The Man from the Sea (6 page)

“I wish I could keep myself there. Is this summerhouse we’re making for safe?”

“No one comes near it, day or night. It’s perfect for–” Cranston broke off, and he knew that his cheeks had flushed as at a monstrous recollection. “The house is a quarter of a mile away. It’s got enormous grounds.”

“Of course Blair is wealthy as well as scientifically distinguished.” The man from the sea had turned on his note of irony. “I remember how your friend’s diamonds proclaimed the fact at that reception.”

“Did you say the Royal Society?” Cranston scarcely knew why he asked the question. But even as he uttered it he acknowledged that it was significant – that his mind by means of it was taking a dive at some submerged memory.

The man from the sea made no answer – perhaps because he had almost stumbled at a turn of the path. When he recovered himself it was to speak in a tone of impatience. “Aren’t we nearly there?”

Cranston in his turn was silent. The garden was warm and scented and very still. The breeze from the sea had either dropped or was here deflected by the sweep of the cliff. The scents were the unique mingling he had known from childhood in such rare northern gardens as this: lavender and roses and sweet briar and night-scented stock shot with the sharpness of the sea and the tang of the surrounding pine and heather. It was a heady mixture. Eden, it queerly occurred to him, had been eminently aromatic – and but for that Eve might never have eaten her apple there. His own apple – Cranston caught himself up. With an appropriateness that was sufficiently broad, the familiar summerhouse had loomed up before him. “We’re there,” he said briefly. “I don’t know about risking a light. We’ll see when we get in.”

They mounted the little flight of steps and passed across the broad verandah. The summerhouse was an elaborate and expensive affair, commodious but without appropriateness to its situation. There was a large dark central room that might have been intended as a refuge from tropical heat, and from the shadowy corners of which it was possible to picture the emergence of exotic persons in the tradition of Conrad or Somerset Maugham. And there was such a presence now – a vaguely defined form in white, that stirred and rose as they entered, and then stood still.

Cranston was startled. “Caryl! You’ve waited? We’ve been–”

The figure in white took a single step forward, and spoke very quietly. “I’m not Caryl. I’m Sally.”

“Mother sprained an ankle coming up the path. She could hardly get as far as the house.” Sally Dalrymple continued to speak from the darkness. Her voice was slightly tremulous and slightly hurried, as if she were determined not to be interrupted before she had declared herself. “So she tumbled me out of bed. She’d had one of her bouts of sleeplessness, she said, and had gone to walk on the beach. And she’d run into you, Dick, with a friend in some sort of fix. It wasn’t very clear – but I was to bring these clothes. Is that right?”

There was a silence – a silence that Cranston knew it was his business to break. But his mouth had gone dry, and he felt as he had sometimes felt when half awakening from a ghastly dream. In the dream he had done he hardly remembered what. But it could never be undone.
Never
. And its aftermath was dread and dereliction and dismay.

“The clothes are right, at least.” It was the man from the sea who spoke – striking in with the hateful urbanity he could command. “From my point of view, they are the important thing. I have to be dressed in them.”

“Then I hope they fit.” Sally’s voice was cold, and Cranston knew that she had instantly disliked the stranger. She distrusted him – and for the same reason that Cranston himself had felt a sudden distrust earlier. He was the wrong age to be in a fix with innocence, with any attractiveness as of mere escapade or extravagance. She had been trying to accept the situation as her incredible mother had launched it at her – and that meant a Dick Cranston involved in some hazardous silliness with a contemporary. Poaching, perhaps – or swimming out to Inchfail to play some prank on old Shamus in the lighthouse. But this smooth middle-aged man was inexplicable.

“I’m sorry about Lady Blair’s ankle.” Cranston spoke these words simply as being no worse than any others. Anything he said to Sally must be abominable. He realised – and his realisation was like a further turn of the screw – that he had no notion what Sally felt or believed. It seemed incredible that she shouldn’t know the truth. But perhaps a girl like Sally was like that – incapable of conceiving evil, or that sort of evil. At least she must be on the brink of knowledge. And Caryl had put her there deliberately; had put her there with the particularly ugly deliberation of the unconscious mind. No doubt Caryl
had
sprained an ankle. But it was, at this moment, the ingenious thing to do. It had enabled her to play what he now understood to be her morbidly compulsive fear-game; to wake Sally with a story as thin as paper. Perhaps – for he felt his new view of Caryl becoming fuller and fuller – perhaps there was a sort of cruelty in it. Perhaps she enjoyed the thought of constraining her daughter desperately to repel what could be to her only a vile suspicion.

