This Rough Magic (15 page)

I shone the torch again. Yes, there was the air-hole, a crescent-shaped, glistening nostril on top of the head. It was open, but half clotted with sand thrown up as the creature had ploughed ashore. I fixed the torch as best I could in the crotch of a pine bough, dipped my hands in the sea, and gently wiped the sand from the hole.

The dolphin’s breath was warm on my hands, and this was somehow surprising: the creature was all at once less alien, his friendliness and intelligence at the same time less magical and more touching. It was unthinkable that I might have to watch him die.

I ran my hands over his skin, noticing with fear how rough this was; the breeze was drying it out. I tried to judge the distance I would have to drag him. Now and again a ripple, driven by that same breeze, washed right up to the dolphin’s tail, but this was the thinnest film of water licking up from the shallows four yards away. Another few feet out, as I knew, the sand shelved sharply to deeper water beside the rocks. Once get him even half floating, and I should be able easily to manage his weight.

I switched off the torch, then put my arms round the dolphin as far as I could, and tried to pull him. But I couldn’t get hold of him; my hands slipped over the faultless streamlining of his body. Nor could I grasp the dorsal fin, and when I tried tugging at his flippers he fidgeted for the first time, and I thought he was going to struggle, and work himself further up the shore. Finally, kneeling, I got my shoulder right against his, and tried to thrust him backwards with all the strength I could muster. But he never moved an inch.

I stood back at length, panting, sweating, and almost in tears. ‘I can’t do it. Sweetie, I can’t even
budge
you!’ The bright liquid eye watched me silently. Behind him four yards away, the sea heaved and whispered under the tail of the wind. Four yards; life or death.

I reached the torch down from the tree. ‘I’ll go and
get a rope. If I tie it round you, I could
pull
you. Get a leverage round a tree – anything!’ I stopped to caress his shoulder, whispering: ‘I’ll hurry, love, I’ll run all the way.’

But the feel of the dolphin’s skin, dry and roughening, made me hesitate. It might take some time to find a rope, or get help. No good going for Godfrey; if he was still out, it would be time lost. And I couldn’t go to the Castello. I would have to go all the way home. I had better throw some sea-water over the animal’s skin before I left him, to keep him safe while I was away.

I kicked off my sandals and ran into the shallows. But the spray I splashed up barely reached beyond his tail, and (so shallow was the water here) came up full of sand and grit that would dry on him even more disastrously than before.

Then I remembered the plastic bag, stupidly small, but better than nothing. I ran out of the water, dragged the bag from my pocket, shone the torch down, and tipped Phyllida’s make-up out on the sand. The Forli diamond fell into the torchlight with a flash and a shimmer. I snatched it up and pushed it on my finger, and dropped the rest of the things back into my pocket, along with the torch. Then I ran back to the sea’s edge, and scooped up my pathetic pint of water to throw over the dolphin.

It seemed to take an age. Stooping, straightening, running, tipping, stooping, running, tipping … When I reached the beast’s shoulders I put a hand over the air-hole and poured the water carefully round it: unbelievably, dolphins could drown, and under the circumstances
one couldn’t expect the right reflexes to be working. When I poured water over his face the first time he blinked, which startled me a little, but after that he watched me steadily, the nearer eye swivelling as I moved to and fro.

At last he seemed we enough to be safe. I dropped the dripping bag, wiped my hands on my coat, which was probably already ruined beyond repair, pulled on my sandals, and patted the damp shoulder again.

‘I’ll be back, sweetie, don’t worry. I’ll be as quick as I can. Keep breathing. And let’s pray no one comes.’

This was the nearest I had got to admitting, even to myself, why I had been whispering, and why, as soon as I no longer needed the light, I had snapped the torch out.

I ran back across the sand. The piano had stopped, but I could still see the faint glow of light from the open terrace window. Nothing moved on the terrace itself. Then I was in the shadow of the wood, where the path to the Villa Forli went up steeply. Using the torch once more, I clambered breathlessly. The breeze, steady now, had filled the wood with a rustling that drowned my steps.

And now the starlit clearing. The frogs plopped into the pool. The stream glittered in the flying edge of my torchlight. I switched off as I emerged from the trees, and crossed the open space quietly, pausing at the far side of it to get my breath, leaning up against a young oak that stood where the path tunnelled afresh into the black burrow of the woods.

