An Indecent Obsession

by Colleen McCullough

  ‘Neil!’ she said, staring. ‘I thought you were gone! They told me you went hours ago.’

  ‘Tomorrow for me. What about you?’

  ‘I’ll be detailed to special one of the serious stretcher cases all the way to wherever we’re going—Brisbane or Sydney, I suppose. Tomorrow or the day after.’ She stirred. ‘I’ll find you something to eat.’

  ‘Don’t bother, honestly. I’m not hungry. I’m just glad I didn’t have to go today.’ He sighed luxuriously. ‘I’ve got you all to myself at last.’

  Her eyes gleamed. ‘Have you really?’

  The way she said that gave him pause, but he sat back easily in the visitor’s chair, and smiled. ‘Indeed I have. And not before time, too. It took some wangling, but the colonel’s still a little sensitive about the whisky, so he managed to get my departure postponed. And he gave me a clean bill of health while he was about it. Which means I am no longer a patient in ward X. For tonight I’m merely a tenant.’

  She answered obliquely. ‘Do you know, Neil, I loathe the war and what it’s done to us? I feel so personally responsible.’

  ‘Assuming the guilt of the whole world, Sis? Come now!’ he chided gently.

  ‘No, not the whole world, Neil. Only that share of the guilt which you and the rest withheld from me,’ she said harshly, and looked at him.

  He drew a long, hissing breath. ‘So Michael couldn’t keep his damned mouth shut after all.’

  ‘Michael was in the right of it. I was entitled to know. And I want to know. All of it, Neil. What did happen that night?’

  Shrugging, mouth screwed up, he settled himself as if to embark upon a rather boring anecdote he secretly felt was not worth the telling. She watched him closely, thinking that the wall behind him, stripped now of its drawings because they resided in her baggage, threw his face into an intense relief it had always needed.

  ‘Well, I had to have another drink, so I went back to the whisky,’ he said, lighting a cigarette and forgetting to offer her one. ‘The racket Luce was making woke up Matt and Nugget, so they decided to help me finish the second bottle. That only left Benedict to look after Luce, who had gone to bed. I’m afraid we did rather forget Luce. Or maybe we just didn’t want to have to remember him.’

  As he talked the memory of that night began to move in him, to regenerate something of its original horror, and his face reflected this vividly. ‘Ben dug into his kit and found one of those illicit souvenirs we all have tucked away somewhere—a Japanese officer’s pistol. He made Luce take his own razor, and he marched Luce to the bathhouse with the pistol right against his ribs.’

  ‘Was it Ben who told you about marching Luce to the bathhouse?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. That much we got out of him, but as to what actually happened inside, I have only the sketchiest of ideas. Ben gets confused about it himself.’ He lapsed into silence.

  ‘And?’ she prompted.

  ‘We heard Luce screaming like one damned, all the way from the bathhouse, screaming, screaming…’ He grimaced. ‘But by the time we got there it was far too late for Luce. It’s a miracle no one else heard, except that the wind was blowing toward the palm grove, and we are a long way from civilization. We were too late—I said that, didn’t I?’

  ‘Yes. Can you give me any idea of how Ben did it?’

  ‘I would guess Luce didn’t have the guts to fight his way out, and maybe didn’t even believe what was going to happen until it was too late. Those damned razors are so sharp… Having forced Luce at gunpoint to hold the razor properly, I think Ben just reached out, grabbed Luce’s hand, and it was all over. I can see Luce screaming and gibbering in fear, not even realizing what Ben was doing to him until it was done. You don’t realize it, with something as sharp as a Bengal razor.’

  Frowning, she thought about it. ‘But his hand wasn’t bruised, Neil,’ she objected. ‘If it had been, Major Menzies would have seen it. And Ben must have had to grip Luce very hard indeed.’

  ‘Hands don’t bruise all that easily, Sis. Not like arms. The major wouldn’t have been looking for anything more than external bruising—this isn’t Scotland Yard, thank God. And it was done, knowing Ben, so quickly. He must have thought and thought about how he was going to kill Luce. It wasn’t spur of the moment. And yet he could never have carried it through without being found out, because the minute it began to happen he went slightly mad—or mad in a different way; I don’t know. Besides, he wasn’t worried about getting caught. He just wanted to dispatch Luce in a way he knew would ensure Luce retained consciousness until the end. Because I think what he really wanted Luce to see was the maiming of his own genitalia.’

