by Mary Renault
The place, in the way of places that contained Celia, was full of people. Celia herself was circulating among them like a fork among the ingredients of a soufflé. She had altered very little in the years since Vivian had seen her, except that she had had her black grey-streaked hair bleached perfectly white, which suited her. Her steel-sprung figure had set into angles here and there, her mouth had dried a little.
“Well, Vivian, my darling child, to think you could come. I was so afraid the Matron wouldn’t let you. Some of them are such peculiar women. I suppose it’s the lives, they lead, poor dears. So here you are and how lovely you’re looking.” (This, with Celia, was the equivalent of “How do you do,” and Vivian accepted it as such.) “And how like Mary. I remember her looking just like that when she played my daughter in Mrs. Warren, the first time we played together. Before you were born, Conrad.”(This over her shoulder to a satellite young man, fair and handsome but moody-looking, who might equally well have been a lover, a nephew, or one of Celia’s innumerable protégés.) “But, my dear, to think of a child of Mary’s being a nurse. But the rules and everything and the operations and the smells. Donald—has Donald come yet, Conrad? Oh, yes, there he is—says they get not to notice it, but when Jan told me—I ran into him in Cornwall a week or two ago and he’s even more like Mary than you are, he smiles like Mary, come-hither-but-not-too-hither, you know. Why don’t you get him married, he simply ought not to be loose. Be quiet, Conrad, really I can’t cope with you today, you know I meant at large, wandering round, that sort of loose. Who’s that driving up, it’s never Charles. Conrad, it is, whatever shall we do about Angela? And here’s lunch ready. Go and meet him, Conrad, and keep him a minute. Now where shall we put Vivian? Let’s see, there’s Donald without anyone. Donald, dear, you and Vivian will look after each other, won’t you? Mary Hallows’s daughter; but of course, you probably—oh, Angela, darling, I was looking for you. Come here just a minute …”
Vivian was left confronting Scot-Hallard, the surgeon, and wondering how much he enjoyed being presented as Donald to someone who, if unusual circumstances gave her the privilege of addressing him at all, would ordinarily have called him Sir.
He seemed, as they settled down to the meal, to be taking it very easily. One might even have supposed him to be pleased. It was only when he told her he would have recognised the likeness anywhere, that she realised he supposed himself to be meeting her for the first time.
Vivian was enormously amused. It was, after all, natural enough. She had never been near him except in the theatre, where she was shrouded like a member of the Ku-Klux-Klan. When the Honoraries made their rounds in the wards the function of the probationers was like that of St. John the Baptist, to make straight the way and then to disappear.
He had been, he told her, a fervent first-nighter of her mother’s all through his student days. He was, after all, the youngest of the honorary staff, probably not past the middle forties.
Stimulated by caffeine, sherry, the aura of Celia and the humour of the situation, Vivian felt herself in increasingly good form. More potent than caffeine was the fact, soon evident, that Scot-Hallard was putting himself at some pains to make an impression. He sent out, from time to time, delicate feelers to ascertain if she was on the stage, and whether she lived in London or in the neighbourhood. Vivian evaded them with equal delicacy, thinking what a good story this would be for Mic.
Her attention wandered for a moment to a snatch of conversation from farther down the table, which revealed the unclassifiable Conrad to be Celia’s second husband. When she had recovered a little, and reconsidered them both in the light of it, she became aware that Scot-Hallard was asking her to dine and dance with him.
Evidently the entertainment had gone far enough, and decency demanded that she should let him out as easily as possible.
“It sounds delightful, but alas, I’m on night duty. On Malplaquet. I was hoping to conceal the fact, but I expect I’m not sufficiently practised in crime.”
She awaited effects with interest: but his recovery was superb.
“Why, of course. I felt all the time there was something besides the look of your mother. But that appalling uniform … one realises now how necessary it is. Never mind, we must fix another time. When you’re a creature of daylight again, or on one of your free days. How did you come here? It might cut your risk by half an hour or so if I run you back.”
