by Mary Renault
Mic cleared up after a fashion; then realised he was empty with hunger, and ate such oddments as the shelves provided. He could not cut bread or spread butter, so the meal was primitive. Pushing the remnants out of sight, he went over to the window and stretched himself in the armchair, putting off the moment when he would have to struggle with his clothes.
The yellow of the electric light kept turning to brown in his aching eyes, so he switched it off. At first only the lighted places in the street were visible, but presently he could see the hard black edges of the roof-tops against the transparent darkness of the sky. The moon had not risen yet.
As, in the effort of limping home, the last of his energy drained away, purpose with its consolations had left him, and nothing remained but the certainty of loss. He did not argue with it or retreat from it or cover its face with the fantasies of hope. His was a mind not skilled in mitigations; neither his studies nor his experience had encouraged them. The species topped their curve and were devoured by their successors; mind foundered in the body’s disease; and no compensation was offered. Forgetful and expectant, life moved on. There was no relief, no ivory tower of withdrawal, only the hard peace of adaptation and truth.
Jan also while he lived had made himself no promises, loved no legends, built himself no cities of refuge in the mind. He had had neither the need nor the time. For him the real had been wonderful, sharp-tasting and new as to a child. If anything of him had outlasted the astonishment of death, it must be this which was most his own. Living, as dead, he would be out of call; eager, concerned with his journey, casting no glances behind.
“If by miracle can be
This livelong minute true to thee—”
Once, a long time ago, as they talked of someone else, he had quoted that to Jan. A reproach had been in his heart; but Jan had only looked up in the quick pleasure with which people greet the neat expression of a dear personal truth. For him it had been a simple statement of the dimension in which he lived. In the minute of miracle his truth was absolute; when that ended, what mattered was to be ready for the next. Mic, who was accustomed to accepting facts on their own terms, had accepted Jan also, as one accepts, along with the uses of fire, the knowledge that it will burn. The burn hurt, but inflicted no sense of wrong.
In this stillness of his mind and the deep exhaustion of the body, a peace fell on him greater than any he had known before. Life ceased to consist in duration; Jan, who would not return, was indestructible, contained in the achieved miracle of being, the instant wholeness that was all of immortality he had known or desired. Mic remembered his face just before the car crashed, full of something unknown beside which death seemed a casual irrelevance.
Very pleasant hast thou been unto me. Mic closed his eyes, pain silenced him by completion. Against the brilliant blackness of a gable an arc of the moon was rising. O Jonathan, thou wast slain in thine high places.
There was quiet in the street, in the room about him, in his body and mind. Time and place faded in the vagueness of approaching sleep.
He was not awakened at once by the knocking on the door. It blended itself with some dream, so that when he opened his eyes he was not sure what it was that had roused him. He shivered; he was very cold, and so stiff that he could hardly rise from the chair. The moon was high, full in his face. It must be nearly midnight. He had better get to bed. Then the knock came again; a slight, un-urgent sound, the knock it seemed of someone with time on their hands and no great sense of conviction in their errand. Feeling too dull and dazed for speculation, he went over to the door, switching the light on as he passed.
It dazzled him, so that for a moment the unmoving profile in the shadows seemed to be Jan’s. Even this caused him no violent feeling, only a stunned suspension of reason. Then he saw that it was Vivian; she stood there, silent, like a sleepwalker, blinking in the sudden light.
“Come in,” he said. It was a little strange to find himself speaking; he had been, and still felt, so much alone.
He tried to rouse himself, to wonder why she had come. He could feel nothing, only a dim resentment at being recalled to things, and a half-deadened shock of pain because for a moment she had been like Jan. Her eyes, he saw, had wandered to his sling. So that was it, he thought, a little stupid still with Weariness and sleep: she had come to look after him, to ask if he wanted helping with his things, to get him a meal perhaps; she had always wanted to be kind to him. What could one say?
