Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

Bea laughed. It was a lyrical laugh. I’m in enough trouble myself, she said.

But she had not said no. It was because she had an excess of good nature—a tendency not without danger on Lemnos.

Maybe just one, she conceded.

She and Angela provided the pencil and some British Red Cross notepaper.

You write first, Naomi said to Sally, offering her the pencil.

For Lord’s sake, said Bea, don’t mention me.

Sally wrote,

Dear Nettice,

I hope you know we are all thinking of you and we will send you some comforts if we can. It goes without saying you should not be in this position. Our minds are set on finding an answer to your situation. It must be hard to get by in the compound. Lt. Byers is well and says that he looks forward to seeing you again. So do we all.

Your loving friend,

Sally passed the pencil to her sister who took it up with energy and wrote in a conspiratorial, certain, fast hand.

Just keep it brief, said Bea, brushing aside one of her ringlets.

Naomi produced from the pocket of her coarse dress a little slab of chocolate.

Is it too much to ask that you give her this too?

Bea laughed in disbelief. But she said, In for a penny, in for a pound. Don’t worry. I slip them all a few extras myself.

They could believe in this beautiful innocent who tended the supposedly mad.

Sally would stop on her rounds and talk to Lieutenant Byers, who had been moved from the general medical ward to a more sparsely populated tent. It was as if he had incurred isolation too. Her conversations with Byers needed to be discreet. There was an embargo on talking to men unless it was to ask them symptomatic questions or order them to lift an arm or a leg or open a mouth. The rules had been reiterated after the Nettice matter. After a time, the wounded themselves became parties to the discipline of the wards rather than land nurses in trouble. But Byers wanted to know everything about Nettice.

They’ve taken her off duty, said Sally. She’s having a good rest. She’s needed a good rest since the ship.

She said a horse brought her back to the surface.

Yes, it’s true. A pony. I saw it.

Thank God for ponies is what I say. Wonderful creatures! Rosie is a real brick.

I’d say so.

Yes, he said. She believes in a divinity that shapes us. And she doesn’t worry about my background in the least, you know. My father sent me to a school for Presbyterians but we were Jewish—changed our name from Myers. The other kids could tell—I don’t know how. But the young have a high degree of discrimination in some things. Is it safe to talk?

Indeed the matrons were not in sight so she said it was.

I’ll tell you something about city people who declare their belief in God too easily, he said. They’re not like Nettice, to start with. Their morality is really a kind of fussiness. Maybe jewelers attract these sorts of people. People who depend on their name and profession to avoid paying their bills. How many gold rings and brooches bought on deposit from Byers and Sons, and we’re still chasing up the full payment. And the problem is that if my father took a writ and summoned them to petty sessions, they’d say, Don’t go to Byers’s place. Why pay the avaricious Jew? So there it is. I’m Jewish as Paddy’s pigs—as a comedian once said. And Rosie doesn’t mind. I’m blind, too, and Rosie doesn’t mind that either.

She heard him give a sudden snort of grief. These humiliations of his childhood—and his father’s humiliations—seemed closer and less bearable to him than the damage to his eyes.

Well, he said, I won’t be worried that way anymore. The “Son” in Byers and Sons isn’t accurate now. I won’t be making much jewelry hereafter.

In the dark she often found a chance to talk with Byers. The more frequent her visits the more his concern for Nettice emerged.

You say she is resting? he asked one night. Where is she resting? Is she ill?

Perhaps a little influenza, said Sally. She’ll be back soon.

You’re not hiding something? Nothing’s happened?

No, said Sally. An energetic liar.

Sally knew that Nettice had become her sister’s mania as she had become Byers’s. She had let herself grow dour and hardened. But Naomi had become a fury. Her eyes darted as she looked about her for the right gestures to help rebalance the earth. Through a further visit to the good-natured English nurses’ mess, Naomi began to work at poor Bea to take her in to see Nettice. Sally could tell Bea’s general goodwill would be no protection against her sister’s tigerish resolve. Naomi planned to go down to the rest compound with Bea as a junior nurse getting an education.

Naomi recounted to her sister her persuading of Bea.

You can say, Naomi had argued, that I told you I was rostered on to the compound. You had no reason to suspect it wasn’t true. And I’ll only stay a while, I promise. But she has to know she’s not been given up.

Poor, susceptible Bea took Naomi one morning, therefore, through the outer wire. She greeted guards whose faces lit to see her and who unlocked the gate which led down a raceway contained by barbed wire on either side. The male patients’ wards were beyond the wire to the south, said Bea, but the violent ones were behind the wire to the north. They progressed between these two. After two hundred yards, they came to the small compound for women. The outlook from this part of the headland, Naomi thought, was not very curative. It was blocked off from the harbor and from at least the notion of escape by a rock outcrop.

Bea’s task—after she said good-morning to the sentry on the gate and asserted airily that this morning she had brought along an apprentice—was first to relieve the night nurse. Naomi was to watch from the tent flap as Bea went in. The night nurse proved to be a Canadian. She was writing case notes at a little table and seemed tired enough not to pay much attention to Naomi as she rose and brushed past. She went to wake up her orderly, who had been on call and who rested in a small watch house in the corner of the compound. Peering into the dim tent Naomi saw first a region with a few soft chairs and a table with magazines. There was a rough bookcase with maybe a dozen titles. On top of it lay a pack of cards and boxes containing draughts and other games. Bea—scanning the notes—mentioned to Naomi that two orderlies she called her “boys” would be along soon with a bucket of porridge and another of water and some loaves of bread. Her reference to them was nearly affectionate. This was a place where it was possible for orderlies to work with women in a manner that was not poison. Bea then left the little table and the notes and cried good-morning to the stirring patients. Her cheery voice would itself be a kind of poultice on the day.

Advancing behind Bea, Naomi saw Nettice sitting on a tousled bed beside a woman who chattered or—more accurately—spoke in tongues.

Bea said, Nettice has become her friend and is very handy to me. Keeps the poor girl less excited. And then the Sapphist is very good, too, trying to get poor Lily talking. Between us we’re a well-rounded crew.

Nettice reserved her most clenched and characteristic frown for the sight of Naomi. She rose upright in her shift but kept one hand on the chatterer’s wrist. While Naomi embraced her with two arms, Nettice had only one free hand for the task. Naomi was surprised to find there was almost something grudging in this welcome and in the pressure of Nettice’s one hand on her back. Nettice explained to her murmuring fellow patient that she was going to sit with her friend for a while. Naomi and barefooted Nettice went and sat together in the soft chairs at the recreational end of the tent.