North Face (36 page)

This was about the time she always came down to breakfast, the starched-up hypocrite. With what she had on her conscience, she was probably hoping to get away quick without meeting anyone. It would be fun to catch her eye across the table, not passing any remark, just to see how long she could take it.

Mrs Kearsey had given Neil his breakfast early, as she often did when she found him up and about. The post arrived soon after he had finished it. His single letter looked overpoweringly arid; feeling in no mood for business, he almost put it in his pocket unopened, but, noting that it had been forwarded from Fort William already, decided that he had better see. He hoped it might not make very high demands on his concentration. In a sense, it did not. A lawyer’s clerk, it seemed, had blundered; his change of address, conscientiously notified, had never been filed. The date at the top informed him that he had been an unmarried man, in the eyes of his country’s law if in no one else’s, for exactly a week.

Ellen was not down yet. He restrained a natural impulse, which only the dimmest promptings discouraged, to run up and tell her as she dressed; and met her presently in the garden.

She looked very tidy, well-brushed and crisp against the memory he had kept from three hours before. There was a delicate staining on her lids and under her eyes, bluish-brown; the look of transparency was oddly moving in a happy face.

She had very little to say: he himself did not feel eloquent. They smiled at one another, in tacit apology for the inhibitions belonging to the time of day. It was evident, however, without speechmaking, that wherever they went from here it could only be together. Would she mind, he asked her, if he went off and saw about the license today? Her brows puckered; he read on them, correctly, an uninformed anxiety about the expense, and kissed her.

“I’ll be back by the first train tomorrow. For God’s sake don’t do any climbing while I’m gone.”

“What am I going to do all that time?”

“You heard me. Promise.”

“Darling, you
are
a fool. You’ve got me into this miserable half-and-half state of knowing just enough to know how much I don’t know. What’s the use of climbing alone till you get me out of it?”

“We’ll go up to Cumberland. Plenty of good graded stuff there. I tell you where …” This led from the geographical to the technical, and thence to something too nearly lyrical for breakfast-time. “By the way,” he remembered, after five minutes of it, “do you mind being married from a place like this?”

“What does it matter? One’s married to, not from. I don’t like a lot of people about, for important things. Do you?”

“No.” The picture of a different ceremony came across his mind, with the altered clarity of something forgiven, and seen through an undistorting lens of truth. “No,” he said; “you can have a bit too much of it.”

She was looking thoughtful; she would be wanting something to wear, he thought. He must have some coupons somewhere, probably quite a number; he was about to give her this news when she said, “We shall have to have witnesses, though, shan’t we?”

“Oh, yes; but they go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in. It’s all laid on.”

“I was just wondering—not if you don’t feel like it—whether those two in there might think it fun. They’ve both been rather nice, in their different ways; and they look the sort to enjoy a wedding.”

“Who—the don and Miss Whatsit? But of course; why ever not? I don’t know why I didn’t think of it. They’re still having breakfast, aren’t they? Come along, let’s go straight in now and ask them.”

Mary Renault (1905–1983) was an English writer best known for her historical novels on the life of Alexander the Great:
Fire from Heaven
(1969),
The Persian Boy
(1972), and
Funeral Games
(1981).

Born Eileen Mary Challans into a middle-class family in a London suburb, Renault enjoyed reading from a young age. Initially obsessed with cowboy stories, she became interested in Greek philosophy when she found Plato’s works in her school library. Her fascination with Greek philosophy led her to St Hugh’s College, Oxford, where one of her tutors was J. R. R. Tolkien. Renault went on to earn her BA in English in 1928.

Renault began training as a nurse in 1933. It was at this time that she met the woman that would become her life partner, fellow nurse Julie Mullard. Renault also began writing, and published her first novel,
Purposes of Love
(titled
Promise of Love
in its American edition), in 1939. Inspired by her occupation, her first works were hospital romances. Renault continued writing as she treated Dunkirk evacuees at the Winford Emergency Hospital in Bristol and later as she worked in a brain surgery ward at the Radcliffe Infirmary.

In 1947, Renault received her first major award: Her novel
Return to Night
(1946) won an MGM prize. With the $150,000 of award money, she and Mullard moved to South Africa, never to return to England again. Renault revived her love of ancient Greek history and began to write her novels of Greece, including
The Last of the Wine
(1956) and
The Charioteer
(1953), which is still considered the first British novel that includes unconcealed homosexual love.

Renault’s in-depth depictions of Greece led many readers to believe she had spent a great deal of time there, but during her lifetime, she actually only visited the Aegean twice. Following
The Last of the Wine
and inspired by a replica of a Cretan fresco at a British museum, Renault wrote
The King Must Die
(1958) and its sequel,
The Bull from the Sea
(1962).

The democratic ideals of ancient Greece encouraged Renault to join the Black Sash, a women’s movement that fought against apartheid in South Africa. Renault was also heavily involved in the literary community, where she believed all people should be afforded equal standard and opportunity, and was the honorary chair of the Cape Town branch of PEN, the international writers’ organization.

Renault passed away in Cape Town on December 13, 1983.

Renault in 1940.

Renault and Julie Mullard on board the
Cairo
in 1948, on their way to South Africa, where they settled in Durban.

Renault in a Black Sash protest in 1955. She was among the first to join this women’s movement against apartheid.

Renault and Michael Atkinson installing her cast of the Roman statue of the Apollo Belvedere in the garden of Delos, Camps Bay, in the late 1970s.

Renault working in her “Swiss Bank” study with Mandy and Coco, the dogs.

Renault and Mullard walking the dogs on the beach at Camps Bay in 1982.

Delos, Greece, with a view over the beach at Camps Bay.