Purposes of Love (35 page)

“Yes,” he said slowly. “I think you might have.”

“I heard you coughing and I—thought you were ill.”

“I’m quite well, thanks. I’ve been smoking too much.”

There was a silence.

“What is it?” he said. “Do you want anything?”

She had been prepared for anything except this exclusion. It was as if one of the unnoticed stabilities of life, like the earth’s firmness, had given way. Then she looked at him again. The aloofness of his face was willed and set. She knew that after all she had not been mistaken.

“I only came,” she said, “to see how you were, and—if there was something I could do.”

He gave a thin little smile, and got up. “It was good of you to come. But it’s better, really, you know, that we don’t meet. It only makes things more difficult. Don’t you think so?”

“It needn’t,” she said.

He had turned away, but faced round and looked at her.

“What does that mean?”

“I’m here. It’s all right. You don’t have to pretend.”

He walked over to the door, and stood half in the darkness of the other room.

“You ought to have known better,” he said after a pause, “than to come here.”

“I did, but I came. Don’t you want me to stay?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

He said, speaking into the shadows, “Because I’ve loved you.”

“You don’t ask me why I came?”

“Must I? A mistaken sense of responsibility, or pity, I suppose.”

“I came because I love you.”

“I’m sorry. That makes it all the more necessary that you should go.”

“Not to me. Don’t worry, Mic. If I only have one thing to give you, that’s no reason for not giving you anything.”

“You don’t understand.” His face was turned away.

“No. I’ve found that. But tell me one thing. Would some other woman—anyone else—do as well?”

He shook his head.

“That’s all that matters.” She threw her coat over the chair.

“What are you doing?” he said, coming back into the room.

“What do you think?” Unfastening the painted clasp, she pulled her frock over her head.

“I haven’t asked you to stay, I believe.”

But she saw, as she watched him, that he was pretending to a pride that he had lost.

Letting fall the last of her clothes, she paused for a moment. He came over to her; and she was ashamed to have exacted this from him, when she might have gone to him. She returned his kisses as if they had not frightened her. Suddenly he held her away at arm’s length, looked at her, and said, “You’ve been with him tonight.”

It was not the words that shocked her, but the voice with its cynical acceptance. The cold of the room began to penetrate her bare body, so that she shivered in his hands.

“I went to him tonight but I couldn’t go on with it. I came here. It’s the first time I’ve been to him since I left you.”

“Yes?” She knew that he did not believe her. “Oh, well it doesn’t matter very much.” He pulled her back to him; she embraced him, closing her eyes.

“Do you wish now that you hadn’t come?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s too late if you do.”

She tried to laugh. “Don’t talk as if you were seducing me, darling, it’s silly.”

“Damned silly,” he agreed; and suddenly hid his face in her hair.

“Mic, dear.” He did not answer.

She drew him closer.

“Don’t think about it. Just for a little while don’t let’s think at all.”

He whispered unsteadily, “That’s a good idea.”

As he lifted her—less easily, she noticed, than before—she knew that she had taken from him something with which he had not meant to part: a forlorn honour, a last defence. But still in her heart she could not believe that she would fail. This was a language in which they had never confused or humiliated one another. So, for a moment, she kept clear before her her separate hope and will. But they were too near, as they had always been; she could not hold herself apart from his passion, it invaded and blinded her, she shared even while she feared it. Her mind struggled with her body to remember that he took her in the bitterness of jealousy and a deliberate, disillusioned sensuality: but her mind ceased to be heard. It was he who made her captive, not she who set him free. She offered herself to his crucifixion, not in forgiveness but in a dark delight. Looking up she saw him smiling with fixed eyes, like someone confronting death. “I love you,” she tried to say; but it turned to a wordless sound of abandonment in her throat, and as such he answered it. Once he flinched suddenly, and she knew that she had made some gesture strange to him, and acquired elsewhere. She returned the savage kisses he gave her just after; she returned everything. She was destroyed with him, exulting. Then it was all over; the light was still, watching them; he gave a sigh like all the world’s weariness, and hid his face beside her. Awaking to herself, she knew that she had failed.

