by Mary Renault
Elsie would have known what to say about a book like this if it had come out of the library in the ordinary way. There was enough suffering and sordidness in real life; a good book should make one happy; one asked the library assistant for the next one on the list. This was her mother’s method and Elsie had always followed it out; for she too disliked depressing books and demanded suffering, if any, in the grand manner. She had never imagined the possibility of being confronted with this kind of thing by a personal acquaintance. It was too awkward for words. She turned over a number of pages rapidly. A phrase met her eye which she had not thought possible outside the Old Testament. She looked again, to make sure. Yes, it was true, and so was the preceding paragraph. What was more, not three hours ago she had been sitting, all unaware, in the same room as the man who had written it. She shut the book, blushing to the roots of her hair, looked over her shoulder to see if anyone was watching, and put it back on the shelf, offering up a prayer of thankfulness that she had not told Leo she was going to read it. It was unfair of Leo. She ought to have warned her. Of what, Elsie was not sure, but she found herself resenting Leo more than the book itself; for taking everything as a matter of course, for being always unembarrassed, for being able to discuss books like this in terms of royalties and serial rights in the same voice as if they were bottled beer; for the whole armour of masculine impersonality which Elsie had sensed without knowing what it was that she had felt and resented; for an unsettling suspicion that one was living on a brittle surface, and that underneath it things might be other than what they seemed. She thought of this morning’s horseplay, so childish that she herself had felt, by comparison, quite mature. It caused one to wonder, at what seemed the safest and most ordinary moments, where one was, where everyone was. It engendered thoughts which, Elsie felt, it would not be possible to communicate even to Peter.
Her mind, following methods of its own, set about tidying up this uncomfortable mess. It did so partly by a process of forgetting; partly by the use of disinfectant adjectives such as “clever” and “difficult”, partly by going into Mawley to exchange Stargleam for Mirabelle’s Man. Like the aspirin, phenacetin and caffeine which Leo had been swallowing upstairs, these remedies might have been inadequate separately; but taken all together, they worked in time.
She had dreaded Joe’s next appearance; but, when it happened, the cure was already almost complete, and his presence finished it. She was washing up the tea-things, and looked up from the rattle in the bowl to find him at her elbow, drying them. “Leo not in yet?” he said, in the manner of one who has already ascertained the answer; and turned to replace the crockery in its correct places on the dresser, with which he seemed rather more familiar than Elsie herself. It was, immediately, as if he had been in the place all day. As he moved about the galley he told her about trouble he had had in the morning with the corpse of a dog which had fetched up against the island and, when dislodged, persistently returned. “Finally I roped it, and towed it down river. I never roped a floating body at home; nothing much for bodies to float in. Too bad Leo wasn’t there.” He drifted into the living-room, and settled down with a book. It would have been as difficult to be disturbed by the comings and goings of the postman.
He had come, as it turned out when the others got back from the village, to tell Helen that Alcox liked her drawings and wished to see what she could do with an article. This he had brought, together with an invitation to lunch with Alcox at the Ivy. Helen said “Joe, darling!” and cast herself into his arms. But Elsie’s excitement and confusion were only momentary. It was as if a nice, spontaneous child had been offered a visit to the circus by a reliable uncle. Joe returned the demonstration in a comfortable, matter-of-fact way, remarking “Wear your fleecy-lined bloomers, ducky; he’s a licentious old goat.” In a last anticipation of drama, somewhere between hope and dread, Elsie stole a glance at Leo. She was sitting with a cigarette on the edge of the table, looking at least as pleased as either of the other two.
When Joe left, Elsie went with him. To fill in, as he remarked, the interval till opening time, he had offered to give her a punting lesson. She went. She had forgotten every word of Remission.
“What a pity it seems,” Leo said when they had gone, “that she didn’t know somebody like Joe ten years ago.”
Helen looked up for a moment. Leo had spoken absently, without emphasis; the thought seemed, somehow, an old one, older by a good deal than Elsie’s coming.
