Return to Night: A Novel

by Mary Renault

  “Excuse me a moment, nurse.” She picked up part of his biceps muscle and gave it a sharp, vicious twist. His face, immobile in another pause of breathing, was wholly passive; she might as well have been using her strength on a fold of the blanket. The nurse said. “He did respond, very faintly, in the ward. I had to do it pretty hard then.” Hilary nodded, and held up the arm for her to fix the strap.

  The porter came in. wheeling in front of him a little trolley with soap and brushes and razors on a tray, and knocked on the door of the changing-room.

  “How much do you want taken off, sir?”

  Sanderson came out, in the kit he wore under his theater gown; a sleeveless shirt and blue jeans under a clear oilskin apron. He had a fine carriage and physique, and this bleak costume displayed it well. He looked down at the trolley.

  “His pulse, nurse?”

  “Forty-six, sir. And respirations three.”

  Sanderson said to the porter, “Half head. Frontal. And be quick.”

  The porter slid a rubber sheet under the quiet head as the nurse lifted it. Whistling faintly between his teeth, he picked up a pair of clippers from the tray and nibbled them in a broad arc. A deep soft swath of black hair slid down onto the mackintosh; the balance and composition of the face were instantly changed. Sanderson said thoughtfully, “I think we can keep the flap clear of the forehead,” and went on into the theater. The porter, clipping away, remarked, “S’right. Shame to spoil ’im for the girls,” and winked at the nurse, who, conscious of Hilary’s presence, ignored him. Hilary took the blood pressure.

  Sanderson had the reputation of being able to turn an osteoplastic flap quicker than anyone in two continents. This time, having nothing else to do, Hilary watched the clock. The lid of bone was lifted in just seventeen and a half minutes. As far as she knew, it was a record. As she stood under the great frosted window, out of the track of those who had work to do, she fell back into the old impersonality. There was, indeed, nothing personal to see. The shape on the table was only a coffin-like oblong, a stand placed across the chest supporting a long green drape so that not even a human outline was recognizable below. All the varied activity in the room was focused on a six-inch oval; already even the bone flap, with its fringe of artery forceps, had been swathed with sterile gauze. There was only one reminder of the incidental presence under the green cloth: the anesthetist on his low stool, the stethoscope in his ears connected to something unseen, making at intervals a tiny point on the chart beside him. This vigil over the hidden life was his only function. Nature had done his work for him; he could have added nothing, except death.

  The theater had an oppressive, greenhouse heat; with no activity to stir her, and drowsy from the ether fumes still hanging after the last case, Hilary felt drugged and suspended in time. Over Sanderson’s shoulder she stared into the neat red oval between the towels, seeing scarcely the hands that made tiny precise movements about it; only the fingers, the direction of the slender forceps, and the long glass irrigator with which the assistant washed their orbit clear. Once something went awry and she heard Sanderson swallow a word. He never permitted himself to swear in the presence of women, and it delighted him when occasion served to get the place clear of them. Hilary smiled into her mask and thought, Well, in any case the Sister’s there. … Hullo. He’s got it.

  The thin steel had found its objective. Finely, delicately it was removing the blood clot it had been seeking. Hilary watched, single-minded; in her mind a tactile imagination reproduced the movements and stored them against a future which she had forgotten was already the past.

  Her trance was interrupted. A voice spoke, curiously out of key with the tone of the proceedings; bewildered, angry, blurred as if with drink or sleep.

  “For God’s sake, let go of my head.”

  There passed through the theater an unseen flash, an inaudible breath. The Sister took a quick, motiveless step forward; the anesthetist, his eyes narrowed in something that was not quite a smile, reached up his hand into the green catafalque. Sanderson and the assistant met one another’s eyes in a quick inexpressive glance. Hilary was entirely still. With such economies, they acknowledged the passing incident of a homemade resurrection. A man who, in all but the last failing mechanisms of the body, had been two hours dead, abused them from his pall. So far, so good. The forceps began their quiet precise movements again. The anesthetist peered under the drape and remarked conversationally, “Don’t worry, we shan’t be long now.” A resentful grunt answered him.

