by Mary Renault
“It’s such a shame,” murmured Christie later on, “that you can’t sleep here.”
“I know,” said Kit. The cushions were as lumpy as fieldgrass, but he meant it. He had recovered, lately, a gift for sleeping anyhow and anywhere, which had helped him through long stretches of heavy work in his hospital days. In the last two years, he had found it forsaking him; it seemed, somehow, obvious and natural that now it should come back.
“Do you get bored,” she asked, “playing house in here?”
Till she spoke, he had almost forgotten about the picnic. She had had one of her bewildering transitions to experience; when they were making love she seemed neither childlike nor sophisticated, but an ageless and necessary counterpart of himself. He stroked her hair drowsily and said, “No, I like it. It’s rather a rest.”
“Is it?” She pulled his hair—a sign of embarrassment—and said quickly, “You get so sick of sharing a room, or using rooms that aren’t yours. When I was a kid my room was really the spare room, and I had to keep it looking all polite. And at the Abbey, where I work, you’re liable to sleep pretty well anywhere, specially when the Summer School’s on. Once I slept on the stage. That was rather a lark.”
Kit suddenly found the evening’s entertainment no longer amusing. He hugged her roughly and said, “I wish I could. …”
“Could what?”
“I don’t know. Look after you, and give you somewhere to be.”
She giggled. “What, put me dans mes meubles? How funny. I don’t know why it should be so funny, do you?”
“Of course it sounds funny when you put it in French. Too technical for you.”
“Would you like me to be more mistresslike, darling? Would I fascinate you more if I wore teagowns and black lace vests? And diamond garters?”
“You disgusting little horror. Would you like to?”
“Well, I’d look very nice in them. In fact, I never know why I don’t do well as a kept woman. I always do something terribly bad form, laugh at the wrong moment or something. Oh, darling, I do love having some one of my own age.”
Such information as this remark contained, Kit had guessed long before, and he did not want, particularly, to know anything further.
“Just how old are you,” he asked, “if it isn’t rude?”
“Practically twenty-two. Are you laughing? Your face feels funny.”
She dug her fingers into his hair and rubbed it, with catlike pleasure, against her cheek.
“You always smell so nice. What’s the stuff you scrub your hands with?”
“Dettol, I expect.”
“If I smelt that anywhere I should think of you.”
For Kit, the sweetish clean smell meant childbirth, infectious fevers, suppuration, death, and certain emergencies desperate enough to have survived the ruck of others in his mind. “Would you?” he said. “How funny.”
There was a little pause, in which an owl that had been squawking in the middle distance flew away, and a single star shone in through a gap in the creeper, looking curiously meaningful, like a signal. Kit pulled his arm from under Christie to look at the luminous dial of his watch.
“You haven’t been here very long,” Christie said.
In point of fact, he had sometimes stayed longer, but he felt, for no reason, suddenly keyed up and anxious; he could not settle down again, and left a few minutes later. On the way back he was annoyed with himself. Nerves were the last thing he could afford to cultivate. Next time it happened, he said to himself, he would take no notice.
But ten minutes after he was back in his room, the telephone rang, announcing an acute appendix. The call had been switched through from Fraser’s flat; Fraser, he learned next morning, had been called out half an hour before.
It was one of several things which he had always known might happen; a long shot, but almost bound to come off once in a month or two. The nearness of it made all the other dangerous possibilities seem nearer. He hurried out, thinking about them, and found the patient on the verge of perforation. That night he got very little sleep. He had put into his work, in the last two years, more of himself than he fully realized, including some of the emotions for which Janet had appeared to have no use. It did not occur to him as strange that he should lie awake in the creeping early light thinking not of Janet, but of the little shop-assistant whose life he had saved by about three-quarters of an hour.
