The Friendly Young Ladies: A Novel

by Mary Renault

  Elsie considered him; his size, his sternness, his hieratic impersonality. They satisfied her; she saw that she had reached the end of her quest. She lingered for a moment; it was the last moment she would spend, today, alone with herself, and she wanted its emotional content to be worthy. But now, at the instant of her gesture, it seemed that already her life had moved on beyond it. Hers was not a spirit equipped to endure nakedness for long. It had begun to gather round it the garments in which it would protect itself during the coming years. She was going to live in London now. There would be cinemas, shop-windows, perhaps a secretarial training now that it could be had near at hand; a twopenny library not miles away on the bus but in the next street. She was conscious of these thoughts diluting the high instant of tragedy. For one breathless draught she had taken its stinging waters neat; but they would be diluted now for the rest of her life. I shall never forget him, she thought; but already within her, truth was losing its sharpness, she was passing from the failure that has courage to know itself, into the deeper failure that disguises and evades. All those slight refusals of reality, which, separately, had represented choices within her power to make, made up a cumulative sum whose weight was beyond her will and her strength, not only to move but to understand. With Peter, with Leo, with Joe, with herself, there had been moments when the life of her spirit had stirred and spoken, calling softly for the difficult relinquishment of an idea, a step from safe ground into the dark, a movement of daring and danger in the mind. She had let them go by; and now she could no longer remember them. In this last pause of hesitation she turned again from the knowledge of her own confusion, to the gesture she had planned. Its drama and pathos comforted her. She stepped out into the road, crossing on the amber light to the exasperation of a London General omnibus and several cars.

  The policeman turned to her, solemn and attentive, not interrupting his more urgent preoccupations, but concentrating them in the tail of his eye. To Elsie it seemed that the axle-tree of London stood still, with herself at its centre. She drew herself erect.

  “I have come,” she said clearly, “to give myself up.”

  Leo had washed the breakfast things, made the beds, dusted. There was nothing else to do. This was the time of day when she settled down to work.

  She went upstairs, and opened her desk. The manuscript ended in mid-sentence: “The lightning movement of his hand to his gun was masked by—” She had been writing it yesterday afternoon, when Joe had called her name under the window. The rest of the sentence had been so obvious that she had gone downstairs at once, not troubling to finish it. She sat staring at the paper, wondering why it mattered so much that the phrase had gone; for sometime, to-morrow or in a day or two, she would know and perhaps even care what it had been about, and would think of another. The movement of his hand towards his gun … the movement … It was not for these, but for other lost words that her mind was seeking. In the moment before they slept, when already she had been beginning to dream and perhaps he also, he had said something, peacefully and sleepily, nothing of importance, nothing new. She had heard the sound; to the words she had not attended, there had been no need, for all possible words had been contained between them. She remembered the tone and the rhythm, the slight movement of his throat against her forehead; a short sentence, four or five words, not more. It was strange not to have foreseen that their loss would be like the loss of a year of life.

  She shut the desk, got up and went to the window. It looked up-river; it was Elsie’s room that faced towards the island. She tried to think about Elsie, to feel the sense of failure and remorse, to care what she was doing now and what she would become; but it was like trying to grasp something with crushed fingers. She was only glad to be alone. It would come, she supposed, to-morrow or the day after, like the movement of his hand toward his gun which was masked by … She passed her hand over her face, and felt a dull soreness from the bruise on her jaw. Last time she had been aware of it, it had not been her hand that had touched it. She shut her eyes, remembering the look in his when the growing light, and an incautious movement of her head, had first showed it him in the morning.

  It was only one o’clock. More than half the day was still ahead; and then tonight, to-morrow, day after day. She looked down at the river, remembering its coldness closing over her head. It had been easy; one had been thinking of something else; it was not till he had struck her that the sense of life had come back with its saving fear. The water went by, smooth and still, tempting her with its silences. She turned quickly back from the window into the room. There must be something to do, some mind-dulling activity in which to hide.

  The impulse to kill thought, when she recognized it, sickened her; escape would punish itself, she had learned that lesson now for good and all. There was nothing to do with pain but to forge and temper it and make it true. He had done it once (she would never know, now, when or why) and she could do it also, as she had followed him up the chimney on Scawfell Pikes; her mind, like Elsie’s, clung to its habits. She went to the bookcase and took out a volume of Plato, much worn and handled; a translation, for she knew no Greek. As she turned the pages back and forth, her eye came to rest in the middle of the Lysis.

  For these things are called friends for the sake of a friend, but our true friend seems to be of a nature exactly the reverse of this; for it was found to be our friend for the sake of an enemy; but, if the enemy were removed, no longer, it seems, do we possess a friend.

  Apparently not, said he, according at least to our present position.

  But tell me this, said I. If evil be extinguished, will it be no longer possible to feel hunger or thirst, or any similar desire. …

  She sat staring at the words, unable to read further, for even those she had read already she could no longer see.

  The doorbell had rung twice before she heard it. She had promised Helen that if the butcher were late again she would say something. Her face in the glass looked, she found, much as usual. She went down.

