An Indecent Obsession by Colleen McCullough
The work was gruelling. There were two shifts only, day duty from 6:30 A.M. to 6:30 P.M., and night duty, which covered the other twelve hours. Most wards contained between sixty and a hundred and twenty patients, had no domestic staff whatsoever, and only three or four nurses including the charge nurse. Every patient had to be bathed daily, though most wards owned only one plunge bath and one shower. All cleaning duties from the washing of walls and light fixtures to the polishing of floors were the sole responsibility of the nursing staff. The hot water was supplied to each ward by a coke-fired boiler which the nurses had to stoke. The nurses cared for the patients’ clothes, from laundering to mending. Though the food was cooked in a central kitchen, it was delivered to each ward in bulk, which meant it had to be reheated, then portioned or carved by the nurses, who often had to cook the dessert and the vegetables in the ward as well. All the dishes, cutlery, pots and pans were washed in the ward. Patients on special diets had their food prepared by the nurses on the ward, for there was no such thing as a diet kitchen, no dieticians either.
No matter how hard or how long they were prepared to work, three or four nurses without domestic help looking after a minimum of sixty patients, often double that number, could never have hoped to complete all that had to be done. So, as at Base Fifteen, the patients worked too. Jobs were highly prized, and the first thing a new nurse learned was not to interfere in any way with any patient’s job. When trouble broke out it was usually because one patient had stolen another’s job, or made the execution of a job intolerable. The jobs were done well, and there was a strict patient hierarchy which depended upon patient usefulness, and patient pride. The floors always shone like glass, the wards were spotless, the bathing facilities and kitchens sparkled.
Contrary to popular opinion about mental hospitals, and perhaps fairly peculiar to Morisset, there was a lot of love. Everything possible to create a homelike atmosphere was done, and the vast majority of nurses cared about their patients. The staff was a part of the same community as the patients; indeed, there were whole families—mother, father, grown-up children—all employed and living at Morisset, so that to many of the staff the hospital was a genuine home, and meant what any genuine home means.
Social life was quite active, and of great interest to patients and staff alike. Pictures were screened in the hall every Monday night for patients and staff together; there were frequent concerts in which patients and staff participated as well as formed the enthusiastic audience; once a month a dance was held, followed by a lavish and delicious supper. At the dances the male patients sat along one wall, the female along the opposite wall, and when a dance was announced the males would dart across the floor to grab their favorite partners. The staff were expected to dance too, but only with patients.
All the wards were locked, and male patients were kept in separate buildings from females; before and after the social functions where the two sexes were permitted to mix, a careful count of patients was always performed. Female patients were nursed by female staff, male patients by males only.
Very few of the patients ever had visitors, very few had private incomes; some received a small remuneration for doing special jobs about the hospital or grounds. To all intents and purposes the inmates regarded the hospital as a permanent home; some remembered no other, some had forgotten any other, some died from pining after a remembered real home with loving parents or spouses. It was not uncommon to see an aged demented patient keeping company during the hours permitted with a spouse who though quite sane had committed himself or herself rather than part completely.
It was no paradise, but the attitude was a caring one, and most of the staff realized there was nothing to be gained but much to be lost by making it an unhappy place; the lot of the patients was unhappy enough to begin with. Of course there were bad wards, bad charges, bad nurses, but not in the large proportions myth and legend contended. Overly sadistic staff, at least in the female wards where Nurse Langtry worked, were not tolerated, nor were charges permitted to run their wards like independent empires.
At times it could be an unconsciously humorous, old-fashioned place. Some of the wards were so far removed by distance from the nurses’ home that the nurses staffing them were fetched on and off duty and to and from meals by a male patient driving a horse-drawn covered buggy. Matron and the superintendent did daily rounds, commencing at nine o’clock in the morning. They travelled from ward to ward in a horse and sulky driven by a male patient, Matron sitting up regally in all the splendor of her full whites, a parasol held above her head in strong sunlight, an umbrella when it rained. At the height of summer the horse always wore a big straw hat with his ears poking out of two holes cut in it.
Nurse Langtry knew that the things which troubled her most were to be expected. It was difficult to go back to probationer status, not so much in the taking of orders as in the lack of privileges and comforts, though she suspected it would have gone far harder with her had she not gone through and survived the grind of wartime nursing. However, for a woman turned thirty who had already been a sister-in-charge, who had helped man a field ambulance under fire in battle conditions, who had worked in casualty clearing stations and a military general hospital, it came hard to have to turn out her room for Matron to inspect every Tuesday morning. Her mattress had to be rolled up so Matron could examine beneath her bed, her blankets and sheets folded in a stipulated manner and neatly arranged on top of the mattress. She tried not to mind, for at least she had not been asked to share a room with another nurse, a small concession to her age and professional status.
As her first year at Morisset drew to a close she began to get into stride, and her personality popped to the surface again at full strength. There had been no struggle to subdue it, for it had sunk to the bottom of its own accord, a protective mechanism engineered to cope with probationer status and a job which was not yet at her fingertips.
