by Mary Renault
“Yes, I’d—no, wait, tomorrow’s Saturday.” The moving of someone else had fitted her, by this time, into the Verdun schedule. “I promised to go to that sculpture exhibition thing.”
“Who the devil with?” asked Colonna, and then began to talk about something else without giving her time to answer.
“I wonder what Matron will say,” Vivian reflected, “when you give notice.”
Colonna told her. She was a good mimic.
Next day in Verdun an old woman died, and the new charge-nurse, Valentine, called Vivian behind the screens to help her with what was necessary. Vivian began to notice her for the first time, because of the grateful reticence with which she worked. During the last months Vivian had learned to excuse indifference at these offices, preferring it to the sentimentality which some nurses thought fit to assume like a kind of badge ritually pinned to their uniform. There stuck particularly in her head the picture of a pink-cheeked girl dressing a dead baby in flowers and muslin, with the dramatised melancholy of a child dressing a doll for a doll’s funeral. “Doesn’t he look sweet?” she said proudly, calling Vivian behind the screen to see.
She realised as the day’s work went on, why Valentine was liked by people who worked for her. She radiated a kind of impersonal comradeship and enjoyment, and, without any deliberate exercise of charm, invited them to work as to an adventure. She was never in doubt. If she ever made mistakes, Vivian was sure she accepted them as the fortune of war, her self-confidence unshaken. Yet behind all her smooth activity there seemed something detached, poised on action and partly satisfied with it, keeping to itself its other needs.
More than the most acrid criticism, Valentine’s mere neighbourhood made Vivian aware of the gulf that still separated her from simple adequacy in her work, still less from any kind of excellence. The thought of Colonna’s departure was still depressing her; and suddenly she began to wonder whether she too had exhausted all that this life could give to her, or, more important, she to it. She thought with longing of the moors at home; of the shabby friendly schoolroom, too much a part of life ever to have changed its name; of her father’s vague, kind, unsurprised welcome, looking up over the book in which half his mind was still entangled; of being free sometimes with Jan. If she gave notice this month, they might canoe up the Loire again in the summer.
Occupied with these thoughts, she had changed into tweeds for a walk alone before she remembered that this was the afternoon when she had promised to meet Mic. She felt that she had no energy just now for social adjustments; but it was too late to think of putting him off. Her tweeds were old and comfortable, and she would have liked to leave them on, but remembered that Mic was poor and difficult and might think she considered him not worth dressing for. She changed into a newer suit, plain too as all her things were, but thinner and better cut.
Mic, when she met him, had on tweeds the exact analogy of those she had taken off, which made her feel a little foolish and unconsciously scratchy. He was in one of his constrained moods and did little to eke out her shortage of conversation. They exchanged civil commonplaces, while Vivian let her mind wander back to Valentine and the ward. It seemed more natural in his company to retreat into her own thoughts than to affect a conscientious brightness. Mic seemed to have reached some similar conclusion.
He was, at least, a comfortable companion for an exhibition, not expecting her to hang over a catalogue with him nor bursting into comment on everything as soon as it came in sight. The collection was a hotchpotch of good stuff lent by private owners and the prize achievements of local art schools and amateurs.
In front of a surrealist exhibit called “Adventitious Agony” they both looked enigmatic for a long time.
“Well?” inquired Mic.
“Frankly,” she said, “I think the indigested contents of the subconscious, and those of the stomach, are about equally significant in visual art.”
“Speaking as an expert?” said Mic, laughing. “For all we know, there may be hosts of people on whom this propeller, with the toothbrushes and—er—so on, has exactly the same effect as Delius.”
“Make it someone else, will you? I like Delius, in a vague uneducated sort of way.”
“Do you? I’ve got the record of the Cuckoo. You must hear it sometime. Look, let’s go back to the flat for tea instead of having it out, and I’ll play it for you.”
