by Mary Renault
“What? Oh, no, leave it. Too much fuss. See you tomorrow.”
He was gone. At the top of the iron stairs he smiled over his shoulder and disappeared; and the baby, after an instant of shocked silence, broke into a wail shrill with outrage, astonishment, and loss. Vivian picked it up. It slobbered indignantly into her neck, its fat year-old face creased with grief under a bandage that sat, like a lopsided turban, over one ear. She rocked its damp softness for a moment in her arms, its cries blending with Thora’s dimly-remembered sobbing at the back of her mind.
On the threshold of the ward Page met her, peering out.
“Whatever was Mr. Herbert doing out there all that time? I particularly wanted to speak to him. Has he gone?”
“It wasn’t Mr. Herbert. It was my brother looking for me. He’s just arrived from Scotland. Stupid of him to come here, but people don’t realise, you know. I told him I was on duty and sent him away.”
The staff-nurse’s eyes had lost their narrow look, and quickened with interest.
“What a shame. You needn’t have sent him off like that, kid.” (She was two years younger than Vivian, but all juniors were “kid” to her unbent moods.) “He could have stopped a minute, and had a look at the ward.” A pity, she reflected. You could let Lingard have little things; she was a good kid and didn’t take advantage. Besides, her brother would be sure to be a nice type of boy, probably an undergrad. Undergraduates came next after housemen in the scale of achievement.
-2-
VIVIAN WOKE EARLY, BEFORE the maids came trampling along the corridors, thumping the doors, and popping a shrill head through each like a cuckoo out of a clock.
“Twenty-to-seven-nurse.”
“Thank you,” said Vivian. The sun was shining, and she wondered for a moment why this was making her so pleased. Then she remembered that she was meeting Jan. She lay and looked at the light leaping on a favourite bowl of thick green glass; liking even her room, a square cream-coloured box eight feet by seven and identical, down to the seams in the lino, with a hundred others, the bed, chest and chair disposed in positions ordained by regulation and unalterable. The tenant was allowed to display not more than six objects of her own; Vivian, with some difficulty, had succeeded in getting her row of books counted as one instead of seventeen.
At breakfast she shared a table with the other nine members of her training set, half listening to what they said, which in six months had become familiar, even soothing, as the National Anthem.
“Well, you know what the round is on Malplaquet when you’re on alone. And then she ticked me off for not having started the washings, and she hadn’t done a thing herself except play up to all the housemen. … Sister’s day off, I remember because we were having a cup of tea behind the kitchen door. … And they found it simply full of fluid, six pints they got. …”
The noise died down as if a door had been shut on it. The Sister who was taking breakfast had risen to call the roll. Vivian answered to her name mechanically, seeing in her mind the coffee-shop and Jan sitting at a window-table which, for no particular reason, she had assigned to him. The roll came to an end.
“Nurse Cope to Crecy. Nurse Fowler to Harfleur. Nurse Kimball to Verdun. Nurse Lingard to Verdun.” The Sister sat down; the rattle of voices began again.
“I say, fancy. Were you due to change your ward, Lingard?”
“No,” said Vivian stolidly.
“Does it mess up your off-duty?”
“I was meeting my brother.”
“Oh, bad luck.”
As if she had staked on the wrong colour at roulette, Vivian thought. Indeed, making any sort of engagement outside the hospital was very similar in principle. Her mind felt heavy and dull; she could see Jan looking out of the window and, after a long time, at his watch. She had, too, a silly vision of the hospital spinning round like a wheel and nurses rolling round it to fall, feebly struggling, into fortuitous holes. There was no way of getting at Jan. She had forgotten, in any case, to ask where he was staying.
Following the usual procedure—notice of moves was never given, so hers was a predicament happening to someone nearly every day—she sought out one of the Verdun probationers.
“What duty will I be taking, do you know?”
“You’re extra. Heavy take-in this week. Extra beds both sides and right down the middle.”
“Oh,” said Vivian. “Thanks.” It meant that she was not on the ward schedule and would be sent off each day when the Sister happened to think of it.
