She leaned her head against the window-frame.
“How little there is of oneself to go round.”
“I take too much,” he said.
“Never enough, nothing’s enough. You take too much!” She took the hand with which he was holding her and tightened it against her breast, though it seemed that nothing but a dim kindness would ever stir in her again. “Nothing will give us back this hour we’re losing, or these hours I’ve been half-alive: never, until we die.”
“It won’t always be like this.”
“Neither shall we, young, and able to enjoy, and see things new for ourselves.”
He said slowly, looking at the lights on the hillside, “And yonder all before us lie deserts of vast eternity.”
“Vast eternity.” She tried to recapture the lift of spirit that, long ago, the words had given her, the great space of freedom and of flight. But it was, for her, a desert and a name. She wanted only the hours that they had lost.
-13-
IT OCCURRED TO VIVIAN next morning that she had accepted her conditions a little easily. At breakfast, she led the conversation round to the subject of rooms.
“I envy you, Forrester, on the ground floor. No stairs.”
“Envy me! Why, good Lord above, mine’s the worst room in the hospital. Poky, nearly on top of the road, all the dust and noise, and everything you don’t want to be public property you have to do in total darkness. Is it near a pal of yours or something? If so you can have it today, before you change your mind.”
“Would you really like to change?”
“Like to? Come on to Home Sister now and let’s fix it quick.”
In Home Sister’s office, Vivian explained that downstairs she would be nearer the members of her own set, which happened to be true and produced a good effect. (It was Home Sister, she guessed, who had reported her offences against the caste laws.) Forrester’s willingness to change needed no explanation.
The room, as she had been warned, was close, dark and dusty; but the jut of wall that cut off the light also sheltered it from view of the other windows. Beyond lay an asphalt path, some not too difficult railings, and a quiet side-road.
“Of course,” said Forrester as they were moving over, “it’s not a bad room for going on the tiles.” She looked at Vivian with a speculation which she appeared to dismiss. “I did a lot of it at one time, but I had a bad scare and it put me off. I never have the energy these nights anyway; besides, the chief attraction’s left the neighbourhood.”
Vivian went over the railings about once a week. The danger was too great, and sleep too necessary, to make it oftener; and the strain, she found, fell most heavily on Mic. He would have run a similar risk casually enough himself, but to be the inactive one upset his nerves and his pride.
“You can’t go on doing this. It’s all wrong. I’d rather do without you than have you this way. Why can’t I come to you, if it’s as easy as you say?”
Vivian would explain, patiently and repeatedly, knowing his violence to be precisely adjusted to the need he felt of her at the time, “Because the walls are so thin you can hear the person in the next room brushing her teeth. Because it would be suicide. Because it would involve you with no result whatever except to make things ten times worse for me. Would you really rather I didn’t any more?”
“Of course, I’ve told you so.”
But before she went away, though nothing had been said, they both knew that she would come. Only once did he ask her on his own account, and then he could not forget it for a moment, and in the resulting tension they nearly quarrelled. He never asked her again, in words: but it was not easy for them to keep these things from one another.
They would start out of a brief forgetfulness, wondering if she had been seen to leave, or whether, in some rare emergency, she might be called up for duty that night. “We won’t go on with this,” one or other of them would say in such moments, “it isn’t worth it.” But after they were apart, fear grew dim in memory, and consolation and delight grew clear, and she would come again.
It gave a secret colour to life: the waiting for dark, the old jersey and short skirt to climb in: the dusty and dewy sweetness of night as she raised the window, the sleep in her eyes making everything vaguely different and unreal: the sense of stealth, and kinship with the night-running cats that slid on printless feet from shadow to shadow across the road. For many years after, the smell of dust in the evening made her feel the rusty iron under her hands, hear the ring of her footsteps in the empty streets: remember darting, as if a hunt were following, into Mic’s outer door, and the breath driven out of her by his first kiss, compounded of anxiety, desire and self-reproach.
One night, when she was thinking how different all this was from everything she had planned to do or to be, something else came into her mind.
“It’s rather a queer thought,” she said, “that Jan doesn’t know about us. Or have you told him?”
“No, I’d have asked you. I’ve not written to him since it started: I don’t know his address.”
“Nor do I. Why should we take Jan for granted like this? Yet we do.”
“Had it occurred to you,” said Mic reflectively, “that I’ve seduced the sister of my best friend?”
“Not till you mentioned it.”
“It hadn’t to me, either!”
“That,” said Vivian, “may be because it wouldn’t occur to Jan.” She looked at Mic. “What is it you’re making up your mind to say?”
“I’d just made up my mind not to say it, because it probably isn’t true. I was only wondering whether Jan would be quite as astonished as we think.”
“I can’t imagine the Last Trump astonishing Jan.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Vivian thought it over.
She said, at last, “He was very inefficient over meeting me that day, in a way he isn’t, as a rule. Did he say anything to you about me?”
“Practically nothing. That you were supposed to be like him, but you had capacities for life that he lacked, or something of the sort.”
“That he lacked? Jan said that about me?”
