Swimming Home Read online

  Praise for In Falling Snow

  ‘A marvellous family saga and moving account of life and death.’

  —Sun-Herald

  ‘A riveting read.’

  —Good Reading Magazine

  ‘What would you sacrifice for love? Your family? Your chance to change your life? And how do we keep each other’s secrets? This powerful novel explores these themes and much more as it moves from the Royaumount Scottish Women’s Hospital at the Western Front in 1917 to the Brisbane of 1978. I loved this book and I cried, my highest compliment.’

  —Sunday Mail

  ‘At once chilling yet strangely beautiful . . . MacColl’s narrative is fortified by impeccable research and her innate ability to create a powerful bond between readers and characters. Well done.’

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

  ‘What a treat it has been to read such a powerful and beautifully written book, based on the fascinating true story of the Scottish Women Doctors who ran hospitals in France and Serbia during WW1.’

  —culturestreet.com.au

  ‘. . . a compelling story of love, loss, friendship, family and dreams, I regretted putting it down to attend to the mundane tasks of everyday life.’

  —bookdout.wordpress.com

  ‘This satisfying saga from an award-winning Australian author takes the reader across continents and time . . . Women as healers, family secrets, medical mysteries, historical setting—call the producers of Call the Midwife.’

  —Booklist

  ‘As Iris recalls her wartime experience, she draws the reader deep into her past, eventually revealing the tragic secret that has shaped the rest of her life . . . an evocative and intriguing tale that encapsulates the horrors of war and the powerful legacy of love.’

  —Australian Bookseller and Publisher

  Swimming Home is Mary-Rose MacColl’s fifth novel. Her first novel, No Safe Place, was runner-up in the 1995 The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award and her first non-fiction book, The Birth Wars, was a finalist in the 2009 Walkley Awards. Her international bestseller, In Falling Snow, was published to great acclaim in 2012. She lives in Brisbane with her husband and son, and is an ordinary swimmer.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organisations, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First published in 2015

  Copyright © Mary-Rose MacColl 2015

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from

  the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 76011 331 5

  eISBN 978 1 92526 836 2

  Cover design: Nada Backovic

  Cover photograph: Cultura RM/Masterfile

  CONTENTS

  PART I

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  PART II

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  PART III

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  PART IV

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  WRITER’S NOTE

  For Andrée MacColl

  Part I

  1

  LOUISA QUICK EMERGED INTO A MORNING AS JOYOUS AS London offered. Princes Square was wearing summer finally, this late in August, almost as if the strange wintery weather of these last few weeks had never happened. Even Louisa, who rarely noticed anything about her surroundings, noticed the change.

  She’d started before dawn at a house in one of the lanes down by the docks; scarlet fever, the rash in full bloom on the chest and arms. Eleven, the lad might have been, twelve at most. He wouldn’t last the day, Louisa had thought but hadn’t said to the mother. He’s terribly unwell was what Louisa did say, which the mother already knew. As Louisa had been leaving the house, the sun had illuminated the clouds quite suddenly in a burst of pink. Majestic was the word that came to her mind. From the spectre of death to a majestic dawn.

  And now, the sun greeted her again as she came out through the clinic’s front door, and oh, the joy of it! What a gift. For just a moment, here was the world full of possibility. Louisa felt strangely blessed, and although she didn’t believe in God, blessed was the word that came to her mind. The still-wet pavement glistened in the sunlight. There were birds—she had no idea where they’d been until today. Louisa’s life seemed unimportant suddenly; the waiting room full of patients, the mountain of paperwork in the office, the grumbling nursing staff. All of it gone. Louisa might skip, she thought, or dance a jig, in weather like this. Actually, now that she thought about it, she’d never skip or dance a jig. That was ridiculous. Someone else might skip or dance a jig, Catherine, Nellie even, but not Louisa. Normally, she wouldn’t even be outside at this time of morning. She’d be inside, working. Where I would be still, she thought, if it weren’t for Helen Anderson.

  Louisa had been in the treatment area off the waiting room with a patient when the front desk nurse parted the curtains and told her she was wanted on the telephone. Can I call them back? Louisa had said. The nurse shook her head. They said it was urgent, Doctor. Rooms or here? Louisa had said. The nurse didn’t know. It was terrible to admit, but Louisa would hurry more for a patient from her Harley Street rooms. They paid, and expected more. Louisa needed their money for the clinic. She left her patient with the nurse and went to take the call.

