Authors: Mary Renault
When she met him, a couple of evenings later, he remarked in the course of amusing her with some gossip or other, “But of course, as Rosenbaum, I think it was, said the other evening—”
She looked up quickly. “You don’t go out with Rosenbaum, do you?”
“No. More often I look in on him in the common-room, when he’s on call. Anyhow, he says—”
“But, Mic, do you
like
him?”
Taking a moment to slant his mind round this unforeseen obstruction, Mic considered.
“Well, I enjoy his company. I suppose it amounts to much the same thing.” He saw her face and added, “You don’t think a lot of him, I expect? I can imagine he isn’t at his best in female society.”
“He’s just squalid.”
“Not really. He was awfully good when I was ill: used to lend me books and come and talk to me in his spare time, and he hasn’t much. He’s extraordinarily interesting about music, too; been everywhere and heard everybody and has rather original ideas.”
“He would have.” She hated herself but could not stop. She loved music too, but knew her own response to be the simple emotional one of the untrained: she could only express it to him in visual images and other fancies.
“He goes out with fat Collins,” she said.
“Yes, I expect he would. Well, he doesn’t take me along.” Mic looked at her thoughtfully, shifted the cushion behind her head and lit her a cigarette. “Sex in the abstract, of course, sometimes. He’s full of esoteric doctrine about it. He doesn’t give me the benefit of it very often, though, because I laugh in the wrong places. He puts it down to the psychically sterilising effect of my scientific training.” He leaned over and kissed her.
His touch seemed, for a moment, to melt away the shell of possessive fear that was closing her in; but he let her go too quickly, handling her lightly because she seemed unequal to life today.
“All the same,” she said, “if you saw me out with him you wouldn’t be particularly pleased.”
“Of course I shouldn’t.” The patience in Mic’s voice was becoming ever so little tired. “Because, Rosenbaum being what he is, the relationship would be entirely different.”
“Would it?”
Silence. She held her breath. She must have been mad. What was he going to say to her? She would take it. Anything that would persuade him to forgive her, if anything would. She looked, hardly daring, at his face.
His expression was purely puzzled, as if he were making up his mind whether her tongue had slipped or his hearing deceived him. Just as she felt she could not bear it for an instant longer, he threw up his head and laughed. She could not believe it. He was not mocking her, even laughing at her. His sense of humour had simply been tickled. His face was like a naughty boy’s, full of improper delight.
Was he never going to stop? She sat looking at him, thinking as if he were a stranger what an attractive laugh he had, and feeling afraid.
He seemed, when he sobered down a little, faintly surprised not to find her laughing too.
“Darling,” he said shakily, “you did mean that to be funny, didn’t you? Because it is, terribly.”
Vivian passed her hand across her eyes.
“Yes, of course I did. Don’t take any notice of me, my mind’s curdled, I think. Mic, I love you.”
Mic slid an arm under her and looked into her face, raising one eyebrow a little.
“Yes. Kiss me. It’s all I’m good for, anyway.”
“That’s too funny to laugh at.”
But she could feel, in the movement with which he took her into his arms, a gesture of relief, as if he were glad to be done with words.
The next thing he said was, “Look at the time.”
Already? She followed his eyes. Yes, there was not a minute, she would be late for breakfast in any case. Though it was the shock of self-discovery that had wakened her with the brutality of a cold plunge, still she was awake and they had been, for the moment, happy. He had answered her brief spark with a flash of his own that had reminded her how foreign to him all these dim smoulderings really were. They had been, for a little while, themselves, and had just been settling into a warm untroubled certainty of one another, something the strength of which would have carried her through the desert stretch ahead. But, as usual, it was time to go. They had had only two hours.
“Oh, Mic, I wish I could stay.”
“I wish you could stay for good.”
She hid her face on his shoulder, tempted almost beyond her power. Without words, with a look, a movement, she could consent. Until he had more to offer, he would never ask her more plainly than he was asking her now. She shut her eyes, surrendering for a moment to the thought of it. No. If she had lost confidence and strength she had less right than ever to saddle him with her dependence. In her inmost heart she knew, too, that she was afraid of losing herself more wholly than she was already lost.
