Return to Night (14 page)

“Well, they had fun with it. I certainly did. Didn’t you?”

“M-mm.” He stretched, and linked his hands behind his head. “You can call it that. It’s a funny thing, it never feels at all that way while it’s going on. Even if nothing goes wrong, and you feel more or less on top of things, I wouldn’t say no, you can’t call it enjoyment, not at the time. More like walking a tightrope, really. And yet, when it’s all over—I wonder—I suppose you wouldn’t have a spare cigarette about you? I didn’t think to bring any.”

She gave it him, wondering for how long he was proposing to settle down. He must surely have things to see to; besides, it was scarcely warmer in the car than outside.

“Of course,” he was saying, “the most hair-raising contretemps were going on practically all the time. Peters had to do some pretty quick thinking when that ladder came down. It was rather good, the way he turned it into a laugh. When I saw him …” And so on. He was, obviously, bursting with gossip of the kind which there would be nobody else to hear. It seemed the crudest heartlessness to turn him away; and she dared not think how little she wanted to. But what was one to do with him?

“Would you like a lift home?” she asked. “I can easily take it in on my way.”

“Thanks very much, but I don’t think just yet—I mean, there are one or two things—I’m keeping you, aren’t I?”

“I’ve nothing to hurry for.” Yes, she should have realized that he could not go home yet. In fact, for the next half-hour or more he had, probably, nowhere in particular to go. It seemed a little hard. But if he was hoping that she would take him home with her (and she suspected increasingly that he was) he would really have to think again. This was deep Gloucestershire, not Oxford at the end of term. People would be talking.

“It feels so odd,” he said wistfully, “just packing up straight away and going home. But they’re like that, here.”

“No party?” she asked, instead of changing the subject as dictated by common sense.

“No party. The aircraft crowd will be fetching up at the Crown, of course; but they’ll be happier on their own. If there were anywhere else, I’d say come and have one with me. I owe you a drink, to put it mildly. But I expect you’re dying to get back to bed.”

“It isn’t as late yet as all that. The heroine looked nicely terrified, I thought. Perhaps her mother told her in time.”

He grinned. “She hadn’t been as near up to my face before. I think it caught her sort of unprepared.”

“It caught me unprepared, if it comes to that. It really was appalling.”

He looked delighted. “That was entirely thanks to you. I’d have been nowhere without that strapping.”

“Julian, a head keeps peering out from that door and then’ vanishing. Do you think they’re looking for you?”

“Oh.” He gathered himself together, reluctantly. “Yes, I suppose I shall have to go in, anyhow, and say good-by to people. And change. After that”—he looked at her ingenuously out of dark-rimmed eyes—“I think I shall go for a long walk.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” She had to laugh; he had done it with such infuriating efficiency, and she could not even tell if he knew it or not. “You’re coming back for some supper with me. Then you can walk home, if you still want to. Or there’s a bicycle you can borrow.”

“That would be
simply
marvelous. But I feel I’m rather planting myself on you. In fact, I know I am.”

“I want to talk to you.” (Odd how one could trip on the moment of decision before one knew one had reached it, like a threshold in the dark.) “How long will you be?”

“Five minutes, inclusive. We’re leaving all the clearing up till tomorrow, and I can finish my face on the way.”

He was back in six, fixing his tie as he came.

As she started the car, he wedged a large tin of grease between his knees, and proceeded to use it with what, considering he had no mirror, seemed creditable efficiency. “Am I respectable?” he asked presently.

“Presentable, anyway. You don’t look very respectable. I think it’s because you’ve left some mascara on.”

“Mascara!” He threw back his head and crowed with laughter. Even when he was unhappy, he remained childishly easy to amuse. “Lord love you, hark at the woman. You want to be careful who you say a thing like that to. Mascara. Well, well.”

“Whatever it is, it’s still there.”

“I only need have done one eye, but I forgot. A bit like blacking yourself all over to play Othello; I must be losing my grip … Anyone would think, to hear me talk, that I was going to be doing this sort of thing for the rest of my life, wouldn’t they? Funny how I even feel, tonight, as if I were.”

“It isn’t funny,” she said. “You know that.”

She heard him draw the swift breath that precedes impetuous speech; but he was silent after all.

