by Mary Renault
“No so much fun to-morrow, I expect.”
“I wish there wasn’t to-morrow, only to-night.”
“Yes.”
“I wish I hadn’t seen you in that. I suddenly feel angry with everything. It seems there ought to be some place, somewhere, where we’d have a right to be.”
“Don’t.” He had never kissed her, since the School began, except at night in the safety of her room. The place was likely to become a thoroughfare at any moment, but for a little while neither of them cared. They tried with closed eyes to escape into a golden age of which their little reading afforded them only casement glimpses: banners, a helmet with a token, a song at a window, a glove thrown down.
Voices sounded along the passage; Christie said, “Look out,” and slid from his arms.
“Dear Kit.” She settled his chain and his long sleeves. “Don’t let’s be unhappy. Some time everything will be all right.”
“I’d better be getting down.”
“I’ll be watching you from the back of the hall.”
“Aren’t you going to make me up?” He opened the door.
“Bad luck, darling; Rollo’s doing the men. Do be marvellous. I’ll be loving you all the time.”
Miss West had broken a tape on her doublet, just after Florizelle had finished her face. In anxious haste to get a repair effected, lest she should lose any possible chance of standing with Kit in the wings, she arrived just in time to hear the last words of the last phrase drift out into the passage, and to see Kit looking over his shoulder in the doorway. Retreating quickly, she managed not to meet him as he went. For her the mediocre stage performance that followed was a cosmic ritual, and Rollo’s blues and ambers were a light that never shone on sea or land; pain has its fantasies no less than delight. Kit only noticed that her doublet was fastened with a large safety pin, which showed.
The clothes, the lights, the feeling of unknown emotions washing up from the shadowy well below their circle of illusion, added themselves to his own mood. After the first sinking when his cue came near, he was amazed to find that he enjoyed it. He even forgot that Christie was watching, absorbed in the thing itself; the curious double life in which one was both the trick and the effect; feeling the dim human mass in front slowly gather itself into a whole whose emotional will, like that of a lover, would suddenly reach out and alter one’s own, so that in response to it one would bring out a gesture or a tone which at rehearsals one had not thought of using, and sense, in the anonymous shadows, a satisfied desire. He felt, in interested wonder, the shape of his costume impose itself on his movements. Rollo, who had slipped round to the back to watch for a few minutes, whispered to Christie, “Damn him, you never can tell with these beginners. If I’d known he was going to ungum himself like this on the night, I’d have had him in Agamemnon after all.”
Following the play was a party, which, after it officially ended, branched off into private extensions. Kit detached himself, with difficulty, from the younger set, which had suddenly seen him in a new light and was determined to open its arms to him. He went up to his room, cleaned his face, undressed, and opened a book which he believed himself to be reading while he listened for Christie’s tap on the door.
It was after midnight when she signalled; she had been kept late clearing up. The darkness behind the stage, when he went down, seemed different, still tingling electrically from the revels that were ended. In Christie’s room the women had been made up, and though Christie had dusted it after a fashion, their powder and cosmetics and removing-cream, and the camphor smell of their dresses, still embalmed the air.
“You’ve taken your costume off,” Christie said sadly.
“Well,” Kit remarked, kissing her, “I’ve always been given to understand that when possible it’s good form. And this one was rather impracticable.”
“You were so lovely. Rollo was wild he hadn’t given you a bigger part. He told me so. Oh, and do you know, when I was at the back I heard one of the women in the sixpennies say at the end, ‘All the same, if I was ’er I’d leifer ’ave ’ad that fair chap that tried to get off with ’er at first.’ And the next woman said, ‘Yes, ’e was a bit of all right, wasn’t ’e?’ It was as much as I could do not to kiss the pair of them.” She kissed Kit twice by way of compensation.
The mood of the play still clung about them; from the other side of the darkened stage, the empty auditorium, like an ebbing sea, still seemed to send out faint ripples of expectation. The parting ahead, like the approaching fall of a curtain, only served to charge the present more highly. When the first cocks crowed, they were still awake.
