by Mary Renault
(“Stay with me, Vivian.”
“Always, always.”)
“Better let me have those teeth of yours, Daddy,” said Rodd. “Never do to swallow them. That’s right.”
Then there was the theatre, with little Rosenbaum, the house surgeon on call that night, in high spirits, saying things he hoped would embarrass the nurses, and looking interestedly at the eye-spaces of their masks to see. She had been thinking of Mic, not listening, and when his little black eyes darted into her face she felt naked, and hardened into hostility before she knew it. He looked away, and asked the night-assistant rather brusquely for something that was already there.
In the early morning, a little before it was time to wake the patients and rush at the routine, she went out to look at the men on the balcony, and saw the day beginning to break. The air and the sky were still; there was no colour yet on the earth, but the trees were darkening against the east. Over them the morning star hung, low in the curve of space, seeming nearer than the almost imperceptible dawn; huge and liquid, faintly trembling like a cup too full of light held in a hand. The six men behind her in their iron beds were silently asleep. She knew that Mic too was sleeping. Her solitude was not crossed by any movement of thought or desire. A faint, clear greenish-gold began to lift into the sky from behind the trees; and in the emptiness a bar of cloud, too fine to be visible before, glowed suddenly with the fervency of blown fire.
She thought: This is how all life should be accepted, in desireless wonder, reaching out for nothing and thrusting nothing away, rejoicing in the different essence of each moment as it blazes into the present from the folded future. But she was under no illusions; for a life of such moments one needed a heart without roots, a spirit free in the wind, and empty hands. Once she had had them. She would never know them again. She had committed too much to earth.
-17-
IT GAVE THE HOURS of morning a curious difference, to have arrived at them not by the process of waking, but by living through the night. The patterns of weather were not the same if one had watched the day from the earliest dawn: it was strange, too, when the life around was accelerating, to feel oneself running down. Bone-weariness and the longing for sleep were so incongruous as not to appear, sometimes, for what they were; they disguised themselves in other forms, melancholy, irritability, or a cutting-off from all experience, so that one moved like a shadow in an unreal world.
But the waking for an evening off-duty time was stranger still; to dress and wander out, still drugged and heavy with sleep, into the late sunlight, to meet Mic and struggle to match the developed thoughts and emotions of his evening with her drowsy break of day. It was difficult for them both, at first. That they adjusted in the end was an achievement that was principally his. With a perception that was purely imaginative, since it was quite outside his own experience, he entered somehow into her vague and dreamlike state, understood her complete inadequacy to violent passion of body and of mind, and conducted things with a quiet which she had never expected, or, indeed, desired of him before.
“Don’t you mind, Mic? We have so little now, and when I am here all I do is lie and purr like a cat in front of the fire.”
“A nice one to stroke, though. No, I only hate for you to be so tired. Sometimes I think you’re good for me like this. Peaceful, and stabilising. Something like—” he hesitated, then quoted, haltingly like something half-forgotten:
“‘O, Shadow, in a sultry land,
We gather to thy breast,
Whose love—’”
“Darling. That’s a hymn.”
“Is it? Will the devil come for me? What a child you are sometimes.
‘Whose love, enfolding us like night,
Brings quietude and rest.’
Enfolding us like a night.” He relaxed beside her with a little sigh. “If I want you differently, it’s generally when you’re not there.”
Vivian nodded. She too sometimes, when it could do no good, lived at another tempo from this.
“And you’re rather often not there, now.”
“I’ll stay longer on Sunday. What have you been doing?”
“What does it matter?
‘From all our wanderings we come,
From drifting to and fro—’
Lampeter says Scot-Hallard takes up too much of my time. He wants me for some stunt of his own. They’ve been fighting for my carcass all day. I feel like the dead Patroclus when everyone was bestriding him. Never mind them.
‘The grander sweep of tides serene
Our spirits yearn to know.’”
But it was not always, after all, as simple as that.
As the weeks went on she became aware that these changed conditions of living were speeding up a process in their relationship, or, perhaps, simulating a process she had feared: the result was the same. Mic was accepting, quietly, naturally, and inevitably, the responsibility for both of them, and she was consenting more and more that it should be so. He was developing at a speed that frightened her, she felt so unable to match it with any progress of her own. The shock of the lake seemed to have jolted something out of his system: it had been his last capitulation. He helped her, now, through every phase of their companionship, supporting her with his vitality instead of tossing it like a challenge to hers. While she was with him, she seemed to live, to be a person and a force: but after she had left him she would wonder whether she had done anything but give back to him, a little warmed and coloured by her love, the reflection of himself.
