by Mary Renault
Christie’s reply came promptly. The letters she wrote from the Abbey were mostly typed, but her typing was as characteristic as her written hand; certain letters were always banged down harder than the others, and she had a trick of absently allowing a long word to overflow the line, and carrying it on to the next from some extraordinary division in mid-syllable. This time haste and eagerness emphasized both habits. Whatever had made him write her such a queer letter? Was he upset with her about going away? But that was the whole idea: she was doing it really for him. When she had made a success in the provinces, she would get a part in the West End. Mr. Cowen had assured her that this was practically a certainty. Then she would be quite free, and would have a marvellous flat of her own, where they would be able to meet. It would be so much nicer than being at the Abbey. (Here followed a page and a half about deficiencies in the Abbey wardrobe, and some trouble or other that Rollo was having with the scenery for the current play.) Mr. Cowen had said that it didn’t matter in the least her not having any training or experience apart from the Abbey. What audiences wanted was personality. And the company was quite sound financially; she herself was investing in it the hundred pounds she had had under her aunt’s unaltered will. She was going to sign everything in two or three days, when Mr. Cowen was taking her out to lunch.
It was at this point that Kit had begun making arrangements to go next day.
Until quite recently, one of several obstacles to this would have been the necessity of excusing himself to Janet. His free afternoon had been earmarked, in the early days, for excursions to town or elsewhere, and long after she had started to make her own arrangements it would still have been unthinkable that he should not have kept the time until he had asked her if there was anything she would like to do. But in the last weeks she seemed to have found the Group activities so absorbing that she had to be reminded when Wednesday came round. She never questioned his movements and, if he made motions of interest in what she was doing herself, became vague and changed the subject. Still, he never approached the day without a certain anxiety. This Tuesday he was relieved, when he got in from the afternoon round, to find that she had people to tea.
The guests were Peggy Leach, who was apparently staying in the neighbourhood again, and a young married couple whose surname he discovered, with difficulty, to be Harrison; they were called Bill and Shirley by every one else. When he came in they turned, simultaneously, and fixed him with identical gazes of bright, interested calculation; a little as if they were reckoning up the chances of selling him something, but not just yet. Kit, after polite exchanges, prepared hopefully to withdraw into the background of the conversation and his own thoughts; they had all seemed more than adequate to one another’s entertainment when he came in. But this, it seemed, would not do at all. They centred on him, as if he were a new boy entering a study at school. With an engaging now-come-on-you-tell-me air, they flung him titbits of information about themselves, and waited open-mouthed (like Mappin Terrace bears, he thought) for reciprocal buns. Kit, whose whole personality was feeling tender and sore, found himself quite unable to detach even superficial parts for inspection. His replies grew guarded to the verge of incivility. Presently he saw them—together, of course—exchange a covert glance with Janet, as who should say, “Ah, yes, we see.”
After this the assault stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Instead the two of them formed, with Peggy Leach, a compact little conversational team, and began to toss round stories about the Group, as if they were engaged in a kind of exhibition match. They described how a friend called Bridget had been guided to break off her engagement owing to the resistance her fiancé had put up (to the Group, Kit gathered after a few ambiguous minutes) and become engaged to Bob, who had Changed her. Another friend, called Timmie, had been guided to give up the idea of trying for Oxford and to stay at home, working for the Group. At this Janet leaned forward a little, and a faint tinge of colour appeared in her cheeks. Probably, thought Kit dimly, all this was rather much even for her. He floated a little way off into himself again. Shirley helped him to visualize Christie, being her exact converse in almost every physical trait.
At precisely a quarter to six, Bill and Shirley sprang to their feet with such dynamic decision that Peggy Leach was drawn up after them, like a lump of iron by a magnet. Probably they had been guided, Kit thought.
“Well,” said Bill, “back to the daily round, the common task! We’ll keep a lookout for you folks to-morrow. Five-thirty sharp. I fancy you’ll find old Ted pretty fine value.”
