Devil By The Sea (3 page)

She repeated earnestly, “It’s awfully important that you should tell me what you really
feel.
That sort of thing is more important between a man and a woman than anything else. More important than sex.”

She brought out the last word with difficulty and lowered her eyes. She thought, with a stirring of pride, that six months
ago she would not have dared to mention that word to a man. She remembered Miss Adams, the botany mistress, whose neck had
become as red as a hen’s whenever she was forced, by the nature of the curriculum, to approach the “difficult subject”.

Aubrey smiled approvingly at her and she leaned her head comfortably against his shoulder. His beautiful, deep, rich voice
droned on and Janet contemplated the poetic tragedy of her own position. She was in love with a married man. This did not
make her unhappy. Indeed, in the beginning, it had given their love an additional piquancy, a spice of danger. “Illicit love,”
she had frequently said to herself in
the privacy of her bedroom, “Illicit love.” The words had a brave and glorious ring.

They had met, earlier in the year, on the beach. They had paddled in the cold, spring sea, talked and gathered shells just—as
Aubrey had said himself—like a couple of children. He was a schoolmaster and these summer holidays they had met almost daily.
They talked—Janet had never talked so much, nor known there were such interesting depths in her own character—and occasionally
Aubrey read his own poetry to her.

Their relationship had been, in Aubrey’s words, as fresh and innocent as a spring morning. They were not lovers although the
question whether they should one day become so, had often been discussed between them. At least, Aubrey had discussed it:
unable to emulate his detachment or to speak of sex without embarrassment (in the Sixth Form, such talk would have been dismissed
as “sloppy”) Janet had meekly listened. He had attacked the matter both from a moral and a psychological standpoint. It was
the effect on
her
that worried him, he frequently said: women were more disposed than men to be emotionally affected by the physical act. At
first Janet had been touched by his consideration but lately his reflective monologues had ceased to excite and merely bored
her. So much talk about what should be a spontaneous and fleshly business must inevitably lead to disappointment. Desire was
bound to wither in this earnest, debating-society atmosphere. Now, drowsily listening to his voice, she decided that by the
time she became Aubrey’s mistress, all the fun would have gone out of it.

Her own cynicism appalled her. She sat upright and said fervently, “I love you so much.”

“What?” Interrupted in his monologue (what, she wondered guiltily, had it been about?), Aubrey’s voice was brusque. He recovered
himself quickly. “Do you?” His
eyes wandered over her hair. “Sometimes I wish you didn’t. It would be easier for me to love you from a distance. Knowing
that I could never have you.” He smiled beautifully. “
La Princesse Lointaine”
he murmured. “Cold and pale and virginal.”

Not for the first time, Janet found him absurd. He’s rehearsing a scene with some quite imaginary person, she thought. Seeing
the impatience in her eyes, Aubrey blushed faintly and pressed his lips against her cheek.

On the beach, a child wailed. Looking up, they saw that a small boy had fallen in a pool by the jetty. He was standing in
the water, soaked to the skin, the tears pouring down his outraged face. His mother left her deckchair and lumbered down to
the pool.

“Where are the children?” said Janet.

They stood up. On either side, as far as they could see, the beach was empty.

“They can’t have gone far,” Aubrey said.

Janet tossed her head at him and ran clumsily towards the steps, head bent, slipping on the stones. From behind she looked
angular and coltish; her shrunken cardigan barely reached below her shoulder blades. She stood on the promenade breathing
asthmatically, puffed by her run.

When Aubrey caught up with her, she turned a distracted face towards him. “They might be anywhere,” she cried. “We should
have watched where they went. They might have gone near the road.”

He thought her distress excessive. Looking at his watch, he saw that he would be expected at home. “Surely they can’t have
gone far?”

Irritated by his calm, she said, “Don’t worry yourself, will you? I’ll find them, you go home.” Seeing he was quite prepared
to do just this, she added spitefully, “It’s all your fault. You knew I was supposed to look after them.”

