An Indecent Obsession by Colleen McCullough
‘What was your stage name, Luce?’
‘Lucius Sherringham.’ He rolled it out impressively. ‘Until I realized it was too long for the marquees, that is. Then I changed it to Lucius Ingham. Lucius is a good name for the stage, not bad for radio, either. But when I get to Hollywood I’ll change the Lucius to something more swashbuckling. Rhett or Tony. Or if my image turns out more Colman than Flynn, plain John would sound good.’
‘Why not Luce? That has a swashbuckling air to it.’
‘It doesn’t fit with Ingham,’ he said positively. ‘If I stay Luce, the Ingham has to go. But it’s an idea. Luce, eh? Luce Diablo would thrill the girls, wouldn’t it?’
‘Daggett wouldn’t do?’
‘Daggett! What a name! It sounds like a sheep’s bum.’ His face twisted as if at some half-remembered pain the years since had dulled. ‘Oh, Sis, but I was so good! Too young, though. I didn’t have enough time to make a big enough dent before King and Country called me up. And when I get back, I’ll be too old.… Some smarmy little bastard with high blood pressure or a rich father to buy him a discharge will be out there in my lights. It just isn’t fair!’
‘If you were good, it can’t make any difference,’ she said. ‘You’ll get there. Someone will see how good you are. Why didn’t you try for one of the entertainment units after they were formed?’
He looked revolted. ‘I’m a serious actor, not an old music-hall comedian! The men in charge of recruiting for those units were old vaudeville types themselves; they only wanted jugglers and tappers. Young men need not apply.’
‘Never mind, Luce, you will get there. I know you will. Anything anyone wants as badly as you want to be a famous actor has to happen.’
Sister Langtry became aware that someone in the far distance was groaning; she came reluctantly out of the insidious spell Luce had woven, almost loving him.
Nugget was making a terrific racket somewhere up near her office, and probably waking up Matt.
‘Sis, I feel so crook!’ came the wail of his voice.
She got to her feet, looking down at Luce with genuine regret. ‘I’m terribly sorry, Luce, I really am, but if I don’t go, you’ll all pay for it later tonight.’
She was already halfway down the ward when Luce said, ‘It’s not important. After all, I don’t feel crook!’
His face was twisted again, bitter and frustrated, the glorious little moment of approbation and limelight snatched away by a child’s peevish howl for Mummy. And Mummy, as all mummies must, had gone immediately to minister where ministry was really needed. Luce looked down at his mug of tea, which had cooled off enough to smear a thick ugly scum of congealing milk across its surface. Disgusted, he lifted the mug in his hand, and very slowly and deliberately he turned it upside down on the table.
The tea went everywhere. Neil leaped to his feet away from the main stream of it, dabbing at his trousers. Michael moved just as quickly the other way. Luce remained where he was sitting, indifferent to the fate of his clothes, watching the slimy liquid course over the edge of the board and drop steadily onto the floor.
‘Clean it up, you ignorant bastard!’ said Neil through his teeth.
Luce looked up, laughed. ‘Make me!’ he said, biting off each of the two words and giving them an intolerable edge of insult.
Neil was shaking. He drew himself up stiffly and curled his lip, face white. ‘If I were not your superior in rank, Sergeant, it would give me the greatest of pleasure to make you—and to rub your nose in it.’ He turned on his heel and found the opening between the screens as if more by chance than design, not floundering, but blinded.
‘Sez you!’ Luce called after him, shrill and mocking. ‘Go on, Captain, run away and hide behind your pips! You don’t have the guts!’
The muscles in Luce’s hands unlocked, went limp. Slowly he turned his face back to the table and discovered Michael busy with a rag, mopping up the mess. Luce stared in pure amazement.
‘You stupid drongo!’ he said.
Michael didn’t reply. He picked up the dripping rag and the empty mug, piled them among the other things on the makeshift tray, lifted it easily and carried it away toward the dayroom. Alone at the table. Luce sat with the light and the fire in him dying, willing himself fiercely and successfully not to weep.
