Purposes of Love (30 page)

She did not know where he was taking her, except that it was a good deal farther than she had ever been with Mic. When he began to talk about tea she reminded him that she had an appointment at half-past five. He assured her, with his usual certainty, that he would get her back—“though,” he suggested, “if you think it could wait till another day the car is quite without false pride and subject to fallibility.”

Vivian did not doubt it. He had put it to her fairly; but she guessed that this proceeded less from scruple than the reluctance of a skilled player to spoil the interest of his game by cheating.

They had tea at a lavish sham-Jacobean roadhouse. Scot-Hallard spent most of the time trying to get it established that they would meet again very shortly, but she was evasive. Her eyelids were becoming heavy, her body tired, and everything increasingly too much trouble. Upstairs in the cloakroom she thickened her make-up to simulate some kind of animation. Yesterday’s sleep was twenty hours behind her. As if by a conjuring-trick the black coffee appeared and Scot-Hallard laced it, more than adequately, from a pocket flask. She felt better, but preoccupied. A chance glimpse of a clock had made it clear to her that, unless they could go back a good deal more quickly than they had come, she would be late. She suggested this to Scot-Hallard.

“You’re not still determined to go back, are you?”

“But of course I am. We
have
still got time, haven’t we?”

“Oh, yes, no doubt, if we make good going. But I was hoping in another half-hour or so we might have forgotten all about it. Stranger things have happened.”

“I expect they have,” said Vivian. “But not to me.” She was beginning, though she would not show it, to be seriously worried. If Mic had to know where she had been, it would have been far better to tell him beforehand.

Long before they got into country that she knew, the sun began to sink. She had not seen sunset for a week, and could not remember what time it was. Her watch was at home: it was too clumsy to wear with formal clothes.

“Turneresque, isn’t it—” said Scot-Hallard, and stopped the car on the crest of a hill.

It was too clear-cut for Turner: a sheet of cirrus cloud lit from below, and stretching almost to the zenith. She was longing to hurry on, but felt it would be a little boorish to say so yet. Scot-Hallard touched her arm.

“When are you going to meet me again?”

His voice had changed, and she felt frightened. She had not expected things to reach this pitch the first time. He was looking into her eyes; she tried to harden her own, but she felt she had not succeeded.

“Perhaps next month, if we’re both free.”

“A month? You dare to talk to me about a month?” His arm went round her, with a confidence so much greater than her own that it got there unresisted. “That was deliberate wickedness. You must be punished for that. Darling.” He swept her into an embrace and kissed her.

His strength made her feel like a doll. Her will as well as her limbs were, for the moment, helpless: and during this moment she made a slight, but instinctive response. Next moment she forced herself away from him: but he was looking at her differently, with a new certainty.

She could not make herself ridiculous by being outraged. Any intelligence or honesty should have prepared her for this. He was still holding her, though she would not let him kiss her again. Against his deep chest and strong shoulders she experienced unaccustomed reactions. She was used to Mic’s love-making, which was one side of a conversation. This was simply a command. The sensation it gave her of being delicate and frail, something that could easily be broken in half but would not be broken, stirred in her feelings of a primitiveness which, for a few seconds, excited her by their newness. She disengaged herself, feeling shaken.

“Well,” she said lightly, “after that, I think the less we spare the horses the better.”

“When are you going to meet me?”

“Not for a long time.”

He leaned towards her. “You can’t run away from life like that, my dear.”

Vivian’s balance returned, and with it her sense of humour and a certain amount of self-disgust. He must imagine I’m a good deal younger than I am, she thought, if he takes that line. Aloud she said, “I’m afraid it’s several years since I gave up spelling life with a capital.”

He changed direction quickly. “The fact remains that it’s very short.”

“I don’t waste it. That’s why I asked you to get me back by five-thirty.”

“I see. … How serious?”

“Do you define life for yourself entirely in terms of love-affairs? Or do you simply think that’s good enough for me?”

“I don’t think one way or another. I can see it in your face.”