  ‘Was Luce dead when you got there?’

  ‘Not quite. That was what saved our bacon. We got Ben away from him just before Luce went into some sort of death convulsion, still hanging onto the razor, and bleeding like a fountain. There were vital arteries severed. So while Matt took Ben outside and kept watch, Nugget and I tidied up. It only took a few minutes. What took the time was waiting until we were absolutely sure Luce had breathed his last, because we didn’t dare touch him.’

  ‘It must have occurred to you to fetch help, to try to save him,’ she said, tight-lipped.

  ‘Oh, my dear, there was not the slightest chance of saving him! Give me more credit than that! Had we been able to save him, Ben wouldn’t have been in such jeopardy. I’m not medically trained, no, but I am a soldier. I admit I never liked Luce, but it was hell to have to stand there and watch the man die!’

  Grey-faced, he leaned to ash his cigarette, watching her absolutely absorbed, pain-filled eyes.

  ‘Nugget was remarkably calm and competent, would you believe that? It just goes to show that you can live with a man for months without ever knowing what’s inside him. And in all the days afterward, not once did I see him look as if he was going to lose his nerve.’

  His hand shook as he decided to stub the cigarette out. ‘The worst part was being sure we had done everything possible to make it look like a suicide, that we hadn’t overlooked anything which might lead to a suspicion of murder… Anyway, when we finished, we took Ben down to the next bathhouse, and while Matt kept watch—he’s an excellent night watchman, he hears everything—Nugget and I hosed Ben down. He was covered in blood, but luckily he hadn’t got his feet in it. I don’t think we could have obliterated footprints. We burned his pajama pants. You were a pair short on your laundry count, do you remember?’

  ‘How was Ben?’ she asked.

  ‘Very calm, and quite unrepentant. I think he still feels he was only doing his Christian duty. To him Luce wasn’t a man, he was a demon from hell.’

  ‘So you shielded Benedict,’ she said coldly. ‘All of you shielded him.’

  ‘Yes, all of us. Even Michael. The minute you told him Luce was dead, he realized what must really have happened. I felt very sorry for Mike. You would have thought his own hand had done the deed, he was so upset, so choked with remorse. Kept saying he ought not to have been so self-centered, ought not to have stayed with you, that his duty was to stay with Benedict.’

  She didn’t flinch; this too was a part of her share of the guilt. ‘He said that to me, too. That he ought not to have stayed with me, that he ought to have been with him. He… him! He never used a name! I thought he meant Luce.’ Her voice broke, she had to pause to compose herself before going on. ‘It never, never occurred to me that he meant Benedict! I assumed he meant Luce, and I assumed he was homosexually involved with Luce. All the things I said, all the things I did! How much I hurt him! And what a mess I made of it! I’m ill even remembering.’

  ‘If he didn’t use a name, you made a natural mistake,’ Neil said. ‘His papers implied homosexuality.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘From Luce, via Ben and Matt.’

  ‘You’re a very clever man, Neil. You knew or guessed it all, didn’t you? And you set out to compound the confusion, deliberately. How could you do that?’

&nb
sp; ‘What else did you expect us to do?’ he asked, using the collective rather than the singular. ‘We couldn’t just hand Ben over to the authorities! Luce was no loss to the world, and Ben certainly doesn’t deserve to be shut up in some civilian mental asylum for the rest of his life because he killed Luce! You forget! We’re all inmates of ward X! We’ve had a tiny taste of what life must be like for mental patients.’

