Devil By The Sea (11 page)

“You didn’t think of that, did you? Or are you still pretending that babies come in the doctor’s little black bag?”

Janet went on staring with her huge, dark, stupid eyes. She opened her mouth and no sound came out of it. Finally she murmured,
with great effort and in a voice so low that Alice could barely hear it, some form of denial.

Alice tossed her head contemptuously. “Are you trying to tell me that you’re still a virgin?”

The brutality of the scene had defeated Janet utterly. The word “virgin” was the final straw: it was a word that had always
embarrassed her beyond measure. She covered her face with her hands and wept bitterly. To Alice, her tears seemed an admission
of guilt. To some extent, they satisfied and calmed her.

Faintly touched with shame, she pulled Janet’s hands away from her streaming eyes and offered her a cigarette.
Janet lit it with shaking hand and puffed at it helplessly. They were both silent, weakened with emotion. They avoided each
other’s eyes.

The front door opened and closed. Auntie had entered the house unnoticed by either of them but now, in the silence they recognised
Charles’s footsteps. Janet threw her cigarette away and bowed her head. Alice put one hand to her disordered hair.

“Has she come back?”

“No…”

Charles looked at his wife and daughter. He said cautiously, scenting trouble, “What’s the matter?”

Janet, raising her head, stared at him mutely with suffering eyes. Alice moved towards her with a guilty, protective air.

“It’s nothing. A bit of trouble. Nothing important…”

She looked, with her hair tumbling round her face and her cheeks glowing with colour, like a great, golden barmaid. Charles
was touched, both by her dishevelled appearance and also by her obvious desire to protect Janet.

He said coldly to his daughter. “Really, Janet, I’m ashamed of you. You are thoroughly selfish. We’re nearly out of our minds
about Hilary and you make a scene. How could you?”

Janet became very pale. Outwardly a dull, insignificant girl, she was inwardly jealous and obscurely passionate. She longed,
above all things, to be first with those she loved. When it became apparent that she was not—and she was quick to see a slight—she
was given to sudden, ungovernable rages. Quite irrationally, she saw her father’s reproof as evidence that she came second
to Hilary in his affections. This, curiously, distressed her more than Alice’s attack had done.

“What about me?” she cried. “Don’t
I
matter? It’s
nothing but Hilary, Hilary—I’m sick of the sound of her name. She’s a little beast, she stole my letter.” Her voice was savage
and desolate and childish. “You don’t love
me.”
She ran from the room. They heard the front door slam.

Alice smiled wanly at her husband. “Oh, dear …”

He returned her smile sheepishly and, overcome by a tumult of emotions, she sat down heavily and burst into tears. He went
to her and patted her heaving back suspiciously: it was a long time since she had wept in front of him.

“What are we going to do?” she asked, drawing away from his touch, humiliated because he had seen her tears.

He answered her with false cheerfulness. “I’ve been to the police, they’re looking for her. But there’s not so much need to
worry as we thought. They caught the man this morning. At least she’s in no danger from
him.”

The man looked at Hilary and thought: what pretty hair. Bright and shining like the firelight on polished copper.

He could remember far back, farther than most people and his memories were clear. His mind was full of pictures like a photograph
album.

He remembered the day when he lay in his crib and stretched out his hands to the copper pan that hung beside the range oven.
It was polished and shining with the red-gold flames dancing in the heart of it. He wanted it. He spoke his first, ugly, guttural
word.

His grandmother gave him the copper pan to play with. It was cold and cruel to touch. He cried and threw the pan away. His
grandmother spoke to him gently, rubbed the pan with her apron and hung it back on its hook where he could look at it.

His grandmother looked after him then: she had long,
white hairs on her chin and her hands were soft and pulpy and crinkled and always damp. She smelt of soap and wet linen. He
dozed, in the daytime, to the drip of drying clothes and the squeak of the big, wooden mangle. When his foot hurt, she held
it in her hands and rocked him backwards and forwards, crooning to him in the firelight.

