Women and War (46 page)

‘You did quite a good job on those, Allingham,' sister said and Tara recognized her far-from-effusive comment as praise indeed.

‘Sure wouldn't I like to have another go at them when they are all in place,' she said craftily – thinking that perhaps a job well done might prove her passport into the wards – and the much more rewarding task of ward orderly. To her delight Sister nodded.

‘More dust probably will shake out of the wood when we carry them into their places. Heaven knows it gets everywhere! All right, Allingham, you can spend some time on that tomorrow – just as soon as you finish the lats.'

By next morning, however, the job had attained top priority in Sister's eyes. A new plane load of casualties had arrived, flown in from ‘over the Owen Stanleys' – the mountain range that bisected the island – and were now occupying the tent wards to which the new equipment had been allocated.

‘Leave everything else and make sure the equipment is pristine clean!' she instructed: ‘Some of the new patients have some very nasty wounds and one or two are threatening gangrene. I don't want any MO saying they got infected through dirty equipment in my wards!'

Tara smiled, her old irrepressible spirit returning. And when she went into the ward, the comments and soft wolf whistles from the patients fit enough to appreciate the sight of a pretty girl lifted her spirits still further.

It seemed so long since she had been in the company of men! The girls were all very well, but Tara had never had close girlfriends. Her looks – and the fact that she was popular with men – too often made her the object of cattiness and, sometimes, outright jealousy. Oh yes, give her a man any time! Even if he did have to be kept in his place …

She bantered with them as she scrubbed the tables yet again, removing any last lingering traces of the thick black dust, passing amused comments about their incapacity to carry out their good-humoured threats and teasing them about the state of their feet – a subject too tender really to be a joke, since many of them had skin and flesh between their toes rotting away from the enforced encasement in boots and shoes day after endless days in wet and steamy conditions.

‘You know what the army advises you,' she told one of them pertly. ‘A change of socks every day and you would have nothing to worry about.'

‘Turn it in, love!' he rejoined. ‘I wasn't going to be caught by any Jap with my boots off! I'd as soon be caught with my trousers down!'

At the end of the ward lay the more seriously sick – a man whose arm had been amputated at the elbow, another with a part of his shoulder shot away. Tara became quieter as she approached them, recognizing the need for them to rest quietly. In the very end bed and set aside a little from the others lay a still figure, his head turned away from her as he dozed fitfully. Tara moved towards him quietly, her soft-soled shoes making no sound. She set down her bucket and wrung out her cleaning cloth in the water, avoiding the crust of dirt which floated on it. Then she leaned across to the table – and froze.

There was something oddly familiar about the shape of the head, the dark thickly springing hair. She let the cleaning cloth fall back into the bucket and walked around the bed. Her breath was coming quick and shallow, and even now she was telling herself she must be wrong. But when she saw his face, pale and drawn though it was, with the skin stretched too tight across the cheekbones, dark smudges beneath the eyes and a growth of stubble around his mouth and chin, she knew she was not mistaken. Heavy lids lifted with an effort but the eyes that met hers, though dulled by drugs, were unmistakably hazel streaked with dangerous looking green. His mouth moved, the lips too thickened by the drugs he had been given to be able to form the words he wanted to say, but the small curve of a smile was there all the same to prove that he had recognized her too.

She stood motionless for a moment, her eyes wide. Then she dropped to her haunches beside the bed.

‘Sean Devlin – what are you doing here?' she said.

When Dev first opened his eyes and saw her there, he was convinced he was hallucinating. Damn the stuff they were pumping into him! The quack had said it would do him good and he had thought it was beginning to – but when he started seeing things, well, he wasn't so sure, even if what he was seeing was a very pleasant sight. Tara Kelly! Dammit, he'd thought he had got her out of his system when he had left her at the Adelaide River more than a year and a half ago. He
had
got her out of his system – and done it the hard way. So why the hell should he be imagining she was here now, standing beside his bed and looking as pretty as she had ever looked – a bloody sight prettier than any girl had a right to look?