  “Diathermy,” said Sanderson. A faint electrical fizzing began and ended.

  The hidden voice said, with a tipsy kind of violence, “Take this sheet off my face. Damn you, I can’t see.”

  At the far end of the table, the green twill was stirred by the movement of a foot below. The anesthetist looked toward Hilary, and jerked his head.

  She came forward, and, stooping, slid her hand under the cloth. It found another hand, gripping exploringly, seeking a leverage. A strained leather strap creaked.

  “Let me get up. I can’t—”

  “Keep still,” said Hilary. “It’s all right. The doctor’s dressing your head.”

  There was a pause. Then, “Is that you?”

  “Yes. Keep quiet now. We’ve nearly finished.”

  “Sorry. I was asleep.” She heard him grumble under his breath, “They didn’t have to tie me down.”

  Sanderson’s deep voice said, with apocalyptic finality, “I want you perfectly still, please.” Stillness followed; the operation proceeded.

  Hilary kept her station, confident of more trouble; for though the tissue layer they were working on was insensitive to pain, as a rule the irritation of the almost exposed brain would find vent in a rambling petulance and a breakdown, more or less complete, in the normal controls. But he only asked later, quite meekly, for a drink, and thanked her when she guided it to him under the drape. When it came to suturing the scalp, which really hurt him, he began to swear in a helpless, schoolboy way.

  When it was over, and they lifted him from the table to the bed which had been wheeled up ready from the ward, he glanced for a moment wonderingly about the theater, but seemed at once to slip into acquiescence. Hilary, deflecting the hand with which he was trying to explore the bandages, walked beside the bed toward the door, a couple of half-remembered lines tagging in her mind:

  At the raising of Lazarus, someone said, “What was it like, in the dark with the dead?”

  She was in the corridor outside the ward when she saw Sanderson standing with his back to her and talking to Mrs. Fleming. It was her eyes that Hilary’s met. Sanderson followed their direction, turned and smiled, then stepped back a little.

  Mrs. Fleming came forward. Hilary felt a chilling discomfort, a causeless feeling like guilt, making her want to escape as if from an accuser.

  “Dr. Mansell, Mr. Sanderson has just been telling me that if you had not acted so promptly in sending Julian here, he—we should have lost him. I want to say how grateful I am for everything you’ve done.”

  “You must thank Mr. Sanderson; the diagnosis wouldn’t have been much use without him.” Hilary smiled, and took the outstretched, perfectly gloved hand. It felt brittle and, even as it grasped, aloof. She looked into the light-gray eyes, and it occurred to her for the first time that Mrs. Fleming had been beautiful, and possessed, in skin and feature, the materials of beauty still. Not the form was lacking, but its acceptance and adventure and inward light.

  “I shall be staying here, of course, for the present. Later on, I hope perhaps you will be able to spare an evening for dinner with me.”

  Hilary expressed happy anticipation. Curiosity, interest, and a habit of facing uncomfortable things, kept her gaze straight and direct on the face that smiled at her; and suddenly, like a strained surface cracking, the smile wavered, the gray eyes looked aside. But in them Hilary had seen the look of someone placed, by cruel luck, under obligation to an enemy.

  Chapter Six: NO LON
GER HER PATIENT

  MAY TURNED TO JUNE. Influenza and measles died down; road accidents doubled. People discussed whether they should go abroad this summer; decided that nothing would come to a head about Czechoslovakia yet, and went. Hilary, who suspected that next summer decisions would go the other way, put in a locum and spent more than she could afford on a holiday to Scandinavia.

  In sulky clouded weather she got back travel-weary, and dispirited by the general and personal shape of things to come. As always, Lisa Clare’s welcome was soothing and reviving; but Hilary thought that the recent heat must have tried her. Her eyelids looked blue and transparent, and she had a kind of lassitude which seemed, curiously, to have left her vitality undimmed. She had just come back, she said, from town.