“Made arrangements?” said the Verdun probationer. “Bad luck.”
The Home Sister went out, releasing them. Through the scraping of chairs she could hear Colonna Kimball, two tables away, swearing. She was the other nurse who had been read out for Verdun, a second-year whose path Vivian had not crossed so far. Her vocabulary seemed richer than the one in standard use, and Vivian noticed that a rather precious public-school accent lent it the effect of higher explosive charge.
Verdun was the newest women’s surgical ward, a dazzling open stretch of light and symmetry and porcelain and chromium. Even with its extra beds it looked spacious and orderly; but custom had, for Vivian, invested the Victorian muddle of Crecy with a kind of shabby cosiness, and she felt chilly and jumpy like a cat in a new house. She imagined Jan watching her fuss as one might the scuttlings of a worried ant in a formicarium; pulled herself together, and began on the line of beds, stripping them, because she was extra, for the others to make.
“Beds again,” said the first old woman she came to, drawing her knees up under the loose blanket. She rubbed her skinny arms, sore from daily injections. “Seems to me life’s nothing but beds and stabbing.” Vivian made a standard soothing answer, and went on quickly because she had thought of something that made her laugh.
“What are you thinking?” said the voice of Kimball behind her.
“Casanova.”
“No, no. Cellini. Cellini definitely.”
“Well, yes.” Vivian folded the next quilt over a chair.
“Casanova’s such a windbag. Before he’s got to the point I’m always asl—”
“Do get on,” said the staff-nurse. “What do you think we’re having an extra nurse for?”
When the beds were made Sister Verdun arrived to read prayers. She was a little fretted woman with an anxious bun, entering with a sense of grievance on middle-age. Rising from her knees, she began at once to run poking about the ward like a hen after maize, finding this and that undone and not waiting for the offender to appear, but making a clucking pursuit into passage, bathroom or sluice. She had the patients’ letters in her hand, and, as she darted about, stopped occasionally to distribute one and to say something with eager, brittle geniality. Vivian, dusting, pictured her twenty years back; a popular, skittish little nurse, nervous of responsibility but goaded up the ladder by an inferiority complex and the impossibility of standing still.
One of the probationers, fresh, round and smiling, was making a patient laugh as she flicked round the bed. Vivian saw the Sister’s face swing round like a sharp little compass needle. She began moving down the ward towards them; but the probationer had pushed the bed back and passed on to the next.
Presently Colonna went up to the desk to ask about some treatment or other. When she had gone Vivian, who was dusting a light-bracket close by, heard Sister Verdun say to the staff-nurse, “I hoped she was only temporary. Don’t like her. Can’t make these girls out who cut their hair off to look like boys. I’ve seen her out. She’ll never make a nurse. Too many outside interests.”
Half an hour later, when Vivian was cleaning up the bathroom, the staff-nurse came in to say, “Sister says you can have an evening.”
“Thank you,” said Vivian unemotionally.
“You lucky devil,” said the little round probationer. “I was dying for an evening, and I’ve got a morning.”
“I’d rather have a morning too.” Vivian looked round; the staff-nurse had not gone. “Do you think Sister would let us chan
ge?”
“Sister never changes off-duty time. She bit my head off last time I asked her so I’m not going to again.” The staff-nurse went out. Vivian spent the morning doing blanket baths.
As she was putting round the knives and forks for dinner, Kimball intercepted her in a corner and asked, “Did Sister let you take your call?”
“What call?”
“Someone rang up for you twenty minutes ago. A man’s voice. I had to tell Sister because I knew she’d heard the bell.”
“It must have been my brother. I was to have met him this morning.”
“Oh, bad luck.”
“Silly of him to ring me up on the ward.”
“She might have told you he did, though.”
“Yes,” said Vivian without excitement. She had long ago realised that any personal life had to be lived in the hospital’s teeth, and continual protest made the effort more tiring.
