by Mary Renault
They were still out of breath with the running and the stairs. Mic came to the surface with a little gasp and said, “Do come—in—for a moment, won’t you—if you’ve time—and—have a drink?”
“You’re very kind. Perhaps—just for a minute.”
They laughed, wandering uncertainly up the scale, and Mic switched on the light. They were dazzled for a minute, not so much by this as what it showed them, the flame of one another’s vitality. It was as if neither of them had been alive before.
“Mic, you’re—”
“What?”
“Nothing. I just liked the look of you, that’s all.”
To herself she had called him beautiful. He had the neutral kind of good looks which in moments of abstraction or constraint passed unnoticed, like an unlit lamp. She had never imagined that he could look like this.
“Why me?” He was staring at her with wide brilliant eyes. “But you’re—no, I can’t tell you.”
He had left sherry and biscuits ready on the table, and a bowl of garden roses. They ate and drank, sitting on the table’s edge, looking across their glasses. When they had done Mic jumped down, found a record and started the gramophone. He came back, and pushed the table to the wall.
“Dance with me.”
“We can’t dance to this.” She took the hands he held out to her, swaying to the music. It was Tchaikovski’s Flower Waltz. They danced, half-drunk with the ballet, half in earnest, half fooling. Mic caught a rose from the table as they went by, and tangled it in her hair. She leaned back against his joined hands, an arm flung out behind her; the snaps of her dress parted at the armpit; he bent, still holding her from falling, and kissed her side.
“Take it off.”
When she stood up it slid down of its own accord, and she kicked it away. In this hot June weather it was almost all she wore. Mic said, “Now dance with me,” and put his arms round her again. But they did not dance. The gramophone played the rest of the record to itself, and stopped with a discreet click.
She had not thought that he might carry her, for he was slight and she nearly as tall. When he swung her feet quite easily from under her she thought, first, It’s all that swimming; then, for a moment, could think no more. A gust of unforeseen fear shook her. She longed, though she would have died rather than do it, to call out, “No, stop, I wasn’t ready.” The hospital veneer of sophistication cracked away and her ignorance spread in a huge blank before her mind. Their nursing lectures told them nothing. They traced the growth of babies from the first cell, but dismissed their cause with the brevity of a diagnosis. She thought of the elementary psychology, outside their course, which in her brief leisure she had imperfectly assimilated. There were so many things, never adequately explained, which could go wrong. She only remembered that if she and Mic made some mistake they would end by hating one another. It seemed that such things happened. This might be the last moment in which they would be happy together. She clung to him desperately as he carried her the little way, shorter than it had ever looked before, to his own room.
She had not been there since the flat was finished, and there was only a crack of light from the door: it looked a different shape, puzzling with angles and folds of unknown things. She could not see the bed on which he put her down. He moved away, but she would not let him go.
“No, don’t put the light on.”
“Can’t I? I like to look at you.”
“There’s a lot from the door. Please.”
She thought, If I’m going to make his life more difficult than it’s been so far, I wish I’d never met him, I wish I’d never been born.
He slipped from her hands, and stood up.
“It’s all right. I’m not going to switch it on.”
She heard the soft thud and click of his clothes as he threw them away. He crossed the half-lit doorway, sharply black and slim, and lay down beside her. She was no longer afraid: he was familiar like something known in childhood and forgotten, inevitable as herself. But he was troubled: she could feel it in the way he kissed her.
“What is it, tell me.”
He did not speak for a moment. Then he said, “Have you had a lover before?”
“No, my darling. Does that matter to you a lot?”
“Yes. It frightens me.” He breathed sharply. “How dare I? I’m not fit.”
She pulled down his head and kissed him.
“What shall I do? No one else is any good.”
He stroked back the hair from her forehead; she made a sound as the rose pulled, and he disentangled it patiently and carefully, only hurting her a little. Some of the petals fell about her face, light and cool, or slid under her, giving up their warm bruised scent.
He dropped the stalk on the floor, and said, in a voice she could scarcely hear, “I can’t talk about you. I never shall be able to. But there’s a clearness about you, a wholeness, a … Not innocence, but better, I can’t find words. If I spoil that for you, after—all the rest—it’s the end, I’ve failed in everything that matters, I’d be better dead.”
She flung her arms round him, not knowing, till she felt her cheek slippery against his, that tears were sliding from her eyes. She did not feel like someone who might be weeping, but infinite, ancient in wisdom, protective as Hera, a mother of gods and men.
“Is that all? I love you, Mic, I love you.”
There was just light enough to see his face stooped over hers. In a moment it would be too near to see, they would be too near to know one another or themselves, not Mic and Vivian any more, but We, a different, narrower, intenser life. The last thing she said was, “We shan’t come to any harm.”
Indeed, they might both have taken things less anxiously; for they found that, in this as in most other matters, they understood one another very well.
-11-
THEY LAY IN BED discussing who should get the breakfast, chiefly as an excuse not to get up.
