‘How can I go home? There are widows and orphans at home because of me! What if I meet the widow of one of those men? I killed those men! What could I possibly say to her? What could I do?’
‘You’d say and do exactly the right thing. Come on, Neil! These are just phantoms you’re exploiting to torment yourself because you haven’t enough to do with your time in ward X. I hate to say stop pitying yourself, but that is what you’re doing.’
He wasn’t disposed to listen, settling into his mood with a kind of inverted pleasure. ‘My incompetence was directly responsible for the deaths of over twenty of my men, Sister Langtry! There’s nothing phantom about their widows and orphans, I assure you,’ he said stiffly.
It was many weeks since she had seen him so passionately down; Michael’s advent, probably. She knew better than to interpret his behavior tonight as entirely related to herself; the arrival of a new man always upset the old hands. And Michael was a special case—he wasn’t leadable, wasn’t the sort who would knuckle under to Neil’s brand of domination. For Neil did tend to dominate the ward, to dictate its patient policy.
‘You have to lose this, Neil,’ she said curtly. ‘You’re a fine, good man, and you were a fine, good officer. For five years no officer did a better job. Now listen to me! It isn’t even established that your mistake was what actually caused the loss of life. You’re a soldier, you know how complicated any action is. And it’s done! Your men are dead. Surely the least you owe them is to live with all your heart. What good are you doing those widows and orphans, sitting here in my office stewing, pitying not them but yourself? There’s no written guarantee that life is always going to go the way we want it to. We just have to deal with it, bad as well as good. You know that! Enough’s enough.’
Mood visibly soaring, he grinned, reached out to take her hand, and leaned his cheek upon it. ‘All right, Sis, message received. I’ll try to be a better boy. I don’t know how you manage to do it, but I think it’s more your face than what you say. You always manage to take away the pain. And if you only knew how much difference you’ve made to my sojourn in X. Without you—’ He shrugged. ‘Oh, I can’t imagine what X might have been like.’
He said she always managed to take away the pain. But how, why? It wasn’t enough to do good; her intelligence needed to know what the magic formula was, and it always eluded her.
Frowning, she sat staring across the little desk at his face, wondering whether it was prudent of her to give him the few small encouragements she had. Oh, to be able to divorce personal feelings entirely from duty! Was she in fact doing Neil more harm than good by becoming involved with him? For instance, how much of this performance had been a ploy to gain her attention? Feeling more for the man than for the patient destroyed true perspective; she would find herself running along lines of thought having more to do with the future than the present situation, when the present situation should have had her whole energy bent upon it. Admittedly there were delicious possibilities in a peacetime relationship with Neil, from experiencing his first kiss to making up her mind whether she would actually marry him, but it was wrong to dwell on that now, here. Wrong, wrong!
As a man she found him attractive, exciting, interesting. His world was much like her world, which had made their friendship logical. She liked the way he looked, his manners, his education, his family background. And she more than liked the kind of man he was—except for this perpetual, unfortunate obsession of his. When he persisted in hearkening back to that day of slaughter as if it would permanently color the rest of his life to mourning, she doubted the viability of a peacetime relationship very much. For she didn’t want to spend her own emotional coin on an emotional cripple, no matter how understandable that crippling was. She wanted, needed, someone able to meet her as an equal, not someone who leaned on her while simultaneously he worshipped her as a goddess.
‘That’s what I’m here for, to take away the pain,’ she said lightly, and removed her hand in a way which could not hurt his feelings. Michael’s papers still lay under her other hand; she picked them up. ‘Sorry to have to cut it short, Neil, but I do have work to do.’
He got to his feet, looking down at her anxiously. ‘You will be down to see us later, won’t you? This new admission business won’t prevent that, will it?’
She glanced up, surprised. ‘Nothing can prevent that! Have you ever known me to miss my late cuppa in the ward?’ she asked, smiling at him, then bent her head back to Michael’s papers.
6
Colonel Wallace Donaldson picked his way down to the far end of the compound by the light of a torch, feeling hard done by. It really was disgraceful! In these peacetime days, with the blackout at an end, and yet the super couldn’t even arrange for a little exterior lighting! In fact the bulk of the hospital lay in utter darkness, for it was uninhabited, and did not give off so much as a reflection from inside lights.
