by Mary Renault
“I come down here,” she confided, offering him a crinkled cigarette, “when I get a bit sick of them all, to think about you.”
“Have you been lately?” A recollection of the last few days tinged Kit’s voice a little.
“Oh, my pet, don’t be cross with me.” She curled down beside him, arranging a dubious cushion under his head. “Isn’t it funny, now you’re here I can’t think how I could have been such an ass.”
“You know,” said Kit with the mildness of security, “that contract was obviously phoney.”
“Oh, I shouldn’t think so. Mr. Cowen was awfully sweet about it. I mean, how did I think I could go away from you for all that time? Why, I might not have seen you for months. Of course it was a chance and all that, but I must have been mad to think I could. As soon as I saw you in that chair looking so lovely under the lamp, I knew I wouldn’t go. Oh, darling, I am so glad you came. Suppose you’d come after I’d signed up everything and it had been too late. I should have died. Honestly I should.”
Her eyes shone in the half-darkness. Kit pulled her into his arms. His sense of power frightened him with a feeling of having offended fate. He tried to placate the gods with a reasoned exposé of the contract and Mr. Cowen. Christie absorbed it all. Presently she found the defeat of Mr. Cowen’s designs outrageously funny. She mimicked his mannerisms, and speculated vividly on his probable connection with dens of vice in the Argentine, and the methods by which his victims were trans-shipped. Kit found himself actually defending Mr. Cowen, but she waved it away.
“I knew he was a crook as soon as I started talking to you. You show people up. Like a lodestone—isn’t it a lodestone?”
“Touchstone, do you mean?”
“A touchstone, of course.” She pushed her head under his chin. “Kit, darling, I’ve been so silly about people. I’ve been had lots of times. Stop me if I do it again. Don’t send me letters like a Times leader, they frighten me. When I got it I nearly wrote off to that shiny little man straightaway, I was so upset.”
“I didn’t want to influence you,” said Kit carefully, “in the wrong way.”
“Is this the wrong way.”
“Probably.”
“Well, it’s the way that works with me.” A clock struck the quarter. Christie smiled, and patted the two cushions together. “They won’t be out of tea for another half-hour,” she said.
CHAPTER 14
IT HAD OCCURRED TO Kit sometimes that his life was developing a rhythm which, if he had charted it, would have made a neat and regular graph, rather like the graph of a recurrent fever. He had amused himself one day by tracing it on his blotting pad. It would start with 98.4 on the second day or so after he had seen Christie; then there would be a sharp little rise, say to 99, on the morning when he expected a letter. If, as sometimes happened, the letter did not come, it might go up to 100 or so, or, on the other hand, drop to subnormal. A letter—a satisfactory letter, that is—would keep the line horizontal until the two or three days before his next visit to the Abbey, during which it would climb steeply to 103 or 104, according to the difficulty and danger he encountered in getting away. But during the time he was with Christie, the graph ceased to operate. He lived on a different scale then, to a different time; when he was with her, he seemed to have been with her always. Even the moment of parting did not become real to him till she was gone; it took a dozen gradual steps back into separate life—the road, the garage, the stairs, his own room—knocking at him in succession, to return him to loneliness.
Since the business of Mr. Cowen, however, the graph had tended once or twice to lose shape. The hours he spent with Christie still had their charmed completeness, but the intervals between were subject to sudden disturbances set in motion by nothing in particular; a couple of days’ delay in her letter made him absurdly anxious, and, when it came, he would torment himself over some doubtful phrase which had its origin in nothing graver than Christie’s slapdash methods of composition. He took to worrying four days beforehand, instead of two, over the chances of getting away to see her. When he was with her, the memory of all this faded, so that he did not perceive the undercurrent of strain threading even through his happiness, and, when it broke the surface, could not imagine what had happened to him.
One day he was driving Christie out to tea in a small hotel they had found; a friendly place where, in the off season, they generally had the little tea lounge, and a log fire, all to themselves. It was on the other side of Paxton, so that they had to pass through the town. In the middle of a shopping street, Christie gripped him by the elbow and said, “Look. Look there.”
