by Mary Renault
One of the men was giving an imitation of someone, egged on by appreciative screams. An especially high note cut through the golden cloud, dispersing it for a moment. Vivian stopped laughing.
“Mic.” She put her hand on his arm, and found it solid and stationary. “I believe I’m drunk, what shall I do?”
Mic, who had been thinking his own thoughts, came back to earth. “Nonsense. You couldn’t be. Not just on that.”
“All right, don’t believe me if you don’t want to, I don’t care.” She laughed again, waveringly. “I remember now, I forgot to have any tea.” She had eaten practically nothing for lunch either, but was just sober enough not to tell him so.
Mic looked her over, wrinkling his eyes.
“Honestly, I believe you are. Serves you right for drinking that stuff. Don’t worry, it isn’t terribly obvious. Be all right when … Better come out in the air for a minute. It’ll soon go off.”
She found she could walk well enough not to be noticed by the engrossed guests. From the end of the lamp-smelling passage someone called “Supper’s near on ready, sir,” and Mic said quickly, “All right, thanks. We shan’t be a minute.”
They walked through the garden, between clumps of pink and cherry-pie. She hung on to Mic’s arm; they seemed still to be floating, but more slowly and securely, in company with the night. The sun had gone down, and half a moon began to be bright as the west grew rusty. At the end of the path a little flight of steps went up and down the stone wall instead of a stile, leading to the field where the fir-trees were.
“Let’s go up there,” she said.
Mic looked doubtful. “Can you?”
“Of course I can.” She felt infinite in faculty, in action like an angel, in apprehension a god.
“Better let me go first,” Mic said.
He stood at the bottom, and steadied her down by the elbows. On the last step she stumbled and swayed forward against him. They stood together for a moment, in the deeper twilight of the trees. Vivian caught her breath; her unstable spirits shifted, the tears rushed into her eyes.
“Mic, you are so nice to me.”
She felt his hands tighten on her arms: his shadowed face bent over her, unsmiling. She lifted her own.
At the last moment he laughed quickly and let her go.
“Darling, you’re awfully drunk. You sit down there.”
He put his jacket on the broad bottom step, and settled her on to it. She moved with dreamlike obedience. He sat down on the grass just below her, and lit her a cigarette. His hand was steadier than hers would have been; but that was not saying quite everything.
A bat flickered out from the black boughs above them, and an owl called. Round Vivian the world began to settle. Just beside her glowed the end of Mic’s cigarette a long bright spike of red.
“Do you always smoke as fast as that?”
“Yes,” said Mic briefly.
Vivian found that she wanted to cry again. She gripped the rough edge of the step, and pressed back her head against the wall. The moon glittered and blurred and ran about the sky.
She fought to keep herself from letting Mic hear. What would he think of her? Try as she might, a throttled sob forced itself out. Through the tears she saw Mic throw his cigarette away. It curved, like a tiny shooting star, into the dimness. Then, without knowing how she got there, she was in his arms, lying across his knees, and he was kissing her. Her tears stopped. They clung together, not hearing the owl when it screamed again.
“I’m not really drunk,” she said presently.
“Of course you are. But I can’t help it.”
“Never mind. You can kiss me again when I’m sober, how will that be?”
Mic did not tell her. A gust of laughter blew out from the inn, a thin joyous sound, distilled by distance. A dry branch rattled to the ground. The sounds, the swaying moon, the sky flowed racing through her; she was embraced by them also and their kisses bewildered her. The dark trees swung into the sky. There was grass under her hair.
“God, how lovely you are.”
She had slipped somehow from his knees, and he was lying beside her. Her shirt was open to the waist. When had that happened? She couldn’t remember. What did it matter, they had been such fools so long. “Poor Mic,” she murmured, stroking his hair; “and you were being so good.”
“I still am,” Mic said, his voice smothered against her breast.
Vivian was more nearly sober than she had supposed. She understood that it was their past unhappiness, rather than themselves, which was driving them; that they would regret this headlongness afterwards, and that Mic would take the responsibility. Half-intoxicated girls under hedges were not his pattern; whatever heresies he might have followed, he had his own integrities. It was easier to think of this than to remember hers.
