by Mary Renault
“She seemed to think so. … I tried to pick one that seemed relatively decent, but it was rather … probably my fault. Anyhow I never felt much like another shot. So that’s all. Are you revolted?”
“Mic, darling, no. I was wishing I’d been there for you. If you hadn’t told me I’d never have known. How could you be so sweet to me, after all that?”
“There isn’t anyone but you. There never will be.”
“Dear.” She had seen his face, and hid his head in her arms so that he should not see she was afraid. Who was she, to be entrusted with this?
It seemed no time at all, after that, till she looked at the clock for the last time and said, “Half-past nine, Mic, dear.”
They got ready to go: indeed, their real time together was already over, and for the past half-hour they had been subdued to the expectation of this moment.
“Don’t bother to get the car out. It makes so little difference. It’s a nice night to walk.”
They kissed in a kind of dulled hopelessness, knowing that however much they crowded into it, in another minute it would all be gone. Their life, as they walked through the town, seemed to have ebbed out of them with the fading light. They made conversation between their silences, words that said nothing but were a kindly gesture, as people do before a journey. They were both, Vivian thought, probably a little tired.
“We shan’t feel like this in the morning, Mic.”
“I suppose you’re right. Sleep well.”
“I fancy we’ll both do that.”
“When are you coming back?”
“I’ve got one evening next week, Wednesday, I think, I’ll let you know.”
“Only one? My God.”
“I know. I might get more next year, when I’m more senior.”
“Where’s your room?”
She looked at him, appalled. He seemed quite serious.
“Mic, if you love me. You’d probably be arrested.” She gave a taut giggle, like the twang of an over-keyed string. “In any case I’d have to leave by the next train. You won’t, whatever happens. Swear it. Are you mad?”
“Perhaps not quite. Don’t worry. It seems queer I’ll never see the place where you sleep.”
“Yes; I’d like it better if you’d been there. Look, don’t come any farther, dear, we shall meet everyone. I love you. Don’t touch me, don’t say anything, I’m going now.”
In the main hospital corridor she met one of the Verdun pro’s.
“Hullo. Got your evening, did you?”
“No. Day off.”
“Day off? Some people strike lucky. You weren’t due till next week. I say, what do you think, they opened Mrs. Simmonds today and her stomach was almost solid with carcinoma, secondaries in the liver and everything, they couldn’t do a thing. Just sewed her up again.”
“How awful. She’s hardly thirty.”
“She doesn’t know, of course. Her husband was in the most awful state when they told him.”
“Yes. I expect so. Good night.”
Her room was almost dark. It looked very chilly and indifferent, and was scattered with odds and ends—bath-powder, face-lotion, and a discarded undergarment—that she had left about in her haste to get ready for Mic. She made a mental note not to do that again. She had been thinking, then, of all the future meetings they would have: now she could see only an infinity of farewells, and dying, in the end, a long way away from one another. Forcing herself to remember how tired she was, she refused to think of anything.
She was just about to put out the light for sleep, when Colonna knocked at her door. Vivian was puzzled, till she remembered there was a charge-nurses meeting that night.
Colonna had not heard about the day off, and there seemed no need to mention it. They talked vaguely, both in turn making efforts and then letting the conversation sag. She wondered why Colonna had bothered to come: it was unlike her to seek out company for its own sake.
“By the way,” Vivian asked in sudden recollection, “what did Matron want Valentine for that time?”
“Haven’t you heard? I thought everyone knew now. She’s going to be made Sister Gallipoli, when old Packington retires.”
“A Sister? But—Well, of course, she’s the obvious choice, if they want one of our own. Only—”
“As you say,” said Colonna, “we shall have to be careful.”
“Careful!” There seemed no more adequate reply, and Vivian stopped searching for one; her brain was not quick tonight. At last she said, “She won’t go back to mental nursing now.”
“Oh, yes. She thinks if she takes this for a year first it will give her more pull.”
“A year—oh, well, you’ll nearly have finished your training by then.” Where, she thought, will Mic and I be?
Colonna did not answer for a moment. Vivian noticed that the gold dragons had a few threads frayed out, and one of them had lost an eye.
“Probably it makes very little odds.” She spoke in a quiet unstressed voice, not like her. “A few months, or a few years. Some day she’ll leave me. All this is just a passing thing, for her. She happens to need it now, but she won’t. She doesn’t know it, but I know it.”
Vivian stared at her, wordless and helpless, but she seemed unaware of it. She was quite calm, like the bankrupt who knows that every security has been realised. She spoke as one might speak of the death of the soul.
Afterwards, Vivian could not remember how the conversation ended or with what sort of good night Colonna went away, or what thoughts of her own had made her cry herself to sleep.
-12-
TRAFALGAR WAS TAKING-IN. The wards took it in turns to admit the new patients, for seven days at a time. This week the weather was warm and fine; which meant, besides the emergency operation cases, a steady flood of road accidents. Six extra beds had been put up already. Sister Trafalgar had been twice to the office to ask for another probationer, but nobody could be spared.
It was a Friday, and Vivian’s evening, that week, for seeing Mic.
