An Indecent Obsession (23 page)

But the year was 1942, he was twenty-one, and he was conscripted into the army. His life from then until now he regarded as useless, an utterly wasteful blank. Oh, it had been easy enough; it hadn’t taken him long to learn how to get comfortable, nor to find the perfect fool to fool, an elderly career army officer who was more a spiritual than a practicing homosexual—until he met Luce, his new assistant. This man had fallen violently, pathetically in love, and Luce had used his love with total calculation. The affair lasted until the middle of 1945, when Luce, bored and restless because he knew the war was ending, ended the relationship in a diatribe of scathing, contemptuous repudiation. There was a suicide attempt, a scandal, and serious discrepancies in the accounting of moneys and equipment which had passed through their office. The investigation panel soon got Luce’s measure, in particular his capacity for wreaking havoc, and dealt with him very simply. They sent him to ward X. And in ward X he remained.

But not for much longer, he told himself.

‘Not for much longer!’ he said to the darkness of the ward.

A friendly MP had stopped him on his peregrinations around Base Fifteen, and told him that the hospital would soon be no more. He had retired to the MP’s doghouse and split a bottle of beer with him, toasting the news with light heart. But now that he was back inside ward X he knew postwar dreams could wait. First things first. And the first thing was fixing Langtry.

4

True to his word, Neil poured no more whisky for himself, but filled the two tumblers and gave one to Benedict, one to Michael.

‘God, I’m turpsed to the eyeballs,’ he said, blinking. ‘My head’s going round like a top. Stupid bloody thing to do. It’s going to take me hours to get myself together.’

Michael rolled his first sip around his tongue. ‘It is strong, all right. Funny, I never did like whisky.’

Benedict seemed to have overcome his initial reluctance very well, for he polished off his first glass fairly quickly, and held it out for more. Neil obliged, feeling it would do the poor coot good.

Luce was a proper bastard. But wasn’t it odd the way desired information arrived after one had despaired of ever getting it? In a roundabout way, what he needed to know about Michael had come from Luce. He forced his eyes to focus on Michael’s face, trying to see in it any trace of what Luce had maintained. Well, anything was possible, of course. For himself, that particular answer to the riddle would never have come. He didn’t really believe it, no matter what Michael’s papers said. They always, always gave themselves away; they had to give themselves away or they’d never get any, and Michael he was sure had nothing to give away. But Sis knew what was in those papers, and she wasn’t nearly as experienced as men who had spent most of six long years almost exclusively in the company of other men. Did Sis have her doubts about Michael? Of course she did! She wouldn’t be human if she didn’t and of late she hadn’t been very sure of anything within herself. Nothing had happened between her and Michael—yet. So he still had time.

‘Do you think,’ he said, speaking laboriously but quite distinctly, ‘that Sis knows we’re all in love with her?’

Benedict looked up, glassy-eyed. ‘Not
in
love, Neil! Just love. Love and love and more love…’

‘Well, she’s the first woman any of us have known as a part of our lives for a long time,’ said Michael. ‘It would be strange if we didn’t all love her. She’s very lovable.’

‘Do you think she’s lovable, Mike? Really?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t know. Lovable seems the wrong word. I always think of lovable as… cuddly. Snub noses and freckles and a charming giggle. The sort of thing you see right off. But she’s not like that at all. When you meet her she’s all starch and steel, and she’s got a tongue like an upper-crust fishwife. She’s not pretty. Fantastically attractive, but not pretty. No, I wouldn’t have said lovable was the right word at all.’

Michael put his glass down and thought about it, then smiled and shook his head. ‘If that’s how you saw her, Neil, you must have been a very sick man. I thought she was dinky. She made me want to laugh—not at her, because of her. No, I didn’t see the starch and the steel at all, not at first. I do now. To me she was lovable.’

‘Is she still lovable?’

‘I said so, didn’t I?’

‘Do you think she knows we’re all in love with her?’

‘Not the way you mean,’ Michael said steadily. ‘She’s a dedicated person who hasn’t lived her life dreaming about love. She hasn’t got a schoolgirl mentality. I have a funny feeling about her, that when the chips are down she’ll always love her nursing best.’

