VIRAGO
MODERN CLASSICS
147

Mary Renault 

Mary Renault (1905–1983) was best known for her historical novels set in Ancient Greece with their vivid fictional portrayals of Theseus, Socrates, Plato and Alexander the Great.

Born in London in 1905 and educated at the University of Oxford, she trained as a nurse at Oxford’s Radcliffe Infirmary where she met her lifelong partner, fellow nurse Julie Mullard. Her first novel, Purposes of Love, was published in 1939. In 1948, after her novel Return to Night won an MGM prize worth £150,000, she and Mullard emigrated to South Africa.

It was in South Africa that Renault was able to write forthrightly about homosexual relationships for the first time – in her last contemporary novel, The Charioteer, published in 1953, and then in her first historical novel, The Last of the Wine (1956), the story of two young Athenians who study under Socrates and fight against Sparta. Both these books had male protagonists, as did all her later works that included homosexual themes. Her sympathetic treatment of love between men would win Renault a wide gay readership.

By Mary Renault

Purposes of Love

Kind are her Answers

The Friendly Young Ladies

Return to Night

The North Face

The Charioteer

The Last of the Wine

The King Must Die

The Bull from the Sea

The Mask of Apollo

The Praise Singer

Fire from Heaven

The Persian Boy

Funeral Games

COPYRIGHT

Published by Virago

978-1-4055-2615-9

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Copyright © Mary Renault 1944

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Afterword copyright © Mary Renault 1984

Introduction copyright © Sarah Dunant 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

VIRAGO PRESS

Little, Brown Book Group

100 Victoria Embankment

London, EC4Y 0DY

www.littlebrown.co.uk

www.hachette.co.uk

INTRODUCTION

At a white-tiled table a young girl was sitting, sucking a bullseye and sewing a shroud… She was nineteen, pretty, undersized and Welsh; hideously dressed in striped cotton, a square-bibbed apron that reached her high collar, black shoes and stockings and a stiff white cap.

… the child who presently would wear the shroud was lying with a pinched, waxy face, breathing jerkily through a half-open mouth. An apparatus of glass and rubber tubing was running salt and water into her veins to eke out the exhausted blood. It was all that could now be done… The little nurse stitched doggedly away… She had made plenty of shrouds; the first few had made her feel creepy, but they were just like the rest of the mending and darning now.

Mary Renault was in her early thirties when her first novel, Purposes of Love, was published. That quiet but dramatic opening was also a mischievous one. Neither the young nurse nor the child would make it past page two. Instead, the story is thrown down a staircase, along with a heap of soiled laundry, into the hands of Vivian, a trainee nurse, whose experience both of hospital life and an intense relationship with Mic, an assistant pathologist, make up the core of the book. So far, so hospital romance conventional. But it isn’t long before a fellow female nurse seduces Vivian and we discover that Mic has had an affair with her brother. By anyone’s lights, such a book, coming out in 1939, marked the arrival of a bold new voice.

For those who, like me, grew up gorging themselves on Mary Renault’s historical stories of ancient Greece, it may come as a surprise that for the first twenty years of her career she wrote only contemporary novels. For others more attuned to the homosexual subculture that the Greek novels explored, or having read The Charioteer, published in the 1950s, it will be less a revelation to learn that even as a fledging popular novelist she was interested in issues of sexuality and sexual orientation, writing with a directness that made some people, including an early reviewer of Purposes of Love, wonder if the author’s name might be a mask for a man.

In fact, Mary Renault was a pseudonym, but not one designed to protect her gender. She was born Eileen Mary Challans, the first daughter of a middle-class doctor, in 1905 in London’s East End. Her early memories show an intelligent, strong-willed child with an independent streak, no doubt exacerbated by her ringside seat on an unhappy marriage. ‘I can never remember a time… when they seemed to me to even like each other,’ she wrote later in life to a friend. Though her fiction often takes the knife to frustrated, resentful mothers – both classical and contemporary – she could also be understanding. In her third novel, The Friendly Young Ladies (the euphemistic title refers to two women in a sexual relationship), she dramatises elements of her own childhood, but not without sympathy for the wife who, though she is intrusive and manipulative, is also clearly unloved.

