In Falling Snow (26 page)

There's a knock on the door. I seem to have fallen asleep on the floor, the contents of the wooden box around me. His letters are spread over the floor, that sure hand I'd never forget. I pick them up quickly and put them back in the box. There's a line of spit from one corner of my mouth that I quickly wipe off my cheek.

Did Grace come this morning? Is she still here? The sun is streaming in through the window. “Coming,” I call as sensibly as I can. But when I go out there's no one there.

I am still half in a dream I have just had, where Tom came and spoke to me, like the waking dream but I'm sure I've been asleep this time. Not Tom as he was in France but as a boy, perhaps eight. There's a photograph of him at that age, standing at the side of the house holding a dead snake he and Daddy have just pulled from the water tank. Tom's head is at an angle, and while his eyes are as bright as ever and shine straight out at you, it's this tilt of his head that lends him an air of uncertainty, impermanence, as if perhaps he knows he's not here forever. I look and want him to tell me, did he know, did he know he would die so young? And was life, the life he had, enough? That's what you come to eventually. When you've got through the guilt and the rage and the blaming. You just want them not to have suffered, to have lived enough. The snake is longer than Tom and he holds it up to show it off, and perhaps it's this rather than some deep life knowledge that tilts his head. “Wasn't it grand, Iris?” he says in the dream. “And didn't we have fun? Don't you think, Iris? Well, don't you?” I can never answer. I try but my voice fails me.

In my groggy state, I see Tom again, as large as life, standing in the hallway, Tom as the young man I knew just before he died. But when he speaks, I realise it's only Geoffrey. He must have been down getting my spare key from under the house when I went to open the door. He looks worried. “Where were you, Iris? I've been knocking for ages.”

“Oh, I was out the back,” I lie, my face all bent out of shape—I could feel it—and my hair all over the place when I touch it.

In June of 1916, we received word to evacuate as many patients as were ambulatory and expect severe casualties. For three days, the hospital was almost empty. We'd already increased our capacity again in response to requests from the Croix-Rouge and now we had four hundred beds, including an emergency ward we set up in the refectory, originally intended to be temporary, moving the staff dining room out into the cloister. Goodness knows what we'll do when winter comes back, Miss Ivens said about our new dining arrangements, but we can't worry about that now. We knew the wounded would come soon as the pounding of guns grew more frequent. We remained twenty-five miles from the front and unlikely to be attacked at Royaumont, but we were near enough to Paris—a key target for the Germans—that Miss Ivens continued to make us carry out occasional drills, blacking out the hospital and moving patients and staff to the cellars under the abbey.

I'd seen Tom every few months. Either he came to Royaumont or I went to Chantilly on an errand. He'd remained in the postal service and seemed to have resigned himself to his role, much to my relief. He lost weight as he grew even taller, so much so I worried at times he wasn't eating enough. When I could, I took something from Royaumont, biscuits, cakes, a lemon tart. He told me I had to stop worrying. He was fine, he said. Violet said she thought I was driving him mad.

As soon as we received the advice from the Croix-Rouge I went to the kitchen to let Miss Quoyle know we were expecting more wounded and we should check our stores and reorder whatever might be needed. When I walked in she and Cicely were arguing. I knew what it was about before I heard their words. A new doctor, Louisa Martindale, had joined us that week. When she'd offered her services to the Scottish Women's Hospitals, Miss Ivens had snapped her up. But Dr. Martindale had brought her husband across with her and she wanted a job for him. Miss Ivens had said he could be a driver. Some of the drivers were happy enough—as happy as they ever were about anything—but because he was a man some of the others were incensed about it. They'd been the same about Tom. Whenever he visited, he helped out in the kitchen—he was a favourite with Quoyle—or shifted furniture for the sisters. He worked on the cars too, for any of the drivers who let him. Most of them were used to him now. But to hear Cicely on the subject of men working at the hospital, you'd think Dr. Martindale had brought the devil himself to work with us at Royaumont.

“Listen to yourself,” Quoyle was saying to Cicely now. “What's he ever done to you?”

“It's not him,” Cicely said. “It's all of them, what they've done to all of us. He comes here and we simply let him in. It's only because he's the husband, not the wife. If he was a woman, what do you suppose would happen?”

“Well, I imagine you wouldn't be making such a fuss,” Quoyle said. “You'd put her straight in. I know your type. You hate men, don't you?”

This was the wrong thing to say to Cicely if Miss Quoyle had hoped to calm the waters. “And I know yours,” Cicely spat. “You're ignorant.”

Quoyle burst into tears—not an easy thing even for Cicely to achieve—and left the kitchen. I looked at Cicely. “This Cause of yours can't be much chop if all it does is upset someone like Miss Quoyle. Have you no respect for age?”

“Shut up, Iris,” Cicely said. “You're so stupid you don't see what's right in front of you.”

I thought about Cicely for the rest of the day. She struck out at everything like a cat that had been mistreated as a kitten. Sometimes you just had to wait for it to subside with people like that. Sometimes it never did. But in the evening, I went over to the garages to find Violet. The truth was, even though it had been a frequent topic of conversation during my time at Royaumont, I didn't really understand what all the fuss was about with the Cause and why it was a source of tension among the other women.

“Suffrage,” Violet said. “They want the vote. Aren't they doing the same in Australia?”

