An Indecent Obsession

by Colleen McCullough

  ‘I understand that Sergeants Wilson and Daggett were involved in an incident early this morning in the bathhouse?’ he asked, his manner indicating that this was what had brought him all the way down the compound to ward X so early in the day.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Neil easily. ‘Sergeant Daggett made an attempt to molest Sergeant Wilson sexually. Sister Langtry fetched us—Sergeant Maynard and myself, that is—to the bathhouse, and we broke it up.’

  ‘Having seen the actual incident with your own eyes, or only having heard of it from Sister Langtry?’

  Neil eyed the colonel with a contempt he didn’t even bother to conceal. ‘Why, having seen it with our own eyes, of course!’ He packed his voice with the nuances of someone forced to pander to an inexplicably prurient interest. ‘Sergeant Wilson must have been surprised in the shower. He was naked, and quite wet. Sergeant Daggett was also naked, but not at all wet. He was, however, in a state of extreme sexual arousal. When Sister Langtry, Sergeant Maynard and myself entered the bathhouse, he was attempting to grapple with Sergeant Wilson, who had dropped into a defensive position to ward him off.’

  Neil cleared his throat, looked carefully past the colonel’s shoulder. ‘Luckily Sergeant Wilson had not imbibed very freely of the whisky we just happened to have in our possession last night, otherwise things might have gone a lot harder for him.’

  ‘All right, all right, that’s quite enough!’ said the colonel sharply, feeling every nuance like a rapier, and the mention of the whisky like a club. ‘Sergeant Maynard, do you agree with Captain Parkinson’s description?’

  Benedict looked up for the first time. His face had the strung and drawn weariness of someone who had reached a point of no return, and his eyes were red-rimmed from the whisky. ‘Yes, sir, that’s the way it happened,’ he said, dragging the words out as if he had been sitting there for days concentrating on nothing but those words. ‘Luce Daggett was a blot on the face of the earth. Dirty. Disgusting—’

  Matt got up quickly and put his hand unerringly on Benedict’s arm, the grip pulling Benedict to his feet. ‘Come on, Ben,’ he said urgently. ‘Hurry! Take me for a walk. After all that grog last night I don’t feel well.’

  Colonel Chinstrap didn’t argue, for a fresh reference to the whisky terrified him. He sat as quietly as a mouse while Benedict led Matt rapidly from the verandah, then turned to Neil again. ‘What happened after your arrival put an end to the incident. Captain?’

  ‘Sergeant Wilson had a bit of a reaction, sir. You know, the sort of thing that can happen after you’ve been keyed up to fight. He got the shakes, couldn’t breathe properly. It seemed to me better that he go with Sister Langtry, so I suggested to her that she remove Sergeant Wilson from the ward, somewhere like her quarters, right away from Sergeant Daggett. That left Sergeant Daggett without— ah—further temptation during the remainder of the night. It also left him in a state of considerable apprehension, which I freely confess I did rather encourage him to feel. Sergeant Daggett, sir, is not my favorite person.’

  At the beginning of this speech Sister Langtry merely watched Neil courteously, but when she heard him tell the colonel it had been his idea to remove Michael from the ward, her eyes widened in surprise, then softened in gratitude. The silly, noble, wonderful man! It would never occur to the colonel to doubt that it had been Neil’s doing; he expected men to take charge and make the decisions. But it also seemed Neil knew very well where she had intended to put Michael for the night, and that gave her pause; had the latter part of the night been written even then on her face, or was it just an inspired guess?

  ‘How was Sergeant Daggett after you returned to the ward, Captain?’ asked the colonel.

  ‘How was Sergeant Daggett?’ Neil closed his eyes. ‘Oh, much the same as always. An acid-tongued bastard. Not a bit sorry, except for being caught. Full of his usual spite. And carrying on about getting even with us all, but especially with Sister Langtry. Luce detests her.’

  So much undisguised dislike of someone dead offended the colonel, until he remembered they didn’t know Luce was dead. He pressed on toward his denouement.

  ‘Where is Sergeant Daggett now?’ he asked casually.

  ‘I neither know nor care, sir,’ said Neil. ‘As far as I’m concerned, I would be delirious with joy if he were never to set foot in ward X again.’

