Purposes of Love

by Mary Renault

  “Who’s on casualty call?” Mic asked the porter.

  “Mr. Rosenbaum. But he’s in the other theatre.”

  “Will he be long?”

  “Couldn’t say, Mr. Freeborn. He’s only just opened up.”

  “But—” The violence that had been on Mic’s tongue died away. Everyone knew that casualties sometimes had to wait. The resident staff was hopelessly insufficient. He pictured little Rosenbaum in the theatre, his fads about his mask and gloves, his pleasantries which, recounted after, had seemed so funny. Now Mic could only think of them in terms of the extra seconds they took. He looked at Jan again. His own impatience seemed an intrusion in the presence of so much leisure. To release it he got up from the couch where he had been sitting, and wandered outside. The ambulance-men had stopped a little way off to fold their blankets up.

  “Well,” said the one who had travelled inside, “we got him in, anyhow. Never reckoned we would.”

  “Nice-looking chap, too,” said the driver. “I’ll need to fill-up before we go in; only about a gallon left. Looked pretty mucky, didn’t he?”

  “Pelvis fractured. See it through the skin. Cuts their guts to bits, that does. Wonder to me he didn’t pip out on the way.”

  “Poor bleeder. Didn’t make much fuss.”

  “They don’t feel nothing, not with the spine gone.” He handed a packet of Tenners. “What was that you was asking me about your Pool coupon when the call came through?”

  “Stoke and the Arsenal.”

  “Ah. You want to watch Stoke. I reckon that last home match” They had gathered up the folded blankets, and passed out of hearing.

  Mic stood still for a moment, looking after them, then went back into the little ante-room. A nurse had come in by the other door, and was trying to take Jan’s pulse, moving her fingers over his wrist because she could not feel it. He turned his head as Mic came in.

  “Hullo. Have they fixed your arm?”

  “Not yet. I was just walking about.” He saw that there was beginning to be a blueness round Jan’s eyes, and turned away.

  “Don’t go.”

  Mic said “All right,” and lowered himself mechanically on to the couch: then his mind became motionless in a half-dulled wonder. Had Jan said that? He himself seemed to be denying it. He was not looking at Mic; his half-shut eyes were steady, not flickering, like the eyes of the very sick and hurt, in search of reassurance or rescue.

  “Stay here with me.”

  “Yes,” said Mic half under his breath, “I—”

  “Well,” said the nurse, putting her watch away and suddenly recognising Mic. “Whatever have you been up to?”

  Mic heard her the second time. He answered something, looking at Jan’s face, composed like something carved in a calm forgotten age. But he had said it; he had said it in the end.

  “What’s the matter with your arm?” asked the nurse. “Feel like a fracture?”

  “No; it’s nothing really.” Mic got up, and stood near the stretcher-head. He could not be sure any longer that Jan was conscious; his eyelids had fallen lower.

  “Mic?” It was Jan’s voice, though it seemed to have come from another room with a closed door between, so that one only just heard it. Mic leaned down a little and touched his sunbaked hair. It felt shockingly young and warm, and shone in the light.

  “I’m here.”

  The Night-Assistant’s head poked briskly round the door.

  “Are you with this patient?” she asked.

  Presently Mic realised that she and the nurse were both looking at him.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Well, would you just come outside and give me a few particulars?”

  Mic closed his hand over one of the stretcher-poles.

  “Would you mind if—”

  “Run along,” murmured Jan.

  Mic let go of the stretcher and went out to the waiting-hall. It was a huge pillared place, with rows of benches, for the out-patients, stretching away into darkness. A solitary bulb burned over the Sister’s desk. The distant walls, half-lost in darkness, echoed like a cave.

  The Night-Assistant settled herself at the desk and drew the admission-book towards her; a tome three inches thick and an arm wide, ruled in blue and red. She had taken over since Mic’s illness and they had never met. She was thin and sallow, with prominent eyes and teeth; very spruce and consciously methodical.

  “We shall be admitting you too for tonight, I expect. May I have your name and address?”

  Mic gave them, too quickly, and had to repeat them again.

