by Mary Renault
“Well, Mother, thank you for telling me all this.” In a recess of his mind, something stored away the sense of timing which the cigarette gave. “I’m sorry. It must have been a pretty depressing job for you all these years, trying to lick me into a gentleman. I wish I could have done more about it. But I’m afraid what’s come out, in the end, is just another cad of an actor.”
She sat upright in her chair.
“Yes,” she said. “Unfortunately, you seem to be right.”
He looked toward the curtains which had beckoned him some time ago, and, through them, reached for the handle of the garden door. When he set it ajar, he felt on his forehead a cool drift of rain. Out there the air was sweet and cold, and almost entirely dark. In a moment, he thought. He paused, holding the brown velvet open with one hand.
“Canadian Irish. And French you said, didn’t you. Not one of the old Quebec families, I take it. If you should happen to Know at all, had he got the Indian strain?”
The heavy curtains framed him, as if he were taking a curtain call. She pressed her pale, fine-edged lips together, and tilted her head.
“I have no idea, and I feel sure he had none either.” Her eyes traveled, in what seemed a detached surmise, over the tall young man holding, between the curtains, the easy-seeming, perfectly effective pose. Presently she added, “He was very dark.”
Julian considered this, holding the curtain steady in its folds. “I see. Well, never mind. It wouldn’t really matter, apart from getting married. One feels one should give people some idea—Oh, of course, that was what I started out to tell you. I’m going to marry Hilary Mansell. But you won’t mind about that, now.”
The little heap of green slid from her lap as she rose to her feet. “I think you must be mad. We know nobody of that name.”
“That’s all right, Mother. I mean who you think I do.” He was about to go, but stopped to add, “Of course, now, I shall have to ask her again. I’d rather, for one thing, be living on money that’s really mine, as soon as I can make any. The great thing, I suppose, is to stay out of jail. Well, that seems to be—everything. I think I’ll just go out for a bit. Good night.”
Chapter Nineteen: INTO THE LIGHT
“YES,” SAID HILARY IN TO the telephone. “Yes, nurse. Quite right. Carry on as you are doing. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
She hung up, and went for her bag. This, she thought with a misery too deep for bitterness, was the first night call she had had for a fortnight. Even so, it might have been something that would have let her be back here in half an hour. But it was an obstructed labor. She might be gone half the night. Half-past eleven. After all, he had said that he might not come. Of all human selfishness, she thought, the wish to be depended on is the most insidious. Going out to the garage, she said to herself for the third time that if he were coming, by now he would be here. It was raining, beside.
She was on the road when the thought she had been trying to shut broke through her resistance; all the other times his resolution had been fixed, the nights when it was to have been tomorrow. They rose up like a procession of ghosts against the flow of the road into the headlamps. In the end, the only exorcism strong enough to lay them was the thought of the woman to whom she was going.
From the sloping lamplit room three children had been expelled, along with the man who was trying forlornly to make them comfortable on the kitchen floor and to invent for them explanations of why they were there. She went upstairs, where the nurse was craning after her from the door.
She was there two hours, and in the end lost neither the mother nor the child. One part of her mind was directing her hands through a matter of anatomy and mechanics; another part was with the unknown creature she was trying to free, which seemed to resist life more passionately than many she had known had resisted death. We ought to thank God, she said to herself, that none of us remember.
It was a boy. When at last she had brought it forth, it would not breathe; she had to go through the whole routine, the slapping, the swinging, the alternate hot and cold, before with a despairing wail it submitted to existence.
When she got back, there was a light in the hall.
It was foolish that her heart should stop and pound at the sight of it. It was late; but Lisa, who slept uncertainly, sometimes went down for something hot to drink. It will only be that, thought Hilary as she walked to the door.
Yes, she thought; it’s all right after all, Lisa couldn’t sleep. For there was Lisa to prove it, sitting in a dressing-gown by the warm ashes of the fire, with a cup beside her. Her heart settled again.
“My dear, are you having a bad night? Let me give you something.”
Lisa got up. “No, I’m all right. But I thought I’d better see you before you went to bed.” She seemed to hesitate. “Julian Fleming was here. About twenty minutes after you left. I—rather thought that perhaps he wasn’t well again.”
Hilary put down her bag.
“Don’t worry, my dear,” said Lisa quickly. “I mean, not about me. It was no trouble. I hadn’t gone to bed.”
In a dreamlike numbness, Hilary comprehended all that the words and the voice contained. There was no time, now, to wonder how long Lisa had known, and how much forgiven, or felt not to need forgiveness. She only said, “Lisa, I’m terribly sorry. Did he leave any message?”
