Authors: Mary Renault
“Well, I must be trotting. I’ll send your breakfast along.”
Vivian sat up in bed with her arms clasped round her knees, staring at the opposite wall. Her breakfast arrived, grew cold and was taken away. When Colonna tapped on the window, an hour later, she had not moved.
“Catch,” said Colonna. “He seems to be getting on all right. You’d better pull your own socks up; don’t you sleep, or what?”
Vivian caught the note she had tossed in.
“I’m all right really. Colonna, will you—” She hesitated, she had only just thought what she would have to say, and had not considered how to say it. But the Home Sister’s round was due; there was no time for discreet preliminaries. She explained.
Colonna’s face altered. She came a step nearer and leaned through the window.
“My God! Are you sure?”
“How can one be sure? It’s probably only because I’m tired, or ill or something. I’d forgotten till today. But I daren’t risk it any longer. It’s the third week now.”
Colonna’s curious dark-grey eyes travelled over Vivian in subtle gradations of fascination, repugnance and compassion.
“All right. Next time I do medicines I ought to manage it. Don’t worry. I’ll fix something.”
“I shouldn’t let you. It disgusts you, doesn’t it? It’s risky, too.”
“I’ll get it today or tomorrow. It’ll be all right. You get to sleep, you look as if you need it.”
She herself looked in need of it too. “Why should you do this?” said Vivian helplessly. “I wish I didn’t have to ask you.”
Colonna smiled wearily. “Why shouldn’t I? I haven’t many responsibilities of my own, you know.” Her eyes, searching and a little bewildered, wandered over Vivian’s face and body. “Do you hate having to get rid of it like this? Would you have liked to have one, if you could?”
“I don’t know,” Vivian said. I hadn’t thought about it.”
“You don’t fit into anything. Be good and sleep, I’ll look after you.” She turned to see if the coast was clear, and slipped away.
Vivian read Mic’s letter. It was scrawled in pencil on the backs of opened-out envelopes, as and when he had the chance. Not much of it was about himself. Once he had begun to say something, changed his mind, and made an undergraduate joke about the Sister instead.
She hugged the letter blindly, seeing with her mind’s eye the bleak scrubbed wood and brown paint of Ramillies, the curtainless windows, the black iron beds and Sister’s heavy stalk over the creaking boards. The nurses would say he was a good patient. He would submit quietly to the mass-produced routine, soon accustoming himself again to being lonely and unimportant; remembering probably what she had told him about understaffing, and not asking even for some of the small things he might have had. She wondered if he was eating anything—the food did not encourage it, unless supplemented privately—and if Sister Ramillies was skinning his bowels with the black draught for which she was notorious. She found that she was nursing his letter in her crossed arms, like a child. Then she remembered.
It was Mic whom this intruding life endangered, who had everything to lose. Little and casually as he spoke of it, she had always known that if anything went wrong nothing she could say or do or pretend would prevent him from marrying her. His own memories had burned him too deeply; his determination not to transmit that suffering was absolute, and it would beat her down. She pictured him, through her fault, impossibly burdened, paying all over again for the miseries of boyhood, with his ambition, his strength and humour, the small graces of his life, his youth. To give him back a little of what he had missed was the only thing she had ever found to do which could not be done as well, or better, by someone else. It was her use for herself; and this competitor would have to return to the non-being from which it had come.
At night Colonna brought her a little rubber-topped phial of thick, brown stuff. After her light was out she fingered it in the darkness; so small a thing, capable of destruction so incalculable; rendered void long trains of consequence; taking out of the lives of God knew what other unborn creatures an enemy, a lover, a betrayer, a guide.
It looked a big dose. She wondered whether it would hurt much or only make her feel ill.
Outside the window the ward lights smouldered under their red shades. She jumped out of bed and, by craning, managed to see the dim glow from the window where Mic would be. It looked remote and impersonal, like a star. If I could touch him for a minute, for an instant, she thought. Her limbs began to ache and shiver, and she went back to bed. On the way she glimpsed herself in the glass, in her dressing-gown, grasping her potion; it looked like a charade, and made her laugh.