One day, his mother was there instead. She opened the door to the rag and bone man and he took away the copper pan with the
other shiny kitchen things and the big, brass bedstead where he slept with his grandmother at night when his pain made him
lonely or afraid. His mother said: who wants this old rubbish, nothing but work to keep it clean? Feeling her anger, hungry
because she had not fed him, he wept sadly, his hands screwed up in front of his eyes. His mother slapped him, saying, stop
snivelling, you devil’s brat, or I’ll give you something to cry for. He was terrified by her red face bending over him. He
screamed for his granny in his flat, hideous voice.

His mother put a wet flannel over his face to muffle the noise and to shut out the hateful sight of him. She shook him, her
sharp nails digging into his shoulders. Your granny won’t come, she said, she’s gone away for ever, dead, dead, dead, banging
his head against the side of the crib.

Most of his memories were of death, of people dying and leaving him alone. He bent down and touched Hilary’s hair. His hands
were reverent like the hands of a bishop at a confirmation. He felt love and the longing for love aching in his body like
a wound. “Pretty, pretty,” he moaned. His hands tightened softly on the little girl’s head.

“It’s all right, Auntie,” Charles bellowed across the green shaded room. “They’ve caught the man, the murderer. Sorry if I’ve
disturbed your nap, but I thought you’d like to know.”

He had never quite ridden himself of the idea that if only you spoke loudly enough, Auntie would hear. Now, as she bent forward
questioningly because she could not clearly see his face, he was irritated at what he suspected, occasionally and unfairly,
was an affectation.

He moved closer to her and repeated his message, his lips emphasising the shape of the words.

“All right, all right,” she said pettishly. “I’m not blind yet,” adding, illogically, “I heard you the first time.”

“That’s all right, then.” He stood upright and mopped his brow. He was tired, the fright had taken it out of him. The pulses
throbbed at his temples like angry little hammers.

Auntie was huddled in her chair. He thought he saw her eyelids close. How easily the old fall asleep, he thought, and tip-toed
to the door.

Her voice arrested him. She said, indistinctly, “I saw her you know. She must be on her way home.”

“Why didn’t you say?” he asked, surprised. Alice would be annoyed if she knew. He said, puzzled, “Where did you see her?”

There was a perceptible pause. Then, “She was on the
top of the cliff. I saw her from the beach. She was quite safe. Naturally, I would have gone up after her if it had been necessary.”
Her voice had a boastful ring and he grinned, hiding his mouth with his hand.

“I bet you would. What were you doing on the beach? Gathering seaweed?”

What a remarkable old creature, he thought indulgently. How many old ladies would scramble along a rough beach at nearly eighty?
She must find it dull, after her active life, to be confined to an ageing body. The spirit didn’t always grow old at the same
pace—hers hadn’t, anyway. She was game. She could have shinned up those cliffs if she’d really had to. He was proud of her
toughness, her indomitable old age.

He chaffed her good-humouredly. “Come on, tell me what you were doing.” He became conscious of a smell of salt and seaweed.
There was a garment drying by the fire. “You were paddling,” he accused delightedly,
“at your
age!”

She did not respond to his teasing. Her eyes were fixed on him with an unfamiliar look, sly, almost afraid, as if she had
something to hide. Her hands fluttered over something in her lap. Curious, he bent forward and saw a toy sailing-boat.

“Surprise for the kids?” he asked.

She thrust the toy behind her back and glared at him. “It’s mine,” she said. “Mine.” He was taken aback by the ferocious intensity
in her voice. Poor old girl, he thought, she’s going ga-ga.

“Yes,” he soothed her. “Of course it is. Did you think I wanted to take it from you?”

“Oh, you fool,” she burst out contemptuously. “Just because I’m old, you speak to me as if I were a child—or an animal. You
don’t know how I feel. You wait till you’re old, you’ll know what it’s like.”

Concerned, he asked, “What’s the matter? Aren’t you happy with us? Don’t we look after you?”

“Yes, you look after me,” she admitted ironically. “You feed me, give me a fire to sit by. But you don’t care. When you’re
young there’s an illusion that someone is bound to you, a husband, a lover, a child…. It’s only when you’re old that you can’t
escape the truth. Then you
know
you’re set apart, shut away inside your body and your mind with no one caring how you feel or think. I never knew I was lonely
until I grew old.”

Her hands trembled together in her lap. For a pitying moment he glimpsed the terror and the sadness that possessed her but
he could not understand it. He felt no desire for other people. Loneliness, to him, was freedom. He longed for it like a lover.

