Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

After she’d got him some tea, they were able to go into Rouen—there were always trucks and cars and ambulances going there. They squeezed into the front seat of an ambulance and walked from the dock—where it was going—to the cathedral square. About the cathedral, Charlie Condon had—as Sally knew beforehand he would—absorbed a great deal. Would his continual enthusiasm ever become tedious? It was not yet. Knowledge was for joy with Charlie and not for showing off. There were newly famous paintings by an artist named Monet, he said. Done some years back, but the world was just starting to catch up with them. About twenty paintings of the great cathedral, he said, the façade and towers in all hours and every degree of light.

She liked the majesty of that phrase: “every degree of light.”

What gives me hope, said Charlie, is that’s what we have back home. Light, light, and more light. Light to burn. Light to waste. But you’ve heard me go on about all that.

He had no idea of the scale to which everything was news to her. He told her of the stained glass seven hundred years old which had a unique turquoise that modern glassmakers couldn’t reproduce. She sensed that the fact there were such things made the world liveable for him.

He listed Rouen’s relics which had brought in pilgrims from all over Europe. And they weren’t all pious pilgrims. It was because they were sinners that they went on pilgrimage and hoped that the sight of the body parts of saints would save them from their crimes. Of course now, he said, it seemed there was no end to body parts of saints and sinners strewn across France and Flanders.

After a few hours a cathedral wanes in interest—something infinite gluts the finite taste. He took her to lunch. It was an auberge called La Couronne which claimed to be the oldest in France—a gabled house, with balconies and leadlight windows and a certain droop to it from the long-running work of gravity. The landlord seemed to expect them. Charlie confessed he had sent a telegram to make a reservation. All without knowing whether he might be eating on his own. The scale of that act of daring impressed her.

Later, she found that the sauce for the duck they ate was made from blood. Because she was a farmer’s daughter, the concept did not repel her. They drank Bordeaux wine—though her hayseed palate took no special delight in it except in its worldliness. But the subsequent feeling of lightness combined with the idea of the telegram and with turquoise glass and the ageless recipes contained in this old house all made an entrancing hour.

What are they like? he asked then. They were eating an apple tart with fresh cream. It was improbably laced with a brandy named Calvados. The fellows you nurse?

He still had that unrequited curiosity about it all.

There’s the new element, Charlie, she told him. There’s gas. We’re shipping a lot of men with gas damage back to Blighty. Which means they’re almost certainly finished as soldiers—and maybe as men. So you must always keep your mask handy. The foul stuff seems to be everywhere up there.

They sent us through a training field full of gas with our masks on. It isn’t the most comfortable experience.

Captain Constable occupied the center and forefront of her imagination. She wouldn’t mention him to Charlie, for there was a fear of infecting him with this reported ill fortune.

Are the Germans shelling you where you are?

No, said Charlie, the shelling’s pretty mild. Sometimes one comes over. It almost seems an accident. There’s a story that can’t be true—but it goes that the Germans have made a deal with us that if we don’t shell Steenbecque, they won’t shell Hazebrouck. Anyhow, that’s how it’s working at the moment. But when we’re considered fit for blooding, off we’ll go to somewhere less cozy.

She sipped wine as a sort of necessary tribute to the day.

Charlie talked about a farm family he and other officers had been billeted with for a while in a small house near Steenbecque. The family had been sullen at first. It had been roughly treated early in the war by German officers and then fairly contemptuously by some British ones from a highfalutin regiment. But Charlie helped with chopping wood and even with milking the family cow—doesn’t hurt to do one cow, he said—and the French family warmed and were astonished. The farmer’s wife asked him how he could actually be an officer and chop wood?

They walked the streets afterwards and Charlie was willing to look in the windows of boutiques—what in Australia they delighted in calling “frock salons.” Charlie was not uninterested in fabric and in the lines of garments. After all, he explained, it was just an extension of his interests. In Rouen it drew no remark at all to go looking at fabrics on the arm—for she had taken his arm—of a man. It seemed to be considered that a woman was fortunate still to have an ambulatory soldier to promenade with on a quiet afternoon.

At two or so Charlie said that he meant to see where Joan of Arc had been burned. She had seen it before—in town with Honora and Leo.

But you must have been there before? he asked. No, she said.

They progressed down the cramped medieval streets to a little square—a church stood there and a monument with fleur-de-lis engraved—topped by a cross to mark the place Joan had died.

Imagine how scared she was, said Charlie.

None of them had thought of that on her earlier visit. They’d marveled at her gameness—a French foreshadowing of Ned Kelly. She was a creature from a valiant tale rather than a girl really tethered and planted in the midst of a burning terror. But Sally could all at once now feel panic in the air.

He was scanning the eaves of the old houses of the square—as if there was some prayer and cry of fear wedged up there. His jawline was straight and his neck scraped and red in places from an earnest razor.

Simply her and the fire, he murmured. And her conscience and her terror.

He turned his face to Sally and laughed then—the memory of their pleasant day retethered him to air that was tranquil and did not blaze. He consulted his watch. My God, his truck was due at the racecourse in half an hour. They looked around for a motor taxi but saw only the occasional private auto and farmer’s dray. They raced back to the cathedral, where a British ambulance driver—in town on some unstated duty—got them back to the hippodrome. There the two of them stood in the gravel road before the administration buildings. They were both uneasy—they were further embarked on friendship than they quite knew what to do with. His truck rolled up and saved them from their bewilderment. She wondered if he would try a kiss before he boarded it and could see he considered it but found that perhaps the day had been too randomly built by him—too plump with jumbled incident—to justify it.

He’d sent a telegram to the auberge! The idea seemed flamboyant beyond the limits of anything she’d known. People sent telegrams for deaths and weddings and urgent unexpected arrivals. He’d sent a telegram for a table.

From the time of their visit to the Tarlton townhouse, Matron Mitchie and Naomi had rooms provided for them at the Dorchester. Although Naomi’s was appropriately more modest than that of Matron Mitchie, it still astonished her with its sumptuousness and—by contrast with Lemnos—its vast bed. She had not slept in a room and on her own for close on two years. Yet the luxurious solitude made her edgy. As payment for this high living, Mitchie set her to work immediately, devising a roster for a hospital of two hundred wounded—to begin with anyhow, said Mitchie. So Naomi planned a schedule for phantom nurses not yet recruited from the army nursing service or from the Red Cross volunteers or from civilian hospitals. Forty trained nurses were needed just for the two shifts of twelve hours and the one day’s rest a week initially planned. Nearly as many women would be needed by night as by day since inquiry showed convoys often arrived then.