  ‘Yes, I understand all that,’ she said patiently. ‘But it doesn’t negate the fact that you took the law into your own hands, that you deliberately elected to cover up a murder, and that you also elected to deprive me of any opportunity to rectify the matter. I would have had him committed on the spot had I known! He’s dangerous, don’t any of you understand that? Benedict belongs in a mental asylum! You were wrong, all of you, but you especially, Neil. You’re an officer, you know the rules and you’re supposed to abide by them. If you plead your own illness as an excuse, then you belong in an institution, too! Without obtaining my consent, you’ve made me a party to it, and had it not been for Michael, I would never have known. I have a lot to be grateful to Michael for, but above all, I’m grateful to him for telling me how Luce really died. Michael’s thinking isn’t the straightest, either, but he’s one up on the rest of you! Thank God he told me!’

  He threw his cigarette case down on the desk so violently that it bounced into the air and fell to the floor with a clatter, the catch springing open, cigarettes flying. Neither of them noticed; they were too intent upon each other.

  ‘Michael, Michael, Michael!’ he shouted, face convulsed, tears starting to his eyes. ‘Always, always Michael! For God’s sake will you snap out of this—this obsession you have for Michael? Michael this, Michael that, Michael, Michael, Michael! I am so sick to death of that bloody name! Since the moment you set eyes on him you’ve had no time for anyone else! What about the rest of us?’

  As in that scene with Luce, there was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide; she sat there filled with a dawning understanding of what Neil was crying from the heart about, her anger at him suddenly vanquished.

  Rubbing his hand angrily across his eyes, he fought visibly for self-control, and when he spoke again he tried to make his voice sound calmer, more reasonable. Oh, Neil, she thought, how you’ve changed! You’ve grown. Two months ago you could never have managed that kind of self-discipline in the midst of such torment.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I know you love him. Even Matt, blind as he is, saw that a long time ago. So let’s take it as read, and put it to one side as the prime consideration. Before Mike came you belonged to all of us, and we belonged to you. You cared about us! Everything you had, everything you were, was channeled to us—toward healing us, if you like. But when you’re sick you can’t see it as objectively as that; it’s completely, exclusively personal. You—you wrapped us in you! And it never occurred to any of us that you spent your heart anywhere but inside X, and on us. When Michael came, it stuck out like a sore thumb that there was nothing the matter with him. To us, that meant you shouldn’t need to bother with him at all. Instead—you turned right away from us, you went toward him. You abandoned us! You betrayed us! And that’s why Luce died. Luce died because you looked at what Michael was, all that sanity and—and strength of being, and you loved it. You loved him! How do you think that made the rest of us feel?’

  She wanted to shriek: But I didn’t stop caring about you! I didn’t, I didn’t! All I wanted was something for myself for a change! There’s only so much you can go on giving without taking something for yourself, Neil! It didn’t seem a very large something at the time. My tenure in X was ending. And I loved him. Oh, God, I’m so tired of giving, giving! Why couldn’t you be generous enough to let me have something too?

  But she couldn’t say any of it. Instead, she leaped to her feet and headed for the door, anywhere to get away from him. He grasped at her wrist in passing; swung her round and held her hard, grinding the bones of both her hands cruelly until she ceased to struggle.

  ‘You see?’ he asked softly, his grip slackening, his fingers sliding up her arms. ‘I’ve just held you a lot harder than Ben probably had to hold Luce, and I don’t think you’ll have any bruises.’

  She looked up into his face, a long way further than Michael’s would have been, for Neil was very tall. His expression was both serious and aloof, as if he knew well all that she was feeling, and didn’t blame her. But as if, like a priest-king of old, he was fully prepared to endure anything in order to achieve the ultimate end.

  Until this interview she had not even begun to understand what sort of man Neil was; how much passion and determination lay in him. Nor the depth of his feelings for her. Perhaps he had hidden his hurt too skillfully, perhaps, as he charged, her absorption in Michael had made it all too easy for her to assure herself Neil was not devastated by her defection. He had been devastated. Yet it had not prevented him from moving to contain the threat Michael presented. It had not stopped his functioning. Bravo, Neil!

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ she said, sounding quite matter-of-fact. ‘I don’t seem to have the strength left to wring my hands as I say it, or weep, or go down on my knees to you. But I am sorry. More than you’ll ever know. I’m too sorry to try to justify myself. All I can say is that we, those who care for you, our patients, can be as blind and misguided as any patient who ever walked through the door of a ward X. You mustn’t think of me as a goddess, some kind of infallible being. I’m not. None of us are!’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘But oh, Neil, you have no idea how I wish we were!’

