An Indecent Obsession by Colleen McCullough
Watching Benedict settle pleasurably on the bench opposite Michael after dinner, the chess set out, made Sister Langtry feel as if the ward was finally complete within itself. How nice to have an ally! she thought contentedly, too generous to resent the fact that apparently Michael was succeeding with a patient she had always known was not amenable to her own brand of help.
3
Luce had more than one quality in common with a cat: not only did he move like one, he could see in the dark like one. Thus he carried no torch as he moved surefooted through the spaces between deserted huts, making for a spot at the end of the nurses’ beach where it was brought up short by a tall outcrop of rocks Sister Langtry had described erroneously to Michael as a headland.
The MPs were lax these days, as Luce well knew; the war was over, Base Fifteen was as quiet as the corpse it was soon to become, and there was no feeling of discord in the air. Sensitive to such things, MP antennae registered zero.
Tonight he was on his way to an important assignation, feeling powerful and light and almost painfully alive. Oh, yes, little Miss Woop-Woop, the bank manager’s precious daughter! It hadn’t been easy persuading her to meet him like this, and she had consented only when she realized there were no other ways of seeing him than illicitly or in the full public gaze of the verandah outside the nurses’ mess. She was a nurse officer, he was a man from the ranks, and while innocent intercourse between old school chums was quite permissible, any intercourse more intimate would bring a sharp reprimand and disciplinary action from Matron, a real stickler for military conventions. But he had succeeded in persuading her to meet him on the beach after dark, and he had no doubts as to how matters would proceed from now on; the biggest hurdle was already behind him.
There was no moon to betray them, but in this place of dark peacefulness the sky shone with an unearthly brilliance, and the matted clouds of nebulae and star clusters along the axis of the galaxy breathed a still, cold light upon the world, faintly silvering it. Thus he had no trouble in picking out her form among the denser shadows around it, and moved very quietly until he stood alongside her.
She drew in her breath sharply. ‘I didn’t hear you!’ she said, shuddering a little.
‘You can’t possibly be cold on a night like this,’ he said, rubbing the goose bumps on the back of her hand with a friendly impersonal touch.
‘It’s nerves. I’m not used to sneaking out like this up here—it’s different from sneaking out of a nice safe nurses’ home in Sydney.’
‘Calm down, it’s all right! We’ll just sit ourselves over here where it’s comfortable, and have a cigarette.’ With a hand under her elbow, he helped her down onto the sand, and sat far enough away from her to reassure her. ‘I hate to be a bludger, but do you happen to have any tailor-mades?’ he said, teeth flashing in the dimness. ‘I can roll you one, but you mightn’t like the taste.’
She fumbled in one of the pockets of her bush jacket and produced a packet of Craven As, which he took without permitting his fingers to touch hers. Then he gave the act a certain intimacy by lighting the cigarette in his own mouth and passing it to her. For himself, he produced his makings and rolled one leisurely.
‘Won’t someone see our cigarettes?’ she asked.
‘Well, I suppose they might, but it isn’t very likely,’ he said easily. ‘The nurses here are a pretty tame lot, so the MPs don’t usually bother with places like this.’ He turned his head to watch her profile. ‘How’s the old town these days?’
‘A bit empty.’
It came hard to say it, but he managed. ‘How’s my mother? My sister?’
‘When did you hear from them last?’
‘A couple of years ago.’
‘What? Don’t they write?’
‘Oh, all the time! I just don’t read their letters.’
‘Then why feign interest in them by asking?’
The flash of spirit surprised him. ‘We have to talk about something, don’t we?’ he asked gently, and reached out to touch her hand. ‘You’re nervous.’
‘You’re just the way you were at school!’
‘No, not a bit. There’s been too much water under the bridge since then.’
‘Has it been very awful?’ she asked, pitying him.
‘The war, you mean? Sometimes.’ He thought of the office he had occupied, the pleasant safe job with the quivering jellyfish of a major who had been his titular boss, though in actual fact it had been the other way around. Luce sighed. ‘A man has to do his duty, you know.’
‘Oh, I know!’
‘It’s good to see a friendly face here,’ he said, after a slight silence.
‘For me, too. I was so happy when Manpower released me to go into the army, but it hasn’t been at all what I expected. Of course it would have been different if the war had still been on. But Base Fifteen’s rather a dead place, isn’t it?’
He laughed softly. ‘That’s a good description of it.’
The question she was burning to ask came out all of a sudden, before she could bite it back, or phrase it more tactfully. ‘What are you doing in ward X, Luce?’
His answer had been ready since the moment when he realized what he had in mind for little Miss Woop-Woop. ‘Battle fatigue, plain, pure and simple,’ he said, and heaved a huge sigh. ‘It happens to the best of us.’
‘Oh, Luce!’
This is the worst dialogue ever written, he thought to himself, but life’s like that. No point in wasting Shakespeare where Daggett would do.
‘Feeling warmer?’ he asked.
‘Much! It’s hot up here, isn’t it?’
‘How about coming for a swim?’