Overhearing his excuses to Celia, she perceived that he was leaving, for her benefit, a good deal earlier than he had meant. The car saved fully half the time of the journey by bus. He scarcely mentioned the hospital all the way, but talked to her about Stockholm, where he had spent his summer holiday. She ought to go, he said. The Swedes were a delightful people, gay, spontaneous, tolerant and free from shibboleths. She would find them temperamentally sympathetic.
His tact, undoubtedly, was exquisite. He omitted nothing that could obliterate the distance between them, or make her feel like someone with the power to confer obligations rather than receive them. Though she knew it to be a highly-skilled illusion, the sense of exercising power over what was itself powerful gave her its inevitable stimulus, like that of feeling an aeroplane respond to a touch on the stick. But when he looked into her eyes with a mixture of searching scrutiny and tender whimsicality so obviously stylised as a silk hat that she wanted to laugh. She walked in (by miracle uncaught) thinking of Mic and softly smiling. It had been like the promenade deck of the Queen Mary after a small yacht in a south-wester. She only got two hours’ sleep that day—her brain, when she went to bed, was astonishingly active—but she felt her spirits improved.
By the time Sunday came round she had polished up the story till it was, she thought, a good one. She went to see Mic in the morning. As they were allowed out in the evening on Sunday without special leave she often did both: it was against the rules, but generally safe. Already Sunday morning had almost lost for her its ordinary associations; it was drinking coffee sleepily to the sound of church bells, sitting on the bed with an elbow on the window-sill; smoking, hearing Mic talk and throwing in a lazy word or two, listening to the gramophone and opening her eyes, knowing suddenly that time had passed, to find that the music had stopped and he had not moved because she had fallen asleep with her head on his knees. Sometimes, since autumn drew on, she had not gone back at all.
“Why don’t you sleep here?” Mic had said. “I’ll be perfectly quiet. I have to read on Sundays anyhow. It will save you two journeys and you’re less likely to be caught.” She had been sleepy, reluctant to leave him, and easy to persuade.
To make the room quieter he closed and curtained the window, leaving the door ajar; but his movements in the next room never disturbed her. She slept generally for four or five hours, and woke sometimes to find him still working, or, with his technical books put away, reading the Observer on the floor on his hands and knees.
Once she opened her eyes to find him curled beside the bed with his head against her pillow and a book slipping sideways on his lap.
“Did I wake you?” he said.
“No. But I was dreaming about you.”
“I’m afraid that may have been my fault.”
She slid out her arm and put it round him. After the folded warmth of the bed his coat felt rough and cold, and the shape of his shoulders very hard and positive.
“Why didn’t you wake me?”
“You don’t sleep enough as it is.”
His arm let a little current of chilly air down beside her.
“You feel like a warm animal uncurling in its hole.”
“That’s just what I am like. Come and see.”
But she had thought afterwards in the night, when she was growing tired, that he had not fallen in love with her in a state of hibernation.
This morning she was determined to be alive. She made some strong tea, splashed herself with cold water, and ran the last half of the way to get the whip of the October wind.
“You look marvell
ous,” Mic said when she got there. “What have you been up to?”
She kissed him. “Wait till you’ve heard the story I’ve got to tell you.”
She told it, rather well, over the coffee. He laughed in the right places very creditably, but, she thought, with a certain lack of conviction.
“Darling, you’re not getting thoughtful about this, are you? You know it’s purely fantastic. Besides, you said you liked him.”
“I said he had a first-class brain and was interesting to work for.”
She pulled his hair. “But he isn’t the kind of man you’d introduce to your sister, is that it?”
“That’s one thing. You probably know all the good stories as well as I do. Of course I know you can look after yourself.”
“You know perfectly well I’m as impervious to that type of man as you would be to Mae West. In any case, he was only making a good exit. I shall never hear from him again.”
“I don’t know, you might. You’re rather obviously not the blackmailing kind.”
