Purposes of Love (12 page)

“Yes, I should like that.” She had felt that she could not face the flat again, and had wondered many times whether he would know this. Now she could scarcely remember that she had had these fears, or why.

Passing through a loose red rubble of council-houses and villas, they struck a footpath to the hills.

She realised for the first time that the clothes he had on were as familiar to her as her own; that she knew by heart the smooth places on the elbows of his Harris jacket, a loose thread near the shoulder that had been caught on a nail; the pattern punched in his brogues. As a thing dreamed once can appear vividly remembered, it seemed to her that these things had always been the accustomed securities, and the past week an improbable excursion, already almost forgotten.

They talked—in this alone like her expectations—of indifferent things: town-planning, Swedish architecture, the sick staff-nurse, whose blood-cultures as it happened had been in Mic’s charge. Yet Vivian did not feel that they were taking shelter or concealing themselves in these things: they were a background, an accompaniment to what was really being said, for which words were instruments too harsh and shrill. A new villa came in sight, with Tudor gables and a machicolated porch supported on Corinthian pillars. Mic said, quite mildly, “Good Lord, deliver us!” and his words had some half-caught significance, tinged with memory.

“What sort of a week have you had?” he asked her. She wanted suddenly to laugh, but only said, “Pretty busy. I’ve been on Malplaquet, you know.”

“That was where the power-station people went, wasn’t it? It must have been pretty grim.”

“It was, rather.” But already that week-old picture seemed years ago; clear, but tiny, gemmed by distance like the image in an inverted glass. “What have you been doing?”

“The usual stuff, and growing some things for Scot-Hallard. It’s not my work, of course, but it saves him trouble and amuses me.”

“He’s always messing about with pathology; the physicians hate it.” But she was not much interested in Scot-Hallard’s weekly clashes with the Senior Pathologist; she was thinking that all these days, while she had been enclosed in her routine and her own troubles, Mic had been leading a life of which she knew very little, with a complicated routine of which she knew scarcely anything, and troubles of his own. Suddenly she saw her miseries as worse than selfish—a narrowing of bounds, blinkers over her eyes. The last of the houses fell behind; the hills opened, and the sun shone over them.

The path climbed eastward; their shadows shot in arrowy length before them; round them the midges glanced in globes, tiny galaxies limited by their own curve of space. On the skyline, to which their track was making, was a round clump of trees, looking, with the sunlight flat against their sides, like green-gold glass lit from within.

The last slope was steep; they needed their breath, and presently ceased to talk. The steady rhythm of their effort, the steady light, the steady lifting into a rarer and lighter air, loosed the mind from its fretful grasp on body and spirit.

At the top of the hill the grass grew long and green between the open trunks of the trees, and round the edge went the dented, short-turfed rampart of a camp. The town they had left was a vague pool of shadow, cupped by the sunlight on the hills. They climbed the ramp and rested there, Vivian sitting on the top, Mic lying along it, propped on his elbows, beside her. They said nothing at all, but looked into the high air below and around them, self-contented, as if it had been some eminence within themselves that they had scaled.

Mic said at last, “I ought to have asked you, before I brought you all this way, if you were tired. We could have gone in the car somewhere.”

He spoke, as he had spoken all along, as if it were pleasant to say something and one thing was as good as another. Vivian answered, “No, I might have been tired in the streets, perhaps, but not here.” They might have agreed with the same effect that no other place existed.

“It’s only another mile,” said Mic. “There’s lots of time.”

The twinkling, glittering sound of a lark hung overhead. They looked idly for its light-hidden source. A magpie drove by, with long stiff tail and whirling wings.

“One for sorrow,” said Vivian, looking after it. “We must find another before we go.”

They turned, scanning the shining trees.

“There it goes,” Mic leaned across her, pointing. “Over to the left.”

“It’s the same one again.”

“Is it?” said Mic, absently.

She had expected him to defend his magpie, and had been ready to turn and answer; but she did not turn. She sat still, looking up at the branch which the bird had left. Mic was still too, leaning on his arm. His cheek was resting, so lightly that at first she had not felt it, against the curve of her breast.

