by Mary Renault
CHAPTER XVIII
“OF COURSE IT’S ABSURD,” said Leo, kicking off her slippers. “But for some reason that makes it all the worse.”
Helen, who was in bed already, looked up from polishing her almond-pink nails.
“If he had turned up she’d probably be far more miserable than she is now.”
“Tell me I’m an egoist. I know. The sort who’ll eat a chicken but won’t be the one to wring its neck.”
“Quite a lot of people are funny like that.”
“I just didn’t think, I suppose. He was so restful, you know.”
“Did you say restful, or wasn’t I listening?”
“Yes, of course. He never left one in the slightest doubt, for a single instant, that he didn’t give a damn. He was so kind and understanding and off the point. I’ve never felt so safe with anyone. I simply forgot. Till I got back here and found her all dolled up and waiting, poor little wretch. I felt as if I’d snatched a penny out of a blind man’s tin. It was horrible.”
“Except that the penny was never really there.”
“And Santa Claus was never really there, but you don’t tell them before they can take it.”
“Santa Claus will attend to that, if you don’t.”
“Oh yes. As soon as it occurs to him that any misunderstanding needs clearing up. The sooner the better, I suppose. It will be bad enough to be there when it happens, without being involved in it.”
“Well, I should think you’ve provided against that. If I’d been him I’d have blackened your eye; someone will, you know, one of these days.”
“Perhaps it’s the one thing I’ve been waiting for, who knows. A gentleman friend of mine did it when I was thirteen. But that was a decent scrap, and all in order. … I wish I understood more about young girls. It’s a handicap never to have been one. How do they feel, what do they really want? I wish I knew.”
“Bless you, I’ve been one. They feel what they’ve read in books, mostly, and they want what doesn’t exist. You can’t do anything about it. Why should you? It has its moments, you know.”
“Has it? You’re always so comforting. … Joe said something once, or wrote it, I forget. Something to the effect that it’s good for youth to be hurt once or twice, provided it’s done with a sharp instrument.” Her face had changed as she spoke; its restless vitality was quieted, she looked, for a moment, peaceful and grave. Helen looked away, feeling, while it lasted, the breath of loneliness that passes for jealousy in generous souls.
“Joe isn’t always very original, is he?” she said smiling.
“I suppose not. I never thought about it. I expect he doesn’t need to be.”
“It was about this time last year you went climbing with him. Do you think you’ll go again?”
“Not this season. He wouldn’t break off in the middle of a book.”
She fell silent, and absently put out her cigarette.
“It rained a good deal,” she added at length.
It had rained three days out of the seven, while they sat in horsehair chairs in the little climbers’ pub, spreading maps on the mahogany table, marking routes in pencil, eating, attending to their boots, reading, and saying nothing unless they had something to say. On the other four days they had climbed, scientifically, silently in the main, roped together once or twice when it was advisable, taking the legitimate risks. She had never had to ask him for any help beyond what is accepted from the leader to the second climber, and he had never had to offer it. He had taught her a good deal, as he would have taught a boy who was shaping well, and with as little patronage. In the evening they had drunk their pint and chewed over the day; when she went up to bed, and heard the two men in the room next door kicking off their boots side by side and talking about cracks and finger-holds till they fell asleep, it had seemed to her silly, but unimportant, that convention prevented Joe and herself from doing the same. She had been the only woman among the six or seven people there, but no one had been curious about their relationship. Everyone was there to climb, and took this and one another for granted, gathering together at the day’s end to compare routes and methods and gear with the impersonality of their kind, and keeping their secrets of exaltation, or fear, or fulfilment to themselves. She had been accepted among them precisely as Joe was accepted; she had worn, without attracting attention, almost precisely the same clothes. “Difference of sex no more we knew than our guardian angels do”: not an ecstasy, but three thousand feet of rock, taken steadily in nailed boots, remained Leo’s idea of the ascent to the state of the blessed. Once, striking rotten rock, they had both been in real danger, and had got out of it, and had sat on the ledge of their endeavour getting back their breath, with no comment beyond a raised eyebrow and a grin. Joe had not felt called upon to apologize because they had nearly died together. He had not asked her if she felt all right to go on. They had shared bread and cheese and chocolate with their feet in space, and it had tasted better than any food in the world. “It rained,” she would say to people afterwards, “three days out of seven.” She had said little more than this even to Helen. She kept it whole with silence; it had been the greatest happiness of her life.