“Dear she said gently, “we didn’t mean it to be like this.”
Mic whispered, “I know. Oh, Christ, don’t go away,” and kissed her mouth.
It was hard to think while he was making love to her. He was without clumsiness, even when he was uncertain or deeply moved. She could not tell whether it came from instinct or experience. It was as if they had remembered and longed for one another for many years. She moved her head a little and said, “I’ll come back again.”
“You’ll never come back.” He pressed the words on her lips like kisses. “You’ve too much sense to come back, if I let you go.”
“I love you.”
His arm slackened, and he caught his breath. “Oh, God, you’re drunk. Don’t say it if it isn’t true, I—love you so much.”
“Of course I love you. You know I do. Look at me.”
“Don’t. You wouldn’t, if—”
“It’s too late for any ifs.”
“Kiss me,” he said.
She murmured, hardly remembering while she spoke what she was trying to say. “Let’s go back to the inn.”
“Stay a little. Just let me hold you: I’ve wanted you so.”
“But not like this. It’s true, isn’t it?” With what seemed an enormous effort she sat up, throwing back her hair. “Mic, I’ve got a pain with hunger. And you can’t keep ham and eggs.”
He began a hard little laugh which shaded uncertainly into tenderness. “What a shame. I’m sorry.” He helped her to her feet, and stood for a moment with his hands on her waist. She felt suddenly separate, unequal to herself, and lonely. The night wind blew round her ribs in a cool stream.
“We’re—not very tidy to meet people,” she said.
“Stand still a minute.” He brushed her shoulders and began, quite capably, to straighten her clothes. “I’m afraid there’s a button off your shirt.”
“Only one?”
He took the pin from under his tie and fastened the gap on the inside.
“Mic, darling, you’ve got half the Downs in your hair. I’ve got a comb.”
He put his arms lightly round her and stooped his head while she combed the pine-needles away. There was something reassuring in these childish services, friendly and secure.
“I haven’t behaved very well,” he said when she had finished.
“Whose fault was that? Mic, I—won’t always be so unkind to you.”
He said, almost inaudibly, “We’d better go in.”
It seemed almost at once, after he had helped her over the wall, that they were blinking in the lamplight of the inn. She wondered whether she looked as dazed and distant as Mic did; at all events, one of the girls at the hikers’ table had a coughing-fit, and her young man had to thump her on the back.
The innkeeper’s wife brought in the supper, hoping too impressively that it would not be overdone. She had a long pale face with pale eyes and a sharp nose, and while she was there Mic’s pin felt very large. Vivian could not talk to her but Mic thanked her quite convincingly and said that they preferred it well cooked. There was a faint difference in the tone and resonance of his voice, but only if you knew him. They were both leaning back against the oak
panelling, and when he spoke she could feel a delicate vibration in the wall.
“I can feel your voice in the panels,” she said shyly. “Can you feel mine?” She was ashamed to be beside him among all these people; what had happened seemed so near that it must still be visible.
“No.” He smiled at her, and she felt safer. “I expect yours is the wrong pitch.”
The ham and eggs were sedative. They ate in silence till the hikers’ conversation got under way again, only slipping in a word or two when the noise was extra loud.
“I suppose,” she considered, “I’d really have sobered more quickly if I’d eaten a meal at once instead of going out.”
“The same thing occurred to me,” said Mic, “as we were starting.”
“And you thought—?”
“Oh, I told myself some lie or other.”
The hikers stopped talking to light a round of cigarettes. After the necessary interval Vivian said, “It’s as well you did. We’d never have lasted the evening. Then the whole box of fireworks would have gone off at the last minute, and I’d have been late in.”
Mic looked at his watch. “You’re free till eleven, as usual, I suppose?”
She remembered something. “Oh, my dear, I’m sorry. Not tonight. Only till ten.”
