Return to Night: A Novel

by Mary Renault

  He put up his hand. “It seems to be all in one piece. One doesn’t feel it much at the time, of course.”

  “I’ll take a look at you, when you’ve cleaned off some of that revolting mess.”

  “Is it as bad as all that?” There could be no mistake this time; his voice was positively lighthearted.

  “Seeing that you’re barely recognizable now, I feel quite curious to know what you’ll look like by tomorrow morning.”

  This was an exaggeration, and she wondered afterward what made her say it. But the effect was instantaneous. Ted’s ministrations had included nearly everything except a split lip, so that the mouth still had that expressiveness which one generally missed because the eyes had more. She saw it relax, simply and involuntarily, into a firm and peaceful line. A new confidence stamped it, a look of grave but carefree release. He remarked, conversationally, “Bad show. It’s a good job we’re here and you haven’t got to be seen about with me, isn’t it?”

  They had come to a wrought-iron gate in a stone wall. He opened it for her, and they went on into a kitchen garden, along an old mossy path between currant and gooseberry bushes. She scarcely noticed where they were, being too much filled with her own preoccupations. In spite of all that she had known before, she hardly found it credible that the hatred of his own beauty could have entered him as deeply as this. It shocked her, and, joining with the rest of her concern for him, made her weapons useless in her hands. She said, trying to escape from it on to her own ground, “I hope you’ve got some kind of antiseptic in the house.”

  “Oh, yes; we’ve got a bottle of iodine somewhere.”

  “Iodine!” she said disgustedly.

  “Why, is it out of fashion, or something?”

  “It’s better than nothing, I suppose.”

  “Well, here we are. You don’t mind coming in by the back door, do you? Are you going to clean me first and spank me afterward, or the other way round?”

  This passed all bounds. He was not even looking to see how she took it, merely accompanying it with a brief, affectionate, one-eyed smile. She maintained a frigid silence. He lifted a hand to the stone sill over the porch, searching, among the moss and stonecrop, for the hidden key. His streaked face, upturned to the faint light, looked suddenly remote and self-contained. She found herself saying, “You won’t need any spanking when you’ve had iodine on that cut, I should think. I ought to have taken you to the surgery.”

  He slid the big iron key into the lock; the green-painted door swung back.

  “It only wants a bit of strapping. I’ve still got some that you gave me for the play.” He clicked on the switch, and stood back to let her enter.

  “Would you mind awfully,” he said, “if I got the surface muck off in the scullery? Because if I use the bathroom, I’m liable to make a bad job of the clearing up, whereas here they’ll only think it’s off a bit of meat.”

  He opened another door, and they went into a big placid room in which everything had been cleaned and covered and stowed away. A huge stone sink stood under the window. He ran the cold tap.

  “Take your coat off first; it’s bad enough already.”

  He did so, following it up, stiffly, with his pullover and tie. “Do you mind if I go on using your handkerchief? I’m afraid it’s done for anyway; I’ll get you another.”

  “Give it to me, you can’t see what you’re doing. I don’t want water swamped all over the cut; it neutralizes the iodine.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “Filthy job for you, I’m afraid.” But he submitted comfortably and easily in her hands.

  “Am I hurting you?” she asked, as she removed the caked blood from his eyelid.

  “Not much. You can do it harder than that if you like.” He inclined his head, with both eyes trustfully closed. She knew that she must be hurting him a good deal: the eyelid was so swollen already that she had to force it open to examine the eye, which seemed uninjured. The cut, when she had cleaned it, turned out to be worse than she had thought.

  “You know,” she said, “this ought to have a stitch in it. I think we’ll have to go to the surgery, after all. If it’s not pulled together I think it will leave a scar.”

  “Oh, is that all? Don’t bother, then; it isn’t worth it. It can’t leave anything that greasepaint wouldn’t cover, surely?”

  “Julian,” she said sharply, “do be realistic. We’re not discussing a stage property; I’m talking about your face.”

