“I’m not normal, I suppose.”
“Or else?”
“Mic, for God’s sake! If you start that again I’ll shoot you.” He began to say something, and she flung herself on him and shook him, furiously. “Stop it! I love you, how many times do I have to say it and say it, I love you, can you get that or shall I translate it into something simpler? By God, I could kill you, Mic, sometimes.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” Mic freed himself, needing some force, and held her hands behind her. “How amazing you are.” He was laughing as he kissed her: but she felt ashamed of herself.
“What on earth has been the matter with us?” she said as they were walking back. “It’s been one continuous nerve-storm, hasn’t it? Even the good part, really. We never used to be like that.”
“Unnatural sort of life, I suppose. Sometimes I’ve thought—”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
She did not ask again, because she knew what he had been going to say. She, also, had felt that she would be happier married to Mic on what he had now, even if it meant living in her present clothes for the next few years. But she had heard enough grim stories about the spoiling of young men’s careers, and had no intention of putting her weight on his shoulders. Later, when she was fully trained and could be self-supporting, it would be different: in any case, Mic himself was not likely to have marked time till then. Meanwhile he would not ask her, she knew, unless she gave him a lead: and she was not going to give it.
“I’ll see you on Saturday,” she said, “if we don’t meet before.”
She would come, as they both knew, some night in the middle of the week: but this formula saved Mic from having to fuss about it.
-14-
AT THE FAG-END of August there was an epidemic of influenza. The medical wards got most of the complications, but the burden fell on the whole hospital because twenty per cent or so of the staff went down. It was a time, too, when a good many people were on holiday. The busiest days of a taking-in week became the normal order of things.
Vivian could not believe, when she dragged herself off duty, that she had ever had the necessary surplus energy to tease Mic. She was grateful enough, now, that he put up with her dullness and was willing, when she had nothing left for him, to look after her and amuse her like a child. He was extraordinarily kind to her: too kind sometimes, for there were moments when she was clogged in a lethargy of weariness and would have been glad to be aroused, but had not the will herself to make the effort. Now and then he would know this: sometimes neither of them knew, and they would struggle against strain and irritability without knowing why. When things were worse nothing mattered except gentleness and rest, and he gave her these.
Curiously, she was often most alive in the middle of the night: she would awaken, then, to a kind of spurious sparkle which would keep her going for an hour or two, then snuff out, and leave everything greyer than before. Once or twice, at such times, she went out of the window to see Mic: but everything had an extravagant, frightening intensity, and she would not do it often because she was so unutterably tired next day. She owed the patients a certain modicum of vitality.
Lying in bed on one of the nights when she might have gone, with her brain running hard and fast like an overturned engine, she took stock of herself. It was time to cease pretending that the hospital was, for her, any longer a testing-ground, an order of discipline, an aesthetic experience, or the means for her service of mankind. It had been, in some degree, all these: now it was simply a power to be placated, because only its consent enabled her to be with Mic.
What remained was honesty, which told her, in a small clear voice like the tick of the watch beside her bed, that such a use of such a community would have to be justified. She must never put in less than if she were there from conviction. It was a thought which remained with her in the morning; and when she was tired and inclined to scamp her work, or to withdraw her mind from what she was doing and think comfortingly about Mic, it often jogged her elbow. If she had tried to forget it, Sister Trafalgar’s presence would have reminded her.
It was impossible not to let Mic see that she was tired, but she always worked hard to minimise it: he was too painfully ready to make any of the asserted discomforts of her life his responsibility. His own work was heavy too. It was an airless, scorching August, and it told on both of them. Often they had moods of bitterness, though they managed to keep from turning them on one another.
“By the way,” said Mic one evening, “you missed a good chance today of being respectably married to a poisoner.”
“A nice one?” said Vivian, catching the ball listlessly.
“Not very. Me. It was hinted in great confidence that if I cared to interest myself in bacterial warfare, I might get a good berth. The thing’s in its infancy, you see; a good chance for a pushing man to get in on the ground floor.”
“How horrible. What would you have had to do?”
“Cultivate sturdy and resistant bugs that would stand up to being dropped on industrial towns, and into water-supplies, and so on. Anthrax does well, I believe.”
“But who asked you? No one at the hospital, surely?”
“I was made to swear secrecy practically in blood, so I suppose I’d better not say. It would have been nice not to be living in sin any more, wouldn’t it?”
“I didn’t believe that was actually happening.”
“Just a few tentative reluctant experiments, in case the other side gets there first.”
“It makes things seem near.”
“Probably this isn’t a very good moment to think about it. You look done up tonight; I’m sorry I told you.”
“I’ve thought a good deal lately, because it struck me the other day that if war comes, my life will just be one endless epidemic, ten times magnified, without this to look forward to. All this time we’ve spent learning to live will just be so much junk. Your survival-value will be smashing men, and mine patching them up to be smashed again, and emptying bedpans and cleaning away blood and filth quicker and quicker. Neither of us knowing where the other is, and, whether alive or dead.”