“Both of you will,” said Shirley.
A pause, which no one filled, caused Kit to look up. Every one was gazing at him expectantly. He perceived that it was himself, and not Peggy, whom the plural included.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize you meant me. I’m afraid I can’t possibly manage to-morrow.” Three pairs of eyes regarded him with thoughtful interest; he could see them each framing the word Resistance, in block capitals. Rather desperately he added, “I should have been delighted, of course, but unfortunately I’m not free.”
Janet said, “But it is Wednesday to-morrow, isn’t it? I told Bill and Shirley we’d both come.”
Kit felt the pent-up suspense of the last days crackling dangerously within him.
“Well, I’m sorry,” he said, “but if you’d asked me first I’d have told you. I shall be away the whole afternoon.”
“I see,” said Janet.
Silence fell.
Kit sat staring in front of him. Accumulated emotions, and the effort of suppressing them, had made him go white. His reason for a moment in abeyance, he waited for Bill and Shirley to explain that they had known about everything for some time, and would be glad to share with him and Janet about it.
They merely looked at him in a kind of regretful satisfaction, as if he had demonstrated by some rather unpleasant reaction the conclusions of their research. Bill turned to Shirley. Both their faces lit up with a bracing smile.
“My dear chap, that’s perfectly all right with us. Absolutely. As a matter of fact, Janet here pretty well explained to us that you’d feel this way about it. It takes time, of course. It did with me. In fact I’ve been through it all, haven’t I Shirley old girl?”
“Rather,” said Shirley. “Worse, if anything.”
“Just think it over, when you’re alone. Turn up when you feel you want to. Don’t bother to let us know. We’ll all understand.”
Kit became aware that the thinness of a membrane divided him from some ineffaceable kind of scene. Murmuring something, he got up and left the room.
The consulting room settled him in a matter of minutes. He found that the clock stood at five to six. Sounds of departure had just come from the hall. He went upstairs again, to apologize to Janet. It was not the best time to pursue a situation which might turn into anything; but he felt incapable of beginning two hours’ work with the thing hanging over his head. He had never been publicly rude to her before in the whole course of their married life.
Janet had gone to her desk, and was preparing to write a letter.
“I’m sorry about this Wednesday business. I didn’t really mean to be short about it. I was thinking of something else.” Janet looked up. It was incredible, but evident, that for a moment she had forgotten what he was talking about. His feelings became deflated to mere embarrassment.
“It doesn’t matter.” She tapped her mouth with a corner of note paper. “Do you mean you’d like to come to-morrow after all?”
“No; I’m sorry. I couldn’t have done that in any case.”
“Then there’s no need to discuss it any more, is there?” She put the paper down on the table, and picked up a pen. He realized that his anxiety had been wasted; she had been relieved by his refusal. It had discharged her of some self-imposed duty and now she wanted to put it behind her. He began to say something perfunctory, saw no point in it and went downstairs again.
Without thinking about it much, he
knew that a section of life finished; their relationship, such as it was, had tapered away to its last thread, and to-day—probably for no stronger reason than it has to happen some time—the thread had snapped. From now onward, they would be associated acquaintances, knowing each other only in the past, as separate in the present as workers at neighbouring desks in office or bank. He had seen it in other homes, but had not foreseen, in his own, a time when some kind of need would not be alive between them, at first his need of her, then hers of illusion. He had supplied it poorly, he supposed; it was better she should have turned to something that had, at the worst, potentials of truth. As far as he was concerned, it lifted somehow the guilt of his deceits; he felt in a confused way that they now became static and formal, like the lies of a servant answering a door. By the time surgery began he was thinking about Christie again. He had been thinking about her for most of the time.
The petrol van swung ponderously round, and vanished down a side-turning. Kit drew in a sharp breath of relief, and put on such speed as the road surface allowed.
