by Mary Renault
While she dressed herself she wished, as she wished every day, that she could afford to get herself a new dress, new underclothes, new powder, a new brush and comb, everything new that she had worn or used with Mic. It would have helped a little; but not much, since no one would sell her a new body and she could not throw her memory away.
Gradually, she supposed, a rubble of small things would sift into this great hole in her life, and loosely fill it. Slight purposes, accumulating, would give her a kind of movement.
She was walking through the streets to Scot-Hallard’s house when an intolerable blackness seemed to leap like a visible thing upon her mind. She tried to fight it off, reasoning with it, for she had been feeling only the dulled emptiness into which lately she had settled; but it defied reason. Suddenly she was sure that it was Mic’s misery she was receiving, as perhaps unknowingly she had often received it before. It was not a call any longer: there was no answer. In her helplessness, not able to bear more self-reproach, she began to reproach him. It was the fault of his own weakness, he had made no effort, accepted defeat. It should have been in his power to pass this test.
But she found no comfort for herself in these excuses. By the time she reached Scot-Hallard’s house the brittle façade of gaiety which, before she set out, she had constructed for herself, had cracked away. There was only a forced brightness, with irritability close behind. She responded to the embrace with which he greeted her deliberately, moved simply by a determination to carry out what she had begun. He offered her a cocktail; they talked with animation but without zest. Like an encroaching dampness there settled into the room the feeling that the party was going to be a failure.
She thought that if she made the conversation impersonal for a little while things might improve; for intellectually he had always the power to interest her. Presently she succeeded in getting him launched on the European situation. He straightened one or two tangled patches in her mind, and passed on, with his usual suppressed gusto, to the approach of war. The Experimental Station, he said, was testing a new and secret gas which seemed in every respect ideal. Unfortunately it was, at the moment, useless because it was unsuitable for dispersal by aircraft, and could not be projected by infantry since, so far, no protection against it had been evolved.
“Thank God for that,” Vivian said; but, warmed to his subject, he supposed her to be rejoicing in the efficacy of the gas.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “we have a new mask which I think may possibly do. We’ve tried it on various animals but the results have been patchy. However, I think presently we shall be ready for a few human experiments. I’ve had one volunteer: young Freeborn, in the Path. Lab. Courageous, but the boy’s a crank.”
“I thought he was a pacifist.” She listened with surprise to her own voice, which seemed unaltered. “Why did he volunteer?”
“Oh, he imagined it was something for the protection of the civil population, I believe. Wanted an assurance that the experiments were for purely defensive purposes, or some half-baked rubbish. As I told him, to suppose that attack and defence can be kept water-tight in modern war is simply to go about in blinkers. He wouldn’t have done in any case. I shouldn’t consider myself justified, at this stage, in using a latent tuberculous subject.”
Vivian became slowly conscious of a cold dampness over her knee. It was her cocktail, which had tipped sideways in her hand.
“What?” she asked.
Scot-Hallard raised his voice patiently. She remembered how he hated being asked to repeat himself in the theatre.
“I said, you can’t separate attack and defence in modern warfare. I told Freeborn so.”
“Yes.” She passed her fingers over the splash on her dress, feeling its slight stickiness. “I meant, how did you find out—that about him? How did you tell?” Through the damp place she could feel the coldness of her hand against her knee.
“How?” Scot-Hallard’s voice was a little bored. “Oh, by looking chiefly. Got all the obvious signs. Take a look at him yourself next time you’re up there. The temperament, too—up and down, gets these typical moods of depression. I ignore them, of course. He’ll do good work if he lives long enough.”
Vivian discovered her handkerchief in her hand, rubbing at the patch on her skirt. She looked at it curiously, having no recollection of taking it out; she was, however, pleased to see it since it gave her something to do till she could speak.
“Did you tell him?” she said.
“My dear Vivian.” He was annoyed to the verge of exasperation; no doubt she had irritated him in the first place by spilling her drink. He hated clumsiness. “You’ll learn as you go on to take these things less dramatically.” Dramatisation was a particular phobia of Scot-Hallard’s, as all his students knew. “The boy isn’t half-witted. He’s educated and has medical knowledge. Of course he knows. Apart from ill-luck it’s in his own hands; if he lives reasonably and takes the proper precautions, probably it will never light up at all. As a matter of fact, I did hint the other day that he was letting himself lose too much weight. He got his back up at once, so I let it drop. These people are always difficult.”
“And these gas tests. Is he doing any others?”
“Certainly not. He should have had more sense than to suggest it. Heroics, I suppose. Half these pacifists are scared, and the rest are foolhardy.”
“If you don’t mind,” said Vivian, “I think I’ll just go to the bathroom and get out this stain with warm water.”
“I’ll get you a dressing-gown, then you’ll be able to take it off.”
“It’s all right, thank you. It isn’t big enough for that.”
