Authors: Mary Renault
“Oh, bad luck.”
“Silly of him to ring me up on the ward.”
“She might have told you he did, though.”
“Yes,” said Vivian without excitement. She had long ago realised that any personal life had to be lived in the hospital’s teeth, and continual protest made the effort more tiring.
“Is there anything you want to know, Nurse Lingard?” Sister had come in from the linen room. “If there’s anything about the patients’ diets you don’t understand, ask me, not a second-year nurse.”
Extra beds told most on the probationers, whose routine included every patient while the seniors’ treatments did not; but somehow, always by the skin of their teeth, they got it through nearly to time. When, sticky and aching, Vivian got down to tea at a quarter to six, she found a note in her pigeonhole.
“I’m sorry I rang you up,” Jan wrote. “And I’m afraid you are too by now. I’ll be with Mic at 20a High Street all day, painting floors, if you can get out. If you’re not there in the afternoon I’ll expect you at half-past five.” Vivian looked at the clock, shrugged her shoulders, and finished her cup of tea.
“Doing anything? “Kimball, ignoring a table occupied by members of her own year, slipped in beside her.
“My brother wants me to go round this evening.”
“Oh. Well, I’m glad you won’t miss him. What is he, by the way?”
“A geodesist.”
The nurse on the other side of Vivian said, “What religion’s that?”
“It’s a science,” Vivian explained. “Measuring the specific gravity of minerals under the earth’s surface.” To Colonna she remarked, “I don’t know quite why he chose it, there are two or three other things he might have done. I think because it takes him to the back of beyond, and he can stay there indefinitely getting the instrument repaired. It always breaks down in the good places because of rough transport.”
“Is he much like you?”
“He’s supposed to be.”
“He must be an unusual young man.” Kimball went over to make toast.
Except that her feet hurt her, Vivian felt less tired walking through the town than beforehand, sitting on her bed trying to collect the energy for unstrapping and unpinning and unhooking her uniform. (It was the stockings, though, that for some reason always seemed the last straw.) Now, in a brilliant March night, fine after rain, the stars were hanging low with a liquid glitter. The wind, like a clear astringent water, washed her mind coat by coat from the accumulated grime of small discomforts and fatigues and indignations. She no longer felt, as she had felt once or twice in the day, incapable of meeting Jan.
Number 20a, was a first floor flat over a draper’s shop with its own faded green front door. She knocked, heard nothing, and knocked again.
A voice, not Jan’s, said, “Push it, my dear, it isn’t locked.”
Vivian opened it, and went up some bare wooden stairs. At the top, in an open doorway, a young man was crawling about with a tin of floor-stain and a brush, shifting a piece of sacking under his knees. He straightened, rubbing his lumbar spine, and she saw that he was just about middle height, lightly made, and not in any way remarkable; he had one of those pleasant, thin, non-committal faces which might belong to half a dozen kinds of personality, and about which one unconsciously reserves judgement till one has seen the person smile or speak. The most definite thing about him was the darkness of his soft untidy hair and of his eyes, which, because their lashes were so thick and long, would have looked thoughtful whatever was going on behind them.
“I’m sorry,” he said composedly. “I thought you were Jan. You’re his sister, of course.” His brown eyes were still and direct on her face, but he did not seem to stare; it was a reticent regard, curiously free from masculine challenge or assessment. Before she had time to say anything, he remarked, “You’re very unlike him, really, aren’t you? But of course, I see what he meant. Do come in. I’ve left some islands leading to the window-seat, if you wouldn’t mind walking on them.”
Vivian thanked him, and picked her way by the light of a naked electric bulb.
“You’re Mic,” she said, “aren’t you? I’m afraid that’s the only part I know.”
“Well it’s all you’ll need.” He might as easily have been discussing the varnish. “But Freeborn’s the rest.”
“Is Jan anywhere about?” The flat looked very small and gave forth no sound but their own.
“He went to meet you. I knew he’d miss, of course, but he had repressed claustrophobia of long standing so it seemed unkind to tell him so. These places do look small when they’re empty. Have a cigarette.” He looked at his hands. “That is, if you wouldn’t mind taking them out of my pocket. This side. I’m sorry; I really will wash.”
