‘Oh, God! Don’t tell me we’ve got to put up with him tonight!’

She looked amused. ‘Well, actually it’s me has to do any putting up with, not you.’

‘And what brings our stalwart chief so far down the compound after dark?’

‘Michael, of course. I rang and asked him to come, because I have no instructions about Michael. I don’t know why he’s here in Base Fifteen or why he’s been slotted into X. Personally, I’m mystified.’ She sighed suddenly, and stretched minutely. ‘Somehow it hasn’t been a very nice day today.’

‘As far as I’m concerned, no day in X is ever a very nice one,’ Neil said somberly, leaning to tap his cigarette into the spent shell case she used as an ashtray. ‘I’ve been moldering in X for nearly five months, Sis. Others seem to come and go, but here I sit like a lily on a dirt tin, a permanent fixture.’

And there it was, the X pain, in him and in her. So galling to have to watch them suffer, to know she was incapable of removing the cause of their suffering, since it was rooted in their own inadequacies. She had learned painfully that the good she did them during the more acute stage of illness rarely extended to this long-drawn-out period of almost-recovery.

‘You did have a bit of a breakdown, you know,’ she said gently, understanding how futile a comfort that must sound. And recognizing the beginning of an oft-repeated cycle of conversation, in which he would castigate himself for his weaknesses, and she would try, usually vainly, to point out that they were not necessarily weaknesses.

He snorted. ‘I got over my breakdown ages ago, and you know it.’ Extending his arms in front of him, he clenched his fists until the sinews knotted, the muscles shaped themselves into ridges, unaware that it was when she watched a small display of physical power like this that she felt a sharp jerk of attraction to him. Had he known it, he might have nerved himself to make a positive move toward cementing his relationship with her, kissed her, made love to her; but in almost all circumstances Sister Langtry’s face never betrayed her thoughts.

‘I may not be any good as a soldier any more,’ he said, ‘but surely there’s something useful I could be doing somewhere! Oh, Sis, I am so terribly, terribly tired of ward X! I am not a mental patient!’

The cry moved her; their cries always did, but this man’s especially. She had to lower her head and blink. ‘It can’t be too much longer. The war is over, we’ll be going home soon. I know home’s not the solution you want, and I understand why you rather dread it. But try to believe me when I say you’ll find your feet in seconds once the scenery changes, once you’ve got lots to do.’

‘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.