Return to Night (26 page)

He had pulled off his jacket when he paused, as if remembering something, and rummaged in the pockets. “Just a minute before I forget.” He produced a length of twine, which he tied, with careful precision, round the third finger of her left hand. “Tomorrow I shall be able to get around a bit.”

“Darling, what on earth do you—”

“Forget it,” said Julian airily, withdrawing the string and pocketing it. “Just an experiment of mine.”

She caught at his arm as he was moving away again, and pulled him back to her. He sat down on the edge of the bed, with an indulgent little smile. Behind it she saw a swift gathering of his resources, a resolution hardened by fear. She smiled back, feeling her own pretense as thin as his. “What have you been up to? You don’t move from here until you tell me.”

“I don’t have to move.” He grinned at her defiantly, and undid his shoes with his free hand.

“Darling, this isn’t funny. What did you mean just now?”

“We’ll talk about that in the morning.” He kissed her swiftly. He was doing it, already, alarmingly well.

“We’ll talk now,” she said.

She had been sure of her power in the last resort; the obedience with which he let her go made her unhappy, so she smiled at him again. “Come along, let’s have it.”

“You’ve had it already.” His gaiety had an increasing quality of desperation. “We had all that out last evening.” She did not reply, but waited, looking at him. “It’s all right. I haven’t had it put in the
Times.
I’ve only written it out to send tomorrow.”

“Darling, could you be serious for a moment?”

“If you’re afraid of the padre thinking you beat me into submission, don’t worry. I can work over the eye all right; I had to do it once for another chap. He went to a dance and got away with it. How soon? Three days?”

She laughed a little, and patted his cheek. “You’ll go far, my dear, I always said so.”

He caught her wrists in both hands. It became impossible to laugh any longer. “Stop fooling with me. You know I mean every word I say.”

“See, dear, let’s not lose our heads: I could too, but we can’t both. Give me a kiss and stop talking nonsense.”

“Nonsense? I asked you if you loved me, you said yes, you let me come here. I asked you to marry me when I asked you that.”

“I know you offered to, darling, and I know you meant it. It was very sweet of you.”

“I
offered
to? My God, what do you mean, I offered to?” He stared at her; the set of his face made her more frightened than before. “Would you be kind enough never to say a thing like that to me again?”

“Is it such a dreadful thing to say? So you did.”

“You’ve no right to talk about yourself like that. How do you suppose I think about you? You must have known, or you wouldn’t—”

“I knew you loved me. And that I loved you.” She searched her mind desperately for the right words. “Marriage is just a way of telling the world. It’s an arrangement, that’s all; but it’s a complicated one; you can’t—”

“It’s only complicated if you make it. Look at the way people did it in the last war—” His face deadened suddenly, as if his words had just overtaken his mind and deeply shocked him. “I ought to have told you this, of course, I didn’t think I’m afraid, but I’d have about eleven hundred a year, clear of—of everything. I’m sorry if that’s less than you’ve been making yourself, it probably is; but after I get started we’ll do better. I hope.”

She clutched at the floating pretext he had allowed to drift in her way. “You’re not suggesting I should give up my work? It means as much to me as acting does to you.” As she spoke she realized, with a muffled astonishment, that this statement had become wholly untrue.

“Not if you don’t want to. I just wondered whether you thought I was expecting you to keep me. Some of your ideas about me have been taking me rather by surprise lately.”

“Dear, please.” The fact which she had been trying to suppress from her consciousness, that she was really very tired, became evident to her. The light made her eyes ache; she shut them, to think better.

“Oh, God, I’m sorry. Hilary, look at me. I didn’t mean it, I swear—”

She opened her eyes again; already she had forgotten the almost involuntary gesture. Bewildered, moved, and shocked by his face, she leaned out and embraced him. “What is it? I was only thinking what to say. Don’t look as if I’d killed you. What is it, I don’t understand.”

“Will you kiss me?” he said slowly at last.

“Here. … What
was
the matter with you then?”

“You looked at me the way people do when they’re—sort of rubbing you out.”

“Don’t be so silly again.”

“You can’t know if people will always be the same. Why won’t you marry me, then?”

