An Indecent Obsession (7 page)

Colonel Chinstrap heaved a huge, long-suffering sigh. ‘Oh, do get on with it, Sister!’

She continued without a tremor. ‘Michael is suspected of unsound mind following an unsavory incident in camp one week ago. A fight broke out between him and a noncommissioned officer, highly unusual behavior for both of them. Had others not been present to drag Michael away from the RSM, it appears the RSM would now be dead. Michael’s only comment since the incident was that he wanted to kill the man, and would have killed him. He has repeated this often, though he won’t enlarge upon it.

‘When the CO tried to find out what was at the bottom of it, Michael refused to answer. However, the RSM was very vociferous. He accused Michael of making homosexual advances to him, and insisted there be a court-martial. It appears Michael’s dead friend had definite homosexual leanings, but as to whether Michael himself was actively involved, opinion was strongly divided. The RSM and his followers maintained the two had been lovers, where the vast majority of men in the company maintained just as firmly that Michael’s attitude toward his dead friend was that of protector and friend only.

‘The battalion CO knew all three men very well, as they’d all been with the battalion a long time—Michael and the dead man since its inception, the RSM since New Guinea. And it was the CO’s opinion that under no circumstances should Michael come to court-martial. He preferred to believe that Michael had suffered a temporary derangement, and ordered Michael to submit to a medical examination, the results of which indicated he was definitely of unsound mind, whatever that might mean.’ Her voice was noticeably sadder, sterner. ‘So they bunged him on a plane and sent him here. The admitting officer automatically slotted him into X.’

Colonel Chinstrap pursed his lips together and watched Sister Langtry carefully. She was choosing sides again, a most regrettable habit of hers. ‘I’ll see Sergeant Wilson in my clinic in the morning. You can walk him down there yourself, Sister.’ He glanced up at the meager wattage of the light bulb in a naked socket over the desk. ‘I’ll look at his papers then. I don’t know how you can read anything in this light—I certainly could not.’ The chair became too hard, too uncomfortable; he rolled his buttocks on it, hemmed a little, frowned fiercely. ‘I loathe cases with a sexual connotation!’ he said suddenly.

Sister Langry was idly holding a pencil, and her hands closed around it convulsively.

‘My heart bleeds for you, sir,’ she said without any attempt to disguise the sarcasm. ‘Sergeant Wilson does not belong in X—in fact, he does not belong in any hospital ward of any kind.’ Her voice shook, she shoved an impatient hand into the front of her hair and slightly dislocated the set of its neat brown waves. ‘I think it’s a pretty poor show when a fight and a highly suspect accusation can break up a young man’s life, already greyed because his friend had died. I keep thinking of how he must feel at this moment. As if, I’m sure, he’s groping through some appalling fog he’s never going to manage to find his way out of. I’ve talked to him, you haven’t. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with him, mentally or sexually or any other way you care to think of. The medical officer responsible for his being sent here ought to be the one facing a court-martial! To deny Sergeant Wilson the opportunity to clear himself by whisking him off instead to a place like ward X is a disgrace to the army!’

As always, the colonel found himself unable to deal with this kind of adamant insolence, for normally men in hospital positions as high as his did not encounter it. Dammit, she talked to him as if she regarded herself as his educated and intellectual equal! Perhaps their officer status was what was wrong with these army nurses, that and the high degree of autonomy they enjoyed in places like Base Fifteen. And those stupid bloody veils nurses wore didn’t help, either. Only nuns ought to wear veils, only nuns ought to be addressed as sister.

‘Oh, come now, Sister!’ he said, holding onto his temper and trying to be reasonable. ‘I do agree that the circumstances are somewhat unusual, but the war’s over. The young man’s stay here cannot possibly be any longer than a few weeks. And he could be in worse predicaments than ward X, you know.’

The pencil flipped through the air, bounced onto the corner of the desk and fell with a hollow clatter just to one side of the colonel, who sat wondering whether her aim was good or bad. Strictly speaking, she ought to be reported to Matron; as head of nursing, Matron was the only officer permitted to discipline the nursing staff. But the trouble was that since the incident of the ravished uniform, Matron held Sister Langtry in considerable awe. Lord, what a fuss there would be if he complained!