9
Of her own choice entirely, Sister Langtry worked a split shift. When ward X was founded shortly after Base Fifteen, about a year earlier, there were two sisters on Matron’s roster to care for its patients. A frail and antipathetic woman, the second sister was not the right temperament to cope with the kind of patients ward X contained. She lasted a month, and was replaced by a big, bouncingly brisk sister whose mentality was still in the jolly-hockey-stick schoolgirl stage. She lasted a week, and demanded a transfer not because of anything done to her personally, but after watching Sister Langtry deal with a terrifying episode of patient violence. The third sister was hot-tempered and unforgiving. She lasted a week and a half, and was removed at Sister Langtry’s heated request. Full of apologies, Matron promised to send someone else as soon as she could find someone suitable. But she never did send anyone, whether because she couldn’t or just forgot, Sister Langtry had no way of knowing.
It suited Sister Langtry beautifully to work ward X on her own, in spite of the toll it took in strength and sleep, so she had never agitated for a second sister. After all, what could one do with days off in a place like Base Fifteen? There was absolutely nowhere to go. Since she was not the partying or the sunbathing type, the only two diversions Base Fifteen had to offer were less enticing to Sister Langtry than the company of her men. So she worked alone, tranquilly convinced after three samples that it was better for the well-being of her men to have to cope with one female only, one set of orders and one routine rather than two. Her duty seemed clear: she wasn’t a part of the war effort to serve her own interests, or to pamper herself unduly; as the servant of her country with her country in peril, she had to give of her very best, do her job as well as it could possibly be done.
It never occurred to her that in electing to run ward X on her own she cemented her power; not the shadow of a doubt ever crossed her mind that she might be perpetrating a wrong upon her patients. Just as her own very comfortable upbringing made it impossible for her to understand with heart as well as mind what poverty could do to a man like Luce Daggett, so a lack of experience prevented her from seeing all the ramifications of ward X, her tenure in it, and her true relationship with her patients. Conscious that she was freeing up a trained nurse for service in some other area than ward X, Sister Langtry merely carried on. When she was ordered away on a month’s leave, she handed the ward over to her substitute without too much heartache; but when she returned to find mostly new faces, she simply picked up where she had left off.
Her normal day began at dawn, or shortly before it; at this latitude the length of the days varied little between winter and summer, which was nice. By sunup she was in the ward, well ahead of the kitchen orderly who would attend to breakfast. When a kitchen orderly turned up at all, that is. If none of her men were up, she made them a pot of early morning tea accompanied by a plate of bread and butter, and roused them. She partook of this early morning tea herself, then attended to the sluice room and the dayroom while the men went off to the bathhouse to shower and shave. Should an orderly still not have turned up, she also prepared the breakfast. About eight o’clock she ate breakfast with her men, after which she set them firmly on the road of the day: made beds with them, supervised one of the taller ones like Neil or Luce in the task of producing that complicated Jacques Fath drape to the mosquito nets. Matron had invented the style of daytime disposal of the nets herself, and it was a well-known fact that provided when she arrived to inspect a ward she found its nets properly arranged, she noticed little else.
In a ward full of ambulant men, housekeeping presented no problem, and did not require the services of an orderly. They managed cleanliness for themselves, un
The minor irritations of ward X’s afterthought construction had long since been ironed out satisfactorily. Neil, an officer, had been given as his private quarters the old treatment room, a cubicle six feet wide and eight feet long, adjoining Sister Langtry’s tiny office. No one in X needed medical treatment, and there was no psychiatrist to administer a more metaphysical kind of treatment. So the treatment room had always been available to house the rare officer patients. When Sister Langtry needed to attend to minor but ever-present ailments like tinea, boils, skin ulcers and dermatitis, she used her office. Malarial recurrences and the gamut of tropical enteric fevers were treated from the patient’s bed, though occasionally if the illness was severe enough, the patient would be transferred to a ward more geared to physical illness.
