The Lily Hand and Other Stories (24 page)

In the morning light the Major looked out of his window, and saw the silvery coils of new barbed wire like a guardian serpent about the flagstaff. And above, afloat upon the restless wind, the expected flag, an enemy that could not be imprisoned or exiled or killed, and certainly could never be silenced. It would soon be down, of course. It could not be nailed to the staff, there had not been time, and silence had been essential. Tied, probably, before the ropes were cut away. It would soon be down; the only trouble was that it would go up again somewhere else. It always did. He was getting used to it.

He had spent several months of his life searching the little houses of these towns for explosives and arms, for subversive literature in the native tongue, for wanted men on the run; and as far as he could see the same processes must continue for ever. The only difference seemed to be that on every occasion the circumstances of the search became a little meaner and more humiliating. Now it was a little girl with a face stained by vegetable dye, who had made a fool of a homesick boy, and helped another boy to raise once again the ubiquitous flag. The Major felt an impatience to have the miserable business finished; but by daylight he no longer mistook for anger and hatred what was, after all, nothing but disgust and exasperation.

The grammar school opened at eight o'clock; at half past eight the Major presented himself there with a sergeant and two men.

It was a necessary act of restraint on his part to wait the additional half-hour, he found it important to prove to himself that what he felt was not the eagerness of the hunter, but only the determination of a man with a sense of duty. If he once began to disbelieve in his own sense of duty he might very well be sick with self-disgust when the moment came, and the terrified child was dragged forth from the back row of desks, shrinking and trying to hide her disfigured face behind a handkerchief. It seemed to him, when he thought of her as an individual girl, that all he had achieved in this war of attrition was to turn little schoolgirls of fifteen into viragos who ran towards danger instead of away from it, and hurled clawing cats into the faces of the enemy; which might be considered a remarkable achievement in its way, but had not been at all his intention.

He was punctilious in waiting in the entrance hall while the headmaster was fetched out to him, though he could no longer be sure whether this was out of consideration for the man's feelings, or from a desire to compel him to lead the authorities with ceremony to their capture. The moment might be salutary for the teacher as well as the pupil.

‘I need hardly tell you why I'm here,' he said, when the headmaster came, his spectacles a little askew on his antique and aquiline nose, his short-sighted eyes blinking mildly at his visitors. ‘No doubt you've already seen the flag over the Town Hall.'

‘I see it's still there,' said the headmaster gently. ‘I thought you would have had it down by now. But no, naturally you need not tell me why you are here.'

‘We intend,' said the Major, ‘to make an example this time. If you allow your children to move up into the front line, you must consider that it is you yourselves who inflict their punishments upon them. We would infinitely rather deal with you.'

‘We would infinitely rather that you did,' agreed the headmaster. ‘You must do what you feel to be your duty. But so must our children. Would you like to begin with the little ones? Forgive me, but your gambit leads me to believe that you are looking for someone more than usually embarrassing as an opponent.'

The Major would have liked to think of a cutting reply, but he had long accustomed himself to the realization that his position would not stand it. The situation had placed irony clean out of his reach.

‘I am looking for a girl of about fifteen. There was also a boy, but I have reason to believe that he will not be so immediately recognizable. You may not be aware that we have recently adopted the use of a spray-gun loaded with one of the local vegetable dyes. The girl will be stained purple. This time I can promise you there will be no collective punishment – this time it will not be necessary.'

‘Purple,' said the schoolmaster reflectively. ‘A royal colour. Also the colour of mourning. A nice choice! And you think the boy escaped?'

‘I think it hardly matters. Once we have our hands on the girl he will come forward of his own will.'

‘I see you have not entirely wasted you time with us,' said the schoolmaster with a polite smile. ‘Very well! You wish to inspect our senior forms? I have kept them assembled in the hall for you. Please!'

