It did rain. In the end Beth went to London in her Burberry and an old felt hat. She carried her night things in a battered hat-box, and took with her some string bags. She did not look at all like Tory’s idea of what reviewers sometimes call ‘lady novelists’, but more like some sensible shopping woman. She also took a new exercise-book, hoping to bring Allegra to her last haven during the train journey. She yearned for the peace and quiet of the railway compartment, as Proust probably yearned for his padded, sound-proof study.
‘You will miss that train!’ Robert called up the stairs.
‘I am just coming, dear.’
It had seemed at that moment as if the sky had suddenly lightened, as if it were going to be a fine, hot day after all, and she was wearing all the wrong clothes; too late to change. She dashed some white powder round her nose and in the middle of her forehead.
‘The stew is in the casserole for to-night, Prue,’ she called.
‘You’ve told me three times.’
‘Don’t be rude to your mother,’ Robert said sharply.
‘This is for you to wear,’ Stevie said, holding out a large enamelled butterfly which Beth pinned hastily to her suit.
‘It won’t show inside your rainingtosh.’
‘But when the sun comes out I shall take it off and show everyone the glory.’ Beth began to go down the stairs. ‘Here I am, Robert. I left the note about the baker on the kitchen dresser. Please ask Mrs Flitcroft to iron Stevie’s frock for to-morrow.’
‘Beth, you will have to come,’ Robert said, very quietly, very distinctly.
‘That drawing of Stevie’s foot for the new shoes!’
‘Where did you put it?’
‘Behind the clock.’
Now they were all flying about and shouting: the cats went distracted.
‘Here it is!’ Robert cried. ‘We are now going, Beth.’
Outside the front door Beth stooped to kiss Stevie.
‘I don’t want you to go,’ she wailed, twining her arms tightly round her mother’s neck, pushing her hat over her eyes.
‘Don’t be silly, dear. Have a nice day with Edward and Tory.’
‘I don’t want to be left.’
‘Stevie, go indoors,’ Robert commanded.
‘I want to go to London.’
Her mouth slowly opened, her face crimsoned, then the tears fell, fluently, easily. ‘I haven’t ever been to London.’
‘You went to see Peter Pan, darling.’
‘I didn’t like it. I didn’t enjoy that day.’
‘Beth, don’t argue with her.’
‘But, sweetest, you know how you loved it at the time, and if you are a good girl I will take you to see it again another day.’
‘I saw the wires. I saw the wires,’ Stevie screamed, becoming slightly hysterical. ‘When they flew, I saw the wires.’
‘If we are going to stand here in the road discussing Peter Pan, I’ll say good-bye,’ Robert began.
‘I can’t leave her like this,’ Beth said over her shoulder.
‘I missed all that on the ship when I had to go out and be excused,’ Stevie bawled. ‘I missed the best part.’
Robert began slowly to walk away.
‘You are always going and leaving me,’ Stevie said, and Beth felt the injustice of this so keenly that she could not go without defending herself.
Tory’s door opened and she came flying out, wearing the lilac overall in which she so neatly did her housework.
‘Darling Beth, please go. She is just enjoying a little scene and she must not be indulged. As soon as you have gone she will lose interest in it.’ She led Stevie into her own house.
‘She wants a damned good thrashing,’ said Robert, that mild man.
Beth’s forehead had begun to pulse. ‘I don’t want to go,’ she said unhappily.
‘Don’t you start,’ Robert said, holding open the car door.
At the station, having bought Beth’s ticket for her, Robert said good-bye and told her to have a nice time, endeavouring not to know that her heart was torn in two.
‘Go to the theatre!’ he added robustly, handing over the hat-box. ‘Enjoy yourself! None of this moping about round the Elgin Marbles that seems to be your idea of a good time. Snap out of yourself a bit.’
Beth looked at him in amazement. He sounded quite unhinged, she thought. As he never kissed her in public, they merely smiled vaguely and drifted apart; she towards her waiting train and he out into the rainy station-yard.
