Return to Night: A Novel

by Mary Renault

  “For fear of that, I still will stay with thee, And never from this palace of dim light Depart again …”

  She listened, with suspended breath. His voice had altered: the verse had moved into the circle of its own dark stars. It was a faultless, disciplined delivery; there was something terrifying in the control which directed, inflexibly, the emotion which her instincts recognized, letting nothing escape from the perfect service of the form. The shock of it was beyond what she had power or will to withstand. She was aware of nothing clearly, except the necessity of seeing his face; and, scarcely knowing what she did, she put out her hands to serve her instead of eyes. They touched his hair and his forehead; and there was a silence, perhaps as long as two beats of the verse, which the soft drip of water measured as clearly as a drum. But he continued; his voice, though it had become a shadow without substance, still kept unbroken the shape and texture of the lines, as if these were a responsibility which could not be set aside.

  “Here, here will I remain, With worms, that are thy chambermaids; 0, here Will I set up my everlasting rest, And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars From …”

  The words were extinguished, like a steady but exhausted flame.

  In a complex recurrent rhythm, two chains of water droppings falling sometimes together and sometimes divided by an instant or so of time, made a thread of sound which traced itself like a visual pattern over Hilary’s brain, as her eyes looked downward, through the refusing darkness, at the unseen head she had caught against her breast.

  Nothing is inevitable, she thought in the pause of realization which no other sound nor any movement disturbed. It is a terrible thing I have done, out of weakness and self-love. It is the sin of witchcraft. I have betrayed him to the power of darkness which I could have destroyed. Even though he would never have forgiven me, I should have destroyed it. She knew that she had betrayed herself to it also.

  He was still, his face hidden. She slipped her arm about his rigid shoulders and felt, without hearing, the violently controlled breath which she had never recognized, till now, except as the index of scarcely endurable pain. “Julian,” she whispered. “My dear.” But he did not answer. She bent her mouth to his hair—it felt soft and warm, like a child’s—but found no response except a sense of tension drawn so far beyond the natural breaking-point that she dared venture no more. In the presence of this voiceless need, to which she could have refused nothing if anything had been clearly asked, she could only measure comfort in cautious crumbs, as food is measured to famine. Moved by some such feeling as this, or by the half-felt chill of the place, or by his stillness which was of the tautened kind that is like a tremor to the touch, she lifted a hanging fold of her loose coat and gathered it round him.

  He caught in his breath (the small movement seemed to pass, like a shudder, all through him) and the arm with which he had gripped her waist fell loosely round her. Silently in her arms his hard immobility changed to a deathlike relaxation. His head fell back against her shoulder. She experienced a moment of intense sweetness and exaltation, followed by guilt and remorse like the guilt of murder. Blindly, between expiation and helpless love, she stooped and began to kiss his forehead and brows and his closed eyes.

  What shall I do, she thought desperately, how shall we escape from this? For one thing was clear among so much unknowing, that none of it could be endured or lived with, when they brought it back into the light of day. And even that, she thought, I might have remembered in time. But even while the thought passed through her, she was stroking the hair back from his forehead and rocking him softly in her arms.

  At last, slowly, he raised himself a little, and, putting his hand behind her head, began to draw it down. She held him closer in a piercing tenderness and a longing mixed with fear.

  A searing glare, blinding and brutal as a sword slash, outraged her wide-open eyes. The cave, the water, everything was defined in the shocking indifference of light. She flung up her hands to her face, to shut it out. The tight pressure of her palms made colored moons and flowers against her eyelids, swimming across the image of Julian’s face as she had seen it in that first instant stolen as it were whole from the darkness, a blind face lifted from her arms in an abandonment so final that it was like despair.

  There was a swift movement beside her, and she felt him gone. She could not bring herself to uncover her face. There is no bitterness like that of the tragedy that ends in farce.

  The fierceness of the light was suddenly tempered. Lowering her hands, she saw that he had run over to the switches in the rock; he must have left them both on before, and had gone now to turn off the floodlights in time. Scarcely yet in command of herself, she was staggered that he should have reacted in seconds to this necessity. Had all men the power of escaping into action even from such a moment as this? She herself had not even thought which lights were burning; she was shocked, and profoundly envious. She got to her feet.

  He was coming back toward her from the central arch. When she looked at him, everything she had felt before swept over her like a returning wave. His eyes were narrowed, painfully, against the light, and he stumbled on an unevenness of the stone. His face was drained. Without looking at her, he put up his hand and pushed his disordered hair back from his forehead.

  “Someone must have fixed the fuse.” His voice was even, though he could not conceal the fact that he had been unable to finish even so short a sentence with a single breath. After a moment he added, “Smart work.”

  As soon as the last two words were out of his mouth, she knew what he wanted. He wanted the impossible. Her emotions, her intelligence, her whole adult apparatus rejected it. But, behind these, something accepted; remembering, from a time which had had no use for tactful regressions, the bald decencies of the schoolroom. He was intolerable, she thought. But he was probably light.

  “I suppose,” she said, “the fuse box must be over at the farm. Or perhaps it was something at the power station.”

  “Might have been that. We’d better get moving before it happens again.”

