Purposes of Love (21 page)

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 could 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.

After a time she raised her face. Everything seemed to have gone out of her. Even to get back to the hospital was like the thought of scaling a mountain. Tonight they would be alone, knowing nothing of one another. She said, simply and literally, “I wish we were dead.”

Mic answered her with silence. But it was a silence that leaped between them faster than spoken words. Like a pale light breaking, it came to her that, out of all their vain desires, this was the one that could be fulfilled.

She put her arms round his waist and pressed her head against him—it made the rasp of his breathing sound very loud—and he held her shoulders. Neither of them spoke, but silently their images of rest and refuge met and were joined.

Vivian’s eyes went to her bag on the table, and then to the red meter against the wall. Mic was looking at his loose silver on the dressing-table. Their faces shared the same calculation.

Everything could be done in five minutes, Vivian thought. Then she could creep back here again, and never move, never go away, as long as she lived.

Obeying a little movement from Mic, she lifted herself on to the bed and lay down in his arms. They sighed in a tired contentment, though they understood the meaning of what they did: that they were tasting peace with a conscious mind before they sank too deeply into it to know it. There was no hurry now: the clock over there, at whose orders they had lived so long, had nothing more to say to them.

Their embrace tightened: they were both trying, through the blur of sickness, to realise one another for the last time. But their spent perceptions failed them, so that they seemed to be struggling with a wall of glass. Their bodies kissed and strained together, while they themselves, helpless and longing, slipped farther and farther away. Vivian understood, then, how short a part of the journey they would make in one another’s company, and her mind turned back, wondering, to the lesser loneliness of which she had been afraid.

Mic had been apart from her in those moments, among his own considerations. He said—it was strange to hear words again between them—“It seems rather rough on Jan. He doesn’t know yet we’re living together, or anything.”

“That’s his fault.”

The sound of her own voice seemed to waken her, as her own cry had wakened her sometimes from dreams. She looked up into Mic’s face. His eyes looked back at her remotely from the dream that she had left, with a faint smile, unstirring. In sudden terror she reached up and shook him by the shoulder.

“Mic! What are we thinking? We’ve only got ’flu.”

Mic sighed; his face lost its distant calm, and took on the lines of conflict and endurance again. He smiled deliberately, and stroked her hair.

“Purely toxic, of course,” he said. “I suppose that’s how these things happen that you read about in the papers.”

“One gets so tired.” She felt the weariness in her limbs like a huge added weight, and shifted herself from across Mic lest this should make it harder for him to breathe. Mic sat up—she could feel the effort with which he dragged himself together—and began to talk, quickly and reasonably.

“Now look here. This is all a lot of nonsense. Go straight home, report off sick, go to bed, and don’t worry. I’ll be perfectly all right here, and if there should be any complications I can go into the hospital. So what’s all the fuss about? We only—” He stopped, out of breath.

Vivian’s rebellion and anger had spent themselves. Her mind fell silent.

“Yes,” she said. “We may as well let go. Things won’t be moved by us. We must leave them to move themselves. I could do that, once.”

“Before you met me,” said Mic. He spoke in thought, and without bitterness.

“Go to sleep, my dear, nothing we think at the moment is likely to be useful.”

They parted quietly, without protesting or clinging to one another.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Nurse Lingard, for going out in this state,” said the Home Sister, after her eyebrows had travelled up the thermometer. She meant that by conserving herself Vivian might have managed another hour or two on duty.

In the nurses’ sick bay Vivian fell into bed and, unconscious for the moment of anything but rest, slept till midnight; when she woke, was sick, spent an hour in waking nightmares and slept again. She had a letter from Mic next evening, posted she supposed by the milkman or the doctor. It contained cheerful but unconvincing information about himself, contradicted by a general impression that it had been an effort to write at all: and asked for news as soon as possible.

