An Indecent Obsession Page 17

  Matt had heard most of it, but until he judged the imminence of physical violence to be past he hadn’t had the courage to interfere, thinking that he could well make matters worse by floundering between them, and knowing Ben would be more than a match for Luce—hoping for it, too.

  He groped for the end of Benedict’s bed, found it, sat down and slid up until his questing hands encountered an arm. He sighed. ‘It’s all right, Ben,’ he said gently, feeling the tears and through them the face. ‘Come on now, it’s all right. The bastard’s gone, and he won’t worry you again. Poor old bloke!’

  But Benedict didn’t seem to hear; his tears were drying, his arms were wrapped about his body, and he rocked back and forth on the bed.

  The scene in the ward had gone undetected by all save Matt because Nugget was beyond caring, Michael had slipped across to the nearest inhabited ward to borrow some powdered milk, and Neil had invaded Sister Langtry’s office almost as Luce slammed out of it. He discovered Sister Langtry sitting with her face buried in her hands.

  ‘What is it? What’s the bastard done to you?’

  She removed her hands immediately, to reveal neither tears nor ravages. Just a very calm, composed countenance.

  ‘He didn’t do anything,’ she said.

  ‘He must have! I could hear him all the way down into the ward.’

  ‘Histrionics, that’s all. He is an actor. No, he was letting off steam because I put the kybosh on a little romance he was having with one of the sisters. The girl from Woop-Woop, the bank manager’s daughter, remember?’

  ‘I remember vividly,’ he said, sitting down and breathing easier. ‘That remains the only occasion on which I have ever found myself in danger of liking Luce.’

  Out came his cigarettes; she took one greedily, drew in the smoke greedily.

  ‘His interest in the girl is vindictive, of course,’ she said, exhaling. ‘I realized that the moment I found out what was going on. I don’t suppose she ever figured personally in his fantasies, but when she popped up here in the flesh, he soon saw how he could use her.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Neil, shutting his eyes. ‘Lucius Ingham the famous stage actor and Rhett Ingham the famous Hollywood film star, thumbing his nose at the inhabitants of Woop-Woop.’

  ‘I gather Sister Woop-Woop fancied Luce when they were children, but I’ll bet she was far too stuck-up to let the washerwoman’s son know she fancied him. And a bit too young to take his fancy then. So to compromise her now is doing wonderful things for him.’

  ‘Naturally,’ Neil opened his eyes to look at her intently. ‘I take it he wasn’t pleased at being foiled?’

  She laughed shortly. ‘That’s a fair assessment.’

  ‘I thought it might be. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I did hear the tone of his voice.’ He studied the tip of his cigarette. ‘I would venture to say that our Luce is pretty angry about it. Did he threaten you?’

  ‘Not specifically. He was far more concerned with telling me all about my shortcomings as a woman.’ Her face screwed up in disgust. ‘Pap! Anyway, I simply let him see that I thought he was talking nonsense.’

  ‘No threats, though?’ Neil persisted.

  She sounded tired of being quizzed as she said impatiently, ‘What could Luce do to me, Neil? Assault me? Kill me? Come off it! That sort of thing happens in fiction, not in life. There’s no sort of opportunity. Besides, you know nothing’s more important to Luce than the safety of his own skin. He won’t do anything he might be punished for. He just spreads those dark wings of his over our heads and lets our own imaginations do his dirty work for him. Only I don’t fall for his tricks.’

  ‘I hope you’re right, Sis.’

  ‘Neil, while ever I sit in this chair I cannot let any patient frighten me,’ she said very seriously.

  He shrugged, prepared to let it go. ‘I shall now change the subject with typical Parkinsonian lightness, and inform you that I heard a rumor today. Well, more fact than a rumor, I suppose.’

  ‘Thank you so much,’ she said sincerely. ‘What rumor?’

  ‘The place is on the skids at last.’

  ‘Now where did you hear that? It hasn’t reached any of the nurses yet.’

  ‘From dear old Colonel Chinstrap himself.’ He grinned. ‘I happened to be passing his quarters this afternoon, and there he was on his balcony like Juliet after a visit from Romeo, ecstatic at the thought of going back to Macquarie Street. He invited me up for a drink, and told me, one officer and gentleman to another, that we have probably less than a month to go. The CO heard from Div HQ this morning.’

