by Mary Renault
Once the thing was settled, she found herself thinking about it a good deal. It gave quite a different tinge of colour to her expectations, and it did undoubtedly increase her confidence. When she came off duty on Wednesday morning, she thought, she would rest for an hour or two, and for an hour or so after she got back. That would be enough to last her until the evening. In the night, heavenly thought, she would sleep.
On Sunday morning she said to Mic, as they sat on cushions by the fire, “I’m going to buy a new frock. What sort would you like me to have?”
Mic contracted his forehead and said, after a few seconds’ concentration, “One that buttons down the front.”
“Honestly, Mic—”
“Sorry, darling. Green suits you, doesn’t it? That Robin Hood thing with the leather tabs on it is the one I like you in.”
“I think I’ll have a Cossack one, with cartridge-pockets. (They fasten with frogs. Frogs are easy.) Would you like me to be a Cossack?”
“Very much. I always admired their beards. What’s the occasion?”
“Next week. Just so I shan’t become a habit, my sweet.”
“You’re not a habit. You’re an addiction.”
He had begun to learn, lately, to say pretty things.
A new dress was overdue; she had not bought one for the daytime for a year. Ever since Jan had sent her twenty pounds she had played with the idea, and today, looking at other people’s new things brought out by the cold, she had made up her mind. She owed Mic something fresh; he had much more taste and observation than he laid claim to and she had had nothing new to speak of since she had known him. Besides, a new dress was imperative if she was not to wear the same one for Scot-Hallard a second time.
She felt very little sense of guilt over not telling Mic about it. Indeed, it was in the nature of a sacrifice, for everything she thought or did gained a new life by being shared with him. But it had been very evident that hearing of the first encounter had not added to his happiness, and to scratch him again would be, it seemed to her, pure egotism. She recalled her own overwrought antipathy to Rosenbaum; she had got over it, but appreciated the tact with which Mic, though he was still seeing him, had refrained from ramming him down her throat until she became reasonable. She would show him the same consideration, and tell him afterwards, at one of those moments when anything can be safely told.
“Shall you be working late on Wednesday?” she asked him.
“No, with luck I’ll only get routine stuff. Lampeter never comes on Wednesdays, nor Scot-Hallard either as a rule. I expect I’ll be free by five-thirty. But don’t get up if you can sleep on.”
“I’m going to save some sleep for the night, darling. If I may?”
“You look as though you could do with both,” he said, and sent her to bed early.
She woke of her own accord, to find the room quite dark. The wrongness and unexpectedness of it frightened her even before she was fully conscious. As if she had been a little girl at the top of the house, the world seemed suddenly huge, hostile and unknown.
“Mic,” she said softly. The door would open, letting in the light, and everything would be safe again.
But there was no answer, and she saw then, by the glimmer from the window, that the door was ajar already and the next room in darkness.
He’s in the kitchen or the bathroom, she said to herself; but she knew all the while that she was alone. There was a barrel-organ playing, a long way off, down the street. To the silence, darkness and loneliness it added the “melancholy of a requiem. It was an old organ: as she woke it had been finishing White Wings that Never Grow Weary, and now it was beginning Silver Threads Among the Gold. Its thin lamentation seemed to draw her farther and farther away from life and comfort; alone, as she would be alone when she had died.
“Mic!” Her voice was only the emptiness assuring her of her fear.
Why should he not be out, she thought; she was always urging him not to tie himself to the place while she slept. But it was dark. Something had happened. She was in this night alone.
The door downstairs closed. She heard him come upstairs, quietly, and let himself in. She could not call to him. Next minute he came softly into the room and leaned over her.
“Have you been awake long? I just ran out to catch the six-thirty post.”
She caught hold of him, silently. The darkness was still on her, more real than his presence: she gripped him more tightly, trying to come back to the world.
“What’s the matter, darling?” He sat down on the edge of the bed. “Had a bad dream?”
“I woke up and it was dark, and I thought you were gone.”
“Gone where? I did come in at five, but you looked so tired I couldn’t wake you.”
“I wish you had. I feel so horrible.”
“Come and toast crumpets while I make the tea. I haven’t had mine yet, either, I was reading hard.”
They sat to eat it on the hearthrug, but still the same forlornness was over everything. She could not laugh, or talk with her whole mind; everything was changed to a shadow of itself, and in a little while Mic grew quiet too. They pushed the tea-things aside, and sank deeper into themselves and their own imaginings.
After they had not spoken for a long time, Mic said, slowly and without coming nearer, “Will you take off your dressing-gown for a minute?”
Not replying or questioning, she ungirdled it and slipped it away, and sat as she had been, on her heels, looking at the blue flames of the gas-fire. Mic lay with his chin on his hand, making no effort to touch her. At last he said, in the quiet passionless voice of meditation, “You’re very beautiful. I shall always remember you like this: kneeling, with the firelight down your side.”
She turned towards him; but his eyes were distant and still, as though already he were remembering.
