6

When the weather was thick the foghorns used to sound throughout the day and night. There was a little cluster of islands about three miles offshore; they were uninhabited, rockbound, and dangerous. Beyond them was the lighthouse. The foghorn sounded from there. In the day it was only a minor irritant; we soon grew used to it. But at night it was different. The muffled boom was like a threat, coming with ominous regularity. We would wake in the small hours after a preceding day that had been clear and warm with no hint of fog, and suddenly in the stillness of the summer night the thing that had woken us would sound again, moaning and persistent. We tried to picture it as something friendly, a mechanical device worked by the lighthouse keeper, some sort of engine or machine that could be turned by hand. But it was useless. The lighthouse could never be reached, the sea was too rough, the rocky islands were denied us. And the voice of the foghorn remained the voice of doom.

Pappy and Mama changed their room to the spare room at the back of the villa because Mama could not bear to wake up and hear the foghorn in the night. The spare room had no view. It looked out upon a piece of kitchen garden, and the road leading to the village. Mama was more than usually tired that summer. The season had been a long one. We had been in London all the winter, and had gone to Rome for Easter, and then on to Paris for May, June and July. Plans were being made for another long tour in the autumn, to America and Canada. There was talk of Niall going to school, and possibly Maria too. We were all growing too fast, we were all getting out of hand. Maria was as tall as Mama, which was not saying much, perhaps, for Mama was small, but when Maria leapt from rock to rock down on the shore, or stood for a moment poised on a ledge before diving, Pappy said she had become a woman overnight and none of us had realized it. We were all depressed when he said this, Maria most of all. She had no wish to be a woman. It was a word she hated, anyway. It sounded like someone old, like Truda; it sounded like a very dull person, Mrs. Sullivan perhaps, shopping in Oxford Street and carrying parcels.

We sat round the table on the veranda, sipping cider through straws, discussing it.

“We ought to take something to stunt our growth,” said Maria. “Gin or brandy.”

“It’s too late,” said Niall. “Even if we bribed André or someone to get us gin from the village, it wouldn’t work. Look at your legs.”

Maria stretched out her long legs from under the table. They were brown and smooth, and golden silky hairs ran down the center of them. She began to laugh suddenly.

“What’s the matter?” said Niall.

“You know when we were playing vingt-et-un the other evening after supper,” she said, “and Pappy made us laugh so much telling us about his young days in Vienna, and Mama had gone to bed early with a headache, and Michel came and joined us from the hotel.”

“Yes,” said Celia, “he was very unlucky at vingt-et-un. He lost all his counters to me and Pappy.”

“Well,” said Maria, “guess what he did. He kept stroking my legs under the table. I got such giggles, I was afraid you would see.”

“Rather cheek,” said Niall, “but I should think he’s the sort of man who likes stroking things. He always makes a fuss of the cats here, haven’t you noticed?”

“Yes,” said Celia, “so he does. I think he’s very affected, and I’m sure Pappy does too. I don’t think Pappy likes him.”

“He’s really Mama’s friend,” said Niall, “they’re always having talks about this ballet he wants to write for her, for the autumn tour. They went on and on about it yesterday afternoon. What did you do when he stroked your legs? Kick out under the table?”

Maria shook her head, and sipped comfortably at her cider.

“No,” she said, “I liked it. It was rather a nice feeling.”

Celia stared at her in surprise, and looked down at her own plump legs. She never tanned properly like Maria.

“Is it?” she said. “I should have thought it was silly.” She leaned forward and stroked her own leg and then stroked Maria’s.

“It’s not the same, you doing it,” said Maria. “That’s dull. The whole point is to have someone doing it who you don’t know very well. Like Michel.”

“Oh, I see,” said Celia. She was puzzled.

Niall felt in his pocket for a sucette. It was lime and very bitter. He sucked it thoughtfully. It was being a strange sort of summer. We none of us played the games we used to play. Catholics and Huguenots, English and Irish, explorers up the Amazon. There was always something else to do. Maria would wander off on her own, or become friendly with grown-up people from the hotel like this boring Michel, who must be quite thirty anyway, and Celia had started a new, irritating business of wanting to be good at swimming. She took things up with such enthusiasm, concentrating hard on her strokes, counting loudly and then jumping up in the water and calling out, “How many strokes that time? Was it better? Do watch, someone.”

No one wanted to watch, but Pappy would glance up with an indulgent smile, and answer back, “Very good. Keep at it. I’ll come and show you directly.”

Once, thought Niall, we would be together, Maria choosing the game, saying who was to be who, what were their names, which was to be the enemy. And now it was changing, the thing of pretending to be other people. That was what Pappy meant about us all growing up, about Maria becoming a woman. Soon we won’t be children anymore. We shall be like Them.

