Authors: Mary Renault
Through the stillness of the sleeping house, a small sound reached her. It was the click of the light switch in the room below, as Julian turned it off.
She gave a last swift look around the room. The curtains were open, for the house was isolated and screened by trees; an ice-white moon hung outside, so bright that even through the golden pool of the bedside lamp she could see its pale square slanting across the floor. His footsteps, quiet and light and unhesitating, were halfway up the stairs. On a blank impulse, she leaned over and put out the light.
The door opened softly. He stood there, finding his bearings, silhouetted blackly against the glimmer on the staircase, his hand on the switch at the top; standing easily and well, a little too well, as if he were gathering himself together for an entrance from the wings. The light went out, and the door closed. She could not see him now, because the moon was in her eyes. For a little while she could not see anything but the moon; she did not know, seeing herself and her surroundings still with the remembering eye of commonplace, how the shadows and straight lines of light had changed it to a dim green cavern whose walls were broken by slender stalactites of white rock; how dark the red of her hair seemed in the blue light; or that her gown had the look of green water flowing in half-transparent streams from her shoulders over her breasts. She had been trained out of fantasies, and the eyes she widened against the silvery dazzle were for her only the instruments of understanding and of sight. She leaned on her elbow and stretched out her other arm to meet him; and he came over to her slowly, and knelt on the floor beside her and looked up into her face. All her anxious anticipations slid from her like a cloud. She bent and took his head in her arms, and knew that she was completing none of tonight’s embraces, but another, strange and haunted and brutally cut off, begun with fear and incantation in the dark. She had wasted her forethought and her care for his dream was stronger than her wisdom. She had nothing to bring him but what he would ask of her, no knowledge that he would not have given her, no aim and no desire except to clothe his lonely imagination in the substance of love.
As she bent to him, and saw his face, white and transformed in the moonlight, flung back in an unbreathing stillness for her kiss, she felt the weight of magic and of legend thrown on her so heavily that she dared not speak. This was not like the kisses he had given her, violent and bewildered; this he waited for her to give, and received it as if it had the power to put a soul into his body. She felt as though it were taking the soul from her own, and was afraid; but the power of the dream held her silent; she could only comfort him in her arms, while. rapt and trembling, he contended with his mystery. It was as if in the kiss she had entered it with him; as if she became even to herself, an ageless source, a shelter and a benediction. He seemed to her, in the dream, the dear creation of her own pain and love, and she forgot that it was by him she had been created. “Come in, my dearest,” she said. “Come in out of the cold.”
So she yielded the gifts of her divinity and was content. Indeed there is much to be said for an apotheosis; for a deity can receive into grace the most unpracticed worshiper and lose nothing of her heaven, while for a woman in love, even a reasonable woman, it is difficult not to expect too much.
I
T WAS THE DEAD HOUR BEFORE DAWN
, and black dark, for the moon had set and the stars clouded over. Hilary stretched out a hand to the little luminous alarm clock on the table, and moved the lever over to
SILENT
. It would be due to strike in five minutes. To reach it, she had to slide from under stray overlapping parts of Julian, of which there seemed a good many, all rather heavy; she could have deduced by now, without other evidence, that he had been used to the undisputed territory of a large bed. Her movement did not wake him. He had only turned twice all night, each time to sleep more profoundly than before.
Once or twice she had dozed fitfully herself; but the hours had streamed through her consciousness like a mood or a dream, without the sense of time. Her first restlessness had not lasted long; for then, while the moon was up, she had been able to see him, and there had been a peacefulness in his sleep so deeply satisfying to the heart that the rest had ceased to be of consequence. She thought that, even if she had been an untaught girl, she would never have taken his inexperience for selfishness. She smiled into the darkness; he had blundered along with so much poetry, with an imagination that had made his passionate and unsuspecting ignorance easy to forgive, and hard to endure. But afterward, and all night till now, she had been happier than ever in her life. Now she must rouse him, for here in the country people were up and working with the first light, and he might be seen to leave. She leaned out farther, turning on the soft shaded light; but he slept on.
