by Mary Renault
“We’re on our way. Just round the next corner.”
The car park was illuminated by one of those arcs which are supposed, for some reason, to resemble daylight. Under its ghastly glare Christie’s face had the pallor of the dead. When he sat down beside her he could feel her shaking. “You’re cold,” he said roughly, and threw the coat over her knees.
“Thank you. It is rather cold.”
He edged the car out, reversing less accurately than usual. While they were driving through Paxton, he made the traffic an excuse for not looking round. In the country roads they drove on still in silence. He glanced round once, to see Christie staring through her own reflection in the windscreen. A few minutes later he stopped the car on a grass verge beside the road.
“Well? If anything’s the matter, say so.”
“Why should anything be the matter?” Christie looked out of the far window. “I’m a very lucky girl. I’ve just been given a fur coat.”
“Well, what are you being like this for? I wanted to give it you … I thought you’d be pleased.”
“Did you? I suppose that was why you went about it the way you did.”
“I wanted it to be a surprise,” he said obstinately.
“It was.”
“Christie, look here.” The lights on the dashboard glimmered up into her face. He saw that her lip was pulled in to keep it from trembling. “No, but, Christie. Come here.”
“Oh, don’t.” She pushed him away.
“Stop being such a fool,” he said, suddenly angry. “Come here.”
“Let me go!” She twisted, furiously, in his arms. One of her fists, clenched to push him off, glanced up and struck him on the mouth. She stopped struggling.
“I didn’t mean to do that,” she said unsteadily.
“It’s all right.” His lip was cut somewhere inside; he swallowed the blood till it stopped.
“Did I hurt you?”
“It isn’t anything.”
“Kit, are you mad or what? How could you do it like that? Not asking me, or anything. And all in front of that beastly woman, so that I couldn’t say I minded. Dragging me into a rich shop, all popeyed and not knowing what the hell was happening and wearing a frock with a darn in it, and buying me a fur coat. A fur coat. I shouldn’t think they’ve stopped laughing yet.”
“I don’t think it’s all that funny.”
“Don’t you? They will. Their customers bring in quite a good class of bird.”
“I’m sorry it annoyed you. I hoped it wouldn’t. Don’t you want it, then?”
“Of course I don’t want it. Stop the cheque and send it back. Give it to your wife. Give it to any one. … I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to be rude. But why did you do it to-day—just this evening, when everything was so nice? And you’d just—” She felt about in the car round her feet. “It’s gone!”
“What’s the matter? Lost your bag?”
“No. My picture of the sunflowers. I’ve left it in that awful shop. Now I haven’t got even that. And I did love it so.” He saw that she was beginning to cry.
“Here, for God’s sake,” said Kit. Her tears roused something primitive in him. He pulled her round, using his strength less carefully this time, so that she stopped fighting with a little gasp of pain. “I’m sick of this. Now shut up.”
“Please, don’t, Kit. Don’t be unkind to me.”
“Unkind?” he said slowly. “I could choke you.”
He pinned her arms behind her and kissed her, painfully and unsparingly. She cried out and struggled helplessly at first, then lay still, with wide-open eyes, in his arms.
“God damn you,” he said, his breath coming in jerks, “you’ve never done anything but lie to me. I suppose you talk to every one the same. It must be damned funny for you, telling them all that none of the others count and they’re the one. This proves it. Doesn’t it?” He shook her unresisting body. “You can’t even take anything from me. You hand me off as if I were some one who’d tried to pick you up in the street. And then you’ve the bloody nerve to make out I’m more to you than this Maurice swine, or Fell, or God knows who. If it keeps me amused it’s good enough, isn’t it? You say anything. You don’t care.”
He kissed her again, forcing her head back, and let her go. There was a silence.
“Kit. Your lip’s bleeding.”
She gathered herself up from the corner into which he had thrust her, and, fumbling a little, fished out a scrap of handkerchief, with eau de cologne on it, from the neck of her dress.
