An Indecent Obsession (36 page)

‘No, Mummy, not a bit.’ Honour put the drawings on the floor beside her chair and lit a cigarette.

‘Still no sign of marriage?’ Faith asked.

‘No,’ said Honour, smiling.

‘Oh, well, it’s better to stay a spinster than to marry for the wrong reasons.’ This was said with a tongue-in-cheek demureness that made her daughter splutter into laughter.

‘I quite agree. Mummy.’

‘I suppose that means you’ll be going back to nursing?’

‘Yes.’

‘Prince Alfred again?’ Faith knew better than to ask if it was likely her daughter’s choice would fall on little Yass—Honour had always liked high-powered places of work.

‘No,’ said Honour, and paused, unwilling to go on.

‘Well, where then?’

‘I’m going to a place called Morisset to train as a mental nurse.’

Faith Langtry gaped. ‘You’re joking!’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘But—but that’s ridiculous! You’re a senior sister! You can go anywhere after the sort of experience you’ve had!
Mental nursing?
Good God, Honour, you might as well have applied to become a prison wardress! The pay’s better!’

Honour’s mouth set; her mother suddenly saw the best display yet of the power and determination which were so alien to her concepts of her daughter.

‘That’s one of the reasons why I’m doing mental nursing.’ she said. ‘For the last year and a half I’ve nursed men who were emotionally disturbed, and I found I liked that sort of work better than any other branch of nursing. People like me are
needed
—because people like you become horrified at the thought of it, among other reasons! Mental nurses have so little status it’s almost a stigma to be one, so if people like me don’t get into it, it will never move with the times. When I rang up the Department of Public Health to get some information about training as a mental nurse and said who and what I was, they thought I was some sort of crank! It took two trips in person to convince them that I, a senior nursing sister, was genuinely interested in becoming a mental nurse. Even the Department of Public Health, which administers all mental hospitals, thinks of it as becoming a madmen’s keeper!’

‘That’s exactly what you will be,’ said Faith.

‘When a patient enters a mental hospital he enters a world he will probably never leave,’ Honour tried to explain, her voice full of feeling. ‘The men I nursed weren’t as badly off as that, but there were still enough direct comparisons to make me see that people like me are needed.’

‘Honour, you sound as if you’re doing penance, or preaching conversion to some religion! Surely whatever happened to you during the war can’t have warped your judgment that much!’

‘I suppose I do sound as if I’m all fired up with a sense of mission,’ Honour said thoughtfully, lighting another cigarette. ‘But it isn’t so. Nor am I atoning for anything. But I
won
’
t
concede that to want passionately to do my bit to help lessen the plight of mental patients is an indication of mental instability on my part!’

‘All right, darling, all right,’ Faith soothed. ‘I was wrong to suggest anything of the kind. Now don’t get hot under the collar if I ask you whether you’re going to get anything concrete out of it, like another certificate?’

Honour laughed, her indignation dead. ‘I’m very much afraid I don’t get a thing out of it, Mummy. There’s no proper course of instruction, no certificate, no nothing. Even when I’m finished my training I won’t be a sister again. I’ll still be plain Nurse Langtry. However, when I’m put in charge of a ward I understand my title becomes Charge Nurse Langtry—“Charge” for short.’

‘How did you find all this out?’

‘I went to see the Matron of Callan Park. That was where originally I thought I’d go, but after we’d talked for a while she said she strongly advised me to go to Morisset instead. The teaching’s just as adequate, it seems, and the atmosphere’s a lot better.’

Faith got up and began to pace. ‘Morisset. That’s near Newcastle, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, the Sydney side of Newcastle. About sixty miles from Sydney, which means I’ll be able to pop off to Sydney when I need diversion, and I think I’m going to need all the diversion I can get. I’m not looking at this through rose-colored spectacles, you know. It’s going to be very hard, especially being a probationer again. But do you know, Mummy, I’d rather be a probationer and learning something new than stuck at P.A. as a senior sister, bowing and scraping to everyone from Matron to the HMOs to the Super, and having to leap some sort of rules and regulations hurdle every five minutes. I just couldn’t take the formality and the drivel after the sort of life I’ve led in the army.’

