Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

And then, this champagne in the interval. Honora rebuffed the offer of supper from a young officer. Lionel Dankworth—the angular and kindly soul from Lemnos—was due for leave and would come and meet her in London. This put her in hectic spirits.

And so the enchantments of the evening played themselves out and the officers took them to supper collectively—all on the strength of their sharing a continent of birth with Mr. Ashe.

Freud joined them again the next day for a meal at Mrs. Rattigan’s Anzac Buffet in Victoria Road—Mrs. Rattigan kept a separate dining room for nurses but made officers and men mess in together. They were all sitting in the lounge afterwards to discuss whether they ought to take the ferry up the Thames to Hampton Court when they saw Sergeant Kiernan across the room engrossed in a copy of the New Statesman . Except that Kiernan was now an officer, with his hat and swagger stick on the chair beside him. They moved en masse to greet him, though Sally noticed that in approaching even decent fellows a darkness—something other than complexion—came forth in Freud’s eyes.

Well, said Honora. What’s a Quaker doing dressed up as a lieutenant?

He rose. He looked well in his uniform—plain as it was and issued by a quartermaster. It was certainly a variation from those of the men they’d met last night. It owed everything to standard issue and little to Bond Street.

Ah, he said, with lowered eyes and a smile which was not quite apologetic. I’ve joined the respectable classes.

He raised his face then and looked directly at them in turn. He said, All the women of the poor old Archimedes.

All the poor old women of the Archimedes, Honora corrected him.

Nonsense, he said. You all look marvelous. Have you sung for the mess, Nurse Freud?

I’ve lost the knack for singing, Freud told him, closing off that subject.

Sally asked him how he had been elevated to this eminence, a first lieutenant. Two pips on his shoulder. Would you call it a battlefield promotion? she asked him.

No, he said, I’d prefer you didn’t. I was working at a casualty clearing station at Pozières and we all ran out of equipment and dressings. Everyone cursed the supply officer and there were complaints that he left the regimental aid posts and dressing stations even worse off. I spoke frankly to a surgeon about it. Next I knew they sent me on a two-month course in England. Here I am. Medical supply officer for a casualty clearing station.

They wondered aloud which one, and he told them.

What bad luck, said Honora.

Theirs bore a different number.

But maybe you could come across to us someday and give us lessons in French history or something else as grand.

I’ll be too busy with my stores. All those lovely bandages, all that potassium manganate.

The tail of his coat bobbed and seemed a little short on him as he murmured with laughter.

My boat train leaves this afternoon, he said. Yours, I take it, doesn’t. You don’t look like women about to go back.

He gathered his hat and the unaccustomed stick. He didn’t make a convincing officer. The others went out into the vestibule with surprisingly little comment.

He asked Sally, I wondered where your sister was?

It’s a simple address, she said. The Australian Voluntary Hospital, Château Baincthun, via Boulogne.

She spelled Baincthun for him.

That afternoon—probably by the same boat which would then return Kiernan to France—Lionel Dankworth was arriving in London. He had booked a room in a hotel near Victoria Station and had written to Honora asking her to invite them all to come as his guests to a supper for which he had reserved a private dining room. So the afternoon ahead lay glowing with possibility. Amidst a horde of Australian and Canadian soldiers, they prowled Westminster Abbey looking for the tombs of the renowned. The busts and elegant slabs and the remembrance plaques didn’t seem to them to be a promise of death, but called up ideas of an amiable world—one balanced between life and an appropriate vanishing remote from the disorder and imbalance of where they came from.

They got to the hotel in Victoria around six o’clock. Lionel Dankworth was already there—waiting for them in a tearoom and accompanied by two friends. Honora ran up and as he rose gave him an intense, unembarrassed, almost motherly hug while his hands wandered uncertainly around her shoulders. They all went off then to the private dining room, where a massive table was set amidst walls heavily padded with velvety scarlet wallpaper. Lionel distributed his two fellow soldiers amongst the women. They were lieutenants from his company. It didn’t take too many seconds of slack conversation for their eyes somehow to wander off as if they were all at once reminded of something they had to do the next day and which mustn’t be forgotten. After the soup—a lobster bisque—Lionel was urged to his feet by Honora, who sat beside him. As he did it, she merrily tapped a knife against a glass to call for order. He was tall but had filled out at the shoulders, a man of obvious command yet one who was nonetheless nervous for the moment.

Ah, he said.

There was a gap during which he looked at the table setting in front of him.

I take this liberty, he continued, or at least Honora told me to take it, because she was of the opinion that the speech ought to be delivered now instead of after the beef.

He coughed.

This means she wants her life settled on course earlier than it would have been if we had followed the normal pattern and waited for one more dish to be served.

They all gave an anticipatory laugh.

As she rightly said, we Australians don’t tend to follow the set-down pattern. So I just wanted to announce on my own behalf but above all that of my very beautiful friend here, Miss Slattery, that we are from this moment engaged. And therefore doomed to marriage. Or at least I should hope we are.

He produced a ring from one of the huge pockets of his uniform jacket and lifted her hand and put the ring in place. Everyone in the room stood and applauded. For Honora could look after herself in a marriage, Sally believed. Honora radiated a sense of achievement and raised herself as high as she could and kissed Dankworth’s mouth through closed lips. This kiss seemed to signal the end of all furtiveness. It also exposed Dankworth’s mashed but functional ear to their gaze, but there was chastity in those closed lips. The two were mobbed with warm wishes and congratulations as, one by one, their friends came up to them. Honora began to weep.

After the beef, Honora ate her flummery left-handed so that the ring could be seen and to enable her to hold on to Dankworth’s hand with her right.

At the end of the evening—after they had waited in the lobby to allow Honora and Lionel a little while on a secluded ottoman to exchange a few sentiments and further embraces—Honora went back with them by cab to what she called Hardtack Castle—Palmer’s Lodge was named after Samuel Palmer who, with Mr. Huntley, produced the tooth-breaking biscuits consumed at the front.

These were even more bitter days at Château Baincthun as—with less hope than the previous year, but with a few shared and dutiful toasts offered in the messes, and one uttered in Erse by Doctor Airdrie—1917 began. It became apparent quite suddenly that the work and the winter were wasting Matron Mitchie. Her presence as well as her frame had thinned. Naomi saw her display irritability at the English Roses over wounds that had not been dressed for two days. It was partly a sense of impotence, a flare of frustration. Mitchie could not get around all the wards in a day. The gardens and paths between the house and the hut wards were so frozen that only sure-footed nurses and patients could walk there. Sometimes in the bleakness and transfixing cold, honest snow fell and consoled the earth—but blocked Mitchie further.