by Mary Renault
His eyes were still closed, and hers travelled over him, counting all the signs which, stupid with love, she had thought so individually himself, and had taken at their simplest aesthetic value; his clear skin, soft dark hair, and long lashes, the fine down that covered his body, the shape of his finger-nails which she had noticed so often without remembering its significance. Concealed in every life was its proper death, waiting for some failure of the host to take possession. Here it was scarcely concealed, but she had not seen. She would always know that she might have stood between it and him, and had failed.
He opened his eyes and looked up at her, but when he would have spoken she laid her hand across his lips. Everything had been said. He turned back to her as if her refusal were a relief. In a little while she felt him grow heavy with sleep, and laid his head softly on the pillow. Sleep was the only thing, she thought, that she had been able to give him. His arm fell back and she saw that he still carried on his left breast the scar of her foil.
She disengaged herself from him cautiously, and rose without waking him. Even when she covered him with the disordered clothes he did not stir. As she was leaving, she noticed the clock which had always been so important. She wound it, and set the alarm to call him in the morning.
So, she thought as she walked back through the empty streets, there was nothing left to try. She had used everything she had. To do more, she must be more than herself. They were insufficient, and that was all.
But early in the morning, when it was still quite dark, it came to her that there was, after all, something left that neither she nor Mic in their lives had so far tried. It was an unpredictable resource; but it was the last, and she used it. Turning on the light, she found pen and paper, and, working slowly and with difficulty at her unfamiliar task, wrote a letter to Cambridge, sending for Jan.
-23-
ALIGHT AND EARLY SNOWFALL had laced the hanging branches; against dazzling banks the river slid sluggishly, its green bronze looking much colder than the snow. Jan climbed the willow-pattern curve of Clare Bridge, and scraped a place on the parapet for his elbows.
Overhead was a pale-blue, translucent sky, shading to the zenith like the colour in an egg-shell cup. A few clear-edged silver clouds moved in it smoothly. The sun was shining, making crisp blue shadows on the snow against which its strong whiteness seemed golden.
For a few minutes Jan forgot his thoughts and the errand on which he was setting out. He surrendered himself; the sharp beauty pierced and lightened in him. When he returned after an interval which seemed longer than it was, the clearness remained; it was as if part of him still inhabited the crystalled trees and passed their cold judgement on the rest.
He was a thing without roots, he thought; even the constant and unfailing earth was a mistress with whom he had evaded marriage. He was thirty this year, and had not built a house, or planted a tree, or (as far as he knew) begotten a child. He was as transitory as this snow in all his ways.
He tried to feel his own deficiency; but, now as ever, he could not make it become a feeling, only a thought. Dislike of other people, boredom, intolerance, cruelty, imposed limits to life; he had avoided them. Possession and being possessed, longing, the fear of loss, restricted it also; these he had found sometimes peace, sometimes a subtle excitement, in refusing. He wondered again what had planted this duality in him, that his mind could pass on himself censures that his spirit rejected.
His mind returned to Vivian’s letter. He took it out, and unfolded it on the damp stone of the balustrade.
“I thought, perhaps, that if he were to see you again he might realise he was comparatively happy before he met me, and come in time to treat all this as irrelevance. It’s an escape rather than a solution, but it’s all that I can see. You have always had a good deal of influence on him; I dare say you know that.”
He had felt, first of all, only wonder. Through what could she have passed to emerge with all her clarity so destroyed? He could hardly believe that it was Vivian who asked this of him. His respect for Mic, even if he could have sunk his own, made it outrageous. He always felt it something of a disgrace to offer, though to people he recognised as inferiors, retreats he would have rejected for himself; and Mic was his friend.
This, he thought, was the kind of disintegration to which people came through losing their identity in one another. He remembered the irrational feeling of misgiving he had had when Vivian wrote to tell him they were lovers; misgiving that was not for them, since he had hoped for this, but as if something of unknown consequence had happened to himself. It had. He had acknowledged a responsibility.
