by Mary Renault
“Aggressive,” said Vivian half to herself, turning it over.
“I’m sorry,” he said abruptly. “That was a purely personal reaction, and I think not true.”
“It’s all right. I was just interested. In any case, you probably know him better than I do.” She said this not because she believed it to be true, but because now that she had got under his guard she found that she had not wanted to. “Relatives are the last people, as a rule.”
“Relative is not a term that suits you, somehow,” he said.
Vivian did not know the right answer to this, if there was one; so she peered into the open part of the book-box and said, “What are all these?”
“I don’t know. Shop in that one, and God-knows-what in this.” He moved himself to the edge of the box to let her explore. It was an odd jumble, she thought, for a scientist; Froissart, Baudelaire, Lawrence (both T.E. and D.H.), Morgan and Huxley, the Chanson de Roland and Don Juan. She found herself with the Hamilton Memoirs in one hand and the Symposium in the other, and laughed.
“House-moving makes strange bedfellows,” said Mic.
“Compared with the Restoration people,” said Vivian idly, “how full of purpose the Greeks were, even in their sins. Nothing, however intrinsically pleasant, without a reason, even though they each had to find a different one.” She stopped because, though she had been looking at the book in her hand, she had been sure that Mic’s eyes, under their unnecessary lashes, had slanted round at her. But he was searching for something in the packing-case. She went on, rather more quickly, “There wasn’t a soul in the Symposium who could have sat through an evening with De Gramont except possibly Alcibiades, and he’d have been yawning long before the end.”
“Yes,” said Mic. “I suppose so.” But his attention seemed to have wandered. Vivian looked up and saw Jan, smiling, in the open door. She wondered that she had not heard him on the carpetless stairs.
“Don’t stop,” he said. She noticed that he had remembered to put one foot on the unvarnished place, and then unconsciously shifted his weight on to the other, which was planted firmly on a wet board. “Which of you was wanting an evening with Alcibiades?”
“Neither of us,” said Mic, uncurling himself, “very much. We were just remarking that Socrates had the right idea. Look where you’re walking, blast you.”
“Sorry,” said Jan.
-3-
VIVIAN RAISED THE BATHROOM window carefully, listening for footsteps in the passage beyond. The night air had been crystal clear, and the waves of steam and bath-salts and human wetness felt like folds of blanket in the darkness. She took off her outdoor things and hung them over the rail, meaning to come back for them later. Merely to be out of one’s room after ten was a minor crime compared with being out of doors. She had just finished when a handful of warm water struck her face.
She looked round. A strip of moonlight, shafted with wreathing steam, fell on a corner of the bath, to which it gave an unreal metallic whiteness. Against this she now perceived what seemed curves of a darker metal. Someone was laughing in the surrounding gloom.
“Enjoyed yourself?” whispered Colonna Kimball.
“I’m terribly sorry.”
“It was funny. I watched you outside deciding which—ssh!”
In the passage sounded the loud tread of legitimate feet, a tapping on doors and the click of electric switches; the Night Sister, putting out lights. The noise came nearer, rebounding from the narrow thin walls of the passage.
“Who’s that in the bathroom?”
A wet hand gripped Vivian’s wrist.
“Who’s there?”
Colonna had drawn breath when a dutiful voice from the next bathroom said, “Nurse Price, Sister. I’ve got late leave.” The feet went hollowly on.
“Had fun?” said Colonna. She had one hand behind her head, and floated herself on the other elbow.
“Lovely.” Vivian rested a knee on the edge of the bath. Her escape did not impress her much. She was still in a mood not contained within the hospital frame, and did not reflect that a second-year, having a bath in the dark after hours, had caught her climbing in at a window. The gloom of the place had thinned to her dark-accustomed eyes, and the lightly-muscled shape blurred with shadows of water pleased her as coolly as the birch outside. She had never seen Colonna before out of her obliterating uniform. Her hair was fair and thickly curling and cut like a Greek’s.
“A penny?” Her voice floated with the steam in the moonlight, vague and faintly warm.
