An Indecent Obsession

by Colleen McCullough

  His chief feeling for Sister Langtry was liking, nor was he sure just when something more personal and intimate had begun to color his liking. But that morning in the dayroom had come as a shock. Luce playing silly buggers, himself riding an absolute control on anger until the right moment to vent it, a moment in which he knew it could not proceed to that awful hunger to kill. And the moment had come; his mouth was literally open to tell Luce what he could do with himself when she made some sort of noise from the doorway. At first his shame had almost overwhelmed him—what must he and Luce have looked like? How could he possibly explain? So he hadn’t even tried to explain. And then he touched her, and something had happened to both of them, something deeper than body yet all wrapped up in body. He knew it had affected her as strongly as it had himself; there were some things which didn’t need words or even glances. Oh, God, why couldn’t the sister in charge of ward X have been that comfortable middle-aged dragon he imagined before his admission? There was no point to a personal relationship with Sister Langtry, for where could it go? And yet… Oh, yes, the thought of it was wonderful. It carried a promise of excitement that had little to do with bodies; he had never, he realized, been enchanted by a woman before.

  ‘Look,’ said Neil, ‘I think we’ve got to face one thing. Sis has been on X for a year now, and it seems logical to me that she’s tired of Base Fifteen, tired of X, and tired of us. We’re all she ever sees. Mike, you’re the newest, what do you think?’

  ‘That of all of you, I’m the least qualified to judge, so instead I’ll ask Nugget. What do you think?’

  ‘I won’t have it!’ said Nugget vehemently. ‘If Sis was fed up with us, I’d be the first to know.’

  ‘Not fed up, just tired! There’s a difference,’ said Neil patiently. ‘Aren’t we all tired? Why should it be any different for her? Do you really think when she wakes up in the mornings she jumps out of her bed singing a song of joy because in a few minutes she’s going to be back in X, back with us? Come on, Mike, I want an opinion from you, not from Nugget or any of the others. You’re the newcomer, you’re not in so deep you can’t see straight any more. Do you reckon she wants to be with us?’

  ‘I don’t know, I tell you! Ask Ben,’ said Michael, and stared at Neil very directly. ‘You’re barking up the wrong tree, mate.’

  ‘Sister Langtry is far too good a woman to grow tired of us,’ said Benedict.

  ‘She’s frustrated,’ said Luce.

  Matt chuckled. ‘Well, X is a frustrating place,’ he said.

  ‘Not that way, you blinkered dill! I mean she’s a woman, and she’s not getting any, is she?’

  The revulsion stabbed at Luce from all sides, but he endured it as if he enjoyed it, grinning.

  ‘You know, Luce, you’re so low you’d have to climb a ladder to reach a snake’s belly,’ said Nugget. ‘You make me want to puke!’

  ‘Name something that doesn’t make you want to puke,’ said Luce scornfully.

  ‘Be humble, Luce,’ said Benedict softly. ‘Be very humble. All men should learn humility before they die, and none of us know when we’ll die. It could as easily be tomorrow as fifty years from now.’

  ‘Don’t you preach at me, spindleshanks!’ snarled Luce. ‘If you go on the way you’re going, you’ll be in Callan Park a week after you’re on Civvy Street.’

  ‘You’ll never see that,’ said Benedict.

  ‘My oath I won’t! I’ll be too busy being famous.’

  ‘Not on my money you won’t,’ said Matt. ‘I wouldn’t pay a farthing to watch you pee.’

  Luce guffawed. ‘If you can watch me pee, Matt, I’ll give you the bloody farthing!’

  ‘Neil is right!’ said Michael suddenly, very loudly.

  The bickering stopped; they all turned their heads to look at him curiously, for the tone of his voice was one they had never heard from him before—full of passion, full of anger, full of authority.

  ‘Of course she’s tired, and can you blame her? The same sort of thing day after day, Luce picking on everyone, and everyone picking on Luce. Why the hell can’t you lay off each other, and lay off her? Whatever’s wrong with her is her business, not yours! If she wanted to make it yours, she’d talk to you about it. Lay off her! You’re enough to drive a man to drink!’ He got to his feet. ‘Come on, Ben, into the water. Wash yourself clean. I’m going to try to, but with the amount of crap that’s been flying around here, it may take a week.’