The outskirts of Paxton came in sight; it was a largish town on whose further edge Brimpton Abbey hung like an ornamental tassel, the centre of an older village which ribbon development had turned into a well-to-do suburb. Already the glitter of tinsel in shop windows reminded him that Christmas was not many weeks ahead.
When he drove into Brimpton, a few lights were anticipating the dusk. He looked up at the gable where Christie had showed him, the first time he came, the window of her room. Its darkness dejected him like an omen; unreasonable since he knew she rarely had time to be there.
He rang, listening to the noises of the place, already familiar; feet and voices echoing on wooden stairs, a piano softly rendering the kind of accompaniment against which verse is spoken; the overtones of a declaiming voice, distance swallowing the rest. He wished it were possible to have some idea who was likely to answer the door; at the Abbey, this was the privilege of any one who might happen to be passing the hall. The domestic staff was loosely defined in function, and subject to rapid change. Perhaps it would be Christie this time.
It was Rollo, in shirtsleeves, with a cigarette in the corner of his long, upward-curving mouth, and a heap of brocades over one arm.
“Oh, hullo,” he said. “Are you looking for Christie?”
They surveyed one another with mutual lack of enthusiasm. On Rollo’s side this was due to finding Kit, who was standing a step lower down, still on a level with himself. This was the third time they had run into each other in a month; he would be living at the Abbey at this rate. Now Christie would be fussing to get away before they had got the scene right. An idea broke in on Rollo’s annoyance. Could the chap, since he seemed to haunt the play anyway, be induced to take St. Michael in the Prologue of the Christmas play? Colouring right; every bit of six foot, going on for seven in a helmet—what an eyeful to raise the curtain on! Kit stiffened under the sweeping and, to him, inscrutable stare with which Rollo—irritation melting in a proprietary glow—was dressing him and making him up.
“Is she busy?” he asked without warmth.
“Well, we’re more or less rehearsing at the moment.” Perhaps not the helmet, after all; a metal sunburst behind the head, fixed with a circlet. Blue-green eye-shadow, a lot of it. … Rollo removed the cigarette from his mouth, and smiled, as he could when he gave his mind to it, with considerable charm. “We’ll only be about half an hour, though. Come along in and watch, won’t you? We’d love some one to sit at the back and shout if we can’t be heard.” Rollo’s least whisper was audible in the last row of the sixpennies; but he contrived to charge the suggestion with diffident appeal.
Kit declined, with thanks. He did not want to sit and watch Christie being embraced and probably kissed by Rollo for half an hour. His reaction to Rollo was permanently coloured by a knowledge that he and Christie had once played in Romeo and Juliet together. Besides, nearly a week of mounting anxiety made the thought of passivity suddenly intolerable. He said he had several things to see to in the town, and would be back.
“Well, come up and take a look at the theatre. You needn’t stay for the whole thing.”
“I saw it the first time I came, thanks.” He found he did not trust himself to greet Christie with Rollo, who looked offensively observant, doing the honours. “I really ought to be getting along.”
“Oh, Christie took you over. I expect she told you it’s one of the three best private theatres in England. You want to see the cyclorama with the lighting, of course. But I forgot, you’re coming to the Easter-School, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” said Kit, who, his attention wandering, had thought that The Easter School was the name of a play. “I’ll certainly run over for it if I can get away.”
“Good work,” said Rollo to his retreating back. “I’ll put you down.”
Kit got into the car again, and drove about aimlessly. When he rang the Abbey bell again, praying that she might answer it herself this time, he got instead Florizelle Fuller. Here he made an almost embarrassing success. She wafted him into the drawing room, sat him down under a shaded table-lamp, heaped copies of Drama before him, and had an earnest conversation with him about Mime, which she pronounced Meem. When she had gone he sat staring, for what seemed several hours, at a photograph of a setting for Macbeth, made of round and hexagonal broken columns with flights of steps running in and out of them.
The drawing-room door slammed.
