In Falling Snow (10 page)

It was the twenty-third of September and Tom and I were going home to Stanthorpe on the train from Brisbane. I remember the date because it was the weekend of the show and Al was with us. He was in his last month at the Mater and things between us had become difficult, from his side not mine. There was a girl back in Sydney. He'd never lied to me about her but for him our friendship was becoming more than friendship and he felt he needed to make a decision about what he wanted. You couldn't have two sweethearts, as Matron had told him when he'd asked her. I only knew Matron had said this because she told me later, over a cup of tea in her room. She also told me to stay away from Al while he sorted himself out and that if I played my cards right, I'd land myself a doctor. Don't fall for the old line, though, she warned me. It's what doctors do best. She smiled and I saw the gold fillings in her teeth. I had no intention of playing my cards in any way at all. Al and I were friends and I truly believed we would remain so whatever happened with this girl in Sydney. I worried about the talk among the nurses—they kept asking me if we were promised to one another—but I wasn't sure what I wanted.

The thing that had attracted me to Al when we first met was his quiet but sure nature. Al was Al no matter who he was with and no matter what they thought of him. We met in the operating theatre at the Mater and the surgeon that day, a difficult little man from England named Jonathan Barton, loved nothing more than to belittle trainees. He criticised everything Al did, although anyone could see Al had a gift for surgery. Daddy always said Al could have been a pianist if anyone had thought to put a piano under his hands. Dr. Barton rode Al that day, told him to use the long knife and then told him he got the wrong size, told him he was fumbling when he wasn't, told him to hurry up. Al apologised when Dr. Barton told him he'd done the wrong thing, looked squarely at Dr. Barton as Dr. Barton became increasingly exercised. This infuriated the surgeon, who wanted to crush Al, to reduce him to a snivelling mess or make him lose his temper. But Al did neither. He just kept on in the same even way he'd begun. In the end, Dr. Barton was yelling, “You've got no idea what you're doing, you young fool. You think you're better than me? Let's see you find your way through this gut without help,” and stood back, so Al was left to do the operation—I can't remember what it was—all by himself. This he did with the same quiet confidence.

Afterwards, Al had seemed brave to me and I realised only much later that it wasn't bravery. He was simply without guile. He could no more change his nature than a leopard could change its spots. He told me years later that he was terrified of Jonathan Barton but that he'd kept his eyes on me. I was smiling at him, apparently, and it made him feel he could do anything. I really think he made that up because I don't remember him looking at me at all, much less us smiling. I was more frightened of Dr. Barton than anyone and dreaded being in the theatre whenever he was on. And we were all wearing masks, so how Al could see a smile was beyond me.

“What about this war business?” Tom said to Al on the train.

“What about it?” Al said over his glasses. He was reading the paper.

“They're calling for volunteers.”

“And?”

“Are you going?”

“No,” Al said. “You look tired, love,” he said to me.

“They want doctors,” Tom said.

“They'll get doctors,” Al said.

“Not you?”

“Not me.”

“Why not?”

“Not interested.”

“You scared?”

“Yes and no.” Al took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes and then replaced the glasses, a gesture he used his whole life to give himself time to think about a thing. “If none of us go, they've no one to fight.”

“And then the Germans take over,” said Tom.

“Not if the German people refuse as well.”

“I think I'll go,” Tom said. Al and I both laughed at this, a terrible mistake I realised later. Tom's face fell. “Why shouldn't I go? Not everyone's a coward,” he said. His voice had started to break and he lost the last part of coward, had to repeat it. He looked straight at Al, who to his credit understood, in a way I didn't, how foolish we'd made Tom feel, how young.

Al didn't rise to Tom's challenge. Instead he looked at Tom seriously. “It's one of those things each man must decide for himself. You do have courage in spades, Tom. But you mayn't have your chance this time around, in any event. They're saying it will all be over by Christmas.”

I looked over at my brother and remembered when he first started school. He cried when I left him at the door of his classroom. I thought he'd settle in but by lunchtime, he'd created such a commotion that his teacher sent for me to come and sit with him for the afternoon. By the time I got there he was sobbing in between sharp panicky breaths.

“Oh Tom Crane, what's the matter with you?” I'd said to him. He ran to me and grabbed on, not caring a fig what the teacher or the other children thought of him. I stayed with him that day and the next and the next.

“Afraid of his own shadow,” his teacher said to me after the second week.

