Devil By The Sea (15 page)

“Cruel little beast,” he yelled hoarsely. “You deserve a good thrashing.” He cuffed the boy once or twice round the head and
aimed a few ineffectual blows at his rear. Wally twisted out of his grasp and ran, howling, across the field. Charles brushed
his hands together with a gesture of distaste. Cruelty of any kind aroused him to a deep and passionate anger; faced with
intentional cruelty, he became a dangerous man. He walked towards Hilary, his body trembling, his eyes cold as blue pebbles.

“Did
you
have anything to do with this?” he asked grimly.

She looked up at him slowly. He saw that her eyes had a blank, dark look, almost as if she did not recognise him.

“Come on,” he said, more gently. “Tell me.”

“It wasn’t Wally’s fault,” she said stoutly. “It was the others, really. And anyway, it wasn’t naughty.
I
told them who he was.”

“Oh. And who is he?”

She glanced at him sidelong, shuffled her feet and sighed. “Why
him”
she answered after a brief interval. “You know. The man in the newspaper. The man they’re looking for.”

He felt the blood beating in his forehead. “What on earth do you mean?”

Her voice was calm, almost monotonous, as if she had learned her piece by rote. ‘The one who took the little girl away. I
saw him at the competition. I wouldn’t go with him, though. But I know him. He talks to me.”

She brought out these last two sentences with a kind of perky pride that dispelled his first, sharp fear.
All children tell lies,
he thought.

He said angrily, “Hilary, I hate a liar.”

“But I’m
not”
she cried, suddenly as angry as he. She stamped her foot. “Peregrine knows about him, too.”

“Knows what?” he asked coldly. “What you told him? What you read in the newspaper?”

She frowned. “Oh, no. I didn’t tell him
that.
I mean that Peregrine knows he is the Devil.”

She brought out this monstrous statement with what seemed to him a quite appalling air of innocence, looking him straight
in the eye.

He said horrified, “Do you know what you’re saying?”

“Of course I know what I’m saying,” his daughter replied impatiently. “I know all about the Devil. But it wasn’t me who knew
he was the Devil
first.
It was Peregrine. He
told
me. He recognised him, you see, when we saw him taking her away.” The hectic colour rose in her cheeks. “And of course he
must be right. He’s so good. He wouldn’t tell me a fib, would he?”

Charles stared at her. There was no question of this thing being some childish nightmare that she and Peregrine had dreamed
up between them. In that event, she would have trembled, wept—certainly she would not have produced the lie in this bold,
bright way. “Hilary,” said her school report, “has an unfortunate manner.” She could never look crestfallen or properly contrite.
When she felt really guilty, she looked insolent. Now, this inability to express the correct emotion was her
downfall. Although she was really very much afraid, she regarded her father with a hard, triumphant stare.

He felt a complete revulsion from her. She was trying to distract his attention from the main issue by a pack of blasphemous
lies. He said, wrathfully, “Hilary, did you, or did you not, throw a stone at that poor old man?”

She gazed at him wonderingly. “Yes, I did. But I’ve told you
why.”

Charles gave way to his righteous anger. His blue eyes grew hot with disgust, his lips trembled. To think that his child should
have so little feeling for the weak and helpless! Heroically, he took some of the blame upon himself. His neglect of her must
have been fearful to have led to this!

“That’s all I wanted to know,” he said in an ominous voice and, taking her arm, led her to a convenient tree stump at the
side of the field. He sat down and, clasping her wrists, held her prisoner in front of him.

“Listen to me,” he said. “That man you read about in the newspaper is in prison. So you lied to me. That is quite bad enough.
But you did something much, much worse. You threw a stone at a cripple, at a poor sick man who had never done you any harm.
And then tried to make me forget about it by telling me a lot of wicked lies.” His voice shook with emotion. “Don’t you see
that this was a dreadful thing to do?”

“But he
is
the man,” she cried, confused, “and he
is
the Devil.”

“That’s blasphemy. But I’m not going to punish you for that. Not for lying to me. I’m going to punish you for wanting to hurt
someone who was poor and old and frightened.” He remembered Peregrine’s burnt lips and his resolve was strengthened. “I hope
this will be a lesson to you will remember all your life.”

