In Falling Snow (43 page)

When we visited the Australian War Memorial in Canberra with Grace as a child, I saw a photograph of one of the hundreds of executions the British Army carried out during the Great War. It wasn't easy to find, although it was listed in the catalogue. I waited at the counter while a librarian found another librarian and another until finally I spoke to an officer who understood why I might want to look at a photograph like that. He'd seen women like me before, mothers and sisters and lovers of those who'd lost someone so wrongly.

It looks as though the soldiers have just fired. The one they have shot is slumped over, held up only because his arms are bound behind him around a stake. He is blindfolded. The background is nondescript trees without leaves, the middle of nowhere and everywhere in France in those years of the war. There are two officers in the frame, the first standing with the firing squad. He has probably given the order to fire. The second, perhaps a medical officer, looks at his watch, recording time of death or simply bored. Of course there would also be the photographer, the man who stood by and watched the whole scene, who decided to take a picture right then. There would be the men who tried and court-martialled and sentenced the soldier, the men who knew this was happening. There would be hundreds involved in every execution, surely. I cannot understand them, these men, all of whom colluded in the act of killing one of their own.

I contacted the Department of Defence to find out information about the man my brother Tom was killed for not killing. He was a boy too, it turned out. His name was Sidney Martin and he'd signed up when he was fifteen, same as Tom. Just after his seventeenth birthday, he was badly injured when shrapnel lodged in his back. He was hospitalised for a month in Amiens and then sent back to the front. He told his mother, in what was to be his last letter to her, that when the guns started again he felt sick and went to hide in a barn. So he was shot as a deserter. In his earlier letters home, which I also read, Sidney asked his mother to send a picture of herself so he could be reminded of her and home.
I'm so frightened, Mother
, one of the letters said.
So frightened of the noise
.

The British army included more than a quarter of a million soldiers who were under the legal age of nineteen. The youngest, I learned, was twelve when he signed up. Their officers must have known. Did they think, eighteen is close to nineteen, seventeen to eighteen, sixteen, fifteen, down to twelve? Did they have sons themselves? Did their sons fight too? And the army executed hundreds of its own found guilty of desertion or cowardice, men who had the good sense to run away from such terrible slaughter. Intentionally, the names of these soldiers are not included among lists of a town's war dead. We accused the Germans of terrible atrocities. I could no longer see us as any different.

For years after Tom's death, I was angry, angry at the great amorphous beast of our institutions, angry at Lieutenant Michaels, who couldn't manage his own broken body unable to fight and so punished my brother for not fighting, angry at Captain Driscoll for leaving Tom. But through all the years I railed against the fact of my brother's death, I would reserve my harshest criticism for myself. I was my brother's keeper and I lost him.

The day I left Royaumont, four months after Tom's death, it was spring, a day hot enough to warm even our poor patients in their cold beds. Jasmine and honeysuckle filled the air, made lazy with the buzz of insects. To me, it wasn't quite real, the dark green of the pines, the iridescence of summer grass, the water chattering away in the stream, and there, the abbey itself, its quiet immutable stone without malice or passion, taking in all who sought her refuge, unquestioning.

Although the Armistice had been reached, the hospital would continue to operate until the middle of 1919 caring for those fallen with the influenza and soldiers with a long convalescence. The drivers had all left us. Violet of course, although we knew we'd see each other again. But the others too. We had no need of war ambulances now.

I must have known when I took that well-worn road back to Viarmes that this would be the last time I would see the abbey. But I left without turning back, not once, as if the abbey had been nothing in my life. Perhaps to turn back would have been too painful. I thought of other things, the meeting with Al I was dreading, seeing Violet again. And underneath that, Tom, what I'd failed to do to protect him, how I'd let him die.

