When she burst into Neil’s cubicle he and Benedict still seemed to be exactly as she had left them; had so little time passed? No, something had changed. The whisky bottles and the glasses had gone. God damn them, they were drunk! Everyone must be drunk!
‘The bathhouse!’ she managed to say. ‘Oh, quick!’
Neil seemed to sober, or at least he got to his feet and moving more quickly than she would have believed possible, and Benedict didn’t seem too bad either. She herded them out like sheep and got them through the ward, down the steps, across the compound toward the bathhouse. Neil tangled himself in the clothesline and fell, but she didn’t wait, just grabbed the hapless Benedict by the arm and hustled him along.
The scene in the bathhouse had changed. Luce and Michael were now crouched like wrestlers in a ring, arms half extended, circling each other; but Luce was still laughing.
‘Come on, lover! You know you want it! What’s the matter, afraid? Can’t you take it that big? Oh, come on! It’s no use playing hard to get, I know all about you!’
At first glance Michael’s face looked very still, almost remote, but beneath that burned something vast and awful and terrifying, though Luce seemed not to be affected by it. Michael didn’t speak, didn’t evince a flicker of change as the flow of Luce’s words went on; it was as if he hardly saw the real Luce, so intent was he upon the turmoil within himself.
‘Break it up!’ said Neil sharply.
The scene dissolved immediately. Luce swung round to face the three in the doorway, but for a moment Michael maintained his pose of defensive readiness. Then he collapsed back against the wall, leaning on it and drawing great gasping breaths as if his lungs were bellows. And suddenly he began to shake uncontrollably, his teeth chattering audibly, diaphragm still pumping beneath the skin of his upper abdomen.
Sister Langtry stepped past Luce, and Michael saw her for the first time, his face running sweat, his mouth open on the agony it was to breathe. At first he had to assimilate the simple fact of her presence, after which he looked at her with a passionate appeal that slowly faded into hopelessness; he turned his head away and closed his eyes as if it didn’t matter, sagging but not falling, supported still by the wall behind him, something draining out of him so fast he seemed visibly to shrink. Sister Langtry turned away.
‘We’re none of us in a fit state to make this public tonight,’ she said, addressing Neil.
Then she turned to Luce, her eyes filled with a sick contempt. ‘Sergeant Daggett, I will see you in the morning. Kindly return to the ward immediately and don’t leave it under any circumstances whatsoever.’
Luce appeared triumphant, unrepentant, jubilant; he shrugged, bent to pick up his clothes where he had strewn them just inside the door, opened it and went out, the set of his naked shoulders indicating that he fully intended to make things as difficult as possible in the morning.
‘Captain Parkinson, I am making you responsible for Sergeant Daggett’s good conduct. When I come on duty I expect to see everything shipshape and normal, and heaven help the man who has a hangover. I am very, very angry! You’ve abused every trust I’ve put in you. Sergeant Wilson will not return to X tonight, nor will he return until after I have interviewed Sergeant Daggett. Now do you understand? Are you fit enough to cope?’ This last was said with less stringency, and the look in her eyes had softened.
‘I’m not as drunk as you appear to think I am,’ said Neil, gazing down at her with eyes that seemed nearly as dark as Benedict’s. ‘You’re the boss. Everything shall be exactly as you wish.’
Benedict had neither moved nor spoken since coming into the bathhouse, but as Neil turned stiffly to leave he jumped convulsively, and his eyes flew from their unwinking contemplation of Sister Langtry’s face to Michael, still leaning exhausted against the wall. ‘Is he all right?’ he asked anxiously.
She nodded, managed a small, twisted smile. ‘Don’t worry, Ben, I’ll look after him. Just go back to the ward with Neil and try to get some sleep.’
Alone in the bathhouse with Michael, Sister Langtry looked around for his clothes, but all she could find was a towel; he must have walked across to have his shower already stripped, the towel perhaps wound about his waist. Not allowed in the rules, of course, which stipulated that all personnel abroad at night be covered from neck to feet; still, he had probably never counted on being discovered.