Faith reached out for Honour’s packet of cigarettes, took one and lit it.

‘Mummy! You’re smoking!’ said Honour, shocked.

Faith laughed until the tears came. ‘Oh, well, it’s comforting to know you still have some prejudices! I was starting to think I’d produced some sort of latter-day Sylvia Pankhurst. You smoke like a chimney. Why shouldn’t I?’

Honour got up, went to hug her. ‘You’re quite right. But do sit down and be comfortable about it! No matter how enlightened one thinks one is, one’s parents are always godlike. No human failings, no human appetites. I apologize.’

‘Accepted. Charlie smokes, Ian smokes, you smoke. I just decided I was being left out in the cold. I’ve taken to drink as well. I join Charlie in a whisky every night before dinner, and it’s very nice.’

‘Very civilized, too,’ said Honour, smiling.

‘Well, I just hope it all turns out as you hope, darling,’ Faith said, puffing away. ‘Though I confess I do rather wish you had never been posted to a troppo ward.’

Honour thought before she spoke, wanting her words to be telling. ‘Mummy, even to you I find I can’t talk about the things that happened to me while I was nursing troppo men, and I don’t think I ever will be able to talk about them. Not your fault, mine. But some things go too deep. They hurt too much. I’m not bottling them up, exactly. Just that no one could ever understand unless they knew the kind of world ward X was. And to try to explain with all the details I’d need to make you understand—I don’t have that kind of strength. It would kill me. And yet, this much I can tell you. I don’t know why I think so, but I do know that I’m not finished with ward X. There’s more of it to come. And if I’m a mental nurse, I’ll be better equipped to cope with what’s still to come.’

‘What could possibly come?’

‘I don’t know. I have some ideas, perhaps, but I don’t have any facts.’

Faith stubbed out her cigarette, got to her feet, and bent to kiss her daughter tenderly. ‘I’ll say good night, darling. It’s so good to have you home! We worried a lot when we didn’t know where you were exactly, or how close you were to the lines. After that sort of worry, mental nursing’s a sinecure.’

She went from Honour’s bedroom to her own, ruthlessly switched on the bedside lamp and flooded her sleeping husband’s face with light. He grimaced, grunted, and turned away from it. Leaving it on, she climbed into the bed and leaned heavily on Charlie’s shoulder, patting his cheek with one hand and shaking him with the other.

‘Charlie, if you don’t wake up, I’ll murder you!’ she said.

Opening his eyes, he sat up, running his fingers through his almost nonexistent hair and yawning. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, knowing her too well to be annoyed. Faith didn’t wake a man up for the fun of it.

‘It’s Honour,’ she said, her face crumpling. ‘Oh, Charlie. I didn’t realize it until just now, when I was talking to her in her room!’

‘Realize what?’ His voice sounded wide awake.

But she couldn’t tell him then, for the grief and the fear overcame her; she wept instead, long and bitterly.

‘She’s gone and she can never come back again,’ she said when she was able.

He stiffened. ‘She’s gone? Where?’

‘Not bodily. That’s still in her room. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you. It’s her soul I’m talking about, whatever it is keeps her going. Oh, God. Charlie, we’re such
babies
compared to her! It’s worse than having a nun for a daughter—at least if your daughter’s a nun you know she’s safe, the world hasn’t touched her. But Honour’s got the footprints of the world all over her. And yet she’s somehow bigger than the world. I don’t know what I’m saying, it isn’t right, you’ll have to talk to her and watch her for yourself to see what I mean. I took up smoking and drinking, but I think Honour took up all the cares of the world, and that’s unbearable. You don’t want your children to have to suffer like that.’

‘It’s the war,’ said Charlie Langtry. ‘We oughtn’t to have let her go.’

‘She never even asked us for permission, Charlie. Why should she? She was twenty-five when she joined up. A grown woman, I thought then, old enough to survive it. Yes, it’s the war.’

2

So Sister Langtry doffed her veil, donned a cap and became Nurse Langtry at the Morisset mental hospital. A huge rambling place of many buildings scattered over many acres, it lay in some of the loveliest country to be found anywhere: sea lakes to form a part of its boundaries, wild mountains behind it smothered in rain forest, fertile placid flatlands, and the coastal surfing beaches not far away.

