The Daffodil Sky (24 page)

As the morning went on and the heat of the day thickened he found himself lashing and groping through a mass of complicated emotion, trying to struggle free. Now and then, down on the new workings, the shot-firers touched off blastings, two or three in succession, that cracked violently in the hot morning air. There was shot-firing every day and ordinarily he never noticed it. He had been so used to it so long that it was just another
form of silence. The sound of nightingales always seemed far louder from the oaks at the top of the gully. It was getting late for nightingales now but in the season, when mating was in full flush, they sang not only at night but throughout most of the day, madly, never afraid of the blasting.

But now, during the sultry heat of the morning, he was shaken and startled by every blast. He was off his guard at the crack of each explosion, so that each time the blood jumped violently and darkly through his head. All his efforts at thinking were simply a series of grotesque and incoherent pictures—Johnson leering and lying, the professor and Kitty alone together in hot afternoons on the hill, the professor calling her his Roman girl, the professor with his stories of people looking down across that valley two thousand years ago, watching the vines, the sun, the summer grass by the summer river, listening to the nightingales—the professor with his way of making the stones talk. He knew that that was the way a man could get a girl excited and fooled and mesmerised.

Now, as he came lumbering up from the gully into the field of stubble beyond, he was all set to get to the truth of it. Unconsciously, hot and blind, he was swinging the spanner. At the back of his mind was the red-hot thought that he had given Johnson a lesson with the spanner. Just a lesson—just the face terrorised for a moment or two, just the bone of the neck pinned back by the rock. It never entered his head again that he had held Johnson, just for a second or two, like a fat scared fly, at the point of death.

Then, as he reached the excavations, he saw that
they were empty. It had been ten days or more since the first excited discovery of the villa's foundations and during that time the professor and himself and Kitty had worked more quickly than before, uncovering the oblongs of two small rooms. Now he wandered into and out of this broken ghost-house almost senselessly, searching clumsily for something he could not find.

It was only when he heard his name called that he came to himself for the first time. It was Kitty's voice, calling him from the edge of the spinney above the diggings, and for a final moment, just before turning in answer, he half-expected to see her there with the professor. He half-wanted to see her there.

Instead she was sitting alone in the long grass under the edge of the spinney, bare-headed, eating the last of a packet of sandwiches. As he came up to her he could see white crumbs of bread on her lips that she had not wiped away. Seeing them, his frenzy began to ebb out of him even before he heard her say:

‘I think the professor's gone down for a drink. I thought I caught sight of him—what made you come up? I somehow thought you would.'

‘I don't know. I just thought——' The spanner was still in his hand.

She saw it and said: ‘All of a hurry too. What made you all of a hurry?'

He felt the blood rushing into his throat. The terror of almost killing Johnson came swelling back, horrible and conscious. With sickness he remembered the professor and the way he had come blindly to find him there.

A moment later he was pressing her down against the
earth. ‘I just wanted you,' he said. ‘I was just thinking about you——' He saw her lips, rose-dark, parted to reveal the soft, wet tongue between. The flush of excitement was rising quickly in her throat, up through the sun-brown face, beyond the black eyebrows and at last under the thick black hair.

He was speaking and kissing her at the same time: ‘Don't let's wait,' he said. ‘I don't want to wait no longer. I'm sick of waiting. We don't want to wait no longer, do we?'

‘What about the house?'

‘We can get rooms,' he said. ‘Pop Nichols has got two rooms. We've waited long enough. I'm sick of waiting——'

She began laughing and put her lips to his face. In the long grass she did not feel that she was breathing. Her bare brown arms pulled him down to her and held him against her body until it was no longer possible to see, above and about him, anything of the pure hot noon sky.

‘Do you think I was ever a Roman girl?' she said. She was laughing again, the blood warm and crimson in her throat. ‘Do you think they were anything like me? Do you think they felt the same?'

