Kind Are Her Answers (38 page)

The letter she had sent him could only have had one answer; that she should have left the responsibility to him he took as a matter of course; he was so used to it that it passed him by like a mannerism, or a characteristic inflection of the voice. He had been interested not in her manner but in her motive. That she knew he had had a mistress he did not believe, and none of her letters had given any sign of it. Between the lines of the last, however, he had read a different reason. Janet had found some one to take his place. The new relationship was likely to be free from the inconveniences of the last, for it was a woman. Janet had begun to write about her friend Rachel some weeks before; her influence in the Group, her sympathy, her understanding, the nursery school she kept for children under five. Later it had appeared that Janet was helping with the smallest children two afternoons a week. In this last letter, she said that if she stayed Rachel wanted her to help permanently, and they were thinking of sharing a flat together.

He wondered, now that it had happened, why neither of them had thought of it before. To Janet it offered as much as she was capable of receiving from life; to him such freedom as his profession’s veto on divorce allowed. He pondered as he walked over the strange and, it seemed, purposeful chain of circumstance which had ensured that it should come too late.

Fraser had been buried some days before. His widow had gone to stay with one of the married daughters, so that he and Garrould had the house to themselves. They got on comfortably, but Kit was looking forward to the time when he and McKinnon would have settled down. There were plans for a big evacuation hospital in the neighbourhood, and Harbutson wanted him, if the time came for it to be used, to take an outside appointment. The tension that stretched through Europe kept his mind in a continual, formless expectation, which extended itself to his day-to-day affairs. He longed for some resting point in his own life, though, in view of what he believed to be coming. He supposed that the uprooted men would be the lucky ones, and those that had never struck roots at all.

Tea was on the table when he got in. Garrould was not back from his round, but they never waited meals for one another. He sat down, glad—since Garrould’s conversation, though inoffensive, palled with time—of solitude and peace.

It seemed that he had rejoiced too soon. Before he was halfway through his first cup of tea, Mrs. Hackett knocked at the door.

“I’m ever so sorry, Dr. Anderson, sir, to disturb your tea. But there’s a patient asking for you urgent, she says, downstairs.”

“There would be.” Mrs. Hackett reminded him so much of the landlady he had had when he was a student, that he found aloofness hard to preserve with her. “What’s the matter, did she say? Because if she isn’t actually haemorrhaging or perforating or anything, surgery starts in an hour and a quarter.”

“That’s just what I told her, sir—in a manner of speaking, that is, not wanting to be too short with her seeing that you never know. But she was most particular that it wouldn’t wait, so I thought, sooner be sure than sorry, I’ll let the doctor know, though I do think it’s a shame, coming at a mealtime as if they thought you could live like an angel without food or sleep. Just you ring when she goes, and I’ll make you a nice fresh pot of tea.”

“Oh, never mind.” Kit seldom found that any annoyance of his own could survive Mrs. Hackett’s vicarious indignation. “If it’s nothing, I’ll soon polish her off. Did she give a name?”

“No, sir. I couldn’t get nothing out of her at all.”

Feeling depressed, since this sounded like something long and confidential, Kit got up from the tea table and went downstairs. He opened the door of the consulting room smartly, and stood, frozen to stillness, on the threshold. Christie was sitting in the patient’s chair.

When he came in she got up, smiled shyly, and said, “Are you surprised to see me?”

“Yes,” said Kit, standing still where he was. His breath felt strangled, as if he had run too far.

“I thought you’d be pleased.”

Still he could not move or speak. He had been, lately, so often solitary that she seemed to confront him like a shape of his solitude, needing an answer only from the mind.

“I’m sorry about pretending to be a patient. You’re cross about it, aren’t you? I thought it would be more respectable than saying I wanted to see you just like that. Darling, you’re thinner. Does that woman give you enough to eat?”

