Return to Night

by Mary Renault

  In a distant contemplative way, Julian had always approved of Lisa. She was not, therefore, prepared for the caustic response he gave when, one night in her room, she mentioned Lisa’s name. She remembered the night when she had told him about David, and his quiet acceptance of the physical fact. That he might actually become jealous now seemed too fantastic to take seriously.

  “She’s quite amusing, I dare say,” he pursued, “but there can’t really be much point in your seeing so much of each other. I mean, you obviously haven’t much in common. You’re so sincere; and anyone can see she’s the frigid type.”

  “Oh, Julian!”

  “You’ve only got to look at her. Naturally she wouldn’t tell you so. But take it from me, she’s the sort of woman who’d tell you all the time not to disarrange her hair.”

  “Well, darling, perhaps she was just going out when you tackled her. You shouldn’t be put off so easily.”

  Julian ignored this as it deserved. “After all,” he told her, “a man can generally form a fair idea.”

  Hilary peered up at him, from under a protecting fold of sheet. She longed suddenly to call out, “Hold it!” like a producer at a felicitous moment. He looked at her reprovingly; solemn, cocksure, ridiculous, beautiful; she could nave wept for tenderness, even while she held herself rigid to keep the laughter in. The rigidity was the only thing he noticed.

  “Now I’ve annoyed you, I suppose. Well, of course I’ve no right to tell you how to arrange your time.”

  “That is a point, isn’t it?”

  He drew himself away. “At least I never fetched you ten miles on a dark night to tell you how much I like being with other people. Ever since you got thick with this woman you’ve been different to me. You didn’t want to see me the other evening. You keep me like a dog hanging around. That’s her idea of how men ought to be treated, I suppose.”

  “Darling, stop being such an unmitigated ass.”

  “Her husband didn’t stand for it, anyway. I’ve been a fool, I suppose, to let you know I—”

  “Yes?”

  “Oh, shut up,” he said, “and let me alone.”

  This was not the end of the conversation; but the rest was conducted in a different language.

  Afterward, she realized how deeply comforting this silly episode had been, and why. For jealousy is soothing to jealousy, like a homeopathic drug; it is only an irritant to untroubled emotions, or those that are expending themselves elsewhere.

  When she searched her mind, she knew that, always, it was his reticences that she found intolerable. The circumstances themselves, which were partly of her own making, she could have borne. She knew, without the need of explanation, that, all his life, his time had been a blank engagement diary for his mother to fill in, and that it was impossible for him to make any drastic change in this routine without giving a reason. Only too gladly, she would have been understanding about this; only too readily she would have commiserated, if he had only asked for commiseration. What worked upon her was the tormented, impregnable loyalty which was eloquent in his silences. She tried to be reasonable about it, reminding herself that the person who makes one an ally in disloyalty will, sooner or later, transfer one to the receiving end of the process. She had always prided herself on not being possessive. It came as something of a surprise to her to find that reason could be convinced, while leaving the emotions quite untouched. In his absences, she was not only lonely, but solitary in her imagination; seeing him in her mind’s eye engrossed in some familiar concern, more than half content without her. If he came later than he had promised, or found it impossible to get away, the disappointment which had belonged to both of them began to seem wholly her own.

  All this she was revolving in her mind on an evening when she had expected him for tea and he did not come. She had delayed as long as possible ringing for the tray to be taken away, and at last Annie had come unsummoned to collect it. The evening had been carefully cleared; she had no work left to do. Lisa was out to dinner. There was a book in her lap, which she had looked forward to reading; she turned it over, unopened, thinking how the first five chapters would be spoiled by listening for his car, the next five by trying not to listen; while he, probably, after ten minutes’ chagrin, would be making the best of it with a cheerfulness which first he would pretend to and presently feel. She indulged this thought until, in reasonless reaction, she said to herself that he might be ill, he might have crashed his car or been thrown again on one of his stolen rides; all this time when she had been accusing him he might be dead. She saw him lying again on the hospital bed, but this time with the change of color that comes when the blood has stopped. Only his dark hair would be still alive, and warm to the hand; they would brush it smoothly, a little differently from his way of brushing it—

  There was a tap on the French window. She started as if death itself had knocked. The latch turned.

  “Hullo,” said Julian cheerfully. “You look very surprised to see me. I believe you’d forgotten I was coming today.”

  He shut the door behind him, and pushed back his hair with one hand; it had been windy outside. He had on the gray suit he had worn on the first night she had brought him back here.

  “Today? Yes, do you know, I believe I had.”

  “I take a very poor view of that.” He came over; she put up her face with a smile. As if she had expressed everything she felt, she found herself expecting of him some acknowledgment of what she had endured, some compensating violence. He kissed her affectionately, and, deceived by her restraint, let her go. Rumpling her head, he glanced at the cleared table.

  “Haven’t you had tea?” she said. “I thought you would have, by this time.”

  “Well, sort of.” He added, with chastened hope, “But it was rather dainty and refined.”

  A vainer man, she thought, would have noticed the revealing discrepancies in what she had said. Or had he noticed and taken it for granted? There was a wistful, well-behaved look about him. It occurred to her that his attention had simply wandered to the receding prospect of tea.