“Mic, dear.” She covered herself again and leaned over, feeling afraid. “Don’t talk as if I were going to die. It’s this mood of mine. Don’t take any notice: wake me up.”
He sat up, and, putting his arm round her, held her beside him; but neither of them wanted to make love. They sat looking, like solemn and frightened children, into the fire.
“Read to me,” she said.
He took the Oxford Book at random from the shelves, and turned the pages to and fro. At last he flattened it at John Davidson and began evenly to read.
“The boat is chafing at our long delay,
And we must leave too soon
The spicy sea-pinks and the inborne spray,
The tawny sands, the moon.
“Keep us, O Thetis, on our western flight!
Watch from thy pearly throne
Our vessel, plunging deeper into night
To reach a land unknown.”
He closed the book and put it aside
“What made you read that?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“There must be an angel passing over us. Never mind, we’ll be better on Wednesday.” She saw that it was nearly time to go, and went to put her things on. But through their farewells, and all through the night that followed, the oppression of strangeness remained.
On Monday morning, feeling (within the limits of night duty) brisk and normal, she bought the new dress. It was dearer than any she had, and she felt reckless and defiant over it, for it was emphatic in its style and would undoubtedly date. There was a rakish little cap to go with it, and as it suited her she bought that too. It would amuse Mic, she thought affectionately: he liked a touch of swagger. The frogs were in the right place and very easy ones. She thought, too, that in its other and fashionable aspect it made her look the kind of person Scot-Hallard seemed to think her.
She undressed, thinking about Mic. She had not been much fun for him on Sunday. Heavy-headed in the morning: asleep for more than six hours: in the evening, a child with sick fancies, only fit to be given nursery tea and comforted by the fire. In the end she had depressed him too. How much longer would he be so patient?
Her mind went back to a conversation a week or two old.
“Mic, I ought to have asked you sooner, would you like to come to the nurses’ dance?”
“Are you going?”
“I haven’t been to the last few, they used to bore me. But I will if you’d like it. They relieve the night-nurses for an hour.”
“Well, we’d get an extra evening together, of a kind, I suppose.”
“We couldn’t have more than two or three dances, darling. Matron will be there. But I thought you ought to be invited.”
He laughed. “Oh, Lord, I have been.”
“Who by?”
“I can never remember their names. The tall dark boneless one, and the rather Russell Flint one with chestnut hair.”
“Oh. Muir and Haighton.”
“And a little fat one covered in scent.”
“All those. What did you say?”
“I don’t know, something or other.”
“They call Muir the Flying Scot, darling. Don’t you want to go?”
“Not if I’ve got to spend the evening looking pleasant with a succession of overheated women breathing down my neck. I never know what to say to them. Do you mind?”
“Of course not. I didn’t really want to go, either.”
She knew that she had been glad he did not want to go. She was content that he should keep these habits of thought and not perceive that they had become unreal. It seemed incredible that he should not know how acceptable he could be to almost any woman if he wanted. Some day—in a month or two, a year or two—someone might think it worthwhile to explain this to him: someone more beautiful, perhaps, more expert than herself; with better clothes and more poise; someone less tired.
It was against this moment that she wanted to pick up the scraps of assurance, sophistication and art that a surface flirtation with Scot-Hallard could give her. She was, she supposed, using him rather selfishly; but he must have used so many people that it did not trouble her conscience. Secretly, too, she knew herself flattered that it should be in her power to use him at all. Before she fell asleep she confessed to herself that she was looking forward to the meeting for its own sake.
It did not disappoint her.
They drove over, as she had guessed they would, to lunch in Brancaster. It was a very pleasing little lunch, better, she guessed, than her experience enabled her to appreciate; and as they talked she soon fell, or was conducted, into the Celia Grey atmosphere again. It was quite easy to forget that she had not slept; easy, she found, even to be amusing. She wondered what Scot-Hallard was really like. She was quite well aware that she was talking, not to him, but to a suit of well-cut conversational clothes tailored, like his material ones, by a craftsman to whom fit and finish had become second nature. His pretences at self-revelation—the lightly deprecated indiscretion, the note of emotion suppressed a second too late—were merely the touches that distinguished Savile Row from the Strand.
In their beautifully restrained way the place and the people in it smelt of money. She thought in an odd moment of Mic, remembering that he was unhappy sometimes because he could not give her anything like this. If only, she thought, he could know how little she really cared about it, and then was angry with herself because she knew she was enjoying this excursion into artificiality and her own success; and because her curiosity about Scot-Hallard was increasing. His range of knowledge was enormous, and from time to time, when they wandered upon one of his special enthusiasms—Holbein, for instance, or the sensations of high-altitude flying—something of himself was visible: she was aware of an avid mind and body, greedy for self-extension, intolerant of weakness. She began to understand his delight in the anaesthetised surgical problem on the table, his impatience with the anxious depressed invalid in the ward.
After the meal was over he said, “Well, where now? Which part of the daylight world would you like to revisit, Proserpina, before you go back to the shades?”