“He's only young,” I'd said to her. “Just give him time to get used to it all.” And now, here he was, wanting to run off to war and fight.

“You don't have to be of age,” Tom said to Al. “There's a seniors boy who's gone. You can just lie about your age.”

Al shook his head. “Then you'd be a young fool, and if you came home, that is if you didn't die there, you'd still be a young fool.”

Tom wasn't his usual self that weekend, easily offended, quick to anger. On Saturday afternoon, he broached the subject with Daddy. We were out on the western boundary mending the fence that the neighbour's cows had come through again. “I'm big for my age,” Tom said. “Robert reckons they'd take me no worries.” The two older Carson boys had already gone off, with Robert, a year older than Tom, planning to follow them as soon as he could. Mr. and Mrs. Carson were all for it.

“Answer's no and we're not discussing it,” Daddy said. “We're just not.” I could see by the look on Tom's face that he was hurt and that the conversation wasn't finished, not for him. Daddy saw it too. “If you were of age and you told me you were going, I'd advise against it. You're certainly not going now.” Tom tried to protest again. “We're working, Tom,” Daddy said, “not talking, working.” I think Daddy thought that would be the end of it.

That night at the dance, Tom drank beer and instead of becoming giggly and silly as he had the few other times he'd had drink, he became loud. He picked a fight with a boy from Warwick who found a fight at every dance I ever saw him at. Tom should have known better. They were facing up outside and Al and Robert Carson took one each to calm them down. When I asked Tom what they were fighting about, he said it was about who'd walk out the door first. I looked at him. “Well, how stupid was that?” I said.

On Sunday Al got the early train back to Brisbane because he had to work. Tom and I took the afternoon train.

He told me of his plan. “I have to tell someone, Iris,” he said, “I don't want bad blood behind me.” He said he and another boy from school were joining up. “I wanted the old man's help but we're going anyway. I already decided. I got money saved from last Christmas to get me to Sydney.” He grinned with the thought of it. “They reckon down in Sydney they don't even check you've got two feet. They take anyone.”

And I did nothing to convince him otherwise. I disregarded Daddy's strong advice and Al's view. I looked out the window of the train. “What an adventure that would be,” I said, and felt a thrill. When I think back now, I can't believe I said that. I used to tell myself I had no concept of war so how would I have known to deter him? I used to tell myself I had a romantic view of Europe, especially France, and that in my mind, going to France could never cause harm. I told myself these things in order to soothe myself, to feel better. But in truth I simply cannot understand the twenty-one-year-old self who looked out the window and said to her brother, as if she hardly cared, what an adventure that would be.

I had raised Tom. I had raised him as any mother raises a son, even though I'd been much, much too young to be his mother and perhaps, after all, that's my only excuse, my youth. Claire had done what she could to help Tom and me. She was good to us when she didn't have to be, but we were motherless children, me the child-mother with no example of mothering, he the child of that child-mother. Tom stuck with me and I stuck with him. And then, at fifteen, he was planning to run away and go to war and I failed to see the only danger I needed to foresee in his whole life.

If I am to confess here, I must confess all. I wasn't even worried. I wasn't worried when the school telephoned to say that Tom had gone. Because I knew where he'd gone. He'd gone to war. I wasn't worried when Daddy sent the wire to the Mater, calling me home to Risdon, calling me to account. In fact, I wasn't worried until I saw Daddy himself in the kitchen, when he stood to greet me. Distraught is how I'd describe Daddy's response when I walked through the door, distraught when he learned not only that Tom had gone but that I had let him go.

“I thought it would be an adventure,” I said to Violet now. “But when Daddy was so upset, I panicked. And now I've come over here and seen for myself, I don't know what's right.”

I left Risdon in October. Al and I had become engaged the week before—it was more rushed than either of us probably wanted, but it felt important to be anchored in some way to home. Daddy came as far as Brisbane on the train. He didn't bring Claire or the boys, and while I was glad at first that we'd have the time to ourselves, later when I saw him at the Breakfast Creek docks I was sorry. He stood there holding his hat, squeezing it and rolling it the way he told Tom not to. I was on the ship by then and high above him.

“You find him and bring him back home, you hear?” was the last thing Daddy said because then there were the three whistles which meant we were leaving. “Bring him home,” I think Daddy repeated. I couldn't hear for the whistles. His mouth looked tight, as if he might cry, and I wished Claire and the boys had been there to distract him.

“I think Claire's grand,” I called but I don't think he heard.