She saw his intention and her eyes dilated. “No,” she screamed, and tried to pull away from him.

He flung her, face downwards, across his lap. Fighting against him, arching her back, she saw, with terrible clarity, Cooper,
standing at the gate and looking in their direction. With an anguished cry she clutched at her skirt. Charles did not notice
Cooper. He was full of distaste for what he was about to do but he was sternly intent on justice and preventive punishment.
Knowing that humiliation would make her remember the occasion more than any pain he would be willing to inflict, he deliberately
raised her skirt and ripped off her knickers. He caught her flailing arms and gripped them between his knees. He beat her,
with sharp, ringing slaps, until her plump behind was rosy. The sight of the red weals on her bare flesh roused in him a painful
sympathy. Afraid that he might be diverted from his purpose by soft-heartedness, he continued to spank her with a heavier
hand than he had intended. She hung, limp and screaming, across his knees. The birds, alarmed by her cries, rose from the
trees and wheeled and called above them. When he had finished, he released her hands and pushed her off his lap. He rubbed
his stinging hands against his trousers. She grovelled on the ground, choking, the saliva running out of her mouth. He was
bitterly ashamed. Violence accomplished nothing and was always wrong. There was no excuse.

“Get up,” he said. “Put your knickers on.”

She obeyed him, fumbling with her underclothing. He averted his eyes. When she was tidy, he said wretchedly. “I’ve never done
that before, have I? I hope you will never forget it. I hope I never have to do it again.”

“I hate you,” she said, between sobs, burning with shame and injustice. “I hope God will strike you dead.”

“Get in the car,” he said, and pointed to the gate. She turned and ran, yellow skirt blowing like a flower under the blue
arc of the sky. She ran straight into Cooper, her head striking him hard in the softness of his ageing belly. He grunted and
held her away from him, an amused grin on his face.

“Been a naughty girl, have you?” he said cheerily. “A bit big to have your bottom smacked, aren’t you?”

He was a horrible, hateful, vulgar man. Hilary longed to die: life, in face of this disaster, was insupportable. She covered
her face with her hands and wept.

“There, there,” said Cooper, who was kindly natured. “It’s all over now, isn’t it?”

“No,” she wailed in black despair. “Never. I hate him. It’s not fair.”

“Hush your mouth,” said Cooper suddenly in quite a different voice. He flung his cigarette away and called, “It’s all right,
Mr. Bray. Hang on. I’m coming.”

Charles could not remember clearly what had happened in the field: all that remained was the memory of an emotion that was
fading like a dream on waking. In the moving car, leaning his head against the cold leather, he had a sense of unreality.
He saw Cooper’s back, the pale tear on Hilary’s cheek, the houses, the cliffs, the sea, and felt them to be illusions that
would vanish if he touched them. His limbs had become large and swollen. If he moved, he felt it would be slowly and heavily
like a deep-sea diver.

The car stopped. “Here we are,” said Cooper in a jolly voice. “Out you get, young lady.”

Hilary stalked, her back humped like an angry cat’s, into the gateway of Peebles. Cooper’s anxious face appeared in Charles’s
line of vision. “Sure you don’t want to get out
too, Mr. Bray? That was a nasty turn you had, up in the field. You ought to have a good lie down.”

“Take me to the shop,” said Charles in an odd, slurred voice. As the car moved off, he murmured, “Poor child,” and was seized
with an attack of giddiness so violent that he closed his eyes. For a moment, it seemed as if all the blood cells in his body
were rushing towards his throat in a mass conspiracy to choke him. Then, as he waited clutching at the soft, puffy seat, the
moment passed and, he felt weak and curiously free of his body. The sky wheeled above his head, the sun made a trail like
lightning across it and his spirit floated on the wind over the glittering holiday town. He sighed, his jaw hung slackly.
The car passed Gorings and he saw red lobsters arranged on the fishmonger’s slab like a painting. A child in a sun hat carried
a bunch of flags for his sandcastle. Miss Fleery-Carpenter in white, woollen stockings and a moth-eaten fur cape, muttered
to herself on the pavement and made extravagant gestures.

