Authors: Mary Renault
At bedtime that night Colonna brought in some China tea. When she sat down on the bed it became gracefully evident that her stiff dragon-encrusted dressing-gown was all she was wearing; and a wave of grey hopeless irritability made Vivian aware for the first time how much she had been looking forward to going to sleep. But the tea was delicious, a liquid fragrance. She drank it thankfully, feeling ashamed of herself because she was turning over, simultaneously, expedients for dislodging Colonna as quickly as possible. As it happened, none of them were needed.
“You look bloody tired,” Colonna said as she put the cup down. “Sister on duty, I suppose. Get straight into bed, I’ll tidy up.”
She helped Vivian undress like a mother, folded her things, tucked her in, handed her night-cream and cleansing tissues. Vivian submitted with gratitude. She had been taken unawares before by these sudden illuminations of kindness and perception; apart from their own pleasantness, they were part of the variegation which made Colonna interesting to her and, in spite of everything, worthwhile.
“I was wondering this evening,” she said as she brushed her hair, “whether one has the right to attach any value to oneself whatever apart from one’s function in the community. What do you think?”
“Aren’t you a Communist?” asked Colonna in faint surprise.
“No; at least, not philosophically. It doesn’t seem to me a—a sufficiently final thing to lose oneself in as they insist you should. I suppose in practice I could muck in with it; in a lot of ways it can’t be so very different from this.”
“I thought you would be one. Nearly all my friends are, and hate personality worse than cancer. Other people’s particularly. But sometimes we reach a gentleman’s agreement that I’m Wrong but Romantic. … I came here tonight with the worst intentions, did you know?”
“Of course. But I like you so much more like this. Do you mind terribly?”
“No, I think I’m glad if I could only make up my mind to it. It’s funny how I won’t let you alone, we’ve so much that would spoil. But—I don’t know—I’m not in love with anyone at the moment, and you’re rather beautiful in a clean hammered way that’s refreshing after all these plush peaches. And you take it all for granted so restfully, instead of popping your eyes and saying oo-er. Making love to you is pleasant and graceful—and innocent, it seems to me, though I suppose I wouldn’t know; because we’re happy and don’t struggle to possess one another.” She paused; the rare planes of meditation, replacing those of motion, made her face seem strange. “Some day, perhaps, we shall look back to this and want it. To be living in the moment, with a light lover who couldn’t hurt us: to be free.”
“Don’t,” said Vivian. “I felt then as if something were walking on my grave.” She pulled the eiderdown, with a shiver, up to her chin.
“Don’t you want a lover?” asked Colonna with dispassionate curiosity.
“No.” Vivian’s mouth shut straight. “I’m not ready to cope with it. I haven’t learned yet to run myself alone.”
“Who has?”
Jan has, thought Vivian. But she said, “I don’t know yet what I am. I must be something before I can be part of anything else. Love only uses part of you, and it changes that part and makes it seem much more than the whole. If you haven’t seen yourself first and where you’re going—even if it were only for one clear moment—you might get lost. Utterly lost; lost forever, perhaps.” Her eyes, fixed on the window, seemed to reflect the dark outside it. “No. Show me a lover in ten years’ time.”
“You’re posing,” remarked Colonna with the interested appreciation of the fellow-craftsman.
Vivian considered this for what it was worth. “If I am,” she concluded equably, “it’s probably half true. Most poses are. They show your aims though not necessarily your achievements.”
“Utterly lost,” said Colonna meditatively; and laughed. “A damp, blasted, female way to be in love.” She stretched herself, five feet ten of handsome arrogance. “I’m always going to be like the Kitchen Cat in Kipling. ‘She is my Cookie, but I am not her cat.’”
Vivian wanted suddenly, protectively, to silence her.
T
HERE WAS A NEW
charge-nurse on Verdun, a small, oliveskinned, wiry girl with dark hair, blue-brown eyelids, and a brittle, mask-like animation like that of some Frenchwoman. When she was left in charge, though the work got done faster than usual, she was curiously little in evidence, so little that Vivian had hardly noticed her by the evening of the first day, till someone said to her in the sitting-room. “You’re lucky to have Valentine. We had her on Ramillies till today; now we’ve got that fat bitch Chandler instead.”
