In her three-berth cabin on deck two Naomi received by way of a steward a letter from Lieutenant Shaw, whose femur wound was sending him home too. “A bit down at the moment,” he confessed. “But there has to be something I can do in the military sense. If you see me, I’ll be the one who walks at an angle of 45 degrees—unless the ship is at 45 degrees, in which case I’ll be leveled out completely.”
She hoped Shaw wouldn’t plague her. That thought was unworthy—for his kindness on Lemnos he deserved to be humored. But she needed a certain solitude to absorb what had befallen her and to contemplate her Australian future. Her vanity when she first presented herself at Victoria Barracks had been to think she would return home with legible success on her brow. Now she was to return as one of the rejected. She was weighed a failure. That would show on her brow. Her father and his new wife might not see it. Yet—knowing it was there—she would cramp in all she did.
Cheers rose from other and incoming troopships as the nurses showed themselves at the railings to take a last view of that isle whose hard edges were veiled by rain. Naomi did not go up there to see her sister’s island shrink away in veils of dimness and downpour. She stayed below to sleep as soon as the ship began to move. But once stirring and turning on her bunk she promised herself that should the ship sink during its weavings across the rough surface of the Mediterranean, she would let herself fall straight to the base of the ocean without waking.
She heard no more from Robbie Shaw the next day and spent her time reading Punch in the lounge. At dawn the next morning they approached the coast of Egypt. But the waves breaking along the Corniche, the apartment buildings which looked like confections of icing sugar, the buildings dreamed up by an architect who had then taken decoration a step too far, the lighthouse where Pharos had once stood, one of those wonders of the world which children were required to number and write down—the whole fabulous city—was a scene she now lacked the means to relish. The Qaitbay citadel they used to see from the docking Archimedes was today like a fortress from a flick or a novel. The British flag above its turreted central tower suggested war was a simple thing—achieved by musketry from battlements aimed at some unwashed tribe.
Nettice was comforted that her troopship had so easily quartered the Mediterranean. She had been busy, in any case—using a steward who attended to their cabin to carry messages to Lieutenant Byers in his quarters one deck up.
They were rested in nurses’ quarters at a British hospital in Alexandria until their train was ready the following morning. At that ornate railway station in Cairo—through which Mitchie had long ago led her untried charges to board the Alexandria train—they set out for Port Suez.
Out of the windows Naomi found camels and their owners on the roads they passed and green crops tended by unaltered, strong, black-clad, bent women so much more unchanged than the world at large. The sky above Suez grew murky and yielded a gray evening—like a scowl from the Red Sea Moses had parted. She saw—as their train rolled into the port—British army and navy officers sitting at tables under the porticos of the Grand Pier Hotel, men still engaged in a rearwards sort of way with the war Naomi and the others were now departing. The sight made her feel excluded from life rather than fortunate in it.
The train came right to the wharf. Orderlies bustled in to help them with their bags. A cluster of wheelchair cases began to form on the station. The amputees on crutches—their trouser legs bravely pinned up to about knee height—tried not to collide with rushing orderlies. Smoking casually, those who missed an arm walked with a balanced air that claimed they had always wanted to sport an empty sleeve.
Their ship looked—according to Carradine’s habitual assessment of vessels—around sixteen thousand tons. It possessed what people called “good lines” and was named the Demeter. The great doors of the lower deck—more or less at dock level, the same doors which on the Archimedes had been opened to admit horses and gun carriages—stood agape.
Those chirpy on this grim Egyptian afternoon cried, Make way, boys! as they stood back to yield the nurses the gangplank. Their wounds were not visible—were covered by their uniforms—and some of them were possessed by the happiness of valid homecoming. But not all. Some were dreading it like she was.
From the deck, she saw below on the pier a contingent of blinded officers—each with a stick held edgily and unfamiliarly in his hand—advancing towards the lower doors in a line. The first had his free hand on the shoulder of an orderly and the second his hand on the shoulder of the first. And so on. She had never seen the blinded so arrayed or in such a force. She noticed Lieutenant Byers in the midst of the column. He looked lost in the mass.
The nurses were now the first to be let below. The steward who led them told them that their cabins were A1. Walking further forward in the ship the women saw what could easily be imagined as peacetime salons and libraries and smoking rooms. And the promenade deck they had been ushered across felt just that—a deck for promenades and not for heaping the wounded. Nettice praised the ship endlessly and kept some of her applause for the spacious ports in their cabin. Naomi suspected that it was Byers’s presence onboard that brought out this applause in her.
At dinner—seated with the captain and his third officer—they began with an entree of fish in a near-vacant dining room. The captain was a Scot and of a certainty, a gaze, a solidity that would not easily yield to any projectile thrown by an enemy. Other nurses they had not yet met arrived in the dining room in their long gray dresses and jackets. Some looked to be women as old as Mitchie and were puffed from climbing the gangplank and companionways. They were all from the great barn of a hospital in Cairo known as Luna Park and from a hospital at Ismaïlia. It turned out that at least two of them—having lost a brother each—were being sent home to console their parents.
The matron of the Demeter spoke at the end of dinner. By then they’d had some miraculous beef and roast potatoes and pudding with custard. The matron was broad-shouldered—she looked like a country girl grown up—and had an eczema outbreak on her cheeks. She enumerated the range of work they would need to do according to a light, six-hour-a-day roster. The demands of the eight-week journey home would tend to be medical rather than surgical. So there were the two small medical wards—for officers and men—and a contagious ward. There was also a small mental ward. Most of the patients here were depressed or suffering delusions harmless except to themselves. Forward and on a lower deck lay the living quarters for some fifty syphilitics. Smile on them, issue their medicines, and then leave them to the orderlies. In the meantime, the majority of the men—in stable condition—would occupy the normal cabins and bunk spaces.
Nettice’s face bloomed and the knot which had fixed her features in place seemed suddenly to release itself.
Naomi’s job some days was to take blinded or lamed men for a turn on deck. Nettice thought it was against the spirit of the matron’s lenient instructions that she should always accompany Lieutenant Byers—she found other ways of meeting him during the day. Naomi was therefore in the company of Sam Byers amidst a now-vivid-blue Red Sea when she saw Sergeant Kiernan in overall control of a string of orderlies guiding blinded men on a spin around the promenade. He stepped aside from the procession a moment to speak to her and Byers.
Sir, he said to Byers, I hope you’re well.
Who is this? asked Byers with his head cocked in a way which had now become habitual to him. Kiernan introduced himself. He wondered whether the lieutenant would allow him to have a word with Naomi.