“It’s twenty to, now. We’ll never do it, even downhill, before half-past. We shouldn’t have come so far. But you’ve always had till eleven before.”
“… So he took it home with him.” An anecdote at the other table came to an end, and was received with the homage of stunned silence. Presently someone said, “Well, really, Les,” and the laughing began.
“I’ve had late leave before,” said Vivian, crumbling her bread. “I didn’t ask this time. I thought I—” She felt alone and naked and knew that she was blushing.
Mic reached for her other hand under the table. “Come on. We’ll run for it. Had enough to eat?”
“More than enough, to run on.” She returned his grip gratefully. They got up, feeling four heads turn, as on one pivot, behind them.
While they were waiting for change in the passage, he said, “Doesn’t it infuriate you to be dodging rules like a schoolgirl at—what are you—twenty-five?”
“Twenty-six.” Their eyes met, exploringly. It was deeply exciting to know so much of one another and so little. “I suppose it’s one of the less unreasonable rules; we get up early and one needs to be awake.”
She fell silent, realising suddenly how free, till now, her solitude and her few desires had made her. Books, and the country, her thoughts and the placid observation of other people, had been there whenever the chances of work set her free to enjoy them. She had taken for granted, when neighbouring lives were thrown into confusion by the hospital’s careless impersonality, that hers would always be tranquil and untouched. By slow degrees the need for seeing Mic had entangled her more and more in anxieties, disappointments and hopes. And now? She felt like someone who had just signed a mortgage; and was aware at once of Mic watching her face.
But, once returned to the night and the growing moon above them, they forgot these questionings and the reason of their speed. They ran, while the moon sailed with them, and the trackway streamed behind like broken water in a dream. The danger in their blood made them tireless. Once, when the track curved, they clambered the low stone wall and cut across a hummocky field, stumbling and laughing. At first she kept level with Mic and sometimes outran him: she liked to hear the little gasp of satisfaction with which he drew level again. When she found herself flagging she forced the pace; it seemed important not to lag behind. Her chest felt sore with hard breathing and her heart beat high in her throat. She looked at Mic jealously to see if he were still running his fastest or easing his speed to hers. He caught her arm and pulled her to a standstill. “Half-time,” he said. They leaned for a minute against the wall, too breathless to feel much besides relaxing muscles and labouring lungs. Mic, with his arm along the wall-top and his head tilted back a little, looked impersonally graceful, like the trees, a part of the night.
In a little while they recovered their breath, and smiled. The running, the night and their delight in one another seemed perfectly balanced and poised. She thought, it would be right and good to go to him now. She made a little movement towards him, but remembered the hospital and how late she would be. He took her by both hands and kissed her quickly. “That’s just for being beautiful.” They ran on.
At the edge of the Downs they paused together, and stood near the rampart, looking at the strewed lights of the town. In the centre, heaped high above the rest, were those of the hospital, dull red and brilliant white.
“They’ve got two theatres going,” Vivian said.
“I hope the Night Sister’s busy there when you go in.”
He took her hand. His gentleness made her ashamed. Did he bear her no reproach at all for having led him on like a wild thing and then refused him? To him it must have seemed that she was simply afraid. Perhaps, after all, she had been; she was no longer sure.
“Mic.” She tightened her fingers on his. “I’ll never do this to you again: I promise. Whenever you ask. If you want me anymore.”
“I love you.” He was looking away, across the valley, and the words seemed not addressed to her, but the slow acceptance of a challenge, lonely, and directed elsewhere. With a sudden pang she remembered the fear which had overtaken her for a moment at the inn, and thought for the first time how small her stake was beside his. He had been hurt, in ways beyond her experience, through all the years most capable of pain. The bitter determination with which he had removed himself from the power of other people was written all over him. She thought of the flat and all its little defiant assertions of self-sufficiency. She had seen him watching Jan, whom he loved, like a dangerous enemy. Yet he had delivered himself up to her unarmed.
She felt abased, and liberated by humility. In this moment, freedom and peace seemed only valuable as things to give in return for what he had given. His mouth was shut in a stubborn recklessness. She came between his eyes and the darkness, and put her arms round his neck.
