by Mary Renault
“Look,” he said, “I thought we should find something here,” and showed her the first violets in a sheltered dip of the long grass. She said, “How quick of you, dear, I should never have seen them.”
By lunchtime, a few small light clouds were drifting across the sun. But there was still no sign of anything serious; he would chance it, he thought.
“See what’s come for you,” his mother said as they sat down. “The post gets later and later. It’s that new postman; I’m sure he finishes this end so that he can drink at the Crown.”
Julian deplored the postman, excused himself, and slit the thick envelope along the top. He would rather have kept it, but she wouldn’t have liked that. They always opened their letters at the table; it was a nice, sociable custom, she said. He had recognized at a glance the rickety spacing of Chris’s typewriter, and fished inside for the letter, leaving the wad of typescript where it was. So Chris had finished it at last, he thought (carefully concealing his quickened interest); if it shaped up to plan, it ought to amount to something. If only he had managed, this time, to get the hang of speakable dialogue. Chris’s stuff always read well, of course; too well.
“What a fat, intriguing envelope, dear. Is it a catalogue, or what?”
“No, it’s from Chris Tranter. You’ve met him, I think. He came on the barge with us at Eights. Thick, fair man with a square face.”
“Oh, yes. He brought me an ice, but it had melted. I remember he was quite mute until the boats came by, and then gave a perfectly deafening bellow almost in my car.”
“No, that would be Fox. Chris would talk till the race started, and then go to sleep.”
“How odd. Never mind, dear, read his letter and then you can tell me the news.”
Julian skimmed the page; he could read it again later.
… so I haven’t altered the structure, essentially, except to write in a short scene for the brother and the prostitute in Act II, which I think gives the note better for what is coming. The rest is cut pretty near the bone. As I said before, what I principally want from you is to vet the speech rhythms. I’m a hopelessly visual type and shall never cure myself of primarily seeing words. You are almost completely auditory: so just mark the margin against anything you personally would find difficulty in putting over. Thank God I won’t be there to see you trail off with that gluey expression as if you were being choked with bread sauce. By the way, when are you coming to town; surely the component parts’ of your skull are properly gummed up by now? There’s a man I want you to meet because, seriously, if this play gets taken I want to put you forward for Anthony: you’re the only person I shall ever really see in the part. Don’t write back and say you’d rather do Old Ike, because that one’s wearing thin. I presume by this that you have managed to sell the acting idea to your people in some form or another; so unless you are absolutely set on rep., I don’t see …
“I always think it’s so odd of people, don’t you, to type their letters? It seems so unintimate, doesn’t it?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” He returned the sheet unobtrusively to its envelope. “It would be rather a waste of time for Chris not to type his, because no one except Chris would be able to read them.”
“Has he any interesting news?”
“Nothing special. He doesn’t get about very much.”
“He must be tied by his work, I suppose?”
“Sort of. He works quite hard.”
“You’re not very communicative about him, dear. Don’t you like him as much as you did?”
“Oh, yes, of course. Chris is all right. He’s in the Civil Service, actually. The Treasury, I think.”
“That doesn’t sound very exciting. Does he send you all his statistics? The envelope looks thick enough.”
He laughed accommodatingly. “Well, not quite. It’s only something he’s written he wants me to look over.”
“Well, dear, that’s very interesting. Is it novels he writes, or short stories? I should like to read it. Perhaps I should be more impartial than you would, being his friend.”
“I expect you would, really.” He knew that Chris had a violent hoodoo about displaying unaccepted work, and would never have sent it even to him without practical purpose. “I don’t know if you’d care much about it, though. He’s rather leftish and strong-spoken, and there’s a sub-plot that—”
“Well, my dear, I think for anyone of my generation you could call me quite broadminded, don’t you?”
“Oh, of course. I was just thinking that perhaps—”
“I should find it so much more interesting, knowing it was by a friend of yours I had actually met. What is it called?”
“Hungry Harvest.”
“What a queer title. It sounds almost a contradiction, doesn’t it?”
“I suppose that was the idea,”
“Yes, I see. That’s rather clever, isn’t it? You’re not getting on very fast with your lunch, dear, don’t let it get cold. If he wants his novel criticized, I expect he would be quite glad to get two different points of view.”
“Well, there is that.” He kept his mouth full, hoping she would start another subject, but it didn’t work. “The only thing is, it’s not finished, so he might not want it seen.”
“He must think very highly of your opinion, then, mustn’t he? Does he want you to suggest an ending?”
“Not quite that. He just wanted me to say if the dialogue sounded natural.”
She looked at her plate. “If it’s a play he sent you, Julian, why did you tell me all this time that it was a novel?”
“I don’t think I said, particularly.”
“You didn’t correct me, did you? … I should have thought it would have been much better to have sent it to someone connected with the stage.”
“He will, I expect, when he’s finished it.”
“I’m afraid I should be of very little help in criticizing a play. I should never have made such a foolish suggestion, if you had explained to me in the beginning. Now we must really get on with our lunch, or it will be ruined.”
