by Mary Renault
“Mic, don’t trust me like this. What am I? You mustn’t, why do you?”
“Don’t be silly.” He seemed amused, as by some childishness. “Obviously, if one loved somebody like this and couldn’t trust them, one would go mad. You do look beautiful.”
She leaned over him, silent, one hand on the pillow, the other pressed against her heart.
“What’s the matter?” He flicked up his eyelids, laughing at her. “Don’t you want to—er—give yourself to me?”
“Mic!” She exploded in spite of herself. “You do pick up the most disgusting expressions. Give myself indeed. What have you been reading?”
“A book one of the nurses lent me. It was full of things like that. I’ve been saving them up for you.”
“Well, you can go on saving them. Wait a minute, I haven’t brushed my hair or put on any cream.”
“Not Lady Mary’s Secret? It did taste so awful. Like lard.”
“You know I only got that because everywhere but Woolworth’s was shut. This is the kind you like.”
She got her brush and sat on the foot of the bed. The candle threw her shadow on the wall, her chin raised towards her lifted hands, her legs curled away, like the shadow of a mermaid on a rock.
Mic lay watching her, his head tilted on his arm. He said, with a soft breathless laugh, “This girl in the book left the man because he wanted to buy her soul.”
She clasped her hands behind her head. She felt straight and shining, weightless, like the candle flames.
“You’ve never offered me anything for mine.”
“How much?”
He had lifted himself on his elbow, and stretched the other hand towards her along the bed. His eyes were wide and still, his mouth faintly smiling.
She put her brush unseeingly down beside her, and heard it slip to the floor. Like water pulled by a moon she seemed to be flowing without her will, out of herself to him and to some ancient fear, darkened with age and secrecy. Leaning, she took his hand. She tried to speak, but shut her mouth again: she had seen, in fancy, her soul passing from her, like a thin blue cloud, between her parted lips.
Suddenly he closed his eyes. Her mind, released, swung back to a trembling equipoise, returning to security with a shadowy and secret regret. Mic had let her go, and thrown himself back on the pillow; she saw the quilt move with the quick rise and fall of his breathing, and, over his head, the text in its cross-cornered frame, with its pink and blue gothic lettering and smug faded flowers.
She gave a little shiver; the nights were beginning to be cold.
Mic opened his eyes. It seemed all in one movement—he could be remarkably dextrous when he wanted—that he leaned out and extinguished the candles, pulled away the arm on which her weight was resting, and flicked aside the bedclothes as she fell. The rough twill sheet, smelling of yellow soap and lavender, closed over her like the sea.
“We’re mad.” She felt his voice rather than heard it: he was making love with remorseless competence. “For the love of God let’s take what we can, and sleep.” They slept like the dead.
It was strange to live for days on end, and never need to consult a clock except for their own convenience. It was proper September weather, with a light frost at night and high glowing afternoons. The first few days, before they had the energy to go far afield, they spent mostly on the hill behind the house; or in the orchard, an elderly unscientific place with lichen on the apple-boughs and the trunks washed white. The apples were little and gnarled-looking like the trees, but sweet and hard.
Mic worked for an hour or two in the mornings. He had technical papers and periodicals and a couple of important new books to keep abreast of, and once he fell into arrears would find it hard to make the time up again. He was apologetic at first, but Vivian was well enough content. She liked lying in the long coarse grass among the windfalls, pretending to read, or looking at the sky through the leaves and crooked branches; or, if he were sufficiently absorbed not to notice it, watching Mic. He worked lying forward on his elbows, or flat with his chin on his arm, heaving himself up sometimes to make marginal cross-references, or pencil structural formulae, like delicate honeycombs, on scraps of paper. Once he swore acidly at a conclusion of which he disapproved: but for the most part his face had that almost frightening purity and peace that come from concentration on impersonal things. Vivian saw with strangely blended sensations. It gave her a simple aesthetic pleasure, like that of watching a ship driving straight forward on its course; and a sense of freedom which passed and repassed into loneliness, in flickering alternations of happiness and pain.
