The Japanese Girl (10 page)

He spoke fair English with a burr – but not a Cornish burr – and although still very exhausted his story came out at short intervals. It was not the Padstow shipwreck but the
King Lear
, a fore and aft, for Bristol with grain. She had been badly damaged in the gales of the last few days and had foundered ten miles out. He had been in the water eight hours clinging to a spar, and for a good time before that had touched no food. She brought him two pieces of cake from the ledge and some home-made toffee. It was all there was. He ate the cake slowly and with care, propped up against the rock drying in the sun, while she stood a white shadow at the other side of the cave and watched him. She knew she ought to be getting back.

‘I'm grateful for your help,' he said. ‘Really I am. Me name's Stephen Dawe. What is yours, ma'am, if I may ask?'

Miss Cotty told him. ‘ I think,' she said, ‘if you're better I'll go and tell the coastguards. They will see you are well looked after.'

‘How far is the village? Give me time and perhaps I could walk. A mile? Is it more?'

‘A little. It would be unwise to go so far without help.'

To prove her wrong he got to his feet, and at once his legs gave way. With a gasp she ran to him and helped him into a sitting position. For a few moments he lolled dizzily against her shoulder, then he shook his head like a dog and straightened his back and looked at her. She took her arm from round his shoulders and stood up – because his face had an almost frightening closeness. She had never been quite so close to a strange man before. And each time she looked at him he seemed to grow more mature. This was no ship-wrecked cabin-boy.

‘Thank you, ma'am,' he said. ‘Sorry to be so foolish, like.'

The next time he tried he was all right. Much taller than the tall Miss Cotty, she found. Fine broad shoulders and long flanks. There was a tattoo of a speared fish on his left forearm, and his blue trousers had bell bottoms. He was still looking at her.

‘I think,' she said quietly, ‘the sea is far enough out for us to get round.'

‘Us? You're very kind, ma'am. If you'd show me and aid me a little to begin you could leave me half-way.'

But the help offered, she would not qualify it. Her father would be furious, but this surely was a fair excuse. The sailor might have lain there for hours, might even have died.

They got on slowly, for he had to rest now and then, while the twilight caught them up like a slow tide. They hardly spoke, because he was too exhausted and she too shy. After a while he did without her arm.

Then, as they came to the inlet round which the village clustered he sighed faintly and sat down on the sand and said he was done, so she went on ahead. Pink in the face and feeling conspicuous, she found the landlord of the Tavern Inn, and very soon men were carrying Stephen Dawe into the village. She hovered for a few minutes near the tap-room, but when the doctor said he could find nothing much wrong she slipped away and hurried off up the tow-path towards home.

Her father wasn't easily softened, not even by the story she brought, and grunted and sulked through the hour before it was time to go to bed.

In her own room Miss Cotty stood for a long time at the window listening to the distant tramp of the sea. When after a while she climbed into her curtained bed it was to dream of blond Vikings and caves and wet sand and a man's eyes upon her.

When she went down to the beach next day after lunch he was waiting for her. Her heart began to beat. He'd bought or borrowed new clothing: a blue shirt open at the throat and long blue corduroy trousers. And the two-day stubble was shaved. He bent his head a little over her hand, very polite.

‘How,' she said, ‘– how did you know? … Did you know I should be here?'

‘Well, I didn't quite like to call at your home. And I reckoned I had to say thank you.'

‘I – sent down this morning to ask. I heard you were better. But there's nothing to thank me for.'

He smiled at her. ‘I like to think different. But it's good luck us meeting like this again. Can you stay a while?'

She sat down at the mouth of the cave, not easily and gracefully as she did when alone, but primly and stiffly, like a spinster. She felt she had been a little familiar in her greeting, and she was angry with herself for still feeling embarrassed.

But he soon got over that. He had a way with him. The exposure and the exhaustion had done him no harm. Miss Cotty got that impression of his vitality. Always it would be able to throw off fatigue or depression. It bubbled. It effervesced. It affected her and fascinated her and threatened to swamp her.

