The colonel stumbled to his feet, crimson with suppressed rage. ‘You are impertinent, Sister!’
‘Do I sound impertinent? I beg your pardon, sir,’ she said, reverting to that unruffled calm which was usually her trademark.
His hand on the door, Colonel Chinstrap paused to look at her. ‘Ten in the morning in my clinic for Sergeant Wilson, and don’t forget to bring him yourself.’ His eyes glittered, he searched for something hurtful to say, a mot capable of penetrating that impregnable facade. ‘I do find it peculiar that Sergeant Wilson, an apparently exemplary soldier, highly decorated, consistently in the front line for six years, has managed to rise no higher in rank than sergeant.’
Sister Langtry smiled sweetly. ‘But, sir, we can’t all be great white chiefs! Someone has to do the dirty work.’
7
After the colonel had gone. Sister Langtry sat at her desk without moving, the slightly nauseating aftermath of her anger filming her brow and upper lip with a chill perspiration. Stupid, to rail at the man like that. It did no good, it simply revealed her inner feelings to him, when she preferred he remain ignorant of them. And where was the self-control which usually carried her victorious through her encounters with Colonel Chinstrap? A waste of time to talk to that man about ward X and its victims. She couldn’t ever remember being quite so angry with him. That pathetic history had started it, of course. If he had arrived a little later, given her time to get her emotions under control, she would not have lost her temper. But he had arrived scant seconds after she put Michael’s papers down.
Whoever the MO was who had written up Michael’s case—and she didn’t connect the signature with a face in memory—was no mean stylist. As she read his notes, the people involved had come alive. Especially Michael, alive for her already. That brief encounter in the ward had triggered lots of speculations, but none had rivalled the real story. How awful for the poor chap, and how unfair! How unhappy he must be. Without realizing what she was doing, as she read the history she wove her own emotions into the story it unfolded; she grieved so for Michael in the loss of his friend that she could hardly swallow for the lump in her throat, the pain in her chest. And then enter Colonel Chinstrap, who got the lot.
Ward X is getting to me, she thought; I’ve committed every sin in the nursing book these last few minutes, from unwarranted emotional involvement to gross insubordination.
But it was the memory of Michael’s face. He could cope, he was coping, even with the fact of his admission to ward X. Usually her griefs were for the inadequacies in her patients, yet here she was, quite overcome by the plight of a man who patently had no need of her support. There was a warning in that. One of her chief defenses against personal involvement with her patients was always to think of them as unwell, sad, frail, any condition which paled them as men. Not that she was frightened of men, or of personal involvement. Only that to give of her best, a good nurse had to remain detached. Not steeled against feeling emotion; steeled against an all-out woman-with-man relationship. It was bad enough when that happened in medical nursing, but with mentally disturbed patients it was disastrous. Neil had cost her much thought, and she still wasn’t sure she had done the right thing in allowing herself to contemplate seeing him when they returned home. She had told herself it was all right because he was so very nearly well now, because the existence of ward X was finite now, and because she could still command enough control of the situation to be able to think of him as poor, sad, frail, when it became necessary.
I am only human, she thought. I have never forgotten that, never! And it is so hard.
She sighed, stretched, pushed her thoughts away from Neil, and away from Michael. It was too soon to appear in the ward; her respiration and her color hadn’t returned to normal. The pencil—where had the pencil gone when she threw it at the colonel? How unbelievably dense that man could be! He didn’t know how close he came to bombardment by the rear end of a six-pounder shell when he came out with that remark about Michael’s lack of promotion. Where had the man been hiding for the last six years? Sister Langtry’s knowledge of other armies was sketchy, but after six years of nursing Australians, she was well aware that her country at least produced quite a few very special men—men who had intelligence, the gift of command, and all the other qualities associated with army officers, but who steadfastly refused promotion above the rank of sergeant. It probably had something to do with class consciousness, though by no means in a negative sense. As if they were content where they were, couldn’t see any point in acquiring additional rank. And if Michael Wilson didn’t belong to that special group of men, then her experience with soldiers had led to many more than this wrong conclusion.
Hadn’t anyone ever told the colonel about men like Michael? Hadn’t he managed to see it for himself? Very obviously not, unless he had simply seized at a straw in order to get under her skin. Colonel bloody Chinstrap. Those vowels of his were unbelievable, even more plummily rounded than Neil’s. Stupid to be so angry with him. Pity him instead. Base Fifteen was a long way from Macquarie Street after all, and he was nowhere near his dotage. He wasn’t bad-looking, and presumably under his pukka uniform he suffered from the same urgencies and importunities as other men. Rumor had it that he had been having an affair with Sister Heather Connolly from theatres for months. Well, most of the MOs had their little flutters, and who else was there to flutter with except the nurses? Good luck to him.