“Tell me; what
are
you going to do for the rest of your life?”

He said, with a little smile, “The Lord will provide, I shouldn’t wonder.”

“But is there anything else at all that you want to do, except this?”

He answered at once, simply and flatly, “No.”

The road zigzagged through a village, and she had to give her mind to the car.

“You’re very good at putting up with people,” he said, “aren’t you? I suppose you get plenty of practice. You’ll need it all tonight, if you don’t look out. I get revoltingly garrulous after a show. I’ll wake up normal in the morning; but while it lasts, it’s absolute hell to keep it in.”

“You needn’t; I like shop.”

“You said that as if you meant it. The worst of it is, there isn’t any real shop to talk. Is it true what they say, that people who’ve had a leg off can still feel their toes?”

“Yes, sometimes; why?”

“That’s rather the way I feel.”

“Except that the leg’s still there.”

“That’s worse, in a way.”

They had arrived. A light was showing in Lisa’s window; she must have gone up to bed. The supper she would have left in Hilary’s sitting-room would be—it always was—plenty for two. She went out to get him a plate, and returned to find him stirring the damped-down fire into flame.

“Thank you,” she said. “That’s better. Come and have some food.”

“How did you guess,” he said presently, “that I was as hungry as this? I didn’t. But I am.”

“All that nervous energy. And think of the duel.”

“Let’s not think of the duel, for pity’s sake, if you want me to digest anything.” He applied himself to his plate—he was certainly hungry and in a little while looked up to say reflectively, “You are funny sometimes.”

His personalities always had a disconcerting suddenness that caught her with one foot off the ground. She contented herself with raising an eyebrow at him.

“You love to pretend you get it all out of textbooks, don’t you? I wonder why?”

“I quite often do.”

“Nervous energy!” The rim of black, still drawn along his lashes, gave something spuriously sinister to a charming smile. “All right, have it your own way.”

When they had finished, they went over to the fire. He took the chair opposite hers, and, when she offered him a cigarette, at first refused it and then changed his mind.

“I shouldn’t keep smoking yours. It was funny, my not bringing any. Shows how long it is since I did anything.” He got up to give her a light, and at once settled himself, with the naturalness of old habit, on the rug at her feet.

“Well?” he said.

Now that it had come to the point, she felt quite unready. Weakly temporizing on the brink, she said conversationally, “How long will it be, do you think, before you get another part?”

“Never, I expect.” He said it as if it amused him.

“You don’t believe that.”

“At the moment, no. That doesn’t stop it from being true.”

She put a needless log on the fire, bracing herself.

“Will you be angry if I say something I shouldn’t?”

“There’s nothing you shouldn’t.” He leaned back against the chair beside her, his hands clasped round his knees. “Go on. I should like you to, even though it isn’t any use.”

“What do you think it is? That you can act? I’ve told you so, and in any case my opinion’s worth nothing compared with others you’ve had before. It’s much more difficult than that.”

“Even so, it probably isn’t as simple as you think.”

“It’s never simple. It wasn’t simple for me.”

“For you?” He looked up at her in a kind of blank wonder. She had seen the look before, when she had made some (it had seemed to her) ordinary statement about her life or background; almost, she had thought, as if he expected her to have emerged from a vacuum. It always vaguely troubled her.

“Why not for me? It happens to scores of people. Yes, getting my people to let me train took me more than a year. I spent years wanting to be the sort of person they needed me to have been, but it wasn’t any use. And they weren’t selfish; if I’d wanted to get married, or take up music, or teach, they’d have made no trouble, I know. But they were middle-aged when I was born, and medicine was more than they could swallow; they belonged to the generation that talked about the New Woman, if you know what that means.”

“I know my Shaw. Go on.”

“Being fond of them, I could see it as they did, too. That doesn’t help. But this is the point: that even the best people don’t always know what it is they’re asking for. If they did, they wouldn’t ask it. They thought I only needed weaning from this silly idea, to give them a nice home-loving girl about the place. I knew that all they’d get would be a slowly decaying corpse. They wouldn’t really have liked it, when it came to the point. So in the end, I went.”

“Were you unhappy about it?”

“Yes, very, for quite a while.”