  A tiny chink in his armor at last, thought Neil, but with no exultation, watching Michael and Benedict walk toward the sea. Michael’s back was very straight. Dammit, he does care for her! But the thing is, does she know it? I don’t think she does, and if I can, I’m going to keep it that way.

  ‘That’s the first time I’ve ever seen you lose your temper,’ said Benedict to Michael, wading into the water.

  Michael stopped, waist deep, and looked at the thin dark worried face with worry written on his own face. ‘It was a stupid thing to do,’ he said. ‘It always is stupid to go off half-cocked. I don’t have a hot temper, so I hate it when people drive me to that sort of behavior. It’s so useless! That’s why I left them. If I’d stayed, I would have made a worse fool of myself.’

  ‘You’re strong enough to resist temptation,’ said Benedict wistfully. ‘I wish I was!’

  ‘Go on, mate, you’re the best of the lot of us,’ said Michael affectionately.

  ‘Do you really think so, Mike? I try so hard, but there’s no easy way. I’ve lost too much.’

  ‘You’ve lost yourself, Ben, nothing else. It’s all there, waiting for you to find your way back.’

  ‘It’s the war. It’s made me a murderer. But then I know that’s only an excuse. It’s not really the war, it’s me. I just wasn’t strong enough to pass the test God set me.’

  ‘No, it’s the war,’ said Michael, hands floating on the water. ‘It does something to all of us, Ben, not only to you. We’re all in X because of what the war’s done to us. If it hadn’t happened along we’d be all right. They say war’s a natural thing, but I can’t see it. Maybe it’s natural for the race, natural for the old men to start it, but for the men who have to fight it—no, it’s the most unnatural life a man can live.’

  ‘But God’s in there,’ said Benedict, sinking down until his shoulders were submerged, then bobbing up again. ‘It must be natural. God sent me to the war. I didn’t volunteer to go, because I prayed about it and God told me to wait. If He felt I needed testing, He’d send me. And He did. So it must be natural.’

  ‘As natural as birth and marriage,’ said Michael wryly.

  ‘Are you going to get married?’ asked Benedict, his head cocked as if he didn’t want to miss the reply.

  Michael thought about it; thought of Sister Langtry, well educated, well born, an officer and a gentlewoman. A member of a class he’d had little to do with before the war, and had elected not to join during the war. ‘No,’ he said soberly, ‘I don’t think I’ve got enough to offer any more. I’m just not the way I used to be. Maybe I know too much about myself. To live with a woman and raise children I think you’ve got to have some illusions about yourself, and I don’t have any these days. I’ve been there and I’ve come all the way back again, but where I am now isn’t where I would have been if there’d been no war. Does that make sense?’

  ‘Oh, yes!’ agreed Benedict fervently, to please his friend; for he didn’t understand at all.

  ‘I’ve killed men. I’ve even tried to kill a compatriot. The old Shalt Nots don’t apply the way they did before the war. How could they? I’ve hosed chunks of men out of bomber turrets because there wasn’t enough of them left to pick up for decent burial. I’ve hunted for meat-tickets in blood and offal inches deep, worse messes than any civilian slaughterhouse. I’ve been so afraid I thought I’d never again be able to move. I’ve cried a lot. And I think to myself, raise a son of mine to go through that? Not if I was the last man left to repopulate the earth.’

  ‘It’s the gu
ilt,’ said Benedict.

  ‘No, it’s the grief,’ said Michael.

  7

  Since it was well after four o’clock, the sisters’ sitting room was very nearly deserted when Sister Langtry walked in. It was a large and airy room, for it had great French doors on either side opening out onto verandahs, and it was screened with mesh, an unbelievable luxury, as was the mess next door. Whatever obscure military planner was responsible for its furnishing must have loved nurses; there were cushions on the cane settees and a brave attempt at cheerfulness through chintz. If the mildew had long since marred the patterns on the chintz and the laundry had managed to reduce color to non-color, it really didn’t matter. In spirit it was a big, cheerful room, and had a corresponding effect on the nurses who used it.

