by Mary Renault
“Well,” she said lightly, “after that, I think the less we spare the horses the better.”
“When are you going to meet me?”
“Not for a long time.”
He leaned towards her. “You can’t run away from life like that, my dear.”
Vivian’s balance returned, and with it her sense of humour and a certain amount of self-disgust. He must imagine I’m a good deal younger than I am, she thought, if he takes that line. Aloud she said, “I’m afraid it’s several years since I gave up spelling life with a capital.”
He changed direction quickly. “The fact remains that it’s very short.”
“I don’t waste it. That’s why I asked you to get me back by five-thirty.”
“I see. … How serious?”
“Do you define life for yourself entirely in terms of love-affairs? Or do you simply think that’s good enough for me?”
“I don’t think one way or another. I can see it in your face.”
Her retort, which she had thought good, felt suddenly adolescent. She said, “Then I wonder why you’re keeping me here?”
“That isn’t the only thing I can see. Very well, I’ll take you back. You’ll find I’m not easily parted from an idea.”
The car went on into the dusk. She tried to put what had happened behind her, but found it was still present whether she liked it or not. Scot-Hallard’s square head and wiry hair, his broad hands with their scrubbed close-cut nails, had ceased to be simply a visual impression.
The headlights, when he snapped them on, showed her a village twenty miles from home as the church clock struck six.
Scot-Hallard was driving in silence. She sat back and tried to force her tired mind to consider implications. One thing she knew she need not fear from him was any kind of awkwardness in the hospital. The water-tightness of his private and professional lives was a byword. Discretion with him needed no effort, but sprang naturally from his scale of proportions. If he met her on duty he would be as impersonal as his theatre gloves. The most probable event was that he would be too busy to notice her. In any case, she found she could not flog her stumbling brain so far ahead. It was enough, and more than enough, to decide what she was going to say to Mic. She was not likely, now, to be much less than an hour late.
At the thought of beginning the evening with any sort of situation, every weary nerve in her body seemed to cower. She was in no state tonight to fling a foil at his head. Tears, or a thin petulance, felt nearer her mark. It was impossible, she could not make herself face it. She would have to tell him she had overslept. Only for tonight. Tomorrow, when they had been happy for a little while, it would be easy. He would understand if she explained how tired she had been. She rested, in a moment of contentment, on the certainty of his kindness.
She asked Scot-Hallard to put her down at the Post Office. It was non-committal, and three minutes from the flat. They were in the outskirts of the town before she realised that, by the way he was taking her, they would approach it through the High Street. However, it was almost fully dark by now.
She had resolved not to look up; but, as they passed the flat, found it impossible to prevent herself from doing so. She had forgotten the street-lamp outside. It shone full into her upturned face; and into Mic’s, as he stood in the unlighted window looking down.
Before there was time for any sign of recognition, they had passed out of sight. Scot-Hallard, watching the traffic, had not seen anything. She noticed for the first time that her hands and feet were cold. The picture of Mic’s silent eyes, encountering hers like a stranger’s, stayed with her. She said to herself, trying to make it sound as prosaic and usual as possible, Well, I shall have to see it through now. Better to get it over, after all. He is sure, really, to understand.
Scot-Hallard had stopped. She thanked him with what she hoped was a safe mixture of social gratitude and emotional discretion. He only said, “Au revoir,” accompanying it with a look that shouldered her flimsy structure aside and made the wreckage look foolish. She found as she walked to the flat that her limbs were cramped and stiff with driving, and remembered with a shock that she had not attended to her face and hair since Scot-Hallard had kissed her. She tried to tidy herself a little by the reflection in a shop-window. There was no time or place for anything more.
She realised, as she climbed the stairs, that there was nothing in the world she wanted except sleep. She could not imagine, now, what had possessed her to stay out for the afternoon instead of resting. It had taken the evening from Mic as surely as if she had consented to spend it with Scot-Hallard instead. It was this which gave her a feeling of disloyalty: not the fact that Scot-Hallard had kissed her. That was irrelevant. One did not supersede one’s right hand by learning to light a cigarette with the left.