She envied him the cool intellectual roads where she was not equipped to follow: not because she would have dogged his footsteps there, but because they seemed to offer, once mastered, an easier way of being free than her troubled gropings after abstraction. Yet she knew he did not pursue them for freedom’s sake, only for the enjoyment of his own capacities and for hard practical use. He seemed without the divisions of which these breathing-spaces made her aware in herself. She put them out of the way, refusing to allow them existence except as undertones of happiness. Use and custom, she said to herself, would come soon enough; she would stabilise, and old habits, like this habit of self-sufficiency, return.
It was pleasant to open her eyes in the morning and reflect that in Verdun at this moment the staff, having rushed through the making of twenty-six beds, were breathlessly lining up for prayers. “Our Father,” they would mutter, framing the unnoticed sounds with the accuracy of practice while their minds scrambled over the work they had done, fearful of deficiencies. Over the prayer-book Sister Verdun’s’ eyes would be wandering about the ward registering creased quilts or a bed not pulled out from the wall. Vivian remembered one morning when they had only succeeded in being ready by the skin of their teeth, Sister Verdun had risen and overtaken them before they had time to disperse. “Nurse Kimball, did I see you trying to pray without your cuffs on?” She laughed into Mic’s ear, which was beside her mouth, and woke him up.
Vivian loved the moment of opening their eyes—not waked by the banging of the corridor maid, or Mic’s alarm—the quiet, with everything taken for granted; the leisured passionless intimacy for which, in their everyday life, they had no time. There was no need, as Mic remarked, to fill the unforgiving minute with eighty seconds’ worth of distance run, and be twenty short at the end of it. She had not known, before, how much they needed times like this: it was like finding, after drinking a great deal of good wine, how hungry one had been for bread.
They became with a bewildering speed acclimatised to happiness, as if to have their needs anticipated by one another and every hurtful thing fended off were an element natural for them to live in. Their strength came back quickly, and at once they forgot how sickness had felt. By the middle of the week they were walking as far as, still lazy, they wanted to. It was only sometimes that they remembered it would end.
One hot afternoon they came to a clear brown lake in the middle of a wood. There were blue dragon-flies over it, and a small island in the middle glancing with silver birches.
“I wish we could go on the island,” Vivian said. “It’s childish how one wants places just because they’re inaccessible.”
“Inaccessible be damned. It’s about fifty yards. Come on.” Mic sat down, and began to unlace his shoes.
“But it’s deep.”
“Beloved, if you’ve forgotten how to swim I’ll tow you.”
Tempted, Vivian looked at the lake again. It was clear-surfaced and translucent; the sun slanting through it showed minnows, and a bottom free from weed. They had walked, that day; a little farther than before: she was beginning to be tired, and thought a few minutes’ coolness would freshen her for the walk back.
“It’s lovely-looking water. Can’t they imprison us, or something, for stripping out of doors?”
“No one ever comes here. If they do, wet your hair and stay down and I’ll call you Joe.”
“All r
ight.” She paused with her frock half over her head. “No, but look here, Mic, what about your chest?”
He looked up sharply. “That’s nonsense. I’ve always swum.”
“You’ve just had bronchitis, haven’t you, you cuckoo?”
“Oh, I see. Oh, good Lord, I’m over that.” He kicked his clothes into a pile and took a running dive.
The water was beautifully warm, and they got to the island only a little short of breath.
“A shame there isn’t anywhere to dive properly,” she said. “You know, I haven’t seen you dive since … for months. We must go to the baths again.”
“Yes. As a matter of fact, I don’t really dive.”
“I don’t know what you hoped I’d say to that, but I’m not going to.”
“I mean, the doctor knocked me off it after I had pneumonia that time.”
“Oh, Mic. Why ever did you let me make you?”
“Freud would tell you. I’ll race you back.”
Before they were half-way Vivian found that she was going to lose badly. Her limbs felt heavier and heavier. She became aware, with protesting surprise, that presently they would refuse to move. She turned on her back, a little unhappy because she could not see Mic from that position.
“Mic” she called. “Are you feeling all right?”
