by Mary Renault
“Yes. It’s a basis on which a number of people do live, all the same.” Now that the first shock was over, she was glad she had forced it out. It gave her what she had been looking for, the key to Mic. It was all simple, she told herself in relief; his ups and downs, his tacit evasions. He had been wondering if she knew and whether she would mind. She must have hurt him in all sorts of chance ways she could not remember. The sense of danger and conflict he gave her were all explained away. Well, that ground was cleared. Now she could help him. They could have a sensible friendship now.
She discovered herself staring at him as if she were seeing him for the first time, and said quickly, “Heard from Jan lately?”
It turned out, of course, that neither of them had heard from Jan since he went away. “But,” said Mic, “there’s one thing about Jan as a correspondent, you know where you are. He’ll wait a week or two, or a month or two, just as it happens, till he’s struck by some thought he feels is communicable to you and nobody else. Then he’ll write you twelve pages. You read it once or twice, and lock it up so that if you have the misfortune to survive him you can get it published when he’s dead. Then you settle down for another year. And a very good way too. For Jan.”
“You are the oddest person, Mic.”
“Why, about publishing it when he’s dead? Why not, you don’t appropriate the wind. If anyone ever thinks he can treat Jan as a treasured possession he—or more probably she—has my sympathy beforehand.”
“It wasn’t that, altogether.” She had been thinking, not for the first time lately, that Mic was a young man singularly capable of keeping his own counsel; and she was puzzled by the deliberate, even provocative way in which he revealed himself to her. It was not as if he were enlisting sympathy, but rather offering some kind of warning. All she knew was that she liked him more than she had before.
They talked a good deal more about Jan. Vivian encouraged it, because it seemed to be taking his mind off what he had told her before. But he broke off in the middle of a sentence and asked her, as though unwilling, “How long have you been so appallingly alike?”
“People have been saying it for about ten years, I suppose. We’re not, really, very often.”
“Often enough.” He was not looking at her. Here it was again. It was her fault; she had strained and upset him and jolted him out of his transient content. It had to come, but she could deal with it better now.
“You said you had a record to play me,” she reminded him. She was full of her resolutions. She would be easier with him, less affected by his moods; would bridge the gulfs which his sudden withdrawals so disconcertingly made.
“Oh, yes. You’ll like it, I think.” He jumped up with a restless jerk, then checked to say, “I’m not making you late, am I?”
“Not for half an hour.” How impossible he could be; did he want her to go? “I’ll hear it next time, though; you’re going out, aren’t you?”
“Oh, Lord, no. Do stay.” He was so evidently taken aback that she believed him.
He had turned the record over when he suddenly said, “That chair’s more comfortable, really. Out of the draught.”
“There isn’t any draught.” Really, she thought impatiently, he was like a cat on hot bricks. Poor Mic, he was thinking already that he had said too much. She would be gentle. “Sit down here,” she said, patting the arm of her chair, “and don’t prowl about.”
Mic clicked on the gramophone and sat down; a little behind her and out of sight, as she had meant him to be. It would give him a chance, she thought, to settle, and her to hear the rest of the record in peace. It was Hoist’s Dance of the Earth Spirits. It happened that Vivian had never heard it before. She forgot Mic and the room in which she sat, straining forward unconsciously towards the sound; enraptured by the wild interlacing of gross and ethereal rhythms.
But that deep underground mutter, pierced with fire—it seemed, more than the composer meant, to dominate the rest; its beat to echo against something in the atmosphere, sultry and overcharged. A nameless unlocated current, it pressed around her, troubling her pure perception of the music, but giving its emotion force. Her eyes shone, she tingled to the play of the half-chained powers. The dance diminished, and faded into air.
“That was exciting,” she said.
Mic did not reply. There was, indeed, no reason why he should; yet his quiet had some quality that made her turn. With an arm along the chair-back, he was looking down at her. His eyes went through hers in a perfectly unresponsive stare.
A tight hand seemed to close on Vivian’s diaphragm. She looked away; and there was a second, which felt like hours, in which nothing happened at all. Then Mic’s voice, close to her, said slowly and, it seemed, quite coolly, “I shouldn’t do this.” There was a quick, hard pull at her shoulders. He tipped her head back over his arm and kissed her, taking his time over it, on the mouth.
She resisted, in the first moment, out of mere surprise. But by the time she had found out that, held as she was, she had no leverage to escape, she knew too that she lacked the wish. This, then, was Mic: not an image in a dark glass, a code to be translated, but this life on hers, this answering wave. The dance beat through her. She kissed him, passionately, lacing her hands behind his head; she could smell the clean dampness of his hair.
The kiss ended; she heard Mic draw a long, sharp breath as if he had been stabbed. He slipped down beside her and gathered her into a brief, violent embrace. In spite of its furious abruptness his touch was certain, even familiar, and she yielded to it without consenting pause. He kissed her again, this time painfully, and let her go. They opened their eyes on one another, left in deeper darkness by the dazzle of the fusing flame: bewildered strangers.
Mic was smiling remotely; a queer, elated, wondering smile. There was something in it of discovery, of defiance, of release. Vivian saw it, and did not interpret it. She only saw its strangeness, and it made her afraid.
