Return to Night: A Novel

by Mary Renault

  In the morning she scarcely knew when he went—he was growing quite reliable about looking after his own departure—and woke feeling peacefully happy with the prospect of Sunday ahead, and only a short round of morning visits. In the afternoon Rupert and Lisa went out walking and she decided that it was warm enough for a deck chair in the garden. It was pleasant to lie there, with sun on her face and a rug against the cool wind, and to think about the immediate future and the immediate past. An hour of this had gone by like ten minutes, when an insistent intermittent sound reached her, the voice of the telephone indoors. She sighed and went in to answer it. A male voice, with a strong Gloucestershire burr, said, “Can I have a word with the doctor, please?”

  “Dr. Mansell, speaking.”

  “Oh, hullo, darling, it’s me. Are you alone?”

  “Yes, it’s all right, the house is empty. You did that rather well. How are you, my dear?”

  “I’m all right.” His voice was hurried, and so low that she could only hear it with difficulty. “Listen, I’m most terribly sorry, but I don’t think it’s going to be possible tonight. Mother’s back, she got here this morning.”

  “I thought it wasn’t till the middle of the week.” Suddenly she felt as if a heavy weight were inside her.

  “I know; things wound up sooner than she thought. She wired me at Chris’s, and the wire was returned of course. She got rather worried; it’s all been a bit difficult.”

  “I’m so sorry, darling. Of course don’t come; we’ll fix up something later. What about your eye?”

  “That was all right. I’m seeing Lowe today. Listen, suppose I can’t let you know when I’m coming, are those glass doors locked every night?”

  “They’re supposed to be.” The cautious voice was getting on her nerves. “I’ll unlock them last thing. I’d rather you let me know if you can.”

  “I’ll try to. It’s hell about tonight. I don’t suppose we shall get to bed till late, talking and so on. You know the way it is.”

  “Of course.”

  “You’re not angry? I couldn’t bear you to be.”

  “You know I’m not. Don’t worry. I still—It’s hard to say things over the phone, isn’t it?”

  “I know. If only—Well, fine, that’s a date for next week, then.”

  “What is?” asked Hilary, puzzled not only by the remark but by the change of tone. “Which day?”

  “About the car,” went on the cheerful, friendly young voice, exactly as if she had not spoken. “It sounds a bit like plug trouble to me. Try shorting them separately, and listen. If you still can’t locate it, let me know and we’ll have a session with it if you like. So long, Tony.”

  The receiver clicked, with a finality in which, for a few moments, she found it impossible to believe.

  Returning to her deck chair, she lit a cigarette and tried to float back into the comfortable torpor of five minutes ago; for after all, she said to herself, this was inevitable, and would continue to be so, thanks not to him but to herself. It was really very trivial. None the less, she was acutely miserable. Hoping that things would look better in the morning, she turned in early; but in spite of having the whole night, and the whole bed, to herself, she did not sleep very well. She heard nothing from Julian the next day and night, or the day and night following.

  On Wednesday morning, she had a letter.

  DARLING:

  I haven’t written before because I kept expecting I would see you. But you know the sort of complications that happen in family life. Aunt Laura went off to Scotland which altered everyone’s plans. You can guess how I have been feeling with all this hanging about.

  Lowe has seen my eye and takes the view that I shall live. He has secret doubts about the curbstone, but kept them to a dirty look which he shot at me privately. I expect you realized why our telephone conversation ended in a rather unsatisfactory manner. The phone here is in the hall.

  It seems years already since we met. I hope it will not belong now before I can get over. I am writing this in bed. [The next line was crossed out, so impenetrably that it defeated all her efforts.] I wonder what you are doing now. I shall never forget that ride on Saturday. I should like to say more, if I were better at it. Chris Tranter would be more the man for this, but I shall not co-opt him, as it would be unfortunate if you were gradually to fall for him like Roxane for Cyrano, particularly as he has quite a normal nose. I wonder if you share my view that Rostand is only actable in the original French. Of course one sees that this feeling about ham is a recent thing and may not outlast our generation. But I did not begin this to talk shop.