I don't remember much of the sea journey except that there were hundreds of us keen to see the war and half were seasick and half were not. I was among the second group; I felt like I was on a difficult horse. London was dark when we berthed and dark when I left two days later for France. It was the dirtiest place I've ever seen and that's all I've got to say about it. The Channel crossing was rougher than the open sea and the passengers now were soldiers or nurses and I knew then there was no going back.

I really did believe that I was going over to bring Tom home and that it would be easy. We'd simply leave the war and come back to Risdon the way we'd gone. I'd marry Al. Tom would marry Jessica Carson and we'd build houses at Risdon and have our babies and stay together.

“It was a lot easier in theory,” I said to Violet now.

She nodded. “You are your brother's keeper, Iris,” she said. “I don't envy you that, not one bit.” The look on her face was hard to read, a flash of sadness or perhaps anger. I didn't feel welcome to ask.

It was later that evening before I had a chance to pen a quick note to Tom. The light had gone for the day and I sat alone in one of the rooms we'd been clearing with a single candle for light. I was exhausted.

We'd had a letter from Tom, just before I left Brisbane. He'd disembarked first in Egypt intending to join the Light Horse, following our neighbour Ray Carson, he said, but he'd met “some sterling chaps” in port who'd talked him into going on to England instead where, he wrote, “if a bloke can shoot or run fast, he can join the British army.” He thought it funny. Our mother was Scottish, our father the great-grandson of a convict. And, yet, they'd have our Tom serve in their army. He was in Southampton now, he said, en route, he thought, to Amiens, where the British were in trouble. He didn't mention his running away and his letter read as if he'd gone off to war with his father's blessing.

Ray Carson had been the lucky one, Tom said. Ray had joined the Light Horse and was already over in Egypt fighting. What Tom didn't know and we did was that Ray had been killed on his first day in Egypt. I'd never seen Daddy cry, not even when our mother was dead and he had been the one to tell me, the one who took that role upon himself when someone else might have. But he cried as he read Tom's letter, swallowed, squinted, handed the letter to me, and while we had already agreed I would go and find Tom and bring him home, I was left with a fear caused not by my brother's being at war but by my father's tears. And it was my father's tears that came back as I sat down to write in that candlelit room of Royaumont.

Dear Tom
, I wrote,
Where are you? I have joined and am at Royaumont near Asnières-sur-Oise. Write me there urgently. Keep safe. Your loving sister, Iris.

I wanted to scratch out
urgently
and replace it with
soon,
which seemed less frantic, but didn't want to mess the paper. Instead I added,
so we can catch up
, which seemed to lend an appropriate air of casualness. But when I read it back over, it just seemed silly. I started again.

Dear Tom, I have joined the Scottish Women's Hospital at Royaumont. Write me there soon, dear brother. I would love to see you. Do keep safe. Your loving sister, Iris.

Iris was still holding the invitation in her hand. “But I'll be right one day,” she said to Grace, her bright eyes brimming. “I will die. Do you know, I think I'd like to go.”

Grace looked at her grandmother's hands on the table, mottled brown and purple, old lady's hands. She looked up at Iris's face, heavily lined but full of hope. Grace took a breath in, out, felt a pull of tenderness so strong it stopped her from responding for a few moments. What she wanted to say was, I love you.

What came out instead was, “Iris, when will you start acting your age?”

When did they swap roles, Grace becoming the parent, Iris the child? It had been the other way around, Iris always there to make sure Grace got up after every fall, and later pushing Grace to work harder at school, to do her best. But now Iris was old. That's all it is, Iris used to say to Grace. I'm just old. Stop fussing so. But Grace couldn't help herself. She was a doctor for a start, taught to her marrow that her job was to fix what was wrong. And if she felt responsible for Iris, wasn't that what you were supposed to feel when your parents aged? The invitation had upset Iris, Grace could see that, and this talk of flying to France for a reunion was ridiculous. What was Iris thinking? And why on earth would she even want to go? What was at this Royaumont that made her willing to risk a trip like that at her age?

Margaret Cameri went to take her baby off the breast. “Stay there,” Grace said. “Let's not upset the apple cart.” She pulled the curtain around the bed. The baby was slurping loudly. “Lusty little tyke, isn't he?” Margaret Cameri looked worried. “No, I meant that's a good thing,” Grace said. “Healthy appetite.” Grace scanned Margaret Cameri's chart. “I just want to check your stitches and tummy.” Grace lifted the covers. “Legs wide. Good good.” She palpated Margaret Cameri's abdomen gently, moving around the baby. “And you're doing very well, Mrs. Cameri. I think the physio will be in later today or tomorrow. They'll give you some exercises to do when you go home. Any pain?” Margaret Cameri shook her head. Grace made a note on the chart and put it back at the end of the bed.