Helen only said, “And after all that, I never asked him to my party. Or did I?”
“Yes, you did. Or perhaps it was me. He’s coming, anyway.”
“I hope it won’t bore him, all hospital people.”
“Not him. He likes trade jargons. He’d listen fascinated to a party of undertakers, I feel sure. Bearing in mind your previous hospital parties, it’s Elsie’s reactions that bother me, if you want to know.”
“But I’m having it partly for her benefit. She wants to meet people, doesn’t she? It’s going to be quite simple and ordinary.”
“Oh, well,” said Leo reflectively, “I dare say it will do her good.” She lapsed into meditation, from which she emerged presently to say, “I wish I were more used to family responsibilities. We’re no nearer deciding what to do with her than we were the day she arrived. Are we abducting her, do you think? I mean in the legal rather than the moral sense. I suppose you can abduct your sister. Or not? I only thought of that this morning.”
“Ask Joe. He knows most things. I should hardly think so. We didn’t entice her to come.”
“No, indeed. If we could only afford to train her at anything. … How about nursing? That’s free, isn’t it?”
“She’s a year too young for any decent hospital. As she’s your sister, I won’t go into the other reasons.”
“Don’t be hard on her. Everyone’s got something they can’t take.”
A look had crossed her face which checked Helen’s neat rejoinder. She said, gently, “There’s a young man somewhere, isn’t there? Some sort of dim medical student, or something. If he comes, we’d better take a look at him. He might be quite worthy and respectable. If we could only get her engaged, she could go home quite comfortably and wait till he was qualified.”
“Well, that would comfort Mother, I suppose. She always hoped indefatigably that one of us would get married. She’d even have got over Tom, I think, if he’d made an honest woman of me and she could have carried a sheaf of chrysanthemums and cried in the vestry. People are odd. It never seemed to occur to her that anything that went on at home could possibly have put me off. … We could have asked this lad of hers to the party, if we’d thought of it.”
“We’ll have another, and ask him to that.”
Elsie got back an hour later, wind-blown, and with a band of early sunburn across the bridge of her nose, to eat a substantial supper, her mind lulled in the peaceful vacancy of a healthy physical fatigue. As she proudly mastered the craft of disengaging the pole from sticky mud without leaving the punt herself, she had been unconscious of her own contentment, the simple product of an hour spent in preoccupations which were, for once, entirely real. Joe had treated her with the friendly detached interest he was equally ready to spend on men, machines, children, places, and most of the women he met. (Helen, near the beginning of her acquaintance with him, had remarked to Leo that he had a mind like a grazing horse; she had been feeling a little annoyed at the time.) The result, in Elsie’s case, had been to give the uneasy growing-pains of adolescence an interval of happy anaesthesia. She came back feeling good, and even looking it. Leo’s bald announcement of next day’s party, however, threw her at once into a violent flutter.
“It’s only some of Helen’s rowdies,” Leo assured her, “coming to make a noise. Half of them won’t ever know you’re there. Oh, by the way, I’ve bought you a frock. Just a cotton thing. No one will dress up, so you could wear that if you like.”
The dress was a bright, simple thing of Viennese inspiration,
with a red top, full blue skirt, and bands of bright formal embroidery. It dazzled Elsie; she repressed with difficulty, from her confused thanks, the words artistic and bohemian, having detected in Leo, and still more in Helen, a curious lack of enthusiasm when they were uttered. But she thought them the more. If Leo had told her the price—approximately what she had saved for repairing the wireless, which had wanted valves for the last few months—Elsie would not have believed it. For the rest of that day, and most of the next, the thought of wearing it to meet Peter absorbed her mind to the exclusion of nearly everything else; and she put it on three hours before the party was due to begin. Neither Leo nor Helen had the heart to suggest that she took it off again to tackle the cleaning and tidying necessary for the event. They left her to experiment with the inoffensive and subdued lipstick which Leo had thrown in with it, and set about the sweeping and polishing by themselves.