  “I am being realistic.” His mouth had hardened. “There’s no need to bother, thanks very much.”

  “But, my dear, you—” No, she thought. Why should I! He’ll only think me a fool. “Oh, very well. If you want to go about decorated like a Prussian junker, it’s your affair. You’ll be sorry, in a few years. Besides, I don’t like being responsible for botched work.”

  “Don’t be cross,” he said, with unexpected gentleness.

  “I’m more than cross.” She tried to infuse conviction into this, but found that she had to look away. He opened an immaculately tidy drawer, produced a clean folded glass-cloth, and dried himself with it.

  There was a cracked square of mirror on the window sill, left there by a maid. He peered in.

  “Interesting,” he murmured. “How long will it last?”

  “I should say it’s hardly started yet. You may be semi-presentable at the end of a week. I hope your friends in London are unconventional.”

  “My—? Oh, yes, I see what you mean. Well, I needn’t—I’ll have to think about that later. Look here, if you’re really going to stick a bit of something on this, the first-aid kit is in my room. Would you mind coming up?”

  “Very well,” said Hilary with professional calm.

  He picked up his coat and eased himself into it with an awkwardness which made her realize that he must have strained a shoulder muscle; he attempted neither the pullover nor the tie. “You have to have something handy, if you’re producing a show with any kind of swordplay. Funny things can happen, even when people know how to fence.”

  He looked, as always when he was on this ground, suddenly adult, responsible, and self-assured.

  She gave it up, and smiled at him. “Tell me you’re sorry for behaving so badly.”

  “I have.” He smiled back at her. “But I will again.”

  “It was so undignified to provoke the man like that.”

  “How would you have liked me to provoke him?” He dropped his hand on an invisible sword hilt, his gesture evoking faultlessly a costume and a scene, and declaimed with ringing clarity:

  “Two stars hold not their motion in one sphere, Nor can one England brook a double reign Of Harry Percy and the Prince of Wales.”

  The comic effect was irresistible, and, though she knew he had played for it, she could not keep from laughing. “I thought that play was a bête noire of yours.”

  “It seems to have worn off. Well, shall we go?”

  They went back into the stone passage, through a baize door, and into the hall. Taken by surprise in its solitude, the place looked different, intimate and vulnerable, deserted by a protecting power. Through a half-open door into the drawingroom she could glimpse the red-braided holland dust sheets that covered everything.

  Upstairs a crimson-carpeted passage, with a broad square-paned Georgian window at each end, ran between cream-painted doors with old hanging handles of pale brass. The last of the cream doors stood half open; he put on the light, and stepped back.

  “Do come in. It’s tidy for once, they did it out this morning.”

  It was a big square room, paneled like the passage in cream, and furnished uncompromisingly as a bedroom in solid Edwardian mahogany, with dull, correct hunting-prints on the walls; a man’s room in the best taste of thirty years before. Indefinably, but unmistakably, it had the curious half-empty pathos of a man’s room that is occupied by a boy. The few personal things—books in a shelved recess, a couple of foils on a bracket, an empty leather pajama case on the dark crimson bed—had th
at air of apology and incongruity, of being there on sufferance provided that they continued to behave. Like a boy’s room well looked after, it was coldly and scentlessly clean; the air, untinged with tobacco or hair cream or hoarded dust-collecting junk, smelled faintly of fresh linen.

  “Somewhere in here, I think.” He opened a drawer in the dressing-table, and, as he rummaged, her eyes wandered again. On the mantelshelf was a photograph in a wide silver frame. The face and the fashion belonged to twenty years ago; but even in the house of a stranger she would have known at once who it was. The shoulders were draped with some softly-falling stuff; gauze filters had been used to frame the portrait in a nimbus of mist; the fair hair, wavy and soft, was pressed down over the forehead with a velvet band. The faint drawing of the features belonged to a time when there were two sorts of women, and make-up was only used by the second. The face had the fashionable softness of the time, the rounded edges, the lips half parted in a dreaming sweetness, the downcast eyes. It was all very gentle, and yet in the gentleness itself there seemed something inflexible; as if this face would always refuse and resist any strong expression—anger, passion, laughter, or violent grief—and would punish their invasion unforgivingly. It was also the face of a contemporary beauty; but so swiftly do fashions in faces change that she realized this fact last of all. What struck her most forcibly was the complete harmony of the picture with its setting; as if it were to this face, not to its tenant, that the room belonged.

