He grinned madly. It was what he had cycled all the way in hope of.
Well, he murmured. That’s a big admission for a girl like you.
Malice Without Ceasing
Freud confided in Sally. She believed that unless Honora now fell apart there would be no putting her together again. The collapse came. Honora was sleepless and working a continuous shift. Then she entered the phase when she would prop herself powerless against the door of a ward and look at the beds with an anguished frown and be stuck as if paralyzed. It was as if all the wounds appealed so equally for her care that she could attend to none. Her overcommitted body smelled of stale summer sweat. This or that nurse would come up to take her by the elbow and fetch her back to the mess tent. But she was hostile to help and would shake herself free.
At last Major Bright himself came, and on his restrained authority she left her ward in the hands of Sally and Leo, who had washed her and packed her things for her. Sister Slattery was being sent back to Rouen for a rest, Bright told them. When her bag and valise were ready, he helped her to a car. She moved like someone elderly but was half dazed with barbital. Freud, Leonora, Sally, and the matron kissed her good-bye through the car window.
The revelation was that Bright intended to travel with her and then be back by evening for the hours when convoys generally came. He was going around to the car’s far door when he met Sally.
I am no mind doctor, he said to her, but it is not just the matter of her fiancé. What happened to him has been made graver by what she’s seen here.
To Sally it seemed as if he thought he must defend her from people who thought the best of her in any case.
Bright climbed into the car’s backseat and adjusted a travel rug across Honora’s lap. He had the demeanor of a servant. Could the scale of her grief have entranced him? After the car had disappeared, Freud said, He wants her well—amongst other reasons—so that he can talk to her. He doesn’t want her mad grief to put her forever inside the walls—a nun or a lunatic.
Bright was back by the evening. And the convoys did come. This late summer and early autumn assault—gambits designed to bring peace by Christmas and consecrate the numbers 1917 forever in the minds of the human species—were said to be a success. Yet it was hard to judge it that way from the wards of Deux Églises. If these bodies equaled success, one could not imagine the formula of defeat.
But then there arrived suddenly a night when the earth froze again and this time the war appeared to pause to mark the change of climate. Summer now seemed to have lasted mere days, all its chances quickly squandered. In the resuscitation ward—to which Sally had returned—she and the nurses wore balaclavas and the cap comforters the soldiers wore, and had hot-water bottles placed for them on their trolleys to warm their hands before they touched a patient. When the hot water from the bottles went cold and threatened to freeze, it was boiled again for cocoa or Bovril.
Her third winter of war was established now. Amidst the wetness of days and the iciness of nights a letter from Charlie Condon arrived. It nominated the dates of the leave he believed he could get to meet her in Paris. She was grateful the letter did not have to chase her. For there were more rumors their clearing station was to be moved northeast into Flanders towards that curious town named Ypres—which officers pronounced “Eep” and soldiers “Wipers.”
She took the letter out of the mess—where it had been delivered to her—and read it standing under a pewter sky on a frozen ground. Of course—observing herself as if from a distance—she took the luxury of weeping in the usual plain way. Tears were a necessary river in the case of her and Condon.
But there were other reasons for these tears. He’d come through again—just a few coin-sized bits of shrapnel near the shoulder blade, he wrote, and a few on the hips. Metal had, he said, kindly avoided his spine. She knew spines metal had chosen to enter.
And so it was set. It must be said to him. The plan to murder a mother was not diminished by the plans to murder divisions of men. Trustworthy Nurse Sally Durance had pilfered rescue, designed it to seep all the way to her mother’s heart—her gracious and unsated heart. But Condon would not be told the Naomi part. I planned murder, she’d say, and would have done it. That’s what I’m capable of.
Under the frosted, sullen sky, Sally understood that part of her still belonged to that sickroom twelve thousand miles away. That it was as close as the resuscitation or gas wards. And thus she could not prance around galleries with Charlie as another girl might. Even if—when she told him—doubt would afflict him and she might find herself back safely and terribly on her own.
For three minutes the hope and uncertainty of the coming meeting kept her out there in the cold. Then exhaustion and shivering drove her inside and to her bunk. It lay in the new-built nurses’ hut, divided into rooms for three or four women set on either side of a central corridor. Even here she had stuck with Freud and Leo. To hell with being called cliquish. She slept profoundly through artillery and aircraft grinding their way to the sky’s apex and then rose to savor Charlie’s letter and its promise of grace. Until a four ack-emma clanging signaled a new convoy had arrived and the sharpness of self was submerged again by busyness.
Later in the day she spoke to Matron Bolger and wrote back to Condon with the dates offered her by that sturdy woman.
In the first days of December they were told the clearing station was being moved—with all its instruments of operation and mercy—away from Deux Églises to a place not yet announced. Sally had her trunk packed in case the move occurred while she was in Paris. She took a smaller bag to the capital to meet Captain Condon. She caught a truck to Amiens—one of the eight-tonners that supplied the clearing station. In the train from Amiens to Paris she slept—but woke in time to team herself with two Canadian nurses as unwilling as she was to negotiate the Métro with their luggage and willing to share a taxi fare from the Gare du Nord. They had time to compare notes briefly. The Canadians worked in a hospital near Arras and had had a tedious journey down to the train. Their faces looked a little hollow—they had the drawn look of women overworked. Do I look like that too? Sally wondered.
The taxi took them to a Red Cross hostel for nurses in Rue de Trévise—one of the Canadians was from Montreal and could thus tell the driver in French that it was close to the Place Vendôme. And—she confided under her breath to the others—the Folies Bergère. Charlie would not arrive until the following morning, so Sally accepted their invitation—as they were being given the keys to their reserved rooms—to join them in the plain dining room that night. They’d hit the town tomorrow, they said. After a needful rest.
Arriving in the dining room a little after six she saw her companions were already at a table. Its linen was fresh and solid-cornered with starch. There was one other woman at the far end of the room and—alone at her table—she seemed well advanced on her meal. Her back was to them. Even so, her shape and the way her shoulders moved minutely at the duties of devouring bread and casserole were acutely familiar. Sally was shocked but immediately filled with a sense of intrusion. It was obviously Naomi sitting there, maintaining the downcast, chaste gaze of a woman eating alone in public.
She must first tell her new companions and excuse herself. She crossed to them and said, I’m a bit astonished. My sister happens to be over there. She hasn’t seen me yet.
They wanted to know where Naomi was working.
In Boulogne, said Sally.
You’re welcome to join us, said one of the Canadian women, but we understand if… Not a lot of chance sisters get to meet and talk about home.