Free Return to Night by Mary Renault Page A

time. Had we better think up a story before you go?” He seemed quite serious about it.
    “Oh, she’ll have started without me. There’s no nonsense about her.”
    “I know. Poor old thing, isn’t it a shame? I think I shall give her a bottle of curious scent for Christmas, called Black Limelight or Ecstase or something… In a way, it was rather a shock. Suddenly meeting you, I mean. You see, actually, I’d become reconciled to the idea that I’d imagined the whole thing. I couldn’t ask about you, because—well, not remembering what you looked like, there seemed nothing to ask. I imagined you quite different, I’m afraid.”
    “I’m sorry.” She laughed.
    “It’s all right. I’ve got used to it now. In fact, I feel as if I’d remembered all along. It does seem odd, though, that I haven’t heard the nurses mention you, or anything. I’ve talked to them quite a lot and I thought I’d got the low-down on pretty well everyone. … Good Lord, I must be crazy. I haven’t asked you now what your name really is.”
    “It’s Mansell.”
    “ Is it?” He looked, for an unguarded moment, positively stupefied. Recovering himself with headlong haste, he said, “You know, I do think I may have heard it, just vaguely, and forgotten again.”
    Hilary was hideously conscious of blushing down to the neck.
    “You know,” he pursued reflectively, “I think nurses are an interesting study, very. I mean, seeing life so much in the raw, as it were, you’d think they’d become frightfully understanding about human nature, wouldn’t you? I often think it’s curious how they’re not.”
    The feeling of relief and well-being which swept over her quite startled her by its force.
    “Well, they understand some aspects of human nature pretty soundly. And, of course, the brighter ones do gravitate more to the big places.”
    “I suppose they must.”
    They had come to the last bend in the drive. “The last part,” she said, “is just under Matron’s window. I think I’d better go up it looking busy and by myself.”
    “You could say you were talking to an old patient. That’s what the nurses say.” He offered this information helpfully, without the least shade of irony.
    “Well, good-by,” she said, and then suddenly at a loss, “I’m glad you’re getting on so well.”
    “I’ll get on all right now.”
    She was round the bend of the drive before the oddness of this valediction reached her; and, when it did, the likeliest thing seemed to be that she had not correctly heard.

Chapter Seven: A Hospital Christmas—And A Kiss
    I T LOOKED LIKE BEING A GREEN CHRISTMAS . Hilary, who had no accompanying superstition about fat churchyards, but on the contrary had seen many chronic invalids and old people killed by cold, welcomed the mild moist weather and the golden rags of autumn which quiet air left hanging on the trees. The place had become friendly to her, the blunt hills with their gray outcrop of stone-roofed houses, their meandering lines of dry walling, and the dips of soft misty space between their shoulders.
    She and Lisa got on increasingly well. It was a relationship owing much to the mutual knowledge that either could seek privacy at any time without affront to the feelings of the other. The house was a newish one built round an old core; Hilary’s two rooms were almost self-contained, her sitting-room having its own glass door on to the garden, and, in one corner, a steep staircase leading into the bedroom upstairs. They need never have met except at meals, but with increasing frequency spent their evening together by the log fire in the hall.
    Rupert Clare had gone from Czechoslovakia to Berlin. When Hilary asked for news of him, Lisa said, “He’s been to a number of theaters. His private letters are all opened and read, of course, so they consist almost entirely of items like that, at present. So do mine.”
    They neither of them had any plans for Christmas. Hilary, whom a vast family gathering