The Major strode across the polished lobby, the sergeant and his men keeping step behind him. The headmaster, advancing his hand to the knob of the hall door, levelled one sudden, glittering glance into the eyes of the invader, and it seemed for a startling instant that what he felt for him was no longer simple antagonism, but almost pity. Then he pushed the door wide, and stood back for his visitors to enter.

The Major marched over the threshold with the briskness of complete confidence, almost of triumph. Fifty-three young heads, with marvellous unanimity, were raised to confront him, the challenging light of fifty-three pairs of dark, wide, Byzantine eyes bristled at him like bayonets, and he checked in his stride and wrenched himself sidewise into stillness, as though he had indeed run his beribboned breast into a thicket of steel. He had come looking for a marked outcast. He beheld a regiment, a Pyrrhic phalanx of embattled children, all their delicate, olive faces spattered from forehead to chin with the resplendent purple of royalty and mourning.

I am a Seagull

When I was a child, I had an aunt by marriage who came from the Hebrides, and after she was widowed she used to come and stay with us sometimes, in our incongruous suburban house in North London. I don't remember what she looked like, or even the sound of her voice, but I know that she brought something of the islands into the town with her, besides her accent and her songs; a sort of secure restlessness, a stormy peace.

It was she who first told me all the old stories about the seal-wives, those mysterious creatures who came out of the sea and sloughed their skins to become women, like other women to all appearance, but more dangerous and more unobtainable. Almost always they came for love of a mortal man, or, at any rate, somehow let themselves subside with deceptive tameness into a mortal marriage; but always, in the end, it was the sea-half of their dual nature that won them back. They made female excuses about being forced to depart if their husbands struck them three times, and then took advantage of anything, a touch, a stumble, to pretend that they had suffered the three irremediable blows; but somehow it was always clear to me that these pretexts covered the revulsion of their own unassuageable longings. They returned to the sea because in the battle of desires the sea was the stronger.

Brought up on fairy stories of another kind, in which marriages existed only to continue happy, and unrecorded, ever after, I suffered seriously from the contemplation of these separations.

‘But why,' I protested, ‘is it always the sea that wins? If she loved the fisherman, how could she love the sea more?'

My aunt said simply, as though it admitted no argument, that the sea was stronger than the land, and the sea life than the land life.

‘But that means it always has to be an unhappy ending,' I objected, my human sense of justice troubled, for I felt the sorrows of those fishermen more than all the pathetic contrivances of Hans Andersen.

She gave me – this I do remember – a surprised but tranquil look, and said mildly: ‘Why should you think that ending unhappy, more than the other?'

I never found an answer to that; it was a kind of terrible window into the seal-woman's heart, and I spent long, solitary hours exploring new sensitivities within my mind, trying to determine whether she had the same right to happiness as her mortal husband, and whether it was right to try to keep her when she was destroyed with the scent and desire of the sea. Children sometimes become involved very deeply in problems like these, and I was already an imaginative little boy.

But my aunt also lost her battle with the ocean, and went back to the Hebrides, and gradually these stories which had so terrified, ravished and perplexed me faded from my mind.

I grew up an inland man myself, from head to foot, and, what with school and Oxford, congealed into as satisfactory an ordinariness as any parents could wish; and by the time I was nineteen, and confronted, like all my generation, with an unwanted but accepted war, and the problem of what to do about it, my only eccentricities were writing poetry and struggling with an occasional play. I had a few promising contracts already, when the stage went into cold storage for a couple of years, and I into the RAF for seven. When I came out, my father was dead in an air raid, and my mother settled into a little house in a Midland town, where I joined her, in a curious mood of suspended will, to try to think what I was going to do next.

Did the war really teach me very much? I don't think so. Or rather, what it taught me became, as soon as it was over, sealed off into another compartment of my life and was of no more practical use to me. All I remember clearly from those days is the uneasy ecstasy of flight, and my painful dissatisfaction with the machinery of it, which permitted the experience of just so much of bliss, just enough to drive me mad with what was withheld. If you've ever dreamed of flying – it's quite a common experience, I'm told – you will know what I mean. To be free and light in the air, to turn and take the curl of the wind at will, without that odious intervention of the containing, the alien machine! That was what I longed for, and could not have. Sometimes I dream of it now and wake up trembling, with tears in my eyes. Because I could not have it when most I needed it. Because of Lucy.

