Return to Night: A Novel

by Mary Renault

  “I’m just eleven years older than you are. Think for a minute, Julian. You’ll be thirty-five yourself one day, unlikely as it may seem to you now. As men go, still quite a young man. And I shall be forty-six. Use your imagination.”

  He smiled a little, rather to himself than at her. “I have,” he said, “long before now.”

  He put up his hand and she felt his fingers travel, with sureness and great delicacy, over the contours of her face. There was an authority in his touch which impressed her as it might have done in a man of her own calling.

  “Yes.” He nodded his head. “One can’t help it,” he said quite simply, “if one plays about with make-up at all. With a face that interests one, one works it out instinctively. If I had the box of tricks handy, I could show you within, say, twenty minutes, what you’ll look like ten, and twenty, and thirty years from now.”

  “Don’t,” she said, with an involuntary shiver.

  “Why not? I love you, and it’s part of you just as your childhood is.”

  “It’s—rather cold-blooded.”

  “You really are a bit unreasonable, aren’t you?” he complained, with patient perplexity. “If you’ll just tell me what reaction you would consider good form, I’ll sit down with my head in my hands and try to work it up.”

  It was like wandering on a moor, she thought in bewilderment; one felt one’s way, precariously, over so much uncertain, quaggy ground, and then, with no warning, felt one’s foot on granite.

  “I know how you feel,” she said. “When I was twenty-four, I could have staked anything you liked to name that what I wanted and believed then I would forever. But if I had to be married now to the sort of man I’d have chosen then, I’d jump out of the window. Don’t you see, in ten years you’ll be literally a different person; all the cells of one’s body change in seven. It’s like making promises for a son of yours who isn’t born.”

  “We’ll leave my sons out of it, for the moment.” There was something hostile in his voice, which disturbed her.

  “What I’m trying to say is that I’m not thinking only about you. You might have grown on me, by the time you grew out of me. I should be getting to the age when habits begin to form.”

  “Do you mean that?” he asked slowly.

  “Every word.”

  “God bless you, darling.” He rolled over on the counterpane beside her, and put his head in her lap: “What a perfect thing to say.” He sighed, luxuriously. “So comfortable and warm. Say it again.”

  “Oh, Julian, I could hit you.” Her courage had somehow to be kept up. “You haven’t listened to a word.”

  “I have. How queer it is that after all this you don’t know how I feel. It always surprises me, you know, if ever you don’t see through me like glass. Of course I shall change. But not about you. I—I recognized you, from the beginning. Don’t ask me what I mean, it’s too hard to explain. I knew you, that’s all. Like a gipsy who comes to a house and sees the patteran on the door.”

  “Darling, do you know what a patteran is? It’s a sign left by another gipsy who’s been there before.”

  Lazily and without moving, he said, “I didn’t mean that.”

  “I expect not. But it’s true.”

  She could tell by the feel of his head and shoulders, which were still quite relaxed, that at least she had not shocked him. Presently he reached up and took her hand. It was the kind of gesture people make who feel they should be saying something. She reproached herself for her clumsiness in underlining what, after all, he had intelligence enough to have guessed. Presently he said, awkwardly, “Were you much in love with him?”

  “I thought so, of course.”

  “Of course. Sorry. Silly thing to ask.”

  “Not so silly. I used to ask myself. But I thought it was sentimental and unmodern to want too much.”

  “Too much what?” he asked, with an astonishing directness.

  She found herself desperately embarrassed for a reply. If David’s shortcomings had been intimately physical, she could have schooled herself to say so sensibly; whereas, now, under the effort of speech she was blushing deeply and could only lust manage her voice.

  “Well, it’s hard to put intelligently. I mean, in a way that doesn’t sound like a housemaid just back from the cinema. Imagination, I suppose. Lightheadedness, poetry if you like. Oh, I don’t know.”

  “In fact,” said Julian, “love?”

