An Indecent Obsession

  Her torment became bewilderment; she stared at him and wondered if she would ever begin to get to the bottom of the mystery that surrounded Michael. ‘What are you talking about? What never happens again?’

  ‘I said it before,’ he said patiently. ‘I think I owe you an explanation. The others don’t agree. They think you ought to be kept right out of it forever, but I want to tell you. I understand why Neil’s so set against your knowing, but I still believe I owe you an explanation. Neil wasn’t with you that night, I was. And it entitles you to an explanation.’

  ‘What explanation? What is all this?’

  There was a big petrol drum lying on its side just where the path petered out; he turned, put one foot up on it, gazed down at his boot. ‘It’s not easy to find the right words. But I don’t want you to look at me the way you’ve been looking at me ever since that morning, not understanding. I agree with Neil, telling you isn’t going to change anything, but it might mean that the last time I ever see you, you won’t be looking at me as if half of you hated me and the other half was wishing it could hate me too.’ He straightened, faced her. ‘This is hard,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t hate you, Michael. I couldn’t ever hate you. What’s done is done. I’m not fond of post-mortems. So tell me, please. I want to know. I have a right to know. But I don’t hate you. I never have, I never could.’

  ‘Luce didn’t kill himself,’ he said. ‘Benedict did the killing.’

  She was back in the midst of all that blood, all that ruined magnificence. Luce sprawled without consideration of grace, fluidity of line, theatrical effect—unless sheer horror was the effect he had aimed for, and Luce was not like that. Luce loved himself too much, visually anyway.

  Her face went so pale the light striking down through the palms gave it a greenish hue; for the second time in their acquaintance Michael moved close to her, slipped an arm around her waist and supported her so strongly all she could feel was the feel of him.

  ‘Here, love, don’t pass out on me! Come on now, take a few deep breaths, that’s the good girl!’ He spoke tenderly, he held her tenderly.

  ‘I knew it all the time,’ she said slowly, when at last she was able to speak. ‘There was something wrong. It just wasn’t typical of Luce. But it’s typical Benedict, all right.’ The color stole back beneath her skin, she clenched her fists in an impotent anger directed entirely against herself. ‘Oh what a fool I am!’

  Michael released her and stepped back a pace, looking more at ease with himself. ‘If I didn’t think so much of you I wouldn’t have told you, but I couldn’t bear to see you hate me. It’s been killing me. Neil knows that, too.’ Then, seeming to decide he was drifting from the subject, he turned back to it. ‘Benedict won’t ever do anything like it again, Sis, you have my word. As long as I’m there to look after him, he can’t do it again. You do understand that, don’t you? I have to look after him. He’s my responsibility. He did it for me, or he thought he did it for me, which amounts to the same thing. I told you in the morning, remember? I told you it was wrong of me to stay with you all night. I should have gone back to the ward to keep an eye on Ben. If I had been there where I belonged, it would never have happened. Funny, I’ve killed men, and for all I know they were better men by far than Luce. But Luce’s death is my responsibility. The death of the others I’ve killed is the responsibility of the King; the King has to answer to God for them, not me. I could have stopped Ben. No one else could have, because no one else had any idea what was going on in Ben’s mind.’ He closed his eyes. ‘I was weak, I gave in to myself. But oh, Honour, I wanted to stay with you! I couldn’t believe it! A little bit of heaven, and I’d been in hell so long… I loved you, but I never dreamed you loved me until then.’

  Huge reserves of strength, she had huge reserves of strength; she plundered them with the carelessness of a freebooter. ‘I should have known that,’ she said. ‘Of course you loved me.’

  ‘I was thinking of myself first,’ he said, apparently happy he could talk to her at last. ‘If you knew how much I blame myself! There was no need for Luce to die! All I had to do was be there in the ward to show Ben I was all right, that it wasn’t in Luce’s power to harm me.’ His chest heaved, more a shudder than a sigh. ‘While I was with you in your room, Ben was all alone, thinking Luce had somehow managed to destroy me. And once Ben came to that conclusion, the rest followed naturally. If Neil had known, it might have been different. But Neil had no idea. He had other things on his mind. And I wasn’t even there to tidy up the mess, the rest had to do that too.’ His hand went out to her, fell back to his side. ‘I have a lot to answer for, Honour. The way I hurt you—there are no excuses for that, either. I can’t make any, even to myself. But I’d like you to know that I… feel it, that I do understand what I’ve done to you. And that of everything I have to answer for, hurting you is the hardest to bear.’

