This Rough Magic (4 page)

‘I’m sorry if I was a little abrupt.’ His voice had not noticeably softened, but that might have been due to awkwardness. ‘We’ve had rather a lot of bother with people coming around lately, and my father … he’s been ill, and came here to convalesce, so you can imagine that he prefers to be left to himself.’

‘Did I look like an autograph hunter?’

For the first time there was a twitch of amusement. ‘Well, no. But your dolphin has been more of an
attraction even than my father: the word got round somehow that it was being photographed hereabouts, and then of course the rumour started that a film was being made, so we got a few boat-loads of sightseers coming round into the bay, not to mention stray parties in the woods. It’s all been a bit trying. I wouldn’t mind, personally, if people wanted to use the beach, if it weren’t that they always come armed with transistor radios, and that I cannot stand. I’m a professional musician, and I’m here to work.’ He added, dryly: ‘And if you’re thinking that this gives me the best of reasons for wanting to get rid of the dolphin, I can only assure you again that it didn’t occur to me.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘it seems there’s no more to be said, doesn’t it? I’m sorry if I interrupted your work. I’ll go now and let you get back to it. Goodbye, Mr Gale.’

My exit from the clearing was ruined by the fact that my wrap caught on the bramble, and came clean off me. It took me some three horrible minutes to disentangle it and go.

But I needn’t have worried about the threat to my dignity. He had already gone. From somewhere above, and alarmingly near, I heard voices, question and answer, so brief and idle as to be in themselves an insult. Then music, as a wireless or gramophone let loose a flood of weird atonal chords on the still air.

I could be sure I was already forgotten.

This gallant which thou seest

Was in the wrack: and but he’s something
stain’d

With grief (that’s beauty’s canker) thou might’st
call him

A goodly person
.

I
. 2.

B
Y
the time I had showered and dressed I felt calmer, and very ready to tell Phyllida all about it, and possibly to hear her barbed comments on the unaccommodating Mr Gale. But when I looked on the terrace she was not to be seen, only the table half-laid for lunch, with the silver thrown down, as if hastily, in the middle of the cloth. There was no sign of Miranda or her mother.

Then I heard the door from the kitchen premises swing open and shut, and the quick tap of my sister’s steps crossing the hall, to enter the big living-room she called the
salotto
.

‘Lucy? Was that you I heard?’

‘I’m out here.’ I made for the french windows as I spoke, but she had already hurried out to meet me, and
one look at her face drove all thoughts of my morning’s adventure from my head.

‘Phyl! What’s the matter? You look ghastly. Is it Caliban?’

She shook her head. ‘Nothing so simple. There’s been bad news, an awful thing. Poor Maria’s boy’s been drowned. Spiro, the boy I told you about at breakfast.’

‘
Phyl!
Oh, my dear, how frightful! But – how? When?’

‘Last night. He was out with Godfrey in the boat – Godfrey Manning, that is – and there was an accident. Godfrey’s just come over with the news, and I’ve been breaking it to Maria and Miranda. I – I’ve sent them home.’ She put a hand to her head. ‘Lucy, it was so awful! I simply can’t tell you. If Maria had even
said
anything, but she didn’t, not one single word … Oh well, come on in. Godfrey’s still here, you’d better come and meet him.’

I drew back. ‘No, no, don’t you bother about me: I’ll go to my room, or something. Mr Manning won’t want to have to do the polite. Poor Phyl; I’m sorry … Look, would you like me to take myself right away for the rest of the day? I’ll go and get lunch somewhere, and then—’

‘No, please, I’d rather you stayed.’ She dropped her voice for a moment. ‘He’s taking it pretty hard, and quite honestly I think it might do him good to talk about it. Come on in … God! I could do with a drink! Caliban’ll have to lump it, for once.’ She smiled a bit thinly, and led the way in through the long window.