Elsie, in spite of her growing trepidation, was at pains to be down early. It seemed, however, that one of the guests had been even earlier than she. A slim young woman in a plain, but excellently cut scarlet frock, her back turned, was lighting a cigarette, and taking what seemed to Elsie a rather ill-bred interest in the arrangement of the drinks. Overcome by nervousness at the thought of being left alone to make conversation, she was about to vanish again, when the stranger turned round. It was Leo. She had on lipstick that matched her dress; silvery clips curled upward along her ears, emphasizing subtly the slant of her brows; there was an almost imperceptible green shadow along her eyelids, and she had done something different with her hair. Elsie stared at her, frankly open-mouthed.
“What’s the matter? You look alarmed.” Leo flicked her cigarette in its ivory holder. “Have I got something showing?” She glanced down at her long silk legs and suède shoes.
“No, really. But you look so different, I didn’t see for a moment it was you.”
“It’s me,” said Leo, “up to a point. Let’s have a sherry before they come.”
Almost immediately after Helen had joined them, looking like porcelain in black with a cream lace yoke, the party began. They heard it coming, for it arrived en bloc, squeezed into two transits of the ferry-boat, each load announcing itself loudly on the way. When the preliminary turmoil was over, it added up to six young men dressed in varying stages between town suiting and corduroys, and four young women, two pretty, one smart, and one dowdy but quite unconcerned about it. Several of them devoted the first five minutes to explaining the trouble they had had in getting away, with confusing effect, as all the obstacles, simultaneously described, were quite different.
“… tried to get me back just as I was leaving to pass two more, but I told him how good it would be for the students to do it ….” “… and believe it or not, this very morning Sister was on the verge of changing my off-duty, but I managed….” “… can’t bear to stitch up without taking something no matter what, so he finished by anastomosing the soundest bit of gut I ever hope to see; I thought we’d be there till morning.”
Helen, and even Leo, seemed not only to understand but to be interested in these events, related as far as Elsie was concerned in a foreign tongue. The introductions at least were less of an ordeal than she had feared; they were brief, sweeping, full of goodwill and succeeded at once by the same din as before, under cover of which Joe added himself to the gathering almost imperceptibly, like a quiet regular entering a pub. He came to rest, apparently by chance, in the relatively quiet corner where Elsie was trying to hide, and settled himself on the floor beside her. Within two minutes, however, he had struck acquaintance with a young man on his other side; their conversation, which they conducted as peacefully as if they had the room to themselves, worked through beer and ballet to the latest developments in plastic surgery. Elsie noticed that Joe was an excellent listener.
The sherry and sandwiches were gone in what seemed to her a matter of moments, and everyone settled down to the more serious business of drinking beer. Joe got up unobtrusively, fixed Elsie a shandy, and continued his discussion where he had left it off. The shandy was nearly all ginger-beer, and she drank it gratefully, taking care not to empty her glass lest someone else should refill it.
The company, nearly all of which was on the floor for lack of chairs, began to settle itself more easily. Each man collected a neighbouring girl and propped her comfortably against his person with a supporting arm. Elsie shrank further into her corner, partly from shyness, partly from the motive which leads wallflowers at dances to linger in the cloakroom. A long arm reached for her and hauled her back again. She found herself settled against Joe’s shoulder with the kind of firm reassuring grip one uses on a child when telling it to keep still and be good. His body felt hard and stable, and as quiet as a resting animal or a tree. There was a simplicity in Joe which defied even Elsie’s powers of misconstruction. She stayed where she was.
It was during a fortuitous lull in the half-dozen conversations that Helen remarked, in her clear gentle voice, “I think we ought to sing.”
The suggestion was evidently so usual as to be practically routine. Elsie was pleased by it, for she enjoyed singing, and, indeed, did it passably and with a good ear. When the chosen ditty had triumphed over two others which had started up at the same time, she was disappointed to find that she did not know it, but listened carefully in the hope of picking it up.
