Everyone was very gay and silly, but with rather more imagination than at other hospital parties to which she had been. They told, as usual, improper stories, but subtler and more allusive ones. Presently someone—Valentine, as far as she could afterwards remember—suggested charades. Valentine picked one of the sides, choosing Colonna first; she had a name, of course, for such things.
Vivian, who was on the other side, could never remember later what word it was that Valentine chose. It ended with a dumb-show, fairly heavily burlesqued, of the tomb scene from Romeo and Juliet. Valentine was Juliet in a white satin nightgown (she had, Vivian noticed, an immature but charming figure) and Colonna was Romeo, wearing a white silk shirt, a sash, and her own black pyjama trousers—a costume that made her look more than ever like a steel plate of Lord Byron gone blond.
Even the audience enjoyed it. Nurses are easy to excite emotionally, like soldiers and other persons strictly regimented and in too frequent contact with death: and no one noticed that the principals guyed their parts less and less as the scene went on. When, at the end, Romeo took his last embrace, and sealed, very firmly, his dateless bargain on the doors of breath, Vivian thought she saw Juliet stir, for a moment, with unseasonable life. But she died very well, with a paper-knife, when her turn came. There was loud and prolonged applause. After the other side had been out, Colonna suggested that they should tell ghost stories in the dark.
In the faint glimmer from the window, which after the bright light did not reveal their shapes to one another, they all curled up together on Valentine’s bed or on cushions on the floor. Warmed and excited by the cocktails and the playacting, their personalities spread and preened themselves in the darkness, peopling it with their favourite fantasies. Someone, she never knew who, gave Vivian a plump shoulder to lean on, and settled her there comfortably; someone else put an arm round her and softly slapped her waist. Neither of them was Colonna. She could hear faint giggles somewhere beyond her in the room. Invisibility, and the fact that half of them were, by regulation, strictly forbidden to know the others, gave to these secret familiarities the illusion of adventure. Behind her, against the wall, Vivian could hear someone moving quietly, in search perhaps of more room.
The ghost stories grew sillier and sillier. Everyone had been awake since half-past six, and most were by now unconcealedly half asleep. One by one, with thanks and a weak drowsy joke, they trickled away. Vivian too felt dim and aching with weariness. Her supporting shoulder had gone, and she longed for the cool solitude of her bed. It must be long after lights-out. She would say good-bye to Valentine, collect Colonna and go. She had been so nearly asleep as to have shut her eyes. When she opened them the sky-lit glimmer seemed, after the darkness of her eyelids, much lighter than before. She perceived that round her, on the floor, all the cushions were empty. The bed, too, above her, was no longer a heaped-up frieze: it held only a low indeterminate blur. Rubbing her aching eyes, she could see a faint surface of white silk, traversed by a flowered sleeve. The white silk stirred softly, and Colonna’s hand gave her a gentle push. Vivian rose and slipped away, without formality or sound.
Colonna did not give notice, after all, next day. Nor did she ever take Vivian to task for going to tea with Mic.
-7-
VIVIAN WAS A LITTLE lonely after this, though Colonna wound up her suit with charming politeness; indeed, it was a small pride of hers that she never, so to speak, sent anyone a marmoset. She sloughed her affairs delicately, like the snake its winter skin, leaving the pretty pattern brittle but untorn. Quite often, in an afternoon when Valentine was elsewhere, she came to see Vivian, made her tea, amused her, and paid her improper compliments for art’s and old times’ sake. But at night the golden dragons prowled no longer; and Vivian, waking as she sometimes did in the first light, would hear down the passage her long soft step and the quiet closing of her door.
Once or twice Valentine asked Vivian up to share their tea or coffee, apparently because she rather than Colonna chose. Vivian found these occasions easy and pleasant; they never behaved embarrassingly and, if they had moods, knew how to keep it to themselves.