“I’d like to,” said Vivian, hypnotised, she concluded next moment, by his complete simplicity and unexpectedness. After surrounding himself during the first half-hour with the caution of a Foreign Secretary in a European crisis, he had delivered this invitation as unequivocally as if they had both been twelve years old. His effect on her alternated between strain and an extraordinary restfulness. They talked easily until they reached the shop where he was going to get cakes, when he said with sudden awkwardness, “Going to the flat won’t make you late on duty? It’s farther away.”
It had just occurred to him, thought Vivian, that a convention exists. Unclassified creature, where had he lived? He seemed neither “advanced”, provincial, nor very innocent; and, when he forgot himself, assumed a certain charm as if he were used to it. Aloud she said, “No, I’ve another hour. I should like to see the place, now you’ve finished it.”
She decided that it was remarkably pleasant. He had got a gas-fire, some rough linen curtains and a couple of modern chairs which looked a little bleak but had been designed, she found, by a sound anatomist. There was a solid working table, and bookshelves making an angle round one corner. The room seemed larger and lighter than it really was, but it was so reticent in its display of personality that it would have been difficult to decide at a glance whether it belonged to a woman or a man. She set the table while Mic, in some hidden and, from the sound, very confined space, made tea. It was a comfortable meal.
“I think human beings need some place as an extension of themselves,” she said when they were smoking afterwards. “Even children do, if you can remember what it felt like the first time you had a room of your own.”
“That was when I went to Cambridge,” said Mic. She was on the point of asking him whether he had been one of a large family, and scarcely knew what it was in his face or voice that prevented her.
“Our rooms are almost fascist in their suppression of the individual,” she said. “Sometimes I think it’s the lack of anywhere you can pretend for five minutes is your own, quite as much as overwork, that makes us so callous about all the patients’ non-physical needs.”
“You say ‘us’?”
“Oh, yes. After six months I notice things much less. The ghastly gloom of the ward services, for instance, and the effect they have.”
“I’ve never known any nurses till now, except one when I had pneumonia at school. A very kind woman. But I can’t associate you with nursing, if you’ll forgive my saying so.”
“I see you’ve discovered already that no compliment pleases a nurse more. It’s illuminating, as a comment on the industry.”
“I hadn’t, but I’ll bear that in mind.”
“Take care you don’t get pneumonia again. This is a good place for it—inland and damp.”
“I’ve a very sound instinct of self-preservation. You’re used to Jan, aren’t you? “He smiled into his cigarette-smoke at a private memory. Vivian found it a little irritating.
“You fence,” she said, to change the subject. The hilts of a couple of foils were sticking out from behind the bookcase, in reach of her hand, and she pulled them out.
“Not for ages. Do you?”
“Mother used to teach Jan and me, when we were small. But our style was a bit rakish. Theatrical, you know.”
“I see. Jan had a few peculiar mannerisms … not like him. He didn’t say.”
“He wouldn’t. He never talks about her.” This came so near to something about which she herself never talked, that she got up quickly and made a pass with the foil she held.
“On guard?” said Mic, picking up the othe
r.
“Not after all that tea?”
“There isn’t room to move, anyway.” He saluted, registering a smart hit on the ceiling. “I don’t know why I keep them.” He made a feint and a lunge which she parried by a kind of instinct; to her surprise, for she had not touched a foil for years. “You ought to have a jacket on. I haven’t got mine. I’ll tie a cushion round you, shall I?”
“What, like Tweedledum? And you’re not going to need anything of course. On guard.”
“You know too much,” said Mic after a minute or two.
“Much good it does me.” In fact, her technique was impossibly rusty and had never been good, but she did know, with a strange fatality, exactly what Mic was going to do next. Now and again she was quick enough to prevent him from doing it. They fought on, a little short-winded with tea and lapse of training, but deeply engrossed. After a while it brought on Vivian a curious mood. It seemed to her that now for the first time she recognised Mic’s narrowed eyes and gentle unconscious smile, that she had stared into them like this long ago, and seen his blade flicker at her like a snake’s tongue; and that when she forestalled him she was remembering. The fancy grew on her. Touched—she should have parried that, she had before. No, this was the moment. It was now that she run in her point, with a longer reach and a stronger arm, six inches down from the left shoulder. He had been wearing something white, and—
“Yes,” said Mic, signalling the hit.
