She stopped just inside the fly-curtain, wondering why there were some people one felt compelled to hurt, yet why one was amazed when they in their turn lashed back. That was she and Colonel Chinstrap; from their first moment of meeting and sizing each other up, it had been a competition to see who could strike hardest. And, by now dedicated to that course, she didn’t feel charitable enough to let him get away with his taunts about Michael.
So she said like silk, ‘I shall request the men to refrain from this running on at the mouth about their alcoholic indiscretions, sir, don’t you think? I really can’t see why it has to be mentioned at all, provided the military police feel there is no doubt Sergeant Daggett committed suicide.’
He writhed, would have given anything he owned to fling it back in her smiling face, shout at her to tell the whole bloody world he had given troppo patients whisky, but he knew he couldn’t. So he merely nodded stiffly. ‘As you see fit, Sister. Certainly I shall not mention it.’
‘You haven’t seen Sergeant Wilson yet, sir. I left him asleep, but he’s quite all right. Fit for an interview, of that I’m sure. I’ll walk over to my quarters with you now. I would have put him in one of the vacant rooms around my own if I could, but they’re all locked up. Which as it turns out was just as well, wasn’t it? I had to keep him in my own room, right under my eye. Very uncomfortable, as there’s only one small bed.’
The bitch, the bloody bitch! If Private Nugget Jones was a potential Pasteur, she was a potential Hitler. And, he was forced to admit, even on his best days he was never equal to Sister Langtry. He was so tired, and the affair had been a considerable shock.
‘I’ll see the sergeant later, Sister. Good morning.’
3
Sister Langtry watched without moving until the colonel was well on his way back in the direction of his own hut, then she walked down the ramp and began the journey to her room.
If only when things happened there was time to think! It never seemed to turn out that way, unfortunately. The best she could do was to keep on the move and one jump ahead. She didn’t trust Colonel Chinstrap an inch. It would be just like him to scuttle like a cockroach back to his hut and then to dispatch Matron to do his dirty work by having Matron descend on her room. Michael had to be moved, and at once. But she would have liked more time before seeing him, a few precious hours in which to find the perfect way to say what had to be said. A few precious hours; days would not have been long enough for this.
There was ruin in the air. The cynics might have put it down to a gathering monsoon, but Sister Langtry knew better. Things built themselves up and then tumbled back to nothing again so fast one knew immediately there had been no proper foundations laid. Which was certainly true of Michael and herself. How could she ever have hoped for something enduring to come out of an utterly artificial situation? Hadn’t she resolutely refused to develop her relationship with Neil Parkinson because of that? Usually a man went to bed, if not with someone he knew, at least with someone he thought he knew. But to Michael there could have been nothing real about Honour Langtry; she was a figment, a phantasm. The only Langtry he knew was Sister Langtry. With Neil she had preserved enough sanity to understand this, to suppress her hopes until both of them were back in a more normal environment, until he had a chance to meet Honour Langtry rather than Sister Langtry. But with Michael there had been no thought, no sanity, nothing save a drive to find love with him here and now and hang the consequences. As if in some utterly unconscious part of her she had known how tenuous it was, how unviable.
Years ago a sister in the preliminary training school at P.A. had taken the probationers for a special lecture on the emotional hazards involved in nursing. Honour Langtry had been one of those probationers. Among the hazards, said the sister tutor, was that of falling in love with a patient. And if a nurse should insist upon falling in love with a patient, she said, let him be an acute patient. Never, never a chronic one. Love might grow and prove durable with an acute abdomen or a fractured femur. But love with spastic or paraplegic or tuberculotic was not, in the measured words of that measured voice, a viable proposition. A viable proposition. It was a phrase Honour Langtry never forgot.
Not that Michael was ill, and certainly he was not chronically ill. But she had met him in a long-term nursing situation, colored by all the darkness of ward X. Even supposing he was not infected, she definitely was. Her first and her only duty should have been to see Michael as an inmate of ward X. With Neil Parkinson she had succeeded; but she didn’t love Neil Parkinson, so duty had proceeded on its serene way.
Now here she was, trying to wear two hats at once, love and duty, both donned for the same man. The same patient. The job said he was a patient. It didn’t matter that he didn’t fit that description at all. For there was duty. There was always duty. It came first; not all the love in the world could change the ingrained habits of so very many years.
Which hat do I wear, love or duty? she asked herself, treading more heavily than usual up the steps onto the verandah outside her room. Shall I be his lover or his nurse-custodian? What is he? My lover or my patient? A sudden puff of wind caught under the edge of her veil and lifted it away from her neck. Questions all answered, she thought. I am wearing my duty hat.
When she opened the door she saw Michael dressed in the pajamas and robe she had borrowed from B ward, sitting waiting patiently on the hard chair. The chair he had relocated half the room away from the bed, now neatly made up and looking as if under no stretch of the wildest imagination could it ever have been the site of more pleasure and pain, more gloriously hard work than any oversized, pillow-strewn voluptuary’s couch. In an odd way the bed’s spartan chasteness came as a shock; she had already enacted the scene to come as she crossed the verandah, and in that scene she had pictured him still lying naked in her bed.
Had he been so she might have been able to be soft, might have sunk onto the mattress beside him, might in spite of her duty hat have summoned up the courage from somewhere to do what she most longed to do: put her arms about him, offer her mouth for one of those powerful and ardent kisses, reinforce with fresh experiences the memories of the night so horribly overshadowed by the dead thing still sprawled in the bathhouse.
She stood in the doorway, unsmiling, stripped of the capacity to move or speak, quite without resources. But the look on her face must have told him more than she realized, for he got up immediately and came across to her, standing close, but not close enough to touch her.
‘What’s happened?’ he asked. ‘What is it? What’s the matter?’
‘Luce committed suicide,’ she said baldly, and stopped, run down again.
‘Suicide?’ At first he gaped, but the astonishment and revulsion faded more rapidly than they should have, and were replaced by a curious, horrified consternation, as if at some action of his own. ‘Oh, my God, my God!’ he said slowly, and looked as if he was beginning to die. The guilt and distress on his face grew whitely; then he said, ‘What have I done?’ and repeated it, ‘What have I done?’ in the voice of an old, enfeebled man.
Her heart came uppermost at once, and she moved close enough to him to clasp his arm in both her hands, looking into his face imploringly. ‘You’ve done nothing, Michael, nothing at all! Luce destroyed himself, do you hear? He was just using you to get back at me. You cannot blame yourself! It’s not as if you led him on, encouraged him!’
