Authors: Mary Renault
She was wearing a dressing-gown. Her hair was untidy, and her face shocked him a little; it looked forgotten, like a blind person’s. She greeted him as if she were listening for something else.
“I came here as soon as I could,” he said, forgetting to whisper. She said, “S-sh,” and, when he took out his pipe which he had felt would help, “Would you mind terribly, Jan? There’ll be the most appalling row if they smell smoke in here.”
“Let’s go out,” he whispered. “We can’t possibly talk like this.”
“I mustn’t. I’m supposed to be in bed. I’m on duty tonight.”
The only chair was covered with her clothes; so he settled himself beside her on the edge of the bed. “Don’t bother with me,” she said. “I’m not fit to talk to and you can’t do anything about me, so it’s only wasting your time. It was good of you to come so soon. You must have taken the first train after you got my letter.”
“I missed the good one, or I’d have been here before.”
“It doesn’t matter. Mic won’t be in till just about now.”
There was a pause, from which Vivian suddenly retreated.
“They might not have let you see me at all. I ought to have warned you, but I forgot.”
She reminded him of a sleepwalker, and he longed to rouse her. “I prevailed with the duenna,” he said lightly. “My face was my birth-certificate, as usual. But I still feel rather like Macheath superimposed on Caesar Borgia. I didn’t appreciate your staying-power till today. Twenty-four hours here would finish me.”
She said, unsmiling, with a weary reasonableness, “After all, I was supposed to be in bed, and the woman isn’t a procuress.”
“I guessed that,” Jan remarked, “from little things she let drop in the course of conversation.”
Vivian’s face relaxed for a moment. “What have you been doing lately?”
He began to tell her. For a few minutes they talked in the old way. But presently her attention drifted away, and her face had again the look of listening. He finished what he was saying, and there was a pause in which neither of them spoke.
“I suppose,” he said at last, “you told me everything in your letter that you wanted me to know.”
She drew a deep breath, which might have been of resolution or relief.
“Everything you need, I expect. You know Mic.”
“I wonder. I used to think I knew you.”
“Oh, well.”
Seeing her dim smile, hushed voice, and circled eyes, the disorder of her hair and dress, he felt it, for a moment, in his heart to be angry with Mic.
She saw him looking at her and said, “Don’t take any notice of me. Anyone would look a wreck under these conditions. In any case, whatever happens to me I’ve asked for. If you’re too late getting to the flat, Mic may have gone out again.”
Jan considered for a moment. She might rest more easily if he went now, letting her think he agreed. But he found it impossible to break the lifelong habit of truth between them. To spare her a direct refusal, he said, “You know, my dear, if Mic thinks I’ve come in the capacity of a district visitor I can’t think of one good reason why he shouldn’t throw me downstairs. It’s what I’d do.”
He had forgotten to whisper again. There was the creak of a bed on the other side of the thin wall; Vivian said, mechanically, “S-sh.” Then, “I’m not asking you to go in that capacity.”
He was silent; and, staring past him, she went on, “You must know as well as I do that he only noticed me at all because you weren’t there.”
It was like a dream, he thought, this whispering in a foreign place of the things one never said awake.
“You’re the last thing left,” she said, “that hasn’t let him down.”
Jan found his voice. “I doubt if Mic looks at it like that. I’ve not known him to suffer much from self-pity as a rule.”
“He doesn’t. But it is so. It’s what gives you a chance.”
“What kind of chance?” If I force her to words, he thought, it may stop her.
“Jan,” she said, “please make him forget me.”
He got up, and, one step taking him across the width of the room, found himself looking into the mirror which hung over the chest of drawers. Behind his own face he could see hers, watching him, and thought suddenly how little was left of the likeness which everyone had found so striking. The Sister, he remembered now, had had to have it pointed out to her.
Her reflected eyes met his in the glass, waiting.
“I’m sorry, Vivian.” He spoke, without turning, to her mirrored face. “You’re worn out and not yourself, or I don’t think you’d ask me. In the first place, it’s an insult to Mic. One doesn’t offer these bolt-holes to one’s equals.”
“I don’t care what it is if it keeps him alive.”