“She seems all right so far,” said Vivian vaguely.
“She is, take it from me.”
“A friend of yours.”
“Good heavens, I don’t mingle with charge-nurses.” (Vivian was always forgetting, sometimes disastrously, that the hierarchies of the wards held good with equal potency off duty.)
“Matter of fact I don’t think she has many friends. One of these reserved people, I dare say. She plays the piano in the old lecture-room sometimes, but only highbrow sort of stuff.”
Vivian soon forgot about her, because that night Colonna came to her room and announced that she was going to leave. It was the twenty-ninth of the month, so that meant giving notice in two days’ time.
“I came for an experience,” she explained, “and I’ve exhausted it. My people won’t mind; they can’t make out my staying this long.”
“You’re honest. I wish I were.” For she knew already that she did not want Colonna to go. She would miss in the greyness her ringing peacock colour; miss, too, the illusion of strength and stability given by the background of her hot indiscipline. They had been, though they had not thought much about it, almost perfect foils for one another.
Considering it all, she asked, “Is the experience really all you get? Doesn’t the work give you any—any—” she gave up the search for some other word that would sound less intolerably priggish, and plunged—“any spiritual satisfaction at all?”
“No. Most of the time one just seems to be fighting evolution, pushing back all the junk it’s trying to get out of the way. Does it you?”
“Sometimes, I think. Or I wouldn’t still be here, I suppose. What else can you do?”
“I was in repertory for a year, you know, before I came here.”
“You never told me.”
“Didn’t I?” Colonna’s rare but unbreakable reticence dropped, like a steel safety curtain, over some memory. “You’re off duty tomorrow afternoon, aren’t you? Let’s walk and have tea somewhere out.”
“Yes, I’d—no, wait, tomorrow’s Saturday.” The moving of someone else had fitted her, by this time, into the Verdun schedule. “I promised to go to that sculpture exhibition thing.”
“Who the devil with?” asked Colonna, and then began to talk about something else without giving her time to answer.
“I wonder what Matron will say,” Vivian reflected, “when you give notice.”
Colonna told her. She was a good mimic.
Next day in Verdun an old woman died, and the new charge-nurse, Valentine, called Vivian behind the screens to help her with what was necessary. Vivian began to notice her for the first time, because of the grateful reticence with which she worked. During the last months Vivian had learned to excuse indifference at these offices, preferring it to the sentimentality which some nurses thought fit to assume like a kind of badge ritually pinned to their uniform. There stuck particularly in her head the picture of a pink-cheeked girl dressing a dead baby in flowers and muslin, with the dramatised melancholy of a child dressing a doll for a doll’s funeral. “Doesn’t he look sweet?” she said proudly, calling Vivian behind the screen to see.
She realised as the day’s work went on, why Valentine was liked by people who worked for her. She radiated a kind of impersonal comradeship and enjoyment, and, without any deliberate exercise of charm, invited them to work as to an adventure. She was never in doubt. If she ever made mistakes, Vivian was sure she accepted them as the fortune of war, her self-confidence unshaken. Yet behind all her smooth activity there seemed something detached, poised on action and partly satisfied with it, keeping to itself its other needs.
More than the most acrid criticism, Valentine’s mere neighbourhood made Vivian aware of the gulf that still separated her from simple adequacy in her work, still less from any kind of excellence. The thought of Colonna’s departure was still depressing her; and suddenly she began to wonder whether she too had exhausted all that this life could give to her, or, more important, she to it. She thought with longing of the moors at home; of the shabby friendly schoolroom, too much a part of life ever to have changed its name; of her father’s vague, kind, unsurprised welcome, looking up over the book in which half his mind was still entangled; of being free sometimes with Jan. If she gave notice this month, they might canoe up the Loire again in the summer.
Occupied with these thoughts, she had changed into tweeds for a walk alone before she remembered that this was the afternoon when she had promised to meet Mic. She felt that she had no energy just now for social adjustments; but it was too late to think of putting him off. Her tweeds were old and comfortable, and she would have liked to leave them on, but remembered that Mic was poor and difficult and might think she considered him not worth dressing for. She changed into a newer suit, plain too as all her things were, but thinner and better cut.