“Can I do anything more for your friend?” The girl asked the question carefully as if she were an agent only, involved in this nocturnal hugger-mugger simply because of an order that had come to her.

“He isn’t a friend.” Cranston swiftly spoke the truth where it could be spoken. “He’s a stranger straight out of the sea, and he has a cock-and-bull story about smuggling diamonds.”

“But I’m not sticking to it.” The man from the sea spoke with an air of easy candour. “I don’t smuggle diamonds.”

“Then is it some sort of joke?” Sally turned towards Cranston in the darkness. “Or is he mad?”

“If he’s mad then others are mad too. You didn’t hear a racket?”

“Not that firing?” Sally spoke swiftly, so that he remembered with ignoble fear how intelligent she was. “It didn’t sound like the usual stuff out at sea.”

“It wasn’t. It was a chap with a gun. And he tried it out on us.”

For a moment she was silent. “Honour bright?”

It was an old challenge between them, and now he hated it. “Honour bright,” he answered. “He ended by losing his gun. But he did some damage first.”

“To you?”

His heart leapt in a sort of dreadful joy at something in her voice. “Not me.”

“He got my eyes.” The man from the sea had been very still in the darkness, and Cranston knew that he was making it his business to gather all he could of the relationship at play before him. But his speech was almost casual. “Only, I think, to the extent of bunging them up with sand. I hope I can get rid of it. For I have to get south, you see – and it will have to be done unobtrusively. Is there any water here?”

“I’ll fetch water – and an eye-bath and lotion if I can find them.” Sally became brisk and moved at once towards the door. She had her sex’s instinct for practical action in any obscure exigency. “But I shall be at least a quarter of an hour. You can work out your plans together.” She had given an edge to this – but now as she passed Cranston she whispered to him on another note. “Dick – are you really involved with him?”

“In a limited way, yes.” This time he felt merely awkward. “But I know absolutely nothing about him.”

“Then I don’t see–” She checked herself. “And it’s something that has to be kept from… Alex?”

She had made the little pause before her stepfather’s name by which she commonly seemed to distance him. He knew that for some reason she didn’t find Alex Blair easy to take. “Yes,” he said. “I think it better had be.”

“Very well.” She was suddenly indifferent. “There are cigarettes and matches on the table, if you want them. Although I can’t think who put them there.”

He was silent. Caryl and he had smoked three or four. It was a small squalid moment as in some low stage-play of adultery.

She turned away. And then suddenly she had turned back again and put out a hand. It touched his arm, his chest, and then without haste withdrew. She was laughing – innocently and genuinely amused. “Dick – have
you
no clothes on either?”

“Precious few.”

“I’ll bring something – a pullover.”

“Alex’s?”

“No!” He was startled, bewildered by the sudden passion in her voice. But she laughed again. “Something of my own. It won’t be too bad a fit.”

She was gone. For a moment he saw her as a mere white blur in the last faint moonlight filtering into the garden. But he saw her too in a sharp interior image, dressed for the moors – wholesomely broad at shoulders as well as hips. It was true that she could bring something that would fit well enough.

From behind him in the summerhouse the man from the sea spoke composedly. “So far, so good. For me – and, I hope, for you.”

“I’d have thought your chances were pretty thin.” Cranston spoke more from irritation than from any sense of a secure grasp of the affair. “You must be some sort of outlaw, I suppose, or you would already be taking steps to contact the police. And a helpless outlaw, too, as long as your eyes are out of action. What you have found, for the moment, is a very insecure refuge, indeed.”

“One must look on the bright side.” The man from the sea was quite invisible, but he appeared to have found somewhere to sit down in the darkness. “Not that realistic appraisal is not always valuable. Were you ever under fire before?”

“No – except for field-days. And with blanks.”

The man from the sea laughed. “Then you did uncommonly well. But so, for that matter, did I.”

“Have
you
never been under fire?”

“Decidedly not. You mustn’t form, you know, too romantic a picture of me.”