For a long time their mutual attraction remained a mystery to Vivian; and a deeper mystery the fact that they never got caught. Perhaps it was because Colonna bore, by the standards of authority, an unsullied reputation. Psychology forms no part of the nursing curriculum, nor did the hospital library contain a single work on the subject. The ruling ranks, settled virgins whose peace of mind was sufficiently disturbed by the direct manifestations of sex, spared themselves the knowledge of its divagations. They had evolved, in many defensive years, an instinct for avoiding discoveries destructive to a rather vulnerable structure of inhibitions. A lipstick a shade too bright; bare legs in the summer; being rung up by a man; on these things the butt-end of Aesculapius’s rod was laid. Colonna, though she broke thermometers often—a fairly serious crime—wore clothes that completely covered her body; made-up so discreetly that the Sisters supposed it to be natural; and was never seen with a man at all. Morally, in fact, she was above suspicion. But socially, as she must be well aware, she had assaulted the Decalogue by becoming friendly with a charge-nurse. It was as if a lance-corporal had gone drinking with the Adjutant; an offence beside which, if it were discovered, all subtler considerations of motive or manner would vanish into air.
At all events, Colonna swaggered less, worked much harder, and had dropped altogether the pose of being more interesting than her job. On the ward she and Valentine were both faultlessly correct; apparently without effort.
Now and again, when Colonna was busy, Vivian would arrive before her in Valentine’s room, and it was at these times that she found out the little she got to know about her; she would emerge from the façade of rather baroque wit which she and Colonna affected as company manners, and talk with a reserved simplicity. She told Vivian one day that she had intended, first of all, to train as a mental nurse. She had gone to a County Asylum, moved by a strong sense of vocation; and it had been the avoidable, rather than the inevitable horrors of the place that had been too much for her in the end. Finally she had been asked for her resignation, after protesting to one of the Sisters about the treatment of a border-line case. But as her general training accumulated successes, she was tormented by the feeling that it was her duty to go back, take her mental course from the beginning again, force herself into some position of authority and do what she could. It was this which forbade her the easy acceptance of privilege, and kept her apart among the people of her own year.
She talked about the asylum very sparingly; but there had been, a little before she came, a hushed-up episode when a man patient, doing garden work, had eluded the male nurses and got through somehow to the women’s side; and during Valentine’s time there the dreadful baby had been born. Valentine had been eighteen at the time, fresh from school, and impressionable. Vivian did not find it difficult to imagine how, between these memories and her mind, Colonna’s epicene beauty might glitter like a delivering sword.
All this meant one off-duty time a week, or less, of Colonna after a steady four or five. Some of the loose time was filled by examinations, for all the nurses’ study-hours came out of their free time. For the rest she had books and the open country, which, after a devastated zone of ribbon-growth, was gratefully near. She had solitude itself—always, after the press of the wards, a luxury eagerly anticipated. It happened also that when Mic suggested things that they might do together, she was generally free.
She became used to finding a note from him in her pigeonhole. She wondered, when she got the first, why the writing was familiar, till she remembered screwing up her eyes at it on pathological report forms. It was an unexpected hand, quite unlike his sub-toned diffident manner and quiet movements; angular, impatient, and undeliberately picturesque. It resembled no one else’s in the hospital and was, as she soon discovered, inconveniently well known. In the end she told him so: having to nerve herself a little first, because Mic
was unpredictable. But he only laughed.
“Sorry. I might have thought of that. It can be corrected.”
“It’s nothing, really,” said Vivian, relieved. “Actually, it’s rather restful to be a subject of hospital gossip, because then you don’t have to listen to it.”
She expected no more notes; but Mic’s solution, it turned out, was to type the envelopes with one finger while the Senior Pathologist’s secretary was at lunch.
After people had stopped saying, “There’s a note for you, Lingard,” with special smiles, the wind only blew her rare and slender straws—a conversation changing, with a certain grinding of gears, when she came into the common-room; the cessation of jokes, once frequent, about her bookish and solitary ways. It amused her, however, to discover herself, sometimes, half-unconsciously playing up to her reputation. At these moments of dramatisation, the picture at the back of her mind was of a quite fictitious affair with an imaginary man; so remote were the legends from the reality of her tentative, fluctuating contacts with Mic.