  ‘I see. Well, Captain, you’re honest.’

  Everyone could see the colonel trying to make allowances for the precarious emotional balance of the men of X, but when he turned to Nugget his exasperation was beginning to show. ‘Private Jones, you’re sitting there very quietly. Have you anything to add?’

  ‘Who, sir, me, sir? I had a migraine,’ said Nugget importantly. ‘The classical pattern, sir, it really was—you would have been fascinated! A two-day prodroma of lethargy and some dysphasia, followed by an hour-long aura of scotomata in the right visual field, and then a left hemicranial headache. I was as flat as a tack, sir.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Well, flatter, really.’

  ‘Flashing lights are not called scotomata, Private,’ said the colonel.

  ‘Mine were scotomata,’ said Nugget decisively. ‘They were fascinating, sir! I told you, it wasn’t your minimal migraine by a long shot. If I looked at something big, I saw it all, no trouble. But if I looked at a small bit of the big thing, like a knob on a door or a knothole in the wall. I only saw the left half of the knob or knothole. The right half was—I don’t know! Just not there! Scotomata, sir.’

  ‘Private Jones,’ said the colonel tiredly, ‘if your knowledge of military matters even remotely equalled your knowledge of your own symptomatology, you’d be a field marshal, and we would have been marching through Tokyo in 1943. When you go back to civilian life, I strongly suggest that you consider studying medicine.’

  ‘Can’t, sir,’ said Nugget regretfully. ‘I’ve only got me Intermediate. But I am thinking about training as a male nurse, sir. At the Repat.’

  ‘Well, the world will have lost a Pasteur, perhaps, but it may gain Mister Nightingale instead. You’ll do splendidly, Private Jones.’

  Out of the corner of his eye the colonel noticed that Matt had returned without Benedict, and was standing in the doorway listening intently.

  ‘Corporal Sawyer, what have you to offer?’

  ‘Never saw a thing, sir,’ said Matt blandly.

  The colonel’s lips disappeared; he was obliged to draw a deep breath. ‘Have any of you gentlemen visited the bathhouse since Sergeant Daggett’s attack on Sergeant Wilson?’

  ‘Afraid not, sir,’ said Neil, looking apologetic. ‘Sorry you’ve caught us unwashed and unshaved, but after our little lapse with the whisky last night what we all seemed to need first this morning was gallons of tea.’

  ‘I do think you might have issued them the top off the APC, Sister!’ snapped the colonel, glaring at her.

  Her brows lifted; she smiled slightly. ‘I have it all ready to go, sir.’

  The colonel finally reached his denouement. ‘I suppose none of you are aware that Sergeant Daggett has been found dead in the bathhouse, then,’ he said curtly.

  As a climax it was dismally ineffective; no one evinced surprise, shock, sorrow or even interest. They just sat or stood looking much as if the colonel had made a particularly banal remark about the weather.

  ‘Now why on earth would Luce do a thing like that?’ asked Neil, apparently feeling the colonel was waiting for some sort of comment. ‘I didn’t think he’d be so considerate.’

  ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish,’ said Matt.

  ‘All me Christmases have come at once,’ said Nugget.

  ‘Why do you assume it is suicide, Captain?’

  Neil looked astonished. ‘Well, isn’t it? He’s a bit on the young side to be popping off from natural causes, surely?’

  ‘True, he did not die from natural causes. But why do you assume it was suicide?’ the colonel persisted.

  ‘If he didn’t have a heart attack or a stroke or whatever
, then he put the kybosh on himself. I’m not trying to say that we wouldn’t have been delighted to assist him, but last night was not a night for murder, sir. It was a night for a wee drop of whisky.’

  ‘How did he die, sir?’ asked Nugget eagerly. ‘Cut his throat? Stab himself? Hang himself, maybe?’

  ‘You would be the one to want to know that, wouldn’t you, you little ghoul?’ exclaimed the colonel, looking fed up. ‘He committed what the Japanese call hara-kiri, I believe.’

  ‘Who found him, sir?’ asked Matt, still in the doorway.

  ‘Sister Langtry.’

  This time their reaction was all he might have hoped for when he had announced Luce’s death; there was an appalled silence as every eye turned toward Sister Langtry. Nugget looked as if he were about to weep, Matt stunned, Neil despairing.