She sat down in the carriage and closed her eyes. Her -forehead hammered dully. ‘Prudence. Stevie. Robert. Has Stevie stopped screaming yet?’ she wondered. ‘I am a bad mother,’ she once more told herself and fought back the feelings of shame and oppression which assailed her at this admission. ‘When I have finished this book I will never write another word. I’ll devote myself to Stevie, get Prue married somehow, turn Robert’s shirt-cuffs, have the hall re-papered. I’ll get a proper maid’ (for the end of authorship would begin the season of miracles, she felt), ‘early-morning tea to please Robert, constant hot water, new loose-covers. And I will have a freshly-laundered overall twice a week, like Tory, and flowers in all the rooms. Then, perhaps, when we are all reorganised I shall be able to write a short story here and there. None of that drugged sinking into a different world. No more guilt.’
She sat with her eyes closed and the train seemed to stretch itself and gather its great length forward out of the fish-smelling station to the open sky along the shoulders of cliffs.
‘A man,’ she thought suddenly, ‘would consider this a business outing. But, then, a man would not have to cook the meals for the day overnight, nor consign his child to a friend, nor leave half-done the ironing, nor forget the grocery order as I now discover I have forgotten it. The artfulness of men,’ she thought. ‘They implant in us, foster in us, instincts which it is to their advantage for us to have, and which, in the end, we feel shame at not possessing.’ She opened her eyes and glared with scorn at a middle-aged man reading a newspaper.
‘A man like that,’ she thought, ‘a worthless creature, obviously; yet so long has his kind lorded it that I (who, if only I could have been ruthless and single-minded about my work as men are, could have been a good writer) feel slightly guilty at not being back at the kitchen-sink.’
The man began to shift uneasily under her scrutiny, to fold his arms and clear his throat and glance out of the window; so Beth, coming again to her senses, took out her writing things and wrote Chapter Eighteen at the head of a page. But she could not go on. Her spirits were too low to describe Allegra’s death. She had looked forward to it so much, but now as she watched fields flying by, wondering where to begin, it was not Allegra’s face which interposed, but Stevie’s, crimson and tear-furrowed.
‘I am sorry to be so rude and inquisitive,’ Stevie said, going quickly through Tory’s handbag. ‘What a dear little silver box!’
‘I thought, by-the-bye,’ Tory began coldly, ‘that you behaved pretty meanly to your mother just now.’
‘You see, I wanted to go to London.’
‘She never has a day off from you.’
‘I never have a day off from her, either.’
‘Well, you have got one now.’
‘I didn’t want it. Look at this photograph of Edward.’
‘Don’t try to change the subject. What I am trying to say is that you have made your mother set out unhappily on her day’s pleasure.’
‘She will soon cheer up.’
‘I don’t think so. Grown-ups don’t cheer up as quickly as children do.’
‘If she is miserable without me, she could have taken me with her,’ Stevie said, exhausted by this absurd argument. ‘I wanted to see Peter Pan again.’
‘Peter Pan is not on,’ said Tory, taking a false step.
‘Yes it is. They go on doing it all the time when I am not there, and as soon as they finish it they begin it all over again, but they have a cup of tea and go to be excused first. I wish my mother was like Mrs Darling.’
‘All children wish that. It is very unfair to their mothers, because she wasn’t much put to the test. Anyhow,’ Tory said quickly, recovering her false move, ‘her children let her go out. They didn’t make a scene and cry in the street.’
‘As soon as she’d gone they weren’t safe, though.’
‘Do you like the pink junket or just plain white?’ Tory inquired, getting up and going to the door.
If Stevie thought that Tory in her turn was changing the subject she was too polite to say so.
‘I like the pink,’ she replied, ‘but it is up to you.’