The most relevant answer Vivian could fish up was, “My brother’s brought me a dancing faun.”
“Show me.” Colonna turned over, silver runnels glittering down her side.
“I left it behind. I thought I’d break it climbing in.” She had thought too that Mic liked it and that it made the flat look less bare, and that its newness would be something to look forward to tomorrow. She was beginning to be very sleepy; but Colonna’s unexpected beauty gave her a remote delight. Her lips moved, uncertainly quoting Marlowe.
“What?”
“Something you reminded me of in Edward the Second, but I can’t remember it properly.” She rubbed her eyes. “‘Sometimes a lovely boy in Dian’s shape,’—something-or-other about his ‘wreathed arms …’”
There was a moment of darkness where Colonna’s eyelids had been. Then they came down again; the water closed over her throat.
“You run along to bed, my beautiful. This bath’s getting cold.”
“Sleep well,” said Vivian. She let herself out. Colonna drifted back into the night’s perspective, a metal fountain-girl in the lead of a garden pool.
The moon was bright enough to undress by, and to see about the room. The glass bowl shone with a submerged glimmer. She put off till tomorrow morning deciding what would have to go to make way for the faun.
“One of us can leave it at the Lodge for you,” Jan had suggested. Mic had looked up and said in his most neutral voice, “Will it be safe there?”
“Probably not. All kinds of things get slammed down. I’d better come here for it, I expect.”
“I would.” He added, “I’ll have the pictures up by then.”
Jan had brought her back. He looked puzzled when she steered him away from the main entrance.
“It’s late. I’ll have to get in at a window.”
“Why? When ought you to have been in?”
“Ten, and it’s a quarter to eleven now.”
They stood in the shadow of the wall, a spot generally used by the wardmaids and their young men.
“You puzzle me,” said Jan. “I wonder what you get out of this.”
“Get? Has no one ever told you nursing’s a vocation?”
“Don’t be absurd. You’ve as much vocation for nursing as I have for punching cows.”
“Well, I suppose I like to think I’m satisfying my personal needs in a way that isn’t entirely useless to the community.”
“Of course. But what personal needs?”
Vivian wondered, as she undressed, what she would have said if it had not seemed needless to tell Jan anything. But she was too sleepy for definitions. Jan’s voice was getting disjointed in her mind’s ear. “Not money for instance. Or a career. Or even sensation. … Some sort of discipline. … The monastic rhythm. … Yet you don’t submit to it.”
Vivian slipped into bed. Her reply mingled in her head with the fantasies of approaching dreams.
“Life’s an uncertain medium, I suppose. The effects you arrange in it don’t always come off.” Her mind floated into absurdities; her body relaxed and grew warm.
The door had opened. In hospital this could mean many things, all requiring wakefulness; and Vivian woke. She could just see a tall shape, fair hair, and the gleam of a man’s dressing-gown in some extravagant brocade. Colonna stood beside her bed, in the manner of one whose presence needs no explanation.
“Hullo,” Vivian whispered.
The bed creaked beside her.
“Here I am, lovely thing. Did you think I wouldn’t come?”
Vivian’s hand touched her hair that was silky and smelt sweet like a child’s. She stroked it, recalling, with infinite remoteness, the Sunday evening counsels of a careful house-mistress. Her emotions, it was true, were unstirred; but she was flattered as one is by the caresses of a fine and fastidious cat, say a Siamese. It seemed boorish to offer no saucer of milk. Vivian grieved at her own unprovidedness, burying her fingers deeper in the curls behind Colonna’s ears.
What next? Call on the hills, presumably, to cover her. But in her dream-entangled mind the dancing faun was still sliding between rain-washed stars. “Do you know De La Mare’s Silver?” she said. Her eye had been caught by the green glass bowl, and it seemed the only thing with real existence in the room.
“No.” Colonna slid an arm round her waist, bringing with it a faint scent of fern. “How does it go?”
Vivian said it, sleep and the sound together making her voice streamlike and slow.