“You may not, but he will. Mic cares a good deal about the terms on which he accepts life.”
“Less than he did,” she said in a whisper he only just caught.
“Probably he’s feeling the strain much as you are. But I think one should only offer people what one feels they’d accept in their clearer moments.”
“All this is rather abstract, isn’t it?” He heard for the first time the edge of bitterness in her voice.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “It isn’t to me.” He was silent for a moment, searching for the words that would best reach her. “Look here, Vivian. I’m a pure hedonist, as you know. If I thought Mic was more fully himself as he used to be I’d persuade him of it, as far as I could without—personal dishonesty. But I happen to be convinced of the opposite. You know his history, surely, by now. He had a hellish childhood; he’s come out of it, on the whole, with singularly little twist. Of course he’s introverted, of course he’s got a rooted inferiority complex. He copes with that pretty well. And not unnaturally he attached himself violently to the first person he met who didn’t seem to think it a pity he’d been born. It happened to be someone young, attractive, and impressionable, with the inevitable result. If you’d been to a public school, you’d—well, anyway, it seems very understandable to me.”
“Oh, I know all that.” She spoke with the dull assent of one who has been over the ground many times before.
“Then, why, if you know? Surely you see that if you’ve meant more to him than most women to most men, it’s because he probably feels he’s completed himself through you. The thing’s done now. You can’t make water run uphill. It’s a pity this business should have happened so soon; adjustments like that take time, of course. But that’s done too, and putting back the clock’s no answer. In any case, it can’t be done. By him or by me. It’s only because I know that, that I’m going to see him at all.”
She nodded her head. People are right, she was thinking. What did I hope from him? He isn’t to blame. A piece of crystal has its own uses; you don’t ask it to oblige you by bending in your hand.
“I think,” he said, knowing her to be unreconciled, “one has to accept the hazards of growth for other people as well as oneself.”
“Why did you come at all?” she asked.
“I hardly know. Perhaps to keep my conscience quiet, or because it was easier than doing nothing. Chiefly I suppose because I’m fonder of you two than I am of anyone else, and because you met through me.”
“We should have met.”
He saw that she believed this; and a realisation came to him of the shock that had broken her, the destruction of a happiness so instinctive as to have seemed part of natural law and the structure of life. It was a terror he had known and could understand. He saw, in a sudden clear distance and tranquillity, the experience about which for years, though he lived to the pattern of its results, he had not thought at all. Compared with this, it seemed simple and merciful. He had not thought that he would live to submit it to comparison, even to reason. Was it for this that, unknown to himself, he had come? It gave him a sense of deeper debt to both of them than he had felt before.
“One thing I’ll do,” he said, feeling his futility, “is to make Mic get his chest examined, if it hasn’t been done. Then at least we’ll know that’s all right.”
“There’s nothing yet.”
“Better to make sure.”
“I am sure.”
“How can you be?”
She looked down at her hands folded in her lap, and said without expression, “I was with him the night before I wrote to you. He wouldn’t have let me stay.”
These were deeper waters than Jan had guessed at. In the pause that followed, many things became clear. He said, “I’ll do what I can.”
“Which means?”
“It means I’ll do anything but lie to him.”
“I’d hoped,” she said slowly, “that you wouldn’t make that reservation.”
“My dear, I’m sorry. I can only be what I am. Isn’t that what you’ve found too?”
She nodded without speaking.
“You ought to sleep if you’ve to be on the wards tonight. I’ll be going.” He got up, and hesitated for a moment. “If nothing any of us can do is any good,” he said, “try not to blame yourself, or me too much. Or Mic. Life’s made harder than it need be by the human belief that effort could make us capable of perfection. It’s part of the evolutionary instinct, but sometimes it has to be put aside. We’re each given some shape, I think, which is the most we can fill. If we can feel we’ve filled it, sometimes we have to be content.”
“I haven’t filled mine.”
He smiled. “Your life’s only begun.” It was only afterwards that he wondered why neither of them had found this amusing. “Sleep well.”
“Good night, Jan. Thank you for coming.” As he turned to the door she rose and, as if moved by some sudden impulse of disquiet, came after him and took his arm. “Even if you can’t do anything, Jan, I’m glad you came. It’s so long since last time. Don’t go away without seeing me again, will you?”