Mary’s escape from her parents came through education: at the insistence of her university-educated godmother, Aunt Bertha, she was sent to boarding school in Bristol and then went on to St Hugh’s College, Oxford, subsidised by her aunt, as her parents considered the expense wasted on a daughter. An early love for history and literature would colour her whole life, allowing her later to meet the challenge of immersion in Greek history. She became involved in theatre, another passion that was to persist, but in other ways Oxford University in the 1920s was a conservative establishment, especially for the few women who went there, and there was no hint from her friendships with both men and women of the more radical way her life was to develop.

Her first attempt at serious writing came in 1928, when, during her last term at Oxford, she began work on a novel set in medieval England. J. R. R. Tolkien was perhaps an influence, as Mary had attended his lectures and clearly admired him. She was later to destroy the manuscript, dismissing the story as ‘knights bashing about in some never-never land’, but she was still working on it at twenty-eight when, looking for a way to support herself independently from her parents, she started to train as a nurse at the Radcliffe Infirmary.

It was to be another defining experience. Nursing was extremely hard work, but it offered the burgeoning writer a richness of experience that would have been well nigh impossible for a woman of her class elsewhere at that time. While others were marrying and starting families, she was deep in the business of life and death, meeting people from all backgrounds. It also gave her first-hand knowledge of the human body, both in its wonder and its fragility. All her fiction would drink deeply from these experiences. When she turns her hand to Greek myth and history she will confidently inhabit its overwhelming masculinity, celebrating athletic, erotic male beauty side by side with the heroism and agonies of battles and death. Meanwhile, the dramas of medicine and illness would permeate all her early novels.

Purposes of Love, not surprisingly, draws heavily on the training she has just come through; even the novel’s title is taken from the prayer that the nurses recited every morning. Peopled by a beautifully observed cast of minor characters (‘Sister Verdun was a little fretted woman with an anxious bun, entering with a sense of grievance into middle age’), it plunges the reader into the gruelling physicality of hospital life, contrasting the drama of sickness and injury with relentless rules and routine. Near the end of the book we sit with a nurse in night vigil over the mangled body of a dying, but conscious, young man. The scene is rich with the authenticity of detail, but it is clever as well as upsetting, since we know the man much better than the nurse does, which makes her mix of professional care and natural compassion even more affecting. The novel was an impressive debut, and became a bestseller, attracting fine reviews both sides of the Atlantic.

Kind are Her Answers was published the following year. Mary was under considerable pressure to write it quickly, as both publishers, especially Morrow in America, wanted it delivered before the outbreak of hostilities. In the end, it came out the week of the evacuation of Dunkirk, in 1940, which meant that it was largely critically ignored. Perhaps for Renault’s long-term reputation that was no bad thing as Kind are Her Answers is a much more conventional love story. It has its moments, though. Kit Anderson is a doctor locked in an unhappy marriage, who meets the woman with whom he will have an affair on a night visit to her seriously ill aunt. For a modern audience, the sexual passion is the most convincing part of the story. Their hungry young bodies make a painful contrast with the old woman’s ageing, fading one and the adrenaline of risk and proximity of death adds to their abandon; during his unofficial night visits they must keep their voices down when they make love in case they are heard.

Return to Night (1947), which won Mary the MGM prize, a whopping £150,000, is a doctor–patient romance, though it cunningly inverts the stereotype by putting a woman, Hilary, in the white coat. The book opens with a riding accident and the time-bomb of internal bleeding inside the brain, which Hilary must diagnose in order to save a handsome young man’s life. Renault had done a stint working on head injuries and the drama of the diagnosis and the tussle of wills between the complacent matron and the woman doctor is expertly played out.

In her fifth novel North Face (1949) nursing becomes character rather than plot. Inside a love story between two guests in a Yorkshire boarding house after the war, Renault uses two women in their thirties as a kind of spatting Greek chorus, ruminating on the morality (or not) of the affair. Already very much professional spinsters, one is a desiccated prissy academic, while the other is a blowzy, more down-to-earth professional nurse. Though the satire is at the expense of them both (at times they are more entertaining than the rather laboured love story), the nurse at least feels in touch with life. If Mary Renault had ever considered academia, this is surely her verdict on the choice she made.

But nursing did more than fire her fiction. It also changed her life. It was while training at the Radcliffe, living inside a set of rules to rival the most oppressive girls’ boarding school, that Mary met twenty-two-year-old Julie Mullard. The coming together of their fictional equivalents after an evening tea party in one of the nurse’s rooms is one of many perfectly realised scenes in Purposes of Love. Mary Renault and Julie Mullard were to be a couple until Mary’s death. In England they mostly lived apart, often working in different hospitals, snatching precious weeks in holiday cottages or visiting each other under the radar of the rules. Then, in 1948, helped by the money Mary had won for Return to Night, they moved to South Africa.