Before he got up he had decided to write and tell Christie he could not come again. He began a letter, and destroyed it. It would be too cruel, he thought, not to see her again first. For a week, and most of the next week, he made only his routine visits to Laurel Dene. At last he had a chance to go in the night again, and went, knowing that when Christie reproached him with his absence the thing would come to a head. He waited for it, having ready what he would say. But she never reproached him. She was merely happy, as if he were her reason for existing. Compassion turned his resolve aside, and desire melted it.
He compromised by shortening his brief visits, and hanging his watch on a nail in the wall where it could not be ignored. She complained of nothing, and seemed concerned only lest she should be unable to give him, in twenty minutes, the tenderness of half an hour. He found that seeing her less only resulted in thinking of her continually. In a meek woman her devotion would have been intolerable; in Christie, it gave him the sense of more than credible felicity, like an opium dream. If she had claimed power over him he would have been roused into resisting her; but she thought no more of claiming power than a child thinks with its mother.
Miss Heath had bought her wireless set. It sat on the table beside the large black Bible, looking rather lost and self-conscious. Miss Heath loved it; especially the plays. The mildest of these seemed able to give her an adventurous glow; her dear mother, she said, had disapproved of the theatre.
“But, after all, things are so different now. So many nice people. … I’m sure you’d never guess, for instance, that my little Christie had acted on the stage?”
“Really?” said Kit, thankful that astonishment, which he could not have concealed in any case, was the correct response. “No, I don’t think I should.” He could not help looking round at Christie, who was in the room at the time. She laughed a little.
“Well, I’ve acted on a stage. About the size of a tablecloth. The Abbey’s only one of these People’s Theatre places. Like the Arts League, only not so good.”
“Well, of course, dear,” said Miss Heath with fond reproof, “Dr. Anderson would hardly be likely to imagine that you were an actress. But she’s played several important parts—haven’t you, dear?—even Juliet. I still have the newspaper cutting that your poor father sent me.”
In Miss Heath’s vocabulary “poor” meant “deceased.” This was another thing he had not known, though he found he had somehow taken it for granted.
“Why didn’t you tell me you acted?” he asked in the hall, as she was seeing him out.
“I didn’t think of it. Besides, the Abbey’s one of those indescribable sort of places you need to see for yourself.” She gave one of her urchin grins. “Why, does it give me more glamour?”
Kit had no chance to tell her, because just then Pedlow crossed the hall, and Christie shut into herself, as she always did when this happened. His own nerves were not as steady as they had been.
A night or two later, when he had meant to go to her, he had a call which he hoped might give him the chance. But it turned out to be a maternity case, a difficult obstructed labour, followed by haemorrhage, which kept him from just after midnight till nearly five in the morning. When he did get in he was (unusual for him) too tired to sleep soundly, and woke with a jerk half an hour earlier than usual. He was on edge all the morning; the new patients seemed incredibly stupid in giving their case histories, the old ones incredibly garrulous. At the end of his round he met Fraser in the drive, and had to listen to yet another summary of the political situation—the fifth that morning—lasting quite five minutes.
“… What can one hope,” concluded Fraser, “from such an administration in a real emergency? Emergency, that reminds me; that call of yours last night detained you a long time. You got very little sleep, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, I got three hours.” Kit’s throat felt hoarse and dry, and he swallowed. Fraser’s room faced away from the garage and the road. He had not thought it possible for his comings and goings to be heard there. “It was a midder,” he said, “down in the council houses. Placenta praevia. I had rather a job with her. The district nurse ought to have got me sooner than she did.”
“Ah, yes, yes, I can well imagine it. A very self-opinionated woman. Both out of danger now?”
“Should be. … I hope I didn’t wake you coming in.”