  “I’ll make you some more.” She went to the cupboard where she kept some tea things of her own. “What a nuisance you are.” She was glad not to look at him; for the first time, she knew what went on in women who made emotional scene.

  “You’re an unfailing angel. Don’t if it’s really a bother. Actually, I’m as empty as a drum. I’ve only had a thimbleful of China tea and a sandwich the size of a bus ticket; women and children first, you know. I got roped in at the last moment, or I’d have been here before.”

  It was still cool enough for an evening fire; she filled the kettle and put the pot to warm. He stood about, going through the motions of being helpful; he was too well-trained to sit down while she worked, though there was nothing for him to do. To feel him just behind her, standing aimlessly at her elbow, went through her like electricity. She could have turned round and struck him.

  “Have a cigarette,” she said.

  “Oh, damn. I bought you a hundred, to make up for my depredations, and I left it behind. Sure you’re not short? It’s a curious thing I’ve noticed, how much better your cigarettes taste than the same brand of anyone else’s.”

  He smiled at her across his burning match. She said, coolly, “It’s probably the sandalwood in the box.” His affection, his charm, his contented imperviousness reached her distorted like images in a heat haze. He was beginning, already, to make a convenience of her, she thought.

  “It’s nice to be here.” He let down his length into a chair by the fire, relaxed, his head tilted back.

  He drew lazily on his cigarette, looking into the fire; she sat back in her chair, stubbornly imitating his ease. Already, restless, she would have liked to get up from her chair; she could get a cigarette; but he would light it for her, and she could not endure him so near. She wished that her will had sharp edges, with which to hurt him.

  “I don’t know what it is,” he said, “but I feel good today.”
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  She got to her feet, and went to the table where the cigarettes were. Over her shoulder she said, “I’m glad; I thought you were perishing of hunger.”

  In the fire, a silky block of coal was jetting a blue-edged flame. Watching it drowsily, he said, “What could be nicer than feeling hungry with half a Dundee cake at your elbow?”

  “Start on it now, the tea won’t be long.” She lit her cigarette quickly, before he looked round.

  “No, I’ll wait now. God, there was a wind up on the Downs today. Makes you sleepy, doesn’t it, coming indoors? I’ll wake up when I have some tea. You look so energetic. Come over here and sit on my knee.”

  He had never asked her this before; she knew he only wanted to complete a vague mood of domestic cosiness. She made an irresolute movement toward him, felt a tremor pass over her, and moved away.

  “No, it would mean such a sordid scramble if the maid came in. I’ve got a new record; would you like to hear it?”

  “Is it very intellectual?”

  “It’s Handel; part of the Water Music.”

  “Just what I feel like.”

  She collected this, delicately, into her private irony, and put the record on. Returning to her chair, she tried to hear it. Julian had shut his eyes. Wholly ignorant of musical structure, and without shame about it, he delivered himself up to the vivid dream pictures which he never pretended not to indulge.

  Hilary, for her part, was recalling the ambitions and the indignations which had seemed important to her a year or two ago. It was as if somebody had repeated to her a very old joke, of which she had only just seen the point. How anxious she had been to prove that she could get an appointment over David’s head! To do this, it had seemed, would prove something or other about women and men. It was excruciatingly funny to think she might have got it—or the presidency of the College of Surgeons, for that matter—only to find herself exactly where she now was. The hard core for a feminist to bite on had, after all, been something as simple as this. She recalled the times when Julian had arrived to find her sleepy or preoccupied, and the manner in which, quite successfully, he had dealt with the situation. She would have despised him if he had been afraid to try, lest she should think him importunate. Now for the first time it was borne in on her, like a piece of news, that being a woman was a fact about which absolutely nothing could be done. She had spent so long in battle with the nonessentials; the essential had stolen up on her unaware. It had the last word in a long argument. She felt the unshed tears burning her eyelids.

  The gramophone clicked; and, almost at the same moment, the boiling kettle hissed into the fire. She made the tea.

  Julian blinked, sat up, and said, “That was quite something. I got some good ideas from that.”

  “I’ll put on the other side.”

  “No, let’s talk. You know, it suddenly struck me just now, I wonder why no one’s thought of using eighteenth-century Venice as a setting for Othello. Canaletto backcloths and perukes and frightfully elaborate manners—you see how the contrast would throw Othello up? Proud and barbaric and dressed like Byron’s Corsair. He is a bit Byronic, come to think of it. And Iago, of course, would come over perfectly as a man-about-town of the Age of Reason; a sort of Congreve hero’s-friend gone bad. I should rather like to do it.”

  She said vaguely, “Because of the blacking?”

  “Blacking? Oh, Lord, not Othello. Othellos are born, not made. Iago, I mean. I’d never get it, though; too tall. Get landed with Cassio, I suppose. But you know, the drunk scene—”

  “Since I’ve made this tea, you might drink it before it’s cold.”