Even my farewell to Miss Ivens was what was required and no more. We embraced lightly. I barely grazed her cheek with my kiss. “Godspeed, Iris,” she said, and when I saw the tears in her eyes I told myself I was mistaken. “I suppose you are quite sure of your course?” I nodded yes, as if I was quite sure, although in truth I was sure of nothing right then. Miss Ivens sniffed and that almost undid me. I told myself these were not tears but Miss Ivens's pesky allergy. Miss Ivens suffered from hay fever in the summer. I told myself this was hay fever and not tears that were for me. I shook my head but couldn't speak.

I had wired Al to come and he came. It was as simple as that and all our lives were decided. He arrived after the baby was born. He'd never suggested we do something else, get rid of the pregnancy—there were women you could go to—and I couldn't have brought myself to do that, not after everything else I'd done. Some of the women at Royaumont had suggested it. Even Miss Ivens had hinted she could help in that way if we thought it best.

The fact Al never suggested it spoke the man he was. We met in London. He looked from me to Rose and said we'd marry. He'd stare anyone straight in the eye and tell a barefaced lie if needs be, he said. He simply didn't care what people said. I burst into tears. Not that I'd expected less of him. He was the most gentle, generous man I ever knew.

I had told Dugald first, before I told Al, when I was sure of the pregnancy. Later I hated myself for this treachery to Al. I told Dugald and he told me the truth, that he was married, with a family of his own, three children waiting each night for their father to come home. They were in Paris, had been in Paris all those times Dugald and I met there, all the times he'd told me how much he loved me. He'd been planning to tell me the truth, he said, to tell me soon. But he couldn't take on responsibility for a child. Surely I must see that. I didn't feel angry. If he had been dishonest with me, it was only a matter of degrees different from my own dishonesty. I hadn't told him about Al, that I was engaged to be married. “I did love you, Iris,” he said as I left him. “I didn't love you,” I said, “not a bit.”

When Al and I consummated our union, Rose sleeping fitfully in the bassinette beside our bed in a grubby hotel room in London, it was with a minimum of fuss and all the tenderness you'd expect a surgeon and a nurse to create between them. Rose was a difficult baby, colicky with a tiny gullet that needed food every hour or so, just like a baby bird, and all my tenderness was gone by then anyway.

Al wanted more children right away and I didn't know what I wanted, so we tried, but no children came, not then or ever. There was no science to conception in those days, not even for the medically trained. It was always seen as the woman's problem. We never discussed what was happening. I never mentioned my menstrual cycle or the vague disappointment I felt each month. We just went on. Somewhere in my mind I thought it was God punishing me. For what I'd done and had failed to do.

Miss Ivens wrote me from France in 1921. She'd driven through Vingré, she said, northwest of Soissons, and had seen a monument which had been erected not long before to a group of French soldiers. She'd heard about these soldiers in the early days of the war, she wrote, but she'd thought it was just a story. Following the Battle of the Marne, in November 1914, they'd been in a company that retreated at the order of their lieutenant who had realised the Germans had advanced and were threatening to outflank his men. Subsequently, they were ordered by their company commander to return to their position and this they did.

But the general in charge of the corps was not satisfied that the men had done enough to defend their post and France was troubled at the time by soldiers refusing to fight. So the twenty-four men who retreated were charged with abandoning their posts in the face of the enemy—cowardice—which carried a penalty of death.

Following a three-hour court-martial, six were sentenced to death on the grounds that the Germans attacked from the right and those six happened to be on the right so were most guilty of cowardice. At dawn the next day, they were shot by six firing squads. Their entire battalion was paraded past the six dead bodies. They were six of the hundreds of French soldiers “
passés par les armes
,” shot at dawn, Miss Ivens said.

Miss Ivens's letter went on to say that in the January just gone, of 1921, the six men had been pardoned and reinstated “
morts pour le France
,” died for France. All six were awarded the Médaille Militaire and the Croix de Guerre posthumously.

It reminded me so much of what happened to your brother
, Miss Ivens wrote,
that I felt a need to contact you. I have never understood what in human nature could lead to such an act and it's hard to believe that your brother's was not an isolated incident of wrongful death, but that hundreds of both British and French soldiers were executed.