Colonna’s arm slackened almost at once. Before the poem was over she was looking up at the window, her hand behind her head. When it was finished she said, lazily, “I wonder why I thought I wanted to make love to you. I don’t, at least not physically. There’s something rare about you. I don’t know what I want.”
Vivian did not feel relieved, because she was transported already into the world she had evoked. Reinforced by Colonna’s belief she felt as rare as mist, and would not have been astonished to find herself levitated an inch or two above the bed.
The night had grown windy, and the stars seemed to be cruising at speed between lazily drifting wreaths of cloud. They lay side by side and watched; the rhythm was hypnotic and lovely, spinning round them a thickening web of silence. Colonna’s drowsy weight and faint fragrance were companionable and undemanding. When, later, she stretched and kissed Vivian and went away, Vivian realised that they had both been sleeping and that the cocks were beginning to crow.
In a moment of lazy thought as she curled up to sleep again, Vivian reflected how half-baked a virtue was inflexible consistency, a kind of small-town shrewdness of the hick perpetually nervous of letting himself be taken in. In every civilised personality there ought to be a green-room and a looking-glass at which to remove make-up and change it for the next act. She was on a large stage, dressed as Hamlet, explaining this to Horatio in very subtle blank verse. Horatio was Mic. He responded with a long speech of the eloquence of dreams, so moving that her throat ached and she slept without stirring till the morning.
-4-
MATRON ANNOUNCED THE NUMBER of the hymn.
It was a wet morning. In sunshine, the Victorian glass of the chapel windows had a tawdry but cheerful glitter, like that of a kaleidoscope; against a dull sky they looked heavy and slimy, like grocers’ oleographs.
The nurses sat in tight rows, arranged in strict order of seniority. Their shoulders were dragged back by the straps of their aprons, their heads were kept stiffly upright by the effort of balancing their high starched caps. Sisters, sitting at the back, found chapel-time very convenient for reviewing these caps, and noting aberrations for future criticism.
The chapel was of the Pusey-Newman period, and had not a square foot of plain surface anywhere. Checkers and scallopings, studs and foliations and convolutions, wrought iron and turned brass and glazed tiles, repelled the eye with shocks so various as to produce, in the end, the effect of monotony. The frescoed walls were hung with large oil paintings illustrating the Miracles of Healing, both medical and surgical cases being treated, but the clinical methods varying very little.
Chapel was compulsory. As they sang the hymn for Ember Days (it seemed mysteriously always to be an Ember Day in the hospital chapel), Vivian counted, to pass the time, six Methodists, two Baptists, four agnostics, and a militant Marxian atheist lending their spiritual force to the chant.
A few rows up she could see Colonna, half a head above the crowd. She looked as flat and inanimate as the sheeted patients in the wall paintings; a clean-looking girl with a good profile, too tall to wear a uniform very well. Her cap was badly made up, and had pins showing which ought to have been concealed.
“Let us pray.”
They scraped and wriggled to their knees, taking care of their clean aprons, while Matron read the hospital prayer. The words, unheard as the ticking of a familiar clock—they assented to them every day of their lives—made a dim background to their multitudinous private thoughts and expectations for the day.
“… To the physicians, surgeons and nurses wisdom, skill, sympathy and patience … and shed Thy blessing on all those who strive to do Thy will and forward Thy purposes of love. For the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”
“Amen,” they agreed. The sound had a dead plump, like that of a suet pudding dropped on a wooden floor.
Vivian recalled that, in her new days, she had extracted a quaint period flavour, a kind of pathos sometimes, from all this. She tried now, vaguely, to recapture it; but the woolly texture of everyone else’s boredom devitalized her efforts; she found herself escaping like the rest into expectation and remembrance. Jan was calling at the Lodge for a note; there would be no mistake about meeting him today. She wondered what Mic’s pictures would be like. A Van Gogh reproduction, probably, and etchings of some sort.
Three more casualties, she found, had reached Verdun in the night. She got a severe reprimand from Sister for breaking off her dusting to address an envelope for a girl with a broken arm.
Jan had arranged to meet her outside the Lodge; but she found him sitting on the porter’s desk, doing his crossword puzzle for him.