  Louisa couldn’t remember what had been the matter with Helen Anderson when she’d come to the rooms, only that she was one of those patients who knew more than her doctor and wouldn’t do as she was told. Louisa saw her again just before

  Catherine started at the Henley School in the spring. The school’s principal, Helen didn’t acknowledge their history. Sometimes patients didn’t want to see their doctors in other settings, and who could blame them? But when Louisa asked on the telephone if she was all right, Helen sounded exasperated. ‘Of course,’ she spluttered. ‘You must come quickly. Write down the address.’ Louisa scribbled down an address as ordered. She was about to ask if anything had happened to Catherine w
hen Helen Anderson rang off. What the devil could be wrong? Louisa thought. It had been a tumour, Louisa recalled now, that she’d excised. Perhaps it had regrown.

  Out on Princes Street, Louisa was accosted by a sweet seller and then by Charlie, who roasted chestnuts over an open fire. Louisa gave him a coin, told him she’d be back in half an hour. ‘Right you are,’ he said. ‘I’ll save ’em here, Dr Louisa.’ He patted his breast pocket—not the cleanest place he could store chestnuts, Louisa thought, but it didn’t matter; she didn’t eat them anyway.

  Louisa hurried through the lane to the Ratcliffe High Way and put her hand out to signal a passing taxi-cab. As the driver pulled over, she realised she’d forgotten her hat and coat; she must look a fright, her dark brown hair, the armoury of pins it took to secure it—she really needed a cut—adding to the view she was fairly confident others had of her, a woman of difficult-to-determine age a little addled by life. Forty-one, she’d tell anyone who asked. I’m forty-one. At least she’d taken off the stained pinafore she’d been wearing—she’d had to dress a nasty head wound earlier and the apron was still covered in blood.

  ‘Why you going down there, Ma’am?’ the driver said, tapping the piece of paper she’d handed him.

  ‘I’m a doctor,’ she said.

  The driver turned around and looked at her with raised eyebrows but said no more.

  Louisa rarely took taxi-cabs, mostly walked where she needed to go, but she didn’t have time today. What the devil was the problem with Helen Anderson? she wondered.

  Brusque, that was how Louisa’s colleague and friend Ruth Luxton had described Louisa. ‘Sometimes, Louisa, you are brusque.’ Ruth said Louisa was working too hard and she needed a break. Brusque. She and Ruth were both working too hard, truth be told, keeping the clinic running with the money they earned from their Harley Street practices. Louisa had upset one of the nurses, Ruth said. The girl had handed Louisa a swab when she’d asked for something else. She wasn’t brusque, she was busy, she told Ruth Luxton. Still, Louisa went and apologised to the girl. She wished they were a bit tougher, these nurses. And, yes, she wished she hadn’t been brusque.

  The driver turned into John Street. ‘Ratcliffe will be faster,’ Louisa said, looking at her pocket watch. The line of patients had been out the clinic’s front door when she left. It would be all the way down Princes Street by the time she returned, with no other doctor expected in before noon. They were the only medical clinic in the East End, the only care these patients had. You couldn’t turn them away.

  ‘No, Ma’am,’ the driver said evenly. ‘They’re digging the sewers, so it’s closed further along today.’

  ‘Very well,’ she said.

  The driver stopped in Narrow Street near the Ratcliffe stairs, in front of a group of tired brick buildings. Louisa could see the masts of ships at anchor on the wharf to her left. The driver turned to look at her when he handed her the change. ‘You want me to wait?’ he said. He smiled, a tooth gone in front, an incisor; he’d miss it when he bit into an apple, she thought.

  ‘Of course not,’ Louisa said.

  He sighed and shook his head, then drove off.

  She looked around. The street was littered with rubbish, including, in the gutter near where she’d stepped out, the remains of what looked like a chicken, feathers and what might have been a claw. She looked up. Most of the buildings had broken windows and looked as if no one lived in them. It was a forsaken place, she thought, such a contrast with the pleasantness of the day, the only relief a group of boys playing football in one of the lanes off to Louisa’s left, using what looked like an unravelling cabbage for a ball, a roughly painted line on the end wall to mark one goal, a couple of dustbins to mark the other. They were dwarfed by the buildings on either side of the lane, which were in worse shape than those on the street, windows boarded over or stuffed with newspaper, washing hanging off ledges. But the boys’ faces, Louisa saw as she looked over, carried the hope of children the world over, their calls ringing out like an antidote to despair.

  ‘Score!’

  ‘Nah, you was offside.’

  ‘Was not.’

  ‘Was too.’

  Louisa thought again of the boy she’d visited early that morning, around the same age as these scallywags. You couldn’t always know what would happen, that was the thing. It was what Louisa hated most about her profession. No matter how hard she worked, sometimes it wasn’t enough.

  ‘Are you laddies playing the wag?’ Louisa called to them.

  They scattered quickly then, disappearing like rats into the maze of passageways that ran off every street. Louisa hadn’t meant to frighten them. Perhaps they thought she’d come to cart them off to school or, worse, give them a needle.