For a second she held her breath; and knew that she had communicated her knowledge. He made a small sound like a hidden sigh, and she saw as if she watched him that he had closed his eyes.

The shared will born of them in the instant rested and was satisfied. They neither spoke, nor tried to touch one another more closely. Presently Mic moved away, and slipped a little way down the slope, so that his head lay beside her knees. She rested her hand on the grass near his hair.

The lark was still singing, ending the same small jet of sound. Vivian looked about her, at the deepening light, the hills, at Mic lying beside her hand. She knew herself the centre on which the hills revolved, the burning-glass through which alone the sun could warm them, and rejoiced: glorious, apocalyptic error, more true than verity! Wonder filled her, but no astonishment. The life in her, like Mary sitting apart and listening to speech unheard by her careful troubled mind, had foreknown it, and claimed now its acknowledgement. Her mind, rebuked, kept silence, as the one should who has been wrong.

Mic sat up. He stretched enormously, and looked slowly all round the horizon, as if it had been given him.

“Well,” he said, “shall we go?”

Their path joined a broad trackway over the top of the Downs, Roman, or older than Rome. They were in the world of high places which from within it seems a separate, continuous world, to which plains and cities are interruptions fugitive and unreal. The skyline hills marched with them, closer neighbours than the valleys between. Curlews cried airily, and tumbled with blunt wings along the wind.

They shouted, and laughed at nothing, and sang. Mic started
The Golden Vanity;
its radiant melancholy matched the light and the air, so that it all seemed to be happening on the blueness just below them; the great-sailed ships becalmed, the yellow-haired boy drifting down, sorrowfully singing like a mermaid, in the lowland sea.

The “Hawk and Ring” stood where the trackway cut a road, a low white house squatting in the cover of some Scotch firs.

“They have that ungodly sort of draught cider you like,” said Mic. “Thick and sweet. I still hope sometime to form your taste in beer. This stuff’s much more alcoholic, anyway.”

“I don’t care if it is, I like the taste of it.”

“It blows you out.”

“If it does I can keep it to myself.”

The bar parlour had an oak settle, two cases of stuffed birds and a coloured picture of a soldier leaving home, in excellent spirits, for the Boer War. Mic had a bitter and Vivian her cider, cloudy and golden in a tall glass with a waist. They started drinking while they waited for the supper to be cooked. A foursome of hikers came in, wedged themselves into a corner table, and plied one another with allusive taunts.

Vivian put down her glass. The thick gold of the cider seemed to have invaded the air; she floated in it, faintly swaying, like the cabin-boy in the golden sea. The laughter of the girls broke round her like bubbles, drifting her this way and that. There was Mic, floating too. How sweet he was! Strange that the girls could sit there, absorbed in their fatuous men instead of coming to try and take him away. The nearest one had on shorts and was broad in the beam. Vivian could see her backside through the bars of the chair, looking larger and larger, a pumpkin, a balloon. It was the most exquisitely funny thing she had seen in her life. She began to laugh softly, leaning back against the wall.

One of the men was giving an imitation of someone, egged on by appreciative screams. An especially high note cut through the golden cloud, dispersing it for a moment. Vivian stopped laughing.

“Mic.” She put her hand on his arm, and found it solid and stationary. “I believe I’m drunk, what shall I do?”

Mic, who had been thinking his own thoughts, came back to earth. “Nonsense. You couldn’t be. Not just on that.”

“All right, don’t believe me if you don’t want to, I don’t care.” She laughed again, waveringly. “I remember now, I forgot to have any tea.” She had eaten practically nothing for lunch either, but was just sober enough not to tell him so.

Mic looked her over, wrinkling his eyes.

“Honestly, I believe you are. Serves you right for drinking that stuff. Don’t worry, it isn’t terribly obvious. Be all right when … Better come out in the air for a minute. It’ll soon go off.”

She found she could walk well enough not to be noticed by the engrossed guests. From the end of the lamp-smelling passage someone called “Supper’s near on ready, sir,” and Mic said quickly, “All right, thanks. We shan’t be a minute.”