The car swung into the narrow, back street and stopped outside the book shop. Cooper, his left arm laid affectionately along
the back of the seat, grinned at Charles. There was a sweat line on his collar and he had not shaved. Once, he would have
got out and opened his passenger’s door, doffing a respectful cap. But why should he, thought Charles, surprised, an old man
in his sixties?

Cooper said, “You look better, Mr. Bray. More colour in your face. Been overdoing it a bit, haven’t you?”

“Have to be careful, now,” Charles muttered. His voice was stronger, more normal.

“None of us is getting any younger.”

“No.”

Cooper said, “D’you know who I took to the station this morning?”

Charles shook his head, clutching at coins in his pocket.

Cooper leaned closer. His breath was foul. “Mrs. Jenkins, poor woman. Her and her husband. They buried the little girl quiet
yesterday.”

“Jenkins? Oh, yes …” Charles bent his head. The thought was too painful, he shrank from it.

“She said there was a lovely lot of flowers. Wish I’d thought to send a nice wreath myself. It must have been a comfort, all
those people thinking of them. She kept on about it all the time: it was so kind of everyone, she said. And such a lovely
funeral, she looked so pretty in her coffin. I wouldn’t take the fare from them although she kept on offering it and afterwards
I wished I had because it made her cry. But it wasn’t anything of course …”

Cooper was talking in a confidential voice. The flash of genuine feeling that had briefly illuminated him was gone and his
expression displayed simply a kind of greedy eagerness. “Just as well it happened at the end of the Season. Bad for business.
Most of us would be finding things a bit tight. Stands to reason, no one wants to bring their kids to a place where they might
get their throats cut. Would you, I ask you?”

“I suppose not,” said Charles carefully, edging his way out of the car. The whole business sickened him, he did not want to
discuss it. “Anyway,” he concluded, standing on the pavement and smiling at Cooper, “they’d be safe enough now.”

He fancied that Cooper looked surprised. He took off his cap and scratched his head, then opened his mouth to speak. But Charles
had had enough. He did not want to have to listen, to smile. The demands of other people clawed at his nerve ends with savage
fingers, affecting him like the scrape of a nail across a blackboard. His head felt enormous: he would need all his strength
to carry him down the stairs to
his tiny, private room, his haven, the peace of his old school desk.

He did not reach it. Miss Hubback met him as he entered the shop. She was weeping, her delicate, absurd nose swollen to the
size and colour of a plum. Her generous tears confused the issue: at first, Charles thought that it was a purely private matter
that distressed her. That it was not, he understood at last after some moments of disordered conversation. She brought him
the morning papers which he had not seen, sobbing her kind heart out at the sadness and uncertainty of life. The man the police
had held for questioning had been released. He had been seen by an old lady to buy an ice cream for a child who had since
been found to be alive and well. The police were looking for the murderer.

Miss Hubback wondered at the expression on Charles’s face and also, some time afterwards, at some of the things he said, not
to her but to himself. His words were vague and rambling, there seemed to be something wrong with his speech. She caught something
about Hilary, there was something that she had done, or said that troubled him. He said in a soft, wondering voice, so low
that she had to strain to catch the words, “She could have seen him … it is quite possible … what a terrible situation for
her …” Then, in a stronger voice, “I have behaved abominably….”

“No,” cried Miss Hubback, shocked. “Never, Mr. Bray.”

He looked up at her after a brief silence, his face ghastly and hollowed like a skull so that she brushed aside what he was
trying to tell her and offered, alarmed, to fetch a doctor. But he shook his head and tried to smile. He was perfectly well,
he insisted, a little tired, that was all. Really all….

The man kept on running. It hurt him to run and he was slow: he got over the chopped ground with a curious hop and skip and
looked like Worzel Gummidge. After a while, he forgot why he was running. He only knew that the fear inside him was like a
pain, as real a pain as the wound on his cheek. He avoided his caravan like a frightened animal and made for the cliffs. When
he reached them, he went straight down over the sides, clinging like a fly. The tide was going out and the beach was empty
except for a bent figure paddling some distance away at the edge of the sea. Once on the shore, he felt safe. He smiled to
himself and began to limp along the shingle. Then he looked up and saw a policeman, black against the skyline.