It was how she told it that worked, and their willingness to be amused.
Affection for Honora had more than crept upon Sally, and she knew her to be a woman of honor by such a simple test as her dealings over the uniforms. So well finished were they that other nurses asked Sally if she had been to a tailor instead of to Hordern’s. A woman of her word, Honora! Of many skittering but honest words. She was one of those girls who said fairly frequently too, When I’m married… They didn’t contemplate any other future state and did not even take into their calculations the idea they might live on, solitary but free. Yet Honora was not anxious for doctors, or so she told Sally. Too conceited, she said. Too used to obedience from patients. Likely to bring the habit home!
That’s the sort of thing Honora might say at table now. Promising MOs—as everyone called the doctors—that none of them was human enough nor the right kind for her.
To mark their transit over the equator, the captain and ship’s officers ordered the creation of a big swimming pool of canvas on the open lower deck aft and filled it with seawater. It was to be the center of the initiation into equator hopping. Some of the others had already been across the line going to or coming from the northern world: a number of the doctors had come to Australia in the first place from Edinburgh or Dublin or the great hospitals of London and were returning to the hemisphere of their birth. But most medical officers and orderlies and nurses had been born in Australia and had thought—as Sally had—that the train between Melbourne and Sydney or the coastal steamer from Brisbane might be the greatest journey the world would ever offer them. Yet now here was the equator—the burning and uncon-sumed filament that divided the world of southern innocence from the world of northern gravity of intent, and the hemisphere of colonists from the hemisphere of the owners.
Around the pool men and nurses dressed as gypsies and pirates had water thrown on them and were ducked under and made to suffer other rituals. The nurses had actually sat in their cabins making costumes for this. When Sally, feeling that she was disqualified from this flippancy both by nature and the serious shadow of her mother’s death, failed to apply herself to that business, Honora presented her with a passable Queen of Hearts costume in any case, the red hearts applied to the puff-sleeved blouse with small, expert stitching. The casual, rapid-working love that had gone into this fancy dress frightened Sally.
On the ceremonial day she dressed with the others and moved aft. But a companionway presented itself and she took the risk of swinging herself down it to the hospital level, the level on which—much further astern—the jollity would be staged. If she was seen, the others knew she had been seasick before, so she was entitled to a little flash of nausea. She excused her way past a number of wide-eyed orderlies, opened the double doors into the hospital and rushed through the empty spaces to the nurses’ pan room a little way forward. Facing it was a further cabin which was unlocked. She entered it. This was meant to be a pharmacist’s office. But wherever the ship’s stocks of medicines were, they were not here. The empty shelves made it even more a hiding space. The Queen of Hearts closed the door. She could hear running on the deck above her. From aft arose mocking, willfully farting bugle sounds and shouts and the profound echo of men’s laughter. There was no chair to sit on in here. But she stood willingly in her vivid dress amongst the blank shelves.
Someone was passing. She heard the door open. Mrs. Carradine was there. Her reddish hair tumbled out of an eighteenth-century sea captain’s tricorn.
I thought I saw you creep down here, she whispered. Are you all right, dearie? Can I fetch your sister?
Sally’s face blazed. No, thanks, she said, surly. Look, it’s just I’m not good at all these geographical hijinks.
Carradine raised her bony nose and hooted, and Sally began gratefully to laugh with her.
I’ll get up there and endure it for Eric’s sake, Carradine admitted. He’s three weeks ahead of me in his convoy. He’s gone through something like it. Or maybe they won’t even let them have a ceremony in the convoy. But I’ll go through it anyway.
Could I ask you a favor? said Sally. Let me stay in here. I’ll be brave next time. I’m sure Naomi will be up there anyhow.
Of course, said Mrs. Carradine. Naomi seems confident in all things.
Carradine stepped up, smoothed Sally’s locks, and suddenly kissed her forehead through them.
You have lovely black hair, you know, she said. I wish I did, instead of this carrot mop. Just as well I’m married. I never thought I’d get away with it, given this head of hair.
She stepped back. Okay, Queenie, she said and then winked. She closed the door like a friend and was gone. Sally would say to Honora, I felt sick. There’ll be other fancy-dress balls, Honora, where I can wear the dress.
Naomi indeed seemed confident in all things. Taller than Sally. Tallness often imbued confidence. Even before high school Sally felt subject to bemused comparisons with Naomi by teachers and other girls. Some of it was her own sense of being less. Some of it was real. Naomi was good at the outside world. It was only with the inner world of the family that she took on an air of distance and exile. She would have no trouble with a “crossing-the-line” party. Things would falter only the next time she and Sally met up.
Across glittering, tepid seas they put into Colombo. With sailors and non-officers confined to the ship, unruly orderlies climbed down the anchor chain at night to steal launches and go ashore. The nurses and medical officers were permitted to land. Met at the wharf by various British middle-aged gentlemen, who assured them that they were in the most beautiful segment of the world and that the Singhalese people were the most handsome on earth, they were taken through a city of stalls and temples and giant Buddhas rising above shops at the end of thoroughfares, and then out along a lovely coast, where women in vivid fabric and brown-faced compact men—machetes in hand—watched them pass. They walked on the ramparts of Galle as the middle-aged men expanded on the subject of the Portuguese, the Dutch, and now the British ownership of the bright-though-hazed reaches of the harbor, and drove away some poverty-grimed members of the most beautiful race on earth, who were trying to sell the nurses fake coins from Dutch wrecks. Lemonade on a hotel veranda of the Amangalla Hotel beside a Dutch church was different from Macleay lemonade—redolent of an extra layer of spice and strangeness.
Oasis
Sally wrote to her father every four days or so, letters replete with a relentless newsiness designed to mask any shame at marooning him on his farm. Now he could be charmed awhile—her theory went—by stories of alien marvels and puzzles.
I never thought I would see the strange things I’ve seen and it goes to show how many ways there are of being a human.
She used all powers of language and scene-making she could—casting Port Suez as a town of many-storeyed buildings and pink hills in the background.
The great Canal shone so sharp and blue in the midst of sand and all along encampments of Tommies and Indians—wandering amongst tents—who looked pretty bored and cheered us. In the Bitter Lakes in the middle of the Canal there was a crowd of ships moored there. Then we were back into the arrow-straight canal and came to the shady town of Ismaïlia—shaded by palm trees, of course I mean. There we moored and came ashore for the first time. A lot of good-looking Arab houses of stone, and mansions people in the know tell me look French. Older Egyptian women dressed in black but urchin girls running around barefoot in orange and yellow and blue tatters. Some women carry big bundles on their heads. You can’t help thinking, what’s your life like, Mrs. Egypt? How does it match up to a farmer’s life in the Macleay?