Writing an answer kept Vivian almost happy for an hour or two. Then she remembered that she could not post it. No one saw her except the Home Sister, and Vivian could as usefully have handed her a Mills bomb. Probably it would go straight to the Matron’s office, if she accepted it at all. In any case it would ensure a major scandal, and once she and Mic began to be watched, it was only a question of time.

She was allowed no visitors, because of infection. As she dismissed one plan after another she could imagine Mic lying there by himself, listening for the post.

In her search for expedients she had forgotten Colonna, who had a vocational feeling for the illicit and who presently paid her respects at the ground-floor window.

The letter changed hands furtively; they might, thought Vivian with a kind of furious amusement, have been fourth-formers corresponding with the boys’ school next door.

“What have you stamped it for?” Colonna asked. “Didn’t you know he’s in Ramillies side ward? Get back to bed, you blasted fool, what the hell do you suppose I’m going to do if you faint out here? He’s all right.”

Vivian found the bed somehow, and lay down. “What is it, pneumonia?”

“No, no, bronchitis. His doctor only sent him in because he was living alone.”

“Thank God.” Vivian began to realise why sick people lost their reserve: it needed too much energy. “How bad is he, do you know?”

“Not very. Sister Ramillies will look after him, she likes a young morsel. You take things gently. That was a pretty dirty colour you went just now.” Someone was coming, and she ran for it.

Vivian spent the rest of the day trying to read, without much success. She could only remember Mic and the times when she had been too tired to love him, or had loved him with one eye on the clock, or had left in a hurry with some kindness that had been in her mind unspoken or undone. She admired her own impertinence in entering a social service. She found it impossible to offer Mic’s share of her to society and, when society helped itself, bitterly resented it.

She did not sleep well: she knew how it went with chest cases in the night. In the early hours, when the light was beginning to come, it occurred to her that wherever they might be, if one of them should die it would be no one’s business to inform the other. It was a thought that lasted her till morning.

Just before breakfast the Assistant Night Sister came to take her temperature. She was in her forties, with limbs that were already setting into elderly angles; but her face had that curious immaturity without freshness, a kind of tired adolescence, into which many nurses become fixed. Vivian was glad to see her instead of the Night Sister, who had no time for sick staff and treated them uniformly as malingerers.

“Is it down?” Vivian asked her.

“You remember you’re a patient, now, Miss Curiosity.” (It was still up, then, as Vivian had guessed.) “Sleep well?”

“Fairly, thank you. Had a busy night?”

“Never stopped even for a cup of tea. Three acute abdomens in, a man off his head in Trafalgar, and a couple of deaths in Ramillies.”

“Who were they?” Vivian asked. My voice sounds just the same, she thought. Her brain felt cold and curiously hollow.

“A diabetic, and a broncho-pneumonia. Quite young, it was a shame.”

She gathered up her things to go. Vivian was trying to make her voice come before she got to the door. At the last moment, she forced it out, in a kind of creaking wooden casualness.

“I hear one of the Path. Lab. men’s in Ramillies. Freeborn, isn’t it? How’s he doing?”

“Oh, yes. Poor boy. Nicely educated, too. Queer he doesn’t seem to have any people.”

“Were they sending for his people?” asked Vivian, feeling sick.

“No, I just noticed there weren’t any in the admission book. I’m going to make some tea. I’ll send you along a cup in a minute, if you like.”

“Is he getting better?” She recognised, in her own sharp thin voice, that of all the querulous sick women she had ever nursed.

As if she had pressed a button, the lines in the night assistant’s face shifted from genial gossip to professional caution.

“He’s comfortable.” She entered Vivian’s temperature and pulse in her notebook, and, as an afterthought, asked a few questions about her general condition: including one which, in the stress of hard work and worry, she had quite forgotten lately to ask herself.

“Pardon?” said the night assistant. Vivian was looking out of the window, with a twist of sheet clenched in a forgotten hand. The approaching gleam of a pair of gold-rimmed glasses caught her eye and brought her back again. “Yes,” she said. “Perfectly, thank you.”