She stood in the bathroom, among the nile-green enamel and chromium showers, pressing her hands over her face. It had been foolish, she now realised, to go into a place by herself; if once she let her face go she might not be able to put it right again. Scot-Hallard would know if she had been crying. He knew so much about women. He might even remember what they had been talking about before. That seemed the one thing left that she had not done to Mic.
She set her face and made it up again, then remembered the stain on her dress and sponged it over. When she came back Scot-Hallard had shaken her another cocktail. He came behind her chair and offered it to her with a kiss. No doubt he thought they had wasted time enough.
He was trying to make her talk about herself. She listened to her own voice answering, gay and evasive. “You’re not drinking your cocktails,” he reminded her. “Is it too dry? I’ll mix you another.”
“No. It’s just right.” She swallowed it obediently, like a dose of medicine, thinking, He’s afraid I’ll be no good in bed.
They had supper; she managed to eat something, though she could not afterwards have said what it was. When they got back into the other room he said, “I hope the frock will recover, because it’s extraordinarily effective. Let’s hang it over the radiator and complete the cure. Shall we?”
It was fastened at the neck with a painted clasp. Standing behind her, he slipped his arm round her shoulder and loosened it. It was what Mic had done, the first time she had worn it for him. Her hand flew to her throat, and she moved away. She remembered the lift of one eyebrow and a little upward murmur by way of saying “Please”—they had only been lovers for a week—and his smile, as if he could not quite get over his surprise and amusement at finding himself doing this kind of thing. Scot-Hallard was looking surprised too, but not very much amused. She shut the clasp again.
“Donald,” she said. “You’ll have to forgive me. I’m behaving like a cad, I know. I’m going home.”
“I’m sorry.” He was looking at her in thought rather than anger. Not to have understood a woman was a scientific defeat; not to have been to bed with her was an inconvenience, easily repaired.
“I came meaning to stay,” she said. “I can’t explain. Will you forgive me?”
“My dear, that’s hardly called for. Your enjoyment is as essential as mine. And there will be
other evenings, I hope. You must let me drive you back.”
He was behaving charmingly and had evidently reached some conclusion that satisfied him. From the solicitude with which he offered to drive her, she guessed what it was. He knew so much about women; about people so little.
When she found herself in the High Street it did not occur to her that she could have been anywhere else. She looked up, as she had always looked, at the windows to see which room he was in. They were both darkened. She stood unable for a moment to take it in. He had always been there, waiting for her, at the times when she had known that she must go.
It was only a little after half past ten. He never slept so early. Commonsense made it obvious that he was out; but she went up the stairs, hearing the stillness before she knocked. The place is empty, she said to herself, I knew it all along. But in her mind she saw him lying dead, changed from himself, removed from all concern with her; sternly alone, and forbidding, like the dead people she had seen.
She knocked again, and the bare little landing gave the sound back to her. She could not go away. Suddenly she remembered that somewhere in her bag she must still have her key. She had never thought of it till now. At first she could not find it, but presently felt its outline with a pencil and loose coppers in the bottom. She opened the door, and waited for a moment before she had courage to switch on the light. The door from the living-room to the bedroom stood open, so she could see at once that there was no one there. She came to herself, ashamed immediately of her impertinence in invading what was, even in his absence, still part of his privacy and no longer anything to do with her. But she could not leave without looking round, if it were only out of homesickness. Nothing was obviously changed; but everything seemed, somehow, perfunctory; it had the feel that places have which are cared for by people who do not live in them.
She closed the door after her, and stood for a few minutes on the landing, aimlessly. She had suffered before, but not this destructive sense, of ruin and of waste. For the first time she comprehended fully how many of her faculties lay unused without her. She felt unlived-in, like this room. But she had wasted more than herself.
It had been enough to know that she had spoiled the lover in him. When he had returned to his weary self-acceptance, it had been as if she had killed a child that had held out its hands to her. She had thought that was all; it would have been sufficient.
She had never thought very greatly of herself; it had seemed a strange and terrible thing that she should have power to kill a love, not conceivable that she had power to kill a man.
His mind might recover from her. He had the honesty that can look on at passion, and the knowledge of freedom. But there was not time. She knew that now. She saw his face again as she had seen it through the closed door; remote and masklike, refusing her quietly as the dead refuse. His absence now, even, seemed deliberate, the beginning of that rejection.
She went back to the hospital, undressed and got into bed. Her mind travelled over all those small indications which now, remembered, seemed so plain. Then, suddenly, her mind was silent. She had received a familiar message, changed from its first simplicity and darkened, but not to be mistaken. She wondered how often it had come before, when she had been shut in her own misery and unable to receive it. She lay for a little while, feeling recognition passing into certainty; feeling the darkness also, and afraid. Then she dressed again, and went out.
She could see the lights in the window from a long way off, and her footsteps grew slower. At the landing door she had her hand already raised to knock, when she heard him coughing. It sounded loud, and frighteningly painful. She knocked sharply, but the noise went on. Once she had seen a man haemorrhage from the lungs, and now suddenly and horribly remembered it. Without thinking any more, she got out her key and went in.