  “Age?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “Are you married?”

  “No.”

  “Well, where does your nearest relative live?”

  Mic knew this dialogue by heart; he had rehearsed it in Ramillies.

  “I have none.”

  “We must have some address. It needn’t be a near relation.”

  “I have no relatives at all. If you’d just let Dr. Lampeter know where I am in the morning.” His piece said, he turned back towards the closed door.

  “Well, your landla—”

  “Oh, you’re on the staff here.” Her voice trailed faintly upward; but the pathological assistants were fairly small beer.

  “Yes. If you’ll excuse me, I—”

  The desk telephone rang.

  “Yes, Mr. Rosenbaum. … Yes. … Yes, a good deal. … Very poor. … Yes.” She put back the receiver and brushed past Mic to the ante-room door. “Nurse, give that patient an ampoule of coramine and get him wheeled through into the theatre.” Returning, she blotted the admission-book carefully and ran her finger down to the next line.

  “Funny my not having seen you in the labs, but I don’t go up there very often. I expect they’ll discharge you in the morning. Now what was the other patient’s—your friend’s name?”

  “Jan Lingard.”

  “John Lingard,” she repeated precisely, writing it down.

  “J-a-n,” said Mic, his voice rising a little. He wanted suddenly to snatch the book out of her hand, to hit her over the head with it, to kill her. His hand was shaking, and he steadied it on the edge of the desk.

  Looking annoyed—for the correction spoiled the neatness of the page—the Night-Assistant altered the line.

  “Address?” she said. Mic gave it.

  “How old, about, is he, have you any idea?”

  “He’ll—he’d be thirty next month.”

  Little Rosenbaum, still wearing his theatre gown and cap, crossed the hall with his scampering trot and disappeared through the door beyond.

  “Would you just wait here, please?” The Night-Assistant got up and bustled after him.

  Mic waited. In a few minutes the other nurse came out and hurried across the hall, her feet awaking responses from walls lost in darkness, got something from a cupboard and hurried back again. The door closed behind her. There was a long hollow silence, into which footsteps in a distant corridor dropped and dwindled, tiny, distinct and menacing.

  Under the theatre door a crack of brilliant light showed; the shadows of feet came and went across it. Mic had only been in the place once, but suddenly he saw it all clearly and in minute detail; the position of the instrument-cabinets and sterilisers, the anaesthetic apparatus (they would not be needing that), the great Zeiss lamp over the table, with its diffused primrose-pale effulgence. He could picture Rosenbaum sucking his cheeks, as he did when he was pensive. “… And such a beautiful body. Beautiful, beautiful,” he used to say afterwards, with lingering melancholy.

  Jan stripped well. A skin tanned like thick brown silk, over sleek hard curves of muscle; open shoulders, narrow waist; the down of his chest and belly golden with sun. On the table under the soft shadeless glare of the Zeiss, what remained of him would satisfy Rosenbaum’s standards.

  “Stay with me,” he had said, perhaps for the second time in his life, perhaps for the first. But little Rosenbaum, considering the lachrytnae rerum over t
he ligatures and artery-forceps, would discover no protest in his eyes. It’s all right: I didn’t really want it.

  The Night-Assistant came smartly out, walked past Mic, picked up the desk-telephone and dialled a number.

  “Casualty speaking. We are sending you a patient with fractured spine, crushed pelvis and ruptured right kidney. Will you prepare for a blood-transfusion at once, please.” She took a form from the desk, and got up.

  A blood-transfusion, thought Mic. Christ, why can’t they leave him in peace!

  “Tell Rosenbaum,” he said, “that his blood-group’s two. It will save time.” (It had always amused Jan to be experimented on. His own group was incompatible, so he could not do even that.)

  The nurse’s teeth closed like a rabbit’s over her lower lip.

  “Well, I expect Mr. Rosenbaum would want a test taken.”

  “I have taken it. Did you think I was guessing it, you fool. … I beg your pardon.”

  “Not at all.” Both lips closed firmly over the teeth, she departed.

