Friendly Young Ladies

by Mary Renault

  “I haven’t done anything,” said Elsie desperately. “I’ve been staying with—with friends.” Even at this moment, the slight shadow of anticlimax in Thelma’s face did not escape her. Her Knickerbocker Glory, scarcely touched, was beginning to settle and melt. It seemed symbolic; and most unfair. Her background would, she knew, have impressed Thelma profoundly if she could have described it without giving herself away. But there was one more asset, the best of all. Taking a deep breath, she said, “I have been thinking, lately, of getting engaged. But of course, nothing’s settled yet.”

  “Really?” Suddenly Thelma’s eager admiration, her envy, her respect, were like a disaster. It was as if one had bought some needless indulgence with an overdraft on the bank, which there was no hope of repaying. A flood of unwanted knowledge slid, as through a new-split fissure, into her conscious mind. She knew, and felt she had known always, that Peter only loved her a little, and occasionally; that, as she reckoned love, he didn’t love her at all; that he was no more likely to marry her than he was Leo, Helen, anyone, even the chance-met girl who had arrived with him the other night. Confusedly she felt that she herself, mortgaging the future with an idle boast, had taken the virtue out of it, cut off its growth like a seedling that one kills with hot water. It seemed, almost at once, like a thought to which she had long grown accustomed; the news she had just had jostled it in her mind.

  “Can I be your bridesmaid?” asked Thelma, who felt that this was due to her.

  “Oh, it won’t be for years yet. It’s all in the air. I don’t believe in getting married too young.” She was not trying to placate Nemesis, only to put the thing quickly away; and it was simply as a gesture of escape that she looked at her watch. It informed her that she had spent forty-five minutes where she had meant to spend fifteen. Thelma, consulted, said, “If it’s Sadler’s Wells, you’d never possibly get there now before the queue goes in.”

  “I shan’t be very quick either, because I don’t properly know the way.” She cared very little, unless Leo were annoyed. Reality seemed enough for the moment, without the assistance of art; besides, she regarded ballet, secretly, as something to talk about having seen rather than to see, and had been wishing all along that Leo had suggested a good straight play.

  “I’ve got a free period,” said Thelma eagerly, “till three o’clock.” She was reluctant to surrender Elsie so soon, with her half-told adventures and her probable capacity for being influenced further. “Why don’t you come for a walk with me instead, and we could talk some more—if you feel like it, of course, I mean. Your friend will have given you up by now, in any case.” The friend was probably, she reflected, an undesirable influence from whom it would be a kindness to separate her. The story of this afternoon would improve with keeping.

  “Well, I don’t know, really. …” But she felt in herself an unwillingness to be alone with her news and her discoveries. With Thelma, she still felt dramatic and rather more than life-size, and the edges of reality were decently muffled. Already her mind was selecting a safely expurgated, but impressive saga. “All right,” she said. “We really might just as well”: and leaned back in her chair, enjoying, against a background of chaotic thought, the sight of Thelma making her excuses to the intrigued, inquisitive Phyllis and Joan.

  Leo watched the tail-end of the queue disappear into the theatre with feelings of exasperation sharpened by anxiety. She ought, she reflected, to have arranged to meet Elsie at Charing Cross and bring her here; she could be relied on to get into the wrong bus or otherwise lose her way. She ought, by this time to recover it without undue alarm; still, the child would be flustered and disappointed, and Leo blamed herself. She strolled down to the box office; there might be a couple of returned seats, even separate ones would be better than nothing. There turned out to be only one, at the extreme end of the dress circle. She bought it, for Elsie if she appeared, or, if not, for herself.