She stooped over him; and without opening his eyes he turned his head into her breast. But it was a surrender she only witnessed, and did not receive. She wondered that the small circle of her arms could enclose so much solitude. The stillness of his face was deeper than sleep; like the quiet of the dying who sink past the consciousness of pain and acquiesce in this release.

His eyes were still closed, and hers travelled over him, counting all the signs which, stupid with love, she had thought so individually himself, and had taken at their simplest aesthetic value; his clear skin, soft dark hair, and long lashes, the fine down that covered his body, the shape of his finger-nails which she had noticed so often without remembering its significance. Concealed in every life was its proper death, waiting for some failure of the host to take possession. Here it was scarcely concealed, but she had not seen. She would always know that she might have stood between it and him, and had failed.

He opened his eyes and looked up at her, but when he would have spoken she laid her hand across his lips. Everything had been said. He turned back to her as if her refusal were a relief. In a little while she felt him grow heavy with sleep, and laid his head softly on the pillow. Sleep was the only thing, she thought, that she had been able to give him. His arm fell back and she saw that he still carried on his left breast the scar of her foil.

She disengaged herself from him cautiously, and rose without waking him. Even when she covered him with the disordered clothes he did not stir. As she was leaving, she noticed the clock which had always been so important. She wound it, and set the alarm to call him in the morning.

So, she thought as she walked back through the empty streets, there was nothing left to try. She had used everything she had. To do more, she must be more than herself. They were insufficient, and that was all.

But early in the morning, when it was still quite dark, it came to her that there was, after all, something left that neither she nor Mic in their lives had so far tried. It was an unpredictable resource; but it was the last, and she used it. Turning on the light, she found pen and paper, and, working slowly and with difficulty at her unfamiliar task, wrote a letter to Cambridge, sending for Jan.

A
LIGHT AND EARLY SNOWFALL
had laced the hanging branches; against dazzling banks the river slid sluggishly, its green bronze looking much colder than the snow. Jan climbed the willow-pattern curve of Clare Bridge, and scraped a place on the parapet for his elbows.

Overhead was a pale-blue, translucent sky, shading to the zenith like the colour in an egg-shell cup. A few clear-edged silver clouds moved in it smoothly. The sun was shining, making crisp blue shadows on the snow against which its strong whiteness seemed golden.

For a few minutes Jan forgot his thoughts and the errand on which he was setting out. He surrendered himself; the sharp beauty pierced and lightened in him. When he returned after an interval which seemed longer than it was, the clearness remained; it was as if part of him still inhabited the crystalled trees and passed their cold judgement on the rest.

He was a thing without roots, he thought; even the constant and unfailing earth was a mistress with whom he had evaded marriage. He was thirty this year, and had not built a house, or planted a tree, or (as far as he knew) begotten a child. He was as transitory as this snow in all his ways.

He tried to feel his own deficiency; but, now as ever, he could not make it become a feeling, only a thought. Dislike of other people, boredom, intolerance, cruelty, imposed limits to life; he had avoided them. Possession and being possessed, longing, the fear of loss, restricted it also; these he had found sometimes peace, sometimes a subtle excitement, in refusing. He wondered again what had planted this duality in him, that his mind could pass on himself censures that his spirit rejected.

His mind returned to Vivian’s letter. He took it out, and unfolded it on the damp stone of the balustrade.

“I thought, perhaps, that if he were to see you again he might realise he was comparatively happy before he met me, and come in time to treat all this as irrelevance. It’s an escape rather than a solution, but it’s all that I can see. You have always had a good deal of influence on him; I dare say you know that.”

He had felt, first of all, only wonder. Through what could she have passed to emerge with all her clarity so destroyed? He could hardly believe that it was Vivian who asked this of him. His respect for Mic, even if he could have sunk his own, made it outrageous. He always felt it something of a disgrace to offer, though to people he recognised as inferiors, retreats he would have rejected for himself; and Mic was his friend.

