Sally could hear Slattery battering at the box with the broken blade. She grunted, God, if you ever loved a poor girl, help me open this damned thing.
It amazed her by opening. A papist miracle of which none of the Ulstermen around and on the raft were heard objecting. Well, said Slattery, a jug of water here. Just right for Matron Mitchie.
I’ll have a sip of that too, said the sergeant aboard with a clotted voice.
In hearing that plea Sally discovered her own thirst. Dryness and ice. She was a cold desert no living water could redeem. She was not surprised to see her mother floating at her side where Honora had been. Life is sweet, said her mother but with the famed Durance frown which raised the chance that death was sweet too. Sally felt with a strange loathing pride what she had achieved—the lethal hoard of morphine gathered in as honest girls gather in… what? Linen, blackberries, peaches? Time to put her money down on the chance death was sweet. Time to discover the infinite space of what she had done. The space lay beneath her and could be explored without limit.
A bandage and this stick thing, said Honora, further reporting the contents of the box.
The flare, said Kiernan. Hang on to it and keep it dry.
But there’s nothing dry here, said Slattery.
Kiernan redefined the objective. Well, don’t let it get too sodden. And pass it to me when another ship appears. It can give you phosphorus burns so don’t let it off yourself.
I wouldn’t know how to, Slattery reflected. She sounded a bit amazed that she had neglected this section of her education.
Go aboard when the time comes, Naomi advised him. Else you’ll drop it in the sea.
Sally saw another soldier slip away and no one but she seemed to take notice or be able to afford to. She could see him floating—she believed—towards Egypt.
Does anyone here have a red handkerchief? Naomi called.
Aboard, Honora repeated the request. Then she seemed to go about rifling pockets. We’ve got gray, she announced.
Use that too! said Kiernan.
For he and Naomi spoke and thought with one mind.
We’re as good as rescued, Naomi told everyone.
Men dangling on the sides of the craft were calling for their sip of the water. Naomi handed it over the far side of the raft. It had gone to only a few men when someone—according to the yells and reproofs of men—dropped it so that it half sank before it could be retrieved, already useless and tainted with salt. There were groans and curses all around the raft. The treasure was gone. That was the conclusive disaster. And the light was growing conclusive too, the sun getting low. In dark—it came to Sally—no one can stop me going to explore. Her forgiving mother said, We’ll slip off alone. Sally looked forward to it, rejoicing. The pain of her hooked arm and the ice at her heart would be relieved.
She could not see more than the upper structure of one of them but it happened the sea was all at once full of ships. Two large shapes—Honora reported—and a smaller, faster one. The flare, called Kiernan, and Slattery passed it over the side like a baton without it being lost in the sea. Sally saw Kiernan—frowning like a prodigy of care—pull some string from it and hold it as high as he could. It blazed brighter than suns in his hand. He waved it while Slattery dared to stand in the raft and wave the gray handkerchief. One of the larger ships veered towards Kiernan’s light and Honora’s cloth. Around the raft ran a sudden, hoarse conversation.
They bloody seen us, cried the sergeant. They’ve got some gobshite there that isn’t total blind. Seen us! Seen us!
But after small hesitancy it turned broadside on, then stern on. Renouncing them.
No excuse to let go, cried Naomi at once. Everyone stay. He’s lowering boats.
A British naval launch—the smallest of the three vessels—presented itself and swept past them making a wave. They could hear the reverberations of its braked engine as it sat by a distant overturned boat to which some still clung. From the raft they could see people lifted and laid down or allowed to limp on its deck. A brisk pennant flapped above them from the mast. Then—instead of to them—it turned to another unseen raft to take its living aboard. The deck seemed to bristle with the rescued as it came onwards to their raft.
Hold on, called a fine, casual, polished voice through a loud-hailer. Hold on there. The French will get you. We have signaled them and they replied.
Their powers of reason were dimmed, but the people of the raft could see that it was so, and the launch was so crowded that its stern dipped. Sally felt a murderous hatred for those who were already on board. The raft swung in the launch’s wake, and they beheld a launch and cutter being lowered as promised from a dusk-lit naval shape. A destroyer—someone said. As the raft swirled in the vortex made by the ship’s displacement of water, they could see the tricolor on the high mast.
Boats were being lowered from a suddenly apparent second French destroyer too. Substantial rescue was about to occur.
The French destroyer held on its deck and within its bulwarks dozens upon dozens of the Archimedes’s children. After being lifted up to the deck each of them had been wrapped in a blanket by sailors with pompoms on their hats like in a play. The thoroughly dry, thick texture of the blanket was a mercy so vast that Sally—laid on the deck beside Nettice—thought the men’s foreign names should be taken by someone so that they could be the recipients of regular thanks. Matelots. They were rubbing men’s bodies but were inhibited as yet from rubbing the bodies of nurses. Nettice shivered, eyes closed—encased in her blanket, beside Sally—on the tender surface of steel reminiscent of the Archimedes’s lost bulk.
Below a hung sail was separated off part of a sailors’ mess as a women’s ward. They were each lifted onto tables and now their life jackets were cut away with their blouses and remnants of clothing. The water had made the women neuters. Sally was washed with wine-tinted hot water and was given a towel to manage her own drying. She just about could. Then a French orderly helped to dress her in the undershirt of a tall sailor. In an officer’s cabin—Honora already asleep in the officer’s bunk—Sally was given a palliasse on the floor. The hot breath of the ship’s engines entered through a vent somewhere.
She quaked with remembered and not yet dispelled terror, and found herself concerned above all with her mind. She tested it and thought she found it a stranger’s mind. Her own having dissolved in the sea, she had picked up someone else’s drifting and bobbing mind. She saw herself now not as a continuous thing. She was no more than a mute core—or a pole on which rings of a particular nature could be placed. Each ring was a successive self—that was it. Her self was utterly new and needed to be learned all over. The childhood ring of self was not connected or continuous with the morphine-stealing one. Nor did the morphine-stealing one share any fragment with the Pyramid gawker. And now she was utterly new again, she found herself alarmed to be so. The latest hard little hoop—being taken out of the water—could just as easily be lifted off and replaced by another as accidental, whose description was: drowned in the Mediterranean. Since she was so tenuous, she might still swerve at any second from her rescued state and into oblivion. There was no such grand connector as destiny at work in her and never had been. Such a thin skin existed between parallel states and chances that they could leak or bleed or be welded into one another.
An officer with a molded beard came along, bowed to her and tenderly called her Mademoiselle. A blanketed, streak-haired Naomi appeared in the doorway. Her half-demented certainty and her zest astounded her sister. She held up Ellis Hoyle’s watch which must have been attached beneath her life jacket to her blouse. She looked joyful and still in command in a way that sidestepped the command of the French officers. The sea’s finished it, she explained. It’s seized it up. It’s just an empty case now.