by Mary Renault
“Is it closing-time yet?”
“Past,” said Mic without looking at his watch. The nearest inn was the “Hawk and Ring”, and he did not want to go there.
“Never mind. The air up here’s nearly as good.”
They turned into the Roman road that ran clear along the edge of the Downs for more than seven miles. Jan began to let the engine out, smiling to himself. He had experienced, ever since this morning on the snowy bridge, a curious heightening of life. It had been with him even in Vivian’s room: he had been moved and sorry there, but never shaken by doubt. It had given the Tightness of necessity to what had happened between himself and Mic. He felt himself encompassed by a clear exaltation and delight. Before him, the headlamps turned the moths and midges that crossed their beam to motes of fire. Suddenly one of their mazes, scattering, made what seemed to Jan the loveliest and most significant pattern he had ever seen. It startled with certainty, it linked and illuminated irreconcilables. He knew all at once what he ought to say to Mic; he knew that it would succeed. He knew, too, the answer to an older question of his own, an answer he had always been seeking.
The light filled him, and the sound of it. Even to his physical eyes light seemed to spring up, leaping to meet him. He heard a shout beside him. It reached him like a sound of triumph: he threw up his head.
“Jan! Look out!”
The web dispersed. He saw, and went for the hand-brake as Mic reached desperately for it too. The old car screamed like a stallion, and ground on with dragging but scarcely diminished speed. The huge van ahead seemed to lean over him like a black cliff. Its moon-like lamps swooped apart. Then the earth smote up at him; a force roared through the air, blasting the universe over sideways; for a great space of thought he was falling, hearing his own voice cry out to him from a long way off.
He seemed to have awaited, for many years before it reached him, the great blow, like the swinging blow of an axe, that drove into his back.
-24-
MIC TURNED OVER ON the road, sucking in his breath with pain, and levered himself up, slowly, on the arm that he could use. The world had come to rest, and he identified with surprise the same patch of road which, a second before, he had seen disintegrated into a leaping chaos. A few yards away was a vague blur, which he recognised as the car on its side; it had skidded when the brakes went on, and struck the van glancing. Mic remembered being hurled out, and imagining, as he hung in the air, the sensations of the impact that was coming and the moment of death. He had landed on his outflung right arm and, by the feel of it, fractured his clavicle with a dislocation of the shoulder. Shock had driven the strength out of him; most of the skin had been stripped off his hand, and gravel ground in; but otherwise he seemed whole.
These discoveries lengthened out the first instant of re-gathered consciousness. He got stumblingly to his knees.
“You went to sleep,” he said, startled to hear his own voice; he had not known it was going to say anything. When he had listened curiously to the sound, he became aware of the silence that had followed it. Nursing his dragging arm with the good one, he swayed to his feet.
“Jan!” he called. “Where are you? Are you all right?”
There was a pause, filled with a small and indeterminate, but somehow frightening sound, which stopped abruptly. Mic stumbled towards the car.
“Jan!”
A dark figure crossed the line of the van’s headlights, and came towards him.
“Thank God,” he said. “I thought—”
“Are you hurt bad?” It was the vanman, who had climbed down and seemed, like his van, unhurt. He was a stockily-built cockney; and looked at Mic with a resentment tempered by concern.
“I wasn’t doing above ten. Couldn’t you of seen there wasn’t no room to pass?”
“Yes,” said Mic vaguely. “I’m sorry. Jan!”
“The other chap’s under the car. I’ve been trying but I can’t shift nothing.”
“Where?” Mic started forward, not feeling for a second or two the wrench in his shoulder. The single unbroken lamp of the van gleamed grotesquely into the under parts of the car, sprawled slanting away from it. In the shadow on the other side Jan lay on his face. The car covered the lower half of his body. He was not moving, and made no sound.
“The two of us might shift it,” the vanman said.
Mic knelt, and took Jan’s wrist. To do it he had to let go of his own arm, which sagged down with a jerk. After a moment of cold sickness he found he was still holding Jan’s radial artery; it was pulsating weakly.
