by Mary Renault
Her cheek pressed against Kit’s on the lumpy cushion, with its mingled smell of clean new cover and musty filling. He moved his head a little to one side, but not altogether away.
“Well?” he asked. “What made you leave him in the end?”
She slipped her arm round his head to bring it nearer. “Silly ass. You ought to know.”
“How do you mean?” said Kit, stiffening a little.
“Cuckoo. Of course, I met you. What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” he said presently. “It’s all right. I hadn’t realized it was quite so—”
“Darling, I haven’t seen him once since I came down here. What does it matter anyway, it’s you I love. I wrote to him last week, saying it was all over. I haven’t heard back from him yet, it’s rather worrying.”
“Last week? But, good God, how many is it since—”
“Darling, I know. It does seem rather dreadful, but I couldn’t bear to upset him, after the Communists and the Surrealists and every one. He does get so appallingly miserable, you never saw anything like it. I kept on starting letters to tell him, and then I’d tear them up and write an ordinary one instead. You know how it is.”
“You mean to say,” said Kit slowly, “that all this time you’ve been writing—” He stopped, hearing his own voice saying, “Of course, Janie, you know I love you.” Aloud he finished, “Well, you know best, I daresay.”
“Kit, darling, you’re not upset with me?”
“No. No, of course not. I hope this chap doesn’t put his head in the gas oven. He sounds a bit unbalanced, to me.”
“He hasn’t got an actual oven, only quite a small ring. Besides, he’s in the middle of a picture. I expect he’d want to finish it, and by that time he’d be feeling better. I wrote him a very nice letter, honestly I did. I wouldn’t hurt his feelings for anything. I said I’d always love him too, in a way, but you were different from any one else, and so you are, my sweet. Listen, didn’t you think the thunder sounded nearer that time? … Kit? … Darling, for heaven’s sake don’t just lie there like an image looking at the ceiling. I suppose you think I don’t know what you look like just because it’s dark. I promise you, I can hardly remember what it felt like now. It’s like something ten years ago. Oh, darling, what shall I do if I’ve made you miserable? Here, look, have some Turkish delight. It’s rather special; I made it myself, as a matter of fact. Look out, it’s rather sticky. You may have to sort of scoop it up with your fingers a bit.”
Kit took some, ate it, and, fishing out his handkerchief, began the still more difficult task of cleaning off the remains. In the course of these processes he found his emotions inclined to go off the boil. Just as he had finished, a flash of sheet lightning, more sustained than the others, revealed Christie to him. She was leaning over him, her face taken unguarded by the light, anxious and tender, pure devotion in her eyes. His thoughts of the darkness fled like ghosts at cockcrow, mocked by this candle-flame of candid love. What he knew grew thin and inconsequent, what he guessed a dream. His too-sharp and dangerous happiness found relief in laughter. Christie caught him in her arms.
“Dear, dear Kit,” she murmured, “if you knew how much I love you. Oh, I do. You’re all that’s real; I just imagined the rest, to pass the time while I was waiting for you.”
The air stirred, heavily, pushed from its sluggishness by the movement of colder air behind; the hidden birds shifted and scuttered in the leaves.
“You do still love me, don’t you?” she whispered.
“Yes.”
“You didn’t stop even for a moment?”
“No.”
“I should die if you did.”
The first heavy drops sounded on the roof above them, but neither of them heard till its first rustle and whisper had turned to a heavy sigh, and the sigh to great drumming gusts that made the empty spaces of the night solid with sound.
“It’s raining,” said Christie lazily. “Now there won’t be a storm at all.”
“You’ll be cold.” Kit reached for his overcoat and drew it over her; the air had freshened quickly.
“If I caught cold,” she remarked as she curled herself into it, “you could come and look after me.”
“Even so, I’d rather you didn’t.” He had wondered, sometimes, what her vague idea was of the professional risks he ran. Probably it amounted to some notion that gossip would be bad for his practice. He had never said much about it, thinking she had enough cause for anxiety at her own end.