“He meant it, too, I think.”
“He did, if he said it.” She fell silent, trying to fit it into the scheme of things. “Mic”—she hesitated—“did he know—that you—?”
“I never told him Oh, yes, he knew.”
“We’re assuming,” said Vivian after another pause, “that Jan had a good deal more confidence in us than we had in ourselves.”
“He generally has. It’s the explanation, partly, of his effect on people. And yet—to exert any influence at all, even that much, is very unlike him. You know his password about letting people alone.”
“That was Mother’s password. Jan’s had a lot from her, I think, that I was too young to get before she died.”
“I wish I’d seen your mother. I never got taken to theatres at that age. What did you say her stage name was?”
“Mary Hallows. Her most famous part was in a play called Marshlight, before we were born. She was always a kind of fairytale to me; all I know of her as a human being I’ve had to piece together afterwards. Father’s a scholar and not well off, and life in a stage set, on her money, would have killed him I should think. But she managed in some way to live her life without messing up his. They used their own incomes, and she had a flat in town where she threw her parties. I conclude he was happy, though, because he grew old in a year, after she died.”
“What did Jan feel about her?”
“It’s hard to say.” She meant, rather, that it was hard to speak of: indeed, she had never spoken of it before.
“I think the first days, after she died, were the worst I can remember in my life. I was twelve and Jan was fifteen. Everyone was taken up with the funeral, and Father, and I think it was believed by the grown-ups that Jan felt it less than I did. Actually, I’d ceased to cry for Mother after the first night: what was really the matter with me was tha
t every time Jan went out of my sight I thought he’d killed himself. I couldn’t tell anyone, so it seemed to me that if he did I should have murdered him.” (Funny, I remember an aunt, or someone, saying to me not long ago, “You were so young, I expect your dear mother’s death is a little dim to you now.”) “She was the only person Jan was ever really involved with. Sometimes I’ve hoped there won’t be another.”
Her body and nerves had resisted this unlocking of cellars longer than her mind, and she was trembling. He kissed her: his comfort seemed to reach back into the past and heal it, as if it had been offered to her then.
“Jan breaks every rule,” he said. “Psychologically speaking, he ought to be running about falling in love with deep-bosomed, middle-aged, protective women.”
“Mother had a nice figure. But she was never middle-aged, and I don’t think protection was a thing that occurred to her very much.”
A fire-engine clanged past under the window, shaking the house. “Wonder where it’s going,” he said idly. “Practice, I expect.”
Vivian stiffened in his arm.
“I must go, Mic; if it’s a bad fire they may be calling extra nurses up; where did I put my things?”
“Take it easy.” He held her down gently: there was always some scare like this. “If it were such a holocaust as all that we’d have seen the glare.”
“I suppose so.” But in a few minutes she was up again. “It’s no good. I shall keep thinking about it now and give you no peace. How long have I been here?”
“About an hour and a quarter.”
“Why in God’s name do we do it? We won’t any more.”
“It’s madness, I always said so. Kiss me before you go.”
“Stop, or I shan’t go, and I must.”
“I’ll come back with you. I can’t stand not knowing if you get in all right.”
“No. You might be seen with me. It’s pointless idiocy to drag you in too.”
“Write to me tomorrow to say it’s all right.”
“You know I will. Don’t worry about me, darling, swear you won’t. It’s absolutely safe, I promise you. I’ve lost my sweater, where is it, I must go.”
“Sorry, I was lying on it. Listen, you’re never to do this again.”
“All right. Good-bye. … Oh, my dear, my dear, I know …”
Next to days-off, when they could play at living together—and these always seemed too few and far to be quite real—Sundays were the best. She came off duty fresh, and was sure of seeing Mic even if her time were suddenly changed. Sister Trafalgar gave her probationers an extra hour on Sundays, so there was time to explore new places out in the hills, to read and talk, without looking at a watch every ten minutes. “I hope it will be fine on Sunday,” they would say; but a wet one was always a warm and secret joy. They still found one another’s minds an adventure, and they had enough imagination and physical sympathy to have become, by now, rather accomplished lovers. They used to laugh, sometimes, over their earlier uncertainties and experiments. Now and then they would say to themselves that they had charted one another; but something generally happened soon afterwards to make them humble.
“Darling,” said Vivian one day, “can you spare me a handkerchief? I seem to have come without one.”
From the living-room, where he was putting some soup on top of the gas-fire, Mic called, “Of course. In the top left drawer, with the ties.”
Vivian opened the drawer, and paused for a moment to contemplate it.
“How repulsively tidy you keep your things, Mic. Matron would love to live with you, I feel sure.”
“You don’t think she’d have me to live with her? That flat of hers looks rather a good one, from the road.”
“My drawers are like the Caledonian Market. I wonder if we ought to get married. What do you think?”
“I don’t mind so long as you leave my stuff where I put it.”
“Aren’t you sweet?” She picked out a handkerchief, and smoothed it approvingly. “These are very extravagant, darling. Rats again?”