“Is there anything you want to know, Nurse Lingard?” Sister had come in from the linen room. “If there’s anything about the patients’ diets you don’t understand, ask me, not a second-year nurse.”
Extra beds told most on the probationers, whose routine included every patient while the seniors’ treatments did not; but somehow, always by the skin of their teeth, they got it through nearly to time. When, sticky and aching, Vivian got down to tea at a quarter to six, she found a note in her pigeonhole.
“I’m sorry I rang you up,” Jan wrote. “And I’m afraid you are too by now. I’ll be with Mic at 20a High Street all day, painting floors, if you can get out. If you’re not there in the afternoon I’ll expect you at half-past five.” Vivian looked at the clock, shrugged her shoulders, and finished her cup of tea.
“Doing anything? “Kimball, ignoring a table occupied by members of her own year, slipped in beside her.
“My brother wants me to go round this evening.”
“Oh. Well, I’m glad you won’t miss him. What is he, by the way?”
“A geodesist.”
The nurse on the other side of Vivian said, “What religion’s that?”
“It’s a science,” Vivian explained. “Measuring the specific gravity of minerals under the earth’s surface.” To Colonna she remarked, “I don’t know quite why he chose it, there are two or three other things he might have done. I think because it takes him to the back of beyond, and he can stay there indefinitely getting the instrument repaired. It always breaks down in the good places because of rough transport.”
“Is he much like you?”
“He’s supposed to be.”
“He must be an unusual young man.” Kimball went over to make toast.
Except that her feet hurt her, Vivian felt less tired walking through the town than beforehand, sitting on her bed trying to collect the energy for unstrapping and unpinning and unhooking her uniform. (It was the stockings, though, that for some reason always seemed the last straw.) Now, in a brilliant March night, fine after rain, the stars were hanging low with a liquid glitter. The wind, like a clear astringent water, washed her mind coat by coat from the accumulated grime of small discomforts and fatigues and indignations. She no longer felt, as she had felt once or twice in the day, incapable of meeting Jan.
Number 20a, was a first floor flat over a draper’s shop with its own faded green front door. She knocked, heard nothing, and knocked again.
A voice, not Jan’s, said, “Push it, my dear, it isn’t locked.”
Vivian opened it, and went up some bare wooden stairs. At the top, in an open doorway, a young man was crawling about with a tin of floor-stain and a brush, shifting a piece of sacking under his knees. He straightened, rubbing his lumbar spine, and she saw that he was just about middle height, lightly made, and not in any way remarkable; he had one of those pleasant, thin, non-committal faces which might belong to half a dozen kinds of personality, and about which one unconsciously reserves judgement till one has seen the person smile or speak. The most definite thing about him was the darkness of his soft untidy hair and of his eyes, which, because their lashes were so thick and long, would have looked thoughtful whatever was going on behind them.
“I’m sorry,” he said composedly. “I thought you were Jan. You’re his sister, of course.” His brown eyes were still and direct on her face, but he did not seem to stare; it was a reticent regard, curiously free from masculine challenge or assessment. Before she had time to say anything, he remarked, “You’re very unlike him, really, aren’t you? But of course, I see what he meant. Do come in. I’ve left some islands leading to the window-seat, if you wouldn’t mind walking on them.”
Vivian thanked him, and picked her way by the light of a naked electric bulb.
“You’re Mic,” she said, “aren’t you? I’m afraid that’s the only part I know.”
“Well it’s all you’ll need.” He might as easily have been discussing the varnish. “But Freeborn’s the rest.”
“Is Jan anywhere about?” The flat looked very small and gave forth no sound but their own.
“He went to meet you. I knew he’d miss, of course, but he had repressed claustrophobia of long standing so it seemed unkind to tell him so. These places do look small when they’re empty. Have a cigarette.” He looked at his hands. “That is, if you wouldn’t mind taking them out of my pocket. This side. I’m sorry; I really will wash.”
“No, don’t. It will dry patchy if you stop.” But he wiped his hands on the sacking apron and disappeared. When he came back the dark patches shone up brilliantly against a background of pink.