Despite the fact that they would live openly and happily together for the next thirty-five years, neither would refer to herself as lesbian, nor talk publicly about their relationship (though elements of it are there to be read in Mary’s fiction: the character of Vivian is clearly a mix of both of them, even down to the dramatisation of the short affair that Julie had with a hospital surgeon soon after they met). Some of their reticence can be explained by Renault’s own personality: private and contained, with success she became more so. Some of it was no doubt a throwback to the difficult moral climate in which they began their relationship; the only contemporary public example of lesbian culture had been Radclyffe Hall’s provocative Well of Loneliness and both of them found it ‘self-pitying’. But it was more nuanced than that.

In 1982, a year before her death, Renault was the subject of a BBC film directed by the late writer and poet David Sweetman, who later went on to write a biography of her. I was a good friend of David’s at the time and, like many gay men I knew, he was eloquent about the place Renault’s novels had played in his life. When he asked her about the sexuality in her work, she had this to say: ‘I think a lot of people are intermediately sexed. It’s like something shading from white to black with a lot of grey in the middle.’

The words describe perfectly much of the shifting sexual territory Renault fictionalised in her first five novels. For the sharp-eyed, The Friendly Young Ladies, published in 1944, is a portrait of a sexual relationship between Leo(nora), writer of cowboy novels – Mary herself loved cowboy fiction – and Helen, a lovely and talented nurse who has the odd dalliance with men. We meet them first through the eyes of Leo’s young sister, who runs away from home to stay with them. Suffused with Mills & Boon sensibility, she sees only what she wants to see; Leo’s tomboy manner and clothes, the shared bedroom and the domestic familiarity are all taken at platonic face value. A young doctor, full of his own psychological insights, is equally blinkered, trying his hand with both women (and being turned down more because of his personality than his gender). It makes for playful story-telling as it divides not only Renault’s characters, but presumably also her readership. In the end, this cosy set-up is broken apart by the rugged American writer Joe, who has a night of passion with Leo that results in what feels like a conventional but unconvincing happy ending.

Interestingly, in 1982, when, on the recommendation of Angela Carter, Virago reissued the novel, Mary herself wanted to alter the ending. In a letter to the publisher, written barely a year before her death, she said: ‘You will see I have marked a cut of several pages near the end, and will I am sure agree that this was a thoroughly mushy conclusion… far better leave Leo’s choice in the air with the presumption that she stays with Helen. The ending I gave it looks now like a bow to convention, which it wasn’t, but it was certainly an error of judgement.’ A compromise was reached, and instead of changing the text she wrote a new afterword, which is reproduced again now.

The same criticism of an imposed happy ending might also be levelled against Return to Night, where the heroine doctor falls in love with Julian, the young male patient she saves. Breathtakingly beautiful, emotionally quixotic and under the thumb of a domineering mother, Julian yearns to be an actor and a halo of sexual ambivalence hovers over him throughout the novel. Hilary meanwhile, eleven years older, in a man’s job with what could be a man’s name, finds herself cast as half lover, half mother. As they head towards the happily-ever-after of marriage you can’t help thinking that they would both benefit from more wriggle-room to experiment.

Mary Renault was eventually to find that wider sexual and imaginative freedom in her Greek novels, but not before one last, extraordinary, contemporary book. Freed from the grey British skies of post-war austerity and culture, in 1951 she wrote The Charioteer, an explicit portrait of homosexuality during the war. Its rich backdrop is drawn from her experience nursing soldiers in a hospital partly staffed by conscientious objectors, and it tells the story of Laurie, an intelligent, introspective young man, who comes to understand his sexuality through a platonic but profound encounter with Ralph, an older prefect at his public school. Injured at Dunkirk, he goes on day release from hospital and is introduced into a homosexual subculture, in which Ralph, now a naval officer, is a player. The hot-house atmosphere of this hidden society is brilliantly, though not always flatteringly, observed (Renault had had experience of such a world in her early years in South Africa).

Laurie’s continued self-analysis and his struggle as to how to live as a gay man, dramatised as a choice between his love for Ralph, who he learns had saved him at Dunkirk, and the growing connection with a young conscientious objector working at the hospital and yet to realise his own homosexuality, make up the rest of the book.