“‘Romeo, Romeo! this do I drink to thee.’” She emptied the phial with a flourish, and almost looked over her shoulder; it seemed incredible that Mic should not be there to share the joke. But she was quite alone. She lay staring at the lights and the darkness outside the window, and waiting for the pain.
V
IVIAN WENT BACK ON
duty four days later, in the afternoon.
Colonna had had to get her a second dose of ergot before it took effect. When it did she felt she would have preferred a few grains of morphia; but it did not keep her temperature up, and if it was rather an early discharge even for simple influenza, the hospital was understaffed and had no margin for times like this.
Mic was making good progress: she wrote to tell him how well she felt.
She walked to the wards, feeling heavy-footed and empty in the head. A transparent but quite impenetrable veil lay between her and everything else, including her own past and future. She accepted the fact that she loved Mic as she accepted the fact that two and two made four; the effect of each statement on her emotions was exactly the same. She would have died for him, if the occasion had arisen, because the willingness to do so was a habit, needing too much energy to break, as it would have needed too much energy to change the parting of her hair.
Her place in Trafalgar had been filled, so they sent her to Verdun. A kind of conditioned reflex pushed her ill-co-ordinated limbs through the routine: like the dissecting-room frog, she thought, continuing to swim with its brain removed. She knew in theory all about post-influenzal depression: in practice it was almost impossible to believe she would not always be like this, perfectly flat and uniformly grey, with the cosmos passing over her like a steamroller.
Sister Verdun sent her out to the kitchen to prepare the ward teas. The table where she had to cut the bread-and-butter was very low; the stooping made her head swim, and pain began to come back, so she found a chair.
“I wonder,” said Sister Verdun, coming in behind her, “what would have been said at
my
training school if Sister had found me trying to do my work sitting down.”
“Yes, Sister,” replied the conditioned reflex. Vivian got mechanically to her feet, and went on cutting and buttering. There was a kind of deadness in her stomach, as if it would have liked to be sick but was too tired; and her head seemed to be evaporating, and growing cold in the process. Between her and the bread-and-butter there had begun to form a very finely-spun black veil, which danced about and grew thicker and thicker. Suddenly it was as if the sickness swallowed her heart; the veil became solid, and at once she was struggling with a dreadful non-being, groping for life like something trying to be born. She opened her eyes and found herself on the kitchen floor, with Sister Verdun dabbing water at her in a kind of aggrieved solicitude.
Next day she was sent for to the office, and told that she might take a week of her annual holiday, starting from tomorrow.
Listlessly, feeling little except a reluctance to be disturbed, she looked up a train to her home. She had no money to go elsewhere, and barely sufficient even for the fare. Their first-year pay was twenty pounds a year. She sometimes wondered what happened to nurses who, like Mic, had no family behind them.
She must write to tell her father she was coming. They would sit, in the evenings, with their books, making conversation occasionally because they felt they ought. Of his two children she took after him more; but the circles of their lives did not meet, even enough to cause friction at the circumference. They respected one another’s minds, and that was all. Perhaps, though she had never put this quite clearly to herself, she had not forgiven him for being the one who received everyone’s pity when Mary Hallows died. That Jan would have rejected pity like prussic acid was beside the issue. She would write, she thought, in the afternoon.
At eleven, she had a note from Mic saying that he was going to be discharged next day, and had been given a week’s sick leave.
There was a queer minute or two of breathlessness, in which she experienced no delight, but simply an agonising disturbance, shocking body and mind, which was all her poisoned nerves could substitute for it. She felt, almost, resentment that joy and sensation should be forced on her incompetence. Presently things settled, and she remembered she had no money. Mic would be lucky if he had enough for his own share. The month had turned and their salaries were due, but that in her case came to about thirty shillings. There was her father: but it offended her to lie to him in order that he might subsidise something of which he would disapprove. As she ticked over all these obstacles, she knew that she would go with Mic in the end. Her tired mind was fixed, with the determination of a donkey that has lain down.