  He turned himself over to look at her. There was nothing in his face but a great and tentative hope.

  She could not answer him. He put both arms round her waist; his cheek made a gentle coaxing movement against her side. “Did you ever care about him as much as you do about me?”

  She drew him closer. The answer was so easy; and yet, as if remembered from a long time ago, she had a bewildering inhibition against it, a feeling of having once been taught, by example, the right thing to say. Drifting memories came with it; the feeling of recent tears, of a sense of desperate insecurity which had somehow to be comforted, of warm silk against her face and a little round button that had pressed against her forehead. “… Do you love me? More than Pussy? More than Auntie May?” and then with bated breath, “More than Pauline?” And the voice of divine justice, quietly rebuking, “No. Hilary and Pauline are both my dear little girls. I love you both exactly the same.”

  She paid no real attention to the memory, but it left behind it a deep eddy of the spirit, a sense of awe and wonder. It was as if a voice whispered, “Command that these stones be made bread,” and one felt the power, but the voice might be from heaven or hell. She closed her eyes, and took the power from its unknown source.

  “I never loved him.” With dreamlike certainty, as if they had waited in her for thirty intervening years, she came to the words which, in that already lost remembrance, the divine justice had refused. “I love you better than anyone, ever. Better than anyone in the world.”

  He did not answer. Presently he pulled her down to him and kissed her. It was a kiss that simulated physical passion, a kind of cipher for what could not be told.

  At last he said, “You had a narrow escape from marrying him, I suppose.”

  Not long since, she would have taken a pride in not being ashamed to say, “Hardly, because he never asked me.” She had been very proud of her honesty, and, it now seemed, of a number of other selfish things. “I should never have married him,” she said, “when it came to the point.”

  “Well, now it’s come to the point again. … No, listen, please, you must.” In the urgency of the moment, he silenced her first half-uttered word by shoving his hand across her mouth. “I’m sorry I’m not older if it bothers you, but there it is and here we are, so why keep on about it? Obviously, we have to get married sometime. Let’s make it now. Straight away, this week. It’s better we should, I know it is, I was never so sure of anything in my life. If not”—he was sufficiently intent by now to allow Hilary, who felt on the point of suffocation, to get his hand away—“we shall get tied up and involved in things, or something will happen—something—Let’s get it fixed. If I’m sure of you I can do anything, I’ve always known that. Things I—I used to think before that I couldn’t do, I can do them for you. Will you? Please. There’s nothing in the world to stop us, except ourselves.”

  “Please, darling, could you not lean on my collarbone quite so hard? It’s rather confusing.”

  “Sorry. Will you marry me this weekend?”

  “No, dearest.”

  “Why not?”

  “For one thing, because everyone would say we had to. What else could they think?”

  “Oh, God. I never thought of that.”

  “For a woman, you know, it is a consideration.”

  “Of course. I’m sorry, it just didn’t occur to me. Well, then, let’s get officially engaged and put the announcement in. And we’ll get married in three months. Will that do?”

  “Julian, dear, why must we be so drastic? Can’t we stay as we are a littl
e longer, and have time to breathe?”

  He let go of her, and propping himself on his elbows, stared into her eyes. His unhappiness, which was very real, was turned by the face that expressed it into a tragic effect much too good to be true. At last he said, “You’ve told me you love me; so I think I’ve a right to know what it is that makes you feel I’m not to be trusted. Would you mind telling me? I’ve got a good reason for asking.”

  “But of course I trust you.”

  “That can’t be true. Tell me.”

  She stroked the hair back from his forehead. His face was almost in profile to her on its unhurt side; and now, because her mind had been preoccupied, she saw him freshly, and the words she had been about to say deserted her. She felt in his sudden stillness the certainty of communicated desire; but when he moved, it was to put her wrist abruptly aside.

  “Yes?” he said roughly. “Well?”

  “Do you really think I’ve so little control that I’d put myself in a situation like this with someone I didn’t trust?”