She ran about Trafalgar in the July heat, cleaning and lifting and washing, serving meals, bathing the new cases and getting their beds ready for operation, always against time, always fifteen or twenty minutes behind schedule, for even on Trafalgar it had come to that this week. Today one of the probationers had a day off, and no relief had been sent in her place. Whenever they began to think they were getting abreast of things, a fresh case came in, or the theatre trolley arrived and someone had to go down with the case. It all seemed to mount higher and higher, the heat, the speed, the smells, the pile of dirty enamel-ware in the sluice, the orange-skins which the patients were continually leaving on the tops of their lockers, the shouts and struggling and vomiting of the operation cases, who had to be watched all the time while the staff tried to cope with the ordinary work. Vivian’s thick twill dress (they wore the same summer and winter, and were nearly always too hot or too cold) clung to her, damp with sweat; her back and legs were a graduated ache, culminating in the feet.
She had set herself a certain amount of work to do before she went off duty—a little more than was strictly necessary, because she knew that none of the Sisters except Sister Trafalgar would have given her the evening at all. It was going to leave the ward terribly short, and the least she could do was to have things straight.
It seemed worse than it really was, she said to herself, because it was five days since she had seen Mic. She counted the diminishing hours—one and a half, one—thinking how all this would disappear. She ought to be thankful, she told herself as she heaved the heavy screens up and down the ward: she had this release to look forward to, but for the patients there would still be the same pain and close heat and squalid sights, and fear of want at home.
Sister was off in the evening too. She was doing all the dressings that could be done early, so as to help the staff-nurse when she had gone. The clock reached five-thirty, and she was still in the thick of it. Vivian was bathing an old man, just admitted, with the dirtiest
feet she had ever seen.
“Shall I relieve you?” said the nurse who had just come on duty.
“No, thanks, I’ll finish. Sister’s doing Ferris by herself: I expect she’d like you to help lift.”
As she came through the screens Sister met her with the trolley. “Are you still there, Nurse, my dear? You run along off duty. I made sure you’d gone.”
“Thank you, Sister.” Vivian cleared up her bowls, washed, got her cuffs on and made for the door.
“Sorry to trouble you, Nurse, but I’ve been and mucked me pillow up.”
Vivian saw that everyone else was tied up with something that could not be left. She cleaned up, changed the bed linen, and washed herself again.
By the time she had changed it was twenty-past six. She had had no time for tea, and could not have eaten in any case. Her face was lifeless, and colourless; she had not the time nor the energy for a clever make-up, and no amount of cosmetics could have taken out the drag of fatigue or put animation into her eyes. She found that the thought of walking half a mile or so to the flat was enough to make her wish she were not going: the discovery did not shock her, because she was not capable of so strong an emotion. Her longing for Mic had become a dull craving for comfort and shelter, the desire a hunted fox might feel for its earth.
I wish to heaven, she thought as she climbed his short flight of stairs, he’d live somewhere on the ground floor.
Mic had heard her coming, and threw open the door before she knocked. He slammed it behind her, laughed, and strained her in the embrace of five days’ starvation. His kisses reminded her thoughts that she loved him, but to her dimmed and deadened body they said nothing at all. She yielded obediently, conscious only that his arms were hurting her ribs. In a moment or two he let her go.
“Darling, what’s the matter?”
“Nothing is, my dear. I’m just a bit tired, I expect.”
He looked into her face.
“But of course there’s something. It’s obvious. Come on, you’ll feel better when it’s off your chest.”
“Truly, Mic.” She heard her voice sharpening. “There isn’t anything.”
His face suddenly changed. “Vivian, it isn’t … Come here, let’s look at you. It is, isn’t it? Listen: you know, don’t you, if—”
His trouble and insistence rubbed the edge of her own fretfulness like something twanging on an exposed nerve.
“Oh, do be quiet, Mic. I’ve told you twice there’s nothing whatever the matter. Honestly, if you keep on and on at me like this I’ll go mad. I came here to get some peace.”
Mic dropped his hands from her shoulders. The responsibility for having hurt him was like an extra weight for her feet to carry. She was too tired to deal with it, much too tired.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Perhaps it would have been kinder of me not to come.”
“Perhaps it would,” said Mic with a hard mouth.
They looked at one another, not quite able to believe it.
Vivian’s irritability flickered down into a grey and exhausted reason. She looked out of the window at the dusty traffic, and the hot and hurrying people in the street.
“You’re right,” she said quietly. “You ought to be angry. Why should you be the one to get the remains? You give me everything: and I come to you used, when everyone else in the world has finished with me. It isn’t the way I wanted it to be.”
There was a movement behind her, and his hand came over hers.
“My dear, I ought to be shot.”
She turned back to him. Suddenly her chin jerked up: she began to laugh weakly.
“Darling, darling, you’ve got it wrong.” She twisted her arms round his neck. “‘Stood up against a wall and shot’ is the expression. You don’t read the right books, or else it’s lack of practice.”
“You sit down.” He picked her up and dropped her into a chair, still helplessly laughing.
“Sweet, the difference between me and a broken-down cabhorse is that they have decent manners and don’t bite.”
“Who’s your blasted Sister?”