The future held no security with this talk about the American tour, taking only Celia, with school for himself and Maria. Niall threw away the bitter end of his lime sucette, and went indoors to the sitting room. It was cool and quiet inside, the shutters were all down. He went over to the piano and gently lifted the lid. It was only this summer that he had discovered how simple it was to find a combination of notes, turn them into chords, and make sense from them. When the others were down on the beach, bathing or lying in the sun, he would come into the empty house and do this. He wondered why people bothered to learn the piano properly, read music, weary their brains with things called crochets, and quavers, and semiquavers, when it was the simplest thing in the world to find the right sound of something that you had heard once, and play it straight off upon the piano.

Already, he knew all Pappy’s songs. You could change the meaning of them too by the alteration of the notes; you could turn quite a bright, jolly song into something sad by putting in or omitting one single chord, and by making the melody run, as it were, downhill. He could think of no other way of expressing it. Perhaps if he went to school somebody would teach him properly, give him lessons. Meanwhile, there was endless fascination in this private method of exploring. It was, in a way, as much fun as the old games of pretence with Maria and Celia, possibly even better, because he could choose his own sounds, whereas in the games he had to play whatever game Maria proposed.

“Au clair de la lune

Mon ami Pierrot,

Prête-moi ta plume

Pour écrire un mot.

Ma chandelle est morte,

Je n’ai plus de feu,

Ouvre-moi ta porte

Pour l’amour de Dieu.”

Pappy used to sing this for a final encore very often. The simpler the song, the wilder became the audience. They would scream, and wave handkerchiefs, and stamp with their feet—just because he did nothing at all but stand perfectly still on the stage and sing a little simple song that everybody had learned in their cradle. It was the voice going soft that did it—you got the same effect with a muted string on a fiddle. And, more exciting still, you could get the same sadness out of “Mon ami Pierrot” by changing the notes around; the melody was the same and the general sense, but by changing the chords, the note of despair became sharper. It was even more exciting to play the melody to a different time.

Pappy used to sing every word for its own value, and that was why it came over so well and with such grace—

“Au clair de la lune.”

But if you changed that, if you started with emphasis on the “Au” and then ran on and emphasized again on “lune,” breaking the lune into two, it became a dance rhythm and was altogether different. The pathos was gone; nobody need be sad anymore. Celia would not have to cry. Niall would not have that awful feeling that swept over him at times of being terribly unhappy for no reason.

“Au clair beat… beat… de la lu… beat… beat… ne

Mon ami… beat… beat… Pierrot”

(ding-a-dong-and a ding-a-dinga-dong).

Yes, of course, that was the answer. It was gay, it was fun. Pappy ought to sing it in this fashion. Niall repeated the song over and over again, making the new beats come in at the most surprising places, and he began to whistle the song against the timing of the beats. Suddenly, he did not know how it was, but it came to him that he was no longer alone in the room. Someone had come in through the door that led into the hall behind him. He had at once a furtive feeling of guilt, of shame. He stopped playing; he turned round upon the stool. Mama was standing in the doorway, watching him. For a moment they looked at one another. Mama hesitated. Then she shut the door and came towards him and stood beside the piano.

“What made you play like that?” she said.

Niall watched her eyes. She was not angry, he saw that at once, and he was relieved. Nor was she smiling. She looked tired rather, strange.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I felt I wanted to. It just—happened.”

She stood there looking down at him, and he realized, sitting upon the stool, that Truda was right about her after all. He had never noticed it before, but she was not tall, she was smaller than Maria. She was wearing that loose peignoir that she generally wore at breakfast, or in her room, and straw sandals without heels.

“I had a headache,” she said. “I was lying down in my room upstairs, and I heard you.”

It was queer, thought Niall, that she had not rung the bell for Truda or someone to come and tell him to stop. Or even thumped on the floor. As a rule, if they made too much noise and she was resting, she always did this.

“I’m awfully sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know. I thought everyone was out. The others were on the veranda a while ago, but they went off, to the beach I think.”

Mama did not seem to be listening. It was as though she was thinking of something else.

“Go on,” she said. “Do it again.”

“Oh, no,” said Niall quickly. “I can’t play properly.”

“Yes, you can,” she said.

Niall stared at her. Had her headache turned her queer? Was she all right? And she was smiling now, not a mocking smile, but kind.

He swallowed hard, and turned once more to the piano, and began to play. But now his hands stumbled and slipped, the sounds were false.

“It’s no use,” he said. “I can’t.”

