Purposes of Love

by Mary Renault

  She was swept into it all like a cork into a waterfall: she fetched and carried, washed instruments and bowls, made operation beds; cleared up round the corpse and escorted it to the mortuary; held down a man recovering from an anaesthetic, who kept begging her to get into bed with him and telling her she reminded him of his mother. Because she was new to the ward, not knowing its routine or the places where things were kept, she was the one spared to take the next case down to the theatre. She helped the porters to lift him on the trolley; a young man, tall and finely proportioned, handsome in a simple physical way, but waxy pale from haemorrhage, for one of his legs had been torn off in ribbons at the thigh. Since he came in he had been perfectly conscious; he thanked Vivian and smiled at her as she settled the pillow under his head.

  The trimming and suturing were hopeless from the first, and everyone knew it. They brought the trolley, running, back to the ward for a blood transfusion; but the dressings oozed faster than the donor gave.

  His parents should have been there, but he had refused to tell the Sister where they lived: he did not want them worried, he said, unaware that the hospital regulations required they should be present at his death. He gave, however, the address of the girl he was engaged to, because he was to have met her that afternoon. Very politely he asked that, if it would not be troubling the nurses too much, someone should let her know he was all right.

  The girl came quickly, fetched from the Sunday School where she had been teaching; wearing neat, cheap Sabbath finery, a tight blue coat, a lace frill, little glass beads. Sister Malplaquet, a towering woman with the feet, figure and terse kindness of a policeman, talked to her at the door. The girl listened, nodding her head stiffly as if at a lesson, and pulling at a little tear in one of her cotton gloves.

  She came up to the bed, smiling; her smile became stiff and fixed for a moment when she saw his face, which was already of the colour of death, but she gave no other sign.

  “Well, Reg, you silly boy, fancy you getting smashed up like this.”

  He whispered, “Hullo, Edie. You shouldn’t have come all up here. I’ll be fine tomorrow. Just a bit knocked out, that’s all.”

  For the rest of the time she sat by his bed, giving him ice to suck, lighting the cigarettes which, since it could make no difference, they allowed him, and meekly going away when the surgeon came. She made mild little jokes about the artificial leg he would have. They were wonderful nowadays, she would never have guessed Ted Barton had one if his mother hadn’t told her. He agreed, smiling when he could no longer speak.

  Towards evening they both gave up the pretence that he would live, but neither of them had strength remaining for the open gesture of farewell. They held hands, and he turned his eyes towards her and smiled sometimes, to show that he was still aware of her.

  The senior nurses did for him the little that could be done; Vivian’s semi-skilled labour took her generally elsewhere. She flung herself at her rough impersonal tasks, finishing them with ever-increasing speed and fanatic thoroughness, as if the effort could give out some supporting virtue.

  When it was beginning to grow dark he died, quietly, his mind still present and unestranged. The girl got slowly to her feet and stood looking down at him, and at his hand which she still held. Suddenly she threw up her head and screamed, a clear bell-like shriek that echoed in the high roof. The nurses came running to her, thinking, from long habit and discipline, of the decencies first of all. She looked at them with a dim bewildered hostility, as if they had reminded her, out of a distant world, of her customary restraints. “Let me go,” she cried, shaking off their hands. “Take me away from here.” She broke through them to the door, and they heard, echoing more faintly down the corridors, the noise of her running feet and high clicking heels. The Sister stood staring after her: such a thing was unheard-of, and a great inconvenience, for there were several things needing to be asked about the funeral, and the disposal of his money and clothes.

  Vivian helped a staff-nurse with the last offices. She washed the working grime from his hands, square vigorous hands tempered with various skill, the hands of a good engineer. His body was faultless; it would have been accepted by Praxiteles. Vivian remembered that the girl, who looked quiet-living and religious, had probably never seen it.

  She stood in the sluice, over the wide china sink, rinsing in endless waters the blood-soaked blankets in which he had died. The tears were streaming down her face so that she could scarcely see. Sister Malplaquet came in behind her and gave her a hard bony tap on the shoulder; whether in sympathy or reproof she never knew.