As I came out from under the oak, something moved on the path.

I checked, fingers fumbling clumsily with the torch. It flashed on, catching the edge of a side-stepping figure. A man, only a yard or so away. I would have run straight into him.

The bushes rustled just beside me. Someone jumped. The torch was struck out of my hand. I whipped round, and I think I would have screamed to wake the dead, only he grabbed me, pulled me to him brutally, and his hand came down hard over my mouth.

Pray you tread softly, that the blind mole may not

Hear a foot fall: we now are near his Cell
.

IV
. 1.

H
E
was very strong. I struggled and fought, necessarily in silence, but I couldn’t do a thing. I must have hurt him, though, in clawing at his hand, for he flinched, and I heard his breath go in sharply. He took the hand away with a hissed ‘
Keep quiet, will you
?’ in English, and then made it certain by jamming my head hard into the front of his jacket, so that I was not only dumb, but blinded, too. His coat was damp, and smelt of the sea. I got the swift impression of other movement near by, but heard nothing above my own and my assailant’s breathing, and the thudding of my heart. The pressure of his hand on the back of my head was hurting me, and a button scored my cheek. My ribs, held in the hard embrace of his other arm, felt as if they were cracking.

I stopped fighting and went slack, and straight away the cruel grip eased, but he still held me pressed to him, both arms caught now and firmly pinioned. As his hold
relaxed I pulled my head free. If I screamed, they would hear me from the Castello terrace … they could be down here in a few seconds … surely, even Max Gale—

‘Where have you been?’ demanded my captor.

I gaped at him. As soon as he saw I had no intention of screaming, he let me go. ‘
You
?’ I said.

‘Where have you been?’

I had my hands to my face, rubbing the sore cheeks. ‘What’s that got to do with you?’ I asked furiously. ‘You go a bit far, don’t you, Mr Gale?’

‘Have you been up at the Castello?’

‘I have not! And if I had—’

‘Then you’ve been to the beach. Why?’

‘Is there any reason—?’ I began, then stopped. Fright and fury, together, had let me forget for a moment what else had happened that day. Max Gale might have no business to demand an account of my movements, but he might well have the best of reasons for wanting to know them.

Nothing was to be gained by refusing to tell him. I said, rather sulkily: ‘I went down to get Phyl’s ring. She left it on the beach this morning. You needn’t look as if you don’t believe me: it was in a little bag, and you missed it. There, see?’ I flashed the diamond at him, then pushed the hand deep into my coat pocket, almost as if I expected him to grab it from me, and glared up at him. ‘And now perhaps you’ll tell me what
you’re
playing at? This game of yours is way beyond a joke, let me tell you! It’ll be mantraps next, I suppose. You hurt me.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I thought you were going to scream.’

‘Good heavens, of course I was! But why should you have minded, if I had?’

‘Well, I—’ He hesitated. ‘Anyone might have heard … My father … It might have startled him.’

‘Thoughtful of you!’ I said tartly. ‘It didn’t matter, did it, if you scared
me
half out of my wits? What a model son you are, aren’t you? I’m surprised you could bring yourself to go out so late and leave your father alone! If it comes to that, where’ve
you
been, that you don’t want anyone to know about?’

‘Fishing.’

‘Oh?’ The heavily ironic retort that jumped to my lips withered there and died. I said slowly: ‘But you were up there at the Castello half an hour ago.’

‘What do you mean? I thought you said you hadn’t been near the Castello.’

‘The noise
you
make with that piano,’ I said nastily, ‘you could hear it from the mainland. I heard you from the beach.’

‘That’s impossible.’ He spoke abruptly, but with a note of puzzlement.

‘I tell you I did! You were playing the piano, and then talking to your father. I know your voices. It
was
you.’

He was silent for a moment. Then he said slowly: ‘It sounds to me as if you heard a working session on tape being played through, comments and all. But I still don’t see how that could be. My father isn’t there. He’s away staying the night at a friend’s house.’

‘How far away?’

‘If it’s anything to do with you, Corfu.’

‘You must think I’ve a scream like a steam whistle,’ I said dryly.