At first her situation was a little awkward, for no one at Morisset had ever heard of a general-trained sister giving up all that her career had gained for her to become a mental-nursing trainee. Many of her fellow trainees were at least as old as she was, some had been in the armed services during the war even, since mental nursing tended to attract women rather than girls, but her peculiar status set her apart. Everyone knew that Matron had told her she would be permitted to sit the charge nurses’ examination at the end of two years instead of three, and everyone knew that Matron not only respected but esteemed her. Gossip said she had done arduous nursing during the war, for which she had been made an MBE, and gossip it remained, for Nurse Langtry made no reference to those years whatsoever.

It took her six months to show everyone she was not doing penance, was not snooping on behalf of some mysterious agency in Sydney, or was not a little mental herself. And at the end of those six months she knew she was very well liked by the charge nurses, for she worked hard and with superb efficiency, was never sick, and proved on countless occasions that her general nursing training could be a godsend in a place like Morisset, where the handful of doctors could not possibly keep an eye on every patient to detect the physical maladies which tended to compound the mental state. Nurse Langtry could spot an incipient pneumonia, knew how to treat it, and had a knack for transmitting her knowledge to others. She could spot herpes, tuberculosis, acute abdomens, inner and middle ear infections, tonsillitis and most of the other complaints which occasionally struck at the patients. She could also tell a sprain from a break, a cold from hay fever, a migraine from a tension headache. It made her very valuable.

The work was gruelling. There were two shifts only, day duty from 6:30
A
.
M
. to 6:30
P
.
M
., and night duty, which covered the other twelve hours. Most wards contained between sixty and a hundred and twenty patients, had no domestic staff whatsoever, and only three or four nurses including the charge nurse. Every patient had to be bathed daily, though most wards owned only one plunge bath and one shower. All cleaning duties from the washing of walls and light fixtures to the polishing of floors were the sole responsibility of the nursing staff. The hot water was supplied to each ward by a coke-fired boiler which the nurses had to stoke. The nurses cared for the patients’ clothes, from laundering to mending. Though the food was cooked in a central kitchen, it was delivered to each ward in bulk, which meant it had to be reheated, then portioned or carved by the nurses, who often had to cook the dessert and the vegetables in the ward as well. All the dishes, cutlery, pots and pans were washed in the ward. Patients on special diets had their food prepared by the nurses on the ward, for there was no such thing as a diet kitchen, no dieticians either.

No matter how hard or how long they were prepared to work, three or four nurses without domestic help looking after a minimum of sixty patients, often double that number, could never have hoped to complete all that had to be done. So, as at Base Fifteen, the patients worked too. Jobs were highly prized, and the first thing a new nurse learned was not to interfere in any way with any patient’s job. When trouble broke out it was usually because one patient had stolen another’s job, or made the execution of a job intolerable. The jobs were done well, and there was a strict patient hierarchy which depended upon patient usefulness, and patient pride. The floors always shone like glass, the wards were spotless, the bathing facilities and kitchens sparkled.

Contrary to popular opinion about mental hospitals, and perhaps fairly peculiar to Morisset, there was a lot of love. Everything possible to create a homelike atmosphere was done, and the vast majority of nurses cared about their patients. The staff was a part of the same community as the patients; indeed, there were whole families—mother, father, grown-up children—all employed and living at Morisset, so that to many of the staff the hospital was a genuine home, and meant what any genuine home means.

Social life was quite active, and of great interest to patients and staff alike. Pictures were screened in the hall every Monday night for patients and staff together; there were frequent concerts in which patients and staff participated as well as formed the enthusiastic audience; once a month a dance was held, followed by a lavish and delicious supper. At the dances the male patients sat along one wall, the female along the opposite wall, and when a dance was announced the males would dart across the floor to grab their favorite partners. The staff were expected to dance too, but only with patients.

All the wards were locked, and male patients were kept in separate buildings from females; before and after the social functions where the two sexes were permitted to mix, a careful count of patients was always performed. Female patients were nursed by female staff, male patients by males only.