Essential Stories (27 page)

“We can’t see the bay any more,” she said. She was thinking of the surf-riders.

“The cliff after the next is the Hole,” he said and pulled her to her feet.

“Yes, the Hole,” she said.

He had a kind of mania about the Hole. This was the walk he liked best and so did she, except for that ugly final horror. The sea had tunnelled under the rock in several places along this wild coast and had sucked out enormous slaty craters fifty yards across and this one a hundred and eighty feet deep, so that even at the edge one could not see the water pouring in. One stood listening for the bump of hidden water on a quiet day: on wild ones it seethed in the bottom of the pot. The place terrified Rowena and she held back, but he stumbled through the rough grasses to the edge, calling back bits of geology and navigation—and to amuse her, explained how smugglers had had to wait for the low wave to take them in.

Now, once more, they were looking at the great meaningless wound. As he stood at the edge he seemed to her to be at one with it. It reminded her of his mouth when she had once seen it (with a horror she tried to wipe from her mind) before he had put his dentures in. Of her father’s too.

Well, the objective was achieved. They found a bank on the seaward side out of the wind where the sun burned and they rested.

“Heaven,” she said and closed her eyes.

They sat in silence for a long time but he gazed at the rising floor of eventless water. Far out, from time to time, in some small eddy of the wind, little families of whitecaps would appear. They were like faces popping up or perhaps white hands shooting out and disappearing pointlessly. Yes, they were the pointless dead.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked without opening her eyes.

He was going to say “At my age one is always thinking about death,” but he said “You.”

“What about me?” she said with that shamelessness of girls.

“Your ears,” he said.

“You are a liar,” she said. “You’re thinking about Daisy Pyke.”

“Not now,” he said.

“But you must be,” she said. She pointed. “Isn’t the cove just below where you all used to bathe with nothing on? Did she come?”

“Round the corner,” he said, correcting her. “Violet and I used to bathe there. Everyone came. Daisy came once when George was on the golf course. She swam up and down, hour after hour, as cold as a fish. Hopeless on dry land. Gordon and Vera came, but Daisy only once. She didn’t fit in—very conventional—sat telling dirty stories. Then she went swimming, to clean up. George was playing golf all day and bridge all evening; that didn’t go down well. They had a dartboard in their house: the target was a naked woman. A pretty awful, jokey couple. You can guess the bull’s-eye.”

“What was this row?” she said.

“She told lies,” he said, turning to her. And he said this with a hiss of finality which she knew. She waited for one of his stories, but it did not come.

“I want to swim in the cove,” said Rowena.

“It’s too cold this time of the year,” he said.

“I want to go,” she said.

“It’s a long way down and hard coming back.”

“Yes, but I want to go—where you all used to go.”

She was obstinate about this, and of course he liked that.

“All right,” he said, getting up. Like all girls she wanted to leave her mark on places. He noticed how she was impelled to touch pictures in galleries when he had taken her to Italy. Ownership! Power! He used to dislike that but now he did not; the change was a symptom of his adoration of her. And she did want to go. She did want to assert her presence on that empty sand, to make the sand feel her mark.

They scrambled the long way down the rocks until the torn cliffs were gigantic above them. On the smooth sand she ran barefoot to the edge of the sea rippling in.

“It’s ice!” she screamed.

He stood there, hunched. There was a litter of last year’s rags and cartons near the rocks. Summer crowds now swarmed into the place, which had been secret. He glowered with anger at the debris.

“I’m going to pee,” he said.

She watched the sea, for he was a long time gone.

“That was a big one,” she shouted.

But he was not there. He was out on the rocks, he had pulled off his clothes. He was standing there, his body furred with grey hair, his belly wrinkled, his thighs shrunk. Up went his bony arms.

“You’re not to! It will kill you! Your heart!” she shouted.

He gave a wicked laugh, she saw his yellow teeth, and in he dived and was crawling and shouting in the water as he swam out farther, defying her, threshing the water, and then as she screamed at him, really frightened, he came crawling in like some ugly hairy sea animal, his skin reddened with cold, and stood dripping with his arms wide as if he was going to give a howl. He climbed over the rocks and back to the sand and got his clothes and was drying himself with his shirt.

