Purposes of Love
Authors: Mary Renault
A Novel
Mary Renault
To J.M. for Thoughts
A
T A WHITE-TILED
table a young girl was sitting, sucking a bullseye and sewing a shroud. Her hands moved in and out of a pool of red-shaded lamplight, glowing in their passage first crimson and then white. She was nineteen, pretty, undersized and Welsh; hideously dressed in striped cotton, a square-bibbed apron that reached her high collar, black shoes and stockings and a stiff white cap.
Nightfall had simplified the ward, picking out highlights and resolving them into pattern, drowning detail, subduing movement, fixing for a moment the symmetry for which, all day, everyone fought errant nature.
Over some of the cots that lined the walls lamps were burning, muffled in red. Under one of them, the child who presently would wear the shroud was lying with a pinched, waxy face, breathing jerkily through a half-open mouth. An apparatus of glass and rubber tubing was running salt and water into her veins to eke out the exhausted blood. It was all that could now be done. Sister, going through her stock that afternoon, had noticed that all her shrouds were too short, and had put out the necessary materials in the sewing-basket. The little nurse stitched doggedly away, thinking of a film she had seen that afternoon, of the boy who had taken her, and of what she would wear when she met him again. She had made plenty of shrouds; the first few had made her feel creepy, but they were just like the rest of the mending and darning now.
Under the green-shaded lamp at the Sister’s table the staff-nurse was writing the day report, glancing up at the patients now and then to refresh her mind with ideas. She was hoping that Joan would not die before her parents arrived from the next county. Joan was unconscious; and when the mother came there would be nothing for her to do but to sit, heavy with sleeplessness, staring into that severe and distant face until, after a monotonous eternity, she cried with relief when the screens were closed and she was led away. Still, it looked bad to put in the report, “Relatives not present”. It was seven o’clock, the time when one began to look at a dying patient and wonder whether they would last till the night-nurses came on duty. A death meant about an hour’s steady and unpleasant work, and forms in triplicate.
There was a whimpering from a cot in the corner. A fat little boy, admitted that day, was sitting up with a damp sheet tucked under him, clutching the cot-bars, his eyes round and bright like a trapped animal’s between his fists. He had slept in his mother’s bed every night, till tonight, of his two years, and would probably have felt no more alien in a Brazilian forest.
“Do get that child straight before the night people come,” said the staff-nurse. “He looks awful. Wet, I expect.”
The probationer laid aside her sewing and wearily collected a clean sheet, soap and water, spirit and powder. She was tired, but reflected that in an adult ward she would not have been sitting at all. Even here, where there was so much sewing, it was tacitly understood that one selected the smallest and most uncomfortable chair, and appeared to sit reluctantly. The chairs used by the day-nurses had been designed in the ’eighties for straight-backed Victorian children. To relax was unprofessional. There were two full-sized basket chairs, but only the night-nurses used them in the secret and sacred watch after the Night Sister’s midnight round.
Presently she put her screens back in the corner and, opening the glass doors at the end of the ward, tossed the sheet through on to the balcony tiles.
“One more. Sorry.”
“It’s all right. I haven’t counted yet.”
Vivian Lingard stooped in a pool of blurred light from the windows, sorting laundry and entering the numbers on a long printed list. She had come to the babies’ squares, and was counting them by the moist plops as they fell. Two children in cots, muffled to the ears, breathed rhythmically on either side. If she put the light on they would wake, but there was time tonight to work in the dark.
Vivian propped the list against the wall and wrote, “Squares, 15”, and rubbed her back, which was aching. Beyond the wrought-iron balcony railings was a huge ragged pool of luminous sky, the space round which the hospital was built. The black surrounding skyline, owing something to every decade for a century and a half, was as irregular as a Dolomite range and less consistent; Victorian-Gothic crenulations here, a decent Georgian pediment there; then a new block of the 1930s, an austere functional cube. From them all came the same unwinking stare of red eyes, except where a great beam, like a stage lime, picked out grass and leaves in unnatural aniline colour; the theatre was at work.
Above it all, looking vague and supernumerary, a half-moon drifted across the clouds. Vivian blinked at it, lifting a hand to shut the theatre light away, and trying to remember how moonlight looked over the high moors at home. It made her think—as many other things did—about her brother, the only person she used to allow to accompany her there. She realised that she was very tired, and would have rubbed her eyes; but her hands were so dirty that instinctively she drew them back again.
A man’s feet sounded on the iron balcony stairs. The house surgeon, no doubt, come to see if the intravenous apparatus was working. She bent to tie up the laundry bundle.
“Excuse me. Does Nurse Lingard—”
“Jan!”
Unbelievably he was there, standing behind her in the reddened light from the ward.
“Well, I’m damned.” Not only now, but always, Jan’s voice seemed freshly warmed by some pleasant discovery. “I never thought that efficient backside could belong to you.”
“But I was thinking about you!” She stared at him, unconsciously rubbing the palms of her hands, which felt sticky, against the sides of her apron, incredulously smiling. For Jan to be present on a wish, instead of half a continent or so away, was like a delightful reversal of nature. He had got very tanned, though it was so early in the year; she always noticed how this made his hair, which should have been the same colour as her own, look much fairer. “I was thinking of you,” she said delighted, “only a moment ago.”