“Yes,” said Kit vaguely. “She’s all right.” His mind had adjusted itself to reality. How strange, he thought, that he should not have foreseen this most obvious of all possibilities; that even afterwards she would still come back. She had loved him, but it had not held her; what else was likely to hold her with more effect? Now that it had happened, he was unastonished, not even much shocked that it should be so soon. She must be still on her honeymoon. She was looking up at him, innocently troubled, without a guilty shadow in her face. Why should there be, he thought; some process of her own was sure to be transforming it all to candour and light.

“Why did you come?” he said.

“I thought probably you’d like to see me now.”

“Aren’t you happy?” he asked slowly. The words forced themselves out, against his will. He had been settled in himself. He had not believed that he was still vulnerable to anything.

“Oh, yes,” she said with her eager smile. “Everything’s all right now. It’s only you I’ve been worried about. It’s been so long. I couldn’t get away before.”

“I’m glad it turned out all right.” Everything was clear again. He felt even happiness that he could use, once, the certainty he had not had to give her before. It would be good to look at her for a few minutes, though, before she went away.

“I’d have come anyhow,” she was saying, “to make sure Pedlow hadn’t done anything to you. I didn’t dare write, in case … Darling! Is that what’s the matter? I wondered why you looked so tired. Oh, she didn’t, she couldn’t. Tell me, Kit—don’t just stand there.”

“No,” he said, staring at her. A sudden surmise stopped his voice. His heart seemed to check, and start again with a jerk that shook him. “No, she tried, but it didn’t come off. Why—do you mean—”

“Yes. That was why.” Something in his face arrested her. “Kit, you did
know?
You did see it in the paper, didn’t you?”

“I’ve been busy lately,” he said with difficulty. “I haven’t looked at more than the headlines for over a week.”

“But it was nearly at the top of the column. About it not taking place. … Oh, God—Kit, darling, you haven’t been thinking I was married all this time? Oh, my sweet, come here.”

Even as they embraced he was thinking, I shouldn’t have let this happen; she means something else; it will be harder afterwards. She was bareheaded, and her hair tangled the light, as it always had, just below the level of his eyes.

“It seems funny now,” she said presently, “that I didn’t realize from the start what Pedlow would be waiting for. I had a queer feeling, as it was, when Jimmie would have that announcement thing put in the paper. Though no doubt she’d have found out anyway. She wrote to him just the day before the wedding.”

He touched her hair, silently. His brief rush of joy was borne down by a remorse too great, it seemed ever to find relief in words; because he had been glad, because he had failed her after all; because even when the truth shouted at him he had not known.

“Oh, darling,” she sighed, “how glad I am Pedlow had all that money. If I had some more I’d like to give it her all over again. Poor old Pedlow.” Her voice shook. He was suddenly aware that it shook with laughter.

“But—”

“Oh, darling, I can’t tell you. Just the very night before, I’d been dreaming I was married to Jimmie, and waking up in the morning was simply like coming back from the grave. And naturally I just tried not to think about it; I mean, the presents had come and the champagne and everything, so it was really as good as over, and I thought after all, probably it would be all right. And then Jimmie arrived looking like an Act of God, and said could he speak to me alone. So silly, because everybody had been leaving us alone as if we had smallpox for weeks and weeks. And he had this letter. He said he’d only come because he knew I’d like to have a chance to deny it myself.

“Deny it?” There passed through Kit’s mind the memory of various confidences; the one in the summer-house, the one in the wardrobe room … “Do you mean,” he said slowly, “that you hadn’t told him?”

“Darling, I
know.
And what made it so much more awful was that he’d confessed like anything to me. I did tell him about Maurice, as a matter of fact, because after that it seemed only fair. And he seemed to find that a bit of a pill. But I just couldn’t tell him about you. Don’t you see, I couldn’t talk to some one else about you as I’d talked to you about the rest—as if you didn’t matter any more. But when he asked me, of course I said it was true.”

“And that settled it?” He tried, and failed, to create a picture of Jimmie in his mind.

