by Mary Renault
The first sentences were such a relief that for a few minutes his eye ran on with little co-operation from his brain. A striking phrase or two, however, recalled his attention, and when he had finished he turned back and read the letter a second time. It was then that the postcript, which was overleaf, first attracted his notice. He gazed at it, in thought, for a moment or two; finally he tore off the address, and put it in his pocket-book, before throwing the rest on the fire.
CHAPTER XIII
“DON’T YOU FEEL LIKE writing today?” asked Elsie. Leo had got up late that morning and, breakfast cleared away, was reading the magazine pages of the newspaper in the manner of one who may as well do that as anything else.
“Not much.” Leo put the paper down, and stretched apathetically. “Well, one can’t do nothing all morning, I suppose. I think I’ll get through some of Helen’s mending. She’s done a lot of mine.”
Moved partly by lack of occupation, and partly by curiosity—the picture of Leo sewing was difficult to form, though one supposed she must have done it sometimes at home—Elsie went upstairs half an hour later to look. Leo had spread a dust-sheet or something similar on the floor; a heap of satin and crêpe de Chine lay on one side of her, on the other the necessary implements, arranged in rows like tools on a bench. Sitting on a cushion in the middle, Leo was stitching with dogged, but workmanlike application; in her serge slacks and fisherman’s jersey, she put Elsie in mind of a sailor doing something to a sail. The result looked, however, on closer inspection, quite competent.
“Got something to amuse yourself with?” asked Leo, looking up. Her face looked, Elsie thought, a shade lighter-brown than usual; but she seemed cheerful enough.
“Yes, thank you. I’ve got lots to do.” Leo did not look in need of help; indeed she never did. Elsie, who had been used to her mother’s more leisurely and diffuse household methods, always found herself a beat or two behind, and had got out of the way of offering; Leo had never seemed to miss it. This morning she had her diary to write up; for two different and, it seemed to her, very significant thoughts about life had occurred to her last night in bed, and she had memorized them carefully. She took the volume (it was already a third full) into the living-room, and flattened it on the table; re-read the last entry, and chewed her pen with lingering anticipation. There had been nothing for her in the morning post; but it was only three days since she had written, and there would be another post in the afternoon.
She had got to the second thought when a voice outside shouted “Le—o!” from the water. Elsie, who had recognized it, withdrew herself reluctantly from composition, and went out on the floating deck. She found, however, that Leo had forestalled her by appearing on the balcony half-way up. She had hitched a knee on the rail and looked, in contrast with her earlier lethargy, quite brisk.
“Wotcher, Joe,” she called, with a vulgarity for which Elsie remembered their mother reproving her. “Come in and help yourself. How’s life?”
Joe eased in his punt, which contained a large enamel water-can, towards the deck.
“Hullo,” he said, smiling up at her. “Shame to rouse you out. I could have asked Elsie, I didn’t see her. Morning, Elsie.” To Leo he added, “Get on, don’t mind me, you look busy.”
“I’m only charing round. Leo balanced on the rail. I’m dead from the neck up. I thought you were in London.”
“I’ve just got up,” said Joe, with what appeared to be complete satisfaction. It was then a quarter to twelve.
“You needn’t be so filthily smug about it.” They grinned at one another, downward and upward, with vague morning cheerfulness, posed like a heavy burlesque of Romeo and Juliet. “What time did you go to bed?”
“About eleven. Then I woke up and worked till four. It went rather well.”
“Have you had breakfast, or lunch or anything?”
“Both, thanks. If you’re really not busy, can I ask you about something?”
“I don’t see why not.” Leo came down, and sat on the rail of the floating deck. It did not occur to Elsie, as it might have done with other people, to disappear; Leo and Joe never had the least appearance of having anything private to say to one another.