But truth will out, and the tartar in Honour Langtry was still very much present, considerably refreshed too from its enforced rest. Its reappearance did her no harm, for it had only ever lashed out at stupidity, incompetence or negligence, as it did again now.
She caught a nurse abusing a patient physically, and reported the incident to the charge nurse, who tended to think that Nurse Langtry was being hysterical in her interpretation of what had happened.
‘Su-Su’s an epileptic’ said the charge, ‘and they can’t be trusted.’
‘What rot!’ said Nurse Langtry scornfully.
‘Don’t you try to tell me my job just because you’ve got your general!’ snapped the charge. ‘If you doubt me, read your Red Book, it’s there in black and white. Epileptics are not to be trusted. They’re sly, deceitful and malicious.’
‘The Red Book is wrong,’ said Nurse Langtry. ‘I know Su-Su well, so do you, and she’s completely trustworthy. Which is beside the point anyway. Even the Red Book doesn’t advocate the beating of a patient.’
The charge looked at her as if she had blasphemed, as in truth she had; the Red Book was a red-covered manual of notes for mental nurses, and represented the only written source of authority the nurses possessed. But it was out of date, hopelessly inaccurate and designed for students of degradingly low mentality. No matter what the illness, it seemed chiefly to recommend an enema as treatment. Nurse Langtry had given it one perusal which showed her so many glaring errors she largely abandoned it, preferring to go on her own abilities to learn about mental disorders, and to buy textbooks in psychiatry every time she visited Sydney. She was convinced that the reform in nursing techniques, when it came, would reflect what the latest textbooks of psychiatry were already saying.
The battle over Su-Su went all the way to Matron, but nothing could quieten Nurse Langtry, or make her back down. In the end the guilty nurse was disciplined and transferred to another ward, where she was watched carefully; the charge nurse was not disciplined, but got the message where Nurse Langtry was concerned: have your facts absolutely straight wh
When she went to Morisset, Honour Langtry was well aware that Michael’s dairy farm was only about eighty miles away to the northwest, though its proximity was not the reason she chose to nurse there. In that she had allowed herself to be guided by the Matron of Callan Park, and knew after a year on the Morisset staff that she had been excellently advised.
During the times when she wasn’t so physically spent that she simply slept and ate when she was off duty, she thought often about Michael. And about Benedict. One day she would venture over to Maitland instead of heading down to Sydney, she knew, but not yet. The wound still hurt, yes, but that was not the reason why she kept postponing the day of her visitation. She had to give Michael time to understand that what he was attempting to do with Ben couldn’t succeed. If her first year at Morisset had taught her anything, it was that people like Benedict must not be thrust into the isolation of a farm, for instance; couldn’t be allowed to limit themselves even further by limiting the company they kept to one other human soul, no matter how gentle and loving a keeper that one human soul was. In a situation like Michael’s farm, Benedict could only grow worse. Which worried her, though she felt there would be no point in her interfering until enough time had elapsed to show Michael he was wrong and she was right.
Within the grounds of Morisset Hospital was a prison hospital for the criminally insane; the sight of it above the trees, tall red-brick blocks barred and walled and under the rigid supervision of a separate staff, always had the power to chill her. In there would Benedict now be living, had events in the bathhouse taken a different turn. And it was not a good place to be. So how could she blame Michael for trying? All she could do was to hold herself ready for the day when he might appeal to her for help, or she gauged she could offer it.
3
When she was notified one evening that someone was waiting to see her in the visitors’ room. Nurse Langtry thought immediately of Michael. If he had had the patience to trace her, he must have need of her indeed—though it could also be Neil waiting, Neil who had the sophistication and the money to know how to go about tracing anyone. It would be like Neil too, the new and tempered Neil from whom she had parted eighteen long months ago, to grow tired of waiting for her to come to him, to decide it was time he insinuated himself into her life again. Also, she was aware that her mother and his could cross paths at any time, though nothing in a recent letter from her mother indicated it.
She walked to the visitors’ room as sedately as she could, enacting the scene to come with every possible variation, and for two different men. For there was no doubt in her mind that she was going to be very glad to see either of them.
But the person in the chair, feet stretched out and shoeless, was Sister Sally Dawkin.
Nurse Langtry stopped as if she had been shot, both hands over her heart. Oh, God, why are women such fools? she wondered, finding a smile and sticking it in place for this first-ever visitor to find her at Morisset. We all live like this, focussed on some man. We can convince ourselves for months on end that it isn’t so, but give us half a chance and there’s the man again, right back in the middle of everything.
Sister Dawkin smiled broadly, but didn’t get up. ‘I was here earlier, but I didn’t like to drag you off your ward, so I had a bit of tea at the fish-and-chippery in Wyong, and came back again. How are you, Honour?’
Nurse Langtry sat down in the chair facing her, still smiling fixedly. ‘I’m very well. How are you?’
‘Oh, a bit like one of those balls tied to a racquet with a long piece of elastic. I don’t know which is going to give out first, me or the elastic.’
‘It won’t ever be you,’ said Nurse Langtry. ‘You are the great imperishable.’
