Purposes of Love (6 page)

“Scott-Hallard, of course,” Vivian surrendered wearily. “He’s a first-class operating machine. But I like Beth.” Sir Bethel was the oldest and gentlest of the honorary staff. She had seen the patients who returned to the wards shocked and collapsed after his long fiddling operations; but she had seen them on the wards, warmed and made hopeful by the old man’s loving courtesy, while Scot-Hallard would have run them over like an index file. She could not sharpen her wits, as everyone else did, on Little Beth.

“I think you foster lame dogs to get confidence.” Colonna, when the time was not auspicious for courting, was always ready to break a lance on the object of desire. “It’s a subtle form of inferiority complex.”

“I expect it is.” said Vivian placidly. “I distrust power because I’m unfitted for it.” (She should have said efficiency, she supposed, but power came easier, thinking of Scot-Hallard’s broad head and great square hands.) “By the time I’m middle-aged no doubt I’ll have inflated my fears into a philosophy.”

“Or accepted power. That’s more likely if you go on in hospitals.”

“I shan’t do that,” said Vivian with certainty.

The general conversation, she found, had branched off meanwhile into a new channel. “Ever so interesting to talk to,” the theatre-nurse was saying. “When I took up the things for biopsy we had quite a chat. More like a varsity boy, I thought, than the type you generally get in the Path. Lab. here.”

“Not much life about him, though.” Her friend took another bun.

“He may be a bit quiet. But that’s often the way with a boy that thinks and reads a lot.”

“He looks a pansy, I think.” Fat Collins patted a galvanised wave back into her cap.

“We all know what your type is, Collins.”

“Go on Frere, you think you know a lot.”

“Know, you’d be surprised what—”

Vivian out in the passage, dropped the swing door on the mounting crescendo.

“Are you overworking, or what?” Colonna overtook her. “You of all people. Collins can’t help being a nymphomaniac, it’s just a matter of hormones.”

“I’m due back on the ward.”

“No you’re not, for seven minutes. Don’t blackleg. Come to my room while I change. I’m on at five-thirty too.” Colonna had been off duty, and was in mufti. She wore, as she always did, man-tailored clothes of a cut that would have looked flamboyant on a man, but which she succeeded somehow in subduing to her personality. Her suit and suede brogues were pale grey, her shirt navy, and her tie bright scarlet. While she removed them with the speed acquired in hospital she contrived to make love to Vivian tacitly, expertly, and with finesse that made it the merest running commentary to the conversation. In the intervals that allowed of thought, Vivian decided that she enjoyed Colonna not altogether in spite of this, but because she eluded classification. Colonna, by all laws of literature, ought to have been plain, heavy, humourlessly passionate and misunderstood, pursuing in recurrent torments of jealousy the reluctant, the inexperienced and the young. She ought to have behaved like someone with a guilty secret. But Colonna, it appeared, accepted her own eccentricities much as she did the colour of her hair, though as a source of more amusement. She was, as Vivian knew quite well, vain, selfish, and without social conscience; a shameless and deliberate
poseuse;
dressed like Byron in the evenings and like a chorus boy during the day; and was, in fact, by the standards of almost any society impossible. But she enjoyed life, did what she set out to do gracefully and well, had a sense of humour, and, whatever other liberties she took, knew how to refrain from handling one’s personality. It was the last virtue which, today, made her company a pleasure which Vivian did not feel like refusing.

As she plodded through the evening’s routine, the high-powered lights of Verdun looked yellow and dingy, the patients seemed dreary and querulous, the staff dim saltless spirits, Sister a lost soul. Yet when she had said good-bye to Jan that morning, she had not experienced any poignant emotion. It was impossible in his presence; he had life in too light and loose a hold. He never attached people to himself nor supported them, so that when he departed there was no tearing of adhesions nor shock of altered equilibrium. But slowly, when he was gone, the light faded out of the web of things, and one only realised then whence the light had come. The mischief of Jan was that when he had removed his vitality he left his standards behind.

Sister came bustling up, a labelled test-tube in her hand.