She lowered her foil. An ache of fear and some half-forgotten anguish pierced her.
“Are you—” Absurd: she had only tapped him. “I thought for a moment I’d hurt you.”
“Oh, no.” They looked at one another, smiling, confident and intent. “I can’t remember where I’ve seen that done before.”
“I invented it.” She flirted her foil, a schoolboy’s swagger. What was happening to her, she wondered; she was not this kind of person with anyone else.
“Like this?” Instead of demonstrating himself, he took her wrist and made a pass with it.
“No, like that.”
“You’ve a strong wrist,” he said.
The illusion of memory, or whatever it was, pressed on her bewilderingly. His eyes on her face and his hand over her wrist had an authority and a challenge; the undertones they moved in were complex and indefinable, like the mood of a dream that remains after its events have been forgotten. She said, “I should have,” without knowing why.
“You haven’t heard the Delius record yet.” He let her go abruptly, and tossed away his foil which he had been holding in his left hand.
“No, I’m looking forward to that.” With a little jolt she returned to normal; straightened with her toe a rug she had heaped up in a lunge; stood her foil neatly against the wall; a polite female visitor.
“I’ll just get the gramophone; it’s in the other room.” He was on his way when she happened to look at the time.
“Oh, Mic, I’m so sorry, I shall have to go. It’s my own fault for fooling about. I’ll have to run, too. Funny how one’s off-duty time always seems to end in the middle of something.”
“You must hear it another day,” he said, without expressing any conventional regrets for her departure. “I’ll run you up in the car; it will save a minute or two.”
“That’s kind of you. I didn’t realise you had one.”
“Sort of Heath Robinson one. Every time they patch it up they give it six months, like a chronic heart. But it still does fifty. Lives in the alley just behind.”
As they walked round to it she said, “I don’t remember if I told you how much I like the flat. We were talking so hard when we came in.”
“I thought you did. Anyhow I’m glad you like it. I think I was rather more pleased by what you didn’t say.”
“What were you nerving yourself for?”
“‘Poor man, who looks after you here?’”
“I didn’t see anything to justify such rudeness. Did you really think I would?”
“No. Still, it was pleasing actually to hear you not saying it.”
“By the way, what were you doing before you came here?”
Mic’s mouth straightened. “Starving rats,” he said pleasantly.
“What?”
“Viner’s Breakfast Vitamins. I was in what they courteously called the Research Department. It sounded rather good on paper. I went straight there from Cambridge; I—didn’t want to wait about for a job. They were very proud of their Research Department: they used to have sketches of us in their advertisements, holding up test-tubes to the light. Not photographs fortunately; they got film extras for that.”
“Where did the rats come in?”
“We used to feed Viner’s latest Vitamin to one batch, and starve another batch as a control. Then they could publish the vitamin content, you see. Of course I’d done a certain amount of the same thing at Cambridge, for more varied and useful purposes. But after a time I began to see rats in my sleep—thin ones, with runny eyes and staring coats. You wouldn’t know, unless you’d seen it, how unpleasant vitamin deficiency can make an animal look. Even a healthy rat can pall as a matter of fact. … Anyhow, when I heard of this job at rather less than half the money. I jumped at it. One needs to feel one’s existence has some justification, even if it hasn’t. That door will shut, if you slam it hard. Let me.”
It was certainly a very old car, but with a marked and pleasing personality, like a mongrel dog’s. Mic humoured its eccentricities with apology, but evident affection.