He did not answer. Below them the villa with its naked dust lay exposed to the midday sun so that it was without a shadow on the hillside. The broom was flaring on the rock. In the spinney there was no sound of nightingales and presently there was no sound at all as she held him against her, in the deep grasses, imprisoned, out of the sun.

‘He is the young man she met on the aeroplane,' Mrs Carteret said. ‘Now go to sleep.'

Outside the bedroom window, in full moonlight, the leaves of the willow tree seemed to be slowly swimming in delicate but ordered separation, like shoals of grey-green fish. The thin branches were like bowed rods in the white summer sky.

‘This is the first I heard that there was a young man on the aeroplane,' Mr Carteret said.

‘You saw him,' Mrs Carteret said. ‘He was there when we met her. You saw him come with her through the customs.'

‘I can't remember seeing her with anybody.'

‘I know very well you do because you remarked on his hat. You said what a nice colour it was. It was a sort of sage-green one with a turn-down brim——'

‘Good God,' Mr Carteret said. ‘That fellow? He looked forty or more. He was as old as I am.'

‘He's twenty-eight. That's all. Have you made up your mind which side you're going to sleep?'

‘I'm going to stay on my back for a while,' Mr Carteret said. ‘I can't get off. I heard it strike three a long time ago.'

‘You'd get off if you'd lie still,' she said.

Sometimes a turn of humid air, like the gentlest of currents, would move the entire willow tree in one huge soft fold of shimmering leaves. Whenever it did so Mr Carteret felt for a second or two that it was the sound of an approaching car. Then when the breath of wind suddenly changed direction and ran across the night landscape in a series of leafy echoes, stirring odd trees far away, he knew always that there was no car and that it was only, once again, the quiet long gasp of midsummer rising and falling and dying away.

‘Where are you fussing off to now?' Mrs Carteret said.

‘I'm going down for a drink of water.'

‘You'd better by half shut your eyes and lie still in one place,' Mrs Carteret said. ‘Haven't you been off at all?'

‘I can never sleep in moonlight,' he said. ‘I don't know how it is. I never seem to settle properly. Besides it's too hot.'

‘Put something on your feet,' Mrs Carteret said, ‘for goodness sake.'

Across the landing, on the stairs and down in the kitchen the moonlight had the white starkness of a shadowless glare. The kitchen floor was warm to his bare feet and the water warmish as it came from the tap. He filled a glass twice and then emptied it into the sink and then filled it again before it was cold enough to drink. He had not put on his slippers because he could not remember where he had left them. He
had been too busy thinking of Sue. Now he suddenly remembered that they were still where he had dropped them in the coal-scuttle by the side of the stove.

After he had put them on he opened the kitchen door and stepped outside and stood in the garden. Distinctly, with astonishingly pure clearness, he could see the colours of all the roses, even those of the darkest red. He could even distinguish the yellow from the white and not only in the still standing blooms but in all the fallen petals, thick everywhere on dry earth after the heat of the July day.

He walked until he stood in the centre of the lawn. For a time he could not discover a single star in the sky. The moon was like a solid opaque electric bulb, the glare of it almost cruel, he thought, as it poured down on the green darkness of summer trees.

Presently the wind made its quickening watery turn of sound among the leaves of the willow and ran away over the nightscape, and again he thought it was the sound of a car. He felt the breeze move coolly, almost coldly, about his pyjama legs and he ran his fingers in agitation once or twice through the pillow tangles of his hair.

Suddenly he felt helpless and miserable.

‘Sue,' he said. ‘For God's sake where on earth have you got to? Susie, Susie—this isn't like you.'

His pet term for her, Susie. In the normal way, Sue. Perhaps in rare moments of exasperation, Susan. He had called her Susie a great deal on her nineteenth birthday, three weeks before, before she had flown to Switzerland for her holiday. Everyone thought, that day, how much she had grown, how firm and full she
was getting, and how wonderful it was that she was flying off alone. He only thought she looked more delicate and girlish than ever, quite thin and childish in the face in spite of her lipstick, and he was surprised to see her drinking what he thought were too many glasses of sherry. Nor, in contrast to himself, did she seem a bit nervous about the plane.

