Authors: Mary Renault
He spent his leave periods with Susan in hotels. She had never found housekeeping easy even before scarcities began, and made it clear now that she could do with some leave herself. He did not doubt that her life was harder than his. Once, at his request, she brought Sally, but it was impossibly difficult and they did not repeat it; a sister of Susan’s took the child in. He was not within reach of any climbing on a short pass; it had to go.
Susan, it seemed to him, was changing; but everything was changing or had changed. The twelve years between them increasingly appeared. He had hoped that the gap would narrow rather than widen; but he thought of the outgoing drafts, and his unhappiness seemed a self-indulgence. Things would straighten out when he got back.
All this was only the preface; it was a background over which his memory ranged at random, setting this in perspective or that. What he had before him tonight was to compose the foreground. This was the thing that had always defeated him, because much of it had to be done without the help of memory. The centre, which he knew, depended for its truth on a complex of lines and shades which only his imagination could supply; and always, when he tried to fill them in, they had toned themselves to the violent colours of his own pain. Helpless and exhausted he had forbidden himself to think about it; everything had been tainted by the knowledge that there was this rotten place, skinned over, in his mind. For the first time, tonight he had felt emotion loosen its stranglehold; if he kept his will steady, he could use knowledge instead, and make deductions of the unknown from the known. If he could do this, it was possible that even from his own part of it he could stand a little away.
Getting out of bed, he opened the door that led to the iron stair. There was a dark, deep sky outside; a three-parts-rounded moon had quelled the stars. The sea sounded, so faintly that it was only as if the silence stirred and said hush. He laid himself down again. Now.
It must have been a year or more after he left the school that the bulldozers came to the big meadow a couple of miles away, the pioneers followed, and the huts went up. The next move was the Head’s, he convened a masters’ meeting and moved the bounds half a mile in.
Marks and Canning, of course, would be the first boys to break them; returning like Joshua’s spies with material treasures, electric torches and compasses and gum, pressed on them by their hosts to console them for the attempts of an archaic system to crush their enterprise. Fanciful rumours were ousted by glowing reports; if you seemed keen and didn’t put on side, the Yanks would go to a lot of trouble to show you how things worked. Marks and Canning learned how to operate a searchlight and (in theory) how to construct the framework of a skyscraper and drill for oil. They had acquired faultless accents and an impeccable use of idiom before, having displayed their accomplishments rashly, they were watched one night and caught.
All these events reached Susan distantly, in the cottage outside the grounds. They seemed at first to concern her no more than the building of a new lab. Sometimes she would see the Americans walk past, together at first, later with the village girls. After a while, when the camp had settled in, appeared the semi-professionals from the towns, little-young-old harpies who saw no reason why the locals should get all the pickings. The village girls were few, and soon acquired “steadies”; the vivandières found it worth while to stay. Susan, considering these things with vague unhappiness, remarked to Neil at one of their meetings that she thought it was a shame.
Neil, his mind reverting to Plautus and Juvenal, agreed a little wearily that since two thousand or so B.C. it had always been a shame. Susan’s eyes looked disappointed; he could feel her thinking that his mind was growing academic and dry, though it was his own boys in training about whom he was trying not to be foolish. Rousing himself, he said that the Americans must have precious few amusements, so far from a town; the staff ought to get up some sort of a do, and ask them over.
In the end, however, it had been Sally who had set the wheels moving. During one of Susan’s frequent lapses of attention she had gone wobbling out of the open front door, down the path and into the road, where the driver of a jeep, scorching his brakes and narrowly missing death in the resulting skid, managed to avoid her by inches.
The driver was a good deal more shaken than Sally. He picked her up and asked her where she lived.
Sally had forgotten Neil, by now, as a human presence; he had passed into her pantheon, along with Gentle Jesus and Santa Claus. But, like many girl-babies, she adored men and could never have enough of them. She embraced the driver confidingly. When he asked her if she would like him to bring her a box of candy, she made sounds of pleasure and clung round his neck.
The driver happened to be detailed for duty next day; but he had children of his own and wouldn’t for worlds have disappointed the kid. He combed the camp for someone to deliver the candy. His two delegates called the next afternoon. They were straight from college, the lean, boyish, gangling kind; very diffident, conscious of their ambassadorial function, courteous and sincere. They explained the candy carefully to Susan, calling her Ma’am. Their youth and their gravity moved her heart; she thought of the harpies dawdling round the camp gates, and asked them in to tea.
Rigidly curbing their appetites (they knew about rationing) they told her how swell of her this was, and how good it felt to be inside a real home. They got out their wallets, and showed her the snapshots of their folks. Susan said that of course they must come again. Sally (to whom the news that candy meant sweets came as a delightful surprise) seconded the motion.
One of them did come the following week, with a different friend. He was about Susan’s own age, and as charming as the others, though he knew a little more about it. He rang Susan up next day, and asked her to a dance at the camp. She went out with him several times, while the help from the village sat in with Sally. He was a good-hearted though not an inexperienced young man. Privately, he thought the girl had a tough break, married to some dusty old professor or something; but as she seemed fond of the guy, he wouldn’t be the one to bust it up. He told her so. He had a girl himself, back in Cleveland. A few friendly kisses would keep them both in training, and do no harm to anyone. He kept his word. It was only pardonable vanity which, when some of his friends formed a wrong impression, kept him from correcting it.
The friends, unoccupied and intrigued, felt themselves challenged. If Pete’s find was as willing as she was pretty, they saw no sense in leaving him a monopoly. One of these, setting out in this spirit of light-hearted competition, fell very nearly in love with Susan; the thing became serious, for him, before long. Susan, for her part, was getting to appreciate the practised approach; the charming boys, with their snapshots of the back porch, began to seem a little insipid. She had been bored and unsatisfied since Neil went away; and, when she did see him, he appeared to be losing his sense of humour. She did not tell him about these developments in her social life, in case he should not understand. He was a little old-fashioned, she was beginning to think.
