by Mary Renault
This was the last scene, the finale at the Christmas crib. Florizelle’s Child-Angels were grouped before a gauzy dark veil, spangled with stars, which was slowly drawn aside. Within it Christie was sitting, her head draped with the blue garment of the Madonna, a baby on her knees.
All the tangled conflicts of the last hour were wiped from Kit’s mind. Nothing that happened since he left her was real any longer. There seemed no mockery in this translation, nothing shocking nor unholy. She sat looking at the child, as she had looked at him in the wood, with her tender downward smile. There was nothing false in her face of poise, nothing artificial or even studied. She was herself.
The baby was not, as he had thought for a moment, a property doll, but real. It wriggled in her arm, and gave the beginning of a cry, and she cuddled it into a more comfortable hold so that at once it was quiet, and presently, to the delight of the women in the audience, crowed. Kit looked at her in a timeless moment of revelation, and did not see, till she turned in greeting, the entry of the shepherds and the kings.
She had no lines to say, but her silence seemed to contain her more perfectly than words. A little sigh of pleasure ran through the theatre; Kit felt it pass him, like a light wind. In the background of his own emotion he could see like a stranger her lightness in this instant of the story, the only one she could have filled. As Mater Dolorosa she would have been shallow, pathetic, lost; she was a Christmas Madonna, loving and amazed and unsuspecting of grief. As he watched, one of the smallest and fattest angels, too little to have been rehearsed in what it did, pulled away from an elder child who was holding its hand, and, waddling unsteadily towards her, saved itself from falling by clutching her blue robe in its fists.
The shepherds and the kings had made their gifts. The orchestra began the music of the hymn with which the scene closed. Christie stood up, holding the child in one arm, and raised the other in benediction. As he was thinking that this too was like her, that she seemed to caress rather than to bless the crowd below her, she saw him.
For an instant she was arrested in mid-movement: then her smile lit and warmed with gladness, and her arm, moving a little further, extended deliberately the circle of its gesture beyond the stage. She blessed him, smiling with the anxious love of a mother into his eyes, and the curtain came down.
The sky was dark blue, clear, and powdered with a frosty galaxy, as Kit drove home. Janet was silent beside him; his thoughts were undisturbed. As the schoolmen used to meditate the thorny mystery of the Trinity, he meditated the truth that this, and the Christie whose letter he had in the drawer at home, were both actual, and equal in reality. He did not think about the future, perhaps because the present was enough, perhaps because he knew.
Janet had thoughts of her own. She had seen, for her part, the pattern of motherhood, and her husband’s eyes turned to his symbol in worship. Her heart, for a moment, knew its own bitterness. It was during this hour that a thought of escape, formless as yet and unadmitted, touched her mind for the first time.
CHAPTER 17
“HULLO, HULLO. HAPPY NEW Year and all that,” said Rollo.
For most of the week he had been acting two parts, been responsible for scenery and lighting to suit costumes, half of which he had designed, in a play he had mainly produced, so he was in particularly good spirits; and when in good spirits he loved to answer the door, even forestalling the maids when they were able and willing to discharge this duty. “Haven’t seen you lately. Been to the play? Good for you. Oh, nice of you to say so. The notices weren’t too bad. Looking for Christie?”
Kit was.
“She’s doing hampers upstairs. We’re a bit behindhand, with the play and so on. She said, if you came, would you like to go up and talk to her while she finished. She’s in the wardrobe room—by herself,” he added, with kindly tact. “You know the way, don’t you?”
Kit thanked him. The sight of Rollo, so unchanged in his dirty grey flannels, but with Lucifer’s iridescent green paint clinging unmistakably round his eye-sockets, deepened the dual unreality he had felt all the way there. Side by side with the furious conflict, lasting for days, which had preceded the journey, he had a feeling, equally strong, that nothing had really happened at all. Tossed between these opposites he groped his way, in semi-darkness, up the twisting staircase that led to the wardrobe room.
Christie was packing for As You Like It. When he came in she was pairing off suède thigh-boots, with a list of sizes in her hand. She dropped the list and ran to him, clasping a russet-coloured boot to her breast.
Kit had gone over the things they would say to one another till his mind was like a nineteenth century letter, with the lines superimposed and counter-crossed. This simple and silent alternative had not entered into his calculations. For a moment, while he kissed her, the illusion of security and continuity was complete, and he rested in it. Then, with compensating violence, imagination woke in him. He thrust her away.
She looked up at him with wide distressed eyes, and dropped the boot to the floor.
“Oh, darling, I didn’t mean you to know!”
The remorse in her voice was of the kind she might have shown if she had broken something which had sentimental value for him, but had hoped to get it replaced, or invisibly mended, before he found put about it. Words deserted him. He gazed at her, helplessly.
“How did you find out?” she asked.
“From your letter, of course.”
“Not my Christmas letter? But I was so terribly careful not to … Oh, darling, and I was thinking of you so hard and wanting you to be happy. I spoilt your Christmas. I wouldn’t have done it for the world, if I’d known that. I feel such a beast.”
“That reminds me, thanks very much for the tie.”
