Death of a Huntsman (15 page)

‘Oh! no.'

‘Not the smallest piece?'

He shook his head. ‘Not a little bit,' he said.

The smile went temporarily out of her face. The mule jerked nervously ahead. ‘I really thought you were mad,' she said and it did not occur to him until long afterwards that she might have hoped he had been.

From Manuel, during the rest of that day and the succeeding day, came an almost constant sound of whistling that jarred and irritated Manson like the scrape of a file. The rest-house, neat and clean, with something not unlike a chapel about its bare white-washed coolness, was divided into three parts. In the large central room Manson and Miss Vane ate at a long mahogany table the meals that Manuel prepared in a kitchen that ran along the north side of a large bird-like cage made of gauze. In this cage Manuel kept up the whistling that continued to infuriate Manson even at night time, as he tried to sleep in the third part, composed of his own bedroom and Miss Vane's on the western side.

Miss Vane was a woman who hated trousers.

‘I was born a woman and I'll dress like one,' she said. So she had ridden astride the mule in a loose cool white dress instead of the slacks Manson thought would have been more suitable, even though he disliked them. And all that day and most of the next, Sunday, she lay in front of the rest-house in a sun-suit of vivid green that was boned so tight to the shape of her body that it was like an extra, gleaming skin.

As she lay in the sun Manson was aware of two sorts of feeling about her. When she lay on her back he saw the Miss Vane he had met on the ship; the Miss Vane of the hotel and the town, of the advancing, blistering
leste
; the Miss Vane incorrigibly and restlessly prodding him into coming to the mountains. She was the Miss Vane with the startling, discomforting tongue of yellow across her black hair. She was uneasy and he could not get near her.

When she turned over and lay on her face he could not see the yellow streak in her hair. Her head was one gentle mass of pure black, undisrupted by that one peroxide streak that always set him quivering inside. The black-haired Miss Vane did not startle him. She seemed quiet and untroubled. He wanted to thrust his face down into the plain unsullied mass of her thick black hair and let himself speak with tenderness of all sorts of things.

Always, at the point when he felt he could do this, she turned over on her back, lifting the front of her body straight and taut in the sun. The peroxide streak flared up. The eyes, too blue and too brilliant, flashed with exactly the same sort of unreality, as if she had dyed them too.

‘Tomorrow we must do something,' she said. ‘We can't lie here for ever.'

‘It's very pleasant lying here.'

‘We must go up to the place where you can see the two coasts. We'll start early and go all day,' she said. ‘By the way, I've been meaning to ask you. You must have come out here very young. How old are you?'

‘Twenty-seven,' he said.

‘I beat you by a year,' she said. ‘It's old, isn't it? We're creeping on. Don't you sometimes feel it's old?—all of it slipping away from you? Life and that sort of thing?'

He could hear Manuel whistling in the distance, in the bird cage, and he could see the paler streak in Miss Vane's hair as she turned and stared at the sky.

‘I must say I thought you were older,' she said.

He was listening to the inexhaustibly dry, infuriating whistle of Manuel.

‘You don't look older,' she said, ‘but I think you act older. But then men of your age often do.'

She lifted one hand to shade her eyes from the glare of sun.

‘The sun gets terrific power by midday,' she said. ‘I think I ought to have my glasses. Would you fetch them?—do you mind?' He got up and began to walk away and she called after him:

‘In the bedroom. Probably with my dress. I left them there when I changed.'

In the bedroom he remembered the cabin on the ship. He remembered how she liked things to be done for her. But now the bed, neatly made by Manuel, was not dishevelled. It was only her clothes that lay untidily about where she had undressed and thrown them down. He could not find the sun-glasses. They were not with her dress. He picked up her clothes several times and finally laid them in a chair. The glasses were not in her handbag and they were not on the bed.

His inability to find the glasses startled him into
nervousness. He approached the bed with trembling hands. He pulled back the coverlet and put his hands under the pillow and let them rest there. He wanted all of a sudden to lie down on the bed. He was caught up in an illusion of lying with her there.

He went quickly out into the sun. From the ledge of short grass, walled by rock, where Miss Vane was lying, he heard voices. And as he came closer he saw that Miss Vane was wearing her sun-glasses.

