Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

Oh, she roared, I’ve got no doubt about that.

Then what do you say?

This is how it happens with women, she knew. Independent beings one second and transformed forever the next. Just by the improbability that someone would want them. Yes, it would be sweet to be held—though that couldn’t happen up here. Not within the possible sight of captains and helmsmen.

It’s too early, she shouted. I believe men are often early with these ideas. And often wrong. I don’t mean you’re wrong now…

He nodded. He took the point seriously. For Naomi the great question returned. There was no more honor in any man than there was in her father. There was no more fineness of soul in any woman than her mother. Yet there had been a discontent in her mother which could not be defined but could not be argued with. A particular, occasional sense of loss—of unease and genteel unrest—in her mother’s face caused Naomi’s blood to turn. In a quiet homestead, they had all crept around her mother. Yet Mrs. Durance should have been aware when she married of what her life would be—she was a cow-cocky’s daughter getting married to a cow-cocky. She knew that love wouldn’t save you from the butter churn or the chapped hands of winter milking. Eric Durance saved his daughters but not his wife from that toil. Mrs. Durance must have known it would never all be a stylish promenade on the mudflats of Sherwood.

Naomi was pleased she could not imagine a milk churn in Robbie Shaw’s future, but that look in the eyes of married women often seemed to tell you there were equivalents to it.

You have to realize, she yelled, I’m going back—at least to Egypt.

What if they don’t let you?

I’ll find a way.

He laughed, and the laughter was stripped from his face by the wind that flattened his cheeks.

I’m going back too, he asserted. They won’t stop me.

Come indoors, she shouted when he said something else she didn’t hear. The gale was if anything wilder. The wind did not tolerate cavalier movement. But with her care he came down the ladder competently. They reached the double doors that led into the greater quiet of indoors. With a whipping sound the inner door closed and the tactful shudder of engines from deep below was now dominant. Shaw looked sheepish, as if he would not have said what he had if he’d been in a place for normal speech. He peered at her from beneath his gingery eyebrows with a gaze of conspiracy which she was sure had always helped suck in lovers.

She said, With our futures so unsettled… Well, what can I say?

I will get off in Sydney, he said. If you stay a day or so we can visit the sights. We can go sailing. Do you sail?

You must get home to your parents.

I can catch the coastal steamer to Brisbane. Faster than this old bucket.

Well, I have a stepmother at home who though a pleasant woman can’t be bursting to see me, she admitted. I suppose…

Two days, he told her. Two days’ leave in Sydney. Delightful. The Australia Hotel—a fine dining room, that one.

I’ll stay at the Young Women’s Temperance Hotel.

That sounds severe.

And I’ve nothing to wear except a uniform.

The same with me, he said.

All right, she said.

If a man went to the trouble of suggesting something as eternal as a marriage then you owed yourself a few days in a place away from masses of nurses and soldiers to study him.

In Port Adelaide—where the ship moored on a bright Australian spring day and the band was close and the wharf triumphantly decked with flags—Rosanna Nettice helped Lieutenant Byers down the gangway to the brass exuberance of “The British Grenadiers.” Nettice herself was leaving the ship and had volunteered to join the staff of the Keswick Military Hospital. She left their company promising to write letters and shedding a few tears but with no apparently profound regret. She took Naomi apart for a special show of thanks—plainly uttered—but her objective to marry Byers overrode all other issues and affections. In her mind it was not for exchanging letters with them that the artillery pony had saved her. It was for Byers.

From the railing of the Demeter, Naomi saw a solidly dressed man and woman and a number of near-adult children greet their blinded son and brother. The mother began to weep on his shoulders despite the grin of reassurance that Byers wore. The father looked on from under his homburg and over his European-style, pointed moustache. He studied his blinded son with his trained jeweler’s eyes. Naomi saw Byers turn to Nettice and introduce her to his family. Was he telling them the entire story? That Nettice would devote herself to Lieutenant Byers’s battle with the seeing world? In any case, Naomi saw his mother extend her hand to Nettice and the father kiss her hand by way of courtly but uncertain thanks. But what were the clan dramas to be worked out? If the father had changed his name from Myers to Byers he was probably open to the concept of his son marrying a gentile. Nettice was conscious her friends were watching from above and as she moved away with the Byers family—a porter behind pushing his luggage and hers—she looked up. She had faced out the parents. Who—in fact—could set a test for Nettice that would defeat her purpose?

In Melbourne two mornings later, Naomi saw some of the men from the syphilis ward go down the gangway to a reunion with families who must not be told—with girlfriends who must not be caressed and wives who must not be penetrated. The homecoming wharves—where people met their variously damaged men, whose minds had been licked as with fire by the daydream of suicide—creaked with laughter and smiling which might yet prove friable. The overearnest band music was doomed to fail everyone as soon as the players stopped for breath. Carradine landed happy on her way to disqualify herself from further official duty by giving the authorities proof of marriage. And then to return as a self-funded volunteer to England.

On their one night in that city, Lieutenant Shaw took Naomi to dinner at the Windsor Hotel—once a temperance palace but now the “flashest pub in town.” He insisted on a bottle of red wine and when it was decanted, he told her he thought it delightful on his palate—though she secretly thought it was sour. Yet under its warm influence she told him about Mrs. Sorley—this woman she must visit in visiting her father.

Easier for me, he said. My family aren’t complicated. My parents are just my parents. My sis and the brothers… quarrelsome beggars. But no grievances. It makes life easy. Quarrels get settled on the spot.

My sister and I, she confessed, are just learning to do that. And making some progress.

Good girl, he said. You’ll need to be forgiving if you’re married to me.

But nothing’s been decided, she warned him. I don’t know that you’re a man for a long engagement, in any case. There’s too much life in you. And there’s no chance of it being a short one.

He shook his head. My God! Until now I’ve only met girls who are busting for marriage. I can’t imagine myself not waiting for such a noble girl though. When will this war end—next year, 1917, 1921, 1925?

Noble, she snorted. That’s you throwing a light on me. Like the Egyptian who used to stand under the chin of the Sphinx with a flare. But the flare burns out and the Sphinx stays the same.

Well, he said, the Sphinx part is right. You don’t give a lot away.

She warned him she could not sponge on him because that assumed some degree of consent she hadn’t given. He won the argument at dinner. For heaven’s sake, he said, women never pay for dinner there. Don’t show me up.

On Sydney Harbour—amidst ferries and pilot boats and launches—they enjoyed a sailing expedition with an associate of Shaw’s father who owned a wonderful clinker-built yacht. His slight limp looked gallant in the lobby and created military fables about him amongst those who still believed that war’s chief duty was to lightly mar the brave.