  The theatre doors swung back. A great shaft of light stabbed the gloom and ribbed the long tiers of the benches. Out of it they brought Jan, a vermilion streak of mercuro-chrome across his temple, his face still.

  Mic went up to the trolley. His eyes were half-open, but they did not move. Mic touched his arm through the blanket.

  “Jan.”

  With a little contraction of the lids his eyes quickened, and met Mic’s in the focus of sight. His lips moved, soundlessly.

  “What is it?” Mic asked.

  Jan drew in a thin breath and whispered, “Will you—”

  “Just a moment, please.” It was the Night-Assistant, with a white card in her hand. “We haven’t got all this patient’s particulars.”

  “For God’s—” Mic checked himself, and stood for a moment silent. Jan’s lips moved again; but Mic perceived that this time it was a smile that he was attempting. The porter was ready at the trolley’s head.

  Mic let his hand fall. “All right,” he said. “Good night, Jan.”

  He never knew whether Jan replied: the trolley was already on its way.

  The Night-Assistant had her book open again, and was unscrewing her pen.

  “We haven’t got the address of Mr. Lingard’s relatives. Do you know it?”

  Derbyshire, thought Mic dimly. The trolley, the other nurse beside it holding the case-sheet, vanished through the door at the end of the hall. Their father lives in Derbyshire. Near … There was a pause in his mind. Like someone returning from a long journey to a place grown strange, he said,

  “Yes, of course. His sister’s a nurse here.”

  -25-

  COLONNA PUT BACK THE last scoured bedpan on the rack and, to avoid thought, picked up a tattered Western magazine she had found in the ward. There was, for the moment, a lull in the work, so she sat down on the edge of the steriliser to read it. She preferred it to sharing the table in the ward with the night-nurse in charge, who was a couple of months junior to herself. Colonna was well overdue for this position; but she had been caught coming in late the month before. Pratt, the “first,” was plodding, humourless, and pointedly in earnest; disapproved of Colonna from the bowels outward, and did nothing to smooth the situation. It had, however, this in its favour, that it allowed little opportunity to meditate.

  The Western was called The Two-Gun Dude, and promised well. Cowboys of the classic kind were a fairyland which Colonna had never outgrown. In their company she dismissed life with its painful compromises, and became her private picture of herself. Flicking open the thumbed pages, and skipping the preliminaries with the ease of practice, she was the Dude in less than a couple of minutes. Clean-limbed, with sinews of steel and whipcord, she toted his silver-mounted guns, knotted his silk bandana, canted his elegant ten-gallon hat, confounded his hairy rivals, shot up his enemies, and kissed his pale-pink, incidental girl.

  But tonight even this exorcism failed, as every other was failing.

  She had given herself, in her own mind, two years to keep Valentine. Three, perhaps; perhaps four; but two at the least. There was security in the thought of years, even of brief years. But it was happening now. She did not know why. She had no experience to point her. She had always been the one to go away.

  Doubling back the gaudy paper cover, she read doggedly on.

  “‘So you figgered to frame me, Red.’ The Dude’s blue eyes were colder than the steel. With a sound that was half curse, half scream, Red Santander hurled forward; but the Dude’s guns had leaped to his lean fingers. ‘Waal,’ he drawled—”

  At the beginning of next year she would be twenty-seven. In a few years more her pose, her tricks of manner, her clothes, all her assumptions would have become ridiculous. She had not acquired any resources against growing old. A few months ago she had believed that she had. She had acquired Valentine. Secure in her, she had begun to let her other securities slip imperceptibly away. Now, with her going, everything had gone. She was not the Dude any more, not a glittering outlaw, but a tired woman, a rather humdrum case, conforming to the textbooks.

  It was not too late. It was never too late. She would buy a new suit, throw up her head, stop pleading with Valentine and begging her for this and that; find another girl, a prettier one, and make her jealous; leave her, forget her.

  “‘Waal,’ he drawled, ‘I guess this is where you and me—’”

  “Oh, there you are, Nurse Kimball. I’ve been looking for you everywhere.” Nurse Pratt, with her elbows sticking out at the angle characteristic of her, had come into the sluice. Colonna suppressed her instinctive movement to conceal the book, and tossed it casually aside. “I thought you might have heard the telephone.”