“We must get this off him, somehow. I can’t use my right arm.” Confused by its pain and hindered by its limp encumbrance, he strained at the body of the car. The vanman heaved and grunted; his leather coat ridged itself across his broad shoulders. The mass felt settled like a granite boulder.
“Could you take down the door, do you think?”
“Not the way it’s jammed now. Have to be cut away, that would.”
“Well, we can’t leave him here,” said Mic, as if the statement must produce some effect.
“I’ve got a rope. Maybe I could tow it off of him.”
“Good God, no, you’d drag him too.” Mic looked round him. There was a kind of shelter in the moment’s necessity, in crisis and expedient. “How long’s the rope, a good long one? Well, look, run it round that tree on the far side of the road. Fix it to the top side of the car, and get into reverse if your bus will move. That should right it. If you could only ease it up a bit I might—oh, hell; can you sling up my arm with something or other? I can’t do anything like this.”
Taking his crispness for the voice of habitual authority, the vanman did as he was bid without discussion. He rigged a sling out of his bandana and Mic’s tie, with what seemed endless fumbling. Mic gritted his teeth more for the loss of time than for the pain. The arm ought to have been strapped to his side, but there were no more minutes to waste.
In the van they found two ropes which, joined, made just length enough. The vanman fixed them, and climbed into his seat. “There’s a front wheel half buckled,” he said, “but I think she’ll shift that much.” The engine started; the rope grew taut. Presently, with a broken sound like scrap-iron, the car began to move.
Mic stood with his left hand and right foot braced against Jan’s side. The car was just clear; but the rope was creaking, and he thought suddenly that it might break and let the thing crash back again. One quick heave now would get Jan beyond it; something in the look of his back and the way he was lying prevented Mic from making it. Instead he got down on his knees and, as the car lifted, slid his own shoulders between. Jan lay still.
With a sudden shattering noise the car fell back on to its chassis, and lurched drunkenly forward at the end of the rope. The van stopped.
“Did the trick,” said the driver, returning. He looked at Jan, rubbing the back of his head uncomfortably. “I’ve got some sacks in the van he could lie on fairly soft.” Bending, he put his hands under Jan’s armpits to lift.
“Stop!” Mic lurched forward, his loosely-secured arm swinging as he moved. When he could speak again, he said, “Don’t lift him. We’ll have to get the ambulance. If you could just help me roll him on his back without twisting him. …There ought to be a pad for the lumbar flexure. My coat might—” He tried to remove it. “Oh, God damn this arm.”
In the end the vanman produced a folded sack, and turned Jan while Mic steadied him in a cold sweat. The man was powerfully made and, apart from mechanics, terrifyingly clumsy, but at last took in what was required. Finally they managed it. Jan lay with upturned face, a trickle of blood coming from a graze on his forehead. His eyes were closed. He looked, as usual, perfectly calm, and in command of his part of the situation.
Mic took him by the shoulder and called his name. His mind repudiated what he saw, as the stomach rejects food it lacks the strength to assimilate. Jan would get up in a moment, and explain that it had all been a mistake. While one part of his brain rep
eated this, the other half saw with a cold clearness the anatomical structures over which the buckled metal of the door had lain, what was likely to have happened to them, and the result.
“There’s an A.A. box at the bottom of the hill,” he said.
“That’s right,” said the man. “Have to walk it. No room to turn. Flat tyre and wheel buckled, too.” He paused. “Came at me like he couldn’t see nothing there.” He looked appraisingly at Mic, who seemed sober, and a sense of his own wrongs rose in him. “I’ll be finding myself on the dole over this, you’ll see. My firm don’t like accidents. Wife and five kids. I wasn’t doing above ten.”
“My brakes were defective,” Mic said. “Tell your firm I’ll admit it. Better hurry on and get that ambulance.”
Jan felt very chilly to touch. Mic groped in the back of the car for a rug to put over him. He tucked it round as best he could. The vanman’s footsteps receded and died away. Mic sat down beside Jan, nursing his arm. The activity that had supported the last few minutes sank into stillness. There was nothing but a great cold, the wind, and the thin wailing of the wires. A nightjar sounded. Mic’s mind came out of its trance of action, into the cold, the silence and the wind.