As a rule he heard her coming upstairs and would have the door open before she got there; but tonight she found it closed. Her key was in her bag, but for some reason she felt unable to use it. She knocked, and heard the scrape of a chair as he got up. The door opened, the light inside dazzling her for a moment. She saw that he was standing aside politely for her to pass through.
She went in, put down her bag and gloves on the table, and turned to him. He had closed the door and was standing with his fingers on the handle, looking at her.
“I’m sorry I’m late, Mic. Honestly it wasn’t my fault. I kept telling him all the afternoon I had to be back.”
He said nothing. He made, after Scot-Hallard, a sharp and rather disquieting contrast; like something with a knife-edge balance after the solidity of a monolith: too slim, too highly sensitised, put together with too dangerous a fineness; easy to hurt, frighteningly capable of hurting.
She could not wait for him to speak. She went on, a halftone higher, “You’re not going to be silly about it, are you, darling? You know I wouldn’t do it on purpose. Don’t you?” She went up to him, and, putting her hand on his arm, made to kiss him.
She felt him stiffen. She had been going to say something more, something light to restore proportion: but when she saw his face she could not speak. That he would be angry she had half-expected; feared that he might be hurt; but nothing could have prepared her for this quiet stare of shocked, incredulous distaste. All her prepared defences vanished. She seemed to contract, as if he had drenched her with icy water.
“Thanks,” he said, “but I think I’d rather you washed Scot-Hallard off first, if you don’t mind.”
She pulled her hand away from his arm and stepped back. Because it was the involuntariness of his movement that had been unbearable, she said, “Don’t strike attitudes.”
He did not answer.
“I dare say I do look a wreck.” She listened to the forced jar of her own voice. “I’ve been driving in an open car, you know.” She took the mirror out of her bag mechanically, looking for him to speak. It could not be real, she thought; she was so tired, it was a trick of her eyes, a trick of the light, that made Mic seem to stand there with a face of helpless and secret shame, like a child that has seen its mother do something it dimly knows to be obscene.
So as not to see his face any more, she looked in the glass at her own. After a moment she lowered it; but Mic’s eyes were still there and she looked again. She saw what he had seen; her mouth and eyes sagging with fatigue which her heavy make-up had masked into dissipation: the expression she had been wearing for Scot-Hallard—not one familiar to Mic, with whom she had never flirted—still faintly lingering: the new hat tilted too far: at one corner of her mouth the lipstick blurred in a small, unmistakable smear. She put the glass away.
“I’m sorry. Perhaps you’re right. May I use the bathroom?”
“Please do. I think I left a clean towel.”
He was still standing there, with his hand on the door, as she went out.
The hot water was comforting, softening her face from the stiffness of stale make-up and lack of sleep. When she picked up the towel, she saw that he had put out, too, the dressing-gow
n and slippers she kept there, her brush and comb and a fresh cake of soap. They were like a sudden light revealing desolation. For a week she had been living for this evening, and Mic, when he laid out these things as neatly as a lady’s maid, had been smiling to himself, looking forward too. She had wasted it, for some reason she could no longer remember. What had happened? It was only some passing snap of the nerves, a trivial thing; there must be some simple way to get this moment of expected happiness back again.
She brushed her hair back smoothly, left only a little powder on her face, and looked in the glass again. The result was not decorative, but at any rate fairly honest. It will be all right in the end, she thought, it always has been. She went back into the dining-room, and found him setting the table with his usual method and care. The ordinariness of it was reassuring. She came towards him smiling.
“Do I look cleaner?”
He laid down his handful of cutlery and put his hands under her elbows. After a moment’s hesitation, he kissed her. She tried to return his kiss, but could not. She seemed to have no part in it, and it frightened her. It was like an experiment in something not quite understood: tentative, watchful, tinged with a kind of reluctant curiosity. She murmured, “Mic—please,” and drew away from him.
