8
As Sister Langtry walked out of her office, down the short corridor and into the ward, she had no presentiment that the subtly poised balance of ward X was already beginning to wobble.
There was a quiet drone of conversation from behind the screens arranged opposite Michael’s bed; she slipped between two of them and emerged at the refectory table. Neil was sitting on one bench at the end nearest to her chair, with Matt beside him. Benedict and Nugget sat on the opposite bench, but had left the section next to her chair vacant. She assumed her usual position at the head of the table unobtrusively, and looked at the four men.
‘Where’s Michael?’ she asked, a tiny spurt of panic bubbling into her chest—fool, was her judgment already so distorted that she could have decided he lay in no mental peril? The war wasn’t over yet, nor was ward X defunct. Normally she would never have left a new admission unobserved for so long during his first few hours in X. Was Michael going to mean bad luck? To leave his papers lying around while she talked to him—now she couldn’t even guard the man himself.
She must have lost color; all four men were looking at her curiously, which meant her voice had betrayed her concern, too. Otherwise Matt could not have noticed.
‘Mike’s in the dayroom making tea,’ said Neil, producing his cigarette case and offering it to each of the other men. He would not, she knew, commit the indiscretion of offering her a cigarette outside the four walls of her office.
‘It seems our latest recruit likes to make himself useful,’ he went on, lighting all the cigarettes from his lighter. ‘Cleared away the dirty plates after dinner, and helped the orderly wash them. Now he’s making tea.’
Her mouth felt dry, but she didn’t dare add to the oddity of her reaction by trying to moisten it. ‘And where is Luce?’ she asked.
Matt laughed silently. ‘He’s on the prowl, just like a tomcat.’
‘I hope he stays out all night,’ said Benedict, lips twisting.
‘I hope he doesn’t, or he’s in trouble,’ said Sister Langtry, and dared to swallow.
Michael brought the tea in a big old pot that had seen better days, rusting where the enamel had chipped off, and badly dented. He put it down in front of Sister Langtry, then returned to the dayroom to fetch a piece of board which functioned as a tray. On it were six chipped enamel mugs, a single bent teaspoon, an old powdered milk tin containing sugar, and a battered tin jug containing condensed milk in solution. Also on the board was a beautiful Aynsley china cup and saucer, hand-painted and gold-washed, with a chased silver spoon beside it.
It amused her to note that Michael sat himself down opposite Neil at her end of the table, as if it never occurred to him that perhaps the place was being saved for Luce. Good! It would do Luce good to discover he wasn’t going to have an easy mark in the new patient. But then why should Michael be bluffed or intimidated by Luce? There was nothing the matter with Michael, he didn’t have the apprehensions and distorted perceptions the men of X were usually suffering on admission. No doubt to him Luce was more ridiculous than terrifying. In which case, she thought, if I am as it seems using Michael as my standard of normality, I too am a little queer, for Luce bothers me. He’s bothered me ever since I came out of that early daze to discover he’s some sort of moral imbecile, a psychopath. I’m frightened of him because he fooled me; I almost fell in love with him. I welcomed what seemed his normality. As I’m welcoming what seems to be Michael’s normality. Am I wrong, too, in my first judgment of Michael?
‘I imagine the mugs are ours and the cup and saucer belong to you, Sister,’ said Michael, looking at her.
She smiled. ‘They do indeed belong to me. They were my birthday present.’
‘When’s your birthday?’ he asked immediately.
‘November.’
‘Then you’ll be at home to celebrate the next one. How old will you be?’
Neil stiffened dangerously, so did Matt; Nugget merely looked awed, Benedict disinterested. Sister Langtry looked more caught off guard than offended, but Neil got in first, before she could answer.
‘It’s none of your business how old she is!’ he said.
Michael blinked. ‘Isn’t that for her to say, mate? She doesn’t look old enough to make it a state secret.’
‘She is the cat’s mother,’ said Matt. ‘This is Sister Langtry.’ His voice trembled with anger.
‘How old will you be in November, Sister Langtry?’ Michael asked, not in a spirit of defiance, but as if he thought everyone was far too touchy, and he intended to demonstrate his independence.
‘I’ll be thirty-one,’ she said easily.
