He smiled and pulled at her hands. Now, she thought, it begins from now; being careful, remembering the things I must not say: hiding the gratitude to him for being himself which I dare not even feel.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
Already she had hesitated too long: there was an unacknowledged doubt in his voice, a thrust-back fear. She jumped to her feet and clung to him, knowing only the instant, impatient need to be reassured.
He took her in his arms and said, very quietly. “What is it?”
“You love me. Tell me you do. Tell me.”
“Yes,” he said, looking down into her face. “I love you. More than I ought.”
“Mic, I’ve loved you always, I swear it. There hasn’t been a moment when I’ve stopped loving you, not a single moment, ever.”
He was no longer holding her. His arms were round her, but still and forgotten.
“Darling,” she said, panic overriding everything, “I’m the same. Nothing of me is any different. It can’t be. I love you.”
He let her go. She knew, then, that she had told him.
She thought that she would never escape from the silence. It was like the walls of a glass coffin and she dared not break it.
She waited, prepared for anything which in his pain or anger he might say to her. But his face had only a struggling lostness, as if he had been put down without warning in some hostile wilderness.
At last he said, staring at her as if she were a part of his foreign scene, “But you were only away from me three days.”
This was worse than anything she had imagined. Finding voice at last, she said, “I suppose it’s in the first days, when one isn’t acclimatised and thinks one will go mad, that these things do happen, if they happen at all.”
“What things? It’s true, then. It can’t be true. You must mean something else.”
She shook her head.
“Who was it?”
She stared at him in silence. It was true; he had questioned sincerely. Scot-Hallard, Rosenbaum, a man she had picked up in the street—all coherence and all certainties were destroyed by the fact that it had happened at all.
“It was Scot-Hallard,” she said.
“Oh, yes. Scot-Hallard, of course.”
Dear God, she thought, watching his face, why didn’t I say a man who picked me up? That I never heard his name or was too drunk to remember it? He has to look at Scot-Hallard every day. He has to take orders from him.
Mic was looking at her, at her disordered hair and loosened shirt. She knew what he was thinking. Something seemed to dry and shrivel inside her; she put up her hand and closed her collar.
“Mic, you must believe I never wanted anything from him, except not to think for a few hours. If I hadn’t minded leaving you more than anything in the world, I could never have done it. You must believe me.”
He said, as if he had not heard her, “Did you stay the night?”
“No.”
“Good. I feel glad you didn’t sleep with him. I don’t know why.”
“He had nothing you’d recognise as being me. Nothing at all. I was like a different person all the time.”
“You adapted yourself to his temperament, I feel sure. Or was it mine that needed more adaptation?”
She could see no impulse of cruelty in his face, only the kind of horror in which people speak aloud to reassure themselves of reason.
“My dear, I beg of you. It wasn’t a great enough thing to be worth this misery. If I’d drunk myself blind you wouldn’t think of it like this. To me it wasn’t any more. You must understand. You must forgive me.”
“Forgive you?” He looked at her, at first blankly and then as if she had said something which, though irrelevant, had recalled him to himself. “What has that to do with it? You’ve done nothing wrong.”
“What do you mean? I’ve just told you.”
“You’re not my property. You say what you did was natural. I believe you. How should I know? It’s I who should ask you to forgive me.”
“What are you talking about? Mic, please try and see this reasonably. I would, if it had been you.”
“Of course you would. Anyone would who was able to. I can’t. To know you could want Scot-Hallard. … Even if I were dead, if I’d never existed. … It’s natural you should, most women do, apparently. I just can’t think about it, it’s unspeakable, it makes me want to kill the lot of us. … I told you I wasn’t fit for you or anyone. I know why it is that I feel like this. It isn’t your fault. I ought to have kept you clear of me.”
She knew then what she had done, but would not believe it.
“You’ve done your best with me,” he said. “You see, it was hopeless. I loved you. But I’d gone too far, I suppose.”
“Mic, no. You’ve got to stop thinking that, you must. Say anything else you like to me. It isn’t true.”
“I expect I’m the best judge of that. … I never had any right to you. I ought to have asked myself whether I could stand this kind of thing. I just didn’t think of it. God knows why.”
“Mic, please. It isn’t you, it’s—don’t you see, I’ve behaved like a bitch. Of course you mind. Any decent man would. Anyone.”
“Not quite like this.”
For a little while now he had not looked at her. He had moved gradually back till he was a couple of yards away. He went on, with difficulty, looking mostly at the floor, “Didn’t you realise—I thought you would have—that the thought of you playing up to Scot-Hallard, like that woman I—God!”
“It wasn’t like that.” The words passed over him. She had spoken without hope, knowing that in the essentials it had been like. He knew it too. She wished she could have died.
“I thought, after that” (he was still looking down), “I should never … but you were so different. That was why I—”
She finished for him, in a little flat voice like a child reciting, “That was why you loved me.”
“You seemed not to be part of it. Unconscious, like … The day you came here and we fenced. I suppose I first wanted you then.”
“And now you don’t want me anymore.”
“Let’s not go into that.”
“My dear.”