  In among the houses and inns were the large warehouses of the docks. It was to one of these that Helen Anderson had directed Louisa. She stood in front of the dark wooden door, which looked bolted fast. Louisa checked the piece of paper where she’d written the address. She was in the right place, although she couldn’t imagine Helen Anderson anywhere here.

  Louisa heard cheering down on the bank below. She turned to see that a little crowd had gathered there. She looked out towards the river where someone was pointing. Halfway across was a swimmer, solid, strong, determined, an Oxford or Cambridge freshman no doubt, conquering the Thames on a dare. That must be what they were cheering about. How could you swim in that? Louisa thought. She didn’t swim at all and the thought of the filthy river made her sick. But as she watched, the sun shone on the water and it made the swimmer golden. Louisa was mesmerised by his slow, sure stroke. There were two large sailing boats beside the wharf and a steamer coming up the river, half a dozen barges and ferries. What mad boys they were, she thought, a strange feeling building in the pit of her stomach, a nervousness she couldn’t account for. Intuition, Ruth Luxton would say. Never underestimate your intuition. Something was very wrong. The taxi driver had gone. She was alone here. Where was Helen?

  Just then she saw Helen Anderson herself puffing as she climbed the bank. ‘Well, what do you think?’ Helen Anderson said. She was flushed, breathless.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I’m sorry too, Dr Quick. We’ve tried to be patient, but this has gone too far.’ She had her hands on her hips now, trying to get more air into her lungs.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Louisa said, beginning to wonder if Helen Anderson was in her right mind.

  ‘That.’ Helen pointed towards the river, the sun disappearing behind a cloud just at that moment. And then the truth fluttered into Louisa’s brain, where it landed lightly and began to work its way into her consciousness. The lone swimmer, turning over now to switch to a perfectly executed back crawl, wasn’t Oxford or Cambridge, wasn’t a man. It was a woman, a girl. It was Catherine. Of course it was Catherine.

  2

  SHE’D JUMPED IN FEET FIRST FROM THE STEPS. THE WATER was deeper than it looked, and she felt as if her body had been dunked in a bowl of ice and held there. When her feet hit the bottom, it was soft and squelchy, nothing like the sandy sea floor at home. She sank down into mud.

  No turning back now, she’d thought to herself as she pushed up. When she reached the surface, she began to swim, one arm up and over, the other up and over, kicking with her legs, trying to generate heat. Her head felt as if it would burst from the cold. She was aware of the outline of her skull, her jaw. Her lips wouldn’t move properly. They were too cold to blow bubbles. They were too cold for the laughter that wanted to come, inexplicably. Was it water that made her want to laugh? Was it being back in water, even water so different from home?

  She couldn’t see her hand in front of her. On the island you’d never go into such brackish water, where a log might be a croc. No crocs here, though, no life in the water at all as far as she could tell.

  And then she was in the rhythm of the swim, a rhythm she knew so well it was like waking in the morning. It was still cold, but after a few minutes the movement
of the swim was creating enough warmth to sustain her. Keep swimming. It was her father’s voice she heard. Even now, it soothed her. She loved the story, the story of how he’d saved her. Keep swimming, bonny Cate, he’d sung that night, and she had kept swimming, or at least she’d held on to him, and by morning, when they reached land, Catherine could swim. That’s what her father had said. She doubted it now, having watched other children learn. Swimming didn’t come naturally, not even to the Islanders, and Catherine had only been three years old. Her father’s story of that night always sounded made up, along with everything he’d told her about her mother, which wasn’t much. ‘It’s because you were so young,’ Florence said. ‘You don’t remember her, so it sounds like a made-up story.’

  ‘What was she like?’ Catherine had asked her father. Catherine had no recollection of her, this mother who was the subject of the story—the sailing boat, the storm, her father saving Catherine, losing her mother. Catherine called her Julia. Mother or Mummy would have seemed false. She’d only ever seen one photograph, deep in the bottom drawer of her father’s dresser, a photograph Catherine knew she wasn’t supposed to see. She’d found her father sitting on the little stool by the bed one day. When he’d looked up, she saw there were tears running down his cheeks, which shocked her. She’d never seen her father cry before. He’d wiped the tears away quickly with one hand, while keeping his other hand, the hand that held the photograph, down by his side. Catherine pretended she didn’t notice, but watched from the corner of her eye as he put the photograph in a drawer. Next time he was out at the hospital, she went looking for it.

  At first it gave her a fright. Here was a person, a person who had lived. Not the Julia of her imagination but Julia herself, or her likeness at least. This Julia was sitting on the end of a sofa Catherine had never seen in a room Catherine didn’t recognise. She had an impression it was somewhere in America, where her mother and father had met, but she couldn’t have said why she thought that. Julia was wearing an emerald-green dress with a lace bodice and, high on her head, above her dark red-brown hair, a large bronze-coloured hat with little feathers hanging off the sides.