by Mary Renault
As she plodded through the evening’s routine, the high-powered lights of Verdun looked yellow and dingy, the patients seemed dreary and querulous, the staff dim saltless spirits, Sister a lost soul. Yet when she had said good-bye to Jan that morning, she had not experienced any poignant emotion. It was impossible in his presence; he had life in too light and loose a hold. He never attached people to himself nor supported them, so that when he departed there was no tearing of adhesions nor shock of altered equilibrium. But slowly, when he was gone, the light faded out of the web of things, and one only realised then whence the light had come. The mischief of Jan was that when he had removed his vitality he left his standards behind.
Sister came bustling up, a labelled test-tube in her hand.
“Nurse Lingard, take this blood. Take it straight to the pathological department, and tell them it’s Mr. Henniker’s specimen for grouping. Mr. Henniker has arranged for someone to stay on and do it. I don’t know who it is but find him, and tell him Mr. Henniker may want to do a transfusion tonight, so will he do it at once, please. And don’t be too long.” Sister never omitted this valediction, even when she sent a nurse to Matron to report the breakage of a thermometer.
The Pathological Laboratory was the remotest place in the hospital, approached by several hundred yards of passage, two staircases, and some prison-like folding doors. The last floor was in darkness, and Vivian, who had only been there once before, could not find the switch. She groped her way along the passage, while from the shelves at either side of her came the sweetish smell of aberrant organs bottled in spirit. Rounding a corner, she saw a chink of yellow light from a door, and quickened her pace; caught her foot in an upturned edge of matting, and pitched forward. The test-tube fell from her hand, and she heard it break.
The fall, assisted by the darkness and the weirdness of the place, jolted her for a moment into a nightmare-like terror, in which she expected to feel some pursuing shadow leap on her back. Then someone snapped the passage light on, and, returning to her senses, she bethought her that she would have to creep back to Verdun and ask Sister to take another specimen. She thought, too, of the wretched patient who would have to be pricked for it a second time. It was, she reflected, the perfect climax for the evening.
While the light was still making her blink someone, moving rather neatly and lightly, picked her up and steadied her to her feet. She screwed up her eyes at the glare and at some changed familiarity. It was Mic, in a white coat which made him look curiously older and a little severe.
“I do hope—” he began stiffly. “Good Lord. It’s you.”
“Thank you,” said Vivian, still a little dazed. He was holding one of her hands in both of his, and her mind registered an impression that this was comforting before anything else. Then he turned it over, and she realised that it was splashed with blood and he was searching it, with impersonal thoroughness, for a cut.
“It isn’t mine,” she explained, “unfortunately. Look what’s on the floor.
“The blood-group from Verdun, I suppose,” he said without looking. “But these things splinter sometimes. Seems all right.” He let her go, adding as an afterthought, “Got any in your knees do you think?”
“No, thanks. You’ve been waiting late for this, haven’t you? I’m sorry.”
“It’s entirely my fault for not seeing the passage lights were on. Evans must have turned them off after him. He never thinks of anything unless it’s been mentioned in Das Kapital. I’m glad you’re not hurt.”
“Not a bit,” repeated Vivian, her resources supplying nothing more. They looked at one another, beneath their awkwardness a reminiscent caution braced for hostility.
“I’ll get this repeated as soon as I can,” she said. “I hope you won’t have to wait long.”
Just as she had been thinking what a hard defensive mouth he had, she had found herself returning his sudden smile.
“It’s all right. As a matter of fact, I wangle these after-hours jobs when I can. It’s almost one’s only chance of doing any serious work.”
He had acquired, she reflected, a good deal of unobtrusive confidence for someone who had only been a day or two in a new job: more than she herself had managed in seven months.
“Look here”—he stooped down suddenly to one of the splashes on the floor—“there’s no need to take another. I’ve plenty on this splinter. I only need enough to make a slide.”
“Doesn’t it have to be sterile?” asked Vivian doubtfully, clinging to the first of her calling’s ten commandments.
He laughed a little. “No, why? It isn’t a bacterial test.” With his hand on the laboratory door he paused to say, “Look, there’s a seat there. Don’t go.”
Vivian sat down on the bench, in a space between specimen-racks and piles of reports. The ward was busy that night and she had not a shadow of excuse for staying except that she felt unhappy, inferior and tired and wanted to escape for a minute or two. There had been something grateful and sheltering about Mic’s quietness, his air of not being much impressed with the importance of anything, and acceptance of herself as something slightly more interesting, in degree rather than in kind, than the test-tube she carried. Suddenly remembering the theatre-nurse, she got up to go; but at the same moment Mic reappeared, with a slip of paper in his hand, and propped his knee on the bench beside her.
“See Jan off?” he asked.
Their glances met. He was not smiling, but it was as if he had unstrapped a weapon and dropped it on the bench between them. She was instantly filled with a reasonless sense of comfort and relief. His dark incurious eyes held, along with their reserve, a kind of weary humour so like a thought of her own that she lost, momentarily, the sense of contact with another personality. She could have told him everything she had been thinking that evening, except that there seemed no need.