  “My husband had a week in England. He couldn’t leave town, he had too much to do. We stayed—somewhere in Lancaster Gate. I’ve forgotten the name already. We’ve stayed in so many places.”

  Not for the first time, Hilary stayed herself from a leading question. It was too bad, she said, that he couldn’t have managed Gloucestershire before the summer got stale.

  “He meant to. But he had to start for the Sudetenland a week sooner than he’d planned. Things seemed to be moving rather fast.”

  Hilary’s speculations were suddenly illuminated. “How stupid I am. Why didn’t it occur to me before that he was Rupert Clare?”

  Lisa smiled, briefly. It was as if for a moment she allowed the hidden glow to reach the surface.

  Hilary had always admired Rupert Clare’s journalism. She told Lisa so, with sincerity and warmth. Lisa said, as usual, very little; but though she changed the conversation almost at once to the subject of tea, Hilary had a pleasant feeling that the quiet progress of their friendship had advanced a little.

  It was over the tea that Lisa said, “How tiresome of Pound’s not to send your new suitcase till after you’d gone.”

  Hilary, who had ordered nothing, went up to investigate as soon as the meal was over. The package was behind the door, where she had overlooked it. Stripping off layers of board and shaving she found, preciously guarded in a fine canvas jacket, a dressing-case of pale pigskin, with H.M. stamped in gilt across the corner. Inside, it was fitted with everything imaginable in cream enamel and gold. It was the kind of thing which might have been possessed by a film star with exceptionally good taste. An envelope was stuck inside one of the dove-gray silk bands in the tray. She opened it.

  DEAR DR. MANSELL:

  I hope this very inadequate token of gratitude from my son and myself will be in time to go with you on your well-deserved holiday this year.

  Sincerely yours, ELAINE FLEMING.

  Hilary sat back, squatting on her heels, staring at the elegance which only its perfect design redeemed from ostentation. She was shocked by her own feelings of sinking embarrassment and outrage. Flowers, a book, some pleasant trifle for her room, anything like this she would have welcomed as a peace offering and in relief. But this—it was horrible. There must, she thought helplessly, be some way of returning it without the appearance of studied insult. She recalled the stamped initials; the writing-case inside the lid, she saw, carried them too.

  The letter was still in her hand. She looked at the date. It had lain here, unacknowledged, for eleven days.

  A light leisured step was crossing the landing. Hilary swung round on her heels.

  “Do come in here a moment. I don’t know what to do.”

  Lisa Clare came in. She looked down at the case, and lifted her eyebrows in cool humorous admiration.

  “Good heavens. Is it yours?”

  “Not if I can help it. It’s stamped all over with my initials,” said Hilary desperately. “What does one do?”

  Stroking appreciatively a cream enamel powder jar, Lisa said, “Why worry? He must have known he was taking a gamble on it. Leave it till tomorrow, and do whatever you feel.”

  “I wish it were so simple,” said Hilary lightly. As she spoke, she wondered why Lisa’s use of the masculine pronoun had made her feel so raw. He was little more than a boy, he was probably still away somewhere convalescing; what more natural than that his mother should write? “It’s from a—grateful patient,” she said.

  “Oh. Do you dislike her as much as that?”

  “I was trying, till this came, not to dislike her as much as I know she dislikes me.”

  Lisa considered briefly; then said, in her placid voice, “Well, I dare say it means a lot to her to take her pride out of pawn at the expense of yours. And after all, unless she’s an exceptional woman, you can probably afford it better.”

  Hilary wrote her letter of thanks next day. It must contain, she decided when she reread it, the highest concentration of bromides ever compressed into two sides of note paper. She posted it with the sense of riddance people feel on dropping something unsavory into the fire.

  Summer ran out; the early sunlight began to be tinged with smoky scents of chrysanthemums and bonfires and faint frost on rotten leaves; tea was by twilight eked out with the fire.

  At the Cottage Hospital, Hilary was invited into the kitchen to give the Christmas puddings a stir. She interpreted this, rightly, as a sign of grace.

