by Mary Renault
A tiny strand of water-weed had dried in his hair. She remembered the lake closing over her, going down into a choking darkness where she could not see or hear him any more. She had been horribly frightened; yet she could remember, at the back of her mind, a confused feeling that it might in some unimagined way have been worse. She knew now what she had felt: that if she drowned now she could never see the passage of life remove him from her, she could never be left alone.
Before they had met, some of the happiest moments of her life had been moments of solitude. Solitude now was only a blank screen for longing and hope to project their imaginations on. When she left him, three days from now, it would not only hurt more excruciatingly than any loss she had felt before; it would also make savourless all the other things which had once given life its taste. She lived, now, in flashes of hours and days, separated by empty spaces of time in which she refused life, straining after next day or next week. What would the end be?
Her loneliness grew unbearable. If she kissed him very lightly, she said to herself, he would not wake. She bent towards him, and drew back again, knowing that she had meant to waken him all the time. She was becoming skilled in self-cheating. Why had she told him about the drug she had taken? Not only a second’s thought, but instinct even, should have warned her that it must hurt him. Something hidden in her secret self had seized on this unguarded moment for its purposes. His suffering, though she had seemed to feel it as her own, had yet been a reassurance; it had revived her sense of power.
She turned over quickly, and pressed her face against the pillow as if to escape. Disturbed perhaps by the abruptness of her movement, Mic murmured some dreaming nonsense and threw his arm across her waist. His mouth was close to hers; he would have kissed her, she saw, but was still too much asleep to open his eyes and find out where she was. If she kissed him now, she knew that he would wake.
She lay looking at his closed eyes, feeling the warmth of his body beside her, meaningless in its nearness when he himself was so far; and remembered that in four nights’ time she would be lying awake, how ready to be contented only with that. Yet still she did not make the tiny gesture that would rouse him. He was not well yet, she said to herself, and needed all his sleep. But she was thinking also of what she had said beside the lake, in the careless candour of sudden need. “I couldn’t be without you.” How easily she had passed on her spirit this sentence of death. She lay still, refusing to call him to her, because it seemed to her that, if she could refrain, the cup might pass from her after all.
-16-
“THERE’S TIME TO GO into the flat for half an hour,” Mic said.
“All right,” said Vivian listlessly. “You know, we’d really be much happier if we left at once.”
“I expect we would,” Mic agreed, flatly, as if to something about which nothing can be done. They went up to the flat and sat together on the bed, saying nothing, looking at the clock, and experiencing all the sensations of having parted along with the expectation of parting to come.
“A fag-end,” said Vivian unemotionally, after fifteen minutes of it.
Mic nodded. “No rocket without a stick.” They kissed, but were too spent to feel anything, except a dim sense of not being there. They had both been awake till after five in the morning, and would have felt better if (as they had intended) they had not slept at all.
“It’s so silly,” Vivian said, trying to rouse herself from the stupor of depression which was shutting her off from him. “On any ordinary day we’d have been so glad to get this half-hour. Let’s pretend I’ve just run in to see you for fifteen minutes.” She jumped up, and came towards him from the door. “Hullo, darling? Are you surprised to see me? Not busy, I hope?”
“Marvellous. How did you manage it?” He came to meet her. His face looked finer-drawn, and the shadows under his eyes darker, when he smiled.
“Where have you been all this long time?” He picked her up, and sat down with her in the armchair. “Tell me all the news.”
His arms, as they held her, did not succeed in speaking the same language as his tongue. She clung to him, as she had not, drowning in the lake.
“Mic, I can’t, don’t let me go, I’d rather you killed me than leave you now.”
“For Christ’s sake, stop.” He caught back her head and kissed her desperately. Then he paused, steadied himself with a wrench that she could feel, and began stroking her hair.
“It will be better in the morning. Remember, darling, you’re very tired.”
For Vivian it was the coup de grace. His surrender might have braced her, but under the gesture of consolation her last defences crumbled; she cried in his arms till it was time to go. Once she looked up at him through her tears, and saw in his face, with its disciplined suffering and pity, an older and more stable beauty than she had known there before. But all it did for her was to tighten her clasp and make her tears run faster. His effort, she knew, was made for her sake; he had no other thought now but to make it easier for her: yet he had only increased her helplessness, and made it more intolerable to leave him.
“Don’t come to the hospital with me,” she said when she had washed her face. “I don’t think I can stop while I’m with you, and I have to report to Matron as soon as I arrive.”
“If you’d rather.” He picked up her handbag from the floor, taking rather long about it. “You look all right. It won’t notice if you make up a bit.”
“Make up for Matron? Oh, Mic, you are sweet.” She shut her hands hard, feeling her eyes beginning to burn again.
“I’ll have to take you back,” said Mic, looking out of the window, “because of your bag.”
“I’ll leave it till I come. I shan’t want it.” There were several things in it that she needed, but she could not bear the thought of unpacking, so many memories lying cold about the room: the crumpled dress she had worn by the lake, her satin nightgown—worn, in honour of its newness, for about half an hour—her ebony brush. She would manage with something or other.