His eyelids drooped; with an effort he forced them open again. It was not a hallucination – or at least if it was, it was a lot more vivid than any of the other figments his fevered imagination had been conjuring up. She was flesh, and blood, he could have sworn it – and dressed in tropical kit too. He could see from her expression that she was as shocked as he was. And when she spoke her voice was unmistakable – that Irish lilt was very real despite the ringing in his ears.

‘Sean Devlin, what are you doing here?'

With an effort he forced his lips to move.

‘It's a long story, darling.' His voice sounded thick; there was no way he could make the effort to tell her, though it was all there. Fragmented but real all the same, in spite of the long harrowing months since the night he had left her to that bloody upper crust medico Richard Allingham.

Once again he forced his lips to form words.

‘Well, it wasn't the bastard Japs who got me,' he said.

Then the effort – and the drugs – became too much for him and his eyelids drooped once more.

It must be malaria, Tara decided. The look of him and the details on the chart at the end of his bed made it almost certain, and his remark about the Japs seemed to confirm it. There had been a number of cases lately, Tara knew, in spite of the atebrin tablets with which every man was issued, and she had heard the doctor speculating that a new strain, resistant to the drug, was rearing its head. Nasty. Malaria was not something to wish upon anyone. Even given that you survived the first bout it could go on recurring for years and years. No, good as it was to see Dev again, she could have wished it had been under different circumstances.

But when she sought out the AANS sister in charge of the ward to confirm her suspicions, Tara was in for another shock of quite a different kind.

‘You're talking about Lieutenant Devlin are you?' she said coolly.

Tara almost dropped the mop she was still carrying.

‘Lieutenant? How did he get to be a lieutenant?'

The AANS sister gave her a strange look. ‘He's quite a hero by all accounts. Acquitted himself very well on the Kakoda Trail and earned himself a commission by his exploits. And yes, you're right, he has come down with malaria. Very unfortunate. He was due to be going home – then the day before he should have sailed this had to happen.'

‘What a shame.' Tara said, but her head was spinning. Dev – an officer! She'd never have believed it. Surprise enough to find him in the army at all. How had he managed that?

Later, he was to tell her how with his business in Darwin non-existent, he had volunteered for the AIF and been accepted, how he had done a spell at the Jungle Training Camp at Conungra and then been posted to New Guinea, and how he had fought long and hard on the notorious Kakoda Trail. What he would not tell her was that she had had a great deal to do with his decision to enlist. That last night after the concert he had finally conceded defeat and it had been the most painful thing he had ever had to do. He would not admit that, any more than he would boast of the courage and good humour, grit and perseverance and qualities of leadership that had made him a legend on the Kakoda Trail and led to his commission – and a decoration for valour. It was not in his nature to wear his heart on his sleeve and so there were things that Tara had no inkling of that day as she left the ward, surprised and oddly cheered to find a familiar face here in New Guinea, even if he was a patient – and a rather sick one at that.

I'll come and see him whenever I can, Tara decided. For after all, shouldn't old friends stick together?

The intravenous quinine injections did their work. Gradually, during the weeks of spring, Dev began to recover, emerging from that strange cloudy land somewhere between coma and dozing to lie, weak but more rational, staring at the canvas tent walls and wondering how the hell a damn silly thing like malaria had managed to put him in hospital where the Japs had failed. For someone as fit as he had always been, it was a blow to his pride, and he snapped irritably when the medic questioned him closely as to whether he had been taking his atebrin tablets and hinted he might be one of those who avoided them because of the rumoured risks to manhood.

‘Where the bloody hell have you been sitting out this war? We haven't seen a woman for months on end. Not being able to get it up would be the least of our worries. Christ, some of you HQ wallahs seem to think we have had nothing to do but cavort about on the beaches with dusky lovelies. Well, let me tell you, sport, it has been nothing like that!'

‘All right, there's no need to lose your temper,' the HQ wallah murmured petulantly and in spite of his own annoyance – and his weakness – Dev had to smile. It was about time they sent some of these cossetted clerks out into the battle lines and taught them, to be real men. Not that he personally would want one of them standing shoulder to shoulder with
him
when the chips were down – on second thoughts perhaps it was better to leave them where they were after all. At least this way they could only irritate a bloke, not get him killed.

