An Indecent Obsession (25 page)

Her hand moved on his shoulder, at first experimentally, then in small circles, the touch more and more like a caress. It was her moment, she didn’t feel any sense of shame in knowing he had done nothing to indicate he wanted this; she touched him with love to please herself, for a memory. And utterly absorbed now in the perfect delight of feeling him, she leaned to put her cheek against his back, held it there, then turned it to taste his skin through her lips.

Yet when he moved toward her she stiffened in shock, her private paradise exposed; mortified, furious at her own weakness, she jumped away. He caught both her forearms, lifting her up from the chair so quickly and lightly that she had no sensation of force, moving himself at the same time. There was no aggression, no roughness; he seemed to shift himself and her so deftly she was scarcely aware of how he did it. She found herself sitting on the bed, one leg folded under her, his arms about her back, his head against her breast, and felt him trembling. Her own arms curved about him possessively, and the two of them remained thus, almost still, until whatever it was that had made him tremble ceased to plague him.

The grip on her back relaxed, his hands fell away, passed lightly around her waist and began to tug at the knot in her belt. He undid it, then moved the material of the robe aside so that he could turn his face against her skin. One slight breast was curved within his hand, an almost reverent taking of it that moved her unbearably. His head came up, his body lifted away from hers, and her face turned of its own volition to seek his. She moved her shoulders to help him slide the robe off, then fitted her breasts against him, her hands around his shoulders, her mouth fascinated and entranced in his.

Only then did she permit the whole of her love to well up in her, closing her eyes which had been open and shining, feeling in every part of her surely some kind of love in him. He couldn’t not love her yet be so much a joy in her, waking her to sensations now long forgotten, even unimportant, yet so familiar still, of a poignant sharpness quite new and wonderfully strange.

They rose to kneel; his hands drifted down her sides with hesitant slowness, as if he wanted to prolong everything to an agony point, and she didn’t have the strength to help him or resist him any more, she was too intent on being one with a miracle.

Part 5

1

A little before seven the next morning Sister Langtry let herself quietly out of her room, clad in full daylight uniform—grey dress, white veil, red cape, celluloid cuffs and collar, the silver rising sun at her throat as polished as if it were new. She had taken special care in dressing, wanting to look how she felt, someone with the mark of love on her. And smiling, she lifted her face to greet the new day, and stretched her tired muscles luxuriously.

The way across to the ward had never been so long nor yet so short, but she wasn’t sorry to be leaving him asleep behind her, wasn’t sorry to be going to ward X. She had not slept herself at all, nor really had he until about six o’clock, when she left the bed and went outside. Before showering she did remember to replace the slats in the window of the next-door room, and so was away for half an hour, a little more. When she returned to her room he was sound asleep; she had left him with a kiss on unknowing lips. There would be time, years of it. They were going home soon, and she was a bush girl anyway; it wouldn’t come to her as any shock to have to do without the conveniences of city living. Besides, Maitland wasn’t so very far from Sydney, nor was dairy farming in the Hunter Valley anything like as harsh an existence as sheep and wheat out west.

Normally someone was up by half-past six, but then normally she would already have been in the ward for half an hour by that time, would have made the early morning tea and got them stirring. This morning everything was still and quiet, all the mosquito nets save Michael’s fastened down.

She put her cape and basket in her office, then went to the dayroom, where an orderly had already deposited the day’s ration of fresh bread, a tin of butter and a new tin of jam—plum again. The spirit stove didn’t want to go, and by the time she had managed to persuade it that its only function was the production of hot water she had lost all the advantages of her early shower; the warmth of the day and the ferocious blaze of the spirit stove combined to produce an outpouring of sweat. The wet season was coming soon; humidity had increased twenty percent in the last week.

When the tea was made and the bread buttered she loaded everything except the teapot onto the board which served as a tray and carried it down the ward, out onto the verandah. A quick return for the teapot, and everything was ready for them. No, not quite! Though last night she had been so annoyed with them she had never thought to pity them in the morning, the later part of the night and Michael melted her resolve to be hard on them for once. After consuming so much of the colonel’s whisky, they would be dreadfully hung over.