“You’re mad,” she said. “You’re not to put that wet thing on.”

“It will dry in this sun,” he said.

“What was all that for?” she said. “Did you find her?”

“Who?” he said, looking round in bewilderment. He had dived in boastfully and in a kind of rage, a rage against time, a rage against Daisy Pyke too. He did not answer, but looked at her with a glint of shrewdness in his eyes. She was flattered by the glitter in this look from a sometimes terrifying old man.

He was tired now and they took the short inland road to the car close to those awful caravans, and when she got him into the car again he fell asleep and snorted. He went to his room early but could not sleep; he had broken one of his rules for old men. For the first time he had let her see him naked. He was astounded when she came into his room and got into his bed: she had not done this before. “I’ve come to see the Ancient Mariner,” she said.

How marvellous. She is jealous, after all. She loves me, he went about saying to himself in the next weeks. She drove to what they called “our town” to buy cakes. “I am so thin,” she said.

The first time she returned saying she had seen his “dear friend Daisy.” She was in the supermarket.

“What’s she doing there?” he said. “She lives forty miles away. What did she say?”

“We did not speak. I mean, I don’t think she saw me. Her son was with her. He said hello. He’d got the hood of the car up. She came out and gave me a nod—I don’t think she likes me,” she said with satisfaction.

The next week she went again to get petrol. The old man stayed at the house, shook one or two mats, and swept the sitting-room floor. It was his house and Rowena was untidy. Then he sat on the terrace, listening for her car, anxiously.

Presently he picked up the sound, much earlier than her usual time, and saw the distant glint in the trees as the car wound its way up. There she was, threading her beauty through the trees. He heard with alarm the sudden silences of the car at some turn in the hill, then heard it getting louder as it turned a corner, then passing into silence again. He put his book down and went inside in a dutiful panic to put the kettle on, and while he waited for it to boil he took the cups out pedantically, one by one, to the table on the terrace and stood listening again. Now it was on the last stretch, now he heard a crackling of wheels below. He ran in to heat the teapot and ran out with his usual phrase: “Did you get what you wanted?”

Then, puffing up the last steps, she came. But it was not she; it was a small woman, bare-legged and in sandals, with a swaggering urchin grin on her face, pulling a scarf off her head. Daisy!

“Gosh!” she said.

Harry skipped back a yard and stood, straightening and forbidding. “Daisy!” he said, annoyed, as if waving her off.

“Those steps! Harry!” she said. “Gosh, what a view.”

She gave a dry dismissive laugh at it. She had, he remembered, always defied what she saw. The day when he had seen her at the fair seemed to slide away under his feet and years slid by, after that, following that day.

“What—” he began. Then in his military way, he jerked out, “Rowena’s gone into town. I am waiting for her.”

“I know,” said Daisy. “Can I sit down and get my breath? I know. I saw her.” And with a plotting satisfaction: “Not to speak to. She passed me. Ah, that’s better.”

“We never see people,” said Harry sternly. “You see I am working. If the telephone rings, we don’t answer it.”

“The same with us. I hope I’m not interrupting. I thought—I’ll dash up, just for a minute.”

“And Rowena has her work . . .” he said. Daisy was always an interrupter.

“I gave you a surprise,” said Daisy comfortably. “She is lovely. That’s why I came. You’re lucky—how d’you do it? Where did you find her? And what a place you’ve got here! I made Stephen go and see his friends. It was such a long time—years, isn’t it? I had to come. You haven’t changed, you know. But you didn’t recognise me, did you? You were trying not to see me, weren’t you?”

Her eyes and her nose were small. She is at her old game of shock tactics, he thought. He looked blankly at her.

“I explained that,” he said nervously. “I must go and turn the kettle off,” he said. He paused to listen for Rowena’s car, but there was no sound.

“Well,” she said. “There you are. Time goes on.”

When he came back with a teapot and another cup, she said, “I knew you wouldn’t come and see me, so I came to see you. Let me see,” she said and took off the scarf from her head. “I told you George died, didn’t I? Of course I did,” she said briskly.

“Yes.”

