It seemed to Sally it was a time as far off as childhood since they had walked like this together in country roads. She spoke briefly of Charlie and more of Leo and the untowardness of all that. Naomi talked of the campaign she and Lady Tarlton were engaged in for liberating Kiernan. The many eminent people they’d written to. He had now been sent to Aldershot Military Prison—the Glasshouse, whose inmates were considered unfit for visits. Still, Naomi was trying to organize one. Trying to imagine what his life was like plagued her imagination. What sort of men might guard and bully him? she asked Sally, not expecting an answer. Certainly men who gave him no credit for the Archimedes or Lemnos or service in France.
In any case Lady Tarlton had told her—as Naomi further explained to her sister—that it was likely that, should war end, civil lawyers could be introduced into the equation, men who could argue a case like Ian’s all over again in a world where reinforcements were no longer the constant cry of generals. Lady Tarlton said she knew a number of such lawyers—fellows who’d represented suffragettes. How they would be paid, Lady Tarlton did not say.
Of course, I’m willing to spend my savings, Naomi continued, and Ian’s father is—I think—affluent. And certainly devoted to his son. And I’ve never found that Lady Tarlton makes a boast on which she does not come good. So I have champions and I have possible resources. Well, that’s my rave and I apologize it takes so long. But now, your Charlie. What of him?
There was less Sally could say. She couldn’t broach the adventure in the hotel at Ailly. And the rest was all tedious and uninterrupted anxiety. There was no earthly power to whom she could write on Charlie’s behalf.
He never seems to be my Charlie, she said. First he’s the army’s. Then he’s his own man. It’s because he’s unownable, I think, that I love him.
Naomi laughed. Well, now, she said. That’s you, that’s Sally exactly.
Sally stared ahead, shielding her eyes so that she could scan the road for potential perils. Naomi reached and enclosed Sally’s hand in her own.
Look, she said, as if to distract her sister. It was along here—in that little dip in the road—that the limousine was thrown on its side and went careering. And poor Mitchie…
This kindly and shady summer stretch—with a slight kink before the trees around the château—hove into view. They both inspected the patch of road as if its tragedy could be reread and perhaps adjusted.
Naomi said, I had a visit from Mrs. Sorley’s son. He seems a big, handy boy. Another one to worry about though.
Sally privately thought she would swap Mrs. Sorley’s son for Charlie’s safety any day. Of course there was guilt attached to doing the deal in her head—Charlie for the other boy. As if there was in fact someone to make the contract with.
It was strange when I met young Sorley, said Naomi. We were trying to feel as if we were stepbrother and stepsister—he made the bravest attempt at it, poor boy. He took the trouble to come here in the first place. I hope we can sit down at some time and have real conversations.
Sally took thought and then said, It used to take us Durance girls a long time to get to know people like that. But we’re getting better at it, I think.
Yes. Taciturn, that’s what they call us. Standoffish. Were you aware people called us that?
Not you, insisted Sally.
Oh yes, said Naomi. Me more than you. They never used the word “shy.” Well, I suppose people think, why use a good word when you can use a bad. I think that on balance you’re much better at being social than I am. I felt you got on quicker with girls like Leo and Freud and Slattery.
You must be really bad then, said Sally, and they laughed together at the affliction of their genealogy.
Sally stayed at the château for two days—meeting Airdrie and the English Roses and the military surgeon and the young ward doctors, and sharing Naomi’s room. Sometimes she went with Naomi into the wards to do dressings and irrigations and to make beds. Otherwise she walked men around the garden. The English Red Cross nurses were awed to see an army sister descend to a menial level, and one said, You Australians—you’ll do anything! as if the Durance girls were exceptionally free-spirited colonials.
As they sat in bed, Naomi told her the story of Major Darlington who—went the authorized version—had chosen between the respectability of base hospitals and the favor of other surgeons over Lady Tarlton’s company.
She seems, said Sally, unshaken.
She can’t be defeated. When all this started I didn’t expect her to be here all the time like this. I thought she would just set it going, like God starting the world, and then go back to London to her accustomed life. But she’s labored with us. And when she’s not here, she’s in Paris visiting the club she’s got going there. She belongs to whatever she begins. But after the war—so she says—she’s not sure she won’t just go back and put up with Lord Tarlton and make an end to all the blather and mess of the whole love business. I doubt she’ll be able to though. It’s always going to be in her nature to do exceptional things.
Naomi took her down to the docks when it was time for her Blighty ferry. They kissed like two children reunited in play. An old French paddlewheel ferry painted in its war patterns of gray waited like a cross between a Dickens-style Channel packet and an antique battleship.
I’ll ask at Horseferry Road if I can see Ian, Sally promised her.
It would be marvelous. I’m afraid you’ll be refused, but please try if you can.
A line of soldiers stood back to let Sally—her travel warrant in hand, and Naomi as escort—advance to the gangway. A military policeman checked and approved her documents and she went up the plank, turning partway to see Naomi’s face streaming with tears. So the entente proposed in a palm court in Alexandria three years before was in full operation. Cherishing her sisterhood, she saw to the west the promise of a long twilight in rouged clouds yellow at the edges. It felt to Sally a good and decent thing to live. Even now. Rapture could not be postponed until a more perfect day. Not when a person had a lover and a sister.
The Epsom Hospital in Surrey was enormous and branched out—in grounds that were once the private garden of a rich family. The grounds held a number of huts and a space where men in hospital uniform—the baggy, pyjama-like tops and bottoms with various-colored lapels—were playing cricket. There was something about the energy of the game and the way hands were thrown up when a man was caught out from whacking a ball impossibly high that made her hope Captain Constable had not been hurled with his one eye into the deep end of a game just yet. She followed the driveway to the main house, where they knew she was coming—Captain Constable and she had exchanged mail about it.
A volunteer was sent to fetch him and he came down the stairs wearing military uniform, his soldierhood taken on again. She saw the sutures across his jaw, the not-quite-formed nose, the unnatural glossiness and tightness of the upper lip and cheek. Though she could see something of what he might have been before, what was there was both little and at the same time an undeniable cure. The scale of his bravery regarding the damage to his face had driven her to expect more than this. The surgeons had forced his facial items back in place. The surfaces they had restored were correct in a technical sense but were somehow unmoving and incapable of expression. His visage was doomed to be an artifact rather than a natural phenomenon. Except for the left eye, this face was dead. It had taken two years to achieve this, and this was all that could be achieved.
Hello, Sister, he said exuberantly. I wondered, might I take you to tea in the high street? It isn’t far.