“No,” she said. “I was on duty too.”
“It doesn’t make much odds, does it?”
He spoke without emphasis, casually even. She reflected that this was the first of the Rout who had no grievance and did not protest.
“Not much,” she answered. “I shouldn’t have gone to the station in any case; he hates it.”
“I know.” He smiled faintly. “I thought you might be the exception, though.”
“Jan doesn’t make any.”
He looked at her quickly, as if acknowledging something; a weapon of hers, perhaps, laid down also.
“Oh, well,” he said, “stations do reduce almost anything to ultimate atomic futility.”
“I know. One gets a kind of aphasia which makes it impossible to say anything except ‘Don’t forget to write to me.’ It’s a fact that I once said that to Jan.”
“A good one, certainly. What did Jan say?”
“He just looked wondering.” She added, half to herself because his quiet made this possible, “Jan never allows fag-ends. I don’t know if that’s as uncommon as I think it is.”
“It depends. It isn’t rare as a principle, I dare say. I mean, no doubt a good many people try to plan their lives on that line. More dignified, and so on. But Jan’s peculiar in that he doesn’t seem to expend any thought or will-power on it. Chucking away fag-ends is a reflex with him.”
“Yes,” Vivian considered. “I suppose, by now, it is.”
She looked up at him, as he stood half-propped by one arm against the wall beside her; but he was looking past her down the corridor, occupied with his thoughts.
“A genius for letting go,” he said. “It’s the most envied form of genius, I suppose. Certainly the most spectacular. ‘They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces …’ The ancients would have surnamed him Fortunatus, don’t you think?”
She had been watching his almost expressionless face, and listening to his voice, a light, pleasant voice, flexible and without mannerisms, as dispassionate as if he had been discussing the contents of the test-tube she had brought. Suddenly she got to her feet—leaning as he was, it brought her eyes on a level
with his—and said to her own astonishment, “Do you hate him sometimes?”
“Sometimes,” said Mic, looking her in the face without a change of voice or expression, “I think it’s better to think so.”
There was a kind of unseen jerk, as if they had come to the edge of a parapet before they expected. Then Mic swung himself off the bench and said, quickly and conventionally, “He’ll like Cornwall. The digs are good, too, I’ve stayed there.”
“Jan likes it anywhere.”
“I know. It’s depressing, isn’t it?”
“I must go,” said Vivian in sudden panic. “Sister will kill me. And well she may.”
“Tell her it’s Group 4. That will cheer her up.” He had been holding, she realised, the report form in his hand.
“Have you done it already?” she asked foolishly.
“Oh yes. I did it straight away, it doesn’t take long. Don’t worry about the lights, I’ll switch them off after you.” She had turned to go when he said, “Why not change your apron before the Sister sees you?”
“I’d better, I suppose. May as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.”
“They’re showing some new sculpture at the Art Gallery this week. Shall we go together some time?”
Vivian hesitated. Her imagination played dimly on the sculpture, very vividly on the hard floor of the gallery under her aching feet.
“That is,” Mic said, “if you don’t get too tired on the wards for any more standing about.”
“No, I’d like to. I’m afraid it can only be short notice, though, because I’m not getting proper off-duty at present.”
“That’s all right. Any evening. Or Saturday.” With one of his unnoticeable movements he disappeared behind the folding doors.
As she went down the stairs she had a sudden terrifying conviction that she had been away from the ward for hours. It was cut off from her as if by some huge lapse of time. She pulled out the big watch from the pocket of her bodice; she had been gone, she found, about twelve minutes.
“Nurse Lingard, where have you been? I never heard of such a thing, when I want you to wait for the result I’ll let you know. The man is capable of walking down to the ward with it, I suppose. If the rest of my nurses were as unreliable as this, how do you suppose I could carry on? Go and collect the mouthwash bowls, everything’s behind.”
Sister trotted off, her face red, her body angular, every muscle contracted, taut as an uncoiled crane. Vivian noted her ugliness with satisfaction, and the satisfaction with disgust.
At bedtime that night Colonna brought in some China tea. When she sat down on the bed it became gracefully evident that her stiff dragon-encrusted dressing-gown was all she was wearing; and a wave of grey hopeless irritability made Vivian aware for the first time how much she had been looking forward to going to sleep. But the tea was delicious, a liquid fragrance. She drank it thankfully, feeling ashamed of herself because she was turning over, simultaneously, expedients for dislodging Colonna as quickly as possible. As it happened, none of them were needed.
“You look bloody tired,” Colonna said as she put the cup down. “Sister on duty, I suppose. Get straight into bed, I’ll tidy up.”
She helped Vivian undress like a mother, folded her things, tucked her in, handed her night-cream and cleansing tissues. Vivian submitted with gratitude. She had been taken unawares before by these sudden illuminations of kindness and perception; apart from their own pleasantness, they were part of the variegation which made Colonna interesting to her and, in spite of everything, worthwhile.