She was ready; the clock, resuming its proper authority, was ready too.
“Darling, we’ve said everything. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye.” He tried to kiss her, as he had spoken, gently and restrainedly, but failed. It was impossible that this should be the last. The last of many thousand kisses, she thought (there was time to think); probably Antony, when he said it, had not believed it either, and had slid still incredulous into death. The last. Her mind and body were conditioned to him as they were to daylight, but in a moment he would not be there. The last, and it was over: but she could not believe it till she saw the closed outer door and the empty street.
The Matron was in her office; a slip of evening sun across it, the secretary’s typewriter faintly rattling outside, papers on the desk in neat trays and files.
“I’ve come to report for duty, Matron.”
“Yes, Nurse. Are you feeling perfectly well now?”
“Yes, thank you, Matron.” (She felt like a puppet without the hand inside it, but she would be well enough when she had slept. She was too tired, she thought with relief, to wake once in the night and look for him.)
“Very well, Nurse. You did not receive the wire I sent to your home this morning?”
“No, Matron.” (What wire, what had her father thought? She would have to find some lie for him after-all.) “I was away from home today.”
“I see. You gave the Secretary your home address. A pity; you should have been in bed this afternoon. I wish you to go on night duty tonight. However, as you have been on holiday you will probably be feeling rested.”
“Yes, Matron. Thank you.” She went out.
Half-past six: she could lie down till eight, when the night-nurses had their breakfast. She ought, she reflected, to have expected it. She had been at the hospital ten months, and they were eligible for night duty after nine. Her eyes were sticky with sleep, and she felt as if she were carrying her body on a skeleton borrowed from an old woman. Well, she
had no excuse for self-pity. If she chose to come to this work in this condition, having expended herself elsewhere, she must take the consequences and do her best to see that no one else suffered. It was the inevitable result of trying to compress two lives into the space allowed for one. Was this what was meant by “leading a double life”? It struck her as feebly amusing: she must remember that this was one of the jokes she could not tell Mic. It was difficult to keep from telling him everything exactly as it drifted through her head. But when she saw him again she would be less tired and, with luck, more intelligent.
When she saw him … She paused, half-way up the stairs to her own room, remembering for the first time what night duty entailed. The night-nurses took their free time in the morning, after they left the wards. The hospital, sensibly aware that they were not likely to have their full faculties available for twelve hours’ unbroken work and their own concerns, had arranged these in appropriate order. By twelve-thirty they had to be in their rooms; not unreasonably, since it was difficult for two nurses to run a ward, which in the daytime employed six, on less than seven hours’ sleep. Once a week, by asking special leave beforehand, they were allowed to go out in the evening instead of the morning, from five-fifteen till eight. Mic was supposed to be free at five; but a busy day, or one of the special jobs that he seemed to be given with increasing frequency, often kept him till after six. There would be that, and an hour or two on Sundays.
Vivian locked herself in, and, throwing off her hat and dress, lay down on the bed. The sun had gone down and everything, indoors and out of the window, was in darkening shades of grey. She lay with a coat thrown over her, staring up at the ceiling. She did not shed any more tears—there seemed nothing left in her to cry with—till the foolish thought came to her that tonight at ten Mic would think of her going to bed, and she would be doing something else. She lay, reaching out to him, with ineffectual memory, slipping into a blackness of being alone; though she knew, when she thought about it a little later, that what she felt could not have had such force if his unhappiness had not followed and kept her company. They had shared these distant moods before.
A spell of night duty lasted three months.
It was a strange life to which she gradually acclimatised herself, dyed in different colours from the daytime world, with its own rhythms, its own emotions and qualities of thought. She suffered in it, as almost everyone did; in health, in power to perceive and even to think, since the mind was perpetually drugged with more or less fatigue, and in the continual pain of longing for Mic which their brief meetings always seemed to sharpen beyond their power to appease. Yet through all this it fascinated her, and she thought sometimes that, if she could have forgotten love or satisfied it, she might have been almost happy.
One woke, heavy-eyed, in the last light; outside the window, a blackbird would be soliloquising on the sunset in low, fluid undertones of inexpressible melancholy. Half-way through breakfast the lights would go on; the little handful of them, bunched in one corner of the huge dining-room, already spoke under their breath as if unseen sleepers surrounded them. They walked to the wards, wondering what changes the lost and unknown day had made there; lit by the yellow corridor lights and by the rusty glimmer of the west through the high windows. The ward on most nights would be quite silent (it was Malplaquet, which looked huger and more vault-like than ever at night); the lights, dimmed with their red shades, lit over the patients just operated on or very ill; the humped white covers of the beds, dyed with the faint reflection, leading in a long perspective to the table at the end and the green lampshade where the Sister sat, waiting to give the senior nurse the day report.
Vivian, if none of the patients needed her, would go into the sluice or clinical room to clean the bedpans or testing things. The work, carried on in quiet and alone, seemed different from the daytime scurry even when, on a busy night, the haste was greater. Perhaps because the air was freer from the tangle of other people’s aims and anxieties, her mind felt enlarged and curiously liberated; she was conscious of this even when she was very tired, finding that with much less volition behind them her thoughts travelled more lightly.
