Authors: Mary Renault
“Yes,” he said. “You must meet Mic, you’ll probably like him.”
“Shall I?” She smiled, concealing a certain lack of enthusiasm. Her encounters with the Rout had not, so far, been very felicitous. Alan, cold with jealousy, had hated her unobtrusively; Thora had appeared in her room, weeping, at three in the morning and stayed till five; and Nigel, during a fortnight’s visit that seemed to last for months, had whiled away Jan’s lengthening absences by engaging her in long nostalgic conversations, which he opened by telling her how like Jan she was.
“No, I meant it,” said Jan. “He’s here.”
“Where?” She peered, alarmed, into the shadows. “He mustn’t be here, get him away quickly.”
“Don’t be fat-headed,” said Jan, reverting to the schoolroom. “I mean I’m staying with him. He’s starting a job here. We’ve been looking at digs, but Mic’s sensitive to the macabre and decided to take an unfurnished flat. I’m helping him fix it. Filthy place, but it’ll be all right when we’ve done it up.”
“Why don’t you have it done?”
“Because Mic’s only got three pounds sixteen and five-pence.”
“It sounds a bit bleak.” She found herself, to her own surprise, concealing an unavowed hostility. “Where will you sleep, on the floor?”
“No,” Jan explained in good faith. “The floors aren’t stained yet. We’ve slept at a pub so far.”
So far? And he had only just come to see her. She asked, with polite interest, “Are you staying with him long?”
“No,” said Jan slowly. “I shall be leaving as soon as we’ve fixed the flat.” He added, quickly casual, “Going down to Cornwall to hunt for tin.”
“Hope you find some,” said Vivian; foolishly, since whatever minerals happened to be present would afford him equal interest. But she had been, for a moment, abstracted. A certain regretful finality in his voice had informed her that Mic was on his way to join Alan and the rest in the limbo of Jan’s unfinished symphonies. She rested her head against his friendly unyielding shoulder, wondering again what it was that, mixed with his hardness, made him so ineluctably dear. She thought of Alan with his smooth wit and angry eyes; of Thora and of the dark brilliant woman she had only seen once, of whom Jan would never talk at all; her compassion tinged with contempt, because they should have known that Jan was not for them or for anyone. As for herself, she thought, life had freed her from possessiveness. She might have reflected with more truth that Jan had trained her to suppress it.
“But what about you?” he asked her suddenly. “You’re the one whose impressions are interesting. I want to know.”
“There isn’t time now.” She doubted whether there ever would be time. “We’ll be meeting tomorrow.”
“It’s changed you.” He tilted her face in his hand towards the light.
“It’s the uniform.”
A thin whimpering, blurred with sleep, began in the nearest cot. She got up from his knees and slid her hand between the sheets.
“Wet?” inquired Jan, interested
She nodded. “Where did you find out about babies, Jan?”
“Don’t be evil-minded. I remembered you.”
“Well, you
will
have to go now.” She patted the keening child with encouraging noises; a little awkwardly, for she had not been on the children’s ward long. Jan was watching her with private enjoyment.
“All right, come to the pub tomorrow. When are you free?”
“Ten-thirty. But we’re sacked if we’re seen in a pub.”
“Great heaven. Well, I’ll wait for you outside here.”
“No, don’t. They might change my off-duty to two or half-past five, you can never be sure. (S-sh, good girl, Nurse is coming.) I’ll meet you at eleven at Dilling’s, it’s a coffee shop, anyone will tell you.” If they met outside it meant eating her next meal in hospital to an accompaniment of, “Was that your brother meeting you this morning, Lingard? He
is
like you, isn’t he? I said to Walker as soon as I saw you out together, That must be Lingard’s brother, you could tell it anywhere. He looks very clever. I expect he
reads
a lot, like you.” And, hopefully, “I expect it’s rather
boring
for him when you’re on duty, isn’t it?”
Dilling’s was dowdy and comfortable, had no wireless, and was not much patronised by the hospital staff.
“Dilling’s. Eleven,” he said. She did not urge him to write it down; he never forgot things he intended to remember. “I’ll bring Mic along, shall I? I think it would do him good.”
“Do if you like,” said Vivian; a defence-mechanism, which practice had made nearly automatic, concealing the fact that she was hurt. But the invitation stopped short of warmth.