  “Yes; it must be getting late.”

  “Look, you’ve dropped some gadgets out of your bag.” He bent to gather up a handkerchief and a compact from the floor; she must have spilled them when she was searching for the lighter.

  “How’s your claustrophobia?” he asked. “Passing off?”

  The effrontery of this almost took her breath away. But she recalled the convention again; one had always been brazen in proportion to the crisis.

  “It was only a spasm,” she said. “Not the real thing, that some people have. But I think it would have been worse, this time, if I hadn’t had someone with me.”

  They were passing through the arch into the upper cave. Partly shadowed by the pillar, he was looking straight in front of him; but she saw in his face, as they came out into the light again, a gratitude and relief which made her feel sufficiently rewarded. It was an astonishment to find, when they reached the surface, the westering sunlight still lying low and golden across the countryside. After the dimness below, even its reflection, seen from within the hill’s shadow, was almost blinding. In a few moments, however, it revealed to her vividly that Julian was in a state of picturesque dishevelment.

  “The wind still keeps up,” she said when they got into the car. “It seems hardly worth tidying oneself just to be blown about again. However—” She got out her comb, and put in some sketchy work with it. “How about you?” She held it out carelessly.

  “Oh, thanks,” said Julian. “Might as well.”

  There was no need for him to walk over to the farm; Mrs. Mott was at the front gate.

  “Well, there, Mr. Fleming, you’ve got back. I was in two minds whether to send one of the men up along. When George made it right he come in and said, ‘The light’s come on in the cowshed, reckon that’s bound to be on now in the cave. It must have given the lady a proper turn, but she’ll be over it by now,’ George said.” She looked at Julian with hesitant repro
ach. “Mr. Mott reckoned someone had interfered with that floodlighting.”

  “I’m afraid he was right, too.” Hilary was relieved to see that he had recovered the power to smile.

  “You never should have touched that. Mr. Fleming. Only Mr. Mott has to do with that. We’d never have known nothing, only it was milking-time, and George was in the cowshed. So he comes back in and says …”

  They managed, somehow, to get away.

  To take in the hills, they had come by a long detour. The journey back was a matter of half an hour. They talked very little, dropping into the silences only the small pebbles of talk which sufficed to keep it from dangerous stagnation. The last sunlight lay flat and green-gold on the sides of trees and the westward curves of the hills. The lamps were burning already in the windows when they reached her house.

  “It was a lovely run,” she said at the gate. “Come in and have a drink, won’t you, before you go?”

  “Thanks terribly, but I ought to be getting back, I’m afraid.” For the first time since they had left the cave, he managed to meet her eyes. “Thank you for coming. I’m afraid it’s been rather a frost for you really, what with one thing and another. I’m—sorry I couldn’t fix things better. I—” His eyes fell, defeated; he pushed the gate which, forgetting his intention of opening it, he had been holding shut in her path. “I hope when the days get a bit longer you’ll come again.”

  “Of course I will.”

  In spite of herself, she had allowed her voice to say more than the words. For a moment, in the unguarded twilight, he turned to her a face of longing and hopeless trust. “Good-by,” he said, swung to the gate, and went back to the car without looking behind him.

  Chapter Twelve: NIGHT AND THE FIRST BELOVED

  THE MOON WAS IN ITS LAST QUARTER. It came up stealthily, between two and three in the morning, taking Hilary by surprise and deluding her, for a little while, into the belief that the dawn was breaking, for she had lost count of time. She had forgotten even to be impatient with her own inability to sleep. She had not reproved her thoughts, or rationalized them, or tried to convince herself that they were otherwise. Simply, she had not been thinking about herself at all. The pale light slid into the room, catching a glass candlestick with a faint prismatic blue and green that disturbed her half-shut eyes. She opened them, and saw through the window, against the luminescence of small clouds, the dark crests of trees. A voice sounded in her head with a thin intolerable clearness like that of the moonlit glass:

  “By yonder moon I swear, That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops …”

  She raised herself on her elbow to see if it were true, if any reflected light shone on the black branches, till she remembered that what had been meant must have been the whiteness of the flowers. But it was her memory that had shown her the fine bareness of the twigs, for her eyes were filled with tears.

  The definiteness of this physical fact brought her mind back, at last, to a belated self-criticism. A habit of truthfulness, inherent in her and fortified by her studies and her work, made further evasions impossible. For some time already she had been pampering, under the disguise of common sense, an arrogance that had refused to let her see her own part in one of humanity’s classically comic situations. Even now she made some attempt to hedge her pride with irony; but it was a thin hedge and concealed nothing.

  In search of an antidote, she tried to see the thing as she might look back on it in a few years’ time, when it would have become a memory, making for tolerance of other people’s follies. At some point in this not very successful enterprise, she found herself thinking again of David, not as a lover—she did not avoid this thought; it had simply faded, like an old photograph left in the sun—but as the background of her surface disposition, which he had helped to form. With David, she had done what had seemed at the time an admirable amount of mental tidying up. She remembered telling him, once, about an adolescent crisis whose confusion and fear still faintly lingered; the effect had been very satisfactory. Yes, he had said, of course, quite so; and had used, with a cool and cleansing indifference, the correctly classifying terms, following them with a story of something similar that had happened to someone he knew. From that moment the memory had been sterilized, dead, as safe to handle as something in a tank of spirit on a laboratory shelf.

