Purposes of Love (11 page)

Mic had written:

“Dear Vivian,

“I let you go yesterday because we were neither of us in a state to improve things by prolonging them. Even now I find I haven’t much to say. You know about me, and whether you find me intolerable or not won’t depend on my excuses or apologies, but on your temperament and habits of mind. In any case I don’t want to excuse anything, except a moment of blind selfishness for which no excuse can exist. Even that I can’t repent of as full as decency demands; the results have been too important to me.

“You will wonder, if that’s all I have to say, why I couldn’t have left you in peace. I would have, for a little longer anyway, if you hadn’t said good-bye so finally. You meant it, obviously, at the time, and small wonder. Do you still? I think, myself, that ours isn’t the sort of relationship that can cease to exist so easily. Neither of us, I imagine, has ever been much amused by the standard boy-meets-girl manoeuvres. We are people first, and belong to our sexes rather incidentally. We liked one another as people, and, as a person, I shall miss you damnably if you go. Does it matter so much that I kissed you once because you looked like Jan? It might, if it could happen again, but it couldn’t. Believe that, and sometime I’ll tell you why.

“Can’t we still pursue a few human interests together? I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t feel this would be easier for you than for me, since it was I who made a fool of myself, not you. Write to me sometime, and tell me what you think.

“Yours, any way you like,

“Mic”

Vivian lay down on the bed, her face on the cool surface of the letter. She thought, He must be lying, of course, to save my face. How could he not know that I kissed him, and held him, and wanted him?—And still want him, added her restless body; she jerked herself upright again. Or perhaps he thinks I respond like that naturally to any sort of kiss. Or was he really so beside himself he can’t remember what did happen? (I kissed you once, he says.) But that isn’t the way he writes. She read the letter again. It was very tidy: not a first copy, she thought. Is it really possible that he thinks I’ll answer it?

“Because you looked like Jan.” She found herself reading and re-reading it; it was, somehow, a relief to see it written down. A sentence among other sentences, it diminished, falling into place in the ground-plan instead of filling the sky. It went over the turn of the page—“I kissed you,” on one side, “once because you looked like Jan,” on the other. She sat reading the first half, slowly, for a long time; then flipped the page over quickly and read the second.

Looking suddenly at the clock, she found that she had been there for half an hour, had missed dinner, and had five minutes to change and get on duty. The letter she pushed into her pocket. There was no time now, she said to herself, to tear it too small for the corridor maid to read.

Valentine met her at the door of Verdun.

“Oh, there you are, Lingard. Run along quick to Malplaquet. You’re extra there today. They’ve a big bunch of casualties in—something blew up at the power station, I think.”

Extra again, thought Vivian wearily, as she walked the long corridor to the men’s surgical wards. Never knowing your off-duty. But I forgot, it doesn’t matter now.

Malplaquet was one of the oldest wards, a huge stone-floored, iron-raftered place like a railway terminus, and, she found, as busy. There were dressing-trolleys, half-cleared, abandoned in the gangways; the sterilizer, a copper antique like a witch’s vat, was belching steam and the senior nurses were running to and from it, cursing one another for putting in unsterile bowls just before the clean ones were due to come out. One of the honorary surgeons was in the ward and the Sister was trying to take in what he said and watch everything that went on around and behind her. Behind one pair of screens a porter was shaving a man’s body for operation, while a probationer collected the theatre clothes and blankets with stumbling speed; behind other screens, someone was being laid out. Vivian knew this because under the screens she could see the bedspread thrown on the floor; they were laundered, after a death.

She was swept into it all like a cork into a waterfall: she fetched and carried, washed instruments and bowls, made operation beds; cleared up round the corpse and escorted it to the mortuary; held down a man recovering from an anaesthetic, who kept begging her to get into bed with him and telling her she reminded him of his mother. Because she was new to the ward, not knowing its routine or the places where things were kept, she was the one spared to take the next case down to the theatre. She helped the porters to lift him on the trolley; a young man, tall and finely proportioned, handsome in a simple physical way, but waxy pale from haemorrhage, for one of his legs had been torn off in ribbons at the thigh. Since he came in he had been perfectly conscious; he thanked Vivian and smiled at her as she settled the pillow under his head.

