by Mary Renault
After a time she raised her face. Everything seemed to have gone out of her. Even to get back to the hospital was like the thought of scaling a mountain. Tonight they would be alone, knowing nothing of one another. She said, simply and literally, “I wish we were dead.”
Mic answered her with silence. But it was a silence that leaped between them faster than spoken words. Like a pale light breaking, it came to her that, out of all their vain desires, this was the one that could be fulfilled.
She put her arms round his waist and pressed her head against him—it made the rasp of his breathing sound very loud—and he held her shoulders. Neither of them spoke, but silently their images of rest and refuge met and were joined.
Vivian’s eyes went to her bag on the table, and then to the red meter against the wall. Mic was looking at his loose silver on the dressing-table. Their faces shared the same calculation.
Everything could be done in five minutes, Vivian thought. Then she could creep back here again, and never move, never go away, as long as she lived.
Obeying a little movement from Mic, she lifted herself on to the bed and lay down in his arms. They sighed in a tired contentment, though they understood the meaning of what they did: that they were tasting peace with a conscious mind before they sank too deeply into it to know it. There was no hurry now: the clock over there, at whose orders they had lived so long, had nothing more to say to them.
Their embrace tightened: they were both trying, through the blur of sickness, to realise one another for the last time. But their spent perceptions failed them, so that they seemed to be struggling with a wall of glass. Their bodies kissed and strained together, while they themselves, helpless and longing, slipped farther and farther away. Vivian understood, then, how short a part of the journey they would make in one another’s company, and her mind turned back, wondering, to the lesser loneliness of which she had been afraid.
Mic had been apart from her in those moments, among his own considerations. He said—it was strange to hear words again between them—“It seems rather rough on Jan. He doesn’t know yet we’re living together, or anything.”
“That’s his fault.”
The sound of her own voice seemed to waken her, as her own cry had wakened her sometimes from dreams. She looked up into Mic’s face. His eyes looked back at her remotely from the dream that she had left, with a faint smile, unstirring. In sudden terror she reached up and shook him by the shoulder.
“Mic! What are we thinking? We’ve only got ’flu.”
Mic sighed; his face lost its distant calm, and took on the lines of conflict and endurance again. He smiled deliberately, and stroked her hair.
“Purely toxic, of course,” he said. “I suppose that’s how these things happen that you read about in the papers.”
“One gets so tired.” She felt the weariness in her limbs like a huge added weight, and shifted herself from across Mic lest this should make it harder for him to breathe. Mic sat up—she could feel the effort with which he dragged himself together—and began to talk, quickly and reasonably.
“Now look here. This is all a lot of nonsense. Go straight home, report off sick, go to bed, and don’t worry. I’ll be perfectly all right here, and if there should be any complications I can go into the hospital. So what’s all the fuss about? We only—” He stopped, out of breath.
Vivian’s rebellion and anger had spent themselves. Her mind fell silent.
“Yes,” she said. “We may as well let go. Things won’t be moved by us. We must leave them to move themselves. I could do that, once.”
“Before you met me,” said Mic. He spoke in thought, and without bitterness.
“Go to sleep, my dear, nothing we think at the moment is likely to be useful.”
They parted quietly, without protesting or clinging to one another.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Nurse Lingard, for going out in this state,” said the Home Sister, after her eyebrows had travelled up the thermometer. She meant that by conserving herself Vivian might have managed another hour or two on duty.
In the nurses’ sick bay Vivian fell into bed and, unconscious for the moment of anything but rest, slept till midnight; when she woke, was sick, spent an hour in waking nightmares and slept again. She had a letter from Mic next evening, posted she supposed by the milkman or the doctor. It contained cheerful but unconvincing information about himself, contradicted by a general impression that it had been an effort to write at all: and asked for news as soon as possible.
Writing an answer kept Vivian almost happy for an hour or two. Then she remembered that she could not post it. No one saw her except the Home Sister, and Vivian could as usefully have handed her a Mills bomb. Probably it would go straight to the Matron’s office, if she accepted it at all. In any case it would ensure a major scandal, and once she and Mic began to be watched, it was only a question of time.
She was allowed no visitors, because of infection. As she dismissed one plan after another she could imagine Mic lying there by himself, listening for the post.
In her search for expedients she had forgotten Colonna, who had a vocational feeling for the illicit and who presently paid her respects at the ground-floor window.
The letter changed hands furtively; they might, thought Vivian with a kind of furious amusement, have been fourth-formers corresponding with the boys’ school next door.
“What have you stamped it for?” Colonna asked. “Didn’t you know he’s in Ramillies side ward? Get back to bed, you blasted fool, what the hell do you suppose I’m going to do if you faint out here? He’s all right.”
Vivian found the bed somehow, and lay down. “What is it, pneumonia?”
“No, no, bronchitis. His doctor only sent him in because he was living alone.”
“Thank God.” Vivian began to realise why sick people lost their reserve: it needed too much energy. “How bad is he, do you know?”
“Not very. Sister Ramillies will look after him, she likes a young morsel. You take things gently. That was a pretty dirty colour you went just now.” Someone was coming, and she ran for it.
