An Indecent Obsession (30 page)

‘You always take away the pain,’ she said.

It was his phrase he used of her; her saying it affected him so powerfully he had to remove his hands quickly. Now was not the time for him to say what he longed to.

Taking her basket from her, he ushered her out of the ward as if he were the host and she a visitor, refusing to give the basket back until they reached the bottom of the ramp. And then he stood until long after her grey shape flickered and vanished into the darkness, looking up at the darkness, listening to the soft dripping of condensation on cooling eaves, the vast chorus of the frogs and the endless murmur of the surf far out on the reef. There was a downpour in the air; it would rain before very long. If Sis didn’t hurry she’d be wet.

‘Where’s Sis?’ asked Nugget when Neil sat down in her chair and reached for the teapot.

‘She’s got a headache,’ said Neil briefly, avoiding eye contact with Michael, who sat looking as if he too had a headache. Neil pulled a face. ‘God, I loathe being mother! Who is it has milk again?’

‘Me,’ said Nugget. ‘Good news, eh? Luce is properly dead and buried at last. Phew! It’s a relief, I must say.’

‘May God have mercy on his soul,’ said Benedict.

‘On all our souls,’ said Matt.

Neil finished his chore with the teapot, and began pushing the various mugs down the table. Without Sis there was little joy in late tea, he reflected, staring at Michael because Michael’s attention was on Matt and Benedict.

With a great show of importance, Nugget produced a very large book, spread it out where there was no danger of spilling tea on it, and began on page one.

Michael glanced at him, amused and touched. ‘What’s that in aid of?’ he asked.

‘I’ve been thinking about what the colonel said,’ Nugget explained, one hand extended across the open book with the reverence of a holy man for his bible. ‘There’s no reason why I can’t go to night school to get me matriculation, is there? Then I could go to university and do medicine.’

‘And do something with your life,’ Michael said. ‘Good on you and good luck to you, Nugget.’

I wish I didn’t like him through every moment of hating him, thought Neil; but that’s the real lesson the old man wanted me to learn out of the war—not to let my heart stand in the way of what has to be done, and to learn to live with my heart after it’s done. So Neil was able to say very calmly, ‘We’ve all got to do something with our lives when we’re out of the jungle greens. I wonder how I’ll look in a business suit. I’ve never worn one in my life.’ Then he sat back and waited for Matt to respond to the deliberate stimulus.

Matt did, quivering. ‘How am I going to earn a living?’ he asked, the question bursting from him as if he had never meant to say it, yet had been thinking of nothing else. ‘I’m an accountant, I’ve got to see! The army won’t give me a pension; they reckon there’s nothing wrong with my eyes! Oh, God, Neil, what am I going to do?’

The others were very still, everyone looking at Neil. Well, here goes, he thought, as deeply moved by Matt’s cry as the others, yet filled with a purpose that overruled his pity. Now isn’t the right time and place to go into specifics, but there’s been enough groundwork laid for me to see if Mike gets the message.

‘That’s my share, Matt,’ Neil said positively, his hand on Matt’s arm firmly. ‘Don’t worry about anything. I’ll see you’re all right.’

‘I’ve never taken charity in my life, and I’m not about to start now,’ said Matt, sitting straight and proud.

‘It is not charity!’ Neil insisted. ‘It is
my share
. You know what I mean. We made a pact, the lot of us, but I have yet to contribute my full share.’ And he said this looking not at Matt but at Michael.

‘Yes, all right,’ said Michael, who knew immediately what was going to be demanded of him. In a way it came as an exquisite relief to have it asked of him rather than to have to offer it. He had known the only solution for some time, but he didn’t want it, and so had not found the strength to offer it. ‘I agree with that, Neil. Your share.’ His eyes left Neil’s stern unyielding face, rested on Matt with great affection. ‘It’s not charity, Matt. It’s a fair share,’ he said.

7

Sister Langtry beat the rain. It came cascading down just as she let herself in her door, and within minutes every kind of living small creature seemed to materialize out of it: mosquitoes, leeches, frogs, spiders reluctant to wet their feet, ants in syrupy black rivers, bedraggled moths, cockroaches. Because her two windows were screened she usually did not need to pull the net down around her bed, but the first thing she did tonight was to tug it free of its ring and drape it down.

