The Sandcastle (14 page)

As he recovered himself and turned slightly he saw that someone was watching
him, standing in the shadow of one of the trees. Mor froze with fear and
indecision. He took a step or two back. Then the figure began to move and come
towards him, gliding forward noiselessly across the grass. For one wild moment
Mor thought that it was Miss Carter. He tried to say something, but the silence
stifled his voice. Then he saw that the figure was too tall. It was Miss
Handforth.
‘Why, it’s Mr Mor!’ said Miss Handforth in her sonorous voice, scattering the
moonlit night about her in fragments. ‘You gave me quite a turn, standing there
so quiet.’
Mor turned about and began to walk quickly back towards the front of the house.
He didn’t, above all, want Miss Carter’s attention drawn to the fact that he
had been standing outside looking up at her window. The strange sensation had
quite gone. Now he only wanted to get away, and not to have to hear Miss
Handforth’s brassy voice echoing through the darkness.
She followed him, still talking. ‘I saw you out of the drawing-room window as I
was pulling back the curtains, and I said to myself, there’s an intruder out
there on the lawn. So I had to come out and see who it was.’
‘That was very brave of you, Handy,’ said Mor in a low voice. They had reached
the front of the house now, and Mor had gone a little way down the drive,
followed by Miss Handforth. He saw that Demoyte’s light was out.
‘You can’t be too careful,’ said Miss Handforth. ‘There really are some odd
characters about. There’s someone been reported hanging around this vicinity
lately, a vagabond man, a gipsy. Probably waiting to see who he can rob.’
‘I hope you lock the house up well at night,’ said Mor. He felt that he was
being shown off the premises. They had almost reached the end of the drive.
‘He won’t steal anything from
our
house!’ said Miss Handforth. ‘Good
night, Mr Mor.’
‘Good night, Handy,’ said Mor. He felt extremely disconsolate. He decided to
walk back by the main road.

Chapter
Eight

YOU
can’t behave
anyhow
to people and expect them to love you just the
same!‘ said Nan to Felicity.
‘That’s just what I do expect,’ said Felicity sulkily, and went back into her
bedroom.
Mor, overhearing this exchange from downstairs, thought, she is right, that is
just what we do expect. He looked at his watch. He was teaching at two-fifteen.
It was time to go. He called good-bye, and as no one answered, left the house,
banging the front door behind him.
Nan pursued Felicity into her bedroom. ‘You have a
good look
in here,’
she said, ‘and you’ll probably find it. It can’t have gone very far. If you
don’t see it, you’d better look in my room again. I don’t want to discover it
in my slippers or in my bed.’
‘It’s no good,’ said Felicity miserably, ‘it must have crawled away into some
crack in the floorboards and it’ll die in there!’ She began to cry.
Nan looked on exasperated. ‘What possessed you to bring a nasty slug into the
house, anyway?’ she said.
‘It wasn’t nasty,’ said Felicity. ‘It was very sweet when it stretched itself
out, it was so long and smooth, and its horns were so nice. I only left it for
a moment. It was curled up into a ball, like a lump of jelly, and it kept
moving to and fro, but wouldn’t bring its horns out. I thought it was stuck,
and I went for some water to wash it with, and when I came back it was gone.’
‘Well, let’s hope it went out of the window,’ said Nan.
‘I’m sure it didn’t. It’s just lost inside the house somewhere. I’ll never find
it now.’ Felicity blew her nose.
‘You’ve changed your room back again,’ said Nan with disapproval.
‘I like it better this way,’ said Felicity. She threw herself on the bed and
went on crying.
‘Oh, stop it, dear,’ said Nan, ‘do stop it, there’s absolutely nothing to cry
about. Just pull yourself together and do something practical. I’ve told you
several times to leave out your summer frocks for washing. If I don’t do them
today they won’t be ready in time for going to Dorset’ She went away
downstairs.
Felicity went on crying for a while. Then she dried her tears and began
searching again for the slug. It was not to be found anywhere. A few more tears
fell as she pictured its fate. It was all my fault, thought Felicity. It was so
happy out there in the garden eating the plants - and I had to go and bring it
indoors, away from its world. I won’t ever do such a thing again.
Felicity went into the bathroom and examined her eyes. They were rather red.