“Did you like it? You haven’t got it on. Were you too upset with me to wear it? Kit, darling, I feel so bad about you. Look here, I can’t leave off packing these hampers, they’ve got to catch a train. Just sit down on that chair there, then I can get on. You don’t mind, do you? We can talk just the same.” As he did not move, she pulled him gently by the arm towards it. “That’s right. You can hold the list, do you mind? I don’t suppose I shall want it again, but I just might.”
Kit sat down. Christie picked up a ball of string and some scissors, and squatting on the floor, began attaching labels to the pairs of boots.
He said, mechanically, “Can I help you?”
“Yes, you can call out from the list if I get stuck. But don’t worry about it. I’m going to be so nice to you when I’ve finished this. Oh, just a minute, what size does Jaques take?”
“Nine.”
“Thanks terribly. Darling, you’d understand if you’d been there, truly you would. You see, he hasn’t got any people, only the sister I told you about who’s got T.B. He lives in deadly sort of digs, and he was going to spend Christmas Day visiting his sister in the sanatorium. He says it’s pretty certain that by Christmas next year she’ll be dead. So when he said wouldn’t I go out with him before, and cheer him up a bit, what could I do? On my honour, when I started out I never meant to go home with him afterwards. But you know how things happen. Darling, I’m so sorry, but could you look and see if I’ve put a tick against Amiens?”
“Yes.”
“Size 8, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“He was in love with a girl once, but he couldn’t make up his mind to marry her because of his family history, and while he was thinking it out she got engaged to some one else. He told me all about her. He’s never been in love with any one since.”
Kit said, taking a little while to get the words ready, “Are you in love with him?”
“Oh, sweet, of course not. Well, I suppose for a minute, or it wouldn’t have happened. But you do see?”
Kit turned the list over: Rosalind, 6½; Celia, 4; Phoebe, 5. Without looking up he said, “Has it—gone on?”
“No. It won’t now.” She threaded a label and tied off the string. “As a matter of fact,
I did say perhaps one evening this week. But when I saw you at the play, I knew I couldn’t. I lay awake for hours, thinking about you in the night.” She sat back on her heels to look at him, pushing her hair out of her eyes. “Darling, you look so worried. Oh, what shall I do?”
“Could you come here just a minute?”
She came over to him, trailing an odd length of string in her hand. Kit came to meet her, and took her by the shoulders. She said in a small shaking voice, “You haven’t stopped loving me, have you?”
Kit felt a laugh forcing its way out of him. It took him by surprise. He felt another laugh forming, painfully, in the pit of his stomach. In order not to laugh he kissed her, again and again.
Christie returned his kisses and, dropping the string, patted him gently between the shoulder-blades with her free hand. “There, darling, it’s all right,” she murmured. “Truly it’s all right. I love you terribly. I was loving you all the time.”
He said, under his breath, “You’d better get those things finished.”
“Yes, I won’t be a minute. Then we can go out somewhere.” She picked up the scissors, snipped off a couple of lengths of string, and collected Touchstone’s pointed shoes. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming to the show?”
“I didn’t know till the day.”
Christie stared at the shoes for a long time, and attached a label to them marked Duke in bold characters. With her eyes fixed on the label she said, “I looked through the side of the curtain at you, after the lights went on.”
“I didn’t see you.”
“No. You were helping your wife on with her coat.”
“She wanted to come.”
“Did she like it?”
“Yes, I think so, very much.”
“I’m glad she did.” She snipped off the end of the string, and twisted it round her little finger. “You didn’t tell me she was so awfully beautiful.”
He had told her, directly, nothing about Janet at all. He said nothing now. Christie unravelled the string from her finger, and, seizing the remaining boots and shoes in one great armful, flung them into the open basket and slammed the lid on them. She ran back to him and flung herself into his arms.
“Darling, you do love me? You do? I’ve been so miserable. Everything’s all different when you’re away.”
He comforted and kissed her, remembering, like a dream, Christmas morning and the pavements ringing under his feet.
“But swear you do?”
“Well,” said Kit slowly, “I came here, didn’t I? Swearing seems a little superfluous, I think.”
She peered up into his face. Into her own came a glimmering, scared realization. She clutched him more tightly.
“I didn’t know. I didn’t think of you minding like that. You …” She paused, groping for clarity in her mind. “You wanted not to love me any more?”
Her perplexity suddenly made him smile.
“Haven’t you ever wanted that?”
“No, not ever. I always like loving people, right till the moment I stop. Oh, Kit, I will be better to you. I’ll never make you unhappy any more. You’ve stopped minding now, haven’t you? Say you have?”
Kit could not refuse her pleading face. He said he had.
“That’s right. Now we’ll have a perfectly lovely evening. The nicest we ever had. Just wait one second while I change.”
“Don’t be long.” He looked past her at the hampers. “Oughtn’t those things to have labels on them, or something, if they’re going by train?”
“Good heavens, yes, and I haven’t tied them up either. My pet, what should I do without you?”