Over the last six months Base Fifteen military general hospital had shrunk pitifully in people, though not in area; like a fat man gone thin yet doomed still to go on wearing his fat man’s clothes. The Americans had built it a little more than twelve months previously, but had moved on immediately, leaving it, partially unfinished and only partially furnished, to the Australians who were driving in a more westerly direction through the East Indies.
During its heyday it had managed to squeeze five hundred patients within its compound, and had kept thirty MOs plus one hundred and fifty nurses so busy that off duty was a distant dream. Now there were only half a dozen inhabited wards left. And ward X, of course, right down on the margin of the palm forest that had once yielded a small fortune in copra for its Dutch owners. Of those thirty MOs, only five general or specialist surgeons and five general or specialist physicians were left, along with a single pathologist. Barely thirty nurses flitted through the huge nurses’ quarters.
As the neurologist, Colonel Donaldson had been assigned ward X when Base Fifteen passed into Australian hands; he always did inherit the handful of emotionally disturbed men who came bobbing to the top of the brew, there to be skimmed off, placed in a ward X.
Before the war Colonel Donaldson had been busy setting himself up in a Macquarie Street practice, struggling to become one of the entrenched on that most prestigious but capricious of Sydney specialist medical scenes. A lucky share speculation in 1937 as the world tried to haul itself out of the Depression had given him the money to buy into a Macquarie Street address, and the big honorariums at the major hospitals were just beginning to come his way when Hitler invaded Poland. At which point everything changed; sometimes he caught himself wondering fearfully whether things could ever go back to what they were before 1939. From the vantage point of this hellhole called Base Fifteen, the last in a succession of hellholes, it didn’t seem possible that anything could ever be the same again. Even he himself.
Socially his background was excellent, though during the Depression the family money reserves had dwindled alarmingly. Fortunately he had a stockbroker brother who was largely responsible for the family’s recovery. Like Neil Parkinson, he spoke without a trace of an Australian accent; his school was Newington, his university Sydney, but all his postgraduate medical qualifications had been secured in England and Scotland, and he liked to think of himself as more English than Australian. Not that he was precisely ashamed of being Australian; more that it was better to be English.
If he had a pet hate, the woman he was on his way to see now was most certainly that pet hate. Sister Honour Langtry. A snippet, barely thirty years old if that, a professional nurse but not army trained, though he was aware she had been in the army since early 1940. The woman was an enigma; she spoke very well, was obviously very well educated and finished, and had trained as a nurse at P.A., a very good training hospital indeed. Yet she had no spit and polish, no exquisite deference, no awareness of her basically servant status. Could he have been so honest with himself, he would have admitted that she frightened him to death. He had to gird himsel
f up mentally and spiritually to all his encounters with her, for what good it did him. She always ended in wringing his balls so brutally it would be hours before he felt himself again.
Even the fly-curtain made of beer bottle caps irritated him. Nowhere but ward X would have been permitted to keep it, but Matron, foul underbred besom though she was, trod always very carefully in X. During its early days a patient had grown tired of listening to Matron harangue Sister Langtry, and had dealt with her in a stunningly simple and effective way; he just reached out and ripped her uniform apart from collar to hem. Mad as a March hare, of course, and shipped off forthwith to Australia, but after that incident Matron made sure she did nothing to offend the men of ward X.
The light in the corridor revealed Colonel Wallace Donaldson to be tall, a dapper man of about fifty, with the high petechial complexion of a spirits-lover. He had a carefully tended iron-grey moustache of military proportions, though the rest of his face was perfectly shaven. His hair now that his cap was off displayed a deep groove in its oiled greyness where the edge of his cap had rested and cut into the scalp, for it was not thick hair, not springy hair. His eyes were pale blue and a little protuberant, but he still showed the lingering vestiges of a youthful handsomeness, and his figure was good, broad-shouldered, almost flat-bellied. In an impeccably tailored conservative suit he had been an imposing man; in an equally impeccably tailored uniform he looked more like a field marshal than any of the real ones did.
