Purposes of Love (16 page)

Vivian found the programme slipping from her knees.

“There’s something else, of course.”

“Yes, I suppose there is. Let’s see.”

“Prince Igor,”
said Vivian dimly.

“Oh.
Prince Igor.
Yes, they’re fond of that.”

They held the programme together, looking at the cast, not reading it.

“Do you think,” said Mic presently, “that
Igor
is one that grows on you?”

They looked at one another again.

“Well,” said Mic “suppose we—?”

“Yes, we might.”

It was scarcely dark outside: the city lights made the sky a deep unearthly blue, but as they got beyond them it greyed and grew luminous. Mic kept the main road this time: its offences were softened, reduced to silhouettes picked out with scattered lights. It saved half an hour.

The dew had laid the smells of dust and petrol, and the field scents blew through to them, clover and great wafts of hay. Trees, and the grass verges of the road, leaped into the beam of the headlights with sudden colour and a hard, metallic clearness of design: moths as they drifted through it waved for an instant vans of fire, and gnats and midges danced like anvil-sparks. Mic and Vivian, scarcely speaking, leaned with their shoulders lightly touching. Mic looked after the car, which could not be treated cavalierly, and Vivian watched his hands through half-shut eyes.

They rounded a bend, and the pale sky was quartered by a towering cube of lights. Vivian, who had not been that way for many months, could not recognise nor remember the huge building which, with its satellites, covered the area of several fields. It was too stripped and hard for a hotel, and too big: bigger than the hospital, and looking, Vivian thought, much more powerful and efficient.

“What on earth’s that?” she asked lazily. It was already falling behind them and Mic was where he had been.

“Haven’t you seen it before?” His voice, losing some of its sleepy gentleness, was a tone flat. “It’s a new chemical warfare experimental station. Been going a month or two now. Scot-Hallard goes there.”

“Do they work at night too?”

“So it seems.”

Vivian said no more. In her mind scattered experiences linked, with a snap like Childe Roland’s closing hills. They came together single and clear, the girl with the glass beads, the chapel hymn, the evocation of
Giselle.
She knew who had been the prophet of their generation, and repeated the words softly, thinking the rattle of the car covered her voice.

“Go on,” said Mic.

She put her hand on his knee.

“Listen.”

It was the roar of a plane, made deeper by the night, spreading through the sky in pulsing rings of sound. Presently they could see the navigation lights sliding between the stars.

“Yes,” said Mic. “Say it.”

She said, slowly, accompanied by that throbbing bass,

“‘But at my back I always hear

Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.

Thy beauty shall no more—’

“Mic, I’m sorry. How could I, tonight?”

“Why not? It’s always for tonight.” He smiled at her, his eyes darkened and made strange by the gloom.

“‘Thus though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, we yet will make him run.’”

The roar of the plane dwindled to a gnat-like drone, to a faint tremor of the air. The car took a bend, throwing them closer together, and they did not move apart again.

They climbed a hill, and saw above the trees the lights of the town to which they were returning, glowing like fixed summer lightning on the sky.

“By the way,” Vivian said in a soft blurred voice, “what sort of ballet is
Prince Igor
?”

“
Oh, there’s a … But you said—”

“I know.”

The car protested shrilly as Mic stamped the accelerator down. They said nothing at all for the rest of the way.

They left the car in its dark little garage in the mews, shut the doors on it, and stood with their hands on the bar, half-visible to one another and half-imagined.

Mic took her wrist. “Come on,” he said. Laughing, they began to run.

“You can’t just—say—Come on,” Vivian panted as they rounded the corner. “It isn’t—done. It’s—won’t I—come in for a minute, and—have a drink.”

“You can have anything and—everything. Come on.”

The light was out on the stairs. She stumbled; Mic pulled her arm over his shoulders and half-lifted her up them. They groped their way breathlessly, smothering their laughter though there was no one to hear.