“I’m afraid my survival-value is going to be very slight. My mind’s made up about that. You can’t spend five or six years watching living cells, at least I can’t, and blow people’s bodies to pieces as light-heartedly as ever at the end of it. All those microscopic interdependent lives, a corporate state in themselves, obeying a dictator we don’t even begin to understand. How do we know a man isn’t just a cell of something larger? Big fleas and little fleas, you know. Anyhow, leaving futile speculations out of it, I can’t see myself heaving a bayonet through a lump of liver-tissue. If they can use me at my job, all right; if not I suppose they may as well shoot me and save my keep. Does that upset you?”
“No, I’m glad. I wonder if we’d suddenly feel we had to have a baby. They say you do: instinct to perpetuate the race.”
“Poor baby. If we do, let’s keep it up our sleeve till we see what the race is in for.”
“It takes nine months to have a child. Probably neither of us would be alive that long. We’re individuals, Mic, a dying species. Why should we mind? I expect God had a lot of enjoyment from dinosaurs, before he thought of something better, and didn’t blame them for not being anthropoid apes. Perhaps the future creatures will have a lovely group-soul, but none of their own, like Bergson’s animals, and that will do as well.”
They reached for one another’s hands, thinking beyond the chances of war to the certainties of change and of death.
It was after supper: the sun had gone down, and there began to be a little air to breathe. Mic shivered, and put his jacket on.
“Do you mind if I shut the window?” he said. “It’s getting cold.”
“Cold? Darling, I think it’s tropical.” Vivian looked at him, then shut the window quickly herself and felt his forehead with her cheek. “Have you got a thermometer anywhere?”
“Of cour
se not. What for?” But presently he shivered again.
Next night Vivian borrowed a thermometer from the ward, and took it over the railings with her. She found Mic very wide awake in bed, with a temperature of a hundred and one. He ran them up easily, he said; it meant nothing; he would be fit for work again in a couple of days. He urged her to go away quickly and not to hang over him, but he was obviously miserable, and glad that she had come. She gave him hot milk and aspirin, prepared as much of his breakfast as was possible overnight, and slept badly.
Mic proved not to be a good patient. He was disobedient, untruthful about his symptoms, not very sweet-tempered under cross-examination, and used to get up and shave before she came, which infuriated her. At intervals, he would relax into a weary and childishly trustful dependence, from which these self-assertions were the reaction. On the second day she required no information from him to ascertain that he was becoming alarmingly bronchial, and more worried than, he wanted either of them to know. She propped him up with all the pillows and cushions she could find, rang up a doctor from the nearest call-box, and arranged to come back, bringing the things most likely to be needed, that night.
In the course of the perpetual readjustments which staff shortage caused, she found herself that day helping in the Private Wing. It was a preserve of senior nurses as a rule, but now there were only just enough of, them to run the wards. Vivian was a kind of runner, doing all the small fagging in order to leave the diminished staff free for treatment. There was a spoilt Anglo-Indian widow, thready and arduously preserved, who appropriated her as a personal maid. Vivian, as she threaded a fresh ribbon into her bed-jacket, remembered that Mic, with a temperature, today, of a hundred and three, was doing everything for himself. She imagined him fainting in the passage, lying there indefinitely, and getting pneumonia, if he had not got it already.
At last the day ended and Vivian went to her room. Luckily it was dark earlier now. She made a bundle of the things she had been able to collect, and began to change. In the middle of it someone knocked at the door. She pulled off the skirt she had been hooking on, kicked it under the bed, and said, “Come in.”
“I’m glad you’re here,” Colonna said. She was out of breath. “I thought I’d be too late. Kept on the ward.”
“What is it?” Vivian asked impatiently. She would have done much for Colonna, but not now. She felt stupid and bone-weary, her head and back ached; there was one thing ahead, and only just enough of herself left to do it.
“It may not be you at all,” Colonna said. “But if by any chance you’ve been getting out of your window lately, don’t do it tonight.”
The pain in Vivian’s head flared up, as if it had been stirred with a bellows.
“Why not?”
“Because you’ll be caught if you do.”
Vivian sat down on the edge of the bed. She was only wearing a silk slip, and hugged herself for warmth. Her teeth were chattering.
Colonna explained: “Valentine told me. She says the Assistant Matron saw someone last night, from the end of the road, but she wasn’t near enough to see who it was or which window they went in at. So for the next few nights they’re going through the rooms to see everyone’s there. Valentine thought at first it must be me she’d seen, but the times and places were all wrong, and it struck me it might be you. So I came along to let you know. Cheer up, it’s a bad time to burn the candle at both ends, anyway. I don’t believe I’ll mind a few nights in myself.”
Vivian lay down, aching and shivering, on the bed. “What shall I do?” she said. “What shall I do?” She caught a fold of pillow between her teeth, lest she should say it again.
Colonna looked down at her with a face of weariness and pity, mingled with a certain disillusion.
“Wait till you get an evening, I suppose,” she said. “And if that’s how you feel about it, try not to let him know.”
“For God’s sake go away.” She heard Colonna move, and suddenly it seemed intolerable to be left alone. “He’s ill. He’ll be awake all night now, thinking I’ve been caught.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was like that.” Colonna’s voice was flat and tuneless; there were shadows like bruises underneath her eyes. She said, with a faint sight, “I never imagined these things happening to you. You always seemed so apart, and free.”
