Indeed the matrons were not in sight so she said it was.
I’ll tell you something about city people who declare their belief in God too easily, he said. They’re not like Nettice, to start with. Their morality is really a kind of fussiness. Maybe jewelers attract these sorts of people. People who depend on their name and profession to avoid paying their bills. How many gold rings and brooches bought on deposit from Byers and Sons, and we’re still chasing up the full payment. And the problem is that if my father took a writ and summoned them to petty sessions, they’d say, Don’t go to Byers’s place. Why pay the avaricious Jew? So there it is. I’m Jewish as Paddy’s pigs—as a comedian once said. And Rosie doesn’t mind. I’m blind, too, and Rosie doesn’t mind that either.
She heard him give a sudden snort of grief. These humiliations of his childhood—and his father’s humiliations—seemed closer and less bearable to him than the damage to his eyes.
Well, he said, I won’t be worried that way anymore. The “Son” in Byers and Sons isn’t accurate now. I won’t be making much jewelry hereafter.
In the dark she often found a chance to talk with Byers. The more frequent her visits the more his concern for Nettice emerged.
You say she is resting? he asked one night. Where is she resting? Is she ill?
Perhaps a little influenza, said Sally. She’ll be back soon.
You’re not hiding something? Nothing’s happened?
No, said Sally. An energetic liar.
Sally knew that Nettice had become her sister’s mania as she had become Byers’s. She had let herself grow dour and hardened. But Naomi had become a fury. Her eyes darted as she looked about her for the right gestures to help rebalance the earth. Through a further visit to the good-natured English nurses’ mess, Naomi began to work at poor Bea to take her in to see Nettice. Sally could tell Bea’s general goodwill would be no protection against her sister’s tigerish resolve. Naomi planned to go down to the rest compound with Bea as a junior nurse getting an education.
Naomi recounted to her sister her persuading of Bea.
You can say, Naomi had argued, that I told you I was rostered on to the compound. You had no reason to suspect it wasn’t true. And I’ll only stay a while, I promise. But she has to know she’s not been given up.
Poor, susceptible Bea took Naomi one morning, therefore, through the outer wire. She greeted guards whose faces lit to see her and who unlocked the gate which led down a raceway contained by barbed wire on either side. The male patients’ wards were beyond the wire to the south, said Bea, but the violent ones were behind the wire to the north. They progressed between these two. After two hundred yards, they came to the small compound for women. The outlook from this part of the headland, Naomi thought, was not very curative. It was blocked off from the harbor and from at least the notion of escape by a rock outcrop.
Bea’s task—after she said good-morning to the sentry on the gate and asserted airily that this morning she had brought along an apprentice—was first to relieve the night nurse. Naomi was to watch from the tent flap as Bea went in. The night nurse proved to be a Canadian. She was writing case notes at a little table and seemed tired enough not to pay much attention to Naomi as she rose and brushed past. She went to wake up her orderly, who had been on call and who rested in a small watch house in the corner of the compound. Peering into the dim tent Naomi saw first a region with a few soft chairs and a table with magazines. There was a rough bookcase with maybe a dozen titles. On top of it lay a pack of cards and boxes containing draughts and other games. Bea—scanning the notes—mentioned to Naomi that two orderlies she called her “boys” would be along soon with a bucket of porridge and another of water and some loaves of bread. Her reference to them was nearly affectionate. This was a place where it was possible for orderlies to work with women in a manner that was not poison. Bea then left the little table and the notes and cried good-morning to the stirring patients. Her cheery voice would itself be a kind of poultice on the day.
Advancing behind Bea, Naomi saw Nettice sitting on a tousled bed beside a woman who chattered or—more accurately—spoke in tongues.
Bea said, Nettice has become her friend and is very handy to me. Keeps the poor girl less excited. And then the Sapphist is very good, too, trying to get poor Lily talking. Between us we’re a well-rounded crew.
Nettice reserved her most clenched and characteristic frown for the sight of Naomi. She rose upright in her shift but kept one hand on the chatterer’s wrist. While Naomi embraced her with two arms, Nettice had only one free hand for the task. Naomi was surprised to find there was almost something grudging in this welcome and in the pressure of Nettice’s one hand on her back. Nettice explained to her murmuring fellow patient that she was going to sit with her friend for a while. Naomi and barefooted Nettice went and sat together in the soft chairs at the recreational end of the tent.
What are you doing here, Durance? Nettice asked first of all. You could get yourself in the deepest trouble.
We thought it was important to let you know that you have not been forgotten or anything like it. They want us to forget you, but we refuse.
I already knew that, said Nettice plainly. I knew you were all my good friends. But I didn’t want you to put yourself in such danger as this.
It’s right I should be the one to visit you, said Naomi.
Nettice—as if implying she might as well ask questions while she had Naomi there—wanted to know how Lieutenant Byers was and whether he knew where she was.
Naomi reported they hadn’t told him more than she’d been suspended. But he asks after you endlessly, said Naomi.
Does he ask after me endlessly? asked Nettice. It’s not something you should say casually unless it’s really happening.
Given the trouble Naomi had taken to be here, it appeared Nettice had only a middling respect for her visit and now seemed to suspect her of deception.
Well, it is the absolute truth, Naomi insisted.
I deserve to be here you know, Nettice confessed. I had in a way gone a little mad, you have to understand. I can’t think what got into me.
But you don’t deserve to be in an asylum, for God’s sake.
The punishment is appropriate, said Nettice with a certainty Naomi hated. It was my lunacy. It’s certainly not Lieutenant Byers’s fault.
It is all someone else’s fault, insisted Naomi. Maybe not all, but whatever you did were minor crimes. If we are ratty and berserk, they have made us that way. We didn’t invite a battalion of troops onboard the Archimedes. We didn’t invent the brainlessness of the colonel and the slavishness of the matrons. Some would say that my being here was criminal. But I say that your being here is the crime.
Anyhow, she argued, you can see I have some nursing to do here day and night. So I am not empty of all purpose. If a person were to mention God, he could say that God sent me here for the sake of the mute and the babbling. We have one each of those.
Naomi should have been pleased to find Nettice so sturdy and very nearly content. And yet there was still a certain disappointment too.
In any case, Nettice conceded, please give Lieutenant Byers my warmest respects. You needn’t tell him—because he already knows—that I might have mistaken friendship and our mutual chattiness for something of a profounder nature.