The
salotto
was a long, cool room, with three big windows opening on the terrace with its dazzling view. The sun was tempered by the wistaria that roofed the terrace, and the room was cool and airy, its duck-egg blue walls and white paint setting off to perfection the gilt of the Italian mirrors and the pale-gold polished wood of the floor. A calm room, with the kind of graceful simplicity that money and good taste can produce. Phyllida had always had excellent taste. It was a good thing, I sometimes reflected, that she, and not I, had married the rich man. My own taste – since I had outgrown the gingham-and-Chianti-bottle stage – had been heavily conditioned by the fact that I had lived for so long in a perpetual welter of junk-shop props picked up cheaply and licked into stage-worthiness for the current show. At best, the effect was a kind of poor man’s Cecil Beaton; at worst, a cross between sets designed by Emmett and Ronald Searle for a stage version of Samuel Becket’s
Watt
. That I enjoyed my kind of life didn’t stop me from admiring my sister’s undoubted talent for elegance.

There was a table at the far end of the room, laden with bottles. A man stood with his back to us, splashing soda into a glass. He turned as we came in.

My first quick impression was of a mask of rather chilly control held hard down over some strong emotion. Then the impression faded, and I saw that I was wrong; the control was not a mask; it was part of the man, and was created by the emotion itself, as a Westinghouse brake is slammed on automatically by the head of steam. Here was something very different
from Mr Gale. I looked at him with interest, and some compassion.

He was tall, and toughly built, with brown hair bleached by the sun, a narrow, clever face, and grey eyes which looked tired and dragged down at the corners, as if he had had no sleep. I put his age somewhere in the middle thirties.

Phyllida introduced us, and he acknowledged me civilly, but all his attention was on my sister. ‘You’ve told them? Was it very bad?’

‘Worse than bad. Get me a drink, for heaven’s sake, will you?’ She sank into a chair. ‘What? Oh, Scotch, please. What about you, Lucy?’

‘If that’s fruit juice in the jug, may I have that, please? Is there ice?’

‘Of course.’ He handed the drinks. ‘Look, Phyl, ought I to go and talk to them now? There’ll be things they’ll want to ask.’

She drank, sighed, and seemed to relax a little. ‘I’d leave it for now, if I were you. I told them they could go home, and they didn’t say a word, just picked up their things. I suppose the police’ll be there to see them … Later on they’ll want to hear every last detail from you, but just at the moment I doubt if Maria’s fit to take anything in at all, except that he’s dead. As a matter of fact, I don’t think she even took
that
in, I don’t think she believes it, yet.’ She looked up at him. ‘Godfrey, I suppose … I suppose there couldn’t be any doubt?’

He hesitated, swirling the whisky in his glass, frowning down at it. The lines of fatigue were deep in his face, and made me wonder if he were older than I had thought.

‘Well, yes. That’s rather the hell of it, don’t you see? That’s why I didn’t come over till now … I’ve been phoning around all over the place, trying to find out if he could possibly have got ashore either here or on the mainland, or if he’d been … well, found. If his body had been washed ashore, that is.’ He looked up from the drink. ‘But I’m morally certain there’s no chance. I mean, I saw him go.’

‘And how far out were you?’

He grimaced. ‘About dead centre.’

‘From here?’

‘Further north, out from Kouloura, right in the strait. But that’s still a mile each way.’

I said: ‘What happened?’

They both started as if they had forgotten my presence completely. Godfrey Manning straightened his shoulders, and smoothed back his hair in a gesture I was to know well.

‘Do you know, I’m still hardly sure. Does that sound incredibly stupid? It’s no more than the truth. I’ve been over it so many times in my mind since it happened that I’m beginning to wonder now how much I really do remember. And, of course, a night without sleep doesn’t help.’ He crossed to the table to pour himself another drink, saying over his shoulder: ‘The worst of it is, I can’t get rid of the feeling that there must have been something I could have done to prevent it.’

Phyllida cried out at that, and I said quickly: ‘I’m sure that’s not true! I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked. You won’t want to talk about it any more.’

‘It’s all right.’ He came back to a chair, but didn’t sit
in it, just perched rather restlessly on the arm. ‘I’ve already been through it with the police, and given Phyl a sketch of a sort. You might say the worst part is over … except, God help me, that I’ll have to talk to the boy’s mother. She’ll want to know rather more than the police were concerned with … As a matter of fact, it would be quite a relief to talk it out.’ He took a pull at the whisky as if he needed it, and looked at me straight for the first time. ‘You hadn’t met Spiro?’

‘I only came last night.’

His mouth turned down at the corners. ‘What a start to your visit. Well, he was Miranda’s twin – I take it you’ll have met her and her mother? – and he works, or rather worked, for me.’

