An Indecent Obsession

by Colleen McCullough

  He wasn’t going to like Luce, but then probably no one ever did like Luce. As with Nugget, there was nothing about him which suggested he had ever seen battle action. On no one would Michael have wished battle action, but the men who had seen it were different, and not in terms of courage, resolution, strength. Action couldn’t manufacture these qualities if they weren’t there, couldn’t destroy them if they were. Its horror went far deeper than that, was far more complex. Looking death in the eye, weighing up the importance of living. Showing a man the randomness of his own death. Making a man realize how selfish he was, to thank his lucky stars the bullet had every name on it save his own. The dependence on superstition. The anguish and self-torment after each action was over because at the time a man became an animal to himself, a statistic to those in control of his military destiny…

  Neil was talking; Michael forced himself to listen, for Neil was a person to respect. He’d had a very long war. His garb was desert, and he bore himself like a real soldier.

  ‘…so as far as I can gather, we’ve got about eight more weeks,’ Neil was saying; Michael had been half listening, and understood that Neil was referring to the duration of ward X.

  Fascinated, he directed his eyes from one face to another, his mind assimilating the discovery that the news of an imminent return home dismayed them. Blind Matt actually shivered in dread! They’re a rum lot, all right, he thought, remembering Sister Langtry’s saying they were frightened to go home.

  Sister Langtry… It was a very long time since he had had anything to do with women, so he wasn’t quite sure how he felt about her. The war had turned things topsy-turvy; he found it hard to conceive of women in authority, women with a kind of confidence he never remembered their owning before the war. For all her kindness and her interest, she was used to being the boss, and she felt no discomfort in exercising her authority over men. Nor, to give her credit, did she appear to relish that authority. No dragon, Langtry, even a young one. But he found it awkward to deal with a woman who calmly assumed they spoke the same language, thought the same thoughts; he couldn’t even reassure himself he had seen more of the war than she, for it was likely that she had spent a considerable part of it under fire herself. She wore the silver pips of a captain in the nursing corps, which was a fairly high rank.

  The men of ward X adored her; when she had first led him out onto the verandah he was immediately aware of the resentment in them, the wary bristling assessment of committed owners for a potential shareholder. That reaction of theirs, he decided, was the reason for their display of crotchety lunacy. Well, they needn’t worry. If Neil was right, it seemed none of them would be here long enough to be obliged to readjust the pecking order on his behalf. All he wanted was to be rid of the war, the army, every last memory of the six years coming to a close.

  And though he had welcomed the idea of a transfer to Base Fifteen, he didn’t relish the idea of spending the next couple of months lying idle round a ward; too much time to think, too much time to remember. He was well, he had full command of his mental faculties; he knew it, and so did the blokes who had been responsible for sending him here. But as for these poor bastards in ward X, they suffered; he could see it in their faces, hear it in their voices. In time he could come to learn why, how. In the interim it was enough to understand they were all troppo, or had been troppo. The least he could do was to make himself useful.

  So when the last man had finished with his pudding. Michael rose to his feet and collected the dirty enamel dishes, then made himself familiar with the lay of the land in the dayroom.

  4

  At least six times a day Sister Langtry crossed the compound between the nurses’ quarters and ward X, the last two of her trips being after nightfall. During the day she enjoyed the opportunity to stretch her legs, but she had never felt at ease in the dark; in childhood she had actively feared it and refused to sleep in a room without a night light, though of course she had long since cultivated sufficient self-control to be able to cope with such an idiotic, groundless terror. Still, while she walked the compound after dark she used the time to think about some concrete idea, and lit her way with an electric torch. Otherwise the shadows menaced too tangibly.

  On the day of Michael Wilson’s admission to X, she had left the ward when the men sat down to dinner, to walk back to the mess for her own dinner. Now, the beam of her torch projecting a steady dot of light onto the path in front of her, she was returning to X for what she regarded as the most pleasant tenure of each day, that slice of time between her own evening meal break and lights out in the ward. Tonight she particularly looked forward to it; a new patient always added interest, and sharpened her wits.