She took the towel from its peg and walked across to him, pausing to turn the shower off.
‘Come on,’ she said, sounding very tired. ‘Put this around you, please.’
He opened his eyes but didn’t look at her, took the towel and wrapped it about himself clumsily, his hands still shaking, then he moved away from the wall as if he doubted whether he could stand up unsupported; but he did.
‘And how much have you had to drink?’ she asked bitterly, grasping him ungently by the arm, urging him to walk.
‘About four tablespoons,’ he said in a stiff, small, weary voice. ‘Where are you taking me?’ And suddenly he shook himself free of her hand as if the peremptory and authoritative quality in it stung his pride.
‘We’re going to my quarters,’ she said curtly. ‘I’ll put you in one of the vacant rooms there until the morning. You can’t go back to the ward unless I call in the MPs, and I don’t want to do that.’
He followed her then without further protest, defeated. What could he possibly say to this woman that could make her refuse to believe the evidence of her own eyes? It must have looked like the dayroom all over again, only so much worse. And he was utterly exhausted, he didn’t have an ounce of reserve strength left after that brief but superhuman struggle with himself. For he had known its outcome the moment Luce appeared; if he swung for it, he was going to have the deep and gloriously satisfying pleasure of killing the stupid, ignorant bastard.
Two things had prevented his leaping for Luce’s throat immediately: the memory of the RSM and of the pain that had followed every day since, of the culminating pain which was ward X and Sister Langtry; and the drawn-out savoring of a moment which was going to be exquisite. So when Luce made his move, Michael hung grimly on and on to his shredding self-control.
Luce looked big and masculine and capable, but Michael knew he didn’t have the hardness, the experience or the lust for killing. And he had always known that behind Luce’s brash confidence, behind the insatiable appetite the man had to torment, there crouched a coward. Luce always thought he could get away with his antics forever, that men took one look at his size, felt his malice and lost their own courage. But Michael knew the moment his bluff was called he would crumble. And as he dropped into an attack position the whole of his future life was there, but it couldn’t make any difference any more. He was going to call Luce’s bluff, but when the big cocky bastard fell apart he was still going to kill him. Kill him just for the sheer pleasure of it.
Twice destroyed. Twice brought to face the knowledge that he was no better than anyone else exposed to killing; that he too could come to throw everything away for the gratification of a lust. It was a lust, he had always known that. There were many things he had learned about himself which he had also learned to live with; but this? Was having this inside him what closed his mouth on love in Sister Langtry’s office? It had welled up, would have spilled out. And then he felt a shadow, something nameless and fearful. This. It had to be this. He had thought of it as his own unworthiness, but now for all time unworthiness had a name.
Thank God she had come! Only how could he ever explain?
7
As they mounted the steps outside her quarters, Sister Langtry realized the other rooms in the block were locked and barred. Not that it meant she was defeated; there were ways of getting into any locked room, and trained nurses who had undergone the convent-like incarceration of a nurses’ home were always experts at getting in and out of supposedly secured premises. But it would take time. So she opened the door to her own room, flicked the light switch and stood back for Michael to
enter in front of her.
How odd. Except for Matron on inspection rounds, he was the only person ever to see her private domain, for all the sisters preferred to congregate in the recreation area when they sought social contact; it was such a hike to go to a colleague’s room. In spite of her weariness she looked at the place with new eyes, noting its drab bare impersonal quality. A cell rather than a lived-in space, though it was larger than a cell. It contained a narrow cot similar to the ones in X, a hard chair, a bureau, a screened-off area to hang her clothes, and two shelves nailed to the wall on which resided her books.
‘You can wait in here,’ she said. ‘I’m going to find you something to wear, and open up one of the other rooms.’
Scarcely waiting to see him seat himself on the hard chair by the bed, she closed the door and moved off, her torch beam going on before her. It was easier to raid one of the nearby wards for something for him to wear than to trek all the way back to X and disturb the men. Besides, she didn’t feel up to seeing Luce before morning; she needed time to think first. A visit to B ward produced pajamas and a robe, upon solemn promise that tomorrow she would replace them.