‘And you’re not married? Not widowed?’
‘No. I’m an old maid.’
He laughed, shaking his head emphatically. ‘No, you don’t have the old-maidy look,’ he said.
The atmosphere was darkening; they were very angry at his presumption, and at her tolerance of it. ‘There’s a tin of bikkies in my office,’ she said without haste. ‘Any volunteers to get it?’
Michael rose immediately. ‘If you tell me where it is, Sister, I’d be glad to.’
‘Look on the shelf below the books. It’s a glucose tin, but it has a label on the lid marked Biscuits. How do you take your tea?’
‘Black, two sugars, thank you.’
While he was gone there was absolute silence at the table, Sister Langtry pouring the tea placidly, the men producing smoke from their cigarettes as if it were an organic offshoot of fury.
He came back bearing the tin, but instead of sitting down went around the table, offering the biscuits to each man. Four seemed to be the number each man picked out, so when he came to Matt he took four from the tin himself and placed them gently beneath one of the loose unseeking hands folded quietly on the table. Then he moved the mug of tea close enough to them for Matt to be able to locate it by the warmth it gave off. After which he sat down again next to Sister Langtry, smiling at her with an unshadowed liking and confidence she found very touching and not at all a reminder of Luce.
The other men were still silent, watchful and withdrawn, but for once she didn’t notice; she was too busy smiling back at Michael and thinking how nice he was, how refreshingly devoid of the usual rich assortment of self-inflicted horrors and insecurities. She couldn’t imagine he would ever use her to further his own emotional ends the way the others did.
Nugget emitted a loud groan and clutched at his belly, pushing his tea away pettishly. Oh, God, I’m crook again! Ohhhhhhhhh, Sis, it feels like me intussusception or me diverticulitis!’
‘All the more for us,’ said Neil unsympathetically, grabbing Nugget’s tea and emptying it into his own drained mug. Then he nipped Nugget’s four biscuits away and dealt them out deftly, as if he handled playing cards.
‘But, Sis, I do feel crook!’ Nugget mewed piteously.
‘If you didn’t lie on a bed all day reading medical dictionaries you’d feel a lot better,’ said Benedict with dour disapproval. ‘It’s unhealthy.’ He grimaced, gazed around the table as if something present at it offended him deeply. The air in here is unhealthy,’ he said, then got to his feet and stalked out onto the verandah.
Nugget began to groan again, doubling up.
‘Poor old Nugget!’ said Sister Langtry soothingly. ‘Look, why don’t you pop down to my office and wait there for me? I’ll be with you as soon as I can. If you like, you can take your pulse and count your respirations while you wait, all right?’
He got up with alacrity, clutching his belly as if its contents were about to fall out, and beaming triumphantly at the others. ‘See? Sis knows! She knows I’m not having you all on! It’s me ulcerative colitis playing up again, I reckon.’ And he sped away down the ward.
‘I hope it isn’t serious, Sister,’ said Michael, concerned. ‘He does look sick.’
‘Huh!’ said Neil.
‘He’s all right,’ said Sister Langtry, apparently unperturbed.
‘It’s only his soul that’s sic
k,’ said Matt unexpectedly. ‘The poor little coot misses his mother. He’s here because here is the only place that can put up with him, and we put up with him because of Sis. If they had any sense, they would have packed him off home to Mum two years ago. Instead, he gets backaches, headaches, gutsaches and heartaches. And rots like the rest of us.’
‘Rot is right,’ said Neil moodily.
There was a tempest blowing up; they were like the winds and the clouds at this same latitude, thought Sister Langtry, eyes travelling from one face to another. All set for fair weather one moment, swirling and seething the next. What had provoked it this time? A reference to rotting?
‘Well, at least we’ve got Sister Langtry, so it can’t be all bad,’ said Michael cheerfully.
Neil’s laughter sounded more spontaneous; maybe the storm would abort. ‘Bravo!’ he said. ‘A gallant soul has arrived in our midst at last! Over to you, Sis. Refute the compliment if you can.’
‘Why should I want to refute it? I don’t get too many compliments.’
