The Friendly Young Ladies: A Novel

by Mary Renault

“It doesn’t really matter,” he said, “if you know what you’re up to and have someone you can trust at the other end of the rope. There’s nothing to it. Except that there are always some people who need to go on.”

  She turned her face upward, trying to see him. He bent his own, and kissed her, slowly and deliberately, holding her like a woman now and not like a frightened child. She felt his gentleness and carefully controlled skill, and a confidence that was imposed on himself for her support, not fully felt; and remembered his first kisses in the garden. Something seemed to break in her, and a great fountain of tenderness and loyalty washed through her, as if her body and mind were being filled with light. She became no longer of importance to herself. Whatever happens, she thought, everything must and shall be well for him; and she turned to confront her fear for his sake; but it was like facing one’s death and finding that one has died already and the spirit is free.

  As his kiss ended, she put her hand behind his head and drew it down again.

  “It doesn’t matter any more.”

  He scarcely returned her kiss, but caught her to him and held her still; a sheltering, almost a tragic gesture, like that of a woman. They were quiet, with his face against her hair, while there passed between them a force of emotion so strong that the physical was swept away in it, and she felt, without knowing why, her eyes fill with tears.

  “Leo,” he said at last, under his breath, “if you’d rather, now, I’ll take you home.”

  She said, quite simply and with an open mind, “Is that what you want to do?”

  “No.” He moved his hand over her head. “But we can do that, or anything, now.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I know.”

  The wide gown, loosened already, was slipping from her shoulders. She pulled the girdle-cord, and let it fall away. He took her back to him, stooped with her and laid her on the pillow. She felt his lips move against her eyelids.

  “You’ll be all right,” he said. “I’ll look after you.”

  In the Lily Belle, in the little buff and green room they called Helen’s, a light went on. To Elsie, the soft glow seemed, after hours of lying face downward in the darkness, a white glare, scorching her eyes. She got up from the bed and, blind at first as if in sudden darkness, felt her way to the water on the dressing-chest, for she was thirsty from lying so long awake. Standing there to drink it, she saw taking shape out of the dazzle, in the glass before her, her own face, its plainness underlined by weeping and strain, her limp hair, her awkward schoolgirl’s body. For the first time they were real; she believed in them; they were not a disguise in which a lovely future hid, ready to break forth like winged creatures in the spring; they were herself, and would always be, for now she had accepted them. Her life would be lived within their boundaries.

  She had cried her eyes dry; as if her mind too had been emptied, it received for a little, as from without itself, an alien clearness. She thought, I could have loved him from a long way off, and never wanted anything, and been happy. It would have been like Monica Hathaway at school, but better. People say it’s a bad thing. But it makes poetry live for you, and music, and the sky at night, and after it’s over, some of it goes into them and lasts the rest of your life. You forget the silly parts quite soon, and you’re left, in the end, with something you’re not ashamed to remember. Not like this.

  As long as I live, I shall be a person whom someone made love to because he was sorry for her. But I know, now, that it wasn’t even really making love. Just being sorry: nothing else.

  Leo was sorry for me too. It must have been difficult to keep me from knowing how they felt about each other. It happened at first sight, I suppose. I can see it all now. The night he came to supper here, and she went on the river with that friend of Helen’s; he could hardly talk to me, waiting for her to come back. Everything’s been easy for Leo. She’s always believed in herself; she’s never been afraid.

  I thought I hated her, but I don’t. To hate people you have to feel they’ve robbed you, that they’ve kept you down. I was down from the beginning. If he hadn’t loved Leo, he would have loved someone else. He’d never have loved me. How could he? I shall never be able to make anyone love me now. You have to believe, first, that you’re a person who can be loved.