  I have been thinking about you a lot. I wish that we could talk instead of writing. You would understand if you were here. I never knew till now [another deep erasure] that I would miss you so much.

  I have been writing this since eleven o’clock and it is now nearly one. But I was wide awake and felt [in the obliteration of the next line and a half, the nib had gone twice through the paper] that I would like to spend the time writing to you. I am sorry that this letter is getting to be such a mess and that I put things so badly. But you know how I feel.

  Yours ever with my love,

  JULIAN.

  P.S. There is a poem on Page 53 of the “Oxford Book of English Verse” beginning “O western wind.” I wonder if you know it.

  Hilary smoothed the sheets, read them again, and again held up the crossed-out portions, vainly, to the light. She and David had spent all their time together under the same roof; so this was the first love letter she had ever received.

  Four more days went by. He did not write again. She began to fall into the state of mind where every remembered straw of uncertainty, every trivial dissatisfaction and doubt, rear up from the past and throws an enormous shadow. She began to sleep badly, and at last, disapproving of herself but growing desperate, took a heavy dose of sedative. In the small hours of the ensuing night, she was seized by a hideous dream; she was in the post-mortem room, and the subject she was dissecting lifted a dead cold arm and fondled her face. Half-aware that she dreamed, she fought to wake. She woke, and the dank fingers were still on her cheek. Gripped by the dumb paralysis of nightmare, she made a choked sound, a sleeper’s scream,

  “Don’t be frightened, darling. It’s only me.”

  Slipping from terror into sheer relief, from relief into consciousness of a dulled body and heavy head, from consciousness into protest, from protest into recollection and effort-all this caused her response to be somewhat delayed. The light went on beside her; she covered her eyes with her hand.

  “I’m terribly sorry I’m so late.”

  She took her hand away. He was kneeling beside her, his black hair straightened and glossed with rain. The clock made it ten minutes to three.

  “I walked here,” he said.

  “Walked?” Using all the footpaths, none of them easy in the dark, it must still be a good seven miles. “But it’s raining.”

  “Only the last half of the way. You see, the trouble is about getting out the car. It would wake everyone.”

  “Your hands are so cold.”

  She took them in hers. Night after night at first, she had expected him even when at last she slept; tonight, careless with dejection, she had bundled her hair into an old stringy ribbon, forgotten the becoming cream which served for night as well as day, and had not retouched her mouth. Even a young girl’s face, she thought, would look dull and puffy after such heavy sleep. He too, pursuing a fixed image with the silliness of youth and desire, must have had his expectation spoiled in the moment when she had failed to awake in instant welcome at his touch. Though she knew this, she resented the faint disappointment in his eyes, thinking of the hair ribbon and her neglected face.

  “You can’t go on doing this,” she said, “walking about all night. It’s ridiculous. You’ll get no sleep at all.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “If you had a job of work to do, you couldn’t spare a night’s sleep so
easily.”

  She had supplied and answered her own implication; she knew it even while she spoke. He had missed it still; but he was staring at her in a flat, aching disenchantment. Sometimes fear is a swifter stimulant than love; she caught him in her arms, explaining, consoling, remorsefully chilling her unprotected warmth against his cold wet hair and sodden shoulders. He brightened at once; but as with a child who has been slapped when confidently expecting praise, a grain of doubt and distrust remained behind.

  The little electric heater, which she had made him turn on to dry his clothes, gave the room a strangeness with its dull red glow, and through everything there was an indefinable difference. She was still a little slow and stupid from the sedative she had taken; and though she confessed to this and he forgave her, nothing was quite as it had been at other times. Besides, they dared not fall asleep, for it would take him two hours to get home again, and it was not worthwhile to set the alarm. At last they talked perfunctorily, to keep awake, with nothing real to say. She remembered, after he had gone, that she had not asked him how they were to meet again. She woke, in daylight, to find Annie, the morning tea in her hand, gazing with curiosity and disapproval at the forgotten electric fire. Unable to think of any excuse for it, she pretended sleep.