Reading The Charioteer now is to be blown away by its intensity and bravery. In 1953, when it came out in Britain, it was a cultural thunderbolt (in America it took another six years to find a publisher); reviews were overwhelmingly positive and Mary received scores of letters from appreciative readers. By then, though, she had moved on and was submerged in two years of research for her next book, which was to be something altogether different.

From the opening sentence of the The Last of the Wine (1956), ancient Greece and the male voices through which she enters it burn off the page with an immediacy and power that will characterise all her historical fiction. Homosexual love, sacrifice, companionship and heroism abound in a culture which accepts, encourages and celebrates sexual diversity. At nearly fifty, Mary Renault had at last found her world.

Sarah Dunant, 2014 

1

Very quietly and carefully, hardly moving her thin young neck and round shoulders, Elsie looked round the room, first at the french windows into the garden, then at the door, measuring distances. Her calculations were instinctive, like those of a mouse; she had been making them since she could crawl. There was hardly any need to look this time; the way to the door lay flat across her father’s line of vision. He was saying, ‘I should have supposed it was obvious to the meanest intelligence almost anywhere, in fact, outside this household –’

Her parents’ chairs were drawn up to the fire, for it was a chilly evening in March, and the Lane family always observed, punctiliously, the routine of domestic comfort. Elsie had begun her reputation for eccentricity at school by remarking suddenly, ‘I do think radiators are nice.’ She thought of radiators as she edged the pouffe on which she was sitting slowly backward, ready for a traverse behind her mother’s chair to the french window.

As she moved, she remembered that her sister Leonora, in the dimly-remembered days when she lived at home, used to cross the room on occasions like this with three flying strides, slam the door, and be half-way down to the beach before there was time to say anything. Elsie had been, and still was, as incapable of following her example as she would have been of soaring through the air. She had always found herself left behind, to hear the comments and the retorts, while Leo had already joined Ted and Albert from the coastguard cottages, and would be looking for jetsam in the caves. Elsie had not envied her Ted and Albert – she agreed with her mother in thinking them very rough and unsuitable – and she rarely remembered now to envy her her technique, it was so long ago. She was free to use her own methods; and Leo, once so terrifyingly apt to heap a family fracas with fresh fuel, was never mentioned at all. Elsie herself hardly ever thought of her.

Her mother was saying, ‘… be spoken to like this in my own house.’ It was now or never, before she noticed Elsie and added, ‘in front of my own child,’ after which it would be too late. Very softly and smoothly, with as much care as one might use to keep a lover’s sleep unbroken, she closed her book, tucked it under her arm, and slid upright on her long schoolgirl’s legs with their thick dragged stockings and sea-stained shoes. She was a dim, unobtrusive girl. One might conjecture that she had been afraid to grow up, lest the change should attract attention to her. She had acquired protective colouring which amounted almost to invisibility; almost, but not quite.

‘Now,’ said her mother indignantly, but also with the air of one who scores a point, ‘see what you’ve done, Arthur, with your shouting and your bad temper. Driven poor little Elsie out of the house. And she’s hardly better yet from that bad cold.’

Her father had been holding The Times, his observations lobbing over the top of it like mortar-canisters over a parapet. Now he suddenly dashed it down on his knee. Thick newsprint can make a dramatic noise. Elsie stood with her fingers contracted round the door-knob: her adolescent stoop exaggerated itself into an idiot slump; her vague, half-formed features grew dull and furtive. She could feel it happening, the familiar cycle. Guilt and shame made her stomach sink. She did not reject them, any more than the young African repudiates a tabu he has broken by accident in the dark. For a moment an etiolated shoot of personality stirred in her and wondered, ‘What could I have done that would have been right?’ but lacked vitality enough to attempt an answer. It had all happened a hundred times before. She cringed, and stared at the red Turkey carpet.

‘This,’ shouted her father, ‘passes everything.’ He raised his eyes, meeting those of a sepia Burne-Jones on the opposite wall, a very thin lady with a lily, whose evident misery seemed to Elsie a reflection of her own. ‘Isn’t it enough that my domestic life should be made a purgatory of nagging, without having these scenes of martyrdom staged for my benefit?’ He flung The Times to the floor; Elsie gazed dully at a heading about something, or somebody, leaving the League, while a dangling thread of her mind wondered whether it referred to Geneva or football.