Kit corrected the swerve that had threatened, and heard an indignant sound of brakes from a car behind.
“For heaven’s sake,” he said, “don’t ever grab any one’s arm when they’re driving. I nearly ran over a woman then.”
“But didn’t you see who it was? No, don’t look now.”
Kit gave an irritated and perfunctory glance at the pavement. The middle-aged woman he had avoided had turned on the kerb to look at the car. It was Pedlow, dressed in black from head to foot; flat black hat, black sealskin coat, black stockings, flat black shoes. Even so briefly, he had time to notice that she had contrived to merge into prosperity without making a single essential change in her appearance. Under the elderly, conservative lines of the fur coat her body still had the same look of being made of leather bands strapped tightly over an iron frame. He could almost believe, from where he was, that he heard her squeak. Her head was turned away, but something about its angle suggested that she had just looked at him, or was just about to look. Then the car moved past, and she was gone.
Christie was sitting pressed back in her seat; she looked quite white.
“What’s Pedlow doing here?”
“Shopping,” said Kit shortly, “by the look of it.” He was particular about his driving and disliked making an exhibition of himself. The oddly uncomfortable impression Pedlow had made on him was somewhere in the background of his irritation; but, reacting from Christie’s nervousness, he pushed the feeling away.
“She’s come here to watch us,” Christie said.
“Of course she hasn’t. You can’t even be certain she saw us. She’s probably visiting an invalid sister. Pedlow would be sure to have an invalid sister or two.” Privately he thought she was as likely as not to be living in Paxton; there had been, somehow, a resident air about her. But he knew it would be tactless to suggest it.
“It was horrible seeing her like that. I don’t like it.”
“Don’t be a baby,” said Kit a little irritably, because he had not liked it himself. “Pedlow’s settled. We know what she wanted, and she’s got it. She’ll have just about as much interest in you now as people have in a rain storm after it’s blown over. Darling, we’ve only got a few hours. Don’t let’s waste them getting into a fuss over Pedlow.”
“I know. I’m sorry. It was a bit soft of me.”
They talked about other things, but a vague discomfort worked like yeast below the surfaces of both their minds. When they got to the hotel, their special table was taken by a couple of middle-aged American women; they raked the room, every minute or two, with eager bird-like glances, anxious that no oddment of Englishness should escape them. Kit and Christie talked in undertones, freezing up altogether when the conversation at the other table stopped. Both of them wanted to go to some quiet place and make love, but the Abbey was particularly impossible because a party of visiting schoolgirls was being shown over it, and the country was sodden after a spell of rain. Both of them disliked the thought of what Christie always described as “messing about in the car”; knew it would end with that; and felt a kind of self-distaste which infected their mood. Christie tried to entertain Kit by describing the progress of the current play; this she did quite amusingly, but with too much recourse to Rollo’s bons mots at the expense of the cast. Kit received the first two with polite amusement, the third and fourth strained toleration, and, at the fifth, sa
id, “Well, I wonder he’s not on the London stage if he’s so damned superior to every one here.”
“Rollo? He isn’t superior, he just enjoys the comic side. He’d go mad in a job like his if he didn’t.”
Kit recalled, with annoyance, Rollo’s cool and roving stare; his imagination added a shade of insolence absent from the original.
“He likes you, too,” Christie said. “He wanted to get you in for the play. He was awfully disappointed when I said you wouldn’t be able to. It was St. Michael he wanted you for; you’d have looked perfect, he said.”
“Oh. Well, I’m sorry to have done him out of a laugh.”
The American ladies paid their bill and went, leaving behind them privacy and peace. But neither of the beneficiaries were made happy by it. Christie’s soft sparkle had gone; her face had a compact look which made her seem suddenly older.
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “You can’t just invent things about people you’ve hardly seen. Rollo isn’t a bit like that, I’ve known him for years.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were so intimate that you couldn’t discuss him.”
