Death of a Huntsman (13 page)

‘Everyone told me it was so brilliant. So much flashing colour. But the rocks are black. It looks burnt out, somehow.'

‘That's just the summer,' he said.

Out of politeness he stared with her at the shore. He thought there was a great deal of colour. It was simply that it was split into a fractional mosaic of blacks and browns, of bleached pinks and the dull ruby reds of
house-tops half-smothered by green. A tower of pale yellow, the new school, was raised like a fresh sugar stick above the black sand of the shore, at the end of which an astonishing summer residence of blue tiles, polished as a kitchen stove, was wedged into the cliff. Two or three rowing-boats, piled with white baskets, with curtains of island embroideries in scarlet and green, were motionless on the oily bay, where in the high season a hundred of them clamoured about liners like fighting junks, manned by brown shivering men diving for coins. Lines of high-prowed fishing-boats, up-curved like horns, striped in green and blue and ochre, were pulled up along the water-front, and far away and high above them he could see the water splash of a spouting
levada
, poised like gathered spittle in a fissure of rock and eucalyptus forest, pure white in blinding sun.

He suddenly felt himself defending all he saw. He wanted to say that there was plenty of colour. Only the sun, burning ferociously, created an illusion of something cindery, melting dully away.

‘It's just a question of——'

‘Oh! my bag,' she said.

She stood on the lowest rung of the gangway, lifting helpless arms, imploring him with a smile.

‘In my cabin—so sorry—twenty-three—you'll see it. Probably on the bed.'

As he mounted the ladder quickly, more insecure than when he had come down, he remembered that cabin twenty-three was one of four on the boat deck and he
walked straight for it, before the purser could speak or stop him.

He found her handbag on the bed. Unstripped, the bed was disorderly and the bag, which was why she had forgotten it, was partly covered by her pillow. Its clasp sprang open as he picked it up. Its white jaws spilled lipstick and handkerchief, a few letters, a mirror, a little diary in black morocco.

He felt intensely curious and wanted to open the diary. The bag gave out a perfume that floated about him for a moment, arousing in him a startling sensation of intimacy.

Then he felt nervous and shut the bag quickly and rushed out of the cabin, only to find the purser coming to meet him on the deck, saying:

‘What was it, Mr Manson? Was it something you could not find?'

He went on without answering, slipping hastily once again on the insecure mahogany cotton-reels of the gangway, down to a sea which the launch's scarlet pennant and the yellow dress were the only things that did not melt and sway.

‘You were very quick,' she said. ‘It was very kind of you.'

The sea was so calm that it was possible for himself and the girl to stand motionless on the launch all the way from ship to shore. She stood erectly looking about her, searching the bay, the shore and the abrupt hills above the town for colour.

‘It surprises me,' she said. ‘I'd expected something more exotic.'

‘It's exotic in winter,' he said. ‘It's all colour then. You should have come in the winter. That's when everybody comes.'

It suddenly struck him that, after all, she was really not looking at the approaching shore. Something about her eyes made them seem glazed with pre-occupation.

‘I'm afraid it was my fault about the cable,' she said. ‘It should have been sent. But I was in a dreadful hurry. I made up my mind all of a sudden and then somehow——'

‘I don't know what you had in mind about hotels.'

‘I suppose they're all shut,' she said.

‘All the recognized ones.'

‘Where do you live? In one not recognized?'

‘I wouldn't recommend it,' he said.

Forgetfulness about the cable, forgetfulness about the bag—he stood pondering uncertainly, staring at the approaching harbour pier, wondering where to take her.

‘I do apologize about the cable,' she said. ‘I'm afraid you're peeved.'

‘I was trying to think of a possible solution to the hotel problem.'

‘It's no problem,' she said. ‘I'm not particular. I shall find something. I always do.'

‘Had you any idea of how long you were staying?'

‘As long as I like it.'

