Under The Net - Iris Murdoch [110]
I was away from the glare of the street lamps it occurred to me that it was a very light night. From the road the garden had looked pitch black; but in the garden itself the darkness was not dense but diffused, and as I walked quietly along I felt that I must be clearly visible from all the windows, and I expected at any moment to hear a voice challenging me from above. But no one spoke. From outside everything looked very different, and it took me some time to identify the window of the store room. When I did find it I was surprised to discover how high it was from the ground. I pulled at the window very gently, holding my breath. To my relief it came open without any check and without a sound. I looked about me. The garden was empty and motionless, the cherry trees turned towards me, quiet as dancers in a tableau. There was still no one on the road. I opened the casement wide, and then hooked my fingers firmly on to the steel frame of the opening on each side. But the foot of the window was just too high for me to reach it with my knee. There was no sill on the outside. I stood back. I hesitated to spring up, for fear of making a noise. Then I thought that I heard footsteps approaching along the road. Quick as a flash, I put one hand into the opening and sprang. The steel edge of the frame caught me at the hip, and next moment I was heeling over gently on to the sill on the inside, and drawing my legs after me. I stood dead still on the floor of the store room. There was a silence into which it seemed to me that I had just let loose a vast quantity of sound. But the silence continued. I drew the window to, leaving it unlatched as it had been before. Then I walked down the middle of the room, feeling rather than seeing in the dark bulks of the iron bedsteads on each side. Here it really was pitch black, with a dense darkness which seemed to coat the eyeballs. I fumbled for the handle of the door, listened for a moment, and then stepped into the corridor. The bright lights and the white walls broke through the door and dazzled me. My eyes, laid open by the dark, winced at this inrush of light, and I covered them. Then I turned in the direction of Corelli, my feet padding dully on the rubber composition floor. Here concealment was impossible. I simply had to hope that some kindly deity would see to it that I met nobody. The Hospital was deserted, yet strangely alive. I could hear it purring and murmuring like a sleeping beast, and even when at times there came as it were a wave of silence I could still sense within it its great heart beating. As I passed the Transept Kitchen I averted my head; for I feared that if I encountered any human eye my guilt would write itself so plainly on my face as to cry 'Shame!' upon itself of its own accord. I came to the main stairs. They were glittering, deserted, immense. The small sound of my footfalls echoed up far above me into the great well of the staircase, and looking up I saw the superimposed rectangles of the banisters diminishing almost to a point many floors above. By now there was no thought in my head at all, not even the most general notion of Hugo, and if anyone had stopped me I would have gibbered like an idiot. I came to the door of Corelli III. Here I paused. I had no very clear conception of how the ward was organized at night. If there were any nurses sleeping in the ward they would be downstairs. In Corelli III there would probably be nobody over and above the patients, except the Night Sister. Of this person I knew only by report, and she had figured in my mind, even before I had planned this escapade, as a sort of nocturnal goddess, a Piddingham of the underworld. Now as I thought of her, with my hand upon the door, I was taken with a fit of trembling, like a postulant approaching the cave of the Sibyl. I opened the door quietly and stepped into the familiar corridor of the ward. One or two lights were burning in the corridor, but the patients' rooms were all in darkness. The kitchen and the Administration Rooms were dark too, except for the Sister's Room, and from