At the same moment, everything grew quiet. The light shone slanting from the inner room. The door was half-open; Mic was lying on the bed, propped on one arm, with a cigarette in his hand. She stopped short; she had been prepared for him to look ill, but was confused by his apartness—they seemed separated already by many years of experience—and by the fact, somehow unforeseen, of his not having expected her. There was in his eyes neither welcome nor hostility; rather disbelief, and even a kind of fear, as if she had appeared in answer to some unholy incantation.
“Mic.”
He sat up, and, after a moment, said, “What are you doing here?”
“I’m sorry. I meant to knock.”
“Yes,” he said slowly. “I think you might have.”
“I heard you coughing and I—thought you were ill.”
“I’m quite well, thanks. I’ve been smoking too much.”
There was a silence.
“What is it?” he said. “Do you want anything?”
She had been prepared for anything except this exclusion. It was as if one of the unnoticed stabilities of life, like the earth’s firmness, had given way. Then she looked at him again. The aloofness of his face was willed and set. She knew that after all she had not been mistaken.
“I only came,” she said, “to see how you were, and—if there was something I could do.”
He gave a thin little smile, and got up. “It was good of you to come. But it’s better, really, you know, that we don’t meet. It only makes things more difficult. Don’t you think so?”
“It needn’t,” she said.
He had turned away, but faced round and looked at her.
“What does that mean?”
“I’m here. It’s all right. You don’t have to pretend.”
He walked over to the door, and stood half in the darkness of the other room.
“You ought to have known better,” he said after a pause, “than to come here.”
“I did, but I came. Don’t you want me to stay?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
He said, speaking into the shadows, “Because I’ve loved you.”
“You don’t ask me why I came?”
“Must I? A mistaken sense of responsibility, or pity, I suppose.”
“I came because I love you.”
“I’m sorry. That makes it all the more necessary that you should go.”
“Not to me. Don’t worry, Mic. If I only have one thing to give you, that’s no reason for not giving you anything.”
“You don’t understand.” His face was turned away.
“No. I’ve found that. But tell me one thing. Would some other woman—anyone else—do as well?”
He shook his head.
“That’s all that matters.” She threw her coat over the chair.
“What are you doing?” he said, coming back into the room.
“What do you think?” Unfastening the painted clasp, she pulled her frock over her head.
“I haven’t asked you to stay, I believe.”
But she saw, as she watched him, that he was pretending to a pride that he had lost.
Letting fall the last of her clothes, she paused for a moment. He came over to her; and she was ashamed to have exacted this from him, when she might have gone to him. She returned his kisses as if they had not frightened her. Suddenly he held her away at arm’s length, looked at her, and said, “You’ve been with him tonight.”
It was not the words that shocked her, but the voice with its cynical acceptance. The cold of the room began to penetrate her bare body, so that she shivered in his hands.
“I went to him tonight but I couldn’t go on with it. I came here. It’s the first time I’ve been to him since I left you.”
“Yes?” She knew that he did not believe her. “Oh, well it doesn’t matter very much.” He pulled her back to him; she embraced him, closing her eyes.
“Do you wish now that you hadn’t come?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s too late if you do.”
She tried to laugh. “Don’t talk as if you were seducing me, darling, it’s silly.”
“Damned silly,
” he agreed; and suddenly hid his face in her hair.
“Mic, dear.” He did not answer.
She drew him closer.
“Don’t think about it. Just for a little while don’t let’s think at all.”
He whispered unsteadily, “That’s a good idea.”
As he lifted her—less easily, she noticed, than before—she knew that she had taken from him something with which he had not meant to part: a forlorn honour, a last defence. But still in her heart she could not believe that she would fail. This was a language in which they had never confused or humiliated one another. So, for a moment, she kept clear before her her separate hope and will. But they were too near, as they had always been; she could not hold herself apart from his passion, it invaded and blinded her, she shared even while she feared it. Her mind struggled with her body to remember that he took her in the bitterness of jealousy and a deliberate, disillusioned sensuality: but her mind ceased to be heard. It was he who made her captive, not she who set him free. She offered herself to his crucifixion, not in forgiveness but in a dark delight. Looking up she saw him smiling with fixed eyes, like someone confronting death. “I love you,” she tried to say; but it turned to a wordless sound of abandonment in her throat, and as such he answered it. Once he flinched suddenly, and she knew that she had made some gesture strange to him, and acquired elsewhere. She returned the savage kisses he gave her just after; she returned everything. She was destroyed with him, exulting. Then it was all over; the light was still, watching them; he gave a sigh like all the world’s weariness, and hid his face beside her. Awaking to herself, she knew that she had failed.
She stooped over him; and without opening his eyes he turned his head into her breast. But it was a surrender she only witnessed, and did not receive. She wondered that the small circle of her arms could enclose so much solitude. The stillness of his face was deeper than sleep; like the quiet of the dying who sink past the consciousness of pain and acquiesce in this release.