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.)
Scot-Hallard, when she came back, was saying, “I’ve been trying to analyse your individual flavouring. A very dry sherry—olives—salted almonds none of those is quite right—”
With a thrust of her mind she overturned the candles and smothered out their intolerable light. “But who,” she asked, “is the meal with which you’re proposing to follow this hors d’oeuvre?”
He smiled at her. (She noticed that he had fine teeth, uneven but white and strong.) It was a smile simple in intention, but containing, beside its message, many things: anticipation, calculation; a disenchanted tenderness, and the thin shreds of some faded dream. She understood at that moment that his satisfactions had become cheap and crude because he now preferred them to be so; that he had pursued from woman to woman some expectation long grown weary, and was beginning to know in secret that its failure lay within himself. A still pity filled her: for him, for herself, for the confusion of mortality. Her pasteboard weapons lay idle. She leaned back in the car beside him, her hands loosened in her lap, wondering why she had resented or been scornful of him, a fellow-creature like herself who had missed his way; and thought how trivial the thing was that he asked for, in comparison with what he had to give—all these hours of not being alone with herself, of having no leisure to think or to remember.
He stopped at the first telephone-box they came to. She knew he was ordering tea at his house and giving his man the evening off. She could see his face through the glass, brisk, composed, dispatching a familiar routine. Her hand tightened on her knee: she saw the charwoman with her American cloth bag and her cup o
f tea, and Mic, taking the stairs in threes and fours, and running to her out of breath. For the first time in these days, she felt the ache of tears behind her eyes. She forced them inward, beneath the smile she was preparing.
-20-
VIVIAN’S FIRST THOUGHT, WHEN she woke in her own bed next morning, was to remember with relief that she would be on duty that night. It was good to know that in scarcely more than twelve hours she would be doing something whose purpose was unrelated to herself, and which had a slight but undeniable usefulness.
Her feelings about the evening before had a curious dimness and inconsequence. It had all been so like expectation that she might almost as easily have been anticipating as remembering it. But it had left behind, in her thoughts of Scot-Hallard, a kind of weary affection and respect. Mic had been wrong about him; he was kind within his limits, and had a careless instinctive honesty which had relieved the affair of such squalors as might have made it unendurable. He did not try to explain away the fact that he had no idea of marrying her; nor tell her a moving story about the woman who had ruined his life; nor say that she was different, or sympathetic, or that she understood him. But he offered the honours of war with courtesy and a certain amount of charm. The most disconcerting thing had been his elaborate code of manners; she was unused to it and it faintly disgusted her, reminding her of the comic papers in which people addressed one another as “Colonel” or “Miss Smith” in bed.
The small element of primitive female in her had, she supposed, been satisfied. He seemed pleased with her, and genuinely anxious that she should visit him again.
“I know less about you than ever,” he said at parting. “You’re a peculiarly intact sort of person, aren’t you?”
She had smiled and gone away, leaving behind her, like a garment, the personality he had created in her, which seemed irrelevant to herself.
It had filled the evening and rescued her from thought, which was all that she had asked. But now that it was over, she regretted it. Not that she felt herself invaded or possessed—she thought that few experiences she could remember had left less mark on her—but because she knew now that retreat had weakened her. In the half-hour before she met him, some beginning of resolution and courage had been moving in her. Now her will felt drugged, as it had when she crept out of the stuffy cinema, leaving her more sensible than ever of pain.
And now pain was returning. The alienness of the emotional climate she had passed through made her long for Mic with a bitter nostalgia for which nothing offered relief. The numbness of the first shock was over: pain defined her, and kept her alive. Perhaps she felt more because last night, for the first time in weeks, she had slept soundly and long.
She knew that, as she had come to understand love, she would never love anyone else. In time she might settle with someone into some kind of mutual kindness: she would take what offered, since life had somehow to be spent. But in Mic she had struck her balance. It was a thing, once found, for which there was no substitute: and it was not one which nature, out of all her plenty, would be likely to reproduce.
Grief for the loss of it seemed sometimes great enough to fill the world. But behind it was the terror of greater and ultimate loss: the loss of herself.
“Hullo,” said Rodd, under the green pool of the lamp. “Had a good binge?”
“Marvellous, thanks. Have you been busy?”
“Busy, we’ve had everything. That bloody little wet Jacobs, who did your nights-off, let a double hernia get out of bed.”
“What happened, did the stitches hold?”
“Yes, they were Scot-Hallard’s, thank God. I got sent to Matron, though. Have to watch our step now.”
Rodd seemed genuinely glad that she was back again; and this made her feel unreasonably moved. She remembered all the nights when she had worked with half her thoughts elsewhere, or had only pretended to listen when Rodd talked about her trousseau and her boy. They were busy that night: a patient came in with a perforated stomach ulcer, and little Rosenbaum came up to the ward after the operation to give an intravenous saline. The patient was badly collapsed, and the necessity of self-forgetfulness brought her the first taste of something like peace. When she was clearing away the stained instruments she looked at Rodd, at Rosenbaum’s crimped black head bent over the hand-basin, and at the sunken-eyed man propped in his high pillows: and, like the Mariner, blessed them unaware.
