Friendly Young Ladies (25 page)

“Isn’t this the Sisters’ corridor?” she asked suddenly.

“Yes,” said Peter soothingly, “but it’s all right.”

They climbed again, to the next floor; at the foot of the stairs a Sister, capless and apronless, pottering about in felt slippers during a restful but eventless period of off-duty, gazed after them in unformed resentment.

“Nearly there,” Peter said.

They were at the top of the central, oldest block of the hospital, in a corridor tall, bleak and grim like all public utilities of the Victorian era, but, because of its height, relieved here by light and air. Otherwise it was nearly identical with the floor below, except for the differences, trivial but enormous, which marked the transit from a feminine to a masculine world. Down there the doors had had a guarded look, an air of preserving, watchfully, small face-savings and shifts from a prying eye; here they were slammed for quiet or stood carelessly open, revealing the method, or litter, or unabashed chaos within. Leo remembered the probationers’ rooms she had seen on her visits to Helen, their cowed symmetry and tidiness, clamant of daily inspections and of rules. She felt no resentment at the contrast, only a sense of naturalness where she was; apart from Helen herself, the other had been always like a foreign region, quaint in its strangeness, an existence of which, by no effort of the fancy, she could have imagined herself a part. Through a couple of doors which faced one another along the passage, two young men were shouting across to one another and rummaging about. She listened, half-unconsciously, to what they said. One of them came out, pushing his shirt absently into his trousers, saw Leo, and went in again, looking annoyed. It made her feel irrationally foolish and hurt.

“Here we are,” said Peter, and threw open a door.

They gazed at the room: Peter, indeed, with more interest than Leo, for she had seen it more or less in replica several times on the way, while he was enjoying a pleasure which seldom palls, that of viewing an extension of one’s own personality through the fresh medium of someone else. The room took on new values and perspectives under his eyes. Its utilitarian bareness—it looked what it was, a place for the hasty changing of raiment and for sleep—assumed a brave but somehow pathetic austerity; the awkward overflow of books from the single shelf to the table and chair was full of intriguing intellectual clues; the crayon caricature pinned to the wall (of a friend he had lost touch with for years) looked casually popular and witty; the black iron bedstead, its mattress flattened at the edge from being sat on, and sagging in the middle under its washed-out counterpane, ceased to be merely an object that took up half the available space, it was a reagent, a tactful and tacit question-mark, an experimental catalyst. Murmuring conventionally deprecating platitudes, he smiled at her, bright-eyed and observant.

“Well,” remarked Leo, “if one must live in London, it’s something to live on top of it.” She strolled over to the window, looking out over the recession of roofs and chimneys and the haze of smoke gilded with late sun.

Peter had a psychological theory about this procedure: he had given one or two previous visitors the benefit of it at later and suitable moments, with interesting effect. With reluctance and regret, he abandoned it this time. The back view, thus idly presented, was as free from conscious curves as his fag’s at school.

“It’s a unique view,” he told her. “You can’t see the Crystal Palace, even on a clear day. Cigarette?”

“Thanks.” She looked vaguely at the two chairs, the hard cane and the unsteady basket, and sat down on the edge of the bed. Peter settled himself beside her, a little more centrally. To set the ball rolling, he turned on her a gentle, quizzical, well-here-we-are-what-now smile.

Leo looked at him reflectively, speculatively, and, as far as he was concerned, enigmatically. London always made her thirsty, and something, surely, had been said about a drink.

Fortunately Peter arrived almost at once at the same concept, though by a rather different mental train. He produced the heel-end of a bottle of whisky, souvenir of a recent celebration, and two not very clean glasses. Leo, who did not care for spirits and would have preferred the soda unembellished, accepted from politeness and because she was dry.

“To our better acquaintance,” said Peter, with light delicate significance.

“Cheers,” Leo said.