“The General Medical Council,” he explained gently, “is apt to take offence if one sleeps with one’s patients.”
“Silly old codgers,” said Christie comfortably. “Sour grapes, I suppose. All their own patients are royalty and cabinet ministers and bishops; and who’d sleep with them, anyway?”
“That’s what I’m always telling them.” Kit grinned drowsily into the darkness; the strength of the rain, now that it had settled, had become rhythmic and hypnotic. He could stay, he thought, for another half-hour. He drew a strand of Christie’s hair through his fingers, and felt it curl round them of its own accord, like the caress of something alive.
It was pitch-dark outside. The noise of the rain changed from a drumming to a wet hissing, as the surfaces it fell on grew saturated and overflowed. Through some crack in the roof above him a single drop fell on his face, startling because of its invisibility. It roused him a little; he shifted out of the way of a second, and shut his eyes again. But before he could settle, Christie twisted out of his arm and sat up; he could feel her stiffen.
“What is it?” he asked unencouragingly. They had fitted themselves into comfortable hollows between the lumps in the cushions, a process that took some time initially, and he did not want to move.
“Nothing; I was just thinking it must be time I went in.”
“What, now? It isn’t very late.”
“I know. I think I’d better, though.”
“But you were just saying yourself … You’re not annoyed about anything, are you?” This was instinctive, and slipped out before he thought.
“Precious, don’t, you know you never annoyed me in your life. I adore every thing you say and every thing you do.” She rubbed her cheek against his hair. “I must go in, though. I suddenly feel I’d better. I don’t know why.”
“But do you realize there’s a cloudburst, or something very like it, going on? You can’t go in this. Apart from anything else, how are you going to explain a wringing-wet nightgown and pools of water all over the floor? Still less can you stroll in wearing my overcoat, willingly as I’d give it you.”
“Oh, I can hide the nightgown. Kit, darling, let me go. I want to. I feel frightened.”
“That’s only the thunder. The rain will die down in a minute. If you go now you’ll be mud up to the knees. You’ve only got satin shoes.”
“I’ll carry them. Truly I’ll get rid of everything. I’m very careful.”
“Are you?” said Kit, his voice hardening. An imaginary portrait of Maurice, built up with vivid inaccuracy in the course of the evening, floated before his eyes.
“Oh, darling, no!” Christie cast herself on him, all solicitude. “You can’t go and be miserable now when you’re going away from me. I couldn’t bear it. I wouldn’t sleep. I promise you faithfully I’ve never loved any one a quarter as much as I’ve loved you. I never will, either. I’d rather die than make you unhappy, you know, you know I would.” She patted and stroked him with little consoling gestures. “Dear Kit. Say it’s all right.”
“Of course it is. I didn’t mean anything. I can’t be quite rational about you, you mean too much.”
“That’s nice.” She sighed contentedly, and curled up beside him again. “I feel so safe with you.”
The rain still thudded over the garden, its even bass broken with the tinkle of odd splashes and drippings among the nearer trees. When another note threaded itself, clearly and insistently, into the noise, Kit heard it for a moment or two withou
t attention. It was only after it had stopped that his mind snapped into recognition. Christie had let him go; now she gripped him again, not caressingly but in fear. They were both still, holding one another and listening to the silence, curiously defined among so many sounds, where this one sound had been.
Christie whispered, “What shall we do?”
“Are you sure it was the bell?” He knew well enough, and was, indeed, hardly aware that he had spoken.
“Yes, yes, of course it was.” She pushed him away; he could hear her groping about the floor. “Where are my slippers? I can’t find them. Where did I put my slippers, Kit?” Her voice sounded as though her teeth were chattering.
Kit got out his torch, and picked them out in the beam. She slipped into them, blinking in the light and throwing up her arm to shield her eyes.
Collecting himself, he said, “Listen. You’ll have to wear my coat indoors. Take it and hide it and go in and see what she wants. I’ll come over later on and collect it. You’ll have time to change your shoes. Keep your hair dry; throw it over your head.”
