Authors: Mary Renault
Vivian, if none of the patients needed her, would go into the sluice or clinical room to clean the bedpans or testing things. The work, carried on in quiet and alone, seemed different from the daytime scurry even when, on a busy night, the haste was greater. Perhaps because the air was freer from the tangle of other people’s aims and anxieties, her mind felt enlarged and curiously liberated; she was conscious of this even when she was very tired, finding that with much less volition behind them her thoughts travelled more lightly.
The nurses had their midnight meal in two shifts, the seniors going first, so that from twelve to half-past she watched the ward alone. Sometimes she was running errands all through the time, and sometimes had to stand beside the bed of a man who was light-headed or about to die. She would look into the face and listen to the broken life-sounds or wandering speech, feeling, with an awareness impossible in the day, a sense of some permanence behind the ungeared mechanism; that while she tended the body which slumped lower into the filth and squalor of disintegration, an impersonal essence, freeing itself slowly as her own in this stillness was half-freed, shared with her a secret silence.
Her senior was Rodd, the auburn staff-nurse from Trafalgar. She was easy to work for, capable and direct and able to relax when there was no need for strain. Sometimes when there were several bad cases at once, or emergencies came in and had to be got ready for the theatre at a moment’s notice, she would become furiously over-wrought and curse Vivian viciously over anything or nothing; but there was a kind of tacit understanding between them that this was to be forgotten as soon as the crisis was over. She was engaged to a warehouse clerk, showed Vivian endless snapshots of his broad, kindly, grinning face, and spent every free minute making her trousseau, which was of the most exotic femininity and had to be kept bunched discreetly in her lap in case any of the patients should be awake. Vivian made her tea and coffee, listened and agreed and admired, feeling her own thoughts move in and out of Rodd’s with a curious lack of obstruction, like ghosts through a wall.
If the work were slack they might get several rests in the two or three hours after the midnight round; during a heavy taking-in week they might be working at racing speed for the whole of the night. They made their own tea on the ward, when and if they had the time.
Their fewness, their responsibilities, their freedom from the presence of the Sisters, perhaps the continual necessity for whispering, created a conspiratorial intimacy among the night staff which was impossible during the day. Everyone knew, after the midnight meal, what had happened in all the other wards, and felt a personal concern in it. The hospital seemed to grow, in the night, at the same time larger, more closely a whole, and more visibly dependent on them. It made for solemnity, and for a tacit consciousness of power.
There were times when Vivian felt caught into this life as if into an enchantment, seeing the normal world at the distance of a week-old dream. Once in the early morning when she and Rodd had been silent, in weariness or their own thoughts, for a long while, Rodd suddenly whispered, “It’s quiet tonight. It reminds me, somehow; I was on night duty the night the old King was dying. The wind kept blowing all the time, and everything else was as quiet as quiet. I was sitting up at the desk alone, and suddenly the ward looked different, as if it wasn’t the shape it really is, but open like a great high passage somehow. The big doors at the end were standing wide apart, perhaps that was why. But it was queer, everything seemed drawn up on either side, sort of waiting. And then the wind stopped. Just like that, cut off in the middle, not a sound. I always remember that. I’m not one to have fancies, as a rule.”
But the next night, when she was cleaning the test-tubes in the clinical room, suddenly it all ceased to exist. The snapping of the spell was so sudden, so independent of her own thought, that she knew at once what was happening and, with the glass and polishing-cloth in her hand, went over to the window as if that would help. A street-lamp shone outside, and a distant car whined. She knew that that was the real world; it was not the beginning of night, but the end of day, half-past eleven or so; the crowds from the cinemas had gone home, the streets were emptying, lights snapping out in ground-floor windows; and Mic wanted her.