“The doctor said they might have to take out my womb,” Margaret Cameri said, her face barely controlled.

“No, Mrs. Cameri, that was me, I was the doctor, that was last night, after the baby was born. We were able to avoid that. You'll make a full recovery, just like with your other children. Have the other docs been round yet, Dr. Martin and the team?”

“Yes, they came about an hour ago. Can I . . . if we want more children . . . Can we?”

“Oh yes,” Grace said. “I would probably be recommending a caesarean next time, just to be on the safe side. You don't want the same thing happening again. But there's no reason you couldn't have more children, no reason at all.” Grace sat down on the edge of the bed. Andrew should have gone through this with her. Grace didn't know if he'd failed because he was a man—a woman would know this was one of the first things a female patient would be concerned about, up there with the health of their baby—or because of inexperience, or both. Maybe that's why he'd called her. Grace would talk to him.

“Have you named him yet?”

“Benno,” Margaret Cameri said, “after his grandfather.”

“Nice,” Grace said. “Now, you rest. We're going to keep you in a few days more.”

“I really need to get back to the other children. My husband has to work.”

“I know, but it's more important you get a chance to heal. Isn't your mother with them?” Grace's pager went off. David. “I need to answer this. Take care, Mrs. Cameri. I'll see you tomorrow.” Grace made a mental note to ask Alice what the Cameri household situation was. It wouldn't do Margaret Cameri any good to be worrying about the other children, and she'd need help when she went home. If there wasn't help, they'd keep her in for the rest of the week.

Grace called David from the office. “How's your inverted uterus?” he said.

“Fine. She'll be home in a couple of days.” Grace told David about the morning with Iris. “You don't suppose she's going batty finally, do you?”

“Iris? We'll be batty before she is. France? Which war?”

“The first, she said. She was a volunteer at a hospital. She's never mentioned it before. I still don't really know the story. It's some sort of reunion. God, they'll all be on respirators.”

“Does she want to go?” David said.

“It's out of the question.”

“But does she want to go?”

“Of course she wants to go. You know Iris. She's as stubborn as a mule.”

“I know her granddaughter.”

“I was short with her. I wish I could . . . She's just so old now.”

“Why don't you go with her?” David said.

“That's ridiculous. How could I get away?”

“It might be the last chance she gets. She doesn't ask much.”

“What if she dies on the way?”

“Well, then she dies on the way. But to tell her she can't go; that's pretty tough, Grace. I don't think I could do that to her.”

“What about Henry?”

“What about him?”

“I can't just leave him.”

“Take him with you. Anyway, I'm on so I gotta go. I just wanted you to know I called Ian Gibson. He can fit Henry in at ten tomorrow.”

“There's nothing wrong with Henry.”

“He fell over this morning on the way up the stairs at day care.”

“Is he all right?”

“Yes, but he was just standing there and his legs gave way beneath him.”

“Did he trip?” Poor little Henry, she thought, an image of him falling in her mind.

“No, he just went over. You can't keep your head in the sand, Grace.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“I just think you're arguing with me when you know as well as I do that something's not quite right. With a lot of these things, it's better to intervene early than wait.”

“What things? We haven't talked about this.”

“We'll talk tonight. Gotta run.” He was gone. Grace held the phone to her ear for a few moments. She was tired, tired to her bones, four hours sleep at most last night, three the night before, and no more than five a night all week. It was the same for David. And now he wanted to open up whatever was happening with Henry.

Grace herself was called to theatre then, an emergency caesarean because a baby was two weeks overdue and was induced and now in distress. Came out a perfect pink and healthy. Grace checked the chart to see who'd dated the pregnancy. It was David's registrar, Michael Mastin, on a consult. There must have been a query about dates early in the pregnancy if it was bumped up to the perinatal team. “If that baby was forty-two weeks, I'm twenty-one,” Grace said to Alice afterwards.