She wandered into the room. She was bareheaded, and in her hair were a few thin flakes of snow that melted to dew-drops as he looked. Her eyes encountered his and passed through them, moving on to the furniture and walls.
He closed the door behind her, but did not at once follow her in. It had come to him that perhaps she wanted to reproach herself with all this, to take the blame; and he did not know how he would answer, or bear with it. He wished he had had time to think and to prepare himself. It was important not to be unkind.
She pulled off the worn fur gloves she was wearing, and laid them down on the table; then picked them up again, hesitantly, as if unsure whether it had been good manners, like a child visiting.
“Mic,” she said in a light strengthless voice, “may I stay here for a little while?”
“Of course,” he answered, wondering; then came forward quickly and dragged up a chair. He had suddenly noticed her pallor and the blind darkness of her eyes, and thought she was about to faint. “Sit down, my dear,” he said, and steadied her into the chair with his hand on her arm.
“Thank you.” She ran her fingers lightly along the table’s edge, as if to test its substance, seeming scarcely aware of what she did; then, recollecting herself, put her hands together in her lap. “I shall be all right now. You mustn’t bother with me any more.” She looked up at him; dimly, as if it were an effort to see him. “Go to bed, Mic, dear, you look so tired. I shall be gone when you wake up. I only want to stay for a minute or two.”
Mic looked down at her hands. The fingers were blanched with cold, the nails bluish, as if the blood had stopped; they were like the hands of a dead woman. He went over and lit the gas-fire, then knelt down by her and put his good hand over them. “You’re awfully cold.” He tried to rub them; they felt like marble. “I can’t do it properly, I’ve only got one hand.”
“They don’t feel cold.” She looked down at them, as if she were surprised to see them there.
“The fire will be warm in a minute. You must have something hot to drink. I’ve got some milk left, I think.”
“Thank you,” she said again mechanically; then straightened herself, and turned to look at him. “No, Mic, you mustn’t worry with me. I don’t need anything. It’s good of you to let me be here.”
“That’s foolish,” he said gently. He went into the kitchen, and tipping out what was left in the milk-bottle into a saucepan, brought it back to the small gas-ring on the top of the fire.
“That will be nice.” She slid from her chair to the rug, holding out her hands to the glow. “I’ll take it off when it boils. I won’t forget about it.”
He fetched a glass and some biscuits and put them down on the table. “You don’t want me to go, do you?” he asked, feeling nothing clearly.
“You mustn’t feel you have to stay.” She spoke still in the same vague voice, light and without substance. “Go into the other room and forget about me. Go to bed, dear. I shouldn’t have come here, I know.”
“Where else should you come?” he said.
“No. There wasn’t anywhere else. I’ll go again soon. You’re not angry with me. I thought you might be, I didn’t know.”
“Angry?” he said, groping through slow memory to comprehension. “No. That—isn’t anything. I’d forgotten.”
She was shivering. He knelt and put his arm round her shoulders.
“How did you get out of the hospital?” he asked.
“I have a few nights off. Till after the—” She controlled herself with a moment’s rigidity, and
went on without a change of tone, “They think I’m with my father. He’s staying the night here. I’ve been with him most of the day. I told him tonight I had to go back.”
The saucepan hissed. Mic put it down by the fire and came back to her. She went on, as if he had not moved, “I couldn’t go on being alone.”
He bent his head overs hers. His heart hurt him with a physical pain. It had been a statement, without personal appeal: the declaration of an ultimate surrender of the spirit. It was a defeat to which he had been so near that he could feel, almost, the taste of it on her lips. He seemed to pass out of himself, without desire of his own or thought of the future or of the past; feeling only her need and his compassion. It would have been nothing for him to have died for her.
“You’re not alone,” he said.
She turned her head against him, silently. For a moment her body remained hard with the control she had imposed on herself; then, making no sound, she loosened in his arm, and he felt her tears.
