An Indecent Obsession

by Colleen McCullough

  ‘Sis, do you count me your friend? I mean someone really on your side, with you all the way?’

  ‘Of course I do! You don’t have to ask me that.’

  ‘Is it really Luce who’s troubling you, or is it Mike? I’ve known and suffered Luce for over three months without feeling the way I do at the moment—ever since Michael arrived, as a matter of fact. In just two weeks this place seems to have turned into an unstable boiler. I keep waiting from minute to minute for it to explode, but so far it keeps seething up into the danger zone and flopping again. To wait for something to explode that you know must explode is a most unsettling feeling. Like being back under fire.’

  I knew you were a bit down on Michael, but I didn’t realize it went so deep,’ she said, tight-lipped.

  ‘I am not down on Michael! He’s a splendid chap. But Michael is the difference. Not Luce. Michael.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous! How could Michael make everything different? He’s so—so quiet!’

  Well, here goes nothing, he thought, watching her carefully. Did she know what was happening to her, to him, to all of them?

  ‘Perhaps because you’re different. Since Michael came,’ he said steadily. ‘You must surely realize that we tend to take our moods and attitudes from you, even Luce. And since Michael came you are a very different person—different moods, different attitudes.’

  Oh, God. Keep your face straight, Sister Langtry, don’t let it give away a thing. It didn’t; it looked at him with an almost polite interest, smooth and calm and impassive. Behind it her brain raced to cope with all the implications of this interview, and to formulate a behavior pattern which would if not pacify Neil, at least seem logical to him. Given what he knew of her, and he had just made her realize that he knew her better than she suspected. Everything he said was true, but she couldn’t admit as much to him; she was too aware of his frailty, his dependence upon her. And damn him for trying to force an issue with her that she hadn’t managed to sort out yet in her own mind!

  ‘I’m tired, Neil,’ she said, her face suddenly showing all the strain of the long difficult day. ‘It’s just gone on too long. Or I’m proving too weak. I don’t know. I wish I did know.’ She wet her lips. ‘Don’t blame it all on Michael, please. It’s far too complicated to deserve a simplification like that. If I’m different, it’s because of things inside me. We’re coming to an end, something else is about to begin. I think I’m preparing for that, and I think all of you are, too. And I’m so tired. Don’t make it any harder, please. Just support me.’

  Something extraordinary was happening to Neil; he could actually physically feel it while he sat listening to an Honour Langtry who almost admitted defeat. As if in seeing her brought low his own inner resources were growing. As if he fed on her. And that was it, he thought exultantly; she was suddenly as human as he, a person with limits to her energies and endurance, and therefore fallible. To see her thus was to understand his own strengths instead of being forever paled by hers.

  ‘When I first met you,’ he said slowly, ‘I thought you were made of solid iron. Everything I didn’t have, you had. Lose a few men in a fight? You’d grieve for that, yes, but it wouldn’t put you in a place like X. Nothing in the whole wide world could put you in a place like X. And I suppose at the time you were what I needed. If I hadn’t needed that, you couldn’t have helped, and you did help. Enormously. I don’t want you to crack now. I’ll do everything in my power to stop you cracking. But it’s so nice to feel the balance tip a little bit my way for a change!’

  ‘I understand that,’ she said, smiling. But then she sighed. ‘Oh, Neil… I am sorry. I really do feel a bit under the weather, you know. Not that I’m pleading it as an excuse. I’m not. You’re quite right about my moods and attitudes. But I can deal with them.’

  ‘Just why is Michael in X?’ he asked.

  ‘You know better than to ask me that!’ she said, astonished. ‘I can’t discuss one patient with another!’

  ‘Unless he’s named Benedict or Luce.’ He shrugged. ‘Oh, well, it was worth a try. I didn’t ask from idle curiosity. He’s a dangerous man. He’s got so much integrity!’ The moment it was out he regretted saying it, not wishing to see her draw away when she had suddenly come so close to him.

