Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

I am afraid I complicated things, Kiernan confessed to Naomi, by pointing out that motor fuel was needed not only to run military trucks but also ambulances. In any case, it’s becoming clear he could end up being considered a pariah. Yet he’s a fine citizen when it comes to civil society. I won’t boast of his exercises of charity, because it is the duty of all Friends to perform such things.

It struck her that this discourse was more substantial provender than Robbie Shaw offered.

Her only other journey ashore was to accompany Matron Mitchie to the emporiums of the city. Making her part-sideways, part-direct approach to the glass counters, she showed a taste for jewelry and face powder and bought some talcum. That evening, as on others, she asked Naomi into her cabin and—sitting in a shift—exposed her raw stump and the long, tough scar for Naomi to apply ointment to.

The hard tropic times and sleeping on deck began. By day the ships of the convoy pushed through a gelid ocean which made dense opposition to their bows and gave their sterns no encouraging push. From nearby cruisers they heard machine gun practice—a submarine drill which caused a surge of momentary panic in Naomi’s chest. Moored off Freetown in saturated air they were not let ashore because of the fevers the place was so willing to pass. They watched from the railings the Africans on the coal bunkers below—singing as they loaded coal aboard in baskets. Everyone formed up on deck for the sea burial of a tubercular stoker.

Out to sea again, and further ceremony occurred when the convoy stopped briefly as three soldiers on neighboring transports received similar rites. Then—in one day off the Azores—the air grew cooler, and in a further few days cold. The ocean turned turquoise somewhere off Spain or Portugal—from both of whose shores the convoy took wide berth for fear of observation by enemy spies. It turned gray under the influence of a lingering winter off Biscay. Soon sleek, lithe, and darting destroyers met them and herded them into the Channel.

A spring fog both protected them from the submarines and prevented those young soldiers who were not immigrants to Australia but were born colonial from sighting the isle of their progenitors. When the ship found Southampton and fabled England, all seemed low sky, grim, gray derricks, long warehouses. Trucks took them to the railway station, past dour, unwelcoming terraces and boarding houses little better than tenements and comfortless pubs on corners. And so to a crowded and besooted railway station. Some of the young soldiers must have secretly asked themselves if this was what they had volunteered to die for.

The railway station—it had to be said—was also a coal dust–ridden wonder, august in its columns and great vault. The troops were bound for the training grounds of Salisbury Plain and the nurses for London. In Horseferry Road, Westminster, where the Australian military administration had its headquarters, they would have their future disclosed to them.

From Rouen they could go for a day to the Paris they had been cheated of on the way north. Sally had written to Freud’s hospital near Wimereaux and named the spring date on which the three of them would be under the main clock at the Gare d’Orsay—a clock which none of them had ever seen but which surely had to exist in all railway stations—at ten o’clock. If Freud could get a lift along the coast to Boulogne, she would find the train journey from there less long-winded than their journey from Rouen.

For their Paris leave they were issued with rail warrants and taken by ambulance to the great white railway station of Rouen-Rive-Droite, where the light through the artfully designed windows was uncertain as to whether to be dreary or display some pastel subtlety for their day out. By the time the train left, the day had decided to honor their journey with color and they were in a mood to let the countryside enchant them. They passed copses of elm trees and poplars which seemed to Sally to have been culled down from ancient forests into ornamental size. The dying ring-barked verticals of tall gums which marred Australian distances were utterly missing from the scene. In the villages women and children were drawing their water from the pumps at the end of streets while—puffing on a cigarette—a boy in sabots and aged about ten watched the train sweep by. An occasional grand house would stand in its own company of trees beyond ploughed fields. But no châteaux were jammed up against the railway line—coal grit was for ordinary people.

Then they approached the squalor and glimpses of grandeur in the city and rolled into the Gare d’Orsay—the grandest locomotive palace one could imagine, the most infused with style, a structure of French jollity to stand in counterpoint to all the solemn domes and columns of British-built railway stations from Tasmania to Egypt. They found on the concourse the great clock they had expected. Beneath it—tall and pale and a little undernourished-looking—stood Freud. Her appearance there—upright and singular and even with that vacancy on her face which belongs to those waiting for a train to arrive—seemed to round out the day with absolution. They rushed to her and she returned their kisses soberly but without any hesitation.

Where are we going? she asked—as if they were in charge.

They could cross the bridge to the Louvre and decided to do that first. The museum was full of soldiers of uncountable nationalities. A good argument for the ultimate rout of the enemy seemed established in this variety of uniforms of alternating dourness and flamboyance. The fancier the clobber—went Honora’s opinion—the less fighting the bloke had done. They had time only for a few galleries—they told themselves they would be back and would devote a day entirely to the museum. Sally was unexpectedly startled by the figures in landscape (landscape for some reason being the lesser element for her) or figures alone. But she was inhibited—since meeting Condon—from ill-educated Oohs and Aahs, from saying something basic when something better should be said. She nonetheless found herself rehearsing—in case she met Charlie Condon soon—the names of artists. She liked David—he was easy to like—and Ingres’s woman with the high-waisted gown. Somehow she understood that she would not have brought the same eye to them if it weren’t for Condon and the brief but intense education on sketching and allied matters he’d given her at Sakkara.

When they emerged from the Louvre they found the day still bright with high, streaky clouds and—though it was chilly—they walked in the Tuileries Garden where trees were still bare. Their branches offered buds though, like promissory notes on a coming exuberance. Then—following the map Sally had bought—they hiked along the embankment of the river towards the island where the great cathedral was to be found. This too they had all seen represented in childhood compendia of the world—and then there was Quasimodo lurching and dominating their imaginations. Like the pyramids, the cathedral could be approached by ordinary steps taken by one’s daily legs—the same legs with which one emerged from Kempsey’s Barsby’s Emporium and crossed Belgrave Street to Mottee’s Tearooms. The cathedral bloomed with side chapels and before each one were ranks of burning candles. Honora lit one after another for what she called “my special intentions” and sank to her knees before the Virgin, moving her lips in beseeching God’s favor for Lionel Dankworth, whose last letter was from Egypt but who might even now be in France. Another little flame for her family and one for the Allied cause. And a fourth. For Freud, she confided to Sally in a whisper. For the wrong we did her. She went on fitting small franc notes into the cash boxes attached to the racks of candles.