She hesitated, smiling and thinking of the clean lift of the long black car over the hills.
“I had been meaning to revisit Morpheus. I’m going out this evening, you see, and I was on duty last night.”
“Don’t dream of it. Two or three hours’ sleep will only make you feel stupid. The open air will brace you up, and you shall have a good strong black coffee and brandy at the end of it. A much better idea.”
He was entirely selfish, she reflected; but she had guessed that already. It was the defect of his qualities. She made no more objections. It was weeks since she had seen the country in the afternoon. Since last time the bracken had rusted, the leaves turned; it was a sunny day, pale-blue and clear brown, with the far hills a dark cobalt against the sky. She was enjoying her own mood: little half-tones and nuances, absorbed unconsciously from her mother’s world and forgotten in the quiet years after, had crept into her manner and her voice. Between the lines of his conversation Scot-Hallard was saying to her, “It is a pleasure to play this familiar game against such unfamiliar skill.” No doubt he knew how to convey this to every woman from whom he hoped to get something; but it was making her feel better pleased with herself than she had for some time.
While they were driving they drifted on to the subject of war. He spoke of its inevitability, sweeping away her arguments in favour of hope. Behind his conventional assumptions of regret she detected an eager and arrogant confidence. She knew he was taking for granted that if it happened he would assume his rightful place: making decisions of which other people were afraid, enduring things under which they broke: using himself to the limit. She acquitted him of the wish for material profit; he was in any case too intelligent to expect even comfort, much less wealth, to survive. He was simply too highly-charged for his age and society; the mere exercise of his skill was not sufficient for him: nothing short of war would give his engines room to open up, and he knew it. Moral affront seemed hardly to the purpose. She wondered how many men like him there were in Europe.
She did not know where he was taking her, except that it was a good deal farther than she had ever been with Mic. When he began to talk about tea she reminded him that she had an appointment at half-past five. He assured her, with his usual certainty, that he would get her back—“though,” he suggested, “if you think it could wait till another day the car is quite without false pride and subject to fallibility.”
Vivian did not doubt it. He had put it to her fairly; but she guessed that this proceeded less from scruple than the reluctance of a skilled player to spoil the interest of his game by cheating.
They had tea at a lavish sham-Jacobean roadhouse. Scot-Hallard spent most of the time trying to get it established that they would meet again very shortly, but she was evasive. Her eyelids were becoming heavy, her body tired, and everything increasingly too much trouble. Upstairs in the cloakroom she thickened her make-up to simulate some kind of animation. Yesterday’s sleep was twenty hours behind her. As if by a conjuring-trick the black coffee appeared and Scot-Hallard laced it, more than adequately, from a pocket flask. She felt better, but preoccupied. A chance glimpse of a clock had made it clear to her that, unless they could go back a good deal more quickly than they had come, she would be late. She suggested this to Scot-Hallard.
“You’re not still determined to go back, are you?”
“But of course I am. We have still got time, haven’t we?”
“Oh, yes, no doubt, if we make good going. But I was hoping in another half-hour or so we might have forgotten all about it. Stranger things have happened.”
“I expect they have,” said Vivian. “But not to me.” She was beginning, though she would not show it, to be seriously worried. If Mic had to know where she had been, it would have been far better to tell him beforehand.
Long before they got into country that she knew, the sun began to sink. She had not seen sunset for a week, and could not remember what time it was. Her watch was at home: it was too clumsy to wear with formal clothes.
“Turneresque, isn�
�t it—” said Scot-Hallard, and stopped the car on the crest of a hill.
It was too clear-cut for Turner: a sheet of cirrus cloud lit from below, and stretching almost to the zenith. She was longing to hurry on, but felt it would be a little boorish to say so yet. Scot-Hallard touched her arm.
“When are you going to meet me again?”
His voice had changed, and she felt frightened. She had not expected things to reach this pitch the first time. He was looking into her eyes; she tried to harden her own, but she felt she had not succeeded.
“Perhaps next month, if we’re both free.”
“A month? You dare to talk to me about a month?” His arm went round her, with a confidence so much greater than her own that it got there unresisted. “That was deliberate wickedness. You must be punished for that. Darling.” He swept her into an embrace and kissed her.
His strength made her feel like a doll. Her will as well as her limbs were, for the moment, helpless: and during this moment she made a slight, but instinctive response. Next moment she forced herself away from him: but he was looking at her differently, with a new certainty.
She could not make herself ridiculous by being outraged. Any intelligence or honesty should have prepared her for this. He was still holding her, though she would not let him kiss her again. Against his deep chest and strong shoulders she experienced unaccustomed reactions. She was used to Mic’s love-making, which was one side of a conversation. This was simply a command. The sensation it gave her of being delicate and frail, something that could easily be broken in half but would not be broken, stirred in her feelings of a primitiveness which, for a few seconds, excited her by their newness. She disengaged herself, feeling shaken.