If he had refused to take out the car. If he had refused to let Jan drive it. If he had not said it was past closing-time. If he had watched what Jan was doing, as he would have watched anyone else. If, even when he saw what was going to happen, he could have shaken off an instant sooner the blind faith which Jan evoked in the teeth of reason and of natural law. It all lay such a little way back in the past. It seemed fantastic that one could not reach out a hand and make the small needed alteration. But it was done; all those fluid alternatives were set, like cooled steel, into this fact.
Today he and Jan had met. They were at the beginning. There was no logic in it, no shape.
He was aware of some difference in the shadows beside him; and looked down into Jan’s open eyes.
“Is that you, Mic?”
“Yes. How are you feeling?”
“I’m sorry I did that.”
“It’s all right. Don’t move.” Mic put a hand warningly on his shoulder.
“I wasn’t going to. What’s the matter with your arm?”
“Glenoid dislocation chiefly. They’ll slip that back in half a minute. Got much pain?”
“Hardly any. Just a backache, and I feel sick. A lorry, wasn’t it? Where’s the man?”
“Not hurt. He’s gone to get help.”
“How long’s he been gone?”
“Five or ten minutes.”
“Has he? Funny. I thought it had only just happened. Was your car insured?”
“Yes,” said Mic untruthfully. “Don’t worry about anything.”
“What’s that light?”
“Just the headlight on the van.”
“It keeps dimming and going up again.”
“Probably pass off in a minute. Are you cold?”
“Not really. I never feel the cold very much. No, don’t take that off, I don’t want it.”
“All right, only keep still.”
The moon came out from behind a huddle of driving cloud, seeming to sail on a strong trade-wind across a starred gulf of sky. Jan turned his face towards it. Its whiteness made a still glitter in his eyes; he lay unstirring until its smooth traverse ended in another cloud.
“It won’t come,” he said.
“What won’t?”
“I was going, to tell you something. But I can’t remember now what it was.”
“Never mind. It’ll come back later on.”
“Perhaps.”
A hunting owl went over them with its dark silent stir. Soon afterwards there was the brief cry, shrill and hard like glass, of some small creature being killed.
“I told him to ring up for the ambulance,” Mic said. “You’ll be more comfortable in that. Properly warmed, and everything.”
“I always wondered what they were like inside.”
There was silence again. The wind was rising.
“I’m sorry about driving,” Jan said. “I ought not to at night. I knew that really.”
“I shouldn’t have let you. The car wasn’t fit to be on the road.”
“I knew that too. Nothing would have stopped me, though. I don’t know why.”
He finished with a gasp, and his lips looked blue. “Don’t talk so much,” Mic said. He was trying to calculate whether the man could have reached the telephone yet.
A scudder of small clouds came over, lightening and darkening as they netted the light of the hidden moon. It was getting steadily colder, and Mic’s dislocated arm felt like ice enclosing protesting nerves. Jan was quiet for several minutes. His voice hardly carried against the wind when he spoke again.
“I wish I could remember what it was I wanted to tell you. But I knew it would go.”
“Leave it till the morning.”
A pause again. Mic was reminded of he knew not what; it was like the fantastication in a dream of something well-known. He found himself listening for a whistle. Then he remembered. It was like seeing someone off by train; the clock crawling through the last minutes, the futility of one’s remarks increasing with the last-minute effort to be significant. A remembered picture came to him of Jan standing in strong sunlight, checked in a moment of suspended movement: “No, don’t come to the station; it’s so dim.”
“Are you warmer now?” he asked.
“Fine, thanks.”
Hope you have a good journey. Well … it’s been nice having you. The train’s late starting, surely, isn’t it? Don’t forget to write to me.
“Mic.”
“Yes?”
“My back’s broken.”
A gust of wind came over like a wave, and licked the rug from Jan’s shoulders. Mic caught it and held it down with his left hand and his knee.
