocent of the range of chloroform and ether and chloroform dispensers and machines and masks she saw in Peel. The Yankauer mask was very like the one she had used when Dr. Maddox—to give him credit—removed a timber-feller’s leg so neatly. It was at the time presumed by her to be the sole species of anesthetics mask on earth.