‘Elsie,’ said her father, ‘come here.’

Letting go of the door-knob reluctantly, as if it were a source of protection, Elsie took a dragging step into the room.

‘Next time your mother puts you up to something of this kind, just think it over for a minute. That’s all your father asks of you. I don’t think it’s a great deal, do you? I don’t think it’s altogether unreasonable? Just ask yourself what would happen if your father, in spite of being treated like a pariah in his own home – a pariah,’ he repeated (the word was a new acquisition) ‘weren’t willing in spite of everything to work for you and give you your food and your clothes and your pocket-money? Just think about that for a moment, and suggest to your mother that she does the same.’

Elsie had left school a year ago, after failing in the School Certificate Examination. The mistresses, one after another, had told her that her homework was thoughtless and showed no signs of concentration at all, and had pointed out what a disappointment this must be to her parents; a prophecy regularly fulfilled when her reports came through. All this accumulated guilt formed a steady reserve, ready to add itself to the guilt of any given moment. Where would she be, indeed? Hypnotized, she pictured herself trudging through the rain into the gates of a large, dark factory, wearing a man’s cloth cap, or maybe a shawl. The factory was drawn from imagination; her travels had been few.

‘Well, Elsie?’ said her father.

When things of this sort happened, if there was time to see them coming beforehand, Elsie was accustomed to pray, ‘Please, God, don’t let them ask me to say anything.’ Her tongue seemed to be swelling inside her mouth. Perhaps, even now, if she waited a moment…

‘Arthur,’ cried her mother, ‘how can you browbeat the poor child like this? It isn’t my fault she can’t bear to be in the same room with you. Never mind, darling; to-morrow morning when your father goes out we’ll do something nice all by ourselves.’

Her mother’s voice trembled. Elsie edged to the door-knob, and clutched it again. If only she had said something in time. She could not think what, but there must have been something. She had made her father angry, and now she had made her mother cry.

‘This attitude,’ said her father, ‘is just what I expected. This is the kind of pernicious malice I see going on every day. Don’t be surprised when it bears fruit. We already have one daughter outside the pale of decent society. If a second finds her way into the demi-monde, believe me, it won’t astonish me.’

‘Arthur!’ Her mother’s voice shrank to a kind of whispering scream. ‘How can you be so wicked? Saying such a thing in front of a young girl.’ She rose, clutching her knitting; several stitches dropped off the needle and began to run, which, to Elsie, seemed somehow to make everything more terrifying. She began to sob. ‘If only one of my children had been a boy. He wouldn’t have stood by to see his mother insulted in her own home.’

‘If I’d had a son,’ shouted her father, ‘I shouldn’t be subjected day by day to this petty conspiracy of women.’

A cold moistness was making Elsie’s hand stick to the knob. Her memory had enhanced the horror of the moment with a recollection of the worst thing that had ever happened at home. It must have been quite nine years ago, but it seemed like yesterday. Elsie herself, small enough then to hide sometimes, had crawled just in time under the table; but Leo had been standing in exactly the same spot where her sister stood now. She had been about Elsie’s own age; but suddenly, as Elsie peeped, her familiar thin brown face and dark tumbled hair had looked different, and one had had the feeling that a third grown-up, more frightening than either of the others, had come into the room. With her feet apart, and her fists pushed down into her shabby tweed pockets, she had said, unbelievably, ‘If I were a man I wouldn’t be here. And I bloody well wish I were.’ A silence had followed, beside which the preceding storm had seemed like child’s play; and in the silence, Leo had walked out, without even slamming the door.

Merely to think of it made the present seem almost ordinary.

Then her father said, ‘That will do, Elsie. You had better run away now,’ in the voice of one wronged beyond the degree to which words can give relief; and, though it was a method of closing discussions which he not infrequently employed, Elsie had a feeling that he remembered too. Since there was always a possibility that he might even yet follow it with ‘But remember, before you go…’ she went instantly, negotiating the door without grace, but with the most efficient silence and speed, and not forgetting to turn the handle firmly, because once she had been ordered back to do it, and, becoming on the strength of this a theme of renewed debate, had had to remain for another quarter of an hour.

Before she was half-way along the passage she could hear their voices rising again, and this decided her against going upstairs to get her coat. One day she had done this, to be met on her way down by her mother, who had left the room in the interval and was anxious to tell her why. Reflecting on this Elsie felt herself to be unnatural, heartless and wicked: but she was used to feeling inferior and inadequate and, indeed, expected it.