‘Now? I don’t have my swimming costume!’
And pause to count four, then say: ‘It’s dark, I can’t see you. Even if I could, I wouldn’t look.’
Of course she knew as well as he that in consenting to meet him here she was also consenting to whatever liberties he planned to take; but the ritual moves had to be made, the ritual responses elicited. Otherwise conscience would not be satisfied, nor parents’ ghosts propitiated. She was panting for him, and she meant to have him, but he mustn’t ever think her cheap or easy.
‘Well, all right then, but only if you go in first and promise to stay in until I’m out and dressed again,’ she said hesitantly.
‘Done!’ he exclaimed, and he sprang to his feet and twisted free of his clothes with the speedy dispatch of one who had been trained in quick-change techniques.
She didn’t want to lose him in the water, so she followed him as quickly as she could, but things like boots and gaiters were new to her, slowed her down.
‘Luce! Where are you?’ she whispered, wading in until her knees were submerged, and frightened that he would grab her in a kind of sport she considered juvenile.
‘I’m here,’ he said reassuringly, from somewhere fairly close at hand, and without attempting to grab her.
Breathing a sigh of relief, she waded further in and bobbed down until her shoulders were covered.
‘It’s nice, isn’t it?’ he asked. ‘Come on, swim out for a little bit with me.’
She followed in the phosphorescent glitter of his wake, swimming strongly, and feeling for the first time in her life the voluptuous freedom of her unclothed body supported by the water. It excited her too much; she turned and began to swim in again, not looking to see whether he still swam out, or was accompanying her.
It was like some magic, enchanted dream, and her mind winged ahead of her flying body, already skin-deep in loving him. No tremulous virgin, she knew what was going to happen, and knew because it was him that it was going to be better than it ever had been in her life.
Her conviction that she was caught up in a spell was heightened when out of the corner of her eye she saw him alongside her; she stopped, trod water, found her feet on the bottom and stood up, waiting for his kiss. But instead he lifted her bodily into his arms and walked from the water, up to the place where he had strewn his
‘Oh, Luce, don’t! Please, I beg of you! You’re hurting me!’
The thin, wailing words seemed to penetrate, for he did stop, began to kiss the breast he had mauled so cruelly a moment before; but the kisses were perfunctory and soon ceased.
It was going to be all right. Her childhood love and her want came back, she sighed and murmured. He propped himself on his hands above her, nudged her knees apart imperatively, and fitted his legs between hers. Feeling the blind thing pushing at her, she reached down to guide it, found the right place with a shiver and took her fingers away to clasp his shoulders, draw him down onto her, welcome him, feel the weight of him and the skin of him, his hands across her back. But he refused to lower himself, remaining propped away from her by the full length of his arms, supporting himself on his hands, touching her only where apparently he thought it mattered; as if to touch her elsewhere would channel precious energy away from the task at hand. The first great thrust made her gasp with pain, but she was young, wet, relaxed and desperately anxious for this; she let her legs rest fully on the ground to lessen the depth to which he could penetrate, and began to pick up his rhythm until she moved with him, not back when he moved forward, but forward to meet each thrust.
And it became beautiful, though she longed to feel him embrace her instead of holding himself aloof. His exasperating posture diminished the friction she found necessary, so it was a full ten minutes before she came to orgasm, which she did more hugely and wildly than ever in her life, feeling the spasms from her jaw to her feet like the clonic jerks of some ecstatic epilepsy.
Enormously grateful to him for controlling himself so long to please her, she expected him to follow immediately with his own orgasm; but he did not. That grim, steady, obsessive pounding continued and continued and continued. Exhaustion began to suffocate her; she went limp, dried up, endured it until she could endure no more.
‘For God’s sake. Luce! Enough! That’s enough!’
He withdrew himself at once, still erect, not having achieved a climax. And it crushed her utterly. Never before had she felt so joyless, so devoid of any sweet victory. No use to whisper to him the timeless, inevitable ‘Was it all right?’ It had clearly not been all right.
But it was not in her nature to remain cast down by the actions of others; if he wasn’t satisfied, it was his problem, not hers. For a moment she lay where she was, hoping he would kiss her, hug her, but he did not; from the time when he picked her up until the end of it there had been no kiss; as if to touch her lips with his own would have destroyed his pleasure. Pleasure? Did he get any pleasure out of it at all? Surely he must! He had been as hard as a rock throughout.
She drew her legs to one side, rolled over on her elbow and began to grope for her cigarettes. The moment she found them Luce held out his hand for one for himself; she passed it over, and leaned to light it for him. The match revealed his face, expressionless, long dark lashes down to hide the eyes. He drew deeply on the cigarette, and the match went out, snuffed by the strength of his exhalation.