“No, don’t. It will dry patchy if you stop.” But he wiped his hands on the sacking apron and disappeared. When he came back the dark patches shone up brilliantly against a background of pink.
“Success very modified,” he apologised. “It reminds me of something. A rather clean pig?”
“No, I think a fox-terrier’s stomach. It’s the same kind of markings. Jan will have waited at the wrong door, of course. There are four.”
“I told him which was the nurses’.”
“I used the main entrance, so that explains it.” She wondered which nurse he was in the habit of waiting for; hearing, with a sudden flat of irritation, the voice of fat Collins saying, “Ever so nice. What I call a thoughtful boy. You should see the books he reads”; and wondered how long Jan would be.
“You see,” he said, “I’ve had to find my way about a good deal in the last few days, for interviews and so on. I start on Monday.”
“Do you?” What could he be doing? None of the housemen were due to leave. She had the impression that he had known about her first assumption and preferred to remove it.
“What’s your job then? Are you a doctor?” It was nearly impossible to know one of the housemen without becoming involved in every kind of silliness and embarrassment, and she had no conviction that in this case it would be worth the fuss.
“No. A pathologist. Or rather, a pathological assistant, here.” He spoke with the uninviting flatness of one who dislikes a subject and is determined to run it out as soon as possible.
“How exciting,” she said vaguely. She had never got nearer to the Pathological Laboratory than leaving a decently-draped specimen-glass outside the door.
He gave her a quick expressionless look from under his thick lashes. “It’s convenient, at the moment,” he said. His tone not only closed the subject, it sat on the lid.
Vivian thought, This is worse than Alan: I wish Jan would come. She turned in the window, and looked out. It was uncurtained, and a street-lamp glared on a level with her eyes.
As she moved, it seemed to her that he gave a little start followed by stillness, as if he were staring at something he had just seen. She would have turned back to the room, but suddenly felt this fixity to be directed to herself, and stayed where she was.
“It isn’t particularly exciting, really.” He was speaking quite differently, with a cool naturalness that seemed, somehow, to have been startled out of him. “You spend most of the time, I gather, doing about half a dozen simple routine tests. I intended of course to do research, as one does.”
“Really,” said Vivian as non-committally as she could. The flat spoke for itself; even in this early bareness, it was beginning to take on the mannerisms of educated poverty—the streaky stained floor, whose string rugs were already present to her mind’s eye; the amateurish paintwork, in cheeky but successful colour combinations; the aura of half-dry distemper from the walls; a little oil-stove in a corner giving out more smell than warmth. She could imagine Jan (who would stay indefinitely anywhere where the roof did not leak nor the food give him ptomaine poisoning) helping with it unseriously, as he would have helped a child to play trains; and felt a sudden ill-defined resentment against him.
It took her a moment to think her way back again.
“What kind of research?”
“Cancer, chiefly, I think.”
It happened that Vivian, on the strength of her negligible experience, had acquired a bee in her bonnet about cancer. She thought the cause was psychological, and told him so.
Mic laughed. His laugh was something of a shock; brief and brilliant and quite transforming. He had a trick of laughing not, like other people, to himself, but straight into your eyes, which from the midst of so much guardedness was both attractive and disconcerting. It necessitated, for Vivian, some readjustments.
With something between a stretch and a spring he got from his sacking mat to the window-seat, and curled up on some book-boxes beside her. From this vantage he looked at her reflectively and suddenly laughed again, to himself this time.
“Well?” she asked.
“Nothing. Only the weirdness of your likeness to Jan.”
“I thought you said we weren’t.”
“It’s just sometimes. Things you say and look wipe it out completely. But when you turned round to the window just now, for instance, it might have been Jan in the room. It’s grotesque.”
“Is it?”
“Don’t be cross. It’s hard to express.”
“I’m not of course.”
“But it’s. … Do you know that
conte
of Gautier’s about a man who took possession of another man’s body for purposes of his own?”
“No.”
“Anyway, its rather like that. You can’t both be right; one of you must have cheated, and I don’t know which, but I think it’s you. One feels you’ve got no right to go about the world casually stripping Jan of his aggressive detachment.”