“Success very modified,” he apologised. “It reminds me of something. A rather clean pig?”
“No, I think a fox-terrier’s stomach. It’s the same kind of markings. Jan will have waited at the wrong door, of course. There are four.”
“I told him which was the nurses’.”
“I used the main entrance, so that explains it.” She wondered which nurse he was in the habit of waiting for; hearing, with a sudden flat of irritation, the voice of fat Collins saying, “Ever so nice. What I call a thoughtful boy. You should see the books he reads”; and wondered how long Jan would be.
“You see,” he said, “I’ve had to find my way about a good deal in the last few days, for interviews and so on. I start on Monday.”
“Do you?” What could he be doing? None of the housemen were due to leave. She had the impression that he had known about her first assumption and preferred to remove it.
“What’s your job then? Are you a doctor?” It was nearly impossible to know one of the housemen without becoming involved in every kind of silliness and embarrassment, and she had no conviction that in this case it would be worth the fuss.
“No. A pathologist. Or rather, a pathological assistant, here.” He spoke with the uninviting flatness of one who dislikes a subject and is determined to run it out as soon as possible.
“How exciting,” she said vaguely. She had never got nearer to the Pathological Laboratory than leaving a decently-draped specimen-glass outside the door.
He gave her a quick expressionless look from under his thick lashes. “It’s convenient, at the moment,” he said. His tone not only closed the subject, it sat on the lid.
Vivian thought, This is worse than Alan: I wish Jan would come. She turned in the window, and looked out. It was uncurtained, and a street-lamp glared on a level with her eyes.
As she moved, it seemed to her that he gave a little start followed by stillness, as if he were staring at something he had just seen. She would have turned back to the room, but suddenly felt this fixity to be directed to herself, and stayed where she was.
“It isn’t particularly exciting, really.” He was speaking quite differently, with a cool naturalness that seemed, somehow, to have been startled out of him. “You spend most of the time, I gather, doing about half a dozen simple routine tests. I intended of course to do research, as one does.”
“Really,” said Vivian as non-committally as she could. The flat spoke for itsel
f; even in this early bareness, it was beginning to take on the mannerisms of educated poverty—the streaky stained floor, whose string rugs were already present to her mind’s eye; the amateurish paintwork, in cheeky but successful colour combinations; the aura of half-dry distemper from the walls; a little oil-stove in a corner giving out more smell than warmth. She could imagine Jan (who would stay indefinitely anywhere where the roof did not leak nor the food give him ptomaine poisoning) helping with it unseriously, as he would have helped a child to play trains; and felt a sudden ill-defined resentment against him.
It took her a moment to think her way back again.
“What kind of research?”
“Cancer, chiefly, I think.”
It happened that Vivian, on the strength of her negligible experience, had acquired a bee in her bonnet about cancer. She thought the cause was psychological, and told him so.
Mic laughed. His laugh was something of a shock; brief and brilliant and quite transforming. He had a trick of laughing not, like other people, to himself, but straight into your eyes, which from the midst of so much guardedness was both attractive and disconcerting. It necessitated, for Vivian, some readjustments.
With something between a stretch and a spring he got from his sacking mat to the window-seat, and curled up on some book-boxes beside her. From this vantage he looked at her reflectively and suddenly laughed again, to himself this time.
“Well?” she asked.
“Nothing. Only the weirdness of your likeness to Jan.”
“I thought you said we weren’t.”
“It’s just sometimes. Things you say and look wipe it out completely. But when you turned round to the window just now, for instance, it might have been Jan in the room. It’s grotesque.”
“Is it?”
“Don’t be cross. It’s hard to express.”
“I’m not of course.”
“But it’s. … Do you know that conte of Gautier’s about a man who took possession of another man’s body for purposes of his own?”
“No.”
“Anyway, its rather like that. You can’t both be right; one of you must have cheated, and I don’t know which, but I think it’s you. One feels you’ve got no right to go about the world casually stripping Jan of his aggressive detachment.”