  The tears were coursing down her face, more for his pain than her own. ‘Don’t you love me now at all?’ she asked. ‘Oh, Michael, I can stand anything but losing your love!’

  ‘Yes, I love you. But there’s no future in it—there couldn’t be, there never was, Luce and Ben aside. If it hadn’t been for the war, I would never have met anyone like you. You would have met men like Neil, not men like me. My friends, the sort of life I like to lead, even the house I live in—they don’t fit with you.’

  ‘You don’t love a life,’ she said, wiping the tears away. ‘You love a man, and then you make a life.’

  ‘You would never have made your life with a man like me,’ he said. ‘I’m just a dairy farmer.’

  ‘That’s a ridiculous thing to say! I’m not a snob! And tell me the difference between one kind of cocky and another—my father’s a cocky too. The scale’s bigger, that’s all. Nor am I dependent upon having money for my happiness.’

  ‘I know. But you are from a different class than me, and we don’t have the same outlook on life.’

  She stared at him strangely. ‘Don’t we, Michael? Now I find that an odd thing for you of all people to say! I think we do have the same outlook on life. We both like to look after those less capable than ourselves, and we both aim at the exact same thing—encouraging them to become self-sufficient.’

  ‘That’s true… Yes, that’s very true,’ he said slowly, and then: ‘Honour, what does love mean to you?’

  The apparent non sequitur took her aback. ‘Mean?’ she asked, hedging for more time to think.

  ‘Mean. What does love mean to you?’

  ‘My love for you, Michael? Or for others?’

  ‘Your love for me.’ He seemed to enjoy saying it.

  ‘Why—why, it means sharing my life with you!’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Living with you! Keeping your home, having your babies, growing old together,’ she said.

  He looked remote; her words affected him, she could see, but had no power to penetrate deeply enough to reach that calm determination which possessed no image of self.

  ‘But you haven’t served any sort of apprenticeship for that,’ he said. ‘You’re thirty now, and your apprenticeship has been for something quite different. A different sort of life. Hasn’t it?’ He paused, not taking his eyes off her face, raised to his in a fearful bewilderment that yet showed the germ of a comprehension she was unwilling to acknowledge. ‘I think neither of us is suited for the life you’re describing. When I started to talk to you I didn’t think I’d mention this, but you’re a good fighter, you won’t be palmed off with anything but the real root of the matter.’

  ‘No, I won’t,’ she said.

  ‘The real root of the matter is just what I said—neither of us is suited for the sort of life you describe. It’s too late to wonder what or why now. I’m the sort of man who mistrusts the wants that come out of a part of me I’m normally able to control. I don’t want to cheapen it by calling it my bodily desires, and I don’t want you to think I’m belittling my feelings for you.’ He gripped her arms near the
shoulder. ‘Honour, listen to me! I’m the sort of bloke who mightn’t come home one night because on a trip into town I found someone who in my mind needed me more than you do—I don’t mean I’d desert you, and I don’t necessarily mean another woman; I mean that I’d know you could get along without me until I could come home again. But I might be two days helping that person, or I might be two years. I’m like that. The war gave me a chance to see what I am. It’s given you a chance to see what you are, too. I don’t know how much you’re willing to admit to yourself about yourself, but I’ve learned that when I’m moved to pity, I’ll always be moved to help. You are a complete person. You don’t need my help. And not needing my help, I know you can get along without me. You see, love is beside the point.’

  ‘You’re approaching a paradox,’ she said, throat aching from the effort to quell fresh tears.

  ‘I suppose I am.’ He paused, searching for the next thing to say. ‘I don’t think I have a very high opinion of myself. If I did, I wouldn’t need to be needed. But I do need to be needed, Honour! I’ve got to be needed!’