Once more he read the letter over, though he knew its bald phrases nearly by heart; its lost proportion, its humility and futile sacrifice. He could scarcely remember, now, a state of being in which such offerings were possible. There came upon him slowly a sense, not of shame which was an emotion but of his sphere, but of indemnity, of being concerned in atonement; the kind of guilt in which the Greeks believed.
It was time to go, if he was to catch his train. He did not know what he would say or do when he arrived; he could only make himself a blank cheque for the opportunity to fill in. Life was not so lacking in design that an occasion of symmetry would be refused him. Already it was waiting, contained in the present as these black branches contained next summer’s leaves.
He reached the hospital in the early evening and, since everyone he saw seemed fully occupied, found his way along the corridors to the nurses’ home. Here he wandered vaguely, in a maze of narrow identical corridors lined with identical doors, scanning the little white name-cards slotted into them. From behind one he could hear voices and laughter; and was about to knock in search of help when crisp skirts rustled, in crescendo, behind him. It was a Sister, out of breath; the one, Jan supposed, responsible for the Home. He smiled, feeling sorry for her because she seemed to carry her responsibilities uncomfortably (like a badly packed rucksack, he thought) as so many women did.
“Can I help you?” she asked. The inflection was that of the constable who says, “Do you wish to make a statement?” As soon as she spoke the laughter had stopped behind the door.
“That’s very good of you,” he said, replying to the words. He smiled again, in friendly speculation: the face in its white frilled frame shaped itself a little stiffly, into the unaccustomed lines of a reply. “I seem to have lost my way. It’s too bad to take up your time, I can see you’re busy.”
“No, no, not at all; the building is very confusing. Which ward were you looking for?”
“I was trying to find Miss Lingard’s room.”
Blankness effaced the struggling smile.
“Nurse is resting. In any case I’m afraid—” Her voice slanted suddenly to a sharper angle. “Was she expecting you, Mr.—er—?”
“Lingard,” said Jan gently.
This was received, for a moment, with a look that removed him from the police-court to Scotland Yard. Then, uncertainly, the smile returned.
“Why, you must be Nurse Lingard’s brother. There’s quite a likeness, when you come to look at it.” She hesitated. Jan produced the smile he used for his grandmother, the Customs, and people who arrested him for taking photographs. “Nurse is sleeping, you see, before duty tonight. Otherwise—”
“It’s rather an urgent family matter. I should be enormously grateful.”
The Sister was only thirty-six, though she looked more. “Well,” she said, “perhaps, in that case … But of course, you know, in the ordinary way—”
“Of course,” said Jan. “I quite understand that. Thank you so much.”
She led him to a corridor like the rest, but approached through folding doors, after which they tiptoed. (“These are the night-quarters, so if you wouldn’t mind making as little noise as possible”) A few moments later, they met a nurse wearing outdoor clothes. At the sight of her the Sister’s head jerked like a pointer’s. The nurse stood stock-still for a moment, her face stiffening, then went quietly
back into the room from which she had come.
“Nurse Lingard’s room is Number Twenty-one,” said the Sister. She left him; he heard her tap on the nurse’s door, and go in without waiting for an answer.
He walked on, watching the numbers on the doors and wondering how women evolved this power of creating intimate hells for one another. A blend, he supposed, of jealousy with the thwarted protective instinct, growing unmanageable with middle age. Reflecting that Vivian had lived here for nearly a year, he ceased to find it remarkable that her personal relationships had got beyond her. She was of an age, though, to have some resistance. He felt sorry for the young girls.
A door opened just ahead of him.
“Come in,” Vivian whispered. “I thought I recognised your step.”
She was wearing a dressing-gown. Her hair was untidy, and her face shocked him a little; it looked forgotten, like a blind person’s. She greeted him as if she were listening for something else.