  In the end, she waited outside till the first interval. Was it possible, she wondered, that some observant constable had pounced on Elsie and identified her? So many people succeeded in disappearing every year that one had not taken the chance very seriously; still, it existed. At least, thought Leo, it would solve the problem which was becoming, as far as she was concerned, increasingly knotted. Leo was unused to responsibility, either material or moral, for other people; it sat on her heavily. The need to bowdlerize, for days on end, large tracts of her own personality in what had been the freedom and privacy of her own home, affected her less as a nuisance than as an insidious attack on her rather defiant integrity. Now that she had managed to involve herself in bowdlerizing Peter as well, it had become, she felt at times, almost too much to deal with. In the intervals which these concerns allowed her, she thought often and unhappily about the household in Cornwall.

  Beyond all this, the economics of Elsie’s future, and even of her present, were beginning to nag. The budget of the Lily Belle was a fluctuant affair, based on haphazard give-and-take; to such systems of finance à deux, one-sided liabilities are disastrous. Leo for her own part had lived on Helen cheerfully for weeks on end, reversing the process when her royalties came in; their accounts, where any existed, had been scribbled on the backs of envelopes, correct, perhaps, to the nearest pound. This had now become, on Leo’s side, unworkable. No mathematician, she had wasted hours of writing-time in inaccurate computation, whose results Helen tore up indignantly and threw away. The friction thus engendered, though no more than skin-deep, was trying to people used to no friction at all.

  Leo found that her meditations had reached a point when the astute policeman had the hopeful promise of a deus ex machina; and became, at once, heartily ashamed of herself. She made another survey of the street, was rewarded by a trickle of audience emerging between ballets for a turn in the air, and decided to give it up. If nothing had happened, Elsie had her ticket home and knew how to get there; if anything had, there was nothing to be done. Leo went in, found her seat, and settled into it just in time for the rise of the curtain on Façade.

  It happened to be an especial pet of hers. In particular, she never got tired of the Dago; he epitomized what seemed to her the more comic aspects of the heterosexual scene. The last self-satisfied wag of his tail as he accepted the coy invitation of the red handkerchief to come inside, rejoiced her this time as much as ever. She thought of Peter; thought how outraged by the thought Peter would be; and laughed again after everyone else had stopped.

  When the curtain fell, she sat for a minute or two nursing her enjoyment, then got up to buy a programme because she had forgotten what the last ballet was to be. It was, she found, Horoscope, which was better than she had hoped. She read, with lingering anticipation, the familiar names, shifting in her seat from time to time to give more restless balletomanes passage to the street or the bar. When she looked up, a scattered lane of empty seats led her eye along till it was arrested, four or five rows forward, by the outline of a head she knew very well. It was Joe; preoccupied, at the moment, in reading his programme too. A little star of pleasure and happiness shot up within her, and hung for a moment like a rocket at the top of its trajectory, sharpening the edges of things with light. She rose in her seat, to make her way round to him; then stopped and sat down again, while the rocket turned earthward, diminished to a fading point, and went out. He had looked up from the programme in his hand, smiled and spoken; but not to her. He had not seen her, and she drew back in her seat, for she no longer wanted that he should.

  The woman in the seat beside him was not, after all, in the least like the one in his book. In the first place, she was not so young; older perhaps by a few years than he. She might have given Leo as much as ten. It was hard to be sure, for she was of a type that matures early and ages late. She was not beautiful, or anywhere near it; but her face, a little too broad, and her firm quiet body, had the confidence of women who have never missed beauty, having had all they want from life without it. She wore a plain dark-red dress which was neither g
ood nor bad; chosen, it seemed, with a thoughtless negative taste, assimilated to herself, and forgotten. She was almost wholly lacking in the paraphernalia of female competition; but its absence was like the absence of small change in the handbag of a queen. Hers was the rare, prideless assurance of the woman whose womanhood has not only succeeded, but has known what to take of success and what to leave aside. She was the kind of woman of whom other women say that they don’t know what men see in her. But Leo knew.

  She saw them talk together for a while, and then cease to talk. There was between them the accustomed ease of people for whom intimacy has long become a background, not a preoccupation. She knew, before she had watched them for three minutes, without hearing even the tone of their voices, that they were old lovers, grown, perhaps, a little careless in the security of years.

