The Friendly Young Ladies: A Novel

by Mary Renault

  The conductor put his head inside.

  “St. Jerome’s Orspital,” he shouted, looking straight at her.

  The bus slowed down; she got dizzily to her feet. In another moment she was alone, among the piping, scuffling children, seeing the shrine of her pilgrimage straight ahead.

  She stood on the pavement, her handbag clutched in her hands, staring up at its tall black front, at the iron balconies with their red-blanketed beds, the great dim windows, the covered ways roofed with sooty glass connecting block with block, at the vast hoarding, peeled in places with wind and weather, which cried aloud for money in astronomical sums. At a side-door, marked OUT-PATIENTS, a slow, sullen stream of humanity, derelict, dirty, crutched, plastered and bandaged, was trickling in, without purpose it seemed and without hope. Within, somewhere, a child screamed. A collarless man brushed past her; she saw, with horror, that half his face was painted over in patches of purple. As if the devil were after her, she ran to the other side of the street, narrowly missing a van, and stood panting, her stomach sinking inside her, to look again.

  From here she could read the hoarding, which before had been just over her head. It told her, with two-foot emphasis, that St. Jerome’s Hospital was fifty thousand pounds in debt.

  She squeezed her bag in her hand, trying to deny her misery. This was where Peter spent his nights and days. Where was the austere, aseptic whiteness she had seen in hospital films, the polished metal, the crystal glass, the great wide silent spaces, the background she imagined every night before she went to sleep? The dirt, the squalor, the suffering were like a physical weight, a stifling blanket pressing on her spirit. At this very moment he must be somewhere within, in the dark of this evil labyrinth, where her mind must now forever stop short, afraid to follow him; in which he too must surely suffer some unknown, assimilating change. Heat and wretchedness, and the prevailing smells, made an oppression inside her so that she did not know whether she wanted to faint, or weep, or be sick. Suppose she were really to faint, and they should rush upon her and carry her inside, and call Peter to attend to her? The shockingness of this notion revived her like sal volatile. She perceived one consolation; the place, as the hoarding assured her, was on the verge of having to close down. Perhaps it would.

  She had no sooner formed the thought than shame overwhelmed her. Peter’s heroism was proven now, if she had never believed in it before. Here was his life-work, at its last gasp for money, and she had actually been glad! Her soul expanded under the light of adoration. She crossed the road, and, groping in her bag, pushed a ten-shilling note into the big wooden box under the hoarding. Comforted and uplifted, she walked back to the stopping-place for her returning bus.

  She reached King’s Cross ten minutes early, and Helen was ten minutes late; but she waited happily. The thought of her ten shillings warmed her through. Presently it would be taken out of the box and with it, perhaps, an instrument would be bought, or some expensive drug which the hospital with its load of debt could not afford; and in some critical emergency, Peter himself would use it and, it might be, save someone’s life, and would never know it had come from her.

  “Hullo.” Helen appeared out of the hot crowd, fresh and clean as if she had stepped out of her own bedroom. “I’m sorry I’m late. How did you get on?”

  “Awfully well, thank you. I didn’t get lost at all.”

  “And you bought a frock?” Helen stole a glance full of kindly interest and hidden misgiving at the nameless bag.

  “Yes. It was rather a bargain. They reduced the price specially for me, wasn’t it nice of them? It’s sort of jade green, with a gold collar. An afternoon frock, you know. Would you like just to peep at it, or shall we wait till we get in the train?” Her fingers were busy already with the string.

  Helen looked, and paused appalled, weighing the possibility of getting the thing changed. Not a chance, she reflected, at the kind of place where that had come from. She gave her warm, gentle smile, and fixed the string back into its holes again.

  “It’s sweet,” she said. “You must let me see you in it tonight.”

  The rushes that half filled the little backwater stood up all round the punt, cutting off their field of vision from everything but the sky. Sounds from the main river came muted by distance and the afternoon heat. The air was still.

  They were both working, with the length of the punt between them; Joe with his elbow and writing-pad propped on the flat end, Leo on her stomach at the other. They had been at it for more than two hours; the shadows had shifted, leaving them in the sun, and its warmth was beginning to make them lazy. Neither had announced the fact, for fear of disturbing the other. Their pauses for thought became more frequent, longer and less intense. Joe crooked his arm under his head, and half shut his eyes. Leo found a young frog in the rushes, sat it in her palm to admire its dapper bronze, and let it flop back in the river again. Encouraged by this sign of levity, Joe heaved himself up and swore at his manuscript, quietly, in the manner which invites comment without insisting on it.

  “Stuck?” asked Leo, with concealed hope.

  “Uh-huh. Carry on, I can go to sleep.”

  “It’s too hot. I’ve been bogged half an hour. Want to go in?”

  “If you like. Might fish.”

  “I brought some cheese along. Do for chub or something.” She looked vaguely about for it, rolled over and relaxed again, her arms behind her head. Joe knocked out his pipe, made a half-hearted movement towards his tackle, picked up the writing-pad instead and stretched himself beside her. To Leo, who knew him well, the fact that he had not dumped the manuscript somewhere out of sight indicated a willingness to talk about it. She said, “Sorry you’ve seized up. I thought you seemed to be going rather strong.”