“I came here as soon as I could,” he said, forgetting to whisper. She said, “S-sh,” and, when he took out his pipe which he had felt would help, “Would you mind terribly, Jan? There’ll be the most appalling row if they smell smoke in here.”
“Let’s go out,” he whispered. “We can’t possibly talk like this.”
“I mustn’t. I’m supposed to be in bed. I’m on duty tonight.”
The only chair was covered with her clothes; so he settled himself beside her on the edge of the bed. “Don’t bother with me,” she said. “I’m not fit to talk to and you can’t do anything about me, so it’s only wasting your time. It was good of you to come so soon. You must have taken the first train after you got my letter.”
“I missed the good one, or I’d have been here before.”
“It doesn’t matter. Mic won’t be in till just about now.”
There was a pause, from which Vivian suddenly retreated.
“They might not have let you see me at all. I ought to have warned you, but I forgot.”
She reminded him of a sleepwalker, and he longed to rouse her. “I prevailed with the duenna,” he said lightly. “My face was my birth-certificate, as usual. But I still feel rather like Macheath superimposed on Caesar Borgia. I didn’t appreciate your staying-power till today. Twenty-four hours here would finish me.”
She said, unsmiling, with a weary reasonableness, “After all, I was supposed to be in bed, and the woman isn’t a procuress.”
“I guessed that,” Jan remarked, “from little things she let drop in the course of conversation.”
Vivian’s face relaxed for a moment. “What have you been doing lately?”
He began to tell her. For a few minutes they talked in the old way. But presently her attention drifted away, and her face had again the look of listening. He finished what he was saying, and there was a pause in which neither of them spoke.
“I suppose,” he said at last, “you told me everything in your letter that you wanted me to know.”
She drew a deep breath, which might have been of resolution or relief.
“Everything you need, I expect. You know Mic.”
“I wonder. I used to think I knew you.”
“Oh, well.”
Seeing her dim smile, hushed voice, and circled eyes, the disorder of her hair and dress, he felt it, for a moment, in his heart to be angry with Mic.
She saw him looking at her and said, “Don’t take any notice of me. Anyone would look a wreck under these conditions. In any case, whatever happens to me I’ve asked for. If you’re too late getting to the flat, Mic may have gone out again.”
Jan considered for a moment. She might rest more easily if he went now, letting her think he agreed. But he found it impossible to break the lifelong habit of truth between them. To spare her a direct refusal, he said, “You know, my dear, if Mic thinks I’ve come in the capacity of a district visitor I can’t think of one good reason why he shouldn’t throw me downstairs. It’s what I’d do.”
He had forgotten to whisper again. There was the creak of a bed on the other side of the thin wall; Vivian said, mechanically, “S-sh.” Then, “I’m not asking you to go in that capacity.”
He was silent; and, staring past him, she went on, “You must know as well as I do that he only noticed me at all because you weren’t there.”
It was like a dream, he thought, this whispering in a foreign place of the things one never said awake.
“You’re the last thing left,” she said, “that hasn’t let him down.”
Jan found his voice. “I doubt if Mic looks at it like that. I’ve not known him to suffer much from self-pity as a rule.”
“He doesn’t. But it is so. It’s what gives you a chance.”
“What kind of chance?” If I force her to words, he thought, it may stop her.
“Jan,” she said, “please make him forget me.”
He got up, and, one step taking him across the width of the room, found himself looking into the mirror which hung over the chest of drawers. Behind his own face he could see hers, watching him, and thought suddenly how little was left of the likeness which everyone had found so striking. The Sister, he remembered now, had had to have it pointed out to her.
Her reflected eyes met his in the glass, waiting.
“I’m sorry, Vivian.” He spoke, without turning, to her mirrored face. “You’re worn out and not yourself, or I don’t think you’d ask me. In the first place, it’s an insult to Mic. One doesn’t offer these bolt-holes to one’s equals.”
