‘Where’s Sis?’ asked Nugget when Neil sat down in her chair and reached for the teapot.
‘She’s got a headache,’ said Neil briefly, avoiding eye contact with Michael, who sat looking as if he too had a headache. Neil pulled a face. ‘God, I loathe being mother! Who is it has milk again?’
‘Me,’ said Nugget. ‘Good news, eh? Luce is properly dead and buried at last. Phew! It’s a relief, I must say.’
‘May God have mercy on his soul,’ said Benedict.
‘On all our souls,’ said Matt.
Neil finished his chore with the teapot, and began pushing the various mugs down the table. Without Sis there was little joy in late tea, he reflected, staring at Michael because Michael’s attention was on Matt and Benedict.
With a great show of importance, Nugget produced a very large book, spread it out where there was no danger of spilling tea on it, and began on page one.
Michael glanced at him, amused and touched. ‘What’s that in aid of?’ he asked.
‘I’ve been thinking about what the colonel said,’ Nugget explained, one hand extended across the open book with the reverence of a holy man for his bible. ‘There’s no reason why I can’t go to night school to get me matriculation, is there? Then I could go to university and do medicine.’
‘And do something with your life,’ Michael said. ‘Good on you and good luck to you, Nugget.’
I wish I didn’t like him through every moment of hating him, thought Neil; but that’s the real lesson the old man wanted me to learn out of the war—not to let my heart stand in the way of what has to be done, and to learn to live with my heart after it’s done. So Neil was able to say very calmly, ‘We’ve all got to do something with our lives when we’re out of the jungle greens. I wonder how I’ll look in a business suit. I’ve never worn one in my life.’ Then he sat back and waited for Matt to respond to the deliberate stimulus.
Matt did, quivering. ‘How am I going to earn a living?’ he asked, the question bursting from him as if he had never meant to say it, yet had been thinking of nothing else. ‘I’m an accountant, I’ve got to see! The army won’t give me a pension; they reckon there’s nothing wrong with my eyes! Oh, God, Neil, what am I going to do?’
The others were very still, everyone looking at Neil. Well, here goes, he thought, as deeply moved by Matt’s cry as the others, yet filled with a purpose that overruled his pity. Now isn’t the right time and place to go into specifics, but there’s been enough groundwork laid for me to see if Mike gets the message.
‘That’s my share, Matt,’ Neil said positively, his hand on Matt’s arm firmly. ‘Don’t worry about anything. I’ll see you’re all right.’
‘I’ve never taken charity in my life, and I’m not about to start now,’ said Matt, sitting straight and proud.
‘It is not charity!’ Neil insisted. ‘It is my share. You know what I mean. We made a pact, the lot of us, but I have yet to contribute my full share.’ And he said this looking not at Matt but at Michael.
‘Yes, all right,’ said Michael, who knew immediately what was going to be demanded of him. In a way it came as an exquisite relief to have it asked of him rather than to have to offer it. He had known the only solution for some time, but he didn’t want it, and so had not found the strength to offer it. ‘I agree with that, Neil. Your share.’ His eyes left Neil’s stern unyielding face, rested on Matt with great affection. ‘It’s not charity, Matt. It’s a fair share,’ he said.
7
Sister Langtry beat the rain. It came cascading down just as she let herself in her door, and within minutes every kind of living small creature seemed to materialize out of it: mosquitoes, leeches, frogs, spiders reluctant to wet their feet, ants in syrupy black rivers, bedraggled moths, cockroaches. Because her two windows were screened she usually did not need to pull the net down around her bed, but the first thing she did tonight was to tug it free of its ring and drape it down.
She went to take a shower in the bathhouse, then wrapped herself in her robe, packed her two pathetically thin pillows against the wall at the head of her bed, and lay back against them with a book she hadn’t even the strength to open, though sleep felt far away. So she put her head back and listened instead to the ceaseless hollow roar of rain on an iron roof. Once it had been the most thrilling and wonderful sound in the world, during her childhood days in country where rain was the harbinger of prosperity and life; but here, in this profligate climate of perpetual growth and decay, it meant only an external deadening to everything save what went on in her mind. You couldn’t have heard anyone speak unless he shouted in your ear; the only voices you really heard were those which chattered on inside your head.
The sick horror of discovering she could lash out at someone beloved as she had lashed out at Michael had faded to an almost apathetic self-disgust. And right alongside it had crept a hunger for self-justification. Hadn’t he done to her what no man should ever do to any woman? Hadn’t he indicated a perverse preference for Luce Daggett? Of all the men in the world, Luce Daggett!
This was fruitless. Round and round and round in ever-diminishing circles, getting nowhere, achieving nothing. She was so tired of herself! How could she have allowed this to happen? And who was Michael Wilson? There were no answers, so why bother to ask the questions?
Mosquito nets suffocated. She threw hers back impatiently, not having heard the tiny dive-bomber sound of a mosquito, and forgetting that the rain would have drowned the noise of a real dive-bomber. There was never enough light within the confines of the net to read, and she felt better; she would read for a while and hope sleep came.
A leech dropped with a soundless plop from some crevice in the unlined roof, and landed wriggling obscenely on her bare leg. She tore at it in a frenzy, gagging at the feel of it, but could not dislodge it. So she leaped to light a cigarette, and without caring whether she burned herself, she applied the red-hot tip to the leech’s slimy black string-like body. It was a big tropical leech, four or five inches long, and she could not have borne to wait the process out, invaded by it, watch it grow bloated and congested on her blood, then finally roll off replete like a selfish man from a woman after sex.
When the thing was fried enough to shrivel away from her skin she ground it to smeared pulp beneath a boot, shivering uncontrollably, feeling as violated and besmirched as any Victorian heroine. Loathsome, repulsive, horrible thing! Oh, God, this climate! This rain! This awful, eternal dilemma…
And then of course the place where the leech had fastened its blind seeking mouth kept bleeding, bleeding, the tissue impregnated with an anticlotting factor from its saliva, and it had to be attended to immediately or in this climate the wound would ulcerate…
It was not very often that she found herself reminded so physically of Base Fifteen, its difficulties, isolation, introspection. Of all the places she had ever been, she thought, dealing with iodine and sterile swabs, Base Fifteen had made less impression than any. In fact, almost no impression at all. As if it were a stage set, without substance or real meaning of its own, simply a claustrophobic backdrop for a complicated interplay of human emotions, wills, desires. Which was logical. Base Fifteen as anything more than an insubstantial backdrop didn’t make sense. A more sterile, dreary institution had never been erected; even the wet canvas world of a casualty clearing station had more personality. Base Fifteen was there to serve a war, it had been dumped where the convenience of war dictated, without respect to the ideal site, staff contentment, or patient welfare. No wonder it was a painted cardboard world.
And, leg propped up on the wooden chair, the walls oozing sweat and speckled with great patches of mildew, the cockroaches waving their antennae from every dark cranny, itching for the light to go off, Sister Langtry looked around her like someone doubting the reality of a dream.