“Hullo. Fine.” His voice sounded alarmingly far away.
“Well, could you …” She felt herself sinking, and gave a choked cry of fear.
“Coming. Hold on.” She could hear as she struggled the cut splash of the water and his harsh breathing; then she was alone in a cold and breathless gloom, her feet finding nothing, going down. It was only, perhaps, the sixth of a minute. A grip that felt strange to her, hard, urgent and untender, thrust her to the surface. Retaining just enough sense not to cling, she breathed and opened her eyes.
“All right?” Mic’s face, under his drenched hair, seemed suddenly to have resolved itself all into straight lines.
“Yes. Just tow me.” She filled her lungs with air. The few minutes to the bank seemed a long time. It was suddenly very cold, and when she waded out her body, deprived of the water’s support, seemed made of lead. Mic laid her down on the sunny grass and, snatching the garment nearest to his hand, dried her with painful force. He said nothing, only kept his mouth very straight and breathed short and hard. When her skin began to smart she caught his arm.
“Darling, you’re flaying me. I’m beautifully warm now. Sorry I was such a rabbit.”
“Put your clothes on.” He picked up her slip and dragged it, inside out, over her head.
“Dress yourself, Mic, dear, your teeth are chattering.”
“I’m not cold.” He shook out her dress, pulling it down, as she struggled into it, with a clumsiness that only hindered, and was unlike him. When it was on he still knelt beside her, holding her shoulders. His face looked pinched, and blue about the mouth.
“Dear, do get dressed, you look starved. What’s this you’ve been drying me with? Mic, not your shirt! A handkerchief, anything would have done. Look, spread it out in the sun and get your flannels on and I’ll hug you. You must get warm.”
She sat down in a sunny place and took him in her arms. He was shaking with a fine hard tremor. “You ought to eat something. Is there any of the chocolate left?”
“A little, I think. You have it, I don’t want it.”
“Darling, what is it? What do you feel?”
“I’m all right, I tell you. … I might have killed you. What do you expect me to feel?”
“Of course you mightn’t. You knew you could get me out.”
“You’ve just had ’flu. Your heart might have gone. I didn’t think.”
“Well, you’ve had it too, so might yours.”
“Much loss that would have been. Are you feeling all right?”
“Absolutely. Now cheer up.”
“Why don’t you tell me I’m not fit to live? You must be thinking it. In any case it’s true.”
Vivian, beginning to feel a little desperate, said the first thing that came into her head.
“Listen, darling, this isn’t your fault at all. I had ’flu awfully mildly, really. I’d be as strong as a horse by now, only I took some stuff and it flattened me out a bit. You couldn’t know, it was up to me to be sensible.”
“What sort of stuff?” He turned his head on her shoulder, looking up into her face.
“Oh, just … I probably needn’t have, but I thought it might be safer. It worked, anyhow.”
Mic opened his mouth to speak, said nothing, and buried his face in the hollow between her arm and her breast. His arms tightened round her till it was hard to breathe. She rubbed his wet hair against her dress, wondering what possession had made her tell him.
“My dear, don’t behave as if it were important. It’s so awfully small and squalid. Everybody does it all the time.”
He did not answer. His face, which ought to have been familiar where it was, felt different with the muscles set. A new thought came to her, like a tentative prick of pain. She bent and put her mouth against his hair.
“Mic, you’ve never said … did you want it? Don’t be unhappy, darling. I’ll have one later on. Or lots if you like. Anything you want.”
Still he did not answer. It’s true, then, she thought. Suddenly he flung back his head.
“Anything I want, my God, what do you think? To look after you, to feel I’m the slightest earthly good to you, that you wouldn’t be a damn sight better off if you’d never seen me. I give you nothing. No peace, no safety. No comfort even. Now I’ve risked your life, for fun. And you say do I want you to have children.”
“Hush, my dear, you know what nonsense all that is.”
“Oh, shut up. I love you. I have to send you back to that stinking hospital, among God knows what filth and danger, to be bullied by those barren bitches of old women. You’re ill because of me; and I’ve half-drowned you on the strength of it. So you apologise to me for not having a baby.” His voice cracked. “I’m sorry. I just can’t bear it, that’s all.”