“Well”—Joe anchored himself and the punt to the rail with one arm—“You know Alcox’s page in The Centaur, and all those significant little thumbnail what-have-you’s they scatter about the columns? Can’t call them illustrations exactly, sort of relevant notions. Frenchman called Brunier did them. He’s going to Russia, indefinitely. They’ll certainly want to keep the layout if they can find someone else. I’m seeing Alcox this afternoon, and it struck me some of those doodles of Helen’s might fetch him. It’s nominally up to the art editor, but anything Alcox says will go. I don’t know, of course. Anyway I could try. Is she around?”
“No, she’s in town for the day. But Joe, not really? It’s awfully good of you. It’s just the sort of thing she’s always wanted to get her foot into. I’m glad she’s out, let’s not tell her until it comes off. Look, I’ll get you her stuff and you can go over it and pick out what you think. Shan’t be a minute.”
She disappeared. Joe, who seemed full this morning of surplus energy and animal spirits, stepped from his punt into the canoe, which was moored ready for use at the rail, undid its painter, and, standing, began to manoeuvre it along with the punt-pole.
“Well, I’m damned,” said Leo in the doorway. She put down Helen’s portfolio on the table, and came out. “What have you been holding out on me, Joe? You never told me you could pole a canoe.”
“Undergraduate stuff,” said Joe, rocking precariously. “Looks flash and serves no useful purpose whatever. Haven’t tried in ten years. The sight of this barge has the most unwholesome psychological effect on me.” He reeled and recovered, remarking to Elsie, disjointedly, “My college barge, this was. They scrapped it after it sank one year. Leo and I met that way. Had to come over and see who was using it. Top floor’s built on, of course.”
Leo remarked, “If you sink that canoe, you can go down after it and get it up again.”
Spurred by this, Joe gave his undivided attention to the matter in hand. He swung the pole; travelled, with great dash and efficiency, for twenty yards; turned half-round to wave to Leo, and went spectacularly into the river. The canoe itself he saved, at the penultimate instant, by performing a kind of vault out of it on the pole. Elsie, much alarmed, was reassured by the sight of Leo standing with her hands in her pockets and laughing whole-heartedly.
Joe came to the surface with unruffled cheerfulness; his short wiry hair, as he shook the water out of it, looked like a wet retriever’s. He appeared to be enjoying himself. Having shoved the canoe and pole in the direction of the deck, where Leo collected them, he heaved himself up and, squatting on the planks, wrung water from the surplus parts of his trousers. Elsie now found their normal state easier to understand. His upper half gave him no trouble, being, fortunately, unclad.
“O.K., try it yourself,” he said to Leo, who was still laughing. “I bet you a pint you don’t get it any further than I did. Elsie can see fair.”
“Done,” said Leo immediately. “You stand there, Elsie. And don’t move till I get there. Where did you start off?”
“About here. No, I’ll give you the benefit, call it here. Done it before?”
“You’ll see.”
“Why not change into a swim-suit first; I would.”
“Oh, you would, would you?” Leo stepped neatly into the centre of the canoe, balanced, and picked up the pole.
Elsie thought, suddenly and embarrassingly, of her letter to Peter. She had thought much about the moment of his arrival, and prayed inwardly that his first impressions might be good. Last evening, the technician from Elstree had dropped in and talked about montage, and Leo had been expert-sounding and intelligent. That would have been an excellent moment. But it was depressingly likely that it would be this kind of thing which would be going on. Only once, so far, had she heard Leo and Joe engag
ed in anything like a serious intellectual discussion, and that had been in the galley, where she had surprised them one morning peeling potatoes into the sink and arguing about Prince Henry’s treatment of Falstaff as if these characters had been personal acquaintances and it had all happened yesterday. Elsie almost wished that she hadn’t said Leo wrote at all. Lost in gloomy forebodings, she moved away from her station, lengthening Leo’s course by several yards.
Leo was off. She made a good start; but even Elsie’s inexpert eye noticed the difference made by three stone less of stabilizing weight. The canoe, several inches higher in the water, frisked like a dancer. Her sureness of foot would have made up deficiences, if it had not been for the heaviness of Joe’s pole, which was stout and, as poles must be in that part of the river, very long. Even so, she got ten or twelve yards before the inevitable happened. She came up laughing, and towed in the canoe; she was too light for her fall to overturn it. Joe leaned out from where he sat, and reached a hand to haul her in.
