by Mary Renault
There was a big farmhouse standing back, in a smooth garden, from the road; a famous place in summer, but hibernating sleepily now in the shelter of a ridge of pines.
“Let’s go there,” Kit said. “It looks peaceful.”
“It looks as if it was closed for the winter, to me.”
They were made welcome, however, with cordial surprise, put into a plushy parlour with a Georgian brass kerb and a log fire, and served with toasted scones, bread-and-butter both currant and plain, two kinds of jam, and a towering home-made cake. They both ate a good deal, but Christie found time to chatter with even more animation than before. Kit said very little; he looked at Christie, drank tea from a thick white cup with a gold clover-left in the bottom, and laughed when required. The farmer’s wife, who had things to do in the back kitchen, left them to themselves.
At the end of the meal Kit said, “Wait here for me. I’ve got something outside in the car.” He brought back the parcel with the make-up box, and put it on her knee.
“What’s this?” she asked, fingering the string as if she were frightened of it. “Is it for me?”
“You ought to have had it at Christmas. But I shan’t be here.”
“Kit, what have you been doing?” She pressed the other hand, unconsciously, against her heart.
“Open it,” said Kit happily. “It won’t bite you.”
“No, but darling, I—” She turned and smiled at him quickly, cleared a space on the table, undid the string and paper, caught her breath and opened the green enamel lid of the box. Kit, standing behind her, saw her face framed, just as he had imagined it, in the mirror inside the lid.
“Oh, Kit.” She opened the folding trays, lifted out the sticks of make-up and put them reverently back again, dipped her finger in the powder and made a little smooth dent. “It’s lovely—I—” Suddenly she turned from the treasures in front of her as if she had forgotten them, and looked up at his face. His hands were resting on the back of the chair; she pressed her cheek against his arm. “Oh, God,” she said, “why do you have to be so sweet?” Her voice broke on a quick violent sob; he could see its passage through her lifted throat. She flung herself forward, her elbows on the table, her head in her hands. Her hair fell down over the bright sticks of greasepaint and the green enamel edges of the box.
“What is it?” Kit smoothed the loose hair back against her cheeks, and tilted up her chin. “Don’t be silly,” he said softly.
“I’m not being silly.” She shook his hands off and turned away. “You don’t know what I’m like or you wouldn’t be good to me like this.”
“Of course I know what you’re like.”
She went on, her voice muffled and indistinct through her hands, “I had a feeling you were going to do something like this. I kept thinking if it was something bitchy you’d brought me, jewellery or something, I wouldn’t feel so awful. But it’s even more like you than I was afraid it’d be. I wish I’d jumped into that quarry we passed just now.” Even in her grief, youth and vitality ran in her voice like water. He knew she had never imagined death for herself in all her life, and smiled.
“What is all this?” He pulled gently at one of her ears, through her hair.
“You’re so’ good. You’re always the same. Don’t you see, I’m not. I’m different whoever I’m with. And I don’t want to be. I only want to be the sort of person I am with you. Oh, Kit, why do you have to be away from me?”
“God knows why. Something I did wrong in a former life, I daresay. I never am away from you, really.”
“But I’ve been away from you.”
“How do you mean?” said Kit. He drew away from the chair and stepped back, so that the brass fender almost tripped him. He steadied himself with an arm on the edge of the mantelpiece. At the sound of his heel against the brass Christie started round in her chair, and looked at him with wet frightened eyes.
“Kit, don’t. I can’t bear it.” She jumped up and caught his other arm between her hands. “Nothing’s happened really. It all seems so senseless now you’re here.”
“What exactly has happened?” He felt the plush fringe of the mantelpiece give dangerously in his fingers, and loosened their grip.