“My dear boy, certainly not; I should say you make the minimum of noise. I remarked on it to my wife only this morning. I remember some years back I had an assistant—really, I might as well have taken all the calls myself, as I finally told him. But I don’t sleep as soundly as I did—nothing in that; at my age one doesn’t require it—and it occupies my mind to speculate on what I hear going on around me. I don’t settle quickly, nowadays, after I’ve been called up. Yes, yes, of course, that was what I had been meaning to tell you. I took a call of yours while you were out. A chronic heart. Stout old lady with a red-haired daughter, lives in that big house at the end of Victoria Avenue. Mrs.—Mrs.—Oh, well, I’ve got it written down.”
“Miss Heath?” Kit’s voice cracked a little on the aspirate.
“That’s the name; I had it on the tip of my tongue. Mrs. Heath.”
“Miss. The girl’s her niece.”
“Niece? Mm—mh, yes, yes. I gave her a sedative. Highly nervous temperament. From her agitation on the telephone, I expected to find the patient in articulo mortis. Most unsuitable type of nurse for a heart case. You must find her trying to deal with.”
“Yes,” said Kit. His mind moved fast and confidently; he had noticed the same thing in patients suffering from the first stages of shock. “Yes, she’s had me up on one or two false alarms. As a matter of fact, I did make tentative moves in the direction of a trained nurse. But there isn’t a hope; the old lady’s devoted to her. Started to throw an attack at the first suggestion.”
“Ah, well. The human element. At any rate, the patient has great faith in you. Looked quite blank when she saw me appear. But I succeeded, hm, in establishing confidence. By the way, I shall be attending an Insurance Committee meeting on … My dear boy, I shouldn’t keep you standing here. That maternity case has used you up. You look positively green. Go in and take a rest, and I’ll work in one or two of your visits this afternoon. No, no, not at all, nobody needs more than six hours’ sleep after fifty-five.”
Kit thanked him confusedly and said he couldn’t think of it, he would be all right when he had had a meal and a drink. He went on into the house, feeling, in point of fact, almost too sick to eat at all. It was no new idea to him that, if he and Christie were caught together at Laurel Dene, nothing could possibly prevent him from being struck off the register. Partly his phenomenal luck in getting away with it so far, partly Christie’s gift for making the thing look like an excursion into a private island, had kept the idea at a comfortable distance most of the time. It had not occurred to him before that a public scandal would nearly kill Fraser. He had brought his standards of propriety intact from the 1880s. Moreover, though he was pompous and capable of being as touchy in his dignity as an elderly schoolmistress, he liked Kit and trusted him.
Kit took his coat off in the hall, and went to hang it up. It was a compact, artistic little hall, with a curtained alcove for the coat-stand which Janet had copied from an illustration in Woman and Home. Kit replaced the curtain carefully after him; he had been in trouble about it so many times that he often caught himself looking over his shoulder to see if Janet were watching him. It reminded him, now, that it was Janet rather than Fraser about whom he ought to be worrying. He tried to imagine how she would feel; and thought instead that she had three or four hundred a year of her own to which, if the worst happened, he could add a little, and himself, if he went about it carefully, get a job as a hospital porter or train as a male nurse. He could not think about her, he found, as he had thought about Fraser; it was an effort, indeed, ever to think about her longer than the day’s contact demanded. He supposed that this was the measure of what he felt for Christie, not knowing that it was the measure of what he had felt for Janet herself. He had not experienced before the deep, the secretly satisfying, indifference that follows an exhausted love. He had, in the end, slipped into this last phase as naturally and as unconsciously as the tired body slips into sleep.
His mind eluded her again, and went back to Christie. Now, if ever, he thought, was the time to stay away. Danger, however casual, had a way of being cumulative. Besides, Fraser was still on his mind. But he could not leave her without a message about the night-call; she must have had the fright of her life. He scribbled something reassuring to leave for her in the tree-hole in the drive when he saw Miss Heath in the afternoon.
Lunch was an uneventful, and thus a restful, meal. The days were gone when he watched Janet’s face as men watch the skies on which the harvest depends. He did not ever notice that her preoccupation almost matched his own.