Now, reconstructing it all as fairly as he could from his broken scraps of knowledge, he accepted a probability he had not admitted to his consciousness till now: that the man who had assisted at her first infidelity had not known he was the first. She liked to please, to avoid awkwardness, to be the kind of person her companion wished her to be; she always affected a little more sophistication than she had.
Whoever the man had been, it would have been the same. She was one of those women to whom the first step is decisive, the rest as easy as a greased slide. If Neil had stayed with her she would never, perhaps, have found it out; habit, sentiment and convention would have reinforced her warm shallow love. Once these cables were cut, there was nothing in herself to hold her. He did not know, even now, how many men there had been later: perhaps three or four, perhaps half a dozen. He did not know if they had all been from the American camp. It made, in the essentials, little difference after the first.
Matters had stood like this for more than a year when Germany surrendered, and Neil’s training depot became a surplus almost at once. The Head wrote that he was applying for his immediate release; the news brought him, now, nothing but pleasure and relief. He was out of the Army just in time for the start of the spring term.
From the first he had known that things were wrong; but for a length of time he found it hard later to believe in, he had not guessed the cause. The truth was that for three years his frustration had been mounting, to a pitch of inferiority where he found for every doubt and uneasiness an explanation in himself. When colleagues were constrained in his presence, or treated him with an awkward excess of consideration, he thought they were pitying the slowness of his adjustments; as, indeed, in a different sense they were. Even when he made love to Susan he did not guess. She had acquired in this language a vocabulary of clichés and vulgarisms which physically shocked him; but he thought she was trying by nervous improvisation to bridge the gulf of absence. His previous experience of women, which had never been commercial, did nothing to enlighten him. He had missed her very much, which made him uncritical.
It was Sally who, if he had not been armoured in self-distrust, would have been the first to tell him the truth. When he came back, still in uniform, she had looked from him to Susan with a sidelong glance that was almost sly. “Hullo, Sally,” he had said, much shyer with her than with Susan, “Do you remember me?” She considered him and seemed, with unknown reservations, to approve him; but her smile, little more than a baby as she was, had a kind of affected babyishness, an air of playing to the gallery. “Hiya,” she answered. He took it for a childish slurring; as he soon discovered, she was very backward in her speech. She had spent increasing time with the village help, who was the leavings of the call-up; kind by her lights, but little more than a high-grade defective. More disquieting facts emerged one by one. The child’s clothes were unmended and half-washed; “She gets through them so quickly,” Susan irritably explained. Before long he could see the reason for this. “Surely,” he asked, still made uncertain by his own loss of confidence, “a child of her age ought to be house-trained?” Susan said he had better get in touch with life again, and find out what running a house was like. He could not bear to see the child’s dinginess; she had always been so crisp and fresh. When Susan was out (she often was) he washed Sally’s things himself.
After he got back into mufti, Sally changed. She seemed suddenly to re-discover him. In dim memory or uncertain trust, she began to claim him again. When he was at work in his study, she used to slip quietly in, making few demands or none; in her sensitiveness to his concentration, and her patience, she was more like an old dog than a young child. With him she dropped her edgy cuteness and her affected lisp; natural talk was almost like a secret between them. She never spoke of anything that had happened when he was away; her memory was too short perhaps, or perhaps she had the child’s sixth sense of something wrong. Her favourite game was to be hoisted to the top of a bookcase or of the garden wall, then she would say that she was climbing mountains like Daddy; it was always the highest mountain in the world.
With her he had the only complete happiness he had experienced since his return; but, before long, he saw that Susan was as ready as ever to leave her entirely to him. At this age, he saw more risk than ever to the child’s emotional balance. At last he forced himself to speak to Susan about it. She flared up quickly; the boredom she had been suppressing was close to the surface. After that, the real quarrel was a matter of days.
He realised, after, that it had supplied Susan’s conscience with some kind of sanction or permit. She persuaded herself, probably, that he no longer loved her, or, possibly, that he had got even with her while he had been away. At all events on the following evening, when a masters’ meeting guaranteed his absence (the Head’s meetings were never brief) she rang up the latest of her men and asked him over.
From this point of the story, there were no more gaps for Neil to fill in with imagination or inference. He knew the rest. If he could get through it clearly and sanely, and somehow without re-living it, he would have done.
The American camp had sent much of its strength home, or to Germany, since the European armistice, but a reduced force was still there. Susan had met this most recent man only a month or two before. That evening, having made it clear to him that Neil deserved no more consideration, she took him up to the small guest room at the top of the house. They were there some time.
Before this, Sally had been put to bed. She must have wakened, and been frightened by silence or by sound. When no one answered (the cottage was an old one, the walls and doors thick) she fumbled her way downstairs, in her nightgown, to Neil’s study. It was empty; but there were warmth, interest and company in the fire, banked to last and burning brightly in the grate.
That night Marks and Canning, seniors by now but unregenerate, were breaking bounds. The novelty of the camp had worn off, their special friends had left, and they had gone back to poaching again. They were on their way tonight to set snares for the rabbits which, tomorrow, they would skin and cook in the furnace-room under the labs, a useful supplement to tea. They went carefully, for they had been cautioned last term, and a threat of expulsion hung over both their heads. When they passed the cottage, therefore, they kept well down behind the wall, concerned not to be seen rather than to see.
The screams from inside had not held their attention at first; they assumed a fit of temper, and crept on their way. After the first few yards, something in the sound made them feel uncomfortable; they stopped in their tracks. No answering voice was audible; the shrieking mounted, intolerably. They looked over the wall, and saw through a window a flame running about a room.