Her unfairness astonished him. He took revenge by observing, coldly and silently, that anger made her nose more prominent
and her skin more sallow. Really, her only beauty lay in an awkward, young simplicity and bloom: she should be more conscious
of her limitations and understand that to be sweet and continuously charming was her only hope. But however vicious his private
thoughts, Aubrey was too cautious to speak them aloud. He did not love Janet but he had literary ambitions and believed that
an
affaire
was necessary to an aspiring young writer. He had no intention of making Janet his mistress but in the absence of anyone
more stimulating she was a useful object on which to practise his technique. He said mildly, “Perhaps they have gone on the
pier.”

She muttered, “They haven’t got any money. It costs twopence.” Irresolute, angry with herself, she turned on him. “We just
sat and talked and talked,” she cried in wild despair. “We were only thinking of ourselves. Anything might have happened to
them.”

When Peregrine called to her, Hilary hesitated for a moment. Then she saw that Poppet and the man had stopped at the telescope.
The man put a penny into the slot, Poppet climbed on to the platform and looked through the eyepiece. Then she got down and,
hand in hand, the man and the child walked on, towards the pier.

Hilary glanced at Peregrine, labouring over the clattering shingle, his face purple in the wind. She decided that she wouldn’t
wait for him: it would teach him a lesson.

She climbed the steps to the promenade and hurried to the telescope to see if there was anything left of the pennyworth but
the shutter at the end had already clicked down. Anyway, there was nothing to look at. Where the telescope was pointing, there
were no boats, nothing but the wide and empty sea.

She skipped along the front, past the clock tower and the lavatories, stopping at the photographer’s kiosk to pat the old,
stuffed bear that stood outside. Some of his inside was coming out and one eye was missing. Sometimes there was a queue of
children waiting to have their pictures taken sitting on the bear but this afternoon it was too cold, there was no one there.
She inserted a finger into the worn hole on the bear’s back and pulled out a little more of the kapok stuffing. Then she saw
that the photographer was watching her thoughtfully from his little box: she hummed a casual tune under her breath and ran
on.

A little farther along the front, you came to the pier and the Fun Fair and beyond that the town petered out into the flat
marshes of the estuary where once the herons had nested and now there was nothing except a road, protected by the high, sea
wall, a few wooden shacks and the soft, flat land crumbling away before the encroaching sea.

Poppet and the man had stopped outside the Fun Fair. They were looking into the distorting glass that hung outside the entrance
to the fair, advertising the Hall of Mirrors, the Big Laugh. The little girl was pointing to her reflection in the mirror.
The sound of her high, light laugh came to Hilary on the wind.

Hilary walked a little closer and stood in a prominent position so that if they turned round, they would see her. If they
were going into the Fun Fair and saw another little girl, alone, perhaps they would take her too. She saw that Poppet was
pulling at the man’s hand, almost as if she wanted to get away, but he was bending over her protectingly, sheltering her with
his great, black coat. His attitude was one of loving kindness.

Suddenly, for no reason at all, Hilary was afraid. The whole sea front was cold and empty and dead, her heart beat loudly.
She no longer wanted to be seen: she bolted into the
doorway of a café and hid behind a placard that said “Oysters in Season”. The wording of the notice was hopeful but faded
and dim. No one who came to Henstable would be likely to ask for oysters. The café did a brisk trade in fish and chips and
Coca-Cola. With relief, Hilary saw that Peregrine was running along the front towards her.

His hair streamed behind him, the tears were drying on his cheek. “Why didn’t you wait for me?” he panted accusingly. “I didn’t
hear you,” she lied softly. His hands, she saw, were white with cold. “Give them to me,” she commanded and he yielded them
meekly so that she could rub them between her knuckles.

“Why did you go without me?” he complained. “What are you doing here? Are you hiding from someone?”

“Be quiet,” she hissed, thumping him warningly between the shoulder blades. Apprehensive, he followed the direction of her
eyes.

The man and the little girl had left the entrance to the Fun Fair and were walking away from the town, towards the marshes.
They were linked closely together as if a great affection bound them. From this distance it was impossible to tell whether
the child’s steps were lagging or whether she went willingly. Once she turned round, her small face, as flat and blank and
meaningless as a piece of white paper, appearing briefly against the man’s dark sleeve. Perhaps she was crying: if she was,
it was a very tiny cry, not loud enough to be heard above the sound of the sea and the noisy yelling of the gulls. The man’s
wide skirts blew around them both so that some of the time Poppet was almost completely hidden. She was so small, now, that
she had little character or significance. She was, already, a committed child, lost beyond redemption.

