The Friendly Young Ladies: A Novel

by Mary Renault

  The canoe bobbed and plunged on the triangular wash; but Elsie was too preoccupied to think about drowning. When the water was smooth again, Leo said, “He’d just finished his first year as an apprentice. He had an extra spell of leave, as it happened, because his ship had fouled a lighter and sprung some plates. He came straight home from Avonmouth to please his people, instead of going up to town on a binge with the others, and of course he got a bit restless and bored. We saw a good deal of each other. I envied him like hell, naturally, and wanted to hear all about it; and we had a look round some of our old climbs. And one morning one of us, I forget which, said, ‘What about that thing we always said we’d do, climbing the Green Man and staying there till the next low tide?’ You know the Green Man.”

  Elsie nodded. It was a great tooth broken off from the point of the headland, with a grass cap on its flattened top, and sides like those of a tower.

  “Can one climb the Green Man?”

  “Oh, Lord, yes, we’d done it before. So we thought we would. We got up it all right, and the tide came in according to plan, and surrounded us—it runs to about fifty feet out there—and it was all rather fun. We still had plenty to talk about, or rather Tom had, and it was quite amusing when the sea was right up and the spray breaking round. But it was a long time going out, and we finally got to the end of our conversation. So after a while Tom told me what a nice girl I’d grown into, and started kissing me. It was a bit of a novelty—to me, at any rate—and it seemed to pass the time as well as anything, so we kept it up for a bit. It’s a place that gives you the feeling of being very remote from everywhere; all the houses, and so on, on shore look rather like toys. I suppose it can’t have occurred to us that a couple of people on the Green Man, at high tide, are rather more noticeable from the other way on. Anyway, Father got the field-glasses out, and before long, he and Mother were snatching them from hand to hand. At least, that’s what I gathered when I got back.

  “Well, I suppose I expected some sort of dressing-down, for the climb. But Father had hardly started before Mother wanted to know when the engagement was going to be announced. The sort of thing one can laugh off if one’s had time to think of it oneself beforehand. Silly to get annoyed, anyway. Father, of course, immediately took the opposite line, and said no one was likely to have me after making a public show of myself. And they started on each other, fixing the blame for my upbringing. You can guess. I suppose I was feeling a bit on edge, what with one thing and another. Anyhow, I said they could settle my future between them any way they liked, because I wouldn’t be there; and left rather quickly. I went blinding along, the way one does, and ran slap into Tom, who’d been down to the village. He knew what it was like at home of course, who doesn’t, so I didn’t need to explain much; I just said I was going away and not coming back. I don’t suppose I really meant it. But Tom said ‘Damned good show, let’s go together somewhere.’ After that I didn’t like to back down; I never had with Tom about anything before.

  “So we just doubled back and collected a few things. When I got in I could hear them still at it. I went upstairs and packed a rucksack without disturbing them. Tom told his people some story about having run into an old pal who’d asked him down for the weekend, and we met up at the station, with our luggage, under the eyes of the vicar’s wife, who was there meeting someone’s train. We thought that was the funniest thing yet. We decided we’d go as far as Exeter and then think where to go next. So we did that.”

  “And where did you go next?” asked Elsie after an expectant pause. Leo seemed to have forgotten to finish; she was exchanging salutes with a weathered-looking man in a new, pencil-thin sculler.

  “That’s Bill Brooks,” she told Elsie, as if this were more interesting and important. “He builds boats.”

  “Does he? You were going to tell me where you went to, after you got to Exeter.”

  “Where we went? Oh, nowhere. At least, nowhere together. Soon after we got to Exeter, we decided it wasn’t such a good idea, after all.”

  Elsie loosed a deep sigh of relief. She had known, she said to herself, that it had only been something like this. But how good it was to have it said, clear and tidied away; no more doubts, no dark corners. The sunny morning, unshadowed now, expanded her heart.

  “What a good thing,” she said earnestly, “that you realized in time.”

  “Yes.” Leo looked at the twist of her paddle in the water. “Wasn’t it?”

  “But then what happened?” Elsie prompted; her sister’s attention showed, again, an irritating tendency to wander. “What did you do next? How did you get here?”

