Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

You’re not feeling sick, are you? asked Naomi.

I am not myself, said Dr. Airdrie. Listening to you, I am not myself. I believe I am in love.

Naomi thought this was worth at least rinsing her hands and ceasing to eat. Oh. Who is the most fortunate man?

That’s the thing. I’m not of the fortunate-man persuasion. I love you.

Naomi felt riveted to her seat and something like an electric pulse moved upwards through her body. It was her turn to cover her face. This could not be taken in. It was not a matter of moral bewilderment. It was too strange.

Please say nothing, Airdrie softly urged her. I have studied you and the way you go about your work. This combination you have of intelligence and reserve and grit.

Naomi decided she would flee the restaurant. A kind of panic drove her. The words intelligence and reserve and grit had done it. Her haunches began to move without reference to her conscious mind. She could have been on the street before she knew it. But she knew on some calm plain of her soul that Airdrie would be back at the château by the evening and need to be worked with. She had heard a matron at Royal Prince Alfred warn of “Sapphic tendencies” which sometimes arose in nurses’ quarters and were to be fought and—please, girls!—reported. Yet after all—after Lemnos and Freud’s rape and all the rest—she was more stunned by Airdrie’s gush of affection than by the idea that the doctor was somehow reprehensible and immoral and, as the matron in Sydney had urged, reportable.

She had been in love—or had thought she was—with the French teacher at the high school in the Macleay. A sunny younger woman who broke girls’ hearts by marrying a traveler and moving to Sydney. In her imagination Naomi had imagined kisses exchanged with the French teacher. But that had been a girl’s fantasy and had not lasted to become the currency between a woman surgeon and a nurse.

Please, Dr. Airdrie said—seeing at once she had been too rash. I shouldn’t have said anything.

Naomi knew she didn’t want Airdrie. But she also did not want Airdrie shamed—and that in spite of the woman’s recklessness. This is why she talks to the nurses in that fevered way, she thought. She’s uncomfortable with her desire. The “Sapphic tendencies.” They make her chatter away.

Naomi reached and held her wrist—just as a woman would the wrist of another who had suffered a loss. Airdrie’s voice became almost inaudible.

I am not enchanted by men, she confided, though I like their company. I am enchanted by women. I’m enchanted by you.

Listen, said Naomi. You’re a good surgeon and the men respect you. And so they should. But I don’t want you to be in love with me—if you are in fact in love, and not just lonely. Saying what you said bewilders me. It shames me too.

Airdrie’s brown eyes showed a flare of anger.

You’re shamed by love? If that’s the case, I pity you.

Maybe you’re right to.

The fury died in Airdrie. It had been perhaps just a product of the rebuff and of her discomfort. Both of them took off their ridiculous burghers’ moules -eating bibs. Their meal was finished.

We can work together, said Airdrie flatly, whatever you think of me. That should be a given.

Of course, said Naomi. We’ll work together as usual.

Any edge of complaint in Airdrie had now been utterly blunted and more as exposition, she murmured, If a man declares love for a woman, that’s romance. But if a woman declares love for a woman, the heavens fall in. It’s worse still for men who love other men. But I’m of normal Presbyterian stock and I fear that in the eyes of most people, and in yours, I’ve committed some crime.

No, no, said Naomi. I know by now that all the crimes are up at the front.

It would actually be easier to deal with my feelings of the moment, Airdrie confessed, if you were outraged. If you picked up your skirts and called down God’s judgement and flounced out.

Once I would have condemned you to hell. Because I didn’t know the scope of things.

Airdrie sighed. So, you won’t give off an air of contempt when we’re working at the Tarlton convent, eh? You won’t flinch when I appear?

Don’t be ridiculous, said Naomi. It was difficult when Airdrie—a surgeon who was meant to maintain remoteness—behaved like some anxious schoolgirl. It was also endearing.

They picked up their glasses of wine. Naomi looked her in the eye as if it was the best method of rebuff. She saw that though this doctor was a year or two older than she was, in some ways she was clearly younger than that.

Did you know I have a sister? Naomi asked. I have a real sister just down the road in Rouen.

You do? said Airdrie. You are not offering her as a substitute sacrifice, are you?

That’s not worth answering.

Younger than you?

That’s right. And we never got on until this war. It is stupid and vain to think that all this…

She waved her hand to imply not just the restaurant but the fiasco out there in the gale, where men stood in streams of water beneath parapets waiting to go on some useless patrol or for a stupefying barrage to descend on them.

It’s stupid to think of this, Naomi persevered, as if it was a machine to make us true sisters. But that’s the way it’s happened. It won’t be any consolation to the wives and mothers of the men. I may one day have a husband—though I can’t exactly imagine it. But if I don’t have a husband, I’ll have my sister. Perhaps we’ll get old living in the same house in the same town. It is possible now where it wasn’t before. While we were at Lemnos we used to say that France and Belgium couldn’t be worse than Gallipoli. But it is worse by multiples! We’re so accustomed to dreadful things now that we might need to live together because no one else will understand the things we’ve seen.

The two finished their wine as equal partners, and beyond the window the malicious gale—mirror to the conflict itself—refused to abate.

After Naomi had rebuffed Dr. Airdrie—after her relief at surviving the lunch with something like aplomb—it was nonetheless as if through Airdrie’s proposal Naomi’s own loneliness had been proven. Her room was at the back of the house. It had been a little too warm through the summer—it missed the sea zephyrs and picked up any hot breeze from the south. Now it was so cold that it needed a stove, but she hesitated to ask for one because there was always a shortage. She used canvas from a torn tent to plug the gaps between the window and its frame. But the cold still seemed to her not a condition but a diabolic presence—like her own solitude made flesh.

As she lay there at night she began to understand that what Dr. Airdrie had spotted in her—and seen as an opportunity—was this unrealized need for warmth, for a body to interpose itself between her and the ruthless cold. Lady Tarlton complained that in the unheated offices overnight, hospital fountain pens broke open when the ink turned to ice. The water pipes froze, and nurses had to melt ice to make cocoa for the patients. And when the cold—despite blankets and a military long coat, army socks, long underwear, even a balaclava—threatened to split Naomi open, she understood the need to be held, flesh on flesh and blood against blood. The past freezing nights had brought her to this conviction—that she might meet Airdrie partway. There might be closeness without passion—embrace of one kind and not of another. Each morning she was pleased she had not yielded to this idea. Each night—under extracoarse blankets—she feared the entry of the perfidious cold into her core.

Someone could see her on her way to Airdrie’s room though—that would be the trouble. Or Airdrie would be called on to operate at some frigid hour while Naomi was there. But one night her coldness could not be endured alone anymore, and she took to the corridor. She had excuses if encountered—she was on her way to a particular storeroom where perhaps there were spare hot-water bottles. She rehearsed the contract she would make with Airdrie.