Sally could feel things happen at the gallop within her. She blazed. Her lungs were bleeding southwards, melting away. She was frightened. But Charlie might come and pour her the sweet wine of clear air.
She’s such a beautiful one, said Slattery to Bright. And Leonora went too. It takes the beautiful.
No, said Dr. Bright. I trust that can’t be true.
Masked Slattery knelt by Sally’s bed at some hour. Her face became as large as a balloon. But she said nothing. My lungs are bleeding away, Sally in the meantime acknowledged, stealing the breath pledged to Charlie, and the delight of lungs filled and expelled. Her mother’s wan good wishes radiated out but could not prevail over melting luck.
The rottenest of luck, said Bright.
Charlie knows my body, she stated. I have opened it to him.
All the Sallys of her acquaintance—the child, the country nurse, the Egyptian tourist, the seaborne nurse, the landlocked one—were torn away like leaves off the boughs of her fever. The thief, the murderer, the sister, the hater, the sinker, the swimmer, the lover, the unloved, the witness of light, the coward of dark, and the binder and rinser of wounds, the daughter fled and the daughter forever. What do I think you do to your friends on the wire, Charlie? Australian mercy comes from the mouth of the rifle. Where is Charlie and his wing, his docked arm? So busy up in a hospital. Not knowing to come once more for a visit and give me back the air.
When air was not returned to her, terror gave way to confusion and it was all dreams and much tumult. It was dreadful how fast the tumult faded, until she let go of all the strings and felt herself choke awhile in a serenity that was A1, first class, not so bad as all that. A woman who wanted to feel more than this serenity would want portholes in her coffin. Ah, ease! It was not hard, after all, to rise—and even Charlie was just part of a mass of people left.
As Sally struggled, the revived influenza struck the Voluntary. Patients and orderlies and English Roses caught the thing and were in a special wing. Naomi too all at once sensed it advancing within her, but for about six hours—from ten in the morning until four that afternoon—denied the symptoms. When one staggered in corridors and was unsure of where the walls were—and the differentiation between them and the floor—then it was time to pay the fever attention. Declaring herself to Airdrie, Naomi was permitted to take to bed in her own room—an isolation ward of one. Her joints throbbed, she vomited the clear broth one of the masked Australian nurses fed her. Through lack of breath she felt a hellish separation from everything, from even the simplest objects in her room—a cup, a book, a coat hanging from a hook behind the door.
An English nurse came in to look at her with arresting but overhuge eyes. She was followed by two masked orderlies manhandling a bed, and two more with a stretcher on which one of the English Roses lay. The girl was gasping hard and thrashed her head continuously, squandering strength. They might both have been the victims of membrane-blistering yperite. At some stage of her fever Naomi was sure they were.
Separated from herself in this plain room, she was aware that another colleague visited her and stood writing on a chart as well. You have stayed here—she wanted to say. No military authority told you. Lady Tarlton asked you and you stayed. Was it to give me back my breath?
Naomi descended from her airless space above the bed to the deck of the Archimedes, where men and women ran about in hysteria. But with an acidic grief in her belly she went looking for Kiernan and her mother, who were both there and not there, who had both stayed and gone. She saw ponies milling on the foredeck as it began to rise.
Shoot the horses! shouted a nurse.
No one is doing it, her mother declared with that wistful smile Naomi had seen in childhood.
Naomi felt the rage she had always had against her mother, who was crying, Nothing can be done, nothing can be done…
Something can be done, Mama! Naomi insisted. Nothing can be done? I killed you with morphine because you said that sort of thing. Sally had taken it from the cupboard in the Archimedes. Sally, the little thief, had put it in place for me. I found it and let the snake run into your heart.
The horses first, said Mrs. Durance, farm-bred and grimly practical, the corners of her lower lip tucked under the upper in resignation. So she went off to attend to those things—the neighing beasts who would not question her, who offered no chance to this victim who made no threats and was content with her own murder.
When the room returned to Naomi, there were still horses in it, raging and panicked. She had time to sit at a breathless table with the gaol governor and plead with him to let Ian out to save the horses. The man was stupid and could not see the urgency which grew in her, the greatest agony of her life. The ship pitched till she and the asinine gaol governor and the men and women and horses slid into the sea which felt of nothing. Thus she went down. Roaring for breath.
1918–1922
Since both the Durance girls knew, without knowing the other did, that there was the smallest membrane between alternate histories of themselves—between the drowning and the floating, between the fevered and the convalescent—it was somehow appropriate that two contradictory reports appeared in the Macleay Valley’s papers—the Argus and the Chronicle.
The Argus read, “Mr. Durance of Sherwood has received the sad news that his daughter Naomi has died of a prevailing influenza while serving as a nurse in France. The Argus and all its readers extend their sincerest sympathies…”
The Chronicle read, “Mr. Durance, a well-respected farmer of Sherwood, has been informed that his daughter Sally (Sarah) has died of a congestive disease while serving our gallant soldiers as a nurse in France. The Chronicle and its readers extend to Mr. Durance their…”
A few days later Mrs. Durance (formerly Sorley) dropped into the newspaper offices. The names had been mixed up, she told them. But that seemed to create further confusion.
The Argus printed a report that said, “The Argus regrets its earlier notification that Nurse Naomi Durance has died in France. It was her sister, Sally, who regrettably succumbed to influenza. The Argus apologizes to the Durance family and again extends its sincerest…”
While the Chronicle declared, “The Chronicle regrets that it was mistaken in reporting the death of Sally (Sarah) Durance of influenza while she was serving as a nurse in France. It was her sister, Naomi, who has died in the service of our valiant young men and of Australia, which this paper chooses to see as a separate entity to the Empire. But, rising above politics, we apologize to Mr. Eric Durance of Sherwood and offer our most heartfelt…”
Thus from the start people were confused. When they mentioned the Durance sisters—as they did infrequently—they were uncertain which of the girls had gone under to the Spanish influenza. It was known that the other one had married a man from Sydney or Melbourne, a returned soldier. One of them had been involved with the Condons, but the Condons were gone from the valley—the solicitor to join his brother’s more extensive practice in Orange. They could not be conferred with on the matter.
The new Mrs. Durance had in a way lost one of her children too. Ernest was not the same boy when he came back from France. He spent a lot of time drinking with other repatriated soldiers at the Federal Hotel and then wandering down to the railway station to chat drunkenly in the refreshment room with any train passengers who were survivors of the war and who happened to be having a meal there during the half hour the Brisbane Mail sat at the station. Ernest had vanished by the end of 1920—off to Queensland, it was said.