Her retort, which she had thought good, felt suddenly adolescent. She said, “Then I wonder why you’re keeping me here?”

“That isn’t the only thing I can see. Very well, I’ll take you back. You’ll find I’m not easily parted from an idea.”

The car went on into the dusk. She tried to put what had happened behind her, but found it was still present whether she liked it or not. Scot-Hallard’s square head and wiry hair, his broad hands with their scrubbed close-cut nails, had ceased to be simply a visual impression.

The headlights, when he snapped them on, showed her a village twenty miles from home as the church clock struck six.

Scot-Hallard was driving in silence. She sat back and tried to force her tired mind to consider implications. One thing she knew she need not fear from him was any kind of awkwardness in the hospital. The water-tightness of his private and professional lives was a byword. Discretion with him needed no effort, but sprang naturally from his scale of proportions. If he met her on duty he would be as impersonal as his theatre gloves. The most probable event was that he would be too busy to notice her. In any case, she found she could not flog her stumbling brain so far ahead. It was enough, and more than enough, to decide what she was going to say to Mic. She was not likely, now, to be much less than an hour late.

At the thought of beginning the evening with any sort of situation, every weary nerve in her body seemed to cower. She was in no state tonight to fling a foil at his head. Tears, or a thin petulance, felt nearer her mark. It was impossible, she could not make herself face it. She would have to tell him she had overslept. Only for tonight. Tomorrow, when they had been happy for a little while, it would be easy. He would understand if she explained how tired she had been. She rested, in a moment of contentment, on the certainty of his kindness.

She asked Scot-Hallard to put her down at the Post Office. It was non-committal, and three minutes from the flat. They were in the outskirts of the town before she realised that, by the way he was taking her, they would approach it through the High Street. However, it was almost fully dark by now.

She had resolved not to look up; but, as they passed the flat, found it impossible to prevent herself from doing so. She had forgotten the street-lamp outside. It shone full into her upturned face; and into Mic’s, as he stood in the unlighted window looking down.

Before there was time for any sign of recognition, they had passed out of sight. Scot-Hallard, watching the traffic, had not seen anything. She noticed for the first time that her hands and feet were cold. The picture of Mic’s silent eyes, encountering hers like a stranger’s, stayed with her. She said to herself, trying to make it sound as prosaic and usual as possible, Well, I shall have to see it through now. Better to get it over, after all. He is sure, really, to understand.

Scot-Hallard had stopped. She thanked him with what she hoped was a safe mixture of social gratitude and emotional discretion. He only said, “Au revoir,” accompanying it with a look that shouldered her flimsy structure aside and made the wreckage look foolish. She found as she walked to the flat that her limbs were cramped and stiff with driving, and remembered with a shock that she had not attended to her face and hair since Scot-Hallard had kissed her. She tried to tidy herself a little by the reflection in a shop-window. There was no time or place for anything more.

She realised, as she climbed the stairs, that there was nothing in the world she wanted except sleep. She could not imagine, now, what had possessed her to stay out for the afternoon instead of resting. It had taken the evening from Mic as surely as if she had consented to spend it with Scot-Hallard instead. It was this which gave her a feeling of disloyalty: not the fact that Scot-Hallard had kissed her. That was irrelevant. One did not supersede one’s right hand by learning to light a cigarette with the left.

As a rule he heard her coming upstairs and would have the door open before she got there; but tonight she found it closed. Her key was in her bag, but for some reason she felt unable to use it. She knocked, and heard the scrape of a chair as he got up. The door opened, the light inside dazzling her for a moment. She saw that he was standing aside politely for her to pass through.

She went in, put down her bag and gloves on the table, and turned to him. He had closed the door and was standing with his fingers on the handle, looking at her.

“I’m sorry I’m late, Mic. Honestly it wasn’t my fault. I kept telling him all the afternoon I had to be back.”

He said nothing. He made, after Scot-Hallard, a sharp and rather disquieting contrast; like something with a knife-edge balance after the solidity of a monolith: too slim, too highly sensitised, put together with too dangerous a fineness; easy to hurt, frighteningly capable of hurting.