“No? Good, we leave Mic to do his house-painting. We can talk better by ourselves.”
The intrusion of Mic was wafted away. For a moment Vivian clung obstinately to her receding indignation; but, as usual, it turned to mist in her hands. Jan leaned over the edge of the cot, and absently stroked the baby’s stomach with the back of a bent forefinger. Its crying sank at once to an unconvinced whimper. He went on stroking with a half-smile; but his eyes were not smiling and his thoughts seemed on other things.
“When you meet Mic—if you do—” he said slowly, “be easy on him.” He surrendered his finger, without looking, to the child’s sleepy clutch. The whimper became a faint hiccup, then silence. “He’s had a very—”
But Vivian’s eye had been caught by the balcony door.
“I believe Page saw you then. She’s still looking. Suppose I tell her who you are? She might give us another few minutes presently, when I’ve changed the child.”
“What? Oh, no, leave it. Too much fuss. See you tomorrow.”
He was gone. At the top of the iron stairs he smiled over his shoulder and disappeared; and the baby, after an instant of shocked silence, broke into a wail shrill with outrage, astonishment, and loss. Vivian picked it up. It slobbered indignantly into her neck, its fat year-old face creased with grief under a bandage that sat, like a lopsided turban, over one ear. She rocked its damp softness for a moment in her arms, its cries blending with Thora’s dimly-remembered sobbing at the back of her mind.
On the threshold of the ward Page met her, peering out.
“Whatever was Mr. Herbert doing out there all that time? I particularly wanted to speak to him. Has he
gone
?”
“It wasn’t Mr. Herbert. It was my brother looking for me. He’s just arrived from Scotland. Stupid of him to come here, but people don’t realise, you know. I told him I was on duty and sent him away.”
The staff-nurse’s eyes had lost their narrow look, and quickened with interest.
“What a shame. You needn’t have sent him off like that, kid.” (She was two years younger than Vivian, but all juniors were “kid” to her unbent moods.) “He could have stopped a minute, and had a look at the ward.” A pity, she reflected. You could let Lingard have little things; she was a good kid and didn’t take advantage. Besides, her brother would be sure to be a nice type of boy, probably an undergrad. Undergraduates came next after housemen in the scale of achievement.
V
IVIAN WOKE EARLY, BEFORE
the maids came trampling along the corridors, thumping the doors, and popping a shrill head through each like a cuckoo out of a clock.
“Twenty-to-seven-nurse.”
“Thank you,” said Vivian. The sun was shining, and she wondered for a moment why this was making her so pleased. Then she remembered that she was meeting Jan. She lay and looked at the light leaping on a favourite bowl of thick green glass; liking even her room, a square cream-coloured box eight feet by seven and identical, down to the seams in the lino, with a hundred others, the bed, chest and chair disposed in positions ordained by regulation and unalterable. The tenant was allowed to display not more than six objects of her own; Vivian, with some difficulty, had succeeded in getting her row of books counted as one instead of seventeen.
At breakfast she shared a table with the other nine members of her training set, half listening to what they said, which in six months had become familiar, even soothing, as the National Anthem.
“Well, you know what the round is on Malplaquet when you’re on alone. And then she ticked me off for not having started the washings, and she hadn’t done a thing herself except play up to all the housemen. … Sister’s day off, I remember because we were having a cup of tea behind the kitchen door. … And they found it simply full of fluid, six pints they got. …”
The noise died down as if a door had been shut on it. The Sister who was taking breakfast had risen to call the roll. Vivian answered to her name mechanically, seeing in her mind the coffee-shop and Jan sitting at a window-table which, for no particular reason, she had assigned to him. The roll came to an end.
“Nurse Cope to Crecy. Nurse Fowler to Harfleur. Nurse Kimball to Verdun. Nurse Lingard to Verdun.” The Sister sat down; the rattle of voices began again.
“I say, fancy. Were you due to change your ward, Lingard?”
“No,” said Vivian stolidly.
“Does it mess up your off-duty?”
“I was meeting my brother.”
“Oh, bad
luck.