It was rather colder than she had thought; that year’s spring had begun mildly even for Cornwall, the morning had been still and warm and the sea turquoise blue under a delicately faded sky. But the sun had gone in, and now it was after four. A damp heavy wind was blowing sluggishly from the sea, and swirls of mist, like clammy steam, hung on the brambles beside the lane. Already they looked soggy, and a film of moisture was covering the rough stone fences and darkening the earth that bound them together.

Elsie crossed her arms over her thin, immature bosom, partly for warmth, partly to protect the book she had brought away with her. Slowly and unwillingly she admitted to herself that it was too cold to sit and read. Perhaps if she hurried and kept warm, the sun would come out presently. She knew it would be setting in less than an hour, but continued to nourish the hope, obstinately, without examining the reason, which was that it happened to be, at the moment, the only hope she had.

A crimson stain began to cover the inside of her hands; it looked melodramatic, but was in fact a film of dye from the softening covers of Beau Brocade. She wiped her palms absently on the thighs of her stockings; the book had already lost all its glaze from previous applications of salt water and rain, and was one of half a dozen she kept for reading out of doors. Elsie was a great reader of romances. Her favourite work had been The Idylls of the King, until, learning that the plots were taken from Malory, she had saved up for weeks to buy him in the Everyman edition. This head-on encounter with the mediaeval mind had been a sad shock to her; its casual masculinity found her singularly ill-prepared. For the facts of life had recently been revealed to her behind a stand of mackintoshes in the school cloakroom. She had believed them, because they had been so much too frightful for even Gladys Hunter to invent; and the thought of her parents having, for a certainty, once been involved in them (since here was Elsie herself to prove it) had been so appalling that she had gone about like a hunted creature, weighed down by the horrible secret, till even her mother noticed it and asked her, one night at bedtime, if she had anything on her mind. A murderer, who sees someone dragging the pond where the body is, could not have surpassed the emotions with which Elsie scrambled together a lie about finding her arithmetic homework too difficult; and her mother (after a scene with her father) had written to the headmistress about it, so that she had to take mathematics with a lower form and a tangible reminder of all this inward sin was held up before her four times every week. And she had only been confirmed a month before! The little red book which the bishop had given her, its exhortations against impure thought suddenly and awfully explained, accused her every time she opened her dressing-table drawer. At last she hid it away under her party petticoat, for she already knew by heart the prayers it provided for such occasions. Sometimes she found it hard to believe that anyone in the world was as wicked as she.

But that was five years ago, and even so unpleasant a discovery had lost the force of its first impact. She had now reached the age when her mother could tacitly assume that she knew the purport of warnings about being spoken to by strange men. These she received frequently, and, sometimes, an even more impressive one about a wicked woman disguised as a hospital nurse, who went up to girls shopping alone, told them that their mother had met with an accident and been taken to hospital, and inveigling them into a taxi with the blinds pulled down, stuck a hypodermic needle into their arms. It never for a moment occurred to Elsie to reflect whether her pale melancholy face, her brown eyes like an anxious retriever’s, her gawky sharp-kneed legs in their ribbed stockings, made up exactly the kind of quarry after which purveyors of vice might range. She lived under the threat of rape and seduction, and once, losing her mother in Truro, had wandered for nearly an hour sooner than ask anyone but a policeman the way.

The fact that she went nowhere, met nobody but her mother’s friends, and lived in a world of her own imagination, had suspended her in the most awkward stage of adolescence for quite three superfluous years. At seventeen her mind was still like Madame Tussaud’s Exhibition, with Love, represented by kings and queens in velvet, on the upper floors, and Sex, like the Chamber of Horrors, tucked away underground. Usually she could forget about the basement in rapturous contemplation of the stately tableaux above. The deepening dye from Beau Brocade (the mist was condensing into a drizzle) comforted her now. A groom from the local riding school, exercising one of the horses, cantered by, silhouetted grey against the sky, and her imagination added to him a cloak and a black mask, silver pistols, a posse of blood-hungry redcoats behind, and a sweet distraught heroine weeping for his peril in a manor over the hill. If only the clouds would lift, and she could sit down and read, she knew that she would feel better at once. But the sad rain and sodden ground wrapped her unhappiness about her and, as always at such times, extended it into an eternal future. There seemed no reason why it should not all be the same ten, or even twenty years from now. Miss Matthews at the Vicarage was, she knew, over forty, and still lived with her parents at home.