  She fell back defeated from an attempt to imagine David at twenty-three; she could not conceive of a time when it would have been in her power either to hurt or comfort him. Only his intolerances would have been cruder, lacking the airs of toleration which he employed, often with some skill, to give them a finer cutting-edge. Nor could she envisage any situation in which he would not have known, and been able to state precisely, what he wanted, and when, and how, and why. She might as well, she thought with forlorn amusement, be a virgin, and a foolish virgin at that.

  Reaching this conclusion, she decided that though folly was a luxury she could not afford, tonight was no time for pursuing wisdom; and, getting out of bed, went to her bag for five grains of medinal. As she settled back in the comfortable expectation of sleep, she reflected that she would have leisure for further thought; she knew, at least, enough of human nature in general to guess that it would be some time before Julian presented himself again. It would have been a relief to her, if she had not been sure that he would be unhappy in the interval. This was launching her mind on an endless circle; she made it a resolute blank, and fell asleep.

  In fact, she saw nothing of him for nearly three weeks. During the first, she thought what an excellent thing it was that he was being so sensible, and recalled the unfortunate way he had once had of reappearing just when one had looked confidently forward to an interval for meditation and rest. Halfway through the second week she began to miss him, intermittently, unpredictably, and with a force which was all the more unnerving because it broke in on periods when she had managed, she thought, to dismiss the whole matter from her mind. At the beginning of the third week, it occurred to her that he might very well have decided to stay away altogether, that she ought to support and applaud this choice, and that the first suspicion of it was already taking the light from the sky.

  When Wednesday of the following week came round, and she had still neither seen nor heard from him, she drove into Cheltenham. She was window-gazing in the Promenade, and shifting her own shadow this way and that to avoid the light reflected in the plate glass, when something among its passing images arrested her. She stood still and counted ten, slowly, before she allowed herself to turn. She had not been mistaken. Disappearing into the crowds on the pavement were Mrs. Fleming and Julian. He was carrying her traveling-coat over his arm; it was a mild day. It was evident that neither of them had seen her. It would, at least, have been evident, but for an inescapable certainty that as they passed Julian had looked around, and then quickly away.

  She walked back to her car. She was driving it, and had reached the outskirts of the town, before her feelings really overtook her. When they did, she reminded herself that he had behaved with ordinary tact, that it had saved her a good deal of embarrassment, that she would not have wished it otherwise. Reason supported all this. It left quite untouched her shocked sense of betrayal and loss, and the shame of her own helplessness. As she drove back through the village she reaffirmed, definitely this time, that she would write it off and forget it, as no doubt he had decided to do. Men were impossible, of any age and of every kind.

  By the time she reached home, she had only one clear wish, to spend the evening talking to Lisa. Not confiding in her; that would have embarrassed both of them; but to talk to Lisa would be good. They would talk about nothing particular; village scandals, the latest book, the news, something on the radio; but, without any decisions of the intellect, life would become simpler.

  In the hail, the welcoming flame was rising between the tall firedogs; but no Lisa rose from the settle to greet her. There was nothing in that, though it brought a moment’s chill because she had anticipated so clea
rly; but she had the instant feeling of the place being different. Something was in the air. Literally: for it was a smell, which in a few moments she identified as that of a rank French cigarette, Caporal or Gaulois Jaune. Half of it was still in the ash tray on the table, where it had been left to smolder out. On the floor, by the settle, a splash of mixed color caught her eye Lisa’s work basket was lying there, on its side, with the embroidery silks spilled out on to the carpet. Hilary knew what had happened, even before she saw the battered portable typewriter on the table by the door. Lisa would not be at leisure this evening.

  She sat down, aimlessly, by the fire, and wondered how long Rupert was likely to stay. So acute was her loneliness that it seemed, for a few moments, perfectly natural to be calculating hopefully that he could never get away from his work for long. When she noticed her own selfishness, it horrified her; but not so much as the state of mind which could make such thought an expression of herself at all.

  She went up to the bathroom to wash her hands. There was a good deal of water on the floor, in which the draggled bath mat had been left lying. She found herself thinking that he might really have cleared up after himself a little better. On her way down again she passed Lisa’s door, and was aware of the kind of silence which is not the silence of vacancy. Lisa was waiting—they were both waiting—fearing that, having noticed nothing downstairs, she might decide to knock; she could imagine the man making a face of irritation, the woman smiling and shaking her head and motioning him to be still. When she had gone, the nearness of her intrusion would be a little joke they would share together before they forgot her existence again.

  Down In her sitting-room she found that tea had been laid for her, and the kettle put ready on the hob. This consideration was typical of Lisa and she knew it; but against all good sense she could only feel in it forethought to keep her out of the way. Though it was very late now for tea, she put the kettle on, and sat waiting for it to boil, finding tears of self-pity not far from her eyes. It was humiliating, contemptible, and, she found, quite beyond her control.