‘You tell that to my feet; I’ve given up trying. They might believe you,’ said Sister Dawkin, scowling down at them ferociously.
‘You and your feet! Some things never change.’
Sister Dawkin was wearing rather drab and badly put together mufti, as was the tendency of so many long-term nurses, used only to appearing awesome in all the starched severity of a uniform and veil.
‘You look so different, Honour,’ said Sister Dawkin, staring. ‘Much younger and happier!’
And indeed she didn’t look any older than the average trainee nurse anywhere, clad in the same sort of uniform she had worn while training at P.A. The variations were minor. At Morisset she wore a dress pinstriped in white and lilac, long-sleeved and high to the neck, with detachable celluloid cuffs and collar. And the apron was the same, a voluminous affair in white, stiff with starch, wrapping completely around the skirt of the dress, up over the chest in a bib, securing across the back with broad straps. Her waist looked neat and very tiny, confined by a wide stiff white belt. Both dress and apron were mid-calf in length. She wore black lace-up shoes with flat heels, and opaque black cotton stockings, just as she had at P.A. The Morisset cap was less attractive than the P.A. one, being a pudding-cloth design, white, secured at the nape of the neck with a drawstring and with a broad stiff band across its front, notched twice in Nurse Langtry’s case to indicate that she was a second-year trainee.
‘It’s just the uniform,’ said Nurse Langtry. ‘You’re used to seeing me without an apron and with a veil.’
‘Well, whatever you wear, you still look like a new pin.’
‘Did you get your deputy matronship at North Shore?’
Sister Dawkin looked suddenly very sad. ‘No. I couldn’t stay in Sydney after all, worse luck. I’m back at Royal Newcastle because it’s close enough to home to live at home. How’s mental nursing?’
‘I love it,’ said Nurse Langtry, her face glowing. ‘It’s not like general nursing in the least, of course, though we do have our medical crises. I’ve never seen so many status epilepticus cases in all my life! We don’t save them all, poor things. But as a mental nurse I feel more important, somehow, more wanted and needed. As a senior sister I’d lost all touch with real nursing, but here, no matter what, you nurse. The patients are like relatives, almost. You know they’re going to be here as long as you are and longer, unless they die in status or of pneumonia—they’re frailer than people whose brains are intact, I’ve found. And I’ll tell you this much, Sally—if you think general nursing involves a commitment, you ought to try mental nursing.’ She sighed. ‘I wish I’d done a couple of years here before I had charge of X. I made a lot of mistakes on X through sheer ignorance. Still, better late than never, as the bishop said to the dancing girl.’
Sister Dawkin grinned. ‘Now, now, that’s my style of remark, not yours! If you don’t watch out you’ll end up just like me, a cross between a dragon and a court jester.’
‘I can think of worse fates,’ said Nurse Langtry, smiling in a sudden genuine rush of pleasure. ‘Oh, Sally dear, it’s so nice to see you! I didn’t know who might be waiting for me. This place is so far out in the sticks that I’ve never had a visitor before.’
‘It’s nice to see you, too. You’ve been conspicuous by your absence at reunions and suchlike. Don’t you even try to keep up with the old gang from Base Fifteen?’
‘No. Funny, I always did loathe post-mortems,’ said Nurse Langtry uneasily. ‘I think it’s the way they take the face, grab it round the edges and yank it down—one should never have to see what’s on the inside of a face.’
‘But that’s mental nursing you’re describing.’
Nurse Langtry folded her arms across her stomach and leaned forward. ‘I never thought of it quite like that. But I still hate post-mortems.’
‘You’re going dotty, is your trouble,’ said Sister Dawkin comfortably. ‘I knew you would, living and working in a place like this, pretty gardens and all.’
‘What made you ask about Base Fifteen, Sally?’
‘Oh, nothing, really, except that b
Nurse Langtry’s skin prickled and shivered and twitched like a horse’s. ‘Which one?’ she asked, dry-mouthed.
‘Matt Sawyer. His blindness was no hysteria.’
‘I knew that. What was it?’
‘Walloping great tumor impinging on the optic tract. An olfactory groove meningioma. Sitting getting bigger all the time. Only it didn’t cause his admission to North Shore. He had a subarachnoid bleed.’
Nurse Langtry sighed. ‘So he’s dead, of course.’
‘Came in comatose and passed away a week later in no pain. Shame about his family. Lovely little girls, nice little wife.’
‘Yes, it is a shame,’ said Nurse Langtry colorlessly.
A small silence fell, not unlike the silence of respect which is accorded to those of sufficiently worldly note who go to meet their Maker. Nurse Langtry occupied it by wondering how his wife had coped with Matt’s blindness when she finally learned of it. What effect had it had on his children? And did his wife understand the magnitude of the stigma they had attached to him, the diagnosis of hysteria? Had his wife perhaps railed at a mind which obstinately refused to permit its eyes to see any more? Or had she been convinced something more malignant than mere mind was causing the blindness? Surely the last, if the photographer had truly captured the eyes of the real Mrs. Sawyer in that picture he used to keep on his locker. Well. Sleep easy, my dearest Matt, she thought tenderly. The long battle’s over.