  That night, before she went to sleep, she wrote a letter.

  “Dear Mic,

  “You are right; let’s forget about it. As you say, there are too many other things in the world, better and worse than ourselves.

  “I am being moved about, and off-duty is uncertain, so perhaps we’d better not fix anything for this week.

  “Vivian.”

  -9-

  THE WEEK FILLED UP, like a sack gradually bulging with the slackness and tension of its appointed contents. There was a hospital dance (not attended by Vivian), which provided dining-room topics in all the major and minor keys for the rest of the week. The first-year nurses were examined in physiology. Vivian expended herself, thankfully, in work for this examination during four days’ off-duty time and a day off; and was surprised, not so much at finding her name at the top of the list, since the standard set was mediocre, as at noticing that she was not unwilling to receive congratulations on it. One of the staff-nurses nearly died of septicaemia; one of the house physicians became engaged to a Sister, a mystery variously explained according to the temperament of each inquirer; one of the wards was closed for repainting, and the patients inconveniently dispersed elsewhere. Collins was caught by the Night Sister, for the third time, coming in late, and went about telling everyone, with eager pride, what the Matron had said. On Thursday Vivian was moved back to Verdun. On Saturday morning she had a note from Mic, asking her to meet him on Sunday whenever she was free.

  She answered it immediately, because she knew that if she gave herself time to hesitate she would refuse. She had begun to be afraid of it, and to put off going to her pigeon-hole, days before it could conceivably have come; so that when it did, expectation was weary, and she found it with a shock almost of surprise. Remarking her own fluency like an onlooker, she wrote over her morning lunch a simple easy acceptance; left it at the Lodge, and spent the morning planning, with hopeless ingenuity, to get it back. In the end, by hanging about persistently, she contrived to get sent on an errand to another ward, and at great risk went back to the Lodge; but her note had gone.

  Her off-duty time that Sunday was in the evening. From five in the morning, when she woke, her imagination peopled the hours from six to ten at night with every misery of concealment, embarrassment and shame. It was impossible, in spite of the assurance of their letters, that they should meet on any terms but those of the most agonising constraint. As the time drew near, her longing to escape at any cost was such that she could almost persuade herself she hated him. It did not occur to her that she might, if she wished, simply refrain from keeping the appointment.

  During the afternoon the clock seemed not to move at all. The visitors tramped and murmured in the ward, loading the beds with flowers and unsuitable food; they stared at the nurses, when necessity thrust them out of cover, as at rare creatures in a show, or buttonholed them to ask for diagnoses, which they were strictly forbidden to give. The seniors took refuge in the bathroom, where they were cleaning instruments if anyone appeared; Vivian and the other probationer sought the kitchen, cut the patients’ bread-and-butter, and made themselves tea. The probationer told stories to illustrate her boyfriend’s sense of humour; Vivian applauded, and urged her on. But half-past five came at last.

  She put on her everyday clothes with a kind of defiant carelessness, knowing that she was only trying to deceive herself, and forget how long she had
spent on her face, her hair and hands. Mic was to meet her in their usual place, a quiet square just out of range of the hospital windows. Her hands felt icy cold and damp, her stomach both empty and sick.

  Shut up in the ward and her own imaginings, she had scarcely noticed what weather it was, except that it did not rain. Now, coming out of doors, she tasted the heavy hanging sweetness of a summer evening, as it shifted in the first light winds before the dew. The sun was still up, but its light was deepening, seeming to penetrate with its long slant the inwardness of things, so that they themselves grew luminous. A blackbird sang liquidly, and a church bell rang, so far away that it was like a movement of silence. As Vivian walked, her breath came more easily, and her mind was stilled by a premonition of peace.

  She turned the corner into the square, and the sun fell full across her eyes, so that for a moment she was blinded. Then Mic, just beside her, said, “Hullo, Vivian.”