She took a deep breath. “You’re not being very tactful, are you, my dear? You must know why.”

He said nothing. He simply waited, His face had a dumb dread which was, strangely, as formless as it was poignant.

She went on, “You’re twenty-four, aren’t you? How old do you imagine I am? The truth, I mean.”

He sat back with a kind of gasp. “Oh, really, this is
too
ridiculous. Good Lord, I thought it was—I don’t know what. What is this, one of those games where you win the cake if you guess the number of currants? I’ve never thought. Did you read medicine at Oxford, or start after?”

“After. But don’t sidetrack.”

“I’m not, I’m working out the length of your training. You had a year or two at home, first, and you’ve practiced since, I’m not sure how long. I suppose the answer is somewhere between thirty-two and thirty-five. So what?” He looked at her impatiently, and a little crossly.

“I’m just eleven years older than you are. Think for a minute, Julian. You’ll be thirty-five yourself one day, unlikely as it may seem to you now. As men go, still quite a young man. And I shall be forty-six. Use your imagination.”

He smiled a little, rather to himself than at her. “I have,” he said, “long before now.”

He put up his hand and she felt his fingers travel, with sureness and great delicacy, over the contours of her face. There was an authority in his touch which impressed her as it might have done in a man of her own calling.

“Yes.” He nodded his head. “One can’t help it,” he said quite simply, “if one plays about with make-up at all. With a face that interests one, one works it out instinctively. If I had the box of tricks handy, I could show you within, say, twenty minutes, what you’ll look like ten, and twenty, and thirty years from now.”

“Don’t,” she said, with an involuntary shiver.

“Why not? I love you, and it’s part of you just as your childhood is.”

“It’s—rather cold-blooded.”

“You really are a bit unreasonable, aren’t you?” he complained, with patient perplexity. “If you’ll just tell me what reaction you
would
consider good form, I’ll sit down with my head in my hands and try to work it up.”

It was like wandering on a moor, she thought in bewilderment; one felt one’s way, precariously, over so much uncertain, quaggy ground, and then, with no warning, felt one’s foot on granite.

“I know how you feel,” she said. “When I was twenty-four, I could have staked anything you liked to name that what I wanted and believed then I would forever. But if I had to be married now to the sort of man I’d have chosen then, I’d jump out of the window. Don’t you see, in ten years you’ll be literally a different person; all the cells of one’s body change in seven. It’s like making promises for a son of yours who isn’t born.”

“We’ll leave my sons out of it, for the moment.” There was something hostile in his voice, which disturbed her.

“What I’m trying to say is that I’m not thinking only about you. You might have grown on me, by the time you grew out of me. I should be getting to the age when habits begin to form.”

“Do you mean that?” he asked slowly.

“Every word.”

“God bless you, darling.” He rolled over on the counterpane beside her, and put his head in her lap: “What a perfect thing to say.” He sighed, luxuriously. “So comfortable and warm. Say it again.”

“Oh, Julian, I could hit you.” Her courage had somehow to be kept up. “You haven’t listened to a word.”

“I have. How queer it is that after all this you don’t know how I feel. It always surprises me, you know, if ever you don’t see through me like glass. Of course I shall change. But not about you. I—I recognized you, from the beginning. Don’t ask me what I mean, it’s too hard to explain. I knew you, that’s all. Like a gipsy who comes to a house and sees the patteran on the door.”

“Darling, do you know what a patteran is? It’s a sign left by another gipsy who’s been there before.”

Lazily and without moving, he said, “I didn’t mean that.”

“I expect not. But it’s true.”

She could tell by the feel of his head and shoulders, which were still quite relaxed, that at least she had not shocked him. Presently he reached up and took her hand. It was the kind of gesture people make who feel they should be saying something. She reproached herself for her clumsiness in underlining what, after all, he had intelligence enough to have guessed. Presently he said, awkwardly, “Were you much in love with him?”

“I thought so, of course.”

“Of course. Sorry. Silly thing to ask.”

“Not so silly. I used to ask myself. But I thought it was sentimental and unmodern to want too much.”

“Too much what?” he asked, with an astonishing directness.