“Of course I could discuss him. You don’t want to discuss him. You’ve got some fixed idea of your own and you don’t want to listen to anything else. You’re talking just like Maurice did.”
“Thanks,” said Kit, hurt as one can only be hurt by a blow on a surface already raw. “It seems quite a pity you had all the trouble of changing over. However, there’s always Rollo, I suppose.”
“Oh, Kit, stop being so maddening or I’ll throw a plate at you.”
They confronted one another, with set faces, across the table.
Behind the hard surface of Kit’s anger a tiny voice made itself heard, reminding him of the moment of release from Janet, the happy rediscovery of solitude. Sickened, even a little frightened, by the violence within him and its wasteful stupidity, for the first time he regretted the freedom which had slipped so imperceptibly away. Something of it must have showed in his face, for the surface flurry of Christie’s temper dispersed in sudden fear. She leaned across the table and caught his hand.
“Darling, don’t. I love you, you know I do.”
“I’m sorry.” The anxiety in her voice, the return of dependence, slid him back into security. They exchanged uncertain smiles, then laughed. Somewhere, distantly, the still small voice that had spoken to him out of the whirlwind still sounded; but he let it fade.
“Fancy being jealous of old Rollo,” Christie said.
“I’m jealous of any one who sees you every day.”
“Honestly I believe you thought Roll made love to me.”
“He’s a bigger fool than he looks if he doesn’t try.”
“Rollo—!” She laughed delightedly. “My dear, if you tucked Rollo in bed with me and locked the door, he’d just go on till midnight telling me how he’d like to produce Hamlet, and fall asleep talking. Honestly. It always amazes me that he can do love scenes as well as he does on the stage; I’ve never seen him look at a woman off it. Fancy picking on old Rollo.” She stroked the back of his hand with the tips of her fingers. “No, if I hadn’t you, I expect I’d cast an eye at the man we’ve got now playing Satan. He’s new this year. Rather lovely, black-and-white and haggard with a voice like a passing-bell. When he comes on and says, ‘How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning,’ it’s like water running down your spine. He’s unhappy, I think.”
“Don’t tease me. We’ve only got three more hours.”
“Oh, darling, I wasn’t. I was only talking off the top; I can’t help talking to you as if I were talking to myself. I’ve hardly spoken to him. Kit, darling, you weren’t really unhappy about Rollo, were you? I can’t bear to think of you being unhappy about me when you’re alone. I want to make you only happy. Don’t you see, that’s what I’m for, for you?”
She took his hand in both hers; her face glowed as if a deep light shone behind it. There was a hard tightness round Kit’s heart.
“If you—” he began.
The waiter came in, and began to clear the things from the other table. They each pulled their hands back and sat with them fixed stiffly on their knees. Presently Kit beckoned him over, and paid the bill.
“Thank you very much, sir,” said the waiter, finding half a handful of small silver pushed blindly back at him.
“Where shall we go, darling?” asked Christie when he had gone.
“Anywhere by ourselves. In the car somewhere?”
“Yes,” said Christie. “Please.”
Kit was happy for the next three or four days. It was an obstinate, enclosed kind of happiness, a little like the pleasure of hugging a fire in winter, when a disregarded voice tells one that a better kind of warmth is to be had by walking in the frost outside. But Kit hugged his fire. He wrote to Christie, and got back, two days later, a letter overflowing with expressions of love. There was hardly room in it for anything else, even for her usual report on the progress of the play. He read it over many times, and kept it to read again; but when he returned to it, it was always with a fear at the bottom of his heart of finding something different between the lines. He never did, and put it away comforted. But some undertone in it—not insincerity, but rather a kind of overanxiety and solicitude—would send him back to it in the same disquiet again.