“I don’t care what it is if it keeps him alive.”
“You may not, but he will. Mic cares a good deal about the terms on which he accepts life.”
“Less than he did,” she said in a whisper he only just caught.
“Probably he’s feeling the strain much as you are. But I think one should only offer people what one feels they’d accept in their clearer moments.”
“All this is rather abstract, isn’t it?” He heard for the first time the edge of bitterness in her voice.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “It isn’t to me.” He was silent for a moment, searching for the words that would best reach her. “Look here, Vivian. I’m a pure hedonist, as you know. If I thought Mic was more fully himself as he used to be I’d persuade him of it, as far as I could without—personal dishonesty. But I happen to be convinced of the opposite. You know his history, surely, by now. He had a hellish childhood; he’s come out of it, on the whole, with singularly little twist. Of course he’s introverted, of course he’s got a rooted inferiority complex. He copes with that pretty well. And not unnaturally he attached himself violently to the first person he met who didn’t seem to think it a pity he’d been born. It happened to be someone young, attractive, and impressionable, with the inevitable result. If you’d been to a public school, you’d—well, anyway, it seems very understandable to me.”
“Oh, I know all that.” She spoke with the dull assent of one who has been over the ground many times before.
“Then, why, if you know? Surely you see that if you’ve meant more to him than most women to most men, it’s because he probably feels he’s completed himself through you. The thing’s done now. You can’t make water run uphill. It’s a pity this business should have happened so soon; adjustments like that take time, of course. But that’s done too, and putting back the clock’s no answer. In any case, it can’t be done. By him or by me. It’s only because I know that, that I’m going to see him at all.”
She nodded her head. People are right, she was thinking. What did I hope from him? He isn’t to blame. A piece of crystal has its own uses; you don’t ask it to oblige you by bending in your hand.
“I think,” he said, knowing her to be unreconciled, “one has to accept the hazards of growth for other people as well as oneself.”
“Why did you come at all?” she asked.
“I hardly know. Perhaps to keep my conscience quiet, or because it was easier than doing nothing. Chiefly I suppose becaus
e I’m fonder of you two than I am of anyone else, and because you met through me.”
“We should have met.”
He saw that she believed this; and a realisation came to him of the shock that had broken her, the destruction of a happiness so instinctive as to have seemed part of natural law and the structure of life. It was a terror he had known and could understand. He saw, in a sudden clear distance and tranquillity, the experience about which for years, though he lived to the pattern of its results, he had not thought at all. Compared with this, it seemed simple and merciful. He had not thought that he would live to submit it to comparison, even to reason. Was it for this that, unknown to himself, he had come? It gave him a sense of deeper debt to both of them than he had felt before.
“One thing I’ll do,” he said, feeling his futility, “is to make Mic get his chest examined, if it hasn’t been done. Then at least we’ll know that’s all right.”
“There’s nothing yet.”
“Better to make sure.”
“I am sure.”
“How can you be?”
She looked down at her hands folded in her lap, and said without expression, “I was with him the night before I wrote to you. He wouldn’t have let me stay.”
These were deeper waters than Jan had guessed at. In the pause that followed, many things became clear. He said, “I’ll do what I can.”
“Which means?”
“It means I’ll do anything but lie to him.”
“I’d hoped,” she said slowly, “that you wouldn’t make that reservation.”
“My dear, I’m sorry. I can only be what I am. Isn’t that what you’ve found too?”
She nodded without speaking.
“You ought to sleep if you’ve to be on the wards tonight. I’ll be going.” He got up, and hesitated for a moment. “If nothing any of us can do is any good,” he said, “try not to blame yourself, or me too much. Or Mic. Life’s made harder than it need be by the human belief that effort could make us capable of perfection. It’s part of the evolutionary instinct, but sometimes it has to be put aside. We’re each given some shape, I think, which is the most we can fill. If we can feel we’ve filled it, sometimes we have to be content.”