Nuns and Soldiers by Iris Murdoch Page B

room and was watching curiously. Anne and the Night Nurse nodded. Anne followed Gertrude into the drawing-room. The door closed. The two women looked at each other.
    ‘Oh - Anne -’
    Anne slipped off her coat revealing a blue and white check woollen dress. She was thin, pale, taller than Gertrude. She now also looked older. Her hair, golden when she was a student, had faded, was still blonde rather than grey, and clung, closely clipped, to her head. She held her coat a moment, then dropped it on the floor.
    ‘I always meant to ask,’ said Gertrude, ‘whether you shaved your head under that ghastly head gear.’
    ‘No, no, only cut the hair close. My dear, I’m awfully sorry to turn up like this, so late -’
    ‘Oh shut up,’ said Gertrude. She took Anne in her arms and they embraced silently, closing their eyes, and standing still, gripping each other in the middle of the room.
    ‘You see,’ said Anne, moving back, ‘I didn’t mean to -’
    ‘Your feet are wet.’
    ‘So are yours. I didn’t mean to bother you - and you carried the case with the books in -’
    ‘You mean you had escaped and you weren’t going to tell me?’
    ‘Well, “escaped” isn’t quite the word, and I was of course going to tell you, but I didn’t want to impose myself, you see I arrived by train and this hotel -’
    ‘Yes, yes, yes -’
    ‘I couldn’t find anywhere to go and as you were so close I just thought -’
    ‘Oh darling,’ said Gertrude, ‘darling, darling Anne, welcome back.’
    Anne laughed a little strangled laugh and touched Gertrude’s cheek. Then she sat down.
    ‘Anne, you must be tired. Have a drink? Do you drink now? What about eating something, have you eaten? Oh I’m so glad to see you!’
    ‘I won’t have a drink. You have one. I won’t eat I think, I can’t -’
    ‘But have you only just emerged, I mean sort of yesterday?’
    ‘No, I’m doing it gradually. I spent a couple of weeks in the convent guest house. Oh it was so odd. I walked about in the country. Then I spent some weeks in the village, I worked in the post office - and now I’ve just come to London -’
    ‘Oh, but do relieve my mind. You are really out of that awful labour camp, you aren’t going back? And you’re really through with it all, with the whole thing?’
    ‘I’ve left the order, yes.’
    ‘But God, do tell me you’ve finished with God?’
    ‘Well, it’s a long story -’
    ‘You must be so tired, I’ll fix your room -’
    ‘Who was that, the woman outside?’
    ‘Oh that - that’s the Night Nurse -’
    ‘Nurse?’
    ‘Guy’s ill - he’s very ill -’
    ‘I’m so sorry -’
    ‘Anne, he’s dying, he’s dying of cancer, he’ll be dead before Christmas -’
    Gertrude sat down and let the sudden violent tears spurt from her eyes and drench the front of her dress. Anne got up and sat on the floor beside her, seizing her hands and kissing them.
     
     
    It was the next morning. The Night Nurse had gone. The Day Nurse reigned in her stead. The Day Nurse was an elderly body, unmarried, wrinkled, wizened, but amiable, always with a little professional smile. She was a good nurse, one of the devoted people to whom it is hard to attribute a private life, personal aims, amazing dreams. She was quiet, untalkative, with a deft animal quickness in her movements. Guy had been got up, had breakfasted, was sitting in the chair beside his bed in his dressing gown. The Day Nurse shaved him. He kept saying that it really wasn’t worth being shaved any more at this stage, but he could not make the decision to stop it, and Gertrude could not make it for him. Gertrude had told him of Anne’s arrival, in which he had taken some interest. He even displayed an emotion which had apparently passed out of his life, surprise.
    Now Anne and Gertrude were sitting in the drawing-room. Outside the sun was shining on the melting snow, smoothing it over, yellowing it and making it glow and sparkle upon unmarked roofs and untrodden square