Return to Night by Mary Renault

Author:Mary Renault [Renault, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-3977-1
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-11-21T23:54:00+00:00

The comic effect was irresistible, and, though she knew he had played for it, she could not keep from laughing. “I thought that play was a bête noire of yours.”

“It seems to have worn off. Well, shall we go?”

They went back into the stone passage, through a baize door, and into the hall. Taken by surprise in its solitude, the place looked different, intimate and vulnerable, deserted by a protecting power. Through a half-open door into the drawingroom she could glimpse the red-braided holland dust sheets that covered everything.

Upstairs a crimson-carpeted passage, with a broad square-paned Georgian window at each end, ran between cream-painted doors with old hanging handles of pale brass. The last of the cream doors stood half open; he put on the light, and stepped back.

“Do come in. It’s tidy for once, they did it out this morning.”

It was a big square room, paneled like the passage in cream, and furnished uncompromisingly as a bedroom in solid Edwardian mahogany, with dull, correct hunting-prints on the walls; a man’s room in the best taste of thirty years before. Indefinably, but unmistakably, it had the curious half-empty pathos of a man’s room that is occupied by a boy. The few personal things—books in a shelved recess, a couple of foils on a bracket, an empty leather pajama case on the dark crimson bed—had that air of apology and incongruity, of being there on sufferance provided that they continued to behave. Like a boy’s room well looked after, it was coldly and scentlessly clean; the air, untinged with tobacco or hair cream or hoarded dust-collecting junk, smelled faintly of fresh linen.

“Somewhere in here, I think.” He opened a drawer in the dressing-table, and, as he rummaged, her eyes wandered again. On the mantelshelf was a photograph in a wide silver frame. The face and the fashion belonged to twenty years ago; but even in the house of a stranger she would have known at once who it was. The shoulders were draped with some softly-falling stuff; gauze filters had been used to frame the portrait in a nimbus of mist; the fair hair, wavy and soft, was pressed down over the forehead with a velvet band. The faint drawing of the features belonged to a time when there were two sorts of women, and make-up was only used by the second. The face had the fashionable softness of the time, the rounded edges, the lips half parted in a dreaming sweetness, the downcast eyes. It was all very gentle, and yet in the gentleness itself there seemed something inflexible; as if this face would always refuse and resist any strong expression—anger, passion, laughter, or violent grief—and would punish their invasion unforgivingly. It was also the face of a contemporary beauty; but so swiftly do fashions in faces change that she realized this fact last of all. What struck her most forcibly was the complete harmony of the picture with its setting; as if it were to this face, not to its tenant, that the room belonged.

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