Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

Our friend Matron Mitchie, she confided, has had an X-ray in Boulogne at Major Darlington’s insistence. There are damp spots on her lungs. She is suffering from tuberculosis. It’s urgent that she go to a sanatorium down there in the south, and take ship to Australia as soon as she can healthily do so. I am trying to recruit an experienced sister or staff nurse from Étaples or Wimereux or Boulogne to special-nurse her. Because you notice that three of our volunteers left during the winter to return home? But I can hardly blame them.

Naomi thought that given the rigors of the work and of the château as a building three departures was a modest number. At the news of Mitchie’s consumption, she thought at once of the sinking of the Archimedes . It was as if that cold and shock had caught up to her at Château Baincthun.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Lady Tarlton went on, she is refusing to move. A tear emerged in the corner of one of her eyes.

I fear she might have no family back there. And yet out of English reticence I don’t ask. I think you can ask her. And use your best endeavors. She must go, says Major Darlington, if she is to see her senior years.

That night Naomi intercepted the volunteer who was carrying a meal from the kitchens to Matron Mitchie’s room on the first floor. The girl was masked, according to the strictures of Major Darlington. Dr. Airdrie had told everyone that Darlington was about to publish an article in The Lancet on the connection between bacteria in nurses’ throats and sepsis, and on the whole issue of masks on or masks off. This—everyone felt—would validate the Voluntary and Major Darlington and Lady Tarlton and themselves.

I’ll take that meal to the matron, Nurse, Naomi said.

Would you, Sister? asked the girl in an elegant, tired voice. She was a sturdy young woman who had once well-meaningly said to Naomi, Your soldiers are extraordinary in their patois. And Naomi had said, I doubt they’d know what patois was.

Naomi took the meal from her but did not don a mask. How could you have a heart-to-heart with Mitchie through a mask?

The matron’s room—into which she was bidden after knocking—was a little larger than her own. The French owners who had fled the war had at least left their thick curtains behind—and in Mitchie’s room they were drawn. But the room was simple apart from that—an iron bedstead, a dresser, a lowboy of painted pine, a little bookcase made of pine. Matron Mitchie in bed wore a mobcap and her hands were folded across her stomach, her bedclothes neat, her prosthesis with its shoe on its false foot beside her bed. The matron grinned unambiguously and broadly at seeing Naomi.

Come, she said. You can put down the food and tea there. I’ll have the tea first. As for the rest, my appetite is not… But tell me—your visit to Paris?

Naomi found herself without embarrassment relating their meeting with Mr. Sedgewick and the other Amis in Paris.

When she was finished, Mitchie declared, I always liked that Kiernan. He was a good egg from the start.

I am so sorry to hear about your problem, said Naomi.

Problem?

Well, that you have some consumption.

Some? asked Mitchie, mock sneering. That’s not a very accurate medical assessment, Staff Nurse Durance. I wouldn’t mind betting that blabbermouth Lady Tarlton told you all about it. And sent you to plague me into going to Marseille. I simply won’t. I am better than Major Darlington and Lady Tarlton think.

Naomi said, You argued you were better than you were to get here in the first place.

Mitchie said, Is there soup on that tray? Place it there on the little table. I might have some.

Would you like me to feed you?

I’m neither a baby nor in my dotage, thank you. If I go to Marseille, they’ll have me on the Australia boat before you know. And so to a sanatorium out in the Dandenongs. I am not a sanatorium dweller. It’s not in my nature. Besides, what is so precious about me that I should be taken out of France? The countryside is weighed down by young men who need to be sent home. I’m tethered here by the same things as you are. So let’s have no argument. I really mean it. Let’s have none.

Namoi set her up with her soup.

Good soup indeed. Some of those English Roses can actually cook.

It’s none of my affair, said Naomi, but I wondered if you had a family to look after you in Australia?

Here we go! said Mitchie in disgust. A family? I have a brother in Tasmania, since you ask. But he’s totally unsuitable as a tuberculosis nurse. I wouldn’t call my brother a relative in any meaningful way. I am as good as forgotten there. Anyhow, it seems that I have been here forever. Even Mudros is distant—and Egypt’s distant beyond belief. This is my home and I won’t be thrown out of my home. Lady Tarlton owes me her loyalty on this, rather than going around enlisting you all to evict me.

You should never have come to France in my opinion, Naomi said. But I know you’ll argue otherwise.

So would you if you were in my position. You wouldn’t want me to have missed out on meeting Major Darlington and all those well-bred English gels? Would you? Truth is, there is no rest for anyone until it’s all over. Unless it’s the sort of final rest they dish out in Flanders and on the Somme.

She handed her unfinished soup bowl back to Naomi. Naomi put it on the tray. The tubercular cough set in and Mitchie covered her mouth with an old towel. The spasm built to a paroxysm and then composed itself.

Don’t gawk at me. I’m not spitting blood yet. Well, not much.

I won’t gawk, Naomi promised.

But do not raise this business again if you want to be my friend. I say this not only to you but to Lady Tarlton too. So enough of it now! Remember this—in helping that woman out, that Lady Tarlton, I hacked all around the bush in third-class carriages and on bicycles and the back of trucks and by horseback. Setting up bases for our bush nurses and visiting them so they didn’t feel lonely and leave us and go back to the big towns and cities. Lady Tarlton did not want any praise for the scheme, but it was her name in the newspapers. Well, her name deserved to be. But I was the one on the bike. I was the one who got saddle sore. And now I deserve her consideration too. I am not to be shunted off to the south. This end of France is where the war and the grief and my friends are, and this is the end I’m staying at.

Matron Mitchie sipped her tea and her lips curled and she frowned. It’s gone cold. I made too long a speech, damn me!

I’ll get you more, Naomi offered.

You’re too busy, Matron Mitchie ordered. Have one of the gels do it.

Naomi said, I’ll get some more. For now, have plenty of rest.

That sounds like condescension to me. “Have plenty of rest, dear!”

For God’s sake, don’t be so sensitive, Naomi told her smiling. A person would think you were a Durance.

Under the spur of her concern for Mitchie, Lady Tarlton thought about a villa on the cliff top at Antibes—between Marseille and Nice—owned by her husband’s family. It was staffed by servants Lord Tarlton’s brother-in-law had been too distracted to let go for the duration of the war. An entire domestic establishment down there thus awaited a convalescent Matron Mitchie. The proposition Lady Tarlton kept bluntly running with Mitchie was that in the south—where there was a North African sun and North African breezes—she would get better. Here she would die.

When Naomi visited her room, Mitchie complained of this further attempt at clearing her away from the Château Baincthun. The disease was eroding her and turning her pallid, thinning her skin to tissue, sharpening the bones at the points of her cheek, and narrowing her nose to a blade.