“Here,” she said.
She wiped his cheek, and held the handkerchief to his mouth. He bent his head lower, over her hands. Reaching her arms out quickly she caught it against her breast.
“Please, Kit. Dear Kit.” He could feel her breath rise and fall with the rhythm of her words, and a little catch in the pauses between. “Listen, I didn’t mean it. Truly. I’ve been a filthy pig to you. It’s a beautiful coat. It was marvellous of you to give it me. I’ve been looking at it in the window for weeks and wanting it every day. I swear I have. Say it’s all right.”
“What’s the use,” said Kit under his breath. “You’re just being kind. As usual. What’s the use of pretending. You didn’t want to take it, and the reason is you don’t give a damn.”
“Don’t. It wasn’t that. Please; you’re making me cry.”
“Of course it was. Cry over Maurice. I can do without.”
“Oh, Kit, stop. Just stop for a minute.” She throttled his face against her, so that he breathed with difficulty. “Don’t you see, I thought you wanted to stop loving me.”
“You’re crazy,” he said into the stuff of her dress.
“Why?” You said you’d have chucked any one else by now. I’ve let you down twice. I thought you’d done it to show me where I got off. Just another bit of fluff.”
Kit twisted his head to look up at her. He gave a blurred grin, which hurt his mouth. “Fluff?” he said. “What a hope.”
“Say you see. Say it’s all right.”
“All right?” He turned his face out of sight. “It’s never all right. I lie awake wondering if you know what I look like when I’m not here. Sometimes I think I’d like to mark you so you’ll remember.”
“You can if you like. Anything. I wish you would. I wish I were dead.”
“No, you’d better not die.” He smiled, his face still hidden. “I couldn’t come and haul you back from there. While there’s life there’s hope, I suppose.”
“You’re bleeding on my dress. Oh, God, I do love you so. Don’t ever leave me.”
“Not till you say.”
“Oh, that’s no use. I say anything. Don’t leave me ever.”
“All right. Look out, don’t put that bloody handkerchief on your face. Mine’s here somewhere.”
“I’ve stopped now.” She attended to her face, inaccurately, by the green dashboard light, “My lovely coat. I shall wear it always. Even in Buenos Aires. I’m going to put it on now. Where is it?”
“God knows. There’s something round my feet.”
They picked it up, and in the semi-darkness brushed cigarette-ash and dust out of its folds.
“I’m going to make this all up to you. At the Easter School we’ll have a heavenly time. No one bothering us all night.”
“The Easter School? Good Lord, I’d forgotten about that.” He helped her into the coat. “All right, I suppose I’ll come if you can get the room. But mind you tell Rollo I’m not going to be let in for any damned love scenes, or anything like that. Couldn’t get the stuff across if my life depended on it. Don’t forget to tell him, will you?”
“No,” said Christie, snuggling her face into the coat to hide a smile. “I’ll remember very carefully.”
CHAPTER 20
KIT MADE THREE SEPARATE attempts to tell Janet about the Easter School before he succeeded in bringing it out. It made him feel ridiculous; and he found that to look ridiculous before her was as unpleasant as it had ever been. It wou
ld have embarrassed him less to tell her the truth.
“I didn’t know,” she said, staring at him, “that you went in for acting at all.”
“Not lately. I—I used to help with the shows in hospital.” (He had once taken the part of an anaesthetized patient in a burlesque operation, quite successfully.)
“Were you still doing that when I met you? I should like to have seen one of them.”
“Oh, well,” he lied desperately, “they weren’t the sort of thing you could take a woman to.”
“No. Of course.” He had guessed that her vague knowledge and general suspicion of hospital would allow this to pass.