These were certain in nothing, except uncertainty. They never had, indeed, anything like a quarrel; that would have implied too much intimacy, a common stock of mutual knowledge. Vivian’s difficulties were more like those of Alice with the Cheshire Cat. Because she was conscious of some natural kinship, deeper than emotion or attraction, between them, it was irritating to have all communication switched off, as it generally was once or twice in every few hours they spent together, arbitrarily, abruptly and without discoverable cause. It would happen in the midst of animated, impersonal talk; he would look inexplicitly at her, flick down his eyelashes—she got to know the trick—turn away, finish what he had been saying with a commonplace, sometimes irrelevant, and be unapproachable for five minutes or so. He might emerge, afterwards, as if nothing had happened; on other days, he would be forced and unreal till they said good-bye. Vivian put up with it because he was hardly ever rude, or, when this did happen, seemed quite unaware of it; and because, between his eclipses, he was better company than anyone else.
With a little more wisdom and use of what she knew, she might have found the answer; with a little less, she might have supplied one. But it would almost have defeated Collins, she thought, to see in Mic a nice, shy young man, remembering that he couldn’t afford to get married. In the first place Mic was Mic; in the second he was not at all shy; in the third his views on marriage, as they emerged in general discussion, were not particularly sacramental. Moreover, it was at these moments alone that he sometimes behaved as though he disliked her. She noticed that he would go to quite elaborate though unobtrusive lengths to avoid a chance physical touch.
She often wished that she had got Jan to say more about Mic before he went away. He had been ready; but she had been uninterested, even perhaps a little unwilling. Jan had sterilised jealousy in her long ago; but a kind of reluctant envy sometimes stirred in her towards his friends when they were new. In her firmament Jan was fixed, a star whose worth was known and height too surely taken. These new watchers would measure it too; but before them first were discovery and suspense, adventure and experiment and hope.
Jan would have moved on by now, as usual without sending his new address. She wondered, supposing she got it, whether to write to him about Mic. If one required from Jan anything definite and important, he would answer as a rule by return of post. But she felt that he would ask, of himself if not of her, why she should make these efforts; what was the use of a relationship so incomplete that it had to be clarified by other people.
Meanwhile, she continued to see Mic. To interpose a buffer between herself and his uncertainties, she began to consider him as a problem, even, in very defensive moments, as a case. Perhaps he had had some emotional shock which made him distrustful of friendship; perhaps his home life might be—what was the catchword?—maladjusted. (She remembered that Colonna’s parents had separated, too late for Colonna, after punctuating her childhood with squalid abusive scenes.) She made up her mind to find out.
Nothing was easier than to get Mic to talk; nothing more difficult than to guide the conversation down the kind of channel she wished to explore. After knowing him for over a month, the only pieces of concrete history she had got out of him were the name of his public school—a third-ranker, not too reactionary—the fact that he had reached Cambridge with a bursary of some sort, worked for a research fellowship which he had failed to get, gone to Viner’s laboratory, disliked it, and met Jan at a meeting of some Cambridge scientific society. About Jan he would talk, sometimes, with startling frankness; at other times, refuse to talk about him at all.
One fine Saturday afternoon she determined to forget all about it. They went swimming in an open-air bath outside the town. The sun glittered through light wind; sharp little clouds cleft the sky like racing yachts; the living air braced their skins and washed their minds of complexities, leaving them simple and receptive only of enjoyment. They raced one another, and horse-played childishly.
“Christ, look at that fellow diving,” said Mic. “Gets ready like Danilova, and a belly-flopper at the end.”
“Let’s see you try.”
“All right. Coming too?”
“No, I’ll watch you. I don’t care about water in my ears. Seen too many mastoids.”
