18 “my buddy”

For the first time in a long time my head ached when I woke. It could have been the bowls of Breton cider that one of the waiters at the Rotonde brought out, as a joke, but that had kept us going through the night, crisp and cold, they tasted like the weather. It could have been the entire packet of cigarettes that disappeared into my lungs. But I knew these were mere symptoms of the real disease: Tom was gone, Bertie was still in London, Theo was somewhere or other but I didn’t need any more men. I needed my women. I needed Maisie.

I telegrammed Maisie Brown Chevallier but I couldn’t wait for a reply. I should have contacted her earlier, I was a fool to take so long to say hello, as I didn’t want to wait to meet her, I didn’t want to make a polite arrangement to call on her, I wanted her right now, I wanted to run immediately to her strong embrace. I barely noticed the streets of Paris as I clipped over to the river, my teal heels rapping against the cobblestones. I hardly saw the seamstresses assess my peacock blue coat with its tatty fur collar, its sumptuous volume in need of a wash. I simply clutched the coat like a prayer and moved forward into the wind.

Angelina’s Tea Room was luxurious gilt and cream, hushed and discreet, and absolutely the wrong place for me at the moment. I was in a dingy-cellar-bar mood, a riverside-pie-cart mood, a mess-tent and biscuits-at-midnight mood. But as I’d practically summoned Maisie to a pot of hot chocolate, I thought this place would be easy for her to find in a hurry. The high ceilings were decorated with Art Nouveau swirls and the walls were mostly mirror. The air smelt of chocolate and expensive perfume. If I hadn’t had a packet of patriotic Gauloises with me, I would have felt dirty smoking.

I remembered the first time I saw Maisie, when I was training to be a nurse in London. Matron had decided to bully me, for my “bright face” Maisie decided, so I was punished on the slightest pretext. As an experienced nurse, Maisie showed me tricks with sheets and bedpans so I could be both precise and quick and thereby avoid the worst of Matron’s wrath. I remembered when we found each other again at the field hospital in Rouen. I’d been in surgery with Fox when she had arrived, I was exhausted and could barely stand in line at the mess tent. She lifted me up with a big hug and then cajoled and threatened the other nurses until we shared a tent. She then tucked me into bed, and when I woke, fed me chocolate rum cake that had been sent to her from England and made me tell her all the hospital gossip.

At the end of the war, Fox and family had called me to London while Maisie stayed in Paris. I promised to write, of course, but I’m a hopeless correspondent. Her letters told tales that seemed to mirror my life: nursing flu patients, working harder in the peace than in the war, performing emergency tracheotomies that ended up useless. Being in uniform but now also in quarantine. Missing each other’s company. Why hadn’t I replied? I received her letters at the Sydney Hospital, where I knew no one except by their eyes and walk as we were all in masks and gloves, all the time. I didn’t leave that hospital until it was almost 1920.

When I met Maisie last year by accident in the street, her high hair and purposeful stride unmistakable even out of uniform, the world was suddenly sunnier. The world was safer; whenever it looked like I might get lost in cocktails, lovers, and spy work, she led me back to myself. She saw me, she knew me almost as well as Tom did, and I needed her. I hadn’t called her as I had been hiding. Now I felt I would fade away if she didn’t turn up soon.

“Katie King!” Her enthusiastic wave, her flash-bulb smile: my Maisie. I pushed past the polite tea-sippers to get to her as quickly as possible, throwing myself into her strong arms and hugging her until she squeaked.

“There’s only one person in the world who calls me Katie King.”

“I came as soon as I got that telegram, though to be honest, it wasn’t that hard to leave the household accounts. When did you get back to Paris?”

“A week ago. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long—”

“Pfft, don’t be silly,” she said, as we walked arm in arm back to our table. “You had to find your Kiki-legs, you know, like sea-legs, only for Paris.”

“I was called Katherine for a year. The first few times I didn’t even respond, I didn’t know who they were talking to. But Kiki doesn’t fit Australia. It’s too…”

“French. Which is why you’re always Katie King to me.”

