An Indecent Obsession by Colleen McCullough
Before she went to check on Michael she attended to the screens around the refectory table, for they came a little too close to the end of Michael’s bed if he should need to get up during the night. Pleating them up into the economy of a closed fan, she pushed them away against the wall. It had been some time since anyone slept in that bed; it was not popular because of the light shining in the windows alongside it.
But she was pleased to see that Michael slept without a pajama jacket. So sensible in this climate! She worried far more for the welfare of those like Matt and Nugget who persisted in wearing confining nightclothes. Nothing she had managed to find to say could persuade Matt or Nugget to give up properly buttoned pajama jackets. She wondered if that was because both men lay enthralled by women who represented the decencies and modesties of the civilized world, a world far from ward X: wife, mother.
Michael was turned away from the ward, apparently not disturbed by the light shining on his face. That was good; he mustn’t mind the bed, then. Unless she walked around to the other side his features were hidden from her, but she was loath to look upon his sleeping face, so stayed where she was. The soft light played upon the skin of back and shoulder, caught a glitter of silver from the chain on which he wore his meat-tickets, two dull-colored pieces of some pressed board material which sprawled one below, the other across the pillow behind him. That was how they would identify him if they found enough of him still intact enough to wear meat-tickets; they would chop off the lower one to send home with his effects, bury him with the other still around his neck… That can’t happen now, she told herself. The war’s over. That can’t possibly happen.
He had looked at her as if he found it difficult to take her seriously, as if she had somehow stepped out of a natural role and into an inappropriate one. Not exactly Run away and play, little girl; more Run away and deal with the poor coots who do need you, because I don’t, and I never will. He was like suddenly running into a brick wall. Or encountering an alien force. The men felt it too, recognizing that Michael did not belong in ward X.
She continued standing beside him for longer than she realized, the torch fixed without deviation on the back of his head, her left hand extended, unconsciously smoothing and stroking the mosquito net.
A soft movement from the other side of the ward intruded. She looked up, able to see Luce’s bed where it lay along the far wall because she had moved the screens back from the refectory table. Luce was sitting on the edge of his bed, naked, one leg propped up, both arms around it, watching her watch Michael. She felt suddenly as if she had been caught in the middle of some undignified and furtively sexual act, and was glad the ward was too dark to betray her blush.
For a long moment she and Luce stared at each other across the distance, like duelists coolly measuring the quality of the opposition. Then Luce broke his pose, lowering the leg as his arms fell away, and raised one hand to her in a mocking little wave. He twisted sideways under the edge of the net and disappeared. Moving quite naturally, she crossed the ward softly and bent to tuck in his net securely. But she made sure she didn’t look anywhere near his face.
It was not her habit to check on Neil; unless he called for her, which he never did, once he was inside his own sanctum his life was absolutely his own. It was as much as she could do for him, poor Neil.
All was well; Sister Langtry paused at her office to change from sandshoes back into boots and gaiters, and clapped her hat on her head. She bent to pick up her basket, dropped two pairs of socks into it which she had culled from Michael’s kit because they needed darning badly. At the front door she slipped absolutely without a sound through the fly-curtain, and let herself out. Her torch beam unshielded now, she set off across the compound toward her quarters. Half-past ten. By eleven she would have bathed and prepared herself for bed; by half-past she would be enjoying the beginning of six uninterrupted hours of sleep.
The men of ward X were not entirely unprotected during her absence; if the inner alarm bell which was intrinsic to every good nurse sounded in her, she would visit the ward during the night herself, and tip off Night Sister to keep a special eye on X as she patrolled from ward to ward. Even without prior warning from Sister Langtry, the Night Sister would always look in once as a matter of course. And if the worst came to the worst, there was a telephone. It was three months since any sort of crisis had occurred during the night, so her dreams were easy.
Part 2
1
The visit to Colonel Chinstrap’s clinic accomplished nothing, as Sister Langtry had expected. The colonel concentrated fiercely upon Michael’s body, preferring to ignore soul and mind. He palpated, auscultated, poked, prodded, pinched, tapped, pricked, tickled, struck, all of which Michael bore with unruffled patience. On command Michael closed his eyes and touched the tip of his nose with the tip of his finger, used his eyes without moving his head to follow the erratic course of a pencil back and forth and up and down. He stood with feet together and eyes closed, walked a straight line, hopped first on one leg and then on the other, read off all the letters on a chart, had his visual fields plotted, played a little word association game. Even when the colonel’s bloodshot eye loomed down on his own, ophthalmoscope at the ready, he endured that most intense and oppressive of close-quarters scrutiny with equanimity; Sister Langtry, sitting on a chair watching, was amused to see that he didn’t even flinch at first contact with the colonel’s halitosis.
After all this Michael was dismissed to wait outside, while Sister Langtry sat observing the colonel prodding at the inside of his own upper lip with the ball of his thumb; it always reminded her of nose-picking, though it was only the technique whereby the colonel stimulated his thinking processes.
