Purposes of Love by Mary Renault

and some prison-like folding doors. The last floor was in darkness, and Vivian, who had only been there once before, could not find the switch. She groped her way along the passage, while from the shelves at either side of her came the sweetish smell of aberrant organs bottled in spirit. Rounding a corner, she saw a chink of yellow light from a door, and quickened her pace; caught her foot in an upturned edge of matting, and pitched forward. The test-tube fell from her hand, and she heard it break.
    The fall, assisted by the darkness and the weirdness of the place, jolted her for a moment into a nightmare-like terror, in which she expected to feel some pursuing shadow leap on her back. Then someone snapped the passage light on, and, returning to her senses, she bethought her that she would have to creep back to Verdun and ask Sister to take another specimen. She thought, too, of the wretched patient who would have to be pricked for it a second time. It was, she reflected, the perfect climax for the evening.
    While the light was still making her blink someone, moving rather neatly and lightly, picked her up and steadied her to her feet. She screwed up her eyes at the glare and at some changed familiarity. It was Mic, in a white coat which made him look curiously older and a little severe.
    “I do hope—” he began stiffly. “Good Lord. It’s you.”
    “Thank you,” said Vivian, still a little dazed. He was holding one of her hands in both of his, and her mind registered an impression that this was comforting before anything else. Then he turned it over, and she realised that it was splashed with blood and he was searching it, with impersonal thoroughness, for a cut.
    “It isn’t mine,” she explained, “unfortunately. Look what’s on the floor.
    “The blood-group from Verdun, I suppose,” he said without looking. “But these things splinter sometimes. Seems all right.” He let her go, adding as an afterthought, “Got any in your knees do you think?”
    “No, thanks. You’ve been waiting late for this, haven’t you? I’m sorry.”
    “It’s entirely my fault for not seeing the passage lights were on. Evans must have turned them off after him. He never thinks of anything unless it’s been mentioned in Das Kapital. I’m glad you’re not hurt.”
    “Not a bit,” repeated Vivian, her resources supplying nothing more. They looked at one another, beneath their awkwardness a reminiscent caution braced for hostility.
    “I’ll get this repeated as soon as I can,” she said. “I hope you won’t have to wait long.”
    Just as she had been thinking what a hard defensive mouth he had, she had found herself returning his sudden smile.
    “It’s all right. As a matter of fact, I wangle these after-hours jobs when I can. It’s almost one’s only chance of doing any serious work.”
    He had acquired, she reflected, a good deal of unobtrusive confidence for someone who had only been a day or two in a new job: more than she herself had managed in seven months.
    “Look here”—he stooped down suddenly to one of the splashes on the floor—“there’s no need to take another. I’ve plenty on this splinter. I only need enough to make a slide.”
    “Doesn’t it have to be sterile?” asked Vivian doubtfully, clinging to the first of her calling’s ten commandments.
    He laughed a little. “No, why? It isn’t a bacterial test.” With his hand on the laboratory door he paused to say, “Look, there’s a seat there. Don’t go.”
    Vivian sat down on the bench, in a space between specimen-racks and piles of reports. The ward was busy that night and she had not a shadow of excuse for staying except that she felt unhappy, inferior and tired and wanted to escape for a minute or two. There had been something grateful and sheltering about Mic’s quietness, his air of not being much impressed with the importance of anything, and acceptance of herself as something slightly more interesting, in degree rather than in