Friendly Young Ladies (40 page)

Beyond this bound

No prophet points us. Here in your empty hand

Sleep the stone laws, the serpent and the rod,

The wilderness, the god.

Suns in our souls have fallen, moons been hurled

From their grieved ocean-beds to make this world

Which now so still

Keeps sabbath, cradled in our resting will.

Seek not the end. It lies with the beginning,

As you lie now with me,

The night with cock-crow, lust with the light unsinning,

Death with our ecstasy.

The past and the future closed together in her, a weight and a meaning too strong for the tiny bridge of the present to bear; as if they would crack it with their force and leave her, blank and nothing, in the gap between. There was a moment when she wanted the bridge to break, and let her escape from both of them. But the bridge held; and, in the very interval of refusal and fear, she found that she had crossed it, not now, but already, while the trippers cheered and played their accordion, and she waved from the rocking window.

Scarcely knowing what she did, but moving as if with purpose over a task she had come prepared to do, she began to go about the room, making a pile on the bed of things chosen, with dreamlike certainty, in the order of their importance to her; her manuscript, her portable typewriter, an armful of essential books, the objects of habitual necessity like brush and comb; then, working more slowly as the need for choice began to arrest and confuse her, clothes. The thought of their occasions and purposes woke her; she stared at the swathe she held, a suit, an afternoon frock still on its hanger, her corduroy slacks. From the middle of the pile came a warm, fragile scent. She let the rest fall to the floor, looking at the green dress from which it came, the dress which was not hers.

Suddenly she flung her other arm across her eyes, and, standing as she was in the middle of the room, began to cry; hard sobs with struggling pauses between, painful and ashamed and resisted, like the crying of a beaten boy.

There were footsteps on the bridge below, and someone knocked a cheerful little tattoo on the outer door. She heard nothing; she was retasting, with the intolerable sharpness of finality, five years of happiness, contentment which, to the part of herself that it satisfied, had been complete.

Then, in the blankness of pain, when the physical sensation of tears—the first she had ever shed in this place—was making a kind of sheltering dullness in her mind, an inconsequent presence, an unbidden image, appeared in it; the grubby little acquaintance of the railway platform, with his mouse-coloured hair and his thirst for knowledge about retractable undercarriages. She wanted to ask him what he was doing here, wandering out of limbo into this moment of time, and why he had changed his face so that it confused itself with Joe’s face when he was explaining something which interested him and which he was anxious to share. He stood and looked at her, the uninvited guest, quietly and unapologetically at home, as Joe had always been; like someone whose presence does not need an explanation.

Slowly, Leo put back the green dress on its hanger, taking care, as she had always taken care with Helen’s things, not to crush it or involve it in the disorder of her own. She hung it in the wardrobe again; and, moving blindly forward, flung herself on the bed beside the pile of books and papers. Her tears had changed; their flow and rhythm were different, release without humiliation, the tears of a woman.

While she lay there, the doorbell rang. Quickly, without thought, she jumped up and locked the door of her room, then lay down again, covering her face. The bell rang once more, a couple of minutes later; but the pillow, and the sound of her own weeping, shut it out.

Peter strolled away, back over the bridge and through the garden. It was too bad that no one was at home; he had called to say good-bye, because his holiday would be over to-morrow. Never mind, he would write or look in another day. His disinterested plans would keep. The book on elementary psychology and the significance of dreams, which he had brought to lend to Elsie, would do next time he saw her. It would tidy up some of the loose ends with which, he feared, her mind was still too generally fringed. And perhaps he would invite her to town one day, some time when Norah was free, and they would all go together to see a really good French or Russian film.
Flower of the Lagoon,
indeed. Ah, well, there was plenty of time. Considering that he had started her from scratch, he did not feel dissatisfied with progress on the whole.

It would be a pity—and it should not be necessary—to let Helen drop. She was the prettiest girl he had seen in a long time, and easy company. Besides, he would be taking up a certain amount of Leo’s time in the immediate future, and one must set about such things tactfully, not let her feel excluded or left on one side. It should not be difficult; she was fond of Leo, and when he had succeeded in ironing out some of the maladjustments there, would like him the better in the end.

