Devil By The Sea (7 page)

This time, he looked up at once. Leaning on his long broom, he scanned the windows of Peebles with flat, incurious eyes. His
gaze was long and leisurely and rested, finally, on the nursery window. There was no perceptible change in his manner, no
suggestion in the white, uplifted face that he saw anything unexpected or out of the ordinary but he remained, for an endless
stretch of empty time, quite immobile and staring at the window.

She knew him now, for certain, and the knowledge was terrible. She pressed herself against the cold bars, hoping that stillness
might save her. What she could not see from the window, her memory supplied: the wide, black coat sweeping low over the twisted
foot. Feeling his eyes burn into her, she gave a low cry and closed her own. Holding herself rigid, she thought: he won’t
recognise me, not in my nightgown. And then she knew, with awful certainty, that God had marked her for just this occasion.
For what other reason, when she had been born so plain, had she been given her one beauty, her bright, unmistakeable, red
hair?

She did not see him go. When she opened her eyes, he was walking away, pushing his green cart. Her fingers hurt: she loosened
them slowly from the bars and saw that they were covered with dark grains of rust. Peregrine was awake, he was watching her
sleepily from the bed.

“It was
Him,”
she said, jumping down from the sill and
running to him for comfort. She crouched, shivering, on his bed.

“Who?” he asked, yawning and stretching his legs beneath the bedclothes.

She remembered his recent betrayal of her and stiffened.

“I shan’t tell you,” she said heavily, getting off the bed and hauling her nightgown over her head. She stood naked, a paunchy
child with a tendency to bandy legs and scratched her buttocks. She knew that in punishing him she was depriving herself of
a certain comforter but she did not shrink from her decision.

“You’re a traitor,” she said. “In the Middle Ages, they used to burn traitors at the stake. You’re bound,” she ended with
relish, “to come to a bad end.”

The pallor of his cheeks, the mournful gaze of his dark eyes, produced a mounting excitement in her. She had an easily diverted
temperament.

“It would be dreadful to burn,” she went on. “Think how it hurts if you scald your finger under the hot tap. It would be a
thousand, thousand times worse than that.”

Meekly, he bowed his head in the face of her just anger.

“I didn’t mean to,” he protested in a weak and injured tone. He blinked rapidly at her and promised, “You can borrow my pen
if you like.”

She hesitated before this attractive offer. Then she said, “Don’t want your beastly old pen. It writes like a spider walking.”
She hitched up her knickers and pulled on her gingham dress.

He looked at her plaintively. “I don’t feel well,” he prevaricated. “You’d be sorry if I died.”

His lack of fight drove her to worse excesses. “I wouldn’t be sorry. I’d dance and laugh. If you were burned, you’d smell
like roasting meat.” She rolled her eyes and smacked her lips appreciatively.

He snivelled sadly into the sleeve of his pyjamas and she regarded him contemptuously. “Cowardy custard,” she said. She left
the nursery and closed the door.

The landing glowed with a weird, green light. At Peebles, the windows on the staircase, in the lavatory and at the sides of
the front door, were of stained glass. Alice, when she had re-decorated the house and hung prints from Picasso’s blue period
on the walls, had wanted to remove the coloured glass but on this point, Charles had made one of his rare, determined stands.
As a child, he had thought the colours rather jolly and he was sentimental about his childhood. He knew the stained glass
was old-fashioned but it still seemed to him a fairly pleasing folly and he could not understand why it should offend his
wife. When friends came to the house Alice pretended that she thought the glass amusing.

Hilary looked at her pale green hands and felt like a rare, strange creature in the depths of the sea. As she went down the
stairs, she saw the morning newspaper and the letters lying on the mat before the hall door, bathed in a soft, religious light.
The segments of glass in the narrow window by the door were blue and yellow and rosy red.

She picked up the letters and examined them carefully. There were two for her father and several for Alice. These she dismissed:
her parents’ letters were seldom interesting. The remaining letter was for Janet and this she examined with care. The bulky
envelope had been posted locally and the address was written in a fine, flowing hand.

“Prying little pig,” said Janet, suddenly appearing behind her. She was dressed in dark-blue linen and the skin of her face
was pale and slippery as if she had been crying.