“Yes,” she said mechanically. He threw the coat over her; she drew it dazedly about her.
“Hurry up,” he said. “She’ll ring again.”
“But how shall I send for you? How will you come?”
“I’ll come when things have settled down.”
“But now. To see her. Don’t you realize, she’s ill?”
“How do you—” For a moment, accustomed to the many small needs for which nursing-home patients rang, he was simply impatient of the delay. The certainty in Christie’s voice penetrated him slowly. He felt a constriction in his chest.
“Of course she’s ill. She’s never once rung in the night except for that.”
Kit got up and, with precise automatic movements, settled his clothes and his hair. Speaking not to Christie or altogether to himself, he said, “It ought to be Fraser. Fraser’s taking the calls.”
“It’s you she—” Christie broke off. In the pause that followed, as if she had waited for it, the bell sounded again. She ran to him and whispered, “No, of course. You mustn’t let any one find you here. You’ll get into trouble. They can do something to you for it, can’t they? Didn’t you say they could? Go away. I’ll get Dr. Fraser. I know what to do till he comes. It will be all right.”
I haven’t got anything with me, said a voice in Kit’s head. He felt the pocket of his jacket, and encountered the tubular screw case of his hypodermic. Beside it was a small, flat cardboard box. He remembered that, earlier in the day, he had called at the chemist’s to replenish his supply of coramine.
Christie’s hand was twisting a fold of his coat. He took her fingers in his and gently disengaged them. His mind felt curiously flat and commonplace; the ingrained habits of four or five years did not afford him even the luxury of an heroic choice. Much as if the casualty bell had sounded when he had just got to sleep, he said, “Damn. All right, I’ll come along.”
Christie was talking again. He did not listen much to what she was saying. The panic in her voice struck already, not on his emotions, but on the part of his mind accustomed to dealing with anxious relatives and people who lost their heads in an emergency.
“Run along,” he said, “there’s a good girl. She ought to have some one with her. Just go in and reassure her, and then let me in at the front door. If it turns out not to be anything, wave through the glass and I’ll go away. Don’t worry, and hurry up.”
Christie moved away. He could hear in the darkness the small sound of the coat being drawn together around her. In the subdued voice of a schoolgirl who has been told to pull herself together, she said, “Yes. I’ll do that.” For a moment her shadow in the doorway made blacker a darkness which had seemed complete before; then he was standing, alone, listening to the rain, which seemed to approach intimately with a personality of its own, like some one who has been awaiting the chance of a private conversation. He turned up his collar, and went out, a stream from the roof drenching him before he was over the threshold.
Memory, and the heavy bulk of the house which he felt rather than saw against the blank sky, guided him till Christie had switched on the light in Miss Heath’s room. Its beam leaped across the lawn, lighting up a silver etching of rain in its path, the sharp wet surfaces of leaves, and the outline of the porch. As he reached it, the light over the door dazzled into his eyes, and he heard the huge Victorian bolts rattle and scrape. The door swung back, and Christie stood in the archway, as she had stood on the first night he had seen her, wearing the Chinese-blue dressing gown, and separated from him by straight gleaming lines of rain.
“Quickly,” she said.
Kit went past her to the half-open inner door. The sound of the rain died as the thick door closed on it; and the thoughts that had accompanied Kit through the dark garden were cut off too like external things. Personality had nothing to do here; it was already leaving the face on the pillow, smoothed out by the uniformity of the act of death. He did not know Christie had come into the room behind him, till the pale straying eyes flickered for a moment in recognition. Without looking round he said, “A glass of water, please,” and, breaking the paper seal of the box, got out an ampoule and a file.
As he bent over the bedside table, sawing at the fine glass by the light of the lamp, he heard a faint movement beside him. The old woman’s struggle for her shallow breath had eased for a moment; the fear in her eyes was superseded, as they turned towards him, by gratitude and surprise. With a fluttering gasp she whispered, “Dr. Anderson … how good … get here so quickly … such a trouble …”
Her yellow hand was picking and fidgeting at the sheet. He held it for a moment, slipping a finger up the wrist to feel the pulse. It was imperceptible; he had not expected anything else. He said, “We’ll have you feeling better in just a moment.” The greying face on the pillow gave back a remote reflection of his smile.