Suddenly he swore under his breath and pulling her back to him, kissed her furiously, giving her no time or chance to respond. It hurt her physically, but more by what she felt in it of a tormented hostility. It was as if he had struck rather than kissed her. The whole day’s strain flooded into her sense of outrage. She wrenched herself out of his arms.
“Was that necessary?” Her voice was shaking a little, but not with tears. “When I’ve done anything about which you’re justified in getting hysterical, Mic, I’ll let you know.”
“I’m sorry,” he said stiffly. “I’m not justified in criticising anything you do. But you looked rather—unlike yourself—when you came in.”
“I was dead tired and made up over it. You ought to be used to the look of that by now.”
“I’m sorry you’re tired. You’ve been up all day, I expect.”
“Yes, I have.”
“Would you like some coffee?”
“No, thanks. I’ve just had some.”
“You must have an early night. You’ll feel better then.”
“I shouldn’t wonder. I hardly could feel worse.”
Out of a cold solitude Vivian looked up at the unknown young man with whom Mic, departing, had left her. It was terrible that he should be so like Mic. She must not let him see she was afraid.
“In that case it would be almost more convenient if I slept at the hospital, wouldn’t it?”
“If you prefer that. Did you enjoy yourself?”
Vivian’s self-control gave away.
“For the love of heaven, Mic, make any kind of scene you like except this kind. I ought to have told you I was going: I know that. Black my eye if it makes you feel better. But this sort of thing’s impossible and I can’t stand it.”
“There was no need for you to tell me. Why should you?” His cool tautness suddenly left him. He said, quietly, “Your time’s your own. If I’ve been behaving as if I had a claim on it, I apologise. It will be soon enough to think about that when I can ask you to marry me.”
Vivian put her hand up to her head. If only she had slept, she thought, she could deal with this. There was a right thing that could be said. But she could not find it. She could only feel the irritable protest of her weariness at being asked to make the effort. The knowledge that she was about to fail made her desperate: her desperation flooded into anger.
“Mic, we can’t labour through all that again. I’ve tried to tell you I’m not something on hire-purchase. I belong to you now as much as I ever shall however much you marry me and keep me, and you’d better make up your mind to it.”
“I’ve done that,” said Mic slowly, “already.”
She felt she could have screamed and beaten on the walls of emotion that shut them in as one might on the walls of a cell; flinging her weight in helpless fury at Mic’s limitations and his tortured awareness of them, at her own worn-out nerves and defiant fear.
“My dear, we must pull ourselves together. It’s so futile, such waste. After all, what’s really happened? Nothing.”
“I suppose not,” said Mic wearily. “One should submit these things to reason. It’s easy enough to talk about it. I can’t do it, that’s all. I can only see you coming in at that door.” His jaw tightened: she saw that their weak attempt at exorcism was over. “Have you seen any of Scot-Hallard’s other women? Because I have.”
“His … Mic, have you the least idea what you’re saying? Do have some self-control. You must be out of your mind.”
“I beg your pardon. His women, then. But you evidently have seen them, to give such a good impersonation.” He glanced down at her dress.
“Don’t be disgusting.” She was losing her temper; she felt it going half in fear, half in angry satisfaction. A mixed ferment rose in her: hurt pride: she thought that the dress had cost more than she could afford; the certainty that he would have liked it if she had not worn it for Scot-Hallard first. Her brain seemed to grow hot and light, to expand, and throw off words like steam which smoked away from her before she could examine them, “Haven’t you enough intelligence to see when you’re being simply pathological? I’m wearing a perfectly normal outfit that you can see in every shop and every magazine, and no more make-up than most women put on every day of their lives. Good God, Mic, are you going to raise hell like this every time I show signs of leading an ordinary social life? Because if so let’s get the thing clear. I’m not going to spend the rest of my life slopping about in tweeds and an old shirt just because you can’t stand the sight of a woman unless she’s half got up as a—” She paused, biting her lip.