‘Phyl told me.’

‘I was lucky to have him. He was a clever mechanic, and that’s something not so easy to find in these parts. In most of the villages the only “machines” are donkeys and mules, and there’s no work for a mechanically-minded boy. They move to the towns. But of course Spiro wanted work near home; his father’s dead, and he wanted to live with his mother and sister. I came here last year, and he’s worked for me all that time. What he didn’t know about boats wasn’t worth knowing, and when I tell you that I even let him loose on my car, you’ll realise he was pretty good.’ He nodded towards the window, where a big portfolio lay on a table. ‘I don’t know if Phyl told you, but I’m working on a book, mainly photographs, and even with that Spiro was invaluable. He not only picked up enough to help me technically – with the processing
and so on – but I actually got him to model for a few of them.’

‘They’re marvellous, too,’ Phyllida told me warmly.

He smiled, a tight, meaningless little smile. ‘They are good, aren’t they? Well, that was Spiro. Not a world-beater, whatever poor Miranda says about him. What brains he had were in his hands, and he was slow, and as stubborn as a blind mule – but he was tough, and you could trust him. And he had that one extra, priceless quality which was worth the earth to me – he photographed like a dream. He was a “natural” for the camera – you simply couldn’t miss.’ He swallowed the last of his whisky, and stooped to set the glass down. The click of glass on wood sounded oddly final, like the full stop after the valediction. ‘Which brings me to last night.’

There was a little pause. The tired grey eyes came back to me.

‘I’ve been doing some experiments in night photography – fishing-boats at night, moonscapes, that kind of thing … and I wanted to try my hand at the sunrise over the mainland, while there’s still snow on the mountains. Spiro and I took my boat out last night. There was a stiffish breeze, but it was nothing to worry about. We went up the coast. You’ll know, perhaps, that Mount Pantokrator lies north of here? Well, the coast curves right out, running almost due east under the shelter of the mountain. It’s only when you come to the end of this, and turn north through the open strait, that you get the weather. We got there within half an hour or so of dawn, and turned up about opposite
Kouloura – that’s the narrowest bit between here and the mainland. The sea was choppy, but nothing a sailor would call rough, though the wind was still rising from the north … Well, I was in the cabin, busy with my camera, and Spiro was aft, when the engine suddenly stopped. I called to ask what was wrong, and he shouted that he thought something was fouling the screw, and he’d have it clear in a minute. So I went on with my job, only then I found he’d let the boat’s head fall away, and she’d turned across the wind, and was rolling rather too much for comfort. So I went out to see what was going on.’

He lifted one hand in a slight, but oddly final gesture. ‘Then it happened. I saw Spiro in the stern, leaning over. The boat was heeling pretty steeply, and I think – I can’t be sure – that I yelled to him to take care. Then a gust or a wave or something got her on the beam, and she kicked over like a mule. He’d had hold of the toe-rail, but it was slippery, and he lost it. I saw him grab again as he went over, but he missed. He just disappeared. By the time I got to the stern I couldn’t even see him.’

‘He couldn’t swim?’

‘Oh, yes, but it was very dark, and the boat was drifting fast, with a fair sea on by that time. The wind must have got up more than I’d realised while I was working in the cabin, and we must have been driven yards apart in as many seconds. Even if he’d stayed afloat it would have been hard to find him … and I don’t think he can have done, or he’d have shouted, and I’d surely have heard something. I yelled myself hoarse, as it was, and there was no answer …’

He got up again, restlessly, and prowled over to the window. ‘Well, that’s all. I threw a lifebelt out, but we were being blown away at a fair speed, and by the time I’d got the engine started, and gone back to where I thought he’d gone overboard, there wasn’t a sign. I must have been somewhere near the right place, because I found the lifebelt. I cruised about for a couple of hours – rather stupidly, I suppose, but then one can’t somehow give up and go. A fishing-boat came within hail, and helped, but it was no use.’

There was a pause. He stood with his back to us, looking out.

Phyllida said drearily: ‘It’s a horrible thing to happen. Horrible.’

‘And was the propeller fouled after all?’ I asked.

He turned. ‘What? No, it wasn’t. At least, I saw nothing there. It was a choked jet. It only took a few seconds to put right. If he’d looked there first …’ He lifted his shoulders, letting the sentence hang.