“Lord, I’m sleepy,” she said. “Well, sufficient unto the day.”
Elsie too was awake. Curled up in bed, with the amber-shaded lamp beside her, she was reading the sonnets of William Shakespeare, Earlier in the day she had noticed the book on one of Leo’s shelves, and had secreted it away; for she had never read them all, only, at school, the ones quoted in the standard anthologies. “Let me not to the marriage of true minds,” and “When in disgrace with Fortune”—she had had no difficulty with these, they were clear and absolute, like something in the Bible; she knew them, of course, by heart. The others, after their metrical and rhythmic virtues had been explained to her, she still found a little confusing; not, somehow, complete in themselves, but like part of a story whose plot one did not know. Half-way through the long evening—for quite early she had been sure that Peter would not come—she had decided that tonight she would read them all. She had experienced so much in the meantime; she would, she thought, understand them now.
As she undressed, she had been a little surprised to find herself less miserable tonight than the night before. Sorrow, this second day of disappointment, ought surely to have accumulated, not softened into this dreamlike melancholy, a purple twilight lit with sad stars. It was, she thought, because her love was of the spirit, a marriage of true minds, not needing the material communication of words and eyes. It did not occur to her—indeed, if anyone had told her she would indignantly have denied it—that real contact with Peter entailed prodigious strain, of several kinds; the effort to appear grown up, to understand everything he said, to make answers that would not sound silly; the effort to assimilate an actual personality into a mind full of cherished, fixed ideas, an effort full of subconscious fear; the effort to tidy up afterwards, to take stock, to accept, to suppress, to rearrange. Tonight there were no new impressions, and those which were already there were settled in, homely, tinged with the kindly colours of the imagination. She had coped with and contained them; there they were, like a bit of wedding-cake in its white and silver box, ready to put under the pillow and dream on. Love alters not (she thought) with his brief hours and weeks, but bears it out even to the edge of doom. She sighed happily, and opened the book.
Knowing it to be Great Poetry, she was slow to admit to herself that she found it disappointing. The long series, all so much alike, containing apparently proposals of marriage, but urging nothing in support of it except that the girl should pass the inheritance of her beauty on, so that it was quite difficult to decide whether it were even the poet she should marry, or somebody else. It seemed very cold and artificial. And then a plunge into complete irrelevance, addressed to a man, to the effect that Nature had intended him for a woman; an odd sort of compliment, she thought, though it was obviously intended to sound polite. Elsie began to skip. Some more to the
woman, quite different, disillusioned and rather coarse; or perhaps it was another one, for surely the first had had golden hair. Her opinion of Shakespeare began, in spite of herself, to descend. He didn’t seem even to like her, very much, or to think her beautiful, so what was it all about? She struggled on, however. “Like an imperfect actor on the stage—” ah, here was something comprehensible. She read the sonnet twice, consoled and cheered to think that even Shakespeare, fresh perhaps from writing Romeo and Juliet, had been tongue-tied in the presence of the beloved object, even as herself. Perhaps that was what had made him write; perhaps she too would become a great poet, and Peter, wondering what had inspired her, would never know. (This would be to the fair lady, she supposed.)