“Don’t be absurd,” Mic said. “It’s your day off and I have every Sunday. If you move I shall be really angry.” He settled his head back on her shoulder and shut his eyes.
“But you always have your own to get, and I don’t.” She played about sleepily with his hair till she happened to look at the clock, which indicated that unless something were done at once Mic, at any rate, would get no breakfast at all. She was next the wall and it was tempting to shift responsibility; but she took a deep breath, kissed him, and dived out over the end of the bed before she had time to think again. It felt cold and empty outside, and the thought of thirteen nights in hospital struck leaden on her heart.
“How could you?” said Mic, looking incredulously at the empty place.
In the end she made the coffee while he fried eggs. The kitchen was a sort of cupboard with a gas-ring and a sink, and had almost as little room for two as the bed. The frying-pan was pushed away behind other things, and she wanted badly to ask him what he had for breakfast when he was alone; but Mic was independent about his housekeeping.
“Do you like fried bread with it?”
“Is there time?”
“Won’t take a minute, I do too.”
They were good fried eggs and she told him so. “I’ll have lunch ready when you come home.”
“How amazing to come back and find you here. I can’t believe it. Will you really be here?”
“Life’s unpredictable, but I fancy so.”
“But look here, there’s nothing in the house for lunch. I was going to take you out.”
“You can leave all that, it’s my turn anyway. Mic, you will be late. I’ll clear away. Don’t be such an ass, I’ve got all the morning. Look at the time. Yes, I do, I do, good Lord, what do you think? Yes, of course I’ll be here if I’m alive. All right, but that’s the last and I swear it. Quick, run!”
It gave her a pleasant, warm feeling of power and possession to have the flat to herself. Not that much needed to be done, except the bed and the washing-up; the place was very well kept, not finickingly neat bu
t without muddles stuffed away in corners. She found Mic’s fountain-pen on the bedroom-floor, where it must have fallen out of his coat. He hated using anything else. She would leave it at the hospital for him. She had started out before she noticed anything wrong with her idea of handing it in at the Lodge—“Just give this to Mr. Freeborn, please, he left it behind.” She came back, feeling suddenly very raw and clumsy; found an envelope, wrapped the pen in a piece of paper saying, “I’m still here,” and stuck it down.
Buying the lunch was consoling. Mic had left her his latchkey to get back again; he was going to get another cut, he said. She pushed open the door with her arms full, and almost walked into a woman who was sitting at the table drinking tea.
“I’m sorry—I—”
They stiffened at one another, and then she saw that the visitor had on a grubby overall, wore her fringe in curlers, and was, of course, the woman who came at intervals to clean the flat. She must have had an easy morning’s work this time. Vivian smiled at her with tardy brightness.
“Good morning. I’m having lunch with Mr. Freeborn, so I came early to get a few things ready.”
“Oh, to be sure, Miss.” She was about forty, with a red, tightly-buttoned face. Into her beadily appraising stare Vivian’s smile sank, leaving no trace. “Would you be wanting any help?”
“No, thank you, I can manage easily.” The woman washed her tea-things noisily, collected outer garments and a sinister-looking American cloth bag, and went, with a look over her shoulder which gave Vivian a feeling in her stomach as if she had eaten something very heavy and indigestible. She walked round the flat to see how much evidence she had left. The bedroom was quite straight; too straight, because Mic would almost certainly have left the bed to be made. Quite certainly he would have left the washing-up. Her compact was on the mantelpiece. Poor woman, she said to herself, firmly reasonable, it’s rather too bad. After all, she keeps the flat very clean. I feel sure, if I did for a gentleman, I should hate to have his fancy-friends bursting in on my elevenses. Mic forgot it was her day, of course. It seems neither of us is particularly good at this sort of thing.
She began preparing the lunch, which was more important.
When Mic arrived he said, “You are still here!” and took a little while to get over it. Then, “Thanks for the pen, but you shouldn’t have bothered. My dear, did Mrs. Gale walk in on you?”
“No, I came in on her. It was all right.”
“I’m damned sure it wasn’t. Darling, I can’t apologise. I didn’t remember about her till five minutes before she was due to be here. She lives just outside the hospital, so I took a chance and dashed out to stop her, but of course she’d gone.”
“Truly it was all right. We were both awfully tactful.”
Mic paid a great many compliments to the lunch, but was a little distrait all the way through it.
“Come out of it, Mic dear. What is it, anyway, not still Mrs. Gale? I forgot about her ten minutes after, and I’m sure she did about me.”
“Not her particularly, but just—”
“Well?”
“Well, what she stands for.”
“What does it matter?”
“It can matter, when you get enough of it. I ought to know that, if anyone does. I’ve lived with it. Now I’ve let it in on you.”
“Don’t worry, my dear. It’s only because you were a child it seems worse to you. It’s all new to me, you know, rather a game.”
“It can’t be long,” Mic said. He got up and went over to the window. “They find me rather useful here in little ways that are really off my beat. If I play for it, one of them—someone like Scot-Hallard, for instance, with a finger in several pies—will give me a leg-up to something we can get married on.