She knew the mood he would be in, his worst and his rarest now; when he despaired of himself, his work and his future and despised himself, in a silence harder to cope with than anything he could have said, for ever having allowed himself to take her. She had never learned what to say to him at these times; there was no need any more. He was alone, trying to read perhaps, or lying in the dark staring upwards, with his arm behind his head. The ward was quiet tonight, Rodd sewing and drowsing at the table, none of the patients dangerously ill. Only half an hour, she thought, looking at the mist of her breath on the window; I could have him asleep in half an hour.
The telephone rang in the passage outside. She took the receiver down.
“Malplaquet ward speaking.” (Mic, I’d be there if I could. I love you. Don’t any more.)
“This is Casualty. We are sending you now a case of strangulated hernia for immediate operation.”
“Yes, Nurse.” (Oh, my dearest, go to sleep.)
She lit the gas under the steriliser on her way up the ward. He so seldom needed her now like this, absolutely; she might never again, perhaps, be asked to work this miracle which she would not be there to work tonight.
“A strangulated hernia,” she told Rodd. “For the theatre at once.”
“Damnation, it would be. I did want to finish these cami-knicks tonight. Better have him in the end bed. Put the steriliser on as you go.”
“I have. The bowls are in.”
“Good kid.”
The patient came in on the trolley, an old man, childish in his wits, too ill to feel fear or much pain. She got the theatre things and helped Rodd to paint his withered body with iodine, while his rheumy eyes blinked at them vacantly from the pillow; and in his place she kept seeing Mic as she had seen him once, his head on her arm, looking up at her as if she had rolled away the stone from his sepulchre.
(“Stay with me, Vivian.”
“Always, always.”)
“Better let me have those teeth of yours, Daddy,” said Rodd. “Never do to swallow them.
That’s
right.”
Then there was the theatre, with little Rosenbaum, the house surgeon on call that night, in high spirits, saying things he hoped would embarrass the nurses, and looking interestedly at the eye-spaces of their masks to see. She had been thinking of Mic, not listening, and when his little black eyes darted into her face she felt naked, and hardened into hostility before she knew it. He looked away, and asked the night-assistant rather brusquely for something that was already there.
In the early morning, a little before it was time to wake the patients and rush at the routine, she went out to look at the men on the balcony, and saw the day beginning to break. The air and the sky were still; there was no colour yet on the earth, but the trees were darkening against the east. Over them the morning star hung, low in the curve of space, seeming nearer than the almost imperceptible dawn; huge and liquid, faintly trembling like a cup too full of light held in a hand. The six men behind her in their iron beds were silently asleep. She knew that Mic too was sleeping. Her solitude was not crossed by any movement of thought or desire. A faint, clear greenish-gold began to lift into the sky from behind the trees; and in the emptiness a bar of cloud, too fine to be visible before, glowed suddenly with the fervency of blown fire.
She thought: This is how all life should be accepted, in desireless wonder, reaching out for nothing and thrusting nothing away, rejoicing in the different essence of each moment as it blazes into the present from the folded future. But she was under no illusions; for a life of such moments one needed a heart without roots, a spirit free in the wind, and empty hands. Once she had had them. She would never know them again. She had committed too much to earth.
I
T GAVE THE HOURS
of morning a curious difference, to have arrived at them not by the process of waking, but by living through the night. The patterns of weather were not the same if one had watched the day from the earliest dawn: it was strange, too, when the life around was accelerating, to feel oneself running down. Bone-weariness and the longing for sleep were so incongruous as not to appear, sometimes, for what they were; they disguised themselves in other forms, melancholy, irritability, or a cutting-off from all experience, so that one moved like a shadow in an unreal world.
But the waking for an evening off-duty time was stranger still; to dress and wander out, still drugged and heavy with sleep, into the late sunlight, to meet Mic and struggle to match the developed thoughts and emotions of his evening with her drowsy break of day. It was difficult for them both, at first. That they adjusted in the end was an achievement that was principally his. With a perception that was purely imaginative, since it was quite outside his own experience, he entered somehow into her vague and dreamlike state, understood her complete inadequacy to violent passion of body and of mind, and conducted things with a quiet which she had never expected, or, indeed, desired of him before.
