by Mary Renault
“Would you like to stay here?” He was short of breath from the speed he had made; it roughened his voice a little. It was dark under the willows; she could barely see his face. He put out his hand, reaching for her in the shadows, and touched her breast.
She had forgotten that in summer, when the nights were fine, this was the place where he slept. Twenty-odd years of civilization had not cured him of preferring the sky over his head. They were here; she had thought there would be a few minutes longer, while they went over to the hut.
“Yes,” she said. She felt herself shivering, and tried to control it by clenching her hand on the edge of one of the floor-slats.
“I’ll go in,” he said, “and get a rug. It gets chilly later on.”
She said nothing; he got to his feet again, and stepped ashore. She heard his quick footsteps on grass, and then on gravel.
Leo sat up in the punt, and stared about her, at the black dangling lace of the willows, the water, and the sky. She had known that this would happen, if he left her alone; but she had not been able to say anything. She had never been able to tell people that she was afraid; she had only been able to revenge herself on them.
It will happen again, she thought; it will be too strong for me. One forgets everything. I shall turn on him like the others. Not many people know enough to hurt Joe. I do. And afterwards I shan’t be able to kill myself, even, because of what it would do to him. He must be there by now. He’ll be coming back.
She heard, clear in the stillness, the creak of the wooden door. No footsteps followed; he must have gone in. Everything in the place was easy and ready to hand; he would not be long.
It was a very small island; there was nowhere at all to hide. The punt was there, under her feet, but she never thought of it. One did not take other people’s craft without asking; on an island it was unthinkable to take them at all. Rules like this were so settled a part of life that it never crossed her mind.
Beyond the arch of the willows, the smooth pale sheet of the river slanted away upstream. Two warm red splashes of light shivered on its surface; she had left the electric fire burning in the Lily Belle. It was only a couple of hundred yards away. She and Helen had often swum to the island and back again.
Getting to her feet, she jerked open her dress and stepped out of it, and loosed her shoes. Her one-piece slip was short enough to swim in, but one of the straps slipped down over her shoulder without the dress to hold it in place. She pulled that off too, feeling it tear in her haste, and lowered herself soundlessly over the side. The day had been fresh, and the chill of the water forced a gasp from her which she stifled between clenched teeth. For a few moments she had hardly breath enough to swim with, but she struck out with long strokes, out from the shadow of the trees into the pale wide water. The sense of freedom regained, of power over her own body and the element it moved in, the effort warming her blood edged with the panic that had launched her, gave her a feeling of desperate exhilaration. She struck out faster, her arm flashing out over her head.
Footsteps sounded on the bank she had left. She would not look round. She floated for a moment, listening, but he did not call, and she swam on, fixing her eyes on the red rippling light ahead, shutting off her mind from everything but that and her own speed.
There was a clean-cut splash behind her, a moment of silence, a quick breathless laugh. A mallard, drowsing on the water, squawked shrilly and took to its wings, clumsy with sleep, beating over her head. The silence of her stealth was shivered to bits like a broken shield. She forgot her science, and the economy of effort that makes for pace, and felt her stroke shortening as the sound of his hard steady thrust began to overtake her. She could hear him breathing, now, between the strokes.
Flight had always been shocking to her, and pursued flight a nightmare. There were dreams she had, which she had learned to break by turning and facing what came behind. There was no waking now. Her heart pounded in her throat. She looked over her shoulder; he was only a couple of yards away, panting and smiling, lifting his head sideways from the water to shake it, as a dog does, out of his eyes and hair. His arm shot out again, and his hand closed round her ankle. He let it go before she could sink, laughed, overhauled her, and gripped her waist.
“Give in, Amphitrite.”
She twisted, quick as a fish, in his arm; but he held on, turned in the water, and pulled her to him. A stifling blackness broke over her mind. She joined her hands round his throat to thrust him away: the dark water, cold and blinding, covered her eyes and crept up through her hair. She sank, dragging him with her. His grip held for a few seconds; then through the hammering in her ears she felt him pull at her arms and throw back his head. But he still felt strong and confident, and her fear, blotting out thought, clenched her grip, only knowing to make him powerless. They went down and down. He seemed, now, scarcely to be resisting. A trailer of weed curled against her ankle, softly, like the exploring feeler of some creature lying in wait.
Something struck her teeth violently together; her head seemed to burst in a great white star. It was a cracking blow, square on the point of her chin. For the necessary moment, it wiped out everything. Then she felt the water coming into her mouth, and knew, for the first time, the terror of drowning and nothing else. She fought her way to the surface, choking, with blank eyes, unaware of his supporting hands.
“Easy now. Let yourself go. I’ve got you.”
Dazed and passive, she let him turn her face upward, and felt, presently, the pull of his hands at her armpits. There was water in her throat; she choked it away and heard her own voice, hoarse and changed, saying “Let me go; I can swim all right.”
“Hold still,” he said sharply. “I don’t want to hand you another one.”
She ceased to struggle, and lay watching the sky over her head until the willow-trees shut it away. He steadied her to her feet in the breast-high water.