“You ought to go to sleep. You’ll have God knows what to do to-morrow, getting this place straight.” He pulled her head down on his shoulder.
“You mustn’t go to sleep here now. We’d be sure to sleep on in the morning, and some one would come to rouse me out. You’d better go back to your room.” She clasped him more tightly. The square of the window be came faintly blocked out in blue.
“I shall never forget this fortnight,” Christie said. “I love you so much, I feel I can’t have loved you properly before. And yet I did. I could drown myself when I think I’ve made you unhappy. I never will again.”
“You never have,” Kit said, believing it.
They were both very sleepy. Irrelevant pictures, the beginnings of dream, drifted before their eyes. They lost touch a little with reality, planning impossible stratagems for meeting more often, wandering into futures of vague felicity. Kit, sinking deeper and deeper into drowsiness, listened to the meandering stream of Christie’s voice describing a house which began on the top of a hill, but later took to itself a lily-pond and swans. “And the whole of the top floor,” she murmured with the singsong intonation of some one concluding a fairy story, “will be the nurseries. And we’ll call the eldest Christopher Antony, and the next Anne Christina, and the next David Julian, and the next …” Her voice trailed away. Kit roused himself, remembering that they must not both be sleeping. The light in the high window was turning grey; the red of Christie’s hair looked deep and dusky, her face pale ivory. Her eyes were shadowed, so that he could not see if they were closed.
“Are you asleep?” he whispered.
“Not properly. I always christen my children when I’m going to sleep. Who did I get to?”
“I forget.” He was suddenly roused to wakefulness. With the quick transition that overtiredness brings, his airy castles had turned to an anxiety nearer earth. It was one that often visited him when he was alone, and increased knowledge of her haphazard ways had only served to deepen it.
“Christie,” he whispered, “you are careful, aren’t you?”
She turned over on her arm. “Careful? What about? Oh, I see. Oh, yes, of course.” She lay down again and pushed her head into the pillow, so that he could only see a tumble of hair.
“Listen; if anything ever does go wrong, you’re not to mess about with these patent poisons, or go to some crook or other. Promise that. You’ll come straight to me.” She did not move or answer; he thought she must be afraid. “Don’t worry,” he said comfortingly. “There are lots of perfectly safe things if you don’t leave it too late. And I’ll look after you whatever happens, you know that. I just thought I’d tell you. … What’s the matter, darling? For God’s sake don’t cry.” A sudden fear contracted his heart. “Everything’s all right now, isn’t it?”
“Oh, yes, quite all right.” She went on crying, almost silently, stiffening her body so that he should not feel her shoulders shake.
“What is it? Forget it, darling, I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
She pushed back her hair, so that he could see her eyes like colourless shadows in the half light.
“If I were going to have a baby, do you think I’d let any one take it away? If I couldn’t have it I’d kill myself as well.”
“Don’t say things like that.” He was used to her extravagance, but the fact of her grief lent this a sincerity whic
h frightened him in spite of himself. “You know you don’t mean it.”
“No,” she said more calmly. “I don’t really mean it now. I wouldn’t have to now, because I’ve got the hundred pounds Aunt Amy left me. That’s why I haven’t spent any of it; it’s a sort of vow I’ve made to myself, till I’m too old to have one. I’ve worked it out; it would be just enough, if I went somewhere cheap, to see me through and carry me on for a bit till I could get a job. It would mean some one would have to look after him while I was working. I wouldn’t like that much. But I’d know if she was kind, I feel sure I would.”
“But—” he began desperately; protesting not against what she said, but against his own thoughts which he longed to refuse.
