Return to Night (17 page)

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.

“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
h
is profile as if he knew what he was doing; if he would thank one only a little less sincerely for not being bored—
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.”

He had stopped the car at a five-barred gate. Beyond it was a farmyard. She saw him knock at a green door in a gray house, pause a minute or so in chat, and reappear.

“I’ve brought you one of the Vicar’s leaflets,” he remarked. “Mrs. Mott insisted. Don’t read it now. It’s frightfully informative and bright.”

The lane had degenerated into a track, with a glutinous surface which sucked at the wheels. They bumped and slithered across a couple of fields, and fetched up under the sheer flank of a hill, whose base was stripped and broken as if by the erosion of water. Here and there a thin crust of turf clung to the rock, and it was in the middle of one such surface that the outer arch of the cave, evidently the recent handiwork of man, had been cut away. Within it, a lintel and posts of rough timber enclosed a still rougher door, fastened with a padlock and chain. Julian unlocked it, and swung it back; the hinges, rusty with late disuse and rain, moved with a heavy groan. The sun was declining, and the long blue shadow of the hillside, speaking already of dusk, seemed to make still deeper the blackness within. Peering, Hilary saw that after a few yards the mud-caked rock of the floor disappeared, abruptly, into nothing. She experienced, suddenly, a powerful disinclination to go on.

“It looks a bit like the mouth of Tartarus, doesn’t it?” said Julian contentedly, “till you get a light. It isn’t really very deep; at least, the first part isn’t. Look.”

He reached up to the inner side of the lintel, and a switch clicked. The void ahead became defined in a yellow, melancholic glimmer, rising from the depths. She saw a rickety-looking ladder spanning a ten-foot drop. The cavity was steep, narrow, and evil-looking like the mouth of an oubliette. At its foot, the walls were visible on every side save one, where a boulder partly concealed a fissure in the rock.

“I’ll go first, shall I,” he said, “to steady the ladder? It’s inclined to wobble.” He eased his long limbs down it with effortless grace, and stood waiting for her at the bottom.

Hilary, annoyed by the consciousness that people do not appear at their best in foreshortened views from the bases of ladders, found that she disliked the cave more strongly than ever, but felt also that to let this appear would be not only unkind, but faintly old-maidish. Craning down to look for footholds, she was relieved to see that her escort, though keeping the ladder firmly braced, had modestly averted his eyes. When he turned to hand her down, he looked so full of quiet anticipation that not for anything would she have let him see how much the place oppressed her. They were out of sight of the sky, and only a little reflected light gave a cold blue-grayness to the small patch of roof overhead. There was a chill, wet smell; the smell of limestone. Somewhere out of sight water was dripping, not musically but with a dull smothered thud.

“Through there,” said Julian.

She flattened herself, and edged through the crack behind the boulder. In this still more confined space, a stifling sense of imprisonment pressed on her like a physical weight. Because it was irrational, and she did not approve of irrational fears, she went on with a new determination. A dry little voice in her head, clinical and detached, remarked,
Quite a number of people have subacute claustrophobia.
It was odd, she said to herself, never to have diagnosed her own case before, but really quite interesting.

“Is it as narrow as this all the way?” she asked, turning her head to look for him. He was close behind her, backed to the rock. The question seemed to amuse him; he returned a proprietary smile.

“Go on round the next bend, and you’ll see.”

She rounded a sharp buttress, and realized that the light was coming, now, not from behind but before. The crack widened. She came out into the cave.

It was, she had to admit, an impressive transformation scene. The place must have been twenty feet high, and not much less across. Here and there, along its irregular sides, the lime deposits of millenniums had dripped their characteristic fantasies; petrified cascades, pointed fringes like the beards of dragons, strong rods and thin waisted stems of water-polished stone. Curiosity, and the relief of wider space, pushed into the background the discomfort of her nerves. She went forward, realizing that what she could see was only an unknown fraction of the whole; for the string of electric bulbs stapled into the roof disappeared downward, and evidently continued round a bend.

Do you like it?” said Julian close behind her. He spoke in the half-whisper that people use in an empty church.

“It’s amazing.” She answered in the same voice. “I’d no idea there was anything here on this scale.”

“It’s rather off the track. There are so many showier ones, nearer the big towns. I like this better, myself.”

He looked past her, down the broken perspective of shadow and dim light. His eyes seemed to have deepened and darkened, and in his face was a curious look of remoteness and of rest.

“The lower half is the best,” he said, moving forward. “Mind how you go, it’s uneven here and there.”

Just beyond the bend, the floor sloped sharply, and the arch was divided by a thick pillar of rock. Passing this, she saw beyond her the dark sheen of water. More than half the wide oval of this inner chamber was a pool. Cold and unmoving as its containing stone, it stretched from a saucer shallowness, where the dull light easily found bottom, into impenetrable depth against the rocky wall. It set her mind seeking a phrase: “the dark backward and abysm of time.” It would not have astonished her if from the farther depths a blunt saurian head had reared itself to blink at them with white eyes. She said something of the kind to Julian, who laughed softly.