Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

Not that, Lady Tarlton, said Sally. But the three of them knew it was that.

Sally and Naomi were dropped in the square of Rouen, with the Hôtel de Ville on one side and the stupefying complexity of the cathedral Charlie had taken her to on the other. As the enormous car drove off, Naomi and Sally laughed together like two girls recently interviewed by an eccentric headmistress. They went straight to a café—a little wooden place with tables set on the surface of the square. Naomi raised her face to the sun and the gesture made Sally feel gleeful too. It was the sort of day when even sisters with their history could sit together and think, If they could see us now—here on the timeworn pavement—drinking our ferocious black coffee and eating not cake but gâteau!

You know, said Naomi, it’s peculiar. It seems to me we’re happier now—at this second and here—than in our past lifetime there .

Lemnos, you mean?

No. There .

You said Matron Mitchie was back? asked Sally, to move the conversation on to safer ground. How is that possible?

Pure willpower, that’s how. She’s a single woman with hardly any relatives. She may be frightened that if she lacks a mission, she’s at an end.

But we’re single women too.

Well, Naomi conceded, a little younger, to begin with. And it may change one day too. Marriage doesn’t seem an impossibility to me anymore. I think the further I’ve got away from the Macleay, the less astounding it looks.

Robbie Shaw?

I don’t know. I’ve written to him and as good as told him no. But he still persists.

He wants to be your fiancé?

When I said the less astounding marriage looks, I’m not thinking of anyone in particular. I’m beginning to think Robbie Shaw’s idea is impossible. I don’t have the disposition for him. I ought to write to him again but I keep delaying. This is the problem: the further away I get from him, the more inconceivable marrying him seems. Whereas it’s supposed to be the other way round. He is a good fellow, a positive fellow. But he thinks there’s something definite in me, when really I am only covering a lack. That’s a dangerous delusion, you see. He’d find out afterwards and never forgive me, and so a really unhappy twenty or thirty years would begin. I’ve got other things to do with the next twenty or thirty years.

But that’s the way marriage works, isn’t it? asked Sally. It’s not possible unless the man and the woman are deluded.

They were silent. They did not want to apply Sally’s thesis to their parents.

No, said Naomi. I think a marriage can be sensibly embarked on. But the other thing Robbie Shaw’s deluded about is that they’ll have him back here, when one of his legs is five inches shorter than the other. They had Matron Mitchie back. But I think now it might have been Lady Tarlton who worked that magic. Shaw doesn’t have a Lady Tarlton. But listen, you said in your letter you’d met a soldier?

How astonishing it was to Sally that she didn’t feel discomfort at this conversation.

The solicitor’s son, Charlie Condon, she said. He’s amusing and has a very lively brain, though I can imagine on a hot day his enthusiasm for old buildings might get a bit much. But he’ll need a clever woman when the time comes. He is a good sketcher but intends to become a better one. He wants to sketch blackfellas, even. It’s the whites in the Macleay he’s not so keen on. He says… Well, he understands how things are in town. A person can say these things when you’re so far away and it’s all reduced to size. All that bush hypocrisy.

They contemplated the idea of the town shame and decided they didn’t want to expand on it.

Charlie hasn’t been in fighting yet, said Sally. And I wish he didn’t have to be. A shell could cut the life of a fine soul like his in a second. It’s done it to other fine souls.

Then she told Naomi how Charlie had visited her and ordered a table by telegram. Underneath was the thought—If this can be told, then all can be said. All must anyhow be said one day. The blame and the thanks.

There was one subject left—Mrs. Sorley. They had both got letters from her which were pleasant and sensible and careful of their feelings.

Naomi confessed, She has sure instincts, that woman.

So we have to go on being fair to her, eh?

It’s beginning to look that way.

Each sister knew—and knew the other one knew—that what stood in the way of becoming daughters to Mrs. Sorley was their caution about liking this unchosen figure, in case it happened that they began to feel her more admirable than the mother they were connected to by sinew and blood and acts of awful kindness.

After their morning coffee, Sally took Naomi through the cathedral and showed her the things that Lieutenant Condon had shown her. Then, almost with relief at having got through the meeting, they saw the great limousine prowling for Naomi around the square. Sally waved to it as energetically as Naomi. In spite of their compact in Alexandria, they were still practicing being at full ease with each other. But this French reunion had gone well.

Captain Constable’s pulse and his blood pressure remained those of a healthy young man—though one plagued by sleeplessness. Sally did not often see his eye closed, even at night, and he would frequently want to write something down. Only sometimes—and then in the dark hours—was there self-pity in what he wrote.

One night he remarked, This is more like an accident in a factory than a wound taken in a battle.

Sally whispered rigorously, taking no nonsense, What’s the difference? This war is a kind of great factory. All I know is you’re still a first-class man.

His mood quickly lightened.

He wrote, Oh yes? Where’s the evidence for that?

I know you by the way you are taking this !

No choice, he wrote. If I tossed things in now, I wouldn’t get through it all.

Thinking like that, she told him, shows the man you are.

And the exchange went on, as they passed the pad back and forth.

I would have liked to have found out whether I made a true soldier or not. I wasn’t even at Gallipoli.

And where is Gallipoli now? she asked. Gallipoli is a boneyard.

She handed him the pad back. Those men—the survivors—they know themselves now, he wrote.

She said, There are millions of men who know themselves without war. Millions.

He shook his head and wrote energetically. When he handed her the pad, it read, Yes. But once you become a soldier the whole point is war. The whole point of it is finding how you manage yourself in war.

He nodded after she had read it, and Sally looked at him with the bleak knowledge that he was right. A thunder came up to the east. It was massive enough to make them uneasy about its meaning and intentions.

Will you ever listen to that? asked Honora, coming up to Sally.

They went to the door of the Nissen hut—the tents were giving way to such structures—and parted the inner and outer air-raid curtains. The eastward sky was continuously and massively lit by pulses and changing emphases of light which moved up and down the horizon. It was bigger than Gallipoli.

Honora said, Bloody old Mars himself doing the scales.

Are they doing it? Or are we? Sally asked. It dwarfed nature and its fires and furies. If it were them making this, how could the front hold? How could the war endure? This was the war’s summit, she was sure. Something must end and something be born.

The thunder went on throughout their daytime rest and into a second night and a second day, and so on. At midnight on the third day the regiments of wounded arrived in convoys of ambulances that choked the approaches to the racecourse. It was like Gallipoli—the mutilation had overflowed the forward stations. And so in the reception wards to which most nurses were rushed, men still wore the reeking uniform fragments and the regimental insignia that now stood for nothing.