At eleven the sun came out. At eleven-thirty it was obscured. Later, it rained again. So it went on all day. Mrs Bracey enjoyed the sudden changes. Down below her on the broken pavement the puddles reflected the blue sky or the blown clouds. The baker’s van had dripped oil over the wet road and it lay there, a great iridescent splash of colour like a peacock’s feather, bronze and pink and green. Now the surface of the sea was dinted like beaten metal by the rain, or pitted, a few minutes later, by glancing sunlight.
At tea-time the fleet put out again towards the fishing-grounds. She watched the trawlers as they were steered towards the mouth of the harbour, one after another until they were all spread out upon the open sea, and in the harbour there were only the coloured rowing-boats rocking to and fro on the littered water, and gulls.
Mrs Flitcroft came out on to the front steps of the Cazabons’ house and waved a duster at the first trawler and then, seeing a neighbour from Lower Harbour Street, where the shops were, stood and chatted for half an hour, her hands folded across her stomach, her head nodding up and down. Mrs Bracey watched her grimly.
That afternoon two strangers appeared on the quay. They walked out to the lighthouse, mackintoshes over their shoulders; two school-mistresses, Mrs Bracey decided, watching them. One had a walking-stick with which she pointed out to the other places of interest along the coastline, also the church tower. At four o’clock they entered – rather dubiously – the Mimosa Café for a pot of tea. Lily Wilson, sweeping mice-dirts out of her window, rearranging the show cards, smiled to herself as she watched them. The first visitors.
It had been an exciting day, beginning for Mrs Bracey with Stevie’s scene of farewell in the morning and ending now (when Maisie came to draw the blind later in the evening) with a French sailor strolling along outside at the water’s edge and entering the Anchor.
But after that it was a dull evening, a long wait for Iris to bring news, no visitors, and Maisie downstairs ironing. ‘I wish I’d stayed where I was,’ Mrs Bracey thought. She banged on the floor with her stick and when Maisie came she said: ‘I meant to tell you, when they was carrying me upstairs, I noticed that hand-rail could do with a dusting.’
‘Oh!’ said Geoffrey Lloyd, when Prudence opened the door to him after tea. ‘Is your mother in?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘She said I might come . . .’ He held up a roll of foolscap and then put it behind his back. He looked over Prudence’s -shoulder to the stairs. Up there, he could hear the sounds of Stevie being bathed and a woman’s voice, and he had the idea that the girl was hiding her mother from him.
‘She has gone to London.’
‘Then she must have forgotten . . .’ It did not seem conceivable that she could have done so.
‘Prue!’ Tory called, coming to the top of the stairs, a damp apron round her. ‘Oh, I beg your pardon, dear, but where is Stevie’s nightgown? Why . . .!’ She began to descend the staircase in a gliding, affected way, her hands outstretched in greeting. ‘I am sure it is dear Rosamund’s boy. I am sure you must be young Godfrey . . .’
‘Geoffrey,’ Prudence said.
‘Geoffrey, I meant. How very exciting! Your mother was a most dear friend of mine when we were girls. Come in and tell me all about her.’ She stripped off the sopping apron with a flourish and made so decisive a gesture that he was bound to follow her. Indeed, he had nothing else to do with the evening.
In the drawing-room, she still seemed to be entranced to see him. ‘But I won’t keep you, for I know it is Prudence you have come to talk to, and not I . . .’ she assured him, ‘and if I am making you late for the cinema you must tell me at once . . . but first of all, how is dearest Rosamund?’
‘She is very well, really, except in the damp weather, when she gets a little rheumatism.’
‘She would!’ Tory thought secretly. ‘And as slim as ever, I expect?’ she asked with gay confidence.
‘Well, I don’t know about slim . . .’
‘I know I should see no difference in her, and yet it’s every moment of twenty years since we met. We were in the same form together at school.’
Geoffrey could not believe this, looking at Tory. ‘Are we going through all that again?’ he wondered.
