Return to Night (2 page)

“What I really want to do, if you can spare it for a couple of days, is to read the darn thing. He’s just offered me Creighton’s job so I feel it may be expected.” He bent his stooping, aquiline head over the pages. “If you’re using it for anything,” he added. “I dare say I could run over it tonight.”

Hilary said quite naturally. “Keep it as long as you like, I’ve done with it. Nice work, David.” Realization filtered in gradually, and was not complete till she had finished speaking. “Very nice work.”

“Hard work,” said David, “is what it looks too much like to me. However, it’s a thing to have done, I suppose.” She knew he was not posing; if this had not fallen at his feet, he would have been sure of its equivalent elsewhere.

Peering at a diagram, he went on indifferently, “I hope a couple of years will about see me shut of surgery, and getting on with something. A century from now, of course, surgeons will be almost period survivals. All this glamour surrounding the theater is just a temporary breakdown in proportion. Atavistic, really. The physician, the biologist, and the chemist will be where they always belonged, and tucked away somewhere in decent obscurity, like the mortuary, will be a sordid little hole, still known by courtesy as the theater, in which a seedy breakdown gang will slice up the few failures in the minimum of publicity. ‘Old So-and-so’s getting past it. Don’t say I told you, but two of his cases have gone to the theater in less than six months.’ That’s how it will be. … What’s the name of that Swede who does the fancy pneumonectomies, doesn’t seem to be here.”

“I can’t remember,” said Hilary. She had little concentration to spare from the sudden, inescapable knowledge that she had never loved him; that, at the moment, to keep from hating him was exacting from her her last reserves of decency and control.

She would have done better to have kept this intimation in sight; but, imperfectly knowing herself (she had always been busy), she had dismissed it with shame as the temporary effect of disappointment and shock. So the internal pressure had risen without vent; and the decisive quarrel, when it came, had sprung from a trifle, a pathetic business about some slides which neither had remembered to put away and which had, in consequence, been broken; a squalid bickering, not leaving even the satisfaction of a large gesture behind.

“It’s typical of a man,” Hilary had brought forth, to her own shocked surprise, from the boiling within her, “to crash through to every objective by plain selfishness, and take for granted it’s just superior ability.”

David had learned early the art of keeping his temper. He looked at her with his eyebrows raised, paused for effect, and spoke. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I always supposed you were competent to hold your own as a human entity, without having resort to the squalling apologetics of feminism. You make me feel rather at a loss.”

It had been as if a nerve in her brain had been touched with something red-hot. From that moment, they were finished.

They had avoided a crisis on major issues; both would have felt it to be embarrassing and melodramatic. They had behaved with restraint and with what had seemed, at the time, to be economy of emotion. Hilary had approved of this, as she had believed she approved of their undemonstrativeness while they were still together. She was not analytical of herself. There had never been much time.

Her intellect and abilities were another thing. These she had studied with the attention she gave to other tools of her calling. She examined her failure, and drew, impartially as she believed, the unpalatable conclusions. Determination, industry, good organization of a good second-class brain, had done their best for her. She was now at the level where they had to be set against the male powers of intellectual and imaginative endurance, the male reserve of stamina for a mental sprint; and she recognized the difference, fully, for the first time. It shocked her with a sense of fundamental injustice. Her relationship with David, which might have resolved everything, had lacked the single essential ingredient; but she did not reflect on this. She merely left the hospital.

In a kind of spite against herself and life, she had thrown herself away on this country practice in a small Cotswold market town. It carried a fair-sized panel, a sprinkling of private patients in the neighborhood, and, one week in a rota of three, emergencies at the Cottage Hospital. By the time she had been there three months, she found herself counting the days to the third week, which sometimes passed without any emergency at all. The cut tendon had been the most interesting event since her arrival.

Hilary stretched herself out of the rug, and, after half an hour’s sheltered inactivity, at once shivered with cold. It became suddenly obvious to her that the only possible time filler was a walk. She let in the clutch; the noise of the accelerating engine seemed shattering in the stillness.

