Return to Night

by Mary Renault

  She parked her car, and went round to the steps. Before she could mount them, Julian detached himself from the porch and came to meet her. He had left his overcoat inside, but still had a thick woolen scarf thrown round his neck. It made him look very much the undergraduate.

  Because she found herself unexpectedly pleased to see him there, she said conventionally, “Thank you so much for the flowers. They were charming.”

  With the smile whose lack of self-confidence never ceased to amaze her, he said, “I’m glad if they were yesterday. You’re not telling me that today flowers could look anything but rather grubby and crude.”

  “They’ll still be there tomorrow.”

  “I wish I thought this would. The sun will be going down, by the time we get out of that racket.”

  “I was thinking that, too.” She turned in the porch beside him, looking out. A buzz of conversation and laughter, and the shrill excitement of children already overwrought, came from inside. They stood for a minute or so in silence. Absently, it seemed, he broke off a sprig from a yew bush that grew beside the porch, and turned it over in his hand; then suddenly dragged it through his fingers, shredding off the bloom with a kind of painstaking and deliberate brutality. When he had finished, he snapped it across the middle, crushed it, and threw it away. Hilary found the little gesture irrationally disturbing.

  “I daren’t be late,” she said. “But don’t let me drag you in.” She hoped that he would take the hint; she had no desire that they should make so public an entrance together.

  He looked at his watch. “It’s only five to. Don’t let’s go for a minute.”

  He spoke without insistence, but she paused for another moment, watching the garden glitter and the blue shadows lengthen, almost visibly, in the deepening sun. Julian said brightly, “Did I tell you, I found Matron that scent. Just the stuff. It’s in a little black bottle with an enormous stopper and it’s called Nuit de Lesbos. It’s on the tree.”

  “Oh, Julian, how could you?” The name slid out without attracting the notice of either. “I’m sure it isn’t appropriate. What does it smell like?”

  “Just like the specification. I think I must be there to see her have it. … Let’s not go in at all. Next time this happens, one might be in town. Or dead.”

  He had spoken quite lightly and without significance; but it was the winter of 1938. Hilary felt as if, without warning, a tight hand had constricted her throat. With extreme flippancy she said, “Try and work up a bit of Christmas spirit. You’re being anti-social.”

  “Yes, I know. Well, let’s go ahead then and have a simply wonderful time. We—”

  He stopped, and turned round quickly. There had been a step in the hall; though the massive pitch-pine door, half-open, was in the way, she knew at once who was coming, and was amazed by her own folly in not having expected it.

  “Hullo, dear,” said Julian, going to the inner door. “I’ve virtually arrived. A matter of instants.”

  “Julian, you absurd boy. What are you doing, daydreaming out here? They’re just beginning. The Matron’s been asking where you are, and the poor little nurses look most hurt at being deserted.”

  “By way of being thoroughly anti-social,” said Julian, “I’ve been detaining the guest of honor, as well.” He set back the door with an unnecessary little flourish. The two women were left confronting one another, an encounter for which only Hilary had been at all prepared. With the instant perception which at such times outpaces thought, she knew that Mrs. Fleming had supposed the remark about the guest of honor to refer to herself; and that Julian had just realized it too late. Everyone snatched up the situation with great social address.

  “Why, Dr. Mansell. I was thinking that surely we should be seeing you today. How very naughty of Julian to keep you hanging about here in the cold. I often tell him he makes himself far too much at home here. You mustn’t let him be a nuisance to you.”

  She looked at him, as she spoke, with affectionate, whimsical apology. The fact that neither the words, nor the look, would have needed any essential alteration if they had been directed at a child of ten, was scarcely apparent, so gracefully was it done. Julian received it with his pleasant diffident smile.

  Hilary said, “Not at all; I was just lingering to admire the garden.”

  “Quite lovely, isn’t it?” Mrs. Fleming came out a little way into the porch, a gracious figure, dressed with dignity and taste in soft blacks and grays. “I expect it’s rarely that you have time for such things, in such realistic work as yours.”

  “I like to remind myself, sometimes, that this is just as real as anything I see when I’m working.” Hilary smiled socially.