‘I’ll do a lumbar puncture first thing this afternoon,’ he said at last, slowly.
‘What on earth for?’ asked Sister Langtry before she could restrain herself.
‘I beg your pardon, Sister!’
‘I said, what on earth for?’ Well, in for a penny, in for a pound. She had started and she owed it to her patient to finish. ‘There’s absolutely nothing neurologically wrong with Sergeant Wilson, and you know it, sir. Why subject the poor chap to a rotten headache and bed rest when he’s in the pink of health considering the sort of life and climate he’s been enduring?’
It was too early in the morning to fight with her. Last night’s tiny excess with the whisky bottle and Sister Connolly had largely been due to his run-in with Langtry yesterday evening, and made the very idea of renewing battle insupportable. One of these days there would be a final reckoning, he promised himself dourly, but today was not going to be the day.
‘Very well, Sister,’ he said stiffly, putting down his fountain pen and closing Sergeant Wilson’s file. ‘I will not perform a lumbar puncture this afternoon.’ He handed her the notes as if they were contaminated. ‘Good morning to you.’
She rose at once. ‘Good morning, sir,’ she said, then turned and walked out.
Michael was waiting, and fell in beside her as she strode a little too quickly from the clinic hut into the welcome fresh air.
‘Is that that?’ he asked.
‘That is most definitely that! Unless you develop an obscure disease of the spinal cord with an unpronounceable name, I can safely predict that you have seen the last of Colonel Chinstrap except on ward inspections and his weekly general round.’
‘Colonel who?’
She laughed, ‘Chinstrap. Luce nicknamed him that, and it’s stuck. His real name is Donaldson. I only hope that Chinstrap doesn’t follow him all the way back to Macquarie Street.’
‘I must say this place and the people in it are full of surprises, Sister.’
‘No more than camp and your own battalion, surely?’
‘The trouble with camp and my own battalion,’ said Michael, ‘was that I knew all the faces far too well, some of them for years and years. Not all of us who originally belonged were killed or invalided out. On the move or going into action, you don
‘Yes, I agree, the chief trouble with war is the monotony. It’s the chief trouble with ward X, too. For me and for the men. I prefer to work long hours and run X on my own because if I didn’t, I’d be troppo myself. As for the men, they’re physically well, quite capable of doing a hard day’s work at something. But they can’t. There isn’t any work to do. If there were, they’d be the better for it mentally.’ She smiled. ‘Still, it can’t be for too much longer now. We’ll all be going home soon.’
Going home didn’t appeal to them, Michael knew, but he said nothing, just marched shoulder to shoulder with her across the compound.
It occurred to her that he was nice to walk with. He didn’t bend his head down to her deferentially as Neil did, nor posture like Luce, nor skulk like Nugget. In fact, he took it quite naturally and companionably, almost one man to another. Which sounded odd, perhaps, but felt right.
‘Do you have a civilian occupation, Michael?’ she asked, turning away from the direction of ward X to take a path which led between two deserted wards.
‘Yes. Dairy farmer. I’ve got three hundred acres of river flat on the Hunter near Maitland. My sister and her husband are working it for the duration, but they’d rather be back in Sydney, so when I get home I’ll take over. My brother-in-law’s a real city bloke, but when it came to the pinch he decided he’d rather milk cows and get woken up by roosters than wear a uniform and get shot at.’ Michael’s face was faintly contemptuous.
‘Another bush bunny for X! We’re in the majority, then. Neil, Matt and Nugget are city, but now you’re here, that makes four bush bunnies.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘My father’s got a property near Yass.’
‘Yet you ended up in Sydney, like Luce.’
‘In Sydney, yes. But not like Luce.’
He grinned, gave her a quick sideways glance. ‘I beg your pardon, Sister.’
‘You’d better start calling me Sis the way the rest of them do. Sooner or later you will anyway.’
‘All right, Sis, I will.’
They climbed a small undulating rise, sandy yet spidered with long rhizomes of coarse grass, dotted with the slim neat boles of coconut palms, and arrived at the edge of a beach. There they stopped, the breeze tugging at Sister Langtry’s veil.
Michael pulled out his tobacco makings and squatted down on his heels the way all country men do, so Sister Langtry knelt beside him, careful not to get her duty shoes full of sand.
‘It’s when I see something like this I don’t mind the Islands so much,’ he said, rolling a cigarette. ‘Isn’t it amazing? Just when you think you can’t take another day of mossies, mud, sweat, dysentery and triple dye, you wake up and it’s the most perfect day God ever put upon the earth, or you see something like this, or something else happens that makes you think it isn’t really so bad after all.’
It was lovely, a short straight stretch of salt-and-peppery sand darkened near the water where it was wet from the retreating tide, and absolutely deserted. It seemed to be one side of a long promontory, for it ended against sky and water to the left, and to the right petered out in a mangrove flat reeking of decay. The water was like a thin wash of color laid on top of white: glassy, palest green, profoundly still. Far out was a reef, and the sea’s horizon was hidden by the white spume fans of surf breaking.