  The following day, Rupert Clare went back to Berlin. She longed, if not to comfort Lisa whose reserve made comfort a touchy business, at least to distract and entertain her. But the feeling of flatness and depression added itself to the torpor of the sleeping-tablets which she had inadequately slept off; she felt, wretchedly, that her efforts were perfunctory and mechanical, and, for Lisa, scarcely preferable to being let alone. Besides all this, a patient she had put on a course of sulfa developed intolerance through taking insufficient fluids, and she reproached herself with not having made her instructions clear. The course had to be stopped before it could become effective; blaming herself for her want of alertness, at the back of her mind she blamed Julian a little too. It continued to rain, thinly and drearily, for two days.

  On the third the rain stopped; but a gray, low-hanging quilt of cloud remained, making everything leaden and wan. She was sitting, tired and dispirited, over a late tea, when there was a knock at the door.

  “Mr. Fleming, doctor.”

  “Oh, yes. Show him in.”

  She ought not to have got so promptly to her feet. Had her face given her away?

  Still conscious of Annie, she approved the calm, amounting for him almost to stolidity, with which he greeted her. As the door shut, she felt that he was rather overdoing it; he could have afforded to smile with a little more animation. Advancing cautiously, he said, “I’d better not kiss you.”

  “You can, darling. I heard Annie go.”

  “I mean—” An urgent dive for his pocket made his meaning all too clear. He emerged from a huge handkerchief to explain, unnecessarily, “I’ve got a bit of a cold.”

  He had; as colds go, it was a classic, a monument. Remembering that after two hours in a warm bed he had gone out in the wet, not having slept, in half-dried clothes and with no overcoat she reflected that it might quite well have been worse. She fussed over him, making him hot tea and settling him by the fire; and suppressed the sneaking thought that he might have stayed away till he was less violently infectious.

  “Let me take your temperature. You ought not to be out.”

  “It’s all right; it’s below normal. It happened to be rather a good chance this afternoon; it seemed a pity to waste it.”

  If only, she thought, he would say crudely, “Mother was out, and it saved questions about where I was going.” It was these continual indirections which rubbed her nerves raw. All she said was, “But, dear, you look wretched. We could have talked on the phone.”

  “I wanted to see you again.” She knew that he too had felt, after last time, unsatisfied and full of the need to be reassured.

  “Come and sit by me, here on the rug; it’s warmer.”

  He came and leaned, heavy-headed, against her lap, scarcely attempting conversation; and yet in this interlude of bathos she found something curiously moving. He sneezed and shivered beside her knees and made painstaking, intermittent attempts at brightness; and she wondered why she did not become irritated, as most women she knew would have been. But it all seemed quite natural and rather endearing, and it occurred to her that her past had conditioned her to him not less than his to her. The difference was that he had had the candor to admit the foundations of his love, as far as he understood them, and to leave open to her those of which he was unaware. Perhaps he could afford it better, she thought; and wondered why she had not thought it before.

  “What a shame,” she said, “after you’d caught your death out on the cold hills, that I should have waked up cross.”

  “It was worth it. I’ve unearthed an old bike in the stables, and I’m getting it furbished up. It would look a bit noticeable to buy a new one. I think it will go.”

  “These roads aren’t safe for cycling after dark. The spring’s hardly begun.”

  “I know all the bad places. I biked over them for about fifteen years, before I had a car.”

  “You’re a terrible worry to me. Sometimes I wonder whether you’re worth keeping. … Oh, my sweet, don’t be silly. Drink that while it’s hot enough to be some good.”

  “It’s lovely to be here.”

  “I’ve missed you terribly … Tell me, have you heard anything yet from this Finnigan man?”

  “Well, no. As a matter of fact, I’m not certain if he’s in England. I seem to remember something somewhere about his going to New York.”