  “I can see you’re a thoroughly balanced person. And that’s a very enviable trait, as I was saying to Julian only this morning. He’s a quite hopeless romantic, I’m afraid. As soon as I missed him, I knew just where I should have to look for him. Take your scarf off, dear, before we go in; it’s quite oppressively hot inside. Of course”—she turned courteously to Hilary—“one quite realizes that sick people need it. I think if we go now we shall be just in time.”

  Hilary paid her respects to the Matron, and was drawn into conversation by Dr. Lomax, who had a bald head continuous with his neck, and a face like an overripe cherub’s. Dr. Dundas, the senior honorary, was invisible; ex officio he would be Santa Claus.

  She was just wondering whether there would be time to greet any of her patients before the show, when a voice said. “Hullo,” on a level with her elbow. She looked round, but she was not being addressed. It was Christine, in a very short, very grubby red satin dress, trimmed with molting marabou, and with a salmon-pink velvet bow in her straight thin hair. She had caught hold of Julian by one sleeve and a handful of the back of his coat, and was making an earnest attempt to swarm up him from behind.

  Julian glanced over his shoulder, winked, and said, “Happy Christmas, pig-face,” under his breath. He reached back an arm and shoved her, gently but firmly, down again. The slight movement had attracted Mrs. Fleming’s attention; she looked down with an inquiring smile. Christine slipped shyly round to Julian’s far side, where she gripped his elbow with both hands and gave herself a swing.

  “Well, Christine, dear?” Mrs. Fleming leaned forward. “What a shy little girl she is today, hiding there. Aren’t you going to let me admire your pretty frock?”

  Christine stopped swinging, and sidled a few inches forward dragging one leg and pulling at the top of her stocking so that her gray cotton knickers showed. Now that the front of her dress was visible, it looked worse than the back. Her family, Hilary remembered, was the worst in the village. Under her streaky fringe she shot a slant look across the ward; Hilary following it, saw Betty, her hospital bedmate, carefully shepherded by a trim mother, and dressed in a clean pale-blue rayon. The parents, of course, were not on speaking terms.

  “We are a smart little girl today,” said Mrs. Fleming, with gently heartening kindness. “And what did Santa Claus bring you this morning?”

  Christine hooked one finger into the hem of her knickers, extended a loop of threadbare elastic, and let it go. She had become so small and skinny that the dress seemed almost to fit her. She said nothing. Retreating, she effaced herself between Julian and Hilary, and traced a pattern on the floor with a dirty sandshoe split at the side.

  Julian had been looking thoughtfully at the tree, and had appeared not to notice. Presently, however, with a caution that verged on the furtive, he dug her in the ribs, and, when he had caught her eye, made an appalling face, like a chimpanzee with a gumboil. He did it very swiftly, and at once put on an expression fit for morning prayers in the College chapel; but Christine straightened her spine and grinned.

  “Really, Julian, what a shame to terrify the little thing. Do try to be civilized, dear; you’re not at Oxford now.”

  Julian looked straight in front of him for a moment, then turned to his mother and smiled. It was a smile into which one could imagine almost anyth
ing: defense, embarrassment, apology and through them, a gentleness in which there was something incongruously mature. Hilary, who would rather have been elsewhere, compromised by looking away.

  A burst of clapping, to her relief, heralded Dr. Dundas, hugely hooded, booted, and bearded, with his sack. He was very tall and gaunt with a double-bass voice, and the fact that normally he never employed three words if a monosyllable would do instead, gave added piquancy to the patter which he growled at each recipient. Everyone was delighted, except a small boy of three in a cot, who panicked at his approach, and, tense with hysterical screaming, ignored the parcel he dropped at the foot of the cot before moving hastily on. Suddenly the screaming stopped. Hilary saw that Mrs. Fleming had let down the side of the cot, and sitting on its edge, had taken the child in her arms. Something brittle seemed to have become flexible in her, some contraction sprung free. The baby gave a few fading whimpers, waved a fist uncertainly, and plunged it with profound physical pleasure into the furs at her neck.