The door shut with a gentle snap. The room was quite dark; the street-lamp slid across one corner an upward-slanting, pale beam. Vivian only saw it for a second before they reached for one another, and Mic’s black silhouette eclipsed it; but in the drowning confusion of themselves, when she could not have said whether her eyes were shut by the night or her own eyelids or Mic’s mouth, she could still see the pale light streaming upward and the curtain glowing in metallic lines.

They were still out of breath with the running and the stairs. Mic came to the surface with a little gasp and said, “Do come—in—for a moment, won’t you—if you’ve time—and—have a drink?”

“You’re very kind. Perhaps—just for a minute.”

They laughed, wandering uncertainly up the scale, and Mic switched on the light. They were dazzled for a minute, not so much by this as what it showed them, the flame of one another’s vitality. It was as if neither of them had been alive before.

“Mic, you’re—”

“What?”

“Nothing. I just liked the look of you, that’s all.”

To herself she had called him beautiful. He had the neutral kind of good looks which in moments of abstraction or constraint passed unnoticed, like an unlit lamp. She had never imagined that he could look like this.

“Why me?” He was staring at her with wide brilliant eyes. “But you’re—no, I can’t tell you.”

He had left sherry and biscuits ready on the table, and a bowl of garden roses. They ate and drank, sitting on the table’s edge, looking across their glasses. When they had done Mic jumped down, found a record and started the gramophone. He came back, and pushed the table to the wall.

“Dance with me.”

“We can’t dance to this.” She took the hands he held out to her, swaying to the music. It was Tchaikovski’s
Flower Waltz.
They danced, half-drunk with the ballet, half in earnest, half fooling. Mic caught a rose from the table as they went by, and tangled it in her hair. She leaned back against his joined hands, an arm flung out behind her; the snaps of her dress parted at the armpit; he bent, still holding her from falling, and kissed her side.

“Take it off.”

When she stood up it slid down of its own accord, and she kicked it away. In this hot June weather it was almost all she wore. Mic said, “Now dance with me,” and put his arms round her again. But they did not dance. The gramophone played the rest of the record to itself, and stopped with a discreet click.

She had not thought that he might carry her, for he was slight and she nearly as tall. When he swung her feet quite easily from under her she thought, first, It’s all that swimming; then, for a moment, could think no more. A gust of unforeseen fear shook her. She longed, though she would have died rather than do it, to call out, “No, stop, I wasn’t ready.” The hospital veneer of sophistication cracked away and her ignorance spread in a huge blank before her mind. Their nursing lectures told them nothing. They traced the growth of babies from the first cell, but dismissed their cause with the brevity of a diagnosis. She thought of the elementary psychology, outside their course, which in her brief leisure she had imperfectly assimilated. There were so many things, never adequately explained, which could go wrong. She only remembered that if she and Mic made some mistake they would end by hating one another. It seemed that such things happened. This might be the last moment in which they would be happy together. She clung to him desperately as he carried her the little way, shorter than it had ever looked before, to his own room.

She had not been there since the flat was finished, and there was only a crack of light from the door: it looked a different shape, puzzling with angles and folds of unknown things. She could not see the bed on which he put her down. He moved away, but she would not let him go.

“No, don’t put the light on.”

“Can’t I? I like to look at you.”

“There’s a lot from the door. Please.”

She thought, If I’m going to make his life more difficult than it’s been so far, I wish I’d never met him, I wish I’d never been born.

He slipped from her hands, and stood up.

“It’s all right. I’m not going to switch it on.”

She heard the soft thud and click of his clothes as he threw them away. He crossed the half-lit doorway, sharply black and slim, and lay down beside her. She was no longer afraid: he was familiar like something known in childhood and forgotten, inevitable as herself. But he was troubled: she could feel it in the way he kissed her.

“What is it, tell me.”

He did not speak for a moment. Then he said, “Have you had a lover before?”

“No, my darling. Does that matter to you a lot?”

“Yes. It frightens me.” He breathed sharply. “How dare I? I’m not fit.”

She pulled down his head and kissed him.

“What shall I do? No one else is any good.”