There was no indoor toilet for the men, or for the staff. In the interests of hygiene, Base Fifteen’s ambulant patients and all its staff used deep-trench latrines built at intervals through the compound; these were disinfected once a day and periodically fired with petrol or kerosene to prevent bacterial proliferation. Ambulant patients performed their ablutions in concrete structures called bathhouses; the bathhouse for ward X lay behind it and about two hundred feet away, and had once been patronized by six other wards as well. The other wards had been closed for six months now, so the bathhouse belonged solely to the men of X, as did the nearby latrine. The sluice room inside ward X, which held urine bottles, bedpans and bowls, covers for same, a meager supply of linen and a disinfectant-reeking can for bodily wastes, was rarely if ever needed. Water for the ward was stored in a corrugated iron tank on a stand which raised it to roof level and permitted a gravity feed of water to dayroom, sluice room and treatment room.
After the ward was straight, Sister Langtry retired to her office to deal with the paperwork, everything from forms, requisitions and laundry lists to daily entries in the case histories. If it was X’s morning for visiting the stores hut, an iron structure under lock and key and ruled from the quartermaster’s office, she and one of her men walked across to fetch back whatever they managed to get. She had found Nugget to be her best escort to stores; he always looked so insignificant and shrunken, yet when they got back to X he would blithely produce from around his scraggy person everything from bars of chocolate to tinned puddings or cakes, saline powder, talcum powder, tobacco and cigarette papers and matches.
Visits from the brass—Matron, Colonel Chinstrap and the red-hat colonel who was the superintendent, and others—always occurred during the later part of the morning. But if it was a quiet morning undisturbed by brass, as most were, she would sit on the verandah with her men and talk, or perhaps even just be silent in their company.
After the men’s lunch arrived somewhere around half-past twelve, depending upon the kitchen, she left the ward and headed for her own mess to eat her own lunch. The afternoon she spent quietly, usually in her room; she might read a book, darn a pile of her men’s socks, shirts and underwear, or sometimes if it was cool and dry enough she might nap on her bed. Around four she would head for the sisters’ sitting room to drink a cup of tea and chat for an hour with whoever might appear; this represented her only truly social contact with her fellow nurses, for meals in the mess were always snatched, hurried affairs.
At five she went back to ward X to supervise her men’s dinner, then returned to the sisters’ mess for her own dinner about six-fifteen. By seven she was on her way back to X for the segment of the day she enjoyed the most. A visit and a smoke with Neil in her office, visits and talks with the other men if they felt the need or she felt they needed it. After which she made the last and most major entry of the day in the case histories. And a little after nine someone made a final cup of tea, which she drank with her patients at the refectory table behind its screens inside the ward. By ten her patients were readying themselves for bed, and by half-past she would have left the ward for the night.
Of course, these days things were quiet, it was an easy life for her. During ward X’s heyday she had spent far more time in the ward, and would dole out sedation before she left. If she had a patient prone to violence, an orderly or a relief sister would have remained on duty all night, but those so ill did not stay long unless a definite improvement was noted. By and large ward X was a team effort, with the patients a most valuable part of the team; she had never known the ward not to contain at least one patient who could be relied upon to hold a watching brief in her absence, and she had found such patients more of a help than additional staff would have been.
This ward team effort she deemed vital, for the chief worry she had about the men of X was the emptiness of their days. Once through the acute phase of his illness, a man faced weeks of inertia before discharge was possible. There was nothing to do! Men like Neil Parkinson fared better because they possessed a talent which was easy to cater to, but painters were rare. Unfortunately Sister Langtry herself had no gift for handicraft teaching, even had it been possible to obtain the materials. Occasionally a man evinced a desire to whittle, or to knit, or to sew, and this she did what she could to encourage. But whichever way one looked at it, ward X was a dull place to be. So the more the men could be persuaded to participate in the everyday routine of the ward, the better.