  “I can’t drink it as hot as you can.” He returned to Othello where he had left off, punctuating his discourse with absentminded mouthfuls of cake. She had enjoyed listening to this kind of thing until today. Now she felt like the tea, stood on one side to cool. He scarcely saw her. She was background music. Julian looked up. “Well, I’ll have to think it out in more detail later. Now tell me what you’ve been doing.”

  But she saw that he had still half his mind in Othello. Looking past him, she said, “Mine’s not so interesting. I’ve only been working; not handing cups of tea to old ladies and thinking what sort of doctor I’d be if I could only make the effort to be one.”

  Julian put his cup slowly down on the table. He had been so unready for it that nothing had had time to show in his face but a jarred questioning, as if at some unexplained physical blow. He studied her face. “You don’t seem to like me very much this evening.”

  “I’m getting a little tired of these pipe dreams, that’s all.”

  He began protestingly, “But how can one help—” then stopped, and looked at her again. In a different voice he said, “You told me once it didn’t bore you. I’ve rather traded on it, I’m afraid. I’m sorry.”

  She felt herself go white with anger. “Don’t try to put me in the wrong. You know it didn’t bore me, as long as I believed in it. If it had the slightest reality, it wouldn’t bore me now. You’re like a child bragging of what it will do when it’s grown-up. Except that a normal child wants to grow up, and you’re afraid to.”

  He continued to look at her, attentive, silent. She perceived that he was absorbing not the content of her words, but simply the fact that she had aimed at inflicting pain. The pause lengthened so unendurably that she began again, “You must see—”

  As if he had not heard, he said, “The point is—what is it that you’re really angry about?”

  She had not foreseen, when she reproached him with childishness, that he would display so promptly the child’s gift for taking an unconscious revenge with an instinctive truth. “Don’t you see,” she said, “that things pile up, and one suddenly reaches a point when one can’t take it any longer?”

  “I know,” he said. “It’s partly because I saw that, that I asked you to marry me straight away.”

  “Yes. You asked me to make myself the talk of the county, simply because you hadn’t any confidence in yourself to hold out when things got difficult.”

  “I suppose it must seem like that to you, now. … I had another reason, too, if you remember.”

  She said impatiently, “Because you’d slept with me, you mean.”

  She saw in his eyes a hurt too deeply felt to be turned outward in reproach. It was misery that drove her on.

  “Yes, very well, you behaved like a gentleman. But we’re living in the twentieth century now; being a gentleman isn’t a career any longer.”

  He got to his feet, pain darkening slowly to anger in his eyes. Driving too deep, she had defeated herself. A moment or two ago, he had looked defensive and ashamed; now, sincerely outraged, and pierced by her desecration, he grew suddenly splendid. He stood, his head up, his mouth closed proudly on his rising anger, his eyes blazing at her; exalted in a passionate sense of wrong.

  She faced him, feeling her breath shorten. If she had been a peasant woman, and able to feel her own nature, she might have released it by a burst of weeping, or by running at him with the kitchen knife. But a long and expensive education had made her slow at understanding very simple things. She allowed her background to interpret for her in its own devious way.

  “It’s no use your trying to look ill-used, Julian. Somebody has to tell you this. If you can put up indefinitely with this lap-dog life. I can’t put up indefinitely with watching you lead it. You can’t afford it, you know. Your looks are against you.”

  Everything stopped. It was as if she had spoken the charm that turns men into stone. Not only motion but color left him. His eyes grew a little lighter, as the iris, opened just now in anger, slowly closed down its gray ring. It was the only thing about him that moved.

  Hilary, watching, did not recognize in herself the peasant woman who had struck her blow, and whose voice protested within her that she had only meant to show him that she hadn’t known the knife was so sharp or that he would lean on it in her hand; that this would turn out in a moment not to have happened at
all. To translate these gestures into the terms of civilization carries its own penalties; one cannot, for relief, scream to the neighbors to come and help, or snatch up a dishcloth to stop the blood.

  A cinder fell into the grate with a light brittle noise. As if it were this which called for some reply, Julian said, with colorless distinctness, “Well, good evening,” and moved toward the glass doors.

  She stood where she was; as it happened, across his path. When he found she did not move, he took her by the arms to put her on one side. Her mind was still in arrears with the situation; but when he touched her, her body, unprompted, made a fierce movement to shake him off. She felt him check in the stride which was to have carried him past her; his hands tightened, pressing her arms against her sides. Furiously she resisted; he shut his teeth and held her motionless. She could feel through her flesh the bones of his fingers against the bone of her arm. Her strength was reduced to complete impotence. This was probably his only purpose, if he had a conscious purpose at all; but it enraged her. With the evenness of controlled hysteria, she said, “Let me go, Julian. Do you hear? Let me go.”

  Unmoved, or unhearing, he stood with his hands locked round her arms. She pretended submission, and, when she felt his grip beginning to slacken, freed one of her arms with a quick jerk. Seeing her about to escape, he snatched her back by throwing his whole arm round her. She lost her head, and began thrusting at him with her clenched hands; leaning back, she found herself looking into his tautened face.

  “I hate you,” whispered the peasant woman, getting through to the surface at last.

  “I know that, damn you,” said Julian from the back of his throat. He brought down his mouth on hers, and held it there.