‘There’s not a woman born who wouldn’t opt for marriage given the right circumstances,’ said Neil.

‘Why?’

‘They all live for love.’

Michael’s expression was actually pitying. ‘Oh, come on, Neil, grow up! Do you mean men can’t live for love? But love comes in all shapes and sizes—and both sexes!’

‘What would you know about it?’ Neil asked bitterly, feeling chastised, a little the way he sometimes felt in the presence of his father, and that wasn’t right. Michael Wilson was no Longland Parkinson.

‘I don’t know how I know about it,’ said Michael. ‘It’s an instinct. It can’t be anything else, can it? I certainly can’t claim to be an expert. But there are some things I know without ever remembering learning. People find their own levels, and every person is different.’ He stood up, stretched. ‘I’ll be back in a tick. I’m just going to see how Nugget is.’

When Michael returned a few minutes later Neil looked up at him rather derisively; he had created a third glass by the simple expedient of emptying the dirty water out of a watercolor jar, and had filled it with whisky for himself.

‘Drink up, Mike,’ he said. ‘I decided I felt like another one after all. I’m celebrating.’

5

Sister Langtry’s alarm went off at one o’clock in the morning; she had set it because of Nugget, wanting to check on him at an hour when his headache should have eased off. And something about the men tonight had triggered a sharp attack of premonitory disquiet; it would not be a bad idea to check on everyone.

Since probationer days she had trained herself to rouse rapidly, so she got out of bed immediately, and took off her pajamas. She climbed into trousers and bush jacket without bothering to don underwear first, then pulled on thin socks and tied up her daytime duty shoes. At this time of night no one would be interested in whether she was in proper uniform or not. Her watch and keys were on the bureau along with her torch; she put them into one of the jacket’s four patch pockets and belted it securely. Right. Ready. Just pray everything in X was nice and quiet.

When she slid around the fly-curtain and tiptoed into the corridor everything did seem to be quiet; too quiet, perhaps, as if the place brooded. There was something missing and something added which together gave the ward an alien lack of welcome. After a few seconds she realized what the differences were: no sounds of sleeping breathing, but a thin beam of light and a soft murmur of voices from under Neil’s door. Only Matt’s and Nugget’s mosquito nets were tucked in.

At Nugget’s bed she moved around the screen so softly he could not have heard her, but his eyes she saw were open, gleaming faintly.

‘Have you managed to be sick yet?’ she asked, after a check of the bowl’s interior beneath its cloth showed nothing.

‘Yes, Sis. A while ago. Mike gave me a new bowl.’ He sounded thin and lost and distant.

‘Feeling better?’

‘Much.’

She was busy for a while taking pulse and temperature and blood pressure, entering them with the aid of her torch on the chart clipped to the bottom of his cot.

‘Could you drink a cup of tea if I made you one?’

‘Could I ever!’ A little strength began to creep into his voice at the very thought. ‘Me mouth’s like the bottom of a cocky’s cage.’

She smiled at him and went away, into the dayroom. No one prepared tea as she did, with the enormous ease and economy of an endless practice which stretched back through innumerable dayrooms to her weepy probationer days. If one of the men did it there was always some sort of tiny accident, tea leaves spilled or the freshness boiled out of the water or the pot insufficiently warmed, but when she did it, it was perfect. In less time than seemed possible she was back beside Nugget’s bed with a steaming mug in her hand. She put it down on the locker and helped him to sit up, then drew a chair alongside and remained with him while he drank thirstily, blowing on the surface of the liquid impatiently to cool it, and taking quick, minute sips like a bird.

‘You know, Sis,’ he said, pausing, ‘while the pain is there I think that as long as I live I’m never going to forget what it’s like—you know, I could describe it with lots of words the way I can my ordinary headaches. Then the minute it goes away I can’t for the life of me remember what it was like, and the only word I can find to describe it is “awful”.’

She smiled. ‘That’s a characteristic of our brains, Nugget. The more painful a memory is, the quicker we lose the key to unlock it. It’s healthy and right to forget something so shattering. No matter how hard we try, we can never conjure up any kind of experience with its original sharpness. We ought not even want to try, though that’s human nature. Just don’t try too hard and too often—that’s how you get yourself into a muddle. Forget the pain. It’s gone! Isn’t that the most important thing?’

