Be careful you don’t catch anything, she said.
Right you are, he said, but shook his head. It’s very Australian, he said, to debunk a man’s kiss. I hope you won’t feel obliged to do it in subsequent instances.
A spry little man of about sixty years, wearing a good-quality alpaca suit, an upright collar, a somber tie, but with kid gloves on his hands and a fashionable cane under his arm, came down the alley. He had already seen them and adopted a smile and increased his pace.
He looks like Billy Hughes, she whispered to Ian.
Sedgewick, the man said as introduction. You must be Brother Kiernan. How amazing that there are Friends in a place like Melbourne.
Naomi thought the same could be said for Paris.
I am the registering officer and the clerk for today’s session. We have perhaps twenty-eight members. But sometimes we have surprise arrivals—Red Cross people who are Friends. There are also some Quaker ambulances… You have both brought your records? Good. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind my keeping them until after the meeting.
Sedgewick unlocked one leaf of the double doors and they followed him up a steep staircase to a bare room where benches faced each other. There was no altar, no pulpit, and no enforced or pious silence. Sedgwick continued to converse. I’m afraid most of us are French, so the meeting will largely be in French. But the Committee of Clarity are all Anglophones, and obviously I include myself.
And this Committee of Clarity? asked Naomi.
Kiernan put a reproving hand to his forehead. Heavens above, he said, I didn’t explain that.
He turned to Sedgewick. It sounds like the Committee of Public Safety in the French Revolution.
Sedgewick uttered a small sequence of sounds that added up to a laugh. It is a group of three, he said, who ask you merely if you are interested in each other as partners for life.
The other Friends began to arrive—modern-looking men like Ian, some older men, a number of women soberly but not unpleasantly dressed. Women’s hands were kissed in the French manner. Men kissed each other on the cheek. They all welcomed Ian and Naomi in that manner and sat them on facing benches on either side of the room. Thus Naomi expected that when the service began the other women would be separated from the men. But men and women were mixed on the benches. In hers and Ian’s case it was therefore a symbol of apartness—their betrothal had not become formal. There was to be a ritual distance between them.
Suddenly—and by some signal Naomi did not see—there was a silence for inner prayer.
O great God, Naomi intoned within herself, who is far beyond the battlefield, too kind to be close to it, too far to be blamed for it, take my thanks that I’ve been brought here by this noble man.
Someone began to speak in French. It was a man, but not Sedgewick. He went on praying for peace and brotherhood in a calm voice. A woman took up immediately after him. And then another woman—and so it went. Apart from hymn singing, she had never heard women make so much noise in church. An hour passed and betrothal had not been mentioned. At last Ian was nudged by Mr. Sedgewick and rose to progress to the middle of the floor, holding out a hand for Naomi to join him. She did so. She felt that her face blazed before these strangers.
Sedgewick stood and stated that Monsieur Panton, Madame Flerieu, Monsieur Gosselin, and he himself were the members of the Committee of Clarity on this matter. The committee swapped seats with others so that they could all sit together on a single bench. Allow us a second to study your papers, said Sedgewick.
Madame Flerieu—thin and fine boned—started a robust discussion about something. Mr. Sedgewick answered, gesturing like a Frenchman and adopting that throaty Gallic seriousness. The two other men had their say as well. At last Mr. Sedgewick looked up at the two candidates.
The question is, he explained apologetically, whether your work, Mr. Kiernan, could be seen as redeeming lives or preparing them for further military demands.
The woman—Madame Flerieu—was clearly the one who had taken this line. So, thought Naomi, this committee business is more serious than old Sedgewick implied.
I have had the same doubt myself, Ian said. I provide medical supplies and surgical equipment. There are Quaker ambulances from America working in the field and what might be said of me could be said of them as well. It is the ancient question of trying to do a small good in a devilish world.
Sedgewick appeared happy with that answer, but Madame Flerieu said in English in a reasonable but intense voice, Members of the ambulances of the Friends do not hold military ranks.
I confess that is a question to discuss, said Ian.
And Mademoiselle Durance holds a military rank. Do you not, Mademoiselle?
I work in a voluntary hospital. I believe the Australian army has forgotten me.
Sedgewick held up his hand and shook his head benignly like a man quelling unease.
And you intend to marry?
As far as Naomi could tell it was the first time anyone had actually used that verb aloud.
She said, Yes. If Ian intends to marry me.
Of course, said Kiernan. Of course I do.
At times convenient to you both, are you able to meet again with the Committee of Clarity? asked Sedgewick.
I’m sure we will make the arrangements, said Ian.
Sedgewick asked, Does Miss Durance have any concern about such a requirement?
Naomi said she did not. But—as she told them—given her duties at the Voluntary Hospital it would take some skill on both their parts to make their leaves coincide.
So it is your will before God, Ian Kiernan, to take Naomi Durance as your betrothed with a view to marriage?
Exalted by her re-creation as a woman betrothed, she heard him agree. Then Sedgewick asked Naomi the same question and afterwards she could not remember having given an answer.
So the betrothal is initiated, said Sedgewick. And may God turn his face to you.
Naomi felt in that second that the solemnity and casualness of the ceremony gave it unrivaled hope, and a sense of liberation, not of bonds. Here—in this room vacant of all but two dozen residents of France—lay a definition of marriage so particular as to mark Ian and herself off from the bad luck and ill will of other alliances. She was sure of it.
The clearing station had quickly spawned its own graveyard, which lay across the shallow valley and a few steps north towards the village in a field one side of which was a farmer’s ditch. Night duty was a time when young men yielded up their souls. Orderlies carried bodies to the morgue hut from which in the morning they would be placed in coffins and carried across the Deux Églises road to the site where a padre from a unit resting out of the line—and a burial party ditto, along with a bugler or bagpiper—would give them their final rites.
Everyone seemed to take this growing crop of white crosses as a given and nothing to distract a person. Only sometimes—as the summer came on—did Sally notice in temporary shock that amongst the hollyhocks the place had grown new suburbs. Farmers and their wives ploughed and planted in the fields all about and were as indifferent to the raucousness of the front and to the field of crosses as were the nurses and orderlies.
Dr. Bright’s Sunday picnics—held in a field on the slight ridge above the casualty clearing station—had grown since the spring and included English doctors and nurses from the British casualty clearing station across the road to Bapaume. Almost inevitably a surgeon from the British clearing station had brought a cricket kit. Thus Test matches—Australia versus England—were played. Nurses and middle-aged doctors leapt to catch hook shots at square leg and crouched to fumble at snicks in slips. But at least they had encountered the rich, dark soil and the irrepressible grass. Sally, however, took a big catch in the position she believed they called square leg.