It was the morning work, after the anxieties and tensions of the night, that really drained one; the waking and washing and breakfasting of the patients, and running about with screens, all against the clock. It was a strict rule of the hospital that the patients were not to be wakened before six: it looked well in the reports, helped the reputation of the place for progress and reform, and would have been pleasant for the patient too if to carry it out, without increase of staff, had been mechanically possible. When things were very slack it could sometimes be done; otherwise—and it was usually otherwise—the successful night-nurse, liked by authority, was the one who smuggled as many of the washings and treatments as possible into the hours between four and six without being found out. To leave any of the night-nurses’ routine for the day staff was unthinkable. They confined their attentions, as far as they could, to patients who were sleepless in any case; but their quietest movements were likely to disturb the others, and there was always the risk of the Night Sister making an early round. If she did, her alternatives were to give them a severe reprimand or confess that the hospital programme was unworkable; so her choice did not admit of much doubt. The net result was a certain amount of added strain, at the time when they could best have done without it.
Sometimes after a heavy night, when she went through the hospital passages to drag herself a mile or two in the open air (she reckoned that, at the rate of three miles an hour, she had already walked more than thirty in the ward) she would long to see Mic without being seen; the effort to carry on anything beyond mere existence seemed too much. It only happened once: he was going up the stairs that led to the laboratories, in a hurry, carrying part of the apparatus for a metabolism test in his hand. Little Rosenbaum, who was just below, looked up and spoke to him, and Mic, leaning out over the rail, answered something with that momentary laugh of his, sharp and vivid like a blade flicked into the light and quickly sheathed again. Then he was gone round the bend of the stairs; they were too far for her to hear what they said. She walked out into the clear autumn sunlight, which felt hostile to her tired eyes, realising that it had made her more, instead of less, empty and forlorn. He had looked so impossibly, unattainably alive; so full of concerns; so sufficient to things without her.
When she met him, a couple of evenings later, he remarked in the course of amusing her with some gossip or other, “But of course, as Rosenbaum, I think it was, said the other evening—”
She looked up quickly. “You don’
t go out with Rosenbaum, do you?”
“No. More often I look in on him in the common-room, when he’s on call. Anyhow, he says—”
“But, Mic, do you like him?”
Taking a moment to slant his mind round this unforeseen obstruction, Mic considered.
“Well, I enjoy his company. I suppose it amounts to much the same thing.” He saw her face and added, “You don’t think a lot of him, I expect? I can imagine he isn’t at his best in female society.”
“He’s just squalid.”
“Not really. He was awfully good when I was ill: used to lend me books and come and talk to me in his spare time, and he hasn’t much. He’s extraordinarily interesting about music, too; been everywhere and heard everybody and has rather original ideas.”
“He would have.” She hated herself but could not stop. She loved music too, but knew her own response to be the simple emotional one of the untrained: she could only express it to him in visual images and other fancies.
“He goes out with fat Collins,” she said.
“Yes, I expect he would. Well, he doesn’t take me along.” Mic looked at her thoughtfully, shifted the cushion behind her head and lit her a cigarette. “Sex in the abstract, of course, sometimes. He’s full of esoteric doctrine about it. He doesn’t give me the benefit of it very often, though, because I laugh in the wrong places. He puts it down to the psychically sterilising effect of my scientific training.” He leaned over and kissed her.
His touch seemed, for a moment, to melt away the shell of possessive fear that was closing her in; but he let her go too quickly, handling her lightly because she seemed unequal to life today.
“All the same,” she said, “if you saw me out with him you wouldn’t be particularly pleased.”
“Of course I shouldn’t.” The patience in Mic’s voice was becoming ever so little tired. “Because, Rosenbaum being what he is, the relationship would be entirely different.”
“Would it?”
Silence. She held her breath. She must have been mad. What was he going to say to her? She would take it. Anything that would persuade him to forgive her, if anything would. She looked, hardly daring, at his face.
His expression was purely puzzled, as if he were making up his mind whether her tongue had slipped or his hearing deceived him. Just as she felt she could not bear it for an instant longer, he threw up his head and laughed. She could not believe it. He was not mocking her, even laughing at her. His sense of humour had simply been tickled. His face was like a naughty boy’s, full of improper delight.
Was he never going to stop? She sat looking at him, thinking as if he were a stranger what an attractive laugh he had, and feeling afraid.
He seemed, when he sobered down a little, faintly surprised not to find her laughing too.
“Darling,” he said shakily, “you did mean that to be funny, didn’t you? Because it is, terribly.”
Vivian passed her hand across her eyes.
“Yes, of course I did. Don’t take any notice of me, my mind’s curdled, I think. Mic, I love you.”
Mic slid an arm under her and looked into her face, raising one eyebrow a little.
“Yes. Kiss me. It’s all I’m good for, anyway.”
“That’s too funny to laugh at.”
But she could feel, in the movement with which he took her into his arms, a gesture of relief, as if he were glad to be done with words.
The next thing he said was, “Look at the time.”
Already? She followed his eyes. Yes, there was not a minute, she would be late for breakfast in any case. Though it was the shock of self-discovery that had wakened her with the brutality of a cold plunge, still she was awake and they had been, for the moment, happy. He had answered her brief spark with a flash of his own that had reminded her how foreign to him all these dim smoulderings really were. They had been, for a little while, themselves, and had just been settling into a warm untroubled certainty of one another, something the strength of which would have carried her through the desert stretch ahead. But, as usual, it was time to go. They had had only two hours.