“I was wondering this evening,” she said as she brushed her hair, “whether one has the right to attach any value to oneself whatever apart from one’s function in the community. What do you think?”
“Aren’t you a Communist?” asked Colonna in faint surprise.
“No; at least, not philosophically. It doesn’t seem to me a—a sufficiently final thing to lose oneself in as they insist you should. I suppose in practice I could muck in with it; in a lot of ways it can’t be so very different from this.”
“I thought you would be one. Nearly all my friends are, and hate personality worse than cancer. Other people’s particularly. But sometimes we reach a gentleman’s agreement that I’m Wrong but Romantic. … I came here tonight with the worst intentions, did you know?”
“Of course. But I like you so much more like this. Do you mind terribly?”
“No, I think I’m glad if I could only make up my mind to it. It’s funny how I won’t let you alone, we’ve so much that would spoil. But—I don’t know—I’m not in love with anyone at the moment, and you’re rather beautiful in a clean hammered way that’s refreshing after all these plush peaches. And you take it all for granted so restfully, instead of popping your eyes and saying oo-er. Making love to you is pleasant and graceful—and innocent, it seems to me, though I suppose I wouldn’t know; because we’re happy and don’t struggle to possess one another.” She paused; the rare planes of meditation, replacing those of motion, made her face seem strange. “Some day, perhaps, we shall look back to this and want it. To be living in the moment, with a light lover who couldn’t hurt us: to be free.”
“Don’t,” said Vivian. “I felt then as if something were walking on my grave.” She pulled the eiderdown, with a shiver, up to her chin.
“Don’t you want a lover?” asked Colonna with dispassionate curiosity.
“No.” Vivian’s mouth shut straight. “I’m not ready to cope with it. I haven’t learned yet to run myself alone.”
“Who has?”
Jan has, thought Vivian. But she said, “I don’t know yet what I am. I must be something before I can be part of anything else. Love only uses part of you, and it changes that part and makes it seem much more than the whole. If you haven’t seen yourself first and where you’re going—even if it were only for one clear moment—you might get lost. Utterly lost; lost forever, perhaps.” Her eyes, fixed on the window, seemed to reflect the dark outside it. “No. Show me a lover in ten years’ time.”
“You’re posing,” remarked Colonna with the interested appreciation of the fellow-craftsman.
Vivian considered this for what it was worth. “If I am,” she concluded equably, “it’s probably half true. Most poses are. They show your aims though not necessarily your achievements.”
“Utterly lost,” said Colonna meditatively; and laughed. “A damp, blasted, female way to be in love.” She stretched herself, five feet ten of handsome arrogance. “I’m always going to be like the Kitchen Cat in Kipling. ‘She is my Cookie, but I am not her cat.’”
Vivian wanted suddenly, protectively, to silence her.
-6-
THERE WAS A NEW charge-nurse on Verdun, a small, oliveskinned, wiry girl with dark hair, blue-brown eyelids, and a brittle, mask-like animation like that of some Frenchwoman. When she was left in charge, though the work got done faster than usual, she was curiously little in evidence, so little that Vivian had hardly noticed her by the evening of the first day, till someone said to her in the sitting-room. “You’re lucky to have Valentine. We had her on Ramillies till today; now we’ve got that fat bitch Chandler instead.”
“She seems all right so far,” said Vivian vaguely.
“She is, take it from me.”
“A friend of yours.”
“Good heavens, I don’t mingle with charge-nurses.” (Vivian was always forgetting, sometimes disastrously, that the hierarchies of the wards held good with equal potency off duty.)
“Matter of fact I don’t think she has many friends. One of these reserved people, I dare say. She plays the piano in the old lecture-room sometimes, but only highbrow sort of stuff.”
Vivian soon forgot about her, because that night Colonna came to her room and announced that she was going to leave. It was the twenty-ninth of the month, so that meant giving notice in two days’ time.
“I came for an experience,” she explained, “and I’ve exhausted it. My people won’t mind; they can�
��t make out my staying this long.”
“You’re honest. I wish I were.” For she knew already that she did not want Colonna to go. She would miss in the greyness her ringing peacock colour; miss, too, the illusion of strength and stability given by the background of her hot indiscipline. They had been, though they had not thought much about it, almost perfect foils for one another.
Considering it all, she asked, “Is the experience really all you get? Doesn’t the work give you any—any—” she gave up the search for some other word that would sound less intolerably priggish, and plunged—“any spiritual satisfaction at all?”
“No. Most of the time one just seems to be fighting evolution, pushing back all the junk it’s trying to get out of the way. Does it you?”
“Sometimes, I think. Or I wouldn’t still be here, I suppose. What else can you do?”
“I was in repertory for a year, you know, before I came here.”
“You never told me.”
“Didn’t I?” Colonna’s rare but unbreakable reticence dropped, like a steel safety curtain, over some memory. “You’re off duty tomorrow afternoon, aren’t you? Let’s walk and have tea somewhere out.”