  She put out the light, and went over to the window. Everything was dark, even the island in midstream where the lamp had burned, on other nights, later than all the rest, blinking when the wind swung a willow-bough across it. Her mind turned, in its unhappy drifting, to the afternoon Joe had spent teaching her to punt. I didn’t know it at the time, she thought; I didn’t think about it, but I was quite peaceful and contented then. He’s such an ordinary sort of person; but he seemed, somehow, to make ordinariness fun. I wasn’t ashamed of anything, or believing in anything that wasn’t real. I wonder if he’s lonely too, sometimes. I don’t suppose anyone would fall in love with him either. He’s so awfully unromantic. It’s a pity; I expect he could make some rather dull sort of woman very happy. If she’d never met anyone like Peter. Peter. I wish I’d died when I was ill at home, I wish I’d been dead before he came.

  It’s a punishment to me, she thought, leaning her head against the window-frame, for running away. Mother loved me, and I made her unhappy. Leo said you paid for making other people suffer. (But Leo never seems to pay.) I was never meant to get away with things; even at school I was always caught when other people weren’t, and had to go back to detention on Wednesday afternoon. I must go back to Mother and Father now, and make it up to them. Nobody else wants me, anyway.

  At least, she thought, I won’t be mean about it. It isn’t Leo’s fault. She and Peter are affinities, I expect. They couldn’t help themselves. I must write her a letter before I go, and tell her I understand. She did her best about me. Like Peter. Everyone meant to be kind. I suppose it must be simply me.

  She put on the light again, and looked in the dressing-chest for something to write on. Her diary was there: she tore a leaf from it, the leaf for to-morrow. She would not be needing it now.

  Helen moved across the garden, down to the water-side. The dull moonlight shimmered on her fair hair and her dressing-coat of pale green satin; she looked ethereal, like a water-spirit seeking its element again. But she had gone to see if the canoe was there.

  It rode at its painter, neat and toylike, its fresh varnish shining slickly. The cushions, which she had taken out that evening for the night, had not been replaced in it. The dinghy was beside it, the oars dry. Leo and Peter must have gone to town.

  She went back again to the room on the upper deck, lit a cigarette, and looked out of the wide window. The river was still; away downstream the island rode like a black barge. She had hoped to see a light on it; it would have been company of a kind.

  She can be certain of me, because I’m free. I’ve gone where I chose, and had what I fancied, and I’m here because this is better. I can never be sure of her. It’s like keeping a wild bird that loves you because it’s got a broken wing. If the wing knits up, then you know; one way or another. That would be something real, one could bear that. But to watch this trying and falling down again, each time it’s as bad as before, it hurts both ways.

  It’s been too long, now. I shall never really know, I suppose. That may be better, for me. Perhaps it won’t be so bad this time, for her; not so far to fall. But, in a way, that’s the worst; to see her getting practical about it. I wonder what Joe would say, if one could ask him. Give her rope, or something, I suppose. He’s easy-going, is old Joe. Sometimes I’ve thought … But that’s another thing that’s gone on too long.

  I’d better get to bed. She won’t feel like talking when she comes in. If Elsie weren’t here she could have slept in that room, if she wanted, and been quiet by herself. It must be restful to be Elsie, not touching reality at any point of the compass. I wonder how it feels.

  She put out her cigarette and lay down; but for a long time her eyes were open, looking at the river and the changing clou
ds.

  In Mawley, in the best bedroom of the Red Castle Hotel, Peter, with his mouth slightly but not ungracefully open, was sleeping the sleep of the just.

  The square of the window sharpened, and, enclosed in its dark frame, the trees defined themselves greyly. Over the water hung and turned, in infinitely slow spirals, the drifting wreaths of the mist. A bird cheeped, found that it was too early, and sank into the fluffed warmth of its feathers again.

  Leo came out of a sleep so deep that, for a moment, she could not remember where she was. Her thoughts held only a shapeless colour and light, such as one brings back from a dream when the horn gate has closed already upon its story. She held them about her, feeling only that they were better than anything the day could give. But at the first touch of her will, they condensed into consciousness.

