Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

They were treated with reverence by shop girls as they browsed in Cape Town’s emporiums.

A climbing party met up on the quay the next morning with robust young women who were members of the Cape Town mountaineering club. Naomi was a member of the group and suffered a phase of guilt. Given she’d felt obliged to walk the deck with Shaw for more than an hour last evening, she had deliberately chosen an outing Shaw certainly could not embark on. From the middle of the barely woken city—occupied only by black street sweepers—they caught a train which took them around the base of the mountain. The party walked upwards through scrubland and wildflowers, at the end of which great rock platforms presented themselves. Nurses and soldiers were helped upwards by young black men who climbed ahead and reached a hand down with unpredictable strength. They were not permitted to eat or swim with whites, but were essential for scaling a mountain. From massive platforms of rock along the way the local mountaineers pointed out Simonstown and—out to sea—Robben Island, where lepers were kept. At the summit of great, split-apart boulders from which grew wildflowers and shrubs, they looked down at the city and bay and could identify the Demeter —rendered minute by distance. They were exhilarated and distracted to happiness by the utterly physical demands of getting here.

Guilt made her seek out Shaw in the officers’ lounge that evening. She talked about the climb as if she had done it for its own sake—for its enlivening enthusiasm. She was pleased to see that his face as yet was the face of Shaw the Joker and not of Shaw the Tragic Lover.

He said, Lucky girl. Of course, I can fall off the donkey with the greatest of ease but I haven’t mastered Table Mountain yet. Spent all morning with massage and exercise. And it pays off, you know.

She found she liked the ease of his company. He never said anything that would make a person sit up and see the world afresh. He therefore gave her a rest from her own unchosen gravity of soul.

He said, It’s not as if I’m less a man. A man’s whole life can’t rise or fall by a few inches of bone this way or that. I’ll be able to ride a horse as good as ever if I balance out the stirrups. And my old man has a motor anyhow. But it’s true a stock and station agent ought to be able to ride. You wouldn’t want to take a motor over some of the tracks up there. Anyhow, I’m well set. And I reckon we should change the subject. We’re getting morbid.

It was to his credit that he thought these modest detours into discussing his condition were morbid. But there was another thing besides the unwillingness to look distress in the face, and that was the inability to see it in the first place.

Look, you don’t have to hang around talking to me. Like a duty to the sick and the lame.

No, please. You are a good and kindly friend and despite the wound and all the rest—despite all that—you seem to live in the sun. So you’ll always attract friends. It’s not a duty for me.

Anyhow, he said, leaning forward and keeping a half-inch or so greater closeness than was preferable, I was off on a jaunt while you were climbing mountains.

He and others had been taken to Cecil Rhodes’s home and seen the grand library with Rhodes’s bust and his last words, “So little done, so much to do,” and then his bedroom full of lives of Napoleon. Robbie Shaw said he couldn’t get over those words.

I’ve never heard a better argument for leading an easy life, he told Naomi. I mean, he ran round Africa like a demented being—diamonds here, gold there, land somewhere else. And still… he was disappointed.

This—she could sense—was like an argument for a pleasant life in a Queensland town and children running in the garden. He did not understand that a person had to possess a gift for contentment to take up what he was offering.

From the decks outside, they could hear the sounds of the Demeter unmooring. No announcement of sailing time had been made earlier. It departed of its own will. There was a rush to the deck now. Robbie Shaw insisted on taking part.

Some nights the nurses dined in their mess. But they were frequently invited to the dining room where Robbie Shaw remained one of the officers who paid them special attention in the Lemnos way. And always that glint—directed at Naomi—that suggested some shared and indefinable secret. At one of the chief tables sat Padre Harris with crosses on the lapels of his uniform. He was a harmless case Naomi had met when she worked in that small section of cabins set aside for the officers with mental concerns. There was a little cabin with a Primus stove in that part of the ship where nurses made tea and cocoa for themselves and the patients. Whenever she gave the Reverend Harris a cocoa he responded with the remotest politeness—one transmitted over a vast and disabling space. Or a display of etiquette remembered by the cells but not by the man. No doubt he had been shocked and became burdened by the men whose hands he’d held for a last “thine is the glory.” His features—which were long and lean—seemed always in false repose. Parsons had a duty to adopt the smugness of possessing the truth on free will and sin and the mind of God. That look seemed long vanished from him.

There were two other padres on board to serve the Anglicans and Catholics. So Harris was not called upon for any duties and was allowed to take his time to find his way back to sureness and solid ground. In the meantime, he was likely to say extreme things suddenly. There was no small talk in him. One evening Naomi delivered him in the officers’ salon his evening mixture of ethanol and laudanum. Other nurses were similarly dispensing pills and mixtures across the room. And after he had drained the mixture, he told her, Two of the boys from the venereal section have jumped overboard, you know. It’s been kept quiet. But shame, you see. Shame killed them.

And then he returned again to his remote self.

Naomi did not know whether this was reliable news or not. At the first chance she asked Carradine whether any men from the syphilis ward had jumped overboard.

Not that I’ve heard, said Carradine. But then they wouldn’t tell anyone, would they, in case the idea came to others.

The next evening Naomi approached the matron of the Demeter and asked the question—whispering it so that the infection did not rise into the air.

The matron inspected her and then looked at the ceiling. It was a confession in a gesture. Lowering her head she murmured, You must not tell anyone. You might start them off like lemmings.

Lieutenant Shaw seemed innocent of the information when he asked her to go for a stroll on deck. He wanted the exercise before the Roaring Forties set in. For when they did, unsteady men would need to take to their bunks. It was a brilliant morning of fierce sunlight when they met up. There was much promise of future violent seas in today’s choppy ocean. The wired-off section where the women had slept on torrid nights had been dismantled. A small section of a lower deck—where the worst mental patients exercised—had been cooped in by wire to prevent the disturbed casting themselves over the side.

Her problem in walking with Robbie Shaw was that she had entered a stage of her existence in which she could imagine the company of men as endurable and more than endurable. Was this the beginning of delusion which would suck her down into drudgery and weariness? Was it the dawn of wisdom?

Walking on the promenade that morning with Shaw she sighted Padre Harris. He strolled in the fraternal care and company of the uniformed Catholic priest and Anglican minister. He was in the middle of the two. Since—as Naomi knew—his conversation was erratic and prophetic, it was understandable that they tended to talk across him. An impulse arose in Naomi to excuse herself from Shaw and run forward to advise them that—though self-harm was unimaginable in a clergyman—they were coming towards the point in the bows where the steel canted away to become the blade which cut the water. The priest and minister were so involved in some topic now that they moved towards each other behind the Reverend Harris’s back. Whatever they discussed—the Nicene Creed or horse racing—they were distracted and barely ready for the fluid way their friend climbed the crossbars of the railings and stepped onto the polished wood at the top and let himself fall into the Indian Ocean more or less in the direction of the bows. The two padres threw themselves against the railings and shouted, and then one rushed up a companionway to the bridge. Shaw and Naomi and others who had seen it all also ran to the rail and gazed down.