“Darling.” She was a little shocked. “He isn’t quite as sordid as that.”
“Have some more coffee.” He poured out two more cups, and there was silence for a minute or two. Then he put his own on one side and said, slowly, “I’ve often thought of my father as a man like Scot-Hallard.”
“But, my dear.” Feeling both distressed and helpless, she could only produce a laugh. “That’s simply wild. He’d have been hardly twenty then—an innocent straight from school.”
“I know that,” said Mic curtly. “I’m not suffering from delusions. I mean a man as he is now, with his standards. Except that Scot-Hallard’s too damned efficient to get himself landed with a bastard.”
“Shut up, darling. I don’t like you when you go Somerset Maugham. And I came here meaning to be particularly nice, too.”
“Why—conscience-money?”
“Mic, shut up. We shall get into a mood. For God’s sake let’s fence, or something.”
“You’ve hardly kissed me yet.”
“I won’t either. Honeying and making love over the nasty sty.” She pulled out the foils and threw one at him. “Take that, blast you, and use it.”
Mic began to say something, changed his mind, pushed a chair out of the way, and took off his coat. They went at it, without at first any noticeable improvement of temper.
“That’s a bloody stage trick,” he snapped presently.
“Why not, you’re in a bloody stage mood.”
She executed a gross flourish straight from The Prisoner of Zenda, and succeeded, at the moment of his annoyance, in hitting him very neatly. To lift the foil out of his hand, she thought viciously, would make him look more foolish than anything else: but he knew all about that. He was affecting a rather exaggerated good form: and, being a better fencer in any case and fresher as well, was soon leading by several points.
They had played with the foils two or three times, but she had never had again the curious experience of the first day. Now, as they went on, she found it returning. It brought with it this time not wonder or fear but an angry exultation. She wondered if she could catch him with the same trick as before; she had not used it since. He was grinning at her defiantly. They had each reached the stage of deciding that if they won they might afford to be pleasant afterwards; but it was necessary to win.
As before, the moment came when she knew exactly what to do. She knew, too, that he could, not stop her. It was only one hit but it seemed somehow more important than the others. Timing and distance were perfect; the feint succeeded. She was about to lunge when her foot slipped on a rug they had forgotten to move, and she pitched at him, her foil still out. She felt it meet flesh with a heavy jar, and bend in her hand. When she got up (it had brought her down on one knee) Mic was looking past her with a distant stare. There was a triangular tear in his shirt, over the left breast.
“Mic, I am so sorry.” Her bad temper had gone like a puff of wind. “We ought not to fool about like this without masks or anything. Suppose it had been your face.”
“It’s all right,” said Mic vaguely. “Did us good.”
She went up to him. Suddenly fear went like a sheet of black across her mind.
“Mic! You’re bleeding.”
“Oh, no. I shouldn’t think so.”
“But you are.” She opened his shirt, her hands shaking. It was only a superficial graze—the button had glanced upward—but it was bleeding a good deal. A small, steady trickle ran down his body to his waist.
At the sight of the blood it was as if some lifelong nightmare exploded in her mind. She snatched out her handkerchief and pressed it over the place. In a little while the bleeding stopped: but she still felt icy cold, and weak at the knees.
“Mic, it’s silly, but I still feel so frightened I don’t know what to do.”
He put his arm round her: she was shaking all over. “Funny, wasn’t it?” he said. They sat down together on the rug in front of the fire. “How cold your hands are.” He held them out to warm. “Better?”
“Yes, much.” They leaned back to back, supporting one another’s weight, in a posture which custom had found convenient.
“Extraordinary thing,” said Mic over his shoulder, “but when you came at me like that I was perfectly certain you were going to kill me. Not surprised, either. As if I remembered it happening before.”
She put her hand over his on the rug. “We must have done some queer things in our past lives, Mic, if there’s anything in those theories. But they say it’s just a trick your mind plays when it doesn’t coordinate.”