  Her face showed a dismay Luce had not been able to bring to it. ‘Oh, God! Only a month?’

  ‘Give or take a week. We’ll just squeak out ahead of the Wet as it is.’ He frowned at her, perplexed. ‘You stump me, you really do. The last time we had a serious heart-to-heart, you sat there looking like death warmed up wondering how you were going to get through to the end. Now you look like death warmed up because the end’s definitely in sight.’

  ‘I wasn’t well then, ‘she said stiffly.

  ‘If you ask me, I don’t think you’re well now.’

  ‘You don’t understand. I shall miss ward X.’

  ‘Even Luce?’

  ‘Even Luce. If it were not for Luce, I wouldn’t know the rest of you half so well.’ She smiled wryly. ‘Or know myself for that matter.’

  Michael knocked on the door and poked his head around it. ‘I hope I’m not interrupting, Sis—tea’s made.’

  ‘Did you manage to get milk?’

  ‘No trouble.’

  She got to her feet immediately, relieved to be able to break off her conversation with Neil so naturally. ‘Come on, then, Neil. Grab the bikkies, would you? You’re closer to them than I am.’

  Waiting until Neil found the biscuit tin, she stood back to let him precede her out the door, then followed the two men into the ward.

  2

  By Nugget’s bed she signalled Neil and Michael to go on without her, and slipped behind the screen someone had put around his bed. He lay without moving and did not acknowledge her presence, so she merely changed the cloth over his eyes for a fresh one before leaving him in peace.

  At the refectory table she discovered Luce was missing, looked at her watch and was surprised to find it much later than she had thought.

  ‘If Luce isn’t careful he’s going to blot his copybook at last. Does anyone know where he is?’ she asked.

  ‘He went out,’ said Matt brusquely.

  ‘He lied,’ said Benedict, rocking back and forth.

  Sister Langtry looked at him closely; he seemed odder, more enclosed, and the rocking was something new.

  ‘Are you all right, Ben?’

  ‘All right. No, all wrong. It’s all wrong. He lied. There’s an adder in his tongue.’

  Sister Langtry’s eyes met Michael’s; she lifted one eyebrow in a mute query, but he, as puzzled as she, shook his head quickly. Neil was frowning, mystified too.

  ‘What’s all wrong, Ben?’ she asked.

  ‘All of it. Lies. He sold his soul a long time ago.’

  Neil leaned across to pat the thin bowed shoulder near him reassuringly. ‘Don’t let Luce worry you, Ben!’

  ‘He’s evil!’

  ‘Have you been crying, Ben?’ asked Michael, sitting down next to him.

  ‘He was talking about you, Mike. Dirty talk.’

  ‘There’s nothing dirty about me, Ben, so why let it bother you?’ Michael got up to fetch the chess set, and began to lay it out on the table.

  ‘I’ll be black tonight,’ he said.

  ‘I am black.’

  ‘All right, then, I’ll be white and you can be black. My advantage,’ said Michael cheerfully.

  Benedict’s face twisted, his eyes closed, his head reared back and tears began to catch the light between his lashes. ‘Oh, Mike, I didn’t know there were any children there!’ he cried.

  Michael paid no attention. Inst
ead, he moved his king’s pawn two squares forward, and simply sat waiting. After a moment Benedict’s eyes opened, saw the move through a wall of tears; he duplicated it quickly, snuffling like a child, wiping his nose on the side of his hand. Michael advanced his queen’s pawn to stand alongside the king’s pawn, and again Benedict duplicated the move, his tears beginning to dry. And when Michael lifted his king’s knight over the pawn in front of it and set it down ahead of his king’s bishop, Benedict chuckled, shaking his head.

  ‘You never learn, do you?’ he asked, toying tenderly with a bishop.

  Sister Langtry heaved an enormous sigh of relief and got up, smiling a good night to everyone before leaving. Neil also got up, but walked around the table to where Matt was sitting, quite forgotten in the little crisis.

  ‘Come and have a talk with me in my room,’ Neil said, touching him lightly on the arm. ‘Colonel Chinstrap gave me something this afternoon I’d like to share with you. It’s got a black label, just like Luce, but inside—ah! It’s pure, unadulterated gold.’