The rest of the day was perfect. The magic circle met and closed again. Once more he was welcomed from the cold air into a familiar room. The room had stood empty for him, the fire burning, his chair waiting by the hearth, nothing disturbed. Within an hour the illusion had become more solid than reality. Within three hours, Christie was able to talk confidentially about Lionel Fell without even interrupting it. One merely had the impression that a chance caller had intruded while she was putting his slippers to warm. She described the course of the sister’s illness, and was interested in his prognosis of the case. Before he left it was as if they had gone out together from their fireside to take comforts to the needy. She made him, somehow, the proprietor of this act of charity, and surrounded him with a glow of merit. It was not till he was almost home that the spell in some part dissolved; and, even then, he hardly cared.
CHAPTER 18
“YES,” SAID TIMMIE UNEASILY. “Yes, of course, it must be.” He looked at the ground.
Janet glanced up sharply at his averted eyes. She was wondering what could have altered him. The change was impalpable, but something had gone; a freshness, a responsiveness. She had been noticing it since Christmastime.
True, when she came into a room his eyes still followed her until the moment when she left it. His attentiveness and eagerness to be on the spot whenever he was wanted for anything, were quite satisfactory. But she detected in his eyes sometimes a look that jarred on her, a glimmer of painful questioning; as if a faithful spaniel had been injected with the faculty of criticism, and were still wondering what to do about it. A grudging look Janet called it to herself.
It was specially apparent when they were walking alone, as they were now. Perhaps a dose of appreciation was what he needed. She gave a melancholy little smile.
“What a natural gift for sympathy you have, Timmie. It will be such a help to you as you go through life. And you’re free to make the most of it. It must be wonderful to have one’s power for good all untrammelled, not sapped by one’s personal problems, and one’s own unhappiness. Not perpetually worn down by demands for what one hasn’t it in one’s power to give. …” She sighed gently, fully believing every word she said. If any one had reminded her that it was nearly eighteen months since Kit had so much as implied a request to her, and five or six since he had even looked as if he would have liked to, she would have felt a sense of gross injustice. Her tower of escape was set firmly on its foundations, the walls were thick, and it was very rarely now that anything would lure her outside. “Your life’s all your own to be generous with,” she said with a tired courageous smile. “You’re luckier than you realize, Timmie.”
Timmie blushed, fingered his tie, and said, “Oh, I don’t know.”
What could have come over him? she thought. It occurred to her that some undesirable person might have been tampering with his mind. That brown-skinned American girl who had come to the last two or three Group meetings; she was not to be trusted, Janet felt sure. American girls were so artificial, so selfish, so hard. She must warn Timmie—very delicately, of course—about this.
They were walking in the public park, a noisy resort in the summer for little boys playing football and little girls picnicking with bottles of lemonade, but peaceful and remote in the winter months. It was the first mild day to bring with its mildness the promise of spring. Timmie looked sideways at Janet, thinking that every new thing she wore, like this green coat with its collar of soft grey fur, made her look more mysteriously beautiful than the last. He longed simply to look at her, to forget the problems of duty that disturbed his mind. But he had been all over it again this morning, in his quiet time, and had known that his doubts all boiled down to a fear that, if things came out right for her, she wouldn’t have time to be bothered with him. Selfishness. Once he had faced up to it like that, he had known he couldn’t shirk things any more.
“The first snowdrops,” said Janet. “Look.”
They were thrusting up at the roots of a tall beech-tree, their green-and-white heads all looking down at the same angle, incredibly formal, delicate and clean.
“They remind me of you,” Timmie ventured, “if you don’t mind my saying that.”
“Dear Timmie.” Unconsciously she drooped her head a little, as the snowdrops were doing. How unspoiled he was, after all.
Unless he made up his mind to i
t now, Timmie was thinking, he’d never do it at all.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said.
“Yes?” said Janet indulgently, looking at the snowdrops. She was reflecting that she did feel, herself, a kind of affinity with them; their fragility, their poise, the solitary courage of their beauty in a grey flowerless world.
“I’ve been wanting to say this for some time, but it’s been pretty hard to screw myself up to it. In fact, I doubt if I could now, if it were any one but you. But you’ve shown me the meaning of absolute honesty, and facing up to things, in a way no one has before. So I feel I can.”
“But of course, Timmie dear. You know you can say anything you like to me. Anything.” Carefully she collected herself to receive the moving little confession that was on the way. Of course, she would say gently, she had guessed for some time. She respected his honesty in telling her; but why should he think it need make any difference to their friendship? Didn’t he think they knew and trusted one another too well for that?
“Yes, I feel I can to you,” said Timmie. He stared at the snowdrops, not seeing them. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what you’ve told me, about your being unhappy with your—at home, and all that. I do see how tough it must have been. But I’ve been thinking too—of course I don’t know myself, but I’ve talked a bit to Shirley, and she explained to me, more or less, how she and Bill got right with each other. What she said was, before she got Changed she felt absolutely convinced that all the trouble they had was Bill’s fault. And of course, as Bill’s the first to admit now, it was, to quite an extent. But she said, too, that one day she had a quiet time, and it came to her suddenly that there was a sort of core of resistance right in the middle of her good intentions. And when she got rid of that, it was amazing, she said, how everything worked out. I say, you don’t mind my saying all this?”