  “Oh, the next part’s even sillier. I thought after that I’d go up to London.”

  “But why didn’t you come home? I mean, if you hadn’t. …”

  “Well, there was the vicar’s wife. And besides, I didn’t feel like it. … Tom was a bit worried about what was going to happen to me. You might say, I suppose, that he could have thought of that sooner; but we were both only nineteen, and he’d had a year of taking life pretty much as it came. I didn’t want him fussing. I cooked him a tale about someone in town who’d promised to get me into journalism any time I liked, so that cheered him up, and we went our various ways. He was too scared to go back home himself; I don’t altogether blame him, old Fawcett was Anglo-Indian and frightfully pukka, if you remember. However he was all right, because he was due to sail in a few days anyway so he didn’t have long to lie low. I expect his people had simmered down by the time he got home again.”

  “I do think,” said Elsie, giving the judgment due weight, “that after he’d compromised you, he ought to have looked after you better than that.”

  “Oh, rubbish. I ran my head into it. He did try to give me what money he had, poor kid, and I wasn’t very nice to him about it. … There’s nothing I blame Tom for. Nothing at all.”

  She had spoken the last words as if they had been a summary and a conclusion. Once again, Elsie had to urge her on.

  “And what did you do in London?”

  “I took some rather peculiar digs near Paddington Station. I’d never been in town before. Then I bought a lot of papers such as the Telegraph, that have advertisements for jobs. If I’d had a shilling for every time they used the words ‘experience essential,’ I wouldn’t have needed a job at all. I got a secondhand typewriter for five pounds and spent my spare time—well, it was all spare really, of course—teaching myself to type. When I could do it nearly as quickly as writing, I tried some of those little articles that look so easy, and sent them in to various periodicals; needless to say, they all came back. I earned thirty bob one week addressing envelopes, and another ten the next selling silk stockings, but I didn’t like that so I stopped. I always typed hard in the evenings, because a tart lived in the room next door, and the sounds that came through were rather off-putting if you didn’t make some sort of noise. As the journalism seemed to be getting nowhere, I dug out some old exercise books I used to scribble in at home, and typed them out instead. In the morning, of course, I looked for jobs. But all the simple ones, like holding horses outside theatres, seemed to have gone out. I tried the Labour Exchange, and they offered to send me to a hostel and train me for domestic service. They said it wouldn’t cost me a penny, but I put it off for a bit; after all, fish and chips are pretty cheap. But whether the fish was bad one evening, or what it was, I don’t know; I started having pains in my stomach, and one night I woke up feeling so odd that I had to knock up the tart—who was pretty decent about it, luckily the last customer had gone by then—and get her to go for a doctor. It was rather embarrassing, as I hadn’t enough money to pay him; but luckily that didn’t arise, because he promptly whistled up an ambulance and had me delivered to the hospital. They had me in the theatre about half an hour later. I’m never sure how much of that night I remember or whether I dreamed some of it. The only thing I’m really sure about is being sick afterwards into a rather chipped enamel pot.

  “I got quite
used to being there later, because the appendix had gone bad in some way and didn’t heal, and I had rubber tubes stuck through the seam and it was all rather sordid. In fact, I didn’t see much prospect in it all. I noticed the doctor used to take the sister carefully out of earshot before discussing me, and I knew what that meant; but it gets not to matter. I used to be a little dimmer every day, and go off into long dozes and forget where I was.

  “Then, one night, I woke up while the night-nurse was standing by my bed, and I noticed something white on the locker and said ‘What’s that?’ ‘It’s a letter,’ she said. ‘It must have been there all day, don’t you want to read it?’ She was a nurse I hadn’t seen before and I thought she looked rather nice, so I said, ‘You read it, do you mind, and tell me what’s in it.’ I suppose I must have been feeling pretty vague not to have thought of its being probably a demand for the rent. Anyway she opened it and said, ‘It’s to say that a story of yours is going to be published in September, and will thirty pounds’ advance royalty do? I didn’t know you were a writer.’ ‘Nor did I,’ I said. ‘What’s the story called, do they say?’ Even after she read out the title I couldn’t for the life of me remember posting it off. She called it amnesia, which made it sound rather grand, and said it was nothing to worry about, and could I remember the plot? The funny thing was, I did, and told her. We talked for ten minutes—I realized later it was the first time I’d conversed with anyone for about a week—and then I slept for four hours, which is a lot in hospital, and woke feeling fine. By the way, we’re just about to land. Don’t try to get out before I do; I’ll hold the canoe for you.”