Fraser—who had, of course, to be given his address—was even worse. He got this over quite baldly, and, when Fraser looked along the top of his glasses, talked rapidly about something else. The weather had turned fine and dry, and the work was falling almost to summer level. He had never taken a holiday so early, but this made the idea sound less unreasonable than it might have done. Fraser probably needed a rest more, and Kit would have persuaded him to take one if there had been any hope of succeeding; but Fraser’s custom of starting out in the first week of August was invariable.
Janet left the day before Kit; Bill and Shirley called for her in their car. He was, to his relief, called out to a case at the time. Bill’s friendly interest in his plans would have been a little more than he could bear.
After he was left alone, the thought of seeing Christie every day for a fortnight left no room for anything else. It was only when he arrived outside the Abbey—in time for tea, as the leaflet suggested—and saw the other members of the School being welcomed by Florizelle Fuller, that panic seized him. He decided he had better see about a garage for the car before he went in, and took as long over it as was humanly possible. This re-resulted in his making an impressive appearance in the drawing room after every one else had arrived.
Anna Sable—whom he had never met in all his visits, for she kept mostly to her own room—was sufficiently unnerving. He was late enough to get her reception to himself. She was over seventy, leaned on an ebony stick, and looked like a French aristocrat in Act I of a play about the Revolution. She put him at his ease—like Royalty, he thought, about to decorate him with something—in a voice that was latent with the rich emotions of the Edwardian stage. She spoke of the decadence of modern drama, and he felt as if she were enlisting him with some noble and tragic emblem, such as a white cockade. You could see her on the point of drawing herself up, as the sans-culottes with the tumbril uttered their first howl off-stage. She used her free hand for small, economical gestures of exquisite precision, while she told him that nowadays people imagined it possible to act without having learned to breathe. By the time she handed him on to Florizelle to be put into circulation, every vestige of his ordinary social confidence had ebbed away, and each looked more terrifying than the last. This was chiefly because the women seemed to outnumber the men by about five to one. They were what he called to himself alarming women; being, in fact, women who spent their lives mostly among their own sex, English mistresses of schools, organizers of girls’ clubs and the like, whose virginal self-consciousness he mistook for intellectual superiority. When they engaged each other in conversation as he passed, lest their pleasant excitement and hope should appear, he felt like a gate-crasher who has been found out. They all looked the same age, as if a 1905 class had been called up.
Suddenly he saw Christie standing in a group in a far corner of the room. At the same time he perceived that he was not, after all, the junior member present. He had forgotten how late he was; the younger set had already had time to coagulate. There were eight or ten of them, sitting on the back, seat and arms, of a large sofa, the overflow standing about it with cigarettes. A businesslike hum of conversation was going on, broken with laughter. Christie caught his eye as he looked; and Florizelle, relieved to see his face register at last some kind of recognition, piloted him over.
Christie smiled, said, “Hullo, you’ve come,” and at once began to introduce him to every one. He had never been with her in a crowd of her own friends before, and the subcutaneous irritation and jealousy normal on such occasions prevented him from catching any one’s name. The men wore undergraduate tweeds with finished carelessness, the girls had on vivid woollens, against which lips and fingernails correctly held their own. Nearly every one, he realized in less than a couple of minutes, had been to at least one previous School at the Abbey, and those who had not all seemed to be friends of the others. Their ages would have averaged about twenty-three. He realized quite quickly that he had broken in on a small self-contained club, which had come not because it expected any unique cultural advantage from being there, but because it had found the place a good setting for collective fun in other years. It was evident that Christie was a respected honorary member. “Do you remember that day we—” they asked her, one after the other.
Christie, whose work called her almost immediately elsewhere, laboured hard for him before she went. When they asked if he had been before, she forestalled his blank negative just in time. No, he hadn’t actually been to one of the Schools, but he’d been in and out of the place for months and knew all the ropes. Carried along on the wave of her popularity, he quite believed this himself, till after she had gone. On the strength of one intelligent remark about Rollo he passed muster for a minute or two; then they began asking him which of the shows he had acted in, and, when that failed, what he thought of this or that play at one of the Sunday theatres. After he turned out not to have seen any of these, they included him in the conversation politely, when they remembered.