She found herself desperately embarrassed for a reply. If David’s shortcomings had been intimately physical, she could have schooled herself to say so sensibly; whereas, now, under the effort of speech she was blushing deeply and could only lust manage her voice.

“Well, it’s hard to put intelligently. I mean, in a way that doesn’t sound like a housemaid just back from the cinema. Imagination, I suppose. Lightheadedness, poetry if you like. Oh, I don’t know.”

“In fact,” said Julian, “love?”

He turned himself over to look at her. There was nothing in his face but a great and tentative hope.

She could not answer him. He put both arms round her waist; his cheek made a gentle coaxing movement against her side. “Did you ever care about him as much as you do about me?”

She drew him closer. The answer was so easy; and yet, as if remembered from a long time ago, she had a bewildering inhibition against it, a feeling of having once been taught, by example, the right thing to say. Drifting memories came with it; the feeling of recent tears, of a sense of desperate insecurity which had somehow to be comforted, of warm silk against her face and a little round button that had pressed against her forehead. “… Do you love me? More than Pussy? More than Auntie May?” and then with bated breath, “More than Pauline?” And the voice of divine justice, quietly rebuking, “No. Hilary and Pauline are both my dear little girls. I love you both exactly the same.”

She paid no real attention to the memory, but it left behind it a deep eddy of the spirit, a sense of awe and wonder. It was as if a voice whispered, “Command that these stones be made bread,” and one felt the power, but the voice might be from heaven or hell. She closed her eyes, and took the power from its unknown source.

“I never loved him.” With dreamlike certainty, as if they had waited in her for thirty intervening years, she came to the words which, in that already lost remembrance, the divine justice had refused. “I love you better than anyone, ever. Better than anyone in the world.”

He did not answer. Presently he pulled her down to him and kissed her. It was a kiss that simulated physical passion, a kind of cipher for what could not be told.

At last he said, “You had a narrow escape from marrying him, I suppose.”

Not long since, she would have taken a pride in not being ashamed to say, “Hardly, because he never asked me.” She had been very proud of her honesty, and, it now seemed, of a number of other selfish things. “I should never have married him,” she said, “when it came to the point.”

“Well, now it’s come to the point again. … No, listen, please, you must.” In the urgency of the moment, he silenced her first half-uttered word by shoving his hand across her mouth. “I’m sorry I’m not older if it bothers you, but there it is and here we are, so why keep on about it? Obviously, we have to get married sometime. Let’s make it now. Straight away, this week. It’s better we should, I know it is, I was never so sure of anything in my life. If not”—he was sufficiently intent by now to allow Hilary, who felt on the point of suffocation, to get his hand away—“we shall get tied up and involved in things, or something will happen—something—Let’s get it fixed. If I’m sure of you I can do anything,
I’ve
always known that. Things I—I used to think before that I couldn’t do, I can do them for you. Will you? Please. There’s nothing in the world to stop us, except ourselves.”

“Please, darling, could you not lean on my collarbone quite so hard? It’s rather confusing.”

“Sorry. Will you marry me this weekend?”

“No, dearest.”

“Why not?”

“For one thing, because everyone would say we had to. What else could they think?”

“Oh, God. I never thought of that.”

“For a woman, you know, it is a consideration.”

“Of course. I’m sorry, it just didn’t occur to me. Well, then, let’s get officially engaged and put the announcement in. And we’ll get married in three months. Will that do?”

“Julian, dear, why must we be so drastic? Can’t we stay as we are a little longer, and have time to breathe?”

He let go of her, and propping himself on his elbows, stared into her eyes. His unhappiness, which was very real, was turned by the face that expressed it into a tragic effect much too good to be true. At last he said, “You’ve told me you love me; so I think I’ve a right to know what it is that makes you feel I’m not to be trusted. Would you mind telling me? I’ve got a good reason for asking.”

“But of course I trust you.”

“That can’t be true. Tell me.”

She stroked the hair back from his forehead. His face was almost in profile to her on its unhurt side; and now, because her mind had been preoccupied, she saw him freshly, and the words she had been about to say deserted her. She felt in his sudden stillness the certainty of communicated desire; but when he moved, it was to put her wrist abruptly aside.