  Elsie scrambled ashore. It was fortunate that Leo made this operation foolproof, for she was concentrating on it very little. She was anxious to continue the conversation, but Leo’s rapid and decisive progress from shop to shop (she hated household marketing) made this impossible. It was not until the cargo was stowed and they were paddling home that she found opportunity to say, tentatively; “Do you still write books?”

  “Yes, of course. About two a year. That’s what I live on.”

  “Would you mind awfully if I read one of them?”

  “You’ve got one there, you ass.”

  From home-acquired habit rather than purpose, Elsie had brought Lone Star Trail along with her. Leo kicked at it with a shabby brown sandal.

  “Oh.” Elsie’s voice went sharply upwards, not so much from surprise as because Leo had made the canoe wobble. “But it says Tex O’Hara.”

  “Be your age, girl. Who do you suppose is going to buy a Western signed Leonora Lane? I shouldn’t waste your time on that one. It’s full of howlers. I did it before I knew Joe.”

  Elsie gazed at her sister with slowly-widening eyes. Almost her bright Bohemian visions were ready to re-form.

  “Then really you’re a famous author all the time.”

  Leo looked at her helplessly, began to say something, and thought better of it. After a controlled pause, she asked, “Would the expression ‘a competent hack’ convey anything to you? Even the top-line Western practitioners aren’t what you might call literary giants, you know.” Her irritation dissolved suddenly in a laugh. “All the same, it’s pretty good fun.”

  The fact that she seemed to mean this made Elsie feel deflated. Indeed, what she had read of the story had sadly borne it out; it had looked the sort of thing a lively but un-intellectual young man might write for boys.

  “But after all your experiences. …”

  “When I write,” said Leo, “I like to enjoy myself.”

  “But don’t you sometimes long to write a great book?”

  Leo grinned. “The book you got that one out of wasn’t great, anyway,” she said. “If you knew any frustrated geniuses, you’d be damned glad not to be staying with one. A couple of cocktails is enough, take it from me. … Personally I always think people are rather sickening who make out they could write better than they do. It’s like losing a game and then saying you didn’t try. I do what I like doing, and do it as well as I can, and make a living at it; and you can’t ask much more of life than that, can you?”

  Elsie said, “No, I suppose you can’t.” Privately, she was unable to imagine how anyone could ask much less. Was it possible, she wondered, that Leo was concealing something from her? After so full and evidently truthful a recital, there seemed little room for it. It had never been easy, at any time she could remember, to know beforehand what would content Leo. She gave it up. By way of saying something, so that conversation should not languish, she enquired, “And how did you and Helen get to know each other?”

  Leo looked at her in surprise.

  “But I told you that. Surely. She was the night-nurse at the hospital. You can’t have been listening. That was really the whole point of the story.”

  CHAPTER X

  LEO BIT THE END of her pen, and stared out of the window beyond her desk. Late afternoon sun caught the gilded hair of the Lily Belle’s figurehead like a fiery halo; she blinked, and returned to the writing pad in front of her.

  “Sitting astride the shattered window-frame,” she wrote, “his Colt balanced on his knee, the unknown rider laughed. It was a quiet laugh, but Cavallo stiffened where he stood; he had heard it once before. He knew: even before the mask was lifted from the lean, coldly smiling face, he saw the ungloved hand that held the gun, and on it his old brand, the Bar-Q; the brand he had blotted everywhere that he had made it. Everywhere but here.

  “‘Montana Mick!’ His voice rattled in his throat.”

  Leo, who was beginning to feel that this would be enough for today, paused to light a cigarette. With the matches in her pocket were a couple of letters, which she had omitted to read when the post came in, and she opened them.