Over towards the town a clock struck chimes for a half hour and almost simultaneously he heard the sound of a car. There was no mistaking it this time. He could see the swing of its headlights too as it made the big bend by the packing station down the road, a quarter of a mile away.

‘And quite time too, young lady,' he thought. He felt sharply vexed, not miserable any more. He could hear the car coming fast. It was so fast that he began to run back to the house across the lawn. He wanted to be back in bed before she arrived and saw him there. He did not want to be caught like that. His pyjama legs were several inches too long and were wet with the dew of the grass and he held them up, like skirts, as he ran.

What a damn ridiculous situation, he thought. What fools children could make you look sometimes. Just about as exasperating as they could be.

At the kitchen door one of his slippers dropped off and as he stopped to pick it up and listen again for the sound of the car he discovered that now there was no sound. The headlights too had disappeared. Once again there was nothing at all but the enormous noiseless glare, the small folding echoes of wind dying away.

‘Damn it, we always walked home from dances,' he thought. ‘That was part of the fun.'

Suddenly he felt cold. He found himself remembering with fear the long bend by the packing station. There was no decent camber on it and if you took it the slightest bit too fast you couldn't make it. Every week there were accidents there. And God, anyway what did he know about this fellow? He might be the sort who went round making pick-ups. A married man or something. Anybody. A crook.

All of a sudden he had a terrible premonition about it all. It was exactly the sort of feeling he had had when he saw her enter the plane, and again when the plane lifted into sky. There was an awful sense of doom about it: he felt sure she was not coming back. Now he felt in some curious way that his blood was separating itself into single drops. The drops were freezing and dropping with infinite systematic deadliness through the veins, breeding cold terror inside him. Somehow he knew that there had been a crash.

He was not really aware of running down through the rose-garden to the gate. He simply found himself somehow striding up and down in the road outside, tying his pyjama cord tighter in agitation.

My God, he thought, how easy the thing could happen. A girl travelled by plane or train or even bus or something and before you knew where you were it was the beginning of something ghastly.

He began to walk up the road, feeling the cold precipitation of blood take drops of terror down to his legs and feet. A pale yellow suffusion of the lower sky struck into him the astonishing fact that it was almost day. He could hardly believe it and he broke miserably into a run.

Only a few moments later, a hundred yards away, he had the curious impression that from the roadside a pair of yellow eyes were staring back at him. He saw then that they were the lights of a stationary car. He did not know what to do about it. He could not very well go up to it and tap on the window and say, in tones of stern fatherhood, ‘Is my daughter in there? Susan, come home.' There was always the chance that it would turn out to be someone else's daughter. It was always possible that it would turn out to be a daughter who liked what she was doing and strongly resented being interrupted in it by a prying middle-aged stranger in pyjamas.

He stopped and saw the lip of daylight widening and deepening its yellow on the horizon. It suddenly filled him with the sobering thought that he ought to stop being a damn fool and pull himself together.

‘Stop acting like a nursemaid,' he said. ‘Go home and get into bed. Don't you trust her?' It was always when you didn't trust them, he told himself, that trouble really began. That was when you asked for it. It was a poor thing if you didn't trust them.

‘Go home and get into bed, you poor sap,' he said. ‘You never fussed this much even when she was little.'

He had no sooner turned to go back than he heard the engine of the car starting. He looked round and saw the lights coming towards him down the road. Suddenly he felt more foolish than ever and there was no time for him to do anything but press himself quickly through a gap in the hedge by the roadside. The hedge was not very tall at that point and he found himself crouching down in a damp jungle of cow parsley and grass and nettle that wetted his pyjamas as high as the chest and
shoulders. By this time the light in the sky had grown quite golden and all the colours of day were becoming distinct again and he caught the smell of honeysuckle rising from the dewiness of the hedge.