  She was thinking about different kinds of pain. It seemed very long ago that she had railed at Matron because of her posting to ward X, protested angrily to that adamant lady that she had no experience with mental patients and indeed felt antagonistic toward them. At the time it had appeared as a punishment, a slap in the face from the army as all the thanks she got for those years in casualty clearing stations. That had been another life—tents, earthen floors, dust in the dry and mud in the wet, trying to keep healthy and fit for nursing duty when the climate and the conditions ground one down remorselessly. It had been a battering ram of horror and pain, it had lasted for weeks on end and stretched across years. But the pain had been different then. Funny, you could weep your heart out over an armless man, a sticky mass of entrails spilling everywhere, a heart suddenly as cold and still as a piece of meat in an ice chest; yet they were physical faits accomplis. Over and done with. You patched up what you could, mourned what you could not, and proceeded to forget while you moved always onward.

  Whereas the X pain was a suffering of the spirit and the mind, not understood, often derided or dismissed. She herself had regarded her posting to X as an insult to her nursing ability and her years of loyal service. She knew now why she had felt so insulted. Bodily pain, physical maiming in the course of duty, had a tendency to bring out the best in those who suffered it. It had been the heroism, the downright nobility, which had come close to breaking her during those years in casualty clearing stations. But there was nothing noble about a nervous breakdown; it was a flaw, evidence of a weakness in character.

  In that frame of mind had she come to ward X, tight-lipped with resentment, almost wishing she could hate her patients. Only the completeness of her nursing ethic and the scrupulousness of her attention to duty had saved her from closing her mind against any change in her own attitude. A patient was a patient after all, a mind in need as much a reality as a body in need. Determined no one would be able to accuse her of dereliction, she got herself through the first few days on ward X.

  But what turned Honour Langtry from a caring custodian into someone who cared far too much to limit her role to mere custodian was the realization that at Base Fifteen no one was interested in the men in ward X. There were never very many X-type patients in a hospital like Base Fifteen, which had started off its existence much too close to the actual fighting to gear itself toward troppo-ness. Most of the men who wound up in ward X were transferred there from one of the other wards, like Nugget, Matt and Benedict. Severe cases of psychic disturbance were mostly shipped straight back to Australia; those who came toward X were less disturbed, more stealthy in their symptoms. The army had few psychiatrists, none of whom were attached to places like Base Fifteen, at least in Sister Langtry’s experience.

  Since there was little or no real nursing for her to do, she began to apply her considerable intelligence and that boundless energy which had made her such a good medical nurse to the problem of what she called the X pain. And told herself that to recognize what the men of X suffered as a genuine pain was the beginning of a whole new nursing experience.

  The X pain was travail of the mind as distinct from the brain; amorphous and insidious, it was based in abstractions. But it was no less an entity, no less the ruin of an otherwise sound organism than any physical pain o
r handicap. It was futile, ominous, uneasy and empty; its malaise was enormous, its effect far longer-lasting than physical hurt. And less was known about it than almost all other branches of medicine.

  She discovered in herself a passionate, partisan interest in the patients who passed through ward X, was fascinated by their endless variety, and discovered, too, a talent in herself for actively helping them through the worst of their pain. Of course she had failures; being a good nurse meant one accepted that, provided one knew one had tried everything one could think of. But unschooled and ignorant though she knew herself to be, she also knew that her presence in ward X had made a great deal of difference to the well-being of most of her patients.

  She had learned that the expenditure of nervous energy could be more draining by far than the most gruelling of physical work; she had learned to pace herself differently, to cultivate huge reserves of patience. And understanding. Even after she got over her mild prejudices against those character weaknesses she had to cope with what seemed a total self-centeredness in her patients. To someone whose adult life to date had been devoted to a busy, happy and largely altruistic selflessness, it came hard to realize that the apparent self-orientation of her patients was only evidence of lack of self. Most of what she learned was through personal experience, for there was no one to teach her, and little to read. But Honour Langtry was truly a born nurse; she battled on, stimulated, absorbed, quite in love with this different kind of nursing.