  ‘My dear, I am so sorry,’ Neil said eventually.

  She shook her head, smiled at them lovingly. ‘It’s all right, truly. As you can see, I’ve survived. Don’t look so upset, please.’

  Colonel Chinstrap sighed and slapped his hands on his thighs in defeat; what could one do with men who felt no regret at the death of a fellow man, then flew into small pieces because their darling Sister Langtry had had a nasty experience? He rose to his feet. ‘Thank you for your time and the tea, gentlemen. Good morning to you.’

  ‘They knew,’ he said, walking down the ward with Sister Langtry. ‘Those smug devils knew he was dead!’

  ‘Do you think so?’ she asked coolly. ‘You’re quite wrong, you know. They were just trying to get on your nerves, sir. You shouldn’t let them succeed the way you do; it only makes them worse.’

  ‘When I need your advice, madam, I shall ask for it!’ he snapped, fizzing with rage. Then recollection of his own very delicate position and the dictatory position of Sister Langtry occurred simultaneously, but he couldn’t resist saying, rather maliciously, ‘There will have to be an inquiry.’

  ‘Naturally, sir,’ she said calmly.

  It was all far too much, especially after the kind of night he had passed. ‘It would seem there was no foul play,’ he said wearily. ‘Luckily for him, perhaps, Sergeant Wilson has an ironclad alibi furnished by no less a person than your good self. However, I shall reserve my decision until after the military police have inspected the corpse. If they concur that there is no suspicion of foul play, I imagine the inquiry will be a mere matter of form. However, that’s up to Colonel Seth. I shall notify him immediately.’ He sighed, cast her a quick sidelong glance. ‘Yes, indeed, how fortunate for young Sergeant Wilson! It would be wonderful if all the sisters on all my wards were so solicitous of patient welfare.’

  She stopped just inside the fly-curtain, wondering why there were some people one felt compelled to hurt, yet why one was amazed when they in their turn lashed back. That was she and Colonel Chinstrap; from their first moment of meeting and sizing each other up, it had been a competition to see who could strike hardest. And, by now dedicated to that course, she didn’t feel charitable enough to let him get away with his taunts about Michael.

  So she said like silk, ‘I shall request the men to refrain from this running on at the mouth about their alcoholic indiscretions, sir, don’t you think? I really can’t see why it has to be mentioned at all, provided the military police feel there is no doubt Sergeant Daggett committed suicide.’

  He writhed, would have given anything he owned to fling it back in her smiling face, shout at her to tell the whole bloody world he had given troppo patients whisky, but he knew he couldn’t. So he merely nodded stiffly. ‘As you see fit, Sister. Certainly I shall not mention it.’

  ‘You haven’t seen Sergeant Wilson yet, sir. I left him asleep, but he’s quite all right. Fit for an interview, of that I’m sure. I’ll walk over to my quarters with you now. I would have put him in one of the vacant rooms around my own if I could, but they’re all locked up. Which as it turns out was just as well, wasn’t it? I had to keep him in my own room, right under my eye. Very uncomfortable, as there’s only one small bed.’

  The bitch, the bloody bitch! If Private Nugget Jones was a potential Pasteur, she was a potential Hitler. And, he was forced to admit, even on his best days he was never equal to Sister Langtry. He was so tired, and the affair had been a considerable shock.

  ‘I’ll see the sergeant later, Sister. Good morning.’

  3

  Sister Langtry watched without moving until the colonel was well on his way back in the direction of his own hut, then she walked down the ramp and began the journey to her room.

  If only when things happened there was time to think! It never seemed to turn out that way, unfortunately. The best she could do was to keep on the move and one jump ahead. She didn’t trust Colonel Chinstrap an inch. It would be just like him to scuttle like a cockroach back to his hut and then to dispatch Matron to do his dirty work by having Matron descend on her room. Michael had to be moved, and at once. But she would have liked more time before seeing him, a few precious hours in which to find the perfect way to say what had to be said. A few precious hours; days would not have been long enough for this.