“It’s all right. I don’t suppose it will ever happen. Don’t worry, I wouldn’t let it on purpose; for one thing it would mean leaving you. I’d go away, of course, where you couldn’t find me, or my people; that would be only fair, if I hadn’t done anything to try and stop it. He’d be mine, and I’d see after him; if I decided it was worth it, it wouldn’t be any one else’s fault. I’d change my name, or something, and tell him his father died when he was a baby. I’d have to do that, you see, or he’d feel he was different. But I’d let you see him, of course, when he was older. … Darling, why didn’t you wake me up? What have I been talking about all this time? You look like death. I say anything, you know I do. Cheer up, precious, I love you more than whole families of the unborn rolled into one. Just be nice to me for a minute, and then you must go upstairs and get some sleep.”
Kit went back to his room in the cold light of morning, half an hour before the maids began to move about the house. Over a chair lay his sky-blue costume, with its great sleeves hanging like the wings of a dead bird. He stood and stared at it. Everything seemed to have a slow circular motion, a wheel, an endless band, a snake swallowing its tail. Inescapably it all came round again, the same spoke of the wheel, the serpent’s head.
He remembered, just in time, to throw back his unused bed before the maid came to call him.
CHAPTER 22
THE SIREN SOUNDED AGAIN; a spacious, impatient sound. The great ship looked as fixed as the stone to which its gang-planks joined it; one could it seemed, expect movement as easily from a chain of hotels. But its voice—the voice of a sea beast, pitched to huge distances—convinced. At the sound of it farewells grew tongue-tied, or garrulous, in realization. Some of the travellers sought relief in little panics over books and cases and bags; an escape denied to Janet, who abhorred any form of public inefficiency. She and Kit stood near the gangway, making conversation assiduously, like callers in a drawing room, while both wondered what the essential thing was that they ought to say.
Kit was concentrated in a last effort to convince himself that this was real. Up till a fortnight ago he had not believed that she meant it; up till a week ago he had been certain she would change her mind. She had made so many gestures, all sterile, all leaving everything as it had been before. When she had got back from the Group house-party and told him her plans—to go with the Group party to the Cape, and while she was there spend a few months with her married sister in Durban—it had not occurred to him that they were considering an approaching event. He had simply wondered, rather anxiously, what cue he was being given; whether agreement or opposition was likely to offend her more. He had struck a careful balance between the two, and had been relieved when she seemed satisfied. A little later another thought had occurred to him; but when he asked she had said no, Bill and Shirley weren’t going, nor any one else in the neighbourhood. He was more sure than ever, then, that when the mood had spent itself, or the gesture taken effect; nothing more would be heard of it; and could not shake himself into realization even when she began buying tropical clothes.
Now here they were: and even now he could not believe that she was doing something real, with effect in space and time. If she meant to draw back now, she would have to make up her mind to it almost at once; already some of the visitors were leaving the ship.
“I suppose I’ll have to go in a moment,” he said. It was still at the back of his mind that she couldn’t have realized, that it was only fair to warn her.
“Yes. But they tell you when they’re going to raise the gangways.” She did not look at him. “I hope Mrs. Hackett will make you comfortable. I told you, didn’t I, she was with a doctor before?”
“Oh, I’ll be all right. Take care of yourself. I hope the Bay behaves properly.” He could produce this sort of thing, he thought; for hours, sooner than throw a real question across the widening silence between their minds. “You’ve got the seasick capsules, haven’t you? They generally work.”
“Yes, in my bag. But I shan’t need them unless it’s very rough.” It had been very rough, she remembered, crossing to the Channel Islands the day after they were married; he had wanted to stay with her, and had seemed unable to understand her horror at the idea of his seeing her indignity. “But, darling, you can’t mind me. I’ve seen thousands of people vomit and thought no worse of them. And anyway I love you.” She had wondered how he could be so coarsely insensitive, and, before she escaped below, had rallied her forces sufficiently to indicate it with a look. Now, as she recalled it, she could only remember how young he had been.