The first verse struck her as rather jolly. The second winded her like a punch in the midriff. At the third, she was unable to believe her ears. She stared, frozen like Lot’s wife on viewing the cities of the plain, at face after cheerful face. It was impossible to credit that these people, looking happy and unselfconscious as scouts and guides at a jamboree, could really be uttering these words; not uttering them merely, but bawling them aloud, in mixed company, meeting one another’s eyes as candidly as children meanwhile. Worse—if anything could be worse—she could feel against her back the regular rise and fall of Joe’s chest and the interior vibration of a deep pleasant baritone joining in the chant.
It seemed to last for hours. Whatever must Helen be thinking, who had so innocently suggested a song? She turned to see. Helen, looking frail and delicate, tucked into the arm of a large athletic young man, was leaning back her head and carolling prettily, as if she were in church.
Horror and shame, combined with sherry and ginger-beer, caused the room to swim before Elsie’s eyes. Dimly she perceived Leo beating time on the shoulder of her neighbour, an intellectual-looking person who had removed his horn-rimmed spectacles and was waving them to the rhythm. Between two especially outrageous verses he remarked, suddenly, “You know, that’s very interesting,” and explained why in terms of the latest psychological research. Everyone agreed that it was, very; and at once fell to with the same zest as before.
Elsie scarcely knew when one song ended and another began. This time it was the ancient classic about the rich man getting the pleasure and the poor getting the blame. They had, naturally, improved it a little. It seemed to Elsie scarcely less appalling than the first. Several people had pet verses of their own, and contributed them solo. During one of these she realized that Joe’s arm was still round her waist, and felt herself grow cold all over. She was wondering how to get away when, in the most natural way in the world, he withdrew his arm to light a cigarette, and did not put it back again.
See ’is heir in silken cradle,
With attendants by the score,
While she lays a nameless barstard
Down beside Barnardo’s door.
“Getting a bit hot in here, isn’t it?” said Joe in her ear. Elsie turned on him the eyes of a hunted hare.
“It is,” she whispered, “a bit.” She was surprised to find that she could still speak.
See him at the billiard-table,
Potting cannons off the red,
While the victim of his passion. …
“Like to come out on deck for a bit, and have a blow?”
“Yes,” said Elsie, “please.�
�
No one seemed to notice them go. Outside the air was cool and sweet, and in the light from the windows behind them, the water rippled like black satin. Joe sat down on the low rail, straddled a leg over it, and took a deep breath, smelling the night. He looked as if he were alone; and Elsie, too, felt peaceful, unmolested and free. Even the song, drifting through the window, seemed musical and remote.
“A lovely night,” said Joe, breaking a silence of nearly a minute. “Isn’t it?”
“Yes. … It was a bit hot indoors.”
As if he were pursuing the same subject, Joe said, “You don’t want to pay any attention to that. It does them good, you know.”
“Oh,” said Elsie. She picked up the end of a splinter from the rail, and became absorbed in pulling it off.
“Not that I’ve had much truck with hospitals myself: but it stands to reason. No one who does what these people do, and sees what they see, could go on taking the human body seriously all their spare time. If they did, they’d go loco—I mean it would get them down.”
“Oh,” said Elsie. “I see.”
“The women particularly. On top of their own troubles, they’ve got several generations of hush-hush and brooding in corners, and then all that nervous frank-and-fearless stuff in the twenties, to get off their chests. Personally, it makes me feel good to see them. Healthy as your mother sweeping house.”
Elsie felt a little offended by this simile; her mother had never been without a good general and help with rough, and she would have liked to indicate this; but suddenly it seemed less important than she had thought. She looked at Joe’s silhouette, square and angular, planted firmly on the rail, and thought, she did not know why, of the man with the sandwiches on the train. He had given her a feeling that was rather the same, like a glimpse from shipboard of a safe and happy land. Indoors, the voices rose to a fortissimo for the final chorus.
It’s the same the ’ole world over—
It’s the poor wot gets the blame,
