At which moment Benedict stirred; his face began to squeeze in on itself, nostrils pinched, eyes glassy. It turned to stone under Michael’s eyes. Curious, Michael turned his head to see what Benedict had seen. And there was Luce in the distance, parading up the beach from its far end toward them, and parade he did. Stepping high in a mincing parody of a lifesaver’s strut, superbly aware of his own superbness, the sun lighting up his golden body, the length and the thickness of his penis mocking every other man on the beach into sullen inadequacy and secret loathing envy.

‘The bastard!’ said Neil, long cobbled toes digging into the sand as if this were but the commencement of a mole process which would end in burying him. ‘God, if only I had the guts to take a Bengal razor to that load he’s carrying!’

‘Just once I wish I could see him,’ said Matt wistfully.

‘A sight to behold,’ said Michael, looking amused.

Luce reached them and swung round gracefully to stand above them, one hand absently caressing his hairless chest. ‘Tennis, anyone?’ he asked, the other hand swishing an imaginary racquet.

‘Oh, is there a court here?’ asked Michael, ingenuously surprised. ‘I’ll have a game with you, then.’

Luce stared at him suspiciously, the realization that the offer wasn’t meant seriously dawning slowly. ‘You’re pulling my leg, you sarcastic bastard!’ he said, astonished.

‘Why not?’ asked Michael, grinning. ‘You’ve got three.’

Matt and Neil laughed uproariously, and Benedict succumbed to a self-conscious titter, which the group nearest to them on the beach echoed, ears tuned guiltily. Luce stood for a moment flabbergasted, uncertain how to act. It was an infinitesimal pause; he shrugged and moved away toward the water as if such had been his intention all along.

‘Very good, Mike,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘Very good indeed! I’m glad to see you noticed.’

‘How could a bloke not notice a donger like that? I thought at first it was a bit left over from the Sydney Harbor Bridge!’ Michael called after him.

The next group down the beach abandoned all pretense at disinterest and burst out laughing; Luce’s grand moment had become a farce. Neil picked up a handful of sand and threw it at Michael joyously. ‘Full marks, old son,’ he said, wiping his eyes. ‘God, how I wish I’d said that!’

When Sister Langtry came on duty a little after five, to discover that the rest of her charges had resoundingly decided to like Michael, she felt like cheering and waving flags. It mattered tremendously to her that they should like him, wished on them at the very last moment as he had been. Just why it should matter so much she had not quite worked out, but she suspected it was more on his behalf than for the sake of the others.

At first he had stirred her curiosity, then her sense of justice and fair play, then her frank interest. If she had doubted how he would settle into ward X, her doubt lay not so much with him as with Neil, the ringleader of X. For Neil had not been warm in his welcome; he might mock himself, but he was a leader, a naturally autocratic personality. The other men looked to him, even Luce, so it lay within his power to make ward X as much heaven or hell as limbo.

To discover Neil treating Michael as a full equal made her profoundly thankful. Michael would be all right from now on, therefore the rest of them would be too.

Then Benedict appeared and was delighted to learn that Michael played chess. Chess was apparently Ben’s one fleshly weakness, but it bored Neil and frightened Nugget; Matt had liked to play when he could see the board and the pieces, but said he found keeping a visual image in his mind all the time too much of a strain. Luce played well, but couldn’t resist turning black against white into a metaphorical struggle between good and evil, which upset Ben more than Sister Langtry felt was good for him, so she had forbidden him to play with Luce.

Watching Benedict settle pleasurably on the bench opposite Michael after dinner, the chess set out, made Sister Langtry feel as if the ward was finally complete within itself. How nice to have an ally! she thought contentedly, too generous to resent the fact that apparently Michael was succeeding with a patient she had always known was not amenable to her own brand of help.

3

Luce had more than one quality in common with a cat: not only did he move like one, he could see in the dark like one. Thus he carried no torch as he moved surefooted through the spaces between deserted huts, making for a spot at the end of the nurses’ beach where it was brought up short by a tall outcrop of rocks Sister Langtry had described erroneously to Michael as a headland.

The MPs were lax these days, as Luce well knew; the war was over, Base Fifteen was as quiet as the corpse it was soon to become, and there was no feeling of discord in the air. Sensitive to such things, MP antennae registered zero.

Tonight he was on his way to an important assignation, feeling powerful and light and almost painfully alive. Oh, yes, little Miss Woop-Woop, the bank manager’s precious daughter! It hadn’t been easy persuading her to meet him like this, and she had consented only when she realized there were no other ways of seeing him than illicitly or in the full public gaze of the verandah outside the nurses’ mess. She was a nurse officer, he was a man from the ranks, and while innocent intercourse between old school chums was quite permissible, any intercourse more intimate would bring a sharp reprimand and disciplinary action from Matron, a real stickler for military conventions. But he had succeeded in persuading her to meet him on the beach after dark, and he had no doubts as to how matters would proceed from now on; the biggest hurdle was already behind him.

There was no moon to betray them, but in this place of dark peacefulness the sky shone with an unearthly brilliance, and the matted clouds of nebulae and star clusters along the axis of the galaxy breathed a still, cold light upon the world, faintly silvering it. Thus he had no trouble in picking out her form among the denser shadows around it, and moved very quietly until he stood alongside her.

She drew in her breath sharply. ‘I didn’t hear you!’ she said, shuddering a little.

‘You can’t possibly be cold on a night like this,’ he said, rubbing the goose bumps on the back of her hand with a friendly impersonal touch.

‘It’s nerves. I’m not used to sneaking out like this up here—it’s different from sneaking out of a nice safe nurses’ home in Sydney.’

‘Calm down, it’s all right! We’ll just sit ourselves over here where it’s comfortable, and have a cigarette.’ With a hand under her elbow, he helped her down onto the sand, and sat far enough away from her to reassure her. ‘I hate to be a bludger, but do you happen to have any tailor-mades?’ he said, teeth flashing in the dimness. ‘I can roll you one, but you mightn’t like the taste.’

She fumbled in one of the pockets of her bush jacket and produced a packet of Craven As, which he took without permitting his fingers to touch hers. Then he gave the act a certain intimacy by lighting the cigarette in his own mouth and passing it to her. For himself, he produced his makings and rolled one leisurely.

‘Won’t someone see our cigarettes?’ she asked.

‘Well, I suppose they might, but it isn’t very likely,’ he said easily. ‘The nurses here are a pretty tame lot, so the MPs don’t usually bother with places like this.’ He turned his head to watch her profile. ‘How’s the old town these days?’

‘A bit empty.’

It came hard to say it, but he managed. ‘How’s my mother? My sister?’

‘When did you hear from them last?’

‘A couple of years ago.’

‘What? Don’t they write?’

‘Oh, all the time! I just don’t read their letters.’