Return to Night

by Mary Renault

  “Nothing. Nobody ever called me an actor before, that’s all. It felt rather strange.”

  “It feels quite natural to me.”

  “Does it?” He spoke with an irony so gentle that it was subtly caressing. Not without a certain irony of her own, she thought: He has a thing about playing straight parts.

  Outside in the hall, the grandfather clock struck eleven. He sighed and said, “I’m afraid that means I ought to go.”

  “Will anyone be sitting up for you? I don’t think I ought to have asked you to come.”

  “I didn’t give you much choice, did I? No, it’ll be all right, if I can really borrow that bike. I’ll bring it back tomorrow.” He made no move to bestir himself. She knew that she ought to dislodge him; and thought, with the weakness of one becoming tired, that her knees would feel cold when he had gone; she had got used to him there. Another minute or so would do.

  “Are you as good to everyone,” he said sleepily, “as you are to me?”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “You would say that. I expect it comes so natural you don’t notice it. Don’t laugh, but I always remember—oh, you know. I always shall.”

  She had never felt less like laughing in her life. Their first conversation in the hospital garden had sprung, with an instinctive association, to her mind: she had never wholly for gotten it, nor his look of shocked bewilderment when she had questioned him. Now, her clearest thought was that then she had wanted something that Sanderson could send to the Lancet. It came back to her like an outrage.

  “That was nothing,” she said.

  “Nothing?” He was looking away from her, talking to the fire. “All that time. And—everything. You must have been frightfully busy, too. One forgets one isn’t the only person in the world.”

  “It wasn’t really so very long.” She cast back her mind. His whole spell of consciousness had been a matter of minutes; through much of it she had been plying him with the routine questions, and making notes. He had been dreaming, she remembered, when she came into the room. It was likely enough that out of the limbo of a jarred brain nothing remained with him but fragments of dream. She must have stirred the dream for a moment and deflected it, and it had colored his imagination of her ever since.

  He said, “It made all the difference. I wanted to tell you. I was thinking, the other day, perhaps people sometimes don’t thank you, when they’re well, simply because they don’t want to remember making fools of themselves. So I thought I would.”

  “You didn’t make a fool of yourself, I told you that.” She felt her own memory entangled in his illusions. Had she really made some response that she had forgotten? She found that the thought brought her emotions to so slippery a place that she had to snatch them back in a panic. “I don’t suppose you remember as much about it as you think.”

  “I remember enough,” he said under his breath, and laid his head against her knee. In his voice and touch she felt a nostalgia, a kind of undemanding weariness. She put her hand for a moment lightly on his hair.

  “You’re tired out,” she said gently. “Go home to bed.”

  “All right.” He got to his feet, and stretched himself. Just as she had foreseen, it felt chilly when he had gone. She put on her coat and went out to the garage with him to find the bicycle. The night had cleared a little; it was moonless, but the stars threw the black edges of things against the sky. They tested the lamp and the tires and wheeled it round; he propped it against the winter-dry myrtle hedge at the gate.

  “Thank you,” he said, “for putting up with me. I can’t think of anyone else I’d have asked to do it tonight.” Without hesitation or embarrassment, he put his arm around her shoulders; it might have been the preliminary to a confidence. “God bless you. You’re a darling. Good night.” He kissed her; quietly, affectionately, even comfortably, and let her go. She saw his head and shoulders against the dim sky, fixed as if self-consciousness had suddenly overtaken him; then they were gone.

  Chapter Ten: LIFTED OUT OF HELL

  OH, GOD, SAID JULIAN TO HIMSELF, I hope it keeps fine.

  He walked out onto the terrace, feeling with relief and distrust the sunshine which, here in the shelter of the house, was almost as warm as spring: After yesterday’s rain, it seemed a turn of luck too good to be true; it probably was. He had known, at the time, that one ought to make some alternative plan in case of bad weather. None had suggested itself, and he had hoped for the best; which, of course, was simply asking for it.