She wandered about, skimming the parts that defeated her with word-play and conceits, lingering over the poems whose meaning was clear and in tune with her mood, those chiefly of unworthiness and the anticipation of death. But gradually she became bewildered and oppressed by the gathering darkness of a misery whose sources she did not understand, and turned the pages more rapidly, choosing at random here and there. From between two leaves a torn scrap of paper fell out, scribbled all over on one side with Leo’s writing. She saw at once that it was not part of a letter, but a slip of old manuscript folded to mark a place, so gazed at it without qualms. There was something about Hank, about a bunk-house, about a Mexican saddle. She turned it over, chiefly to postpone the effort of turning to Shakespeare again. On the back was a pencil-scrawl, of the sort people write while thinking of something else:
Yet this I ne’er shall know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out.
Suddenly she felt as she had felt sometimes in the caves at home; that she did not want to go further on into the dark, that she must turn back now, while a glimmer of daylight still showed round the corner of the bend. As soon as one saw the sunlight, the feeling was gone, and one forgot what had made one turn. It was so now. She read “When in disgrace with Fortune” over again, surrendering to its age-long alchemy of iron into gold. Then she put out the light, and, thinking of cypresses, of fountains, of moonlight and viols and nightingales, fell asleep.
CHAPTER XIX
THE FERRY-BOAT WAS crossing laboriously, against the wind. As they waited for it on the river steps, Peter gazed at Norah with kindly approval. Bringing her here this evening had been an excellent idea. She had had an exacting week, poor child, before the death of her patient, and was looking quite washed out; the blow would do her good. It would be excellent, too, as he had just been telling her, if she and Elsie should get to know one another; her healthy common sense and normality were just what the girl needed, pitchforked as she had been from her impossible home into this rather eccentric ménage. Peter could not help feeling, now and again, a certain responsibility for this, together with a consciousness of not having, himself, got much forrarder with her lately. He had really had very little time. Contact with Norah would give her just the fresh impetus she must be needing. He had already talked of them to one another; at least, he had certainly discussed Elsie with Norah, and, he supposed, vice versa, though the precise occasion had slipped his memory.
Norah was wearing a simple cretonne frock, bare legs and sandals, a costume he approved. He disliked artificial-looking fashions, and had explained to her, convincingly, why they were psychologically wrong. (They had, of course, a superficial attraction when one was meeting a woman for the first time, but that was beside the point.) It had taken a certain amount of persuasion to induce her to come; her occasional diffidences were due, he supposed, to some unresolved inferiority complex. She had even asked whether they were expecting her, a suburbanism which he had gently but firmly laughed away. They were, in any case, expecting him, for he had met Elsie in Mawley during the morning and told her he was coming; she remained, he noticed, in spite of her efforts towards emancipation, painfully shy. It was not until an hour or two afterwards that the thought of bringing Norah had occurred to him. It had seemed an ideal arrangement, and still did.
Elsie occupied, indeed, a very convenient position in the foreground of all this reasoning. Somewhere further back was a less classifiable figure, presenting an issue not quite so clear. Quietly and by imperceptible degrees, whose progress he had not exactly graphed, the desire to give Leo’s psyche a helping hand had turned into something not unlike an urge to put it in its place. Norah was very dependable; amusing, when she got over her initial reserve, always ready to cap one’s anecdotes and to add the little extras which modesty forbade one to insert oneself, well supplied with entertaining London gossip which, because of the contacts she made in her job, was quite well-informed. She was, definitely, an asset. … Then there was Helen, a closed book so far, but very attractively bound. … Still further back in the recesses of thought, only a shy faun in the brushwood, so to speak, was a kind of suspicion that Norah herself had been growing a shade, a tiny shade too independent lately, nothing serious, but … in fine, Peter was sure that everyone would be very good for everyone else.
It was Helen who first saw the approach of the ferry-boat. She went up to tell Leo, who, because it was sunny and cool, was working on the roof, lying on her stomach with a cushion under her chest, a position not very favourable to writing but excellent for thought and for intervals of siesta.