“Don’t you mind, Mic? We have so little now, and when I am here all I do is lie and purr like a cat in front of the fire.”
“A nice one to stroke, though. No, I only hate for you to be so tired. Sometimes I think you’re good for me like this. Peaceful, and stabilising. Something like—” he hesitated, then quoted, haltingly like something half-forgotten:
“‘O, Shadow, in a sultry land,
We gather to thy breast,
Whose love—’”
“Darling. That’s a hymn.”
“Is it? Will the devil come for me? What a child you are sometimes.
‘Whose love, enfolding us like night,
Brings quietude and rest.’
Enfolding us like a night.” He relaxed beside her with a little sigh. “If I want you differently, it’s generally when you’re not there.”
Vivian nodded. She too sometimes, when it could do no good, lived at another tempo from this.
“And you’re rather often not there, now.”
“I’ll stay longer on Sunday. What have you been doing?”
“What does it matter?
‘From all our wanderings we come,
From drifting to and fro—’
Lampeter says Scot-Hallard takes up too much of my time. He wants me for some stunt of his own. They’ve been fighting for my carcass all day. I feel like the dead Patroclus when everyone was bestriding him. Never mind them.
‘The grander sweep of tides serene
Our spirits yearn to know.’”
But it was not always, after all, as simple as that.
As the weeks went on she became aware that these changed conditions of living were speeding up a process in their relationship, or, perhaps, simulating a process she had feared: the result was the same. Mic was accepting, quietly, naturally, and inevitably, the responsibility for both of them, and she was consenting more and more that it should be so. He was developing at a speed that frightened her, she felt so unable to match it with any progress of her own. The shock of the lake seemed to have jolted something out of his system: it had been his last capitulation. He helped her, now, through every phase of their companionship, supporting her with his vitality instead of tossing it like a challenge to hers. While she was with him, she seemed to live, to be a person and a force: but after she had left him she would wonder whether she had done anything but give back to him, a little warmed and coloured by her love, the reflection of himself.
It was the morning work, after the anxieties and tensions of the night, that really drained one; the waking and washing and breakfasting of the patients, and running about with screens, all against the clock. It was a strict rule of the hospital that the patients were not to be wakened before six: it looked well in the reports, helped the reputation of the place for progress and reform, and would have been pleasant for the patient too if to carry it out, without increase of staff, had been mechanically possible. When things were very slack it could sometimes be done; otherwise—and it was usually otherwise—the successful night-nurse, liked by authority, was the one who smuggled as many of the washings and treatments as possible into the hours between four and six without being found out. To leave any of the night-nurses’ routine for the day staff was unthinkable. They confined their attentions, as far as they could, to patients who were sleepless in any case; but their quietest movements were likely to disturb the others, and there was always the risk of the Night Sister making an early round. If she did, her alternatives were to give them a severe reprimand or confess that the hospital programme was unworkable; so her choice did not admit of much doubt. The net result was a certain amount of added strain, at the time when they could best have done without it.
Sometimes after a heavy night, when she went through the hospital passages to drag herself a mile or two in the open air (she reckoned that, at the rate of three miles an hour, she had already walked more than thirty in the ward) she would long to see Mic without being seen; the effort to carry on anything beyond mere existence seemed too much. It only happened once: he was going up the stairs that led to the laboratories, in a hurry, carrying part of the apparatus for a metabolism test in his hand. Little Rosenbaum, who was just below, looked up and spoke to him, and Mic, leaning out over the rail, answered something with that momentary laugh of his, sharp and vivid like a blade flicked into the light and quickly sheathed again. Then he was gone round the bend of the stairs; they were too far for her to hear what they said. She walked out into the clear autumn sunlight, which felt hostile to her tired eyes, realising that it had made her more, instead of less, empty and forlorn. He had looked so impossibly, unattainably alive; so full of concerns; so sufficient to things without her.