In France, at least, justice is finally being done. I cannot say the same for my own country.
I knew that Miss Ivens and the doctors had pursued their protests about the execution of British soldiers after the war. I also knew their protests had fallen on deaf ears. I couldn't join them in writing to the War Office and pleading Tom's case. I didn't care that he would be remembered as a coward instead of being included among the honourable dead of Great Britain. If I joined in pleading his case I would be consumed by rage. I knew that path would lead to self-destruction.

Iris, I think of you often and wonder how you are
, Miss Ivens concluded.
Do write and let me know. Sincerely, Frances Ivens
. I never replied. I never replied to any of them.

I sat on the steps and watched the mother sugar glider and her remaining child on the wire, making the journey from Suzanne's gum to my mango. Poor Henry. I had a picture in my mind then of Tom, ready for school, holding my hand as we walked down the main road towards the convent, chattering away like a little stream, while I worried that we were late. He was so vulnerable even then. All children are.

Grace was helpless, I could see, just as I was helpless. I had wondered when the past would catch me up. I had thought long and hard about truth. It had been Al who'd said we shouldn't tell Rose. And I'd agreed. I was so old now. How could something that happened so long ago reach out still and take more lives?

I would have to tell her now. I would have to tell her the truth. I looked around me, saw the little table on the front verandah, the sugar glider mother, the tree. Just for a moment, I couldn't work out where I was. And then remembered. I was going to talk to Grace.

I went back into the house and dialled the number. She answered almost straightaway. “Is everything all right, Iris?” I looked at the time. It was 12:30 a.m.

“Would you be able to come over tomorrow, dear?”

“I'm on in the morning and have to pick the kids up. I'm off Thursday.”

“Oh well, all right then.”

“How about I finish early tomorrow and come over for lunch?”

“That would be good. And Grace, I love you. I always have.”

“Good, I'll see you tomorrow then,” she said. “Are you sure you're all right, Iris?”

“Oh yes, I'll see you then.”

It was 9 a.m. when the phone rang. She'd slept badly, awake through the middle hours after Iris rang, getting up finally at four to finish some reports.

Grace found she was getting used to Henry's condition and she wondered if that was actually worse than railing against it. Iris had helped. Grace had been able to cry and cry and Iris had had the good sense to let her. Grace had felt like a girl again, safe in Iris's arms. And Iris's confidence that Grace would pull through had given Grace confidence.

They'd decided to wait until Henry's symptoms became obvious before they said too much to the children and then give information as each of them asked. To Mia, who knew something was wrong, David simply said that Henry's muscles weren't going to develop in the same way as other kids'. He'd need more help to do things.

David had busied himself researching DMD and setting up therapy. He found a physiotherapist who'd done some work in London with DMD kids. The physio and Henry hit it off immediately. “We'll keep him moving as best we can,” she said to Grace and David. She'd come to the house three mornings a week to make things more normal for Henry, she said. Small kindnesses like this—the physio's willingness to come to Henry instead of making him go to a clinic—moved Grace. She bit back tears.

Henry himself had been awake since five that morning and looked like he was starting a cold. Normally Grace would have sent him to day care anyway but today she decided to keep him home. She called the hospital and said to call her if they needed her. David was already at work. The girls were at school.

Grace picked up the phone, sure it would be the hospital and wondering if she could drop Henry with Iris, when the voice at the other end said, “Grace Hogan? Hi, it's Bernadine McKellar. We spoke once before. I'm Iris's GP. I'm very sorry to say she's gone, Grace. Iris died overnight.”

After she hung up the phone, Grace had that same feeling of there not being enough air to get into her lungs as she'd had in Ian Gibson's office. This time, she called David at the hospital. She couldn't quite say the words. “Iris,” was all she said. “Come and get me.” He was there fifteen minutes later. He put his strong arms around her and held her while she sobbed.

