Purposes of Love (8 page)

“Mother used to teach Jan and me, when we were small. But our style was a bit rakish. Theatrical, you know.”

“I see. Jan had a few peculiar mannerisms … not like him. He didn’t say.”

“He wouldn’t. He never talks about her.” This came so near to something about which she herself never talked, that she got up quickly and made a pass with the foil she held.

“On guard?” said Mic, picking up the other.

“Not after all that tea?”

“There isn’t room to move, anyway.” He saluted, registering a smart hit on the ceiling. “I don’t know why I keep them.” He made a feint and a lunge which she parried by a kind of instinct; to her surprise, for she had not touched a foil for years. “You ought to have a jacket on. I haven’t got mine. I’ll tie a cushion round you, shall I?”

“What, like Tweedledum? And you’re not going to need anything of course. On guard.”

“You know too much,” said Mic after a minute or two.

“Much good it does me.” In fact, her technique was impossibly rusty and had never been good, but she did know, with a strange fatality, exactly what Mic was going to do next. Now and again she was quick enough to prevent him from doing it. They fought on, a little short-winded with tea and lapse of training, but deeply engrossed. After a while it brought on Vivian a curious mood. It seemed to her that now for the first time she recognised Mic’s narrowed eyes and gentle unconscious smile, that she had stared into them like this long ago, and seen his blade flicker at her like a snake’s tongue; and that when she forestalled him she was remembering. The fancy grew on her. Touched—she should have parried that, she had before. No, this was the moment. It was now that she run in her point, with a longer reach and a stronger arm, six inches down from the left shoulder. He had been wearing something white, and—

“Yes,” said Mic, signalling the hit.

She lowered her foil. An ache of fear and some half-forgotten anguish pierced her.

“Are you—” Absurd: she had only tapped him. “I thought for a moment I’d hurt you.”

“Oh, no.” They looked at one another, smiling, confident and intent. “I can’t remember where I’ve seen that done before.”

“I invented it.” She flirted her foil, a schoolboy’s swagger. What was happening to her, she wondered; she was not this kind of person with anyone else.

“Like this?” Instead of demonstrating himself, he took her wrist and made a pass with it.

“No, like that.”

“You’ve a strong wrist,” he said.

The illusion of memory, or whatever it was, pressed on her bewilderingly. His eyes on her face and his hand over her wrist had an authority and a challenge; the undertones they moved in were complex and indefinable, like the mood of a dream that remains after its events have been forgotten. She said, “I should have,” without knowing why.

“You haven’t heard the Delius record yet.” He let her go abruptly, and tossed away his foil which he had been holding in his left hand.

“No, I’m looking forward to that.” With a little jolt she returned to normal; straightened with her toe a rug she had heaped up in a lunge; stood her foil neatly against the wall; a polite female visitor.

“I’ll just get the gramophone; it’s in the other room.” He was on his way when she happened to look at the time.

“Oh, Mic, I’m so sorry, I shall have to go. It’s my own fault for fooling about. I’ll have to run, too. Funny how one’s off-duty time always seems to end in the middle of something.”

“You must hear it another day,” he said, without expressing any conventional regrets for her departure. “I’ll run you up in the car; it will save a minute or two.”

“That’s kind of you. I didn’t realise you had one.”

“Sort of Heath Robinson one. Every time they patch it up they give it six months, like a chronic heart. But it still does fifty. Lives in the alley just behind.”

As they walked round to it she said, “I don’t remember if I told you how much I like the flat. We were talking so hard when we came in.”

“I thought you did. Anyhow I’m glad you like it. I think I was rather more pleased by what you didn’t say.”

“What were you nerving yourself for?”

“‘Poor man, who looks after you here?’”

“I didn’t see anything to justify such rudeness. Did you really think I would?”

“No. Still, it was pleasing actually to hear you not saying it.”

“By the way, what were you doing before you came here?”

Mic’s mouth straightened. “Starving rats,” he said pleasantly.

“What?”

“Viner’s Breakfast Vitamins. I was in what they courteously called the Research Department. It sounded rather good on paper. I went straight there from Cambridge; I—didn’t want to wait about for a job. They were very proud of their Research Department: they used to have sketches of us in their advertisements, holding up test-tubes to the light. Not photographs fortunately; they got film extras for that.”

