As a sort of duty the other women coated a few of their extremities with the mud so that they could report to the men that they had done it.
They could hear that next door Dankworth and Shaw were asking each other raucous questions and answering with barks of laughter. A mud fight had obviously developed. Since the women felt they should not leave their room until the men left theirs, Carradine had time to tell them that there had been such an improvement in her husband that he’d been to London with a theatre party. They had worn their proper uniforms. And then Sally found herself announcing as a marvel that she and Naomi had a stepmother.
He was just waiting for his daughters to get out of the way, suggested Leonora.
She’s a strict Presbyterian, Sally explained. She’s made our old man a Presbyterian as well.
But that won’t kill him, said Carradine.
I can’t imagine anyone being willing to marry my old man, said Honora. Now that he’s old and bitter. Just as well my poor mother’s still alive.
They were relieved in the end to clean themselves off and change and climb the few steps out of the baths. Dankworth and Shaw emerged ruddy. Somehow they had had a wonderful time in the fog of sulphur. What a place to bring you! said Shaw. You can get mud anywhere you like. But we brought you all this way as if it’s a treat!
This is holy mud, Demetrios reminded him.
The women exaggerated the delight of the experience. In the outdoor café, a dense coffee was served with pastry full of honey, and cakes with fruit at their center and their dough teased out into strands. All this revived the day. The chatter became hectic, and Freud—holding Naomi’s hand across the table—took trouble to keep up with it and occasionally contributed a smile. But she did not seem certain about whether it belonged at the particular point she bestowed it.
Sally saw Shaw wince as he unwisely crossed his legs. She leaned towards him.
How long were you there? On Gallipoli?
Three months or so. Hard work, positioning the guns.
Was it terrible? she dared to ask him.
Well, he said, it was hard achieving elevation for the guns. They allowed only thirty percent elevation. And we just had to try to haul them up the ravines to level ground. That was the worst of it.
He was determined to make it a problem of terrain. He wished to abstract from the blood. She did not dare push him any further on the matter.
Did you happen to know a man named Captain Hoyle? Naomi asked—still holding Freud’s wrist across the table.
Shaw’s eyes tried to measure how much grief the name might carry for her.
No, she said, he’s not a relative. Nor anything else. But I went riding to the pyramids with him once.
Captain Hoyle fell on the first day, he said. Just after we landed.
It shocked me at the time—he left his watch to me. I didn’t know what that meant. I knew him socially but that was all. The watch puzzled me and upset me at the time.
As she spoke she stroked Freud’s wrist.
Shaw had become solemn. Solemnity didn’t sit easily on him.
Instantaneous, I promise you, he said. There was a lot of “instantaneous” that first day.
They sang all the way back to Mudros. They were exhilarated—even Freud—by wildflowers, the reaches of the Aegean, the mountains of Thrace. And the holy, sulphurous mud was forever part of their comic repertoire. On the final ascent to the hospital Sally saw distantly the military stockade and men shuffling across a reach of gravel to collect a meal of what she hoped was bitter bread.
On Monday morning the colonel and both matrons came to fetch Freud from her place at the mess table. The colonel said he wished to invite her to what he called in their hearing “a parley” in his office. Naomi—given the lopsidedness of numbers between the authorities and Freud, the single victim—had risen, expecting an invitation. But the matron-in-chief said with a confident measure of scorn that Staff Nurse Durance could sit again. Sally’s suspicion was that in some way they were taking Freud onto their own ground to make her prey again.
Only those still there in the mess tent at eleven o’clock that morning saw Freud come back with a mute face and utterly dry eyes. Sally was not there. According to the chanciness of rosters she had been placed on day duty. So it was to only a few of her fellows that Freud announced they had posted her to Alexandria. But there has to be a trial, one of the nurses said. Freud’s face knotted and melted then into some ageless and unredacted mask of rage.
There will be no trial, she told them. They were all in agreement on that. They say the boy was too easily persuaded by his mates. So he’s been sent—you won’t believe it—to Gallipoli. And it’s considered good enough for me to be sent to Alexandria. The orderlies return to their ways, and the monster and I are removed.
She reflected on the inequity. Her face was almost abstracted.
We could win on Gallipoli, and men would still be brutes. And there would still be stupidity.
The news—as it spread—demented the others too. They shook their heads but their outrage was too huge and subtle to be stated. When Naomi offered to walk with her through the wards, Freud said she was forbidden the wards. But imagine the wounded over there on the land being dragged down the ravines by my monster. And falling into his hands.
So it came down to near-useless gestures and words—such as Honora telling her not to forget a rug since the cold season was coming and they all knew it could be chilly in Alexandria. Yet she and everyone else understood well that climate could not alter things for Freud. Naomi and others went to help her pack. A truck arrived for her, its engine vibrating with impatience. An unsteady Freud was helped up into the cabin. Naomi and the others could not lend enough hands to lift her portmanteau and her hatbox into the rear of the vehicle.
One last idea struck Naomi then. Mitchie is in Alexandria, she called.
But the truck had circled and was on its way, and she did not know if Freud had heard.
Nor was this the only departure that day. Nettice had by now been moved to the post-operative ward in lieu of Freud. Here, amputees and other dazed survivors of surgery from a newly arrived convoy lay in a hut amidst groans and murmurs. The matron-in-chief was flanked by two orderlies when she found Nettice there and announced that she was to be sent to a rest compound until she had recovered from her mania.
The “rest compound” was—in this case—the evasive name for the mental hospital below Turks Head. Other nurses saw Nettice refuse to go, but it was pointed out to her that the orderlies could take her straitjacketed if she chose. The Durances were sleeping at the time. It was not until an orderly clanged a series of shell casings to signal time for the night-duty nurses and orderlies to leave their beds that they and others discovered what had happened. It gave Sally that sickening sense of the authorities creating their own world, working by their baleful rules and excluding all other versions. This awareness made other nurses feel a disqualification from protest and an unfitness for struggle before the powers at play on Turks Head. The local regimens seemed more potent than the prerogatives operating in the known but remoter universe beyond the island.
Sally sensed that her own feelings of outrage—like all those of the cowed women—were secondary in their depth to Naomi’s.