“Oh, darling, isn’t this lovely!” Christie ran the length of the room, and flung herself into his arms with such force that she knocked him back into the chair from which he was still rising. Her hair tangled itself, into his eyes, and the sleeve of her cotton smock, smelling of old greasepaint and none too clean, constricted his breathing. He assembled her into a manageable shape on his knee. All the anxieties, fears and jealousies of separation concentrated themselves into the violence with which he kissed her. She clung to him with strong little hands, eager and warm. A telephone bell, distantly ringing, recalled them at last to external things.
“I did like that,” said Christie, loosening her arm. She gazed round her in general satisfaction, and remarked, seemingly in the same paragraph, “This room used to be the Abbot’s. The monks were awfully immoral. There’s a book in the library about them.”
Kit pulled her head back by a handful of hair. “Oh, my God,” he said, laughing, “do I have to leave you in a place where the ghosts come after you too?”
“Well, I have heard noises,” said Christie seriously. “But I shouldn’t think they would. The book rather thought choir-boys, I believe; it was rather sort of veiled about it.”
As if they had been seeing each other for days, they began to talk inanely about future archives in which Christie would appear. Kit remembered dimly that he had driven over in a different mood from this, but it seemed distant and artificial. He was back in the charmed circle again; nothing could go wrong, nothing outside was entirely real. “Not in the open shelves, of course. You’d be marked, ‘Not accessible except to bona fide students.’”
“And the students would have to produce letters from two clergymen.”
“Except medical students, naturally.”
There were footsteps in the hall outside. Christie leaped from his knee and, sat in a distant chair, affecting great social poise. A lock of hair trailed down into one eye. The footsteps passed.
“Oh, Kit, I do love you. I get so bored being with every one else but you. Come on out of here. I want to devour you undisturbed. Come up to my room.”
“Of course I can’t. They’d throw you out if they got to know.”
“Who cares? I could get another job just by crooking my finger.”
Kit realized that his victory was won without battle joined. It did not particularly surprise him. The circle was complete.
“I know what,” Christie said. “I’ll take you round the theatre again. If we meet any one I’ll say you’re thinking of coming to the Easter
School. But they’re all having tea.”
They went through mazelike passages, broken by purposeless stairs. The smell of greasepaint, old costumes and dry rot seemed like part of the walls. Already it had taken on for Kit the magic of incantation. It would have made Christie present to him if he had smelt it at the Pole. Her dirty flowered smock, unbelted and short to the knee, with deep pockets bulging with string and safety-pins and butt-ends of eye-pencil and carmine, had folded him in it along with her arms. He found it clinging to his coat when he got home.
The theatre, really so small as to be almost miniature, seemed expanded by emptiness to the size and solemnity of a church. They tiptoed through it, talking in undertones, and climbed the steps into the wings. More steps led down to the junkrooms under the stage, where oddments of furniture and properties were stored. Christie guided him with the stealth of a smuggler, and switched on a yellow light, by which they picked their way. Fragments of scenery divided the space into secret alleys and caves. The heating-pipes went through, wrapped in sacking, and the air was close and full of dry smells.
The ceiling was just half an inch from the top of Kit’s head.
“This way.” Christie navigated him round the corner of a small crenelated tower. Behind it the light was filtered to dimness. He could see on one side a terrace wall festooned with paper roses, on the other a throne draped with threadbare brocade. In the space between he saw, after he had nearly fallen over it, a canvas bank covered with remnants of fibre moss. An ass’s head leered on the floor behind it. Some old cotton cushions and a striped rug, arranged against it, were hollowed from being lain on, like a hare’s form. A packet of cigarettes, a thin book which looked like poetry, a tin of bull’s-eyes and a pocket torch poked out from the folds of the rug. Kit remembered the summerhouse at Laurel Dene, which now interpreted itself.
Christie sat down on the bank, which made a sound of creaking shavings, and pulled at his hand.
