With her half-mad and all-commanding sister above her, she felt it safe to fall into sleep and did without further thought.
She awoke to a bright evening world and sailors carrying her on a stretcher through places full of glaring electric light. On deck a launch hung in the air and she was loaded on when it was level with the deck. She had an impression they were in a harbor—Mudros, she decided. On Lemnos. From the deck of the descending launch she could see Naomi—a blanket on her shoulders—walking the destroyer’s rail and looking seraphic. No eye had ever been clearer or readier for this place than hers. The Argonauts landed blind compared to Naomi.
Bitter Lemnos
Sally and others were carried down a cramped laneway that smelled of earth and urine and into a large tent. Naomi passed Sally’s stretcher on foot and scouted ahead. She felt canvas brush her elbow as she was brought into a tent and placed on a cot. Here she fell asleep and—after not one dream—woke in gloom lit by a hurricane lamp hanging from the central pole.
She heard a significant voice and struggled to identify who it was by the dim lamp and an early morning glimmer of light through the canvas. Carradine bent down to pull back her blanket. A band was playing in the distance, orderlies shouting—for its own sake, it seemed—and a few blowflies buzzed in the tent.
Look, said Carradine. The blanket says “RF” and then down here République Française. A bit of the old parlez-vous, eh?
Sally reached up and took her by the elbows. She found them solid and present. She gazed into Carradine’s face.
I was hoping you were all safe, said Carradine.
But we left you with your husband, Sally protested. You’re with him, not me.
Ah, said Carradine. Well, that’s a tale for later.
That awful hole in his head…
He’s well. He speaks well. He’s fit to get elected to parliament like his father.
Sally let Carradine loosen the sailor’s shirt she still wore and wash her shoulders and her breasts, and then her belly and genitals and rump and legs. All of it was the sweetest friction.
You’ve washed the others? she asked with feverish democratic concern.
Oh, yes, said Carradine. They’re all clean. And fit to talk to.
Oh, said Sally. But Eric?
Carradine said in her nurse’s whisper, The doctor in England—at Sudbury Hospital—said I was holding up his recovery. The terrible thing is that he’s probably right. Eric’s depended on me so much. But he cried when I was sent off here. He cries easily, then gets angry and afterwards never stops apologizing. It’s the nature of the wound. He gets periods of delirium when he thinks the world’s out to get him. I’ve seen more men weep in the head-injury ward in the last four months than I’ve seen in my whole life before.
The feel of the towel remained exquisite. Had such a fabric existed before the torpedo?
The problem, Sally assured Carradine, is that men are not strong. It was men who drifted away from our raft. Whereas Mitchie…
Carradine nodded—assenting to the proposition that Mitchie had endured.
Well, she’s had surgery but I haven’t heard any more… Most of the time I work as a dresser. I have a fine tent. Or if it’s possible to have a fine tent here, mine is. And everything I need—and two orderlies who treat me with contempt, the buggers.
There were suddenly tears on Carradine’s face. My God, she said, I’m as bad as the fellows at Sudbury.
She rose. Another nurse had finished bathing Honora, who had barely stopped talking in a hushed voice.
Carradine! hissed Honora, Carradine being the icing on survival’s cake.
Honora was sitting up. Sally saw an apparition of Freud stirring and settling in a sailor’s shirt on a camp cot across the tent.
Sally drowsed further now and was awakened by her sister’s lips on her cheek. Naomi was in her long sailor’s shirt and shivering beneath the blanket around her shoulders.
Imagine what it would have been like for Papa, she said. If we hadn’t been lucky. We wouldn’t have lasted the night. The night would have done for us.
I think you would have lasted, Sally insisted.
She heard a sudden wind blow grit against the side of the tent. An officer and a matron entered with an orderly. The officer was a man of middling years who held himself with that certainty peculiar to a particular kind of surgeon. He had not made any notable noise in entering, yet the women roused themselves and looked up, wan faced, and Sally swung her legs to the dirt floor and sat.
Ladies, he said, Colonel Spanner here. Welcome to Lemnos. May I present my congratulations on your survival.
Their survival, however, did not make him smile. Something in his greeting made Honora turn a mad, mocking face in Sally’s direction. Nettice frowned from the far side of the tent with that vehemence with which she had yesterday risen out of the ocean on the pony. There was something improper in his dominance of them—with them prostrate or lolling.
Are there any problems then? he asked. Concussion, abrasions, contusions, lesions of any kind?
The women all chorused their No’s and felt foolish because they sounded like a class of schoolgirls. The colonel—responding like a headmaster—asked, were they sure? The matron said there was no mention on their charts of anything beyond exposure. So the colonel turned to the orderly. Private, you are my witness that they have vouchsafed no information indicative of trauma.
Yes, sir, said the orderly and smirked.
So, said the colonel like a jolly uncle but one who could not hereafter be blamed, no grounds for a long delay in returning to work then.
Carradine stood there with narrowed eyes.
Orderly, will you see that the women are issued some clothing? Chemise, blouse, skirt, or pants… Yes, and shoes and Wellington boots.
Doctor, said Naomi suddenly, with a sort of impetus. There were more than twenty nurses on the Archimedes.
Yes, said the colonel. Six of them are missing. Please accept my condolences.
Naomi—the one nurse standing—declared, How dare they put soldiers and military equipment on our ship! And apart from the painted-over red crosses, men were visible on deck, exercising when they should have been below, hiding. It gave the U-boat its reason to sink us. I would ask you on behalf of all of us here to protest to the military command.
These are arguable points, said the colonel, but moot. Damage done now, wouldn’t you say? And don’t you normally address officers as “Sir”?
If we had a military status then we would, said Naomi with her eyes full on him.
Ah, said the colonel. A barrack-room lawyer here. You should feel free to write your own letter of complaint, if you choose. But may I say this is a small matter in a landscape of huge matters. Perhaps best forgotten in light of your deliverance.
The English matron read the names of the missing. Egan, Weir, Stanmore, Keato, Delamare, Fenwick. They were Sally’s acquaintances, but belonged to other cabins and another clique. All these lost women had sat generally at the other table of the two in the mess. So they had stuck together in the water—just as her clique had—and been unfortunate together. Someone in the tent began to grieve and her frank tears could be heard. Freud mourned Keato as a fellow Melbourne girl. Sally felt her kinship with them too. She felt nine-tenths saturated by the Mediterranean and that she might carry its weight around in her for good.
And our matron? Honora asked.