Return to Night: A Novel

by Mary Renault

  He went over to a table at the other end of the room, where one was generally kept.

  “He said that when he saw how angry I was, he had been afraid to ask me; but he hoped I would forgive him, and marry him as soon as possible, as life was so uncertain at that time. He sent the letter by a French dispatch rider. That was the kind of thing he did.”

  The ash tray was there; silver, and highly polished. It seemed a pity to use it. He put it on the mantelpiece, and remained standing beside it and flicking his ash into the fire.

  “I was in a great deal of doubt and unhappiness. I had allowed myself, before all this happened, to become very fond of him; and after this letter, which was—very persuasive, his conduct didn’t make the difference that it should have done, What I thought of far more was how appalled my parents would be. I was afraid even to hint at it in a letter home. My father was in poor health and I knew they worried a good deal about me already, and exaggerated the danger from shellfire and so on, which was really very slight. But on the other hand, Andy said—” She jerked the crochet hook quickly through its loop. “Captain O’Connell said there was a chance of his being moved at any time, perhaps to the line. I never discovered whether that was true.”

  She had come to the bottom corner of the bed jacket, and made the turning carefully, pausing while she did so. Julian occupied the time by closing the curtains. Parting the last again, he looked out. It was quite dark outside. He tried, to imagine for a moment that he was there, alone. Soon, he thought, I can get away somewhere. Five minutes, ten; fifteen, surely at the most; it wouldn’t seem very long, if one were sitting with a book. If only, he thought, one could leave one’s body in the chair to hear out the rest, dump it there like a ventriloquist’s dummy, and from some dark hiding-place manipulate the strings. … With a nerve in the back of his head, he sensed that she was about to look up, and came back to the fireplace.

  “One heard a great many excuses, after the war, for what wasn’t excusable; that people’s nerves were strained, that one was living in the presence of death, and so on. I always detested it. You have no idea of the depths people reached in that way. Many of them had put up with very little; and, in any case, what is the use of having standards if they break down at the first test? I don’t justify myself, because one can’t justify deceit. I said to myself of course that my parents would understand, and that I would make it up to them in every possible way; but even if that had been so, it would have been no excuse at all for continuing to write to them as if nothing were changed. Letters like that are lies in themselves, even if nothing untruthful is actually said. And there was another thing which I knew in my heart could never have been right. Knowing he was a Roman Catholic, I agreed to be married by a Roman priest. In fact, I did more than agree; he would have been willing for a Protestant wedding (he told me he had lapsed, as they say) but I knew that he would be thought by his own Church to be living in a state of sin. It seemed too much to ask of him. So in the end, it was I who insisted. … You wish to ask me, I expect, why I never told you that I had been married before. You will understand in a moment or two.

  “The priest who married us was a military chaplain from a French army rest camp. He was very pleasant and kind, and I think in his way a good man, though he hoped I should become proselytized, I’m afraid. Still, perhaps that was natural. He was killed a few days later, when his detachment went up to the line again. I believe he died very bravely, giving a sacrament or something of the kind. It must have been quite irregular for him to marry a British officer, and I don’t know how he was persuaded to do it. I expect he must have been deceived in some way.

  “I forgot to mention that we had both succeeded in getting leave together. I, of course, had told no one at all what I was doing. We spent our honeymoon at a small hotel in Paris.” With careful distinctness, she added, “The Germans had a large gun, which they fired at the town from time to time. One could hear the shell coming from quite a distance; an odd noise, rather like a train. No one paid much attention to it.

  “The day before we were due to leave, he went out for a short time, I think to get theater seats for the evening. We had spent the first part of the afternoon—resting, and talking about these plans he was always making for his career after the war. He had been showing me some photographs, and cuttings from Canadian papers about parts he had taken in various touring-companies; I can’t remember what they were, and it’s of no consequence. I had been quite interested in the cuttings, and after he had gone, I took them out again, as we hadn’t had time to go through them all. I knew he kept them separately; had they been with private things, I should, naturally, not have touched anything. One or two were quite long notices, the kind of thing that provincial papers print; gossip and description, rather than criticism as we should understand it here. There was an actress in the company with one of these very obvious and affected stage names; I remember thinking that her real one was probably something very prosaic. Then I came to a paragraph which said that in private life she was Mrs. Andre O’Connell.”

  While she had been speaking, her ball of wool had rolled from her lap to the carpet. She had not let her eyes follow it, unwilling perhaps to seem in need of distraction. Julian had been watching it; the tiny jerks it made, as the pull came from above, had given it an air of associating itself with the story. Now he took an uncertain step forward, and, kneeling, picked it up. He held out his hand to her, open, with the wool in it, his eyes on a level with her lap. She seemed about to turn toward him; but after all took the wool without touching or glancing at him, and dropped it into a secure place on the chair beside her. After a moment or two, he sat down on the floor.

  “My first thoughts were not of the kind people imagine. One doesn’t, in real life, believe in such things happening to oneself or to people one knows. It seemed rather stupid and odd, and I wondered how the mistake could have happened; though provincial papers of course are always making these faux pas. And I thought that if I had been a character in one of these plays of his, I should have taken it seriously and some absurd situation would have arisen. But it gave me, somehow, a restless, unpleasant feeling, and I hoped he would not be out long.