  There was ruin in the air. The cynics might have put it down to a gathering monsoon, but Sister Langtry knew better. Things built themselves up and then tumbled back to nothing again so fast one knew immediately there had been no proper foundations laid. Which was certainly true of Michael and herself. How could she ever have hoped for something enduring to come out of an utterly artificial situation? Hadn’t she resolutely refused to develop her relationship with Neil Parkinson because of that? Usually a man went to bed, if not with someone he knew, at least with someone he thought he knew. But to Michael there could have been nothing real about Honour Langtry; she was a figment, a phantasm. The only Langtry he knew was Sister Langtry. With Neil she had preserved enough sanity to understand this, to suppress her hopes until both of them were back in a more normal environment, until he had a chance to meet Honour Langtry rather than Sister Langtry. But with Michael there had been no thought, no sanity, nothing save a drive to find love with him here and now and hang the consequences. As if in some utterly unconscious part of her she had known how tenuous it was, how unviable.

  Years ago a sister in the preliminary training school at P.A. had taken the probationers for a special lecture on the emotional hazards involved in nursing. Honour Langtry had been one of those probationers. Among the hazards, said the sister tutor, was that of falling in love with a patient. And if a nurse should insist upon falling in love with a patient, she said, let him be an acute patient. Never, never a chronic one. Love might grow and prove durable with an acute abdomen or a fractured femur. But love with spastic or paraplegic or tuberculotic was not, in the measured words of that measured voice, a viable proposition. A viable proposition. It was a phrase Honour Langtry never forgot.

  Not that Michael was ill, and certainly he was not chronically ill. But she had met him in a long-term nursing situation, colored by all the darkness of ward X. Even supposing he was not infected, she definitely was. Her first and her only duty should have been to see Michael as an inmate of ward X. With Neil Parkinson she had succeeded; but she didn’t love Neil Parkinson, so duty had proceeded on its serene way.

  Now here she was, trying to wear two hats at once, love and duty, both donned for the same man. The same patient. The job said he was a patient. It didn’t matter that he didn’t fit that description at all. For there was duty. There was always duty. It came first; not all the love in the world could change the ingrained habits of so very many years.

  Which hat do I wear, love or duty? she asked herself, treading more heavily than usual up the steps onto the verandah outside her room. Shall I be his lover or his nurse-custodian? What is he? My lover or my patient? A sudden puff of wind caught under the edge of her veil and lifted it away from her neck. Questions all answered, she thought. I am wearing my duty hat.

  When she opened the door she saw Michael dressed in the pajamas and robe she had b
orrowed from B ward, sitting waiting patiently on the hard chair. The chair he had relocated half the room away from the bed, now neatly made up and looking as if under no stretch of the wildest imagination could it ever have been the site of more pleasure and pain, more gloriously hard work than any oversized, pillow-strewn voluptuary’s couch. In an odd way the bed’s spartan chasteness came as a shock; she had already enacted the scene to come as she crossed the verandah, and in that scene she had pictured him still lying naked in her bed.

  Had he been so she might have been able to be soft, might have sunk onto the mattress beside him, might in spite of her duty hat have summoned up the courage from somewhere to do what she most longed to do: put her arms about him, offer her mouth for one of those powerful and ardent kisses, reinforce with fresh experiences the memories of the night so horribly overshadowed by the dead thing still sprawled in the bathhouse.

  She stood in the doorway, unsmiling, stripped of the capacity to move or speak, quite without resources. But the look on her face must have told him more than she realized, for he got up immediately and came across to her, standing close, but not close enough to touch her.

  ‘What’s happened?’ he asked. ‘What is it? What’s the matter?’

  ‘Luce committed suicide,’ she said baldly, and stopped, run down again.

  ‘Suicide?’ At first he gaped, but the astonishment and revulsion faded more rapidly than they should have, and were replaced by a curious, horrified consternation, as if at some action of his own. ‘Oh, my God, my God!’ he said slowly, and looked as if he was beginning to die. The guilt and distress on his face grew whitely; then he said, ‘What have I done?’ and repeated it, ‘What have I done?’ in the voice of an old, enfeebled man.

  Her heart came uppermost at once, and she moved close enough to him to clasp his arm in both her hands, looking into his face imploringly. ‘You’ve done nothing, Michael, nothing at all! Luce destroyed himself, do you hear? He was just using you to get back at me. You cannot blame yourself! It’s not as if you led him on, encouraged him!’