  “Trust for what? Not to boast about it in a pub? That doesn’t get us very far, does it?” He had propped his chin in his hands and was staring, obstinately, straight in front of him. “Something about me makes you think I’m not reliable. I want to know what it is.”

  “You’re certain it’s you,” she said softly, “that I daren’t trust?”

  He drew a sharp little breath and, turning to her slowly, embraced her, elaborately, at some length, and with unforeseen skill. When he lifted his head from kissing her he said, with a defensive bitterness that made him for a moment look five years older, “Well, I may as well make the most of what you’re willing to give me, I suppose.”

  After all, she thought, what else had she asked for? Perhaps her remorse showed in her face, for she saw a new hope in his. She wondered if he knew how successful his essay had been.

  “That isn’t fair,” she said. “It’s not you I’m afraid of; it’s time, and change, and life; the things that we can’t control.”

  He smiled a little shamefacedly, and said, “Isn’t it a bit late to be worrying about those, in this year of grace?”

  Her heart turned over; not at the words alone, but at the universal, the contemporary inflection, the air of having made an allusion in admittedly doubtful taste. As their grandmothers would have shied at a sexual innuendo, so these, with circumspection and apology and a sense of bad form, touched if they must on their daily shortening expectation of maturity. There seemed very little to say. He seemed suddenly removed across an invisible gulf; even to kiss him now would be tinged with insult, as if he had asked for pity.

  She said at last, “How much do you think yourself that ought to count?”

  “Not at all.” He spoke with sudden force. “Nobody knows that better than I do. … But I’m still asking you to marry me.”

  Suddenly she knew what she ought to have said all along. “Listen, then, my dear. Don’t mind this; it isn’t personal, it’s just the way things are. Try to see it for a moment not as we do, but as everyone else will. The fact that you’re so much younger, by itself, we could probably get away with, if you’d had a chance to get about at all, and meet other women, and get started in a career. But if we announce ourselves now, don’t you see how it will seem? When you’re only just down from Oxford, you come to me as a patient, and I get my claws in you. I’m not even your family doctor, but I take good care you don’t slip away. Before you’ve had time to turn round, I pin you down and marry you. No, be quiet, darling; I’ve listened to you, haven’t I? I know it’s not pretty; but I’ve heard it said with much less excuse than I’d be giving. They’d go on saying it, too, for most of our lives. You may think me a coward; I expect I am one. But it weighs with me.”

  “I think you mean,” he said slowly, “that the remedy’s up to me.”

  “Yes; that’s what I mean.”

  He had gone rather white, but he met her eyes squarely. “How long do you give me?”

  “Would a year be fair?”

  “Yes, a year’s fair enough. Not to get anywhere, of course, but to know whether one will. You don’t expect to see me in the West End by then?”

  “I don’t expect anything, I don’t know enough about it. You’ll be able to tell.”

  “All right. That’s settled then.” He sat up, and swung himself off the edge of the bed. She felt cold from his absence, and with sudden fear.

  “Julian. Where are you going?”

  “Nowhere. You don’t want me in bed with my clothes on, do you?”

  He removed them, in silence, and came back. Now as often before, she felt her mind reaching out to another impenetrably concealed from her by a disguise too splendid to have any relation to the real. When he put out the light she felt only relief, as if some barrier between them had been broken down.

  “Darling, are you angry with me?” she whispered.

  “No. I knew it was coming. I know you so well.”

  “But you hoped it wouldn’t.”

  “I’m not sure even of that. They say, ‘the good is the enemy of the best,’ don’t they?”

  “You think it is the best?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you forgive me, afterward?”

  “Tell me what you told me before.”

  “I love you.”

  “Go on,” he prompted.

  “Better than anyone in the world, always.”

  Now in the darkness, he had lost the fear of self-betrayal, and she of her perilous invocation. In the end it was not only his imagination but her own which was stilled by its enchantment, so that she forgot they had talked of everything but what lay closest to the center of both their thoughts.