Vivian spent the rest of the day trying to read, without much success. She could only remember Mic and the times when she had been too tired to love him, or had loved him with one eye on the clock, or had left in a hurry with some kindness that had been in her mind unspoken or undone. She admired her own impertinence in entering a social service. She found it impossible to offer Mic’s share of her to society and, when society helped itself, bitterly resented it.
She did not sleep well: she knew how it went with chest cases in the night. In the early hours, when the light was beginning to come, it occurred to her that wherever they might be, if one of them should die it would be no one’s business to inform the other. It was a thought that lasted her till morning.
Just before breakfast the Assistant Night Sister came to take her temperature. She was in her forties, with limbs that were already setting into elderly angles; but her face had that curious immaturity without freshness, a kind of tired adolescence, into which many nurses become fixed. Vivian was glad to see her instead of the Night Sister, who had no time for sick staff and treated them uniformly as malingerers.
“Is it down?” Vivian asked her.
“You remember you’re a patient, now, Miss Curiosity.” (It was still up, then, as Vivian had guessed.) “Sleep well?”
“Fairly, thank you. Had a busy night?”
“Never stopped even for a cup of tea. Three acute abdomens in, a man off his head in Trafalgar, and a couple of deaths in Ramillies.”
“Who were they?” Vivian asked. My voice sounds just the same, she thought. Her brain felt cold and curiously hollow.
“A diabetic, and a broncho-pneumonia. Quite young, it was a shame.”
She gathered up her things to go. Vivian was trying to make her voice come before she got to the door. At the last moment, she forced it out, in a kind of creaking wooden casualness.
&nbs
p; “I hear one of the Path. Lab. men’s in Ramillies. Freeborn, isn’t it? How’s he doing?”
“Oh, yes. Poor boy. Nicely educated, too. Queer he doesn’t seem to have any people.”
“Were they sending for his people?” asked Vivian, feeling sick.
“No, I just noticed there weren’t any in the admission book. I’m going to make some tea. I’ll send you along a cup in a minute, if you like.”
“Is he getting better?” She recognised, in her own sharp thin voice, that of all the querulous sick women she had ever nursed.
As if she had pressed a button, the lines in the night assistant’s face shifted from genial gossip to professional caution.
“He’s comfortable.” She entered Vivian’s temperature and pulse in her notebook, and, as an afterthought, asked a few questions about her general condition: including one which, in the stress of hard work and worry, she had quite forgotten lately to ask herself.
“Pardon?” said the night assistant. Vivian was looking out of the window, with a twist of sheet clenched in a forgotten hand. The approaching gleam of a pair of gold-rimmed glasses caught her eye and brought her back again. “Yes,” she said. “Perfectly, thank you.”
“Well, I must be trotting. I’ll send your breakfast along.”
Vivian sat up in bed with her arms clasped round her knees, staring at the opposite wall. Her breakfast arrived, grew cold and was taken away. When Colonna tapped on the window, an hour later, she had not moved.
“Catch,” said Colonna. “He seems to be getting on all right. You’d better pull your own socks up; don’t you sleep, or what?”
Vivian caught the note she had tossed in.
“I’m all right really. Colonna, will you—” She hesitated, she had only just thought what she would have to say, and had not considered how to say it. But the Home Sister’s round was due; there was no time for discreet preliminaries. She explained.
Colonna’s face altered. She came a step nearer and leaned through the window.
“My God! Are you sure?”
“How can one be sure? It’s probably only because I’m tired, or ill or something. I’d forgotten till today. But I daren’t risk it any longer. It’s the third week now.”
Colonna’s curious dark-grey eyes travelled over Vivian in subtle gradations of fascination, repugnance and compassion.
“All right. Next time I do medicines I ought to manage it. Don’t worry. I’ll fix something.”
“I shouldn’t let you. It disgusts you, doesn’t it? It’s risky, too.”
“I’ll get it today or tomorrow. It’ll be all right. You get to sleep, you look as if you need it.”
She herself looked in need of it too. “Why should you do this?” said Vivian helplessly. “I wish I didn’t have to ask you.”
Colonna smiled wearily. “Why shouldn’t I? I haven’t many responsibilities of my own, you know.” Her eyes, searching and a little bewildered, wandered over Vivian’s face and body. “Do you hate having to get rid of it like this? Would you have liked to have one, if you could?”
“I don’t know,” Vivian said. I hadn’t thought about it.”
“You don’t fit into anything. Be good and sleep, I’ll look after you.” She turned to see if the coast was clear, and slipped away.
Vivian read Mic’s letter. It was scrawled in pencil on the backs of opened-out envelopes, as and when he had the chance. Not much of it was about himself. Once he had begun to say something, changed his mind, and made an undergraduate joke about the Sister instead.