“He seems to have someone with him.” Helen, standing, was visible from midstream, and returned as she spoke the cheerful salutation which Peter waved to her.
“Really?” Leo levered herself up a little on her elbows. She had an equally good view from between the bars of the balustrade, which, however, screened her effectively from sight. “Well, what do you know?” she said inelegantly, “He’s brought a bird along with him. His regular, by the looks of it. How rich.” Shading her eyes against the light, she looked again. “A bit on the sturdy side, but quite nice, don’t you think?”
“Elsie didn’t tell me,” said Helen thoughtfully, “that he was bringing anyone. I wonder if she knew.”
“Oh, good God. Elsie.” The suddenness of Leo’s movement dislodged a sheet of manuscript which she saved, just in time, from blowing overboard. “No, but really, you know, this is the limit. Poor little devil. This isn’t education, it’s butchery.”
“I expect,” said Helen, “he means it all for the best. She has to wake up sooner or later, you know.”
“But, damn it all. No, he ought to know better than this. It—it isn’t civilized.” Leo’s brows settled into a straight dark line. With sudden decision she said, “I’m not taking it.”
“It looks,” said Helen mildly, “as if none of us had much choice.”
“Does it? I wonder.” Leo propped her chin on her hands. Her eyes narrowed; a stranger might have thought her to be daydreaming.
“Think again,” advised Helen. “Think several times. And then don’t do it.”
“Do what?” asked Leo absently.
“Anything you think of doing when you look like that. This is going to be embarrassing enough, without any sideshows from you.”
Leo emerged from her meditations.
“Have we got any of that face-pack left?”
“I think so. But surely you—”
“Well, go and spread some on Elsie and make her lie down with it for twenty minutes. Do you want to change?”
“No, why? Is anything the matter with me?”
“You were never lovelier. But if you don’t, run along and be there when they arrive, because I do.”
“I don’t fancy any of this. I don’t like you when you behave badly.”
“Really I won’t. I’ll be almost imperceptible. Go and do your stuff. Please. There’s a honey.”
Helen was unmoved by this, and by the smile which went with it. But the ferry-boat was nearly half-way across. She went, reluctantly.
“I’ll show him,” said Leo under her breath.
Elsie had just finished her face when Helen arrived in the room. Absorbed in the task, she ha
d not noticed the boat in midstream. She had drawn a cupid’s bow which overlapped the line of her mouth in three places, and had attempted to rouge her cheeks with her lipstick, the result being not quite symmetrical either in shape or shade. Seeing that it would all have to come off in any case, Helen reflected that the pack would make a good pretext without hurting her feelings. Elsie accepted it readily. In its cloudy pink jar it looked and smelt exotic, and she found in herself a curious lack of objection to the delay. It was pleasant to lie with the glossy film on her face, feeling it tighten and crackle interestingly here and there, knowing that by now Peter was probably here, within twenty yards of her, but freed from the responsibility of having to do anything but think beautifully about him. Now and again she would anticipate the moment when, all preparations over, she would go downstairs, open the door, be face to face with him; and her heart felt mixed uncomfortably with her diaphragm, both of them throbbing like machinery.
A footstep outside made her open her eyes, the only part of her face at her disposal. Leo was passing the open door, and had paused for a moment to look inside. What a number of clothes she had, thought Elsie, sighing. Here were still more that she had never seen. Leo had on a plain cream shirt of dull heavy silk, beautifully cut, with the top button open; trousers of cambridge-blue linen with turn-ups and a knife-edge crease, a broad hogskin belt with two gilt buckles and sandals to match. She smiled encouragingly at Elsie, saying at the same time, “Don’t move your face, you’ll crack it.” She looked quite dashing, thought Elsie (trying unsuccessfully to smile back without moving anything but her eyes) with that brown-gold make-up and russet lipstick. The whole outfit looked quite expensive; how odd to spend money on such things when one could have bought a really lovely frock. Leo waved to her, and went on downstairs.