Suddenly, with a bright objective clarity, she saw herself as she had been sitting in the minutes before he kissed her. Her blurred disregarded knowledge of her own body reassembling, the image crystallising as if in a stranger’s eyes, she could see her own short beech-brown hair and straight firm jaw; her intent and distant face; her hands, big for a woman’s and roughened with soap and antiseptics, clasped in front of her as she sat forward, elbows on knees, in a familiar pose. It was a pose characteristic; but not of herself.
“Mic!” She sprang to her feet, away from him. There was no doubt in her mind. He had struggled too hard, against himself and her, to make it plain. That he had tried to warn her and that she had been too vain, too pleased with her own interpretation of him, to understand, was the heaviest notch in the score. What had she, hot steel or cold, that would cut deep enough? She had returned his kiss, and would have returned it again.
“That was a pity,” she said. Good; her voice held, stretched and hard. He was still half-lying in the chair, propped on his elbow towards the place where she had been, looking up at her, his smile changing. “It isn’t even new—did you think so—except in blatancy.” (How easy it was to think of such long words, its ease surprised her.) “But you’re rather more aware of yourself than the others. That removes the last excuse.”
“What do you mean?” said Mic. He was still a little short of breath.
“Are you asking me to tell you?”
Mic picked himself up out of the chair, and with a mechanical movement shook out the squashed cushion on which they had lain. Then he said, in a small colourless voice, “That may have been true. It isn’t any more. You don’t give me credit for much decency, do you?”
“No. But I gave you credit for a certain amount of honesty, till now.”
Her throat was tightening, her chest grew heavy. With shame and horror she felt the approach of tears—of shock, partly, and nervous strain, with, somewhere behind it all, a bitter sense of loss. She looked away from Mic, in the childish fancy that she was less visible when she could not se
e.
Mic murmured to himself, “Oh, God.”
“I’m sorry”—she turned on him savagely—“to upset you. I forgot you’re not accustomed to women.”
“That didn’t sound like you,” said Mic quietly.
The fight went out of Vivian; only devastation remained. She sat down in the other chair, and covered her face. She could hear Mic move up to her and stand, afraid to touch her.
“Oh, Mic, how could you?” she sobbed. “We were so nice together.”
“We’ll be nicer than ever,” said Mic unevenly. “Only don’t cry.”
She shook her head. Mic knelt beside her and tried to dry her eyes with his handkerchief; repeating, as if to a child, “Come on, my dear, don’t, please don’t; look, it’s all right now.”
“It will never be all right,” said Vivian in a swallowed voice. As she spoke she held up her face for him to dry; it seemed irrelevant, and natural. Presently she stopped crying, and Mic put his handkerchief away.
“Vivian,” he said, choosing his words stiffly and carefully, “it’s hard to ask you to forgive me, because what you think isn’t true. And it’s hard to defend myself, because it has been. I’m terribly sorry to have hurt you like this.”
What was he saying? She was shaken and dishevelled and unbelievably tired. Her mouth felt bruised. She only wanted to get away.
“It’s all right, Mic. Don’t mind any more. I’m sure everything happened as it had to. But we’d better not meet again, you know.”
He was still kneeling there, quite close, searching her face. The bones of his cheek and chin looked sharp and fine, and she wondered inconsequently whether he got enough to eat. But that would be no concern of hers.
“Will you believe me,” he said, “if I say you’ll never have anything from me that isn’t your own?”
There was a soft untidy strand of hair on his temple that had got into her eyes when he kissed her. Looking at it she said, “Yes. I’ll never have anything from you at all.”
She got up, and put on her jacket and hat. She wondered what state her face was in, and would have liked to powder it; but Mic had not taken his eyes off her, and she could not make the squalid little gesture.
She picked up her bathing things. Mic stood and watched her. He did not move or speak. Something, mere social habit perhaps, made it impossible to walk out of the door without a word.
“You have given me some nice times, Mic. Thank you for them. This is my fault too. I ought to have known it wouldn’t work. Good-bye.”
Mic came out of his stillness, and, with a reflex movement, opened the door for her. He began to speak, and stopped. “Good-bye,” he said. She went downstairs, hearing the quiet closing of the door behind her.
-8-
THE FIRST THING OF which Vivian was conscious next morning was trying not to wake. There was a transitional instant, past sleep but short of waking, like standing sheltered in an open door, to which she clung. It passed quickly. She plodded through the motions of washing and dressing, fixing straps and pins and balancing her cap, thrusting her mind at the daily things which had not altered, trying to think about the ward. But the effort to escape only increased her misery. She tried, instead, to think about what had happened, but could find no materials for thought, only a raw flinching surface that would not be touched.
Breakfast, though she could not eat it, was a relief. She became exceedingly talkative, made a number of jokes, some of which were much admired, and plunged into the concerns of everyone at the table. Once the Home Sister had to speak to them about the noise they were making. She got up disliking everyone to whom she had spoken, and aching as if her mind had been beaten with rubber truncheons. Valentine pointed out to her, on the ward, that she had left the top of a locker dirty.
