Purposes of Love

by Mary Renault

  “I know,” he said.

  She slackened her clasp and looked up, calmed as no assurances of safety and protection could have calmed her.

  “I’m sorry, Mic. You’ve worked through this alone.”

  “Not entirely.”

  She sighed, relaxing in his arm.

  “Would you go back now, if you could? Tell me truly.”

  He shook his head.

  “We think this has come on us from outside ourselves, but it hasn’t. Probably nothing can.”

  “Maybe. One talks of one thing, and chooses another. But however it came, I’m glad it’s here.”

  “And I,” he said. “Whatever happens.”

  A siren wailed shrilly from a works close by.

  “That’s two o’clock,” said Vivian. “I’ve been gone nearly a quarter of an hour. Good-bye, Mic. Good-bye. If I try to come back, slam the door.”

  “Come back quickly. … Look, your cap. Let me put it on for you, you’ve got the book.”

  “Is it filthy?”

  “Do till tomorrow. Just—no, you’d better go. Good-bye.”

  She dared not look back once she was through the door, but plodded on, farther and farther away, down staircases, along passages, clasping her seven-pound burden and hating its hard angles because they came between her memory and him.

  The visitors were streaming in, with their bags and bundles and their wilting flowers done up in brown paper and string. She edged her way through them, aware of them at first as a half-regarded physical nuisance like a dust-storm, till she passed an anxious-faced girl and it occurred to her to wonder what it would be like, if Mic were ill, to sit with him always under the stare of crowds of people; to ask how he was and to be answered, tolerantly, with what was good for her to know. In Verdun, Valentine at the Sister’s desk was telling a husband that they would perhaps have decided by the weekend whether there was to be an operation.

  “Here are the notes,” Vivian said when he had gone. “I’m sorry, I’ve been longer than I meant.”

  “It’s all right. There’s nothing to do. You can help with the trolleys.” She saw another strained, question-fraught face bearing down on her, and braced herself again.

  Next day, Thursday, was operation day, and a heavy one. Vivian ran for blankets, filled hot-water bottles, mixed salines, heaved the end of beds up on blocks, scrubbed mackintoshes, prevented partly anaesthetised patients from getting out of bed and held bowls under the heads of others, in the intervals doing her routine work as best she might. She took down one case to the theatre, where she stood masked, hooded and robed into the anonymity of a cult priestess while Sir Bethel, like an augur taking the haruspices, paid out fold after fold of intestine, lovingly, on to a sterile towel. She watched, chiefly conscious of a moment’s inactivity; the theatre never shocked or sickened her, it was too impersonal—the patient unconscious and almost wholly hidden under the white coverings, the exposed organs detached, as it were, from their context, like the diagrams in an anatomy book. Sir Bethel finished his meticulous work and departed filled with aesthetic joy, leaving the patient blue. Vivian ran back beside the trolley, trying to keep pace with the porters and peer into the blanket-swathed face: collided with someone, and when she found that it was Mic had no time to think about it, after one look to see that she had not made him drop the test-rack he was carrying. But at night-time she was glad of the day, because it was impossible not to sleep.

  Friday was a beautiful morning. Vivian jumped out of bed, stretched her back to shake out the stiffness of yesterday, and wondered if Mic was awake. Her sleep had been deep and unbroken, and everything looked easy, direct and clear. She ate a good breakfast, explaining as she did so, to an inquirer recently on Verdun, what Sir Bethel had found in Mrs. Wagstaffe’s abdomen. The sun shone on the marmalade dish and made it glow like amber light: a huge cumulus cloud rolled itself majestically across the sky in the window.

  The Home Sister got up.

  “Nurse Vane to Ramillies. Nurse Lingard to Trafalgar.”

  Vivian looked round her, at the shaft of sun, the sky, the tall cloud. She had not invented them, they were the same.

  “You’re lucky going to Trafalgar,” said the friend of Mrs. Wagstaffe. “I loved it when I was there.”

  “Yes.”

  “You do look fed-up, though. Arranged your off-duty, I suppose.”

  “Yes, I had.”

  “Jolly bad luck.”