He called her Miss Cotty and was soon talking to her as to a woman of his own age and class. At first she had thought he looked on her as older than himself, but she saw now that it wasn't so. She was curiously flattered.

He told her he was the illegitimate son of a Gloucestershire baronet by one of his servant girls. He told her this without shame, and before she had time to feel horrified he was on with his tale. At sixteen he had run away to sea, and for twelve years had gone all over the world. That makes him twenty-eight, she thought. She began to subtract twenty-eight from thirty-five and then stopped. I don't know why I should bother to work
that
out, she thought.

Perhaps it was because he seemed interested in her. His bright eyes were always on her. She didn't know whether to be flattered or amused or scornful. After all he was a sailor. And he wasn't being familiar in a familiar way. She found herself swayed by the sound of his voice, quick to be angry and quick to sympathize. Her mind was active all the time in resisting his taking ways, yet all the time step by step it was yielding.

They talked for an hour, and then she remembered herself and got up, and he asked if he might come again. Her tongue played a trick and she said yes. It didn't hesitate and it didn't qualify. He kissed her fingers and went off with vigorous rangey strides, leaving her standing quietly there on the sand.

It is the surprise. I didn't expect him. Tomorrow I shall know. Tomorrow will be different. Kept at a distance he can be – amusing … one or two days more. He can't be staying longer than that. I forgot to ask him. Perhaps he won't be there even tomorrow.

That was silly, because it weakened her. And he was there. Of course he was there. Distantly she asked him her questions, but he wasn't put out. He was going to stay a while yet. As for money, there had been some in a belt round his waist, and when that was done he'd walk to Plymouth. He was tired of the sea and wanted change.

That day, after her pride had been softened, he asked her about herself, and in short sentences she told him what he wanted to know. He didn't seem to have seen anyone like her before. She was not pretty, no. But she was tall, with that grace – like the frond of a fern – and so cool and composed – or so he thought. And above all she was a lady and as unspotted as a flower growing under glass. She was so unlike his podgy, unimaginative mother and his rip-roaring father. He had met all the women he wanted in the hundred ports of the world; but not Miss Cotty.

He came the next day and the next day and the next. It grew to be an assignation. Two o'clock or three o'clock or four. He began to call her Miss Lavinia. She never called him anything to his face. Her pride had gone down in defeat. She no longer thought of the conventions. In fact she hardly thought at all – at least not reasonably, dispassionately, not in the way she used to think.

An hour was the time they stopped. Sometimes he talked all the time, sometimes hardly at all. He told her of the sea. Of Marseilles, and the great lion rock of Gibraltar, of the islands of Greece and the sapphire blue Caribbean; of Malay and villages built out in the water on stilts; of the opium dens of Singapore; of hurricanes in the Strait of Macassar and typhoons in the China Sea; of rounding Cape Horn in the black of the night, and scudding down the Roaring Forties; of wrecks and comradeship and old sea shanties.

She listened most times leaning back against the rock with closed eyes, at ease now and her stiffness forgotten. And always he watched her. Now and then she would smile and sometimes she would laugh outright, which did not seem like Miss Cotty. Sometimes she would blush – it was queer how easily she blushed; he could make the colour come and go almost as he pleased. And sometimes she would open her eyes and look at him and say: ‘I don't believe that!' And because her eyes had a new sparkle in them he was set on convincing her and would kneel up in front of her in a supplicating way. Sometimes her laughter would stop short at this and she would get up and walk down to the sea as if her feelings were too much for her.

One day he kissed her. How it came to that she didn't know. He had been playfully imploring her to believe in some story about a shark and she would not. Perhaps there was something in her eyes that should not have been there, because the next moment he was nearer her and his lips were on hers.

That changed everything. She pushed him away from her and ran breathless up the cliff-path. For three sunny days she did not go near the cove. But on the fourth she went and found him there.

At first he was penitent, bending his yellow head and saying he was sorry. But after she'd half relented she found things subtly different. She wasn't any longer in control, and she crossed the sandhills on her way home knowing that they had agreed to meet tomorrow and that she had listened to things no respectable lady should have stayed to hear.