  He gave her a light hug, kissed her brow, and let her go. ‘Well, it’s done, and you know the old saying—even the gods can’t unscramble eggs. I feel better for speaking my piece. But I’m sorry too. It’s no joy for me to find that I can hurt you, even though you don’t love me.’

  ‘I wish I could love you,’ she said.

  ‘But you can’t. I know. It’s inescapable. You saw me the way I was when I first came to X, and it put me under a liability to you I don’t suppose I’d ever cancel, even if there had been no Michael. You fell for him because he started out as a man for you—a whole man. He never hid himself away, or blubbered with self-pity, or completely unmanned himself. You never had to change his pants or clean up his messes or listen for long boring hours at a time to a litany of his woes—the same woes you must have heard from two dozen men just like me.’

  ‘Oh, please!’ she cried. ‘I have never, never thought of it—or you—like that!’

  ‘It’s how I think of myself, looking back. I am able to look back now. So it’s probably a more accurate picture of me than you’re prepared to admit. But I’m cured, you know. From where I’m standing now I can’t even see why it ever happened to me in the first place.’

  ‘That’s good,’ she said, walking to the door. ‘Neil, please, can we make this goodbye? Right now, I mean. And can you manage to take it for what it is, not a sign of dislike or neglect or lack of love? It’s just been the sort of day I want desperately to see end. And I find I can’t end it with you. I’d rather not see you again. Not for any other reason than it would be like holding a wake. Ward X is no more.’

  He accompanied her out into the corridor. ‘Then I shall hold my own wake. If you ever feel you’d like to see me, you’ll find me in Melbourne. The address is in the phone book. Toorak, Parkinson, N.L.G. It took me a long time to find the right woman. I’m thirty-seven years old, so I’m not likely to change my mind in a hurry.’ He laughed. ‘How could I ever forget you? I’ve never kissed you.’

  ‘Then kiss me now,’ she said, almost loving him. Almost.

  ‘No. You’re right. Ward X is no more, but I’m still standing in its uncooled corpse. What you’re offering is a favor, and I want no favors. Never any favors.’

  She held out her hand. ‘Goodbye, Neil. All the best of luck. But I’m sure you’ll have it.’

  He took the offered hand, shook it warmly, then lifted it and kissed it lightly. ‘Goodbye, Honour. Don’t ev
er forget—I’m in the Melbourne phone book.’

  The last trek from X across the compound; one never really thought it would come to that, even after one began to long for it. As if Base Fifteen represented a segment of life as huge as life itself. Now it was over. And it had ended with Neil, which was only fitting. That was quite a man. Yet she could see the truth in his saying he had started out with a big disadvantage. She had thought of him chiefly as a patient. And lumped him in with the rest. Poor, sad, frail… Now to find him none of those things was exhilarating. He implied his cure had come out of the situation in X during the last few weeks of its duration, but that wasn’t true. His cure had come out of himself. The cure always did. So, in spite of the grief, the horror, and the pain, she commenced this last trek feeling as if ward X had existed for a purpose, a good purpose.

  Neil hadn’t even bothered to ask her whether she was going to try to exact the justice he felt was already done and she felt had been miscarried. Too late by far. Thank God Michael had told her! Knowing what they had done had freed her from a large measure of the guilt she might otherwise have preserved over her conduct toward them. If they thought she had betrayed them in turning to Michael, she knew they had betrayed her. For the rest of their lives they would have to live with Luce Daggett. So would she. Neil hadn’t wanted her told because he feared her brand of intervention would liberate Michael, and because he genuinely wished to spare her a share of the guilt. Half good, half bad. Half self, half non-self. About normal, that was.

  Part 7

  1

  When Honour Langtry got off the train in Yass there was no one to meet her, which didn’t dismay her; she hadn’t let her family know she was coming. Loving them was one thing, facing them quite another, and she preferred to face them in private. This was childhood she was coming back to, and it seemed so very far away. How would they see her now? What would they think? So she had put the moment of reunion off. Her father’s property wasn’t far out of town; someone would give her a lift.