  “I wish we could keep Christine and Betty,” the Matron said regretfully. “If we only had the beds, they wouldn’t complain, poor little things. But I’ve promised they shall come up for the Christmas tree. Between you and me, I think it’s going to be rather special this year. Mrs. Fleming’s promised to give it, and anything she does will be done very nicely, you can be sure.”

  “Oh, really?” After this lapse of time, the name brought only a vague discomfort in the nerves. “I’m glad she’s been taking an interest.”

  “She’s been a real asset to us this summer, I must say. Nearly every week something or other’s come down. Remind me to show you the little woolies she knitted for the babies. …” Hilary listened with an amusement which was only very slightly acid; here too, it seemed, time had brought healing. The Matron was continuing, “Yes, I really must say, they both—”

  “Oh, Matron, could I speak to you for a moment?”

  “Very well, Sister, though really, if I can’t be out of the way for five minutes—You won’t go away without your cup of coffee, will you, doctor? Just make yourself comfortable in my room; I shan’t be long.”

  Hilary went out through the flagged kitchen passage and opened the green baize door into the hall. Round the corner, from the stairs, came the chirruping laughter of Christine and Betty, who were well enough now to have the run of the place. She paused to listen.

  “No, not that one. No, that’s a silly one. Do the monkey face.”

  A pause, followed by squeals of ecstatic mirth.

  “Again. Again. Do it again.”

  Hilary walked round the corner.

  Squatting on the last few steps of the staircase, in a doubled-up simian crouch, was a man whose face it was at first difficult to see, since it was partly obscured by his knees. He was scratching his armpit, reproducing vividly a monkey’s sporadic but earnest concentration. When he moved, she glimpsed a prognathous-looking jaw and a hideously grimacing mouth beneath a mournful stare. Christine, hopping on one leg with delight, was handing him an imaginary morsel. He snatched at it, and went through motions of peeling a banana so lifelike that she could almost see the skin when he threw it away.

  “Go on. Go on. Now crack a nut.”

  “Half a minute,” said the man, unfolding himself. “I think someone’s looking for you two.”

  He got up. His face, after a few minor adjustments, had resolved itself into one at which she stared with unbelieving recognition. It had been like a trick done with mirrors.

  Her first feeling was regret. He had seen her, they would have to converse, one had better prepare for the worst immediately. She could only remember having met two men with a fraction of his looks, and both had been, in different ways, insufferable. She smiled, and waited resignedly.

  He sc
rambled to his feet, wriggling his disarranged clothes back into place. As he did so, he grinned at her over the heads of the children, guiltily but hopefully.

  “It was my fault,” he said, “entirely. I fetched them down.” Reaching out for Christine and Betty, he collected them, amid squeaks of protest, by the scruffs of their frocks. He handled them, not amusingly or indulgently like a grown-up person, but with the heavy-handed kindness of a bigger boy.

  “It’s all right,” said Hilary. “I expect it’s given the nurses a rest. How are you getting on yourself?”

  The children had been jerking at their collars like little dogs; now they recovered their freedom so suddenly that they had to run to keep from falling.

  “Forgive me,” he said slowly, “if I’m making a mistake. But I think we know each other, don’t we?”

  He was staring at her in an intense, puzzled concentration; not as men stare, with an eye to the reaction of the object, but with that self-forgetfulness which rarely survives childhood: in fact, self-consciousness shortly overtook him and made him look down, none too soon for Hilary, who had found it rather unnerving. He was a tall, strongly made young man—taller, probably, than he looked, his perfect proportions made it unnoticeable—and his physical carriage had a kind of inbred assurance which seemed separate from the uncertainty in his face. He looked up again.

  “Do you,” he asked anxiously, “remember me at all?”

  “Yes, of course.” She pulled herself together in time to smile. “But I’m rather surprised if you remember me. You weren’t very wide awake while I was there.”

  He said, with the same slow concentration, “I knew your voice. As soon as you spoke, I knew who it was. But I’ve been here so often, and never seen you. They told me one of the nurses had left since I was there, and I thought it must be you.”