Well, it is, she said, standing up and kissing his blistered forehead. But you know, don’t you, it isn’t Big Sister anymore?
He frowned. There was no complaint there, however.
He said, Force of habit. I’m feeling better.
You weren’t taking care of yourself up there, Mitchie reproved him.
I was, he said and then winked, but I gave the servants a day off and they left the gas on. Buggers!
He laughed—choking—and his eyes watered so that he needed to close them. Mitchie had been laughing with him—crying also—and the shared jollity threatened to strangle her too.
That doesn’t sound good, said the boy, nodding towards her.
Don’t you worry about me, she said. It’s just a winter cold.
He fell asleep again and after a while Mitchie and Naomi left.
The next time they went there, Mitchie asked Naomi—with more apology than Naomi was used to—if she would mind having tea in the nurses’ mess while Mitchie went alone to the ward.
Naomi sat there for an hour and a half, reading Punch and being interrupted by jovial questions from other mostly Australian nurses, who wanted to know about the Château Baincthun—of which they had heard all manner of rumors. That it was a club for officers really, and that it was somehow a loose place. They didn’t mean her, but by and large…
By now Naomi had learned to talk like other gossipy women in situations like this—she became an imitation girl, even though she’d barely been able to handle such impersonation in her earlier life.
I wish it was an officers’ club, she told them, and we were all club floozies. But it’s like any hospital. It has all the normal wards and departments. The work is just as long-winded as yours. We have surgeons, ward doctors, nurses, and orderlies and a pathology lab. All you’ve heard is nonsense. As for Lady Tarlton, the Medical Corps had to build your hospital. But she built the Australian Voluntary out of pure kindness.
Ah, said the women of Wimereux, it’s good to get that cleared up.
And then they began to decry the failure of the conscription referendum, which would have forced new men into the frontline. Naomi knew all the arguments both ways. Could conscripts be trusted? Could the unwilling? And the contrary arguments. The British and Canadians have conscripts. And conscripts would allow our fellows longer to recover and longer leaves. Naomi’s secret argument in response was that all those who arrived would anyhow be fed into the furnace, without any break for the ones already there.
She was rescued by Carling’s arrival at the door telling her that Matron Mitchie was already in the Phaeton and ready to leave.
She followed Carling, the ice crunching beneath their boots. The light was nearly gone, and a high wind rattled the slimmer branches of the leafless trees around the hospital perimeter. She found Mitchie in the backseat sobbing without pause and taking jerking breaths between furies of grief.
He began to choke, she said. It’s unfair. The pneumonia’s gone and now this bloody mustard gas! The doctor came—they used the hot ether device. It was horrifying. Poor boy. Breathing again though.
It will take him a day or two, said Naomi meaninglessly. Then he’ll be all right.
He called out for my mother to tell him he’d be all right. His eyes were searching for her. He didn’t call for me.
Naomi embraced her and pulled her into her own shoulder. He’s still getting used to it, Naomi said.
Matron Mitchie could not however rest there in Naomi’s caress. Coughs racked her, and she turned her head away. The coughing grew cruel—as was the norm for Mitchie. In her desperation she near shoved the eucalyptus handkerchief into her mouth—as if its vapors could choke her disease.
They were partway home, amidst meadows and copses where ice delineated every bare branch. As they entered a dip in the road quite close to the château, Naomi felt the iron fabric of the car take up a new kind of motion, a glissade which the wheels seemed to her to follow—as if the chassis would otherwise tear itself away from its axles. As she watched, the hedges on her right-hand side slid away at angles and almost graciously the limousine turned its nose into the hedge on the left, pitched itself on to its side with a frightful steel whack and then, with a terrible howling and grating, slid endlessly on its side along the road. The glass of the window below her was shattered and road replaced open air, and Naomi hung by a leather strap for an instant before she was flung forward and downwards beyond all control. In her own gyrations she saw Matron Mitchie flying also and at one moment Naomi collided—brow forward—into the heel of Mitchie’s unyielding prosthetic foot. Then Naomi’s head found a sort of permanent harbor in a fixed bolster on the seats that had been opposite her. Far too late the shrieking slide ended. At last—in stillness—she moved her head from between the seat and arm bolster, within which she had been expecting her neck to break, and looked at the skywards door and at that side of the car which had now become the roof. A grudging light was still in the low clouds and she yearned to climb out and greet it. But she turned her head and saw Matron Mitchie. Her feet—the true and the false—were both now unshod. She was head down to the shattered window and—through it—to the road. Carling climbed over into the passenger compartment. His face was bloodied but he was frantic to bring rescue.
He reached down past Matron Mitchie’s disordered skirts and lifted her by the waist. Naomi helped him pull her upwards. There was copious blood, of course. But what was worse was that her brow had been flattened and seemed to have become part of her skull.
Do you think you could climb up there, Miss Durance? Carling asked, pointing to the sky, and push the door open? Yes, use the bolster to stand on.
It was the same bolster that had saved her head.
She dug her remaining boot—the other had disappeared—into a cleft in the wall of upholstery, and turned the door handle and pushed with as much power as she could from such a purchase. But the door was heavy and it reclosed itself.
We need to smash the window, she told him. He lifted and laid down Matron Mitchie according to the car’s new alignment. She seemed limp still, but the damned war gave one a certain faith in medicine, in resuscitation. She climbed into the front seat and came back with the starter handle which was kept in its own cavity. She smashed the window thoroughly with a number of blows. Glass rained down on them. But it was a lesser peril. Then she hauled herself up and out and knelt down on the flanks of the Phaeton.
She had barely positioned herself on the side of the great auto when a military supply truck appeared and behind it an ambulance on its way to the château with a delivery of wounded. They slowed and stopped. Driver and orderlies got out and climbed up onto the wreckage. Naomi’s hands were bleeding and unsteady, so as two of the orderlies clambered up, she surrendered to them the responsibility of getting Mitchie out of the car. She could smell their sweat and their hair oil even as they did it. They lifted Mitchie out and down to two men below. Then they lifted Naomi herself on to the road. The astounding Carling levered himself free and slid down the roof of the Phaeton to the ground.
Oh, he said to the ambulance driver. There’s a lane back there. Go back and turn right and you can get your men to the Voluntary that way.
He came to Naomi wringing his hands and with his face bleeding considerably. He wept. Forgive me, he said. Forgive me. It was ice. It just took the Phaeton away from me.
My God, you’re knocked about, Miss, someone said as the icy atmosphere bit her wounds. She saw Mitchie lying by the side of the road as the orderlies brought a stretcher.