The nurses had their midnight meal in two shifts, the seniors going first, so that from twelve to half-past she watched the ward alone. Sometimes she was running errands all through the time, and sometimes had to stand beside the bed of a man who was light-headed or about to die. She would look into the face and listen to the broken life-sounds or wandering speech, feeling, with an awareness impossible in the day, a sense of some permanence behind the ungeared mechanism; that while she tended the body which slumped lower into the filth and squalor of disintegration, an impersonal essence, freeing itself slowly as her own in this stillness was half-freed, shared with her a secret silence.
Her senior was Rodd, the auburn staff-nurse from Trafalgar. She was easy to work for, capable and direct and able to relax when there was no need for strain. Sometimes when there were several bad cases at once, or emergencies came in and had to be got ready for the theatre at a moment’s notice, she would become furiously over-wrought and curse Vivian viciously over anything or nothing; but there was a kind of tacit understanding between them that this was to be forgotten as soon as the crisis was over. She was engaged to a warehouse clerk, showed Vivian endless snapshots of his broad, kindly, grinning face, and spent every free minute making her trousseau, which was of the most exotic femininity and had to be kept bunched discreetly in her lap in case any of the patients should be awake. Vivian made her tea and coffee, listened and agreed and admired, feeling her own thoughts move in and out of Rodd’s with a curious lack of obstruction, like ghosts through a wall.
If the work were slack they might get several rests in the two or three hours after the midnight round; during a heavy taking-in week they might be working at racing speed for the whole of the night. They made their own tea on the ward, when and if they had the time.
Their fewness, their responsibilities, their freedom from the presence of the Sisters, perhaps the continual necessity for whispering, created a conspiratorial intimacy among the night staff which was impossible during the day. Everyone knew, after the midnight meal, what had happened in all the other wards, and felt a personal concern in it. The hospital seemed to grow, in the night, at the same time larger, more closely a whole, and more visibly dependent on them. It made for solemnity, and for a tacit consciousness of power.
There were times when Vivian felt caught into this life as if into an enchantment, seeing the normal world at the distance of a week-old dream. Once in the early morning when she and Rodd had been silent, in weariness or their own thoughts, for a long while, Rodd suddenly whispered, “It’s quiet tonight. It reminds me, somehow; I was on night duty the night the old King was dying. The wind kept blowing all the time, and everything else was as quiet as quiet. I was sitting up at the desk alone, and suddenly the ward looked different, as if it wasn’t the shape it really is, but open like a great high passage somehow. The big doors at the end were standing wide apart, perhaps that was why. But it was queer, everything seemed drawn up on either side, sort of waiting. And then the wind stopped. Just like that, cut off in the middle, not a sound. I always remember that. I’m not one to have fancies, as a rule.”
But the next night, when she was cleaning the test-tubes in the clinical room, suddenly it all ceased to exist. The snapping of the spell was so sudden, so independent of her own thought, that she knew at once what was happening and, with the glass and polishing-cloth in her hand, went over to the window as if that would help. A street-lamp shone outside, and a distant car whined. She knew that that was the real world; it was not the beginning of night, but the end of day, half-past eleven or so; the crowds from the cinemas had gone home, the streets were emptying, lights snapping out in ground-floor windows; and Mic wanted her.
She knew the mood he would be in, his worst and his rarest now; when he despaired of himself, his work and his future and despised himself, in a silence
harder to cope with than anything he could have said, for ever having allowed himself to take her. She had never learned what to say to him at these times; there was no need any more. He was alone, trying to read perhaps, or lying in the dark staring upwards, with his arm behind his head. The ward was quiet tonight, Rodd sewing and drowsing at the table, none of the patients dangerously ill. Only half an hour, she thought, looking at the mist of her breath on the window; I could have him asleep in half an hour.
The telephone rang in the passage outside. She took the receiver down.
“Malplaquet ward speaking.” (Mic, I’d be there if I could. I love you. Don’t any more.)
“This is Casualty. We are sending you now a case of strangulated hernia for immediate operation.”
“Yes, Nurse.” (Oh, my dearest, go to sleep.)
She lit the gas under the steriliser on her way up the ward. He so seldom needed her now like this, absolutely; she might never again, perhaps, be asked to work this miracle which she would not be there to work tonight.
“A strangulated hernia,” she told Rodd. “For the theatre at once.”
“Damnation, it would be. I did want to finish these cami-knicks tonight. Better have him in the end bed. Put the steriliser on as you go.”
“I have. The bowls are in.”
“Good kid.”
The patient came in on the trolley, an old man, childish in his wits, too ill to feel fear or much pain. She got the theatre things and helped Rodd to paint his withered body with iodine, while his rheumy eyes blinked at them vacantly from the pillow; and in his place she kept seeing Mic as she had seen him once, his head on her arm, looking up at her as if she had rolled away the stone from his sepulchre.