She said, “It won’t be long.”
“No.” There was a shadow of weariness in his voice. “I suppose not.”
“I must go,” she said. But she could not force herself to leave him. The thought of unclasping her hands made her cold with sudden fear. She said, not knowing how or why the words were coming.
“Mic, whatever I do, whatever happens, I love you, I’ll always love you, I can never love anyone as I love you, one can’t again. You believe me. Say you do.”
“Believe you?” he said wonderingly. He tilted her head back to see her face. “I wish you were off this blasted night duty. You wouldn’t suddenly ask the Pope if he believed in St. Peter. Or he’d be surprised if you did.”
“Are you surprised?”
“Very. Look, you’re going to be just incredibly late. Put your things on and I’ll run ahead and get out the car.”
The night that followed happened to be a quiet one, and she had plenty of time—too long—to think.
Mic was growing up. It was a process so rapid that it could be watched, like the growth of a retarded plant suddenly given a necessary salt. Probably, she thought, his air of diffidence had always been superficial, a trick of manner largely, and the remains of a lack of social security. At school he had been alone a good deal because he could not discuss his people or ask other boys to stay; and at Cambridge, where that need not have mattered, want of money had produced much the same effect. Now, by imperceptible degrees, even the manner was disappearing. He talked about his work with a confidence that verged often on authority; the resident staff, the physicians first and now the surgeons, had begun to notice him and treated him as one of themselves, a thing not usual in his position. The fact that, in view of this and the special work he was often given, he had not quarrelled with the rest of the laboratory staff—though she gathered that there were occasional tensions—argued the use of more than average tact.
She relied on him more and more. The lassitude and continual sub-tone of her present life had destroyed her initiative, and in all their encounters now he managed her, not assuming any dominance but taking for granted that she would wish it; as indeed, when it came to the point she did. It occurred to her that once she would not have left it to him, as she had left it today, to keep an eye on the time. Nor would he have remembered if she had. It was a straw, but a significant one.
If she could have discussed things with persons of greater sophistication they would, she supposed, have laughed at her. These, they would say, were the excellent results of a satisfactory love-affair, and she ought to welcome them. After their uncertain oscillations, Mic was taking up at last his natural inheritance, and she had better make up her mind to hers. But she could not. She could neither reconcile herself to a passive destiny, nor feel her essential being at the mercy of someone else without the sense of sin, and of having given away what should not be given. She recognised Jan’s dread of captivity; but she lacked his ruthlessness in self-preservation. Sometimes she envied it.
Her first experience of jealousy had been grotesquely trivial; but it had showed, like a peep-show, what one could become, self-locked, demanding, afraid.
He would weary of her. She brought it into the open for the first time, and looked at it in the grey early light. It might please him to be leaned on for a little while; but he had loved Jan. He had always loved panache, rivalry, an upright carriage of the spirit, a mind that struck sparks from his own, the passion of equals. In honour of these, and still in the faith of them, he treated her now with this unfailing kindness. But he would waken some clear day or other and find that there was only kindness left.
For the rest of the week, as if there were spurs at her back, she flung herself at life; reading the most exacting books she could find; swimming one morning though it was much too cold; doing anything that occurred to her, from moment to moment, to give her mind an existence of its own and stab it awake.
On one of these days she received, from an old friend of her mother’s whom she had not known to be living in the county, an invitation to lunch. She should, of course, have refused it out of hand. She could not possibly get back for bed less than three hours late: an insane risk, and one that she would pay for the next night even if she ran it successfully. But she remembered from her childhood Celia Grey’s feckless charm, and the circle of bright kaleidoscopic movement that surrounded her. The excursion would be something new, something of her own, something to talk about to Mic on Sunday. She accepted.
When the morning came she wondered whether, after all, it would be worth it, and felt fairly sure that it would not. But she put on her most presentable things, did what she could with her face, and took six grains of caffeine citrate to keep her eyes open.