‘What? Oh, I …’ he had the grace to stammer slightly ‘… I’m afraid I did rather say the first thing that came into my head. But it’s true that he’s not at home.’

‘And neither were you?’ I said. ‘Well, whoever was playing the tape, it certainly made a wonderful alibi.’

‘Don’t be silly.’ His laugh was excellently done. He must have some of his father’s talent, after all. Possibly only someone as experienced with actors’ voices as I could have told that the easy amusement was assumed over some urgent preoccupation. ‘Your imagination’s working overtime, Miss Waring! Please don’t go making a mystery out of this. All that’ll have happened is that my father’s decided for some reason to come home, and he was amusing himself with the tape-recorder. As for myself, I’ve been out fishing with Adoni … And if it’s any satisfaction to you,
you
frightened
me
half out of my wits. I’m afraid my reactions were a bit rough. I’m sorry for that. But if someone suddenly breaks out of the dark and runs straight into you, you – well, you act according.’

‘According to what? Jungle law?’ I was still smarting. ‘I wouldn’t have said those reactions were exactly normal, unless you were expecting … Just what
were
you expecting, Mr Gale?’

‘I’m not sure.’ This, at any rate, sounded like the truth. ‘I thought I heard someone coming up from the
beach, fast, and trying not to be heard, but the breeze was covering most of the sounds, and I couldn’t be certain. Then the sounds stopped, as if whoever it was was hiding and waiting. Naturally that made me begin to wonder what they might be up to, so I waited, too.’

‘I only stopped to get my breath. Your imagination’s working overtime, Mr Gale.’

‘Very probably.’ I wasn’t sure if he had even noticed the gibe. His head was bent, and he seemed to be studying one of his hands, turning it this way and that. ‘Well, just as I decided I’d been mistaken, you erupted from the trees like a deer on the run. I grabbed you. Pure reflex.’

‘I see. And I suppose it was pure reflex that you knocked the torch out of my hand before I could see anything?’

‘Of course,’ he said woodenly.

‘And that even when you saw who it was, you acted like a – a
Gestapo
?’ No reply to that. I can only suppose that excitement and the moment’s fright had pumped too much adrenalin into my bloodstream; I think I was a bit ‘high’ with it. I remember feeling vaguely surprised that I was not in the least afraid of him. At some level, I suppose, I was reasoning that the man (in spite of his dubious bit of adventuring in what Godfrey had called the ‘milk run’) was hardly a dangerous criminal, and that he obviously intended me no harm: on the conscious level I was damned if I went tamely home now without finding exactly what was going on around here. It had already touched me far too closely to be ignored. The enchanted bubble had never really existed.
I was beginning to suspect that there was no such thing.

So I asked, as if it were a matter of purely academic interest: ‘I still want to know why it should have mattered to you where I’d been? Or that I might recognise you? Or was it the others I wasn’t supposed to see?’

I thought for a moment that he wasn’t going to answer. From somewhere further up in the wood, an owl called breathily once, and then again. In the pool, a frog tried his voice tentatively for a moment, lost his nerve, and dived again. Max Gale said, quietly: ‘Others?’

‘The men who went past while you were holding me.’

‘You’re mistaken.’

‘Oh, no, I’m not. There was somebody else there. I saw him beside the path, just as you jumped on me.’

‘Then you probably recognised him as well. That was Adoni, our gardener. You’ve met him, I believe?’

You wouldn’t have thought he was admitting another lie, or even conceding a slight point. The tone was that of a cool, social brush-off. I felt the adrenalin soaring dangerously again as he added, calmly: ‘He usually comes with me when I go fishing. What’s the matter? Don’t you believe me?’

I managed to say, quite pleasantly: ‘I was just wondering why you didn’t beach the boat in your own bay. This seems a funny way to come – if you’ve just been fishing.’

‘The wind was getting up, and it was easier to come
in the other side of the point. And now, if you’ll excuse me—’

‘You mean,’ I said, ‘that you left your boat on
our
side of the point? Tied to our jetty, even? Now, isn’t that too bad? I think you’d better go straight down again and move it, Mr Gale. We don’t like trespassers at the Villa Forli.’

There was a short, sharp pause. Then, unexpectedly, he laughed. ‘All right. One to you. But not tonight. It’s late, and I’ve got things to do.’