  “He was back within, I think, about five minutes. As soon as he got inside the room, he looked at me quickly; and immediately, it was as though he had told me. He had remembered, after he was in the street, what was in the cutting, and had come back to put it out of the way. He had not had nearly time to do what he had gone for; I suppose he would have found some explanation. But we both knew, before either of us had spoken a word.

  “He told me, at first, that she was dead. I never had an instant’s doubt that he was lying; I was recovering my natural instincts, I suppose. He admitted it, almost at once. He said, then, that he knew he was in mortal sin (a Catholic expression) and that it was because he hadn’t wished me to have any part in it that he had told me this added lie. I don’t think there was anything in the world that he wouldn’t have met with some invention. To me, of course, everything he said had become quite meaningless. I think he told me something about his marriage, that they had parted after a few months and that he had had no news of her for years; that it would have taken a long time to trace her and that as they were both Catholics she would probably not have divorced him. He saw, I think, that he was making no impression on me. When he’d exhausted all these excuses, he said that though he had felt unable to live without me, he had wished to preserve my innocence, even at the price of his own soul; it was the Catholic marriage he meant, I suppose. It was all so melodramatic and horrible that I couldn’t realize at first what he was leading up to—he actually thought that he could persuade me to go on living with him, as his wife. It was some little time before I could make clear to him what my feelings were.”

  Slowly and with difficulty, Julian lifted his eyes from a study of the carpet. But she was looking at something in the middle distance, and her words seemed to be directed at it, as if again she must make an in
tention perfectly clear.

  “I went back to the hospital. I didn’t wish to meet people; but I was afraid that if I had nothing to occupy my mind, I might give way to some wicked impulse. It was more than the facts in themselves; it was the feeling that there was no justice in the world. There were women I had seen behaving with complete lack of decency and control, who for that very reason had not been subjected to the same ignominy. The very name. A police-court word. My mother had had a servant, a kitchen maid, to whom the same thing had happened; the circumstances were almost exactly similar. I remembered my father saying that she had been victimized because she was a respectable girl, and giving her money to help her over her—her difficulties.”

  Julian tried to look up again. In the effort to force himself, he dug his nails into the pile of the carpet. When he could see the sweep of her skirt, with the high lights along its fall, he found he could get no farther. Stealing out a hand, he drew toward him a fold of the stiff silk, and bent his lips to it.

  When it moved, she turned her head and looked down at him. One of her hands half stirred toward him. But even at this moment, when he could not have spoken to answer a threat against his life, his body carried, like a brand, its inbred eloquence. The gesture had finish; it was fatally and damningly right. Quietly she moved her hand across her knee, and, smoothing the stuff, withdrew it from his fingers. The whisper of its corded surface sounded as clearly as a word.

  “Everyone at the hospital took it for granted that I had spent my leave at home. People asked, of course, the usual questions about how I had enjoyed myself. I felt so contaminated with falsehood and deceit that nothing would have induced me to add to it. So I simply said that I had had bad news toward the end of the time. I was put on night duty. There had been a number of changes in my absence—more casualties had come in, and others had been moved to make room for them—but I found that Richard was still there. Your father.”

  It came to him, dimly, that something was being expected of him. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, of course.”

  “As some of the more senior officers had gone, he had been given a small room to himself; he was one of the patients whom I used to settle for the night. He told me he had missed me very much while I was away. It made me ashamed of having always been so cool to him although I knew he cared for me a great deal more than he had ever told me. Your father was always reserved; nothing was on the surface with him.

  “One evening, the Sister in charge came in while I was there, and found that I had made some mistake or other. My mind, of course, was not on my work, and she was quite justified in pointing it out to me, though not I think in the presence of a patient. I behaved with the proper etiquette and didn’t answer her; but when she had gone, your father said something sympathetic. It sometimes has the effect of upsetting one more than unkindness. I had been sleeping badly. At all events, I broke down; the only time, I think, that I had allowed myself to do it since I was a child. My parents were very strict about fuss and never took notice of us as long as we cried. Your father showed great kindness and consideration. When I was feeling more myself, he said that he hoped I would forgive him for saying something personal, but that he had always felt that O’Connell was not, as he put it, up to my mark, and that sooner or later he would let me down. It was quite beyond me even to begin to speak of it; but when he saw from my manner that he hadn’t been mistaken, he said that that was all he ever wished to know, and that if I would marry him he asked nothing better of life than to help me forget any unhappiness I might have had. I realized then that he was everything Andy was not; straightforward and genuine and controlled, the kind of man who respects a woman’s reserves and would never ask anything from her which—which afterward she would be ashamed to remember; the kind of man I was really adapted to care for. It made the last few weeks seem like a kind of nightmare. I knew that, feeling all this, I could grow to—to love him, as indeed I did. So I accepted him. We were married a fortnight later, when he was discharged from the hospital. My parents, who knew his family quite well, were delighted. He brought me back here; he didn’t wish me to return to France, and I was very glad to leave it.” Her voice took on the note of conclusion. “Shortly before we were married, he told me again that he thought we should be happier if we decided never, in any circumstances, to refer to the past. I agreed, and we never spoke of it afterward.

