Devil By The Sea (2 page)

The audience clapped through a wave of laughter. Uncle Jack bent down and asked him where he learned to sing the song. The
little boy stared solemnly through his thick lenses and said, “Ford Road Mission.”

There was more laughter and he was sent to the far side of the platform where he stood by the piano, sticking out his stomach
and staring at the floor.

One by one, the children walked to the microphone. Four of them sang the same song, “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?”
Poppet was in front of Hilary. As she walked to the front of the stage, her skirt bumped on her little behind. She sang, “Lover
Man,” in a soft, husky, thread of a voice and swayed her hips in time to the music. When she had finished singing, she tap-danced,
her skirt swirling high, her legs brown against her white
knickers. The clapping was very loud and a group of big boys at the back of the audience whistled and stamped their feet.

Hilary took her place. Uncle Jack asked her name and announced it through the microphone. “What are you going to sing?” His
teeth gleamed at her like a toothpaste advertisement.

“See Where Golden-hearted Spring.”

It wasn’t the kind of song that the other children had sung, but it was the only one she knew. She had learnt it, during the
Easter term, for the Lent concert.

Uncle Jack patted her on the head and made a funny face. “Perhaps you’d like to tell them yourself,” he said.

He adjusted the microphone and she spoke into it. Her voice, vast and booming, filled the bandstand. She saw Janet turn and
look at her. She began to sing hurriedly, without the piano, forgetting to clasp her hands loosely in front of her but remembering
to breathe deeply and sound her aitches even when there wasn’t one at the beginning of a word. When she had finished the people
clapped, only not as loudly as they had clapped for Poppet.

She stood unhappily by the piano and saw Janet’s angry face across the line of deckchairs. She looked away from Janet and
saw Peregrine. His shoulders were hunched, his thin legs twined miserably round the struts of the deckchair. She knew the
depth of shame he must be feeling and longed to comfort him. Then she thought how generous and good she was to feel so sorry
for him and, raising her eyes soulfully, stared at the sky.

The prizes were presented; a boy who had played the mouth organ was given ten shillings as the first prize and Poppet got
five shillings for the second. All the children in the competition were given ice-cream cornets by Uncle Jack. They sat on
the stage, eating their ice cream and
watching the Punch and Judy show. Hilary kept her back towards the audience, her tongue lingering over the dry, sawdust taste
of the cornet after the ice cream was gone. She had seen the Punch and Judy show several times that summer and during the
performance she watched Poppet who was sitting beside her. One of the seams of Poppet’s green dress had split. There was a
tide mark on her neck and one of her front teeth was loose. She waggled it from time to time between her thumb and forefinger.

When the show was over Uncle Jack brought Mr. Punch out of his box to shake hands with the children and then he retired into
a little room beside the stage where the conjuring things were kept.

Hilary said to Poppet, “I know Uncle Jack very well personally. I live here, you see, and he came to my Christmas party. He
cost three guineas.”

Poppet stared at her without speaking. Her beautiful oval face was pale and haughty. Hilary knew that she had committed a
social blunder by speaking to her and her spirit shrivelled. Poppet tossed her head and, jumping lightly from the stage, ran
to her mother. Lingering, Hilary saw them leave the bandstand and, as they left, the dirty man got up in a hurry and followed
them.

Peregrine was waiting for Hilary. He said, pathetically, “You ate it all, every bit. It isn’t fair. I didn’t have an ice cream,
did I?”

He looked very sad and small. She hardened her heart and reasoned with him. “You can’t always have the same things as I do.
It wouldn’t be fair to me. I’m nearly ten.”

He inquired hopefully, “When I’m three years older, will I be able to have more ice cream than you?”

“No, you won’t. Because I’ll still be older than you, even then. You’ll never be as old as me, never, never.” She spat the
words gleefully into his face.

This was too much. His eyes grew large and miserable. “It’s not fair.”

She felt savage pleasure at his distress. She said with impatient cruelty, “You’re greedy. God doesn’t like little boys to
be greedy.”

She saw the bright tears glitter at the ends of his lashes. Pleased because she had hurt him, she became indulgent and maternal.
She placed her arm round his shoulders and squeezed him affectionately. “I’ll buy you a cornet,” she promised generously.
“On Saturday, when I get my pocket money.”