By the next time he went over it was mid-December; the last chance he was likely to have until after Christmas. The day beforehand he walked about the lighted shop windows, looking for something to give to Christie. There were several things he fancied—a little moleskin jacket, a gold watch the size of a sixpenny bit—which somehow he was shy of. They had a kind of hackneyed suggestion, were in fact what Christie would call mistresslike. She was liable to sudden and illogical fits of embarrassment about such things. In the end he found, almost by accident, something exactly right; a box for theatrical make-up, large and flat and businesslike, enamelled pale green and full of flaps and drawers and unfolding mirrors and trays, unspillable compartments for powder of every shade, round pots for grease, thin slots for eye-pencil and thick slots for greasepaint. He had them all filled with the appropriate things, and, in secret that night in his room, unwrapped it and opened up all its lids and hinges and flaps and drawers; picking up the bright clean sticks of greasepaint with their gilt labels and cellophane covers, peering in gingerly at the powders (he was astonished to find that one was green), and imagining Christie’s face looking back at him from the mirror in the lid. The only unfilled part was a large compartment in the bottom, for trinkets and oddments. He grinned to himself as he imagined the kind of thing with which Christie would fill it.
He enjoyed himself so much with this toy that, by the time he started for the Abbey, all his vague uneasiness had blown away. It sat on the seat of the car beside him, and had already a companionable air, like something she had worn. There was a sharp nip in the wind, and a frosty sun; a glassy-clear light like yellow crystal picked out bare trees and the sharp furrows of the ploughland; he sang to himself along the empty stretches of the road.
Christie met him at the Abbey gate, dressed for the cold; she had on a bright green hood of soft leather lined with fleece, and gloves to match. Her hair, escaping round the hood, shone like a smoky sunset, and her cheeks were pink with the frost. She got into the car (Kit had hidden his parcel under the dashboard), and looked up to say, with a little sigh, “Oh, Kit, how nice you always are to see again.”
She looked, to Kit, so lovely that he felt incapable of talking about it. “Where would you like to go?” he asked. “Shall we drive out somewhere?”
“Let’s go on the hills. I’ve been quite sore with wanting to be out all day.”
They drove west, away from the town, between beeches whose fallen leaves made a red border to the road, and up beyond them to the bare hills. Here only Scotch firs and tamarisk grew, licked sideways by the upper wind which, leaping the levels, came at them with strength still unbroken from
the sea. The short sullen grass between the stone fences seemed to suck in the sunlight and mix it with the water in their roots. The clouds were frail and transparent, and the wind tore them and streaked their rags along the thin blue of the sky.
Christie was very gay. She talked incessantly, telling Kit anecdotes about the Abbey—which seemed to grow a fresh crop, like exotic fungi, every week—and getting Kit to tell her stories in exchange. She had an inexhaustible memory for characters, and he brought her all the tales about odd contacts in his practice to which Janet had listened, in the days when he still tried to amuse her, with strained politeness. Even when the joke depended on a technical point, she was quick to take it up from his simplified explanation. She had a kind of unsophisticated shrewdness like that of an intelligent child who has been much with its elders; nothing he said to her fell with the dead drop which marks the gulf between personalities.
On a bare stretch of hill they got out and walked, enjoying the last of the sun which sparkled through the thin air like bubbles in wine. The wind was so strong that the struggle to walk against it made them hot in spite of its coldness; Christie clutched his hand and he had a fancy that she needed his weight to hold her down to the ground. Just before it was time to turn back, they stood in a clump of firs and looked at the light slanting along the lionlike flanks of the hills. Kit watched the skyline, content with himself and the world; at rest in the present and without demands on the future. After a minute or two he turned to look at Christie, expecting to see his thoughts reflected in her face as, all afternoon, his other thoughts had been. She was looking not at the golden grass but at him; her face was strained with compassion and, it seemed, with fear. His exaltation left him, he became suddenly aware that the sun was setting coldly and that the blue of twilight was creeping up from the valleys.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
She squeezed his arm quickly. “Nothing, darling. I’m getting hungry, aren’t you? Let’s go somewhere and have a nice cup of tea.”