  “I was. It’s all right. It’s only that I’ve got through the amusing part and come to connective tissue. The prospect of work’s all my trouble. I’ll get down to it tonight. Damn Milton, and his father before him.”

  “What did his father do?”

  “Most of the damage, probably. Gave him a classical education and brought him up respectable. God, to think what he might have produced if he’d knocked around like Shakespeare did, instead of sitting indoors ruining his eyesight and thinking up filthy words like connubial and affable and congratulant. I suppose when they were fresh, all the writers in the country must have gulped them down like unspoiled savages getting their first taste of gin. Now we’re sodden with ’em, and all the rest of his fancy diseases. He can afford them; he’s never less than archangel ruined, blast him. But he’s left the English tongue like Satan left Adam and Eve—fig-leaved and self-conscious. If I ever get to heaven I’ll tell him what I think of him.”

  “How he’d love having you thrown out for obscene language, wouldn’t he? Go back home and read Berners’ Froissart.”

  “What’s the good. He crawls in like original sin. Simplicity can never be innocent any more; only penitential, like a whore parading in bare feet and a shift.”

  “It’ll probably read better in the morning.”

  “I’ll try some on you in a minute. Not this last part; it stinks. I’ll have to do it over. How’s yours?”

  “Oh, slogging along. Rather boring, really, because I’ve written the next three chapters in my head and now it’s just clerical work; I could almost do it straight on the type-writer. … I don’t like Milton either, but it’s probably a bias due to a suspicion I have that he wouldn’t like me.”

  “Well, maybe you’ve got something there.” He grinned at her with the sun in his eyes, and sprawled down more comfortably. “I suppose the first, spontaneous flavour of those Adam and Eve passages is one of life’s incommunicable things, like the taste of cod liver oil.” He expanded his chest and began to declaim with sonorous relish, directing his piece at the sky or, possibly, at the author.

  Leo, lying with her eyes closed against the deepening light, listened and lost half the sense of the words. She wondered why it had never occurred to he
r before that Paradise Lost was primarily a composition for a male voice.

  “God is thy law, thou mine; to know no more

  Is woman’s happiest knowledge and her praise—

  Revolting, isn’t it?”

  “Horrible,” said Leo, rousing herself. “Do you know any more?”

  “Yards. It fascinates me. ‘Nor turned, I ween, Adam from his fair spouse, nor Eve the rites mysterious of connubial love refused.’ The first love-scene in creation, and that’s what he does with it.”

  “Don’t you know any decent bits?”

  Good-natured as always, Joe obliged with a dozen lines about Hell.

  “That’s better,” remarked Leo when he had run himself to a standstill. “Thanks.”

  They lapsed into drowsy silence, their minds drifting back, through the receding Miltonic echo, to their labours of the afternoon.

  “Do you ever worry,” said Leo sleepily, “about the situation you leave your characters in when you stop writing? I mean, they’ve got to stay put like that till one starts again.”

  Joe opened his eyes to laugh. “Why, no. Do you?”

  “Well, you notice it more in the sort of thing I do. When you’ve left a man bound and gagged in an upright position in a ruined shack with night coming on, and coyotes, and he’s had nothing to eat since breakfast, it makes you think a bit.”

  “You silly ass,” said Joe with affection. “Well, anyway, my people can’t complain. I left them in bed. First time, too. They should be O.K.”

  “Oh, have you got that far? Milton apart, how’s it going?”

  “Not too badly, as a matter of fact. Funny thing, I often like the stuff best that I’ve turned out working with you. Other people around put me off.”

  “You can feel people’s minds fidgeting if they’re not as busy as you are. I’m working too, so I’m as good as not there, that’s all it is.”

  “Maybe it’s that.”

  “When do you reckon to finish?”

  “Oh, not for months yet. This is a side-line, the real subject’s only just getting under way. I aim to get it out next spring, if possible. So far, it shapes better than the last.” He added, thoughtfully, “I hope so, anyway. Because before very long I foresee an interruption to one’s experiments lasting several years.”

  She knew what he meant. They had discussed the thing before from the political angle, and did not reopen it now. She only said, “Why interrupt them? I don’t suppose one sane war book would come amiss.”

  “Four or five years after it’s over—just about the time when the reading public’s sick of the subject—I shall probably decide the conditions are ideal for trying to write one.”

  “Yes,” said Leo with an irony that had no cutting edge. “When it’s too late to cash in on the action or the reaction, I’m sure you will.”

  “Good books will be written, mind you. There’s no virtue in being unable to handle your stuff till it’s cooled. It’s just a matter of knowing your limitations. But if you do work cold, it imposes certain obligations, I think.”

  “Which might conflict with certain others?”

  “Which would, inevitably. If it’s done with your eyes open, it doesn’t take much to damn your soul. Just leave out a little something, and shift the high-lights somewhere else, and change a bit that would never do for something that will do at a pinch. Well, it’s all right if you can take to it, I suppose. I’d sooner go to bed with a woman for money.”