Hilary was shocked by her sudden, stealthy appearance. Concealing Janet’s letter in the pocket of her dress, she said accusingly,
“I didn’t hear you come down.”

“I daresay you didn’t. I was in the kitchen. I’ve been up for hours. Were you going to open the letters?”

Hilary answered truthfully, “I don’t know.” Janet picked up the letters and looked through them. The envelope was burning
a hole in Hilary’s pocket. She said rudely, making matters worse, “There wasn’t one for you, anyway.”

“I can see that.” Janet laughed nervously and touched the white bow at her throat.

“I don’t suppose Uncle Aubrey can be bothered to write to you every day,” said Hilary outrageously. “I expect he thinks you’re
silly, really.” She looked uncertainly at her half sister. “Soppy Janet,” she said.

Janet did not answer. She did not even look angry. The expression of her eyes was sad and sorrowful; her dejected appearance
depressed Hilary. Sighing gently, she stood on one leg and scratched the back of her knee with the toe of her sandal. She
had not intended to steal the letter but she could not possibly replace it now without Janet noticing. The corners of her
mouth turned downwards, she sighed again.

Janet was relieved, rather than upset, because the letter she expected had not come. Lately, Aubrey’s long, poetic letters
had begun to bore her. She was no longer impressed by his poetry—most of it, she considered, was too bad to be flattering
to her and the good bits had a familiar ring. Her critical attitude distressed her although she was sure that her feelings
for Aubrey were unchanged. She did not love him less because she could not bear to. It was so much more important to love
than to be loved: if she should cease to love Aubrey, what would happen to her? Her heart would be empty, her life a desert.
She had been thinking a good deal about the death of love in the past few weeks and had often wept in private.

She heard Hilary sigh and looked down on her with lofty pity. “Other people’s letters are much duller than you think they’re
going to be,” she said kindly. “Isn’t it your turn to lay breakfast?”

“I suppose so,” Hilary agreed, and went with leaden feet into the dining-room.

Scowling at the sunlight that lay in dusty shafts across the table, she slapped the place mats down on the dark, polished
wood and set out the cutlery. She took the pepper and salt from the sideboard, the coloured tile for the coffee pot and the
bottle of Worcester sauce for Auntie. The napkins, rolled in their rings of Italian straw, were jumbled among the knives and
forks. Glancing over her shoulder, she took the letter out of her pocket, opened it, screwed up the pages to make it look
like an old letter, and stuffed it at the back of the linen drawer. This action made her feel worse, not better. She frowned
at her reflection in the silver sugar-basin. The curved sides widened her face into a fat, pale slab in which wicked, piggy
eyes glinted angrily. She thought she had never seen anything so horrible, so empty of hope.

“Ugly beast,” she addressed the face. “Horrible Hilary. Everyone hates you.”

Depression dragged her down into the pit. She was unwanted, set apart from other people. She read letters that did not belong
to her and, in her incurable greed, stole chocolate biscuits from the larder. She felt her badness grow inside her like a
dark flower. She wanted to shout, to stamp her feet and cry. She heard her mother talking to Peregrine in a loving voice as
she came down the stairs.

“Put on your blue jersey, darling, the weather’s changed. Hurry, or we’ll start breakfast without you.”

Hilary pushed her porridge round her plate. She made a contour map with islands of porridge and rivers of milk.

“Don’t mess your food about,” her mother said. “Look how nicely Peregrine behaves.”

Beside his sister, Peregrine ate daintily, his napkin tied round his neck. He hated to get his clothes dirty; if he were to
drop porridge on his trousers they would have to be changed immediately. After his first, nervous glance at Hilary as he slid
into his seat, he had been too embarrassed to look at her. He knew, though he had forgotten how or why, that he had let her
down and the knowledge of his own inadequacy distressed him.