Tea rescued him, since men were needed to carry plates about. He fed, assiduously, the 1905 class, which the last ten minutes had rendered less formidable by contrast. Once Christie passed him, carrying cakes.
“Liking it?” she asked anxiously.
“Fine, so far.” She smiled and began to move away. In sudden panic he hissed after her, “What do we do for the rest of the day?”
“Oh, nothing much to-day. Just get settled in.” She hurried off.
After tea, Kit found, as this remark had led him to expect, that every one seemed to have something to do except himself. When Rollo had showed him his room (dispelling a lingering hope that Christie might do so), and he had unpacked, which took about five minutes, Kit wandered out and went to a cinema.
At dinner he found he had been put at a table otherwise filled by the younger set. Christie was still doing her best for him. Shamed by this into social efforts, he discovered that the young man opposite was reading medicine at Oxford and intended training at his own hospital. After this Kit’s stock became noticeably more buoyant, and they went off afterwards to have a drink together, Kit managing to trade his hospital assets for a little information about the School, only one item of which—that the auditions were held in camera—did anything to raise his spirits.
At half-past twelve that night, just as he had decided that she would not come at all, Christie tapped on his door.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I couldn’t come before, I’ve had such a lot to do. It’s always like that the first day; been at it since half-past six. Come down in a quarter of an hour. I’ll leave the door ajar so you can see the light.”
Kit looked at his wrist-watch a good many times in the next fifteen minutes. The evening behind him suddenly presented itself in mellower tones. It would be all right, he supposed, when he had found his feet a bit. In any case, it was worth it.
At the end of ten minutes he nearly went down. Surely, he thought, she would have done everything she did by now; it seemed hours. But Janet had been a rigid stickler for privacy in the intermediate stages of her toilet; perhaps other women felt the same about it. He had better wait. He started a cigarette, extinguished it on the point of the fifteenth minute, and groped his way down the dark stairs.
Beyond what seemed a rabbit-warren of little passages and doors, there was a crack of light. Unnerved
by the noisy creak of the floor-boards, he found his way to it and pushed open the door.
It was a tiny room, which must have been mostly below ground-level, for the window was made of frosted glass, uncurtained, and high up in the wall. The only furniture beside the bed was a wooden chair and a deal table, over which a mirror in a picture frame hung on a nail. On the table a square of shabby brocade, a remnant of some costume, was covered with Christie’s oddments: powder, a jar of cream with the lid left off, the green brush and comb painted with flowers. On the bed, a hard-looking collapsible affair, Christie was lying in her dressing gown and slippers, fast asleep.
When he bent and kissed her she did not stir. Her cheek felt soft, relaxed and warm against his, and it was as if he touched the hem of her dress, or some other thing belonging to her, when she herself was away. She was drowned in sleep, breathing deeply and evenly, lying on her side with one arm folded across her breast and her hand under her cheek. Her dressing gown, the Chinese-blue one she had worn at Laurel Dene, had fallen apart so that he could see the soft babyish crease in her bare shoulder. He noticed, under the naked electric light, that the blue silk was beginning to be threadbare at the edges, so that the white cotton padding showed through.
He said her name and kissed her, softly, again; but could not bring himself to any gesture louder or stronger than the rhythm of her sleep. She made a little sound, a deeper breath rather than a sigh, and seemed to slumber more profoundly than before. It occurred to him that the Abbey had been organized to receive between thirty and forty people, and that she and Rollo had probably done three-quarters of the work between them.
He looked round the room. There was nothing with which to cover her except the plaid rug on which she was lying already. He took off his camel dressing gown and spread it carefully over her, switched off the light, and, fortunately meeting no one, found his way back to bed.
At breakfast it was given out that auditions would be taken during the morning; members would find a list of times on the notice-board in the hall.