‘Ward X is a limbo!’ cried Sister Langtry, more angry than he had ever seen her. His curiosity began to stir; Sergeant Michael Wilson’s plight had certainly had an extraordinary effect on her. It might be interesting to see him in the morning after all.

She continued, fuelling her anger on her own words. ‘Ward X is a limbo! The patients no one knows what else to do with are just filed under X and forgotten! You’re a neurologist. I’m a general-trained nurse. Not a whisker of experience or qualification between us. Do
you
know what to do with these men? I don’t, sir! I grope! I try my best, but I’m miserably aware that it’s nowhere near good enough. I come on duty every single morning praying—praying that I’ll manage to get through the day without crushing one of these frail and difficult people. My men in ward X deserve better than you or I can give, sir.’

‘That is quite enough. Sister!’ he said, a purplish tinge creeping under his skin.

‘Oh, but I’m not finished yet,’ she said, unimpressed, unswerving. ‘Shall we leave Sergeant Wilson entirely out of it, for example? Let’s look at the other five current inmates of ward X. Matt Sawyer was transferred here from neuro when they couldn’t find an organic lesion to account for his blindness. Diagnosis hysteria. You co-signed that one yourself. Nugget Jones was transferred from abdominothoracic after two NAD laparotomies and a history of driving the entire ward mad with his complaining. Diagnosis hypochondria. Neil—Captain Parkinson, that is—had a simple breakdown which one might better call grief. But his CO thinks he’s protecting him, so here Neil continues to sit, month after month. Diagnosis involutional melancholia. Benedict Maynard went quite mad after his company opened fire on a village in which it turned out there were no Japanese at all, just a lot of native women and children and old men. Because he sustained a mild scalp wound at the time his mental problems began, he was admitted to neuro as a concussion, and then transferred here. Diagnosis dementia praecox. I agree with that diagnosis, as a matter of fact. But it means Ben ought to be among the experts in Australia, receiving proper care and attention. And Luce Daggett, why exactly is he here? There’s no diagnosis of any kind on his papers! But we both know why he’s here. Because he was living the life of Riley, blackmailing his commanding officer into letting him do precisely whatever he wanted. But they couldn’t make the charge stick, and they didn’t know what else to do with him except to send him to a place like X until the shooting was all over.’

The colonel stumbled to his feet, crimson with suppressed rage. ‘You are impertinent, Sister!’

‘Do I sound impertinent? I beg your pardon, sir,’ she said, reverting to that unruffled calm which was usually her trademark.

His hand on the door, Colonel Chinstrap paused to look at her. ‘Ten in the morning in my clinic for Sergeant Wilson, and don’t forget to bring him yourself.’ His eyes glittered, he searched for something hurtful to say, a mot capable of penetrating that impregnable facade. ‘I do find it peculiar that Sergeant Wilson, an apparently exemplary soldier, highly decorated, consistently in the front line for six years, has managed to rise no higher in rank than sergeant.’

Sister Langtry smiled sweetly. ‘But, sir, we can’t
all
be great white chiefs! Someone has to do the dirty work.’

7

After the colonel had gone. Sister Langtry sat at her desk without moving, the slightly nauseating aftermath of her anger filming her brow and upper lip with a chill perspiration. Stupid, to rail at the man like that. It did no good, it simply revealed her inner feelings to him, when she preferred he remain ignorant of them. And where was the self-control which usually carried her victorious through her encounters with Colonel Chinstrap? A waste of time to talk to that man about ward X and its victims. She couldn’t ever remember being quite so angry with him. That pathetic history had started it, of course. If he had arrived a little later, given her time to get her emotions under control, she would not have lost her temper. But he had arrived scant seconds after she put Michael’s papers down.

Whoever the MO was who had written up Michael’s case—and she didn’t connect the signature with a face in memory—was no mean stylist. As she read his notes, the people involved had come alive. Especially Michael, alive for her already. That brief encounter in the ward had triggered lots of speculations, but none had rivalled the real story. How awful for the poor chap, and how unfair! How unhappy he must be. Without realizing what she was doing, as she read the history she wove her own emotions into the story it unfolded; she grieved so for Michael in the loss of his friend that she could hardly swallow for the lump in her throat, the pain in her chest. And then enter Colonel Chinstrap, who got the lot.