She smiled, a real smile of love and joy. When I first met her, she’d had little freckles all over her nose, but they had disappeared after the first winter in the hospital tents and had never returned. She squeezed my hand, but when I returned the squeeze it turned into another hug across the table. Although I embraced her with all my might, I was so slight compared to her that I felt like a child hugging an adult. I could feel the muscles in her shoulders and back flex, whereas my strength was simply desperation. She was taller than me, even accounting for her usual bouncing hair, which today was tucked securely away. She pulled back from the hug and smoothed my messy bob. She was wearing a sheer cream blouse and a tight brown skirt, a palette which looked subtle, sophisticated, and very Parisian.

“You’re even stronger than when I left, Maisie.”

“I’m back on the wards.”

“What, they’re paying you?”

“Nope, I’m still married.”

“You’re not working for free? Oh, Maisie…”

“It’s just so boring being a housewife! I can’t do it. I’ve told Ray, I’d rather lance a boil than spend more than five minutes choosing curtains. You know, the upholsterer came in with six books of samples and a packed lunch? He expected to be in apartment all morning. He was shocked when I sent him off with an order in under ten minutes. It would have been five but he insisted on a cup of tea.”

My face hurt with grinning. “And what else, Maisie? What else?”

She winked. “Chocolate first. Here, I’ll order.”

“Your French has improved then.”

“It’s had to, working on the wards. Even in the American Hospital.” She ordered us pots of chocolate and the famous hazelnut Mont Blanc pastries.

“Now, Katie, tell me all about your mother. I can see your sorrowful business isn’t finished. You wear your sadness like a skin disease.”

“Charming.”

“It isn’t.”

I laid out the year as a story, from the moment I stepped off at Woolloomooloo to the moment I reunited with Bertie, the gilded mirrors and the smell of hot chocolate lending a fairy tale quality to my words. She listened as a friend, as a nurse, as one who knows the action of grief. She didn’t interrupt, her strong hands cutting the pastries into tiny slices. As I spoke, I felt the Sydney summer, when the humidity sat on the streets like a drunk and I was sunk in darkness. I felt how the colder southerly winds brought the sounds from the harbor and the street and let me breathe. I saw how I was jolted out of my slump by my aunt, a shock that would have broken me if it had come too soon, but instead came at just the right time to set me in motion.

“You’re stronger than when you left, Katie. Stronger, perhaps, than you realize.”

“It’s my only hope.” I rolled the chocolate round my mouth, sip by tiny sip, it was so rich and sweet. The pastries were now only crumbs. “How did you cope, Maisie?”

“With what? My mother’s death? I only ever knew various nuns and matrons.”

“I thought…”

“It’s the life of a mission kid.” She shrugged. “I never knew my mother. I wasn’t that lucky.”

She returned the squeeze of my hand.

“It’s why…” She exhaled with force. “It’s why it’s so complicated… my grief when I lost the baby.” She couldn’t stop her tears then, dabbing at her eyes as though to push the tears back in.

“I didn’t want to get pregnant. Ray expects a nanny, he wants to send his children to boarding school. But I can’t, I just can’t hand over my children to some officious bitter matron, who enforces prayers at bedtime and whacks your palm if you ask for more dinner.”

“Oh, her… I know that matron.”

“You see? Until I win that fight: no kids. But the pregnancy just happened, in the way they do, and I loved the little thing as soon as I knew it existed, imagining it blue-eyed like Ray or brown-eyed like me… This was my family, here, I could set things right. I could be grounded in the world in the way I always should have been, so when I woke up with vice-like pain and blood on the sheets…”

“Maisie, Maisie…”

“He didn’t understand, he just said we’ll have another, we’ll try again—which I know, of course, as a nurse, pregnancies fail all the time—but he couldn’t possibly understand that this blood is history, it releases ghosts…” She put her face in her hands.

“This place is too polite for what we need to say now, Maisie.”

She sniffed, blinked, wiped her eyes on the napkin and her nose on the back of her hand.

“You know all the bohemian cafés, Katie. Take me somewhere where my tears can turn to laughter.”