Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

Oh, cried the woman with the not-quite-perfectly-done hair. I don’t need an introduction to Marion. I know Marion. You remember her, Bobby? From Melbourne?

Oh yes, said Lord Tarlton, who didn’t remember Mitchie at all.

His wife kissed Matron Mitchie on the cheek with a sisterly intensity.

My champion in the wilderness! said Lady Tarlton. Do go in, Marion, with your friend. Have whatever you like, and I’ll come along in a moment to have a good confab.

Lord Tarlton put a hand into Naomi’s gloved one and muttered, Delighted! in a voice of great indifference. Lady Tarlton shook it with more earnest energy. I do so admire you for being here in embattled Britain, she said.

In a room full of men and women who were chiefly middle-aged and looked important—some of the men proving it by wearing the red tabs indicating they were generals—a waiter with a tray came to ask them what they would care to drink. Matron Mitchie nominated dry sherry and so did Naomi—though purely for lack of something else credible. No one came to talk to them so they went to a deep-set window and Mitchie gratefully took a seat in a gilt-backed chair placed there. The honking in the room was like that of poultry who knew a thing or two. Naturally enough Naomi asked Mitchie how it was that a woman from her world had met someone so preposterous as to bear a name like Lady—or, as she was announced, Viscountess—Tarlton.

Well, Mitchie explained, Lady Tarlton asked me to help her set up a nursing service in the bush—for women, you understand. She’d traveled in the bush with her husband when he was governor-general and living proof any fool can do the job, and while he looked at horses and girls, she looked at the way real women lived and gave birth on the farms further out. She also tried to go up into the tropics to see what was happening there. But the prime minister told her it would cost too much for a naval ship to take her. Really, he was just trying to hurt her husband. Mind you, she’s disapproved of. People call her “ spirited.” And you know what they imply by that? Immorality, that’s what.

Mitchie snorted at that trick of words.

And did you set up this scheme of nurses in the bush?

She set it up. She gave her own money for it. Oh yes, she might seem a long way removed from your ordinary shearer’s or selector’s wife. But you’ll see she has this sympathy. It’s in her nature.

Naomi dropped her voice. And is it in Lord Tarlton’s nature?

She wanted to hear a mischievous answer and got one.

Very little you could put a reasonable name to is in his nature.

Within herself, Naomi was dizzied at this conversation. I am talking, she realized—or at least being spoken to—like a worldly woman in a play. She was warily delighted with it but would have been happy to be free from the stiffness and furtiveness this house imposed on her and go back to Paddington.

Mitchie said, They don’t really live together as husband and wife, and it’s just as well, since Tarlton doesn’t deserve her. Look at her! See the loose hair? The ribbons? Posh people don’t like that at all. Some of the Melbourne snobs didn’t like it either. They said she was “untamed.” As for him, I’ve got to admit he was in Gallipoli for a while. But he’s the sort of man who always comes through, or—more likely—gets out in time. Probably by being sacked.

Mitchie shook her head to clear it of Lord Tarlton. She sipped her sherry a while. Now, the point is, she said then, Lady Tarlton has visited every rich Australian in London. And likewise the English who have Australian connections and are making a slap-up fortune from Australian copper and iron and so on. With the blessing of that chap over there—recognize him, the slightly portly fellow? Fisher, our former prime minister. The very chap Tarlton annoyed. He’s here out of respect for Lady Tarlton. No other reason.

Naomi glanced. So I am also looking at prime ministers as if they were mere bank managers. Mr. Fisher was certainly portly, though his face bespoke good intentions.

She wants to create an Australian voluntary hospital in France, Mitchie continued. The military people hate her for the idea—maybe they’re frightened she’ll do a better job than them. But she is very powerful and they have to take her seriously, and even give her nurses from the army nursing services.

You don’t mean us? asked Naomi.

If you like. She wants me to be matron of her hospital, and I can offer a post to you, Naomi—a means to get away from all the army stuffiness.

I promised I’d join my sister.

I know Sally. She’d understand. Look, I’m not pretending it won’t be hard. You’ll be helping to run the place, as well as nursing. And there’ll be a lot of paperwork for us to do. We’ll be working with Red Cross volunteers who might come and go for all I know. Do you think you might like to work with me on such a scheme?

A rosy feeling of both deliverance and promise swept through Naomi. And Sally would be within reach. France was not immense.

In fewer than two weeks, said Mitchie, you and I would be off to Boulogne with Lady Tarlton to find a site that might serve for the hospital. When I say the hospital, I should tell you that she would not have her name formally attached to the nurses in the bush, and she intends in the same spirit to call her hospital not Lady Tarlton’s but simply the Australian Voluntary Hospital.

Barely knowing it was happening, Naomi began to weep softly.

Oh, my dear, said Matron Mitchie. Is that grief?

It’s that you trust me.

Oh yes? asked Mitchie. I give you an impossible job and you shed tears of gratitude. See what you think in six months!

The portly, tall man with the long, benevolent face and the soft eyes—that is, the man who was once prime minister of the Commonwealth—had begun to look over and now excused himself from men and women around him and advanced on them. Naomi could barely grasp what he was saying. Mitchie displayed her easy worldliness by calling him “High Commissioner,” because he’d given up his life in Australian politics to take up that role in London—not bad work for an old coal-miner, as Mitchie would later remark. He talked of their dedication and how Australia honored them. He uttered the normal hope about the war ending with any luck by the autumn of this year of Our Lord 1916. He even quoted generals—British and French—who had assured him of it. Across the room, people were beginning to leave the reception, and when nearly all had done so, the high commissioner shook their hands and went too. Lady Tarlton—smiling and tall with her hair having further escaped her ribbon—approached them from across the room.

Charlie Condon turned up overcoated one chilly morning at the Rouen racecourse to see Sally. When he took his slouch hat off, she could see how carefully he had combed his brown hair during the journey. His eyes still had the same enthusiasm as they had shown in Sakkara, his nose was flared as if he were anxious to breathe in the encounters he was about to experience, and the V of his well-shaven jaw ended in a bulb of chin which shone with what she thought of as boyish inquiry.

He had set out early from a rest area near Amiens and found a truck that was coming to Rouen, and had been on the road for five hours—even though he had needed to travel barely sixty miles. He would need to leave by three o’clock—when a truck would come to get him again.

His arrival at the door of the nurses’ mess was the sort of thing that got fatuous talk going, but by good fortune she did not need to swap shifts and go to the matron for permission to rearrange the roster. She had, in fact, just finished the night shift in the surgical ward which contained Captain Constable. Charlie Condon’s eyes glittered in the doorway of the hut which had now been put in place by Australian carpenters and German prisoners to accommodate the nurses at mealtimes and during recreation.