  However, she didn’t recoil or become defensive, though she did get to her feet. ‘It’s high time I put in an appearance on the ward. Which is not a dismissal, Neil. I have too much to thank you for.’ At the door she stopped to wait for him. ‘I agree with you, Michael is a dangerous man. But so are you, and so is Luce—and Ben, for that matter. In different ways, perhaps, but yes—you’re all dangerous.’

  5

  She left the ward a little earlier than usual that night, declining Neil’s offer of an escort, and walked to her room slowly. Awful, not to have anyone to turn to. If she tried to talk to Colonel Chinstrap he’d mark her down for a mental examination herself, while as for Matron… There was no one she felt she could turn to, even among her nursing friends, for the dearest of them had gone when Base Fifteen partially closed down.

  This had been the most disastrous day of her entire life, a shattering series of encounters which tormented, confused, worried and wearied her. Michael, Luce, Neil and herself, twisting and turning and popping in and out of focus like the images in those fun-parlor mirrors which reduced familiar forms to grotesqueries.

  Probably there was a logical explanation for most of what she saw—or thought she saw—in the dayroom. Her instincts about Michael pointed her one way, his conduct in the dayroom and some of his statements to her another. Why hadn’t he just shoved Luce away, even knocked him down? Why stand there like a ninny for what seemed like hours, letting that horrible physical presence dominate him? Because the last time he shoved someone away a lethal fight ensued and he wound up in X? That could very possibly be, though she didn’t know for sure if that was the way the lethal fight had ensued. His papers weren’t specific, and he said nothing. Why did he stand there letting Luce paw him? Surely he could simply have walked out! When he saw her standing watching there had been shame and disgust in his eyes, and after that he closed himself away from her completely. None of it made any sense at all.

  The sound of Luce whispering. I’m anything, anything you like to name… Young, old, male, female—it’s all meat to me… I’m the best there is… I’m even a little bit of God… Despite her personal and her nursing experience, it had never occurred to her that people like Luce existed, people who could gear themselves to permit sexual functioning on any level, purely as an expedient. How had Luce become what he was? Just to imagine the amount of pain necessary to create a Luce frightened her. He had so much, looks and brains and health and youth. And yet he had nothing, nothing at all. He was an emptiness.

  Neil in the driver’s seat, wringing admissions out of her she hadn’t had time to understand fully herself. In her quite long and close acquaintance with Neil she had never thought of him as an innately strong man, but clearly he was. A hard man. Heaven help you if he didn’t love you, or you did something to turn that love back in upon itself. Those gentle blue eyes had gleamed like two chips of lapis.

  The shock of her own enormous, involuntary response to Michael, a weakness and a leaping that were there before she even knew. She had never felt like that in her life before, not in the wildest throes of what she had thought a complete love. If Michael had kissed her, she would have dragged him down onto the floor and had him then and there like a bitch on heat…

  Once in her room, she looked at the top drawer of the bureau longingly, but made herself leave the bottle of Nembutal untouched. Earlier in the day its employment had been absolutely necessary; she knew that if she spent the afternoon awake, nothing on earth would ever have forced her to go back to X. Shock treatment. But she was over the shock now, even if there had been plenty of fresh ones since. She had done her duty and gone back to X, back to the nightmare X had become.

  Neil was right, of course. The change was
in her, it was due to Michael, and it was affecting all of them badly. Fool, not to have realized that her presentiment of trouble had nothing to do with the ward or her patients per se; it started and it ended within herself. Therefore it had to stop. It had to stop! It had to, it had to, it had to, it had to. Oh, God, I’m mad. I’m as insane as any man who ever passed through X, and where do I go from here? Where, God, where?

  There was a stain on the floorboards in the corner where she had once spilled the only container of lighter fluid she owned. At the time it had upset her, she remembered. Now the stain sat there, an unsightly memento of clumsiness.

  Sister Langtry fetched a bucket and a brush, got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed the patch until the wood began to look white. Then the rest of the floor seemed dirty by comparison, so she moved on, piece by piece, until all of the floor was wet, clean, bleached. But it had made her feel better. Better than the Nembutal. And she was tired enough to sleep.

  6

  ‘I tell you there is something wrong with her!’ Nugget insisted, and shivered. ‘Christ, I feel crook!’ He coughed from the bottom of his lungs, hawked, spat with stunning accuracy at a palm trunk over Matt’s shoulder.