  The air was bright and clear; too bright to count on. It was still only eleven. Obviously, one would have to be armed with some possible scheme in case. If it wasn’t too bad when he got there, there would be a certain amount of waiting about for it to clear, which would bring it near teatime, and she would suggest having it there; but there had been so much of that, it wouldn’t be decent. And supposing it were hopeless from the first. It would be ridiculous to take her an hour’s run in the rain to Cheltenham, simply to eat in some dim cafe and none of the cinemas were showing films worth crossing the street to see. The only reasonable thing would be to put her in the car and bring her back here. It would stick out a mile.

  No, there was no way round it. If it looked doubtful by lunchtime, he would have to say where he was going. That part was going to be difficult, in any case.

  Well, after all, she would have to come here, obviously, from time to time. If only she hadn’t been forced to come out in the open about the play. He had seen the whole thing ahead then, as he stood outside with his hand on the door, before he had walked into the room to tell them that Tom was out. Well, she must know that. She always handled these things well. If it came to the worst, it would probably pass off all right.

  God, if it would only keep fine.

  The weather had been uncertain since early morning, but he hadn’t worried much. That, though, was before he had known that this was going to be one of the days when something was wrong, and his mother hated him.

  When he began to know, he had tried, as he always tried at first, to dismiss it as imagination. Then, as always, even after these years, he had searched himself for a cause. Could she have found out, for instance, that though she had made him sell Biscuit after the accident (old Lowe, of course, had backed her by forbidding him to ride) he slipped over to Pascoe’s twice a week? She had taken it into her head to blame Biscuit for the crash; and remembering nothing himself, he could not disprove it. She had said that as long as he kept him, she wouldn’t know an instant’s peace of mind. He had sold the horse to Pascoe for half what he was worth, because Pascoe couldn’t afford him, would treat him properly, and let one exercise him now and again. But he had been terribly careful always, ‘taking his breeches and boots in the car to change into on the way, and having a bath as soon as he got back lest the smell of horse should cling. Still, some fool might have seen him and said something; and, when he knew today that something was wrong, he had led the conversation round indirectly to riding, hoping it might come out. But it had not been that, or anything that could be dealt with. It was the other thing.

  It must be seven years now since all this had begun. But even before, he had been aware of something. It had passed quickly then, and, accepting as children do his original sin and wickedness in the eye of that perfection, he had been content to be forgiven and had never thought it strange. He had never wondered, even for a moment, if a time could come when the sin would remain and the forgiveness cease.

  He could only remember one incident which had had a definable shape. He had been six or seven, perhaps, and a lady called Aunt-Louise-from-America had come to tea. She had been one of those courtesy aunts, an old school friend of his mother’s probably. He had been fascinated by her beautiful make-up, longing to ask her how she did it, and by her delicious smell and the way her soft voice slipped upward in places where other people’s voices went down. He would have liked to sit and look at her, but she had insisted on taking notice of him, which had made him so shy tha
t he had escaped at the earliest moment after tea. Wanting, however, to study her again from a place of safety, he had gone into the hollow center of the big deodar when she and his mother were sitting on the lawn. It had embarrassed him very much to find that she was still talking about him.

  He had been about to slip away again, feeling silly, when he had heard his mother’s voice, quick and defensive: “Oh, but he’ll lose that as he gets older. I should hate him to grow into one of those too-good-looking young men. They’re always superficial and untrustworthy. Julian’s really quite a manly little boy.”

  He hadn’t known what “superficial” meant; the grown-up form of “sissy” he had supposed. What had he done to make her afraid he might grow up like that? For she had been, though she had said not; he could tell by her voice. For months he had dreaded Aunt Louise appearing again. Then he had forgotten about it, until the thing had happened which he was never likely to forget.

