Byers laughed. Pardon me, he said, but I was never used to such courtesy from my platoon.
So Kiernan turned to Naomi, calling her Sister Durance. He said he had undertaken to produce a newspaper for the ship. Could she write something about the sinking of the Archimedes for him? He said he would publish it after they’d left the Cape and got into safer waters.
Her very blood revolted at the idea. To put the thing down in ink would be a form of self-exposure and would profane the drowned. She told Kiernan she was sorry but she could not do it.
Oh, go on, Nurse, said Byers. It should be recorded by somebody. I have been at Rosie Nettice to set something down but she won’t consent.
Naomi challenged Kiernan. Why don’t you write it?
I think it will have greater authority coming from a woman. And I remember that you were very conscious throughout. I might have approached Matron Mitchie but I doubt she remembers much. But if you like, I could write it and say how thoroughly brave you were and that you deserve the Military Medal.
That idea appalled Naomi. She felt rage towards him, that he would play such mean games when it came to the Archimedes.
I beg you not to do that, she told him. You will never be my friend if you do.
Yes, he said, chastened. That was a stupid joke. I’m sorry.
There was much wire netting on the Demeter, and as the ship reached the end of the Gulf of Aden the nurses—if stifled by heat in their cabins—were permitted to sleep under distractingly brilliant night skies in a wired-off area at the stern of the promenade deck. They made their way there each evening carrying their palliasses and pillows. Beyond a canvas curtain they disrobed to their slips. There was some conversation here before women trailed off into sleep.
Drowsy Carradine told Naomi she had met Lieutenant Shaw while he was undergoing a strenuous massage of his upper leg and hip in the room off the officers’ medical ward. He had promised them a stroll around the deck but he wanted to get his leg fit so he did not hold them up. Though she wished him a normal gait, Naomi was pleased to be free of social duties. The literary ones were enough for the moment. Kiernan’s request for an account of the Archimedes had unexpectedly started in her a compulsion to set down the whole business in ink without exaggeration or vainglory. It was an imperative that came from within her—not from Kiernan. She still had time and space for dutiful strolling with blinded or lamed soldiers. But not yet for Shaw’s bush whimsy and flirtatious chat.
Two days’ sail from the equator—when both the starboard and port decks seemed open to the withering sun, and the tar in the deck became liquid—Naomi went into the officers’ library. Here nurses were permitted amongst all those writing letters home and reading bound volumes of Punch, and it was here she continued her account.
“The Sinking of the Archimedes,” she wrote after she’d chosen a desk.
Whether nurses or doctors or orderlies, we had all come to think of the Archimedes as our full-time home. It was also our post of duty from the first time a barge from the beach at Gallipoli came alongside with wounded men on its decks. Some of the men on the Demeter might even have been nursed on the Archimedes at one stage or another. We were not to know that our ship—which seemed as solid as a town or as a hospital in a city—would soon be taken from us. But not before it had brought many damaged men to Alexandria and to the harbor of Mudros.
What a delight it all at once was to write of this—even in the plainest terms. But the horses and their terror. How could that be conveyed? And the boyish apathy of those who slipped away and yielded themselves up? And Nettice—the layers of ocean through which she sank and rose. The horror of men hitting the propellers—as if they preferred to be obliterated quickly by the mechanical instead of slowly by the weight of water. Could all this be put down?
As she went on, Kiernan drifted into her imagination, grabbing on to his copper cube. He had been a full partner in her command of the raft. She remembered having been loud and high-handed. For the torpedo had strangely restored her authority when it took down the Archimedes. (That was something not to be included in the account.) The Archimedes had taught her about her weakness and yet educated her in the nature of the woman she was.
As she was writing, too, the idea of Kiernan having been admirable—of his proving he’d probably be admirable anywhere he was put—took hold of her imagination. The word itself seemed lodged in her brain for the two days she was engaged on the task. When she later saw him on duty, he seemed to her to be placed in the midst of people with a special distinctness other figures lacked. This sharpness of outline was not a form of infatuation but rather a new version of seeing things. It was more akin to identifying a prophet.
The captain recommended that they be at the railing to see the coast of South Africa and the approach to Cape Town.
Naomi and Carradine caught a grimy little train to town. The city was comparable to towns they had known in girlhood—with the strangeness, though, of African women in their swathes of wildly colored cloth selling flowers and fruit from baskets on the footpaths. Black children harried Naomi for money, shouting, Australia! Rich Australia. Give us some.
They were treated with reverence by shop girls as they browsed in Cape Town’s emporiums.
A climbing party met up on the quay the next morning with robust young women who were members of the Cape Town mountaineering club. Naomi was a member of the group and suffered a phase of guilt. Given she’d felt obliged to walk the deck with Shaw for more than an hour last evening, she had deliberately chosen an outing Shaw certainly could not embark on. From the middle of the barely woken city—occupied only by black street sweepers—they caught a train which took them around the base of the mountain. The party walked upwards through scrubland and wildflowers, at the end of which great rock platforms presented themselves. Nurses and soldiers were helped upwards by young black men who climbed ahead and reached a hand down with unpredictable strength. They were not permitted to eat or swim with whites, but were essential for scaling a mountain. From massive platforms of rock along the way the local mountaineers pointed out Simonstown and—out to sea—Robben Island, where lepers were kept. At the summit of great, split-apart boulders from which grew wildflowers and shrubs, they looked down at the city and bay and could identify the Demeter—rendered minute by distance. They were exhilarated and distracted to happiness by the utterly physical demands of getting here.
Guilt made her seek out Shaw in the officers’ lounge that evening. She talked about the climb as if she had done it for its own sake—for its enlivening enthusiasm. She was pleased to see that his face as yet was the face of Shaw the Joker and not of Shaw the Tragic Lover.
He said, Lucky girl. Of course, I can fall off the donkey with the greatest of ease but I haven’t mastered Table Mountain yet. Spent all morning with massage and exercise. And it pays off, you know.
She found she liked the ease of his company. He never said anything that would make a person sit up and see the world afresh. He therefore gave her a rest from her own unchosen gravity of soul.
He said, It’s not as if I’m less a man. A man’s whole life can’t rise or fall by a few inches of bone this way or that. I’ll be able to ride a horse as good as ever if I balance out the stirrups. And my old man has a motor anyhow. But it’s true a stock and station agent ought to be able to ride. You wouldn’t want to take a motor over some of the tracks up there. Anyhow, I’m well set. And I reckon we should change the subject. We’re getting morbid.