The place was on a country bus route, and she reached it without trouble. The house was typical of Celia: old and dramatically picturesque, filled with expensive modern fitments, and screaming everywhere for the simplest repairs. The rooms were furnished with a groundwork of homogeneous good taste, overlaid by secondary and tertiary deposits of foreign souvenirs, gala-night presentations and mementoes from old stage sets and dismantled theatres. On the walls of the drawing-room, half a dozen fine Japanese prints, spaced at austere intervals, were jostled by a breathless scrum of photographs, all of them very large, very romantic, and scrawled with very loving dedications.
The place, in the way of places that contained Celia, was full of people. Celia herself was circulating among them like a fork among the ingredients of a
soufflé.
She had altered very little in the years since Vivian had seen her, except that she had had her black grey-streaked hair bleached perfectly white, which suited her. Her steel-sprung figure had set into angles here and there, her mouth had dried a little.
“Well, Vivian, my
darling
child, to think you could come. I was so afraid the Matron wouldn’t let you. Some of them are such
peculiar
women. I suppose it’s the
lives,
they lead, poor dears. So here you are and how
lovely
you’re looking.” (This, with Celia, was the equivalent of “How do you do,” and Vivian accepted it as such.) “And
how
like Mary. I remember her looking just like that when she played my daughter in
Mrs. Warren,
the first time we played together. Before you were born, Conrad.”(This over her shoulder to a satellite young man, fair and handsome but moody-looking, who might equally well have been a lover, a nephew, or one of Celia’s innumerable protégés.) “But, my dear, to
think
of a child of Mary’s being a
nurse.
But the
rules
and everything and the operations and the
smells.
Donald—has Donald come yet, Conrad? Oh, yes,
there
he is—says they get not to notice it, but when Jan told me—I ran into him in Cornwall a week or two ago and he’s even more like Mary than you are, he smiles like Mary, come-hither-but-not-too-hither,
you
know. Why don’t you get him married, he simply ought not to be loose. Be
quiet,
Conrad, really I can’t cope with you today, you
know
I meant at large, wandering round, that sort of loose. Who’s that driving up, it’s
never
Charles. Conrad, it
is,
whatever shall we do about Angela? And here’s lunch ready. Go and
meet
him, Conrad, and
keep
him a minute. Now where shall we put Vivian? Let’s see, there’s Donald without anyone. Donald, dear, you and Vivian will look after each other, won’t you? Mary Hallows’s daughter; but of course, you probably—oh, Angela, darling, I was looking for you. Come here just a minute …”
Vivian was left confronting Scot-Hallard, the surgeon, and wondering how much he enjoyed being presented as Donald to someone who, if unusual circumstances gave her the privilege of addressing him at all, would ordinarily have called him Sir.
He seemed, as they settled down to the meal, to be taking it very easily. One might even have supposed him to be pleased. It was only when he told her he would have recognised the likeness anywhere, that she realised he supposed himself to be meeting her for the first time.
Vivian was enormously amused. It was, after all, natural enough. She had never been near him except in the theatre, where she was shrouded like a member of the Ku-Klux-Klan. When the Honoraries made their rounds in the wards the function of the probationers was like that of St. John the Baptist, to make straight the way and then to disappear.
He had been, he told her, a fervent first-nighter of her mother’s all through his student days. He was, after all, the youngest of the honorary staff, probably not past the middle forties.
Stimulated by caffeine, sherry, the aura of Celia and the humour of the situation, Vivian felt herself in increasingly good form. More potent than caffeine was the fact, soon evident, that Scot-Hallard was putting himself at some pains to make an impression. He sent out, from time to time, delicate feelers to ascertain if she was on the stage, and whether she lived in London or in the neighbourhood. Vivian evaded them with equal delicacy, thinking what a good story this would be for Mic.
Her attention wandered for a moment to a snatch of conversation from farther down the table, which revealed the unclassifiable Conrad to be Celia’s second husband. When she had recovered a little, and reconsidered them both in the light of it, she became aware that Scot-Hallard was asking her to dine and dance with him.