Still conscious of injustice, Peregrine did not respond. “You get more pocket money than me, anyway,” he said coldly and wriggled
away from her.

Janet’s voice startled them both. It rang out above their heads, loud and angry.

“What on earth do you think you were doing? Wait till we get home, you’ll catch it.” There were red patches on her neck, she
grabbed at the children’s hands.

Hilary said in a high, carrying voice. “I went in for the competition. I know I didn’t have a ticket. I pretended I’d lost
it.”

Janet glanced hastily round her and said in a low, entreating voice, “Hilary,
do
be quiet. Do you want everyone to know?”

Hilary sensed, behind the reprimand, Janet’s basic dislike of her. She looked beyond Janet, at the man standing awkwardly
behind her and said pointedly, “It’s not my fault. You didn’t try to stop me, did you? Mummy said you were to look after us
but you didn’t. You were too busy talking.” Her face smarted with incipient tears.

Janet glared at her vengefully and chewed her lower lip. Uncle Aubrey laughed. Bending down, he spoke to Peregrine. “Didn’t
you want to be in the competition, old chap?”

“No thank you,” Peregrine answered politely. He was always polite, a graceful child. He seemed to know instinctively what
grown-up people wanted of him and as a result they adored him. He looked so sweet, too, in his blue, Dayella knickers and
striped shirt. His face was pale and narrow with delicate bones, his straight, blond hair and soft brown eyes gave him a wistful,
orphaned look. His ears stuck out almost at right angles to his head and were the source of much ridicule. At school, the
bigger boys pulled him along by them. He was not popular with other children: they thought him smug and stuck up. Only Hilary
knew he was not. She knew he was painfully shy and genuinely good, and longed to please everyone.

Now he continued to smile with great sweetness and to regard Janet and Aubrey with a fixed and aimiable stare. Hilary wondered
if he knew they were in love. She found it difficult to believe that they were for Janet was not pretty: her nose was too
big, her hair never curled and her skin was brown as a gypsy’s. She was too ugly to be loved and yet, watching them from behind
a rock one long, hot afternoon, Hilary had seen them kiss each other.

Janet said, “Would you like to go on the beach for a little while? We haven’t to go home yet.”

Hilary sniffed. “It’ll be cold on the beach. But we’ll go if
you
want to. Can we go by the pier?”

“If you like,” Janet answered coldly and held out her hand to Peregrine.

Outside the bandstand, the wind blew keenly. The beach was almost empty, a wide, shingly waste, and beyond the shingle, stretching
to the creaming edge of the sea, was the shining blue mud and the slippery rocks with the gulls crying over them. There was
the smell of low tide; the faint, pervasive smell of worms and snails and jellyfish and crabs; the lovely iodine smell of
seaweed left drying by the ebbing sea.

Peregrine walked between Janet and Aubrey. They each held one of his hands and swung him in great leaps over the cracked paving-stones.
He laughed and they smiled self-consciously at each other above his head. Behind them, Hilary trailed her feet along the pavement,
her face fixed in a mutinous scowl. She saw Poppet and her family sitting in the shelter of the jetty and tugged at Janet’s
skirt.

“I want to go there.” She pointed.

“Not on the pier? For heaven’s sake, make up your mind.” Janet turned to Aubrey with an expression that said, “See what I
have to put up with?” She gave a false, merry laugh. “A frightful child. Never knows her own mind from one minute to the next.”

For form’s sake, Hilary said to Peregrine, “Come and throw stones in the sea.” When he shook his head, she did not try to
persuade him and, alone, crunched across the shingle towards the jetty. Poppet’s mother was leaning back in a deckchair with
her eyes closed. Two little boys played beside her, aiming stones at a bucket. Poppet had climbed across the jetty and was
building a hill of stones on the other side. There were very few people on the beach.

Hilary peered across the jetty at Poppet. Then she saw the man who had been sitting next to her in the bandstand. He was standing
by the steps that led from the promenade to the beach, quite close to where Poppet was playing.

