An Indecent Obsession by Colleen McCullough Page A

feet, looking down at her anxiously. ‘You will be down to see us later, won’t you? This new admission business won’t prevent that, will it?’
    She glanced up, surprised. ‘Nothing can prevent that! Have you ever known me to miss my late cuppa in the ward?’ she asked, smiling at him, then bent her head back to Michael’s papers.

6
    Colonel Wallace Donaldson picked his way down to the far end of the compound by the light of a torch, feeling hard done by. It really was disgraceful! In these peacetime days, with the blackout at an end, and yet the super couldn’t even arrange for a little exterior lighting! In fact the bulk of the hospital lay in utter darkness, for it was uninhabited, and did not give off so much as a reflection from inside lights.
    Over the last six months Base Fifteen military general hospital had shrunk pitifully in people, though not in area; like a fat man gone thin yet doomed still to go on wearing his fat man’s clothes. The Americans had built it a little more than twelve months previously, but had moved on immediately, leaving it, partially unfinished and only partially furnished, to the Australians who were driving in a more westerly direction through the East Indies.
    During its heyday it had managed to squeeze five hundred patients within its compound, and had kept thirty MOs plus one hundred and fifty nurses so busy that off duty was a distant dream. Now there were only half a dozen inhabited wards left. And ward X, of course, right down on the margin of the palm forest that had once yielded a small fortune in copra for its Dutch owners. Of those thirty MOs, only five general or specialist surgeons and five general or specialist physicians were left, along with a single pathologist. Barely thirty nurses flitted through the huge nurses’ quarters.
    As the neurologist, Colonel Donaldson had been assigned ward X when Base Fifteen passed into Australian hands; he always did inherit the handful of emotionally disturbed men who came bobbing to the top of the brew, there to be skimmed off, placed in a ward X.
    Before the war Colonel Donaldson had been busy setting himself up in a Macquarie Street practice, struggling to become one of the entrenched on that most prestigious but capricious of Sydney specialist medical scenes. A lucky share speculation in 1937 as the world tried to haul itself out of the Depression had given him the money to buy into a Macquarie Street address, and the big honorariums at the major hospitals were just beginning to come his way when Hitler invaded Poland. At which point everything changed; sometimes he caught himself wondering fearfully whether things could ever go back to what they were before 1939. From the vantage point of this hellhole called Base Fifteen, the last in a succession of hellholes, it didn’t seem possible that anything could ever be the same again. Even he himself.
    Socially his background was excellent, though during the Depression the family money reserves had dwindled alarmingly. Fortunately he had a stockbroker brother who was largely responsible for the family’s recovery. Like Neil Parkinson, he spoke without a trace of an Australian accent; his school was Newington, his university Sydney, but all his postgraduate medical qualifications had been secured in England and Scotland, and he liked to think of himself as more English than Australian. Not that he was precisely ashamed of being Australian; more that it was better to be English.
    If he had a pet hate, the woman he was on his way to see now was most certainly that pet hate. Sister Honour Langtry. A snippet, barely thirty years old if that, a professional nurse but not army trained, though he was aware she had been in the army since early 1940. The woman was an enigma; she spoke very well, was obviously very well educated and finished, and had trained as a nurse at P.A., a very good training hospital indeed. Yet she had no spit and polish, no exquisite deference, no awareness of her