During the past three days his imagination had played indescribable tricks, visualizing her with Michael in any one of a thousand different ways, by no means all to do with sex. Her betrayal ate at him, try as he would to be dispassionate, and so understand. There wasn’t the room for understanding when he had also to accommodate his own torment and jealousy, his own unshakable determination to have what he wanted, what he needed, in spite of her obvious preference for Michael. She had turned to Michael without thinking of any of the rest of them, and he couldn’t seem to forgive her. Yet his feelings for her were as strong, as intense as ever. I am going to have her, he thought; I will not give her up! And I am my father’s son. It has taken this to make me see how much I am my father’s son. It’s a strange sensation. But it’s a good sensation.

She, poor lost soul, suffered so. He couldn’t take any pleasure in witnessing that, nor did he wish it upon her, but he did feel hers was a case where to suffer would eventually lead her back to the place where she had once been, where he, Neil, belonged rather than Michael.

He said, ‘Don’t take it so hard.’

She thought he was referring to her rapped knuckles, and smiled wryly. ‘Well, it’s over and done with now, thank God. It’s a pity that life with Luce wasn’t more pleasant. I never wished him dead, but I did wish we didn’t have to put up with his living presence. Only now it’s some kind of hell.’

‘Is that really to be laid at Luce’s door?’ he asked; perhaps now that the verdict was in they could both relax enough to begin communicating again.

‘No,’ she said sadly. ‘It has to be laid at my door. At no one else’s.’

Michael tapped. ‘Tea’s made, Sis.’

She forgot where the conversation with Neil might have been leading, and looked straight past Neil to Michael. ‘Come in for a moment, would you? I’d like to talk to you. Neil, will you hold the fort? I’ll be down shortly, but you might like to pass on the news to the others.’

Michael shut the door behind Neil’s back, his face a mixture of unhappiness and dread. And discomfort. And fear. As if he would rather be any place on earth than standing in front of her desk, her desk.

In that she was correct; he would rather have been anywhere else than there. But what she saw in his face was on his own behalf, not anything to do with her. And yet everything to do with her. He was terrified of breaking down in front of her, aching to spill all the reasons for his pain to her; but that would be to lift a floodgate which must remain closed. It was all gone, and perhaps it had never been, and certainly it could never be. A chaos. A confusion more desperate than any he had ever known, while he stood there and longed for things to be different, and knew things could not be different. Sorrowing for her because she didn’t know, agreeing that she couldn’t be permitted to know, fighting himself and what he wanted. Knowing that what she wanted could not make her happy. And continuing to learn as he watched her face that he had hurt her very cruelly.

Some of this showed on his face, too, while he stood in front of her desk, waiting.

And suddenly it literally blazed in her, that look of his, set fire to a store of wounded pride and pain she had scarcely known she possessed.

‘Oh, for God’s sake will you get that bloody look off your face?’ she cried, her voice a quiet scream. ‘What on earth do you think I’m going to do to you, get down on my bended knees and beg for a repeat performance? Well, I’d rather be dead! Do you hear me? Dead!’

He flinched, whitened, set his mouth, said nothing.

‘I can assure you, Sergeant Wilson, that the thought of any personal relationship with you is the farthest thing from my mind!’ she went on feverishly, like a lemming to the killing sea. ‘I simply called you in here privately to inform you that the verdict on Luce’s death is in, and it’s suicide. Along with the rest of us, you’ve been completely exonerated. And now perhaps you’ll be able to stop this nauseating display of self-recrimination. That’s all.’

It had never occurred to him that the largest part by far of the hurt he had inflicted upon her was due to what she saw as his rejection of her. Horrified, he tried to put himself in her place, to feel that rejection as she was feeling it, a purely personal thing all tied in with her womanhood. Had he valued himself more, he might have understood sooner, better. But to him, her reaction was almost inconceivable; she was interpreting the whole thing in a way he could not. Not because he wasn’t sensitive, or perceptive, or involved with her. But because where his mind had been dwelling since Luce’s death was so divorced from the personal aspects of what had happened in her room. There had been so many other considerations to torment him—and so much to do—that he hadn’t stopped to think how his behavior looked to her. And it was too late now.

He seemed ill, grief-stricken, curiously defenseless. And yet, Michael as always, still his own man. ‘Thank you,’ he said, without irony.

‘Don’t look at me like that!’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I won’t look at all.’

She transferred her gaze to the papers on her desk. ‘So am I sorry, Sergeant, believe me,’ she said with cold finality. The papers might have been written in Japanese for all the sense she could make of them. And suddenly it was just too much to bear; she looked up, her heart in her eyes, and cried, ‘Oh, Michael!’ in a very different tone of voice.

But he had already gone.

It took her five minutes to get moving, the reaction was so devastating. She sat and shook, her teeth chattered, she wondered for a moment if she might truly be going mad. So much shame, so little self-control. It had not occurred to her that she could possess such a huge blind urge to hurt anyone she loved, or that the knowledge she had succeeded in hurting could be so comfortless and intolerable. Oh, God, dear God, she prayed, if this is love, heal me! Heal me or let me die, for I cannot live with this kind of agony one minute more…

She went to the door of her office, reaching to unhook her hat, then remembered she had to change back into boots. Her hands were still trembling; it took time to lace the boots, do up the gaiters.

Neil appeared as she bent over in her chair to pick up her basket.

‘You’re going off now?’ he asked, surprised and disappointed. After that promising final remark of hers before Michael had appeared he had been hoping to resume where they had been cut off. But as usual Michael took precedence over him.

‘I’m awfully tired,’ she said. ‘Do you think you can manage without me for the rest of the evening?’

It was gallantly said, but he only had to look at her eyes to see that there was very little between gallantry and despair. In spite of himself he reached out, took her hand and held it between both his own, chafing the skin to instill in it a little warmth.

‘No, my very dear Sister Langtry, we can’t possibly do without you,’ he said, smiling. ‘But we will, just this once. Go to bed and sleep.’

She smiled back at him, her comrade of so many months in X, and wondered where her burgeoning love for him had gone, why Michael’s coming had so abruptly snuffed it out. The trouble was she had no key to the logic behind love, if key there was, if logic there was.

‘You always take away the pain,’ she said.

It was his phrase he used of her; her saying it affected him so powerfully he had to remove his hands quickly. Now was not the time for him to say what he longed to.

Taking her basket from her, he ushered her out of the ward as if he were the host and she a visitor, refusing to give the basket back until they reached the bottom of the ramp. And then he stood until long after her grey shape flickered and vanished into the darkness, looking up at the darkness, listening to the soft dripping of condensation on cooling eaves, the vast chorus of the frogs and the endless murmur of the surf far out on the reef. There was a downpour in the air; it would rain before very long. If Sis didn’t hurry she’d be wet.