  “But he must have left someone behind who’d have acknowledged your letter.”

  He shifted himself a little nearer to the fire. “The assistant director doesn’t know me. Contacts are vital in this sort of thing. A deputy you haven’t met is no good.”

  “But I thought—” She felt her way, slowly, to the fact behind this verbal haze. “Do you mean you’ve not written yet at all?”

  “I’m watching the papers. As soon as I see he’s back I’ll post it off.” He sounded so anxious not to emphasize the fact that he was feeling low, that for a moment she felt quite ashamed of herself for bothering him. Then her common sense reasserted itself, together with a suspicion that he had not been quite unaware of producing this effect.

  “But if you want to know whether he’s there, why don’t you just put a trunk call through to the theater, and find out?”

  “It doesn’t do to seem in a flap. Puts people off.”

  “You needn’t ask to speak to him. Or even say who you are. The box office would tell you, surely?”

  “I suppose they would. Yes, that’s quite an idea. However, as it turns out it’s just as well I left it; if he’d sent for me this week I’d have looked pretty silly. I’ll obviously have to wait now till my voice comes back.”

  This seemed unanswerable. “Yes,” she said. “You’d better, of course. What happens at an audition, by the way?”

  He began to tell her, with anecdotes. When he forgot himself and became interested, he seemed better at once. He must have felt this himself, for he said, “It’s done me a world of good, talking to you. I knew it would.”

  “Some quinine would do you more. Wait a minute, I’ll see if I’ve got some.”

  “That’s very sweet of you. … Oh, by the way, does it matter if you take a double dose?”

  “It will make your ears sing; and you don’t need it.”

  “I mean I might have to have another, when I get back.”

  In a sudden flare of exasperation, she snapped, “Then why on earth couldn’t you say so?”

  “Sorry,” said Julian, looking at the fire. “It was nice of you to think of it.”

  “It was ordinary common sense.” With a reasonableness that seemed the product of some vast muscular effort, she added, “My dear, you don’t need to apologize to me for being properly looked after at home. I’m very glad you are.”

&
nbsp; For a moment he looked almost shocked; when he spoke and smiled, she sensed an effort something like her own. “Never mind, you do me more good than quinine. I ought to be going, I’m afraid. I wish I could kiss you good-by.” The clock struck in the hall. He looked at the one on the mantel piece, which said ten minutes to the hour, and asked sharply, “Which of those is right?”

  She glanced at her wrist. “The hall one. I must put this on; I never look at it when I’m wearing my watch.”

  “Oh, my God.” In the ensuing pause he seemed searching for words which would excuse, without explaining, the tone he had just used. She could not remember, afterward, what he did say in the end. In any case, he was gone. She found herself wandering round the room, and sat down with a cigarette.

  As she lit it, it was as if the flash of the lighter had had an internal counterpart. She knew, suddenly and certainly, the reason for all his trivial reticences which had so confusedly goaded her. She had been oversubtle in her interpretation of him; the truth had been too obvious to see. A vague repression would never have driven him to these circumlocutions; he would have overridden it, and said what appealed to him as the proper thing. Therefore he must have a reason, a conscious one, a staring embarrassment in the foreground of his thoughts. There could be only one. Mrs. Fleming had not forgotten her, nor had her opinion softened with time. It must have been driven in on him inescapably, for certainly he would have escaped it if he could; and recently, or he would have persuaded himself to forget it. Inevitably, he would have let it pass in silence, not trusting himself to challenge it without giving himself away.

  “What does it matter?” said Hilary to herself. To be quite sure, she said it aloud.

  Chapter Fifteen: A SHATTERING EXPERIENCE

  SHE MIGHT HAVE KNOWN (as she told herself a day or two later) that she had not sounded the trough of anticlimax to its bottom yet. The decisions of that last evening had carried with them, at the time, the sense of hauling on a slack rope which is one of life’s quiet intimations of irony. No crisis confronted her. She merely developed Julian s cold.