  She knew where she was, and why; her mind was like water holding a still reflection, her body, heavy with peace, gave back dim echoes of pain and delight, too quiet to stir it from tranquillity. She lay as she had fallen asleep, still in his arm with her own flung across his breast, her head on his shoulder. If she moved a little she could see his face; but she did not move, lest it should wake him.

  It was easy to be still, for only her mind was waking, as if sleep were a pool from which she had raised her head, while her limbs still drifted under its smooth surface. It was better, after all, to be awake and remember.

  So many kinds of contentment were mixed together in her; the contentment of the adventurer after peril, of the captive after release, of the woman after love. They were falling already into the stuff of her life, and she had almost ceased to wonder at them. She thought instead about what she had learned of him, and how like it was to what she had already known. She knew now that his love affairs had been like his books, few and good and deeply felt, passionate in impulse, patiently complete in execution; she knew that hack-work had never coarsened his style. She knew too something she had not known before, that some trouble in his life, solved or reconciled long ago, had left hidden in him an instinct of compassion so strong that he was ashamed of it as if it had been a kind of violence. For a time she had released it; and after its cause was gone, when he himself had half forgotten it, some of its power over him had passed to her. She knew that she had possessed his imagination, suddenly and unawares. She thought of all this as she lay watching the night thin away in her half-shut eyes. She did not think that she loved him finally and irrevocably, because it was a fact too certain for thought, and, besides, it had become an old story.

  He lay half-turned towards her, companionable and warm. He was used to sharing a bed—she knew that too—and to sharing it kindly, with someone he was prepared to find there in the morning. He was sleeping very quietly; she could feel his breathing, shallow and soundless, not like the breathing of a sleeping man. Then she knew, without moving or opening her eyes, that he was awake, and had been awake already for a long time.

  Through all those moments of clouded, dreamy well-being, he had been lying with open eyes, looking out above her head at the creeping light, solitary in his own thoughts; facing, with the straightness he could not have escaped if he had wanted, the implications of what had happened, and what would happen if it went on. He had been thinking—she was sure, as if he had turned to her and told her—of his half-written book, needing a steady mood, solitude and time; remembering the mistress who had been easy to him, who had accepted for years, without destructive suffering, the part of himself which, in the end, would still be all that he would have to give. His thoughts seemed to flow to her, clearly and inescapably; they might so easily, at another time and place, have been her own. She felt them with the mind of a friend who could share and approve them; it was only to the woman in his arm, naked and newly born, that they were desolation and loss.

  Her first choice had been true, she thought; they were only possible to one another, ultimately, in the relationship of man to man. They had been allies, acknowledging one another’s codes of living, and making the same reservation of themselves. The ghost of their old companionship seemed to be lying here beside them, with a face of its own like the face of a dead boy struck down quickly in a smile. He was smiling now, with a boy’s cheerful unpitying scorn, at the woman holding the man who looked out beyond her, the silly fool in love, for whom nothing would be enough.

  Go ahead, said the ghost, smiling at her. Hang round his neck, the way you did last night in the river. He’ll take it, for a bit. He won’t expect the same guts from you that he did from me.

  He won’t let you drown him. He’s got horse-sense; it’s one of the things I always like him for. It won’t be a lot of fun for him, handing you off; you’ll leave a bruise on him that will last longer than the one he’s put on your face now. But what do you care? Women are all the same.

  “You’re awake,” said Joe’s soft voice against her ear. He tilted up her face and kissed her. “Come over on my other side, darling, my arm’s gone to sleep. How long have you been foxing there?”

  “Only a second.”

  She smiled at him; but something in her face made him look from her to the growing light in the window, and say quickly, “It’s early yet.”

  She turned into his arms, and felt him relax; she had broken the circle of his thoughts, and, loosing himself from them in relief, he was becoming sleepy again. It was still no more than twilight. But presently a brightening greyness forced itself under her eyelids.

  “I must go soon,” she said.