‘It isn't always possible to leave when you think you will,' he said. ‘Ships are very irregular here. They don't just happen when you think they're going to.'

‘Does anything?' she said.

The launch began to make its curve to the landing pier, the change of course uplifting the scarlet pennant very slightly. Above steps of baked white concrete a line of idle taxis stretched out, with a few ox-carts, in the shade of flowerless jacarandas. A smell of oil and hot bullock dung and rotting sea-weed seethed in the air and he said:

‘I'm afraid you'll find anything down here in the port very hot.'

As the launch came into the jetty he leapt out. On the steps he held out his hand to her and she lifted the long cream glove.

‘The man will bring the bags up to the top,' he said.

At the top of the jetty he realized with concern that she was hatless. Heat struck down on concrete and then back again as if pitilessly forced down through a tube, dangerously compressed under the high enclosure of hills.

‘I hope you're all right?' he said. ‘I mean the heat?—the air is terribly clear and you don't always realize——'

‘I don't feel it,' she said. ‘I never feel it.' She touched her hair, running her fingers through it. The paler streak of it, uplifted, exposed the mass of pure black hair below, and he realized how thick and strong and wiry it was. Its heavy sweep, shot with the curious blonde streak, aroused in him the same odd sensation of uneasy intimacy he had experienced in the cabin, smelling the perfume of the handbag, by the disordered bed.

For a moment longer she stood engrossed by the sight of him staring at her hair, and he did not realize how
absorbed and uncomfortable it had made him feel until she said:

‘Where do we go from here? Where can I get a taxi?'

‘I was thinking you could come to the office and leave your things——'

‘I'd rather get a hotel,' she said. ‘What's the name of yours?'

‘
Mafalda
,' he said. ‘It's terribly small and they don't really cater——'

‘It doesn't matter if it's reasonable and the beds are clean. Are the beds clean?'

‘Quite clean.'

She looked at him without any kind of disturbance, the clear, rather too large blue eyes fixing him with exacting softness, and said:

‘I think any beds that are clean enough for you ought to be clean enough for me.'

‘You can always try it temporarily.'

From the hot taxi she leaned her long body forward and looked at the mounting hillside. Above it successive folds of rock, exposed in crags that seemed sun-blackened, submerged under encrustations of blue-green forests of pine and eucalyptus, fascinated her large blue eyes into a larger stare.

‘What's up there?' she said. ‘I mean the other side of the mountain?'

‘Not much,' he said. ‘More rock and forest and so on. Not many people. Over the other side there's a power station. It's lonely. There are places you can't get to.'

She smiled and sat back beside him on the seat, wrapping
the surprisingly cool cream gloves deftly one over the other.

‘That's where I'd like to go,' she said.

Then, without attaching importance to what she said, without really giving it another thought, he was inspired to remark with sudden cheerfulness that there would probably be, at the hotel, a cup of tea.

There were mice in the upper ceilings of the old hotel and he lay listening to them half the night, turning over in his mind what seemed to him the vexing problem of her being there, in that highly unsuitable, dark, cheap hotel where no English visitor ever came except for a temporary night, in sheer high season desperation. He had carefully warned her a number of times that the food would not be English. ‘It will be oily and all that,' he said. ‘It's something it takes a long time to get used to.' When she reminded him that he at any rate appeared to survive it he did not dare tell her that it was simply because he could not afford anything else. He had just had to get used to it; and now he did not ask for anything better and in his limited way he was perfectly happy. At least he supposed he was.

But something troubled him much more than this. He was perplexed and worried by a phrase she had used.

‘What are you going to do with yourself?' he asked her. ‘It can be terribly exhausting at this time of the year——'

‘I'm going to poke about,' she said. ‘I want things to do. I want to see things.'