  “It’s—” Vivian stopped, driving her fingers into the seat of her chair. It was no use. She could refrain from crying or saying anything, but that meant nothing, it only saved her social pride. It did not alter the fact that she was entirely enclosed in this moment, powerless to escape beyond it; nor change the certainty that she and Mic would need one another increasingly with knowledge and custom, that under the conditions of their life these miseries would continually recur, becoming less rather than more endurable: that she had given herself into the power of things, and would generally be alone.

  She went up to her room and tried to write to Mic to tell him: tore up the first draft because it said too much, the second because it said too little; dragged her bed together and went down to chapel, kneeling and standing and picking up her hymn-book when the others did.

  “Prophecy will fade away,

  Melting in the light of day.”

  sang the choir. Several other voices had joined in too; the hymn was unusually cheerful for a hospital choice.

  “Love will ever with us stay

  Therefore give us love.”

  The letters danced before Vivian’s eyes, and in their place she saw the girl with the glass beads, and heard her scream and her tapping heels.

  “Faith will vanish into sight,

  Hope be emptied in delight—”

  She shut her book and put it down. The oleograph saints shimmered in the sun, the rows of pleated caps, swimming together, seemed to move like water and slip past her, and she too drifted, subject to time, to the finality of its losses.

  Go, lovely rose. The sum of the world’s roses will be the same. But tell the free spirit so, not betrayed to transience by desire.

  Golden lads and girls all must, as chimney-sweepers, come to dust. Therefore, give us love. For thou, perhaps, on thy return, shalt find thy Darling in an Urne. Therefore, give us love.

  They said a prayer for the Diocesan Conference, and went up to the wards.

  Trafalgar (men’s surgical) was contemporaneous with the Albert Memorial. It was very high, conveyed, in spite of many huge windows, the impression of being always dark, and bristled with odd brackets, pulleys, and knobs whose purpose no one now living could remember. The patients’ bathroom contained, besides the bath, shelves of enamel-ware, the testing cabinet and specimen-glasses, and a large brass steriliser heated with a gasring. It also contained the off-duty list, but the beds had to be made and there was no time to look at it. She ran round with a red-haired staff-nurse, swinging twelve-stone men up into their pillows, trying to make the clothes look tidy over cradles and splints and pulley-lines, talking to the patients who were fit to talk, and wondering what to say to Mic.

  She was putting on her cuffs for prayers when the staff-nurse said to her, “You’ll be taking First Pro’s off-duty. When are you off today?”

  Vivian ran her finger along the list.

  “I don’t know,” she said dully. “I’m supposed to be down for a day off tomorrow, so Sister will give me what she thinks, won’t she?”

  “If you’re down for a day off tomorrow you’ll have it, of course, and evening tonight.”

  Vivian stared at the list till she could no longer see it.

  “But I thought—I mean, I’m not due till next week, and if it happened that way on Verdun, Sister used to make you wait three weeks for the next.”

  “Sister Trafalgar will give it to you.”

  It was true.

  Sister Trafalgar was small and weakly pretty, with pale eyes behind large glasses, faint blo
nde hair, and a cockney accent, and was a mystery. No Sister in the hospital was more efficient. She never gave any orders, but when she requested this and that in her shy genteel voice it was done, and done her way. She called no one careless, dirty, slovenly, and, in her ward, no one was. She never put the men in their place; and they respected her more than their mothers. She gave Vivian her day off.

  “You look quite gaffed,” said the red-haired staff-nurse. “After all, it has to come up heads some time or other.” Peering in the cracked mirror of the nurses’ lobby, she stuck a mouthful of kirbigrips into her hair.

  Vivian let out a long, deep breath. “What lovely hair you have,” she said. Her voice was deep and warm, and Rodd, the staff-nurse, was for her from that hour. But Vivian hardly realised that she had spoken. She was wondering if Mic knew that a day off included leave of absence for the previous night.

  The patients confided to one another, in their few minutes of privacy, that the new nurse was a good sport. It was something to see a bright face, they said.

  Mic was waiting in the square. He had persuaded the car to accompany him, and was sitting half-turned towards her, looking about.