I had a dwindling gratuity, a rusty gift for words, no job, and a blank wall in front of my senses at twenty-six. I went off with a decrepit little car, a poor substitute for the wings I wanted, to fritter away my leave in Cornwall, and came in October to a fishing village on the north coast, a wild, cliff-closed bay with an impossible harbour, in and out of which the diminutive fleet could inch their keels only in good weather and a southerly wind. One zigzag street rolled down by cobbled leaps into the bay. When the wind was high it drove the spray far above the roofs and the tide up to the edge of the square. Each side of the obstinate little lightning-flash cleft of human dwellings, the cliffs reared their wet, slate-black sides to a crumbling huddle of heath, and gorse, and tussocky grass, screaming with gulls.

I liked it there. I stayed at the only hotel, at the top of the jagged street, and I walked on the cliffs in the wildest weather October brought us. It was the nearest thing to flight I could find – dangerously near sometimes at the edge of the sheer, fluted slide of slate, looking down on the boiling bay and the streaming blue-black beach.

It was raining, too, in a wild downpour, the day I met Lucy; even the air had become lashing water, and as I went up the cliff-path there was above me an inverted cauldron of cloud, boiling, too, and casting up spinning, blown, crumpled debris of gulls. They screamed through the howl of the wind, like demons. Their voices seemed to me to hold the whole of desolation, but the whole of joy, too. I went up, flapping in my oilskins, to where the rocks, like broken teeth, jutted on the cliff's edge, the wind round them like a coiled ribbon, black, oily, streaming storm water.

There was someone there, on the extreme edge, arching a slender back to balance birdlike on the rim. Raincoats are sexless, but when this being heard or sensed me, and turned a sudden intent face to stare, I saw it was a girl.

The gulls were blowing round her like aimless fragments of paper on the wind, and the rain was salt with spray. She was wet as a seal, her short black hair streaming water, her eyes brilliant, her face sleek, everywhere the gloss and glaze of the water flowing down her, and polishing her with liquid grey light. She looked at me and laughed, straight into my face, because I must be as mad as she was, to be there in such weather. In all the gestures she made there, I never saw any of shielding herself, or shaking off water, or hiding even her eyes from the sting of the driving rain. She arched her head, her body, her face into it, and let wind and weather break upon her as if she felt only a caress, and exulted in it. And she put an instant hand upon my arm as I reached her, and leaned to watch the thunder and slash and hollow withdrawing cry of the waves beating in under the cliff.

‘Listen!' she cried. ‘Listen! Isn't it magnificent?'

I screamed obvious things at her, feeling that she ought to be indoors and dry and sane, though I might act like a lunatic if I chose. Only when the wind subsided a little could we hear each other's words without shrieking, and therefore our conversation there on the cliff was nothing but breathless laughter, and the exchange of glances. I loved her before ever I knew her name. She was beautiful like a slender, bright, ardent bird, muscular, and wild as the wind.

We came down into the town together at last, and when the walls sheltered us we could speak, and exchange names. It was too late then for us ever to be strangers again.

‘You're not staying here?' I asked, half-surprised when she did not turn in at the inn door, for indeed she had not the look or the sound of a native of any place familiar to me.

‘I live here,' she said, ‘in the white cottage near the harbour. My name's Lucy Hillier.'

I asked if I might walk down there with her, and we went, water running from us all the way as if we were the revenants of drowned people, and we not caring, hardly knowing. As we went she looked at me and laughed, and her laughter seemed to ring from wall to wall of the empty street.

‘You like the wind and the storm, too,' she said. ‘Most people think I'm crazy because I love it.'