A cold, heavy water-drop ran from her hair down the inside of her collar. She began to realize that she was really wet, and, in spite of walking as fast as she could, was beginning to feel cold. She knew that she ought to go home. But if she arrived dripping, she would be noticed, and questioned, and discussed. If the rain stopped soon, and she slipped in afterwards and changed quickly, it would seem much more ordinary.

In any case, she did not want to go in yet. This evening had been a bad one. Suddenly she remembered why. It was because of what her father had said about Leo. She had guessed, she supposed, for a long time; but it had seemed so incredible that, in the absence of anything but suggestive silences, it had been easy to convince herself that she must be mistaken. Perhaps, she had said to herself, Leo had simply cheeked Father so outrageously that he had ordered her out of the house; she remembered enough of her sister to feel that this was quite likely. But surely Mother would have mentioned her sometimes (and, she thought, reproached her father with it) unless there had been something more. There was only one thing too bad to talk about.

Even now that she knew it was true, it had the inconsequence of a bad dream. Such things never happened to anyone whom one knew, let alone to one’s own family. But this had. When her mother took her to tea with the Matthews or the Garaways, people never asked, as they asked after other relations, if they had heard from Leo lately, or how was she getting on. Suddenly Elsie saw why. They all knew. Even if she conquered her wicked thoughts by prayer, even when she grew old enough to have a dress allowance, even if her mother let her have her hair waved, and she had an invitation to a dance, it was no use; she would never be like other people. Her parents quarrelled, quarrelled in front of visitors; and her sister was living in sin.

She tried to imagine what Leo would be like now. She would be twenty-six or seven, almost middle-aged. By now she must be walking the streets at night, speaking to strange men; for her mother had explained, deviously but often, that women who were led astray, or went with the hospital nurse in the car, always ended so. Probably she would have dyed her hair (Elsie’s innocence never suspected hair of being tinted unless it was an alarming shade of orange or maroon, so it was thus that she pictured her sister’s). It was all very difficult to link with Leo, for Elsie remembered her quite well, having been nine when she went away. She had spent her pocket-money, not on powder and rouge, but on telescopes, pocket compasses, knives fitted with screwdrivers and tools for attending to horses’ feet, ordnance survey maps, and hacking at the stables down the lane. Even when promoted to a real dress allowance, twenty pounds a year, she had never laid out this envied privilege cleverly, as Elsie longed to do, on pretty lace collars and artificial silk stockings; she had been apt to spend half of it at once on a plain tweed suit, and even this she did not save for Sundays or going out to tea, but wore it for almost everything, bulging the pockets with apples and bits of string.

Elsie had always been a little frightened of her. They had never told one another their secrets. In the school holidays, Leo spent nearly all day over at St Trewillian with Tom Fawcett and the crowd of boys he brought home to stay, coming back at night, dirty, and bearing trophies of rare eggs and crystal spar, with holes in her stockings, grazed knees, and once, Elsie recollected, with a black eye, which she had unconvincingly explained away. When she remembered Elsie’s existence, she had been absently kind to her, and the old dolls-house in the attic was still full of furniture which Leo had made out of woven rushes and carved wood, all very neatly contrived. During her last year at home, after Tom had gone to sea with the Elephant Line, she had still gone off mysteriously, as far as Elsie knew alone. But Elsie, it seemed, knew nothing.

Leo’s thin tanned face floated before her, with its look of being sloped up a little at all the edges – dark-brown eyebrows, light-brown eyes, high cheekbones, long mouth and narrow chin, all slanted at almost the same angle; an old silk shirt blowing apart at the throat. Straining after coherence, she imagined it topped with a frizzed mound of puce-coloured hair, raddled and powdered mauve. Suddenly, hopelessly, she began to cry. The light rain drizzled round her, matting her hair and mingling its salt spume with the tears on her cheeks so that they ran down together, coldly, into her mouth. Her vest began to stick to her back, wetly, like a bathing dress; the wind plastering it closer. She felt as if the rain were soaking past it into her body. Her teeth were chattering. Hugging the red, slimy cover of Beau Brocade with one hand, and groping with the other under her knicker elastic for her handkerchief, she stood still for a moment, desolate and ungainly, sharing the solitude with a rough red cow, cropping the verge beside the brambles; then turned back towards the house.