This, he thought, was the kind of disintegration to which people came through losing their identity in one another. He remembered the irrational feeling of misgiving he had had when Vivian wrote to tell him they were lovers; misgiving that was not for them, since he had hoped for this, but as if something of unknown consequence had happened to himself. It had. He had acknowledged a responsibility.

Once more he read the letter over, though he knew its bald phrases nearly by heart; its lost proportion, its humility and futile sacrifice. He could scarcely remember, now, a state of being in which such offerings were possible. There came upon him slowly a sense, not of shame which was an emotion but of his sphere, but of indemnity, of being concerned in atonement; the kind of guilt in which the Greeks believed.

It was time to go, if he was to catch his train. He did not know what he would say or do when he arrived; he could only make himself a blank cheque for the opportunity to fill in. Life was not so lacking in design that an occasion of symmetry would be refused him. Already it was waiting, contained in the present as these black branches contained next summer’s leaves.

He reached the hospital in the early evening and, since everyone he saw seemed fully occupied, found his way along the corridors to the nurses’ home. Here he wandered vaguely, in a maze of narrow identical corridors lined with identical doors, scanning the little white name-cards slotted into them. From behind one he could hear voices and laughter; and was about to knock in search of help when crisp skirts rustled, in crescendo, behind him. It was a Sister, out of breath; the one, Jan supposed, responsible for the Home. He smiled, feeling sorry for her because she seemed to carry her responsibilities uncomfortably (like a badly packed rucksack, he thought) as so many women did.

“Can I help you?” she asked. The inflection was that of the constable who says, “Do you wish to make a statement?” As soon as she spoke the laughter had stopped behind the door.

“That’s very good of you,” he said, replying to the words. He smiled again, in friendly speculation: the face in its white frilled frame shaped itself a little stiffly, into the unaccustomed lines of a reply. “I seem to have lost my way. It’s too bad to take up your time, I can see you’re busy.”

“No, no, not at all; the building is very confusing. Which ward were you looking for?”

“I was trying to find Miss Lingard’s room.”

Blankness effaced the struggling smile.

“Nurse is resting. In any case I’m afraid—” Her voice slanted suddenly to a sharper angle. “Was she expecting you, Mr.—er—?”

“Lingard,” said Jan gently.

This was received, for a moment, with a look that removed him from the police-court to Scotland Yard. Then, uncertainly, the smile returned.

“Why, you must be Nurse Lingard’s
brother.
There’s quite a likeness, when you come to look at it.” She hesitated. Jan produced the smile he used for his grandmother, the Customs, and people who arrested him for taking photographs. “Nurse is sleeping, you see, before duty tonight. Otherwise—”

“It’s rather an urgent family matter. I should be enormously grateful.”

The Sister was only thirty-six, though she looked more. “Well,” she said, “perhaps, in that case … But of course, you know, in the ordinary way—”

“Of course,” said Jan. “I quite understand that. Thank you so much.”

She led him to a corridor like the rest, but approached through folding doors, after which they tiptoed. (“These are the night-quarters, so if you wouldn’t mind making as
little
noise as possible”) A few moments later, they met a nurse wearing outdoor clothes. At the sight of her the Sister’s head jerked like a pointer’s. The nurse stood stock-still for a moment, her face stiffening, then went quietly back into the room from which she had come.

“Nurse Lingard’s room is Number Twenty-one,” said the Sister. She left him; he heard her tap on the nurse’s door, and go in without waiting for an answer.

He walked on, watching the numbers on the doors and wondering how women evolved this power of creating intimate hells for one another. A blend, he supposed, of jealousy with the thwarted protective instinct, growing unmanageable with middle age. Reflecting that Vivian had lived here for nearly a year, he ceased to find it remarkable that her personal relationships had got beyond her. She was of an age, though, to have some resistance. He felt sorry for the young girls.

A door opened just ahead of him.

“Come in,” Vivian whispered. “I thought I recognised your step.”