That cut Neil, but he leaned back on the bench as if perfectly relaxed. ‘What a plumping lie!’ he said gently. ‘You know very well we shower you with compliments. But for that plumper, you can tell us why you’re rotting in X. You must have done something.’
‘Yes, as a matter of fact I have. I’ve committed the terrible sin of liking ward X. If I didn’t, nothing compels me to stay, you know.’
Matt got up abruptly, as if he found something at the table suddenly unbearable, moved to its head as surely as if he could see, and rested his hand lightly on Sister Langtry’s shoulder. ‘I’m tired, Sis, so I’ll say good night. Isn’t it funny? Tonight’s one of those nights I almost believe that when I wake tomorrow, I’m going to be able to see again.’
Michael half rose to help him through the barrier of the screens, but Neil put out a hand across the table to restrain him.
‘He knows the way, lad. None better.’
‘More tea, Michael?’ asked Sister Langtry.
He nodded, was about to say something when the screens jiggled afresh. Luce slid onto the bench beside Neil, in the place where Matt had been sitting.
‘Beaut-oh! I’m in time for some tea.’
‘Speak of the devil,’ sighed Neil.
‘In person,’ Luce agreed. He put his hands behind his head and leaned back a little, looking at the three of them through half-shut eyes. ‘Well, what a cozy little group this is! I see we’ve lost the riffraff, only the big guns are left. It’s not ten o’clock yet, Sis, so there’s no need to look at your watch. Are you sorry I’m not back late?’
‘Not at all,’ said Sister Langtry calmly. ‘I knew you’d be back. I’ve never yet known you to stay out one minute past ten without a pass, or commit any other breach of regulations, for that matter.’
‘Well, don’t sound so sad about it! It makes me think nothing would give you greater pleasure than to be able to report me to Colonel Chinstrap.’
‘It wouldn’t give me any pleasure at all, Luce. That is your whole trouble, my friend. You work so darned hard at making people believe the worst of you that you literally force them to believe the worst, just to have a little peace and quiet.’
Luce sighed, leaned forward to put his elbows on the table and prop his chin on his hands. Thick and waving and a little too long to meet the strict definition of short-back-and-sides, his reddish-gold hair fell forward across his brow. How absolutely perfect he is, thought Sister Langtry with a shiver of real repulsion. Perhaps he’s too perfect, or the coloring is impossible to absorb. She suspected he darkened his brows and lashes, maybe plucked the one and encouraged the growth of the other, but not because of sexual inversion; purely out of overweening vanity. His eyes had a golden sheen, were very large and set well apart below the arch of those too-dark-to-be-true brows. Nose like a blade, straight, thin, flaring proudly at the nostrils. The kind of cheekbones which looked like high, purely structural supports, the flesh beneath them hollowed. Though it was far too determined to be called generous, his mouth was not thin, and had the exquisitely defined edges one usually saw only on statues.
Little wonder that he knocked me sideways when I first saw him.… Yet I’m no longer attracted by that face, or the height of the man, or his splendid body. Not the way I am to Neil—or to Michael, come to think of it. There’s something wrong with Luce, inside; not a weakness, nor merely a flaw, but something that is all of him, innate and therefore ineradicable.
She turned her head slightly to look at Neil, who in any company save Luce’s would pass for a handsome man. Much the same sort of features as Luce’s, though far less spectacular coloring. Most handsome men looked better with the sort of lines graven into the flesh of the face Neil had; yet when those lines appeared on Luce he would change from beauty to beast. They would be the wrong lines, perhaps. Would indicate dissipation rather than experience, petulance rather than suffering. And Luce would run to fat, which Neil never would. She particularly liked Neil’s eyes, a vivid blue and fringed with fairish lashes. He had the sort of brows a woman might like to stroke with one fingertip, over and over and over again, just for the sheer pleasure of it.…
Now Michael was quite different. He might pass for the very best kind of ancient Roman. Character rather than beauty, strength rather than self-indulgence. Caesarish. There was a contained singularity about him which said, I’ve been looking after others as well as myself for a long time now, I’ve been through heaven and hell, but I’m still a whole man, I still own myself. Yes, she decided; Michael was enormously attractive.