“Well,” he said, “if that was your first try, as I suspect, it was far the best effort I’ve ever seen. Masterly.” He slapped her waist, making a loud wet noise. “I remember distinctly I didn’t as much as get the thing moving till my second shot. I consider I owe you a pint, on that.”
“You win, all right. I’ll have to practise. Take you on again in a week or so. Come on in and have the stakes.”
Joe collected the pole, which had drifted in of its own accord. “Go and get changed first. You look a bit blue. Water’s cold today.”
“Is it? Well, maybe. What about you, like a bath-wrap or something till you go?”
“No, thanks; they’re so disgustingly clammy when you put them on again. I’ll remember not to sit on the upholstery. I can go over Helen’s stuff while you’re gone.”
“Give him a towel, Elsie, or he’ll drip over everything.” Elsie went up after her to get it, and heard her teeth chattering from several feet away. She came down, however, five minutes later, changed and smiling, though with rather more make-up than she generally wore, and poured out the drinks, keeping up with Joe one of those desultory and cryptic conversations, broken by terse and allusive jokes, to which Elsie had become accustomed and only listened, now, with half an ear. After fifteen minutes or so she remarked, casually, “Well, take whatever you like of those things. She’ll never notice they’re gone. I think I’ll get back to work now; I feel suddenly inspired. Must be the beer.”
She went upstairs, leaving Joe with the sketch-books and portfolio. Elsie thought it a little abrupt, but Joe seemed to take it as a matter of course. They behaved like this, Elsie supposed; and thought how comically inept her first speculations had been. Imagine herself strolling away in the midst of a conversation with Peter. Life must be very simple, Elsie thought (with the secret feeling of superiority which this reflection always engenders) for people so easy-going and tough.
Joe provided himself with a kitchen chair, dried his hands carefully, and settled down to the drawings, going steadily through them and putting his selections in a pile. He had evidently forgotten Elsie’s existence, and she got out her diary again, almost forgetting his, for he was a person in whose presence this came easily. Once or twice, in search of an idea, she happened to glance up, and it occurred to her for a moment that he looked rather different without his usual half-smile of indolent good-humour; coolly critical, decisive, and surprisingly shrewd. But the diary soon engrossed her thoughts again. When he had finished he filed what he had chosen, filled his enamel can at the sink, and went away humming. Elsie, remembering what Leo had said about being inspired, carefully refrained from disturbing her until lunch-time had passed by three-quarters of an hour.
It was just after four when Helen came in, earlier than she had expected. Elsie was, by this time, more than usually pleased to see her.
“I’m in time for tea after all,” she said. “Where’s Leo? Lying down?”
“Yes, she is.” Elsie stared, in amazement at Helen’s prescience. “I don’t think she’s quite herself this afternoon. She didn’t eat any dinner; she just drinks tea all the time. She doesn’t look very well.”
“Bother.” Helen spoke with concern, but no surprise. “She hasn’t had a go like that for ages. She was in quite good shape this morning, too. Has she been doing anything silly?”
“She did fall in the river this morning. I hope it hasn’t given her a chill.”
“Fall in the river?” Helen’s voice mingled astonishment and outrage. “However did she manage to do that?”
“The canoe upset.” Seeing that Helen now looked frankly incredulous, she added in explanation, “She was standing up in it. Joe bet her she couldn’t punt it with a pole.”
“Oh, damn Joe,” said Helen heartily, and went upstairs.
From her curled-up position on the bed, huddled under a thick winter coat, Leo looked round with a pale guilty grin. Her face had the tinge of greenish vellum, and her eyes were underlined, as if with streaks of kohl.
“I’m going to get up in a minute,” she said. “I feel fine now.”
Helen sat down on the edge of the bed. “Elsie told me. Whatever on earth possessed you? You were bad enough that time you just got wet in the rain.”