Mic’s face seemed to be uninhabited. “Yes? Please go on. Better to have it clear, as you say.”
Where are we going? cried her bruised and terrified mind. It was like feeling one’s clothing caught in a machine: seeing what was coming, struggling impotently to get free.
“I’m sorry, Mic. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”
“Didn’t you? I thought you did. I shouldn’t go back on it, it’s probably true.”
“No. I ought not to have said it.”
“It isn’t important.”
The thing could not have happened, protested her remorse and fear, so easily, with these few seconds’ worth of words. There must be some hand-hold that could drag them back again. She groped for it, clumsy with panic.
“Mic, we must stop working up this fever. It’s madness, we’re neither of us responsible for what we say. Listen. I did flirt with Scot-Hallard, in a trivial way. He kissed me once. That’s absolutely all. I don’t blame you if you were jealous for a minute. But you know it means nothing. You know really. Don’t keep on.”
His eyes travelled over her. She saw again that flinching speculation.
“Oh, Scot-Hallard kissed you.”
“Of course he did. You knew that as soon as I came in.”
“Was it nice?”
“It was amusing, for a second or two. What does it matter, to us? Try to keep some sense of proportion.”
“Evidently I haven’t one … God, how could you? A man like Scot-Hallard. How could you? It just makes me want to be sick.”
“That’s morbid. He isn’t vicious: too many other uses for his brains. You ought to know that.”
“I know enough about Scot-Hallard.” She saw that he had gone white. His eyes looked unnaturally large and dark, like the dilated eyes of someone drugged. “He’s gross. All he’s fit for is hanging around brothels, but he knows his way about too well for that. Seduction’s cheaper and more hygienic. I shouldn’t think he ever wasted a minute’s honesty or kindness on a woman in his life. He’s filthy. … You know that, and still you go out with him. And without even having the decency off you, you come back here to me made up like o
ne of his worn-out tarts, with smears of paint where he’s mucked you about, and expect me to enjoy it. … Go back to him, if he gives you such a damned good time. If that’s what you like I don’t see what use you can have for me.”
“That’s more than enough, Mic.”
They looked at one another, amazedly remembering the times when they had neither known nor cared where one mind and body ended and the other began. That they could become this. From the friend, the lover—the face seen without eyes in the darkness, the whisper before the kiss, the silence after—had been made this impenetrable thing, this sharpened and hardened instrument of pain.
“Yes. I’m sorry.” He sat down on the edge of the table. The incandescence had died down; he looked tired and drawn. “It’s what I feel, but I might have expressed it with a little more restraint.”
“What does it matter how you express it? If we can do this to one another it’s no good going on. We were happy while it lasted, but it’s better we know in time. Good-bye.”
He got up. “Where are you going?”
“Anywhere. Back to be myself again, if I can.”
“Vivian. We—” Hesitatingly, he came towards her.
“No. Go away from me. Stay away. Mic, if you come near me again and touch me as if I were a new kind of dirt, I’ll hit you in the face. Go away, I can’t bear any more. For God’s sake let me go.”
She had been backing away from him: now with a stumbling swerve she snatched open the door and ran down the stairs into the street. As she went she thought she heard the door open again behind her; but the rattle of her own feet drowned it. The street door closed. The lamp threw her lengthening shadow before her; for each of her halting steps it shot forward with a great stride, till its head was hidden in darkness.
It had happened. She was alone.
-19-
SHE WALKED BACK, THROUGH the streets, through the hospital gates, through the passages. Someone said, “Hullo, Lingard, got nights-off?” and she said “Yes,” and felt her face move in a smile.
Up in her room her uniform was thrown over a chair, as she had left it in the morning. On the locker was a book that Mic had lent her, with a pencilled note from him marking the page. She pulled it out and began slowly to tear it up. The strips she made were horizontal, and on one of them she read, “I wish you were here. If you were—” Her fingers moved more quickly, tearing the strips into finer and finer pieces.