The HQ wallah's lips tightened as he noticed the grin.

‘It really is not funny,' he said primly. ‘We can't afford to lose men unless it is absolutely necessary.'

That caused Dev to roar with laughter, but moments later the laughter had turned into a fit of convulsive shivering. They still came regularly, these bouts when every hair on his head – and body – seemed to stand on end and his teeth chattered uncontrollably. He hunched himself over, ignoring the medic as he tried to gain extra warmth from the blankets, and when at last the spasm passed the man had gone – crept away rather than face the reality of malaria, no doubt, Dev thought scornfully.

He lay for a moment with the blanket still wrapped around him, cursing his luck once again. It was so bloody frustrating, being laid up – even now when he was still too weak almost to walk down the ward unaided it was getting to him. What it would be like as he began improving he dreaded to think.

There was one bright spot, of course, Tara. Since the day when she had discovered he was in the hospital she had come to visit whenever she could. Just to see her sitting there beside his bed was as good as a tonic. And the envy of the other men had done his heart good too. But now that he was getting better and his brain was functioning more normally he found that seeing Tara was just another frustration. It would have been bad enough knowing, as he had done in Northern Territory, that she regarded him as an old friend and nothing more, but Dev was not used to being a loser and he thought that he might have looked on this encounter as one more chance to try to get through to her. But things were different now. She was someone else's wife. Not a nice thought at all – and that was putting it mildly.

He had tried, God knew, to be pleased for her. He had known, after all, how badly she had wanted Richard Allingham. But self-sacrifice had never been one of Dev's strengths, he had always laughed at nobility and scorned submissiveness. Now, the best he could do was pretend indifference and so salve his pride.

‘Well, well, Tara, so you married the man! Congratulations!' he had drawled when she had shown him her wedding ring. ‘I never thought you'd make it, but …'

‘Why not?' Her eyes had snapped blue fire.

‘Oh, come on now, Tara, it wouldn't be chivalrous of me to spell it out. And chivalry is something you prize very highly, isn't it? It must be or you wouldn't have fallen in love with Richard.'

She looked at him sharply, suspecting that he was mocking her yet not able to put her finger on exactly how he was doing it.

‘If you are going to be rude, Sean Devlin, I shall not come in to see you any more. I'm not a ward orderly here, you know, I'm a maid of all work. And I am visiting you out of the goodness of my heart in my own time.'

‘Sorry – sorry!' He raised his hands in mock surrender, a ghost of his old smile creasing his face.

He had no idea of the way his appearance had shocked Tara – ‘He was such a fine, upstanding man, now he looks like a scarecrow!' she had confided to Jill Whitton. She kept her shock well hidden, however. It would not do for him to know what she was thinking every time she looked at his emaciated frame and sunken cheeks.

‘And it's sorry you should be!' she said tartly. ‘ Just thank your lucky stars they brought you here. At least you had a friendly face when you came around. You weren't surrounded by strangers.' She leaned closer. ‘I think if I'd been as ill as you were and I woke up to find myself surrounded by the natives, I'd die.'

Dev's lips twitched. Marriage had not changed her one scrap.

‘Those natives have not been christened the Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels for nothing. We'd never have done what we did without them. And they always seem to be cheerful. Always smiling, never mind the fact that every tooth in their head may be gone and the gums turned red from chewing betel nuts.'

‘Well, I think they look fierce,' Tara said.

Dev was silent for a moment, remembering the native New Guinea islanders upon whom they had relied in the mountains – men whose dark curly hair receded from high veined foreheads, who went bare-chested but often knotted a scarf around their necks or adorned themselves with all the bracelets and rings they could find. Perhaps it was the thick eyebrows, set low over their eyes, which gave them their fierce appearance; perhaps it was just that to Tara they were an unknown quantity. But he knew them better than that; knew the way they could unerringly find paths through the rain forests, their bare feet sure as a mountain goat's despite the slippery mud and rippling tapestry of tree roots; knew that as stretcher bearers they were dedicated to getting every wounded man to medical aid.