‘Tell her you met Victoria Lawson – my maiden name,’ she smiled brilliantly, ‘and give her my dear love, and now I won’t keep you a second longer, for I know you want to be off to the cinema. Where did you say the nightgown is, Prue?’
‘It should be under her pillow,’ Prudence began, going towards the door.
‘All right, my dear. Don’t bother!’ Tory went running upstairs as fast as she could.
After a pause, Geoffrey said: ‘I had a feeling she was making fun of my mother. I expect it was my imagination.’
Prudence felt a slight warmth towards him.
‘I don’t think so. She makes fun of my mother, too.’
‘I am not often ill at ease with women,’ Geoffrey lied, ‘but with her I felt definitely . . .’ he shrugged.
‘I know.’
‘What is at the cinema?’ he inquired.
‘I haven’t the least idea.’
‘Would you like to take the chance?’
‘The chance of what?’
‘Of its being a bad film.’
Before she could answer Robert came in.
‘Oh, I’m afraid my wife is in London,’ he said to Geoffrey.
‘I was just asking Prudence if she would care to come to the cinema with me.’
‘Oh, fine!’ Robert became enormously enthusiastic, Prudence noticed. ‘Excellent idea!’
‘I don’t care for films,’ she faltered. ‘They give me headaches.’
‘Nonsense. Do you good. Make you snap out of yourself. All young girls like films, don’t they, Geoffrey?’
But Geoffrey merely waited for her reply, quietly considering her. She stared at her father in a dazed and helpless way. ‘Snap out of myself,’ she thought. ‘What can have happened to make him talk like that?’ And then she knew what had happened to her. She had grown up. And she no longer loved him. Nor looked to him for assistance. ‘Yes, I’ll come,’ she said to Geoffrey. ‘I’ll run and fetch my coat.’
Lily Wilson was the first in. ‘Two beers,’ she thought, ‘and then home before it grows too dark. And beer it must be—’ for she was a little frightened of the way her money seemed to melt, leaving no trace.
Iris poured her brown ale carefully.
‘And for yourself,’ Lily was obliged to say.
Iris filled another glass.
‘Here’s cheers, then, dear.’
‘Quiet to-night,’ Ned Pallister said. He stood up on a chair and adjusted the clock to public-house time.
‘I always enjoy a drink early on,’ Iris said. ‘You can take your time over it, then.’ It looked as if she might take the whole evening over it, so undisturbed were they.
‘How’s your mother?’ Lily asked.
‘She keeps the same, thanks. Well, I never!’ Iris lifted the bar-flap and went over to the window. ‘Look at that!’ she said. ‘The doctor’s girl out with a boy. Quite nice-looking, too.’
Prudence and Geoffrey walked by, rather apart from one another, and both looking as if they were not on speaking terms. In spite of Ned Pallister urging her to come away from the window, Iris stayed there to watch them go up the steps by the Waxworks into Lower Harbour Street.
‘They must be going the cliff way to the New Town,’ she said. ‘To the pictures, I suppose.’
‘What’s it to do with you if they are?’ Ned asked. ‘She’s as bad as her mother,’ he thought.
‘What awful clothes she wears!’ Iris sighed. ‘That camel-hair coat! You can see it’s quite threadbare across the . . . where she sits down.’ She took her place behind the bar again, not that there was anyone to serve. ‘Her mother’s dowdy, not like Mrs Foyle. They wear for years, of course,’ she went on, rather as if she were talking to herself, ‘camel-hair coats, I mean. But that’s the very reason I wouldn’t want one. You get tired of things. It’s no use saying you don’t. The only thing I wouldn’t tire of would be a nice mink coat . . .’
‘Mink coat!’ Mr Pallister said.
‘I wouldn’t mind how plain the dress was underneath.’
‘That’s decent of you, I’m sure.’
‘But good material, of course . . .’
‘Naturally.’ He winked at Lily, who smiled uneasily.
‘And well-cut. That’s one thing that puzzles me about Mrs Foyle. She doesn’t have a decent fur coat.’