He held her near to him, thinking only to lend her some sense of security; not remembering the nights when the longing to hold her had been like a sword in him, and had kept him waking till the morning. The faint unforgotten scent of her hair was under his mouth, and he could feel, crushed to him as she clung, the lifted softness of her breasts; but it was only as if a child in terror of the dark had run into his arms to be hidden.
He had lied to her too as if to a child, for she would always be alone and he also, though he knew, with a certainty detached from his perception of the present, that they would return to one another, and would pass and repass through one another’s flesh and thoughts and spirit, and would seem often to be a single body and sometimes a single mind. But the fact of essential human solitude was, it seemed to him, for the people able to know and to endure it to reserve to themselves.
When her crying lost its first urgency of release, he poured the milk out into the glass and held it up to her. “It’s still rather hot. Don’t drink it too quickly.”
“You must have some too,” she said. In some cloudy way she seemed to attach importance to this, and he drank a little to please her.
“Now you must lie down,” he told her, when he had taken the empty glass away: and, as this made little impression on her, “You’ll have to get some sleep, you know.”
She looked up quickly; he felt her fingers clench themselves on the lapel of his coat. “It’s all right,” he said. “I’m not going away.”
He found her a spare pair of pyjamas and put them to warm by the fire. She undressed mechanically, stopping sometimes to watch him as he moved about the room putting things straight for the night. He was trying to ease his coat off in the bedroom by himself, when she appeared in her drifting way and helped him out of his clothes with practised, impersonal efficiency, tied up his sling and pinned it to his pyjama jacket, then drifted out again. He found her, when he was ready, sitting and staring into the red of the fire.
“Come along.” He turned it out, and she blinked and looked up at him. “You’re going to sleep now.” He remembered as he spoke the extent of his own weariness, which for a time he had forgotten.
She slipped into the bed and lay at the far edge of it, making herself narrow against the wall. “I won’t knock your arm,” she whispered as he put the light out. “Good night.”
Mic lay down. Sleep and fatigue pressed like dark heavy hands on his brain; he wanted nothing but to slide into silence under their weight, to loose himself from his bruised body and flagging mind. He could lie easily, as if he were alone, for she had drawn herself into so little room that even in that small space she hardly touched him. She was quite still, even her breathing made no sound. But he knew in the dark that her eyes were open. Presently, with a tiny, secret movement, he felt her put her finger-tips on the stuff of his sleeve.
She lay, as she had always lain, on his left side. Without speaking he reached out for her, and drew her into the hollow of his arm. She came with a long sigh, her head slipping to his shoulder; he kissed her forehead.
It seemed then that she lay with the heaviness of sleep; but in a little while when his own eyelids were dropping, her voice stirred, hardly moving the darkness.
“Mic, I only wanted you to know, this is what I shall remember you by, always, after I’ve gone away. More than all the rest. Always.”
He made a sleepy questioning sound, the words only half penetrating his mind. “You’re not going away.”
“Yes. I’ve no right. I’ve nothing for you, Mic. I’m beaten.”
“So are we all,” he said, “in one way or another. Different ways, sometimes. That’s the use of being two.”
“You say that, my dear. You’re kinder than I thought anyone could be. But we know that isn’t enough.”
He laid his cheek against her hair. “I love you,” he said. “I’ve never ceased to love you.”
The words sounded strange in his own ears, for he was emptied of emotion, almost of thought. It was as if his spirit had spoken in a stillness within him.
For a moment she was quite still; then he felt and half saw the lifting of her head as she tried to look into his face. He stooped and kissed her on the lips. They stayed so for a little while; it was a long, strange kiss, without physical passion but curiously intent; they were too spent to know what they found in it, a communion or the taste of their private dedications.
Suddenly, as if a spell had been lifted, Mic looked up and said, in his ordinary voice, “Good Lord, I forgot to open the curtains. We shan’t get any air.” He slid out of bed and drew them back, letting in a faint not-darkness which seemed like light.