Julian rediscovered the food on his plate, and, to avoid comment, pushed it down. The room itself looked different, and he realized that the sun had gone in again. Everything had been going so well. He wouldn’t be there at teatime. Things must be got right, somehow, before he went.
“Chris keeps trying,” he said casually. “I don’t suppose he’ll do anything with it. But his job’s dull, and it cheers him up to have someone take his stuff seriously. I’ll look it over sometime. he’ll be offended if I don’t.”
“Poor boy.” Her voice was a little warmer already. “Yes, it must be an interest for him. Don’t hurt his feelings about it: one can always find something to praise, can’t one? There’s too much faultfinding in the world, I think.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve had such a nice letter from the Matron of the Cottage Hospital. When people are so appreciative, it’s a pleasure to do anything one can to help. I think some time this week I shall let them have those old bound Punches—they’re rather out of date, but they would pass the time. I expect, for people in bed.”
Julian thought swiftly. The Cottage Hospital was only twenty minutes out of his way; it might simplify things.
“I’ll run them down for you this afternoon, if you like.”
“It’s hardly worth a special journey. One of us is sure to be passing before long.”
“I might as well.”
“The weather looks rather uncertain, or I might come with you, just for the run. What do you think? We could wait a little, and see if it clears.”
He got up, and walked to the window; not because it had not been clearly visible from where he sat.
“It doesn’t look up to much, at the moment.”
“It was beautiful, not long ago. I expect it will change again.”
“We’d probably get a better run tomorrow.”
“There’s the Women’s Institute tomorrow. Today would really be bett
er.”
“I think it’s definitely blowing up for rain.” He recognized the insistence with which she would sometimes pursue a point for no reason but that his response had had some reserve; and he gathered his resources together. For one brief moment, he thought that after all he could ring up and put it off on the grounds that it looked like rain. But if he did, he would feel about her as he was feeling now about Chris. It couldn’t be lived with. No, the thing would just have to be handled with tact. He turned back to the table, smiling.
“Let’s think up something properly organized for tomorrow. Or shall we do something reckless and unpremeditated, to fill you with élan for the W.I.? I tell you what, I’ll wander round this afternoon seeking inspiration, and spring it on you out ol the void? No?” He leaned over the table toward her, making it as persuasive as possible.
“Please don’t be silly, Julian.”
Something shrank in him. He knew the tone, and even the words.
“You have such an exaggerated manner sometimes, dear. I don’t like it; it makes you seem insincere. I’m sure you don’t mean to be, but it’s an affectation, and you know how I hate that. We’ll think about tomorrow when it comes. I think you’re quite right about the weather today; it would probably have been disappointing. Really I have a thousand and one things to see to, and this would be a very good time to get them done.”
She rang for the sweet, and, when the maid had gone again, talked on as if she had still been in the room. That was the worst of all, that she never allowed any crisis, any definition. Punishment would have seemed like forgiveness, rather than this withdrawal which was a reaction of the whole self. The loneliness it left was absolute; there was no appeal because, till the unknown moment of her return, nothing was there to receive appeals.
He said, when they got up, “I don’t think I shall be in to tea”; and would gladly have gone through every anxiety again from the beginning, if she would only have questioned him, or objected, or shown any concern for his comings and goings or for his being at all. She had written him off, for an offense not of word or deed but of his own person; he knew this with the piercing certainty of childhood, whose condition it is to receive effect without cause.
As he would have done after this in any case, he went to the garage to get his car. It was a thin red M.G., which he had bought at Oxford second-hand, but kept in shape with careful servicing. It would still do eighty, on a good road. He chose a good road, though it was out of his way.
The release of speed, the sense of power submitting, without the disturbance of any unknown factor, to his control, gave him a simulacrum, for a while, of peace and freedom and invulnerability. It wouldn’t have lasted; but he remembered that this afternoon it had no need.
It had been an unpremeditated recklessness to ask her. Later, at night, it had seemed inconceivable to have abandoned so much, so lightly, to an almost certainty of wreck. But thinking it over, he had known that it had sometime to be done; and, when it failed, perhaps that would be the best. One could cling to one’s myths too long, and offer them too much power. It would have to go, once it had been made forever impossible by the certain test. He put the thought from him, because he had a car to drive, and because to think even of the impossibility stirred a longing so intolerable that, unless he could succeed in forgetting it, he would arrive with nothing to say.
Chapter Eleven: BETRAYED TO THE DARKNESS
“LOOK.” Hilary pointed through the check curtains of the tea-shop window. “It’s beginning to clear. Cheer up.”
“Is it? Oh, yes. That’s fine. I say, you’re not eating anything. Try one of these things with jam on.”
Hilary looked round. If she had not been troubled for him, she would have reached by now the point of exasperation. She remarked, restrainedly, “No, thank you. I’m still smoking the cigarette you gave me when we finished tea five minutes ago.”
“Oh, good Lord. I’m terribly sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking about.”
“It’s all right,” she said, smiling. “I wasn’t going to ask you.”