Sister Langtry came to receive him at once, ushered him into her office and saw him comfortably seated in the visitor’s chair, though she did not sit down herself—one of her little tricks, he thought resentfully. It was the only way she could tower over him.
‘I apologize for having to drag you all the way down here, sir, but this chap’—she lifted the papers she was holding slightly—‘came in today, and not having heard from you, I presumed you were unaware of his arrival.’
‘Sit, Sister, sit!’ he said to her in exactly the same tone he would have used to a disobedient dog.
She dipped down into her chair without demur or change of expression, looking like a schoolboy cadet officer in her grey trousers and jacket. Round one to Sister Langtry; she had provoked him into being rude first.
She extended the papers to him silently.
‘No, I don’t want to look at his papers now!’ he said testily. ‘Just tell me briefly what it’s all about.’
Sister Langtry gazed at him without resentment. After his first meeting with the colonel, Luce had given him a nickname—Colonel Chinstrap—and because it suited him so perfectly, it had stuck. She wondered if he knew that the entire human complement of Base Fifteen now called him Colonel Chinstrap behind his back, and decided he did not. He couldn’t have ignored a derogatory nickname.
‘Sergeant Michael Edward John Wilson,’ she said levelly, ‘whom I will call Michael from now on. Aged twenty-nine, in the army since the very beginning of the war, North Africa, Syria, New Guinea, the Islands. He’s seen a great deal of action, but there’s no evidence of mental instability due to seeing action. In fact, he’s an excellent and a very brave soldier, and has been awarded the DCM. Three months ago his only close friend was killed in a rather nasty engagement with the enemy, after which he kept very much to himself.’
Colonel Chinstrap heaved a huge, long-suffering sigh. ‘Oh, do get on with it, Sister!’
She continued without a tremor. ‘Michael is suspected of unsound mind following an unsavory incident in camp one week ago. A fight broke out between him and a noncommissioned officer, highly unusual behavior for both of them. Had others not been present to drag Michael away from the RSM, it appears the RSM would now be dead. Michael’s only comment since the incident was that he wanted to kill the man, and would have killed him. He has repeated this often, though he won’t enlarge upon it.
‘When the CO tried to find out what was at the bottom of it, Michael refused to answer. However, the RSM was very vociferous. He accused Michael of making homosexual advances to him, and insisted there be a court-martial. It appears Michael’s dead friend had definite homosexual leanings, but as to whether Michael himself was actively involved, opinion was strongly divided. The RSM and his followers maintained the two had been lovers, where the vast majority of men in the company maintained just as firmly that Michael’s attitude toward his dead friend was that of protector and friend only.
‘The battalion CO knew all three men very well, as they’d all been with the battalion a long time—Michael and the dead man since its inception, the RSM since New Guinea. And it was the CO’s opinion that under no circumstances should Michael come to court-martial. He preferred to believe that Michael had suffered a temporary derangement, and ordered Michael to submit to a medical examination, the results of which indicated he was definitely of unsound mind, whatever that might mean.’ Her voice was noticeably sadder, sterner. ‘So they bunged him on a plane and sent him here. The admitting officer automatically slotted him into X.’
Colonel Chinstrap pursed his lips together and watched Sister Langtry carefully. She was choosing sides again, a most regrettable habit of hers. ‘I’ll see Sergeant Wilson in my clinic in the morning. You can walk him down there yourself, Sister.’ He glanced up at the meager wattage of the light bulb in a naked socket over the desk. ‘I’ll look at his papers then. I don’t know how you can read anything in this light—I certainly could not.’ The chair became too hard, too uncomfortable; he rolled his buttocks on it, hemmed a little, frowned fiercely. ‘I loathe cases with a sexual connotation!’ he said suddenly.
Sister Langry was idly holding a pencil, and her hands closed around it convulsively.