  ‘I need you!’ she said. ‘My soul, my heart, my body—every bit of me needs you; it always will! Oh, Michael, there are all kinds of need, all kinds of loneliness! Don’t confuse my strength with a lack of need! Please don’t! I need you to fulfill my very life!’

  But he shook his head, obdurate. ‘You don’t. You never will. You’re already fulfilled! If you weren’t, you couldn’t be the person I know you to be—warm, loving, interested, happy doing a job few women can do. Almost all women can make a home, have babies. But you’re too different to be content in that sort of cage. Your apprenticeship’s wrong for it. Because after a while that’s how you’d see the life you described with me, devoted exclusively to me. As a cage! You’re a stronger bird than that, Honour. You’ve got to stretch your wings in wider territory than a cage.’

  ‘I’m prepared to risk that happening,’ she said, white-faced, desolate, but still fighting.

  ‘I’m not. If it was just you I was describing, maybe I would risk it. But I’m describing me as well.’

  ‘You’re chaining yourself to Ben far more rigidly than you would to me.’

  ‘But I can’t hurt Ben the way I’d end in hurting you.’

  ‘Looking after Ben is a full-time job. You won’t be able to take off to help anyone else on a trip to town.’

  ‘Ben needs me,’ he said. ‘I’ll live for that.’

  ‘What if I offered to share your charge of Ben?’ she asked. ‘Would you agree to a life with me that shared our need of being needed?’

  ‘Are you offering that?’ he asked, uncertain.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I can’t share you with the likes of Benedict Maynard.’

  ‘Then there’s no more to be said.’

  ‘About us, no.’ She still stood between his hands, and made no move to escape them. ‘Do the others agree that you should look after Ben?’

  ‘We made a pact,’ he said. ‘We all agreed. No lunatic asylum for Ben, no matter what happens. Nor will Matt’s wife and children go hungry. We all agreed.’

  ‘All of you? Or you and Neil?’

  He acknowledged the accuracy of this with a rueful twist of lips and head. ‘I’ll say goodbye now,’ he said, hands sliding up across her shoulders to cradle the side of her neck, thumbs moving against her skin.

  He kissed her, a kiss of deep love and pain, a kiss of acceptance for what must be and hunger for what might have been. And a voluptuous, erotic kiss filled with the memories of that one night. But he took his mouth away abruptly, too soon; a lifetime would scarcely have been long enough.

  Then he came stiffly to attention, a smile in his eyes, turned on his heel and walked away.

  The petrol drum was there; she sank down onto it so that she wouldn’t have to watch him until he disappeared, looking at her shoes, at the weak brown tendrils of grass, at the infinity of grains which made up the sand.

  So that was that. How could she compete with the kind of need a Benedict had for a Michael? He was right thus far. And how lonely he must be, how driven. Wasn’t that always the way it was? The strong abandoned in favor of the weak. The compulsion—or was it the guilt?—the strong felt to serve the weak. Who battened first? Did the weak demand, or did the strong offer themselves unsolicited? Did strength beget weakness, or reinforce it, or negate it? What was strength, what weakness, for that matter? He was right, she could get along without him. Was that therefore a lack of need for him? He loved her for her strength, yet he couldn’t live with what he loved. In loving, he turned away from loving. Because it didn’t, or it couldn’t, satisfy him.

  She had wanted to cry out to him, Forget the world, Michael, curl yourself up in me! With me you’ll know a happiness you’ve never dreamed of! Only to cry that would have been to cry for the moon. Had she done it deliberately? Chosen to love a man who preferred to minister than to love? Since the day of his arrival in X she had admired him, and her love had grown out of that admiration, out of valuing what he was. Each of them had loved the other’s strength, self-reliance, capacity to give. Yet it seemed these very qualities pushed them apart, not together. Two positives. My dearest, my most beloved Michael… I shall think of you, and pray for you, that you continue always to find the strength.