She opened the clothes to receive him back again. “Was it cold out there?”
“Feels like a frost.”
“What a shame,” she murmured drowsily. “Here.” She folded the warmth of her body against him, and almost at once they were asleep.
Vivian opened her eyes in the early light, dimly aware that some slight sound from Mic had aroused her; he had coughed, perhaps, or groaned at a sudden movement in his sleep. Whatever it was, it had not waked him. He lay with his face turned upward; at some time while they slept he had taken away the arm that had been around her, and crossed it, in subconscious defence, over the other that was slung to his chest. It was the posture of an effigy, calm and self-contained. Perhaps it was the watchfulness of his body, guarding its injury and forbidding him quite to relax, that had so dispelled the casual, almost childish abandonment in which he used to sleep, which had so often given her the sense of pathos, and, hardly realised, of her own power. In the grey glimmer of dawn she could see the contours of his face. There were changes of stress about the mouth and eyes, an indefinable shifting of shadows; traces of ill-health were there, but she noticed them, with a faint surprise, after the rest. It was the face, she saw, of a man and a possessor of himself. She knew, without joy or sorrow but in a motionless certainty, that he was the possessor of her self also.
Henceforward their relationship was fixed, she the lover, he the beloved. She believed that he would never abuse it, never perhaps wholly know it; he had a natural humility and he had his own need of her, not final like hers but implicit in him and real. She too would hide the truth a little; for there is a kind of courtesy in such things that love lends, sometimes, when pride has been destroyed.
But she would know always; it would always be she who would want the kiss to last longer, though she might be the first to leave hold; she for whom the times of absence would be empty, though she would often tell him how well she filled them; she who stood to lose everything in losing him, he who would have a little of the stuff of happiness in reserve.
In the secret battle which had underlain their love, of which she, only, had been aware with the mind, she was now and finally the loser. There were several ways in which she might partly have evaded the knowledge she brought to this moment. Half-truths might have sheltered her; that poverty had fought against her; that her work had demanded more
of her than was just or than her life could afford; even that she was a, woman and had the fluid of submission in her blood-stream. But she knew that she could not surrender on any of these terms without dishonour. Mic had been right long ago: true or not true, that was not a basis on which life could be lived. There was an integrity which, illuminating defeat, could reflect in it the image of victory; and, embracing this, she acknowledged to herself that none of these things had settled her course. Like water she had found her own level; this was as it was, only because she had fought in the conscious craving for self-certainty and power, he in the simple instinctive reaching of his spirit for the good.
The sounds of the birds, dispersed and broken, was beginning, and the footsteps of the earliest workers rang at intervals, clear in the quiet and firm with their morning purpose, along the road. She turned softly on her side, in a position from which, without having to move again, she could lie and watch him; keeping her face pressed close to the pillow so that she might seem to be sleeping when he opened his eyes.
THE END
A Biography of Mary Renault
Mary Renault (1905–1983) was an English writer best known for her historical novels on the life of Alexander the Great: Fire from Heaven (1969), The Persian Boy (1972), and Funeral Games (1981).
Born Eileen Mary Challans into a middle-class family in a London suburb, Renault enjoyed reading from a young age. Initially obsessed with cowboy stories, she became interested in Greek philosophy when she found Plato’s works in her school library. Her fascination with Greek philosophy led her to St Hugh’s College, Oxford, where one of her tutors was J. R. R. Tolkien. Renault went on to earn her BA in English in 1928.
Renault began training as a nurse in 1933. It was at this time that she met the woman that would become her life partner, fellow nurse Julie Mullard. Renault also began writing, and published her first novel, Purposes of Love (titled Promise of Love in its American edition), in 1939. Inspired by her occupation, her first works were hospital romances. Renault continued writing as she treated Dunkirk evacuees at the Winford Emergency Hospital in Bristol and later as she worked in a brain surgery ward at the Radcliffe Infirmary.