  Often for far longer than she hoped or expected, there was no tangible evidence that she had reached a patient. Often the breakthrough when it came made her wonder if anything she had done personally had actually contributed. Yet she knew she helped. Had she doubted that for one moment, she would have wangled herself a transfer months ago.

  X is a trap she thought, and I’m in it. What’s more, I enjoy being in it.

  When the beam of the torch slid onto the beginning of the ramp, she turned it off and walked up its wooden length as quietly as her booted feet would permit.

  Her office was the first door on the left down the corridor, a six-by-six cubbyhole which two louvered exterior walls saved from a submarine-like horror. It barely held the small table she used as a desk, her chair on one side, a visitor’s chair on the other, and a small L-shaped area of plank shelving plus two lockable wooden drawers which she referred to as her filing cabinet. In the top drawer resided the paper shells of all the men who had been inmates of ward X since its inception, not very many files altogether; she had kept carbon copies of the men who had been discharged from the ward. In the second drawer she kept the few drugs Matron and Colonel Chinstrap deemed necessary for her to have on hand—oral paraldehyde and paraldehyde for injection, phenobarb, morphine, mist APC, pot cit, milk of magnesia, mist creta et opii, castor oil, chloral hydrate, sterile water, placebos, and a large bottle of Chateau Tanunda three-star hospital brandy.

  Sister Langtry took off her slouch hat, her gaiters and her army boots, and stacked them very neatly behind the door, then tucked the little wicker basket in which she carried her few personal requirements while on duty beneath her desk and put on her sandshoes. Since Base Fifteen was in an officially designated malarial zone, all personnel were obliged after dark to clothe themselves from wrists to neck to toes, which in a miserable heat made life just that bit more miserable. In actual fact, copious spraying with DDT for miles around had rendered the anopheles threat almost nonexistent, but the rule about after-dark apparel still held. Some of the more emancipated nurses wore their grey bush jackets and long trousers during the day as well as after nightfall, vowing that skirts had never been so comfortable. But those like Honour Langtry who had spent most of the war in casualty clearing stations where trousers were mandatory preferred amid the relative luxury of Base Fifteen to wear a more feminine uniform when they could.

  Besides, Sister Langtry had a theory. That it did her patients good to see a woman in a dress rather than in a uniform akin to their own. She also had a theory about noise, removed her own boots when she entered the ward after dark, and forbade the men to wear boots indoors.

  On the wall behind the visitor’s chair a collection of pencil portraits was pinned, about fifteen in all: Neil’s record of the men who had passed through ward X in his time, or were still residents of ward X. When she looked up from her work she stared straight at that most revealing pictorial record; as a man moved on elsewhere his sketch was removed from the central row and placed more peripherally on the wall. At the moment there were five faces in the central row, but there was more than enough room for a sixth. The trouble was she hadn’t counted on a sixth face appearing, not with time for Base Fifteen rapidly dwindling, the war over, the sound of the guns stilled. Yet today Michael had arrived, a fresh subject for Neil’s piercing eye. She wondered what Neil would see in Michael, found herself looking forward to the day when the result of that eye would be pinned up opposite her.

  She sat down in her chair and put her chin on her hand, staring at the central row of drawings.

  They’re mine, she caught herself thinking complacently, and pulled herself sharply away from that most dangerous concept. Self, she had discovered since being in X, was an unwelcome intruder, of no help to the patients. After all, she was, if not the arbiter of their final destinies, at least the fulcrum of their sojourns in X. In that lay considerable power, for the balance of X was a very delicate thing, and she was the one who stood at the point where it could tip either way, ready to shift her weight as needed. She tried always to respect her power by not using it and not dwelling upon it. But just occasionally, as now, awareness that she did possess it popped into consciousness and stared her a little too smugly in the eye. Dangerous! A good nurse should never develop a sense of mission, nor delude herself that she was the direct cause of her patients’ recovery. Mental or physical, recovery came from within the patients.