She hugged the letter blindly, seeing with her mind’s eye the bleak scrubbed wood and brown paint of Ramillies, the curtainless windows, the black iron beds and Sister’s heavy stalk over the creaking boards. The nurses would say he was a good patient. He would submit quietly to the mass-produced routine, soon accustoming himself again to being lonely and unimportant; remembering probably what she had told him about understaffing, and not asking even for some of the small things he might have had. She wondered if he was eating anything—the food did not encourage it, unless supplemented privately—and if Sister Ramillies was skinning his bowels with the black draught for which she was notorious. She found that she was nursing his letter in her crossed arms, like a child. Then she remembered.
It was Mic whom this intruding life endangered, who had everything to lose. Little and casually as he spoke of it, she had always known that if anything went wrong nothing she could say or do or pretend would prevent him from marrying her. His own memories had burned him too deeply; his determination not to transmit that suffering was absolute, and it would beat her down. She pictured him, through her fault, impossibly burdened, paying all over again for the miseries of boyhood, with his ambition, his strength and humour, the small graces of his life, his youth. To give him back a little of what he had missed was the only thing she had ever found to do which could not be done as well, or better, by someone else. It was her use for herself; and this competitor would have to return to the non-being from which it had come.
At night Colonna brought her a little rubber-topped phial of thick, brown stuff. After her light was out she fingered it in the darkness; so small a thing, capable of destruction so incalculable; rendered void long trains of consequence; taking out of the lives of God knew what other unborn creatures an enemy, a lover, a betrayer, a guide.
It looked a big dose. She wondered whether it would hurt much or only make her feel ill.
Outside the window the ward lights smouldered under their red shades. She jumped out of bed and, by craning, managed to see the dim glow from the window where Mic would be. It looked remote and impersonal, like a star. If I could touch him for a minute, for an instant, she thought. Her limbs began to ache and shiver, and she went back to bed. On the way she glimpsed herself in the glass, in her dressing-gown, grasping her potion; it looked like a charade, and made her laugh.
“‘Romeo, Romeo! this do I drink to thee.’” She emptied the phial with a flourish, and almost looked over her shoulder; it seemed incredible that Mic should not be there to share the joke. But she was quite alone. She lay staring at the lights and the darkness outside the window, and waiting for the pain.
-15-
VIVIAN WENT BACK ON duty four days later, in the afternoon.
Colonna had had to get her a second dose of ergot before it took effect. When it did she felt she would have preferred a few grains of morphia; but it did not keep her temperature up, and if it was rather an early discharge even for simple influenza, the hospital was understaffed and had no margin for times like this.
Mic was making good progress: she wrote to tell him how well she felt.
She walked to the wards, feeling heavy-footed and empty in the head. A transparent but quite impenetrable veil lay between her and everything else, including her own past and future. She accepted the fact that she loved Mic as she accepted the fact that two and two made four; the effect of each statement on her emotions was exactly the same. She would have died for him, if the occasion had arisen, because the willingness to do so was a habit, needing too much energy to break, as it would have needed too much energy to change the parting of her hair.
Her place in Trafalgar had been filled, so they sent her to Verdun. A kind of conditioned reflex pushed her ill-co-ordinated limbs through the routine: like the dissecting-room frog, she thought, continuing to swim with its brain removed. She knew in theory all about post-influenzal depression: in practice it was almost impossible to believe she would not always be like this, perfectly flat and uniformly grey, with the cosmos passing over her like a steamroller.
Sister Verdun sent her out to the kitchen to prepare the ward teas. The table where she had to cut the bread-and-butter was very low; the stooping made her head swim, and pain began to come back, so she found a chair.
“I wonder,” said Sister Verdun, coming in behind her, “what would have been said at my training school if Sister had found me trying to do my work sitting down.”
“
Yes, Sister,” replied the conditioned reflex. Vivian got mechanically to her feet, and went on cutting and buttering. There was a kind of deadness in her stomach, as if it would have liked to be sick but was too tired; and her head seemed to be evaporating, and growing cold in the process. Between her and the bread-and-butter there had begun to form a very finely-spun black veil, which danced about and grew thicker and thicker. Suddenly it was as if the sickness swallowed her heart; the veil became solid, and at once she was struggling with a dreadful non-being, groping for life like something trying to be born. She opened her eyes and found herself on the kitchen floor, with Sister Verdun dabbing water at her in a kind of aggrieved solicitude.
Next day she was sent for to the office, and told that she might take a week of her annual holiday, starting from tomorrow.
Listlessly, feeling little except a reluctance to be disturbed, she looked up a train to her home. She had no money to go elsewhere, and barely sufficient even for the fare. Their first-year pay was twenty pounds a year. She sometimes wondered what happened to nurses who, like Mic, had no family behind them.
She must write to tell her father she was coming. They would sit, in the evenings, with their books, making conversation occasionally because they felt they ought. Of his two children she took after him more; but the circles of their lives did not meet, even enough to cause friction at the circumference. They respected one another’s minds, and that was all. Perhaps, though she had never put this quite clearly to herself, she had not forgiven him for being the one who received everyone’s pity when Mary Hallows died. That Jan would have rejected pity like prussic acid was beside the issue. She would write, she thought, in the afternoon.
At eleven, she had a note from Mic saying that he was going to be discharged next day, and had been given a week’s sick leave.