‘It's all right—Manuel found them. I'd left them in the dining room.'

Manuel, in shirt-sleeves, without the black waiter's coat, stood stiffly erect, holding a bunch of two or three roses in his hands.

‘Don't you think that's amazing?' Miss Vane said. ‘He even finds roses up here.'

‘Where on earth do you get roses?' Manson said.

‘In the garden, sir. At the back.'

‘He says there was a wonderful garden here once. An Englishman made it. He used to come here for the summer. He was a sugar-planter or something. Wasn't that it, Manuel?'

Manuel's eyes rested thinly and dryly on some point across the valley.

‘Yes, madame. He was sugar. He was sugar, wine, sugar-brandy, coal, sardines, water, everything.' He spoke slowly. ‘He took the water from the people and sold it back again.'

‘You mean he developed the country,' Manson said.

‘That's so, sir.'

Manuel walked away and Manson looked after him. He detected, for the first time, an oddity in Manuel's walk. The right foot, swinging outwardly, stubbed the ground as it came back again. And this weakness, not quite a deformity, suddenly deprived the stocky shoulders of their power.

‘Are you looking at his leg?' Miss Vane said. ‘He was in an accident or something. With his brother. He was telling me before breakfast. Before you came down. Did he tell you?'

‘No.'

‘I feel rather sorry for him,' she said.

He sat down in the sun, his mind searching for a change of subject. He stared across the valley, remembering with what thin, dry abstraction Manuel had looked there.

‘Oh! I just remembered,' he said. ‘After the
Alacantara
on Wednesday there isn't another decent boat for three weeks.'

‘No wonder you get a feeling of isolation here.'

‘Well, anyway I thought you ought to know. It's a long time.'

‘Would you find it long?'

He wanted to say ‘It depends.' He wanted to qualify, somehow, the statement he had already made. He knew that what he had to say and feel depended on Miss Vane and whether Miss Vane caught the
Alacantara
. Already he did not want her to catch it. He was afraid of her catching it. But he could not express what he felt and he said:

‘That damned man is always whistling. Can you hear it? He's always whistling.'

‘I hadn't noticed it.'

When they went in to lunch Manuel stood behind her chair, holding it, pushing it gently forward as she sat down.

As he prepared to serve soup she suddenly waved her hands with impatience at herself and said:

‘My bag. Would you think I could be such a dim-wit? I leave it everywhere——'

‘I will get it, madame,' Manuel said.

He hurried out of the room with dignified jerky steps.

‘I could have got it for you,' Manson said.

‘I know you could.' The large flashing blue eyes disarmed him. ‘But he likes doing things. He would be hurt if we didn't let him. That's what he's here for.'

Manuel came and put Miss Vane's bag on the lunch-table.

‘Thank you, Manuel,' she said.

Manuel served soup from a wicker trolley.

‘By the way,' she said, ‘we would like to do the climb to the top. How long will it take us?'

‘It isn't a climb, madame,' Manuel said. ‘It's just a walk. It takes half an hour.'

‘You and your inaccessible places,' she said to Manson. ‘Everything is too easy for words.'

‘What about the Serra?' Manson said. ‘That isn't easy, is it?'

‘I do not know the Serra, sir.'

‘What is the Serra?' she said.

‘It's the high plateau,' Manson said. ‘The really high one. The really lonely one. Isn't that so, Manuel?—it's lonely. People don't like it, do they?'

‘No, sir,' Manuel said. ‘People don't like it.'

‘Why not?' she said.

‘I can't say, madame,' he said. ‘I think it's because there's nothing there. People like to have company. They don't like places where there is nothing.'

‘I think that's where we should go,' Manson said. ‘That would be something worth while.'

‘I don't think so, sir.'

‘Oh! I most certainly think so,' Manson said. ‘After all, that's what we came up here for—the high places and the view and that sort of thing.'

‘If the view is no better,' Miss Vane said, ‘there's hardly any point in going, is there? Is the view any better?'

‘I don't think you can see so far, madame,' Manuel said.

‘Well, there you are,' she said.

With irritation Manson said: ‘I thought you were the adventurous one. I thought you liked it the difficult way.'

