Return to Night

by Mary Renault

  “Oh, Julian, my dear.” She did not know whether to laugh or cry; putting up her hand to her face, she felt it burning. “Don’t be absurd, you know that wasn’t what I meant.”

  “I’m glad,” he said. “I shouldn’t like to think we didn’t understand each other. We always have.” He crossed the room and gripped her by the elbows. “Look here. I know what you’re thinking. I see this is the way a cad would behave. We ought to be engaged and do everything properly; if a man respects a woman he’s supposed to wait for her and all that. Anyone could say, ‘It’s got to be tonight but I can’t explain why.’ It’s one of the things men do say to women, of course.”

  “Is it?” said Hilary gently. In her experience they either refrained from saying anything, or were armed with abundant and logical reasons. “I don’t think you’re behaving like a cad, because I know you’re not one. I’m just rather frightened of rushing into anything so serious quite so fast; I suppose it’s not the way I’m made.”

  “I know,” he said, looking down at her gravely. “Women are different. I’m sorry if I frightened you.” He put his arm round her with studied moderation, as if she were ill. “Are you angry about it?”

  “No,” she said. “I can’t afford to be.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” he explained. “You couldn’t know.” He dropped his arm, and stood away from her. “Listen; I’ll say this without making love to you at all; that’s fair, isn’t it? We’ll get married as soon as you like. This week, as soon as I can get a license; it can’t be too soon for me. But—don’t go away tonight. I’m not asking just because I—I’m in love with you. It isn’t just that. It’s a thing I have about it, that it’s terribly important. It’s—Oh, God, you’ll think I do nothing but quote plays, but it’s the best way of saying it—

  “Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat.

  “Do you see what I mean?”

  “Yes,” she said slowly. “But what makes you feel that?”

  “I wish I could tell you. It’s—too complicated, I don’t really understand it myself. I just feel absolutely sure. You do believe me? You don’t think I’m just faking something up on the spur of the moment to get what I want?”

  “No.” She looked up at him. “I know you’re not. I think you’re right for both of us; it ought to be tonight, or not at all. Julian, will you leave me here for about five minutes? No, darling, not for that; I’ve got to think. I’m sorry, my dear.”

  “Oh, God, why must you think? You said you loved me.”

  “That is why.”

  “You don’t know how long five minutes is. If you’re only waiting for an entrance cue it seems a year. Can’t you think with me here?”

  “I’ve tried, darling, but it hasn’t been any good. Please.”

  “All right. You’re not worried because you think it’s immoral, or anything, are you?”

  “Not in the way you mean.”

  “There—isn’t anyone else to think about, is there?”

  “No.”

  “Can I kiss you before I go?”

  “How much help do you think that would be?”

  “You always see through me, don’t you?” He felt in his pockets. “I suppose you haven’t got a spare cigarette?”

  She gave him one, lighting one for herself along with it. (As she did so, she admitted to herself that the moment when he had asked her for a cigarette after the play had been the first in which she had known inescapably that she loved him, and she wondered how she had managed to evade this knowledge at the time.) He went out, softly closing the door.

  Hilary sat down on the edge of the bed. When she began to think, she knew that she had been over everything already, not once but many times. Impatient of her own hypocrisy, she wasted no time on obvious practical considerations, such as the effect on her practice. Even a very small private income, possessed since girlhood, lends a powerful if adventitious fortitude in matters of this kind. To the social aspect she felt indifferent, having had a love affair in hospital, where such affairs are, within weeks, the property of almost everybody one knows. She dismissed all this, and turned to the essentials. But here, again, there was nothing new to think about, except her own incredible shiftlessness in not having reached, long since, the decision she had left till now.