There seemed no end to the odd cards up Mic’s sleeve. He dived beautifully, with the grace of co-ordination perfectly achieved and forgotten; launching himself, from every kind of take-off, into loops and rings and fantastic arcs and sliding into the water like a spear. At first he was enjoying himself too much to notice that everyone else in the bath had suspended activity to watch him; but presently, pausing on the highest board, he saw the upturned faces, came down with a formal dive and swam back to her.
“You can dive, Mic.”
He looked a little ashamed of himself. “It’s about the only thing I can. I used to do a lot at school to get out of games.”
They sunned themselves on the grass at the edge, feeling limber and good-looking and fit to be alive in early June. Vivian had on a new costume, dark and clever and deceptively plain.
“I like you in that,” Mic told her suddenly.
Did he, indeed? There was no keeping track of him. Vivian was not unaware that she possessed a well-shaped body, but entirely unprepared for being informed of it by Mic. She found that she was pleased.
He added, “It makes you look like you.” It was a compliment typical, she thought, of Mic in Delphic ambiguity.
They went back and had tea, as usual, in his flat. When they had washed up—she had persuaded him, by now, to let her help with this—they talked lazily. Vivian thought what a successful afternoon it had been. So far, Mic had not blacked-out once. She looked at him as he sat smoking, relaxed in pleasant weariness. His hair was drying in a soft childish disorder; he looked young, candid and defenceless. No one knew better than Vivian, by now, how far to trust in such appearances; but they moved her and reminded her how much, in spite of everything, she really liked him. She had been telling him about her home, and the ways in which she and Jan had spent their childhood. The constraints between them seemed trivial inventions, needing only to be brushed aside.
“Tell me, Mic, where do your people live? Let’s have a little from you for a change. What’s your father, as they say at school?”
Mic ceased to look conspicuously young. He blew a smoke-ring, which he did very neatly.
“I haven’t got one.”
“I’m sorry. Has he been dead long?”
Aiming carefully, Mic put a second ring plumb through the middle of the first.
“I hope so,” he said.
Vivian squeezed the arms of her chair. How obtusely slow she had been! It seemed now that he had been shouting this at her for weeks. But she had never before, to her knowledge, met anyone illegitimate; she would have thought as quickly of his mother being an Eskimo.
She had exposed him from little more than curiosity, and to support her self-esteem. Her s
calp tingled. She was too much concerned for him to wonder what her face looked like.
Mic looked round at her. “I’m sorry,” he said, with most of the bite gone out of his voice. “I thought Jan would have told you.”
Vivian pulled herself together. “I don’t suppose it struck him as sufficiently important. It wouldn’t me. Though perhaps that’s rather a stupid way of expressing it; it must have been important to you.”
“I dare say it wouldn’t have been, particularly, except that I was brought up by people who didn’t approve and never stopped discussing it.”
“My dear.”
“Oh, well, that’s a long time ago. Now it’s just a nuisance in practical ways. Actually, most people have been rather touchingly good about it. But Jan was the first I met who genuinely wouldn’t have minded if it had been himself. Perhaps that—influenced me.”
“He wouldn’t, as he is. You can’t say what another sort of environment would have made of him.”
“Would you mind?”
Vivian considered. “When other people did, I expect, like you. But in itself—well, yes, I suppose I should think about my mother.”
“Mine doesn’t give me much chance. She married someone when I was two, and hasn’t seen me since. Probably got a proper decent family by now.”
There seemed nothing left to say to that. Nor were helpful little gestures—the pat on the arm, the inarticulate murmur—somehow in the picture with Mic.
“How did you get educated?”
“Somebody put down some money for it. The father, I believe. … The people who brought me up always referred to him as ‘the father,’ so that’s how I think of him.”
“Why aren’t you a revolutionary, Mic? Don’t you want to smash the social order? What are you, by the way?”
“Oh, a sort of middle-brow Socialist, I suppose. I want everyone to have enough money, and decent working conditions, and education, as soon as possible. And no more wars. The usual stuff. But getting my knife too deep into the social order would be a bit like blaming myself on to my environment. It may be partly responsible for some things I’d prefer to be different. Doubtless is. But true or not, that’s an impossible basis on which to live.”