  Since then, when something went wrong, he had always known that that was a part of it, that he had grown up with a handicap which would need a great deal of living down. He would need to be very careful, she had implied, to keep men from disliking him and the wrong sort of girls from making him look like a fool—the right sort would probably distrust him at sight. (This was his own private and crude analysis.) He was, in fact, in a rather humiliating way not very good form. By the time he went up to the University, he had accepted this as unquestioningly as he might have done a speech impediment, lack of money, or reach-me-down clothes. It had been an agreeable surprise (though she had been right about the girls) to find people so decent to him on the whole. But then he had found out quite soon, with vast relief, how easy it was to be the kind of person no one takes very seriously.

  Not being taken seriously was obviously the way to live; and it had been obvious, too, what to do with the rest of oneself which this simple recipe did not employ. Provided one did it well enough—if one’s technique had the polished surface which gave invulnerability—one could get away with anything on the stage. If the disguise were really impenetrable, one could get an emotional response from other people honestly, without loss of self-respect; one could become real.

  He had given it up when it had seemed that, if he did not, she would altogether cast him out. He had thought then that there would be security, that the moments when something was wrong would cease. They had not ceased; the thing had gone on, descending out of clear weather, falling like rain on the just and the unjust of his days. He never knew what had brought it, nor, when it was lifted, the cause of his absolution. There was only the central core of it at which he guessed.

  He had been over it a thousand times, eliminating every possibility except one. How often, in these moments of exile, he had walked up to the stiff straight-faced photograph on the wall, searching it with the acuity of hatred for a resemblance, a characteristic expression, a typical gesture to avoid. But what? There seemed no common factor. A clean, squared, military face with a clipped army mustache, disciplined, conventional; a stiff upper lip over a well-bred sentimentality. “All this emotion,” the face seemed to say to him, “not quite the thing. Not what I expect in a son of mine. A brisk walk and a cold bath, my boy. That’s the secret.”

  Now and again, in the night, he had thought he knew what was meant by “after death, the judgment.” Expelled from the body, one found oneself absolutely alone in absolute space. It one could cohere for the appointed time, one was admitted to heaven. Heaven was warm and enclosed, secure from intrusion; the branches and leaves of the tree of life encircled it, the sun through the leaves making it warm and sleepy; the river flowed through it, sun-warmed, and one could live and breathe in the river like a fish in a summer stream. As long as he could remember, he had thought of heaven like this.

  After Biscuit had thrown him, he had not known at first that he was dead. His soul had loafed about, aimlessly, like an out-of-work at a street corner. Once he had been aware of cold, and had known then that something was amiss; but he had escaped from the cold and dreamed again. But presently the dreams had ceased, and he had known that he was dead and that the judgment was beginning. It was just as he had imagined. He was alone, a minute pin point of in the infinite black shadow of God. God’s face was turned away, because his soul was not yet proven. He must walk, like St. Peter on the sea, a certain way through the emptiness by his own power, before God would stretch out a hand. With a thrill of horror he had known that he was not ready. He should have died hereafter, there would have been a time for such a word. The fear of the ultimate loneliness was tearing him apart; God was receding, not approaching; and he began to sink.

  But all was not lost, for he could see beyond the great ring of eternity the mediatress who could cause the cup to pass away. He had called to her, silently in the silence, knowing that with the call power went out of him and the last hope of salvation from himself. She had turned a little, and then she had turned away; and he had understood immediately that this was one of the times when something was wrong, and that it had been inevitable, always, that this should be the ultimate end.

  The gate of hell had opened, then, below him. Already the pull of its descending spiral was making his soul tenuous and misshapen; in another instant its disintegration would begin. At the very last, some reserve in him held him together for a despairing thrust upward, such as the drowning make; and in this penultimate moment, the Other had come, to whom in his extremity he had forgotten to pray. Unremembered, unimplored, moved only by the mercy which was her being, she had come to him from her own place, hidden in its shadow like a veil, and lifted him out of hell by the hand.