“I don’t find you in the least romantic.” Cranston spoke with conviction. “My guess is that you’re some sort of paid spy.”

“It sounds ugly. And yet I suppose all spies get pay. Is it your idea that the chap with the gun was from – what is it called? – MI5?”

“I don’t know. And I don’t know why he went off in that commonplace fashion.”

“Because he wasn’t – for him – doing anything very out of the way. He could take no further effective action against us. So he simply passed on to the next thing.”

“Which would be reporting failure? Would he go back to that ship?”

For a moment the man from the sea made no reply. When he spoke again his voice was slightly muffled, and Cranston caught a gleam from his naked shoulders unexpectedly near the floor. He must be sitting on some low bench or stool, with his head buried in his arms, and probably his eyes were hurting him badly. “The ship? I don’t think so. It wouldn’t linger. He was simply shoved ashore from the motorboat before it went back to the ship, and told to do what he could. The people he will have to contact are now in this country.”

“Doesn’t that give you time?” Cranston felt for something on which to sit down himself. “I find it hard to believe that he can whistle up a whole like-minded gang out of the Highlands.”

“It’s an encouraging point.” For the first time, the man from the sea let something like weariness tinge his irony. “But how boring this is. All about me. Let’s talk about you – and the girl.”

“Let’s do nothing of the sort – and damn your impertinence.”

Cranston took some satisfaction in coming roundly out with this. But the response of the man from the sea disconcerted him. “I’m sorry. I oughtn’t to have approached it – or not in that way. But you’ve been rather a good show, you know, so far as I’m concerned. You’ve given me the deuce of a leg up – and for no earthly reason that I can see. So I didn’t mean impertinence – only sympathy.”

“I don’t want sympathy.”

“No more you do. I talk like an idiot. All long-distance swimmers are probably idiots.” The man from the sea produced his phonetically perfect laugh. “But I think you might want – well, an objective appraisal. Are you in a mess?”

“You can see that I’m in a mess.”

“Talked to anyone?”

“No.”

“You love the girl?”

There was a silence. “Yes.” Incredulously, Cranston heard his own voice ring out the word. “Yes. I do.”

“She turned you down?”

“She turned me down. She had a right to, hadn’t she?” He spoke savagely. “As a matter of fact, she was horrified.”

“My dear lad!” The man from the sea appeared to be soberly unbelieving. “You can’t mean horrified. It doesn’t make sense.”

“It had to make sense – to me. There it was. I’d thought – I’d thought it might be all right. And there it was – a ghastly flop. It must have been the last way she was prepared to think of me. And yet it wasn’t…or I thought not.” Cranston stopped, aware of his own incoherence. “That gun shook me, I suppose. I’m crazy to tell you this.”

“Did you ever think to make love to a girl before?”

“No – I didn’t.”

In the darkness the man from the sea laughed softly, so that Cranston felt his cheeks suddenly burn. “My dear boy, I won’t say of the virgin approach that it’s a terrible mistake. But it invites disasters – and it’s a matter of luck whether they turn out comic or tragic. You were utterly at sea. You hadn’t a clue. And you missed out whole volumes in folio.”

“I don’t believe a healthy girl wants volumes in folio. But I expect I was” – Cranston hesitated – “clumsy enough.”

“That was the whole thing.” The man from the sea spoke with unemphatic conviction. “Think about her here – about her tone to you – a few minutes ago.”

“I can’t – I won’t.” It came from Cranston like a cry. “There can’t have been a mistake – a misunderstanding. There mustn’t. It would make it worse, far worse, unbearable.”

“About the mother?”

“Yes.” It took Cranston seconds to utter the word, and he did so tonelessly. “I turned cynical, vicious, crazy – and I went for her.”

“What utter nonsense.”

It was the man from the sea at his quietest, and it pulled Cranston up. “What do you mean? Do you think we haven’t – ? Do you think I’m boasting, telling some filthy lie?”

“I think you’re flattering yourself.” The man from the sea was amused. “About that access, I mean, of vicious, cynical activity. You were thrown off balance and the mother seduced you. It came to no more than that. You’re about the age she goes for, I’d say. And if she virtually raped you from her own daughter – well, that was additional fun.” He paused. “You know all this. You possess an active intelligence which has certainly got you straight about it by this time.”