  It was altogether different from her imaginings, the nervous smiling from a distance, wondering, as they walked nearer, what to say. But it became, instantly, inevitable and known, the reality which in these dreams she had forgotten. Mic stood there, smiling. She returned his smile. Immediately she had seen him, she had ceased to be anxious, or to feel any responsibility for their conduct of this meeting. She perceived that he had accepted it for both of them. He looked older but not, as sometimes before, also bitter and defensive. For the first time since she had known him, he seemed self-reconciled, directed and serene; yet it gave her no sense of novelty or change, only of a return to something which had belonged to them always.

  “Do you know the ‘Hawk and Ring’,” he said, “over the top of the Downs? It’s a nice pub. I thought we might walk up there and have a drink and something to eat; there’ll still be light enough to walk back.”

  “Yes, I should like that.” She had felt that she could not face the flat again, and had wondered many times whether he would know this. Now she could scarcely remember that she had had these fears, or why.

  Passing through a loose red rubble of council-houses and villas, they struck a footpath to the hills.

  She realised for the first time that the clothes he had on were as familiar to her as her own; that she knew by heart the smooth places on the elbows of his Harris jacket, a loose thread near the shoulder that had been caught on a nail; the pattern punched in his brogues. As a thing dreamed once can appear vividly remembered, it seemed to her that these things had always been the accustomed securities, and the past week an improbable excursion, already almost forgotten.

  They talked—in this alone like her expectations—of indifferent things: town-planning, Swedish architecture, the sick staff-nurse, whose blood-cultures as it happened had been in Mic’s charge. Yet Vivian did not feel that they were taking shelter or concealing themselves in these things: they were a background, an accompaniment to what was really being said, for which words were instruments too harsh and shrill. A new villa came in sight, with Tudor gables and a machicolated porch supported on Corinthian pillars. Mic said, quite mildly, “Good Lord, deliver us!” and his words had some half-caught significance, tinged with memory.

  “What sort of a week have you had?” he asked her. She wanted suddenly to laugh, but only said, “Pretty busy. I’ve been on Malplaquet, you know.”

  “That was where the power-station people went, wasn’t it? It must have been pretty grim.”

  “It was, rather.” But already that week-old picture seemed years ago; clear, but tiny, gemmed by distance like the image in an inverted glass. “What have you been doing?”

  “The usual stuff, and growing some things for Scot-Hallard. It’s not my work, of course, but it saves him trouble and amuses me.”

  “He’s always messing about with pathology; the physicians hate it.” But she was not much interested in Scot-Hallard’s weekly clashes with the Senior Pathologist; she was thinking that all these days, while she had been enclosed in her routine and her own troubles, Mic had been leading a life of which she knew very little, with a complicated routine of which she knew scarcely anything, and troubles of his own. Suddenly she saw her miseries as worse than selfish—a narrowing of bounds, blinkers over her eyes. The last of the houses fell behind; the hills opened, and the sun shone over them.

  The path climbed eastward; their shadows shot in arrowy length before them; round them the midges glanced in globes, tiny galaxies limited by their own curve of space. On the skyline, to which their track was making, was a round clump of trees, looking, with the sunlight flat against their sides, like green-gold glass lit from within.

  The last slope was steep; they needed their breath, and presently ceased to talk. The steady rhythm of their effort, the steady light, the steady lifting into a rarer and lighter air, loosed the mind from its fretful grasp on body and spirit.

  At the top of the hill the grass grew long and green between the open trunks of the trees, and round the edge went the dented, short-turfed rampart of a camp. The town they had left was a vague pool of shadow, cupped by the sunlight on the hills. They climbed the ramp and rested there, Vivian sitting on the top, Mic lying along it, propped on his elbows, beside her. They said nothing at all, but looked into the high air below and around them, self-contented, as if it had been some eminence within themselves that they had scaled.

  Mic said at last, “I ought to have asked you, before I brought you all this way, if you were tired. We could have gone in the car somewhere.”