‘Oh! I do,' she said. ‘But if there's no point. I mean if Manuel doesn't think the thing worth while.'

Manson waited for Manuel to clear the soup dishes and take them away through the gauze doors that separated the dining room from his cage at the back.

‘I fail to see what Manuel has to do with it,' he said. ‘We can go alone. Manuel isn't obliged to come.'

‘What is there about this place?' she said.

‘He's afraid of it. They're all afraid of it. They're superstitious about it.'

‘Is there anything to be superstitious about?'

‘Not a thing.'

‘Then why do you suppose they're superstitious?'

‘They hate being alone,' he said.

‘Don't you?' she said.

‘Not a bit,' he said. ‘I rather like it——' Abruptly he realized what he had said and he felt his confidence, which had been mounting and strengthening, suddenly recede. Confusedly he tried to retrieve it and said:

‘I didn't mean it quite like that—I meant I liked being alone in the sense that I wasn't frightened of it——'

‘Oh! it doesn't matter,' she said. ‘Here comes the food. It looks like sort of pie—is it, Manuel? Is it pie?'

‘Yes, madame,' he said. ‘It is steak and kidney pie. Made in the English way.'

After lunch, as they had coffee outside, under a tree he kept telling her was an arbutus, though he was not sure and it was only a way of getting his confidence back, she said:

‘About this place. Would you like to go?'

‘I'd like to,' he said.

Her eyes, always so large and incorrigibly assertive and apparently forceful, seemed suddenly uncertain. She ran her hand across the streak of paler hair and said:

‘It isn't one of those evil places, is it? You know—nothing to do with the dead?'

‘It's just high and lonely,' he said. ‘It's the crowning point of the island. That's all.'

She stared across the valley, to a far glitter of sun on harsh iron rock, and Manson remembered how Manuel had stared across the valley too.

‘You'd really like to go, wouldn't you?' she said. ‘We'd have to go alone, I suppose? Manuel wouldn't come.'

He felt an ascendant rush of triumph at the thought of being alone with her.

‘I don't think it need bother us,' he said. ‘It isn't that far.'

For a moment she did not answer. She had slipped off the dress she had put on to cover her sun-suit during lunch and once again he found himself thinking how taut and mature her body looked, emerging naked and smooth pale brown from the costume of vivid green. If only he could have rubbed out, somehow, the disturbing streak of paler hair.

‘You really think it's not one of those evil places?' she said. ‘Nothing to do with the dead?'

‘No more than anywhere else has.'

‘Only I couldn't bear it,' she said, ‘if it had anything to do with the dead. And it's been so easy so far.'

They arranged to start next morning at nine; but when Manson came out of his bedroom and went out on to the verandah he discovered Miss Vane and Manuel talking at the foot of the steps. Manuel had rigged up a pole on which, at each end, he had hooked a basket for luncheon. As he saw Manson coming he hoisted the pole to his
shoulder, balancing the basket on the curved smooth pole.

With vexation Manson said: ‘I thought Manuel wasn't coming.'

‘He's coming as far as lunch,' Miss Vane said. ‘Then if we want to go on any further——'

‘Of course we want to go farther, don't we?' he said. ‘We want to do the whole thing.'

‘He says that's up to us.'

‘It's amazing how people fold up when it comes to it,' Manson said. ‘Good God, you might think it was Everest or something.'

‘Well, it's probably as well he is coming,' she said. ‘We'd only have to carry the lunch baskets and it's going to be awfully hot.'

Manuel, who had not spoken, began to walk on ahead. Miss Vane followed him and Manson walked some paces behind her. The sunlight behind him was already so crystalline in its sub-alpine transparence that it shone in Miss Vane's hair with a remarkable effect of edging it with minute thorns of tawny gold.

Presently, across the steep short valley, he could see the high edge of the central plateau. It surprised him, in that first moment, by having something domestic about it. It emerged as a vast and domestic piece of pumice stone abandoned between two vaster shoulders of naked rock. In the strong sunlight he could have sworn that these rocks, perpendicular and iron-grey and treeless to the foot, shot off a spark or two that flashed like signals across the lower valley.