The trimming and suturing were hopeless from the first, and everyone knew it. They brought the trolley, running, back to the ward for a blood transfusion; but the dressings oozed faster than the donor gave.

His parents should have been there, but he had refused to tell the Sister where they lived: he did not want them worried, he said, unaware that the hospital regulations required they should be present at his death. He gave, however, the address of the girl he was engaged to, because he was to have met her that afternoon. Very politely he asked that, if it would not be troubling the nurses too much, someone should let her know he was all right.

The girl came quickly, fetched from the Sunday School where she had been teaching; wearing neat, cheap Sabbath finery, a tight blue coat, a lace frill, little glass beads. Sister Malplaquet, a towering woman with the feet, figure and terse kindness of a policeman, talked to her at the door. The girl listened, nodding her head stiffly as if at a lesson, and pulling at a little tear in one of her cotton gloves.

She came up to the bed, smiling; her smile became stiff and fixed for a moment when she saw his face, which was already of the colour of death, but she gave no other sign.

“Well, Reg, you silly boy, fancy you getting smashed up like this.”

He whispered, “Hullo, Edie. You shouldn’t have come all up here. I’ll be fine tomorrow. Just a bit knocked out, that’s all.”

For the rest of the time she sat by his bed, giving him ice to suck, lighting the cigarettes which, since it could make no difference, they allowed him, and meekly going away when the surgeon came. She made mild little jokes about the artificial leg he would have. They were wonderful nowadays, she would never have guessed Ted Barton had one if his mother hadn’t told her. He agreed, smiling when he could no longer speak.

Towards evening they both gave up the pretence that he would live, but neither of them had strength remaining for the open gesture of farewell. They held hands, and he turned his eyes towards her and smiled sometimes, to show that he was still aware of her.

The senior nurses did for him the little that could be done; Vivian’s semi-skilled labour took her generally elsewhere. She flung herself at her rough impersonal tasks, finishing them with ever-increasing speed and fanatic thoroughness, as if the effort could give out some supporting virtue.

When it was beginning to grow dark he died, quietly, his mind still present and unestranged. The girl got slowly to her feet and stood looking down at him, and at his hand which she still held. Suddenly she threw up her head and screamed, a clear bell-like shriek that echoed in the high roof. The nurses came running to her, thinking, from long habit and discipline, of the decencies first of all. She looked at them with a dim bewildered hostility, as if they had reminded her, out of a distant world, of her customary restraints. “Let me go,” she cried, shaking off their hands. “Take me away from here.” She broke through them to the door, and they heard, echoing more faintly down the corridors, the noise of her running feet and high clicking heels. The Sister stood staring after her: such a thing was unheard-of, and a great inconvenience, for there were several things needing to be asked about the funeral, and the disposal of his money and clothes.

Vivian helped a staff-nurse with the last offices. She washed the working grime from his hands, square vigorous hands tempered with various skill, the hands of a good engineer. His body was faultless; it would have been accepted by Praxiteles. Vivian remembered that the girl, who looked quiet-living and religious, had probably never seen it.

She stood in the sluice, over the wide china sink, rinsing in endless waters the blood-soaked blankets in which he had died. The tears were streaming down her face so that she could scarcely see. Sister Malplaquet came in behind her and gave her a hard bony tap on the shoulder; whether in sympathy or reproof she never knew.

That night, before she went to sleep, she wrote a letter.

“Dear Mic,

“You are right; let’s forget about it. As you say, there are too many other things in the world, better and worse than ourselves.

“I am being moved about, and off-duty is uncertain, so perhaps we’d better not fix anything for this week.

“Vivian.”