“You’re very forgiving.” He roused himself; she could see him struggling back to the fluency with which he had been talking nonsense a few minutes before. “No gentleman ought to think in the presence of a lady. Like spitting. It isn’t done.”
“Don’t consider it. A little accident like thinking can happen to anyone.”
“I feel so badly about dragging you out here in all this rain. I ought to have taken you back to our place. I kept thinking till the last minute it would clear.”
“So it has.”
“Yes, it would now we’ve passed all the views.”
“But that was one of the best parts, being so high and watching the rain come across the valley.”
“You’re terribly good about all this. I should think in actual fact you’ll look back on this afternoon as the year’s high spot in discomfort and boredom.”
“If you lay on the suggestion so powerfully, I probably shall. I thought I was enjoying myself till you began upsetting my ideas.”
“It’s a sense of guilt, really, at having enjoyed it myself.”
“I don’t know whether you’re giving me credit for brilliant deception or yourself for a thick skin. Would you really have enjoyed it if I’d been so bored?”
“Quite honestly, no. But one can’t say, ‘Thanks frightfully for not being bored.’ Or can one?”
“If one must mean it, I don’t see why not.”
He looked at her with a faint smile, and said nothing.
“I don’t mind your thinking,” she told him. “But don’t think at me. That really is annoying.”
“Sorry, of course it must be. But it’s rather fascinating when someone makes a remark that more or less epitomizes them. A sort of heraldic device. ‘I don’t see why not.’ Argent, in a bend gules a scalpel of the first. Crest, a head sutured proper with mantling of the second.”
“Good heavens. Wherever did you pick up all that?”
“Oh, you have to get a smattering, if you do anything about costumes. Otherwise you perpetrate the most awful howlers. I remember one …”
With a little encouragement, he was well away. She listened in quite genuine interest, but in still more relief. She had realized long since that he belonged to a type which mistrusts or fears its own capacity for introspection. Violently extroverted activity would be his solution for all minor forms of internal strain. This afternoon he had talked the hind leg off a donkey, as well as driving within the bare margin of safety until the road surface had begun to compel discretion. If these had failed him, something must be seriously wrong. He had never been distrait in her company before. With an older man, she would very likely have asked what was the matter; but she had no confidence that, if he wished to keep his own counsel, he would know how to do so without embarrassment to them both.
It struck her afresh how urgently his temperament, as well as his abilities, required the outlet of the stage. It would give him extroversion without suppression; how could anyone with a lifetime’s knowledge of him fail to perceive it? No one could, she thought, without self-imposed and deliberate blindness.
“… so I had to go over them all,” he was saying, “with a pot of gold paint, and of course when it came to the time, not a damned one was dry. Everyone …”
I take it all too seriously, she thought, he had a face like a peeled rabbit and no chin. I suppose he could be enduring the agonies of Hamlet, and all I should feel would be guilt at not feeling more, plus a longing to get home. As it is, he only has to look a little absent-minded—when probably it’s nothing at all but a certain embarrassment at having bungled the expedition … Why is one such a fool
“… and it wasn’t till he was starting the big love-scene that I noticed half his nose was gilded …”
Or if he’d only pose a little, she said to herself; or present his profile as if he knew what he was doing; if he would thank one only a little less sincerely for not being bo
red—But the anecdote had come to an end, and it was time to be amused.
“The sun’s definitely shining,” she said presently. “If we’re going to do this cave of yours, don’t you think we ought to get on?”
He looked across at her quickly. “We could do it, easily, before the light goes. But, honestly, do you want to? Are you feeling damp, or cold or anything? Don’t let me just drag you around. If you like, we could go into Cheltenham and see a flick.”
“There are so many films. I’d rather see the cave. Just wait while I tidy up, and we’ll catch this fine spell while it lasts.
When she got back he was waiting for her in the car. He had quietened down in the interval, and presently a steep gradient, full of sharp bends, demanded concentration enough to keep him silent altogether. She made no attempt to develop conversation, because his erratic restlessness appeared to have left him; she noticed that his management of the car had toned down into a rational kind of enterprise which was no doubt his normal style. Presently, however, they came to a clear stretch, and with an air of thoughtful deliberation he began to accelerate. The needle climbed smoothly. It occurred to her that all through the drive she had been very little conscious of his movements, and it was borne in on her, suddenly, that his confidence sprang from a first-class technique. It came as a curiously new thought to her that for a number of things, twenty-three is the prime of life. But, of course, it was the better part of a year since she had first met him; by now he must be twenty-four.
“Why are we going down here?” she asked. “This looks like a private road to a farm.”
“It is. It’s Mott’s Farm. The cave’s on their land. It’s only been discovered about fifty years.” His voice had become brisk and factual. “The story is that one of the young Motts was out rabbiting with a dog, and the rabbit dashed into a hole in the side of the hill, with the dog after it. So the lad brought his father along to help dig out the dog, and after they’d been at it for a bit one side of the hole collapsed inward, and there was the cave. We’ll have to call at the farm for the key. In summer they do a line in conducted tours; but they don’t bother conducting me, I’ve been too often. Here we are. Don’t get out, I shan’t be a moment.”