  “Afternoon, Miss Lane,” said Foxy Hicks. He winked. This implied nothing in particular; it was Foxy’s habitual greeting to her, founded on a joke so ancient that she, at least, had forgotten what it was. By a kind of reflex, she returned the grin which was its correct response.

  “Afternoon, Foxy. Want the pliers again?”

  “Nah,” said Foxy knowingly. “Not today. Too hot for work today. Just had forty winks in the bottom of me boat, that’s me this afternoon. Might of made it eighty, only I woke up and remembered this little job. Promised Mr. Flint I’d let you have it sometime today.” He groped in his pocket, remarking as he did so, “Shan’t be seeing no more of him for a bit, seems like. Give me his punt to lay up. Use it, he says, if it’s any good to you; I dunno when I’ll be wanting it again. Not me, I says, I ain’t never learned, silly lopsided way of getting along if you ask me. Ah, here we have it, slipped down the lining.” He fished out a crumpled envelope, grubby and dog-eared. “Looks a bit worse for the heat, don’t it? Must have laid on it when I was having my nap.”

  “Oh, thanks,” said Leo. She put the letter, without looking at it, into her pocket. “Have a cigarette to take along.”

  “Well,” Foxy acknowledged, “it never comes amiss, as they say.” He stuck it behind his ear, winked, and departed about his affairs.

  Leo went up to her room, and took the envelope out of her pocket, mechanically straightening out the creases and bends. The “Miss Lane” in the middle of its blank surface looked cold and strange. They had never written to one another, except for a few utilitarian lines to fix a meeting. She put the letter down unopened; lit a cigarette; extinguished it; and slit the paper, with a quick jerk.

  The letter began, without preliminaries or any opening form of address:

  After all, there wasn’t enough room on the river. By the time you get this, I shall be in London; and, next week, on the way to Arizona, which will be neither as I remember it nor as you have convinced me that it ought to be, but
which used to have, and probably has still as much room as anywhere.

  I can only suppose that this must have been going on for some time with me. I wanted not to see it, for various reasons; and you had your own—better ones, it seems to me now—for singing me to sleep again whenever, in spite of myself, I was on the point of waking up. You developed the knack so well that you used it once or twice, I think, without knowing. But didn’t you know that this morning would be once too often, and too late? When these things come to the surface, they take their revenge.

  Perhaps you were right; perhaps we couldn’t have made it. You have the citadel of freedom in you without which, to me, people are only so much breathing flesh. I salute it; and I would invade it at the first chance you offered me. Men are so constructed, God knows why. Some women surrender it, to their loss and ours, and are shocked by our unthankfulness; some just sit in it and smile, for as long as we like to go on making fools of ourselves. Some fight. You would. Perhaps I’ve wanted that; it would take too long, now, to tell you why. None the less we should hurt one another and ourselves; and that’s the least of it.

  There are two people in you. One of them I have known much longer than the other. I am missing him, already, as much as I ever missed a friend. I should like him back—sometimes. But you know, now, how much he counted for when he came between my woman and me. I sacrificed him; I even made use of him. When occasion arose, I should do it again; sometimes, no doubt, with polite expressions of regret, sometimes without, sometimes not even knowing what I did. At last, we might wake up one morning to find that I had killed him. I tell you this, not because I approve or defend it, but because it’s true and you ought to know. I think you do.

  I can’t tell how much he means to you. Perhaps, ultimately, he is you, and has the immortal part of you in his keeping. Only you can know, and even you may not be sure. It is the fashion to find in such things a casual product of cells and environment, or a disorder to be cured. I think their roots may go as deep as the soul. To the friend and companion I had, if his integrity comes first of all, I am worse than useless now, I am an enemy. Yet in spite of myself, I think I have written the whole of this letter, so far, to him.

  I had something else to say to the woman who came to me out of the water. …

  The rest of the paragraph was direct, naked and unashamed. It swept her like a physical embrace; she knew he had intended it so. Now, in the moment of separation and loneliness, the memories it evoked were scarcely endurable; and perhaps he had intended this also.

  I shall be at this address for the next three days. If you come to me now, we can go on into this thing with our eyes open. I dare not, and will not, take you any other way.

  I promised everything should be finished if you chose it. Did you trust me, and believe that this was only to say good-bye? Already, you see, the word I gave to my friend is worth no more than the letter. If chance brought us together now, it would be worth nothing at all. There’s a lot of room on the river, but not enough.

  I leave you with the burden of decision, a meanness I have despised in other men. But there are decisions no one has the right to make for another human soul. Don’t come to me in doubt, or in any belief that we shall talk like friends, and weigh for and against, and help one another to a reasonable choice. I can warn you of this now, and that is all. When one wants a thing too much, one loses sight equally of truth, obeying or denying desire. The last counsel that, as a friend, I have to give you, is not to trust this letter either. It’s as honest as I can make it, which means that it’s rotten with tricks. Even while I write it, I have been possessing you in my thoughts.

  If I have left out, all this while, the thing with which it is customary to begin, you will know why. Love is a word, like God, which can be used to beg every kind of question. We made our own word, and I’ll stand by that. Come, if you can see it that way, and what we have we will give one another. I know you too well not to trust you, whichever you choose.