The pencil was under the far edge of the desk; she crawled under to retrieve it, put it where it belonged, and sat down again. What on earth would Heather Connolly talk to him about? Presumably they did talk. No one spent every moment with a lover in loving. As a peacetime practicing neurologist, Wallace Donaldson’s great interest had been an obscure set of spinal diseases with utterly unpronounceable hyphenated names; perhaps they talked about these, and mourned the lack of obscure spinal diseases in a hospital where when spines were treated it was for the gross, final, ghastly indignities inflicted by a bullet or shrapnel. Perhaps they talked about his wife, keeping the home fires burning in Vaucluse or Bellevue Hill. Men did tend to talk about their wives to their mistresses, like discussing the merits of one friend with another while simultaneously mourning the lack of opportunity to make them known to each other. Men were always so positive their wives and mistresses would be great friends could the social rules permit it. Well, that stood to reason. To think otherwise might reflect badly on their judgment and choice of women.
Her man had done that, she remembered all too painfully. Talked to her incessantly about his wife, deplored the fact that the conventions did not permit their meeting, sure they would adore each other. After his first three descriptive sentences about his wife, Honour Langtry had known she would loathe the woman. But she had far too much good sense to say so, naturally.
What a long, long time ago that was! Time, which could not be measured in the ticking away of hours and minutes and seconds, but grew in fits and starts like a gargantuan insect shrugging itself free of successive shells, always emerging looking and feeling different into a different-looking and different-feeling world.
He had been a consulting specialist, too, at her first hospital in Sydney. Her only hospital in Sydney. A skin specialist—a very new breed of doctor. Tall, dark and handsome, in his middle thirties. Married, of course. If you didn’t manage to catch a doctor while he still wore the full whites of a resident, you never caught one at all. And she had never appealed to the residents, who preferred something prettier, more vivacious, fluffier, more empty-headed. It was only in their middle thirties that they got bored with the choice of their twenties.
Honour Langtry had been a serious young woman, at the top of her nursing class. The sort there was always a bit of speculation about as to why she chose nursing instead of medicine, even if medicine was notoriously hard going for a woman. Her background was a wealthy farming one, and her education had been acquired at one of Sydney’s very best girls’ boarding schools. The truth was she c
hose to nurse because she wanted to nurse, not understanding entirely why before she began, but understanding enough to know it was physical and emotional closeness to people that she wanted, and that in nursing she would find this. Since nursing happened to be the most admirable and ladylike of all female occupations, her parents had been pleased and relieved when she declined their offer to put her through medicine if she really wanted it.
Even as a new trainee nurse—probationers they were called—she didn’t wear spectacles and she wasn’t gawky or aggressive about her intelligence. Both at boarding school and at home she had pursued an active social life without any real attachment to any one young man, and during the four years of her nursing training she did much the same kind of thing—went to all the dances, was never a wallflower, met various young men for coffee in Repins or an evening at the pictures. But never with a view to serious involvement. Nursing fascinated her more.
After she graduated she was appointed to one of the female medical wards at P.A., and there she met her skin specialist, newly appointed to his honorarium. They hit it off together from the beginning, and he liked the quick way she came back at him; she realized that early on. It took her much longer to realize that she attracted him deeply as a woman. By the time she did, she was in love with him.
He borrowed the flat belonging to a bachelor lawyer friend of his in one of the tall buildings down toward the end of Elizabeth Street, and asked her to meet him there. And she had agreed knowing exactly what she was getting herself into. For he had gone to great pains to tell her, with a directness and frankness she thought wonderful. There was no possibility he would ever divorce his wife to marry her, he said, but he loved her, and he wanted an affair with her desperately.
Founded honestly, the affair foundered honestly about twelve months later. They met whenever he could manufacture an excuse, which sometimes wasn’t easy; skin specialists didn’t have important emergencies like general surgeons or obstetricians. As he had put it humorously, whoever heard of a skin specialist being pulled out of bed at three in the morning to minister to a critical case of acne? It was not easy for her to find the time either, for she was a mere junior sister, still in an apron, and not able to demand any preferential treatment in the rostering of time off. During the course of the affair they managed to meet as often as once a week, sometimes as little as once every three or four weeks.
It had rather tickled Honour Langtry to think of herself, not as a wife, but as a mistress. Wifehood was tame and safe. But to all mistresses clung an indefinable aura of glamour and mystery. The reality just didn’t measure up, however. Their meetings were furtive and too short; it was disconcerting to discover that too much of them had to be given over to lovemaking rather than to a more intelligent form of communication. Not that she disliked the lovemaking, or deemed it an activity beneath her dignity. She learned from him quickly, was intelligent enough to modify and adapt her new knowledge so that she could continue to please him sexually, and thereby also please herself. But the little clues he offered her to the central core of himself could never be followed up satisfactorily, for there just wasn’t sufficient time.
And then one day he got tired of her. He told her immediately, offering no excuses for his conduct. With quiet good manners she accepted her congé in the same spirit, put on her hat and gloves and walked out of his life. Someone who looked and felt different.
