The other girls arrived in the dining carriage. Naomi was with them and seemed to look at everything as from a great distance.
Come on, Slattery, Mitchie yelled, pointing to the two vacant seats at her table and at the table across the corridor. Come on, Carradine, sit with a poor woman, won’t you? Empress Naomi, join us. Freud the diva, sit at that one with Leonora. Ah, Nettice, welcome.
So they settled as ordered.
Now, your father-in-law, said Mitchie, skewering Carradine with a brown eye. He’s some great man, isn’t he?
He is the attorney-general. And the deputy prime minister.
Carradine absorbed without apparent shock the news that Mitchie was aware of her marriage and willing to be forthright about it.
And your husband? Does he have political intentions?
He hasn’t said it yet. I think he finds the military ones hard enough to keep up with at the moment. Poor chap, he’s not thought of as strict enough by his colonel. But that’s his method, you see. To appeal to people’s good natures.
Well, said Mitchie, beaming. He certainly managed to appeal to yours, Nurse Carradine. Everyone seems content to ignore your marriage for now. A ministry letter said that single women were to be recruited, but it’s not the law or anything. If asked, I’ll pretend ignorance.
Carradine grew uncomfortable.
I’m sorry, said Mitchie then. I understand this should have been discussed privately.
In a kind of reparation she let nurses ask her where she was from. Melbourne, she told them. But where were you born? they asked her. She was born in Tasmania, she told them, a dairy farmer’s daughter.
At first her mother seemed very severe—a Scots woman. But that was because there was a little too much fun in her father—he loved a horse, any horse on which there was a rider wearing silks. But there are worse vices, and then he died of meningitis and that settled things and her mother could be easier about things.
She turned to Honora. Now, with a name like Slattery you’d know about horses, since all the good papists are horse-crazy and gamblers? Isn’t that so?
The words might in another’s mouth be malice but it was somehow clear they weren’t that here. Sure, said Honora, as if in imitation of her Irish parents, if you don’t gamble on horses, you’re denied the Christian sacraments. Too much drink is merely venial. Anything else, including talking to Protestants, is a mortal sin that’ll send you straight to the pit without appeal.
The train seemed to have left the main channel of the great river. Sally saw Naomi squint out of the window and try to decipher some diagonal of desert they were crossing. Sometimes the whole apparatus would—with a huge groan of steel and snort of steam—haul up at a tiny desert or oasis station, and in dim light Egyptian effendis and their wives would get down or would board, on business beyond Sally’s knowing. A dark and silent scatter of flat-roofed buildings sat behind the kerosene lanterns of the station. Sally saw one stationmaster escort a well-dressed Egyptian couple off the platform and into the mystery of the town. But sometimes the mystery was that there was no town behind the station at all.
When Matron Mitchie excused herself and vanished from the dining car, going either to the lavatory or for a snort from the whisky flask she was rumored to carry in her big valise, Honora started up on the question of whether Mitchie had ever been married.
Could she be a widow? Or did her husband do a flit?
Men often do with the best of women, said Nettice with conviction. They don’t know when they’re well-off and go looking for harpies.
Sally said she had always assumed that matrons were above the married state.
Honora argued Mitchie’d got too much sauce in her not to have led men on.
Well, said Naomi, exchanging a sliding instant’s glance with her sister, I think she’s wise enough to know being married’s not the greatest state open to a girl.
What about you and that Captain Hoyle? asked Honora like a challenge.
There was a silence since it was somehow not exactly normal to ask a woman with an air of such austerity as Naomi a question about men.
Naomi said, If sharing a gharry means an intention to marry a fellow, I’d be married to half the Australian Imperial Force.
When the engine stopped nowhere and they sat still, the voices of the women in the dining car and their talk when they returned to their compartments seemed shrill. With a great gulp of air another train would pass—carrying English troops in one direction or the other—and you could see soldiers’ faces close as they smoked and laughed at each other or lay with their heads back. It was the business of the army not only to fight wars but to shift the soldiers in Alexandria to Cairo and those in Cairo to Alexandria—and then for extra pleasure of authority to do it again.
The Alexandria Misr Station into which they came in the dark of three o’clock had a great dome, and the forecourt was like a Greek rather than an Egyptian palace—all to honor Alexander the Great. A few peddlers were around them even at this hour, selling replicas of Pompey’s Column. Tommies in kepis—ready to outface heat wherever they were sent—sat on their kitbags or leaned against walls. They puffed smoke from blank faces and made tired comment from the corner of mouths.
Into a glass-windowed transport office Mitchie went to speak to a harried-looking officer and an NCO. The man she made her demand for transport to threw up his hands as if he had expected Mitchie to be the ultimate trial and here she was. The Australian orderlies marched up in less than military exactness—led by the tall surgeon Fellowes who was not yet comfortable with drill. The party was trailed by Lieutenant Hookes. All nurses looked at Leonora, who was assumed to be infatuated for life with Fellowes. They had learned from Leonora he was an ear, nose, and throat expert of little militia experience. Sally had seen some more militarily vain medical officers who even rode mounted in front of their precise-stepping men.
At last Captain Fellowes handed Mitchie out through the door, and it was clear they had won the transport argument. Mitchie invited her women to follow her two by two out of the main door and past the Greek columns to where trucks were backing and grinding in chilly air. Orderlies held the women’s elbows as they ascended the steps to the back. The trucks drove them through night streets full of high-walled villas and tall blocks of flats, all quieter than Cairo. They spun a small way along the Corniche whose fame they were as yet ignorant of. The sea lay to their right with the water maintaining a kind of deep purple, lit only by the moon and the lights of the Corniche.
Then they swung onto an electrically lit mole crowded with ships both civilian and military. The trucks rolled as far as towers of boxed supplies and crowds of men smoking or slouched by stacked rifles—and opposing automobiles honking for leeway—would permit them. Mitchie’s platoon of nurses got down onto the wharves. The orderlies from the trucks ahead came to carry their bags and portmanteaux and even their valises.
Some two hundred paces along the harbor pier the Archimedes came up like an apparition. E73—as naval notation had it. By the lights burning along the pier its wide bulwarks towered and its huge crosses were deep scarlet. British soldiers were guarding the gangway. The ship was not to be boarded until seven ack-emma, one of them said. Meanwhile there was a waiting room.
That’s impossible, young fellow, said Mitchie. My girls must be fit and rested by breakfast time.
Be a good fellow, said Fellowes. There’s a brick!
The young man—hating having been called “good fellow”—went off to confer with superiors. Fellowes shook his head and openly laughed at the military ridiculousness of it all. Leonora raised a gleaming face—whitened abnormally by the lights on the wharf. For she and they all somehow loved it that Fellowes was still a young civilian surgeon and was far from converted to war’s protocols.