Return to Night (32 page)

“No. I’m supposed to be over at Tony Blake’s. I rang up from a call box and told him some story. I’ve just been driving about, waiting till I thought you’d be finished.”

Beginning again to say, “Why?” she changed it to “Where?”

“Oh, up and down on the earth. Like Satan, you know. Satan walked, though, didn’t he?” He began searching his pockets; she gave him another cigarette. “I went over Mott’s Farm way.”

“Did you”—she caught sight of his profile, bent over the match, and finished quickly—“see anything interesting?”

“I contemplated the beauties of nature. The esthetic type, you know.”

Hilary got up, and went over to examine a picture on the opposite wall. It consisted of a complete set of cigarette cards depicting British Fresh-Water Fish. Later she could recall several varieties of eel, though at the time she had not been aware of seeing anything at all. She thought, however, as she went back to her chair, it would make as good a subject of conversation as any other. What she said was, “Julian, I can’t stand much of this, and neither can you. Had we better change our minds?”

He had followed her with his eyes across the room, and, when she turned, looked away at his cigarette smoke. Now he said, “What do you mean?” He had made his voice blank; his eyes were those of a man who has evaded arrest for a long time, and feels a hand on his shoulder.

“What I say. I won’t be a burden on anyone’s conscience, least of all on yours. What I think right or wrong doesn’t matter; your mind hasn’t been at rest since this began. I know why; I don’t want you to tell me about it. What matters is that if you come to me with a conviction of sin, we shall never be happy and it can’t last. I’m not willing to go through with it on those terms. Tell me now—you’ve had plenty of time to think—and if that’s how it feels to you, we’ll say good-by. Now, today.”

He got up, and stood looking at her. There was a moment when she thought he was silent from indecision (it was the moment in which he was still trying to realize what she had said); and in this interval, the cold sinking of her heart told her, with merciless point, how much farther she was committed even than she had been aware. But she had trained her face, long ago, not to give her away, and it served her now. Julian was less successful; perhaps he had no such concern. He simply stared at her, his whole mind turned outward from himself.

He said, at last, “I can’t blame you. I expected this.”

“Did you?” she found herself saying. “I didn’t.”

In a voice from which all its characteristic vividness had been bleached away, he said, “Oh, yes. You think I’ve got bad blood In me. I have, of course; you can’t say I didn’t tell you the truth about it.”

“Julian,” she said, bewildered out of her purpose, “what
are
you—” She stopped; the waiter had come in. Julian swung round at him and said, “Two more coffees, please,” with the grand-seigneur manner he adopted when highly wrought. Looking surprised (understandably, thought Hilary, recalling the chicory essence, tinned milk, and tepid water) the waiter retreated.

“I can’t drink it,” she said mechanically. “Julian, are you out of your mind?”

“Not at the moment. You’re trying to put it nicely, of course. But of course I know; I’ve always known. You can’t have a father who’s a swine and a brute, as mine was, without wondering where it’s going to come out in you. You’ve been thinking that, too, haven’t you?”

She could not believe, at first, that it was not a piece of deliberate theater. But a look at him was enough to demolish this theory. His sincerity was alarming.

Collecting herself, she said, “How could you suppose such a thing? You must be mad. One would think your father had been a criminal. If you know as little about him as you say, you’ve no right to speak like that about a man who died as he did.”

“In the war, you mean? That’s sheer sentimentality. Every kind of man died in the war.”

“You don’t know what kind of man he was. You don’t know how people lived then, or what men had to go through. You don’t know any of the circumstances at all.”

“I know the only thing that matters. I hope to God I never know anything more.”

Something in his tone, or his face, arrested her. He was like someone who, stumbling blindly, finds he has crossed a forbidden threshold and that it is too late to step back.

“I think it might be better for you to know.”