Ward X is getting to me, she thought; I’ve committed every sin in the nursing book these last few minutes, from unwarranted emotional involvement to gross insubordination.

But it was the memory of Michael’s face. He could cope, he was coping, even with the fact of his admission to ward X. Usually her griefs were for the inadequacies in her patients, yet here she was, quite overcome by the plight of a man who patently had no need of her support. There was a warning in that. One of her chief defenses against personal involvement with her patients was always to think of them as unwell, sad, frail, any condition which paled them as men. Not that she was frightened of men, or of personal involvement. Only that to give of her best, a good nurse had to remain detached. Not steeled against feeling emotion; steeled against an all-out woman-with-man relationship. It was bad enough when that happened in medical nursing, but with mentally disturbed patients it was disastrous. Neil had cost her much thought, and she still wasn’t sure she had done the right thing in allowing herself to contemplate seeing him when they returned home. She had told herself it was all right because he was so very nearly well now, because the existence of ward X was finite now, and because she could still command enough control of the situation to be able to think of him as poor, sad, frail, when it became necessary.

I am only human, she thought. I have never forgotten that, never! And it is so hard.

She sighed, stretched, pushed her thoughts away from Neil, and away from Michael. It was too soon to appear in the ward; her respiration and her color hadn’t returned to normal. The pencil—where had the pencil gone when she threw it at the colonel? How unbelievably dense that man could be! He didn’t know how close he came to bombardment by the rear end of a six-pounder shell when he came out with that remark about Michael’s lack of promotion. Where had the man been hiding for the last six years? Sister Langtry’s knowledge of other armies was sketchy, but after six years of nursing Australians, she was well aware that her country at least produced quite a few very special men—men who had intelligence, the gift of command, and all the other qualities associated with army officers, but who steadfastly refused promotion above the rank of sergeant. It probably had something to do with class consciousness, though by no means in a negative sense. As if they were content where they were, couldn’t see any point in acquiring additional rank. And if Michael Wilson didn’t belong to that special group of men, then her experience with soldiers had led to many more than this wrong conclusion.

Hadn’t anyone ever told the colonel about men like Michael? Hadn’t he managed to see it for himself? Very obviously not, unless he had simply seized at a straw in order to get under her skin. Colonel bloody Chinstrap. Those vowels of his were unbelievable, even more plummily rounded than Neil’s. Stupid to be so angry with him. Pity him instead. Base Fifteen was a long way from Macquarie Street after all, and he was nowhere near his dotage. He wasn’t bad-looking, and presumably under his pukka uniform he suffered from the same urgencies and importunities as other men. Rumor had it that he had been having an affair with Sister Heather Connolly from theatres for months. Well, most of the MOs had their little flutters, and who else was there to flutter with except the nurses? Good luck to him.

The pencil was under the far edge of the desk; she crawled under to retrieve it, put it where it belonged, and sat down again. What on earth would Heather Connolly talk to him about? Presumably they did talk. No one spent every moment with a lover in loving. As a peacetime practicing neurologist, Wallace Donaldson’s great interest had been an obscure set of spinal diseases with utterly unpronounceable hyphenated names; perhaps they talked about these, and mourned the lack of obscure spinal diseases in a hospital where when spines were treated it was for the gross, final, ghastly indignities inflicted by a bullet or shrapnel. Perhaps they talked about his wife, keeping the home fires burning in Vaucluse or Bellevue Hill. Men did tend to talk about their wives to their mistresses, like discussing the merits of one friend with another while simultaneously mourning the lack of opportunity to make them known to each other. Men were always so positive their wives and mistresses would be great friends could the social rules permit it. Well, that stood to reason. To think otherwise might reflect badly on their judgment and choice of women.

Her man had done that, she remembered all too painfully. Talked to her incessantly about his wife, deplored the fact that the conventions did not permit their meeting, sure they would adore each other. After his first three descriptive sentences about his wife, Honour Langtry had known she would loathe the woman. But she had far too much good sense to say so, naturally.