“Everyone is alone. You don’t have to be old to know that. There’s no comfort in other people,” he said wearily, feeling suddenly
worn out, finished. His body was a life sentence, it gave him claustrophobia.

“The Church,” he said with difficulty. “Faith might help….”

“I don’t believe in God,” she said. “A fairy story for weaklings.”

For a moment, her eyes brightened, she sat more stiffly in her chair. But it was only a temporary recovery: almost immediately
she slumped back into a hunched, defeated position. When Charles spoke to her, she made no response and fell, quite suddenly
asleep, whimpering a little, a stream of pale dribble running unheeded from the corner of her mouth. With surprise he saw,
for the first time clearly, that she was really very old. In the last few years she must have declined without his noticing
it. Up to this moment he had, he realised, thought of her not as she was but as he had, as a young man, known her. Then, when
her
deafness was only partial, she had flourished a hearing-aid like a decoration and been an asset to any dinner party. She had
been Charles’s fascinating aunt, the wit, the monumental old character. At nearly sixty she had tramped Europe, an intrepid
water-colourist, with one hundred pounds and a hot-water bottle in her rucksack.

Now he looked at the ruin and thought, without much pity: poor old girl, but I suppose we all come to it in the end. An indignity,
perhaps, but is there any use in whining? Some people were luckier, though—for himself, he prayed passionately for a quick
death, no dragging years of uselessness.

As he left the house to look for Hilary it began to rain, big, pattering drops like a summer storm.

Hilary shook her head violently and, dropping his hands to his sides, the man stepped backwards.

“You should be more careful,” he said. “I knew a little girl got stuck in one of those pipes. She was playing a game and she
got stuck inside.”

She looked up at him, her hands gripping the edge of the pipe. “What happened to her?” she asked curiously.

“I don’t know. Her friends ran away and left her. They didn’t tell anyone. They were afraid that if they did, they’d get into
trouble. So they left her and pretended that they’d been somewhere else all afternoon.”

Hilary nodded. She was not surprised at what seemed to her entirely natural behaviour. Her legs felt cramped inside the pipe.
“I feel stuck,” she said, horrified. The man smiled kindly and bending, hauled her out. Her dress was crumpled and covered
with red dust. He brushed her down with his hands, muttering softly to himself. Then he spat on a corner of his dirty handkerchief
and wiped the rust from her hands
and face. When he had finished, he looked at her critically and smiled.

Then he sat down with his back against the sun-warmed pipe and took out a hunk of bread and cheese. He hacked at it with a
penknife, singing a tune under his breath. He ignored Hilary completely.

She stood and watched him, shifting from one foot to the other. She sighed deeply. Nothing interesting was going to happen
after all. It was a dull and pedestrian climax to the excitement that had seized her inside the pipe. She sidled up to the
man and stood beside him, breathing heavily.

He said, without looking up, “Do you want something to eat, girlie?”

“Yes, please.” She sat beside him and watched his thin fingers tear the bread into two. He gave her half the bread and a piece
of dry, cheese rind. She ate it quickly, stuffing it into her mouth and swallowing it in lumps. His eyes flickered briefly
over her face before he went back to the business of his own meal. He ate daintily, rolling the soft bread into grey, smooth
pellets and pecking at them like a bird. As he swallowed, his long hair fell forward, curving across his face with a smooth,
glossy motion like a bird’s wings folding.

Hilary watched him with fear that felt like ecstasy. She sat quite still so as not to disturb him, her knees drawn up to her
chin. When he was done, he brushed the crumbs from his coat and turned his head. He stared at Hilary with dark, mournful,
unblinking eyes until she felt as if she were drowning in them. She could not look away.

He smiled, a gentle, loving smile. “You’re a funny little girl, aren’t you?”

“Why?” she asked expectantly. Delicious shivers ran through her body.

“A pretty little girl,” he continued without answering her, “but are you a sensible little girl, I wonder?” He cocked his
head on one side and regarded her inquiringly. “I think you are,” he said. “I think so, yes, yes, yes.” He bobbed his head
jerkily like a Jack-in-the-box and Hilary felt the laughter forcing itself up inside her. She clapped her hands over her mouth.