She went back to her office and unlocked the drug drawer, took out the bottle of mist APC. The aspirin and the phenacetin had sunk in coarse white granules to the bottom, the caffeine floated as a straw-colored syrup on top. It was an easy matter to decant off some of the liquid caffeine into a medicine glass. When she had them all assembled outside she would give each man a tablespoon of the caffeine; it was the oldest hospital trick in the world for treating a hangover, and it had saved many a young doctor’s and young nurse’s reputation.

At Neil’s door she did no more than poke her head around it. ‘Neil, the tea’s made! Rise and shine!’ The air in the cubicle smelled foul; she withdrew her head quickly and went into the ward.

Nugget was awake, and gave her a sickly grin as she yanked the netting away from around him, twisted it swiftly into a bundle and threw it upward with an expert flick to rest higgledy-piggledy on the ring; time later to do battle with the Matron Drape.

‘How’s the headache?’

‘All right, Sis.’

‘Good morning, Matt!’ she said cheerfully, repeating her act with the mosquito net.

‘Good morning, Ben!’

Of course Michael’s bed was empty. She turned to go across to Luce, and something of her happiness died. What was she going to say to him? How would he behave during the interview she couldn’t very well postpone much beyond breakfast? But Luce wasn’t in his bed; the net was torn away from under the mattress, and the bed when she unveiled it had been slept in, but was quite cold.

She turned back toward Benedict and Matt, to find both of them sitting on the edges of their beds, their heads in their hands, shoulders hunched, looking as if every small movement provoked pain.

‘Damn the Johnnie Walker!’ she said under her breath as she caught sight of Neil weaving gagging from his cubicle to the sluice room opposite, his face grey-green.

Well, it seemed as usual as if she was the only one capable of locating Luce. So she opened the door next to Michael’s bed, stepped onto the little landing outside, then headed down the plank steps toward the bathhouse.

But it was a beautiful, beautiful day, humidity and all, she thought, half blind with the dizziness of too little sleep and the glitter of the early sun on the grove of palms just beyond the compound perimeter. The light had never seemed so clear, so sparkling, so soft. When she found the clothesline in ruins she simply smiled and stepped over the tangled heaps of shorts, shirts, trousers and underclothes and socks, trying to picture her dear dignified Neil drunk and fighting free of laundry.

The bathhouse was very quiet. Too quiet. Luce was very quiet. Too quiet. He lay sprawled half against the wall, half on the rough concrete floor, a razor in his spasmed hand. His glistening golden skin was strewn with stiffened, cracking rivers of blood, a congealing pool lay stagnant in the hollow of his belly amid other more hideous things, and the floor around him was awash with blood.

She came only as close to him as she needed to see properly what he had done to himself: the mutilated genitals, the hara-kiri slash which had opened up his abdomen from side to side. It was his own razor, the ebony-handled Bengal he preferred to a safety razor because of the closeness of its shave, and his fingers around it were unquestionably the only fingers which had ever been around it: there was nothing artificial about his grip on the handle, nor about the blood sticking razor and fingers inextricably together—thank God, thank God! His head was tilted unnaturally far back, and almost she fancied his eyes moved derisively at her beneath half-lowered lids; then she saw that it was the golden sheen of death in them, not the gold they had been in the gold of his so vital life.

Sister Langtry didn’t scream. Once she had looked, her reaction was instinctive; she stepped quickly back through the door and slammed it shut, scrabbling frantically at the padlock which hung by its unsnapped handle through an eyelet on the door-jamb. With controlled desperation she managed to fling the hinge nailed to the door itself over the eyelet, to thread the padlock back through and press its handle home. Then she leaned against the door limply, her mouth opening and closing, yammering up and down with the nightmarish automatism of a shiny wooden ventriloquist’s dummy.

It was perhaps as many as five minutes before the yammering stopped, before she could unglue her hands from their flattened stance against the door.

The insides of her thighs felt sticky, and for a horrid humiliating moment she thought she must have wet herself, then realized it was only sweat and the aftermath of Michael.