“Where did the rats come in?”

“We used to feed Viner’s latest Vitamin to one batch, and starve another batch as a control. Then they could publish the vitamin content, you see. Of course I’d done a certain amount of the same thing at Cambridge, for more varied and useful purposes. But after a time I began to see rats in my sleep—thin ones, with runny eyes and staring coats. You wouldn’t know, unless you’d seen it, how unpleasant vitamin deficiency can make an animal look. Even a healthy rat can pall as a matter of fact. … Anyhow, when I heard of this job at rather less than half the money. I jumped at it. One needs to feel one’s existence has some justification, even if it hasn’t. That door will shut, if you slam it hard. Let me.”

It was certainly a very old car, but with a marked and pleasing personality, like a mongrel dog’s. Mic humoured its eccentricities with apology, but evident affection.

“Well, at least while I was there I got the car, such as it is, and a fairly good gramophone and some records. You’re coming again to hear it, aren’t you? Delius, Handel, Beethoven, all out of rats with beriberi and rickets.”

Vivian was entertained, till she happened to look round, and saw in his face what seemed the settled bitterness of a much older man.

“Well, the ones that got the vitamins must have enjoyed life. … I suppose I came here for some sort of justification too, but I can’t claim to have found it. After all,” she said in sudden rebellion, “why should we feel we must earn the right to exist? Sometimes I think the happiness—being reconciled, and sufficient in oneself—is the only justification.”

Mic took a corner too fast. “The gospel according to Jan,” he said.

She was moved, for a moment, to tell him that her mind was not entirely clothed in Jan’s cut-down ideas; but though he was smiling, he looked so desperately unhappy that it ceased to matter. She only said, “I doubt whether Jan would claim paternity for it.”

They had reached the gates. Collins, coming back on duty with some friends, saw them, exchanged glances with her group, and hurried on, big with a silent pregnancy of future words. Vivian reflected without emotion that she would have told the whole hospital by this time tomorrow. Mic had noticed nothing; he was unfastening the door, which had stuck.

He had provided her, she found out, with seven minutes to change in. She returned to the ward with a feeling of aeration; of seeing things from different angles and in slightly altered tinges of colour. Although Sister was in charge that evening she felt no anxiety about her work; there was, even a kind of relaxation in it, as of a simple exercise after a complex one that had strained concentration a little.

While they were tidying up the sluice one of the other probationers said, “By the way, Lingard, is it true you’re going to leave?”

“No, of course not,” said Vivian at once. “Who told you?”

“They were saying it in the dining-room. Just one of these rumours, I suppose. The brainy ones always seem to, like Carteret who used to draw, you know.”

“I’m not nearly clever enough to leave.” Vivian rubbed an enamel bowl with Vim, remembering suddenly, from a remote distance, the meditations in which she had spent the morning. “I shall just wait till I’m pushed, I expect.”

The probationer laughed appreciatively. “Matron will need a few more names on the waiting-list before she pushes a nice quiet girl like you. Now I nearly did get sacked last year. I was out, you see, without late leave, and the boy I was with—”

Nurses,” said Sister in the doorway, “you may or may not be aware that the noise of your chattering can be heard halfway up the ward.”

Vivian was walking down to the dining-room after duty, feeling less tired than usual, when Colonna caught her shoulder from behind.

“Don’t go in to supper. Cut it. I want you to go to a party with me.”

“Whose party?” Vivian looked round to see if the Home Sister were watching for defaulters. “Am I invited?”

“Yes, at least she said I could bring whoever I liked. Do come it’s going to be awful, I can’t think why I was such a bloody fool as to say I’d go.” But she sounded pleased.

“Who’s giving it.”

“Valentine.”

“Not Charge-nurse Valentine? Why ever did she ask you?”

“God knows. To rope me into some hell-begotten society or other, I expect. Folk-dancing, or singing glees, you know the things they do. Oh, Lord, is she a Grouper by any chance?”

“I shouldn’t think so. All right, I’ll come. Can we wear dressing-gowns?”

“I’m going to, anyway. I hope there’ll be enough to eat.”

“Oh, well,” said Vivian comfortably, “I had a good tea.”