There was no reason, she told herself, why this should seem so much worse than anything else that had ever happened to her. It was a passing effect of delayed shock. She tried to assemble her old resources against trouble; but one of these had always been Jan, uninvolved in turmoil as a cloud. Mic’s achievement was to have struck this resting-place from under her; Jan’s name hurt her, like the sunshine and her wet bathing-costume and the sight of her own face in the glass.
She was free in the morning that Sunday, and, changing quickly, hurried out of doors. She walked fast and far, and, lying down when she was tired, on the brackeny fringe of a grass-track, tried to be still. But everything failed her. She could not loosen her mind, nor open it to truth. Her bitter anger against Mic, her condemnation, her longing to see him shamed or cast down, were no refuge but simply the climax of humiliation. She knew, deeply and secretly, that if she had been an impersonal onlooker she would have felt no hostility nor sense of wrong, only concern for him and the wish, if she could, to straighten his confusion. It was herself she wanted to revenge on him, herself for which she could not forgive him.
Returning heavy and unrefreshed, she found that her feet ached already, with the day’s work still ahead. As she passed through the Lodge, the porter called after her.
“Note here for you, Nurse Lingard.”
She came back, her heart lurching, recognising the hand.
“No,” she longed to say, “keep it and throw it away, I don’t want it.” She took it with a slur of thanks.
“Mr. Freeborn left it.” The porter’s sandy eyebrows bristled with interest. “You only missed him by a minute or two.”
“It doesn’t matter, thank you.”
She put it in her pocket, and went up to her room. She could still tear it up, now, in its envelope, and go away, her half-dulled wounds untouched. Sitting down on the bed, she opened the envelope with cold clumsy hands.
Mic had written:
“Dear Vivian,
“I let you go yesterday because we were neither of us in a state to improve things by prolonging them. Even now I find I haven’t much to say. You know about me, and whether you find me intolerable or not won’t depend on my excuses or apologies, but on your temperament and habits of mind. In any case I don’t want to excuse anything, except a moment of blind selfishness for which no excuse can exist. Even that I can’t repent of as full as decency demands; the results have been too important to me.
“You will wonder, if that’s all I have to say, why I couldn’t have left you in peace. I would have, for a little longer anyway, if you hadn’t said good-bye so finally. You meant it, obviously, at the time, and small wonder. Do you still? I think, myself, that ours isn’t the sort of relationship that can cease to exist so easily. Neither of us, I imagine, has ever been much amused by the standard boy-meets-girl manoeuvres. We are people first, and belong to our sexes rather incidentally. We liked one another as people, and, as a person, I shall miss you damnably if you go. Does it matter so much that I kissed you once because you looked like Jan? It might, if it could happen again, but it couldn’t. Believe that, and sometime I’ll tell you why.
“Can’t we still pursue a few human interests together? I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t feel this would be easier for you than for me, since it was I who made a fool of myself, not you. Write to me sometime, and tell me what you think.
“Yours, any way you like,
“Mic”
Vivian lay down on the bed, her face on the cool surface of the letter. She thought, He must be lying, of course, to save my face. How could he not know that I kissed him, and held him, and wanted him?—And still want him, added her restless body; she jerked herself upright again. Or perhaps he thinks I respond like that naturally to any sort of kiss. Or was he really so beside himself he can’t remember what did happen? (I kissed you once, he says.) But that isn’t the way he writes. She read the letter again. It was very tidy: not a first copy, she thought. Is it really possible that he thinks I’ll answer it?
“Because you looked like Jan.” She found herself reading and re-reading it; it was, somehow, a relief to see it written down. A sentence among other sentences, it diminished, falling into place in the ground-plan ins
tead of filling the sky. It went over the turn of the page—“I kissed you,” on one side, “once because you looked like Jan,” on the other. She sat reading the first half, slowly, for a long time; then flipped the page over quickly and read the second.
Looking suddenly at the clock, she found that she had been there for half an hour, had missed dinner, and had five minutes to change and get on duty. The letter she pushed into her pocket. There was no time now, she said to herself, to tear it too small for the corridor maid to read.
Valentine met her at the door of Verdun.
“Oh, there you are, Lingard. Run along quick to Malplaquet. You’re extra there today. They’ve a big bunch of casualties in—something blew up at the power station, I think.”
Extra again, thought Vivian wearily, as she walked the long corridor to the men’s surgical wards. Never knowing your off-duty. But I forgot, it doesn’t matter now.
Malplaquet was one of the oldest wards, a huge stone-floored, iron-raftered place like a railway terminus, and, she found, as busy. There were dressing-trolleys, half-cleared, abandoned in the gangways; the sterilizer, a copper antique like a witch’s vat, was belching steam and the senior nurses were running to and from it, cursing one another for putting in unsterile bowls just before the clean ones were due to come out. One of the honorary surgeons was in the ward and the Sister was trying to take in what he said and watch everything that went on around and behind her. Behind one pair of screens a porter was shaving a man’s body for operation, while a probationer collected the theatre clothes and blankets with stumbling speed; behind other screens, someone was being laid out. Vivian knew this because under the screens she could see the bedspread thrown on the floor; they were laundered, after a death.