“Better?”
There was a discreet tap; the waiter, with two more cups of stagnant coffee. Looking at him with aloof loathing, Julian said, “And the bill, please. Thank you. No change.” The door shut again.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be so bloody rude. Perhaps it would be better to know, for you. On the other hand, I suppose it’s partly because nothing like this has happened to you that you’re the person you are. Not that I’d have you different. But you can’t tell what it’s like to have lived all your life knowing there’s—something, and—and that in any crisis it may come out.”

Hilary saw light. It illuminated much in the past; it left her, in the present, groping more blindly than before.

“But, my dear, this is—Hearing things is bound to be painful, at the time. But there can’t be anything you could hear that—wouldn’t be better for you than this. The war was lettered with broken marriages between quite average people. They had violent experiences apart from one another, and it made them feel separate. It’s part of the general beastliness of war.”

“I’m not talking about average people. I’m—I don’t want to talk about it. Or think about it. Just tell me whether or not you’re through with me. If you are, then I shall know.”

“What will you know?”

He was silent. At this moment, the door burst open, and a mixed party surged into the room, demanding drinks. Julian picked up Hilary’s coat, and in rigid silence helped her into it. They went out.

He stopped the car at random; in an almost pitch-dark field, by a palely weaving stream, they sat on Julian’s coat. Somewhere an invisible horse trod and snorted and tore at grass. Still locked in an almost palpable silence, Julian sat with his arms round his knees. Presently she took one of his hands—it was stone-cold-and held it.

The chill of the ground began to come up through the coat they were on, and the chill of the heavy dew through hers which she had shared with him. She could see no end to it all, only a pendulum swinging, up and down and side to side, in the same rhythm, endless and enclosed. She began to shiver; he gave her the whole of her coat again, and held her tightly, trying to warm her lest she should wish to go. She would have stayed, but the shivering once begun would not be controlled. “You’ll take cold,” he said. “We’d better be getting along.”

“It must be getting late. I ought to go.”

He said without moving, “As well now as later, I suppose. I was just thinking it would be less trouble to die.” Before she could answer, he was getting up.

Lisa was keeping coffee hot for her by the fire. Thankfully, Hilary offered her quota of small talk and petty news. In the midst of it, and without much change of tone, Lisa said, “Tell me, now; if a woman came to you who’d lost two babies in succession, would you call her a fool to be starting another?”

“Oh, not necessarily at all; it would depend on—” She looked up. “My dear, of course not. I always said that. I’m terribly glad. Isn’t it a bit soon, though, to be sure?”

“I feel pretty sure. It’s just like the other times.” She explained; Hilary agreed that she was probably right. “I think,” added Lisa lightly, “that I should feel quite disappointed if anything happened this time.”

Hilary said, with firmness and certainty, “It won’t. We’re going to make a job of this.” Seeing the reinforced hope in Lisa’s eyes, she thought she must have said it well.

Lisa would have dropped the subject almost at once; she always had difficulty in believing that anything personal to herself could fail to bore other people. Once Hilary had disposed of this, she was glad to talk. Hilary gave her all the advice she knew; she reflected that a necessary part of the treatment would consist in not leaving Lisa too much alone.

Emphasis was not in Lisa’s nature at any time; so Hilary was a little while in realizing, from one day to another, the eager trust which her trained knack of confidence inspired. The discovery profoundly moved her; she was grateful to Lisa for so much quiet easing of life. She took pains with the arrangement of her work, and once or twice put Julian off when she discovered that Lisa had an evening on her hands. The reasons she gave were not very adequate; she knew herself to be the only person in Lisa’s confidence and respected her almost fanatical love of privacy. Now and then she was conscious of an unhappy satisfaction which was not wholly the fruit of self-sacrifice. With Lisa for a decent reason, she obeyed impulses which she would not openly have entertained; to prove to herself her independence, to revenge on him certain moments of solitary thought; to stir, in a way for which she would not afterward accuse herself, his sense of insecurity. She caught herself thinking, sometimes, that she had been making things too easy for him, reconciling him too readily to a state of affairs which it was right that he should find intolerable.

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.