Mic, when she met him, had on tweeds the exact analogy of those she had taken off, which made her feel a little foolish and unconsciously scratchy. He was in one of his constrained moods and did little to eke out her shortage of conversation. They exchanged civil commonplaces, while Vivian let her mind wander back to Valentine and the ward. It seemed more natural in his company to retreat into her own thoughts than to affect a conscientious brightness. Mic seemed to have reached some similar conclusion.
He was, at least, a comfortable companion for an exhibition, not expecting her to hang over a catalogue with him nor bursting into comment on everything as soon as it came in sight. The collection was a hotchpotch of good stuff lent by private owners and the prize achievements of local art schools and amateurs.
In front of a surrealist exhibit called “Adventitious Agony” they both looked enigmatic for a long time.
“Well?” inquired Mic.
“Frankly,” she said, “I think the indigested contents of the subconscious, and those of the stomach, are about equally significant in visual art.”
“Speaking as an expert?” said Mic, laughing. “For all we know, there may be hosts of people on whom this propeller, with the toothbrushes and—er—so on, has exactly the same effect as Delius.”
“Make it someone else, will you? I like Delius, in a vague uneducated sort of way.”
“Do you? I’ve got the record of the
Cuckoo.
You must hear it sometime. Look, let’s go back to the flat for tea instead of having it out, and I’ll play it for you.”
“I’d like to,” said Vivian, hypnotised, she concluded next moment, by his complete simplicity and unexpectedness. After surrounding himself during the first half-hour with the caution of a Foreign Secretary in a European crisis, he had delivered this invitation as unequivocally as if they had both been twelve years old. His effect on her alternated between strain and an extraordinary restfulness. They talked easily until they reached the shop where he was going to get cakes, when he said with sudden awkwardness, “Going to the flat won’t make you late on duty? It’s farther away.”
It had just occurred to him, thought Vivian, that a convention exists. Unclassified creature, where had he lived? He seemed neither “advanced”, provincial, nor very innocent; and, when he forgot himself, assumed a certain charm as if he were used to it. Aloud she said, “No, I’ve another hour. I should like to see the place, now you’ve finished it.”
She decided that it was remarkably pleasant. He had got a gas-fire, some rough linen curtains and a couple of modern chairs which looked a little bleak but had been designed, she found, by a sound anatomist. There was a solid working table, and bookshelves making an angle round one corner. The room seemed larger and lighter than it really was, but it was so reticent in its display of personality that it would have been difficult to decide at a glance whether it belonged to a woman or a man. She set the table while Mic, in some hidden and, from the sound, very confined space, made tea. It was a comfortable meal.
“I think human beings need some place as an extension of themselves,” she said when they were smoking afterwards. “Even children do, if you can remember what it felt like the first time you had a room of your own.”
“That was when I went to Cambridge,” said Mic. She was on the point of asking him whether he had been one of a large family, and scarcely knew what it was in his face or voice that prevented her.
“Our rooms are almost fascist in their suppression of the individual,” she said. “Sometimes I think it’s the lack of anywhere you can pretend for five minutes is your own, quite as much as overwork, that makes us so callous about all the patients’ non-physical needs.”
“You say ‘us’?”
“Oh, yes. After six months I notice things much less. The ghastly gloom of the ward services, for instance, and the effect they have.”
“I’ve never known any nurses till now, except one when I had pneumonia at school. A very kind woman. But I can’t associate you with nursing, if you’ll forgive my saying so.”
“I see you’ve discovered already that no compliment pleases a nurse more. It’s illuminating, as a comment on the industry.”
“I hadn’t, but I’ll bear that in mind.”
“Take care you don’t get pneumonia again. This is a good place for it—inland and damp.”
“I’ve a very sound instinct of self-preservation. You’re used to Jan, aren’t you? “He smiled into his cigarette-smoke at a private memory. Vivian found it a little irritating.
“You fence,” she said, to change the subject. The hilts of a couple of foils were sticking out from behind the bookcase, in reach of her hand, and she pulled them out.
“Not for ages. Do you?”