She went to take a shower in the bathhouse, then wrapped herself in her robe, packed her two pathetically thin pillows against the wall at the head of her bed, and lay back against them with a book she hadn’t even the strength to open, though sleep felt far away. So she put her head back and listened instead to the ceaseless hollow roar of rain on an iron roof. Once it had been the most thrilling and wonderful sound in the world, during her childhood days in country where rain was the harbinger of prosperity and life; but here, in this profligate climate of perpetual growth and decay, it meant only an external deadening to everything save what went on in her mind. You couldn’t have heard anyone speak unless he shouted in your ear; the only voices you really heard were those which chattered on inside your head.

The sick horror of discovering she could lash out at someone beloved as she had lashed out at Michael had faded to an almost apathetic self-disgust. And right alongside it had crept a hunger for self-justification. Hadn’t he done to her what no man should ever do to any woman? Hadn’t he indicated a perverse preference for Luce Daggett? Of all the men in the world, Luce Daggett!

This was fruitless. Round and round and round in ever-diminishing circles, getting nowhere, achieving nothing. She was so tired of herself! How could she have allowed this to happen? And who was Michael Wilson? There were no answers, so why bother to ask the questions?

Mosquito nets suffocated. She threw hers back impatiently, not having heard the tiny dive-bomber sound of a mosquito, and forgetting that the rain would have drowned the noise of a real dive-bomber. There was never enough light within the confines of the net to read, and she felt better; she would read for a while and hope sleep came.

A leech dropped with a soundless plop from some crevice in the unlined roof, and landed wriggling obscenely on her bare leg. She tore at it in a frenzy, gagging at the feel of it, but could not dislodge it. So she leaped to light a cigarette, and without caring whether she burned herself, she applied the red-hot tip to the leech’s slimy black string-like body. It was a big tropical leech, four or five inches long, and she could not have borne to wait the process out, invaded by it, watch it grow bloated and congested on her blood, then finally roll off replete like a selfish man from a woman after sex.

When the thing was fried enough to shrivel away from her skin she ground it to smeared pulp beneath a boot, shivering uncontrollably, feeling as violated and besmirched as any Victorian heroine. Loathsome, repulsive, horrible thing! Oh, God, this climate! This rain! This awful, eternal dilemma…

And then of course the place where the leech had fastened its blind seeking mouth kept bleeding, bleeding, the tissue impregnated with an anticlotting factor from its saliva, and it had to be attended to immediately or in this climate the wound would ulcerate…

It was not very often that she found herself reminded so physically of Base Fifteen, its difficulties, isolation, introspection. Of all the places she had ever been, she thought, dealing with iodine and sterile swabs, Base Fifteen had made less impression than any. In fact, almost no impression at all. As if it were a stage set, without substance or real meaning of its own, simply a claustrophobic backdrop for a complicated interplay of human emotions, wills, desires. Which was logical. Base Fifteen as anything more than an insubstantial backdrop didn’t make sense. A more sterile, dreary institution had never been erected; even the wet canvas world of a casualty clearing station had more personality. Base Fifteen was there to serve a war, it had been dumped where the convenience of war dictated, without respect to the ideal site, staff contentment, or patient welfare. No wonder it was a painted cardboard world.

And, leg propped up on the wooden chair, the walls oozing sweat and speckled with great patches of mildew, the cockroaches waving their antennae from every dark cranny, itching for the light to go off, Sister Langtry looked around her like someone doubting the reality of a dream.

I shall be so glad to go home, she thought for the very first time. Oh, yes, I shall be glad to go back to my home!

Part 6

1

Sister Langtry came into the sisters’ sitting room about four the next afternoon feeling more like herself, and looking forward to a cup of tea. There were five sisters scattered in two groups about the room, and Sister Dawkin on her own, sitting in one chair with her feet propped up on another, her head nodding toward her ample chest in a series of jerks which culminated in one large enough to startle her into waking. Eyes about to close again, she saw who was standing in the doorway, waved and beckoned.

As Sister Langtry walked across to join her friend a strong wave of dizziness provoked a sudden panic; she wasn’t sleeping and she wasn’t eating properly, and if she wasn’t careful she would become ill. Contact with the men of X and their problems had educated her sufficiently to understand that her present symptoms were escapist, a means whereby to manufacture an end demanding her removal from ward X without the humiliation of having to request Matron for a transfer. Therefore pride dictated that she sleep and eat. Tonight she would take a Nembutal, something she had not done since the day of the incident in the dayroom.