Christie had put down the glass of water beside the syringe. He rinsed it, and drew up the coramine. “This isn’t going to hurt you. Just the usual prick.”
He picked up a fold of skin and slipped the needle under it. Christie had gone round to the opposite side of the bed. He saw her hand close, warm and comforting, over the limp hand on the sheet. For a moment Miss Heath’s eyes moved from one to the other: not very differently, seventy years before, little Amy Heath had looked from her dear Mamma to her dear Papa as, clutching their fingers, she walked towards the darkest, laurel-roofed bend of the drive. Then Kit drove the piston home. In the first instant after the needle was withdrawn that look of dream-shadowed, timid trust remained; in the next, a kind of lightning-flash of consciousness lit the flaccid face and the glazed eyes. They fixed themselves on Kit in a stare as of astonished realization; but what they saw he could not tell, for immediately there was a tremor of the limbs, and a jerking spasm of the breath which no other breath succeeded. Miss Heath’s hand lay still, with a little fold of sheet under the fingers, and her mouth dropped open as it had been on the night when she had snored in her sleep. Her eyes, still fixed in their stare, became, with the strange definiteness of death, no longer eyes but simply part of the blank surface of a body. Kit bent and closed them.
He had known, as he gave the injection, that it was too late. The syringe was in his hand. He glanced round the room, registering, almost unconsciously, the fact that there was nowhere to boil it.
“She’s gone,” he said. He began to draw the pillow out from under the dead woman’s head, not realizing that he had waited a moment, instinctively, expecting Christie to support it as a nurse would have done.
There was a window-bay at the far end of the room. It was almost an outer room in itself, with a wide window-sill where greenhouse plants flowered in pots of willow-pattern china. A heavy lace curtain shut it half away. Miss Heath’s chair had been wheeled into it on sunny days.
Christie stood in the window, stroking the thick grey-green leaf of an ice-plant between her fingers. She did not
look up when Kit went over to her, and he did not look at her. He said the things that doctors say to devoted relatives after a death; that it had been inevitable for months, that she had been a comfort to her aunt, given her interests, prolonged her life. His voice had a practised, professional kindness. Christie nodded, fingering the glaucous leaves. There was a tension between them, of fear for the moment when some personal inflection would first be used.
Kit said that he would call in the morning to make out the certificate and see if there was anything he could do. Christie said, “Thank you. I should be glad if you would”; and looked at a small round rosette she had snapped away from the plant, as if she were surprised to see it in her hand. Turning it round she said, without any alteration of voice, “She was frightened by herself. She rang twice. I came here so that she could have some one to come at once when she rang.”
Kit, looking past her at the blank dark of the window, said, “If I hadn’t been here, you’d have had to leave her to go to the phone.”
They both stopped, like people at the end of their conversation.
Kit moved out past the curtain. The face on the bed seemed, to his questioning eyes, very remote from reproach or forgiveness. It was concerned only with itself, with being a thing in its final form; like print of which the manuscript has been destroyed. There could be no more emendations, no revision, no touching up. Kit went over and covered it with the sheet. Christie returned the bunch of leaves carefully to the flower-pot, as if importance attached to the act.
“Shall you be all right,” he asked, “here for the night?” This too was a formula; people were often afraid of being alone with a corpse; they got a relation or a neighbour to come in.
“Yes, thank you.” They moved towards the door. “You know, the servants are in the house.”
“Oh, yes,” said Kit. “Of course.”
Christie opened the door. They both stopped, aware that something was different before they knew what it was. The hall was no longer dark, lit distantly, as it had been, by the light outside the porch. The big cut-glass lamp in the ceiling was burning, looking strident and unreal, as a bright light does in the dead hour of the night.