  “I am afraid,” she said, “that if he had lived, you would have been a great disappointment to him.”

  Julian looked up. “Don’t you mean that I was a great disappointment to him?”

  Her profile was as hard and clear as the head on a cameo. “It has been my greatest regret that he didn’t live to bring you up. I think he might have been more successful than I have.”

  “Only after he’d taken a look at me, he—put it off for a bit?”

  “Service on the Western Front was a very severe strain. A short time after you were christened—he was on leave then, as you know—he wrote to say that it was beginning to tell on him; that men reached a point when they dared not entirely relax, because the effort of going back was greater in proportion. A number of officers felt like that.”

  Julian murmured to himself, Journey’s End.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing. Sorry.” Malcolm, an odd thread of his brain remembered, had wanted to put it on at school, but the Head had vetoed it; it had unhealthy undertones, the Head considered. The thread twitched, stirring others. He tried to accustom himself to the thought that this, which had impended all his life (for he could not reach back to a time when his instinct had not felt it, so that now his mind seemed to have defined its expectation), had come, and was over. But not over, for, he remembered, what he had heard was not a curtain line (how gladly he would have seen the lights go down, and the sheltering darkness come); it was his own cue. He must tell her, now, that he would make the only amends she wanted, the death of the offending part of him, from which, when it knelt to her, she had drawn her skirt aside. Tenacious of life, it prompted him still with its outcast impulses: to lay his head against her breast where once it had been accepted, to kiss her hands. But she would only see an actor’s gesture, and would make clear to him—as clear as she had made it in Paris—what her feelings were. Nothing was required of him but the single act of atonement. In his mind he had already made it, and scarcely knew in what blind impulse of delay he spoke.

  “And—this other man—O’Connell? Was he killed, too?”

  “He was discharged dishonorably from the army, of course. I believe it was in Canada that he served his sentence. After that he returned, I imagine, to the kind of life where he belonged.”

  He was aware in himself of physical sensations, separate from thought; sickness, or cold, or something of both. His mind, a little dulled by the feeling as in illness, pursued its inquiry. “How did they get on to it? I thought you said the padre was killed?”

  “One has a duty to society. There might have been other women. I informed his commanding officer myself.”

  The cold spread in his body.

  She continued, “I knew where the headquarters was, because—I had once been told. After some trouble in getting there, I had no difficulty in seeing him alone. He knew my name at once, and it turned out that he had been at school with my father. He was so distressed when he knew, that for a moment he couldn’t trust himself to speak. Then he told me that he had always thought O’Connell the worst kind of Temporary Gentleman (that was a term the Regular Army had for people they thought outsiders). If it had been in his power, he said, he would have had him shot. I assured him that all I wanted was ordinary justice, and to protect other people. He said I must leave it all in his hands, and that I could be sure my privacy would be respected. A little later he called at the hospital and told me what was being done. He would have dealt with him, he said, even more quickly, but there had been some delay in tracing him; he was found eventually in the French forward line, where he had no business whate
ver to be. That was typical of him, the Colonel said, and he looked forward to getting a dependable officer in his place. I hope he did; he was a very courteous and charming man.”

  Suddenly, Julian found that the heavy nausea had left him. He was still very cold; but differently, a light empty cold, as if he had been hollowed. Out of this emptiness, which was filled with a vague turning, anything might come.

  He said, his voice suddenly light and clear, “And you never heard of him—O’Connell, I mean—again?”

  “I saw him once, in a sense. You may have seen him, too; but I don’t suppose you were attending.”

  “I saw him? Where?”

  “A year or two ago. In a film, at Cheltenham. There was a thing about Chinese peasants you were anxious to see. It rained, if you remember, and we had to go in early and sit through part of the supporting picture. It was rubbish, as they generally are; a kind of farce about a night club. He was one of the waiters. I knew him at once, although he was very much altered.”

  He said, half aloud, “An extra, in a quota film.”

  “He had probably never had talent,” she said, “except in his own opinion.”

  “It would be hard to know. I mean, he’d find it a little difficult to get started, when the agencies asked him where he’d been. And if he got started, he could never star.”

  “Do you think a man of that kind would have made any good use of success?”

  He lifted his eyes, because he felt, now, strangely protected. “He was a rotter, of course. But I think he loved you.”

  “Loved me? You don’t know the meaning of the words you use. You must always remember that the harm such people do doesn’t always stop short with one generation.”

  In the lightness and the emptiness, he said, “No, I don’t forget that. I see why you felt that both of us ought to die for it.”

  She closed her eyes. But, even now, he could see in her face what it was that her first instinct had flinched from; not the thing he had felt, but the fact that he had expressed it. Suddenly he wondered what he was doing, sitting here on the floor. A bad position to speak from. It felt wrong. He got up; the box of cigarettes was where he had left it, on the arm of the chair. He took one and lit it, neatly and decisively.