“I will be good to you, Mic.”
He held her, with her forehead against his mouth. She felt an exultation which was beyond emotion or desire, as if she had shaken limits from herself and broken, free, into new space. “Do you trust me?” she said.
“Yes.”
She met his eyes; and, closing her own, lifted her lips for him to kiss. Her mind fled, comforted, into the warmth and darkness of her body; but she knew that she had retreated, seeing open before her a height and depth for which she had not been prepared.
-10-
THE MATRON’S OFFICE GOT ALL the afternoon sun; the anteroom, too, was crossed by a broad beam that haloed the secretary typing in the window, and fell on the fumed-oak centre table with its straight piles of nursing magazines—never, in its progress, picking out a grain of dust. Even in the shaft of it not a mote danced. The air was a thick drowsiness of light and heat, crossed by little threads of activity: the click of the typewriter, the blurred noise of a trolley going by in the outside passage, the shuffling and rustling and broken whispers of the nurses who were strung out in single file from the outer to the inner door.
They twisted and fidgeted, assuring themselves or one another that their caps were straight, their apron-buttons not showing beneath their belts, that there were no ladders in their stockings, or, if they had been out, that they had wiped all the lipstick off. One who had not had time to clean her shoes was polishing them by rubbing each foot in turn against the other calf; another was twisting her cuff round to hide a stain. All their aprons were freshly changed, and stood out round them in a stiff glaze.
Those farthest away from the inner door whispered stealthily together, and gave little sprung giggles which stopped sharply when the door opened to let a nurse out and another in. Sometimes the outgoing nurse would make a stealthy face signifying indignation or relief, but generally they cha
nged over in nervous silence, as though they were already visible from inside. The two or three who were at the head of the queue never talked or giggled; they shifted from foot to foot, or patted their aprons or their hair. One had a broken thermometer, which she kept pulling through her fingers.
Vivian was, at the moment, fourth. She stood narrowing her eyes against the sun, which made her blink, looking at an iodine-stain on her apron which the laundry could not remove, and feeling the current of nervous tension twanging through her.
Her apron-strings held back her shoulders, her high round collar kept up her chin, like a scold’s bridle; her cap, rigidly pleated, circumscribed the movements of her head. A white stiffened belt, whose constriction she could feel whenever she tried to breathe deeply, gripped her waist from which the clumsy gathered skirt and wide apron hung nearly to her ankles. It was a costume which, except for the fact that it could be laundered, bore little reference to physical function which, in fact, it generally hindered. Its purpose was partly that of a religious habit, a reminder of obedience and renunciation; partly, as such habits generally are, a psychic steriliser, preventing the inconvenient consciousness of personality. In it, all gestures of expression automatically died, leaving only a few of servant-like relaxation, folding the arms, or setting them akimbo.
Vivian put her hand into the bib of her apron and felt the thick double edges of her dress, and the line of linen buttons. The tight stuff strained to waist and shoulder, made her breasts into a hard, shallow curve like a doll’s. Her movement felt faintly indecent: it seemed improper, as well as improbable, that there should be a body underneath of which these clothes did not form a permanent part.
Last night, being caught on her way in had made so small an impression on her that in the morning she had forgotten all about it. It had been her own fault; she had walked swinging through the main entrance, hatless, her hair tumbled by the wind and Mic’s last kisses at the edge of the town, the pupils of her eyes dilated by excitement and the darkness, so that she had not seen the Night Sister till they were almost colliding. She had to be asked twice why she was late before she took it in, when she replied that she was sorry, she hadn’t noticed the time. With something about the office vaguely sounding in her ears she had gone to bed, where she had not slept very much, but for other reasons. When she found her name on Matron’s list in the morning, it took her a minute or two to remember why. Now, suddenly, only this place was real: the Downs were a year-old memory, she could not feel Mic in her arms or believe that she had promised to be his lover. She was a nurse who had come in late and had to go (in her off-duty time) to Matron about it. That was all.
