Authors: Mary Renault
“I shouldn’t wonder. I hardly could feel worse.”
Out of a cold solitude Vivian looked up at the unknown young man with whom Mic, departing, had left her. It was terrible that he should be so like Mic. She must not let him see she was afraid.
“In that case it would be almost more convenient if I slept at the hospital, wouldn’t it?”
“If you prefer that. Did you enjoy yourself?”
Vivian’s self-control gave away.
“For the love of heaven, Mic, make any kind of scene you like except this kind. I ought to have told you I was going: I know that. Black my eye if it makes you feel better. But this sort of thing’s impossible and I can’t stand it.”
“There was no need for you to tell me. Why should you?” His cool tautness suddenly left him. He said, quietly, “Your time’s your own. If I’ve been behaving as if I had a claim on it, I apologise. It will be soon enough to think about that when I can ask you to marry me.”
Vivian put her hand up to her head. If only she had slept, she thought, she could deal with this. There was a right thing that could be said. But she could not find it. She could only feel the irritable protest of her weariness at being asked to make the effort. The knowledge that she was about to fail made her desperate: her desperation flooded into anger.
“Mic, we can’t labour through all that again. I’ve tried to tell you I’m not something on hire-purchase. I belong to you now as much as I ever shall however much you marry me and keep me, and you’d better make up your mind to it.”
“I’ve done that,” said Mic slowly, “already.”
She felt she could have screamed and beaten on the walls of emotion that shut them in as one might on the walls of a cell; flinging her weight in helpless fury at Mic’s limitations and his tortured awareness of them, at her own worn-out nerves and defiant fear.
“My dear, we
must
pull ourselves together. It’s so futile, such waste. After all, what’s really happened? Nothing.”
“I suppose not,” said Mic wearily. “One should submit these things to reason. It’s easy enough to talk about it. I can’t do it, that’s all. I can only see you coming in at that door.” His jaw tightened: she saw that their weak attempt at exorcism was over. “Have you seen any of Scot-Hallard’s other women? Because I have.”
“His … Mic, have you the least idea what you’re saying? Do have some self-control. You must be out of your mind.”
“I beg your pardon. His women, then. But you evidently have seen them, to give such a good impersonation.” He glanced down at her dress.
“Don’t be disgusting.” She was losing her temper; she felt it going half in fear, half in angry satisfaction. A mixed ferment rose in her: hurt pride: she thought that the dress had cost more than she could afford; the certainty that he would have liked it if she had not worn it for Scot-Hallard first. Her brain seemed to grow hot and light, to expand, and throw off words like steam which smoked away from her before she could examine them, “Haven’t you enough intelligence to see when you’re being simply pathological? I’m wearing a perfectly normal outfit that you can see in every shop and every magazine, and no more make-up than most women put on every day of their lives. Good God, Mic, are you going to raise hell like this every time I show signs of leading an ordinary social life? Because if so let’s get the thing clear. I’m not going to spend the rest of my life slopping about in tweeds and an old shirt just because you can’t stand the sight of a woman unless she’s half got up as a—” She paused, biting her lip.
Mic’s face seemed to be uninhabited. “Yes? Please go on. Better to have it clear, as you say.”
Where are we going? cried her bruised and terrified mind. It was like feeling one’s clothing caught in a machine: seeing what was coming, struggling impotently to get free.
“I’m sorry, Mic. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”
“Didn’t you? I thought you did. I shouldn’t go back on it, it’s probably true.”
“No. I ought not to have said it.”
“It isn’t important.”
The thing could not have happened, protested her remorse and fear, so easily, with these few seconds’ worth of words. There must be some hand-hold that could drag them back again. She groped for it, clumsy with panic.
“Mic, we must stop working up this fever. It’s madness, we’re neither of us responsible for what we say. Listen. I did flirt with Scot-Hallard, in a trivial way. He kissed me once. That’s absolutely all. I don’t blame you if you were jealous for a minute. But you know it means nothing. You know really. Don’t keep on.”
His eyes travelled over her. She saw again that flinching speculation.
