5
She left the ward a little earlier than usual that night, declining Neil’s offer of an escort, and walked to her room slowly. Awful, not to have anyone to turn to. If she tried to talk to Colonel Chinstrap he’d mark her down for a mental examination herself, while as for Matron… There was no one she felt she could turn to, even among her nursing friends, for the dearest of them had gone when Base Fifteen partially closed down.
This had been the most disastrous day of her entire life, a shattering series of encounters which tormented, confused, worried and wearied her. Michael, Luce, Neil and herself, twisting and turning and popping in and out of focus like the images in those fun-parlor mirrors which reduced familiar forms to grotesqueries.
Probably there was a logical explanation for most of what she saw—or thought she saw—in the dayroom. Her instincts about Michael pointed her one way, his conduct in the dayroom and some of his statements to her another. Why hadn’t he just shoved Luce away, even knocked him down? Why stand there like a ninny for what seemed like hours, letting that horrible physical presence dominate him? Because the last time he shoved someone away a lethal fight ensued and he wound up in X? That could very possibly be, though she didn’t know for sure if that was the way the lethal fight had ensued. His papers weren’t specific, and he said nothing. Why did he stand there letting Luce paw him? Surely he could simply have walked out! When he saw her standing watching there had been shame and disgust in his eyes, and after that he closed himself away from her completely. None of it made any sense at all.
The sound of Luce whispering. I’m anything, anything you like to name… Young, old, male, female—it’s all meat to me… I’m the best there is… I’m even a little bit of God… Despite her personal and her nursing experience, it had never occurred to her that people like Luce existed, people who could gear themselves to permit sexual functioning on any level, purely as an expedient. How had Luce become what he was? Just to imagine the amount of pain necessary to create a Luce frightened her. He had so much, looks and brains and health and youth. And yet he had nothing, nothing at all. He was an emptiness.
Neil in the driver’s seat, wringing admissions out of her she hadn’t had time to understand fully herself. In her quite long and close acquaintance with Neil she had never thought of him as an innately strong man, but clearly he was. A hard man. Heaven help you if he didn’t love you, or you did something to turn that love back in upon itself. Those gentle blue eyes had gleamed like two chips of lapis.
The shock of her own enormous, involuntary response to Michael, a weakness and a leaping that were there before she even knew. She had never felt like that in her life before, not in the wildest throes of what she had thought a complete love. If Michael had kissed her, she would have dragged him down onto the floor and had him then and there like a bitch on heat…
Once in her room, she looked at the top drawer of the bureau longingly, but made herself leave the bottle of Nembutal untouched. Earlier in the day its employment had been absolutely necessary; she knew that if she spent the afternoon awake, nothing on earth would ever have forced her to go back to X. Shock treatment. But she was over the shock now, even if there had been plenty of fresh ones since. She had done her duty and gone back to X, back to the nightmare X had become.
Neil was right, of course. The change was in her, it was due to Michael, and it was affecting all of them badly. Fool, not to have realized that her presentiment of trouble had nothing to do with the ward or her patients per se; it started and it ended within herself. Therefore it had to stop. It had to stop! It had to, it had to, it had to, it had to. Oh, God, I’m mad. I’m as insane as any man who ever passed through X, and where do I go from here? Where, God, where?
There was a stain on the floorboards in the corner where she had once spilled the only container of lighter fluid she owned. At the time it had upset her, she remembered. Now the stain sat there, an unsightly memento of clumsiness.
Sister Langtry fetched a bucket and a brush, got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed the patch until the wood began to look white. Then the rest of the floor seemed dirty by comparison, so she moved on, piece by piece, until all of the floor was wet, clean, bleached. But it had made her feel better. Better than the Nembutal. And she was tired enough to sleep.
6
‘I tell you there is something wrong with her!’ Nugget insisted, and shivered. ‘Christ, I feel crook!’ He coughed from the bottom of his lungs, hawked, spat with stunning accuracy at a palm trunk over Matt’s shoulder.
All six of them were squatting on the beach, naked, formed into a circle; from far enough away they looked like a ring of small standing stones, brown and quiet and put there intentionally at the bidding of some oracle or ritual. It was a perfect day, hovering between warmth and heat, and free from humidity. But in spite of the alluring weather their backs were turned on sea, sand and palms. They were looking inward at themselves.
Sister Langtry was the subject under discussion. Neil had called a council, and they were hard at it. Matt, Benedict and Luce felt that she was physically a bit under the weather but otherwise all right; Nugget and Neil thought something was radically wrong; and Michael, to Neil’s fury, kept abstaining every time his opinion was asked.
How many of us are being honest? wondered Neil. We toss our theories back and forth about everything from dermo to malaria to women’s troubles as if we really do believe it’s only her body ailing. And I for one am not game to suggest a different cause than body. I wish I could crack Michael, but so far I haven’t even opened up a cranny. He doesn’t love her! I love her, he doesn’t. Is that right or fair when she can’t see me for him? Why doesn’t he love her? I could kill him for what he’s doing to her.
The discussion didn’t rage, it jerked along punctuated by lengthy silences, for they were all afraid. She mattered so much, and they had never before had occasion to worry about her for any reason. The one unshakable rock in their uncertain sea, to which they had tethered themselves and ridden out their storms to eventual calm. The metaphors were endless: their beacon, their madonna, their rock, their hearth, their succor. For each of them had special memories and concepts of her, special only to himself, an absolutely individual reason for loving her.
To Nugget she was the only person other than his mother who had ever cared enough for him to worry about his precarious health. Transferred from abdominothoracic to ward X amid grateful cheers from the whole crew he was leaving, he was carried out of a busy, smelly, noisy world wherein no one ever had time to listen to him, and so had forced him to keep his voice insistently raised, demanding attention. He was sick, but they just wouldn’t believe it. When he arrived in X he had a headache, admittedly not one of his migraines, but a thumping protest against muscular tension which at the time he had felt was just as bad as a migraine in a different way. And she had sat on the side of his bed and listened raptly while he described the exact nature of his pain, interested and concerned for him. The more lyrical he waxed about his pain, the more impressed and sympathetic she became. Cold towels were produced, a battery of little pills of different kinds displayed—and the bliss of being able to discuss sensibly with her the problems involved in choosing the most suitable medication for this particular headache as distinct from all the other headaches he had ever had… Of course he knew it was her technique; no fool, Nugget. The diagnosis on his history didn’t change, either. But she really did care about him, for she devoted her precious time to him, and that to Nugget was the only criterion for caring. She was so pretty, so complete a person; and yet she always looked at him as if he mattered to her.