  When Sister Langtry came in she saw that its only occupant was Sister Sally Dawkin from neuro, a crusty middle-aged major who was no more a professional army nurse than Sister Langtry was, fat and jolly and chronically overworked, poor soul; neuro was a notoriously hard ward for any nurse to run. In fact, Sister Langtry could think of no more depressing branch of medicine to be in than wartime neuro, with its dismal prognoses and the incredible way its cases sometimes lingered in defiance of all the natural laws governing survival. An arm didn’t grow back, but the organism did function without it, mourned its loss yet coped with life in much the same way. Brains and spines never grew back either, but what was missing was not the tool; it was the operator of the tool. Neuro was a place where no matter how religious you might be, you sometimes yearned to be able to reconcile euthanasia with humanitarian ethics.

  Sister Langtry knew that she could survive the very worst ward X could ever offer her, where she would never have survived neuro. Sister Dawkin felt the opposite. Which was just as well. Their values and skills were alike excellent, but their preferences were quite different.

  ‘Tea’s fresh—well, not bad,’ said Sister Dawkin, looking up and beaming. ‘Good to see you, Honour.’

  Sister Langtry sat down at the small cane table and reached for a clean cup and saucer. She added milk to the cup first, poured in a dark and aromatic stream of tea not quite to the revoltingly stewed stage, then sat back and lit a cigarette.

  ‘You’re late, Sally,’ she said.

  Sister Dawkin grunted. ‘I’m like Moses, always late. You know what the Lord said: Come forth, and Moses came fifth and lost his job.’

  ‘You’d have to have half a brain missing to appreciate that joke fully,’ said Sister Langtry, smiling.

  ‘I know. What can you expect? It’s the company I keep.’ Sister Dawkin bent to unlace her shoes, then hauled her uniform dress up and unhitched her suspenders from her stocking tops. Sister Langtry got a good glimpse of the army-issue bloomers everyone called ‘passion-killers’ before the stockings were peeled off and thrown onto a vacant chair.

  ‘Most of the time, Honour my pet, when I think of you stuck right down at the end of the compound with half a dozen loonies for company and no help, I don’t envy you one bit. I much prefer my thirty-odd neuros and a few female cohorts. But today is one of the days when I’d gladly change places with you.’

  There was an ugly galvanized iron bucket full of water on the floor between Sister Dawkin’s feet, which were bare now and revealed as being short, broad, bunioned and minus anything in the way of an instep arch. While Sister Langtry watched, amused and touched, Sister Dawkin plonked both feet into the bucket and slopped and splashed luxuriously.

  ‘Ohhhhhhhhhh, that’s so beeeeeee-yew-tiful! Truly, I could not have gone another flipping step on them.’

  ‘You’ve got heat oedema, Sally. Better take some pot cit before it gets any worse,’ observed Sister Langtry.

  ‘What I need is about eighteen hours flat out in bed with my legs elevated,’ said the sufferer, and chuckled. ‘Sounds good when you put it that way, doesn’t it?’ She withdrew a foot from the bucket and probed with merciless fingers at the puffy red ankle above it. ‘You’re right, they’re up like a bishop at a girlie show. I’m not getting any younger, that’s my real trouble.’ The chuckle came again. ‘Oh, well, it was the bishop’s trouble, too.’

  A solid, well-known tread sounded at the door; in sailed Matron, her starched white veil perfectly formed into a lozenge down her back, her impossibly starched uniform not showing a crease, the glitter from her shoes quite blinding. When she saw the two at the table she smiled frostily and decided to come over.

  ‘Sisters, good afternoon,’ she boomed.

  ‘Good afternoon, Matron!’ they chorused like obedient schoolgirls, Sister Langtry not rising to her feet out of consideration for Sister Dawkin, who could not.

  Matron spotted the bucket, and recoiled. ‘Do you think, Sister Dawkin, that soaking your feet in a public room is quite seemly?’

  ‘I think it all depends on the room and the feet, ma’am. You’ll have to forgive me, I came from Moresby to Base Fifteen, and we didn’t have many niceties at Moresby.’ Sister Dawkin hauled one foot out of the bucket and regarded it clinically. ‘I must agree, it’s not a very seemly foot. Got bent out of shape in the service of good old Florence Nightingale. But then again,’ Sister Dawkin went on in exactly the same tone of voice, foot back in the water and splashing merrily, ‘nor is a grossly understaffed neuro ward quite seemly.’