“Oh, Mic, I wish I could stay.”
“I wish you could stay for good.”
She hid her face on his shoulder, tempted almost beyond her power. Without words, with a look, a movement, she could consent. Until he had more to offer, he would never ask her more plainly than he was asking her now. She shut her eyes, surrendering for a moment to the thought of it. No. If she had lost confidence and strength she had less right than ever to saddle him with her dependence. In her inmost heart she knew, too, that she was afraid of losing herself more wholly than she was already lost.
She said, “It won’t be long.”
“No.” There was a shadow of weariness in his voice. “I suppose not.”
“I must go,” she said. But she could not force herself to leave him. The thought of unclasping her hands made her cold with sudden fear. She said, not knowing how or why the words were coming.
“Mic, whatever I do, whatever happens, I love you, I’ll always love you, I can never love anyone as I love you, one can’t again. You believe me. Say you do.”
“Believe you?” he said wonderingly. He tilted her head back to see her face. “I wish you were off this blasted night duty. You wouldn’t suddenly ask the Pope if he believed in St. Peter. Or he’d be surprised if you did.”
“Are you surprised?”
“Very. Look, you’re going to be just incredibly late. Put your things on and I’ll run ahead and get out the car.”
The night that followed happened to be a quiet one, and she had plenty of time—too long—to think.
Mic was growing up. It was a process so rapid that it could be watched, like the growth of a retarded plant suddenly given a necessary salt. Probably, she thought, his air of diffidence had always been superficial, a trick of manner largely, and the remains of a lack of social security. At school he had been alone a good deal because he could not discuss his people or ask other boys to stay; and at Cambridge, where that need not have mattered, want of money had produced much the same effect. Now, by imperceptible degrees, even the manner was disappearing. He talked about his work with a confidence that verged often on authority; the resident staff, the physicians first and now the surgeons, had begun to notice him and treated him as one of themselves, a thing not usual in his position. The fact that, in view of this and the special work he was often given, he had not quarrelled with the rest of the laboratory staff—though she gathered that there were occasional tensions—argued the use of more than average tact.
She relied on him more and more. The lassitude and continual sub-tone of her present life had destroyed her initiative, and in all their encounters now he managed her, not assuming any dominance but taking for granted that she would wish it; as indeed, when it came to the point she did. It occurred to her that once she would not have left it to him, as she had left it today, to keep an eye on the time. Nor would he have remembered if she had. It was a straw, but a significant one.
If she could have discussed things with persons of greater sophistication they would, she supposed, have laughed at her. These, they would say, were the excellent results of a satisfactory love-affair, and she ought to welcome them. After their uncertain oscillations, Mic was taking up at last his natural inheritance, and she had better make up her mind to hers. But she could not. She could neither reconcile herself to a passive destiny, nor feel her essential being at the mercy of someone else without the sense of sin, and of having given away what should not be given. She recognised Jan’s dread of captivity; but she lacked his ruthlessness in self-preservation. Sometimes she envied it.
Her first experience of jealousy had been grotesquely trivial; but it had showed, like a peep-show, what one could become, self-locked, demanding, afraid.
He would weary of her. She brought it into the open for the first time, and looked at it in the grey early light. It might please him to be leaned on for a little while; but he
had loved Jan. He had always loved panache, rivalry, an upright carriage of the spirit, a mind that struck sparks from his own, the passion of equals. In honour of these, and still in the faith of them, he treated her now with this unfailing kindness. But he would waken some clear day or other and find that there was only kindness left.
For the rest of the week, as if there were spurs at her back, she flung herself at life; reading the most exacting books she could find; swimming one morning though it was much too cold; doing anything that occurred to her, from moment to moment, to give her mind an existence of its own and stab it awake.
On one of these days she received, from an old friend of her mother’s whom she had not known to be living in the county, an invitation to lunch. She should, of course, have refused it out of hand. She could not possibly get back for bed less than three hours late: an insane risk, and one that she would pay for the next night even if she ran it successfully. But she remembered from her childhood Celia Grey’s feckless charm, and the circle of bright kaleidoscopic movement that surrounded her. The excursion would be something new, something of her own, something to talk about to Mic on Sunday. She accepted.
When the morning came she wondered whether, after all, it would be worth it, and felt fairly sure that it would not. But she put on her most presentable things, did what she could with her face, and took six grains of caffeine citrate to keep her eyes open.
The place was on a country bus route, and she reached it without trouble. The house was typical of Celia: old and dramatically picturesque, filled with expensive modern fitments, and screaming everywhere for the simplest repairs. The rooms were furnished with a groundwork of homogeneous good taste, overlaid by secondary and tertiary deposits of foreign souvenirs, gala-night presentations and mementoes from old stage sets and dismantled theatres. On the walls of the drawing-room, half a dozen fine Japanese prints, spaced at austere intervals, were jostled by a breathless scrum of photographs, all of them very large, very romantic, and scrawled with very loving dedications.