Free Purposes of Love by Mary Renault

found it a little irritating.
    “You fence,” she said, to change the subject. The hilts of a couple of foils were sticking out from behind the bookcase, in reach of her hand, and she pulled them out.
    “Not for ages. Do you?”
    “Mother used to teach Jan and me, when we were small. But our style was a bit rakish. Theatrical, you know.”
    “I see. Jan had a few peculiar mannerisms … not like him. He didn’t say.”
    “He wouldn’t. He never talks about her.” This came so near to something about which she herself never talked, that she got up quickly and made a pass with the foil she held.
    “On guard?” said Mic, picking up the other.
    “Not after all that tea?”
    “There isn’t room to move, anyway.” He saluted, registering a smart hit on the ceiling. “I don’t know why I keep them.” He made a feint and a lunge which she parried by a kind of instinct; to her surprise, for she had not touched a foil for years. “You ought to have a jacket on. I haven’t got mine. I’ll tie a cushion round you, shall I?”
    “What, like Tweedledum? And you’re not going to need anything of course. On guard.”
    “You know too much,” said Mic after a minute or two.
    “Much good it does me.” In fact, her technique was impossibly rusty and had never been good, but she did know, with a strange fatality, exactly what Mic was going to do next. Now and again she was quick enough to prevent him from doing it. They fought on, a little short-winded with tea and lapse of training, but deeply engrossed. After a while it brought on Vivian a curious mood. It seemed to her that now for the first time she recognised Mic’s narrowed eyes and gentle unconscious smile, that she had stared into them like this long ago, and seen his blade flicker at her like a snake’s tongue; and that when she forestalled him she was remembering. The fancy grew on her. Touched—she should have parried that, she had before. No, this was the moment. It was now that she run in her point, with a longer reach and a stronger arm, six inches down from the left shoulder. He had been wearing something white, and—
    “Yes,” said Mic, signalling the hit.
    She lowered her foil. An ache of fear and some half-forgotten anguish pierced her.
    “Are you—” Absurd: she had only tapped him. “I thought for a moment I’d hurt you.”
    “Oh, no.” They looked at one another, smiling, confident and intent. “I can’t remember where I’ve seen that done before.”
    “I invented it.” She flirted her foil, a schoolboy’s swagger. What was happening to her, she wondered; she was not this kind of person with anyone else.
    “Like this?” Instead of demonstrating himself, he took her wrist and made a pass with it.
    “No, like that.”
    “You’ve a strong wrist,” he said.
    The illusion of memory, or whatever it was, pressed on her bewilderingly. His eyes on her face and his hand over her wrist had an authority and a challenge; the undertones they moved in were complex and indefinable, like the mood of a dream that remains after its events have been forgotten. She said, “I should have,” without knowing why.
    “You haven’t heard the Delius record yet.” He let her go abruptly, and tossed away his foil which he had been holding in his left hand.
    “No, I’m looking forward to that.” With a little jolt she returned to normal; straightened with her toe a rug she had heaped up in a lunge; stood her foil neatly against the wall; a polite female visitor.
    “I’ll just get the gramophone; it’s in the other room.” He was on his way when she happened to look at the time.
    “Oh, Mic, I’m so sorry, I shall have to go. It’s my own fault for fooling about. I’ll have to run, too. Funny how one’s off-duty time always seems to end in the middle of something.”
    “You must hear it another day,” he said, without expressing any conventional regrets for her departure. “I’ll run you up in the car; it will save a minute or