‘Sit down, love, you look knocked up,’ said Sister Dawkin, tugging at a chair without getting up herself.

‘You must be pretty knocked up yourself to snatch forty winks in here,’ said Sister Langtry, seating herself.

‘I had to stay on the ward last night, that’s all,’ said Sister Dawkin, disposing her feet in a new position. ‘We must look like Abbott and Costello to the rest of the room, me like the wreck of the
Hesperus
and you like a poster to recruit army nurses. That tomfool of a woman, even daring to suggest there was any ulterior motive! As if you’d ever stoop to anything vulgar or underhand!’

Sister Langtry winced, wishing that Matron had had the good sense to hold her tongue. But the stupid woman had blabbed to her best friend, who had blabbed to her best friend, and so on, and so on. The whole nursing staff (which meant the MOs as well) knew that Sister Langtry—of all people!—had kept a soldier in her quarters all night. And of course the place was buzzing about the hara-kiri suicide; it was no use hoping such drama would not be talked about. Though luckily her own reputation was so good that few indeed believed there was anything more in her conduct with the solider than an urgent and understandable desire to keep him out of harm’s way. If they only knew, thought Sister Langtry, feeling the eyes on her from the two other tenanted tables, if they only knew what my real troubles are! Inversion, murder, rejection. Though murder has gone, thank God. I don’t have to worry about that one.

The kind fading eyes that forthrightness saved from being commonplace were looking at her shrewdly; Sister Langtry sighed and moved a little, but did not say anything.

Sister Dawkin tried another gambit. ‘As of next week, me dear, it’s back to dear old Aussie and Civvy Street,’ she said.

Sister Langtry’s cup just missed making contact with its saucer, and slopped tea all over the table. ‘Oh, bother! Now look what I’ve done!’ she exclaimed, reaching into her basket for a handkerchief.

‘Are you sorry, Honour?’ Sister Dawkin demanded.

‘Just taken by surprise,’ Sister Langtry said, mopping up tea with her handkerchief and wringing it out into her cup. ‘When did you hear, Sally?’

‘Matey told me herself a few minutes ago. Came sweeping into D ward like a battleship in full sail and let it drop with her mouth all pursed up as if she’d been eating alum for a week. She’s devastated, of course. She’ll have to go back to that poky little convalescent home she ran before the war. None of the big hospitals or even the district hospitals would touch her with a barge pole. It beats me how she ever got so high up in the army.’

‘It beats me too,’ said Sister Langtry, spreading her handkerchief out to dry on a comer of the table, then dispensing more tea into a fresh cup and saucer. ‘And you’re right, none of the decent hospitals would touch her with a barge pole. Somehow she always reminds me of a night-shift forewoman in a big food factory. Still, if the army will keep her on she might remain in the army. She’d be better off. Better pension when she retires, too, and she can’t be all that far off retirement.’

‘Hah! If the army keeps her it will be better luck than she deserves.’ Sister Dawkin reached for the teapot and replenished her own cup. ‘Well, I know I’m going to be sorry to go home,’ she said abruptly. ‘I hate this place, I’ve hated every place the army has sent me, but I’ve loved the work, and God, how I’ve loved the freedom!’

‘Yes, freedom is the right word, isn’t it? That’s what I’ve loved too… Do you remember that time in New Guinea when there was no one else fit to operate but you and me? I’ll never forget that as long as I live.’

‘We did all right, too, didn’t we?’ Sister Dawkin smiled, swelling visibly with pride. ‘Patched those boys up as if we’d got our FRCSs, and the boss recommended us for decoration. Ah! I’ll never wear any ribbon with more pride than my MBE.’

‘I am sorry it’s over,’ said Sister Langtry. ‘I’m going to loathe Civvy Street. Bedpan alley again, women patients again. Bitch bitch, moan moan… It would be just my luck to land on gynae or obstets. Men are so easy!’

‘Aren’t they? Catch women patients lending you a hand if the staff situation’s desperate! They’d rather be dead. When women hit a hospital they expect to be waited on hand and foot. But men pop on their halos and do their best to convince you that their wives never treated them the way nurses do.’