‘My heart bleeds for you, sir,’ she said without any attempt to disguise the sarcasm. ‘Sergeant Wilson does not belong in X—in fact, he does not belong in any hospital ward of any kind.’ Her voice shook, she shoved an impatient hand into the front of her hair and slightly dislocated the set of its neat brown waves. ‘I think it’s a pretty poor show when a fight and a highly suspect accusation can break up a young man’s life, already greyed because his friend had died. I keep thinking of how he must feel at this moment. As if, I’m sure, he’s groping through some appalling fog he’s never going to manage to find his way out of. I’ve talked to him, you haven’t. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with him, mentally or sexually or any other way you care to think of. The medical officer responsible for his being sent here ought to be the one facing a court-martial! To deny Sergeant Wilson the opportunity to clear himself by whisking him off instead to a place like ward X is a disgrace to the army!’
As always, the colonel found himself unable to deal with this kind of adamant insolence, for normally men in hospital positions as high as his did not encounter it. Dammit, she talked to him as if she regarded herself as his educated and intellectual equal! Perhaps their officer status was what was wrong with these army nurses, that and the high degree of autonomy they enjoyed in places like Base Fifteen. And those stupid bloody veils nurses wore didn’t help, either. Only nuns ought to wear veils, only nuns ought to be addressed as sister.
‘Oh, come now, Sister!’ he said, holding onto his temper and trying to be reasonable. ‘I do agree that the circumstances are somewhat unusual, but the war’s over. The young man’s stay here cannot possibly be any longer than a few weeks. And he could be in worse predicaments than ward X, you know.’
The pencil flipped through the air, bounced onto the corner of the desk and fell with a hollow clatter just to one side of the colonel, who sat wondering whether her aim was good or bad. Strictly speaking, she ought to be reported to Matron; as head of nursing, Matron was the only officer permitted to discipline the nursing staff. But the trouble was that since the incident of the ravished uniform, Matron held Sister Langtry in considerable awe. Lord, what a fuss there would be if he complained!
‘Ward X is a limbo!’ cried Sister Langtry, more angry than he had ever seen her. His curiosity began to stir; Sergeant
Michael Wilson’s plight had certainly had an extraordinary effect on her. It might be interesting to see him in the morning after all.
She continued, fuelling her anger on her own words. ‘Ward X is a limbo! The patients no one knows what else to do with are just filed under X and forgotten! You’re a neurologist. I’m a general-trained nurse. Not a whisker of experience or qualification between us. Do you know what to do with these men? I don’t, sir! I grope! I try my best, but I’m miserably aware that it’s nowhere near good enough. I come on duty every single morning praying—praying that I’ll manage to get through the day without crushing one of these frail and difficult people. My men in ward X deserve better than you or I can give, sir.’
‘That is quite enough. Sister!’ he said, a purplish tinge creeping under his skin.
‘Oh, but I’m not finished yet,’ she said, unimpressed, unswerving. ‘Shall we leave Sergeant Wilson entirely out of it, for example? Let’s look at the other five current inmates of ward X. Matt Sawyer was transferred here from neuro when they couldn’t find an organic lesion to account for his blindness. Diagnosis hysteria. You co-signed that one yourself. Nugget Jones was transferred from abdominothoracic after two NAD laparotomies and a history of driving the entire ward mad with his complaining. Diagnosis hypochondria. Neil—Captain Parkinson, that is—had a simple breakdown which one might better call grief. But his CO thinks he’s protecting him, so here Neil continues to sit, month after month. Diagnosis involutional melancholia. Benedict Maynard went quite mad after his company opened fire on a village in which it turned out there were no Japanese at all, just a lot of native women and children and old men. Because he sustained a mild scalp wound at the time his mental problems began, he was admitted to neuro as a concussion, and then transferred here. Diagnosis dementia praecox. I agree with that diagnosis, as a matter of fact. But it means Ben ought to be among the experts in Australia, receiving proper care and attention. And Luce Daggett, why exactly is he here? There’s no diagnosis of any kind on his papers! But we both know why he’s here. Because he was living the life of Riley, blackmailing his commanding officer into letting him do precisely whatever he wanted. But they couldn’t make the charge stick, and they didn’t know what else to do with him except to send him to a place like X until the shooting was all over.’