“Sorry I had to do that.” He was still breathing hard; it took the expression out of his voice. “It’s the only thing. I hit harder than I meant, though. Did you bite your tongue?”
“No.” She pulled herself towards the bank; her arms, lifted from the water, felt like lead. “I’m sorry. I—I don’t know what happened. I lost my head.”
“My fault. It’s a silly game, catching at people out of their depth.”
He clambered up the bank and pulled her up after him by the hands, then let her go. A faint outline in the gloom, he stood silent for a moment, not touching her. Without his support her own weight felt limp and heavy, almost too much for her feet to bear. She gave a laugh, which she did not recognize as her own.
“It’s pretty poor, isn’t it, holding a person’s neck who’s trying to life-save you.”
“Oh, that. Nothing to it. Strong swimmers are always the worst; it’s a well-known fact.”
He moved away. She stood, swaying on her feet, her hands pressed to her eyes.
“Here.” His voice came from behind her; the rough wool of the sleeping-rug went round her shoulders. “Go on up to the hut, and have a rub down. My dressing-gown’s behind the door. I’ll come in a minute.”
She went up through the trees, on to the open grass, hearing no movement behind her.
The door of the hut stood open; she went in, feeling in the dark the shapes of familiar things, for she knew it as if it were a room in her own home. There was an electric torch in the pocket of his dressing-gown. She found the matches and lit the lamp, watching the known shadows, estranged like enchantment, flicker on the wooden walls, the typewriter on the big deal table, the manuscript strewn beside it, a paragraph crossed out with long decisive strokes; the folding bed in disorder where he had pulled the rug away. From a ledge on the wall a carving, in some smooth dark wood, of a negro’s head, seemed to watch her as the shadows moved over its deep-cut eyes. She went for the towel and saw, in the Woolworth mirror he used for shaving, her own face, white and set, with dark dilated eyes and dripping hair. Suddenly she felt bitterly cold, an
d, taking up the rough towel, rubbed herself till her skin hurt, but still without getting warm. She combed back her hair (she knew where everything was, he had lent her most of it some time or another), and corded the dressing-gown round her, rough and heavy against her sides.
“Can I come in?”
At the sound of his voice, even and friendly, just as she had heard it a thousand times, the light seemed to alter and settle, the shadows grew familiar again. She could see, on a shelf in the corner, the mouth-organ which he still called a harmonica, a dented thing with the plating rubbed away; it had been given him by one of the ranch-hands and had been old when he was a boy. He kept it for luck, he said. She remembered how he had shown her how to play it, somewhere about midnight, on the last night she had spent here. “O, bury me not in the lone prairee. …” She had picked it up, in the end, quite well.
“Sure,” she called, her voice sounding her own again. “Come on in.”
He opened the door, in his old flannels and leather belt, smiling at her, his shoulders in the lamplight still shiny with water. Her dress and slip were over his arm; he threw them, casually, on the back of a chair.
“Br-rr,” he said, giving himself a little shake. “Let’s have the stove on.” It was an oil-stove with a red glass chimney; the light of it made the room seem warmer, even before the heat struck through. He dipped into the can of drinking-water, filled a saucepan and stood it on the top. “Coffee in a minute. Can you remember if I had a shirt on when I started out?”
“Yes, I think so. Some sort of flannel one.” As she spoke she remembered, suddenly and vividly, the feel of its texture in her arms, and looked away.
“I thought I did. It’ll keep wherever it is. Have you got the towel anywhere?”
She tossed it over to him, and watched him scrub it over his rough curly hair. The room was growing warm; everything seemed drawing together about her into an encircling security and comfort.
“Have a cigarette”—he dried his hands to light it for her—“while I make the coffee. Put your feet up and get your breath.” She curled herself up on the bed, wrapping the dressing-gown round her bare ankles; there was plenty of it to spare. He spooned out coffee and condensed milk into the saucepan; one could never believe, watching Joe make coffee, that the finished product would be drinkable, but it always was.
“I wish,” he said, strolling over to the table, “that you’d take a look at this sometime and tell me how it strikes you.” He tossed a new novel into her lap. “I think it falls pretty heavily between two stools myself, but I’d like to be wrong because I met the man once and rather took to him. I’ve got to review it for the Mercury.”
She turned the book over, tasting it here and there, trying to pick up a thread in it and focus her mind. Joe had gone over to the table again and was sorting out his manuscript, clipping a chapter together and putting the cover on the typewriter. Her eyes left the book in front of her, and rested on his bent head and the line of the lamplight on his shoulder. Presently he turned and came back to the saucepan; she picked up the book again.
“He writes rather well,” she said.
“Very well. That’s the pity.”
She turned the pages; whenever she ceased to read, her mind was wiped as blank as a slate. Joe strained the coffee into a jug, poured it out into two thick china mugs and brought one over to her.
“There’s something in this,” she said, tasting it.
“Only a spot of rum. Not much. Good for the circulation.”
She smiled back at him, for the first time. “I saw a film of the circulation once. Like a lot of hoops bowling along. A frog’s foot, they did it with. The coffee part’s good, too.”