All round them, Groupers were being seen off by other Groupers. Their youth, their crude enthusiasm, their certainty, gathered power in this windy place full of sunlight and salt air, ringing with sounds of action and of purpose. Their voices drifted to Janet, charged with reassurance and hope. For months, for as long as she could think ahead, their liking and admiration and belief would be a film of bright flattering colour between her and herself. In the safety and freedom of new places, she would watch all that she wanted to believe of herself taking on reality in their minds. She looked at the May sunlight; it would be winter before she was back again. “I’ll write from Madeira.”
Not far away, two South African business men were greeting one another as they waved to receding friends. One said, “Yes, had a great trip. It only goes to show you—my wife was all out to stop me leaving. Thought I’d get caught up in a war. Not much get done in the world, I said, if we all waited for that.”
“You’ve said it. Look at last autumn. ’Bye, Stella! ’Bye, Peter! Well, that’s over. Come on below and have a drink.”
Kit was looking at the Groupers, feeling envy mingle in him with compassion. He had felt the same sometimes when McKinnon, his dark eyes glowing with defiant faith, was using the words Capitalist and Proletarian as if they were definitions of moral values. He wondered how it felt to be one of these dedicated creatures in their birdlike skimmings over the dull, dull surface of human inertia, so joyfully certain that the heavy mass was rising in their wake. When one worked, as he did, knee-deep in the stuff itself, their effects seemed covetably quick and easy. They could seal a soul to the elect in a couple of afternoons, whereas it might take him months to effect a fine adjustment in the same human being’s blood-sugar, and then his work would only be begun. A physician himself by temperament, he had felt a similar unease in the company of brisk and optimistic surgeons. Well, they seemed happy, and there was room for more of it. Perhaps Janet was a surgical case. At any rate, he wished her luck.
“It’s queer,” she was saying, “to think that when I get back it will be nearly Christmas time. Oh, by the way, did you manage to get me a paper?”
“Yes, of course. I’ve got it somewhere.” He dug into the pocket of his driving-coat. “Lilliput—Digest—will those do? And a picture-paper.” He pulled it out, looking absently at the headline. “German Press Attacks Poland.” “Here you are. Nothing much in it.”
More people were leaving the ship. A party of Groupers further along the deck seemed to have shed all theirs already; they were all waving over the side. Kit followed the direction of their eyes. He saw, conspicuous by his ginger hair, Timmie Curtis close to the edge of the dock. A qualm assailed him; had the unhappy boy meant
to see Janet off, expecting her to be alone? He calculated the chances—and the ultimate kindness—of affording a last-minute opportunity by making himself scarce, but decided against it, because Timmie did not look particularly dejected. Next moment Kit perceived that the brown-skinned girl on Timmie’s right was not, as he had supposed, pressed against his side by the denseness of the crowd. She was clinging, with both hands, to his arm.
“Have you seen some one we know?” Janet asked. But already, before he thought about it, he had shifted himself between her and the group on shore. To be her buffer against truth had been his function for so long that, even in this latest minute, he fulfilled it by instinct.
“You wouldn’t know him. He used to be a patient of mine.”
CHAPTER 23
KIT SMOOTHED OUT the letter and read it again. This time he smiled a little. He could have written it for her, he thought.
Well, he would be there in good time to-day. The work had panned out very conveniently. He put the note into his pocket and ran up to his room to change. Burford—Jimmie Burford? Oh, yes, of course. He had been at the Easter School, a rather dim hanger-on of the younger set. A prep-school master, or something similar. He had looked as if he might refer at any moment to keeping a straight bat or playing for the side; and had performed with even less abandon than Kit himself. No doubt he had been there in the interests of the school dramatic society. It was impossible to work up much emotion about any one so neutral; Kit, as he wriggled into his shirt, merely hoped that Christie hadn’t led the poor little devil too far up the garden path. All from the most generous motives, of course. Probably he worried about his job, or had an ailing mother. Whatever it was, Christie would have had it out of him within half an hour. It had started, of course, in the three weeks or so before Janet’s departure, when he had not been able to get away.