  Absently, following the habits of a life in which thought had generally to be accompanied by action of some kind, she wandered over to the dressing-table and began to tidy it, wiping the iodine bottle on a swab, throwing the trimmings from the dressing into the wastepaper basket, folding in the edges of the clean packet and opening the drawer to put it away. She looked in, incuriously, concerned only to find a corner into which the packet would fit, and not noticing the keychain, which she had not seen him use to open it, still hanging from the lock. A vague impression of unexpectedness in the contents, the absence of the routine handkerchiefs and ties, made a second glance too spontaneous for proper feeling to catch it up. It was enough to explain the expressionless look of the room; all the personality was here, safely shut away; the technical books, the photographs, the programs and stage trinkets and unopened spare make-up and false hair. The likeness of a revolting mask leered up at her; the structure of the face made her deduce the First Madman in Malfi. Under it was a head study of the Oberon. At this point it occurred to her that she was not behaving nicely, and she put them back again, only allowing herself a passing glance at the books. Of the top three, one was a famous theatrical autobiography; was it necessary, then, for him to keep even that hidden away? The second one was Married Love, by Dr. Stopes. The third, which she was feeling too much ashamed of herself to notice at the time, she remembered only in retrospect after she had shut the drawer. It had been a thin gaudy little pamphlet with a young man in a flying-helmet on the cover: The Royal Air Force. Today and Tomorrow.

  The ash fell from her cigarette onto the carpet. It was the room, she thought, that oppressed her, its strangeness, its prim order, its secretive reserve. She summoned her will to defy it, and looked round. Something was different; she missed the focal point at which, unconsciously, her defiance had been aimed. Then she remembered. The silver-framed portrait on the mantelpiece was gone. She saw that the clock and vase and the candlesticks had been shifted, so that a gap should not appear.

  For a moment she stood still, in an attitude which would have been recognized by people who had worked with her, her hands in her pockets, her lower lip caught in. Then she put out her cigarette, and opened the door.

  “Julian.”

  He was standing at the turn of the passage, by the window which he had opened to lean out. He came back to her, his head and shoulders poised in a deliberate ease of carriage which looked a little larger than life; and something told her that the tension in which he had waited had produced, by unconscious association, the control of movement that would have carried him through a first entrance on the stage. When he got to the doorway he stopped, and stood waiting, with the same unreal naturalness.

  “Yes?” he said.

  She looked at him, gathering him into her knowledge and understanding, so concerned with her search that she forgot to smile or to speak, till she saw him, as she had seen patients waiting for a verdict, slow his breathing forcibly and moisten his lips. Then she went up to him, and took hold of his coat, but he still stood looking down at her, with a set face, as if he were waiting for her to strike him.

  “Darling,” she said, “if you like you can drive me home and—” She had smiled as she spoke, but he had not understood, and she saw for a moment in his face a half-hidden despair which shocked her because it was so helpless and final. She caught him into her arms, “—and I’ll find you some supper, because it’s long past suppertime. You see, you can’t be missed; but my telephone rings in the night, sometimes.”

  He began, slowly and cautiously, “You mean you—” and suddenly clipped the
last word against her mouth. She caressed him comfortably, murmuring self-reproaches and foolish endearments. She could still feel the stiff, forced steadiness of his breathing which only defeated his purpose by accelerating his heart. He let her go and went over to the window; she could hear the half-suppressed gasp as he filled his lungs.

  “You were only three-and-a-half minutes,” he said at length.

  “Was that all? It seemed much longer.” Constraint descended suddenly between them. “If we’re going out again,” she said. “you’d better put on a tie.”

  He found one, and a clean pullover. She saw that he had difficulty in lifting his arm, and helped him put it on.

  “Where does it hurt?”

  “Never you mind, doctor,” he said, suddenly grinning at her. “Surgery’s shut.”

  They walked back through the wood to the abandoned car. Cool leaves brushed their faces; the earth had the cold vivid tang of new greenness consuming last year’s death. The stealthy quiet was cut suddenly by the thin intolerable shriek of a rabbit’s death cry in the teeth of a stoat. She said, “That’s a terrible sound.”

  “Life is terrible.” He spoke with the passionate certainty of the very young, with the freshness of truth alive in the imagination, not dulled by the weary repetition of proof. They clung to one another, straining against the eternal loneliness of the self. “I love you,” they whispered, unhappily, hopelessly, as if the words were a failure, a kind of frustrated slang.

