She continued standing beside him for longer than she realized, the torch fixed without deviation on the back of his head, her left hand extended, unconsciously smoothing and stroking the mosquito net.
A soft movement from the other side of the ward intruded. She looked up, able to see Luce’s bed where it lay along the far wall because she had moved the screens back from the refectory table. Luce was sitting on the edge of his bed, naked, one leg propped up, both arms around it, watching her watch Michael. She felt suddenly as if she had been caught in the middle of some undignified and furtively sexual act, and was glad the ward was too dark to betray her blush.
For a long moment she and Luce stared at each other across the distance, like duelists coolly measuring the quality of the opposition. Then Luce broke his pose, lowering the leg as his arms fell away, and raised one hand to her in a mocking little wave. He twisted sideways under the edge of the net and disappeared. Moving quite naturally, she crossed the ward softly and bent to tuck in his net securely. But she made sure she didn’t look anywhere near his face.
It was not her habit to check on Neil; unless he called for her, which he never did, once he was inside his own sanctum his life was absolutely his own. It was as much as she could do for him, poor Neil.
All was well; Sister Langtry paused at her office to change from sandshoes back into boots and gaiters, and clapped her hat on her head. She bent to pick up her basket, dropped two pairs of socks into it which she had culled from Michael’s kit because they needed darning badly. At the front door she slipped absolutely without a sound through the fly-curtain, and let herself out. Her torch beam unshielded now, she set off across the compound toward her quarters. Half-past ten. By eleven she would have bathed and prepared herself for bed; by half-past she would be enjoying the beginning of six uninterrupted hours of sleep.
The men of ward X were not entirely unprotected during her absence; if the inner alarm bell which was intrinsic to every good nurse sounded in her, she would visit the ward during the night herself, and tip off Night Sister to keep a special eye on X as she patrolled from ward to ward. Even without prior warning from Sister Langtry, the Night Sister would always look in once as a matter of course. And if the worst came to the worst, there was a telephone. It was three months since any sort of crisis had occurred during the night, so her dreams were easy.
Part 2
1
The visit to Colonel Chinstrap’s clinic accomplished nothing, as Sister Langtry had expected. The colonel concentrated fiercely upon Michael’s body, preferring to ignore soul and mind. He palpated, auscultated, poked, prodded, pinched, tapped, pricked, tickled, struck, all of which Michael bore with unruffled patience. On command Michael closed his eyes and touched the tip of his nose with the tip of his finger, used his eyes without moving his head to follow the erratic course of a pencil back and forth and up and down. He stood with feet together and eyes closed, walked a straight line, hopped first on one leg and then on the other, read off all the letters on a chart, had his visual fields plotted, played a little word association game. Even when the colonel’s bloodshot eye loomed down on his own, ophthalmoscope at the ready, he endured that most intense and oppressive of close-quarters scrutiny with equanimity; Sister Langtry, sitting on a chair watching, was amused to see that he didn’t even flinch at first contact with the colonel’s halitosis.
After all this Michael was dismissed to wait outside, while Sister Langtry sat observing the colonel prodding at the inside of his own upper lip with the ball of his thumb; it always reminded her of nose-picking, though it was only the technique whereby the colonel stimulated his thinking processes.
‘I’ll do a lumbar puncture first thing this afternoon,’ he said at last, slowly.
‘What on earth for?’ asked Sister Langtry before she could restrain herself.
‘I beg your pardon, Sister!’
‘I said, what on earth for?’ Well, in for a penny, in for a pound. She had started and she owed it to her patient to finish. ‘There’s absolutely nothing neurologically wrong with Sergeant Wilson, and you know it, sir. Why subject the poor chap to a rotten headache and bed rest when he’s in the pink of health considering the sort of life and climate he’s been enduring?’
It was too early in the morning to fight with her. Last night’s tiny excess with the whisky bottle and Sister Connolly had largely been due to his run-in with Langtry yesterday evening, and made the very idea of renewing battle insupportable. One of these days there would be a final reckoning, he promised himself dourly, but today was not going to be the day.
‘Very well, Sister,’ he said stiffly, putting down his fountain pen and closing Sergeant Wilson’s file. ‘I will not perform a lumbar puncture this afternoon.’ He handed her the notes as if they were contaminated. ‘Good morning to you.’
She rose at once. ‘Good morning, sir,’ she said, then turned and walked out.
Michael was waiting, and fell in beside her as she strode a little too quickly from the clinic hut into the welcome fresh air.
‘Is that that?’ he asked.
‘That is most definitely that! Unless you develop an obscure disease of the spinal cord with an unpronounceable name, I can safely predict that you have seen the last of Colonel Chinstrap except on ward inspections and his weekly general round.’
‘Colonel who?’
She laughed, ‘Chinstrap. Luce nicknamed him that, and it’s stuck. His real name is Donaldson. I only hope that Chinstrap doesn’t follow him all the way back to Macquarie Street.’
‘I must say this place and the people in it are full of surprises, Sister.’
‘No more than camp and your own battalion, surely?’
‘The trouble with camp and my own battalion,’ said Michael, ‘was that I knew all the faces far too well, some of them for years and years. Not all of us who originally belonged were killed or invalided out. On the move or going into action, you don’t notice the monotony. But I’ve spent almost all of the last six years in some sort of camp. Camps in desert dust storms, camps in monsoon rains, even camp in the Showground. Always hot camps. I keep thinking of the Russian front, wondering what a really cold camp would be like, and I find myself actually dreaming about it. Isn’t it queer that a man’s life can become so monotonous he dreams of a different camp rather than of home or women? Camp is just about all I know.’
‘Yes, I agree, the chief trouble with war is the monotony. It’s the chief trouble with ward X, too. For me and for the men. I prefer to work long hours and run X on my own because if I didn’t, I’d be troppo myself. As for the men, they’re physically well, quite capable of doing a hard day’s work at something. But they can’t. There isn’t any work to do. If there were, they’d be the better for it mentally.’ She smiled. ‘Still, it can’t be for too much longer now. We’ll all be going home soon.’