‘Just being cussed, I daresay,’ Mr Pallister suggested, with a sarcasm which only Iris ever evoked.
Lily felt too dejected to talk. All the afternoon she had been tidying up for the summer, securing loose spangles upon Queen Mary’s bosom and, with a small brush, going over the pink baby-faces of démodé murderers, poking fluff from their eyelids and dust from their nostrils. In a few weeks, the scornful, loutish crowds from the New Town would go guffawing through the exhibition. Or if they did not she had no idea of how she would live.
For the first time, acting on the principle that when one has nothing there can be nothing to lose, Lily asked Iris about Bertram; but she did so casually while sipping her beer, glancing out of the window, as if she could scarcely be expected to listen to the answer. Iris’s reply was a matter of delicate insinuation, a tongue in her cheek and a movement of her head in the direction of Tory’s house. Then, aloud, briskly, for Mr Pallister’s hearing, she said (her voice so forthright): ‘I don’t know. He’s not in the bar so much these light evenings.’ And winked.
It was then, in the middle of Lily’s great mental anguish, that the door was opened and the French sailor walked in. He looked a little uncertain, rather puzzled, as if he had been bidden to a party and found instead a house of mourning.
Bertram was not with Tory. He was in his little bedroom above the bar, sitting on the edge of the bed in shirt-sleeves, darning a pair of socks. This he did beautifully, with great care, weaving the black wool so finely that it had the texture of linen. Sitting there, unobserved, slack, he looked his age, his head bent with its little bald patch, his beard untidy, and the top button of his trousers undone to ease his belly. He could not send his socks to be washed until they were mended lest some woman should cobble them together.
Out of the swollen, gilded Turneresque sky, a shaft of blood-red sunshine struck the painted jug on the washhand-stand and also a picture of Our Lord carrying a nouveau-art lantern and surrounded by a flock of Hampshire Down ewes.
The film was falsely emotional. Prudence sat timidly watching, finding no way of understanding; for her own immaturity had in it the hope of growing up, and that of the people in the film had not. She felt strange, sitting there beside Geoffrey. Other young men in uniform surrounded them, their arms round girls. In the darkness the heads fell together, cheek lay against shoulder, lips whispered into hair.
In colonnaded gardens, the screen-lovers encountered one another in a perpetual moonlight, or stood upon rustic-work bridges looking down at water-lilies; were always on holiday or never worked, created emotional problems to pass the time, kissed often, always unhappily. Eyes flashed and swam with tears, yet behind the grief was always delight and excitement, music surged up, covering banalities of dialogue, to heights which the ears could scarcely endure. Geoffrey blew his nose.
With a little sensation of terror, Prudence felt his foot move against hers, and his thigh came into line with her thigh. His proximity seemed to her too steady, too relentless to be accidental; yet he seemed to be absorbed enough in the film, sitting there bolt upright with his arms crossed on his chest.
When the lights went up he smiled at her in a cool and friendly way. ‘Awful tripe. I’m sorry.’
The lads in uniform pushed their young women savagely through the exits, trying to get out before the National Anthem was played. Those who, like Prudence and Geoffrey, were caught, stood stiffly and piously to attention.
‘This is a great nuisance,’ Geoffrey thought, as they went back along the cliff-path to the Old Town. He felt gloomy, contemplating the walk back on his own.
‘You might as well leave me,’ Prudence said abruptly. ‘There’s no sense in coming all this way. I can go home alone, surely?’
‘I shouldn’t dream of it,’ he assured her. ‘Besides, I enjoy the walk.’
‘But it will be such a long time before you get back to . . . to camp.’
‘I have a late-pass.’ (Though he had not meant to use it in this way.)