Then she did a surprising thing. She sat down on the stool beside him, she put her left arm round his shoulder, and her right hand on the keys next to his two hands.

“Come on,” she said. “We’ll play together.”

And she took up the pace and the rhythm of the song where he had left it, she turned the song into a dancing, happy song, as he had done. He was so surprised, so startled, that he could not think at all. Perhaps Mama was sleepwalking, or had taken a pill for her headache that had driven her mad, like Ophelia in Hamlet. It seemed to him that it could not be true, Mama sitting like this beside him at the piano, with her arm in the peignoir round his shoulders.

She stopped and looked at him.

“What’s the matter?” she said. “Don’t you want to play anymore?”

It must have been true that she had been resting, because there was no powder on her face as there usually was, or lip stuff. Her face was not “done,” as Maria would have said. It was just her face. The skin was soft and smooth, and there were little lines at the corner of her eyes that did not show as a rule, and at the corners of her mouth. He wondered why it was that she should seem so much prettier when she looked like this, so much kinder. Not a person to be afraid of anymore. She was suddenly not like a grown-up person. She was young, like himself, like Maria…

“Don’t you want to play?” she repeated.

“Yes…” he said, “Oh, yes…” and now he was not nervous. The feeling of nervousness went away; he was happy at last, happier than he had ever been, and his hands were no longer false, no longer clumsy.

“Ma chandelle est morte,

Je n’ai plus de feu.”

And Mama was playing with him and singing too—Mama who never sang with Pappy.

Outside, through the shuttered window leading to the veranda, the foghorn sounded for the first time that afternoon; it boomed deeply. Once, twice and then again.

Niall went on playing, with Mama beside him, quicker and louder than before.

“Ouvre-moi ta porte,

Pour l’amour de Dieu…”

Down over the rocks, by the deepest pool, Maria was lying on her tummy watching her own reflection. She found she could make tears come into her eyes without the slightest effort. She did not even have to pinch herself, or squeeze her eyes. She just pretended she was sad, and the tears came. You said words to yourself that sounded sad, and the thing happened.

“Nevermore… Nevermore…” she murmured, and the face that stared back at her from the pool was tear-stained with grief. There were pieces from the Bible that were good to say too, not for crying, but just to say.

“How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince’s daughter.”

Was that the Bible? Well, anyway, it was from something. There were so many lovely things to say. She wanted to string them altogether in a hopeless jumble.

“Now seems it more than ever rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain…”

She turned over on her side, shutting her eyes, listening to her own voice talking.

“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”

It was warm and lovely, lying there beside the pool. It should be summer always. Never anything but summer, and the sun and the splashing sound of waves restful and lazy.

“Hullo, water nymph,” said a voice.

She looked up, and blinked. It was Michel. She wondered how he had discovered her. She was so well hidden by the overhanging rock.

“Hullo,” she said.

He came down and sat beside her. He wore bathing-trunks, with a towel round his waist. Maria wondered idly why it was that men could go about with their top half bare, and women could not. Because of being fat, she supposed. She was not fat yet, thank goodness, but Truda made her cover her top half this summer for some silly reason. She was getting too big to run around like that, Truda said.

“I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” said Michel, a note of reproach in his voice.

“Have you?” said Maria. “I’m sorry. I thought you were talking to Pappy, or Mama.” Michel laughed.

“Do you think I would be with them if there was the slightest chance of being with you?” he said.

Maria stared at him. Well, really… He was grown-up, he was their friend, wasn’t he? Grown-up people generally preferred being together. She did not say anything. There was nothing to say.

“You know, Maria,” he went on, “I’m going to miss you terribly when I go back to Paris.”

“Are you?” said Maria. She lay back against the rock, and shut her eyes. How hot it was, really too hot to bathe. Too hot to do anything but lie against the rock.

“Yes,” he said. “Won’t you miss me?”

Maria thought a moment. If she said “No” he would be offended. Perhaps she would miss him a little. He was tall and nice and rather good-looking, after all. And he had been very good-natured playing tennis, and looking with her for starfish.

“I expect I shall,” she said politely. “Yes, I’m sure I shall miss you very much.”

He leaned over, and began to stroke her legs as he had done at vingt-et-un. It was queer, she thought. Why was he so mad on this business of stroking legs? At vingt-et-un it had been nice, oddly exciting, chiefly because the others were all there and did not know, and she had an instinctive feeling that Pappy would have been angry, which was fun. Now that she and Michel were alone she did not like it so much. It was rather silly, as Celia said. But again, if she moved her legs away, he would be offended. Suddenly, she thought of an excuse.

