Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

What are you doing here, Durance? Nettice asked first of all. You could get yourself in the deepest trouble.

We thought it was important to let you know that you have not been forgotten or anything like it. They want us to forget you, but we refuse.

I already knew that, said Nettice plainly. I knew you were all my good friends. But I didn’t want you to put yourself in such danger as this.

It’s right I should be the one to visit you, said Naomi.

Nettice—as if implying she might as well ask questions while she had Naomi there—wanted to know how Lieutenant Byers was and whether he knew where she was.

Naomi reported they hadn’t told him more than she’d been suspended. But he asks after you endlessly, said Naomi.

Does he ask after me endlessly? asked Nettice. It’s not something you should say casually unless it’s really happening.

Given the trouble Naomi had taken to be here, it appeared Nettice had only a middling respect for her visit and now seemed to suspect her of deception.

Well, it is the absolute truth, Naomi insisted.

I deserve to be here you know, Nettice confessed. I had in a way gone a little mad, you have to understand. I can’t think what got into me.

But you don’t deserve to be in an asylum, for God’s sake.

The punishment is appropriate, said Nettice with a certainty Naomi hated. It was my lunacy. It’s certainly not Lieutenant Byers’s fault.

It is all someone else’s fault, insisted Naomi. Maybe not all, but whatever you did were minor crimes. If we are ratty and berserk, they have made us that way. We didn’t invite a battalion of troops onboard the Archimedes . We didn’t invent the brainlessness of the colonel and the slavishness of the matrons. Some would say that my being here was criminal. But I say that your being here is the crime.

Anyhow, she argued, you can see I have some nursing to do here day and night. So I am not empty of all purpose. If a person were to mention God, he could say that God sent me here for the sake of the mute and the babbling. We have one each of those.

Naomi should have been pleased to find Nettice so sturdy and very nearly content. And yet there was still a certain disappointment too.

In any case, Nettice conceded, please give Lieutenant Byers my warmest respects. You needn’t tell him—because he already knows—that I might have mistaken friendship and our mutual chattiness for something of a profounder nature.

Are you certain it wasn’t more serious than that? He appears to hope it was.

It is true that if you’ve been rescued by a pony from the bottom of the sea, you get ideas about yourself. Delusions, you know. They evaporate when you’re somewhere like this. As for him, tell him I won’t tolerate any palaver about him being at all to blame. If he starts hogging blame, it is actually selfishness on his part.

Bea’s “boys” could be heard exchanging greetings with the guard and came just then through the door with their buckets. Naomi got up and kissed Nettice good-bye. Then she went to embrace the generous Bea, who had been making beds and was now talking to the thin mute girl.

You’re the kindest girl in the world, Naomi told her. And I’ve taken advantage of you.

After another doubtful look and wave in Nettice’s direction, Naomi left the tent. The sentry opened the gate wide for her. At the main gate at the end of the raceway she began the ascent up Turks Head. She kept to the verge—a pathway by the white-painted stones—to make room for ambulances and supply trucks and the wagons of timber driven by Greeks. She assessed the morning and found she felt a modest sense of triumph to have broken into Nettice’s place of detention. Coming down the road as she rose was a party of people for whom even the trucks and wagons themselves pulled to the side to make clearway. A British matron in a red cape and an older man in a tailored uniform, red tabs, and gleaming boots were attended by two young aides. She stopped out of a reflex respect to let them pass in the certainty of their own authority. She moved on and only the matron glanced briefly in her direction.

That evening—when Naomi was woken by the clanging of a bell—the matron-in-chief was waiting at the door of the officers’ ward. She strode up as Naomi approached and without introduction asked what she had been doing in the rest compound. A British matron accompanying the deputy inspector had seen her leave the place and—knowing that only her own nurses were employed there—had been mystified. And—indeed—was further affronted by her surly lack of respect towards the passing brigadier general. The mention of surliness nonplussed Naomi. She had not taken any surliness she was aware of into the encounter. Had the British matron accompanying the general misread her? Or had events imbued her with that quality? The matron-in-chief now told her that she—Durance—had been at the center of all disorder since she had arrived on Lemnos. She had been grievance incarnate, the matron intoned.

I cannot see you have any future in the nursing service. You are suspended from all duty, and I do not trust you with my patients.

Aren’t you getting short of nurses? Naomi asked with a layer of genuine concern that momentarily submerged her rage and contempt.

But there was no arguing with that austere woman who spoke for the colonel and was wedded to his berserk medical creeds.

The idea of being on Turks Head, and of having no purpose to fulfill, seemed to Naomi to be a fair definition of hell. She took her sentence dry-eyed. If they wanted to see tears they’d have a long wait. Ditto repentance. There was a temptation to go and lose herself amongst the villagers on the Thracian side of Lemnos. There the landscape and the light had seemed richer.

You’ll have to take the news of Nettice to Lieutenant Byers, she told her sister.

When Sally at last saw Byers, he insisted—of course—on saying that he was the one who put Nettice there. That was understandable. But Sally felt it as an unnecessary self-indulgence.

Yes, we’re all to blame, she told him fiercely. Except the stupid generals who sent you to be blinded, and the enemy who obliged them. And those who dreamed up a terrible, oppressing place like this. They are obviously all innocent and you and I are utterly to blame.

Byers said, How do you expect me to feel though? Blameless? But, yes, to put her in the compound is a mongrel act.

My one hope, said Naomi to her sister at breakfast the next morning, is that they will ship me back to Alexandria in disgrace. Can you imagine that when I nursed in Sydney I saw myself as a future matron? But I am afraid I am spoiled goods now.

And she must endure meaningless days—all without the comforts of tending others that Nettice enjoyed. She tried to read as energetically as her sister but found her attention frayed. She was permitted to take exercise on Turks Head and favored the cliffs facing south. Her pride did not allow her to call on other women for company. She felt a long erosion of her spirit, could even sense the risk of madness.

Two days later, however—when she was dreaming of the Archimedes and of her failure to drown with it—an Australian medical inspector named Colonel Leatherhead arrived on Lemnos. In retrospect it seemed to all of them that Leatherhead’s appearance had the nature of an angelic visitation from the Bible. He placed himself between the world of shadows where they dwelt and a world of possible light. But none of that was clear at first. He was not built on angelic proportions. He was round faced and round bodied and his hips were wider than his shoulders. There was the possibility in his face that in a second it might slide in either direction—mercy or condemnation.