“Please,” he said, and stepped backward. Her hands fell.
He was trying to say something more. She waited: it must be something that would release them, awake them from this dream. He looked up at her as if he had slowly forced himself to do it.
“I wonder if you’d mind going now? I think it would be best. I’m sorry: would you mind?”
“Mic, you can’t. You can’t simply send me away. I can make everything all right, I always have. You know I have, haven’t I? How can I leave you like this?”
He had gone over to the bookcase in the corner, and was turning over a textbook that lay on the top of it, looking first at the front cover, then at the back.
“You’ve been very good to me. Kinder than anyone in my life. I shall never forget that. Perhaps if I could have married you. But you see, I can’t even make money. You’ll find someone in a little while who’s better adapted to life and can make you happy. Good-bye.”
Her mind and body both rejected it. She took him by the shoulders and dragged him round to face her.
“Look at me, Mic. Look at me, I said. You can’t give in to this. You’ve no excuse: you know yourself, you can see beyond it. You loved me before I told you this. You still love me. You can’t torment us both like this. Neither of us deserves it. Even I don’t. Come here. Now kiss me.”
He kissed her.
“Satisfied?” he said when it was over. “You asked me. I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right, Mic. I asked, as you say. It’s funny I still love you, isn’t it?”
“You’ll get over that.”
“Probably. I’ll go now.”
“I think I should.” When she was at the door he said, “Remember, I take the entire responsibility for this. You’ve nothing to reproach yourself with.
You’ve been very good and very patient; but you can’t work miracles. No: I want you to go. Please.”
She went, and in the thin light of the lamp her shadow fled and hid its face before her.
-21-
THE NEXT-DOOR WIRELESS was still playing Noel Coward. Mic flattened his hands over his ears, and focused again on the close print and double columns of the periodical between his elbows.
“The Chemistry of the Colloids. Some Notes on Recent—” Realising that he had attacked this page four times without getting to the end of the heading, he turned over in search of something else. As soon as he moved his hands the song came through again, rendered by a light baritone with delicate hesitations and a whimsical, ironic melancholy:
“Reason may sleep for a moment in spring,
But please let us keep this a—casual thing;
Something that’s sweet to remember—”
“Christ!” said Mic, and slammed the window down.
“A Comparison of Basophile Changes in Certain Anaemias.” Mic took one of his notebooks down from the shelf, found a place and began to read. A thin sweet trickle of sound still infiltrated somehow through the glass. He copied two diagrams, scribbled them through, and reached for another cigarette. It occurred to him, as he lit it, that thirty-odd cigarettes a day were not helping his cough, which had come back after a cold a fortnight ago; but he had struck the match by then, and it did not seem worthwhile to waste it.
“Let’s look on love as a—plaything”
pleaded the light baritone, smiling through a sigh.
“All those sweet moments we’ve known—”
Mic pushed the litter of books on the table into a heap, and got up. It was only ten o’clock, and if he walked till eleven or twelve it sometimes happened that he slept at the end of it. As he shut the street door, the song’s last cadences drifted down after him, in a dying fall:
“Let’s say good-bye, and—leave it alone.”
It was a raw night; the pavements were damp in the middle with mist, and he shivered after the heat of the gas-fire. The fog made his chest feel rough, and he began to cough again. With a faint shrug he turned his collar up and walked on. He had started and it was not worth turning back.
The lights of the High Street swung past him. Swift movement gave the illusion of purpose, of moving towards some attainment of escape. There were a good many people still about, but, closed in himself, he put out no threads of contact; and passed like a shadow, no eye moving after him. He was used to this, and felt dazed for a moment when a girl detached herself from the window of a cheap jeweller’s and fell into step beside him.
“You’re a nice boy. All alone?”
“Sorry,” Mic said, withdrawing his arm quickly from her outstretched hand. “Good night.” He heard the girl titter as she fell behind.
Too late he tried to wrench his mind off the worn groove into which, at this reminder, it had slipped with a sickening, accelerated spin. No use. He swung on, past the town, in the first greyness of a hidden moon.
At half-past eleven he decided that he was probably tired enough. His brain and body had settled into an exhausted emptiness which, even if he could not sleep, was almost anaesthetic. He must sleep, though, if he could; his mind had developed, lately, a habit of snapping off, like an interrupted circuit, at moments when he was concentrating hard. Whenever he could nowadays he always put his reports aside to check again, and, if he had to let an urgent one go out immediately, would go over and over it in his mind, imagining slips and errors which, so far, he had not made. A few more nights like last night, and he would begin to make them. Eventually he would make one for Scot-Hallard. Scot-Hallard did not pass errors without comment; and Mic wondered, with a cold feeling, which of several things would happen then. His train of thought was interrupted by another coughing-fit, which hurt.
It was time, he thought, switching on the staircase light to look at his handkerchief, that he put his sputum underneath the microscope again. He was inclined to postpone it, which was, after all, unfair to the people round him. There had been nothing last time. Sometimes he thought that if he found anything it would be a relief; he would be in no doubt then what to do.