Grace went down to the special care unit and found Michael Mastin asleep in the treatment room. She shook him awake. “Dr. Mastin,” she said. He raised a bleary head. Grace ignored his sleepiness. “Get up. I just delivered a baby. You were out by a month dating the pregnancy and it means we've done a caesarean we didn't need to do.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Grace handed him the chart. “Don't speak back to a consultant like that. This is not the first problem we've had. Instead of sleeping in your spare time, can I suggest you learn how to measure a fundus.”

“Can I suggest you stop telling me what to do,” he said, unrepentant. “I'm not in your program.”

“More's the pity,” Grace said. “Because I wouldn't let you on your own with a patient until I was confident you knew what you were doing. Don't worry. I'll be talking to your boss.” She flicked on the examination lamp above the bed and turned and left Michael Mastin blinking in the light before he could make some snide remark about pillow talk.

After lunch, she called the antenatal clinic and told them she'd be down to help at some stage. Before going down, she phoned the veterinary school at the university. “Yes, a sugar glider,” she said when the woman who answered the phone asked. “I think it's a baby that's fallen from its mother's pouch,” she said.

“Could be,” the woman said.

“Can I bring it out there?”

“We don't really look after wildlife here. Maybe call National Parks.”

“Thanks anyway,” but no thanks, Grace thought. They were a vet school. What else did they do but look after animals?

Grace checked the labour ward, authorised pain relief for a woman having her first baby, and agreed with a midwife to try some Pitocin on a labour that had stalled. Then she went down to the antenatal clinic to help finish up. It was like a cattle yard, at least three dozen patients still waiting to be seen by a doctor and only two doctors rostered on. Grace saw four patients in quick succession—all straightforward antenatal checkups and the midwives had already seen them. She decided to take one more before going to pick up the kids. She wanted to call David back too before she had the kids with her. He was convinced they should see Ian Gibson. Put David's mind at ease, Iris had said, or words to that effect. But what if something really was wrong, something they couldn't fix? Would knowing help?

The woman who waddled over was in her late thirties, possibly close to term but overweight so it was hard to be sure. Thirty-six weeks according to her file. She'd already been to see a midwife who'd written CONSTIPATED!!! and the date. Why three exclamation marks? Grace thought. These young midwives were so unprofessional. And if it was only constipation, why did it need a doctor? It wasn't even a routine antenatal check—the woman had been in for that the day before. She'd seen a doctor then, Michael Mastin, David's guy. Surely he could do an antenatal check without someone holding his hand. Why was she seeing a doc again? Grace wondered.

The woman came into the cubicle and Grace didn't even look up as she washed her hands from the patient before. “Mrs. Wilson, I'm Dr. Hogan. Have a seat. Did you ask to see the doctor again?” The woman didn't answer and Grace turned around and looked at her.

She was sitting down, looking uncomfortable in the white plastic chair. Her face was flushed. Big baby, Grace thought.

“Grace Hogan? Is that you, Grace?” the woman said. She put her hand to her chest as if she had indigestion.

Grace looked at her more carefully. The face was vaguely familiar. “I'm sorry. I know you?”

“Grace Hogan. Oh my God, it is you. I heard you were a doctor. Wow. Grace Hogan. How are you?” The woman smiled. Grace still couldn't place her. “It's me, Jennifer, Jennifer Bennetts. I'm Wilson now. We were in high school together.” The woman shifted her weight and took a short breath, holding her belly.

Once she heard the name, Grace remembered. Jennifer Bennetts, Deirdre Macklin, and Janet Dalton. Year ten, the three girls who'd decided Grace was the “it” for the year. They were the A group, popular, funny, smart. Grace was never one of them. They turned her interest in science and maths, her tall athletic frame, into something abnormal. Lezzo, that's what they called her, a lezzo. Grace was amazed at how much the description could still make her feel deeply ashamed, as if her body itself was in the wrong. The nickname was taken up by all the other girls for a time and Grace became the class joke. But the initial three fed it and continued long beyond when the others would have stopped. Grace started telling Iris she was sick on school days, but Iris got wise to that. So then Grace took to truancy, changing out of her uniform in the Valley public toilets and spending the day on trains or wandering the city. It was this she was finally caught for. The principal's office rang Iris and called her in for an interview.

Before they went to see the principal, Iris asked Grace why she hadn't gone to school. Grace tried to explain, told Iris the name the girls had called her, how they went through her bag, putting boys' underpants in there, how they took pictures of her in the change room and drew male genitalia and facial hair on them and put them up on the walls. Iris shook her head and said that life would bring harder things than three stupid nasty girls and when would she learn that women had to be tough to survive. Grace had felt even more at fault.