by Mary Renault
“You’ll feel all different in the morning. Next time we meet we’ll pretend it never happened.”
“Next time we meet,” he said, “we shall probably have to. But I’m glad it did happen and I always shall be.”
“You must go.” She moved her cheekbone softly in the hollow of his hand.
He made a movement to rise, then slipped to his knees and put his face beside hers on the pillow. “I shall miss you,” he said, afraid of the sudden knowledge of it.
“I’ll think about you,” she said in her warm comforting voice. “I promise I’ll be thinking of you and loving you, darling. Always I will.”
The wind rattled the rain-beaten casement impatiently behind him. He pressed his face into the spread of her hair, and did not contradict her.
CHAPTER 5
“I CAN’T TELL YOU how relieved I was,” said the nurse, “when I heard your car stop. Fancy your noticing the light and remembering which house it was. Those few minutes just made all the difference. I hardly dared leave her, even to phone. And having your bag with you and everything.”
“I happened to be passing this way,” said Kit, scrubbing his nails, “from another case. The bag was luck, really. Brought it out by mistake and couldn’t be bothered to take it in again.”
The maternity nurse handed him a clean towel, her plain face warm with appreciation and the solid friendship of those who have shared a skilled and strenuous job. The first crying of an infant sounded, thin, indignant and lonely, from across the landing.
“You can’t have been in bed at all to-night,” said the nurse with sympathy. She had only had an hour herself.
“Not to sleep.” Still enclosed in the concentration of the last few hours, he meant simply that he had been awake when the first call came.
The wind veered, and above the noise of water gurgling out of the bathroom basin came the sudden drumming of rain. Kit was still for a moment, with the towel held to the wrist he had been drying; then looked away quickly from the nurse’s pleased, tired eyes and matter-of-fact smile.
“Yes,” he said slowly after a moment, “it was lucky I came along when I did.”
In a lull of the baby’s wail a faint voice called, “Nurse—please—”
“Don’t bother with me,” Kit said. “I’ve got everything. I’ll let myself out. Good night, and thank you.”
It was nearly six when he got in. He woke in sunlight, to find himself being shaken by the shoulder. He blinked, dazed and scarcely knowing where he was: he had thrown himself on the bed meaning only to rest, but had fallen into a sleep so deep that waking left him dazed, like coming round from an anaesthetic or a blow. The curtains had just been opened, and a patch of sun fell on his face. It hurt his eyes, and he threw his arm across them, longing for sleep again. Then, under it, he saw that it was Janet who was standing there, dressed for the morning, looking down at him.
He moved his arm, narrowing his eyes in the light. She did not speak for a moment; she had taken her hand away quickly when he woke, but was still standing beside him. To his indistinct vision there seemed a kind of softness and shadow in her face, and a little droop at the corners of her mouth that he had not seen lately. He rubbed his eyes, gathering his mind together, dimly remembering that something had happened, that it was somehow wrong she should be there; that it made him unhappy to see her.
“I’ve brought you some breakfast,” she said. “You won’t get anything to eat before surgery begins unless you have it now.”
He realized that there was a smell of coffee in the room. “What?” he murmured, his voice furred with sleep. “What time is it?”
“Half-past eight. I left you as long as I could.”
Struggling with a weariness that seemed ten times what it had been when he fell asleep, Kit began to come to himself. He felt stiff and cramped, and remembered that half-way through undressing it had not seemed worth while, and he had lain down as he was in his trousers and loosened shirt. He pushed back his hair, which was falling over his forehead. Janet turned away, and pulled up the bedside table with the tray on it.
“I told Elsie to bring you up some fresh shaving-water. The first jug will be cold by now.”
“Thank you.” Kit sat up. Her voice had a gentleness that moved and confusedly hurt him. “You shouldn’t have bothered,” he said. “I could have come down.”
“You looked absolutely dead. You never sleep on like that. What happened? What time did you come in?”
“I don’t remember, about six I think. I had two night-calls straight on, a heart case first and then a midder.”
“You mean you’d been out ever since that first bell went before twelve? No wonder you’re tired.”
“It’s all right. I’ll wake up if I have a cold bath.”
“Have this first while it’s hot.” She poured out a cup of coffee, moved to go, and sat down instead on the foot of the bed; a thing she had not done for more than a year. Kit picked up the coffee cup; he was too tired to feel hungry yet, and hoped she would not stop to see if he ate.
She said, looking out of the window at the sun glittering on wet roofs and trees, “It must have been a terrible night to be out in. I lay awake for hours listening to the rain.”
“I wasn’t out in it very much. I’m sorry it kept you awake.”
“Look! The ends of your trousers are soaking wet even now. You’ll make yourself ill, sleeping in damp clothes. Kit, what a stupid thing to do. Whatever made you? Were you too tired to take them off?”
“I didn’t notice them. It won’t hurt me for once.”
“You will change them?”
“My dear, of course I shall—the crease is out for one thing. Don’t you worry about me.”