“Aggressive,” said Vivian half to herself, turning it over.
“I’m sorry,” he said abruptly. “That was a purely personal reaction, and I think not true.”
“It’s all right. I was just interested. In any case, you probably know him better than I do.” She said this not because she believed it to be true, but because now that she had got under his guard she found that she had not wanted to. “Relatives are the last people, as a rule.”
“Relative is not a term that suits you, somehow,” he said.
Vivian did not know the right answer to this, if there was one; so she peered into the open part of the book-box and said, “What are all these?”
“I don’t know. Shop in that one, and God-knows-what in this.” He moved himself to the edge of the box to let her explore. It was an odd jumble, she thought, for a scientist; Froissart, Baudelaire, Lawrence (both T.E. and D.H.), Morgan and Huxley, the
Chanson de Roland
and
Don Juan.
She found herself with the Hamilton
Memoirs
in one hand and the
Symposium
in the other, and laughed.
“House-moving makes strange bedfellows,” said Mic.
“Compared with the Restoration people,” said Vivian idly, “how full of purpose the Greeks were, even in their sins. Nothing, however intrinsically pleasant, without a reason, even though they each had to find a different one.” She stopped because, though she had been looking at the book in her hand, she had been sure that Mic’s eyes, under their unnecessary lashes, had slanted round at her. But he was searching for something in the packing-case. She went on, rather more quickly, “There wasn’t a soul in the
Symposium
who could have sat through an evening with De Gramont except possibly Alcibiades, and he’d have been yawning long before the end.”
“Yes,” said Mic. “I suppose so.” But his attention seemed to have wandered. Vivian looked up and saw Jan, smiling, in the open door. She wondered that she had not heard him on the carpetless stairs.
“Don’t stop,” he said. She noticed that he had remembered to put one foot on the unvarnished place, and then unconsciously shifted his weight on to the other, which was planted firmly on a wet board. “Which of you was wanting an evening with Alcibiades?”
“Neither of us,” said Mic, uncurling himself, “very much. We were just remarking that Socrates had the right idea. Look where you’re walking, blast you.”
“Sorry,” said Jan.
V
IVIAN RAISED THE BATHROOM
window carefully, listening for footsteps in the passage beyond. The night air had been crystal clear, and the waves of steam and bath-salts and human wetness felt like folds of blanket in the darkness. She took off her outdoor things and hung them over the rail, meaning to come back for them later. Merely to be out of one’s room after ten was a minor crime compared with being out of doors. She had just finished when a handful of warm water struck her face.
She looked round. A strip of moonlight, shafted with wreathing steam, fell on a corner of the bath, to which it gave an unreal metallic whiteness. Against this she now perceived what seemed curves of a darker metal. Someone was laughing in the surrounding gloom.
“Enjoyed yourself?” whispered Colonna Kimball.
“I’m terribly sorry.”
“It was funny. I watched you outside deciding which—ssh!”
In the passage sounded the loud tread of legitimate feet, a tapping on doors and the click of electric switches; the Night Sister, putting out lights. The noise came nearer, rebounding from the narrow thin walls of the passage.
“Who’s that in the bathroom?”
A wet hand gripped Vivian’s wrist.
“Who’s there?”
Colonna had drawn breath when a dutiful voice from the next bathroom said, “Nurse Price, Sister. I’ve got late leave.” The feet went hollowly on.
“Had fun?” said Colonna. She had one hand behind her head, and floated herself on the other elbow.
“Lovely.” Vivian rested a knee on the edge of the bath. Her escape did not impress her much. She was still in a mood not contained within the hospital frame, and did not reflect that a second-year, having a bath in the dark after hours, had caught her climbing in at a window. The gloom of the place had thinned to her dark-accustomed eyes, and the lightly-muscled shape blurred with shadows of water pleased her as coolly as the birch outside. She had never seen Colonna before out of her obliterating uniform. Her hair was fair and thickly curling and cut like a Greek’s.
“A penny?” Her voice floated with the steam in the moonlight, vague and faintly warm.
The most relevant answer Vivian could fish up was, “My brother’s brought me a dancing faun.”