‘My oath it is!’ said Nugget fervently.

‘More tea?’

‘No, thanks, Sis. That was the grouse.’

‘Then slide your legs off the bed and I’ll help you up. You’ll sleep like a baby if I change you and the bed.’

While he sat shivering on the chair she stripped and remade his bed, then helped him clothe his skinny shanks in fresh pajamas. After which she tucked him in securely, gave him a last smile and shut him inside his mosquito net.

A quick check of Matt revealed him lying in a most unusual abandon, mouth slackly open and something suspiciously like a snore issuing from it. His chest was bare. But he slept she thought so deeply that there didn’t seem to be any point in disturbing him. Her nose wrinkled, she stiffened in shock; there was a definite smell of liquor about him!

For a moment she stood regarding the empty beds with a frown between her brows, then in sudden decision turned and walked quickly to Neil’s door. She didn’t bother to tap on it, and she was speaking even as she entered.

‘Look, chaps, I hate to have to act like Matron, but fair’s fair, you know!’

Neil was sitting on the bed, Benedict on the chair, both slack-shouldered. Two bottles of Johnnie Walker, one empty and one just about full, stood on the table.

‘You
idiots
!’ she snapped. ‘Do you want to get us all court-martialled? Where did that come from?’

‘The good colonel,’ said Neil, working hard at speaking distinctly.

Her lips thinned. ‘If he had no more sense than to give it to you, Neil, you ought to have had more sense than to take it! Where are Luce and Michael?’

Neil thought about that deeply, and finally said, with many pauses, ‘Mike went for a shower. No fun at a party. Luce wasn’t in here—went to bed. Huffy.’

‘Luce is not in bed, and he’s not in the ward.’

‘Then I’ll find him for you, Sis,’ Neil said, struggling to get off the bed. ‘I won’t be long, Ben, I’ve got to find Luce for Sis. Sis wants Luce. I don’t want Luce, but Sis does. Beats me why. I think I’m going to puke first, though.’

‘If you puke in here I’ll rub your nose in it!’ she said fiercely. ‘And stay where you are! The state you’re in you couldn’t even find yourself! Oh, I could murder the lot of you!’ Her temper began to die, a trace of fondness crept into her exasperation. ‘Now will you be good chaps and clear the evidence of debauchery away? It’s past one in the morning!’

6

After a thorough check of the verandah failed to locate either Luce or Michael, Sister Langtry marched across to the bathhouse like a soldier, chin up, shoulders back, still simmering. What on earth had possessed them to carry on like that? There wasn’t even a full moon! Just as well X was down at the other end of the compound, right away from any of the other inhabited wards. She was so busy fuming that she ran into the clothesline the men had rigged up so they could do their own washing, and floundered amid towels, shirts, trousers, shorts. Damn them! It was a measure of the degree of her annoyance that she didn’t even see the funny side of her collision with the clothesline, simply got it together again and marched on.

The squat bulk of the bathhouse loomed straight ahead. It had a wooden door which opened into one very large room, a barn-like place with showers along one wall and basins along the opposite wall, and a few laundry tubs at the back. There were no partitions or stalls, nowhere for a man to hide. The floor sloped to a drain in its middle, and was perpetually wet on the shower side of the room.

During the night a low-watt light bulb in the ceiling burned continually, but these days the bathhouse rarely saw visitors after dark, since the men of X showered and shaved in the morning and the latrine was in a separate, far less substantial building.

Coming in from the moonless night outside, Sister Langtry had no difficulty in seeing. The whole incredible scene was lit up for her like players on the stage for their audience. A shower, forgotten, still trickling its small curtain of water; Michael in the far corner, naked and wet, staring mesmerized at Luce; and Luce, naked, smiling, erect, standing some five feet away from Michael.

Neither of them noticed her in the doorway; she had a panicked sensation of déjà vu, and saw the scene as some sort of bizarre variation on that other scene in the dayroom. For a moment she stood paralyzed, then suddenly knew that this was something she couldn’t handle on her own, didn’t have the knowledge or the understanding to handle. So she turned and ran for the ward, running as she had never run in her life before, up the steps, in through the door near Michael’s bed, up the ward.