Luce was watching her. She felt it, and brought her eyes back to him, making their expression cool and aloof. She defeated him, and she knew it. Luce had never been able to discover why his charm hadn’t worked on her, and she was not about to enlighten him, either about his initial impact on her, or the reasons why it had been shattered.
Tonight for a change his guard was down a bit; not that he was vulnerable, exactly, more that perhaps he would have liked to be vulnerable.
‘I met a girl from home tonight,’ Luce announced, his chin still propped on his hands. ‘All the way from Woop-Woop to Base Fifteen, no less! She remembers me, too. Just as well. I didn’t remember her at all. She’d changed too much.’ His hands fell; he assumed a high and breathlessly girlish voice, conjuring for them an image so strong Sister Langtry felt physically thrust into the middle of that encounter. ‘My mother did her mother’s washing, she said, and I used to have to carry the basket, she said. Her father was the bank manager, she said.’ His voice changed, dropped to become Luce at his most superior, most sophisticated. ‘That must have won him a lot of friends with the Depression on, I said. Foreclosing right, left and center, I said. Just as well my mother didn’t have anything worth foreclosing on, I said. You’re cruel, she said, and looked as if she was going to cry. Not at all, I said, just being truthful. Don’t hold it against me, she said, big black eyes all wet with tears. How could I ever hold anything against anyone as pretty as you, I said.’ He grinned, quick and wicked as a razor slash. ‘Though that wasn’t being at all truthful. I’ve got one thing I’d love to hold against her!’
Sister Langtry had adopted his earlier pose, elbows on table, chin on hands, watching fascinated as he mimicked and postured his way through the story.
‘So much bitterness, Luce,’ she said gently. ‘It must have hurt a great deal to have to carry the bank manager’s laundry.’
Luce shrugged, tried unsuccessfully to assume his normal devil-may-care insouciance. ‘Yah! Everything hurts, doesn’t it?’ His eyes widened, glittered. ‘Though in actual fact carrying the bank manager’s laundry—and the doctor’s, and the headmaster’s, and the Church of England minister’s, and the dentist’s—didn’t hurt half so much as having no shoes to wear to school. She used to be in the same school; I remembered her when she said who she was, and I even remember the kind of shoes she used to wear. Little black patent-leather Shirley Temples with straps and black s
ilk bows. My sisters were much prettier than any of the other girls, and prettier than her, too, but they had no shoes of any kind.’
‘Didn’t it occur to you that those with shoes probably envied you your freedom?’ asked Sister Langry tenderly, trying to find something to say which would help him see his childhood in better perspective. ‘I know I always did, when I went to the local public school before I was old enough to be sent away to boarding school. I had shoes a bit like the bank manager’s daughter. And every day I’d have to watch some wonderfully carefree little urchin dance his way across a paddock full of bindy-eye burrs without so much as a wince. Oh, I used to long to throw my shoes away!’
‘Bindy-eyes!’ exclaimed Luce, smiling. ‘Funny, I’d forgotten all about them! In Woop-Woop the bindy-eyes had spines half an inch long. I could pull them out of my feet without feeling a thing.’ He sat up straighter, glaring at her fiercely. ‘But in the winter, dear well-educated and well-fed and well-clothed Sister Langtry, the backs of my heels and all around the edges of my feet and up my shins used to crack!’—the word came out like a rifle shot—‘and bleeeeeed’—the word oozed out of him—‘with the cold. Cold, Sister Langtry! Have you ever been cold?’
‘Yes,’ she said, mortified, but a little angry too at being so rebuffed. ‘In the desert I was cold. I was hungry and I thirsted. In the jungle I’ve been hot. And sick, too sick to keep down food or drink. But I did my duty. I am not an ornament! Nor am I insensitive to your plight when you were a child. If my words were wrong, I apologize. But the spirit in which they were intended was right!’
‘You’re pitying me, and I don’t want your pity!’ cried Luce painfully, hating her.
‘You haven’t got it. I don’t pity you. Why on earth should I? Whatever you came from doesn’t matter. It’s where you’re going that does.’
But he abandoned the mood of wistfulness and self-revelation, turned bright, metallic, chatty. ‘Well, anyway, before the army grabbed me I was wearing the best shoes money could buy. That was after I went off to Sydney and became an actor. Laurence Olivier, stand aside!’