She washed her face in cold water. Then she decided that she would go into
school and look for Don. This was something which was strictly forbidden by all
the authorities concerned. Her presence in his room could bring quite dire
penalties down upon Donald - and Felicity herself had frequently been told by
her parents never to enter the precincts of St Bride’s except when officially
authorized to do so. Felicity, though strongly endowed with a sense of right
and wrong, did not have any particularly reverential attitude towards
authority, and her conscience functioned vigorously enough in complete
detachment from the adult world of prohibition and exhortation which surrounded
her, and which she often failed completely to make sense of. Felicity could not
see that there was anything innately wrong in her going into St Bride’s to see
her brother - and this being so, the only remaining question was whether she
could do so with impunity. She changed her dress, and combed her hair, making
herself look as pleasant as possible. Then she ran downstairs and prepared to
leave the house.
‘Where are you off to, dear?’ asked Nan from the kitchen.
‘To the library,’ said Felicity at random, and leaving the house she ran along
towards the main road.
As she ran she whistled softly to Liffey, who soon came bounding up to run
beside her, turning to look at her every now and then, and smiling as dogs do.
She never came into the house now, or entered any human habitation. Since the
dissolution of her material body Liffey had become rather larger, and now had
black ears and a black tail, to signalize her infernal origin. There was as yet
no sign of Angus, but Felicity knew, now that Liffey had come, that it would
not be long before she saw him, in one or other of his disguises. Felicity
passed the main gate of St Bride’s and began walking down the hill. A dried-up
grass verge separated her from the dual carriageway. Up and down the hills the
cars roared, going from London to the coast or from the coast back to London.
They came savagely up like bulls and sped carelessly down like birds, and the
swiftness of their passage made the air rock, so that as Felicity walked along
her dress flapped in a perpetual breeze. Towards the top of the hill the school
was shut in by a high wall, with broken glass on it, above which could be seen
the upper windows of the Phys and Gym building. Half-way down the hill, the
wall was changed for a high and well-made fence, above which could be seen the
red-tiled roof of one of the houses, Prewett’s in fact, where Donald lived, and
then lower down the tree tops of the wood. After this, there was to be seen the
green-glass roof of the squash court, and to be heard the frantic shouts and
splashing from the swimming pool. Here the edge of the school domain began to
swing a little farther away from the road, and a grass verge appeared on the
inside of the pavement, and widened gradually as the arterial road and the grounds
of the school parted company. By now the white walls and slated roof of Mr
Everard’s house were plainly visible at the bottom of the hill.
Felicity followed primly along the pavement, as if she had no interest at all
in the school. Liffey, who had been amusing herself by passing spectrally
through the bodies of several other dogs who were coming up the hill, was
running along now by the fence, and in an instant had passed through it.
Felicity paused and looked about her. Then she left the pavement and began to
follow the fence, which was now turning sharply away from the road. At a
certain point it met at right angles with another fence which was that of a
private garden which belonged to a house in a side road. At the end of this
garden, where the garden fence met the school fence, there was a shrubbery.
Between the two fences at that point there was a very narrow place through
which a slim body could squeeze itself. Felicity’s body, though still of a
material nature, was extremely slim, and in a moment she was kneeling among the
bushes at the bottom of the private garden.
Here she could work at ease. The school fence was composed of slats of wood,
each of them about two feet broad. One summer holiday she and Donald had been
at pains to extract the nails which held one of these slats in place, and
secure the slat again by means of nails which projected at an angle from the
adjoining wood on both sides. Thus, by working the slat a little, it could be
slipped out, leaving a gap through which a body similarly slim could pass.
After pausing a moment to make sure that there was no one in the garden,
Felicity began to tilt the slat until it cleared the nails on one side. The
other side then slipped out easily and Felicity slithered through into the
grounds of the school. She then reached back through the hole and drew the wood
into place again.
She found herself in a dreary gardener’s wilderness of rubbish heaps and
abandoned bonfires behind some trees below Mr Everard’s house. She began to
walk along to her right so as to come up into the wood on the opposite side
from the squash courts. This part of the grounds was less frequented, and if a
neglected shrubbery which was part of Evvy’s garden was taken into account,
there was good cover all the way up the hill. Liffey, who had been waiting on
the inside of the hole, glided noiselessly ahead of her, charming her footsteps
to silence. Felicity wondered if she would see Angus now. She had only met him
once within the precincts of the school, on an occasion when she had entered
illicitly and he came upon her in the form of a man sitting in a tree, who
observed her quietly without saying anything, and waited while she went past.
That was eerie. Felicity preferred Angus disguised as a bricklayer or the
driver of a police car. Remembering this occasion she felt frightened for a
moment. Liffey disappeared, as she always did at such times. By now Felicity
was in Evvy’s shrubbery, making her way along, still close to the fence, by
crawling under bushes and slinking behind clumps of greenery. The ground rose
steeply here into the wood, and Felicity saw distantly between the trees the
sunny open expanse of the playing fields. She moved on in the shadows at the
edge of the wood. She would not strike dangerously across it until she was
nearly level with Prewett’s.