Iris's front door was open so Grace went in and through to the kitchen without looking into the bedroom, Henry gripping her hand. David had been scheduled on in theatre and had offered to find someone else to cover so he could stay home with Henry. “You go,” Grace had said, knowing that finding another consultant would be almost impossible. “We'll be all right.”

There was a man in an orange safety vest, sitting in the kitchen. “I told the doctor I'd wait until you came,” he said.

“Who are you?” Grace said, sounding harsher than she'd intended.

“I'm Geoffrey. Iris was . . . Iris was my friend.” There were tears in his eyes and Grace wanted to hit him. What right did he have to cry?

“Who are you?” Grace said again.

“I'm Geoffrey, the postman. Iris was very good to me.”

“Oh,” Grace said. “I think she mentioned you. Did you find her?”

He smiled weakly. “She was always back from the shop by the time I got here,” he said. “Every morning without fail. And if not, she'd leave me a note.” Geoffrey's eyes were red-rimmed, as if he'd spent the morning in Grace's grandmother's house sobbing. “Every morning, without fail, unless I came early, which I always tried not to do, especially lately when her brother's been giving her such trouble.” He shook his head. “She always came to the door for the post. It was easier for her than if I left it in the box. And then we'd have a cup of tea . . . She showed me where the spare key was.”

Grace didn't know Iris had shown anyone where the spare key was, let alone a postman. She noticed the bag of undelivered mail at his feet.

Henry spoke. “Mummy, where's Granna?”

“In her bed, sweetie. We'll go in soon.”

Geoffrey got up then. “I said I'd wait until you got here. I should be going.”

“Of course,” Grace said. Geoffrey was at the front door when she called him back. “Thank you for waiting with her. If you write down your number, I'll call when I know what the funeral arrangements will be.”

“Iris always spoke so proudly of you,” Geoffrey said.

After he left, Grace looked at the table, cleared and wiped down, the dishes dry in the rack from the night before, a plate, a saucepan, two cups and saucers, a bowl. On the stove was the little espresso maker Iris used, ready for the morning. Iris had drunk proper coffee for as long as Grace could remember.

She scooped Henry up, opened the fridge, the same food as last time, plus the remains of what looked like a roast pork. It had been Grace's favourite meal when she was young: crumbed, roasted fillet of pork. Grace wanted to cry, seeing the roast there, knowing Iris had probably eaten it alone without Grace, knowing too that she would never eat with Iris again. She wanted to sit down and consume the rest of the meat even as she knew it would make her sick. She wanted to take in whatever was left of Iris, to have this moment go on and on. Henry was pulling on her arm and she wished she'd taken up David's offer to look after him. “Henry, don't. We'll go in and see Granna in a minute.” She put him down.

In the little living room, on the table next to Iris's chair, there was the book she'd been reading, a new Mary Stewart.

She took Henry's hand to lead him back to the bedroom, not quite sure who was providing comfort to whom. “Okay,” she said. “Granna will look different. She won't be breathing and that will look strange. And her skin will be a different colour.”

“What colour?”

“A bit bluey grey, not white.” Henry nodded solemnly. They stood at the door to the room for a moment before entering. Iris was lying on her back on the bed. She normally slept on her side, Grace knew, so maybe the doctor had moved her. Iris's arms were outside the sheets by her sides. The bed was made around her. It was like Iris and not like her at all. No matter how much preparation Grace had done for her grandmother's death—hearing the advice from Mark Randall, seeing the way Iris had been leaving by slow accretions, her increasingly confused state—nothing would have prepared Grace for this. She let out a gentle sigh. There was nothing she had left to say, none of the unfinished business her friends talked about. “I just wanted you to stay,” Grace said as she approached the bed. She sat down on the little chair, noticed the shoehorn hanging off the back of it. She pushed a wisp of hair off Iris's face. Her eyes and mouth were closed and rigor was setting in.