  They left the car in a lane a field away, and came toward the house by the footpath at the back. As it came in sight, he said, “Is this all right? What about Mrs. Clare?”

  “I live in the old end of the house,” she said. “The walls are very thick.” Lisa had been on her conscience already. But that was only one of the things that had had to go. “Besides, her husband’s at home.”

  “Is he? I thought they were separated or something.”

  “Only by circumstances, his work and so on. They’re very fond of each other.”

  “I’m glad. She’s nice, isn’t she; sort of comfortable and warm.” His hand reached out for hers.

  “We’ll try the French window,” she said. The door gave; she went over to the light switch, seeing against the uncurtained glass his outline standing questioningly, his arm making an exploring movement among the familiar objects she knew by heart. The light went on, hurting their eyes.

  Setting him to stir the fire, she found what she could without risking an excursion to the kitchen; some new bread and cream cheese, and half a bottle of sherry, the gift of a grateful patient, which had been opened some days. They took it on the rug by the fire, sharing the same plate and glass, for these would be found in the morning. They both did excellently by the first slice, and stuck, with hopeless finality, halfway through the second.

  “Oh, Julian, try. We can’t leave two separate half-eaten bits. You must have more room than me. I shall have to, if you don’t.”

  “You’re not very resourceful, are you?” He picked up both pieces and deposited them in the middle of the reviving fire.

  “Darling, what an awful thing to do. Burning bread. When I was little, I’d have been beaten for that.”

  “Why is it awful? Everybody ought to waste things who can afford to. It keeps down unemployment. It’s only a race memory, or something, that makes people feel it’s bad.”

  “I suppose so. Finish the sherry, anyhow. That glass is yours.”

  He lifted it slowly, looking at her across it. In spite of his disfigured face, the look succeeded, in its way, in being a minor masterpiece. It contained, beside what was simple and obvious, all those half tones most apt to move, or flatteringly disturb; warning, appeal, challenge, forgiving reproach. He was quite unselfconscious, and very much in earnest. It gave her a feeling as if her bones were loosely joined and not quite solid, which David’s well-rehearsed addresses had never once achieved. She looked down at her empty plate, feeling that he still looked at her, and thinking, Next time he does that, he’ll do it knowing it works.

  “Shall we wash up now?” Only a few minutes ago, surely he would have been asking this with a certain anxiety to learn her wishes in the matter. But now he had whispered it, with his mouth just touching her ear.

  “We needn’t,” she said.

  “Good.” The whisper ended in an eloquent little kiss. He got up and put the things on the sideboard; looking round, she saw him standing there, trying to seem at ease and waiting for her to say or do something.

  “Have a cigarette by the fire. I won’t be long.” It had not occurred to her till now that the prospect of stage-managing everything herself would be so unnerving, or even that she had never had to do it before.

  He took the cigarette, drew on it, and asked, “About how long?” with careful offhandedness.

  “Another cigarette after that one.” She had chosen the first decisive-sounding remark that came into her head. To cover an absurd sense of approaching panic, she reached for the bookshelf, said, “There’s a new Punch here, have you seen it?”

  “Thank you,” he said blankly. She felt the last props of her self-possession crumbling, and, before it should become hopelessly apparent, turned to switch on the staircase light. A voice behind her, soft and caressingly amused, said, “I like you when you’re silly.”

  She paused with her hand on the switch. In addition to the emotions she had accumulated already, she suddenly felt a fool; much as a provincial music teacher might if a young Menuhin presented himself, respectfully, for introductory violin lessons. She was invaded, without warning or comprehension, by an impulse to hurt; a compound of self-protection, of pride, perhaps of jealousy feeding on the empty air of the future. It made her begin to go up the stairs without answering; but the flicker of cruelty died in the moment that she became aware of it, and she turned to smile. He was standing with an elbow on the mantelpiece and Punch in his hand, an anxious questioning already in his face. The light returned to it as she watched. It was a terrible thing to mix with love, this sense of absolute, yet tremblingly precarious power. She said, “You won’t lose your way. The stairs only lead up to me.”