They drank. Leo thought, I wish I could tell good whisky from bad; it’s uninformed. The stuff only makes you thirstier, and beer’s no good after it. I’ll get back to the station in time for a lemonade or something. Outside the door a houseman passed, in conversation with a porter; he had been called to an urgent casualty, and was getting details as he went. Interested by the odd phrases she caught, she turned her head for a moment to listen. This must be a good life, she thought; hard, but good. Working at something you know beyond doubt to be useful, under a boss who’s only your boss because he’s a better man. Nothing about you concerning anyone, except whether or not you deliver the goods. She turned to look at Peter, the only representative in view.

“Well?” he said. His voice was tentative, personal and softly challenging. Oh, blast him, thought Leo; and took a long impatient drink.

Peter considered her, well content with the sense of his own originality and enterprise. How few of his friends and acquaintances, he reflected, would have bothered with this girl. She had no physical provocation; a cruder and simpler taste would have rejected her at sight. But to the more highly trained intelligence, there was a deliberateness about this lack of sexual window-dressing, which intrigued and asked to be explored; nothing like the well-meant flounderings of the younger sister. A less expert investigator would, he realized, have had the diagnosis pat. Peter wasn’t so sure. It was well worth looking into. She was sitting with her drink balanced on one knee, leaned back a little against a propping hand; a boyish, angular, lounging pose; there was about her a kind of obstinate rawness. Someone, definitely, ought to take her in hand. She had, he remembered, a dreadful family background (it was helpful to begin knowing this) but it was probably not too late. A little adjustment now might alter her whole destiny, and she would remember it, very likely, with gratitude all her life. He hoped her immediate response to the treatment would not be too embarrassing; but with a worth-while case one must take such risks.

“What do you do?” asked Leo, looking round from a cursory inspection of the books on the shelf. “General surgery, or medicine, or something specialized?”

Peter told her, in detail. He prided himself on never rushing things.

“I wondered, when you told me you were a resident. Because I rather got the impression, from the way Elsie talked, that you were a psychologist.”

This came unexpectedly near the knuckle. Peter took refuge in a modest indulgent smile. “Not officially. But it’s indispensable, of course, in any branch. Unfortunately far too few people can be got to realize that.”

This sounded to Leo like good sense. She wished to know more.

“Have you ever,” she asked, “found psychological treatment really decisive in curing a patient?”

Peter could have asked nothing better than this. He was off. In skilfully linked succession he recounted three instances of cases (they were, by some coincidence, all female cases) where he personally had restored the will to live at what had seemed, to less imaginative colleagues, the eleventh hour.

Leo listened, gratifyingly. There was information to be had; and, besides, she found the narrative style rather charming. At the end of the third history, however, she interrupted the flow; cutting, somewhat unfairly, into a pause whose intention had been purely dramatic.

“But,” she asked, “what happened afterwards, when they found out?”

Peter looked at her gravely. Her trick of gaucherie, he reflected, was effective up to a point; it was a pity she overdid it.

“They went out, I think,” he said, “happier and less lonely people than they came in. It isn’t much one can do. The rest one just has to hope for.”

He means this, said Leo to herself; he really means it. This is fascinating; I’m glad I came.

“I’m sorry,” she said aloud, “but I still don’t quite get this. In the end, what did they make of it? I mean, they must either have thought you were really taken with them, which would lead to a certain amount of disappointment when you didn’t follow it up; or else they’d gather at some stage that you’d just been doing them good, in which case one would rather expect them to hand you a clip on the ear. Still,” she concluded reasonably, “I suppose the great thing at the time was to save their lives. Like jabbing a boathook into someone who’s drowning.”

Peter received this with a complex series of emotions. In the first moment sincerely hurt and offended, he found, in the second, the assault—if it was an assault—subtly promising. It showed a personal interest, perhaps a personal application. … Boathook. Drowning. He knew his Freud. A highly significant choice of symbols and, obviously, unconscious. The first thing was to crack this defensive shell, and then the possibilities were really fruitful. A forgiving, understanding warmth irradiated him.

“I don’t think they would feel that way about it. Why should they? One’s affection is perfectly real, and one’s desire to help. They’ll have had that, you know. It does mean something to people who haven’t had much of either in their lives.”