  Matron stiffened alarmingly, thought better of what she had been about to say because Sister Langtry was there as a witness; she turned sharply on her heel and marched out of the room.

  ‘Old bitch!’ said Sister Dawkin. ‘I’ll give her seemly! She’s been down on me like a ton of bricks all week because I had the temerity to ask her for extra staff in front of a visiting American surgeon general. Well, I’d been asking her in private for days without getting anywhere, so what did I have to lose? I’ve got four quads, six paras, nine hemis and three comas as well as the rest of the rabble. I tell you, Honour, if it wasn’t for the three or four blokes who are compos enough and fit enough to lend us a hand, my ship would have sunk to the bottom a fortnight ago.’ She blew a very rude-sounding raspberry. ‘Flipping mosquito nets! I’m just waiting for her to tell me D ward’s nets aren’t quite seemly, because the minute she does, I’m going to wrap one of her precious nets around her neck and strangle her with it!’

  ‘I agree she deserves a lot of things, but strangling? Really, Sally!’ said Sister Langtry, enjoying the sparks.

  ‘The old cow! She couldn’t hit a bull on the bum with a handful of wheat!’

  But the very promising display of Dawkin fireworks fizzled damply the moment Sister Sue Pedder walked through the door. Any further eruptions became impossible. It was one thing to blow one’s top comfortably to Honour Langtry, who was if not in the same age group at least a topflight nurse of many years’ experience; to Sister Dawkin they were peers. Besides, they had served together from New Guinea to Morotai, and they were friends. Where Sister Pedder was a kid, no older than the AAMWAs who had worked for something like forty-eight hours at a stretch in Moresby. And that was the rub, perhaps. No one could imagine Sister Pedder working for forty-eight hours at a stretch anywhere.

  Barely twenty-two, extremely pretty and extremely vivacious, she was in theatres, and had not been on the Base Fifteen staff for very long. It was a current joke that even old Carstairs the urinary surgeon had whinnied and pawed the ground when Sister Pedder waltzed through his theatre door. Several nurses and patients had lost money at that moment, having laid bets that Major Carstairs was really dead but didn’t have the grace to lie down.

  The nurses left to man Base Fifteen until its extinction were all senior in age and experience, all veterans of jungle warfare and jungle nursing. Except for Sister Pedder, who was not generally regarded as part of the group, and was eyed by some with a great deal of resentment.

  ‘Hello, girls!’ said Sister Pedder brightly, coming over. ‘I must say I don’t see much of the ward stars these days. How is life on the wards?’

  ‘A darned sight harder than lif
e in theatres making goo-goo eyes at the surgeons,’ said Sister Dawkin. ‘But enjoy it while you can. If I have anything to say about it, you’ll be off theatres and on neuro.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ squeaked Sister Pedder, looking utterly terrified. ‘I can’t stand neuro!’

  ‘Too bloody bad,’ said Sister Dawkin unsympathetically.

  ‘I can’t stand neuro either,’ said Sister Langtry, trying to make the poor girl feel more at ease. ‘It takes a strong back, a strong stomach, and a strong mind. I dip out on all three counts myself.’

  ‘So do I!’ agreed Sister Pedder fervently. She gulped a mouthful of tea, discovered it was tepid and horribly stewed, but swallowed it because there was nothing else to do save swallow it. A rather awkward silence fell, which frightened her almost as much as the thought of being transferred from theatres to neuro.

  In desperation she turned to Sister Langtry, who was always very pleasant but standoffish, she thought. ‘By the way, Honour, I met a patient of yours from X a couple of weeks ago, and discovered I went to school with him. Isn’t that amazing?’

  Sister Langtry sat up straight and bent a far more searching gaze on Sister Pedder than Sister Pedder considered her statement warranted.

  ‘The bank manager’s daughter from Woop-Woop!’ she said slowly. ‘Saints be praised! I’ve been wondering for days which one of us he could possibly mean, but I forgot all about you.’