He stroked back the hair from her forehead; she made a sound as the rose pulled, and he disentangled it patiently and carefully, only hurting her a little. Some of the petals fell about her face, light and cool, or slid under her, giving up their warm bruised scent.

He dropped the stalk on the floor, and said, in a voice she could scarcely hear, “I can’t talk about you. I never shall be able to. But there’s a clearness about you, a wholeness, a … Not innocence, but better, I can’t find words. If I spoil that for you, after—all the rest—it’s the end, I’ve failed in everything that matters, I’d be better dead.”

She flung her arms round him, not knowing, till she felt her cheek slippery against his, that tears were sliding from her eyes. She did not feel like someone who might be weeping, but infinite, ancient in wisdom, protective as Hera, a mother of gods and men.

“Is that all? I love you, Mic, I love you.”

There was just light enough to see his face stooped over hers. In a moment it would be too near to see, they would be too near to know one another or themselves, not Mic and Vivian any more, but We, a different, narrower, intenser life. The last thing she said was, “We shan’t come to any harm.”

Indeed, they might both have taken things less anxiously; for they found that, in this as in most other matters, they understood one another very well.

T
HEY LAY IN BED
discussing who should get the breakfast, chiefly as an excuse not to get up.

“Don’t be absurd,” Mic said. “It’s your day off and I have every Sunday. If you move I shall be really angry.” He settled his head back on her shoulder and shut his eyes.

“But you always have your own to get, and I don’t.” She played about sleepily with his hair till she happened to look at the clock, which indicated that unless something were done at once Mic, at any rate, would get no breakfast at all. She was next the wall and it was tempting to shift responsibility; but she took a deep breath, kissed him, and dived out over the end of the bed before she had time to think again. It felt cold and empty outside, and the thought of thirteen nights in hospital struck leaden on her heart.

“How could you?” said Mic, looking incredulously at the empty place.

In the end she made the coffee while he fried eggs. The kitchen was a sort of cupboard with a gas-ring and a sink, and had almost as little room for two as the bed. The frying-pan was pushed away behind other things, and she wanted badly to ask him what he had for breakfast when he was alone; but Mic was independent about his housekeeping.

“Do you like fried bread with it?”

“Is there time?”

“Won’t take a minute, I do too.”

They were good fried eggs and she told him so. “I’ll have lunch ready when you come home.”

“How amazing to come back and find you here. I can’t believe it. Will you really be here?”

“Life’s unpredictable, but I fancy so.”

“But look here, there’s nothing in the house for lunch. I was going to take you out.”

“You can leave all that, it’s my turn anyway. Mic, you
will
be late. I’ll clear away. Don’t be such an ass, I’ve got all the morning. Look at the time. Yes, I do, I do, good Lord, what do you think? Yes, of
course
I’ll be here if I’m alive. All right, but that’s the last and I swear it. Quick, run!”

It gave her a pleasant, warm feeling of power and possession to have the flat to herself. Not that much needed to be done, except the bed and the washing-up; the place was very well kept, not finickingly neat but without muddles stuffed away in corners. She found Mic’s fountain-pen on the bedroom-floor, where it must have fallen out of his coat. He hated using anything else. She would leave it at the hospital for him. She had started out before she noticed anything wrong with her idea of handing it in at the Lodge—“Just give this to Mr. Freeborn, please, he left it behind.” She came back, feeling suddenly very raw and clumsy; found an envelope, wrapped the pen in a piece of paper saying, “I’m still here,” and stuck it down.

Buying the lunch was consoling. Mic had left her his latchkey to get back again; he was going to get another cut, he said. She pushed open the door with her arms full, and almost walked into a woman who was sitting at the table drinking tea.

“I’m sorry—I—”

They stiffened at one another, and then she saw that the visitor had on a grubby overall, wore her fringe in curlers, and was, of course, the woman who came at intervals to clean the flat. She must have had an easy morning’s work this time. Vivian smiled at her with tardy brightness.

“Good morning. I’m having lunch with Mr. Freeborn, so I came early to get a few things ready.”