  “How’s this for equipment?” Julian had brought forth two paper packages marked with large red crosses, and the black japanned make-up box; the smell of greasepaint, as he lifted the lid, seemed so out of place as to be a little outrageous. He found the roll of strapping and put it beside the packages. Stooping had made the cut on his forehead begin to bleed again.

  “Splendid,” she said. “Can I wash my hands?”

  She had meant the request in its most literal sense, as a preliminary to the dressing; but he apologized profusely, and led her round to a spruce Victorian room with everything encased in mahogany and brass taps polished like gold. He snatched the iodine from a wall cupboard, muttered, “Here and next door,” and hastened off.

  When she came back he had arranged the iodine, and a pair of scissors, along with the dressings.

  “You’d better sit down,” she said. “I can’t reach you up there. Here, under the light.”

  He pulled forward one of the stiff-backed chairs, and she uncorked the iodine.

  “This will hurt horribly. Are you sure you haven’t anything else? Flavine, or Dettol, or anything?”

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I’m not a baby.” He settled himself, his face turned up to her, his hands on his knees.

  It was a ragged cut; she had to open it farther to make sure that the antiseptic should do its work, before pulling it together with the strapping. He bore it all with great equanimity, and, during the last part of the process, remarked that the Matron had always used iodine at school.

  “She would,” said Hilary, fixing the pad of gauze in place. She pulled the strapping tight, and pressed her palms against the ends for the warmth to make them sticky.

  “We called her Mata Hari, I forget why. She used to buy me ice cream, though, when I crocked my knee. … Don’t go away, I want to tell you something.”

  He stood up so suddenly that, poised forward over him, she almost lost her balance and to regain it caught instinctively at his arms. They went firmly round her. There was a smell of iodine near her face. His lips brushed her cheek, and, with sudden decision, closed on her mouth.

  He had succeeded, in spite of everything, in taking her utterly by surprise. Before her mind had dealt at all with the situation, she had returned his kiss. Next moment she tried to free herself; but, using his height to the best advantage, he simply swayed her off her balance again. She hung there, helpless, clinging to him for support. He looked down at her face, laughed, and kissed her again.

  “Julian!” Her voice was a pale ghost of indignation, mocking her. He tightened his arms, so that she was resting on her feet again; but already it was unbearable to let him go.

  “I always have,” he said. “I always shall. You know that. No, be quiet. What’s the use; it’s happened now.”

  “My dear, no, we—”

  “Be quiet, and kiss me. Properly this time.”

  “No, I—” The words died; she felt, with defiant joy, the stoop of his shoulders under her disobedient hands.

  “Oh, God,” he said, “why did you keep pretending all this while?”

  “It’s impossible. I shouldn’t have—Dear, let me go.”

  “I shall never do that,” he said, “as long as I live.”

  A strand of black hair was falling down over his bruised eye. His cheekbone and jaw were darkening already; he had the clear thin skin that marks easily. She tried to say something, but her breath caught in her throat instead. With tears in her eyes, she reached her arms up round his neck.

  She had never realized how strong he was; nor, it was pain fully evident, had he. His first embrace had had, in its swift deliberation, something unconsciously theatrical; something learned, like a step in a dance, by sight. Now, suddenly, all this poise had stopped dead. Her physical sensations became a mere protesting consciousness of breathlessness, aching ribs, a crushed mouth, and a crick in the neck. In this moment of acute discomfort, unmixed with pleasure of any kind, a kind of tenderness rose in her, quietly, like a certainty of truth.