“Oh, I don’t do that. I know you’re independent.” She smiled, a tight little smile more like her ordinary one. “But you looked so … Well, I mustn’t sit here making you talk, or you won’t get anything to eat.” She got up, smoothed the pleats of her neat skirt, and walked away. At the door she turned for a moment, seeming about to say something, but changed her mind. Kit finished his coffee, disarranged the bacon and eggs as plausibly as he could, and hurried to make himself presentable. He had loosened his tie when he undressed and pulled it over his head; it still retained the knot in which Christie had tied it. He pulled it out straight, then crumpled it quickly, tossing it into a far corner of the drawer and pulled out another.
He was not a success with himself that morning. His mind moved laboriously and in circles, decisions came stickily, and he found it easier to worry over his bad cases than to think constructively about them. He had a headache which, after he had been driving for a short time, extended itself to his eyes. Nothing untoward happened, because he pushed himself at the details of his routine with irritable obstinacy; but he had a precise technical standard, and did not tolerate muddled method any the better because it got approximate results. During the unhappiness and discomfort of all this, his recollections of the previous night became exceedingly objective.
At the time, the purely professional aspect of what he had done had seemed distant; fantastic, even, to the point of humour. Now, hideously lucid and concrete, it began to emerge. He could see it set out, in neat clear sentences of neat small type, in the lower half of a right-hand column in the British Medical Journal. “While visiting the house of a patient in a professional capacity …” He could swear to the exact spacing of the words on the paper; “professional” was run over the end of a line, and divided at the first syllable.
Towards the end of his round he checked over his notebook, ticking off the visits he had already made. He found with relief that there were only two left, but flicked over the leaf perfunctorily to make sure. At the top of the last page was, “Thurs. Miss H. Laurel D.? renew prescription.”
It was, he realized, the first Thursday morning for months that he had not turned in at the gates as mechanically as he dressed or shaved, never varying the time by more than ten or fifteen minutes. He looked
at his watch; it was a quarter to one. He sat in the car, with the notebook propped against the wheel, staring at the almost illegible scribble, which habit had reduced to a sort of symbolic glyph. After a moment or two he took his pencil and, scoring out the words with long heavy strokes, wrote underneath, “Visit last night.”
That’s that, he thought. It amounted to nothing in particular, since he would have to call within the next few days in any case; but it satisfied, momentarily, his impulse of recoil, and made him feel better.
At lunch he found Peggy Leach’s place empty. She was lunching with some of the people from the conference. He expected to feel relieved, but did not; he had, in fact, unconsciously counted on her as a buffer between Janet and himself.
It was the first time he had deliberately concealed from her anything more concrete than his own unhappiness. He had found deceit difficult once; even the needs of his own self-respect had got him no further than reticence. But, later, the demands of her weakness had coaxed his integrity from him step by step. He had made himself more and more an accessory to her flights from truth, till at last he lied to her instinctively, kindly, without mental apology, as naturally as he handed her cheques for the housekeeping. So, now, he felt strained rather than ashamed when she began to ask him about his night calls, whether one of them had been to the old lady with the weak heart, and whether she had been very ill. It was a ritual of hers, once in every day or two, to take an interest in his work. She never remembered what he told her, so he was used to suppressing anything complex or personally absorbing. He gave her a lucid, inaccurate account of the night’s work, shifting the times, almost automatically, to sound plausible. She listened with a bright, kindly little smile, sitting straight and graciously in her chair. She was as beautiful, still, as she had ever been. Now that it was all over he remembered the happiness she had given him rather than the pain, and the thought that he had broken his promises to her distressed him. That he was deceiving her, it did not occur to him to think. It was a condition of his life: he took it for granted.
No (he explained) Miss Heath wouldn’t have a trained nurse. She had a sort of companion who looked after her if she was taken ill in the night.
“Poor woman,” said Janet sincerely. “It must be terrible to grow old in other people’s houses, picking up the fag-ends of other people’s lives. I think I’d rather be almost anything than a companion.”
“Yes,” he said absently. The visit as it had really been had passed before his mind, and with it, suddenly, a picture of Miss Heath’s placid sleeping face. It occurred to him for the first time that Christie might not have told her he had called at all. He had not thought, in the night, of making any arrangement about it. In that case Miss Heath—and Pedlow—would have been expecting him this morning. He always called on a Thursday. It meant that he would have to go this afternoon. “This one isn’t so very old,” he said.
“That must make it almost worse.” Janet looked round the room, at the new curtains and the bright clever pattern of the dahlias on the table.
“I suppose so.” He ate something which he did not taste, and found difficult to swallow. He knew, now, that he had wanted all the time to go more than he had wanted to stay away. But he was too much at war with himself to feel pleasure at the thought of it. He resented the rather painful disturbance of his nerves, and told himself that she would probably be out, or in some other part of the house or the grounds; in any case, he was almost certain not to see her alone. He began planning conversational openings for Miss Heath or Pedlow which would be safely ambiguous. He would have to be careful, if he did not see Christie first. But in his heart he was sure that he would see her. She would manage it somehow. Against his will he thought of her comfort and her promises. While he was at work he had wanted to be free of her; but here at home, where every familiar thing had its own association of disappointment and loneliness, he knew why she had been necessary to him, and that she would be necessary again.