  Well, she said to herself, turning her eyes away, this was nothing new. It had been a certainty familiar to her imagination since the first weeks when she had received Joe as a friend. She had not minded then. She had often believed since that she was glad of it. Why should it be different now?

  For it was different; it hurt her bewilderingly, like a pain in some part of one’s body that has always been healthy and strong. She looked at the woman again; her maturity, the sexual poise and confidence marked all over her, qualities Leo had seen and recognized with indifference elsewhere, were not indifferent now. They turned in the heart like a sword. There was no sense in it, she thought.

  It was in her mind for a moment to leave the theatre, but the idea revolted her as soon as she had formed it; a female kind of resource, almost on a level with fainting or weeping or boned stays. It might even attract Joe’s notice, for by this time all other outgoings were over. He might look embarrassed; he might smile, wave, introduce her. He might do all these things. She sat looking before her, stubbornly confronting her own emotions as one might try to outface an enemy by staring him in the eyes. She had always, till now, got rid of unwanted things more readily by this means than by running away. But it was only like thrusting oneself against something sharp; the pain increased as one pressed it home. Perhaps, she said to herself, this only seemed to matter because she had been in a mood, worried about Elsie already. It might be better to consider that instead. Perhaps, after another five minutes’ waiting, Elsie would have turned up. She would have been occupying this seat; noticing nothing, probably, for she was unobservant, or remarking afterwards, between earnest platitudes about the ballet, “Joe was there. No, I didn’t speak to him. He was with a friend. Oh, just an ordinary sort of woman.” (“Middle-aged,” Elsie would probably add.) “She looked quite nice. I think she may have been some sort of relation; they were rather like each other, in a way.”

  Leo smiled; the bitter flavour of the joke was, for the moment, restorative. She looked up, and was just in time to see that Joe and the woman were talking again, before the returning tide from the gangways silted up the space between.

  The lights went down, the curtain parted, a blue dropcloth displayed the signs of the Zodiac. The orchestra began. She sat alone, not penetrated by the music; the warring measures of the planets, disputing mortal destinies, had nothing to say to her, nor the young lovers caught in their beams. With a passing irony she recalled that she had been born in August, between the signs of the Lion and the Virgin; a fancy of her mother’s, born of this fact and a chance-read magazine feature, had been responsible for her name. The lion, she remembered, was fabled to humble himself before the virgin. But this legendary reconciliation had, it seemed, somehow failed to take place; perhaps something had happened to spoil his temper.

  She smiled into the dark auditorium, a hard fixed little smile, and the delicate shifting lights and colours hurt her; beauty out of the mind’s reach, like water poured out before the thirsty. She went out quickly at the end, while the audience was still relaxing its tension with the absurd, discordant noises of applause.

  “I’m most awfully glad,” said Elsie, “that you went in the end. I felt rather awful about it, but I knew you wouldn’t think anything had happened to me, now I know London so well. I felt sure you’d understand; it’s so funny, isn’t it, meeting someone you know in quite different surroundings?”

  “Yes,” said Leo. “It is amusing.”

  “I do hope you didn’t miss the best part because of me.”

  “No, that’s all right. I didn’t miss anything important.”

  “I’m so glad. … Thelma and I had the most awfully interesting talk.” The news was on the tip of her tongue; but, somehow, it got no further. She did not want to tell, to discuss, to be edged towards thought or decision by the definition of words. She did not want to know what Leo would have to say. Leo’s thought was apt to have hard shapes and sharp edges, which came through any comfortable draperies in which one tried to wrap it. There was no need to begin thinking today; something might happen to-morrow, splendid, and significant, solving everything. She said, “And I had the most marvellous Knickerbocker Glory; nearly a foot high, and covered in cream.”

  “Darling,” said Helen, “you’re crazy, buying stockings like this when we’ve still got the milk to pay. Besides you’ll be through them in five minutes; they’re a size too small.”