  Loosing her a little at last, he said quickly, as if to forestall her before she could speak, “It’s all right. Don’t think about anything; it can’t matter.”

  “Yes, we must.”

  “There’s nothing to think about, I came back here for you. Nobody knows. I’m supposed to be in town. The house is shut up; you saw, of course. When I saw you this afternoon I knew I had to.”

  “Why did you do it? It—it isn’t fair.”

  “Fair? I love you; do you love me?”

  He had spoken abruptly, roughly almost, holding her away. When she looked at him, she knew that whatever she told him, he would accept and believe.

  She looked away. She was one of those people who hold that to lie about the truth of a personal relationship is never justified; she had never lied to David, only kept to herself facts for which he had never asked, and which he would not have understood. Now she would have not only to lie, but to do it well. She tried to think what she would say, but could only remember the naked trust in his face: beside it her own thoughts felt suddenly shabby, and she knew that she had not been thinking, as she had believed, only of him, but of her own image of herself, a competent person with a sense of proportions and life in rein; of what her friends would say if they knew; of how David would laugh.

  “Do you love me?” said Julian again. He shook her a little, as if he supposed that in this brief interval she had forgotten about him, and needed reminding.

  “That’s a terrifying thing to be asked,” she said, trying to smile.

  “I told you,” he said, “without being asked. And I was terrified too, if you want to know.”

  “You’re too clever for me. Yes, I do.”

  “I don’t know why.” He spoke quite quietly. “But I hoped you might, because if you didn’t, nothing would mean anything.” He stood looking at her for a moment or two in silence, then said swiftly, “Well, that’s all right, then. Now kiss me. Really this time.”

  He pulled her back into his arms. She became quite frightened, more for him than on her own behalf. She could have controlled the situation better if he had used his strength deliberately, for mastery. One could deal with greed; this was more like offering hospitality to someone not clearly conscious of starvation. He had the brutality of innocence, of a complete lack of sensual technique; he seemed lost in a bewildered attempt to incorporate her substance in his own. When she could bear it no longer she said, “Darling, you’re rather hurting me.”

  “I’m sorry.” H
e let her go, and looked at her as if he were half dazed. She saw a fine moisture on his temples. “I didn’t know I—I’m sorry.”

  She stroked the hair back from his forehead. He stood without touching her, tense and silent, with closed eyes. “Be still a moment,” she whispered; and, taking his face between her hands, kissed him softly. It was a variation David had taught her; but she did not remember that.

  He stayed, as she had asked, quite still till she had done. Then, not so gently, he returned the kiss. She had scarcely reckoned on so ready a learner, or one who would improve so quickly on her instruction. He shifted his grasp on her abruptly; and at first she did not resist, thinking it an accidental clumsiness which he would notice and correct without being told. But this, she found, was an error of judgment.

  “Julian,” she said quickly, “please let me go.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “That was pretty poor. I meant to do it better. I’m glad you told me off, I should have been spoiling things.” He crossed the room to the door; she thought he was about to go out, but he was unhooking his dressing-gown that hung there. He threw it over his arm, and said, rather awkwardly but without uncertainty, “Knock on the wall when you’re ready. I’ll be next door. Oh, just a minute.” She watched him, speechless, cross to the bed and throw back the red coverlet. “It’s all right. I thought they might have left it without any sheets.”

  He was on his way out. She called him back, in a voice she had difficulty in summoning. Her heart, she discovered, was thudding in her chest as if she were a frightened young girl. “My dear, I’m sorry if—But you really can’t rush to conclusions quite like that.”

  He looked at her inquiringly, then said, without resentment, “When a thing’s going to happen anyway, it ought to happen naturally. Why not?”

  Helplessly aware of talking rubbish in a desperate search for time, she said, “It’s not very good manners, for one thing.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, putting down the dressing-gown carefully on a chair. “I see what you mean. I should have asked you to marry me first, of course. I suppose I thought you’d take that for granted.”