“No. That was really what worried me.” She spoke without embarrassment, only with concern. “I was just starting to undress when I heard something. I thought it might be you coming in, and that I’d see if you’d have some Ovaltine, or anything, because of the rain. So I went into your sitting-room, and he was standing there. He was wearing a dinner jacket and no coat, and I think he must have walked here like that. He looked like it, and I hadn’t heard the car. When I came in he looked round vaguely and said, ‘Oh, excuse me,’ as if he’d never seen me before. I asked him if he wouldn’t like a drink, or to dry his jacket while he was waiting, but I don’t think he took it in. He said something about having just looked in and that he was sorry, and simply went, before I could stop him. I wish I’d let him alone. It’s been worrying me ever since.” She looked at Hilary, and added with one of her quick impulses of protection, “It was just that I thought perhaps he wanted something for his head, because of having hurt it last year. if so, of course he’d have come to you.”
“Lisa, I ought to have told you—”
“My dear, of course you oughtn’t. Whatever you mean. Let’s not bother with all that now. All I’ve been wondering was whether you knew anywhere he might have gone. I just had the feeling it might be better if he had somebody with him.”
“He’ll probably have gone home to bed by now. There’s so much I ought to be saying to you. You know, Lisa, this isn’t the first time he’s been here. I ought—”
“My dear, please. If it’s that—I’ve thought so often, since I met Rupert, suppose I’d been married to someone else when he came. It gives me a point of view. … Hilary, if I were you, I think I’d go. I don’t think he ought to be alone.”
“I’ll go.” It was not till after she had spoken that the fear which had been accumulating under the surface of her mind drenched coldly over her. “Yes. I’ll go now.”
As she went, she heard Lisa’s voice behind her saying, “If you find him, bring him back here. I’ll keep Annie away.”
When she was driving, she had a few moments’ panic uncertainty whether she could remember the way. The concentration needed, the use of the map, were a kind of comfort while they lasted, pinning down her mind. After that was settled, she tried to think of Lisa again; but her thoughts took color from her own formless dread, so that Lisa too seemed to carry some shadow of fatality, and she imagined the coming child destroying her, as the child she had delivered tonight had nearly destroyed the mother to whom it had clung. She rid herself quickly of the thought, rating herself for hysteria. Two years later, she was to remember the half-prescience which had sprung from the memory of Lisa’s exalted face. Lisa,
in the end, was to accomplish both her wishes: the child, and the reconciliation of her own and Rupert’s irreconcilable lives. After no foothold was left in Europe even for the war reporters. Rupert came home to London, and Lisa to Rupert. No more decisions confronted them. In one of those hotel rooms, about whose recurrence in their story Lisa used to laugh, everything was settled for them while they slept. The little girl, kept in the country for safety, was left to resolve in herself two elements so perversely formed to attract but never to combine.
Hilary drove on. By now he had had time to be home, and, worn out, was probably fast asleep. She would be ashamed, when they met, to tell him about this wild-goose chase, which even he would think absurd. One was impressed by Lisa because of her habit of understatement; but pregnant women were unstable, Lisa herself had confessed to nerve storms in the past. Julian had looked, as sometimes before, disturbed and wretched; Lisa had been tired, and imagined the rest. Another and more concrete thought came when she was half way. By the time he could have reached the place—and, walking, he could barely be there yet—everyone would have been in bed for hours. The door was padlocked, he could not get in. This seemed so conclusive that she was easing the accelerator, and looking for a place to turn back, when stray memories came to her of other small country show places, and the procedure when one went for the key. Four times out of five, its custodian unhooked it from somewhere in the front porch. She cast her mind back to the day when he had brought her there, and had talked to the woman at the door. There had been no moment of the time when he had been left waiting alone. Her foot went down on the pedal again.
She had forgotten that, unless the farm was to be roused, she must walk the last part of the way, and was already almost too near for safety when it occurred to her. She parked on a grass verge, and was thankful for the big garage torch which after her last call she had left in the car. Shading it carefully, she crossed the yard. She was tempted to look in the porch, for, if the key were hanging there, she could save herself the rest; but she was thankful not to have risked it when, as she was climbing the gate, a dog barked and leaped on its chain. Her skirt had torn on a nail. She hurried on into the field; the track faded into ruts, and faded away. All she would have to guide her now was the outline of the hill; and she could see nothing beyond the circle of her torch. Putting it out, she stood still, sensitizing her eyes to the darkness, and at last something was visible against the thick starless sky. She had her direction, and was about to switch on the torch again, when she was aware of something more: a fine flaw in the blackness, the shape of an inverted L. Then she knew what it was: the edge of a door ajar, thrown up by a light beyond.
She ran toward it, stumbling through muck and puddles. But after all this haste, when at last she reached the door she stood still; breathless already, she was almost choked with fear. Even with Julian, in full day, the cave had frightened her; she had had no time to think what it would be to enter it now alone. Suddenly she thought that it might not be he; anyone might be there, for any purpose, crime, or some obscene assignation. Nothing that happened here, at this hour, could fail to be horrible. Quieting her breath, she listened, but there was only the silence she remembered, more powerful than any sound. She was beginning to feel sick, and could trust herself to delay no longer. Flattening herself to leave the rusty hinges unstirred, she went in.
As she squeezed through the narrow fissure at the ladder’s foot, she told herself, This is the worst, it will be better beyond. It was longer than she had thought; her head and chest felt compressed and there was a bursting pulse in her throat. The passage bent; she was through, she drew breath and looked.