  “Try them against the red suit. They’re for you.”

  “You’re crazier than I thought. Whatever for?”

  “Can’t imagine. I just walked into the shop and bought them. It suddenly struck me, for some reason, how much better I like you than anyone else.”

  CHAPTER XXI

  PETER AND HELEN SAT on a fallen log in the Great Avenue at Hampton Court. But for themselves, the stately vista was deserted; it was a weekday morning, and the few visitors had left for lunch. Peter and Helen had brought theirs with them, and were finishing it with the assistance of a large swan which, appearing with an apologetic waddle and a mien deceptively meek, had now reached the stage of snatching from their hands portions intended for themselves. As it gulped and swallowed, it fixed them with a yellow, malevolent eye.

  They had come on the spur of the moment; Peter, killing time in Mawley, had met Helen emerging, trim and sleek, from the hairdresser’s. It happened to be one of the days on which none of her surgeons had cases sufficiently curious to be worthy of record. She had accepted his suggestion that they should spend the day together as easily as if it had been the offer of a short drink, without going through any of the conventional motions of having other engagements. This had merely intrigued him; Helen had the looks, and the indefinable aura of success, which enable a woman to convey by acquiescence the idea that she is making no effort. Such a double-bluff would not, however, have occurred to her in a lifetime; it came quite naturally. Taking the lunch had been her idea. She had gone back to get it, without offering to bring him along with her, and had left him wondering. He was wondering still, but had every intention of finding out.

  “There are still some tomato sandwiches,” she said. She fished one out for him; the swan, less preoccupied than Peter, forestalled him, missing her fingers by half a centimetre.

  “This is ridiculous,” she said, in exasperation rather than alarm; she had met a number of swans. “Give the disgusting creature the bag and let him take it away. Swans ought to stay on the water; it brings out their better natures.”

  Without undue reluctance, Peter threw the bag as far as it would go. The swan made off, looking at him first like a boss gangster whose dignity has been upset. Helen, unruffled and cool in her candy-striped print, sat smiling after it. The sunlight glinted on her hair; she wore it down today, its bright curls just reaching her shoulders. Her slim hands, tipped with a delicate varnish of dusty rose, were locked round one knee. Peter shifted himself a little closer along the log.

  “Swans ought to stay on the water.” He repeated the words with dreamy, mysterious significance. “I agree with you, my dear.” He slipped his arm round her waist. Warm, slender and compliant, it yielded easily, but somehow non-committally, into his hold. S
he smelt like a clean little girl, of fresh-laundered cotton, dusting-powder, and sun-warmed hair and skin. He looked up; there was still no one about.

  “What are you thinking of, with that solemn face?”

  “Thinking?” she said in a kind of placid surprise. “No, why should I be?”

  “Why should you, indeed?” He worked his arm a little further round. It would have been quite easy, he reflected, to believe her stupid if one had not had evidence to the contrary. Perhaps, at this moment, she even was stupid; she had a faculty of disconnecting the more active part of her personality, as easily, it seemed, as turning off a switch. He tilted her face towards him, smiling into her eyes; she awaited, with contented passivity, the expected kiss, and accepted it as a lazy cat submits to being stroked. He had, as with a cat, the feeling that if her attention were distracted she would have forgotten all about it in a few seconds. Nevertheless she was pleasant to kiss; her superficial candour, her underlying indifference, made a teasing combination. He tried the effect of a little ardour; partly from inclination, partly with an eye to the situation which would be created by her refusal to respond. But the result was still inconclusive; she was sweet and yielding, but, behind it, he felt the smooth surface of her self-possession as undisturbed as a pool in the rock. There was nothing to take hold of, except what he held already; and, in a place which might become public at any moment, the possibilities of this were strictly limited. In any case, there was a cosy and amiable quality in her responses which made it impossible to develop anything in the nature of passion without feeling foolish. It was a pity she had shown so lukewarm an enthusiasm for the Maze.