“Nothing that you could call anything. It’s only that this Lucifer man’s been sort of hanging round me a bit. Lionel Fell his name is. He’s all right, not bad. Really it was because I felt so sorry for him. You see he’s always wanted to go on the stage, and he’s good too, but his people are dead and he’s got a sister in a sanatorium with T.B. and has to work at insurance, or something, to pay for her. His father died of it and of course secretly he thinks he will too in the end, though he doesn’t actually say so. He came an hour early for rehearsal one day through muddling the times, and told me all this while he was waiting about. I couldn’t not be nice to him. I didn’t mean him to take it seriously. And when I found he had, it seemed a bit brutal to choke him off all at once. But truly nothing’s happened except we’ve gone for walks round the grounds after rehearsal, and he’s kissed me once or twice. Darling, say you don’t mind.”
“Why should I mind?” said Kit in a dead level voice. There was a little round ornament made of Goss china on the mantelpiece, just on a level with his hand. He picked it up and turned it over, looking at the red-and-yellow arms of some seaside place or other, stamped on the foolish fat curve of its belly. He did not look at Christie. He was contending with a part of his brain which wanted to make him say, “Good Lord, did you fall for a tale like that?” If he said it he would say other things in support of it, and before long would believe them to be true. This mattered, somehow, even more than the distrust it would inevitably sow between Christie and himself. He did not reason it all out as consciously as this; it was simply that two images fought for possession of his inner eye, one hot and poisoned, the other clear.
He put the little china pot back on the mantelpiece, turning it round carefully so that the crest came outside.
“Poor chap,” he said. “I should go gently with him if I were you. People with that tendency are usually emotional, you know.”
“Yes, he is.” She stared up at him, hanging on his arm. “Kit, aren’t you shocked with me? Playing around with other people when I love you all the time?”
“No,” he said. “Not particularly.” He had been neither shocked nor surprised; not even surprised by his own lack of astonishment. He had felt, in an expected place, an expected pain. But this, refusing the last fence, he did not admit to himself.
“I feel such a beast. I didn’t think I could look at any one else after knowing you. He was so unhappy, that’s how it all started.”
“Well, of course,” said Kit lightly. He laughed, and removed a teardrop from her face with the tip of his finger. “Damn it, you don’t have to come to me in a sackcloth and ashes every time you kiss some one good night. So long as I don’t actually see it happening.” Imagination at once presented the picture to him; he laughed again, quickly. “I thought, from the way you carried on, you were going to tell me you’d been to bed with him every night for a week.”
She pressed her cheek against his shoulder. “Darling, I won’t. Oh, I’m so glad you came to-day. I feel I know what I want and what I am, when you’re here.” She felt his body harden under her arm. He said nothing. She went on, eagerly, “Truly, Kit, I won’t; no matter what he says.”
Kit was staring intently at a large engraving, on the opposite wall, of Wellington and Blücher shaking hands. He could have drawn it afterwards from memory, though he did not know he saw it at the time. He said, speaking to a bandaged soldier in the foreground of the picture, “Had you made the appointment?”
“No, not really. Not in so many words. He isn’t the sort of person who’d ask you like that. I only said I’d come to tea and look at his acting books and things. Probably nothing would have happened when it came to the point.”
“No,” said Kit gently, to the soldier, “of course not.”
“No, I feel
sure it wouldn’t really. But all the same, I won’t even go to tea now. Probably it would only unsettle him more. You’d like him, Kit, I feel sure, if you met him. I’ve made him sound a bit of a misery, but he never talks about it in the ordinary way. He’d do well on the stage if he had a chance; he moves beautifully.”
“Perhaps I’ll see him act sometime.”
“Yes, if I can I’ll—” She stopped and looked up at him. “My precious, what is it? You look as if something were walking over your grave. You aren’t upset with me after all?”
A straying part of Kit’s subconscious was examining the rag with which the soldier’s wound was bound, and substituting a surgical bandage of correct pattern. He said, “You’re not by way of falling in love with this man, are you?”
