Return to Night (22 page)

“Don’t you fret, miss,” a voice was muttering beside her. “Ted can’t keep that up, not long he can’t.” She was dimly aware that the small man had given it up as a bad job, and come to rest beside her. Ted had landed a vicious body blow. She saw Julian’s teeth shut spasmodically, wondered if a rib had gone, and wished she had never opened Grey’s
Anatomy.

“Fact is, miss, I told ’im, time and again. ‘You come on ’ome, Ted!’ I said. ‘We don’t want no trouble.’ I never see ’im the worse before, quite a quiet chap ’e is ordinary.”

“Yes,” said Hilary abstractedly. She was watching Ted avoiding, by inches, backward collision with a tree, and imagining Julian being tried for manslaughter with herself as witness.

“How it was, not being ’imself he took your friend up wrong. I mean, out with a lady, stands to reason your friend wouldn’t fancy Ted getting fresh. That’s natural. But Ted took him up wrong, see, took it like he was making out he owned the place.”

“Well, he does,” said Hilary dimly. Julian had almost missed his footing with a sharp incline behind him. It was not till she recovered her breath that she noticed her companion’s horror and perturbation. “But it’s entirely his own fault for not saying so, and being so rude. … This is awful, can’t we do
anything
?”

“Dunno, I’m sure, miss. They won’t listen to me. You’ll see, they’ll be fed up with it before long. Ted’s not been accustomed to it, no more than what your friend has.”

If they had, Hilary thought, they might at least have taken their coats off before they began.

Some latent instinct of self-preservation had advised Julian to keep out of a clinch. He had managed it more by agility and reach than skill, the chief benefit of training that remained with him being a capacity to keep steady under face blows, of which he had now had several. Hilary perceived very little of this. She saw that a cool fanaticism had settled on his bruised face, and received a general impression as of a borzoi involved with a bull terrier. Without noticing the change, she was becoming less conscious of her own outraged taste and feelings, more aware of the grace which was built into his bones and remained a part of him even in uncaring violence, the blood on his face, and his indifference to it like that of a young savage to whom the war-drum has lent an entranced tolerance of pain.

Just then Ted, whose wind was shortening painfully, made a final effort to close in. But, his mind colored by recollections of the all-in booth, he wasted a little concentration on making the correct all-in face. It not only slowed him down, but betrayed his intention. Julian was just in time to sidestep him, much as a matador does a bull, and got in a rapid jab at his solar plexus. Ted doubled up, tripped, fell headlong, and was enormously, excruciatingly sick where he lay.

As if cold water had been thrown on her, Hilary’s confused emotions subsided into a chill disgust. Julian stood panting with his exertions, looking astonished and slightly dazed.

Breaking what could not, unfortunately, be called a silence, the little man observed to Hilary, “Best thing, that is. Be more ’imself after that, see.”

“I hope he’s all right.” She was moved to this less by concern for Ted than by good will to his unwilling second, toward whom she had curiously warmed.

“Cor!” he replied reassuringly. “I’ll see after ’im. Don’t you worry.” Tactfully lowering his voice, he murmured, “When you get your friend home, you want to put a nice bit of beefsteak on that eye. Draws it, see?
Nah
then, Ted.”

Ted heaved himself up to his knees. He had lost his florid complexion, and looked so like one of Hilary’s patients that instinctively she advanced toward him. Ignoring her, he looked at Julian with a reproach that lacked the strength to be indignation. Responding instantly to this, Julian said, “Sorry. I didn’t set out to do that. Didn’t think.”

Ted muttered, sourly, “Wasn’t low … Had one or two. Acting silly.”

“Call it even,” said Julian. His naturally engaging smile appeared, with confused effect, on his damaged face; he evidently found it painful. Having assisted the little man in getting Ted standing, he inquired, “Can you get home all right?”

“Ted’ll be okay,” said the little man, not without a certain odd dignity. He turned to his ministrations, and Julian, after a moment or so, to Hilary.

“Well,” he remarked quite cheerfully, “may as well be getting along.”

