So would you if you were in my position. You wouldn’t want me to have missed out on meeting Major Darlington and all those well-bred English gels? Would you? Truth is, there is no rest for anyone until it’s all over. Unless it’s the sort of final rest they dish out in Flanders and on the Somme.
She handed her unfinished soup bowl back to Naomi. Naomi put it on the tray. The tubercular cough set in and Mitchie covered her mouth with an old towel. The spasm built to a paroxysm and then composed itself.
Don’t gawk at me. I’m not spitting blood yet. Well, not much.
I won’t gawk, Naomi promised.
But do not raise this business again if you want to be my friend. I say this not only to you but to Lady Tarlton too. So enough of it now! Remember this—in helping that woman out, that Lady Tarlton, I hacked all around the bush in third-class carriages and on bicycles and the back of trucks and by horseback. Setting up bases for our bush nurses and visiting them so they didn’t feel lonely and leave us and go back to the big towns and cities. Lady Tarlton did not want any praise for the scheme, but it was her name in the newspapers. Well, her name deserved to be. But I was the one on the bike. I was the one who got saddle sore. And now I deserve her consideration too. I am not to be shunted off to the south. This end of France is where the war and the grief and my friends are, and this is the end I’m staying at.
Matron Mitchie sipped her tea and her lips curled and she frowned. It’s gone cold. I made too long a speech, damn me!
I’ll get you more, Naomi offered.
You’re too busy, Matron Mitchie ordered. Have one of the gels do it.
Naomi said, I’ll get some more. For now, have plenty of rest.
That sounds like condescension to me. “Have plenty of rest, dear!”
For God’s sake, don’t be so sensitive, Naomi told her smiling. A person would think you were a Durance.
Under the spur of her concern for Mitchie, Lady Tarlton thought about a villa on the cliff top at Antibes—between Marseille and Nice—owned by her husband’s family. It was staffed by servants Lord Tarlton’s brother-in-law had been too distracted to let go for the duration of the war. An entire domestic establishment down there thus awaited a convalescent Matron Mitchie. The proposition Lady Tarlton kept bluntly running with Mitchie was that in the south—where there was a North African sun and North African breezes—she would get better. Here she would die.
When Naomi visited her room, Mitchie complained of this further attempt at clearing her away from the Château Baincthun. The disease was eroding her and turning her pallid, thinning her skin to tissue, sharpening the bones at the points of her cheek, and narrowing her nose to a blade.
She thinks I want to stay out of pure vanity, Mitchie complained. I want to stay because this is the place and there isn’t any other.
It seemed to Naomi that Mitchie had the talent and force of temperament to make a community wherever she went—and in the south of France no differently than anywhere else. Lady Tarlton had already found a reliable and pleasant Red Cross nurse to go to the marvelous, all-healing south with her, and had also organized some orderlies to travel with them to Paris and transfer them to the train down to the south. But it seemed that to Mitchie the supposed date of her departure hung over her like an ax and distressed her so much that one night Dr. Airdrie had to sedate her with lithium bromide.
By the evening before the departure Matron Mitchie had become a plaintive shadow of that figure Naomi had once seen on sticks and a prosthetic leg rising up the gangplank of the Melbourne-moored troopship, bent on Europe, the cockpit, the center of all matroning. Naomi began to wonder if the threat of leaving the château was not doing Mitchie more harm than good, and she went searching for Dr. Airdrie. She found her writing case notes in her office. Her handsome long nose was red at the tip from cold, and her hands mittened, though it was meant to be spring.
You must talk to Lady Tarlton, Naomi urged her after greetings. This going-south idea is doing no good at all.
That may be so, Airdrie admitted and reached for a cigarette. But convincing the boss lady is another thing. Look, Mitchie will be hunky-dory once she gets there.
It makes good sense medically, said Naomi. Except Mitchie has a real dread.
What is there to dread? asked Airdrie. I wish she were sending me.
Yet Airdrie could tell Naomi would not let the question rest.
I’ll go and see Pretty Polly myself, Airdrie sighed. But you come too.
They went down the corridor and knocked on Lady Tarlton’s office door. The young London Red Cross woman who worked as her secretary opened it. Lady Tarlton was at the desk frowning over documents. The office looked cluttered at first view—there were piles of paper around the walls, for example—but it did not take long before you saw they were organized, that each individual suburb of paper beneath the citadel of the desk had been deliberately assembled by the secretary and put in folders by alphabetic order and held in place by paperweights. Here were bills and requisitions, rental agreements, invoices for repairs and food and heating fuel and linen—some supplied by the military, some supplemented by her own purse and that of the London committee to whom she must send proper accounts. She looked up and greeted them with her normal flustered warmth.
Naomi and Airdrie did not sit. Naomi frankly made her point about Mitchie. When she was finished Lady Tarlton sighed a long, musical sigh. We must go and see her then, she said at last, dropping her pen and fetching up a shawl to wear in the corridor.
The door of Mitchie’s room was opened by the English nurse meant to accompany her to Antibes. Mitchie greeted them with something like sullen disgust. Here we go! she said, casting up stricken eyes. The bailiffs have arrived!
She began to cough horrendously. Lady Tarlton sat on the chair by her bed and took one of her hands. Mitchie grudgingly permitted the grasp.
What’s the trouble, old friend? asked Lady Tarlton. I have only your welfare in mind.
That’s a fine excuse for torment, said Mitchie.
I feel I’d be guilty of murder if I did not send you off, Mitchie. Everything’s so damp and changeable up here.
Mitchie’s cheeks flared an angry, tubercular red. She tossed her head wearily.
If I were lying on a stretcher with my intestines hanging out, you’d have some idea of what to do for me. You’d listen to all I said. I am not in that condition and so I’m shorn of a voice of my own. I’m patronized and patted on the head and told I’ll be taken—by orderlies!—to a train, and put on it like someone who’s overstayed her leave.
The other thing, Mitchie continued, breathless but unlikely to stop, the other thing is that I am considered to be simply stubborn—like an old woman, or a four-year-old. I can be cajoled and humored, and treated with force if all that fails.
My dear friend, said Lady Tarlton. There won’t be any force.
I’m glad to hear it. In that case I won’t be going.
Lady Tarlton was silent, and her eyes looked bleak.
I have potent motives to remain here, Mitchie reiterated, believe me. Just because I don’t blab them, it is no reason to consider me a pigheaded old biddy. For example, will I get the official casualty lists at this Antibes place?
No, I hope not. For you, it’ll be as if the terrible ruination here doesn’t exist.
But this is all that counts. This is the world. The ruination, or whatever.
For dear God’s sake, Lady Tarlton honked. You’ve done more than anyone else could in this snake pit. You are an amputee with consumption. And even at the risk of offending you, I will not be guilty of your particular murder, my dear friend.