“What a shame.” He turned and stroked her knee. It was a caress entirely without sexual suggestion; a woman or a child could have made it. “You were right, of course. One can see the results.”

“The result is that I’m a second-rate surgeon. I’m only alive instead of dead. And you may be a second-rate actor, for all I can be sure of. But you see why I asked you not to be angry, don’t you?”

“I’m not angry.”

“Well?”

“You see—I don’t know what it is, one could cope better if one did. I tell you, she has a thing about it. She—thinks I’d go to the bad in some way: she doesn’t say so but I know. It’s impossible even to begin to talk to her about it. I have an idea why, but—well, I can’t start about that now. Anyhow, I honestly think it would kill her, or crack her up in some way, if I went on the stage.”

“My dear,” she said as gently as she could, “believe me, people don’t die so easily.”

He looked into the fire. “Perhaps not; if one could afford to try it out. You see, I’m very fond of her.”

“Of course,” she said quickly. “Of course, I know.” She had spoken as people make, sometimes, a swift movement to escape from a stab of pain. What she felt humiliated, it even frightened, her; she threw her will against it. “But it’s amazing, you know, how family pride will react to a little success. When I’d no more than passed my first M.B., my father was running round informing everyone to boring-point, poor dear. I think you’d find that the first-time you played lead, and got a good notice or two, it would be the same.”

“No. There you couldn’t be more wrong.” His voice had a certainty that asked not to be questioned; she did not question it. Presently he said, “Besides, I very much doubt whether, professionally, I’d stand a chance.”

This made her angry. “That’s an excuse you make to yourself. You must know that as well as I do. You should face the real issue, at least.”

“You mean that nicely, I know.” He spoke with a kindness that had unconscious dignity, and made her feel more rebuked than protest would have done. “I think you’ll believe me if I explain. If you’re going to take the stage seriously, the only-way to start is in rep. You can’t pick and choose your parts there; that’s just why it’s good training. You don’t get typed; anyhow, not much before you’re forty. They’re not going to take anyone my age to do character stuff all the time.”

“I suppose not; why should they? What you want is an all round training.”

“They don’t take people to train from the bottom, you know. They take them to act.”

“But I don’t—You’re not trying to tell me, are you, that you
can
only act character parts?”

“Yes, I am.”

“But, Julian,
why?
”

“I’ve never done anything else.” His face was growing closed and withdrawn.

“But—it’s absurd. You—you don’t look peculiar, or deformed. You’ve a good voice, you’ve no eccentric mannerisms. Why on earth shouldn’t you play straight parts? They must be much easier than what you’ve done. What’s to stop you?”

“I don’t know.” His mouth was as obstinate, now, as a lying child’s. “I just have a thing about it.”

“But you took Oberon and did very well.”

“That’s not a straight part. Oberon’s nonhuman.”

“And there was—” But she remembered his oddness over the photograph, and something warned her to hold her peace. “Well, perhaps you have got a thing, or whatever you call it. But then it matters all the more to do something about it. For its own sake, I mean. People can’t let their lives be governed by irrational phobias.”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “It’s easy to talk.”

A display of resentment would have shaken her far less than the unsuspected reserve of bitterness from which he spoke. Somehow she had succeeded in really hurting him. She could see it would be wasting her time to ask him why.

“Never mind,” she said, smiling. “You’ll wake up one morning, sometime, and wonder what it was all about.”

“That will be very nice.”

He was perfectly polite. With a humility she had rarely shown to anyone, she said, “I’m sorry. I’m just being tiresome and interfering. I only said all this because I thought you were good tonight; better than I’ve said. Now I’ve spoiled it, haven’t I, preaching and nagging and carrying on?”

“Of course you haven’t.” He seemed to come out of himself and turned to her a face grown, in a moment, anxious and eager. “Please don’t think anything like that.” With impulsive swiftness he leaned up to her, and threw his arm across her knees. Now as before, there was no more in it than the coaxing gesture of a young boy. It made her feel restless, irritable, and unsettled; she could almost have drawn away, but found that her hand was on his shoulder instead. He tucked himself more comfortably round her, giving her a little squeeze. “I’m not taking offense, I told you I wouldn’t. As far as that goes, I had a pretty good idea beforehand what you’d be likely to say.”