“What makes you think that?”
“I felt it go. And my legs won’t move.”
Mic slid his hand under the rug and touched Jan’s knee.
“Can you feel that?”
“Feel what?”
“Nothing. Never mind. Sometimes if you have a bad jar it numbs you temporarily.”
“I dare say.”
“They don’t make anything of spinal fractures nowadays. Just put them in a plaster jacket. You’ll be walking in a few weeks.”
“Yes,” said Jan, like one unwilling to be argumentative. “I expect I shall.”
He closed his eyes. Mic knew he was conscious because now he looked tired. As if simplified by the body’s extremity, his face seemed to have shed a decade of experience and maturity. It moved behind Mic’s mind the image of another sleeping face; but, concerned with the present, he let the vague thought go.
From time to time he could hear the passage of cars along the distant main road. Every second or third sounded like the ambulance till it passed. Jan’s head lay on the naked road and he dared not lift it to his knees. Drawing cautiously away, he got somehow out of his coat and, returning, eased it under as best he could.
“I told you—” Jan began, opening his eyes; but his voice drifted off as if he were no longer interested. “Thanks,” he said.
His forehead was still bleeding a little. Mic got out his handkerchief and held it over the place.
“Don’t look so worried.” There was a tenuous amusement in Jan’s voice. “You’ll see bloodier heads in Spain.”
“Damn Spain. You don’t suppose I’d go till you’re better, do you?”
“Won’t you? That’s good. You haven’t a cigarette?”
“Of course. Oh, but the petrol; it’s all over the shop. I’m so sorry, Jan. I’ll give you one in the ambulance.”
“It’s all right. I didn’t really want it.”
He shut his eyes again. Gradually his face was smoothed, as if by sleep.
Don’t come to the station. Messing about. You could be doing something. Mic sat still, his back to the wind, nursing his aching arm.
&nb
sp; He was surprised when at last the ambulance came. It was like time breaking in on eternity. They could hear the bell, clearing the high-road, a long way off. Jan turned his head.
“Ambulance coming,” Mic said.
“I know. This is the first time I ever tried to make myself useful. Apparently not my function.”
The lights of the ambulance turned the bend, swinging a long shadow round the wreckage in the road.
There was a smooth sound of brakes. The ambulance men, cheerfully capable and interested, ran up with their stretcher.
“It’s his back,” Mic said. “Possibility of a fracture.”
“Right, sir. We’ll watch after that.” They rolled the stretcher under Jan with skilled smoothness, and were about to cover him again when the man who knelt lowest took his hand away and held it out in the light of the headlamps.
“Here,” he said, “half a minute. What about this?”
Jan looked round at the palm’s wet redness. “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t feel anything.”
“Run back and get the dressing-box, Fred.”
They got it, found scissors and slit Jan’s clothes away. When the stuff had parted Mic shut his eyes for a second, then watched while they did what could be done. The darkness, the cold and the wind’s edge were in his heart and bones. Jan glanced at the proceedings and then away, as if a momentary interest had been satisfied, or a foregone conclusion confirmed.
In the ambulance they let him have Mic’s cigarette.
By the time Mic’s arm had been splinted to his body (he had become so used by then to the pain that its partial cessation was like a shock of pleasure) they were purring in through the hospital gates. The night-porter came out and helped to unslot Jan’s stretcher from its supports and to slide it on the trolley; casually efficient, exchanging gossip with the ambulance-men over his shoulder. They wheeled it into the little ante-room beside the out-patients’ theatre, changed the blankets belonging to the ambulance for older ones, belonging to the hospital, and left him with the porter and Mic. It was a tiny cell-like place, just holding a cupboard and examination-couch; the stretcher nearly filled it.
On the journey Jan had become increasingly quiet. Now, under the unshaded light, his head might have been cut, with the reticence and precision of some archaic craftsman, out of one hard pale-brown stone. His colourless face seemed to shade into his hair, bleached hemp-fair by many latitudes of sun. His eyes did not wander, like those of the other injured men that Mic had seen.