Fundamentally, Leo thought, he’s a far better human being than I am. If I were half as nice, I’d be telling him now how wonderful he is. I wish I were.

“The only drawback is,” she said, “that women” (she used the noun with objective detachment, as one might say “horses”) “don’t really enjoy being helped and done good to. Not emotionally, anyway. They’d much rather think that against your conscience and better judgment you were jeopardizing their souls. It gives them more self-respect. At least, that’s been my experience.”

There was a serene matter-of-factness in the way this last remark was delivered which seemed to Peter somehow misplaced. It took him a few dubious seconds to reach the idea of picking it up by the other end. But surely, he thought, damn it all. … She was returning his gaze with perfect sangfroid.

“Take Byron,” she pursued. “Mad, bad and dangerous to know. He swept Europe with that line; and they still fall for it, believe me. And then look at Shelley. He did good like blazes to every woman he took up with, and what happened? They got madder than hornets, or threw themselves in ponds. None of Byron’s women ever committed suicide, that I can remember offhand.”

“You’re an amazing woman,” said Peter, who felt the need of gaining a little time. Leo accepted it as a form of punctuation, which it was.

“That’s where you’re wrong,” she said. “The others just don’t tell you.”

“Have another drink.”

“Better not. I’m offensive enough on one, aren’t I?”

“There’s only a drop left. Shame to waste it. There isn’t likely to be any by the time I get back.”

He refilled their glasses. It afforded another interval for constructive thought. The impulse towards lame dogs and stiles had, he found, curiously evaporated. However, he reaffirmed it to himself, for he was a lover of good reasons. There was something, it seemed to him, impalpably changed in her voice and physical poise, rather less of the lad in petticoats. She seemed, oddly, to have become more feminine as she grew more malicious. A defence mechanism, he said to himself; very interesting. … He had not found the allusions to Byron and Shelley altogether distasteful, their effect, though a subconscious one, having been to make him feel endowed with the diablerie of the one and the tragic weird of the other.

“Your mistake, I think,” he said, “is expecting other people to have your own rather exacting standards. You, I imagine”—he looked searchingly and sympathetically into her eyes—“are a person who’s taken some hard knocks from life, and said very little about them. In that, anyhow, you and I are rather alike.” He paused to gauge the effect of this; Leo merely waited, with cool attention, for him to continue. “You’re conscious in yourself of things which—separate you from the herd, and you’d rather die than seek any concession from people whose stupidity and lack of imagination you despise. Isn’t that true?”

“Good Lord, no,” said Leo. “Of course it isn’t.” She looked simply surprised; indeed, the wish to remove this misconception had ousted, for the moment, all other impulses. “For one thing, stupidity about people like me is all to the good and makes life much more comfortable all round. This sort of thing is all right once in a way, but if everyone I met started exercising their imagination on me, it would embarrass me to death. For another thing, I don’t feel separate from the herd, if by the herd you mean ordinary people and not public mobs, as I suppose you do. I like them. Why should they pamper oddities, anyway? It’s they who are in charge of evolution. They think it’s better not to be odd, as far as they bother to think at all, and they’re quite right. There are shoals of women made up pretty much like me, but a lot haven’t noticed and most of the rest prefer to look the other way, and it’s probably very sensible of them. If you do happen to have had your attention drawn to it, the thing to do is to like and be liked by as many ordinary people as possible, to make yourself as good a life as you can in your own frame, and to keep your oddities for the few people who are likely to be interested.”

“I’m interested,” said Peter. “I’ve been wanting to tell you that for a long time,” Removing the glass gently from her hand and setting it down, he put his arm round her shoulders.

Leo did nothing. Her face had a faint, almost impersonal smile. She looked a little like someone in a theatre, who is waiting for the curtain to go up.

Peter kissed her; lightly and experimentally at first, then with enthusiasm. A certain cautious instinct had caused him to keep his right hand free for emergencies; but, this proving not to be necessary, he put it firmly round her, and tilted her into a more convenient position. She looked up at him with a smile in which irony and encouragement were curiously mingled. He kissed her again.