“Well, at least while I was there I got the car, such as it is, and a fairly good gramophone and some records. You’re coming again to hear it, aren’t you? Delius, Handel, Beethoven, all out of rats with beriberi and rickets.”
Vivian was entertained, till she happened to look round, and saw in his face what seemed the settled bitterness of a much older man.
“Well, the ones that got the vitamins must have enjoyed life. … I suppose I came here for some sort of justification too, but I can’t claim to have found it. After all,” she said in sudden rebellion, “why should we feel we must earn the right to exist? Sometimes I think the happiness—being reconciled, and sufficient in oneself—is the only justification.”
Mic took a corner too fast. “The gospel according to Jan,” he said.
She was moved, for a moment, to tell him that her mind was not entirely clothed in Jan’s cut-down ideas; but though he was smiling, he looked so desperately unhappy that it ceased to matter. She only said, “I doubt whether Jan would claim paternity for it.”
They had reached the gates. Collins, coming back on duty with some friends, saw them, exchanged glances with her group, and hurried on, big with a silent pregnancy of future words. Vivian reflected without emotion that she would have told the whole hospital by this time tomorrow. Mic had noticed nothing; he was unfastening the door, which had stuck.
He had provided her, she found out, with seven minutes to change in. She returned to the ward with a feeling of aeration; of seeing things from different angles and in slightly altered tinges of colour. Although Sister was in charge that evening she felt no anxiety about her work; there was, even a kind of relaxation in it, as of a simple exercise after a complex one that had strained concentration a little.
While they were tidying up the sluice one of the other probationers said, “By the way, Lingard, is it true you’re going to leave?”
“No, of course not,” said Vivian at once. “Who told you?”
“They were saying it in the dining-room. Just one of these rumours, I suppose. The brainy ones always seem to, like Carteret who used to draw, you know.”
“I’m not nearly clever enough to leave.” Vivian rubbed an enamel bowl with Vim, remembering suddenly, from a remote distance, the meditations in which she had spent the morning. “I shall just wait till I’m pushed, I expect.”
The probationer laughed appreciatively. “Matron will need a few more names on the waiting-list before she pushes a nice quiet girl like you
. Now I nearly did get sacked last year. I was out, you see, without late leave, and the boy I was with—”
Nurses,” said Sister in the doorway, “you may or may not be aware that the noise of your chattering can be heard halfway up the ward.”
Vivian was walking down to the dining-room after duty, feeling less tired than usual, when Colonna caught her shoulder from behind.
“Don’t go in to supper. Cut it. I want you to go to a party with me.”
“Whose party?” Vivian looked round to see if the Home Sister were watching for defaulters. “Am I invited?”
“Yes, at least she said I could bring whoever I liked. Do come it’s going to be awful, I can’t think why I was such a bloody fool as to say I’d go.” But she sounded pleased.
“Who’s giving it.”
“Valentine.”
“Not Charge-nurse Valentine? Why ever did she ask you?”
“God knows. To rope me into some hell-begotten society or other, I expect. Folk-dancing, or singing glees, you know the things they do. Oh, Lord, is she a Grouper by any chance?”
“I shouldn’t think so. All right, I’ll come. Can we wear dressing-gowns?”
“I’m going to, anyway. I hope there’ll be enough to eat.”
“Oh, well,” said Vivian comfortably, “I had a good tea.”
“Like hell you did. We’re going to talk about that.”
Evidently Collins had wasted no time.
Valentine had a big room, nearly as big as a Sister’s, at the top of the building; part of the old structure, with a huge mansard window from which the lights of half the town and the nearest villages could be seen. It was a good party, with much more than enough to eat, and cocktails as well. There was no one else there nearly so junior as Colonna, let alone herself; the other half-dozen guests were seniors to whom she had hardly spoken. Valentine herself had on a red flowered kimono, and had tied back her dark wavy hair from her forehead with a red ribbon. It made her look surprising young; seniors two or three years younger than oneself always appeared, somehow, to be older on the wards.