During the supper which they had after duty, someone leaned over to her and said, “There’s a note in your pigeonhole, Lingard.”
“Oh. Thank you.” She blinked in a sleepy irritation: she had noticed on the face of her informant a familiar kind of smile.
“Been there since last night. Didn’t you know?”
She played for a moment with a wild conjecture that Scot-Hallard had had the madness to write to her in his own hand; but that would have been a sensation out-topping smiles. Suddenly she found she could not eat any more. As soon as the meal was over she got the note and took it into a quiet corner by herself.
She had known. It was from Mic: the shortest letter he had ever sent her.
“I want to ask you to forgive me. If that’s possible, will you come on Sunday? I shall wait for you.” Half a line was crossed out, then, “I don’t suppose there is much you will need me to explain.
“I love you. But perhaps I’ve no right to love anyone. If you don’t come I shall know that is what you have decided, and accept it.”
Sunday was today.
She walked unseeingly to her room, with the letter in her hand, and began to take off her uniform. The release was too great: it seemed to choke her; that or the shame that came with it, to think that, alone as she had not dared to be alone, he should have forced himself to this.
She had not thought of him, except as something that had hurt her, something she had lost. Having used on him every weapon he had ever put into her hands she had left him, to lick her own wounds and hire herself out in exchange for forgetfulness. She reached for her outdoor clothes, no longer coherently thinking; feeling only the need to be there.
She ran a good deal of the way; but when she reached the door at the foot of the stairs it was a second or two before she could make herself turn the handle.
He opened the door of the flat as she reached it. There was a little pause in which neither of them thought of speaking: a moment of acclimatising themselves to not being alone. They looked into one another’s faces. Mic’s eyes looked as if he had slept less than she: they had a quiet, and what seemed already a habit of private endurance. He said, “I—” and stopped. She took a step forward: and suddenly they were not separate any more.
The door stood open. Presently, without letting go of her or taking his lips from hers, Mic put an arm out blindly and swung it to.
They had both had words of some kind ready to say, but nothing came. One does not excuse oneself to one’s house when one returns weary from travel. Her arms felt the accustomed shape of his waist and shoulders. There had been a moment, two nights before, when Scot-Hallard was being gentle and charming to her and she had almost wept for strangeness; he had been like a foreign landscape reminding her of exile.
They wandered somehow to the window-seat. “I love you,” she said. “I was a fool and a beast and a liar.” Mic whispered, “Be quiet,’ and kissed her again.
They had done too much to one another with words to trust them easily now, and for a time they used none. Vivian tried to cast out the hauntings of fear which seemed, even here, to shadow her. This, if anything, was certainty; this had always been, and would never have to end. Yesterday, in her room alone, she had remembered them like this; Mic stretched along the seat beside her, the fine crispness of his hair against her neck. Which was, and is, and is to come. She folded her hands about his head, in the crossed gesture with which saints in windows fold their symbol or the instrument of their death. His touch with its love and knowledge was like an absolution. The days of wandering were as if they had never been.
/> They were leaning against the square panes of the window, in a fold of curtain which Mic with a silent laugh had drawn round them. Outside the bells of the churches were ringing, making thick circles of sound in the Sunday air.
“Why do you still love me?” she said.
He answered her in silence. The hard shell of her emptiness had dissolved; she felt like a warm golden stream, flowing under the sun, the banks of its appointed course embracing it.
He stood up, and offered her his hands. She took them, not moving for a moment, though she knew where he was taking her and was glad. They were still, their hands joined, listening to the bells and watching the people stream by with their thick dark clothes and prayer-books in the street below.
Looking down at her, he said, “Next time anything—happens—I expect you’d better simply lie to me. That seems to be all I’m fit for.”
Across Vivian’s warmth and radiance fell suddenly the chill of a passing wind. He had spoken easily, in the hour’s security, but she knew that he had meant what he said.
She pulled him nearer by the hands and rested her face against his sleeve, trying, in these few seconds that she had, to think. She could not think, she could only hide herself for fear. The cruel perversity of it was that she had not thought till now of telling him. It had not occurred to her as being of any immediate importance. It had become no more than an uncomfortable dream for which, when there was time, she would ask him to comfort her.
Now she understood that she had not shed or evaded it, but brought it with her, everything, down to the trace of stale gardenia on the dressing-gown: delicately, inerasably etched into the accomplished past. It was part of the sum of her, of her hands that he held, of her love itself.
Well, he had told her what to do. It was the evident, the accepted wisdom. This was her punishment, the loss of their completeness, the locking of a room within her where he could never come; to be shut away from him, every now and then, into this small and sordid loneliness.