  He spoke, as he had spoken all along, as if it were pleasant to say something and one thing was as good as another. Vivian answered, “No, I might have been tired in the streets, perhaps, but not here.” They might have agreed with the same effect that no other place existed.

  “It’s only another mile,” said Mic. “There’s lots of time.”

  The twinkling, glittering sound of a lark hung overhead. They looked idly for its light-hidden source. A magpie drove by, with long stiff tail and whirling wings.

  “One for sorrow,” said Vivian, looking after it. “We must find another before we go.”

  They turned, scanning the shining trees.

  “There it goes,” Mic leaned across her, pointing. “Over to the left.”

  “It’s the same one again.”

  “Is it?” said Mic, absently.

  She had expected him to defend his magpie, and had been ready to turn and answer; but she did not turn. She sat still, looking up at the branch which the bird had left. Mic was still too, leaning on his arm. His cheek was resting, so lightly that at first she had not felt it, against the curve of her breast.

  For a second she held her breath; and knew that she had communicated her knowledge. He made a small sound like a hidden sigh, and she saw as if she watched him that he had closed his eyes.

  The shared will born of them in the instant rested and was satisfied. They neither spoke, nor tried to touch one another more closely. Presently Mic moved away, and slipped a little way down the slope, so that his head lay beside her knees. She rested her hand on the grass near his hair.

  The lark was still singing, ending the same small jet of sound. Vivian looked about her, at the deepening light, the hills, at Mic lying beside her hand. She knew herself the centre on which the hills revolved, the burning-glass through which alone the sun could warm them, and rejoiced: glorious, apocalyptic error, more true than verity! Wonder filled her, but no astonishment. The life in her, like Mary sitting apart and listening to speech unheard by her careful troubled mind, had foreknown it, and claimed now its acknowledgement. Her mind, rebuked, kept silence, as the one should who has been wrong.

  Mic sat up. He stretched enormously, and looked slowly all round the horizon, as if it had been given him.

  “Well,” he said, “shall we go?”

  Their path joined a broad trackway over the top of the Downs, Roman, or older than Rome. They were in the world of high places which from within it seems a separate, continuous world, to which plains and cities are interruptions f
ugitive and unreal. The skyline hills marched with them, closer neighbours than the valleys between. Curlews cried airily, and tumbled with blunt wings along the wind.

  They shouted, and laughed at nothing, and sang. Mic started The Golden Vanity; its radiant melancholy matched the light and the air, so that it all seemed to be happening on the blueness just below them; the great-sailed ships becalmed, the yellow-haired boy drifting down, sorrowfully singing like a mermaid, in the lowland sea.

  The “Hawk and Ring” stood where the trackway cut a road, a low white house squatting in the cover of some Scotch firs.

  “They have that ungodly sort of draught cider you like,” said Mic. “Thick and sweet. I still hope sometime to form your taste in beer. This stuff’s much more alcoholic, anyway.”

  “I don’t care if it is, I like the taste of it.”

  “It blows you out.”

  “If it does I can keep it to myself.”

  The bar parlour had an oak settle, two cases of stuffed birds and a coloured picture of a soldier leaving home, in excellent spirits, for the Boer War. Mic had a bitter and Vivian her cider, cloudy and golden in a tall glass with a waist. They started drinking while they waited for the supper to be cooked. A foursome of hikers came in, wedged themselves into a corner table, and plied one another with allusive taunts.

  Vivian put down her glass. The thick gold of the cider seemed to have invaded the air; she floated in it, faintly swaying, like the cabin-boy in the golden sea. The laughter of the girls broke round her like bubbles, drifting her this way and that. There was Mic, floating too. How sweet he was! Strange that the girls could sit there, absorbed in their fatuous men instead of coming to try and take him away. The nearest one had on shorts and was broad in the beam. Vivian could see her backside through the bars of the chair, looking larger and larger, a pumpkin, a balloon. It was the most exquisitely funny thing she had seen in her life. She began to laugh softly, leaning back against the wall.