“Well,” he remarked, sliding off, “if five down comes to me later in the day I’ll ring you up about it. Hullo, Vivian. Walk?”
“Yes, it’s the right day.” It was blowing, gleamy weather, light swift clouds and sharp slivers of sun. The hospital was on the outskirts of the town, and they were in green country almost at once. Jan was, as usual, enjoying himself, and delighted to be where he was. The spring sun picked out the patches on his jacket, let in where the straps of rucksacks, cameras and scientific apparatus had worn it through; and in the hard brilliant light the green stains on his flannels became visible even to Vivian.
“Jan,” she inquired, “have you got any clothes except the ones you’re wearing?”
“Oh, yes. Somewhere.” He was watching a swift wheeling after flies. “In Cambridge, I think. You don’t mind, do you?”
“Of course not. Just academic interest.”
“I hate clothes that you know are there.”
“You should wear our uniform,” said Vivian, enviously.
People whom Jan had upset often put down his shabbiness to a particularly arrogant self-confidence. Certainly there was nothing dim or apologetic about it, and it only seemed to make his looks more conspicuous; in very dilapidated states he was—perhaps because his linen was inconsistently clean—almost comically suggestive of the prince thinly disguised as a swineherd in Act I. But Vivian acquitted him of realising this. On the rare occasions when she really wanted to call him to order she had a secret method which consisted simply in employing the word “picturesque”. It annoyed him a good deal and produced an unfailing, though transient, effect.
They had not walked together since she started her training, and she could not at first think what was different till she found that it was her aching feet. They had become an almost unnoticed background to life, except for a rather vivid moment when she first put them down in the morning. But her stride, too long for good deportment, still went with Jan’s very well.
They made for some Scotch firs which were the highest point on the immediate skyline, while he talked to her about Scotland, the new pendulum, and people who had amused him since they met. She knew he would not open last night’s conversation without her leave. Jan treated other people’s fences with all the punctilio he demanded for his own.
Round about the firs the turf
was short, spongy and hummocked by the rabbits of eternal years. The tiny grass was sprinkled with flowers to scale, of pinhead size. Vivian spread her raincoat for them to sit on.
“What’s that for?” asked Jan.
“For you, and you can sit on it and shut up. This grass is soaking. You’ll get acute rheumatism and it’ll leave you with a heart and then you won’t be able to climb hills at all. What will you do then?”
“Shoot myself, what do you think?” Jan sat down on a corner of the mackintosh, looked round him for a few minutes, and lay back to watch the fir-branches weaving with their sea-sound against the sky. His hands were clasped behind his head, and his shoulders were settled comfortably into the glittering grass. Vivian swallowed what she had been about to say, took off her own shoes and stockings and worked her toes in among the grass-roots, dislodging sharp wet smells. The pain went from across her soles. Jan was looking with a half-smile, remotely expectant, at a space of blue in the treetops that changed its shape as the wind shifted. Neither of them spoke for five minutes or so.
Vivian picked up a little bullet of rabbit-dung from between her toes, flicked it down the hillside, and said, “All the same, Jan, I think I shall carry on.”
Jan rolled over on his elbow, his eyes focusing down to her slowly as a cat’s do. “Why not? You may as well complete the reaction, whatever it’s going to be.”
“You’re right. It’s not being what I thought. But it wasn’t the monastic rhythm I came for. I can get that at home; too much of it. It’s so long since you lived there, you wouldn’t remember. I was prepared for the discipline and the routine, of course. But I came here really as a sort of test.”
“M-m?” said Jan. He tasted a blade of grass critically and spat it out again. “Not that you were capable of holding down the work, surely? You must have known that.”
“No, not that. As a matter of fact I rated my practical capacities a good deal higher than I’ve found them. You’ve got the usual lay idea about nursing, I see. When people have disabused themselves of the belief that it consists entirely of stroking foreheads, they always conclude that it consists entirely of emptying slops. Actually, it’s a highly technical skill, and I’ve always been a bit clumsy with my hands, you know. That’s just one of the things I didn’t bargain for.”