  “Well, I didn’t. I was purging the mind with pity and terror, as a change from giving enemas. Anything coming in?”

  “A patient is being admitted with a fractured spine, crushed pelvis and ruptured right kidney—”

  “Sacre bleu. I thought tonight was too peaceful.”

  “—and he’s to have a transfusion immediately.”

  “A transfusion! That will be Rosenbaum, I suppose. I wish he’d cultivate a lower boiling-point. Getting a poor devil of a donor out of bed at midnight and bleeding a pint out of him for a man who won’t live twelve hours whatever happens. We’ll put him in the side-ward, of course?”

  “Certainly,” said Pratt with dignity. Secretly she found her precedence even less comfortable than Colonna, but was determined not to let it appear. “Will you be getting on with it? Don’t forget the boards and the binder and the sandbags and the cradle. And put the transfusion things on to boil. I shall go down now and get a meal, so as to be ready when the case comes up. You’ll be sure to keep an eye on the ward, won’t you?”

  “Of course not,” said Colonna, exasperated. “I shall bolt myself in the lavatory and sit there till you come back.”

  Nurse Pratt stiffened her shoulders, tucked in her chin, and departed. Colonna tiptoed about the preparations, smiling sardonically. She guessed that Pratt was uncertain of the setting—a fairly complex one—for a blood-transfusion, and must be congratulating herself on passing the buck without loss of face.

  The case had not arrived when Pratt came back, and Colonna left in her turn for the second meal. In the passage she met Vivian, on her way to the dining-room too. Suddenly she remembered that Vivian had been another of her failures. She had, till now, long ceased to regret this and, indeed, enjoyed the ease of their friendship, but tonight she forgot it and the pleasant recollections that went with it. Only the thought of defeat remained.

  Vivian looked, as she generally did nowadays, deadly tired and devitalised. They greeted one another with indifferent smiles.

  “Had good nights off?” asked Colonna, for the sake of saying something.

  “Yes, thanks,” she answered listlessly. Awake all last night with the boy, Colonna thought, feeling a dull resentment directed she hardly knew where. “Been busy?” Vivian asked with th
e same perfunctoriness.

  “Not yet, but by hell we’re going to be. What do you think we’ve got coming in?” She explained.

  “Too bad,” said Vivian wearily.

  “I wish,” Colonna remarked as they walked towards the dining-room, “that old Beth would tell Rosenbaum where he gets off. A transfusion, I ask you.”

  Vivian said unemotionally, “I expect it’s a young man. Rosenbaum always panics when young people die. I suppose it seems to bring it nearer.”

  The casual bitterness in her voice penetrated Colonna’s self-absorption, and shocked her a little.

  “Are you taking iron, or anything?” she asked. “You ought to be. Most people need some sort of a tonic on nights. Your ward’s pretty full, too, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Extra beds in the middle. They tried to get us to take another case just now, but we hadn’t room. It was only a clavicle, or a dislocation or something.”

  “Well, we haven’t anywhere.”

  “I expect,” said Vivian without interest, “they put him up in Casualty somewhere. Or sent him home. After all, his wife could look after him with a little thing like that.”

  The Night Sister came hurrying—she was always in a hurry—along the corridor towards them.

  “She looks in a hell of a flap,” remarked Colonna idly. “Found someone’s room empty, I expect.”

  “Nurse Lingard. Will you just come in here for a moment?”

  Colonna walked on, wondering what Vivian could have done. She had obeyed with a harried vagueness unlike conscious guilt, but it must be something serious from Sister’s sickbed manner. Only the worst kind of trouble started with that. Perhaps the Matron had found out about young Freeborn. That—she felt unable to work up much feeling about it—would mean dismissal, for Vivian. He would get off, of course; the man always did.

  One would miss Vivian, probably, more than one expected. She was self-centred but not self-blinkered; and she saw things, if not always straight, at least first-hand. That was rare enough, hereabouts, to be valued. This kind of training—