Something white on the floor caught his eye. It was a letter, which he must have missed on his way out. Mostly they were mistakes for the shop underneath. But this one was from Colin, to whom he had owed a letter for nearly six months.
Upstairs he smoothed the thin sheets out on the table. The same fifth-form sprawl, running downhill at the end of the lines. (“That’s an awfully bad sign of character,” Colin had informed him proudly on the first day they met.)
It appeared, after the station scandal, and a bored, but wicked, account of a moonlight picnic, that Colin’s wife had at last made up her mind to divorce him, and he was arranging the evidence. (Colin was rather amusing about this.) Afterwards he hoped to get a transfer to Bairanpur. Had Mic heard of the Bairanpur Institute of Tropical Diseases? They were always shouting for pathologists, and, incidentally, paid rather well.
“I wonder what you look like now,” it ended. “Have you grown a beard or anything? And do you still quote funeral orations at the most conspicuously unsuitable moments? I always remember Urne-Burial up the river that day, and how I laughed and how bloody cold it was when you threw me in.”
Mic remembered it too, very well. “But Man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnising Nativities and Deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of bravery in the infamy of his nature.” He had known that day, for the first time certainly, that Colin would forget him.
He remembered that earliest afternoon, near the beginning of the autumn terms; fine September weather; they had shared a study for a week.
“Will you kindly stop your benefit performance, Mansel, and let me do some trig? What the hell are you playing the fool like this for, anyway?”
And Colin, sprawled along the edge of the table, “Because I like watching you laugh.”
Silence, and light, in which even the past was altered; a dark wall falling, distances opening of power and value; the shock of beauty, the fear of entertaining awkwardly this unaccustomed guest.
Re-reading the paragraph about the Institute, he discovered with a distant wonder that he exercised, even now, a certain power over Colin’s mind. Colin had hinted, not suggested, that he might go out. He played with the idea, and found it beginning to solidify. He had done very little tropical pathology, but enough to make a start on, if he worked. There would at least be an escape from the daily, exhausting effort to be sane when Scot-Hallard came into the laboratory and spoke to him.
He was returning the letter to its envelope when he noticed that this still contained something. It was a glossy clear snapshot, sharply etched by a vertical sun. Colin was standing under a palm tree that made him a crossed background of black swords, dressed in white for polo, his sun-helmet tilted back from his face. Mic looked at it for a minute or two; then slowly took the old one from its drawer and laid them side by side. Yes; in the midst of so much grace and lightness it had all been there. In that gaiety the facetiousness of an arrested mind; this smugness in that endearing vanity. How quickly that dragon-fly inquisitiveness had been satisfied with the second-rate! He had set and thickened; his face was looser on the bone; he looked as if he overdrank a little as a matter of course. He was laughing, like one who must always be amused lest a pause for thought engulf him.
Mic slid the photographs one over the other, and tore them through the middle. Solemnising nativities and deaths—he thought, crookedly smiling—with rather unequal lustre. The light thin flakes of the letter went after them into the basket. He sat staring in front of him, seeing not Colin any longer, but Vivian looking down at the picture, thrusting her tumbled hair out of her eyes. He remembered a little movement of her hand along the bed towards him, accepting everything. Her face had been like Jan’s and yet not like: it was as if the rock had been smitten, and given for
th a spring of water.
He got up from the table, and returned his books to their places on the shelves. He was tired to death, but it was useless to hope for sleep. If he had had access to drugs, he supposed he would have been taking something by now. Rosenbaum would probably provide it within reason; but so far he had been ashamed to ask. He threw himself down, dressed, on the bed, lit another cigarette, and wondered whether she was with Scot-Hallard tonight; for Scot-Hallard was not likely to be tired of her yet. As if a cinema-projector over which he had no control were playing on his brain, he saw her leaving her room (of which he had always had a clear imaginary picture), leaving the hospital, passing through the streets, into Scot-Hallard’s house. He shut his eyes, but the film went on unrolling, through his eyelids, through his skull. …
He must have killed Scot-Hallard, by now, in five or six different ways. How long could this violence go on before it destroyed his mind? It was like an ape with an iron bar let loose among instruments of precision. In the morning he repaired the wreckage, always a little less securely.
To distract his eyes from the pictures behind them, he began to blow smoke-rings in elaborate patterns and chains. Presently a deep inhalation made him cough again; so he did not hear the footsteps on the stairs, nor the opening of the door outside.
-22-
VIVIAN HAD VISITED SCOT-HALLARD that evening, for the first time since she had left Mic. He had asked her for some time to promise him her first free night; but she had not, till now, reached the necessary pitch of indifference to herself. She would have been willing enough to make herself useful to anyone who really needed her—it would have given her life a brief appearance of meaning—but with Scot-Hallard it had seemed so certain that any woman out of three or four would do. His invitations were, of course, all conveyed or refused by letter; but one night, when he had remained at the hospital unusually late, they had passed one another on an empty section of the stairs; he had paused for a minute and made as if to speak, and it seemed to her that he remained silent less from caution than from hurt pride. To find him even so far assailable by her had touched her; she had smiled as she passed, and next day, when he wrote asking her again, had accepted.