“Where's the bullet hole?” Grace had forgotten about Henry. He was standing beside the bed, peering at Iris.

“What?”

“The bullet hole. Where's the bullet hole?”

“What do you mean, Henry?”

“Where they shot her.”

“No one shot her, Henry. She just died. She was very old.”

He looked more closely at Iris's face as if he didn't really believe Grace. “I know. So where's the bullet hole?”

“No, Henry, they don't shoot people for being old.”

He nodded. “She looks the same as asleep. Let's go.”

“A minute,” Grace said. “You go out to my bag and find the chocolate. I'll be out soon.” He toddled off. “Iris,” she said. “You had so much left to live for. It's selfish, I know, but I just wish we'd had you with us a while longer.”

As they were leaving, Grace caught a whiff of the sugar glider and remembered she hadn't done anything about it. She looked in the umbrella box but it wasn't there. Iris had said she was planning to let it go soon. Perhaps she had already. The glider was nowhere in the house when Grace looked so it must be out in the world somewhere. “Good luck,” Grace said. “I hope you remember who cared for you.”

When the girls got home from gymnastics David and Grace told them about Iris. Mia cried while David held her. Phil cried for a minute or two and then busied herself interrogating Henry about the body and what it looked like.

In the bath later, Henry told Grace he'd need a new Superman suit soon. The current one was a pile on the floor. “It's getting tight,” he said. “Is that because I'm growing?”

“Yeah,” Grace said. “You're getting bigger all the time.” She smiled at him.

“There's something wrong with me,” he said.

Grace breathed and focused on her hands on the washcloth so she wouldn't cry. It had been such a long day, finding out about Iris, such a long month, knowing about Henry. Grace didn't think she could cope with this. Had he heard them talk? Had he guessed something, noticed the other kids at day care were stronger? It wouldn't help to cry, she told herself, narrowing her eyes and holding her emotions in check. “There's something wrong with me too,” she said, mock flippant. “I think I've got a cold.”

“That's not what's wrong with me,” Henry said. Grace didn't respond. She wasn't ready to go here now. “My penis is wrong.”

“How do you mean?” Grace was racking her brains for DMD effects on penis growth.

“It doesn't have a button at the end. Like the other boys.”

Grace felt relief flood through her. “Circumcision, Henry. Did I not explain this?” He looked up at her, his clear green eyes on the verge of tears. He shook his head no.

“Okay,” Grace said. “They sometimes cut some skin at the end of baby boys' penises. There's a whole lot of reasons people think it's a good idea. But me and Daddy didn't want to do that to you.” David hadn't been circumcised. He'd been in trouble when he first came to the Mater for telling couples it was a barbaric practice, that babies felt pain, that there was no reason you'd do that to a child. Grace had had no strong views either way, but with David as his father, Henry was never going to be circumcised. “Daddy's the same,” she said now. “They didn't do it to him. When they do it, boys look like they have a button.”

“I want a button.”

“Yours is better, like Daddy's.”

“No, it's not,” Henry said. “His is all furry.”

Grace smiled. “That's just because he's a grown-up. You ask him, get him to show you. The other boys, they've had some skin cut off the end. You haven't. That's all.”

Grace leaned back and sat down on the floor. She'd nearly rushed in and talked about DMD when Henry first said he wasn't like the other boys. She'd nearly told him. Grace had always been honest with the children, answered their sometimes uncomfortable questions about their bodies with accurate science. The children had a right to good information. It hadn't been her experience as a child. She'd often felt that Iris only told her some things, that important information was always held back. She looked at Henry, so little and thin. Already his muscles were letting him down. Grace wasn't sure she could get through this.

Henry knew he was different. That's what this was about. He was starting to see the differences between him and the other boys. Let him learn slowly, Grace thought, at his own pace. And just answer every question as honestly as you can. She wouldn't lie to him but she wouldn't burden him with the reality of his disease until she had to.