  She looked out over the beach, a little battered after the wind and rain of a few days before. There were two beautiful white terns soaring, soaring, wingtip to wingtip as if tied; they wheeled suddenly, still tied, dipped, and were gone. That’s what I wanted, Michael! No cage! Only to fly with you against a great blue sky.

  Time to get going. Time to walk Matt, Benedict, Nugget and Michael to the assembly point. It was her duty to do so. Neil as an officer would leave separately, she didn’t yet know when. They’d tell her in due time.

  As she walked, other thoughts than Michael began to intrude. There had been a conspiracy among the patients of ward X. A conspiracy in which Michael had been a willing party. And Neil was its ringleader. It didn’t make any sense. Oh, it made sense to keep her in ignorance of what had really happened in the bathhouse until the cause of death was officially established and any inquiry closed. But why was Neil so against Michael’s wish to tell her now, when it couldn’t possibly matter? Neil knew her well enough to understand it was not in her nature to go running off to Colonel Chinstrap with the true story. What use would there be in that? What could it change? It could ensure Benedict’s permanent commitment to some civilian institution, perhaps, but it would also result in dishonorable discharges for the rest of them, if not prison. Probably too they had agreed to close ranks against her, and would have denied all she might have told Colonel Chinstrap. Why had Neil fought to retain her ignorance? Not only Neil. Matt and Nugget were in it too.

  What had Michael said, right at the last? They made a pact. Matt’s wife and children would not go hungry. No doubt Nugget would get through medicine without starving, either. Benedict would not go to a mental asylum. Michael and Neil… They had split up the responsibilities between them, Michael and Neil. But what did Neil get out of it, if he was furnishing the money for Matt’s family and Nugget’s education? Two weeks ago she would have said, nothing; but today she wasn’t so sure.

  That hurt Neil didn’t seem to have, his apparent acceptance of her rejection with sufficient tranquillity and lack of concern to make her feel he couldn’t possibly be hurt. And who had been talking to Michael, that he came out with all those antiquated class differences between them? She clutched at this prideful straw eagerly. Someone had been working on Michael, trying to convince him he had to give her up. Someone? Neil!

  5

  The evacuation was very well organized. When she reached the assembly point with her four men they were snatched from her very quickly, barely time for a hug and a pecking kiss from each. And afterward she couldn’t even remember how Michael looked at her, or how she looked at him. It seemed futile to linger hoping for another sight of them, so she slipped thr
ough the knots of waiting men and shepherding sisters, and walked back to X.

  Second nature to tidy and straighten up; she went down the length of the ward smoothing the sheets, adjusting the nets for the last time in the Matron Drape, opening lockers, folding up the screens which hid the refectory table.

  Then she went into her office, kicked her shoes off without unlacing them and sat down in her chair with her feet tucked under her, something she had never done before in that official seat. It didn’t matter. There was no one to see, ever again. Neil was gone too. A harassed sergeant with a clipboard informed her of Neil’s departure. She didn’t understand what or who had slipped up, but it was too late to do anything about it anyway. And perhaps it was better not to be obliged to confront the ringleader of the conspiracy. There would be too many uncomfortable questions to ask him.

  Her head drooped, propped on her hand; she dozed, and dreamed not unpleasantly of Michael.

  It was about two hours later that Neil came swinging across the compound behind ward X, whistling jauntily, looking neat and at home in his captain’s uniform, swagger stick tucked into the crook of his arm. He leaped lightly up the steps at the back of X and came into the dim and lifeless interior. Shocked, he pulled up sharply. X was empty; its emptiness shouted at him. After a moment he began to move again, but less surely, less lightheartedly; he opened the door to his cubicle and received another shock, for all his baggage was gone. There was not a trace of Neil Parkinson, troppo patient, left.

  ‘Hello?’ came Sister Langtry’s voice through the thin wall. ‘Hello; who’s there, please?’

  She was sitting in a pose he had never seen before, not dignified, not professional, side-on to her desk, with her legs curled up under her on the chair, and her shoes empty on the floor. The room was full of smoke; her own cigarettes and matches lay in full view on the desk. And she looked as if she had been sitting so for a very long time.