  “Not yet.” He roused himself a little to add, “We’ve been out so often before breakfast, no one will think anything of it. They might wonder if they saw you now.”

  “I’d like to be back before Helen’s awake. She’ll begin to think something’s happened to me.”

  “Hasn’t it? It has to me.”

  She laid her cheek against his. It would begin or end from now; and in this moment it seemed to have begun before her own life, and that she could as easily destroy the morning.

  “Leo.”

  “Yes?”

  “You know, don’t you, this can’t end here.”

  “My dear,” she said, “it’s to-morrow now. It has ended.”

  “We said that. But not now.”

  “Now more than ever. You know that’s true.”

  “It would tear up our lives,” he said slowly. “I’ve thought of all that. But it might be worth it.”

  “It might be. But it never is.”

  As she brought out the words she was herself incredulous of their bleakness. Was this all she could say to him, for everything? He was silent now, and she had time to remember. He had looked after her, as he had promised, with a generosity so self-concealing that only instinct had made her aware of it, till she had been able to release both of them from the separate consideration of You and I. She had not known that there would be a moment when her fear would overtake her again, but he had known; or that she would want the comfort of speech, but he had given it. Now for all this she could not offer as much as a gesture, a kiss or a tightened arm; he was too quick to understand.

  “I suppose,” he said presently, “I knew this. I’ve never known you say a thing and not stick to it.”

  “Or you,” she said.

  “I won’t go back on it, if it’s what you want.”

  She said, smiling, “It was a damned good bonfire, wasn’t it? In spite of so much water.”

  “What do you want, Leo? Do you think you can get back into your sweater and corduroys and disappear as if they were the cloak of darkness?” He leaned on his elbow, looking at her. “There’s nothing you’ll be able to hide in them now from me.” She felt her body clean and beautiful, as the sun makes it.

  “There’s nothing I’ll want to hide from you.” she said.

  “Leo. Do you mean—”

  “So we’d better just not meet at all. There’s a lot of room on the river.”

  He said nothing. It seemed to her that she had been speaking for a part of his own mind
. Over her head, on the joists of the ceiling, there were racks fixed to hold rods and tackle; she remembered the day they had put them up together.

  He turned to her out of this thoughts, with sudden fresh insistence.

  “Leo. Darling, look here. I can work any place where there’s a door that shuts, and so can you. I’d been thinking anyway that when this book was done I’d take a trip to Arizona. We’ll go now. We’d be in time to see a bit of the fall round-up. Wouldn’t you like to know how you look in a Stetson, Tex?”

  He pulled round her face, smiling at her. She turned it away, out of sight. When she could bear to speak again, she opened her mouth to say gently, “Don’t be fantastic, my dear, these are your people, how could you take a woman there?” But she was still with the words unspoken, realizing what it was that, as yet half-unconsciously perhaps, he had implied.

  “We’d have to go on a cargo-boat,” he said. “At the moment I don’t think I could run to a liner. It takes longer, but it’s more fun.”

  She looked up at the roof, counting, carefully, the brass hooks in one of the joists. In the end, she found she could bring it out quite easily. “Thank you, Joe dear. But I don’t suppose I’d ever write another line if I saw the real thing. Imagine how safe and modern it must all be now.”

  His voice altered. “I don’t know how much you know about me,” he said slowly. “I’ve taken you for granted so long, it seems incredible when I think of it. But, on my side, nobody’s going to be really hurt by this. I’m as sure of that as anyone reasonably can be. I don’t suppose you want to know anything more.”

  “No,” she said. “Thank you for telling me.” She paused for a moment, and went on, “On my side, there’s Helen. I don’t suppose you want to know any more about that, either.”

  “I don’t think I need to,” he said quietly. “I’m very fond of her. But Helen will never be without resources.”

  With sudden recollection, she said, “Elsie would. Entirely without. … You see, my dear, it’s everything. ‘Too like the lightning. …’ Look, the sun’s beginning to rise.”