  She thought this was all; but an odd scrap of paper came away from behind it.

  I enclose this because, if we don’t meet again, the rest is about nothing; it belongs to you, and is the only token I have. It’s a good many years since I gave up the unequal struggle with verse; but I woke this morning with the beginning of it in my head, and you were sleeping, so I finished it.

  She read on down the sheet; but thought and feeling were overburdened in her. It was a shape of words on paper, she could not give it meaning or form. After a time she did not measure, she found herself leaning from the window that looked up-river. Noise, and the shaking of the house-boat, had roused her. A steamer was passing, sardine-packed with trippers. Someone was playing an accordion amidships. As they drew level, those who found their exuberance too good to keep to themselves shouted to her, and waved caps and bottles over the rail. She smiled at them, and waved back, as she always did; and found that she was waving with the half-sheet of notepaper that was still in her hand. As the noise faded, and the rocking of the floor under her began to settle, she turned from the window, finding it strange, when she knew her own thoughts again, that so much should have passed within her in what had seemed an absence of herself; stranger still to find that she remembered clearly the lines which, flagging for a moment’s respite, she had seemed to read with the eye alone. She turned the leaf over, for she had stopped before, with the end of the page.

  … this instant breath,

  Children forgetting birth, and spirits death.

  Fire-pillared night with cloudy noon confound,

  Folded in twilight of the unpromised land.

  Beyond this bound

  No prophet points us. Here in your empty hand

  Sleep the stone laws, the serpent and the rod,

  The wilderness, the god.

  Suns in our souls have fallen, moons been hurled

  From their grieved ocean-beds to make this world

  Which now so still

  Keeps sabbath, cradled in our resting will.

  Seek not the end. It lies with the beginning,

  As you lie now with me,

  The night with cock-crow, lust with the light unsinning,

  Death with our ecstasy.

  The past and the future closed together in her, a weight and a meaning too strong for the tiny bridge of the present to bear; as if they would crack it with their force and leave her, blank and nothing, in the gap between. There was a moment when she wanted the bridge to break, and let her escape from both of them. But the bridge held; and, in the very interval of refusal and fear, she found that she had crossed it, not now, but already, while the trippers cheered and played their accordion, and she waved from the rocking window.

  Scarcely knowing what she did, but moving as if with purpose over a task she had come prepared to do, she began to go about the room, making a pile on the bed of things chosen, with dreamlike certainty, in the order of their importance to her; her manuscript, her portable typewriter, an armful of essential books, the objects of habitual necessity like brush and comb; then, working more slowly as the need for choice began to arrest and confuse her, clothes. The thought of their occasions and purposes woke her; she stared at the swathe she held, a suit, an afternoon frock still on its hanger, her corduroy slacks. From the middle of the pile came a warm, fragile scent. She let the rest fall to the floor, looking at the green dress from which it came, the dress which was not hers.

  Suddenly she flung her other arm across her eyes, and, standing as she was in the middle of the room, began to cry; hard sobs with struggling pauses between, painful and ashamed and resisted, like the crying of a beaten boy.

  There were footsteps on the bridge below, and someone knocked a cheerful little tattoo on the outer door. She heard nothing; she was retasting, with the intolerable sharpness of finality, five years of happiness, contentment which, to the part of herself that it satisfied, had been complete.

  Then, in the blankness of pain, when the physical sensation of tears�
��the first she had ever shed in this place—was making a kind of sheltering dullness in her mind, an inconsequent presence, an unbidden image, appeared in it; the grubby little acquaintance of the railway platform, with his mouse-coloured hair and his thirst for knowledge about retractable undercarriages. She wanted to ask him what he was doing here, wandering out of limbo into this moment of time, and why he had changed his face so that it confused itself with Joe’s face when he was explaining something which interested him and which he was anxious to share. He stood and looked at her, the uninvited guest, quietly and unapologetically at home, as Joe had always been; like someone whose presence does not need an explanation.

  Slowly, Leo put back the green dress on its hanger, taking care, as she had always taken care with Helen’s things, not to crush it or involve it in the disorder of her own. She hung it in the wardrobe again; and, moving blindly forward, flung herself on the bed beside the pile of books and papers. Her tears had changed; their flow and rhythm were different, release without humiliation, the tears of a woman.

  While she lay there, the doorbell rang. Quickly, without thought, she jumped up and locked the door of her room, then lay down again, covering her face. The bell rang once more, a couple of minutes later; but the pillow, and the sound of her own weeping, shut it out.

  Peter strolled away, back over the bridge and through the garden. It was too bad that no one was at home; he had called to say good-bye, because his holiday would be over to-morrow. Never mind, he would write or look in another day. His disinterested plans would keep. The book on elementary psychology and the significance of dreams, which he had brought to lend to Elsie, would do next time he saw her. It would tidy up some of the loose ends with which, he feared, her mind was still too generally fringed. And perhaps he would invite her to town one day, some time when Norah was free, and they would all go together to see a really good French or Russian film. Flower of the Lagoon, indeed. Ah, well, there was plenty of time. Considering that he had started her from scratch, he did not feel dissatisfied with progress on the whole.