“Sister’s a gentleman. It just happens.”
“Let’s have these off.” Sitting at her feet, he began to unlace her shoes.
“Dear, don’t be silly,” she said, though what she had wished to say was that she was ashamed to accept such a service of him. He put them aside and threw his arm across her knees.
“You’re here. Nothing else matters.”
She put her hand on his shoulder. It was strange, she thought, that she would have submitted her body for his sake to any pain demanded of her, yet could not compel it to experience joy.
“I wish I were here, all of me.”
“I’ll play you some music,” he said.
He put on Cesar Franck’s Variations. She lay back with closed eyes, liberated a little from herself. How happy, she thought, to be bodiless, to know no landscape more substantial than these waters and hills of sound.
“Oh, Mic, I feel such a swine. Give me a drink, have you got anything? I’ll be all right then.”
“You don’t have to get tight for me.”
“What does it matter? I’ll do anything. You’ve waited nearly a week.”
“You may he just as busy tomorrow, and you’re not starting with a hangover. Do you like Ravel?”
“Yes.” She sat up with a last flicker of will. “But I know what I’d like better. A nearly, but not quite, cold bath. May I?”
“Of course. I might have thought of that.” He got up. “Here you are. Soap, towel. Run along, and I’ll have some coffee made.”
The bathroom was a wedge-shaped space, from which the kitchen had been subtracted with matchboarding. It was just the width of the bath, which had to be entered from one end. She could hear Mic moving in the kitchen, a yard away.
“Don’t bump your elbows,” he said.
She shouted, over the running of the taps, “Why are old baths with the enamel off always more fun than shiny ones?”
“Probably because you’re surprised they have any water.”
“Perhaps it reminds me of being little. Or else it’s more like water out of doors.”
The shock of cold was heavenly. Her feet stopped hurting. She threw the water on her face, splashed and stretched. Something like life began to stir in her. If it would only last long enough.
“Darling,” she called.
“Hullo.”
“Come and talk to me. We’ve only got about three hours left.”
“I can’t leave the coffee.”
“Bring me a cup in here.”
There was a rattle of utensils that seemed to go on for a long time. After she had decided he was not coming, he appeared with two cups, and sat down on the end of the bath. There were biscuits in the saucers. She had not known that she was hungry.
“My dear, that’s perfect.” She put the empty cup on the floor. “Your coffee’s better than mine.”
“It wanted longer to simmer.”
“Well, it can’t have it. I feel marvellous.”
“Don’t stay in too long and get cold.”
“I haven’t finished washing yet. I like your soap, it smells clean. Do you know, Mic, I’ve bathed six people today and washed nine? I do think I oughtn’t to have to wash myself.”
Mic turned up, slowly, the sleeves of his blue shirt. Presently she laughed.
“This isn’t quite the way I should bathe a patient, Mic.”
“My God, I hope not. You have a gorgeous back, do you know?”
“It doesn’t seem fair, does it, that you can see it and I can’t?”
“Do a lot of the patients make love to you?”
“No. Only coming round from the anaesthetic. It’s funny, the women mostly just weep and vomit, but men do the weirdest things. I wonder what you’d do.”
He trickled a handful of water down her spine.
“Hold the houseman’s hand is what you think, isn’t it?”
It was the first t
ime either of them had managed that sort of joke. She hugged him sharply, forgetting her wetness, and soaked him to the skin.
“I’m sorry I haven’t got any bath-powder,” he said as he finished towelling her.
“Why? Aren’t I nice enough without?”
“Here are your things.”
“I don’t want them. Lend me your dressing-gown instead.”
“You’ll be late if you leave everything to the last minute.”
“I don’t care. Mic, why are you so good to me, why are you? Come here to me and let’s take that wet shirt off. I’ll keep you warm.”
“No.” He held her wrists away, rather too hard. “You’re tired.”
“Not any more.”
The faint and transient life she had kindled served before it burned away, and with that she was content. But her mind wandered and wavered to and fro: she did not know always where she was, they seemed to be embracing in many times and scenes, by night, by day, in a garden, on a stream. “Are you happy?” she said, and had forgotten what she asked before he kissed her.
The sky in the top of the window was grey and glimmering. Its paleness twisted in a slow, mysterious rhythm before her eyes. Mic was shaking her softly.
“I wasn’t asleep.”
“You ought to be. That’s why I’m taking you home.”
“Home. That’s funny. What’s the time?”
“Nearly ten. Lie still, and I’ll bring your things from the bathroom.”
“But, dear, it’s all right: I’ve got late leave.”
“I’m taking you back and you’re going to bed.”
“I’ve gone to bed, haven’t I?” She pulled at his arm like a child. “Don’t go, I don’t want to leave you.”
“You mean you don’t want to move.”
It was true. For a long time, before he roused her, she had not known that he was there.
“All right,” she said.
He helped her dress. The cold silk of her frock made her shiver. Kneeling on the bed, she looked out of the window. It was a glorious dusky twilight, full of murmuring and secrecy and adventurous promises. The window was open, but a thick sheet of glass seemed to lie between her and the dew-fallen air and sky. They did not move her.