It was a somewhat dilapidated Eros whom the lamp of Psyche revealed. The color of his eye had deepened to black-purple. It was evident that he would not be able to open it at all. She knew already that the strapping above it had come adrift (as he was falling asleep he had smiled to feel her putting it back again) so it was without much surprise that she found he had shed his young blood not only on the pillow, but on her nightgown, her bare shoulder, and her breast. She looked down at him in loving amusement, recalling a chapter in Malory wherein Lancelot, being entertained by Queen Guinevere after a combat, had behaved with the same lack of tact. She wondered whether Lancelot had ever gone visiting with a black eye. She leaned over, and rocked his shoulder.
“Julian.”
He made a protesting little noise, puckered his unswollen eyelid, and wriggled down under the sheet. Feeling very unkind, she pulled it away, gave him a shake, and kissed him. He fetched a deep sigh, turned, enveloped her comfortably with himself, and immediately went to sleep again.
“Darling, wake up. It’s morning.”
This time she must have stirred up a stiffened strain, for he winced and woke. His blurred sleepy face looked touchingly youthful; he felt at his eye before taking her in his arms and kissing her drowsily. She said, “Yes, my sweet, but you’ve got to go.”
“What time is it?” He turned his head to peer at the window. Now that the light was on, the glass might have been backed with jet.
“You mustn’t wait till it’s light. Listen, the cocks are crowing.”
“They crow practically all night.” said Julian conclusively, and slid down in bed again. She felt rather desperate, from distrust of her own resolution as much as anything. He had curled round confidingly; she felt the just-evident morning roughness of his cheek against her shoulder, and his soft hair tickling her neck. With weak procrastination she caressed him, nerving herself for another effort; but he saved her the trouble by starting away suddenly, and exclaiming with wide-awake dismay, “When did this happen? My God, have I hurt you? What did I do?”
It took her a moment or two to realize what he was talking about. Feeling the dressing, she decided that what was left of it would see him home. “It’s your own, darling. Don’t you remember?”
“Oh, is it? Thank heaven for that. But it’s on that lovely-green thing, too. No, don’t move.”
“Look at the clock. It will start to be light in half an hour. You wouldn’t like to compromise me, would you?”
“Of course not, I ought to be shot, I’ll get up right away…. Lord, I do feel stiff.”
“Let me look at you. … Oh, my dear. Stiff! I should think you do. No wonder I thought you’d broken a rib. Let me feel it a minute.”
“Feel them all,” said Julian generously. He lay down again.
“Oh, darling, don’t be such an effort.”
“I’m going, I swear I am. Five minutes.”
“What you want is another four hours’ sleep.”
“Is it? What time can I come tomorrow—tonight, I mean?”
“My dear, anything might happen. I’ll ring you up.”
“But I can’t not see you tonight. I—we haven’t talked about anything. How can I go away just not knowing
when
I’ll see you again?”
“Lisa will want me to meet her husband. We may sit talking till all hours. I might have a call. I’ll ring you up, whatever happens. Late, sometime after eleven.”
“Let’s meet somewhere in the day.”
“I shan’t have a minute.” She could imagine how she would be looking, after a white night and a morning’s work. “I promise, dear, if it’s a human possibility I won’t keep you away.”
“You won’t decide it’s all been rather a pity?”
“Darling, you’re just stalling for time.”
“Aren’t you going to kiss me more properly, when I’m going away for all this while?”
“That’s properly enough. It’s getting so late.”
“What’s the matter? Don’t you care about me as much as you did before?”
He didn’t speak that piece very well,
she thought;
almost anyone could have worked in more pathos than that.
She looked up; he smiled quickly, but not quickly enough. His face had been taut with suppressed disquiet. He had meant it. It was more than she could bear.
Feeling turned upon her the betrayed and outraged eyes of a million female generations, she whispered, “Yes, darling; more, much more.”