She turned down the path beside him; it wound between the larches, and soon they were alone. She looked in front of her. sorting and arranging what she had to say. He said nothing at all, and presently began to whistle something from
Carmen
between his teeth. He began fumbling in his coat pocket.

“Damn,” he remarked with firm annoyance. “I could have sworn I had a handkerchief somewhere.”

He turned toward her, searching for the pocket on the other side. She had been walking on his right, too much absorbed in her anger to look at him. Now, in the light of a small clearing, she got a sudden close view. Fresh blood was still trickling from the smeared drying mess on his cut brow; the puffed and darkening eyelid was sticky with it, for a sickening moment she thought it was coming from the eye itself. The cheekbone under it was dull red-purple along the high straight line of its ridge; so was the angle of the jaw. By some peculiarity of Ted’s tactic or his own defense, most of the havoc was concentrated on one side; from the other he had looked almost normal. What had kept the boy on his feet through such a battering? As she knew from last year, he was neither physically insensitive nor naturally tough. She was, however, still too angry for her divided feelings not to make her more so.

Julian had found his handkerchief. He produced it, with a grunt of satisfaction, and lifted it toward his eye. She saw that it was no more than reasonably clean. “
Don’t
put that filthy thing on an open cut. Do you want it to go septic?”

“I’ve only used it once,” said Julian mildly. “And I can’t see out of my eye.”

“Well, use this one then.” She took a clean one out of her bag. He took it, turned it over, and sniffed at it.

“Oh, no, what a waste. It’s got scent on it.”

“Keep it folded, and hold it there hard.” It was not till he was obediently following these instructions that she had time to reflect how outrageous (and how unexpected) his self-possession was. She paused no longer.

“You appear pleased with yourself.” Because an undermining concern still lingered, she spoke even more acidly than she had meant to.

“Oh, no, far from it.” he assured her, briefly inspecting the handkerchief and putting it back again. “On the contrary, I was just about to apologize.”

He said it very nicely. It dawned on her, with amazement, that his equanimity was not shaken in the least.

“Were you really? You astonish me. I thought you must have imagined that I was enjoying myself.” She edged her voice savagely, thinking, almost while she spoke,
He ought to get that eye looked at immediately; it’s impossible to tell, with nil that mess—

“No, of course not. I ought to have taken him off somewhere else. Sort of thing one thinks of when it’s too late. I’m afraid you’re annoyed about it; of course you are.”

“Has it only just occurred to you”—she governed her voice with a considerable effort—“that I might be annoyed?”

“Well, it should have; but there wasn’t much time.”

“At first I thought you couldn’t be sober. But I doubt now whether you had even that excuse.”

“I never take anything,” he assured her with more concern than he had so far shown, “when I’m going to drive. I take driving fairly seriously, as a matter of fact.”

Hilary boiled over. “Then I should be glad if you’d also take seriously the fact that when I go out with anyone I expect some elementary standards of civilized behavior. It was completely inexcusable and disgusting.”

“I know.” he assured her “I really am most hideously sorry. He spoke with feeling; with too much feeling. In fact, he spoke like someone making a sincere effort to feel what he knows to be required of him. In the gathering gloom she saw him turn and regard her hopefully out of his serviceable eye. During this moment of preoccupation, he collided sharply with a tree on his off side, and stood holding its trunk, dazed and unsteady. Forgetting the whole purport of the conversation, she found herself gripping him by the arm.

“Julian, what is it? Are you all right?”

“Yes, thanks,” he said, regaining his equilibrium. “I didn’t see the darn thing coming, that’s all.”

“Well, look where you’re going.” She withdrew to the other side of the path, but could not keep herself from watching him and, eventually, from saying, “You don’t feel giddy, do you?”

He stood still, dutifully giving the matter his attention. “No, I don’t think so. I mean, when one walks into something one usually does, for the moment.”

“You don’t remember, I suppose, whether you got a blow on the right temple?” She tried to use her consulting-room voice.

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?”