“I know. A sort of double-exposure. But I’ve wondered sometimes if it’s possible, in only five months, to get so thoroughly tangled up with another person as I am with you.”
“People have always wondered that, haven’t they? If it were true I’d owe you a life, I suppose.”
“Well, I did my best to kill you last month, so perhaps that will count as a token payment. … Have you read Dunne? He says that sometimes we remember the future.”
Vivian contracted her fingers quickly over his, and loosened them again. “That sounds awfully far-fetched,” she said.
Mic got up, and looked out of the window. “They’re coming out of church. It’s time you were going to bed.”
“I suppose so.” She rose, stretching: after the fencing her spurt of energy had petered out all at once. “Good night, darling. Don’t let me sleep after five, will you?”
He shut the window, and darkened the room. At the door he took her in his arms and said, “I’m sorry about this morning. I have blind patches here and there I don’t seem able to do anything about.”
“I ought to know better than to walk on them by now. I’m sorry too.”
“They’re a lot smaller since you came.”
“I’m glad.” She felt his arms tighten, and rubbed her cheek against his. “Yes, stay if you want to. I’ll sleep all the better when you’ve gone.”
She was asleep before he left her. Next morning she received (in a typed envelope) a letter from Scot-Hallard. It was amusing, well put together, and hoped she would let him know when she had an evening free. It happened that three nights fell due to her in the following week; but she tore the letter finely and threw it away.
-18-
FOR MOST OF THE next week Vivian lived on credit; she let an almost untasted present slip by her, nourished with anticipation. She could not remember looking forward to anything quite so urgently as, now, to the freedom of three nights and days with which they were rewarded for a month’s night duty. In her case it was nearly six weeks, for she had started in the middle of the last month, too late to qualify. The newness of her inverted life had long since worn off, and with this the power to appreciate any strangeness or beauty in it. The thought of sleeping at night, and sufficiently, and of waking in the morning, was delicious; the thought of doing both in Mic’s company was so beautiful that it frightened her. She felt that in her diminished state sh
e no longer had the power to attract such happiness to herself; that the moment would know her undeserving, and pass her by. Joy, she thought, is taken by storm, not prayers. She could not assume the arrogance of a claimant, and the knowledge of it chilled her.
It was in this mood, seeking without much hope for anything that would convince her of herself, that she began to think again of Scot-Hallard’s unanswered letter. Accustomed as she was to associating sex with a rather complex personal relationship, she had found his approaches almost comically crude, the comic element being supplied by his very evident belief in his own subtlety. But she had intelligence enough to be aware that the entire human being was not to be measured by these manifestations. Scot-Hallard himself was neither crude nor trivial. His admiration had flattered her; his power and vitality had stimulated her: and the fraction of his mind which he thought it appropriate to spend on a woman had suggested new possibilities in her own.
She had dismissed his invitation without a second thought, because the time he had asked for belonged to Mic: but it occurred to her now that as her holiday did not cover a weekend she would be alone all through Mic’s working hours. Scot-Hallard, she recollected, had added a postscript suggesting lunch, or tea, if she could not manage an evening time. It seemed to her that, after all, a brief meeting might make a good aperitif for the more important meal of life to follow. So much had to be extracted from it: it had to last so long; it seemed sinful to come to it listless if anything could give her a fillip. Unfair, too, to Mic.
She knew in her heart that she had another motive too, and a more fundamental one. Scot-Hallard had given her an illusion of independence. With him she was sought, and un-seeking; she had left him with indifference, knowing he was not altogether indifferent to her; she desired nothing of him and feared nothing at his hands. In his company, she was free.
On the second and third of her days, Thursday and Friday, Scot-Hallard generally snatched his lunch between work in clinics and the theatre: on the first, Wednesday, he was less busy. By Saturday of the previous week she had made up her mind. She rang up his flat before going on duty: found him in, and, apparently, pleased to hear from her, and arranged to meet him. She had a moment’s impression (probably, she thought, conveyed on purpose) that he had decided to put off another engagement.