  “Thank the Lord,” he said. “I was afraid they’d stopped you.”

  “I’m sorry. I was a bit late coming off, and then I had a bath.” She slipped in beside him.

  “Nice bath-powder you use. I can’t believe you’re here. This morning I was sure you wouldn’t come.”

  “What time was that?”

  “Early. Till about nine.”

  “Funny, because just then it didn’t look as if I would.”

  “Where shall we go? Do you mind being shaken up in this? You oughtn’t to walk after a day in the wards this weather. We’ve got nearly four hours.”

  “We’ve got longer than that.”

  “What, did she give you late leave after all?”

  “No, not exactly. I’ve suddenly come in for a day off. Tomorrow, you know.”

  “Tomorrow? Lord, what luck, that’s Saturday. We’ll have half the day. I mean, if you’re not doing anything?”

  “You know I’m not.”

  “Aren’t you? Everything seems different when you’re away. It does still, a bit. Where shall we go? God knows why we’re sitting here. What time do you have to be back tonight?”

  He did not know. She felt shyer than she had expected, but extraordinarily happy and secure.

  “Well—any time. The day off starts from now, you see.”

  “Oh, good,” he began cheerfully. “Then—” His voice stopped. They both looked into the windscreen, and caught one another’s eyes reflected there. “Good,” said Mic softly, and started the car.

  “Where are we going?” she said, as they left the town.

  “God knows. Oh, yes, but so do I. It’s just come. I’m taking you to the ballet.”

  “Mic, darling, you’re unhinged. We can’t make town under three hours.”

  “This car takes five, on a good day. But there’s a tour in Brancaster this week.” He named the company.

  As there was time, they avoided the macadamised artery with its tea-shacks and filling stations and went by the lanes, which were laced with cow-parsley between great lush hedges tangled in bryony. The evening was warm and cloudy and the fields thick with buttercups, so that the sunlight seemed reversed, swimming upward from the ground.

  “We’ll have time for some supper before it begins.”

  They found an inn that was a farm as well, with a clipped yew taller than itself towering in rings against its grey stone face.

  “What’ll you drink?” said Mic, laughing at her sidelong.

  “Beer.”

  She found that for the first time she rather liked it. The thing was to take long drinks, it got past the bitterness to the flavour. It was a good inn, and they left it unwillingly.

  “I hope there’ll be seats,” he said as they parked the car. “Brancaster is rather on to these things as a rule.”

  “Upper circle only,” said the box-office girl.

  “We forgot to look and see what they’re doing,” she said when they had found the seats.

  “Here’s the programme.” They broke the seal like children diving into a Christmas stocking.

  “Oh, Mic, it’s Giselle.”

  The lights went down, the music started. They touched one another’s hands in the darkness, and looked at the curtain with its flat silly nymphs.

  The footlights went on: the curtain lifted on the first act. In the interval they hardly spoke.

  Night fell: the water-witches danced by the mere, blown like mist, expiating their brief, too light mortality: and little Giselle floated out to them from her unhouseled grave. The lovers met and danced their brief reunion, their limbs moving in the rhythms of passion and of longing, their faces calm with a secret and dream-like peace.

  At last it was over; cockcrow came, the wraiths dissolved; Giselle was drawn into the sepulchre, and the prince left alone in the grey morning. Vivian clung to the last instant, dreading the lights and the noise of applause. There sounded for her, in the last phrases of the music, the lament for Ammon and Osiris, for Lesbia’s sparrow, for Lycidas and Adonais, for the flowers of the forest.

  The lights and clapping broke, Giselle and her lover took the curtain. Vivian turned, and met Mic’s eyes.

  Conversation and rustling broke out all round them, and presently two men climbed past them to get a drink. Mic blinked as though he had been asleep, and said, “They’re better than I’ve known them before.”

  Vivian found the programme slipping from her knees.

  “There’s something else, of course.”

  “Yes, I suppose there is. Let’s see.”

  “Prince Igor,” said Vivian dimly.

  “Oh. Prince Igor. Yes, they’re fond of that.”

  They held the programme together, looking at the cast, not reading it.