‘This is the patients’ beach,’ she said, sitting back on her heels. ‘In the morning it’s out of bounds, which is why there’s no one here. But between one and five each afternoon it’s all yours. I couldn’t have brought you here then, because between one and five it’s out of bounds to all females. Saves the army having to issue you with swimming costumes. The orderlies and the other noncom staff use it too, the same hours. For me it’s been a godsend. Without the beach to divert them, my men would never get well.’
‘Do you have a beach, Sis?’
‘The other side of the point is ours, though we’re not as lucky as you. Matron’s down on nude bathing.’
‘Old killjoy.’
‘The MOs and officers have their own beach too, on our side of the point, but cut off from us by a little headland. The officer patients can swim there or here.’
‘Do the MOs wear costumes?’
She smiled. ‘I really haven’t thought to inquire.’ Her position was uncomfortable, so she used a glance to her watch as an excuse to get to her feet. ‘We’d better head back. It’s not Matron’s morning for rounds, but I haven’t taught you yet how to drape your mosquito net. We’ve got time for an hour’s practice before your lunch comes.’
‘It won’t take an hour. I’m a quick learner,’ he said, reluctant to move, reluctant to break the pleasantness of this truly social contact with a woman.
But she shook her head and turned away from the beach, obliging him to follow. ‘Believe me, it’s going to take you much longer than an hour. You haven’t tried anything until you’ve tried to drape your net the right way. If I knew exactly what it portends, I’d suggest to Colonel Chinstrap that he use the Matron Drape as a test of mental aptitude.’
‘How do you mean?’ He caught up with her, brushing a little sand from his trousers.
‘Certain X patients can’t do it. Benedict can’t, for instance. We’ve all tried to teach him, and he’s very willing to learn, but he just can’t get the hang of it, though he’s intelligent enough. He produces the most weird and wonderful variations on Matron’s theme, but do it her way he can’t.’
‘You’re very honest about everyone, aren’t you?’
She stopped to look at him seriously. ‘There’s no point in being anything else, Michael. Whether you like it or not, whether you think you fit in or not, whether you belong or not, you’re a part of X now until we all go home. And you’ll find that in X we can’t afford the luxury of euphemisms.’
He nodded, but said nothing, simply stared at her as if her novelty value was increasing, yet with more respect than he had admitted yesterday.
After a moment she dropped her eyes and continued to walk, but strolling along rather than striding out at her customary brisk pace. She was enjoying the break from routine, and enjoying his rather unforthcoming company. With him she didn’t have to worry about how he was feeling; she could relax and pretend he was just someone she had met socially somewhere.
However, all too soon ward X came into sight around the corner of a deserted building. Neil was standing outside waiting for them. Which vaguely irritated Sister Langtry; he looked like an overanxious parent who had allowed his child to come home alone from school for the first time.
2
In the afternoon Michael went back to the beach with Neil, Matt and Benedict. Nugget had refused to come, and Luce was nowhere to be found.
The sureness with which Matt moved had Michael quite fascinated, discovering that a small touch on elbow or arm or hand from Neil was all Matt needed to navigate; Michael watched and learned, so that in Neil’s absence he could substitute competently. Nugget had informed him in the bathhouse with much technical detail that Matt was not really blind, that there was nothing at all wrong with his eyes, but to Michael his inability to see seemed absolutely genuine. A man feigning blindness would surely have groped, stumbled, play-acted the part. Where Matt did it with dignity and understatement, his inner self uncorrupted by it.
There were about fifty men scattered up and down the sand, which could have absorbed a thousand men without seeming crowded. All were naked; some were maimed, some scarred. Since there were noncom staff admixed with systemic convalescents after malaria or
The troppos from X shed their clothes far enough away from any other group not to be accused of deliberate eavesdropping, and swam for an hour, the water as warm and unstimulating as a tepid baby’s bath. Then they spread themselves on the sand to dry off, skins powdered with rutile-bearing grains like tiny elegant sequins. Michael sat up to roll a cigarette, lit it and handed it to Matt. Neil smiled faintly but said nothing, merely watched the sure hands as Michael embarked upon making one for himself.
A nice change from camp, Michael was thinking, staring out across the water with eyes narrowed against the glare, watching the thin blue streaks of his smoke hover for a moment before being taken by a breath of wind and swirled into nothing. Nice to witness a different family than the battalion, though this was a much closer-knit family, gently ruled by a woman, as all families ought to be. Nice to have a woman around, too. Sister Langtry represented his first more than transient contact with a woman in six years. One forgot: how they walked, how they smelled, how different they were. The sensation of family he felt in X stemmed directly from her, the figurehead of whom no one in X, not even Luce, spoke lewdly or with disrespect. Well, she was a lady, that was true, but she was more than a lady. Ladies with nothing to back up a set of manners and attitudes than more of the same had never interested him; Sister Langtry, he was beginning to see, had qualities he felt he shared, most men shared. Not afraid to speak her mind, not afraid of men because they were men.