“Oh, Scot-Hallard kissed you.”
“Of course he did. You knew that as soon as I came in.”
“Was it nice?”
“It was amusing, for a second or two. What
does
it matter, to us? Try to keep some sense of proportion.”
“Evidently I haven’t one … God, how could you? A man like Scot-Hallard. How
could
you? It just makes me want to be sick.”
“That’s morbid. He isn’t vicious: too many other uses for his brains. You ought to know that.”
“I know enough about Scot-Hallard.” She saw that he had gone white. His eyes looked unnaturally large and dark, like the dilated eyes of someone drugged. “He’s gross. All he’s fit for is hanging around brothels, but he knows his way about too well for that. Seduction’s cheaper and more hygienic. I shouldn’t think he ever wasted a minute’s honesty or kindness on a woman in his life. He’s filthy. … You know that, and still you go out with him. And without even having the decency off you, you come back here to me made up like one of his worn-out tarts, with smears of paint where he’s mucked you about, and expect me to enjoy it. … Go back to him, if he gives you such a damned good time. If that’s what you like I don’t see what use you can have for me.”
“That’s more than enough, Mic.”
They looked at one another, amazedly remembering the times when they had neither known nor cared where one mind and body ended and the other began. That they could become this. From the friend, the lover—the face seen without eyes in the darkness, the whisper before the kiss, the silence after—had been made this impenetrable thing, this sharpened and hardened instrument of pain.
“Yes. I’m sorry.” He sat down on the edge of the table. The incandescence had died down; he looked tired and drawn. “It’s what I feel, but I might have expressed it with a little more restraint.”
“What does it matter how you express it? If we can do this to one another it’s no good going on. We were happy while it lasted, but it’s better we know in time. Good-bye.”
He got up. “Where are you going?”
“Anywhere. Back to be myself again, if I can.”
“Vivian. We—” Hesitatingly, he came towards her.
“No. Go away from me. Stay away. Mic, if you come near me again and touch me as if I were a new kind of dirt, I’ll hit you in the face. Go away, I can’t bear any more. For God’s sake let me go.”
She had been backing away from him: now with a stumbling swerve she snatched open the door and ran down the stairs into the street. As she went she thought she heard the door open again behind her; but the rattle of her own feet drowned it. The street door closed. The lamp threw her lengthening shadow before her; for each of her halting steps it shot forward with a great stride, till its head was hidden in darkness.
It had happened. She was alone.
S
HE WALKED BACK, THROUGH
the streets, through the hospital gates, through the passages. Someone said, “Hullo, Lingard, got nights-off?” and she said “Yes,” and felt her face move in a smile.
Up in her room her uniform was thrown over a chair, as she had left it in the morning. On the locker was a book that Mic had lent her, with a pencilled note from him marking the page. She pulled it out and began slowly to tear it up. The strips she made were horizontal, and on one of them she read, “I wish you were here. If you were—” Her fingers moved more quickly, tearing the strips into finer and finer pieces.
She undressed, and had a bath. She seemed a shell of physical sensations, the heat of the water, the slipperiness of the soap, the towel’s friction, giving entity to a consciousness which, without their definition, would have trickled away, like fluid from a broken glass.
She cleaned her teeth, put out the light, and got into bed. Her mind felt so blank that it vaguely surprised her to find herself unable to sleep. There was no sequent thought in her head: she lay with her eyes wide open, looking upward at a slant of light across the ceiling. As a cracked gramophone record repeats endlessly the same phrase, her brain reproduced over and over what had happened, their voices, their words, Mic’s face and the changes of his eyes, ending always with the neat full-stop of the slammed door. She did not think, “If I had said this, if I had thought of that in time.” She simply saw and heard, heard and saw. She tried to deaden her mind and be still, thinking of the length of days ahead and wanting to lose a little of their duration now in sleep.
In the early morning she fell into a half-doze, from which she was wakened by the maids hammering on the day-nurses’ doors. She tried to hold the blankness of sleep round her, knowing even before she had gone that something terrible was waiting to spring at her out of the light. But the blankness receded, inexorably, leaving her naked to recollection. When she had dressed she wandered out into the town to get something for breakfast, so as not to have to go into the dining-room. There were two more days and two nights to do nothing in before she went back to work.