They looked at one another for a moment, thinking of an evening a few months back, and taking, for the first time, the full shock of change. Then Vivian bent and pulled her skirt out from under the bed.
“What’s the time?”
Colonna looked at her watch. “Ten past nine.”
Vivian was putting her clothes on.
“You’re mad,” Colonna said.
“No, I’m not. I can do it and be back by ten. They won’t start the round before then.”
“Someone may have their eye on the window.”
“I shall use the door.”
“It’s your funeral.” Colonna paused on her way out. “But I should give them best tonight, if I were you, and take fifteen grains of aspirin. You don’t look any too good yourself, to me.”
“Don’t be a fool,” said Vivian, with a force that made her cough. She stopped herself, swallowed hard because her throat was sore, and added, “Thanks for coming, it was good of you. Good night.”
To be out before ten was a fairly mild risk, because only people who had seen her in uniform that evening could be certain that she was not off duty. The Matron, she remembered, had not made a round of the ward. But it would only leave her about ten minutes with Mic.
She got out safely, and ran through the town, pausing sometimes because her laboured breathing made her cough till it was no longer possible to breathe at all. Every step jolted a flash of pain across her eyes. She waited a minute or two outside the flat, to straighten herself and quieten down.
The sound of Mic’s breathing pleased her less than ever. She could tell, before she took it, that his temperature was up again.
“What did the doctor say?”
“He didn’t worry,” said Mic huskily. “He just said rest and keep warm.”
“Did he say you ought to have a nurse?”
“Good Lord, no. Of course not.” She knew that he was lying.
“How much money have you got, Mic? I’ve got fifteen shillings.”
“About two pounds. As a matter of fact, I feel a lot better tonight.”
“I’ll be off in the afternoon tomorrow. You’re not to get out of bed till then. I’ll fix everything. And you’re to keep this stuff on your back and chest, and if it comes off you’re to put it back again. Promise all that.”
“All right. Thank you,” said Mic gently. She longed for him to argue with her, as he had at first.
“I’ll have to go back in half a minute, darling. There’s a sort of room-inspection on. Just time to help you get washed first.”
“I had a bath today. It didn’t take a minute. I felt all right.”
“Oh, Mic, I told you. You must do as I say. It drives me frantic to think of you doing all these damn fool things when I’m not here.”
He took her wrist with sudden force. “Listen. You’re not to worry about me. Go back and get some sleep.” His cracked voice went up a tone. “You look awful tonight. I ought never to have let you come here. You must be doing fourteen hours a day, counting me.”
“I’m all right. I didn’t have time to put any make-up on. Nature in the raw, that’s all it is.”
She straightened his tangled bed. While she was arranging the pillows he slipped his hand up her arm and held it quickly against his face. It was then that she remembered he had had pneumonia, badly, before. She looked at the clock: her time was up.
As she went back the little breezes of the night shocked her heated body like waves of cold water alternating with waves less cold. She knew that he would not sleep: his temperature was too high. She had left him to spend all night alone in the dark, in pain and afraid, and she knew no mastery of life that c
ould make it endurable.
Next morning, when she came on duty, she felt so dazed with fever and sickness that she seemed almost to have ceased to be a person at all. There was a physical machine of limbs and eyes that worked and appeared, somehow, separate from its sensations, which were distractions in the dull brain that pushed it along. She could no longer feel belief in the importance of anything, but remembered, like a learned lesson, that she must keep going long enough to get to Mic in the afternoon.
Sister stopped her as she passed the nurses’ duty room.
“Nurse Lingard, I saw you out last evening after duty. I ought to send you to the office; you know that, don’t you?”
“Yes, Sister.” It all seemed to be happening somewhere else, or in the past.
“I won’t say anything this time. But I shall, if it occurs again. We can’t have it, you know: you can’t be fit for your work next day. You look half asleep now. It isn’t fair to the ward, is it?”
“No, Sister. I’m sorry.” It was all true. Everything was true, everything cancelled out. So she could not go tonight. But she had known that she could not go tonight. There was, in this finality, a kind of release.
Mic, when she got there, seemed much the same: or perhaps it was too great an effort to make her mind judge whether he looked better or worse. He had kept his promise, and had not shaved. She roused herself to talk to him and do what was necessary. In the middle of it she felt the approach of a fit of coughing she knew she would not be able to control. She went into the bathroom and shut the door till it was over, and then went back to the lint she was spreading on the table.
“Vivian.” Mic’s voice, roughened in his chest, was unlike his own and its expression unreadable. “Come here just a minute.”
She went through the open door and knelt on the floor beside the bed, partly to hide the fact that she was shaking, partly because it was easier than to stand. She tried to force herself to stop shivering, but could not.
“I thought so,” he said, and looked away. He began to speak again, but his voice grated and stopped in the middle of a word, and he pulled her head sharply down into the bed beside him, and held it there. She could feel the muscles of his body harden so that he should not cry. It seemed, to Vivian, a blank wall at the end of all things. She wept without heart, hope or control—probably the kindest service she could have done him, though she was past such calculations.