  Matt looked bewildered. ‘Isn’t it lights out?’

  ‘Officially I suppose it is, but we all seem to be a bit wound up tonight, which is probably why Sis has gone off duty without tucking us up. Besides, Ben and Mike look settled to chess. And don’t forget Nugget—if we do get to sleep before he heaves up his guts, he’ll only wake us.’

  Matt’s movements as he got up seemed a little fumbling, but he was smiling with keen pleasure. ‘I’d love to come and talk. And solve your riddle. What’s labelled black yet inside is pure gold?’

  Neil’s cubicle was just that, a space six feet wide by eight feet long, into which he had managed to jam a bed, a table and one hard chair, besides several shelves nailed rather precariously to the walls where he wasn’t likely to stand up and hit his head on them. It was littered with painter’s impedimenta, though someone in the know would have seen immediately that he had limited his techniques to less permanent and messy media than oil. Pencils, papers, charcoal, brushes, jars of dirty water, tins of children’s watercolors, tubes of poster color, crayons and pastels. There was absolutely no order in the chaos; Sister Langtry had given up long ago trying to make him keep the cubicle tidy, and merely bore with fatalistic calm Matron’s endless strictures about the state of Captain Parkinson’s room. Luckily he could when he wanted charm the birds out of the trees, even, as he said most disrespectfully, a silly old chook like Matron.

  The perfect host, he got Matt settled comfortably on the bed and swept various bits and pieces off the hard chair onto the floor before seating himself on it. There were two small tooth tumblers and two bottles of Johnnie Walker black label Scotch whisky sitting on the end of the table. Neil slit the seal and prized the cork carefully out of one bottle, then poured a generous measure into each glass.

  ‘Cheers!’ he said, and drank deeply.

  ‘Mud in your eye,’ said Matt, and did the same.

  They gasped rather like two swimmers coming up after a dive into unexpectedly frigid water.

  ‘I’ve been a sober man too long,’ Neil said, his eyes watering. ‘God, this stuff packs a punch, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It tastes like heaven,’ said Matt, and drank again.

  They paused to breathe deeply and savor the effect.

  ‘Something must have happened tonight to push Ben off the deep end,’ said Neil. ‘Do you know anything?’

  ‘It was Luce, chattering like a machine gun and taunting Ben with killing civilians. Poor old Ben burst out crying. Bloody Luce! He told me to go to hell and pushed off out somewhere. I think that man’s possessed.’

  ‘Or else he really is the devil,’ said Neil.

  ‘Oh, he’s flesh and blood, all right.’

  ‘He wants to be mighty careful, then. Otherwise, one of us might put his mortality to the test.’

  Matt laughed, holding out his glass. ‘I’ll volunteer.’

  Neil refilled the glass, then refilled his own. ‘God, how I needed this! Colonel Chinstrap must be a mind reader.’

  ‘Did he really give it to you? I thought you were joking.’

  ‘No, it came from him in person.’

  ‘What on earth for?’

  ‘Oh, I expect it’s a part of his ill-gotten hoard, and he worked out how much he can get through himself before Base Fifteen folds up. Then he decided to be Father Christmas and give the surplus away.’

  Matt’s hand trembled. ‘We’re going home?’

  Cursing the loosening effect of the whisky on his tongue, Neil looked at Matt gently, but of course all the gentle looks in the world couldn’t penetrate blindness, real or imagined. ‘About a month to go, old son.’

  ‘So soon? She’ll know!’

  ‘Sooner or later she has to know.’

  ‘I thought I’d have a bit more time than that.’

  ‘Oh, Matt… She’ll understand.’

  ‘Will she? Neil, I don’t want her any more! I can’t even think of that any more! She’s been waiting to have her husband back, and what’s she going to get? Not a husband.’

  ‘You can’t say that from where you’re sitting now. Try not to cross your bridges—you don’t know what’s going to happen. But the more you stew about it, the worse it will be.’

  Matt sighed, tipped up his glass. ‘I’m glad you had this stuff on hand. It’s like an anaesthetic.’

  Neil changed the subject. ‘Luce must have been in the foul mood to end all foul moods tonight. He had a go at Sis before he had a go at Ben,’ he said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Did you hear it too?’

  ‘I heard what he said to Ben.’