They walked on in silence which they could scarcely help doing, for their words would have been lost in the wind and the sound of the sea at high-tide. Waves exploded and crashed one after the other, falling away, sucking and dragging at the loosened shingle. Geoffrey had never lived at the seaside and the great waves fascinated him. He lingered at the railings from time to time to watch just one more break, but then another. Prudence stood by, waiting, her hands in her pockets. The wind lifted her hair in curving wings away from her forehead, ‘Like that head of Hypnos,’ he thought, turning from the rail and seeing her grave face bent down slightly, her eyelids lowered. He felt moved by this comparison, although he considered an interest in any Greek sculpture other than archaic to be a sign of a bourgeois outlook.
‘If she had her mother’s intelligence!’ he found himself thinking, in spite of Beth having shown little intelligence about his own poetry. He wondered about this as they walked on. Perhaps Beth was not intelligent, after all; indeed, he found it difficult to concede the quality to any woman. ‘In-tuition,’ he thought, and seemed to clasp this word to his bosom, so agreeable did he find it. Having dispensed with the stumbling-block of intellect, he could feel more warmly towards Prudence, especially walking there in silence and in the moonlight.
Prudence enjoyed walking against the wind. As it struck her body she experienced the same sensual delight as she felt when lying in bed with her silken cats warm and heavy in her bare arms.
Even her thick coat assumed the appearance of marble drapery, Geoffrey thought, and she walked well, meeting the wind with indifference.
They passed one of the little glassed-in shelters which faced the sea, and which were always occupied after dark by whispering and entangled couples.
Prudence walked more quickly, frowning. ‘Love,’ she thought, impatiently, ‘what a scuffling thing it is. How sly and sickening!’
Spray flew suddenly over their heads and they moved back against the side of the cliff for an instant, awaiting the next wave, wondering where the foam would spatter down.
Geoffrey drew her up close to him, half curious to know her reaction, half moved by the look of her in the moonlight. He kissed her cheek, which tasted salty.
Prudence stood quite still, forbearing to scuffle. He had never before embraced a girl who remained completely motionless, and felt a little put out. Then the next lot of foam came down like a canopy. In the silence that followed it, in the backwash of shingle, he said: ‘You are very annoyed.’
Prudence said nothing.
‘Why?’
‘You make me feel like those two back there in the shelter.’
‘Well, why not?’ His bravado was assumed, for the deep and trembling scorn in her voice disconcerted him.
‘Why not?’ she asked. ‘I expect it is quite the sort of thing you do yourself.’
He was relieved at this, feeling he could deal with mere jealousy.
‘No. I can say I have never made love to a girl in a shelter in my life,’ he said airily.
They were obliged to stand close to one another to make themselves heard, and he leant against a ledge of sandstone and looked at her. She murmured something, but it was lost in the sound of a wave breaking.
‘Is it the shelter you object to or the fact of my kissing you?’ he asked.
This time he heard several words – ‘furtive’ for one, and perhaps even ‘loathsome’ as well.
‘I didn’t kiss you furtively,’ he pointed out. This was true.
‘It wasn’t that. But the fact that they’ – she waved her hand contemptuously the way they had come – ‘they put it into your head to do so.’
‘Indeed they did not. I don’t need other people to give me ideas of that kind. I kissed you because it suddenly came to me that I wanted to; you look so very beautiful to-night. So I did. And I enjoyed it, liked the taste of it.’ (‘But was it worth all this discussion?’ he wondered to himself.) ‘I imagine you didn’t enjoy it?’
‘I didn’t mind either way,’ she said coldly.
‘I could kiss you so that you would mind. Shall I try?’
‘No.’
‘You are deeply upset,’ he observed. And he wondered what exactly had been going on in the shelter, and felt like going back to have a look.
‘If you so hate things being secret, I will kiss you next time on the Esplanade at noon.’
‘You know it is not that I mind. It’s nothing to do with you.’
‘Then who is it to do with?’ he asked more gently.
But she began to walk on, keeping close to the side of the cliff, and he could see her hair and one shoulder wet with spray.