“Nurse Lingard, take this blood. Take it straight to the pathological department, and tell them it’s Mr. Henniker’s specimen for grouping. Mr. Henniker has arranged for someone to stay on and do it. I don’t know who it is but
find
him, and tell him Mr. Henniker may want to do a transfusion
tonight,
so will he do it at
once,
please. And don’t be too long.” Sister never omitted this valediction, even when she sent a nurse to Matron to report the breakage of a thermometer.

The Pathological Laboratory was the remotest place in the hospital, approached by several hundred yards of passage, two staircases, and some prison-like folding doors. The last floor was in darkness, and Vivian, who had only been there once before, could not find the switch. She groped her way along the passage, while from the shelves at either side of her came the sweetish smell of aberrant organs bottled in spirit. Rounding a corner, she saw a chink of yellow light from a door, and quickened her pace; caught her foot in an upturned edge of matting, and pitched forward. The test-tube fell from her hand, and she heard it break.

The fall, assisted by the darkness and the weirdness of the place, jolted her for a moment into a nightmare-like terror, in which she expected to feel some pursuing shadow leap on her back. Then someone snapped the passage light on, and, returning to her senses, she bethought her that she would have to creep back to Verdun and ask Sister to take another specimen. She thought, too, of the wretched patient who would have to be pricked for it a second time. It was, she reflected, the perfect climax for the evening.

While the light was still making her blink someone, moving rather neatly and lightly, picked her up and steadied her to her feet. She screwed up her eyes at the glare and at some changed familiarity. It was Mic, in a white coat which made him look curiously older and a little severe.

“I do hope—” he began stiffly. “Good Lord. It’s you.”

“Thank you,” said Vivian, still a little dazed. He was holding one of her hands in both of his, and her mind registered an impression that this was comforting before anything else. Then he turned it over, and she realised that it was splashed with blood and he was searching it, with impersonal thoroughness, for a cut.

“It isn’t mine,” she explained, “unfortunately. Look what’s on the floor.

“The blood-group from Verdun, I suppose,” he said without looking. “But these things splinter sometimes. Seems all right.” He let her go, adding as an afterthought, “Got any in your knees do you think?”

“No, thanks. You’ve been waiting late for this, haven’t you? I’m sorry.”

“It’s entirely my fault for not seeing the passage lights were on. Evans must have turned them off after him. He never thinks of anything unless it’s been mentioned in
Das Kapital.
I’m glad you’re not hurt.”

“Not a bit,” repeated Vivian, her resources supplying nothing more. They looked at one another, beneath their awkwardness a reminiscent caution braced for hostility.

“I’ll get this repeated as soon as I can,” she said. “I hope you won’t have to wait long.”

Just as she had been thinking what a hard defensive mouth he had, she had found herself returning his sudden smile.

“It’s all right. As a matter of fact, I wangle these after-hours jobs when I can. It’s almost one’s only chance of doing any serious work.”

He had acquired, she reflected, a good deal of unobtrusive confidence for someone who had only been a day or two in a new job: more than she herself had managed in seven months.

“Look here”—he stooped down suddenly to one of the splashes on the floor—“there’s no need to take another. I’ve plenty on this splinter. I only need enough to make a slide.”

“Doesn’t it have to be sterile?” asked Vivian doubtfully, clinging to the first of her calling’s ten commandments.

He laughed a little. “No, why? It isn’t a bacterial test.” With his hand on the laboratory door he paused to say, “Look, there’s a seat there. Don’t go.”

Vivian sat down on the bench, in a space between specimen-racks and piles of reports. The ward was busy that night and she had not a shadow of excuse for staying except that she felt unhappy, inferior and tired and wanted to escape for a minute or two. There had been something grateful and sheltering about Mic’s quietness, his air of not being much impressed with the importance of anything, and acceptance of herself as something slightly more interesting, in degree rather than in kind, than the test-tube she carried. Suddenly remembering the theatre-nurse, she got up to go; but at the same moment Mic reappeared, with a slip of paper in his hand, and propped his knee on the bench beside her.

“See Jan off?” he asked.

Their glances met. He was not smiling, but it was as if he had unstrapped a weapon and dropped it on the bench between them. She was instantly filled with a reasonless sense of comfort and relief. His dark incurious eyes held, along with their reserve, a kind of weary humour so like a thought of her own that she lost, momentarily, the sense of contact with another personality. She could have told him everything she had been thinking that evening, except that there seemed no need.