Hilary leaned against the angle of the sea wall and the jetty and closed her eyes. She felt that she looked pale and distinguished.
Perhaps Poppet would notice her and say, “How ill you look, would you like to play with me? We could go by ourselves to the
Fun Fair and spend my prize money.” Hilary would suggest that they took Peregrine with them and Poppet would laugh and say
they didn’t want boys. They weren’t any good at anything, were they? I’ll
count twenty very slowly, she said to herself, and when I open my eyes she’ll come and speak to me. She closed her eyes tightly
and began to count. When she opened them, nothing had happened except that the sky was clouding over above the houses on the
cliff.

Poppet had not moved but the man was squatting beside her now, the skirts of his long coat spread out on the shingle. They
were talking. Once, he flung up his arm and pointed towards the pier.

Hilary sat down and watched the two younger children. They took no notice of her. She stared at them, willing them to look
at her. She picked up a stone and threw it at their bucket. It missed the bucket and hit one of the little boys on the leg.
He wailed, his mother opened her eyes and said automatically, “Mind what you’re doing, now.”

The little boy snivelled and wiped his nose on his sleeve. He picked up his bucket and toddled down the shelving beach to
the end of the jetty where he stood, weeping and resigned, ankle-deep in the yellow foam left behind by the retreating tide.

Sighing deeply, Hilary stood up and climbed on to the jetty. She had to lean on her chest and pull her legs up sideways. Lying
flat on the slimy, smelly surface, she saw Poppet stand up and take the man’s hand. They walked together up the steps and
on to the promenade. The man’s cloak blew about him, he looked like a great, black bird.

Hilary dragged herself upright on the jetty, scraping her knees, and watched them go. The sky was dark now, a flat, dull,
metal colour. She jumped down on the other side of the jetty and behind her, his voice made thin and fading by the wind, Peregrine
called, “Hilary, Hilary, wait for me.”

Peregrine had not wanted to go on the beach. He was cold, the wind brought out goose pimples on his skin and the tips
of his fingers had gone white and bloodless. He did not complain, he had learned to accept the discomforts of a bad circulation,
but when Janet and Aubrey sat on the edge of a beached boat he stood beside them, frowning in a reproachful manner until Janet,
giving his shoulder a quick, impatient push, said, “Run along, dear, do.”

When he had gone, Aubrey at once resumed the conversation that had been interrupted by the end of the children’s performance.
He had been waiting impatiently to do so: he loved the sound of his own voice. Sheltering the flame with his jacket, he struck
a match and lit his pipe. The words emerged muffled through clenched teeth. “As I was saying, Janet, I can’t possibly disassociate
myself from Milly’s problem. I see it so pathetically clearly. Perhaps more clearly because I don’t love her. She is utterly
dependent on me.…”

He stared reflectively at his pipe. The spent match hissed on the wet stones. His profile was stern and affecting. “I don’t
mean just socially and economically. The important thing is that she needs me mentally. I think for her, I am her
mind”
He gestured sombrely at the wide horizon. “Sometimes I think that I did her an injustice in marrying her. If she had had
to continue alone, she might have become a more complete
person.”
He emphasised the word, “person” lovingly, as if it had a very special significance. He continued, “As it is, if I were to
leave her now, she would be lost. A foreigner in a strange land without a phrase book. A foreigner who didn’t know a word
of the language,” he amended gravely, always pedantically anxious to make himself clear.

Ignoring the thrill of fear and joy that shot through her at the thought of Aubrey leaving his wife, Janet said tartly, “I
thought you married her because she said she was pregnant.”

He turned wide, surprised eyes towards her. He was
wounded by her vulgarity. “Janet,” he said, with infinite, sad reproach, “Oh, Janet.”

“I’m sorry,” she mumbled. Her eyes veiled, she plucked at a sticky burr that was tangled in the wool of her jersey.

There was a silence. Then his arm crept round her shoulders and he said, in a deep, rich, loving voice, “Janet, my poor child.
It’s my fault. I should never have talked to you about Milly. It was tactless of me.”

This sentiment put her completely in the wrong.

“Oh, no,” she protested eagerly. “Of course we must talk about her.”

The wind caught his light-brown hair and swept it into agreeable disorder, hiding the patch of baldness on his temple that
occasionally distressed her. He was a handsome young man with a profile that distracted women, a thin mouth and cold, angry
eyes.