Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

Boats were being lowered from a suddenly apparent second French destroyer too. Substantial rescue was about to occur.

The French destroyer held on its deck and within its bulwarks dozens upon dozens of the Archimedes ’s children. After being lifted up to the deck each of them had been wrapped in a blanket by sailors with pompoms on their hats like in a play. The thoroughly dry, thick texture of the blanket was a mercy so vast that Sally—laid on the deck beside Nettice—thought the men’s foreign names should be taken by someone so that they could be the recipients of regular thanks. Matelots. They were rubbing men’s bodies but were inhibited as yet from rubbing the bodies of nurses. Nettice shivered, eyes closed—encased in her blanket, beside Sally—on the tender surface of steel reminiscent of the Archimedes ’s lost bulk.

Below a hung sail was separated off part of a sailors’ mess as a women’s ward. They were each lifted onto tables and now their life jackets were cut away with their blouses and remnants of clothing. The water had made the women neuters. Sally was washed with wine-tinted hot water and was given a towel to manage her own drying. She just about could. Then a French orderly helped to dress her in the undershirt of a tall sailor. In an officer’s cabin—Honora already asleep in the officer’s bunk—Sally was given a palliasse on the floor. The hot breath of the ship’s engines entered through a vent somewhere.

She quaked with remembered and not yet dispelled terror, and found herself concerned above all with her mind. She tested it and thought she found it a stranger’s mind. Her own having dissolved in the sea, she had picked up someone else’s drifting and bobbing mind. She saw herself now not as a continuous thing. She was no more than a mute core—or a pole on which rings of a particular nature could be placed. Each ring was a successive self—that was it. Her self was utterly new and needed to be learned all over. The childhood ring of self was not connected or continuous with the morphine-stealing one. Nor did the morphine-stealing one share any fragment with the Pyramid gawker. And now she was utterly new again, she found herself alarmed to be so. The latest hard little hoop—being taken out of the water—could just as easily be lifted off and replaced by another as accidental, whose description was: drowned in the Mediterranean. Since she was so tenuous, she might still swerve at any second from her rescued state and into oblivion. There was no such grand connector as destiny at work in her and never had been. Such a thin skin existed between parallel states and chances that they could leak or bleed or be welded into one another.

An officer with a molded beard came along, bowed to her and tenderly called her Mademoiselle. A blanketed, streak-haired Naomi appeared in the doorway. Her half-demented certainty and her zest astounded her sister. She held up Ellis Hoyle’s watch which must have been attached beneath her life jacket to her blouse. She looked joyful and still in command in a way that sidestepped the command of the French officers. The sea’s finished it, she explained. It’s seized it up. It’s just an empty case now.

With her half-mad and all-commanding sister above her, she felt it safe to fall into sleep and did without further thought.

She awoke to a bright evening world and sailors carrying her on a stretcher through places full of glaring electric light. On deck a launch hung in the air and she was loaded on when it was level with the deck. She had an impression they were in a harbor—Mudros, she decided. On Lemnos. From the deck of the descending launch she could see Naomi—a blanket on her shoulders—walking the destroyer’s rail and looking seraphic. No eye had ever been clearer or readier for this place than hers. The Argonauts landed blind compared to Naomi.

Sally and others were carried down a cramped laneway that smelled of earth and urine and into a large tent. Naomi passed Sally’s stretcher on foot and scouted ahead. She felt canvas brush her elbow as she was brought into a tent and placed on a cot. Here she fell asleep and—after not one dream—woke in gloom lit by a hurricane lamp hanging from the central pole.

She heard a significant voice and struggled to identify who it was by the dim lamp and an early morning glimmer of light through the canvas. Carradine bent down to pull back her blanket. A band was playing in the distance, orderlies shouting—for its own sake, it seemed—and a few blowflies buzzed in the tent.

Look, said Carradine. The blanket says “RF” and then down here République Française . A bit of the old parlez-vous , eh?

Sally reached up and took her by the elbows. She found them solid and present. She gazed into Carradine’s face.

I was hoping you were all safe, said Carradine.

But we left you with your husband, Sally protested. You’re with him, not me.

Ah, said Carradine. Well, that’s a tale for later.

That awful hole in his head…

He’s well. He speaks well. He’s fit to get elected to parliament like his father.

Sally let Carradine loosen the sailor’s shirt she still wore and wash her shoulders and her breasts, and then her belly and genitals and rump and legs. All of it was the sweetest friction.

You’ve washed the others? she asked with feverish democratic concern.

Oh, yes, said Carradine. They’re all clean. And fit to talk to.

Oh, said Sally. But Eric?

Carradine said in her nurse’s whisper, The doctor in England—at Sudbury Hospital—said I was holding up his recovery. The terrible thing is that he’s probably right. Eric’s depended on me so much. But he cried when I was sent off here. He cries easily, then gets angry and afterwards never stops apologizing. It’s the nature of the wound. He gets periods of delirium when he thinks the world’s out to get him. I’ve seen more men weep in the head-injury ward in the last four months than I’ve seen in my whole life before.

The feel of the towel remained exquisite. Had such a fabric existed before the torpedo?

The problem, Sally assured Carradine, is that men are not strong. It was men who drifted away from our raft. Whereas Mitchie…

Carradine nodded—assenting to the proposition that Mitchie had endured.

Well, she’s had surgery but I haven’t heard any more… Most of the time I work as a dresser. I have a fine tent. Or if it’s possible to have a fine tent here, mine is. And everything I need—and two orderlies who treat me with contempt, the buggers.

There were suddenly tears on Carradine’s face. My God, she said, I’m as bad as the fellows at Sudbury.

She rose. Another nurse had finished bathing Honora, who had barely stopped talking in a hushed voice.

Carradine! hissed Honora, Carradine being the icing on survival’s cake.

Honora was sitting up. Sally saw an apparition of Freud stirring and settling in a sailor’s shirt on a camp cot across the tent.

Sally drowsed further now and was awakened by her sister’s lips on her cheek. Naomi was in her long sailor’s shirt and shivering beneath the blanket around her shoulders.

Imagine what it would have been like for Papa, she said. If we hadn’t been lucky. We wouldn’t have lasted the night. The night would have done for us.

I think you would have lasted, Sally insisted.

She heard a sudden wind blow grit against the side of the tent. An officer and a matron entered with an orderly. The officer was a man of middling years who held himself with that certainty peculiar to a particular kind of surgeon. He had not made any notable noise in entering, yet the women roused themselves and looked up, wan faced, and Sally swung her legs to the dirt floor and sat.