“In love with him? Darling, don’t be fantastic; I’ve got you. Here, let’s sit down.” She pushed him towards the big plush armchair by the fire, and climbed on the arm. “It’s all right, I’ll jump off if I hear the woman coming. No, don’t you see, it’s like being in love in a play. He does it all rather well, you know—I don’t mean he ever actually poses, he’s quite a sincere sort of creature, but he has what you might call a sense of situation. And when he reaches a specially artistic moment, I think what my part ought to be as you might remember your part in a play, and before I’ve time to think, I’ve picked it up. I’m often like that.” She paused, looking reminiscently into the fire. “But when I see you again, I suddenly realize, like after the curtain, I’m hot and tired and covered in make-up, and I want to get it all off and change because there’s my own comfortable room waiting for me. I’ve never felt like that before. That’s why I used to go on with all those things. I never will again.”
Kit pulled her down, silently, into his arms, She clung round his neck, murmuring that she loved him. A log in the fire settled with a soft crack and a flap of flame. He looked down at her hair, shutting himself into the warm shell of the instant’s touch and sight, wondering how long he could make it last before something broke through it, and let the future move in on him again. It lasted for just three minutes, before the rheumatic tread of the farmer’s wife sounded in the passage outside. Christie wriggled away from him, jumped back to the table, and began to shut up her box. He looked after her, longing to bring back the moment that was over. She winked at him, with affectionate vulgarity, over her shoulder.
For the rest of the day she lavished herself on him, perfectly; the hours became dreamlike, and passed with the smooth speed of a dream. Once she said, “I want to be so good to you. I want to be nicer to you than any one ever was to any one. I want to be as nice to you as the houris are, who lie about in Paradise and do nothing but learn how to be nice for a million years.”
A frosty white moon shone in through the window of the car, silvering the high lights of her hair. Kit pulled the rug closer round her. “The houris,” he remarked lazily, “have to renew their virginity every time. So Mahomet said, I believe.”
“Do they really? How jolly unfair. I’m glad I’m not a Mohammedan.”
“You couldn’t have a soul if you were. Mohammedan women aren’t allowed to have souls. That goes for houris as well.”
“Sometimes I miss my soul when you’re not there.”
The moonlight seemed to pass through her face, lighting it palely from within. Belying her soft heavy warmth in his arms, she looked like a creature of spirit thinly clothed with mist and light. He looked down at her, trying to print her face on his eyes, knowing that, as always before, it would be blurred by the very longing with which he tried to recall it.
“Kit, darling, I’ll never go away from you any more. Until I see you again, I won’t think for a single moment of any one but you. I’ll always be the person I am for you; it makes me so much happier than all the other people I’ve tried being. I promise I will. You do believe me?”
“Yes,” said Kit. He would have believed her if she had promised that the moon would come to her hand. Afterwards when he was driving back through the dark alone, he still gathered belief round him, like a garment which the wind tugs at and pierces more and more with fingers of cold.
CHAPTER 15
ON THE AFTERNOON OF Christmas Eve a caller was announced for Kit.
The work had fallen to its festival minimum of emergency cases. He had nearly finished his work in the morning, and had allowed himself an hour before winding up those that were left. Janet had gone out, to sing carols at Shirley’s house; a couple of visitors were staying there for Christmas. Kit had an unconscious habit of expanding in her absence, like a large well trained dog who for once has got the hearth rug to himself. He lit a pipe, pushed his chair round to the middle of the fire, pulled a table up to his elbow and strewed papers and oddments round him on the floor. Having done this, he found the effect so pleasant that he did not read any of the things he had accumulated, but put his feet in the fender and sprawled with his eyes half-shut, looking at the flames. A vague pool of thought washed about in his mind; memories of Christmas when he was a boy, of a long white house in Cumberland and his father coming in, with snow in his fair pointed beard, from visiting patients on horseback, mingled with thoughts of Christmas at the local hospital to which, having been a house surgeon there for a year before he married, he was always invited. He looked forward to this, partly because it was a pale provincial echo of the tremendous London Christmases of his training days. The year after he left he had taken Janet with him, looking forward to her enjoyment; she had thanked him politely afterwards, in a way which subtly conveyed what she thought of the vulgarity and childishness of it all.