  All six of them were squatting on the beach, naked, formed into a circle; from far enough away they looked like a ring of small standing stones, brown and quiet and put there intentionally at the bidding of some oracle or ritual. It was a perfect day, hovering between warmth and heat, and free from humidity. But in spite of the alluring weather their backs were turned on sea, sand and palms. They were looking inward at themselves.

  Sister Langtry was the subject under discussion. Neil had called a council, and they were hard at it. Matt, Benedict and Luce felt that she was physically a bit under the weather but otherwise all right; Nugget and Neil thought something was radically wrong; and Michael, to Neil’s fury, kept abstaining every time his opinion was asked.

  How many of us are being honest? wondered Neil. We toss our theories back and forth about everything from dermo to malaria to women’s troubles as if we really do believe it’s only her body ailing. And I for one am not game to suggest a different cause than body. I wish I could crack Michael, but so far I haven’t even opened up a cranny. He doesn’t love her! I love her, he doesn’t. Is that right or fair when she can’t see me for him? Why doesn’t he love her? I could kill him for what he’s doing to her.

  The discussion didn’t rage, it jerked along punctuated by lengthy silences, for they were all afraid. She mattered so much, and they had never before had occasion to worry about her for any reason. The one unshakable rock in their uncertain sea, to which they had tethered themselves and ridden out their storms to eventual calm. The metaphors were endless: their beacon, their madonna, their rock, their hearth, their succor. For each of them had special memories and concepts of her, special only to himself, an absolutely individual reason for loving her.

  To Nugget she was the only person other than his mother who had ever cared enough for him to worry about his precarious health. Transferred from abdominothoracic to ward X amid grateful cheers from the whole crew he was leaving, he was carried out of a busy, smelly, noisy world wherein no one ever had time to listen to him, and so had forced him to keep his voice insistently raised, demanding attention. He was sick, but they just wouldn’t believe it. When he arrived in X he had a headache, admittedly not one of his migraines, but a thumping protest against muscular tension which at the time he had felt was just as bad as a migraine in a different way. And she had sat on the side of his bed and listened raptly while he described the exact nature of his pain, interested and concerned for him. The more lyrical he waxed about his pain, the more impressed and sympathetic she became. Cold towels were produced, a battery of little pills of different kinds displayed—and the bliss of being able to discuss sensibly with her the problems involved in choosing the most suitable medication for this particular headache as distinct from all the other headaches he had ever had… Of course he knew it was her technique; no fool, Nugget. The diagnosis on his history didn’t change, either. But she really did care about him, for she devoted her precious time to him, and that to Nugget was the only criterion for caring. She was so pretty, so complete a person; and yet she always looked at him as if he mattered to her.

  Benedict saw her as infinitely superior to all other women, distinguishing as always between women and girls. Females were born one or the other, they didn’t change. Girls he found disgusting; they laughed at how he looked, they teased as cruelly and deliberately as cats. Women on the other hand were calm creatures, the guardians of the race, beloved of God. Men might kill and maim and fornicate, girls might tear the world apart, but women were life and light. And Sister Langtry was the most perfect of all women; he never saw her without wanting to wash her feet, die for her if necessary. And he tried never to think of her dirtily, feeling this as a betrayal, but sometimes in his unruly dreams she walked unbidden amid breasts and hairy places, and that alone was more than enough to convince him that he was unworthy to look upon her. He could atone only if he found the answer, and somehow he always felt that God had put Sister Langtry into his life to show him the answer. It still eluded him, but with her he lost his differences, he felt as if he belonged. Michael gave him the same sort of feeling; since Michael’s arrival he had come to think of Sister Langtry and Michael as one person, indivisible, surpassingly good and kind.