  Hilary at once felt more comfortable. Looking round with a general feeling of relief, her eye happened to encounter Julian. He was not watching the pretty little scene at the crib; it was evident that he had just turned away. His mouth had a line which was as near to sulkiness as so sweet-tempered a face could easily harbor; a little neglected, a little put about.

  Hilary went quickly down the ward, to an old woman who was a patient of hers. With eager enthusiasm she admired Santa Claus’s gift of a blue bed-jacket, and helped to put it on.

  The present-giving was over. Christine was parading with the finest doll, one of Lisa’s. The nurses were comparing their soaps and bath salts in a corner. Mrs. Fleming was still on the cot with the baby; she had unwrapped his rabbit for him, and was showing him its paces. Suddenly Dr. Dundas’s boom rose above the general gabble.

  “Now, Matron. What about a Christmas box for Santa Claus? Don’t be shy; don’t be shy.”

  The staff, who knew what was coming, began an anticipatory giggle. Dr. Dundas, still in full canonicals, but handling the Matron’s eleven stone like eight, swept her under the mistletoe (not far from which she had by some coincidence been standing) and kissed her resoundingly, courteously snapping his beard under his chin for the purpose, and receiving a furor of cheers.

  “Now somebody else kiss somebody else,” squealed Betty. She was at the hectic stage of elation which precedes crossness and tears. “Go on, Monkey. You kiss a lady.” She hurled herself at as much as she could reach of Julian’s back, catching him off balance and making him stumble a pace forward. “Kiss a lady. Go on.”

  From somewhere in the background came a hissing sound of “Give-over-Betty-this-minute-and-let-that-gentleman-alone-the-very-idea.” Betty wavered; but the patients, well warmed up, had begun a round of applause.

  Julian had been standing laughing with everyone else, semi-submerged in the crowd. To find himself isolated on the floor. and a center of interest, seemed for a moment to take him as much by surprise as Betty’s impact in his rear. Almost at once he gave his friendly casual grin, said, “All right,” and shot out an arm to grab Christine; but Christine ducked, squeezed between two visitors, and ran away up the back of the line.

  “Not Christine, silly.” Betty had subdued her voice to a piercing whisper. “Christine doesn’t count. A lady. Go on, you’re scared.”

  By this time everyone was looking. Dr. Dundas gave a deep eupeptic chuckle, and the Matron a dubious but indulgent click. From the group of nurses a few yards away, Nurse Jones, looking very pink and round and pretty, had drifted in a preoccupied maiden meditation toward the empty space on the floor.

  Julian continued to smile; a nice-mannered, tolerant, party smile. Whether he was aware of Nurse Jones’s presence it was impossible to say. Hilary watched him, feeling first amusement, then a sudden painful unease. Though he could scarcely yet have been said to hesitate, she found herself shoving him along with her will as hard as Betty had with both fists. As if he had felt it too, he turned and caught her eye. She responded, instinctively, with a social smile.

  Julian moved. With a long, swift, graceful stride, he pressed the floor to her, made an eighteenth-century bow, said, “Madam, your servant,” and handed her out under the chandelier. He kissed her, briskly, cheerfully, and inaccurately, bowed again, and let her go. It went very well. He stepped back into his place, relaxing comfortably, and smiled at her.

  Hilary smiled too, in the correct Christmas-party manner. It had all happened so quickly that by a kind of delayed action she only felt the kiss after she had got back to her place. In the same moment she saw Mrs. Fleming, looking gracious and benevolent. To Hilary she looked like the lady of the manor unbending to exactly the right angle at a servants’ ball. It was an expression so characteristic that on her it must be considered innocuous. Hilary found herself shaking the Matron by the hand, murmuring something about an urgent visit and a delightful time, and making her way down to her car.

  That evening, as they sat over coffee, it occurred to Hilary that it would be, for some unexplained reason, a good time to hear Lisa talk.

  Lightly she said, “You’ve been very nice to me all day. Particularly considering that I’m here instead of the person who ought to be.”