“M-m. I’ve made better. Throw it down while it’s still too hot to taste.” He sat down beside her, nursing his mug between his knees. “I saw a damned funny thing once. A couple of hearties had a slight misunderstanding and tried to life-save each other. In Parson’s Pleasure it was, while I was up at Oxford. One of them tried this slugging trick, and the other, who’d only been turning somersaults in the water, didn’t think a lot of it and slugged him back. They churned up the river like a couple of alligators. Then the vice-president of the Union came out of the huts; having missed the preliminaries he thought they were both drowning and didn’t feel equal to the double event; so forgetting he was stripped to the buff he went haring round the screens and started waving his arms at the first punt he saw, which was full of Somerville women. They thought he was an exhibitionist gone berserk and tried to make off, but they only liked to look one way, so by the time I’d found my pants and got there they were going round and round in the water, and the chap was just about to leap in and swim out to them so as not to waste time.”
Leo choked over her coffee, and put it down on the floor to laugh. Once she began, she found it hard to stop. She caught her breath and said, “You never told me that one before.”
“Oh, surely. Look, your cigarette’s gone out. Have another.” He bent over her to light it. “You’re going to have a hell of a bruise there in the morning.” He took her chin in his hand, turning her face towards him. She smiled up at him; his face, shadowed with the light at his back, smiled back. The yellow lamplight, the rough primitive room like a room in the backwoods, were suddenly beautiful. “I caught you a crack with the punt-pole, if you remember. Slipped out of my hand.”
“Clumsy devil. You ought to have paddled, like I said.”
“Yes.” He looked down at her, no longer smiling. “I know that.”
There was a silence. A launch went by, swift and purposeful in the night. They were still while its sound lasted. Then he collected the empty coffee-mugs, and took them over to the table.
“That lamp keeps smoking,” he said idly. He bent over it, his shoulders making a great shadow over half the room. “Maybe it wants trimming.” He touched the key; the flame leaped, then dwindled; the light became a little pool on the table, and went out. She could see, after a few seconds of blankness, the pale glimmer from the uncurtained windows and his outline against it, his face still turned to the dead lamp. “That’s torn it,” he said evenly. “The wick’s gone in. I’ll have to fix it when it cools.”
Her cigarette burned in front of her, a point of light making the darkness emphatic. He must have turned off the stove when the coffee was finished; she had not noticed because she was no longer cold. His shadow moved across the window towards her. She felt a contraction at her heart, and drew back a little, feeling behind her the planks of the wall.
“I was going to have a cigarette,” his voice said, close beside her, “but Lord knows where the matches are.”
“Take a light from mine.” She held it out, leaning forward, her eyes on its red spark. He rested his knee on the edge of the bed beside her, and took her wrist to guide her hand. But both their hands were still.
The cigarette was drawn gently from between her fingers. She watched it move away and downwards, and disappear on to the floor. His weight settled beside her, and a board in the wall creaked as his back came to rest against it. He took her hand in both of his, and held it against his knee. The pulse that had been beating in her head quieted. His hands were steady, hard and warm. She moved back a little, relaxing against the wall, and found herself resting on his shoulder. He moved his cheek softly against her hair.
The memory of the river flooded over her, realized and fully understood for the first time. She was filled with a horror of herself; and she must have moved her hand, for his grip tightened. She clung to his fingers, as people cling to ease a moment of physical pain.
“Joe,” she whispered. “You know I … You know I tried …”
He said gently, into her hair, “It’s hell, getting cramp in the water.”
She turned and flung her arm round his neck, hiding her face against him. He gathered her on to his knees, holding her as one holds a child.
“Let it go. Let it go, my dear. It’s over now.”
“It’s never over.
Sometimes I think I’d be better dead.”
“Let it go.”
“It isn’t that I … You see, it’s only …” She could not go on.
He finished for her, easily, it seemed without emotion, “Something went wrong the first time.”
She shut her eyes. She was trembling again.
He moved his head a little away. As if it had been light enough to see him, she knew that he was looking past her, at the pale blur of the window.
“Do you remember,” he said at last, “that morning on Scawfell Pikes? I suppose you might say it was a pretty close call.”
“Yes,” she said, wondering, “I suppose you might.”
“Did it strike you at all that most people wouldn’t have led straight on up that chimney, afterwards, without asking you first how you felt about turning back?”
“I shouldn’t have liked it if you had.”
“No, I suppose not. That wasn’t the reason, though. I couldn’t have made the descent from where we were then.”
“Don’t talk such rubbish,” she said, almost forgetting what had gone before. “Why, that part was as easy as climbing a tree. I could have done it on my own.”
“Yes, you rather enjoy a vertical view, don’t you? I used to wonder how soon you’d spot my lukewarm enthusiasm for what the manuals call ‘a sensational prospect’. You were always pointing them out to me, I remember. The fact is, when I’m climbing at any height, I can’t look straight down for more than a split second; I get vertigo if I do.”
“Joe. Why didn’t you say?”
“Why didn’t you?”
The tautness of her arm round his neck relaxed, and she shut her eyes again, but not in fear.
“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.”