Suddenly she heard movements in the woodland not far in front of her, and then
through the leaves she detected the flash of a white shirt. Felicity fell to
the ground, and after lying still for a moment began to crawl forward. Liffey,
who had appeared again, went before her, waving her black ears magically to
silence any sounds which Felicity might make. This was just as well, as there
was a good deal of bramble and crackly fern to be slithered through before
Felicity could see what manner of creature she was stalking. At last a lucky
vista gave her the view she wanted. Through a tunnel of green she could see, as
in a crystal, a man sitting on the ground with his legs drawn up in front of
him. He seemed to be alone. A book with wide white pages lay beside him. He had
probably been sketching. He had laid the book aside now and was staring
straight ahead of him, his arms clasped round his knees. She watched him for a
long time, nearly five minutes, during which his attitude did not vary. He was
a strange-looking man with big hypnotic eyes and rather long hair. She thought
that she had seen him before. After a while she remembered that he was the art
master. She would have taken him for sure as a manifestation of Angus, except
that Angus never appeared in the guise of people that she knew.
His extreme stillness began at last to frighten her. She was reminded of
stories of yogis and magicians. She began to wriggle backwards out of the
tunnel of fern; and when she was able to stand upright she ran away with
careful silent strides diagonally across the middle of the wood, regardless of
peril. She had managed by now to frighten herself thoroughly, and wanted only
to get to Donald’s room as quickly as possible. As she neared Prewett’s, Liffey
made off among the trees. In a moment Felicity emerged at speed from some
sheltering bushes and shot in through a small green back door into Prewett’s
house. She paused a moment to listen. No pursuit and no sounds of imminent
danger. She was in a disused cloakroom, which now served to store boys’ trunks
and cricket gear. Distant sounds of laughter and banging echoed through the
house. There was a stale smell of wood and damp concrete and old perspiration
and sports equipment. Felicity moved forward into a dark space out of which
some wooden stairs rose into an equally dark region above. She fled up these -
hid while voices near by became suddenly loud and then died away - then shot
like a hare down the adjoining corridor and straight in through the door of
Donald’s room.
Donald was lying full length upon the table. The window was open, and one white
clad foot was dangling somewhere outside. The other foot swung nonchalantly to
and fro over the end of the table. His head was propped up on some books and a
cricket pad. He was not alone. Underneath the table lay Jimmy Carde. Jimmy’s
head was flat upon the floor and his feet were propped up on the arm of a
chair. One hand was dug behind the back of his neck, while the other hand had
hold of Donald’s ankle. At Felicity’s violent entrance they both jumped, saw
who it was, and resumed their former postures.
Felicity was very disappointed at not finding Donald alone. She had never been
able to make out Jimmy Carde; and since he had become her brother’s best friend
a special hostility had existed between them.
‘Fella,’ said Donald, ‘I have told you six times, and must I tell you again,
that you should not come in here to see me.’
‘No one spotted me,’ said Felicity. ‘I was very clever, the way I came through
the wood. I spied on your art master. He was sitting there like fakir in a sort
of trance.’
‘Bledyard will put the evil eye on you,’ said Jimmy Carde. ‘He stared at the
school cat once all through chapel. It was sitting outside the window. And it
died of convulsions three days later.’
Felicity shivered. ‘He didn’t look at me,’ she said, ‘though I looked at him.’
She began to wander round Donald’s study to see if anything had changed. The
room was small and papered with a flowery wallpaper which had faded to a
universal colour of weak tea. A small mantelshelf was painted chocolate brown,
and a matching brown cupboard contained Donald’s bed, which was folded up
during the day. A rickety bookcase with a chintz curtain contained Donald’s
chemistry books, a number of thrillers, some books on climbing, and
Three
Men in a
Boat. A table, a chair, and a carpet with a hole in it completed
the room. Small pictures and photographs were dotted about at intervals on the
walls, fixed by drawing-pins into the wallpaper. The position of these pictures
was compulsory, since some previous inhabitant of the room had decorated it,
shortly before he left, with a pungent and ingenious series of obscene
drawings. In order to preserve these masterpieces for posterity it was the duty
of each succeeding incumbent, enforced in case of need by the prefects of
Prewett’s house, to pin up pictures in the appropriate spots and see that they
stayed in place.
Felicity studied Donald’s pictures. She had not been told what lay behind them.
She looked with interest, since she had not been in Donald’s room since some
time in the previous term. A photograph of a lioness with her cubs. A coloured
photograph of Tensing on top of Everest. A small framed reproduction of the
Snake Charmer of Henri Rousseau, donated by the parents. A coloured
advertisement from the