An Indecent Obsession by Colleen McCullough Page B

basically servant status. Could he have been so honest with himself, he would have admitted that she frightened him to death. He had to gird himself up mentally and spiritually to all his encounters with her, for what good it did him. She always ended in wringing his balls so brutally it would be hours before he felt himself again.
    Even the fly-curtain made of beer bottle caps irritated him. Nowhere but ward X would have been permitted to keep it, but Matron, foul underbred besom though she was, trod always very carefully in X. During its early days a patient had grown tired of listening to Matron harangue Sister Langtry, and had dealt with her in a stunningly simple and effective way; he just reached out and ripped her uniform apart from collar to hem. Mad as a March hare, of course, and shipped off forthwith to Australia, but after that incident Matron made sure she did nothing to offend the men of ward X.
    The light in the corridor revealed Colonel Wallace Donaldson to be tall, a dapper man of about fifty, with the high petechial complexion of a spirits-lover. He had a carefully tended iron-grey moustache of military proportions, though the rest of his face was perfectly shaven. His hair now that his cap was off displayed a deep groove in its oiled greyness where the edge of his cap had rested and cut into the scalp, for it was not thick hair, not springy hair. His eyes were pale blue and a little protuberant, but he still showed the lingering vestiges of a youthful handsomeness, and his figure was good, broad-shouldered, almost flat-bellied. In an impeccably tailored conservative suit he had been an imposing man; in an equally impeccably tailored uniform he looked more like a field marshal than any of the real ones did.
    Sister Langtry came to receive him at once, ushered him into her office and saw him comfortably seated in the visitor’s chair, though she did not sit down herself—one of her little tricks, he thought resentfully. It was the only way she could tower over him.
    ‘I apologize for having to drag you all the way down here, sir, but this chap’—she lifted the papers she was holding slightly—‘came in today, and not having heard from you, I presumed you were unaware of his arrival.’
    ‘Sit, Sister, sit !’ he said to her in exactly the same tone he would have used to a disobedient dog.
    She dipped down into her chair without demur or change of expression, looking like a schoolboy cadet officer in her grey trousers and jacket. Round one to Sister Langtry; she had provoked him into being rude first.
    She extended the papers to him silently.
    ‘No, I don’t want to look at his papers now!’ he said testily. ‘Just tell me briefly what it’s all about.’
    Sister Langtry gazed at him without resentment. After his first meeting with the colonel, Luce had given him a nickname—Colonel Chinstrap—and because it suited him so perfectly, it had stuck. She wondered if he knew that the entire human complement of Base Fifteen now called him Colonel Chinstrap behind his back, and decided he did not. He couldn’t have ignored a derogatory nickname.
    ‘Sergeant Michael Edward John Wilson,’ she said levelly, ‘whom I will call Michael from now on. Aged twenty-nine, in the army since the very beginning of the war, North Africa, Syria, New Guinea, the Islands. He’s seen a great deal of action, but there’s no evidence of mental instability due to seeing action. In fact, he’s an excellent and a very brave soldier, and has been awarded the DCM. Three months ago his only close friend was killed in a rather nasty engagement with the enemy, after which he kept very much to himself.’
    Colonel Chinstrap heaved a huge, long-suffering sigh. ‘Oh, do get on with it, Sister!’
    She continued without a tremor. ‘Michael is suspected of unsound mind following an unsavory incident in camp one week ago. A fight broke out between him and a noncommissioned officer, highly unusual behavior for both of them. Had