“No,” said Mic, stirring the soup. “I had them given me, as a matter of fact.”
“Oh.” Vivian looked at the fine linen sideways for a moment, then smiled and tucked it into her dress. She was about to close the drawer again when something else caught her eye. She pulled it out, unrolled it, and said, “My God!”
“What are you messing about with in there? Soup’s nearly ready.”
“But this is serious. My sweet, I do think you ought to have told me you had a velvet tie.”
“Oh, that. They were rather hot-dog at Cambridge one term. I only wore it about once, at the sort of party where one would.”
“Put it on and let me look.”
“You did say you were going to set the table.”
“I will presently,” said Vivian, laughing to herself. “Don’t come in just for a minute.” She shut the door.
There was a dark shirt on which the tie looked very effective. Mic’s best flannels fitted her fairly well, with a little folding at the waist. She brushed her hair back flat behind her ears, and turned round before the glass, admiring the result. When she emerged Mic had got the table almost laid. His back was turned and he did not see her at first.
“Well, darling?” She lounged in with her hands in her pockets. “All complete except that I couldn’t find the green carnation. Nice?”
Mic turned round, looked at her, and carefully put the soup-saucepan down beside the fire.
“Not very,” he said. “I should take it off if I were you.”
Vivian had slept well the night before; her day’s work had been fairly light, and the unusual possession of a little superfluous vitality had gone to her head. In any case dressing-up delighted her: one of her few traces of stage blood. Such danger-signals as she noticed only added to the interest of things.
“Aren’t I handsome enough?” she asked, coming nearer. “I was afraid your standard would be too exacting.”
Mic stood over her and said, not very loudly, “Are you going to take that off, or am I going to do it for you?”
“Don’t lose your temper, dear boy. You know my nerves won’t stand it.”
She laughed into Mic’s eyes, which seemed to have changed from brown to black in a way they had at certain times.
“I mean it,” he said. “Take it off.”
“After supper I will. Sit down, and I’ll pour out your soup for you. Like Ganymede.”
Mic caught her by the shoulders.
“Damn you. Come here.”
She ducked out of his grip and, slipping up under his arm, kissed him. For a moment nothing happened, then her kiss was returned, at a higher rate of interest than she had bargained for. She laughed while she had breath to laugh, which was not for long.
“And that,” said Mic, “will be about enough, I think.”
He took hold of her shirt, so unhurriedly that she thought he was going to kiss her again: and with one well-directed jerk split it down from throat to hem. The halves fell back from her shoulders; he pulled the ruin free and threw it away.
“I wish,” he said with savage conciseness, “you could see how damned silly you look with only that bloody tie.”
It did not occur to Vivian to say anything. Her mouth opened a little. Mic held her at arm’s length, studying the effect: then twisted the tie off and threw it after the shirt.
Vivian found her voice.
“Suaviter in modo, darling. I thought then you were going to choke me.”
“So did I,” Mic agreed.
“You expect me to mend that shirt for you, I dare say.”
“Shall I tell you what you can do with it?”
“No. Let me go.”
“Why? This is your party, isn’t it?”
She twisted light-heartedly in his arms; he had never been rough with her. But this time she found she had taken too much for granted. He was a good deal stronger than she thought, and at first it was all rather new and exciting, so sh
e had not the sense, even then, to keep quiet, and presently it ceased to be a joke at all.
“Mic, no!” she said, struggling in earnest this time, though it was unlikely, now, that he would notice the difference. He had wrenched her arm fairly hard as he dragged the shirt off; she could still feel it, and was expecting to be hurt a good deal more: but suddenly she no longer cared whether she was hurt, except for the effect it would have on Mic when he came round. She had sold him for a sensation, she thought as she still fought him: and in a rush of remorseful tenderness she ceased to resist. Let her take what she had asked for, and get it over for both of them. But at once he was still also. Their eyes met in bewildered recognition.
“How much have I hurt you?” he said, looking at her as if she had been concealed from him. “Why didn’t you stop me before?”
“Mic. Are you angrier with me than anyone in your life?”
“I haven’t much right to be angry at all.”
“You have. Why did you let me off, I deserved it.”
“What possessed you, anyway?”
“I don’t know. To see what would happen, I suppose. And partly … it’s just I love you so much, I can’t help playing up to anything you want.”
“I want you and only you, and I thought you knew it.”
After that they were wildly happy, though at rather too high a pitch, and the time passed quickly.
“This clock’s four minutes fast,” Mic said.
“It will be just as bad in four minutes. How I hate this moment more every time. It was all so peaceful and what we needed. We never have time to be quiet.”
“I know. I always want you to stay till morning.”
“Never mind, I’ve a day off on Saturday. It seems a year since I slept with you. It’s so jerky and scrappy, all this jumping in and out like a tart.”
“Don’t. I’m sorry.”
What had she said, would she never learn? She pulled his averted face back to hers. ‘Mic, darling, please. Please stop being responsible for everything, honestly. I can’t bear it. I never think of it like that, never.”
“Why don’t you? It’s the normal way to think.”