I speak facts, he assured everyone. These are not the words of a jingo.
Freud’s American boyfriend, Boynton, made no special claims that he’d go back to Chicago—when he had volunteered in early 1915, the senior surgeons at Rush Hospital had been so hostile to the idea that he wondered if he would get his job there back, even though he would return instructed by the experience of war surgery. But there were other places he could try, he supposed, even San Francisco, where his uncle was a physician and a surgeon.
Without warning—and like a public announcement not of professional intentions but of the end of the alliance with Boynton—and without waiting for all the doctors to define their plans, Freud spoke up. Well, she said, should the war ever end, I think I’ll stay on in Europe. The reports from Germany—all the illness brought about by the blockade—make me think I might go there.
Dr. Boynton regarded the surface of the sheet on which the picnic items were spread. He knew, Sally assumed, that Freud was wounded in some way and that her goodwill towards him fluctuated. The corners of his mouth turned up in a semirictus that combined regret, bewilderment, and embarrassment.
I am sick of seeing Europe in this particular way, Freud added. I feel I haven’t seen the true Europe at all.
Honora surprised everyone—not least Major Bright—by agreeing it was a good idea. It was as if she did not see Freud’s statement in its real terms but only in terms of a desire for peaceful tourism.
I reckon, Honora went on, that whenever it ends, a woman could live for a year in France on the savings she makes working here.
A glaze came over Major Bright’s eyes too. Was Honora—after all those demented months of hers—unable to read what Freud meant? He had his career to pursue in Australia—he would not be permitted to pursue it here once there were no more wounds. Professional urgency would not permit him to sightsee for a year in France.
Freud got up suddenly from the picnic. Thank you, Major, she said. If you will excuse me, ladies and gentlemen.
They tried to start a conversation again in normal tones, but it could only sputter along as Freud descended the slight slope which led to the nurses’ tents.
Boynton begged them to excuse him soon after.
Sally had made no pronouncements on her own future. If Leo lacked one, all the more might she. So an instinct of reticence—which would have kept her quiet in normal times—prevented her all the more now. The young wounded who reckoned the enemy was dished might carry a sense of communal triumph to the grave with them. Yet she could not feel it herself. And if it did ever end, she thought, I might simultaneously stop breathing. Only the chance to see the artifices of paint in Charlie’s company gave her a glimmer of the afterlife.
As a mist rose, the Ford and Sunbeam ambulances arrived, full of young Germans—dirty faced and bleeding, deflated and staring. The field-gray somber walking wounded of the enemy advanced with extreme caution and—as if trained in medical etiquette—soberly visited friends in the resuscitation ward and on nurses’ orders held up bags of plasma and saline and looked down at their sallow comrades whose martial ambitions were reaching a close.
A letter from England from Captain Constable—the defaced soldier—had chased Sally all over Picardy and now caught up with her.
I have the dressings on my face from what the surgeons say was the last of my reconstructions. What emerges once they’re off will be the final version of me from now on. Naturally I hope to find out what that is and discover it is not as bad as all that. There is hope for all of us now, says the matron. My bandages off will be a sign to her—part of a great global scheme in her head. Though I doubt the future of my dial is a matter upon which princes and prime ministers and parliaments will spend much time.
Despite the complaining flavor of my words, I think always of the boys who’ve been dead two years here and there—all without the option of wondering how things will turn out. How is that Slattery girl I knew? I hope you can tell me she is still young and fresh and impudent.
Well, enough! Enough, I hear you say and a fair thing too. Whatever is waiting behind the dressings I’d happily show you and her because I know you’d recognize me. Others might have a harder time of it.
Constable and his ironic distance from his frightful wound and from the regimen of face-remaking operations that he had endured was as much a tonic to her and Slattery as they had once tried to be to him.
Unexpectedly but in view of a further improvement at the numbers brought up by the algebraic formula applied to clearing stations by headquarters, Freud and Sally and a few others received orders signed by Bright to take leave. Without Charlie, Paris would not offer enough. So Sally decided to try to get to Amiens and north to Boulogne to visit Naomi at the Australian Voluntary before taking the Blighty ship. She had a hankering to visit Captain Constable and to see one of the fatuous West End shows. But on the way she wanted to talk to Naomi about Charlie, and the swiftness of Leo’s death as a sign of the imbalance of things.
The truck journey to Amiens took two of her available hours, and the train for Boulogne left on time since it fed the arteries of the war. In the train she slept almost without interruption in a near-empty first-class compartment of comfortable velvet. She reached the Gare Centrale and signed herself in to the Red Cross nurses’ home and found she could send a messenger by bike to Château Baincthun. Waiting to hear from Naomi, she walked towards the port and managed to reach a lookout on the ancient walls, from which she could see the entire drama of the place. Camouflaged troopships were arriving with soldiers and leaving with wounded and men on leave. Along the beaches bathing cabins weren’t disgorging many swimmers but she saw a man with one leg emerge and hop across the wet sand, determined to encounter the late summer sea.
She made her way back to the hostel along narrow workers’ streets where barefooted boys played rough games and looked up from their little brutalities to see her pass. Future poilus, she thought, who would be sent to fight for the right to their squalor.
By the time she got back from her walk Naomi was outside the hostel looking peaked and concerned. Her face was transfigured when she saw Sally, and the sisters embraced without any complications or reticence or subtle suspicion or begrudging. Now—with all distance between them vanished—they went looking for a café. Naomi, Sally could see, had been altered by the loss of Mitchie and Kiernan to something simpler, more intense and direct. Sally had once thought her complexity would baffle all science. Now Naomi carried on her face a look of the most straightforward joy at reunion, of happiness unanalyzed and unapologized for. She also looked older—or at least ageless—and still thinner. As much as any soldier, she too needed a peace.
I had an idea, said Naomi, once they had ordered their coffee. It’s a beautiful afternoon and the hospital is just five miles inland. Are you well enough to walk?
Sally was tired, but nonetheless felt exhilaration at the idea of a hike. They set off with the sun high and mists of insects tumbling in the air above the crops of wheat and barley that the sisters would see through gaps in hedges and over farm gates. Fields of flax bloomed pale-blue and blowflies troubled the hindquarters of cattle. This country was not as flat as the battle areas—the hedgerows climbed genuine slopes that were steeper than the mere slight ridges for which tens of thousands had died further east.