The gulls were waking, and, somewhere a long way off, two men shouted to one another across a field. It was too late now to get into a cold bed and count sheep; and, however he spent the time between now and breakfast, he could hardly be hungrier than he was already. Mrs Kearsey’s alarum sounded, a note of inspiration. If he arrived at the right moment on his way down to the beach, she had been known sometimes to give him a cup of her morning tea.
18 Rescue Party
“I DO NOT THINK,” wrote Miss Searle, drawing her dressing-gown closer about her in the seven o’clock chill, “that I have ever been confronted, even in College, with a moral decision which weighed on me more. In fact I am not sure whether I am writing to you because I feel I must discuss it with someone of judgement and principle, or simply to clarify my own thoughts. In an issue like this, it is so easy to find two sides even to one’s own motives. One can say, for example, that these matters are for the private conscience of the people concerned, and thus give oneself the great relief of feeling no further responsibility. But then one realises that this is simply bowing to a pagan morality; that, perhaps, it is only loose-thinking opinion, and the personal unpleasantness, which one fears. One could not adopt this standpoint in, say, a case of theft; the criminal law would recognise one as an accessory. Surely, then, one becomes equally so under the, moral law.
“No one, it seems to me, can sufficiently condemn a woman who deliberately tempts a man at such a time; so, whatever the consequences to her, they can only be deserved. In the case of the man” …
She broke off; her fingers felt almost too cold to control the pen. She warmed them in the lapel of her dressing-gown, looking over what she had written; trying to make the lines on the paper fill the inward as well as the outward eye. She wanted to use them as a barrier against memory, as, two hours earlier, she had used her door as a barrier against sight. It was useless; she could still see the face she was trying to obliterate, as clearly as she had seen it in the lit doorway in the second before the light went out, drowsy and inward-looking, blurred and yet intent. The almost unseeing eyes, the tousled hair, the marks of a profound physical weariness partly smoothed by sleep—it had all been terrible to her. It was a whole world of rejected knowledge, a mine exploding security, a shaft into a darkness full of whispers, the revelation of a shame which must never, never be understood. It was life: it was death.
“In the case of the man, one may hesitate to form a personal judgement, since one cannot enter into their very different psychology; but, after all, the authorities of the Church have always been men, and have stood firmly, and I am sure rightly, against a separate standard. It would seem the height of presumption to set up one’s ignorance against their knowledge and experience.” (Considering this in some uncertainty, she crossed “and experience” out.)
“One must ask oneself, too, what future happiness either party could hope for on the foundation of a sin which must, inevitably, prevent each of them for having any respect for the other. However there is no real need to burden one’s conscience with such questions, since the ruling both of the Church and of the civil law is perfectly clear.
“There is only one thing which makes me hope that, perhaps even in the interval before your reply reaches me, this very painful decision may be taken out of my hands. You will remember my telling you in my first letter about a Miss Fisher whose conversation was so trying! Her efforts to attract the attention of this man to herself have been so obvious as to be most embarrassing; so that she has naturally taken a morbid (and clearly malicious) interest in all these developments. I have no doubt she will have made it her business to know about this most recent one. The question is whether one is justified in letting her take steps (as I feel sure she will) from the wrong motives, and spare oneself the ordeal of acting from the right ones. Since she will no doubt do so in any case, one’s effort would after all be superfluous. If as a result one were questioned in any investigation, of course one could only speak the truth. She loves to hear her own voice, and will no doubt make quite evident what she intends to do.
“Do please bear with this long epistle. I know how many calls you have on your time …”
She finished the letter, dressed, and took it out to the letterbox at the bottom of the road. It was almost time for breakfast. She would wait now until she heard Miss Fisher going downstairs. Much could be learned, this morning, from a little quiet observation.
Miss Fisher, throwing odd ends of bandage and lint into her wastepaper basket, reflected that it wasn’t like her to leave these messes overnight. She had brought them in from the bathroom, meaning to get rid of them immediately; but there had been something indefinably warming in their visible presence about the room. One was incurably soft, she thought. Men were a curse: careless, wrapped up in themselves, not giving a damn unless they wanted something, and as blind as bats even then. One had known all this for a good fifteen years: and still one of them had only to come along looking a bit under the weather, knocked about through his own silly fault, shiftless and guiltily casual like a kid; and there one went again, soft as tripe. You patched them up; you cared, incredibly after all this time at it, how much it hurt them; you let them see it; and if they went maudlin over you for half a minute, you felt they had done you proud. And then, the first thing you knew …
Well, thought Miss Fisher, wiping the greasy edge of the flavine cream pot and examining the inside of her sponge-bag for stains, he might have cause to remember one after all. He must have been off his head—here in the house, when there were miles of country available all day, and with that shaky alibi for the other night which the King’s proctor could almost certainly crack up. And the walls so thin you could hear almost what people said, crying and carrying-on. Probably he’d found out about the Phillips boy. But that sort always knew how to soften a man up.
If he hadn’t had the sense to remember anything else, couldn’t he have remembered that sanctimonious cat only just across the way? No wonder the male expectation of life was shorter; there wasn’t one who’d live long enough to get a woman into trouble, if some other woman weren’t fool enough to wrap him up in cottonwool.
It was at this point of her meditations that Miss Fisher, who had moved over to the window, saw Miss Searle going down the path with a letter in her hand.
So she had been up to something. Miss Fisher had felt it already, in every bone. Well, now one knew where one was. Suddenly, Miss Fisher felt much better.
It was one word against another, and surely to goodness they’d have to listen to the person with the room next door. If it wasn’t enough to say one had been awake all night and had never heard a sound, there’d be nothing for it but to go the whole hog in a good cause. One had been into the girl’s room at—one-thirty, two?—to ask for some aspirin, but hadn’t liked to wake her, seeing her so sound asleep. Bright moonlight—well, light enough—you could see all over the room. Not that she deserved it; but there was someone else who needed a lesson much more. It would make her look a bit of a fool, to be shown up trying to blacken a respectable man; she might not be so sure, after that, that all the answers came out of books.
When the case was over, at the back of the court, or in one of those corridors you saw on the films with lawyers dashing about, Miss Fisher would give her a look. No need to say anything. Just a look.
As for him, there were plenty who wouldn’t care to take the risk of saying Thanks; but he wasn’t like that. Nothing definite, of course, he wasn’t a fool. Just take one’s hand perhaps, and say—oh, well, something about having appreciated it, and making all the difference to his life. They were all alike; whatever you did for them they forgot in five minutes. One ought to have more sense and, in fact, one had. And yet …
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, jus
t 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.”
A Biography of Mary Renault
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.
Portrait of Renault in 1982.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1948 by William Morrow and Company, Inc.
Cover design by Mauricio Diaz
978-1-4804-3981-8
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Mary Renault, North Face: A Novel
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