It had hurt; it had hurt very badly. And the worst hurt of all was in not really knowing why. Why it had begun for him, why he felt compelled to terminate it. In her more optimistic moments she told herself it ended because he was getting out of his depth, caring for her too deeply to be able to bear the transience of their relationship. In her more honest moments she knew that the real reason was a combination of inconvenience and the hideously trapped feeling of sameness the affair had begun to assume. In all likelihood the identical reason why he had originally embarked on the affair. And she knew there was one more reason: her own changing attitude toward him, the resentment she found it harder and harder to hide, that she meant very little more to him than someone different in his bed. To hold him enthralled forever she would have had to devote all her time and energy to him alone, as very possibly his wife did.
Well, that degree of feminine acrobatics just wasn’t worth it. She had more to do with her life than devote it exclusively to pleasing a rather egotistical and selfish man. Though the great majority of women seemed to want to live that way, Honour Langtry knew it never would be her way. She didn’t dislike men; she just felt it would be a mistake for her to marry one.
So she had continued to nurse, and found in it a pleasure and a satisfaction she had not genuinely found in love. In fact, she adored to nurse. She loved the fussing, the busyness, the constantly changing parade of faces, the really absorbing problems life on the ward threw at her constantly. Her good friends, and she had several, looked at each other and shook their heads. Poor Honour was badly bitten with the nursing bug, no doubt about it.
There would probably have been other love affairs, and perhaps one profound enough to cause her to change her mind about marriage. But the war intervened. Twenty-five years old, she was one of the first nurses to volunteer, and from that moment of entering army life there had been no time for thinking of herself. She had served in a succession of casualty clearing stations in North Africa, New Guinea and the Islands, which had effectively destroyed all vestiges of normality. Oh, what a life that had been! A treadmill so demanding, so fascinating, so alien that in many respects she knew nothing thereafter would ever measure up to it. They were a pretty exclusive band, the nurses on active service, and Honour Langtry belonged heart and soul to that band.
However, those years had taken their toll. Physically she had survived better than most, for she was both tough and sensible. Mentally she had also survived better than most, but when Base Fifteen appeared in her life she greeted it with a sigh of relief. They had wanted to send her back to Australia, but she had fought that successfully, feeling that her experience and her basically sound health would be of more service to her country in a place like Base Fifteen than back in Sydney or Melbourne.
When the pressure had begun to ease about six months ago, she had time to think a little, to reassess her feelings about what she wanted to do with the remainder of her life. And began to wonder if indeed nursing back in some civilian hospital would ever satisfy her again. She also found herself thinking of a more personal, concentrated, intimate emotional life than nursing offered.
Had it not been for Luce Daggett, she might not have been in a state of readiness to respond to Neil Parkinson. When Luce was admitted, Neil was still in the worst throes of his breakdown; she thought of him in no other way than as a patient. Luce did something to her, she was still not quite sure what. But when he strolled into ward X looking so complete, so in command of himself and the situation in which he found himself, he took her breath away. For two days he fascinated her, attracted her, made her feel as she had not felt in years. Womanly, desirable, lovely. Being Luce, he destroyed her feeling himself, by tormenting a pathetic little private they had had at the time following a suicide attempt in camp. The discovery that he was lead rather than gold had almost caused her to resign from her nursing commission, which was a foolish overreaction, she told herself later. At the time it had seemed that big. Luckily Luce had never realized the effect he had on her; one of the few times in his life, no doubt, when he had failed to follow up an advantage. But ward X was new to him, all the faces were new, and he left his move to cement a relationship with Sister Langry just one day too late. When he turned the full power of his charm upon her, she rebuffed him stingingly, and without caring about frailty.
However, that very minor aberration in her conduct marked the commencement of a change. It may have been awareness that the war was all but won, and this bizarre life she had led for so long was going to come to an end; it may have been that Luce performed the office of a Prince Charming, and wak
ened Honour Langtry from a self-imposed personal sleep. But ever since, she had been unconsciously moving herself and her thoughts away from utter dedication to her duty.
So when Neil Parkinson popped out of his depression and manifested interest in her, and she saw how attractive a person he was, how attractive a man, that hitherto sturdy adherence to proper nursing detachment began to erode. She had begun in liking Neil enormously, and only now was starting to love him. He wasn’t selfish, he wasn’t egotistical, he admired and trusted her. And he loved her. To look forward to a life with him after the war was bliss, and the faster that life approached, the more eagerly she welcomed it.
With iron self-discipline she had never permitted herself to dwell upon Neil as a man, to look constantly at his mouth or his hands, to imagine kissing him, making love with him. She couldn’t, or it would already have happened. And that would have been disastrous. Base Fifteen was no place to commence an affair one hoped would last a whole lifetime. She knew he felt the same way, or it would already have happened. And it was rather fun to walk an emotional tightrope above the rigidly suppressed wants, desires, appetites; to pretend she didn’t see the passion in him at all…
Startled, she saw that her watch said a quarter past nine. If she didn’t get into the ward soon they would all be thinking she wasn’t coming.