As for Leo, things were going so well that already he was looking ahead. It should take very little, now, to edge her out of those corners of escapism, those retreats from life into the
Boys’ Own Paper
. He had dipped into one of her efforts: the writing showed average competence; with a little emotional and mental stimulus, she might be stirred to attempt serious work and even, in time, make something out of it. His own usefulness to her would, of course, be temporary, and before long he intended to introduce her to a friend of his who liked women of her type and whose psychological layout, as observed by Peter, ought to link on to hers very nicely: so it would all continue to be interesting for quite a while yet.

A bank of cloud, which had been hiding the sun, slid away from it; the light, swept from the edge of silver along which it passed, struck keen and lively on the willows and the water, sharpening leaves and wavelets and giving a sparkle to the fresh breeze. Peter whistled a little tune under his breath. It wasn’t much one could do, he thought, but one helped, one eased things along, one left something constructive behind. To-morrow there would be work again, bringing its solid irreplacable satisfaction; and, along with it, new people, new personalities behind the façade of trauma and disease, new opportunities for a word in season and a guiding hand. Life stretched before him, like an immensely amusing amateur theatre, in which sometimes one played the lead, sometimes effaced oneself with the lighting or the costumes and added one’s unseen quota to the effect just for the love of the game. Even now, at twenty-eight, he had not succeeded in making up his mind which was the better fun. Perhaps he had not tried. Why choose, when one could have both?

He loitered in the sunshine, looking contentedly at the willow-trees rippling in the sun and wind on the deserted island, and beginning to think about his tea.

O
N RE-READING THIS
forty-year-old novel for the first time in about twenty years, what struck me most was the silliness of the ending.

Leo and Joe have both been credited with reasonably good intelligence. He at least, the brighter of the two, would surely have had sense enough, in the sober light of the morning after, to steer them clear of such inevitable disaster. Sexual harmony apart, one cannot contemplate without a shudder their domestic life, hitherto so well arranged. Of course, more doomed and irresponsible unions happen in real life every day; but it is naïve to present them as happy endings.

Tempting as it may be, with such a distant book, to start reviewing it as if it were by someone else—as in effect it is—one had better go on to recall what caused it to be written.

In 1938, I was staying with a friend in the small hotel of a French fishing village, somewhere near Hardelot. I think it was in Boulogne that we picked up a copy of
The Well of Loneliness
, then still banned in England. It was a thick, pale brown paperback, a collector’s edition I expect today, but too bulky to have a chance at customs, so we left it behind. Every morning, before getting up and starting out for the beach, we used to read it with the coffee and croissants, accompanied by what now strikes me as rather heartless laughter. It is a fact however that we both found it irresistibly funny. It had been out ten years, which is a long time in terms of the conventions; but it does, I still think, carry an impermissible allowance of self-pity, and its earnest humourlessness invites irreverence. Solemn, dead-pan descriptions of Mary knitting stockings for Stephen—and when there was real silk!—and mending her “masculine underwear” (what can it have been? It was long before briefs; perhaps Wolsey combinations) are passages I can still not read with entire gravity.

I was working just then on my second book; it came out in the week of Dunkirk, sinking without trace.
The Friendly Young Ladies
, my third, was written in the pauses of full-time hospital nursing. I had given it up when my first novel brought me in enough to live on; now, I was seeing again terribly ill and dying and bereaved people, and this time, as well, young men suddenly disabled for months or years, often for life, facing their future without complaint. (Years later, when the dust had settled, I wrote about them in
The Charioteer
.) Looking around at the lot of these fellow creatures, I thought it becoming in people whose only problem was a slight deviation of the sex urge—not necessarily an unmixed tribulation—to refrain from needless bellyaching and fuss.