On that night of Michael’s arrival in X, as on every other night, Sister Langtry came out of her office at a quarter past ten, a torch in her right hand. The lights in the ward were all extinguished save for one still burning at the far end above the refectory table. That she put out herself by flicking a switch at the junction of the short corridor and the main ward. At the same time she switched on her torch and directed its beam toward the floor.
Everything was quiet, except for a slight susurration of breathing around her in the semi-darkness. Curiously, none of this present group of men snored; she sometimes wondered if this was one of the chief reasons why they had managed to put up with each other in spite of the rawnesses and the oddities. At least in sleep they did not encroach upon each other’s privacy, could get away from each other. Did Michael snore? For his sake, she hoped not. If he did, they would probably end in disliking him.
The ward was never fully dark since the lifting of the blackout. The light in the corridor behind her remained on all night, as did a light at the top of the steps which led eventually to the bathhouse and the latrine; its wan rays penetrated through the windows in the wall alongside Michael’s bed, for the door to the steps stood just beyond the foot of the bed.
All the mosquito nets were pulled down, draped in easy curves across and over each bed like ambitious catafalques. Indeed, there was something tomb-like about the effect, a series of unknown warriors sleeping that longest and most perfect of sleeps lapped in dark clouds like smoke from funeral pyres.
Automatically after so many years as a nurse, Sister Langtry changed her hold on the torch; her hand slid across its front to mask the brightness, reduce it to a ruby glow and small white sparkles between the black bars of her embracing fingers.
She walked first to Nugget’s bed and directed the dimmed light through the mosquito netting. Such a baby! Asleep of course, though in the morning he would inform her he had not so much as closed his eyes. His pajamas were neatly buttoned up to his neck in spite of the heat, the sheet drawn tidily up under his arms. If he wasn’t constipated he had diarrhoea; if his head let him alone, his back played up; if his dermo wasn’t flared to weeping bloody patches like raw meat, his boils had risen like beehives on his backside. Never happy unless tortured by some pain, real or imagined. His constant companion was a battered, dog-eared nursing dictionary he had filched from somewhere before arriving in X, and he knew it by heart, understood it too. Tonight she had dealt with him as she always did, kindly, full of commiseration, willing to engage in an interested discussion of whatever set of symptoms was currently uppermost, willing to purgate, analgize, anoint, foll
Matt’s bed was next. He too was asleep. The gentle reddened glow from the torch probed at his lowered eyelids, softly illuminated the spare dignity of his man’s features. He saddened her, for there was nothing she could do for him or with him. The shutter between his brain and his eyes remained fast closed and permitted no communication between. She had tried to persuade him to badger Colonel Chinstrap into weekly neurological examinations, but Matt refused; if it was real, he said, it would kill him anyway, and if as they thought it was imagined, why bother? A picture sat on top of his locker, of a woman in her early thirties, hair carefully rolled over wadding in best Hollywood style, a neat little white Peter Pan collar over the dark stuff of her dress. Three small girls wearing the same white Peter Pan collars were arranged around her like ornaments, and on her lap sat a fourth child, also a girl, half infant, half toddler. How strange, that he who could not or would not see was the only one who kept and treasured a picture of his loved ones. Though during her service in X she had noticed that a lack either of loved ones or of pictures of loved ones was commoner in X than in other kinds of ward.
Benedict asleep was not like Benedict awake. Awake he was still, quiet, contained, withdrawn. Asleep he thrashed and rolled and whimpered without true rest. Of all of them, he worried her the most: that eating away inside she could not seem to arrest or control. She couldn’t reach him, not because he was hostile, for he never was, but because he didn’t seem to listen, or if he listened, he didn’t seem to understand. That his sexual instincts were a great torment to him she had suspected strongly enough to tax him with it one day. When she had asked him if he had ever had a girl friend, he had said a curt no. Why not? she had inquired, explaining she didn’t mean a girl to sleep with, only someone to know and to be friends with, perhaps think of marrying. Benedict had simply looked at her, his face screwed up into an expression of complete revulsion. ‘Girls are dirty,’ he said, and would not say more. Yes, he worried her, for that and many other reasons.