Opposite the children, Auntie mumbled at her food and read the
New Statesman.
Her mouth was pouchy and lined and soft, her whole face sagged in worn creases like an old leather handbag. White drifts
of talcum powder lay on either side of her nose. She was grossly old: her eyebrows bristled like a man’s and the hair on her
head was so sparse that areas of skin, pink and soft as a baby’s, showed through the thin, grey strands. She wore a shapeless
dress of grey alpaca held at the waist by a linked, silver belt sent, long ago, from India by an elder, bachelor brother.
A knitted cardigan of beige wool was fastened at her pulpy throat by a ruby and emerald brooch. Her chief and lasting impression
was one of excellent quality as if she had been fashioned out of the best materials and built to last. In order to impress
a world that no longer cared about her, she acted several, deliberate character parts. Sometimes she was the imperious, eccentric
aristocrat, sometimes she infuriated Alice with a display of excessive humility. Beneath her various poses she concealed a
shy defended heart. She loved Charles as tenderly as a very young girl: Alice, she thought, was nowhere good enough for him.

Now, she pushed a piece of bacon on to Charles’s plate.

“I don’t need it as much as you do. I’m only an old woman.”

Alice put down the popular morning paper she was reading. “Auntie, there’s enough for everyone,” she said sharply.

The old woman ignored her. Alice sighed and, leaning across the table, passed the newspaper to her husband. She said something
in French.

Hearing the unfamiliar language, Hilary looked up. Her parents were discussing something with their eyes: their faces were
set and ominous. She said, to attract their attention to herself, “Can we go on the beach this morning?”

Meaning glances were exchanged. Alice answered her brightly. “Not this morning, dear. Janet can’t take you.”

“Why can’t we? We sometimes go by ourselves,” Peregrine said innocently. His blank, sweet gaze went from one parent to another.
Sensing a mystery, a faint line showed between his brows.

“Just because, dear.” She spoke carefully to Charles. “
Que pense-tu?
Unwise in the circumstances, don’t you think?”

A heavy silence hung over the table. The children watched their parents uneasily. Janet and Auntie went on eating. Charles
rose from the table and cleared his throat. He said uncomfortably, “Might be a good idea to keep them away from the holiday
crowds just now.”

Hilary said, “People are always going on holiday. I don’t see why
we
can’t have a holiday.”

“But you live by the sea,” chided her father, smiling.

“A person can get tired of the sea,” Hilary said coldly.

Alice said indulgently, “If you’re a good girl, we’ll all go on a real holiday one day. We might even go abroad. That would
be nice, wouldn’t it?”

Charles, passing behind Hilary’s chair, ruffled her burning hair. She twisted round and smiled up at him, her rare, refulgent
smile.

“Can I come too?” asked Peregrine, interested.

“Of course, my darling.” Alice beamed on him. “We’ll all go. There is so much to see, you’ll love all the funny foreign places.”
She caught her breath and looked at Charles. “Why not, after all? Spain is cheap just now. Charles, let’s go to Spain.”

“We could see a bull-fight,” added Hilary happily.

Everyone smiled: a pleasant atmosphere of family concord filled the room.

Janet destroyed it. Her voice was thick and hoarse. “We could go to Paris, couldn’t we? Paris is lovely, especially in the
spring. The blossom is out along the Seine and you can sit at the little cafés and watch the people go by. That’s what you
said, isn’t it? Only
I
never got there, did I?”

She flung the question at Alice with bitter, trembling intensity. It shocked them all. They sat silent and stared at her blazing
eyes. Then Janet began to cry. “Always promises, promises. Why do you do it?” Leaving the room, she slammed the door.

“Well,” said Charles. He raised his voice. “Janet, come back here at once.”

“Leave her alone, dear.” Alice was pale. “It’s my fault. I said—oh, years ago—that we’d take her to Paris. It wasn’t serious.
Has she hated me for this, all this time?”

Hilary thought Janet was stupid. Why couldn’t she see that it was only a game? And her mother was hurt. She looked beautiful
and sad.

She said chivalrously, “Silly Janet. It’s all right, Mummy.
She
doesn’t understand when you’re only pretending. She wants everything to be true, always.”

Alice addressed her resentfully, as if she were an adult. “You saw that, did you? What a fool I am.”

“My dear girl.” Charles went to his wife and patted her shoulder. Peregrine began to cry silently. He was violently
affected by family tension. The tears, like pale, transparent pearls, rolled down his cheeks and splashed on to his napkin.

“It’s all right, old chap,” his father said.

“Why can’t we go on the beach?” Hilary demanded. “I want to go. We don’t need Janet, we can play by ourselves.…”