“Heavens, it’s hot,” she said. “I simply must have a swim to get cool.”

She stood up and dived into the deep pool. He sat there on the rock watching her. He looked rather annoyed. Maria pretended not to notice.

“Come in too; it’s lovely,” she said, shaking the water out of her hair.

“No, thank you,” he said. “I’ve had my swim.”

He leaned back against the rock and lit a cigarette.

Maria swam around, watching him from the pool. When he sat slumped, lighting his cigarette, he looked nice. The top of his head, bent, was fair, and his neck a deep brown. But when he smiled, his teeth were rather too big, and that spoiled everything. She wondered if men were ever nice altogether, hair, eyes, nose, mouth, legs, arms, or if there was always something that would be irritating, putting off. She kicked her legs, and splashed, and then dived again, showing off, because she knew she dived well. Michel went on smoking his cigarette. Presently, Maria climbed out of the pool, and picking up her towel she dried herself in the sun. She felt fresh and cool after her swim.

“I wonder where the others are,” she said.

“Never mind the others; come and sit down,” he said.

The way he said it, almost like an order, and patting the rock beside him, surprised Maria. Generally, if anyone ordered her to do anything she refused, instinctively. Her nature was to disobey rules on principle. But when Michel spoke like this she realized that she liked it. It was much better than his soft voice saying he would miss her. Then he looked a fool. Now he did not look a fool at all. She spread her wet towel on the rock to dry, and sat down beside him. She shut her eyes, and leaned back against the rock. This time he did not speak, nor did he touch her legs. He reached out for her hand, and held it.

It was nice to have her hand held, peaceful and strangely comforting. And the feel of his shoulder, just touching hers, was comforting too. Yet, thought Maria, if Pappy came and saw us sitting here, and looked down over the rock, I should feel embarrassed, ashamed. I should quickly take my hand away and pretend Michel had not touched it at all. I wonder whether that’s why it is so nice. I wonder if I like it just because it’s something Pappy would not let me do.

Away in the distance, the foghorn sounded from the rocky islands across the bay.

Celia heard it, and frowned, and turned her head towards the sea, but the mist was coming down fast, and already the islands were hidden. She could not see them anymore.

Boom… there it was again, doleful and persistent. She simply could not forget it, once it had begun. She stood back, surveying the house she had made. It was a lovely shape, with shells for windows, and trailing paths of seaweed from the front door to the gate. The doors and gate had been difficult to find, she was so particular about the exact shape of the stones. There was a bridge too, and a tunnel. The tunnel went right underneath the garden to the house. It was sickening to think that the sea would come up and destroy the house she had taken such pains to make. Seep it away, little by little. It just showed how useless it was to make things that did not last. Drawing was different. If you drew a picture, you could put it away in a drawer, and look at it again, and it would always be there whenever you wanted it again.

It would be nice to have a model of the sand-house, and to keep it always so that when they were home again, wherever home should be next time, Paris or London or some other place, the sand-house would be a possession, something to treasure with all the other things she hoarded, she never quite knew why, but in case… In case of what, Truda asked? Just in case, Celia answered. There were shells, and smooth green stones, and pressed flowers, and stubs of pencils, even little old bits of stick, picked up in the Bois, or in Hyde Park, and carried back to the hotel or the apartment.

“No, no, you mustn’t throw that away,” she used to say.

Because once she had chosen an object it must remain, forever; it was a treasure, it was something to be loved.

Boom… the wretched foghorn sounded again.

“Look, Pappy,” she called out, “come and look at the dear little house I’ve made, just for you and me.”

He did not answer. She turned round and ran to the place where he had been sitting. He was not there anymore. His coat and his book and his field glasses were gone. He must have got up while she had been building the sand-house, and gone back to the house. She had been alone on the beach perhaps for ages, and she had never known. The foghorn sounded again, and the mist came nearer, closing in upon her.

She was swept in sudden panic. She picked up her spade, and ran.

“Pappy,” she called. “Pappy, where are you?”

Nobody answered. She could not see the cliffs. She could not see the house. They had all gone, they had all deserted her. She was alone, she had nothing left but her wooden spade.

She went on running, forgetting she was no longer a little girl, but would soon be eleven, and as she ran she panted under her breath, “Pappy… Pappy… Truda… Niall, don’t leave me. No one must ever leave me,” and all the while the pursuing foghorn was booming in her ears.

He came suddenly, out of the mist, just by the garden gate that led to the house, Pappy in his old blue coat and white sun-hat, and he bent down and lifted her from the ground.

“Hullo, my old silly,” he said. “What’s the matter?”

But nothing mattered. She had found him. She was safe.