  Upstairs, she prepared for a hasty tidying of her room, and was astonished to find it impeccably neat. She herself must have done it, before going out. If it had been a presentiment, she thought, it had been a singularly ineffectual one; it had advised her in nothing, except to cover a jar and powder box and put a pair of discarded stockings away.

  Standing before the long glass, and brushing back her hair into its thick waves, she remembered David telling her that he could never make up his mind whether she wore the wrong clothes, or whether she was simply a type who shouldn’t wear any. She had a French torso, he had decided, and English legs. In the acute stagefright which had descended on her, she found herself turning up his memory simply for reference, so little it had become. With him it had been as easy and, it had seemed, as spontaneous as sliding down a chute. There had not been anything clearly recognizable as a moment of decision. As with other kinds of highly trained performance, it had seemed so simple, so obviously the thing, that it had taught her nothing at all. Now, when he meant no more to her than any other demonstrator in a specialized subject, she felt she was appreciating him for the first time. Left to herself, what a portentous business she had made of it! She imagined Julian below, solemnly regulating his second cigarette to an average rate of combustion, and felt herself shaken by a giggle which she stifled hastily, having caught in it the first vibrations of hysteria.

  She was actually shivering all over. Perhaps it was only the chilly air after the fire downstairs. Better get into bed. But she was out again next moment, having decided to put a nightdress on. It had some confused association in her mind with having received a proposal; with trousseaus, perhaps. She unearthed from its tissue paper the gift of an extravagant friend (who must, she had thought at the time, have decided to smarten her up), a deep emerald ninon, fine enough to go through a ring. She had never worn i
t, but remembered thinking that it would help to raise her morale if she were ever ill. Slipping it on she found the filmy warmth of the silk comforting. The cold of the sheets made her shiver again. She remembered what Julian had said about waiting for an entrance call, and decided that it served her right. She could have spared him this business of crisis and declaration and ceremonious surrender. This left her where she had started, still overlooking the simple platitude that a first lover helps very little, if at all, toward dealing with a first beloved.

  Through the stillness of the sleeping house, a small sound reached her. It was the click of the light switch in the room below, as Julian turned it off.

  She gave a last swift look around the room. The curtains were open, for the house was isolated and screened by trees; an ice-white moon hung outside, so bright that even through the golden pool of the bedside lamp she could see its pale square slanting across the floor. His footsteps, quiet and light and unhesitating, were halfway up the stairs. On a blank impulse, she leaned over and put out the light.

  The door opened softly. He stood there, finding his bearings, silhouetted blackly against the glimmer on the staircase, his hand on the switch at the top; standing easily and well, a little too well, as if he were gathering himself together for an entrance from the wings. The light went out, and the door closed. She could not see him now, because the moon was in her eyes. For a little while she could not see anything but the moon; she did not know, seeing herself and her surroundings still with the remembering eye of commonplace, how the shadows and straight lines of light had changed it to a dim green cavern whose walls were broken by slender stalactites of white rock; how dark the red of her hair seemed in the blue light; or that her gown had the look of green water flowing in half-transparent streams from her shoulders over her breasts. She had been trained out of fantasies, and the eyes she widened against the silvery dazzle were for her only the instruments of understanding and of sight. She leaned on her elbow and stretched out her other arm to meet him; and he came over to her slowly, and knelt on the floor beside her and looked up into her face. All her anxious anticipations slid from her like a cloud. She bent and took his head in her arms, and knew that she was completing none of tonight’s embraces, but another, strange and haunted and brutally cut off, begun with fear and incantation in the dark. She had wasted her forethought and her care for his dream was stronger than her wisdom. She had nothing to bring him but what he would ask of her, no knowledge that he would not have given her, no aim and no desire except to clothe his lonely imagination in the substance of love.