If at this time there was a book to whose excellence I looked with envy, it must have been Compton Mackenzie’s
Extraordinary Women.
Set in an idyllic, pre-tourist Capri, it is a masterpiece of gentle satire, wit, style, and pervading unbitchiness; better on the whole than
Vestal Fires,
in which he explores the male side of that human comedy. Only now, looking it up in a reference book, I learn to my surprise that it preceded, not followed, Radclyffe Hall’s book. I had always taken it for, so to speak, his
Cold Comfort Farm
. It is all there: poor Rory, with her French bulldogs and
boxeuses
, her monocle which in moments of emotion falls into her drink, her Villa Leucadia, her sad pursuit of dandified caddish Rosalba, her uncomfortable boiled shirts. But no, she must have been done from life. There are magnificent social disasters, in the grand English tradition later upheld by Anthony Powell: the concert cut short with crashing chords when Cleo, the pianist, observes Rosalba flirting with someone else; the appalling party where people make scenes and lock themselves in rooms, and the sole, awful male guest feels it his mission to cheer the poor girls up; the debacle of the white peacocks; Rosalba’s impulsive offering of Rory’s piano, borne on the shoulders of staggering porters, to an unimpressed visiting celebrity; it is all done with benign good humour and with moments of high seriousness. Not all the extraordinary women are absurd; some are civilised, philosophical, and make their lives without fuss. It continues to amaze me that, only a year after the first edition of this delicious and durable book appeared, Radclyffe Hall, enjoying all the freedoms conferred by independent means, could bring herself to sound so woebegone a note.

Would she, had the word been then in vogue, have described her protagonists as “gay”? I shouldn’t wonder. This splendid Old French word, once trailing clouds of glory, resounding with the trumpets of the lists and the songs of troubadors, has become a casualty as deplorable as “disinterested” which likewise has no real synonym. Whether the subject is politics, sociology or sex, nothing is so damaging as euphemism; like air-freshener, it proclaims a bad smell below. “Poor” has remained an honourable term, while “underprivileged” has drawn to itself associations with bed-bugs.

Conventions change; but defensive stridency is not, on the whole, much more attractive than self-pity. Congregated homosexuals waving banners are really not conducive to a good natured “Vive la différence!” Certainly they will not bring back the tolerant individualism of Macedon or Athens, where they would have attracted as much amazement as demonstrations of persons willing to drink wine. Distinguished homosexuals like Solon, Epaminondas or Plato would have withdrawn the hem of their garments; Alexander and his friends would have dined out on the joke. Greeks asked what a man was good for; and the Greeks were right. People who do not consider themselves to be, primarily, human beings among their fellow-humans, deserve to be discriminated against, and ought not to make a meal of it.

That is what I would describe as an explicit statement. Unfortunately, that adjective too has become a cut-down word. In this truncated sense, I have sometimes been asked whether I would have written this book more explicitly in a more permissive decade. No; I have always been as explicit as I wanted to be, and have not been much more so in recent books. If characters have come to life, one should know how they will make love; if not it doesn’t matter. Inch-by-inch physical descriptions are the ketchup of the literary cuisine, only required by the insipid dish or by the diner without a palate.

There is much in
The Friendly Young Ladies
which I would now write differently, supposing I could be bothered to write it at all. To one passage at least I can still respond wholeheartedly: Joe’s opinion on p. 160 of the demand that writers should be ready to cook their books for good causes. One can only reflect that in 1937, the approximate date in which the story is set, Joe didn’t know he was born.

Mary Renault, Cape Town, South Africa, 1983

T
HE FRIENDLY YOUNG LADIES
is Mary Renault’s most autobiographical novel. Like her character Leonora, Renault (a pen name for Mary Challans) was bored as a child by conventional female play; like “Leo,” as Leonora is called throughout, young Mary was boyish, bookish, fascinated by cowboy stories, and had constant conflicts with her mother who “liked everything nice.”
¹
To escape from her parents’ perpetual discord, Mary, again like Leo, left home, guiltily believing she had deserted her younger sister Joyce, just as Leo felt she had deserted her sister Elsie.