T
HE WEEK FILLED UP
, like a sack gradually bulging with the slackness and tension of its appointed contents. There was a hospital dance (not attended by Vivian), which provided dining-room topics in all the major and minor keys for the rest of the week. The first-year nurses were examined in physiology. Vivian expended herself, thankfully, in work for this examination during four days’ off-duty time and a day off; and was surprised, not so much at finding her name at the top of the list, since the standard set was mediocre, as at noticing that she was not unwilling to receive congratulations on it. One of the staff-nurses nearly died of septicaemia; one of the house physicians became engaged to a Sister, a mystery variously explained according to the temperament of each inquirer; one of the wards was closed for repainting, and the patients inconveniently dispersed elsewhere. Collins was caught by the Night Sister, for the third time, coming in late, and went about telling everyone, with eager pride, what the Matron had said. On Thursday Vivian was moved back to Verdun. On Saturday morning she had a note from Mic, asking her to meet him on Sunday whenever she was free.

She answered it immediately, because she knew that if she gave herself time to hesitate she would refuse. She had begun to be afraid of it, and to put off going to her pigeon-hole, days before it could conceivably have come; so that when it did, expectation was weary, and she found it with a shock almost of surprise. Remarking her own fluency like an onlooker, she wrote over her morning lunch a simple easy acceptance; left it at the Lodge, and spent the morning planning, with hopeless ingenuity, to get it back. In the end, by hanging about persistently, she contrived to get sent on an errand to another ward, and at great risk went back to the Lodge; but her note had gone.

Her off-duty time that Sunday was in the evening. From five in the morning, when she woke, her imagination peopled the hours from six to ten at night with every misery of concealment, embarrassment and shame. It was impossible, in spite of the assurance of their letters, that they should meet on any terms but those of the most agonising constraint. As the time drew near, her longing to escape at any cost was such that she could almost persuade herself she hated him. It did not occur to her that she might, if she wished, simply refrain from keeping the appointment.

During the afternoon the clock seemed not to move at all. The visitors tramped and murmured in the ward, loading the beds with flowers and unsuitable food; they stared at the nurses, when necessity thrust them out of cover, as at rare creatures in a show, or buttonholed them to ask for diagnoses, which they were strictly forbidden to give. The seniors took refuge in the bathroom, where they were cleaning instruments if anyone appeared; Vivian and the other probationer sought the kitchen, cut the patients’ bread-and-butter, and made themselves tea. The probationer told stories to illustrate her boyfriend’s sense of humour; Vivian applauded, and urged her on. But half-past five came at last.

She put on her everyday clothes with a kind of defiant carelessness, knowing that she was only trying to deceive herself, and forget how long she had spent on her face, her hair and hands. Mic was to meet her in their usual place, a quiet square just out of range of the hospital windows. Her hands felt icy cold and damp, her stomach both empty and sick.

Shut up in the ward and her own imaginings, she had scarcely noticed what weather it was, except that it did not rain. Now, coming out of doors, she tasted the heavy hanging sweetness of a summer evening, as it shifted in the first light winds before the dew. The sun was still up, but its light was deepening, seeming to penetrate with its long slant the inwardness of things, so that they themselves grew luminous. A blackbird sang liquidly, and a church bell rang, so far away that it was like a movement of silence. As Vivian walked, her breath came more easily, and her mind was stilled by a premonition of peace.

She turned the corner into the square, and the sun fell full across her eyes, so that for a moment she was blinded. Then Mic, just beside her, said, “Hullo, Vivian.”

It was altogether different from her imaginings, the nervous smiling from a distance, wondering, as they walked nearer, what to say. But it became, instantly, inevitable and known, the reality which in these dreams she had forgotten. Mic stood there, smiling. She returned his smile. Immediately she had seen him, she had ceased to be anxious, or to feel any responsibility for their conduct of this meeting. She perceived that he had accepted it for both of them. He looked older but not, as sometimes before, also bitter and defensive. For the first time since she had known him, he seemed self-reconciled, directed and serene; yet it gave her no sense of novelty or change, only of a return to something which had belonged to them always.

“Do you know the ‘Hawk and Ring’,” he said, “over the top of the Downs? It’s a nice pub. I thought we might walk up there and have a drink and something to eat; there’ll still be light enough to walk back.”