”
As if she had staked on the wrong colour at roulette, Vivian thought. Indeed, making any sort of engagement outside the hospital was very similar in principle. Her mind felt heavy and dull; she could see Jan looking out of the window and, after a long time, at his watch. She had, too, a silly vision of the hospital spinning round like a wheel and nurses rolling round it to fall, feebly struggling, into fortuitous holes. There was no way of getting at Jan. She had forgotten, in any case, to ask where he was staying.
Following the usual procedure—notice of moves was never given, so hers was a predicament happening to someone nearly every day—she sought out one of the Verdun probationers.
“What duty will I be taking, do you know?”
“You’re extra. Heavy take-in this week. Extra beds both sides and right down the middle.”
“Oh,” said Vivian. “Thanks.” It meant that she was not on the ward schedule and would be sent off each day when the Sister happened to think of it.
“Made arrangements?” said the Verdun probationer. “Bad luck.”
The Home Sister went out, releasing them. Through the scraping of chairs she could hear Colonna Kimball, two tables away, swearing. She was the other nurse who had been read out for Verdun, a second-year whose path Vivian had not crossed so far. Her vocabulary seemed richer than the one in standard use, and Vivian noticed that a rather precious public-school accent lent it the effect of higher explosive charge.
Verdun was the newest women’s surgical ward, a dazzling open stretch of light and symmetry and porcelain and chromium. Even with its extra beds it looked spacious and orderly; but custom had, for Vivian, invested the Victorian muddle of Crecy with a kind of shabby cosiness, and she felt chilly and jumpy like a cat in a new house. She imagined Jan watching her fuss as one might the scuttlings of a worried ant in a formicarium; pulled herself together, and began on the line of beds, stripping them, because she was extra, for the others to make.
“Beds again,” said the first old woman she came to, drawing her knees up under the loose blanket. She rubbed her skinny arms, sore from daily injections. “Seems to me life’s nothing but beds and stabbing.” Vivian made a standard soothing answer, and went on quickly because she had thought of something that made her laugh.
“What are you thinking?” said the voice of Kimball behind her.
“Casanova.”
“No,
no.
Cellini. Cellini definitely.”
“Well, yes.” Vivian folded the next quilt over a chair.
“Casanova’s such a windbag. Before he’s got to the point I’m always asl—”
“Do get
on,
” said the staff-nurse. “What do you think we’re having an extra nurse for?”
When the beds were made Sister Verdun arrived to read prayers. She was a little fretted woman with an anxious bun, entering with a sense of grievance on middle-age. Rising from her knees, she began at once to run poking about the ward like a hen after maize, finding this and that undone and not waiting for the offender to appear, but making a clucking pursuit into passage, bathroom or sluice. She had the patients’ letters in her hand, and, as she darted about, stopped occasionally to distribute one and to say something with eager, brittle geniality. Vivian, dusting, pictured her twenty years back; a popular, skittish little nurse, nervous of responsibility but goaded up the ladder by an inferiority complex and the impossibility of standing still.
One of the probationers, fresh, round and smiling, was making a patient laugh as she flicked round the bed. Vivian saw the Sister’s face swing round like a sharp little compass needle. She began moving down the ward towards them; but the probationer had pushed the bed back and passed on to the next.
Presently Colonna went up to the desk to ask about some treatment or other. When she had gone Vivian, who was dusting a light-bracket close by, heard Sister Verdun say to the staff-nurse, “I hoped she was only temporary. Don’t like her. Can’t make these girls out who cut their hair off to look like boys. I’ve seen her out.
She’ll
never make a nurse. Too many outside interests.”
Half an hour later, when Vivian was cleaning up the bathroom, the staff-nurse came in to say, “Sister says you can have an evening.”
“Thank you,” said Vivian unemotionally.
“You lucky devil,” said the little round probationer. “I was dying for an evening, and I’ve got a morning.”
“I’d rather have a morning too.” Vivian looked round; the staff-nurse had not gone. “Do you think Sister would let us change?”
“Sister never changes off-duty time. She bit my head off last time I asked her so I’m not going to again.” The staff-nurse went out. Vivian spent the morning doing blanket baths.
As she was putting round the knives and forks for dinner, Kimball intercepted her in a corner and asked, “Did Sister let you take your call?”
“What call?”
“Someone rang up for you twenty minutes ago. A man’s voice. I had to tell Sister because I knew she’d heard the bell.”
“It must have been my brother. I was to have met him this morning.”