“No,” she said. “I was on duty too.”

“It doesn’t make much odds, does it?”

He spoke without emphasis, casually even. She reflected that this was the first of the Rout who had no grievance and did not protest.

“Not much,” she answered. “I shouldn’t have gone to the station in any case; he hates it.”

“I know.” He smiled faintly. “I thought you might be the exception, though.”

“Jan doesn’t make any.”

He looked at her quickly, as if acknowledging something; a weapon of hers, perhaps, laid down also.

“Oh, well,” he said, “stations do reduce almost anything to ultimate atomic futility.”

“I know. One gets a kind of aphasia which makes it impossible to say anything except ‘Don’t forget to write to me.’ It’s a fact that I once said that to Jan.”

“A good one, certainly. What did Jan say?”

“He just looked wondering.” She added, half to herself because his quiet made this possible, “Jan never allows fag-ends. I don’t know if that’s as uncommon as I think it is.”

“It depends. It isn’t rare as a principle, I dare say. I mean, no doubt a good many people try to plan their lives on that line. More dignified, and so on. But Jan’s peculiar in that he doesn’t seem to expend any thought or will-power on it. Chucking away fag-ends is a reflex with him.”

“Yes,” Vivian considered. “I suppose, by now, it is.”

She looked up at him, as he stood half-propped by one arm against the wall beside her; but he was looking past her down the corridor, occupied with his thoughts.

“A genius for letting go,” he said. “It’s the most envied form of genius, I suppose. Certainly the most spectacular. ‘They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces …’ The ancients would have surnamed him Fortunatus, don’t you think?”

She had been watching his almost expressionless face, and listening to his voice, a light, pleasant voice, flexible and without mannerisms, as dispassionate as if he had been discussing the contents of the test-tube she had brought. Suddenly she got to her feet—leaning as he was, it brought her eyes on a level with his—and said to her own astonishment, “Do you hate him sometimes?”

“Sometimes,” said Mic, looking her in the face without a change of voice or expression, “I think it’s better to think so.”

There was a kind of unseen jerk, as if they had come to the edge of a parapet before they expected. Then Mic swung himself off the bench and said, quickly and conventionally, “He’ll like Cornwall. The digs are good, too, I’ve stayed there.”

“Jan likes it anywhere.”

“I know. It’s depressing, isn’t it?”

“I must go,” said Vivian in sudden panic. “Sister will kill me. And well she may.”

“Tell her it’s Group 4. That will cheer her up.” He had been holding, she realised, the report form in his hand.

“Have you done it already?” she asked foolishly.

“Oh yes. I did it straight away, it doesn’t take long. Don’t worry about the lights, I’ll switch them off after you.” She had turned to go when he said, “Why not change your apron before the Sister sees you?”

“I’d better, I suppose. May as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.”

“They’re showing some new sculpture at the Art Gallery this week. Shall we go together some time?”

Vivian hesitated. Her imagination played dimly on the sculpture, very vividly on the hard floor of the gallery under her aching feet.

“That is,” Mic said, “if you don’t get too tired on the wards for any more standing about.”

“No, I’d like to. I’m afraid it can only be short notice, though, because I’m not getting proper off-duty at present.”

“That’s all right. Any evening. Or Saturday.” With one of his unnoticeable movements he disappeared behind the folding doors.

As she went down the stairs she had a sudden terrifying conviction that she had been away from the ward for hours. It was cut off from her as if by some huge lapse of time. She pulled out the big watch from the pocket of her bodice; she had been gone, she found, about twelve minutes.

“Nurse Lingard, where
have
you been? I never heard of such a thing, when I want you to wait for the result I’ll let you know. The man is capable of walking down to the ward with it, I suppose. If the rest of my nurses were as unreliable as this, how do you suppose I could carry on? Go and collect the mouthwash bowls, everything’s behind.”

Sister trotted off, her face red, her body angular, every muscle contracted, taut as an uncoiled crane. Vivian noted her ugliness with satisfaction, and the satisfaction with disgust.