“It wasn’t anything. It just cropped up, the way things do.”
“Cropped up. Don’t talk to me. This hot-water bottle’s stone cold. Have you had some A.P.C.?”
“About twenty grains. … He fell in and I laughed at him; I couldn’t back out myself after that, could I?”
“After which you went and swallowed a pint of cold bitter, I suppose.”
“Well, naturally, seeing I lost.”
“But why on earth? Why didn’t you tell him you had an off day, like anyone else would?”
“Maybe they would, in one of your filthy hospitals.”
“Oh, nonsense. It isn’t 1890.”
Leo’s mouth shut in a straight obstinate line. After a while she said, awkwardly, “It makes you feel a fool.”
“I just don’t get it. Joe of all people, too. I don’t know what you’ve noticed in his books, or his conversation either, to make you think his mother didn’t instruct him in the facts of life.”
“There are times,” said Leo, “when the facts of life strike me as so damned silly I stop believing in them. Have you got any cigarettes? Mine were in my pocket when I went in. A smoke’s all I want, and I’ll be fine.”
“Of course. Couldn’t Elsie have gone out and got you some? What’s she been up to, hasn’t she done anything about you at all?”
“She flaps about. I told her to read a nice book or something. Asking what’s the matter. One feels such a fool. … This is better. Don’t bother with that bottle, I’m coming down now.”
Elsie, who liked to please, had taken Leo’s injunction literally. Her diary had been brought up to the minute, and there had been nothing else to do. Partly from a sense of social duty, partly because Leo’s library contained nothing more alluring, she had settled herself with the thinnest of four volumes, severely bound in dark blue, which she had found in the downstairs book-case where the more presentable books were kept. Remission. J. O. Flint. She need only read enough to be able to converse intelligently about it. Recalling Leo’s remark about fairness, she had formed beforehand a very good idea of the kind of book it would be; the kind, no doubt, which had been recommended to them at school to broaden their minds on social problems. They had read them up in the holidays, and had informal discussions about them in class. Each side of each problem had been represented by one good character and one bad, and the debating points shared out between them in equal numbers, like counters in a board-game. She had been quite expert in picking out the argument without reading every word. Sooner or later, the subject of Joe’s books was bound to come up when he was present; and she was anxious not to hurt his feelings by making it evident that she had not read even one of them. So far, no opening had occurred; he had discussed with Leo, at various times, the
sales, binding, advertising, printing and general negotiation of books, but had not referred at all to the process of writing them; and once, in the belief that she was listening to another of such conversations, she had been some time in realizing that it was beer he was talking about instead. It was all very odd and unlike what one had imagined. None the less, she was determined to be ready with something appropriate and polite to say about Remission, even if it were all as dull as the title. She opened it in the middle; the first chapters, explaining everything, generally by long conversations between distinguished men in clubs, were always the worst.
She read a paragraph, a page, three pages, with growing sensations of discomfort and surprise. No politics, no economics, no pro and con; instead a clear and meticulous description of a dead baby, which its mother was washing on her lap and dressing in the clothes it was to be buried in. Elsie had never seen a baby, or, for that matter, anyone else dead. After reading a hundred words, she felt that she had, and that her previous ideas on the subject had been inaccurate. It would have been excusable, she felt with an obscure sense of injury, if it had made one cry in a pathetic, comfortable way. One ought to be told what to feel, eased into a nest of emotion which had been warmed up for one beforehand, not left to feel on one’s own responsibility, to ask questions that disturbed and frightened one, to be made, somehow, ashamed of not wanting to ask them. The worst of it was that there was nothing to take hold of, nothing to argue with except what one felt oneself. Without a word of generalization, only a picture built up with a detail here and a detail there, one was left not simply with a dead baby, but with death itself. For no reason on which one could put one’s finger, it made death seem a thing with which one had to come to terms while one was living, even a kind of door in oneself through which it was necessary to pass in order to live. It was all very quiet, terrifyingly quiet and cool. It offered no escape and no promises. It simply put the thing before one, and left one alone with it.