The children, sensing that something irrevocable was happening, drew closer together and watched in silence.

At last Hilary whispered, “I wonder where they’re going.” Peregrine did not answer her. He was breathing noisily, watching
the departing couple with a fixed, glazed stare.

Hilary said hopefully, “I expect he’s her Daddy.” This, on the whole, had not seemed likely so she tried again. “Or her Uncle,
or somebody like that.”

Peregrine suddenly flushed bright scarlet. “He’s not anyone she knows. He’s taking her away. He’s the Devil.”

As he spoke, the colour ebbed from his face as quickly as it had come, leaving him very pale. He took a pace forward, one
hand clutching Hilary’s wrist. Memory served him now, not sight, for the figures had dwindled. He remembered what he had seen,
without understanding, when the man had sat beside him in the bandstand: the clumsy horror beneath the full, concealing skirts,
the surgical boot, the club foot. Now he knew what he had seen and felt the knowledge strike him like a sword.

“He’s the Devil,” he insisted gently. “I saw …” He caught his breath and began to cry. “I saw his cloven hoof.”

Hilary felt quite faint and sick. Peregrine was always truthful. She remembered the Nanny who had said long ago when they
were in their bath to an aunt or some other, shadowy, forgotten figure, “That child’s a saint, too good to live. He’d never
tell a lie, not to save his soul.” Then, the wraith-like person, swathed in steam and bath towels, had muttered something
about long ears and no more had been said.

That night, lying awake in the moon-cold nursery, Hilary had thought that Peregrine was going to die or, worse, had somehow
damned himself irretrievably, and sobbed herself to sleep. When morning came and she watched Peregrine across the breakfast
table, saw his calm, living face, this acute terror passed and she knew that the sly words had been no more than a cold dig
at
her,
Hilary, the untrustworthy one,
the unwanted girl, the liar. From that moment she had known that she was wicked and worthless and that Peregrine was wholly
good, the beloved of God, the flower of the flock.

If Peregrine said that he had seen the Devil, it was true. He knew the Devil when he saw him because he was a saint, too good
to live. With a bursting heart, she cried, “Let’s go back, go back…” She began to run, weeping, into the wind. After a little,
her breath gave out and she turned to Peregrine. “You’re quite sure?” she asked.

“Oh yes.” His clear eyes looked back at her with tranquil certainty. He was no longer troubled by his vision. He believed
in the Devil and, after the first shock, to see Him had seemed nothing out of the ordinary.

He said calmly, “Let’s play at jumping over the cracks, shall we?”

Slowly, hopping and skipping, they returned to the jetty. Janet was standing by the clock tower alone, looking in the opposite
direction. Giggling, they slipped down on to the beach and crept along in the shelter of the sea wall.

The face of Poppet’s mother appeared above the jetty. There was a spot on her chin, an inflamed, red pustule with a fat, white
head.

“Poppet,” she called. She ignored the children and her voice was squeaky as if she were angry or afraid. “Poppet, come here
this minute.”

She clambered on to the jetty, flopping on her forearms like an old seal as she heaved her legs sideways. Her cotton skirt
whipped in the wind. Her legs were knotted with purple veins and thick as tree trunks. She wore dirty, white plimsolls, the
laces dangled. Hilary watched her, thinking how ugly she was. Beside her, Peregrine turned his face away. He found ugliness
quite unbearable, it made him sick.

“Poppet.”

The salt wind tore at the dry, permed hair. Legs straddled wide, she stood on the slimy jetty and looked wildly at the empty
beach, at the grey, curling sea.

“Hilary, you naughty girl. I’ve been looking everywhere.”

Janet bore down upon them like an avenging angel. She seized Hilary’s hand and pulled her towards the steps, prodding Peregrine
in front of them. Hilary dragged back, watching the woman over her shoulder.