Laurel Dene was his last visit. The hollow tree was just in reach of his arm from inside the car. But the note was not posted; as he drew up, Christie slipped out of the plantation. She had been so still that he knew she must have been waiting there a long time. She ran up to the car with green marks from the bushes on her cotton frock; a black smear down one of her cheeks made her look as if she had been climbing trees. When he leaned out to her and she clutched his wrist, her hand felt small and grubby and wiry, like a little boy’s.
“Is it all right?” she whispered.
“Yes.” He got out of the car and kissed her. “Don’t worry, nothing happened.”
“Really nothing? Didn’t he say anything to you about me? Didn’t he think I sounded funny on the phone? I was just going to say something to you, and then I remembered you’d told me not to, and didn’t. And then he answered. All the time we were talking I kept thinking, supposing I’d said what I’d meant to say, and I felt so sick I hardly knew what I was talking about. Didn’t he really notice? He must have; he gave me some aspirin, or something, when he went.”
“He noticed you were in a state, but he thought it was panic about your aunt. Cheer up, it might have been a lot worse. By the way, how ill was she? I must see her, of course.”
“Yes, of course. Don’t go in for a minute. … Kit, I’m so miserable. She wasn’t ill at all. I couldn’t think of anything quick enough, except to tell him to come. I thought if he found her asleep he wouldn’t disturb her, and I’d say she was better, like I did …” She stopped quickly. Kit pretended not to notice. “I thought it would be all right. But he makes more noise than you do, and she woke up. She didn’t recognize him at first—I suppose he hasn’t been for ages—and it must have upset her heart, because he listened to it and didn’t say I got him for nothing, or anything. And she’s worried to-day because she thinks she’s been ill. I thought I could always work it so that it shouldn’t make any difference to her. I feel such a dirty crook. I don’t know what to do.”
“It isn’t anything to do with you. I’m running this show. I ought never to have let you send for me like that. I knew this might happen and you couldn’t know.”
“I did know. I just hoped it wouldn’t.”
A heavy bird, a rook or an owl, rustled in a tree. Kit looked quickly over his shoulder at the noise. When he turned back to her again she flung her arms round his neck and covered his face with kisses, childishly quick and clumsy. “You’re good for me,” she whispered. “You’re good for me.”
“Yes,” remarked Kit in some bitterness, “it looks like it.”
Seeming not to have heard him, she said, “I’m nicer when I’m with you
than I am with any one else. There suddenly seems more of me than I thought there was. I feel I could stop messing about and really be something. You make me feel good, and yet I can’t be near you for five minutes without doing something wrong. How do things get mixed up like that? It’s seems so damned unfair. … It must be my fault really, of course. If I were a real person I’d be able to tell.”
Her trouble, added to his own, had for Kit the force of a full stop. Everything seemed to have run to a standstill. He had been up most of the night, and his mind felt flat and grey. He said, colourlessly, “You mean it’s making you more unhappy than happy. I thought it would. Why don’t you chuck it all? You will in the end, if that’s what it does to you, whether you like it or not; and God knows I’d be the last person on earth to blame you. Let’s say good-bye.”
She looked up at him. Her face, always so full of movement, was for an unnatural moment perfectly still. It was as if he had asked her whether she were ready to die. She turned her head quickly away.
Kit’s heart seemed to stop. For him, what he saw was beyond joy or fulfilment; it went too deep to be felt except as a painful, almost physical, shock. Presently he would assimilate it; but its impact hurt him like sudden light. For years he had carried the shame of unreturned love about with him like remorse for an undiscovered crime. Most potent when he thought about it least, it had seeped even into his successes and tinged them with failure. He had written it off, like a bad debt. It had become part of his imagination of himself.
The look, quickly hidden, on Christie’s face discharged this bankruptcy. There had been something absolute in it, drowning the physical, without calculation or reserve. He did not think about it; it went too deep into things painfully buried, shook him too radically, for him to know at once what it meant.