  The first was long, personal, and offended, beginning, “My dear Leo—Your behaviour at our last meeting came as something of a shock, and in view of a certain evening last week, I think I have some excuse for feeling bewildered. You gave me, as far as I remember, no cause to imagine …” and so on, for several pages. Leo skimmed the first and last of them, tore all four quickly in half, and dropped the pieces into the basket. The second was a shorter and more formal affair: “Dear Mr. O’Hara, I have read all your books and am writeing to ask you if you can send me the adress of a ranch that is taking beginners,” ending correctly, “I hope you are well, yours respectfully, Ernest William Smith.” She read this one carefully through, and put it into a pigeon-hole marked “Urgent.”

  Stimulated, she turned to the beginning of the chapter she had been working on, made one or two corrections, and settled down to writing again. As concentration deepened, her face grew expressionless, shut-in and plain, and a loose strand of hair slipped down over her forehead. Her fountain-pen scratched on. She did not hear Helen coming till she was inside the room.

  “Hullo, darling,” she said absently.

  “Don’t stop, I’m early. I’ll get the tea.”

  “I have stopped, really; but I had a fan-letter and it started me off again. What did you do?”

  “Oh, a ridiculous afternoon. Scuttling backwards and forwards between two theatres, from a cerebellar astrocytoma to a bone-graft on a maxilla. Of course the crucial moments were almost simultaneous. However, Harvey took me to the Savoy Grill at the end of it.”

  “Becoming expensive, aren’t you?” Leo tilted her cigarette and one eyebrow.

  “Oh, it didn’t matter. David can’t afford it and Lewis would regard it as an investment, but Harvey can and doesn’t, so he’s all right. You’ve done a lot. What’s happening, is Mick still going around in that mask? It seems a pity when he’s so good-looking.”

  “He’s just taken it off to shoot up the half-breed.”

  “Let’s look. … You know, I don’t think you ought to say ‘with a vile oath’ so often. It will lead the reader to suspect that you don’t really know any.”

  “Well, I don’t, in Spanish, do you? I made him say ‘Caramba!’ a paragraph ago, and I doubt if it’s
all that vile, anyway. What’s the Spanish for bastard?”

  “You ought to buy a dictionary.”

  “It’s sure to be something awfully colloquial. Joe may know some. But his are generally too vile to pass the publisher’s reader.”

  “I met Joe on the station. He said he was looking in.”

  “Oh, did he? If I’d known he was going up to town I’d have asked him to see if those galleys were in. Did you tell him about Elsie?”

  “Only that she was staying here. However, he’s eager to meet her. He asked me whether she was like you. I said the family resemblance wasn’t very striking.”

  Leo put down her cigarette. “There’s only one thing,” she said slowly, “that could make me more worried about keeping Elsie than I am already.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A feeling I have that you don’t much like her, and that in spite of everything you said last night, you don’t want her here.”

  “I did mean it. I should never have forgiven you if you’d turned her away. She’s like someone coming up for the third time, isn’t she? Suppose she were my sister instead of yours.”

  “The fact remains that she isn’t your sister, and this is your home.”

  “It isn’t that.” Helen took one of Leo’s cigarettes and lit it abstractedly. Her dark, trim town suit, with its glimpse of crisp white collar between the revers, looked out of place against Leo and the room. “I don’t dislike her—what has she got that one could dislike?—and I don’t mind having her about. After five years we’d be rather maudlin if we couldn’t bear not to live tête-à-tête for a week or two. And we can manage the money, of course, if we’re careful. But—well, yes, I suppose I do resent her. Not because of herself, because of you.”

  “Me? How?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Helen’s softness and gentleness were suddenly absent; even her physical contours seemed to have hardened a little. “It’s all being made so easy for her. You didn’t see yourself in that ward all those nights. You forget, I suppose; but I don’t, not in eight years or eighteen. And now she comes along, the good little girl, who’s never been short of a square meal, or had anything worse to put up with than a little family bickering; she takes it perfectly for granted that you’ll wrap her up in cotton-wool and absorb all the shocks, and thinks she’s been through a heroic ordeal because she’s crossed England in the train without her mother putting her in charge of the guard. Why should she fall on her feet? What about you?”