Benedict saw her as infinitely superior to all other women, distinguishing as always between women and girls. Females were born one or the other, they didn’t change. Girls he found disgusting; they laughed at how he looked, they teased as cruelly and deliberately as cats. Women on the other hand were calm creatures, the guardians of the race, beloved of God. Men might kill and maim and fornicate, girls might tear the world apart, but women were life and light. And Sister Langtry was the most perfect of all women; he never saw her without wanting to wash her feet, die for her if necessary. And he tried never to think of her dirtily, feeling this as a betrayal, but sometimes in his unruly dreams she walked unbidden amid breasts and hairy places, and that alone was more than enough to convince him that he was unworthy to look upon her. He could atone only if he found the answer, and somehow he always felt that God had put Sister Langtry into his life to show him the answer. It still eluded him, but with her he lost his differences, he felt as if he belonged. Michael gave him the same sort of feeling; since Michael’s arrival he had come to think of Sister Langtry and Michael as one person, indivisible, surpassingly good and kind.

Whereas the rest of ward X was like the rest of the world, a series of things. Nugget was a weasel, a stoat, a ferret, a rat. He knew it was silly to imagine that were Nugget to grow a beard he would grow rodent whiskers, but he did imagine it, and whenever he saw Nugget in the bathhouse shaving he worried, longed to urge him to borrow a Bengal and shave even closer, because those whiskers were lurking just beneath his skin. Matt was a lump, worry bead, a dull stone, an eyeball, a currant, an octopus turned inside out with all its tentacles chopped off, a single tear, all those round smooth opaque things, for tears were opaque too, they led from nowhere to nowhere. Neil was an old mountainside gouged deep by rain, a fluted column, two boards that fitted tongue in groove, the marks of anguished fingers down a pillar of clay, a sleeping seed pod that could not open, because God had stuck its edges together with celestial glue and was laughing at Neil, laughing! Luce was Benedict, the Benedict God would have fashioned had Benedict been more pleasing to Him; light and life and song. And yet Luce was evil, a treason to God, an insult to God, an inversion of intent. Luce being so, what did that make Benedict?

Neil was very worried. She was slipping away, and that could not be borne. Not at any price. Not now that he was finally beginning to understand himself, to see how like he was after all to the old man in Melbourne. He was growing in his power and enjoying the process. How odd, that it had taken a Michael to hold up the mirror in which he saw himself properly for the first time. Life could be cruel. To come to know himself through the offices of one who simultaneously was removing the reason why he was so anxious to know all about himself… Honour Langtry belonged to Neil Parkinson, and he was not going to let her go. There had to be a way to bring her back. There had to be!

To Matt she was a link with home, a voice in the darkness more dear to him than all other voices. He knew he would never physically see his home again, and at night he lay trying to remember what his wife’s voice sounded like, the thin bells of his daughters’ voices, but he could not. Where Sister Langtry’s voice was cemented within the cells of the brain he knew was dying, the only echo which came to him of other times and other places, as if in her they had crystallized. Though his love for her was quite devoid of desire for her body. To him who had never seen her, she had no body. Somehow he didn’t have the strength for bodies any longer, not even in his imagination. Meeting Ursula again was a terrifying thought, for he knew she would expect him to summon up a desire he did not have any more. The very idea of groping across and through and down his wife revolted him; like a snail or a python or a drift of seaweed, wrapping himself aimlessly around a chance obstacle. For Ursula belonged to a world he had seen, where Sister Langtry was the light in his darkness. No face, no body. Just the purity of pure light.

Luce was trying not to think of her at all. He could not bear to think of her, because every time she popped into his brain she had that look of nauseated rejection on her face. What on earth was the matter with the woman? Couldn’t she just take one look at him and see what he would be like? All he wanted from her was the chance to prove to her what she was missing in ignoring him, and for once he just didn’t know how to go about persuading a woman to try. It was usually so easy! He didn’t understand. But he hated her. He wanted to pay her back for that look, that disgust, that adamant rejection. So instead of thinking about Langtry he thought about the details of the exquisite revenge he was going to take; and somehow every idea ended in a vision of Langtry kneeling at his feet, admitting she was wrong, begging for another chance with him.

Michael didn’t know her yet, but the beginnings of a pleasure in learning to know her were stirring in him, which brought him no pleasure at all. Sex apart, his knowledge of women was extremely limited; the only one he had ever really known well was his mother, and she had died when he was sixteen. Died because apparently she had suddenly decided there was nothing worth living for, and it had been a great blow. He and his father somehow had both felt responsible, yet they genuinely didn’t know what they had done to tire her of life. His sister was twelve years older than he, so he didn’t know her at all. While he had still been at school it had awed and fascinated him to learn that girls thought him interesting and attractive, but his explorations as a result of discovering this had never been very satisfactory. His girls were always jealous of his lame ducks, and of his tendency to think of his lame ducks first. There had been one fairly long affair with a girl from Maitland, a bodily affair which had consisted only of constant and varied sex. It had pleased him to have it so, for she limited her demands to this, and he felt free of her. The war had broken it up, and very soon after he went to the Middle East she married someone else. When he found out it had not hurt much; he was too busy keeping alive to have time to dwell upon it. The oddest thing was that he didn’t seem to miss the sex, felt stronger and more whole without it. Or perhaps he was just lucky enough to be one of those people who could turn sex off. He didn’t know, wasn’t concerned about, the reason.

His chief feeling for Sister Langtry was liking, nor was he sure just when something more personal and intimate had begun to color his liking. But that morning in the dayroom had come as a shock. Luce playing silly buggers, himself riding an absolute control on anger until the right moment to vent it, a moment in which he knew it could not proceed to that awful hunger to kill. And the moment had come; his mouth was literally open to tell Luce what he could do with himself when she made some sort of noise from the doorway. At first his shame had almost overwhelmed him—what must he and Luce have looked like? How could he possibly explain? So he hadn’t even tried to explain. And then he touched her, and something had happened to both of them, something deeper than body yet all wrapped up in body. He knew it had affected her as strongly as it had himself; there were some things which didn’t need words or even glances. Oh, God, why couldn’t the sister in charge of ward X have been that comfortable middle-aged dragon he imagined before his admission? There was no point to a personal relationship with Sister Langtry, for where could it go? And yet… Oh, yes, the thought of it was wonderful. It carried a promise of excitement that had little to do with bodies; he had never, he realized, been enchanted by a woman before.