“Darling, don’t. No, no, Mic, you mustn’t. You know nothing matters; I couldn’t be without you. It’s only a little while, everything will be all right.” She hid his face in her arms, “Why don’t I think what I’m saying, why must I be such a fool?”
Helplessly, her eyes wandered round the lake and the clearing. They met with no source of inspiration. A trickle of water from Mic’s hair ran coldly between her breasts and down the length of her body. He was still shivering. She looked round again, and saw something move at the end of the lake. Soon there were voices too.
“Mic,” she said miserably—it seemed the last straw—“I think there are people coming.”
Mic said, “Oh, bloody hell,” and turned over quickly on his face, where he pulled a bracken-frond to pieces. She took out a comb and straightened herself a little—(her hair, which he had partly dried in the rubbing process, was standing out in elf-locks—trying to think what she would say when they were alone again.
In a moment or two there appeared, along the narrow path that fringed the lake, a company of Girl Guides, rambling, with all their mysterious campaigning gadgets on. At the back was the leader, a bright adolescent in the late thirties, with a solid waist in a shiny leather belt, a well-soaped pink face and eager pale-blue eyes. Vivian saw her throw back her head and give a jolly, inspiring laugh, looking as if she had just received guidance to do so.
“But what’s so wonderful,” she was saying as her voice came within range, “is that in Nature there’s beauty everywhere. The greatest artists may strike a false note”—her voice became a little self-conscious, as if she were recalling examples—“but Nature never makes a mistake. Look at this lake.” She swept a gauntleted hand, following it with her eyes; as, indeed, Vivian was doing also. Next moment she and Mic intersected the visual arc. There was a hollow second of suspension; the gauntlet wavered for a moment, descended in an uncertain curve, and swep
t with electric eagerness towards the distant shore.
“Look, Daphne! Isn’t that a dabchick?”
“Oh, where, Miss Curwen?” The cavalcade passed on.
Vivian glanced towards the last spot to which (before the dabchick) Britomart’s glove had pointed. Caught on a low spray of bramble was the only one of her garments in which Mic, for reasons of haste rather than modesty, had omitted to clothe her. Both legs hung down gracefully, like something displayed in a shop-window. Her inside contracted in a kind of convulsive crow. Mic turned round to her, supposing that she wept.
“Look at that.” She threw herself down beside him, getting the words out between gasps. “Beauty everywhere. Why are we worrying, Mic? Nature never makes a mistake.”
Mic looked up. For a second he gazed in doubtful meditation; then he gave a strangled snort, and rolled over on top of her. They laughed till they were warm, and comfortable tears stood in their eyes.
They had a meal soon afterwards, with plenty of scalding tea; got a bus home, made an early night of it, and felt very little the worse.
Vivian was the last to fall asleep. She lay looking at Mic, who was turned towards her. Sleeping, he always looked improbably young and pastoral, his dark hair (he was beginning to fuss about having it cut) tumbled forward, his cheeks a little flushed, his lashes making thick dark shadows. She thought suddenly of the fair boy Colin, for the first time with hostility; he had looked so gay and confident, and had gone lightly away.
There were only three nights left. Then a narrow hospital bed (six objects only belonging to the nurse to be displayed, the furniture not to be moved) all night alone. They would have given her another room—they were always filled as soon as one moved out of them—and she would not be able to climb out and see him. She longed violently for him to wake and speak to her; but he had fallen into his first deep sleep and was very tired. One of his hands was stretched towards her; she moved cautiously nearer so that it just touched her side.
He was sleeping very quietly, his breathing almost inaudible; his mouth was closed in a softer line than it had in waking hours. He looked unbelievably remote, in a peace too distant from life to be called happiness. To know that with a sound or a touch she could wake him made no difference. She remembered a stanza in Don Juan about a sleeping lover. “Like death without its terrors,” it had ended. Without its ugliness, she thought; but it is not in its disfigurements that death’s terror lies.