  ‘You mean there was more to it than the machine gun?’

  ‘A lot more. He came raving out of Sis’s office and went for Ben because Ben objected to the things he was calling Sis. But what got Ben so upset was what he said about Mike.’

  Neil’s head turned; he looked at Matt as if at something precious. ‘What exactly did he say about Mike?’

  ‘Oh, that he was a queen. Did you ever hear anything so silly? He kept telling Ben he’d read it in Mike’s papers.’

  ‘The bastard!’ Oh, sometimes fate was kind! Handed all this, and by a blind man, a man who couldn’t see how he looked, what effect the news had… ‘Here, Matt, have some more.’

  The whisky went very quickly to Matt’s head, or at least so Neil thought until he looked at his watch and saw it was well past eleven. He got up, draped Matt’s arm about his shoulders and hoisted him to his feet, feeling none too steady on his own.

  ‘Come on, old son, time you were in bed.’

  Benedict and Michael were putting the chess set away; Michael came quickly to help Neil, and together they stripped Matt of his trousers, shirt, singlet and underpants, then tipped him into bed, for once without his pajamas.

  ‘Out to it,’ said Michael, smiling.

  And looking at that calm, immensely strong face, knowing what he was going to do to blight it, Neil suddenly loved it clear through to his whisky-maudlined soul; he put his arms around Michael’s neck and his head on Michael’s shoulder, close to tears.

  ‘Come and have a drink,’ he said sadly. ‘You and Ben come and have a drink with an old man. If you don’t I’m going to cry, because I’m my old man’s son. If I start thinking about you and him and her I’m going to cry. Come and have a drink.’

  ‘We can’t have you crying,’ said Michael, disentangling himself. ‘Here, Ben, we’ve got an invitation.’

  Benedict had finished stowing the chess set in the ward cupboard, and came across. Neil reached out an arm and hung onto him.

  ‘Come and have a drink,’ he said. ‘There’s a bottle and a half left. I’m going to stop, but I can’t leave all that lovely grog there undrunk, can I?’

  Benedict drew back. ‘I don’t drink,’ he said.

  ‘It’ll do you good tonight,’ said Michael firmly. ‘Come on now, none of that holier than thou crap.’

  So all together they walked
across the ward, Michael and Benedict supporting Neil between them. At the corridor junction Michael reached up to switch off the light above the refectory table. There was a discordant rattle from the fly-curtain inside the front door as Luce came in, not stealthily but defiantly, as if he expected Sister Langtry to be lying in wait for him.

  The three men stood looking at him, and he at them. Michael cursed Neil’s dead weight between him and Benedict, worried that Luce’s sudden appearance would start Ben off again. But at that moment Nugget managed to terminate his headache by vomiting.

  ‘Oh, God, what a revolting noise!’ said Neil, coming to life immediately.

  He pushed Benedict and Michael through into his cubicle, went in after them, and shut the door firmly.

  3

  Luce continued toward his bed without another glance in the direction of the cubicle; he was alone in the ward in the soft dimness, with only a hideous retching sound for company.

  So tired he could hardly move, he sat down on the edge of his bed; he had walked for hours up and down the paths of Base Fifteen, along the beaches, through the pallid groves of coconut palms. Thinking, thinking… Wanting with a blind ferocity to lash out at Langtry until her head went rolling away as free as a football. The stuck-up bitch! Luce Daggett wasn’t good enough, and then she’d had the hide to compound the insult by throwing herself away on a shirt-lifting pansy. She was mad. If she’d picked him she could have led the life of a princess, for he knew he was going to be rich and famous, a bigger star than Clark Gable and Gary Cooper combined. You couldn’t want something as much as he wanted that and not get it. She’d said that, too. Every single minute of every single hour of every single day since before he left Woop-Woop had been directed toward hitting the big time as an actor.

  On the day he arrived in Sydney, a half-grown lad of almost fifteen, he already knew that acting was his ticket to the big time. And he already hungered for the big time. He had never seen a play nor been to the moving pictures, but he had been listening for most of his school days to the adoring chatter of the girls about this actor and that actor, and fended off their suggestions that he should try to get into pictures when he grew up. Let them mind their own business; he’d do it his way and not have any idiot female walking around boasting that she’d pushed him into it, that it was all her brilliant idea.