  Activity was what she needed. She got up, unearthed the tape which pinned her keys to the inside of her trouser pocket and pulled it through her hands until she came at the key for the top drawer, unlocked it and took out Michael’s case history.

  5

  When Neil Parkinson came in on the echo of his knock she was getting herself settled back in her chair, the papers still unopened on the desk in front of her. He sat down in the visitor’s chair and looked at her gravely. She, taking his look for granted, merely smiled and waited.

  But the eyes she took for granted never gazed on her with the blinded ease of a friendly liking; they took her apart and put her back together again at each meeting, not in any lascivious sense, but as a delighted small boy might dissect the mystery of his most treasured toy. The novelty in discovering her had never left him, and he took fresh pleasure in it every evening when he came to her office to sit with her and chat in private.

  Not that she was any raving beauty, or could substitute sensuality for beauty. She did have youth and the advantage of a particularly lovely skin, so clear the veins showed under it smokily, though atabrine yellow marred it now. Her features were regular, a little on the small side save for her eyes, which were the same soft brown as her hair, large and tranquil unless she was angry, when they snapped fiercely. She had a born nurse’s figure, neat but sadly flat-chested, with very good legs, long, slender yet well-muscled, fine in the feet and ankles; all this the result of constant movement and much hard work. During daylight hours when she wore a dress, the white crisp folds of her nurse’s veil formed a charming frame for her face; at night when trousered, she wore a slouch hat to and from duty, but went bareheaded within the ward. Her short, wavy hair she kept that way by trading off a part of her generous nurses’ liquor allowance in return for a cut, shampoo and set from a QM corporal who had been a hairdresser in civilian life and did the nurses’ hair upon request.

  That was her surface. Underneath she was as tough as annealed metal, intelligent, very well read in a posh girls’ school way, and shrewd. She had decision, she was crisp, and for all her kindness
and understanding she was clinically detached in some core of her. She belonged to them, she had committed herself to them, these patients of hers, yet whatever it was that lay at the center of her being she always held back from them. Maddening, but probably a part of the secret of her attraction for Neil.

  It couldn’t have been easy, finding the lightest and deftest touch in dealing with soldiers to whom she was a restatement of that almost forgotten race, women. Yet she had managed it beautifully, never given one of them the slightest indication of sexual interest, romantic interest, call it what you would. Her title was Sister, they called her Sis, and that was how she always presented herself—as a sister to them, someone who was extremely fond while not willing to share all of her private self.

  However, between Neil Parkinson and Honour Langtry there existed an understanding. It had never been discussed nor indeed even so much as openly mentioned, but they both knew that when the war was over and they were back on Civvy Street he would pursue his relationship with her, and she would welcome that pursuit.

  They were both from the very best homes, had been brought up with an exquisite appreciation of the nuances duty scarcely began to define, so that to each of them it was inconceivable that personal matters should claim precedence over what was owed to duty. At the time they met, the war had dictated a strictly professional kind of relationship, to which they would adhere strictly; but after the war circumspection could be abandoned.

  To that prospect Neil clung, looking forward to it with something more painful than eagerness; what he dreamed of was virtually the rounding out of his life, for he loved her very much. He was not as strong as she, or perhaps it was simply that his passions were more involved than hers, for he found it difficult to keep their relationship within the bounds she laid down. His minor infringements were never more than glances or remarks; the idea of touching her intimately or kissing her appalled him, for he knew were he to do so, she would send him packing on the spot, patient or no. The admission of women to wartime front conditions had been reluctant, and was largely limited to nurses; to Honour Langtry, the army had placed her in a position of trust which could not permit an emotionally draining intimate relationship with a man who was patient as well as soldier.