The car twisted downhill, between hedges in which the scent of the may was still quenched by dew and the chill of dawn; dropped into shadow in the valley, and climbed again. She turned off from her homeward road, and, slowing to an easy twenty, began to meander over the hills, looking about for a place to park.

She found it at a white, five-barred gate into a larch wood, whose trees, thinly spaced, let in the sun. The gate gave on to a ride, evidently private land; but it was too early to feel very serious about trespassing, and, having had a country childhood, she could judge that the place was not heavily preserved. She opened the gate, closing it conscientiously behind her.

The grass of the ride had the extreme velvety fineness which generations of rabbits create about their ancestral homes. It was a good morning for them; their sentinel ears pointed her approach, their white scuts bounced before her, and their jaunty young, losing their heads, took the longest way across the track before popping down into the green. Between padded mats of needles under the larches, bluebells lay in cloudy lakes and streams. Exercise was already making her warm.

The ride gave out in a clearing, stubbled with cut bracken; through the rusty stalks the hard new shoots were uncurling in fantastic crooks and croziers and little fans, mixed with sparse hardy bluebells. The sun was beginning to have heat in its brightness. Hilary let herself down onto a heap of old bracken, and sighed with animal content. Her tweeds melted into the landscape like the protective coloring of a partridge or a hare; she felt, like one of them, comfortably and inconspicuously at home. The warmth began to make her healthily sleepy. She shut her eyes.

It might have been after five minutes, or thirty-five, that she opened them again, with a start. Among the light rustlings and cracklings of small life in the undergrowth, a new noise, rhythmic and strong, was growing louder, the thud over turf of a cantering horse. It came from the ride she had left, facing her now across the clearing. She did not disturb herself about it; the wood was too dense behind her for anyone to ride that way, and, sunk in her form of bracken, it was unlikely that she would be seen. The hoofbeats slowed to a walk; a stick cracked quite near. In a dim curiosity to know whose solitude she was sharing, she raised herself a little.

They came out into the lake of sunlight in the clearing, a big light dun, and a rider sitting loosely and at ease. Hilary stared, forgetting her trespass and the apologies she might need to improvise. She felt a little detached from reality. The light, the setting, the hour, seemed a theatrical extravagance, exaggerating, needlessly, what was already excessive, the most spectacularly beautiful human creature she had ever seen. Because her habit of mind had made her hostile to excess, she thought irritably,
It’s ridiculous. It’s like an illustration to something.

He had not seen her. If he came nearer, she would find that distance had been playing tricks. When he passed near enough for her to hear the creak of leather, she still did not quite believe in him. His boots and breeches, which were old and good, were topped off with a blue cotton shirt open at the neck; a carelessness natural to the hour, but transformed by its wearer to something traditional, the basic costume of equestrian romance. He was slender, but strongly boned. His hair was so black that the brightening sun did not touch it with brown; his face had the hard, faintly hollow planes in which art seems to have lost interest between the fourteenth century and the twentieth, the lines which invite not paint or marble, but stone or bronze. But sculpture would have missed the contrast of a fair skin and gray eyes with the blue-black hair, the slanted brows, and lashes which were emphatic even from that distance away. His grace in the saddle, flexible and erect, was something separable from good horsemanship, as if it would have cost him a deliberate effort to make any movement which was ugly or out of line. His head was up—he and the horse were getting their breath—and this chance pose gave him a look of medieval challenge and adventure which went with all the rest. It was fantastic that anyone unself-conscious and alone could look so faultlessly arranged.

He looked quite unaware of himself, and happy. His long mouth had the rare mingling of sweetness and arrogance which can last only for a few years while youth holds them in suspension; for he was very young, perhaps twenty or so, perhaps not out of his teens. It was hard to say; his beauty was of that mind-arresting kind which silences other questions. Now, his face reflected only movement and the morning. Two magpies, scared up from the edge of the wood, flew suddenly out against the trees. He lit with a flash of pleasure as vivid as their flight, then touched his horse with his knee, and trotted away into an open aisle of the larches. The fallen needles muffled the sound, so that he seemed to vanish like a legend, leaving the sadness of mortality in his wake.