She could not wait for him to speak. She went on, a halftone higher, “You’re not going to be silly about it, are you, darling? You know I wouldn’t do it on purpose. Don’t you?” She went up to him, and, putting her hand on his arm, made to kiss him.

She felt him stiffen. She had been going to say something more, something light to restore proportion: but when she saw his face she could not speak. That he would be angry she had half-expected; feared that he might be hurt; but nothing could have prepared her for this quiet stare of shocked, incredulous distaste. All her prepared defences vanished. She seemed to contract, as if he had drenched her with icy water.

“Thanks,” he said, “but I think I’d rather you washed Scot-Hallard off first, if you don’t mind.”

She pulled her hand away from his arm and stepped back. Because it was the involuntariness of his movement that had been unbearable, she said, “Don’t strike attitudes.”

He did not answer.

“I dare say I do look a wreck.” She listened to the forced jar of her own voice. “I’ve been driving in an open car, you know.” She took the mirror out of her bag mechanically, looking for him to speak. It could not be real, she thought; she was so tired, it was a trick of her eyes, a trick of the light, that made Mic seem to stand there with a face of helpless and secret shame, like a child that has seen its mother do something it dimly knows to be obscene.

So as not to see his face any more, she looked in the glass at her own. After a moment she lowered it; but Mic’s eyes were still there and she looked again. She saw what he had seen; her mouth and eyes sagging with fatigue which her heavy make-up had masked into dissipation: the expression she had been wearing for Scot-Hallard—not one familiar to Mic, with whom she had never flirted—still faintly lingering: the new hat tilted too far: at one corner of her mouth the lipstick blurred in a small, unmistakable smear. She put the glass away.

“I’m sorry. Perhaps you’re right. May I use the bathroom?”

“Please do. I think I left a clean towel.”

He was still standing there, with his hand on the door, as she went out.

The hot water was comforting, softening her face from the stiffness of stale make-up and lack of sleep. When she picked up the towel, she saw that he had put out, too, the dressing-gown and slippers she kept there, her brush and comb and a fresh cake of soap. They were like a sudden light revealing desolation. For a week she had been living for this evening, and Mic, when he laid out these things as neatly as a lady’s maid, had been smiling to himself, looking forward too. She had wasted it, for some reason she could no longer remember. What had happened? It was only some passing snap of the nerves, a trivial thing; there must be some simple way to get this moment of expected happiness back again.

She brushed her hair back smoothly, left only a little powder on her face, and looked in the glass again. The result was not decorative, but at any rate fairly honest. It will be all right in the end, she thought, it always has been. She went back into the dining-room, and found him setting the table with his usual method and care. The ordinariness of it was reassuring. She came towards him smiling.

“Do I look cleaner?”

He laid down his handful of cutlery and put his hands under her elbows. After a moment’s hesitation, he kissed her. She tried to return his kiss, but could not. She seemed to have no part in it, and it frightened her. It was like an experiment in something not quite understood: tentative, watchful, tinged with a kind of reluctant curiosity. She murmured, “Mic—please,” and drew away from him.

Suddenly he swore under his breath and pulling her back to him, kissed her furiously, giving her no time or chance to respond. It hurt her physically, but more by what she felt in it of a tormented hostility. It was as if he had struck rather than kissed her. The whole day’s strain flooded into her sense of outrage. She wrenched herself out of his arms.

“Was that necessary?” Her voice was shaking a little, but not with tears. “When I’ve done anything about which you’re justified in getting hysterical, Mic, I’ll let you know.”

“I’m sorry,” he said stiffly. “I’m not justified in criticising anything you do. But you looked rather—unlike yourself—when you came in.”

“I was dead tired and made up over it. You ought to be used to the look of that by now.”

“I’m sorry you’re tired. You’ve been up all day, I expect.”

“Yes, I have.”

“Would you like some coffee?”

“No, thanks. I’ve just had some.”

“You must have an early night. You’ll feel better then.”