He grew increasingly uneasy about this as the evening went on. It was not a good thing to poke your nose into things in Salandar. It was a place, in the right season, in the delicious winter flowery days, of infinite surface charm. Bougainvilleas covered with steep massive curtains of purple and sienna-rose all the dry ravines coming down from the hills; starry scarlet poinsettias lined the potato patches; a honey odour of incense trees hung over the old streets at night-time. If underneath all this there were people who had not enough to eat, who were afraid of something or somebody, who were tubercular or illiterate or superfluous or resentful, that was no concern of visitors.

‘Don't you ever poke about and find out how things really are?' she said.

‘No.'

‘Have you been here long?' she said. ‘How many years have you been here?'

‘I came here about three and a half years ago. Nearly four.'

It was getting so long ago he could hardly remember exactly. His time there had gradually become, in the Salandar fashion, a succession of dull tomorrows.

‘How long is it since you went over to the other side of the island?' she said.

‘I'm afraid I've never been over to the other side.'

‘By the way you spoke I thought you'd been there often,' she said.

‘No,' he said, ‘I've never been there.'

‘Haven't you any inclination at all to see what it's like?'

‘Not particularly.'

It seemed to him that she did not speak her questions so much as impose them on him with the too large, too brilliant, uneasy eyes.

‘What about Santo Carlo?' she said. ‘They say that's very interesting. Have you been there?'

No: he had not been to Santo Carlo either.

He found, presently, what seemed to him a happy solution to her restlessness, to the problem of what she should do with herself. It was also a tremendous relief to be able at last to change an uncomfortable subject.

‘You could join the club,' he said. ‘I don't know why I didn't think of it before.'

‘Do you belong?'

‘Not now,' he said. ‘I gave it up.'

In winter the club was crowded with visitors he did not know; in summer there was no one there. After six months of it he had not considered it worth while to renew the subscription. He decided he would save the money. He had to think of the future.

‘What happens there?'

‘People play bridge and tennis and that sort of thing and there's a small golf course,' he said. ‘It's rather beautiful,' and then added, as if it was an extra thought to impress her: ‘You can get tea.'

She did not say anything and he went on:

‘You can get a temporary subscription—I think for even a week. I can find out for you—but then if you don't know how long you're going to stay——'

‘That was something I was going to talk to you about,' she said.

In speaking of the times of ships he felt more certain of himself. That at least was his job.

‘It depends where you want to go from here,' he said. ‘If you'll give me some idea of times and places I'll have——'

‘When is the next ship in?'

‘There'll be nothing in this week. Not until after the week-end,' he said. ‘Then the
Alacantara
is due. She's pleasant.'

‘It would be nice just to have the sailing times of what's likely to be coming in,' she said. ‘Could you? It would be very sweet of you.'

She had asked him so many questions that this final acutely personal one, delivered more softly, in a lowered voice, made him more uneasy than he had been before. He did not grasp even that the conversation had been largely about himself. He felt only another rush of feeling about her: a repetition of the sensation he had had in the cabin, over the handbag and the disorderly bed, and from the way she had run her fingers through her thick black hair.

‘You look tired,' she said to him at last. ‘It's time you got into that good clean bed.'

In the morning he woke to an air that had in it the breath of ashes. It sprang at his already catarrhal throat with windy choking heat. He grasped then the reason for his lethargy of the previous day, his soporific irritations as he met the boat that he had not expected. The
leste
was
blowing: the wind from the north-east that burned with pure incineration off the mainland sand.

This had not prevented Miss Vane from getting up at five o'clock and watching the night-boats, like slowly extinguishing fireflies, bringing in their fish across the bay.

‘They looked wonderful,' she said. ‘Haven't you ever seen them come in?'

‘No.'

‘I talked to some of them—the men, I mean. There were two brothers from Santo Carlo——'

‘You should be very careful how you talk to these people,' he said.

At breakfast, which they had together in the already shuttered little dining room, in a queer kind of morning twilight through which even her large and exceptionally blue eyes looked almost white in their diffusion, he warned her about the intolerable burning wind.