She knew that behind this confidence there must be some resource she had not thought of. Presently it came to her. She gambled a trunk call to Jan’s college, and found that he had left the Lodge his last address. It was a possibility that had not occurred to her before; they were not in the habit of writing to one another about anything that would not wait. She wrote at once. It was quite likely that he might have some money, if he had not given it all away lately, or left his cheque-book with his washing in the last place but one.
She never knew what to say to Jan. His own letters—three or four a year, on her birthday or when he was abroad—had a virtuosity that paralysed her style: they delighted her, but reduced her to the inferiority of the schoolroom. It was of little consequence, as Jan, given the facts, supplied the marginalia for himself. So her explanation now was very untrimmed (“We’ve been living together, technically, since June, but this is the first chance we’ve had to do it actually, so it would be fun if we could”) and ended in a postscript dictated by family tradition and knowledge of Jan: “Don’t if it leaves you with less than two pounds five, as I have that much myself.”
Jan replied next day, by express letter, apologising. He did nothing by halves, and, when he apologised, lay down, strapped himself to the altar-stone, and handed you the knife. That she should have wanted something that he could supply, and been doubtful how to come by it, seemed to have upset him. He sent her twenty pounds (she had asked for five) and his love to Mic. She kept all the money, knowing that he would merely be irritated if she tried to return any. It was useless to speculate on what he had left; if it was less than his fare to Cambridge, he would be certain to enjoy the walk.
It would have been helpful to discuss plans with Mic, but it was unlikely that Sister Ramillies would let her in: and if she did, they might as well advertise themselves on the front page of the
Daily Mail.
She knew he would not want or expect it. There was a little inn on the far side of the Downs, where they had had meals sometimes. She booked a room there for a week, and wrote to Mic to explain. To call for him when he left the hospital would be most dangerous of all, so she arranged that they should meet at the flat.
Everything was as it had been left when Mic was taken away: the bed open, a glass of milk turned sour beside it. It was strange to see dust. He must have kept the woman away for fear of infection. She put things to rights, rather laboriously and with pauses to rest. When it was finished she waited, her spirits suddenly sagging: she felt unequal to the moment of meeting, and turned away from the sight of her own pale face and lifeless hair in the glass.
At last she heard a taxi stop and the downstairs door open. She had forgotten that there were so many stairs, because in the ordinary way they both took them two or three at a time. Half-way up his light careful step stopped altogether. Vivian flung open the upper door and came out on the landing. Mic, who was standing with his hand on the wall, saw her, ran the rest of the way, began to kiss her, and stopped to gasp for breath.
“Oh, Mic, you fool! How
could
you be such an ass!” It was not what she had arranged to say. She held him tightly and felt the sharpening of his shoulders through his clothes. His eyes looked bigger than she remembered them.
“Sorry,” he said. But it only seemed to amuse him a little. “Let’s go and sit down.” He led her in with an arm round her waist and curled up beside her on the bed. His lack of self-consciousness about his own weakness seemed to blow her fretful anticipations away. Her plans and determinations slipped from her; she was no longer in charge. As they kissed again, more efficiently this time, she thought how easy his honesty made it to underestimate his strength.
“You’re not listening,” he told her.
“Of course I was.” But she had been listening to his voice, not to what he said.
“They had no business to make you take your holiday as sick leave.”
“I suppose not. But I’m glad I’ve got it, aren’t you?”
“I’ve been telling you I’m glad for the last five minutes.” His calm continued to surprise her: she had seen him so often in a state of resistance: she had not guessed that this capacity for acceptance could exist behind his rebellions. Perhaps the line between the inevitable and the assailable was more clearly drawn in his mind than in hers. He made no fuss when she confessed to having borrowed from Jan.
“No,” he said in answer to her question. “I don’t suppose I would have. But you felt it was all right, and—anyhow it’s done. So let’s enjoy it.”