“Well, not at once. You see then he said well, as I’d confessed freely we must try to forget about it, because of course you were a cad to have taken advantage of me, and ought to be horsewhipped. And when he said that, it came all over me, and I told him I never wanted to forget you, and you were the best person I’d ever known; and if it came to that it was just as much me who’d seduced you, and I was jolly glad I did. And we had a row.”

“Did you?” Kit’s mouth twitched. He straightened it quickly, feeling ashamed of himself.

“Yes, terrific. I didn’t mind that part; in fact, it did me a lot of good. But it was pretty grim with the family afterwards. I don’t think I’ll tell you about that part—not till it’s sort of sunk into the background a bit. Anyway, it’s over now. Has it happened—what you thought?”

“Has what happened?”

“That you’ve stopped loving me. You said you might.”

“I’m afraid that wasn’t true.”

“I wondered, afterwards, if perhaps it wasn’t.”

They said nothing more for a little while. But Kit thought, when her face as far enough away for him to see it, that it had faintly changed. He remembered how he had thought that decisions mattered chiefly to the person who made them. She had made, at last, a movement against the stream, and already it showed a little.

“You know,” she said, “about this children business; it was really a mistake. I mean, thinking that any one’s would do. I’d have known that if I’d been with you a bit longer that afternoon. But you went away so quickly.”

“I tried to come back. Did you wait long in Birmingham that day?”

“I knew it was because you couldn’t.”

“Fraser’s dead.”

“Oh, my darling. I am so sorry.”

It seemed quite natural that she should be the only one to realize he had suffered a personal loss. He could not remember having told her anything about Fraser except the most superficial, and often humorous, things.

She rubbed her face softly against his cheek. He closed his eyes like a recurring pattern, the memory of the past stamped itself on the future. Nearly all of it would happen again. It was as certain as the approach of death, and as little to be argued with, since death was the price of life.

“Darling Kit. I’m here to look after you now.” Warmly, securely, her voice enclosed him, like the walls of a firelit room. “Everything’s going to be all right now. You’re never going to be unhappy any more.”

Mary Renault (1905–1983) was an English writer best known for her historical novels on the life of Alexander the Great:
Fire from Heaven
(1969),
The Persian Boy
(1972), and
Funeral Games
(1981).

Born Eileen Mary Challans into a middle-class family in a London suburb, Renault enjoyed reading from a young age. Initially obsessed with cowboy stories, she became interested in Greek philosophy when she found Plato’s works in her school library. Her fascination with Greek philosophy led her to St Hugh’s College, Oxford, where one of her tutors was J. R. R. Tolkien. Renault went on to earn her BA in English in 1928.

Renault began training as a nurse in 1933. It was at this time that she met the woman that would become her life partner, fellow nurse Julie Mullard. Renault also began writing, and published her first novel,
Purposes of Love
(titled
Promise of Love
in its American edition), in 1939. Inspired by her occupation, her first works were hospital romances. Renault continued writing as she treated Dunkirk evacuees at the Winford Emergency Hospital in Bristol and later as she worked in a brain surgery ward at the Radcliffe Infirmary.

In 1947, Renault received her first major award: Her novel
Return to Night
(1946) won an MGM prize. With the $150,000 of award money, she and Mullard moved to South Africa, never to return to England again. Renault revived her love of ancient Greek history and began to write her novels of Greece, including
The Last of the Wine
(1956) and
The Charioteer
(1953), which is still considered the first British novel that includes unconcealed homosexual love.

Renault’s in-depth depictions of Greece led many readers to believe she had spent a great deal of time there, but during her lifetime, she actually only visited the Aegean twice. Following
The Last of the Wine
and inspired by a replica of a Cretan fresco at a British museum, Renault wrote
The King Must Die
(1958) and its sequel,
The Bull from the Sea
(1962).

The democratic ideals of ancient Greece encouraged Renault to join the Black Sash, a women’s movement that fought against apartheid in South Africa. Renault was also heavily involved in the literary community, where she believed all people should be afforded equal standard and opportunity, and was the honorary chair of the Cape Town branch of PEN, the international writers’ organization.

Renault passed away in Cape Town on December 13, 1983.