“Well . . .” she said. “Harry, I had to see you. You are the only wise man I know.” She looked nervously at the garden and across to the army of trees stacked on the hill and then turned to him. “You’re happy and I am happy, Harry. I didn’t come to make a scene and drag it all up. I was in love with you, that was the trouble, but I’m not now. I was wrong about you, about you and Violet. I couldn’t bear to see her suffer. I was out of my mind. I couldn’t bear to see you grieving for her. I soon knew what it was when poor George died. Harry, I just don’t want you to hate me any more. I mean, you’re not still furious, are you? We do change. The past is past.”

The little liar, he thought. What has she come up here for? To cause trouble between himself and Rowena as she had tried to do with his wife and himself. He remembered Daisy’s favourite word: honesty. She was trying for some reason to confuse him about things he had settled a long time ago in his mind.

He changed the subject. “What is—”—he frowned—“I’m sorry, I can’t remember names nowadays—your son doing?”

She was quick to notice the change, he saw. Nothing ever escaped Daisy.

“Oh, Tommy, the ridiculous Tommy. He’s in Africa,” she said, merrily dismissing him. “Well, it was better for him—problems. I’m a problem to him—George was so jealous too.”

“He looks exactly like George,” Harry said. “Taller, of course, the curly hair.”

“What are you talking about? You haven’t seen him since he was four.” She laughed.

“Don’t be stupid, Daisy, we saw him last week at that—what is the name of the place?—at the fair.”

The blood went from Daisy’s face. She raised her chin. “That’s a nasty one,” she said and gave her head a fierce shake. “You meant it to, didn’t you? That was Stephen. I thought you’d be the last to think a thing like that, with your Rowena. I expect people say it and I don’t care and if anyone said it to him he wouldn’t know what they were talking about. Stephen’s my lover.”

The old sentimental wheedling Daisy was in the coy smile that quickly followed her sharpness. “He’s mad about me,” she said. “I may be old enough to be his mother, but he’s sick of squealing, sulky girls of seventeen. If we had met years ago, he would have hated me. Seriously, Harry, I’d go down on my knees to him.”

“I am sorry—I—that’s why I didn’t recognise you. You can ask Rowena. I said to her, ‘That’s Daisy Pyke’s daughter,’ ” Harry said, “when I saw you.”

Daisy gaped at him and slowly, her lips curled up with delight. “Oh, good! Is that true? Is it? You always told the truth. You really thought that! Thank you, Harry, that’s the nicest thing you ever said to me. I love you for it.”

She leaned forward, appealing to him quietly.

“George never slept with me for seven years before he died. Don’t ask me about it, but that’s the truth. I’d forgotten what it was. When Stephen asked me I thought it was an insult—you know, all this rape about. I got into the car and slammed the door in his face and left him on the road—well, not on the road, but wherever it was—and drove off. I looked back. He was still standing there. Well, I mean, at my age! That next day—
you
know what it is with women better than anyone— I was in such a mood. When I got back to the house I shouted for George, howled for him to come back and poured myself a tumblerful of whisky and wandered about the house slopping it on the carpet.” She laughed. “George would have killed me for
that
if he had come— and I went out into the garden and there was Stephen, you won’t believe it, walking bold as brass up from the gate. He came up quickly and just took the glass from me very politely—the stuff was pouring down my dress—and put it on the grass and he wiped my blouse. That’s what did it.”

She paused thoughtfully and frowned. “Not there,” she said prudishly, “not at the house, of course. I wanted to get away from it. I can’t bear it. We went to the caravan camp. That’s where he was living. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I mean, there’s a lot more.”

She paused. “Love is something at our age, isn’t it? I mean, when I saw you and Rowena at Guilleth—I thought I must go and talk to you. Being in the same boat.”

“We’re not,” he said, annoyed. “I am twenty years older than you.”

“Thirty, if you don’t mind,” she said, opening her bag and looking into her mirror. When she had put it away with a snap she looked over the flowers in the steep garden to the woods. She was listening for the sound of a car. He realised he had stopped listening for it. He found himself enjoying this hour, despite his suspicions of her. It drove away the terrors that seemed to dissolve even the trees of the ravine. With women, nature returned to its place, the trees became real trees. One lived in a long moment in which time had stopped. He did not care for Daisy, but she had that power of enticement which lay in stirring one with the illusion that she was defying one to put her right. With Rowena he had thrown away his vanity; with Daisy it returned.