The room right next door to her own was the obvious one in which to deposit Michael, so she set to work levering the wooden slats out of its louvered window. The locks were mortice and too strong to pick with a hairpin. There. Four panels ought to be plenty. She shone the torch through the gap to make sure there was still a bed inside, and discovered it in much the same position as her own, its mattress rolled up. He would have to make do without any sheets, that was all, and she couldn’t summon up much pity for his plight anyway.
By the time she let herself back into her own room she had been absent for perhaps three-quarters of an hour. The night was close and humid, and she was soaked with sweat. There was a pain in her side; she stood for a moment massaging it with one hand, then looked toward the chair. He wasn’t on it. He was on the bed, curled up on his side with his back to her, and he looked as if he was fast asleep. Asleep! How could he sleep after what he’d just been through?
But it softened her as nothing else could have. After all, what was she so angry about? Why did she feel like turning and rending the nearest object limb from limb? Because they’d all got drunk? Because Luce had merely acted true to form? Or because she wasn’t sure any more about Michael, had not been since he turned away from her in the office? Yes, a little over the whisky, perhaps, but the poor beggars were only human, and none too strong at that. Luce? He didn’t matter one iota. By far the largest part of her anger was rooted in her grief and uncertainty over Michael.
Quite suddenly she realized she was near to exhaustion herself. Her clothes were stuck to her, mottled with dark patches of sweat, and chafing because she had thought it would be a brief visit and so had not donned underwear. Well, as soon as she got him settled next door she could have a shower. She went across to the bed, not making a sound.
It was after half-past two by the clock on the bureau, and he was so absolutely relaxed that in the end she didn’t have the heart to rouse him. Even when she tugged the upper sheet out from under him and spread it up over him, he didn’t stir. Out to it.
Poor Michael, the victim of Luce’s determination to pay her back for little Miss Woop-Woop. Tonight must have seemed like manna from heaven to Luce, all of them stupid with drink, Nugget incapacitated with a headache, the field clear when Michael went to the bathhouse. She wanted to believe that Michael had done nothing to invite Luce’s advances, but surely if that was so he would simply have told Luce to get stuffed and walked out. He wasn’t physically afraid of Luce, he never had been physically afraid of Luce. But had all that power made him afraid in a different way? If only she knew men better!
It looked as if she was going to have to be the one to sleep without sheets next door, unless she found the resolution to wake him. In the meantime, she could postpone that decision by going to have a shower. So she pulled her cotton robe off its hook behind the door and went to the bathhouse, shed her trousers and jacket and stood beneath the trickle of tepid water almost ecstatically. To be washed clean was a feeling that sometimes went far deeper than skin. The robe was a large, loose kimono-like affair which belted around the middle; rather than wait for a complete drying, which was debatable anyway on such a humid night, she dabbed herself with a towel and then pulled the robe on, folded it overlapping across the front, and belted it.
And, she thought, picking up her clothes, I’m darned if I see why it has to be me to sleep on a mattress full of crawlies. He can jolly well get himself together and transfer right now!
The clock said five past three. Sister Langtry dropped her sweat-soaked clothes onto the floor, moved to the bed and put the palm of her hand on Michael’s shoulder. It was a hesitant, delicate touch, for she hated to have to wake him, and it remained delicate, for she decided after all not to wake him. Too tired even to be amused by her own lack of decision, she sank down onto the hard chair beside the bed and rested her whole hand on his bare skin, unable to resist the fulfillment of an impulse she had known all too often: to feel him. A sensation not to be resisted. She tried to remember what it had been like to feel the bare skin of a beloved man, but could not, perhaps because between him and that other man so long ago there stretched a life so different it obliterated sensuous memory; more than six years of burying her own needs beneath the more urgent needs of others. And, she realized with a shock, she hadn’t really missed it! Not intolerably, not yearningly.
But Michael was real, and her feeling for him was real. For how long had she wanted to do this, touch the life in him as if she had every right to do so. This is the man I love, she thought; I don’t care who he is, what he is. I love him.
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
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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.