  Because she was there, pain and a heart-wrenching sickness had been like friends assuring him of safe return. For a little while he had been afraid to let her go, lest he might drift away again into the dark; and she must have known this, for although he could not speak, and did not know even the place in which they were, she had been close and consoling and had refused no comfort for which he had asked her; of this he was sure, though it was growing hard, now, to keep the fragments of true memory apart from the rest which was also, but differently, true. He could bring it all back, even now, if he shut his eyes.

  When, after so long, he had found her again, it had started him at first to find her so different in daily life, her charity so armored and disguised. It scarcely seemed, sometimes, that she remembered. But the armor had never deceived him. It made one, superficially, a little shy and uncertain how to approach her, and he wondered sometimes if, supposing one had met her first in the ordinary way, one would have understood her at all, or would not even have been a little scared of her. Such speculations were pointless, for they had met as they must.

  “Thou art so true, that thoughts of thee suffice To make dreams truths, and fables histories …” He remembered the rest, and caught himself up quickly. If he began to let himself think like that, when he was with her he would remember it and wouldn’t be able to look at her, wondering if she knew.

  Nothing was so strange about it all as the need of external behavior, having to keep in mind what stage of an outward acquaintance they had got to, and observing the social rules. It was practically impossible to think of her as an entity of the polite world who had a right to expect that one should return her hospitality suitably, and even, of all impossible incongruities, invite her home. (But please God. not today.) It was a violation of her mystery; one should go to her, always. But even if she knew that, she couldn’t say; and neither could he.

  The sky seemed as clear as ever. It would probably be all right. At least, there was no need to worry about it yet.

  “Julian.”

  “Hullo, dear.”

  He saw at once, as his mother stepped out onto the terrace, that he was forgiven again. She was dressed for the garden in the old cardigan and tweed skirt he knew so well. Suddenly everything settled, the sunlight even seemed more stable.

  “I was wondering where you’d got to. The Laytons want us to
go there to dinner on Tuesday. I told her I was sure you were free.”

  “Yes, of course.” The Laytons were a bore, but in his reassurance and relief he was glad to appear delighted.

  “We really must go into Cheltenham, I think, one day this week, and get you some white shirts. I’ve just been going through them; that Oxford laundry must have been disgraceful.”

  “I suppose it was rather fierce. What are you going to wear?” He always asked her this, knowing that she liked it.

  “I think the gray. Of course if I wore the blue, it goes with the little jacket we chose in town. But I can’t make up my mind if it’s really me.”

  “Of course it is. That’s why I made you have it.”

  “Well, dear, I’ll wear that if you like. I chose it to please you; I had meant to get something much quieter. You give me extravagant ideas, I sometimes think.”

  “Nonsense, you can carry it off. It looks rather regal.”

  “But, you absurd boy, I can’t look regal at the Laytons’. I’d better wear the gray.” He knew that she wanted him to persuade her, and did so.

  “Where’s your jacket, Julian?” she asked when the point was settled. “That pullover’s far too thin to wear out-of-doors this weather. I don’t want to have you ill again, after all I went through last year.”

  “I was just going in.”

  “I’m going round the garden. Fetch your jacket, and you can come with me. It’s so beautiful now in the sun.”

  Yes, it was beautiful now, in the sun. Immediately it had come out from the silver edge of its concealing clouds, how easily the cold mist could be forgotten. As they went down from the terrace into the wilderness-garden below, he almost found himself wishing that he weren’t going this afternoon, in case any awkwardness should crop up about it. Soon, of course; he had been looking forward to it a good deal; tomorrow, perhaps. And yet, as he knew from experience, once on the way he would be glad to have made the effort; like acting, or slipping off to ride Biscuit, these truancies gave him a mingled sense of value and of guilt. Sometimes he had gone when it was very difficult; when, having made no arrangement beforehand, there was no need, and when the worry involved outweighed all anticipated pleasure. He didn’t know why; only that if he failed the impulse, he would not feel, as one should, good and unselfish, but defeated and accused.