Return to Night by Mary Renault Page A

herself to ask him. “But I haven’t got one. I’m not a lecturer in anatomy.”
    “Oh, I see.” He looked quite dashed. “I thought most doctors had one tucked away somewhere.”
    “My dear boy! Seeing that an articulated skeleton can cost anything up to seventy pounds, and the simplest way of moving one about is to borrow an ambulance and lay it out on the stretcher, it isn’t a thing one acquires casually. Must you have one?”
    “Well, not really. It would have been ideal, but I expect I can fake up something or other.”
    “You know,” she felt moved to say, “it isn’t my business, of course; but sometimes these rags don’t turn out as funny as people think beforehand. I remember one where the victim pretty nearly died of shock.”
    “But I don’t want it to terrify anyone with. Good heavens, what a frightful idea.” He looked quite reproachful before relenting enough to add, “Of course, I ought to have explained. It’s for a stage prop.”
    “Oh, I see. Well, I apologize; but if you knew what some medical students are capable of—What exactly do you want it for?”
    “Actually, for the Lynchwick Dramatic Society. I’m producing for them this year. Some of them aren’t at all too bad, in the right sort of stuff. Of course, they’ve the usual yearning toward Sheridan and Coward—attraction of opposites, or something. I suppose. But once you’ve jollied them out of all that, it’s amazing what you can get out of them. I’ve got two chaps from the aircraft works that are perfect naturals, and one who can really act. They’d rather set their hearts on a real skeleton. Of course we could have the thing screened from the audience and use a bit of suggestion; in fact I’d prefer it myself. But you know how it is, a few slap-up props are good for morale. It’s more for the effect on the cast I want it, than anything.”
    “I wish I had one for you.” She spoke mechanically; she had been, for a few moments, quite startled by his change of tone. It had been almost a change of personality. She recognized in him for the first time what she had unconsciously missed most, because in her own world she had been used to taking it for granted; the voice of a man talking with casual confidence about a job. “Have you done much of that kind of thing?”
    “Oh, well, on and off. I produced at school, and acted a bit. And when I went up to Oxford, I was in Ouds.”
    “Really?” He couldn’t have made the Ouds, she was thinking, on looks alone. “I might even have seen you, then. No, I suppose not; the only one I’ve seen in the last four years was The Tempest, one of the summer ones. You weren’t in that.”
    He grinned. “Don’t you remember me? Well, I am hurt.”
    This was more than awkward. She cast her mind back: the Ferdinand, fair and much too small; the Prospero, broad, and the voice too deep; the Trinculo, definitely not. Perhaps she might have missed him in a minor part. “Well, I give up.”
    He leaned forward, then suddenly dropped his arms so that they hung beside his knees. His face, thrust out, took on a mournful and malevolent stare. It recalled to her the face he had made for Betty and Christine.
“I prithee, let me bring thee where crabs grow, And I with my long nails will dig thee pignuts …”
    Even after she had heard, and remembered, the gross and forlorn voice whose sullenness had been so curiously moving, she exclaimed, “Don’t try to tell me the Caliban was you.”
    “And you never knew me again. You can’t imagine what that does to me. And I had such cute green gills. I made them myself, out of pig bladder.”
    “Well, now that I’ve got my breath, let me congratulate you. You were far better than the Stratford man the same year.”
    “Who, Streatley? I think he was all right, if you see it funny. Shakespeare may have done, at that. The Elizabethan sense of humor was so much tougher than ours, one’s apt to over-interpret what one can’t swallow, don’t you