Well, that ought to keep the silly bitch happy, he thought, lying back with his hands behind his head, the cigarette held between lightly clenched lips. Thump them until they yelled for mercy, then they had no right to complain or criticize. How long that took didn’t matter to him. He could keep it up all night if he had to. He despised the act, he despised them, he despised himself. The act was a tool, the tool of the tool between his legs, but he had vowed long ago never to be the tool of either. Always the operator. He was master, they were servants, and the only people he couldn’t bend to his will were those like Langtry who felt no tug toward servants or master. God, what he wouldn’t give to see Langtry down on her knees, begging and pleading for any and all of them, servants and master.…
He glanced at his watch, saw that it was after half-past nine. Time to go or he would be late in, and he was not about to give Langtry the satisfaction of reporting him to Colonel Chinstrap. Reaching out, he gave the reclining figure near him a neat slap on her bottom.
‘Come on, love, I’ve got to go. It’s late.’
He assisted her into her clothes with the scrupulous attention to detail of a ladies’ maid, kneeling to lace up her boots, buckle her gaiters. He dusted her down, twitched the grey bush jacket into place, did up its belt and adjusted the set of her slouch hat to his satisfaction. His own clothes were wet in places from the sea, but he slid into them indifferently.
Then he walked with her to the boundary of the sisters’ blocks, his hand beneath her elbow to guide her through the darkness with an impersonal care she found infuriating.
‘Will I see you again?’ she asked when he stopped.
He smiled. ‘You certainly will, my love.’
‘When?’
‘In a few days. We can’t make the pace too fierce or we’ll be nobbled. I’ll come to pay my respects to you on the verandah outside your mess, and we’ll arrange something then. All right?’
She stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek self-consciously, then commenced the last lap home on her own.
He changed immediately into a cat, went slipping off into the gloom, skirting the patches of light, keeping well alongside buildings when he came to them.
And he thought about what he had been thinking about through most of the lovemaking: Sergeant Wilson, hero and shirt-lifting poofter. Shipped off to X by an embarrassed CO to escape the disgrace of a court-martial, he was willing to bet. Well, well! The admissions to X were certainly getting queerer and queerer all the time.
It had not escaped him that Langtry thought the new admission was a bit of all right. Perked her up no end, he had! Of course she didn’t believe what she’d read in his papers, no woman ever did—especially when the bloke was as manly and strong as Sergeant Wilson, a proper answer to an old maid’s prayers. The question: Was Sergeant Wilson the answer to Langtry’s prayers? Luce had thought for a long time that privilege was going to be Neil’s, but at the moment he was not so sure. He’d better do a bit of praying himself, that Langtry preferred a sergeant to a captain, a Wilson to a Parkinson. If she did, it would be a lot easier to do what he was planning to do. Make Langtry grovel.
He became aware that his balls ached all the way through to his teeth, and stopped in the lee of a deserted ward to urinate. But as usual the wretched stuff wouldn’t come; it always took him ages to manage to pee. He dallied as long as he dared, willing the stream to start, holding his despised prize tool between his fingers, wrinkling its skin back and forth in a quiet frenzy of desperation. No use. Another look at his watch told him there wasn’t any more time; he would have to endure the ache a few minutes more.
Part 3
1
Michael had been a patient in ward X for about two weeks when Sister Langtry first began to experience an odd feeling of premonition. Not a pleasant anticipation of pleasantness, but a morbid, crawling dread which had absolutely no basis in reality. The reality was the converse, a smooth new completeness. There were no undercurrents; everyone liked Michael, and Michael liked everyone. The men were relaxed, and certainly more comfortable, for Michael waited on them hand and foot, fetched and carried cheerfully. After all, he explained to her, he couldn’t read endlessly, he had his indolent periods on the beach, and he
Yet still her disquiet persisted. He is a catalyst of some kind, she thought; in his own nature and essence harmless, but in ward X, who knows? Yes, everyone liked him and he liked everyone. And there were no undercurrents. But ward X was different since his advent, though she could not discover what the difference was. Just an atmosphere.
The heat became oppressive, very still, and the air brooded; the slowest, most leisurely of movements produced rivers of sweat, and the waters of the ocean beyond the reef turned a sullen green, horizon smudged. With the full moon came the rain, two days of awesome steady downpour which laid the dust but brought mud instead. Mildew popped out on everything: mosquito nets, sheets, screens, books, boots, clothes, woodwork, bread. But with the beach unavailable, it saved the men from complete idleness, for Sister Langtry kept them all hard at it cleaning off the mildew with spirit-dampened rags. She issued an order that all boots and shoes must come off just inside the front or back door, yet still by some osmotic process the mud infiltrated everywhere into the ward, and that kept the men busy too, with buckets and mops and floor cloths.
Luckily there was nothing depressing about the rain itself, as it didn’t mourn the passing of the sun the way the tender, colder rains of higher latitudes did. As long as it didn’t set in, such rain as this almost had the power to exalt, filling the human mind with a vast impression of might. If it set in, as it would when the real monsoons came, its effect was worse than any other rain, for the power became remorseless and overwhelming, human beings mere scurrying impotent ants.
But this rain was too early to be the beginning of the monsoon, and when the rain cleared, even that drab unlovely collection of buildings called Base Fifteen looked unexpectedly beautiful: scrubbed, rinsed, swept.