“Of course not. I promise. Sleep if you can.” He kissed her, and went out. She stood in the doorway, watching him, till he turned the corner of the corridor.
Jan, as he walked to the High Street, wished that Mic ran to a telephone. He would have liked to announce himself from a decent distance; dwellers in small flats were, after all, singularly defenceless against an unwelcome caller. Once away from Vivian and her distraught hopes, he could see no valid reason why Mic should be even pleased to see him, and several good ones for slamming the door in his face. Besides, there was always the chance of taking Mic somehow off his guard, and he was not likely to receive that with Vivian’s indifference.
The flat windows were lit. He opened the street door, considered for a moment, then closed it again softly and knocked. Nothing happened the first time, but after the next attempt he heard the window above him open. There was a moment’s stillness, then, “Good God, Jan. Is that you?”
“Hullo,” he said, looking up. The leaning face, half in shadow, was only a blur.
“Come on up, you bloody fool; you know that door’s never locked.”
He came in and groped for the light. Presently Mic switched it on from above. They met on the landing. Jan’s first thought was not what he had expected. It was simply, He’s grown up.
“Come in,” Mic said. He spoke like someone who is trying with a certain curiosity to make up his mind what he feels.
The place was in a reckless litter; Mic had been working, clipping out and filing portions of periodicals that he wanted to keep and discarding the remains where they happened to fall. It was not like what Jan remembered of his methods. He pushed an armful of rubbish off a chair, picked a new paper out of it, and pulled the chair up to the fire. “Why on earth didn’t you say you were coming? I might have been out.”
“I didn’t know I was coming till today.”
“Like the Queen’s Hall,” said Mic, recalling an old joke. They both smiled, at first spontaneously, then with sudden recollection and constraint.
“Are you working at anything vital?” Jan asked. “If so, I’ll read while you finish. Or come tomorrow. Plenty of time.”
“Oh, Lord, no. Just the monthly clearance. About as vital as playing patience.”
Jan knew the monthly clearances. Mic used, he remembered, to effect them in about half an hour, absently meticulous, while he listened to the gramophone or talked about something else. Following Jan’s eyes over the mess, he appeared to be about to say something, but changed his mind. “Cigarette?” he suggested, offering them.
“Thanks,” said Jan, “I’ve got a pipe somewhere.” He felt for it, thinking, He’s not well, of course. I suppose it’s natural for her to have concentrated on that.
“How did you” Mic who had just lit himself a cigarette, coughed, apologised, and put it out again. “Road or rail?”
“Rail. Maine’s got the car in Ireland.”
“Do you ever use your own car at all?”
“Oh, yes, when I really want it. I never use it so much in winter, you know. I’m not a very desirable night-driver, for one thing. Find it too fatally easy to think.”
“Thought, its cause and cure.” Mic got up, and began stacking the papers on the table. Presently, while Jan was still filling his pipe, he turned, stood still for a minute, and then said quite steadily, “Have you seen Vivian yet?”
“Yes.” Jan looked at the bowl critically, and packed on a final layer. “I saw her just before I came here.”
“How much did she tell you?”
“How do I know? The elements, I suppose.”
He struck a match. It made a little dazzle of flame between them, hiding them from one another.
“Whatever she said,” Mic went on evenly, “I’m the one principally to blame.”
Jan looked up.
“I shouldn’t start cultivating a sense of sin, my dear. You’ve got trouble enough without that.”
Mic said nothing for a moment. Then, “I’ve found it’s better than cultivating a sense of injury. When balance becomes impossible, you have to choose the less dangerous of your aberrations.”
It was not an easy remark to follow up. In the ensuing pause, Mic continued to sort armfuls of torn paper from clippings and whole books, and Jan to sort his impressions. The nearest he could get to summarising them was to decide that Mic’s personality seemed to have been burned or starved to a skeleton. Such curves and soft places as it had had were gone; the hard framework of support stood stripped, its construction and articulations showing. It was a structure without much elegance, but it had a kind of hard-beaten fineness and was, Jan thought, considering all things, surprisingly straight.