A nice change from camp, Michael was thinking, staring out across the water with eyes narrowed against the glare, watching the thin blue streaks of his smoke hover for a moment before being taken by a breath of wind and swirled into nothing. Nice to witness a different family than the battalion, though this was a much closer-knit family, gently ruled by a woman, as all families ought to be. Nice to have a woman around, too. Sister Langtry represented his first more than transient contact with a woman in six years. One forgot: how they walked, how they smelled, how different they were. The sensation of family he felt in X stemmed directly from her, the figurehead of whom no one in X, not even Luce, spoke lewdly or with disrespect. Well, she was a lady, that was true, but she was more than a lady. Ladies with nothing to back up a set of manners and attitudes than more of the same had never interested him; Sister Langtry, he was beginning to see, had qualities he felt he shared, most men shared. Not afraid to speak her mind, not afraid of men because they were men.
At first she had put his back up a little, but he was fair enough to admit the fault lay in him rather than in her; why shouldn’t women have authority and rank if they could cope with it? She could, yet she was a womanly woman, and very, very nice. Without seeming to exert any obvious wiles, she held this motley collection of men together, no doubt about that. They loved her, really loved her. Which meant they all saw sex in her somewhere. At first he hadn’t seen sex, but after only one day and two private talks with her, he was beginning to. Oh, not throwing her down and having her; something more pleasant and subtle than that, a slow and delicious discovery of her mouth, her neck and shoulders, her legs… A man switched off when he was unable to avail himself of anything save the guilty misery of masturbation, but having a woman around all day started the juices flowing again; his thoughts began to stir beyond the level of an unattainable dream. Sister Langtry wasn’t a pinup poster, she was real. Though for Michael she did have a dreamlike quality—nothing to do with the war, or its scarcity of women. She was upper crust, a squatter’s daughter, the kind of woman he would never have met in the ordinary sequence of civilian life.
Poor Colin, he would have hated her. Not the way Luce hated her, because Luce wanted her at the same time, and loved her to boot. Luce could pretend to himself that what he felt for her was hate because she didn’t want him back, and he couldn’t understand it. But Colin had been different. Which had always been Colin’s trouble. They had been in it together since the beginning. He had gravitated toward Colin very soon after enlisting, for Colin was the sort of bloke other blokes picked on, not really understanding why he irritated them, just lashing out because the irritation was perpetually there; like horses pestered by flies. And Michael had a strong protective streak which had plagued him since early childhood, so that he had always accumulated lame ducks.
Colin had been girlishly skinny and a little too pretty and a demon soldier, as handicapped by the way he looked and how he felt as Benedict probably was. Burying the butt of his cigarette in the sand, Michael rested his eyes thoughtfully on Benedict. There was a lot of trouble packed down inside Ben’s narrow frame, torment and soul-searching and a fierce rebellion, just as there had been inside Colin. He would have bet any sum an onlooker cared to name that Ben had been a demon soldier too, one of those unlikely men who were the picture of mildness until battle euphoria got into them, when they went mad and behaved like ancient heroes. Men with much to prove to themselves usually were demon soldiers, especially when spiritual conflicts gingered up the mixture of troubles.
Michael had started in pitying Colin, that protective instinct very much to the fore, but as the months went on and one country succeeded another, a curious affection and friendship had grown between them. They fought well together, they camped well together, and they discovered neither had a taste for whoring or getting blind drunk when on leave, so that to stick together at all times became natural, welcome.
However, proximity can blind, and it blinded Michael. It was not until they reached New Guinea that he fully came to understand the extent of Colin’s troubles. The company had been saddled with a new noncommissioned officer, a big, confident, rather blustering regimental sergeant major who soon displayed a tendency to use Colin as his butt. It hadn’t worried Michael too much; he knew things could only go so far while he was there to draw a line over which no one stepped. The RSM had got Michael’s measure too, and wasn’t about to step over the line. So the pinpricks directed at Colin were minor, confined to comments and looks. Michael waited placidly, knowing that as soon as they went into action again the RSM would see a different side to the flimsy, girlish Colin.
Therefore it came as a complete shock to Michael one day to discover Colin weeping bitterly, and it had taken much patient probing to learn what the problem was: a homosexual overture from the RSM which tormented Colin on many levels. His inclinations lay that way, he confessed. He knew it was wrong, he knew it was unnatural, he despised himself for it, but he couldn’t help himself, either. Only it wasn’t the RSM he wanted; he wanted Michael.
There had been no revulsion, no outraged propriety on Michael’s part; only an enormous sorrow, the tenderness and pity long friendship and genuine love permitted. How could a man turn away from his best mate when they’d been through so very much together? They talked for a long time, and in the end Colin’s confession had made no difference to their relationship, save perhaps to strengthen it. Michael’s preferences didn’t lie in that direction, but he could feel no differently toward Colin because his did. That was life, that was men, that was a fact. The war and the existence it had forced upon him had meant Michael had learned to live with many things he would have rejected outright when a civilian, for the alternative to living with them was literally to die. Choosing to live simply meant learning tolerance; so long as a man was let alone, he didn’t inquire too closely into the private activities of his fellows.
But it was a burden to be loved as a lover; Michael’s responsibilities toward Colin had suddenly multiplied. His very inability to return Colin’s love the way Colin wanted it returned laid additional care upon Michael, increased his urge to protect. Together they had seen death, battle, hardship, hunger, loneliness, homesickness, illness; too much by far to abandon. Yet to be unable to return love fully was a burden of guilt only to be expiated in what help and service he could permit within the bounds of his own nature. And Colin, though the ultimate joy of a sexual relationship was always unattainable, bloomed and brightened immeasurably after that day in New Guinea.
When Colin died Michael hadn’t been able to believe what his eyes were showing him, one of those fluke kills from a tiny splinter of metal driven faster than sound through the close-cropped hair between neck and skull, so that he just lay down and died, so very quietly, without any blood, without disgust. Michael had sat beside him for a long time, sure that his clasp on the stiff cold hand would eventually be returned; in the end they had had to prise the two hands apart, living one and dead one, and persuade Michael to come away, that there was absolutely no hope of ever seeing life in that calmly sleeping face. It looked noble, at rest, sacred, inviolate. Death would have changed it in some way. It always did, for death was slack and emptied. He still found himself wondering whether in truth Colin’s dead face had seemed to sleep, or whether his eyes had wrought a change in it that made it seem simply to sleep. Grief he had often known, but not grief like this.