Michael, oh, Michael!
She beat one fist against the door in a sudden frenzy of rage, of despair. God damn Luce to eternal hell for doing this! Oh, why hadn’t those drunken fools in there kept better custody of him? Did she have to do everything herself? Luce, you bastard, you’ve won after all! You utter, foul, insane, maggoty bastard, to have carried your notions of revenge so far…

Oh, Michael! There were tears on her face, tears of a terrible grief at a snatched imperfect brutally brief joy, with all the dear bright morning in ruins at her feet, drowned in blood. Oh, Michael! My Michael… It wasn’t fair. They hadn’t even talked yet. They hadn’t begun to get together the unravelled knots of what had been their previous relationship, hadn’t had the time to knit them into a common thread. And, straightening, moving away from the door, she knew then, knew irrevocably, that there could be no hope of happiness for her and Michael. No relationship of any kind. Luce had won after all.

The walk across the compound she did like a robot, moving quickly and jerkily and mechanically, heading at first she knew not where, then heading in the only possible direction. Remembering the feel of tears on her face, she lifted one hand to wipe her eyelids with its palm, tinkered with the set of her veil, smoothed down her brows. There. There, Sister Langtry,
Sister
Langtry, you’re in charge of this mess, it’s your damned duty! Duty, remember duty. Not only your duty to yourself, but to your patients. There are five of them who have to be protected at any cost from the consequences of Luce Daggett.

2

Colonel Chinstrap was sitting out on his little private verandah attached to his little private hut, stirring his tea reflectively and not thinking anything very much at all. It was that sort of a day, somehow. A nothing very much at all sort of day. After a night with Sister Heather Connolly it usually was, but last night had been hard in a different way; they had spent most of it talking about the coming disintegration of Base Fifteen and the possibility of continuing their affair when they returned to civilian life.

As it was his habit to over-stir his tea, he was still turning his spoon over and over in his cup when Sister Langtry, looking neat and precise as a pin, marched around the corner of his hut and stood on the grass below him, looking up.

‘Sir, I have a suicide!’ she announced loudly.

He half leaped off his chair, subsided onto it again, then slowly managed to lay the spoon down in the saucer and find his feet. He tottered across to the flimsy balustrade and leaned on it gingerly, looking down at her.

‘Suicide? But this is dreadful! Dreadful!’

‘Yes, sir,’ she said woodenly.

‘Who?’

‘Sergeant Daggett, sir. In the bathhouse. Very messy. Cut himself to ribbons with his razor.’

‘Oh, dear! Oh, dear!’ he said feebly.

‘Do you want to have a look for yourself first, sir, or do you want me to go straight for the MPs?’ she asked, dragging him inexorably on to decisions he felt he didn’t have the energy to make.

He mopped his face with his handkerchief, the color so died out of his skin that the grog blossoms on his nose stood out in blue and crimson glory. His hand twitched, a betrayal; he thrust it defensively into his pocket and turned away from her toward the interior of his hut.

‘I suppose I had better have a look for myself first,’ he said, and raised his voice peevishly. ‘My hat, where the devil is my damned hat?’

They looked quite normal as they moved together across the compound, but Sister Langtry set the pace and it kept the colonel puffing.

‘Any… idea… why… Sister?’ he panted, slowing down experimentally, but discovering that she continued to forge ahead without any sort of regard for his wind.

‘Yes, sir, I do know why. I caught Sergeant Daggett last night in the bathhouse attempting to molest Sergeant Wilson. I imagine that at some time during the night Sergeant Daggett was seized by some sort of fit of guilt or remorse, and decided to end his life where the attack had occurred, in the bathhouse. There’s a definite sexual motif—his genitals have been slashed about rather badly.’

How could she speak so effortlessly when she was walking so damned quickly? ‘God spare me days, Sister, will you bloody slow down?’ he shouted. Then what she had said about genitals penetrated, and the dismay crept over him as lankly as a jellyfish. ‘Oh, dear! Oh, dear!’

The colonel took but one brief look inside the bathhouse, which Sister Langtry had unlocked for him with rock-firm hands. He dodged out again barely hanging onto his gorge, but also determined that he was not going to lose it in front of this woman above all people in the world. After a period of deep breathing which he disguised by strutting about with his hands behind his back, looking as important and thoughtful as his gorge would let him, he harumphed and stopped in front of Sister Langtry, who had waited patiently, and now eyed him with faint derision. Damn the woman!