  Chapter Fourteen: THERE’S NO SUBSTITUTE FOR LIVING

  “IT’S VERY MEDIEVAL, ISN’T IT,” said Julian, “all this leaving at dawn? We only want someone with a lute under the window. playing an aubade, with one foot on the end of the rope ladder. ‘Busie old foole, unrulie Sunne …’” He stretched, magnificently, before seeking his clothes.

  Hilary watched him from the bed. He moved about the room already as if he lived there, and, when he was ready, made unerringly for her hairbrush. She had found a black strand in it yesterday, luckily before Annie came to dust. His lazy vitality made her feel dim and blurred; at what age, she wondered, did one lose the urge to quote Donne at five in the morning? They had not slept till nearly two. The prospect of a day’s work frankly appalled her. She had been loath to let him go chiefly out of reluctance to be disturbed, for he had already acquired the knack of being comfortable in a confined space, and her back, round which he had neatly fitted himself for sleep, felt drafty and unprotected. She pulled down the end of the pillow into the gap, thinking that in a moment or two, when he had gone, she would get off to sleep again. When he came back to the bed to kiss her good-by she wished he would not make such a business of it, letting in the draft she had just excluded. But she kissed him tenderly; partly because she felt tenderly disposed, partly because he looked in the mood to persist till he got a response that he considered adequate. He was a romantic young man, and was fast developing an opinionated sense of style; in moments of passion he was much more manageable than when he had made up his mind to a suitable gesture. On such occasions, one became suddenly aware of latent standards of criticism. She allowed him, without protest, to scoop her out of her warm place and drape her into a beautiful and touching pose of farewell.

  “Don’t bother to ring me tonight,” he said, “it’s a nuisance for you. I’ll just come along about twelve. If there are any lights still on, I’ll wait. I won’t let anyone see me.”

  “Ring you—? Oh, my dear, I don’t think you can come tonight again.”

  “Why not?” asked Julian. He sounded amazed.

  “We might be found. Someone might come for me. I’m expecting to be sent for tonight.” This was just possible if several chances, all very unlikely, should all happen to coincide.

  “Oh, God.
You never told me. Two days, and a whole night.” He gathered her up into an embrace which was like a sculptural symbol of Despair. It made her feel very paltry and inadequate. She kissed him again; in any case, by now she was broad awake. “I’ll tell you what,” he said with new inspiration; “I’ll wait in the garden and watch till you come in.”

  “Darling, I could never keep my mind on what I was doing. I should think about you all the time. I might kill somebody.” These picturesque possibilities became quite real to her as she spoke. It ended with her promising to meet him at Pascoe’s farm tomorrow afternoon, and go riding. By the time this tryst had been plighted in accordance with Julian’s sense of fitness, she felt as wide-awake as the birds.

  Saturday was fresh, bright, and blowing. Hilary tried on and pressed her long-neglected riding-things, and went downstairs too full of spirits to anticipate the obvious until the moment when it happened.

  “Well!” said Lisa, coming into the hall with Rupert at her heels. “Of all the dark horses. You’ve been here all this while and never told me you rode. We could have done some hacking; I’ve only lapsed myself for want of stirring-up. Rupert, doesn’t she look nice?”

  “Very nice,” said Rupert accommodatingly.

  “Is anyone mounting you, or are you going to the Chestnuts?”

  The Chestnuts was an excellent riding-stable, less than a mile away. Hilary gave her crop a careless little flick.

  “How absurd we never thought of going together. I only wanted stirring-up, too. In fact, I got it the other day quite by accident. I ran into young Fleming—you remember, I saw him when he was thrown last year—and he was very full of having started to ride again. He’s supposed to be finding me something at the place where he keeps his own. I’ve no idea what they’ve got; I’ll let you know.”

  “You’re lucky with weather,” Lisa said. “I suppose they can’t have gone away after all, then. The Flemings, I mean.”