  Whereas the rest of ward X was like the rest of the world, a series of things. Nugget was a weasel, a stoat, a ferret, a rat. He knew it was silly to imagine that were Nugget to grow a beard he would grow rodent whiskers, but he did imagine it, and whenever he saw Nugget in the bathhouse shaving he worried, longed to urge him to borrow a Bengal and shave even closer, because those whiskers were lurking just beneath his skin. Matt was a lump, worry bead, a dull stone, an eyeball, a currant, an octopus turned inside out with all its tentacles chopped off, a single tear, all those round smooth opaque things, for tears were opaque too, they led from nowhere to nowhere. Neil was an old mountainside gouged deep by rain, a fluted column, two boards that fitted tongue in groove, the marks of anguished fingers down a pillar of clay, a sleeping seed pod that could not open, because God had stuck its edges together with celestial glue and was laughing at Neil, laughing! Luce was Benedict, the Benedict God would have fashioned had Benedict been more pleasing to Him; light and life and song. And yet Luce was evil, a treason to God, an insult to God, an inversion of intent. Luce being so, what did that make Benedict?

  Neil was very worried. She was slipping away, and that could not be borne. Not at any price. Not now that he was finally beginning to understand himself, to see how like he was after all to the old man in Melbourne. He was growing in his power and enjoying the process. How odd, that it had taken a Michael to hold up the mirror in which he saw himself properly for the first time. Life could be cruel. To come to know himself through the offices of one who simultaneously was removing the reason why he was so anxious to know all about himself… Honour Langtry belonged to Neil Parkinson, and he was not going to let her go. There had to be a way to bring her back. There had to be!

  To Matt she was a link with home, a voice in the darkness more dear to him than all other voices. He knew he would never physically see his home again, and at night he lay trying to remember what his wife’s voice sounded like, the thin bells of his daughters’ voices, but he could not. Where Sister Langtry’s voice was cemented within the cells of the brain he knew was dying, the only echo which came to him of other times and other places, as if in her they had crystallized. Though his love for her was quite devoid of desire for her body. To him who had never seen her, she had no body. Somehow he didn’t have the strength for bodies any longer, not even in his imagination. Meeting Ursula again was a terrifying thought, for he knew she would expect him to summon up a desire he did not have any more. The very idea of groping across and through and down his wife revolted him; like a snail or a python or a drift of seaweed, wrap
ping himself aimlessly around a chance obstacle. For Ursula belonged to a world he had seen, where Sister Langtry was the light in his darkness. No face, no body. Just the purity of pure light.

  Luce was trying not to think of her at all. He could not bear to think of her, because every time she popped into his brain she had that look of nauseated rejection on her face. What on earth was the matter with the woman? Couldn’t she just take one look at him and see what he would be like? All he wanted from her was the chance to prove to her what she was missing in ignoring him, and for once he just didn’t know how to go about persuading a woman to try. It was usually so easy! He didn’t understand. But he hated her. He wanted to pay her back for that look, that disgust, that adamant rejection. So instead of thinking about Langtry he thought about the details of the exquisite revenge he was going to take; and somehow every idea ended in a vision of Langtry kneeling at his feet, admitting she was wrong, begging for another chance with him.

  Michael didn’t know her yet, but the beginnings of a pleasure in learning to know her were stirring in him, which brought him no pleasure at all. Sex apart, his knowledge of women was extremely limited; the only one he had ever really known well was his mother, and she had died when he was sixteen. Died because apparently she had suddenly decided there was nothing worth living for, and it had been a great blow. He and his father somehow had both felt responsible, yet they genuinely didn’t know what they had done to tire her of life. His sister was twelve years older than he, so he didn’t know her at all. While he had still been at school it had awed and fascinated him to learn that girls thought him interesting and attractive, but his explorations as a result of discovering this had never been very satisfactory. His girls were always jealous of his lame ducks, and of his tendency to think of his lame ducks first. There had been one fairly long affair with a girl from Maitland, a bodily affair which had consisted only of constant and varied sex. It had pleased him to have it so, for she limited her demands to this, and he felt free of her. The war had broken it up, and very soon after he went to the Middle East she married someone else. When he found out it had not hurt much; he was too busy keeping alive to have time to dwell upon it. The oddest thing was that he didn’t seem to miss the sex, felt stronger and more whole without it. Or perhaps he was just lucky enough to be one of those people who could turn sex off. He didn’t know, wasn’t concerned about, the reason.