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 chose 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.