There was plenty to think about that morning, including work; the concentration demanded by the last seemed, today. painfully unnatural exercise. On the homeward drive her mind reverted to personal matters, from the fresh and much more practical standpoint belonging to the hour. Thus preoccupied, she nearly walked through Rupert Clare in the garden, like a ghost walking through a wall.
If she had had time lately to build up expectations, she would have found this first sight dismally disappointing. He converged on the front door with her, a slight, neutral-tinted, insignificant man of forty-odd, with a narrow head and lines under his eyes, who looked at her with that air of reserving judgment which clings as an unconscious habit to people who have had to live guardedly. Hilary found it a little repelling. They introduced themselves conventionally and made dim, well-meant conversation, during which she had the feeling that he was taking advantage of her less attentive moments to make mental notes; as indeed, out of ingrained training and routine, he was. But she was aware of something behind all this: a kind of signal of good will made as it were from a distance through a small window, which seemed to be saying,
Don’t suppose that I don’t like or approve of you, simply be
c
ause I come no nearer; you must excuse me, I don’t go out very much.
It was not till his attention flagged for the first time from what he was saying, that she saw Lisa in the doorway, come to announce lunch.
When Hilary came in at the end of the afternoon, they were sitting placidly by the fire, and begged her, with a kind of lazy sincerity, to come and talk. They so evidently meant this, that she stayed for nearly an hour; they accepted her into their private world as people who are a little drunk welcome strangers into the circle of their geniality. She could, she thought, have spent most of the evening with them without feeling that her presence was causing them the least embarrassment. In fact, however, she retired to her room, feeling the need of a little sleep.
Hilary need not have feared for her chances of privacy that evening. By ten-thirty, the house was as still as a school after lights-out.
She sat fingering the telephone uncertainly, her mind set free again for her own self-questionings and doubts, and filled with a renewed sense of guilt about Lisa. With whatever conviction she might say she regarded herself as a legalized mistress, the fact remained that she was a respectable married woman with a correct establishment, and Hilary was making what most people would think an inexcusable use of her house. Lisa ought to be told, in general if not in particular. But there had been no opportunity; and Julian had had his promise. Principle, as well as a strange sensation like a warm shiver in her bones, told her that promises must be kept. She picked up the receiver. The promptness of the reply was such that she could only suppose Julian had been sitting with the instrument on his knees.
Half an hour later he was in her room. When she emerged from his arms, she was aware of the cool sharp smell of narcissus, and found he had laid a sheaf on the pillow beside her.
“Do you like them?” She asked, slipping his arm round her waist. “You look as if there were something funny about it.”
“My dearest, they’re lovely, but in a way there is. I mean, it’s rather arresting to go into someone’s room in the morning and find it full of flowers that weren’t there the night before. But perhaps they’ll only think I walk in my sleep.”
“Oh, Lord, would you think anyone could be so dumb?” He was completely dashed. His black eye—which was no better, except that the swelling had begun to go down—made his expression rather comic, but Hilary felt no impulse to laugh. She put down the flowers and kissed him.
“It’s all right,” he assured her; “I’ll take them back when I go. I’ll make a point of remembering.”
“Of course you shan’t. I was only being feebly funny, darling. Lisa doesn’t notice things. They’re my favorite flowers.”
“I’d have brought you something better, but I was seeing too lopsidedly to drive into town.”
“I should think not. How are you? Is the cut all right?”
“Oh, fine. I slept all afternoon and half the evening. I feel terrific. And you, my beautiful?”
“Terrific,” murmured Hilary. She tried to remember what it felt like to be so full of surplus energy at the end of a long day.
“What a marvelous dressing-gown. You do have nice things. And always right with the lighting. That green thing would have looked rather immense under strong blues, come to think of it. Is it all right? Let’s look.”
“It’s not dry enough yet to wear.”
“Oh, too bad. What are you—” The sentence remained, rather abruptly, incomplete.
“You’ve given me doubts now.” she murmured, “about the lighting.”
“They’re quite unnecessary,” said Julian softly.