He thought of a pink-and-white nurse with black curly hair, who had a way of looking up at him under her lashes, and wondered whether she had finished her training yet: and this brought him round to Christie, like every other line of thought if he pursued it long enough. There was a red, faint flame in one corner of the fire, the colour of her hair. It was an hour of rest and warmth and security; the bright anticipations flowered in his mind, and the dark ones were hidden from sight under their leaves.
There was a knock, and Elsie the maid came in, looking flustered—she had been caught in the middle of changing for the afternoon. She eyed the scene of comfort nervously, and said that there was a gentleman downstairs waiting to see him.
Kit gathered himself partly together, grunted, and put his feet back in the fender again. “Not a call, is it?” he said.
“No, sir, I think he just wanted to see you.”
“Well, find out if it’s urgent, and if it isn’t tell him I’m just going out and there’s no surgery to-day.”
Elsie looked defensive. “I did tell him that sir, but he said he particularly wanted to speak to you personally and Friday wouldn’t do.”
Kit swore silently and said aloud, “Who is he?”
“A young gentleman, sir. A Mr. Curtis.”
“All right. Show him into the consulting room and tell him I’ll be down.” He pulled resentfully for a minute or two at his pipe, which had been drawing well; propped it in the fireplace, stretched, and got up.
Timmie, balanced tensely on the outside inch of a chair, heard the brisk footsteps on the stairs and shot upright, licking his dry lips with the point of his tongue. His hands felt very cold, and he was individually conscious of the difficulty of disposing of each of them. He arranged them at his sides, clenched in positions of outward ease, and fixed his eyes on the door. When he had started from home he had felt slightly larger than life, and round ringing words had succeeded one another, with the fluency of a carillon, in his head. The consulting room, carrying in its spare neatness the aura of an unknown personality, had been subtly undermining. The footsteps unsettled him still more; they ought to have been heavier and more aggressive. He suddenly wished he had not imagined it all quite so vividly; the impalpably different approach of reality made his splendid rehearsals fluffy in his mind. The footsteps were crossing the hall. Timmie set his jaw. Even if the chap did look different,
it couldn’t alter the fact of what he was. Timmie had that on authority which, as far as he was concerned, might as well have descended from heaven on tablets of stone. There was the guidance, too, under which he had come. He was trying desperately to recapture the certainty of this, when the door opened.
Kit’s professional curiosity had had just time to surmount his annoyance at being disturbed. He gazed with interest at a tense youth with light ginger hair, whose blue eyes were fixed on him in what looked like a mixture of desperation and blank surprise. Perhaps, he thought, it was Fraser the lad wanted after all. The pipe in the fender beckoned again, more hopefully. He smiled.
“It wasn’t Dr. Fraser you came to see, was it? I’m his partner. But if you’re a patient of his, I think he’s available.”
“Er—no, thanks.” Timmie swallowed with a muscular constriction so violent that it hurt Kit to look at it. “You—you are Dr. Anderson, aren’t you?”
“Yes. Sit down, won’t you?” Kit indicated the usual chair beside his desk; then noticed that the boy’s face, where its colour could be seen for freckles, looked chalky white, and added, “Or why not lie down, there’s a couch over here. Then you can tell me about it comfortably.”
A crimson blush flooded the caller’s neck and face, ending with burning intensity at the ears. “Oh, no. No, thanks very much. I haven’t—I mean, I’m perfectly all right.” There was a pause, while his Adam’s apple rose and fell like a piston in his throat.
Kit looked tactfully away, and pretended to be doing something with the note-pad on his desk. On his side, the interview was not proceeding abnormally. He had received several patients; of the same age and sex, and with an equal degree of reluctance in coming to the point. They had a way of choosing himself, rather than Fraser, for their deplorable confessions, because he was younger and, presumably, less likely to moralize. He prepared the helpful responses which generally succeeded in speeding matters up; recollected that he had poured away after morning surgery the bowl of antiseptic for his hands, and got up to mix some more.