“… After all,” Janet was saying, “in practice it seems to work out, doesn’t it? They all seem such happy, contented people. Look at Peggy, for instance.”
“Yes, don’t they?” murmured Kit, wondering to what, and how long ago, she had changed the conversation. “It’s a question of what suits one, I suppose.” He was thinking that he would ring up, after lunch, to say he was sorry he had not had time to get over in the morning, and would be along shortly. Whoever answered, Christie would probably get to know. After all, he reasoned with himself, she had been extraordinarily good to him. When he broke the thing off it would have to be very gently indeed. He was bound to see her to-day. Put like this, it all looked simple and straightforward; but longing and resistance continued their conflict, unreconciled, within him.
The meal got to an end without Janet having noticed anything unusual. He had trained his face and his voice, by now, to look after the amenities when he himself was elsewhere.
He put the call through from his own room, because there was just a chance that Christie might answer. While he listened to the bell ringing in the empty hall his hands felt cold, and there was a constriction in his chest. He was angry with himself for not being able to take it more humorously, and tried to retell it to himself in terms of a funny story. But when the receiver clicked he started as if he had been shot. It was Pedlow, after all. He tried his most ingenious gambits on her, but she was completely—almost carefully—non-committal. Miss Heath seemed a little better, she thought. She said nothing about last night’s visit, and nothing to convince him that she did not know of it. He told her he would be there between half-past two and three.
That would give Christie time, he thought, to wind up anything she might be doing and get out to meet him in the drive. As the time drew near, and he got out the car, his mind felt smoothed-out and secure again. He thought that she would be pleased to see him—the first conviction of the kind he had known for years—and felt warmed, uplifted and protective. Again he decided that he must put an end to it. This time he was thinking not of himself, but of her.
He saw her when he was half-way up the drive. She was standing just as he had imagined her, in a gap of the laurels on the other side of the lawn; wearing a light soft dress, the colour of meal, and a little yellow jacket. She was too far off for her face to be clear, but he knew at once that she had seen him. He slowed down—he had not come in sight of the house—and lifted his hand to wave to her. At the same instant, she turned and disappeared into the trees.
At first he did not take it in. He thought she was coming to meet him by some hidden path, to avoid being seen. He stopped the car, and waited. Presently he caught a distant glimpse of her through the trees. Her back was turned; she was walking in the opposite direction.
There was a moment in which he appeared to himself to be accepting this quite naturally and calmly. Yes, of course, she was walking away. He had known this was quite likely to happen all the time. He started the car, contemplating the event reasonably, while the surrounding scene underwent a curious contraction, deadening and chill. In the next instant, this time fuse gave way to detonation. The focus of reaction inside him—his dread of self-betrayal, his painfully vulnerable pride—had been waiting for something of this kind all along. They had it all their own way, for every argument, moral and utilitarian, was on their side. Horribly hurt and blindly angry, he let them rip.
He found he had reached the porch, stopped, and, catching a glimpse of himself in the driving-mirror, waited a moment to settle down.
Pedlow opened the door. She seemed more drawn-in and buttoned-up than ever. Even her stays did not squeak.
“How’s Miss Heath?” he asked. “Any change since I last called?”
“None, sir, as far as I am aware.” It was not like Pedlow to be so non-committal. She was a woman of definite ideas. Probably, he thought, she was put out by having the girl in the house. Now he would have to glean his information from Miss Heath, a much more complicated matter. His resentment grew.
>
Worse was to follow, for Miss Heath turned out to be having one of her vague days. Her faculties fluctuated a good deal, as old people’s will. When he congratulated her on looking better than she had last time, she told him how thankful she was to Providence for not letting her suffer as her dear mother had done; and went on from there to a hunting accident her father had had when she was six years old.
“How did you sleep last night?” he asked her at last, in desperation.
“Oh, I can’t complain of my sleep, doctor. But I have disturbing dreams sometimes, very disturbing dreams. I dream sometimes that I’ve been thrown into the sea and that I’m just about to drown. And then one night this week I dreamed I heard you and Christie talking in the hall. Just the voices. It seemed quite real at the time; so foolish.”
“So long as you don’t actually stay awake,” said Kit evenly, “I don’t think we need worry about that. You must let me know, though, if you have any more restless nights.”
“It’s really of no consequence, doctor: I can always make it up in the day.” Her round face smiled at him, deprecating and kindly. He realized that he had become, in the last year, exceedingly fond of her. He hated lying to her as he had not hated lying to Janet; quite apart from the professional side of it, which left him no peace all day. She was leaning forward in her chair, peering out the window.
“Now, I wonder where my little Christie is. Naughty girl, she must have forgotten the time. I particularly told her you were coming; I know you like to have some one to help with the lifting. But I’ll ring for Pedlow.”
“No, please don’t bother. I think the chest will be enough to-day.” He listened, made out a fresh prescription, and left quickly.
He did not notice that he was doing a good thirty down the drive (which had a shocking surface) till he rounded a blind bend and saw Christie, walking well in the middle and quite oblivious of him, a few yards ahead. He just managed to avoid running her down by jamming on both sets of brakes, and skidding the car into a laurel-bush.