They walked through the garden, between clumps of pink and cherry-pie. She hung on to Mic’s arm; they seemed still to be floating, but more slowly and securely, in company with the night. The sun had gone down, and half a moon began to be bright as the west grew rusty. At the end of the path a little flight of steps went up and down the stone wall instead of a stile, leading to the field where the fir-trees were.

“Let’s go up there,” she said.

Mic looked doubtful. “Can you?”

“Of course I can.” She felt infinite in faculty, in action like an angel, in apprehension a god.

“Better let me go first,” Mic said.

He stood at the bottom, and steadied her down by the elbows. On the last step she stumbled and swayed forward against him. They stood together for a moment, in the deeper twilight of the trees. Vivian caught her breath; her unstable spirits shifted, the tears rushed into her eyes.

“Mic, you are so nice to me.”

She felt his hands tighten on her arms: his shadowed face bent over her, unsmiling. She lifted her own.

At the last moment he laughed quickly and let her go.

“Darling, you’re awfully drunk. You sit down there.”

He put his jacket on the broad bottom step, and settled her on to it. She moved with dreamlike obedience. He sat down on the grass just below her, and lit her a cigarette. His hand was steadier than hers would have been; but that was not saying quite everything.

A bat flickered out from the black boughs above them, and an owl called. Round Vivian the world began to settle. Just beside her glowed the end of Mic’s cigarette a long bright spike of red.

“Do you always smoke as fast as that?”

“Yes,” said Mic briefly.

Vivian found that she wanted to cry again. She gripped the rough edge of the step, and pressed back her head against the wall. The moon glittered and blurred and ran about the sky.

She fought to keep herself from letting Mic hear. What would he think of her? Try as she might, a throttled sob forced itself out. Through the tears she saw Mic throw his cigarette away. It curved, like a tiny shooting star, into the dimness. Then, without knowing how she got there, she was in his arms, lying across his knees, and he was kissing her. Her tears stopped. They clung together, not hearing the owl when it screamed again.

“I’m not really drunk,” she said presently.

“Of course you are. But I can’t help it.”

“Never mind. You can kiss me again when I’m sober, how will that be?”

Mic did not tell her. A gust of laughter blew out from the inn, a thin joyous sound, distilled by distance. A dry branch rattled to the ground. The sounds, the swaying moon, the sky flowed racing through her; she was embraced by them also and their kisses bewildered her. The dark trees swung into the sky. There was grass under her hair.

“God, how lovely you are.”

She had slipped somehow from his knees, and he was lying beside her. Her shirt was open to the waist. When had that happened? She couldn’t remember. What did it matter, they had been such fools so long. “Poor Mic,” she murmured, stroking his hair; “and you were being so good.”

“I still am,” Mic said, his voice smothered against her breast.

Vivian was more nearly sober than she had supposed. She understood that it was their past unhappiness, rather than themselves, which was driving them; that they would regret this headlongness afterwards, and that Mic would take the responsibility. Half-intoxicated girls under hedges were not his pattern; whatever heresies he might have followed, he had his own integrities. It was easier to think of this than to remember hers.

“Dear she said gently, “we didn’t mean it to be like this.”

Mic whispered, “I know. Oh, Christ, don’t go away,” and kissed her mouth.

It was hard to think while he was making love to her. He was without clumsiness, even when he was uncertain or deeply moved. She could not tell whether it came from instinct or experience. It was as if they had remembered and longed for one another for many years. She moved her head a little and said, “I’ll come back again.”

“You’ll never come back.” He pressed the words on her lips like kisses. “You’ve too much sense to come back, if I let you go.”

“I love you.”

His arm slackened, and he caught his breath. “Oh, God, you’re drunk. Don’t say it if it isn’t true, I—love you so much.”

“Of course I love you. You know I do. Look at me.”

“Don’t. You wouldn’t, if—”

“It’s too late for any ifs.”

“Kiss me,” he said.

She murmured, hardly remembering while she spoke what she was trying to say. “Let’s go back to the inn.”

“Stay a little. Just let me hold you: I’ve wanted you so.”

“But not like this. It’s true, isn’t it?” With what seemed an enormous effort she sat up, throwing back her hair. “Mic, I’ve got a pain with hunger. And you can’t keep ham and eggs.”