  “So what?”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “I suppose I shall use my intervals of leisure, if any, noticing what traces of ordinarily conditioned human behaviour, if any, remain on view, and doing what I think about them. Too bad.”

  “And when you’re at the front, up to the knees in muck and stink, you’ll get a wad of clippings from London telling you what an escapist you are.”

  “Shouldn’t wonder,” said Joe, unmoved. “Though without—as yet—any personal experience, I imagine war is about the most potent escape from the problems of its own solitude that the human ego has ever thought up.”

  “Yes,” said Leo, half to herself. “I think that’s possible. And at the end of it, one’s problems would be just what they were before. Or rather worse.”

  Joe asked for no elaboration of this. They were both people who could rely on one another to say, with or without persuasion, exactly as much as they wished.

  “Your books will boom, anyway,” was all he said. “They’ll appeal to the nostalgia of the mechanized cavalry.”

  “There was a rumour earlier on,” she reminded him, “that you were going to read me some of yours. Or have you gone off the idea?”

  “No. You had it coming. I’d be glad to know what you think, as a matter of fact.”

  “Good,” said Leo lightly, “go ahead.” She settled herself, her head turned a little away from him, to listen.

  He fished the manuscript out of its folder, settled himself on one elbow, and began to read. Being confident of his work and his audience, he read very well, without the monotony or over-stress which self-consciousness produces; his pleasant, even voice intruding itself as little as a page of well-spaced print.

  It was a dialogue between a man and a woman, dropped in, after a manner Joe had, with a delusive air of sudden irrelevance and with practically nothing in the way of preliminaries. The effect of these passages was apt to be curious, ranging from the Elizabethan intrusion of a lyric to a general impression on the reader that a hitherto sober and solid fabric had been struck by lightning. This extract was of the second sort. Joe read it like the work of someone else, to which he was anxious to be fair.

  How can he? thought Leo, as she had thought once or twice before at such times. He was actually writing this an hour ago. Hasn’t it left anything behind at all? She felt her own breathing quicken a little, and, ashamed both of this and of a failure in critical detachment, devoted all her strength of will to imagining herself alone. The chapter came to an end before she had succeeded; and Joe put it away as coolly as he had got it out. He made no comment and asked for none; but she knew he was waiting, he was human enough for that.

  “Well,” she remarked, “I see your difficulty in getting down to sea-level again from there. It must be about as good as anything you’ve done.”

  Her voice was boyish and hard. The emotion it suppressed appealed to Joe as a compliment both subtle and sincere. His mind warmed to her; he thought, as he often did, what reliable company she was and how free from difficulties. He smiled down at her, leaning on his elbow as he had propped himself to read. The wind had blown the powder off her smooth skin, but her mouth was a clear scarlet in her cream-brown face. Her silk shirt, limp with the heat, had moulded itself to her small high breasts. She met his smile and looked past him into the sky, her eyes following the flight of a passing bird. Joe stayed as he was, and looked at her. He had not, in spite of the appearance which seemed to him good form, been wholly unmoved by what he had been reading.

  A lace-wing fly, pale and helpless as a Victorian lady, fluttered over the side of the punt, and settled in Leo’s hair. Its delicate green pleased him against the glossy darkness; he watched it till it began to be entangled and to wave, in feeble fright, its transparent wings.

  “Keep still a minute,” he said. “There’s a creature losing its way in your hair.” He rescued the lace-wing, and put it over into the rushes; but the dark hair was warm and vital and sweet-smelling. He stroked it lightly, and slid his hand under its weight. Leo felt his touch; she supposed him to be still seeking the mayfly or whatever it might be. Partly to help, partly in a drowsy impulse of contentment, she turned a little; it brought her head into the palm of his hand.

  The sun was hot, the air languid and still; a light haze hung over the river, promising greater heat to come. A pleasant lazy ache, too gentle yet to be called desire, crept over Joe and filled him with a vague and aimless tenderness. It came as naturally as breathing to smooth the warm silk with his free han
d, gently and confidingly, till it came to rest over the light upward curve. A tiny movement, a breath perhaps, lifted it; the slightest of responses, but making his senses aware of themselves. To kiss her became obvious and necessary. He bent to do it, and met her eyes. She was looking at him as if she had surprised him with a knife levelled at her heart.

  Softly and very carefully, with the tact he would have used equally to a frightened animal or child, Joe withdrew, blaming himself for a fool. An unprejudiced and considerate person, he made the deduction which was reasonable on such facts as he knew. It’s true, then, he thought, though I wouldn’t believe it when that woman told me. Well, she makes a damned good job of keeping it to herself. She thought I was safe, and so I ought to have been. What a lout I am, to have played her up like this.

  He trailed off his caress into a friendly nothing, as if he had intended it. One ought to be able to tell, he thought; it seemed for a moment … oh, well, one imagines things. She remained unnaturally still. He said aloud—it was almost the same voice he had used to scared colts when he was a boy—“Sorry. I must be getting absent-minded.” As she gave no sign of having heard, he added, “Just formless emotion; bred, like your crocodile, from the operation of the sun”; and smiled at her, watching her fixed face relax.