“Women already have the vote in Australia,” I said.

Violet nodded. “Well, in England there are those who want the vote and those who will go outside the law to get the vote, the Pankhursts and their friends. Royaumont was started by the national union. Elsie Inglis was for the hunger strikes, or at least, she didn't come out against them. The war's put a hold on it all anyway and I've no idea why Cicely's so upset about old Jack Martindale. He wouldn't hurt a fly. And he's good at poker.”

When Violet mentioned the name Pankhurst, I remembered my aunt Veronica, who visited us from Scotland when I was eight. The first I knew of her was when Daddy showed me the letter saying she was coming “to meet the wee bairns.” I didn't even know I had an aunt and when I asked Daddy, he said he hadn't thought to tell me. He'd only met her once before he married our mother. When I asked Daddy what she was like he just said, “She's like your mother, only younger,” which didn't help.

“Your mother's sister is a suffragist,” Mrs. Carson told me the day before Veronica was due to arrive. She said it delicately, as if I might be offended. I think Mrs. Carson came over especially to warn me, to make sure Tom and I weren't going to be in any moral danger. “You'd do well to be polite, but not listen to what she has to say. She's in cahoots with Pankhurst and her crew.” Mrs. Carson left a rhubarb and apple pie, which was kind of her, and then scooted off when she saw Daddy's horse approaching from the western boundary. I wondered what cahoots were.

Daddy shaved and changed his clothes and told me to bathe Tom. He cleaned up the bottles from the table and helped me wash the linen and make the beds. He swept. Then he took me and Tom to the railway station in the trap. Before the train had quite stopped, a woman jumped down and I knew straightaway it was Veronica. She had a huge grin on her face and red hair like mine that fell down her back like a long rust waterfall, a wild thing, and she had my green eyes and milky skin but not my freckles. She was tall and long-legged and looked as if she might like to get on a horse and ride pretty fast right then. And she wore pants. I'd never seen anything like her before. She was amazing.

Veronica was five years younger than my mother, my father had told me, twenty-eight when she visited us. I was big for my age and awkward. The only models of womanhood I had were Mrs. Carson, who was large and slow moving, and the nuns at the convent, who were impossible to fathom. I knew enough to know that clothes were part of being a woman and that my clothes were never quite right—the hems, the pressing, the combinations—but not enough to know how to fix them.

“You must be Iris,” Veronica said, picking me up in surprisingly strong arms and swinging me around onto her hip, then scooping Tom up in the other arm on the turn. “Aren't you both gorgeous?” At first Tom held onto my hand as we swung around but soon he was giggling. I'd never seen him as comfortable with a stranger.

Daddy was shy, pulled at his hat, couldn't seem to get his big hand around Veronica's to shake it, then couldn't seem to let go. Back at home, the trip punctuated by Veronica's chatter and Daddy's meagre responses, he couldn't make tea in the pot or get the bread cut for sandwiches. He kept dropping things and forgetting what he was doing. He'd set up a camp bed in my room so that Veronica could have his bed and he managed to tell her so. She told him not to be silly. “I've come to see them, Jack,” she said. “At least let me share their room.” And so my aunt slept in the room with Tom and me and it was the best month of my young life.

For here was another kind of woman altogether, different from Mrs. Carson and the nuns and the whole sex as I'd known it to that date. I wondered was this what my mother had been like. Veronica didn't care a hoot what anyone thought of her and when I told her what Mrs. Carson had said, that she was a sufferist, she laughed for a full minute before she said, “That's a good word for it. I'm a sufferist.”

The sufferist brought gifts, a little Eiffel Tower for Tom she'd picked up in Paris, some drinking chocolate from Belgium for me that tasted heavenly when you whipped it up with fresh milk and put extra sugar in, toys for both of us that were just perfect.

“I have met a suffragist,” I told Violet now. “My aunt from Scotland was in the movement.”

Some of the suffragists at Royaumont wore trousers like my aunt Veronica. Some smoked pipes and acted like men. Violet made fun of them, had to explain to me so I'd get her jokes. Dykes, she said, after the boy who put his finger in one, and giggled. They like each other the same way you like your Al. How do you mean? I asked, although I understood immediately. They sleep together, do things with their hands. I giggled. What things? I'll leave that to your imagination, my dear.

When I thought about it, I'd met girls like these before, at school, in nursing. At Royaumont they were more open about their relationships. I wanted to ask Miss Ivens about them but I was too shy. Was it normal? Did she know before they came? Mostly both had jobs, one as driver, the other as orderly, one as doctor, the other as nurse. Was it sinful? On this last count, I'm sure it was. Most things I wasn't told about were sinful, I often later learned.

They fascinated me, these women, the way they strode about like men, the openness of their smiles, like they'd found the secret of life. I wanted to be like them, or to be a boy, with a boy's straight body and a boy's easy laugh. For some of them, especially the doctors, it might have been a convenient arrangement. How could a woman have a husband, even the most understanding husband, and lead the kind of life a doctor of Royaumont led? There would be children and then what would she do? For others, though, it was the only way they'd live. These were the ones I admired most, the women who had chosen this life because they wanted it. It was their courage, their certain knowledge that they were not wrong, just misunderstood, that I loved in them. I suppose it came from having had to be different, likely suffering jeers from others, shunned by some. They were truly brave, I always felt.