After that there was no fixed hour. He crossed the beach with the incoming tide and left it with the ebb. Sometimes that meant two hours, sometimes three.

The weather had set fair, with a faint easterly breeze which turned the sand-dunes paler, and the sea was quiet and lapped at their feet. They were like days taken from an eternal summer.

Even Mr Cotty began to take note. These walks of Lavinia's grew longer and longer and could not seem to be put off for more urgent things, like reading to him. And the impulse took her at any awkward hour, sometimes soon after breakfast, sometimes late in the evening. She was absent-minded and jumpy and excitable; her cheeks would flush up at nothing, her eyes were queer and wayward. When she came in she was out of breath. At meals she was out of breath. It was all very trying. But she gave him no useful answers, and he did not see whom else he might ask. He had noticed the sailor once or twice in the village, a great tall fellow with tawny hair and a rolling seaman's walk. But nothing would ever have brought Mr Cotty to suppose that his daughter, his little Lavinia, rising thirty-five or six and devoted only to him could be carrying on with such a common fellow.

That was what it came to. Carrying on. The vulgar phrase brought the colour into her face, so after a time she refused to use it even in her private thoughts. She knew as well as her father that Lavinia Cotty wouldn't do what she was doing; some other woman had taken her place. Reason was there now and then, but it showed like a half-tide rock, disappearing regularly with the flood of the tide.

And he, oddly, was in much the same state. Something withdrawn in her and untouched had turned his imagination into flame.

On the twentieth of July they separated at one in the afternoon and he said: ‘Come tonight. At midnight the tide will be up and there'll be a fine moon.'

Without hesitation she said,
no
. But his last words were: ‘I'll be here at midnight, waiting.'

She went up the cliff-path, hot and angry and afraid.

At eleven that night she stood at me window of her bedroom. She had fought the battle and won. Bad she had been – but not that. They loved each other; he had told her his own feelings often, and she – she knew what she felt about him.

But marriage was out of the question – even if he had suggested it, and he had not. Deep down there could be nothing between them except this strange passion. He had put in here like a ship into port, for rest and repair. Soon he'd be off again on his roving. Already perhaps he was privately dreaming of standing down the Channel in a stiff westerly breeze. Miss Cotty, sailor's wife. Futility before it began. Futility? Miss Cotty, sailor's mistress. That was what it came to, and here thirty-five years of strict upbringing was too strong for even Stephen Dawe.

She threw down the cloak she had picked up and went to the bed. Days of quiet work, nights of dreamless rest. Days and nights and years stretched behind her and stretching away ahead. Father asking for his spectacles. Susie crying when she is scolded and having to be petted up again. Sowing wall-flower seeds and layering carnations. Playing hymns on the piano. Knitting and sewing and reading. This is my life and I am happy in it, I am
happy
in it! Leave me alone! Go home, Stephen! Here in my own room I am too strong for you!

She left the house at eleven-thirty, slipping quietly from the back door and out at the gate in the tamarisk hedge. She wore her winter cloak, and the moon made silver streaks in her hair. The sandhills were a desert of salt with deep pools and ravines of shadow. Across them and through them she plunged, sometimes waist-deep in darkness, sometimes in full light, her shadow like a dog at her feet. She walked as if in a dream.

At the cliff she hesitated. The surf was a line of phantom cavalry dividing sand and sea. All that was fastidious in her urged her to go back, but her will would not bring itself to check her steps. Instead, her cloak fluttering, she went down.

At the bottom the sand was soft and pale and secret. The lightest of cool airs wafted, and she shivered, but it was not cold. Everything was different. It was not her friendly familiar cave. The rocks were sharp-edged like witches' faces and the shadows were monstrous and misshapen. It was a midsummer night's dream, all of it a dream, in which she walked lonely and afraid.

She went into the cave, knowing that at any moment a shadow would move to join her and turn this dream into a muted twilit reality, to drown her thoughts in a dark ecstasy for the duration of its stay.