“Were you?” He slanted his head, looking not at her uniform which he had never seen before but at her face; seemed to form some conclusion, and came over to kiss her. Her starched waistband amused him; he drummed a little tune on it with his fingers. “How extraordinary you smell.”
“It’s dirt, mostly,” she said, but did not move. It was always pleasant to be touched by Jan; as if, from being much in the sun, he could give out a little, as the sea does, when it was absent. As soon as he put his arm around her she had forgotten she was tired. He was sniffing her shoulder in interested analysis.
“Carbolic, isn’t it, partly? I like it. Most individual.”
“Individual?” She laughed under her breath; his presence was so inevitable already as to be commonplace. “Really, Jan, I didn’t know your experience was so limited. Do you mean to tell me you’ve never made love to a nurse?”
“Well,” Jan apologised, “I haven’t been ill, you know, since we had measles, and it was a bit early then. By the way, does it matter my being here?”
Vivian looked round in sudden panic. “Of course it does. You can’t come here, I’m on duty. I was so surprised to see you, I didn’t think.”
“Oh, very well, see you later.” He moved towards the stairs with that light contented acquiescence which she had always thought must be so intolerable to the people who fell in love with him. Even Vivian, after all these years, was not wholly immune.
“If Nurse Page sees you,” she said to keep him a moment longer, “she’ll think you’re a man come to see me.”
“Better let her come and take a look.”
Jan—he was twenty-nine—was the elder of them by three years, but from their teens onwards strangers had often taken them for twins. They themselves, more conscious of their differences as close relatives are, still found this amusing. They took for granted their light beech-brown hair, clear brown skins shaped closely to the bone, grey eyes, thick soft eyebrows nearly meeting in the middle; their springy uprightness, their long thin hands and feet: and remained unaware of a hundred tricks of voice and manner, some family stock, some individual to the one but picked up by the other. These things seemed trivial to them, their inner contrasts enormous and, to their accustomed eyes, colouring the outside too.
In the last few years the resemblance had lessened. Vivian had shed an early boyish gawkiness; and Jan, toughening under climatic and other influences, lost an air of rather finedrawn aestheticism which had misled a good many people to their confusion. At some unnoticed stage of the process he had acquired an arresting kind of beauty which Vivian found teasing, because she possessed most of its raw materials herself. It was a style, though, that went better on a man; typical, she often thought, of Jan to get the best of the bargain so early and unawares.
There were other differences. Jan was a few inches taller, and there was a hazel fleck in his eyes which turned them by some lights from grey to green. In repose Vivian’s mouth shut straight and rather seriously, while Jan’s had that slight, remote and somewhat disquieting smile often found on the statuary of archaic Greece.
As he stood in the weak shaft of light at the iron stairhead, poised, as he was always poised, ready to go, she considered him afresh. He has everything, she thought, and seems to need nothing. It’s curious that I shouldn’t detest him. Most sisters would. And she wished, wondering how many other people had wished it, that she loved him less.
“Come up here,” she said, “against the wall. You can’t be seen then.”
“All right.” He moved over accommodatingly, sat down on the bale of laundry and propped his back against the wall, stretching out his nailed shoes. “Come on.” He patted the hummock beside him, smiling up at her.
“No thanks,” said Vivian, withdrawing. “Neither would you if you knew what was inside.”
Jan arranged himself more comfortably. “What is dirt? Merely, as someone said, Russell I expect unless I thought of it myself, unwanted irrelevance. You can sit on my knee if you’re so fussy.” He took a handful of the seat of her dress and pulled her down with a thud.
“Jan, you’re insane. Someone will come out and they’ll never believe us.” But she settled herself, a stream of dim childish recollections lulling her into pleasant security. His jacket smelt of peat-smoke, petrol, tobacco and dry summer earth.
“How do you come to be down here, anyway?” she asked curiously. “Not to see me.”
“Of course. Partly.” A sleepy noise came from one of the cots, and they lowered their voices.
“Is Alan with you?”
“Alan?” he murmured in vague surprise. “No. Alan’s in Italy somewhere. I think.”
“Short innings,” was Vivian’s only comment.
“He’s writing,” said Jan sharply. “He’s damned good, too.”
“I expect so,” Vivian agreed, confirmed in her opinion by this punctilious loyalty. Alan had struck her, during a brief meeting, as dangerously tenacious.
“How did Scotland go?” she asked.
“Oh, very well. The new pendulum’s a great improvement. More stable, and gives finer shades of accuracy. Shall I tell you about it?”
“Not here, we won’t have time. Did you write anything?”
“Only the work. I don’t know what we did all the time. Talked, I shouldn’t wonder. Oh, yes.” He grinned retrospectively. “And Mic tried to photograph birds.”
“Mic?” she asked with tepid curiosity. If she found out who he was she would never remember; she had long ceased trying to keep track of what, fresh from
Comus,
she had once annoyed Jan by calling his Rout.