He followed her. As they turned a corner the lighthouse flashed and they saw the little half-hoop of lights along the foreshore. Here the path bent away from the sea, and the wind was suddenly silenced as if it were shut up in a box. In this lull, Geoffrey said: ‘I wish you’d listen to me for a moment and not walk so fast.’ He wondered what to say next, knowing that she would not answer. ‘You are angry with me because I have reminded you of something you would rather forget. Don’t walk so quickly. I refuse to skip along beside you as if I were a child. An adult person does not go on and on, trying to pay off old scores. Whatever has happened to you, it doesn’t belong to me, or to now.’
‘To now!’ she thought to herself. ‘What is happening now in that house, where both Tory and my father intrigued to be rid of me this evening?’
‘People making love in a shelter!’ he was saying furiously, his indignation gathering momentum. ‘What the hell’s that to do with me, or you, or anyone but themselves? Making love is secret, not furtive. Secret – like blood.’ She started at the word and gave him an astonished, frightened look. ‘People who cannot bear the sight of blood have good instincts, for it was meant to be hidden, not seen. The skin keeps it from sight, as convention keeps love from sight. Not shame. It isn’t furtive, but meet and proper. You remember what dear Turgenev said: “It is a great sin to bring blood to the light of day.” ’ He knew she would not remember nor ever have known, but he threw in one word after another against her silence. ‘And it is the same between men and women.’ (‘Someone has made love to her who should not have done so,’ he decided. ‘What else could account for her disgust or that reiterated word?’) ‘It is my misfortune that I have reminded you of something you are perhaps trying to forget. Let me kiss you again as myself. And you think of me as I am. Someone only belonging to now.’
She stopped, but he had the wit to know it was not for the kiss but to make some explanation.
‘Nothing has happened to me,’ she said quite fiercely. ‘And I will never tell you.’
‘Nothing has happened and you will never tell me!’ he repeated drily, for he had overlooked the very words which made the phrase significant.
They came to the flight of steps which went down beside the Waxworks, and Prudence looked quickly along the waterfront and saw light spilling from every window over the cobblestones.
‘I don’t want you to come in with me,’ she said breathlessly. ‘I want to go the rest of the way alone.’
Now she seemed agitated. When he took her hands and held them against his chest, she allowed him to, but her eyes implored him to let her go on alone.
‘All right. And you won’t kiss me good night?’
‘Please not.’
‘Promise me that one day . . .’
‘Yes, one day,’ she agreed, nodding hurriedly, not caring what she promised.
He stood at the top of the steps and watched her going along the quay towards her home. As she drew level with the pub, light came from the door like an opening fan. An old man came out and seemed to consider the night air. He closed the door and walked towards Prudence. This little scene, watched from above, had, Geoffrey thought, some meaning which he could not for the moment fathom – the old man’s movement towards the girl, and her sudden curvetting avoidance of him, like a cat, or a ballet-dancer. A second later she had entered the house, and the old man was standing on the quayside alone, looking down at the water.
‘Someone has made love to her who should not have done so,’ Geoffrey repeated to himself. And he had a great deal to occupy his mind as he turned and began the long walk back to camp.
Prudence had not stopped to speak to Bertram, her head ached so. She opened the front door and entered the dim hall. Then she slammed the door behind her with a great crash and went towards the morning-room, where they always sat in the evenings. Robert was writing busily at the table.
He looked up and smiled at her before he spoke.
‘Nice hats!’ Iris said vaguely, staring at the French sailor.
Lily nodded.
‘They don’t understand the money, though,’ Mr Pallister said. ‘Asking for change out of sixpence! Up in London now, you won’t get a light ale under tenpence, I’m told.’
‘That so?’ Lily murmured, her eyes on the sailor-hat with its red pom-pom. As if aware of her scrutiny, he took it off and placed it on his knee. He sat on a high stool by the bar and the light ran over his dark, greased hair when he moved. Each time Lily looked up he was studying her carefully. To prove to herself that this was not coincidence, she looked up more frequently and, yes, his eyes were each time upon her. She felt uncomfortable, and then elated.