On her way in she found a parcel, addressed to her. The writing was Mic’s. She felt for a moment a dull wonder that from her life which was over this could emerge into the present; then everything was cut through by an agonising stab of hope. She pulled off the wrapper: it was her gown and slippers, with her afternoon bag of yesterday on the top; all very well folded and packed, the bag wrapped separately. There was no letter, no message of any kind. She took them back to her room and put them away.
In the afternoon, having found that she could not read with any understanding of what was in front of her, she drifted into a cinema. The film was a sea-story, and for a little while she escaped into it. The thought, “If I could only get back to it, there is a whole world of simple things, horses, men working with their muscles, birds flying, ploughland and the sea. Perhaps one day I may find some peace in that.” Then the scene shifted to the inside of a cottage, to a hackneyed, sentimental love-scene. At the moment of the kiss the young man turned his back to the lens: the shape of his bent head was a little like Mic’s, and he had dark soft hair, through which the girl stroked her fingers. Vivian rose, and went out into the cold cloudy afternoon.
On the second day she felt herself sinking into a stagnation which was worse than suffering, because it seemed less clean. It gave her a loathing of herself: she thought that she was, after all, a temporary vessel for part of the life of the universe, and if she had forgotten how to use it had at least no right to let it rot and stink. With no end in view but to keep up some belief in herself, she dressed in her best walking clothes, put a few touches to her face and hair, and went out.
She was on the outskirts of the town, in a street of scattered houses that trailed away into a lane, when a car stopped beside her and Scot-Hallard’s voice said, “I was expecting to meet you today.”
He was exactly the same: his strength, his vitality, his air of being a natural ruler of his own terrain and not much concerned with any other. He was the first thing she had seen, since this began, that looked the same as before.
“Were you?” she said. “Why?”
“Possibly because I’m tenacious of an idea.” He looked quickly along the road towards the houses. “We can’t talk here. Get in.” He opened the door. His will, imposed on her unresisting inertia, moved her into the car as if he had picked her up and lifted her in.
“Why did you run away from me?” he said.
“Run? I only continued on my way.”
An answer from the property-box; what Mic had called “boy-meets-girl-manoeuvres”. That was after he first kissed her. Sudden and inescapable, like an animal springing from cover, the memory leaped at her; the wall she had been looking at turning into the ceiling as he pulled her back, then into his face: the feel of his hair, dry on the surface, but still damp from swimming when she held him tightly. … This cannot be lived with, she thought: it must be destroyed, something, anything, must take it away. To escape it, she threw her perceptions outward again. Scot-Hallard was saying something. With struggling concentration she got hold of the word “elusive.” He was telling her something about herself, and she tried to look intelligent. There was an observation, then, about the art of living. It consisted in something else, which, at the moment of throwing back another memory from the ramparts of her mind, she missed. Refusal of life (she got a whole sentence here) was the only sin against the Holy Ghost. His property-box was much better stocked than hers.
She was like Brünnehilde, he said, encircled by fire and refusing to cross it, waiting for someone to carry her over.
“What do you say,” she asked in momentary interest, “to small women? Under about five feet, four, I mean? The Sleeping Beauty in the hedge of thorns? Siegfried certainly does suit you better than the Fairy Prince.”
He looked, before he had time to conceal it, quite affronted. It occurred to her that he had perhaps, after all, thought up this simile especially for her, and she regretted her ungraciousness. A certain amount of experience, she thought, digested with imagination, could make a man or woman alluring; but too much dulled the edges, gave a stale and handled taste of which a fresher palate could not fail to be aware. Everything he said had the ring of worn coin, his most intimate looks were like stock phrases. He had recovered his assurance in time to laugh and make some retort: the game went on, a ritual, with the predictable regularity of a phallic dance.
(“What about me, then?”—“You’re simply you.” Someone must take the candles away, their light was burning her.)