Hilary sat up, and brushed bits of bracken smartly from her tweeds. With amused impatience, she dusted off also the impression from her mind. She naturally distrusted, and felt ill at ease with, physical perfection in either sex; not from envy—for she seldom troubled to improve on her own moderate good looks—but because she found it a confusing irrelevance, camouflaging the personality which interested her more. Within her own observation, the principal function of beauty had been to make a fool of intelligence, in one or two instances a tragic fool. The way to enjoy it was like this, impersonally, at a distance, for what it was worth; and she felt grateful for the absence of introductions, which had doubtless preserved her from hearty, illusion-shattering banalities about the clemency of the morning and the prospects of golf.

These reflections carried her back to her car. As she drove home the air was still sweet and cool, but the early magic had dispersed; it was not sunrise but day, and already there was white dust on the road. Her mind began to travel on to the day’s work, and the glimpse in the larch wood only remained there as an incidental part of the pleasures of early rising, like dew and young rabbits, which in general cause one to say, “Why don’t I do this more often?” while knowing that one will not.

H
ILARY SAT AT THE COTTAGE TABLE
, holding a little glass pipette like a fountain-pen filler, and gazing down into a cardboard shoe box. In the box was cotton wool lined with a clean handkerchief of her own, and, embedded in the handkerchief, a tiny waxen face, no bigger than the palm of her hand. The face was full of an ancient ennui; the eyes were closed; the mouth was shut too, in remote obstinacy, passively resisting the pipette which Hilary was trying stealthily to introduce to it. With her fingertip she drew down the lower jaw, revealing a cavity much the size of the moon on a thumbnail. A few drops of brandy-and-water trickled in. The mouth sketched a grimace of languid, but definite, resentment, and out of it came a cry, thinner than the mew of a newborn kitten. Moving out from under the handkerchief in undirected protest, a hand, perfect and slender like an adult’s in miniature, closed round one of Hilary’s fingers and let go again in fastidious distaste.

From the bed against the wall a dim voice said, “Was that her crying?”

“Yes,” said Hilary cheerfully. “And about time, too.”

“I couldn’t hardly hear it.”

“Give her time. She’s not much over three pounds, by the look of her.”

“Will I rear her, doctor?”

“I hope so. But not here, you know. She’ll need everything rather special. Nurse has gone to ring for the ambulance to take both of you to hospital.”

“Oh, dear, oh, doctor. Whatever will my husband say?”

“Your husband has been very sensible about it. He wants to do what’s best for both of you.”
Or if he doesn’t,
she added to herself,
he can be learning.

“And what’s to become of the children, that’s what I can’t see, and Mother with her leg bad again.”

“We’ll fix something. You’ve just got to concentrate on this one now. Would you like to see her?”

The woman on the bed gave a harassed sigh; but her head craned a little over the worn sheet. Hilary carried the shoe box over, and tilted it. “We mustn’t uncover any more of her. They feel the cold.”

Between the folds of the handkerchief, the tiny unmoving mask in the box lay with closed mouth and eyes, withdrawn and refusing. It had nothing to say to the life that had been thrust on it seven weeks too soon. Its arms and legs were folded in its prenatal posture; its whole grain of being seemed bent on affirming that the unpleasant fact of birth had not happened, or, if it had, could be decently ignored. Its composure made Hilary’s efforts toward its survival feel intrusive.

The mother’s face puckered, and a tear slipped down her cheek. “The little love,” she whispered. “You do what’s best, doctor. Anything so’s I don’t lose her, bless her heart.”

Hilary put down the box on the table, and went over to the window, in which tall geraniums excluded half the small available light and air. Looking out, she reflected that Mrs. Kemp had three small children already, one of them “backward,” and a husband who did little for her beyond ensuring that events like this were frequent and regular. She had tried to stop this one, as Hilary knew, by every means short of the criminal, and now—
How on earth,
she wondered,
does Nature manage to pull this trick?