An Indecent Obsession (21 page)

‘I want a word with you, Sis, and I want it now,’ he said, white-faced.

She moistened her lips. ‘Certainly,’ she managed to say, and put Michael out of her mind.

Luce advanced until he stood before her desk; she went to her chair and sat down.

‘I’ve got a bone to pick with you.’

‘Sit down, then,’ she said calmly.

‘It’s not going to take long enough, pet,’ he said, lips lifted back from his teeth. ‘Why did you queer my pitch with little Miss Woop-Woop?’

Sister Langtry’s eyes opened wide. ‘
Did
I?’

‘You know bloody well you did! Everything was coming along beautifully, and now suddenly out of the blue she starts telling me that it isn’t proper for her to associate with the likes of Sergeant Luce Daggett, because your talk with her made her see a lot of things she didn’t see before.’

‘Nor is it proper for the two of you to associate in a clandestine manner,’ said Sister Langtry. ‘Officers do not engage in intimate relationships with men from the ranks.’

‘Oh, come off it, Sis! You know as well as I do that those rules are broken every night in this bloody place! Who else is there except men from the ranks? The MOs? There’s not an MO in Base Fifteen who could get it up for Betty Grable! The officer patients? The only ones left are crocks who couldn’t get it up for the Virgin Mary!’

‘If you must be cheap and vulgar, Luce, you might at least refrain from blasphemy!’ she snapped, her face set, her eyes hard.

‘But it’s a cheap and vulgar subject, sweetie, and I feel like doing a lot worse than blaspheming. What a prissy old maid you are! No gossip in the mess about Sister Langtry, is there?’

He leaned forward across the desk, hands on its edge, his face looming within inches of her own, as it had loomed once before, but with a far different expression now.

‘Let me tell you something! Don’t you ever dare to interfere with me, or I’ll make you wish you’d never been born! Do you hear? I was enjoying little Miss Woop-Woop in more ways than you’ll ever know, you dried-up scrubber!’

The epithet penetrated where he could not be sure that anything else he said did; he saw her flare of pain and outrage, and pressed home this unexpected advantage with all the venom he could summon.

‘You really are dried up, aren’t you?’ he drawled. ‘You’re not a woman, you’re just an apology for one. There you are, dying to go to bed with Mike, yet you can’t even treat the poor coot like a man! Anyone would think he was your pet dog. Here, Mike, heel, Mike! Do you really think you’ll get him to sit and beg for it? He’s not interested enough, sweetie.’

‘You can’t make me lose my temper, Luce,’ she said, coldly and slowly. ‘I prefer to treat your personal aspersions as not made at all. No exercise in the world is as futile as a post-mortem, and that’s what this is, a post-mortem. If Sister Pedder has thought better of her association with you, I’m glad for both your sakes, but especially for hers. Ranting at me is not going to change how Sister Pedder feels.’

‘You’re not an iceberg, Sister Langtry, because ice melts. You’re stone! But I’m going to find a way to pay you back. Oh, yes I am!
I
am going to make you weep tears of blood!’

‘What idiotic melodrama!’ she said contemptuously. ‘I’m not frightened of you, Luce. Disgusted and sickened by you, yes. But not frightened. Nor can you bluff me the way you do the others. I see through you; I always have seen through you. You’re nothing but a petty little confidence trickster!’

‘But I’m not bluffing,’ he said airily, straightening. ‘You’ll see! I’ve found something you think belongs to you, and I’m going to take great pleasure in destroying it.’

Michael. Her and Michael. But Luce couldn’t even begin to destroy that. Only Michael could. Or she could.

‘Oh, go away, Luce!’ she said. ‘Just go away! You’re wasting my time.’

‘The dirty bitch!’ Luce said, looking at his curled hands as if they astonished him, looking at the bed where Benedict sat hunched apathetically, looking at the ward crowding in around him. ‘The dirty bitch!’ he said again more loudly, straight at Ben. ‘Do you know who I’m talking about, you barmy fucker—do you? Your precious Langtry, the dirty bitch!’ He was beside himself, too obsessed by his own hatred to remember that Ben was not a man he usually provoked. He just wanted to lash out at anyone, and Ben was the only one around. ‘You think she cares about you, don’t you?’ he asked. ‘Well, she doesn’t! She doesn’t care about anyone except Sergeant bloody hero Wilson! Isn’t that a laugh? Langtry in love with a shirt-lifting pansy!’