“Like hell you did. We’re going to talk about that.”

Evidently Collins had wasted no time.

Valentine had a big room, nearly as big as a Sister’s, at the top of the building; part of the old structure, with a huge mansard window from which the lights of half the town and the nearest villages could be seen. It was a good party, with much more than enough to eat, and cocktails as well. There was no one else there nearly so junior as Colonna, let alone herself; the other half-dozen guests were seniors to whom she had hardly spoken. Valentine herself had on a red flowered kimono, and had tied back her dark wavy hair from her forehead with a red ribbon. It made her look surprising young; seniors two or three years younger than oneself always appeared, somehow, to be older on the wards.

Everyone was very gay and silly, but with rather more imagination than at other hospital parties to which she had been. They told, as usual, improper stories, but subtler and more allusive ones. Presently someone—Valentine, as far as she could afterwards remember—suggested charades. Valentine picked one of the sides, choosing Colonna first; she had a name, of course, for such things.

Vivian, who was on the other side, could never remember later what word it was that Valentine chose. It ended with a dumb-show, fairly heavily burlesqued, of the tomb scene from
Romeo and Juliet.
Valentine was Juliet in a white satin nightgown (she had, Vivian noticed, an immature but charming figure) and Colonna was Romeo, wearing a white silk shirt, a sash, and her own black pyjama trousers—a costume that made her look more than ever like a steel plate of Lord Byron gone blond.

Even the audience enjoyed it. Nurses are easy to excite emotionally, like soldiers and other persons strictly regimented and in too frequent contact with death: and no one noticed that the principals guyed their parts less and less as the scene went on. When, at the end, Romeo took his last embrace, and sealed, very firmly, his dateless bargain on the doors of breath, Vivian thought she saw Juliet stir, for a moment, with unseasonable life. But she died very well, with a paper-knife, when her turn came. There was loud and prolonged applause. After the other side had been out, Colonna suggested that they should tell ghost stories in the dark.

In the faint glimmer from the window, which after the bright light did not reveal their shapes to one another, they all curled up together on Valentine’s bed or on cushions on the floor. Warmed and excited by the cocktails and the playacting, their personalities spread and preened themselves in the darkness, peopling it with their favourite fantasies. Someone, she never knew who, gave Vivian a plump shoulder to lean on, and settled her there comfortably; someone else put an arm round her and softly slapped her waist. Neither of them was Colonna. She could hear faint giggles somewhere beyond her in the room. Invisibility, and the fact that half of them were, by regulation, strictly forbidden to know the others, gave to these secret familiarities the illusion of adventure. Behind her, against the wall, Vivian could hear someone moving quietly, in search perhaps of more room.

The ghost stories grew sillier and sillier. Everyone had been awake since half-past six, and most were by now unconcealedly half asleep. One by one, with thanks and a weak drowsy joke, they trickled away. Vivian too felt dim and aching with weariness. Her supporting shoulder had gone, and she longed for the cool solitude of her bed. It must be long after lights-out. She would say good-bye to Valentine, collect Colonna and go. She had been so nearly asleep as to have shut her eyes. When she opened them the sky-lit glimmer seemed, after the darkness of her eyelids, much lighter than before. She perceived that round her, on the floor, all the cushions were empty. The bed, too, above her, was no longer a heaped-up frieze: it held only a low indeterminate blur. Rubbing her aching eyes, she could see a faint surface of white silk, traversed by a flowered sleeve. The white silk stirred softly, and Colonna’s hand gave her a gentle push. Vivian rose and slipped away, without formality or sound.

Colonna did not give notice, after all, next day. Nor did she ever take Vivian to task for going to tea with Mic.

V
IVIAN WAS A LITTLE
lonely after this, though Colonna wound up her suit with charming politeness; indeed, it was a small pride of hers that she never, so to speak, sent anyone a marmoset. She sloughed her affairs delicately, like the snake its winter skin, leaving the pretty pattern brittle but untorn. Quite often, in an afternoon when Valentine was elsewhere, she came to see Vivian, made her tea, amused her, and paid her improper compliments for art’s and old times’ sake. But at night the golden dragons prowled no longer; and Vivian, waking as she sometimes did in the first light, would hear down the passage her long soft step and the quiet closing of her door.