She agreed. They set off on the gravel drive with her arm in his. Reaching the gate and walking down leafy streets he pointed out the grandeur of the distant race track.
That’s where that suffragette threw herself under the hooves of the King’s horse, he said. Just like the boys who’ve thrown themselves under the hooves in the last four years.
You needn’t have dressed for me, she said. If that was what you did.
Oh, he said, after all this time, I’m sick of those rotten pyjamas. They look ridiculous with a slouch hat.
She noticed the wound stripe on the left forearm of his jacket. She thought it underexplained what he had suffered.
They’re sending me home very soon anyhow, he said. So I’ve had to clean up the old kit.
She wondered if the mayor of his municipality would bestow honors on this drastically altered young man, and remembered her sister’s story of the epidemic of suicide on the ship Naomi had taken home long ago. But he was too strong a man for that.
In a teashop in the high street they ordered tea and cream puffs. English cakes were sludge beside French. Yet this big, jolly lump of dough and sugar was somehow the right thing. The waitress did not seem surprised by his appearance. She might have become used to serving such men.
Do you know, said Sally when the tea arrived and the fragrant steam began to have its effect on both of them, if I had to give a prize for my best patient of all, it would be you. It would really be you. I’m not trying to butter you up. I doubt I could have borne what you have.
He laughed a rueful laugh and drank some tea. She wondered if there were nerves in those lips to feel the heat of the drink.
I’m not so good now as I was earlier, he asserted. I’m getting churlish. The thing’s settled now. I’ve got what I’ll have forever. I could handle the disease but I don’t know how I’ll go—if I tell you the truth—with the cure.
You are entitled to be a bit churlish, as long as you don’t overdo it.
She could feel though, very clearly, that he was in a new struggle.
I’ve decided to stay in the old town. Narromine. I’ll work with my father on the station—we run sheep and stud rams. People can get used to me, I reckon, in a small place, where there’s only so many you can shock. That makes sense. To me at least.
But you could go anywhere, she said. I would hate it if you thought you must limit your life somehow.
No, I think I’ll start out at home. I just want to shy clear of the pity merchants for a while. And any special medallions and speeches. The old man will need to fight all that off too—I’ve told him. I don’t want any band at the platform.
They walked back under a pleasant autumn sky that was the color of duck eggs. When the northern European weather took it into its head to be subtle and yet vital at once, it was able to do it with extreme craft, with fifty or so variations of blue and a hundred of yellow.
And so, he said, it looks like it’s going to be at an end—everyone’s saying so, hard as it is to believe. Fritz’s line’s gone.
But he’ll make another, Sally said. There’ll still be no shortage of wounded.
He considered this and then began to stutter with laughter.
What is it? she asked.
When they ask me to write my war memoirs, they’ll consist of one thing. Standing in the wrong place.
This sounded like self-pity at last to her. Though she did not believe he could avoid it forever, she was disappointed.
She told him, I came to England especially to see you. I have to say honestly that when I think of a hero, I think of you. And you know I would not easily say that.
But with me you’re also satisfying curiosity, aren’t you? he asked, half amused. We’re old friends—yes. But you’re partly a tourist, aren’t you? See what the joker looks like now! I’d be the same in your position.
You could drive people off saying that sort of thing, she warned him. I’m far too busy to be a tourist and I’m in a constant state about an infantryman I love who’s still in the center of the storm. And on top of that, I have to try to visit my sister’s fiancé, who’s in prison in Aldershot for mutiny. But, listen, if your position ever seems to be too much for you, you write to me and I’ll write back and come and visit if I can.
And on that basis, back at the hospital they exchanged addresses. Sally wrote down her father’s farm—Sherwood via Kempsey, Macleay Valley, New South Wales—and found it was an address she could not imagine herself ever having occupied or inhabiting in the future. But there a letter would find her.
They said good-bye in the lobby and she was already at the door when he called out to her, You’re too thin, you know. You’re much thinner than you were at Rouen. Don’t let them work you too hard.
Beyond the gate there was a line of tall shrubs. She stepped amongst them and let out a cry like a crow and then stood there while the river of tears flowed out of her, a grieving torrent. After ten minutes of it, she was well enough again and composed herself and went off to catch the early evening train to Victoria.
At Horseferry Road, Sally visited the provost marshal’s office. The clerk at the desk led her into the office of a middle-aged captain, who listened with an open face—neither pretending too much sympathy nor sour with condemnation—as she made her case to visit Kiernan in Aldershot. When she was finished he laid out his hands palm-up on his desk. It’s no use, he said. Aldershot is a British camp, and they play by their rules. We agreed to that so they wouldn’t keep pestering us to shoot our boys.
Numbed by failure, that evening she went to a West End farce with Freud and Freud’s American doctor. At the interval, as Captain Boynton queued to buy champagne for them, Freud said, He’s always taking it for granted we’ll live in Chicago. I’ve even been foolish enough to argue the surgical claims of Melbourne with him, as Bright does. But it seems the end of the earth to him.
It is, said Sally. Believe it or not, it is.
It could be cause for a rift. Or I could make it that. No one need think I’m that desperate to have a man.
That’s not a good reason to get rid of a decent one.
It was interesting that as always Freud would say “have a man” when others would say “get married.” But when Boynton arrived with the champagne, there seemed to be no chasm between them. The American was more exuberantly entranced than Fellowes would ever have admitted to being by Leo. They all chatted briskly and honestly, bantering away.
Do you think the characters in this play know there’s a war on? Boynton asked.
That’s the charm, said Freud. They live in a play where there never was a war.
Sounds like America, he said. But these characters? Their heads are empty of history.
Sometimes, Freud argued, people need a history enema.
The playwright’s succeeded then, said Boynton. He’s a real benefactor of humanity. Give the man a prize.
Whatever in God’s name that is, said Freud.
At which the American hugged her by the waist.
Listen to this kid! he invited Sally.
She was back at Vecquemont within five days. As well as Captain Constable at Epsom, in London Sally had seen at a superficial level sights missed last time. But getting back was what she profoundly desired. First thing, she went looking for Slattery and found her standing at the far end of the gas ward coughing and watching as two nurses applied blister cream to a soldier’s flesh. Honora saw her and—her boots clopping on the board floor—moved fast to meet her.
Is there a chance for a tea? Sally whispered. As she petitioned Honora she leaned down almost automatically and adjusted an oxygen mask on the face of a soldier. His mustard-gas rash called out for ointment. But oxygen was more important. The patient frowned up at her.