Ben came slowly to his feet. ‘Don’t say it, Luce. Keep your filthy tongue off her and Mike.’ His tone was gentle.

‘Oh, come off it, you stupid drongo! What do I need to do to show you? Langtry’s nothing but a silly old maid in love with the biggest queen in the A.I.F.!’ He moved across the space between his own bed and Benedict’s with a slow, sideways gait that made him look immense and powerful. ‘A queen, Ben! That’s Mike I’m talking about!’

The rage was gathering in Benedict, and in rage he grew too, his dark dour face sloughing its layers of dejection and apology off until something deeper and more appalling began to show like bones at the bottom of a wound. ‘Lay off them, Luce,’ he said calmly. ‘You don’t even know what you’re talking about.’

‘Oh, but I do, Ben! I do! I read it in his papers! Your darling Mike’s a queen!’

Two small bubbles puffed out at the corners of Ben’s mouth, thick and glistening. He began to tremble, a quick, minute shaking. ‘You’re a liar.’

‘Why should I lie? It’s all there in his papers—he buggered the arses off half his battalion!’ Luce stepped back a pace hastily, deciding that he didn’t want to be too close to Ben. ‘If Mike’s a queen,’ he taunted, unable to stop himself, ‘what does that make you?’

A thin, wailing scream came ripping out of Benedict, a very quiet scream, but before his tensed muscles could react in the violence that leaped ahead of his body like a great shadow, Luce began to emit a staccato series of noises which sounded eerily like the chattering of a submachine gun. Benedict jerked and recoiled, his whole body jumping in time to the volley.

‘Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah! Remember that, old son? Of course you do! That’s the sound of your gun killing all those innocent people! Think of them, Ben! Dozens of them, women and children and old men, all dead! You murdered them in cold blood just so you could come to X and crawl to scum like Mike Wilson!’

His rage drowned in another, greater torment, Benedict subsided onto the bed, head back, eyes closed, tears flooding down his face, a human vacuum of despair.

‘Get out of here, Luce!’ said Matt’s voice from behind Luce’s shoulder.

Luce jumped, but as he remembered that Matt couldn’t see, he turned, wiping the sweat from his face. ‘Go to hell!’ he said, as he pushed roughly past Matt and plucked his hat off his bed. He put the hat on his head with a nonchalant air and walked away down the ward to the front door.

Matt had heard most of it, but until he judged the imminence of physical violence to be past he hadn’t had the courage to interfere, thinking that he could well make matters worse by floundering between them, and knowing Ben would be more than a match for Luce—hoping for it, too.

He groped for the end of Benedict’s bed, found it, sat down and slid up until his questing hands encountered an arm. He sighed. ‘It’s all right, Ben,’ he said gently, feeling the tears and through them the face. ‘Come on now, it’s all right. The bastard’s gone, and he won’t worry you again. Poor old bloke!’

But Benedict didn’t seem to hear; his tears were drying, his arms were wrapped about his body, and he rocked back and forth on the bed.

The scene in the ward had gone undetected by all save Matt because Nugget was beyond caring, Michael had slipped across to the nearest inhabited ward to borrow some powdered milk, and Neil had invaded Sister Langtry’s office almost as Luce slammed out of it. He discovered Sister Langtry sitting with her face buried in her hands.

‘What is it? What’s the bastard done to you?’

She removed her hands immediately, to reveal neither tears nor ravages. Just a very calm, composed countenance.

‘He didn’t do anything,’ she said.

‘He must have! I could hear him all the way down into the ward.’

‘Histrionics, that’s all. He is an actor. No, he was letting off steam because I put the kybosh on a little romance he was having with one of the sisters. The girl from Woop-Woop, the bank manager’s daughter, remember?’

‘I remember vividly,’ he said, sitting down and breathing easier. ‘That remains the only occasion on which I have ever found myself in danger of liking Luce.’

Out came his cigarettes; she took one greedily, drew in the smoke greedily.

‘His interest in the girl is vindictive, of course,’ she said, exhaling. ‘I realized that the moment I found out what was going on. I don’t suppose she ever figured personally in his fantasies, but when she popped up here in the flesh, he soon saw how he could use her.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Neil, shutting his eyes. ‘Lucius Ingham the famous stage actor and Rhett Ingham the famous Hollywood film star, thumbing his nose at the inhabitants of Woop-Woop.’

‘I gather Sister Woop-Woop fancied Luce when they were children, but I’ll bet she was far too stuck-up to let the washerwoman’s son know she fancied him. And a bit too young to take his fancy then. So to compromise her now is doing wonderful things for him.’