“Did you want to marry me?”
“Vivian!”
“Sweet, don’t look like that. I’m sorry. Please. But I thought you didn’t believe in it.”
“Good God, did you think I’d be satisfied with things as they are?”
“I don’t know. I suppose I just accepted it. It’s all we can have.”
“Well, I don’t accept it. I love you, in case I never told you so. Do you suppose I’m content not to offer you any security? What do you think I am?”
“I hadn’t thought like that.”
It had never occurred to her that she had put Mic under any obligation to offer her security. They had wanted something from one another and got it in fair exchange. Being married was obviously desirable because it would enable them to be together: and it was unfortunate that neither of them had any money, but nobody’s fault. They had proved themselves alike in so much, she had taken it for granted that he would share these feelings also. She had reckoned, as now she understood, without his childhood, the years of contempt and his need of compensation.
“I think, my dear,” she said at last, “we’re both starting life rather late and taking it rather hard. You know, however well-off we were, we’d have been crazy to marry without living like this for a little first. We both have rather angular personalities. It seems the angles fit, but we needed to find out.”
“That would have been different. It’s feeling that we can’t.”
“I’m glad, in a way, we can’t yet. Not that I wouldn’t trust you with every part of my life.” Reckless, insane commitment, yet she knew it to be true. “But this leaves us—what Jan would call fluid.”
He looked at her in a kind of liberated wonder. “I shall never know you.” He held her face between his hands. “Often I think I do, but there’s always something more.”
They spent the afternoon lying out on the hills, finding a night of four hours’ sleep not conducive to anything more strenuous. It was a good time, with hours of being together behind them and in front; they talked in desultory implications, smoked, made easy love and read one another things from Texts and Pretexts. In the evening they came back to the flat, not looking much at the clock because it had become unthinkable that this should end.
“You don’t mind tonight that it isn’t dark,” Mic said.
“I’m glad it isn’t. You know, Mic, apart from the fact that I love you, it’s very restful to see a body that isn’t a case and doesn’t look as though it could be.”
“Did you find so many bodies rather overpowering, coming suddenly at first?”
“Hardly at all. One’s mind somehow insulates them, at least, mine did. I suppose it’s the only comfortable way to carry on—I just didn’t realise how completely one does it till last night. All the men I’d bathed and dressed were as irrelevant as so many tables. Did you think me amazingly silly?”
“Amazing, but not silly.”
They dressed, more or less, in order to sit on the bed and look out of the window; Mic in shirt and slacks, Vivian in his dressing-gown, her shoulder half out of a split seam.
“I’m sorry it’s so decrepit. I had it at school, I believe.”
“I’ll mend it for you. It’s lasted pretty well if it’s ten years old.”
“Six, to be exact.”
“Only six? How old exactly are you, Mic? I don’t believe I know. I’ve always assumed for some reason that you were Jan’s age.
“That was rather flattering of you. Actually, I’m about ten years younger than Jan in development, and four in fact.”
“Are you only twenty-five? But then you’re a year younger than me. Mic, I can’t take this in. When I’m thirty you’ll only be twenty-nine.”
“Tempted by some fresh little thing of twenty-eight, you think?”
“But you do feel older in so many ways.”
“Mostly in ways I’d rather be without.”
“How little we know about one another, really. I don’t even know how many lovers you’ve had before me. It’s rather exciting, in a way.”
“Not very,” he said slowly. He looked withdrawn, like someone making a decision. “Do you want to know? One.”
“Tell me about her. What was she like?”
Mi
c got up without looking at her, and rummaged among some papers in a drawer. Presently he came back and put a snapshot into her hand. She saw a fair boy in tennis-flannels, gay and brilliantly vital, laughing into the lens. There was a date on it, five years old.
“You see.” He took it back again.
“It’s all right, Mic. I guessed, anyway.”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“He looks charming. Where is he now?”
“In India. Married.” He put the picture in his pocketbook. “It seemed all very natural, at the time.”
“Of course. It’s a phase a lot of people go through at school.”
“We went on to Cambridge together.” He looked up quickly at her face.
“How did it end?” she asked lightly.
“Just died a natural death. We both had too much else to think about.”
“No women?” She was touched by the kindness he had shown her, and impressed by his imagination. Biology counted for something, she supposed.
“No. At least—”
“It doesn’t matter, my dear.”
“I’ll finish now I’ve started. It struck me after Colin had gone that I was twenty-three and hadn’t felt anything much about a woman, and I began to wonder. Then I met Jan, and there seemed no more doubt about it.”
“But you can’t count Jan. The most improbable people lose their heads over him. I can’t think why: he never does anything about it. I don’t think he knows, half the time.”
“I know, but I didn’t then. It seemed to me I ought to make up my mind one way or another. Unfortunately I didn’t know any girls very well, and it would have hardly been fair if I had. So—”
“All right. I know what you did. Was she kind to you? People say they are.”