But the first chamber of the cave was empty; and, beyond the pillar, all that was visible was empty too.
She would look for a moment at the floor. For a focus, she shone the torch there. In the center of its circle, something dark stood out on a surface of naked rock; the print of a man’s wet shoe with a fresh cake of mud.
Snapping off the torch, she walked forward. The prints petered out quickly, dried in the dust; but she went steadily on toward the dividing arch, her own feet silent, for she had on shoes wedged with thick sponge crepe. She could not bring herself to call or even to speak. It was fear of the echo, partly; but much more it was the fear that only the echo would answer.
Reaching the arch, she paused again. When she could look, she felt a confused mingling of relief and fear; fear of the solitude, and relief because this part too was empty. She could see everything, now, except the few feet still hidden from her by the screen of stalactites and the rock beyond them which Julian called the Chair. He must have come and gone, leaving the lights forgotten. She was about to turn and face the journey back to the passage; but she did not move. She was not conscious of hearing any sound, except the thud of lime-laden water. She simply knew that she was not alone.
Still she could not make herself go forward, but stood with one hand pressed on the pillar where the light switches were. It was he who moved, rising to his feet out of the hidden space where, since first she entered, he must have been. He did not see her; and when she would have spoken, her voice was held, for the thought had visited her that if she called to him he still would not see. In the yellow downward glimmer, he looked like the dead. He was mud-plashed to the knees, his hair and clothes sodden, his collar pulped to a rag, and open; he must just have loosened it, for she could see the tie he had taken off dangling from his hand. As she looked he let it fall, then, seeming to reflect, picked it up again and stuffed it in a pocket. He Walked on, away from her, till he was stopped by the edge of the pool, and stood there, looking down.
She was still gathering herself to speak, for his face made her more afraid than the cave had done, when he stepped back a few paces from the water, and she saw his arm move. She thought he was taking something from his breast pocket, a handkerchief perhaps; he was half turned from her, so that she could not clearly see; but now she realized that he had made the sign of the cross. When he knelt, she thought that it was to pray, and that she would wait, now, till he rose, and pretend she had not seen and had only that moment come. But his prayers were said, it seemed; he was taking off his shoes.
It had needed this to make her understand. Even now that she saw, she stood helplessly frozen, for he was far enough away to be, perhaps, already beyond her reach. If she startled him, he might not wait for her, so near to the promise of the last darkness which had become for him the promise of the first. After the final rejection, the final return.
There would be no time to overtake him, either on his way, or after, when a running dive had carried him into the covered water under the rock. He stood for a moment with his shoes in his hand, then pushed them deliberately into the pockets of his jacket, and began to strip it off. Suddenly she knew the only thing that was left to do, with any certainty of checking him. Reaching up to the switches just above her head, she put out the light.
She heard the wet thud of his weighted coat on the ground, then stillness. It was all clear to her now. She crossed quickly to the throne of rock, while she still remembered distance and direction; groped, felt it under her hand, and sat down.
“Julian,” she called softly. “Julian.”
She heard him move; but so slightly that she could not tell which way he was going, and a terror seized her that, in his familiarity with the place, the darkness might be no hindrance to him. Forcing her voice into control, she said again, “Julian. Come here to me.”
As she ended the last word, one of his hands brushed her. She reached out for him, and would have risen; but already his head and arms were on her knees.
The cold of his body horrified her; he might have been already drowned. As once before, she gathered the edge of her coat round him; but when it touched him, he began to tremble so violently that it slid away. She took him in her arms, and lifted his head. He began to speak; she could hardly hear, because his teeth were chattering. “I didn’t know I’d done it.”
; “Darling. You’re here with me.”
He put up a hand to touch her face and dress; then clung to her, silently. After a few moments he whispered, “Oh God. I’m so cold.”
“Dear, I know.” She covered him with the coat again. “You must come home now. You’ve, been out too long. You’re tired. You must have a hot bath, and a drink, and come to bed.”
He shook his head. His voice muffled in her breast, he was trying to tell her something. She could hear less than half he said. It told her, however, as much as for the present she needed to know. She held him closer, thinking not so much of what she had learned as of what she must do for him; that there was a rug in the car, and the flask of coffee which she had not had tonight, that she must put on the bedroom fire, or perhaps Lisa would have done it already. While her mind ran on these things, she murmured over him without much thought of what she said, the kind of foolishness she had indulged sometimes while he slept. “My dearest boy,” she whispered, “my beloved, my beautiful.”
He made a sudden violent sound; it was like something tearing in him. Pulling his face away from her, he pressed it into his arm. The sound came again, muffled; she could tell that he had shut his teeth on the flesh. She felt painfully helpless. The nurses used to say to women, “Have a good cry, dear; it will make you feel better.” But though she had heard men groan often, and had once heard a man scream, she had never heard one cry, and found that she did not know whether it made them feel better or not. Judging by what she had just heard, it seemed unlikely. “There, my darling,” she said uncertainly; “you’re tired and cold. You’re not well. I’ll take you home.”