‘Naturally,’ Neil opened his eyes to look at her intently. ‘I take it he wasn’t pleased at being foiled?’

She laughed shortly. ‘That’s a fair assessment.’

‘I thought it might be. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I did hear the tone of his voice.’ He studied the tip of his cigarette. ‘I would venture to say that our Luce is pretty angry about it. Did he threaten you?’

‘Not specifically. He was far more concerned with telling me all about my shortcomings as a woman.’ Her face screwed up in disgust. ‘Pap! Anyway, I simply let him see that I thought he was talking nonsense.’

‘No threats, though?’ Neil persisted.

She sounded tired of being quizzed as she said impatiently, ‘What could Luce do to me, Neil? Assault me? Kill me? Come off it! That sort of thing happens in fiction, not in life. There’s no sort of opportunity. Besides, you know nothing’s more important to Luce than the safety of his own skin. He won’t do anything he might be punished for. He just spreads those dark wings of his over our heads and lets our own imaginations do his dirty work for him. Only I don’t fall for his tricks.’

‘I hope you’re right, Sis.’

‘Neil, while ever I sit in this chair I
cannot
let any patient frighten me,’ she said very seriously.

He shrugged, prepared to let it go. ‘I shall now change the subject with typical Parkinsonian lightness, and inform you that I heard a rumor today. Well, more fact than a rumor, I suppose.’

‘Thank you so much,’ she said sincerely. ‘What rumor?’

‘The place is on the skids at last.’

‘Now where did you hear that? It hasn’t reached any of the nurses yet.’

‘From dear old Colonel Chinstrap himself.’ He grinned. ‘I happened to be passing his quarters this afternoon, and there he was on his balcony like Juliet after a visit from Romeo, ecstatic at the thought of going back to Macquarie Street. He invited me up for a drink, and told me, one officer and gentleman to another, that we have probably less than a month to go. The CO heard from Div HQ this morning.’

Her face showed a dismay Luce had not been able to bring to it. ‘Oh, God! Only a month?’

‘Give or take a week. We’ll just squeak out ahead of the Wet as it is.’ He frowned at her, perplexed. ‘You stump me, you really do. The last time we had a serious heart-to-heart, you sat there looking like death warmed up wondering how you were going to get through to the end. Now you look like death warmed up because the end’s definitely in sight.’

‘I wasn’t well then, ‘she said stiffly.

‘If you ask me, I don’t think you’re well now.’

‘You don’t understand. I shall miss ward X.’

‘Even Luce?’

‘Even Luce. If it were not for Luce, I wouldn’t know the rest of you half so well.’ She smiled wryly. ‘Or know myself for that matter.’

Michael knocked on the door and poked his head around it. ‘I hope I’m not interrupting, Sis—tea’s made.’

‘Did you manage to get milk?’

‘No trouble.’

She got to her feet immediately, relieved to be able to break off her conversation with Neil so naturally. ‘Come on, then, Neil. Grab the bikkies, would you? You’re closer to them than I am.’

Waiting until Neil found the biscuit tin, she stood back to let him precede her out the door, then followed the two men into the ward.

2

By Nugget’s bed she signalled Neil and Michael to go on without her, and slipped behind the screen someone had put around his bed. He lay without moving and did not acknowledge her presence, so she merely changed the cloth over his eyes for a fresh one before leaving him in peace.

At the refectory table she discovered Luce was missing, looked at her watch and was surprised to find it much later than she had thought.

‘If Luce isn’t careful he’s going to blot his copybook at last. Does anyone know where he is?’ she asked.

‘He went out,’ said Matt brusquely.

‘He lied,’ said Benedict, rocking back and forth.

Sister Langtry looked at him closely; he seemed odder, more enclosed, and the rocking was something new.

‘Are you all right, Ben?’

‘All right. No, all wrong. It’s all wrong. He lied. There’s an adder in his tongue.’

Sister Langtry’s eyes met Michael’s; she lifted one eyebrow in a mute query, but he, as puzzled as she, shook his head quickly. Neil was frowning, mystified too.

‘What’s all wrong, Ben?’ she asked.

‘All of it. Lies. He sold his soul a long time ago.’

Neil leaned across to pat the thin bowed shoulder near him reassuringly. ‘Don’t let Luce worry you, Ben!’

‘He’s
evil
!’

‘Have you been crying, Ben?’ asked Michael, sitting down next to him.