  Lisa answered with something friendly and unimportant; paused; then said, slowly, “In any case, I can’t afford ideas like that. You see, we’ve each tried living with the other—the other’s kind of life, I mean—and it nearly killed us each in turn. Only the difficulty was that at the end of it we were still in love. So the present compromise is by way of being the last resort. It wouldn’t do to get discontented about it.”

  As she talked on, Hilary had a clear picture of a relationship predestined, one would have said, for inevitable disaster. Rupert was a wanderer by instinct and vocation, extrovert, gregarious. Lisa had, as she herself described it, the temperament of a cat. Hilary agreed; Lisa did in fact possess every feline quality except the cat’s self-sufficiency: the love of solitude, the passionate attachment to places which she had made her own; the instinct for quiet which looks like secrecy and partly is so; the power of absolute relaxation. She and Rupert had come together by a violent attraction of opposites, overlooking, in the temporary insanity of their state, the fact that opposed ways of life do not fuse like personalities. It was she, of course, who had made the first attempt at adaptation. Her friends had envied her; she would have, they said, a marvelous time; travel, exciting new contacts, leisure, Continental hotels, parties. She had had them all, when all she wanted was a home with roots in the ground, old comfortable friends, and a child. Late nights and cocktails had always upset her; but the contacts had to be kept up. It had been after a party that she and Rupert had had one of those quarrels so destructive that, however absolute the forgiveness after, the memory remains like a visible scar. Appalled by it, they had comforted one another, as Lisa put it, “like murderers, with the body under the stairs.” A few weeks later, she had realized that she was pregnant.

  Thus confronted with an inevitable fact, they had both found its decisiveness a relief. It had been early summer, and Lisa had stayed on for another two months; Rupert was due for a holiday and hoped to travel back with her. Everything had been ready for the journey, when Rupert’s editor had telephoned to say that the correspondent in Moscow was invalided home, and Rupert was to take his place.

  A refusal would have checked his career and probably finished it. Lisa had set out alone, her reason acquiescent, her emotions in violent revolt, only comforted by the thought of the baby. She was a poor traveler at any time; the Channel crossing had been a particularly bad one. During the train journey to London she had known that something was wrong, and gone straight to hospital, where she had a miscarriage.

  On the first day when she had been allowed to sit up, she had written to Rupert asking for a divorce. They had had the intimacy in which people entrust to one another an unlimited power to hurt, and Lisa had wasted none of it. The necessary evide
nce had arrived a fortnight later.

  Lisa had gone back to the house in Gloucestershire, which, Hilary now learned, was her own, the legacy of an aunt who had brought her up after her parents died. It had been her home for most of her childhood; and in returning to it, and to her own instinctive kind of life, she had found a relief which she had almost been able to pretend was contentment. But within a few weeks of the divorce decree being made absolute, an old friend asked her to marry him. She realized then that during all the intervening time she had been stunned, that the loss of Rupert had never, till now, had reality in her imagination.

  Lisa had packed and gone to town. It was no more than possible that she might find Rupert there; his series from Moscow had stopped recently, and this was all she knew. Arriving, she had gone, for lunch to the chophouse he generally frequented, and he had been there. At this point her account grew rather vague. “The hotel was just like all the other hotels, except that you could drink the tea. We sent the bill to the King’s Proctor with a nice little note to say we were sorry he’d been troubled.”

  When they had been able to rouse themselves to a partial sense of realities, Rupert had managed somehow to get himself transferred to a political assignment at home. They had taken a flat in London; and, for nearly as long as Lisa had done before, he had managed to blind himself to the fact that the work was wholly uncongenial. The reaction had come after. Rupert’s successor abroad had turned out to be, comparatively, a failure. His articles were to Rupert a daily exasperation. Lisa guessed that the paper wanted him back on his old job; she was afraid to ask him, and he never told her. Their tenderness to one another became watchful, patterned with silences and edged with fear.

  And then, as once before, decision had been forced on them by circumstance. Rupert had split with his paper; the issue was clear and Lisa wholly with him. But when he came to look for work elsewhere, there was nothing to be had except the work in which his reputation had been made.