  “Do you think,” said Mic presently, “that Igor is one that grows on you?”

  They looked at one another again.

  “Well,” said Mic “suppose we—?”

  “Yes, we might.”

  It was scarcely dark outside: the city lights made the sky a deep unearthly blue, but as they got beyond them it greyed and grew luminous. Mic kept the main road this time: its offences were softened, reduced to silhouettes picked out with scattered lights. It saved half an hour.

  The dew had laid the smells of dust and petrol, and the field scents blew through to them, clover and great wafts of hay. Trees, and the grass verges of the road, leaped into the beam of the headlights with sudden colour and a hard, metallic clearness of design: moths as they drifted through it waved for an instant vans of fire, and gnats and midges danced like anvil-sparks. Mic and Vivian, scarcely speaking, leaned with their shoulders lightly touching. Mic looked after the car, which could not be treated cavalierly, and Vivian watched his hands through half-shut eyes.

  They rounded a bend, and the pale sky was quartered by a towering cube of lights. Vivian, who had not been that way for many months, could not recognise nor remember the huge building which, with its satellites, covered the area of several fields. It was too stripped and hard for a hotel, and too big: bigger than the hospital, and looking, Vivian thought, much more powerful and efficient.

  “What on earth’s that?” she asked lazily. It was already falling behind them and Mic was where he had been.

  “Haven’t you seen it before?” His voice, losing some of its sleepy gentleness, was a tone flat. “It’s a new chemical warfare experimental station. Been going a month or two now. Scot-Hallard goes there.”

  “Do they work at night too?”

  “So it seems.”

  Vivian said no more. In her mind scattered experiences linked, with a snap like Childe Roland’s closing hills. They came together single and clear, the girl with the glass beads, the chapel hymn, the evocation of Giselle. She knew who had been the prophet of their generation, and repeated the words softly, t
hinking the rattle of the car covered her voice.

  “Go on,” said Mic.

  She put her hand on his knee.

  “Listen.”

  It was the roar of a plane, made deeper by the night, spreading through the sky in pulsing rings of sound. Presently they could see the navigation lights sliding between the stars.

  “Yes,” said Mic. “Say it.”

  She said, slowly, accompanied by that throbbing bass,

  “‘But at my back I always hear

  Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;

  And yonder all before us lie

  Deserts of vast eternity.

  Thy beauty shall no more—’

  “Mic, I’m sorry. How could I, tonight?”

  “Why not? It’s always for tonight.” He smiled at her, his eyes darkened and made strange by the gloom.

  “‘Thus though we cannot make our sun

  Stand still, we yet will make him run.’”

  The roar of the plane dwindled to a gnat-like drone, to a faint tremor of the air. The car took a bend, throwing them closer together, and they did not move apart again.

  They climbed a hill, and saw above the trees the lights of the town to which they were returning, glowing like fixed summer lightning on the sky.

  “By the way,” Vivian said in a soft blurred voice, “what sort of ballet is Prince Igor?”

  “Oh, there’s a … But you said—”

  “I know.”

  The car protested shrilly as Mic stamped the accelerator down. They said nothing at all for the rest of the way.

  They left the car in its dark little garage in the mews, shut the doors on it, and stood with their hands on the bar, half-visible to one another and half-imagined.

  Mic took her wrist. “Come on,” he said. Laughing, they began to run.

  “You can’t just—say—Come on,” Vivian panted as they rounded the corner. “It isn’t—done. It’s—won’t I—come in for a minute, and—have a drink.”

  “You can have anything and—everything. Come on.”

  The light was out on the stairs. She stumbled; Mic pulled her arm over his shoulders and half-lifted her up them. They groped their way breathlessly, smothering their laughter though there was no one to hear.

  The door shut with a gentle snap. The room was quite dark; the street-lamp slid across one corner an upward-slanting, pale beam. Vivian only saw it for a second before they reached for one another, and Mic’s black silhouette eclipsed it; but in the drowning confusion of themselves, when she could not have said whether her eyes were shut by the night or her own eyelids or Mic’s mouth, she could still see the pale light streaming upward and the curtain glowing in metallic lines.