He drank very slowly, sipping even. ‘They’re used to wines,’ Lily thought. The idea of wine always appealed to her, of tasting something sweet. The brown ale was so cold, so metallic.
Ned Pallister was pulling beer; Iris had moved away, it was difficult to catch her eye. Lily coughed delicately into her hand once or twice, fidgeting with a half-crown on the counter, not liking to be seen sitting there without a drink.
The sailor suddenly leant forward and spoke to Iris, indicating Lily with a very exact and foreign gesture. ‘If he’s going to offer me a drink, I’ll smile in a friendly way, but refuse,’ she decided. But he had merely drawn Iris’s attention to her.
‘I’ll have a small port, please, Iris.’
‘Red or white?’
‘Red,’ she said recklessly. She thought: ‘It seems more like wine when it’s red.’ ‘How much?’
‘Go on. That’s with me.’
Lily protested awkwardly.
‘Do you good. Go on.’
‘Well,’ Lily began, lifting the glass and smiling shyly. ‘That’s better,’ she thought, sipping and glancing at the sailor. He drank very slowly. He picked up the beer and took a small mouthful and their eyes met as they drank, as if they pledged one another.
The wine ran down her throat and then seemed to branch out in all directions, even to her finger-tips. The world was about to burst into blossom as she remembered it doing when she was a girl. The next moment might bring . . . but the wine did not help her to formulate her desires, merely enhanced the mood for indulging them.
Then the sailor drained off his glass, put his hat on and went out.
She felt fooled and baffled: the wine, tasteless now, was wasted. To hide her disappointment, she lit a cigarette, glanced at the clock and fiddled with her brittle, untidy hair.
When Tory spent an evening alone she used it as a successful General might – a pause in the forward movement for consolidation and reinforcement. Clay was spread over her face, her fingers trailed in bowls of warm olive oil, her chin was tightly strapped.
It was obvious that she would not answer the door in this state, and Bertram, who had finished his darning and was lonely, went away again, drawing incorrect conclusions.
Prudence had overlooked the fact that Tory would not leave her son alone in the house, nor could Robert leave his daughter. She had served him with the cheerless stew Beth had prepared, and hurried away to put Edward to bed. At the dining-room door he had held her for a brief moment and kissed her. Then, utterly hollowed, shaken, she had hastened from him.
Just as Lily thought she would leave, the door opened and the strange sailor walked in again. This time he came to her side of the bar, and once more he removed his hat. He felt in his pocket and brought out a handful of coppers, which he laid touchingly, like a child, along the edge of the bar.
‘Yes?’ Iris asked, showing no surprise; but, as she turned to get his beer, she winked at Lily, who looked down quickly, blowing out a cloud of smoke.
After a while she and the sailor resumed their contemplation of one another, which, as they drank, became more explicit, less veiled.
Another man, she felt, would have sat beside her, bought her a drink, tried his way forward with jocularities, flattery. The steady excitement between them was more subtle, more exquisite. She forgot her terror of going home.
She let her eyes, through the smoke, rest boldly upon his, using her power over him with confidence now. They might have been alone. When at last he had finished his drink he put down the glass, staring at her, and then, without shifting his gaze, stood up and straightened his tunic. He went to the door and, as he turned to go out, his eyes gave her a message she could not misunderstand.
She finished her drink in a panic. ‘I’ll go,’ she thought, ‘but I’ll walk briskly and turn into home as if that’s all I meant. As, of course, it is all I mean.’
‘Good night, dear,’ Iris called after her.
‘Good night,’ she said huskily. And now she was beyond caring what Iris or anyone might think of her. She opened the door and stepped out on to the pavement. Faint moonlight struck the rounded cobbles, blanched the lighthouse. The dark water slapped at the slime-covered steps. Little chalky boats rose and fell.
He was standing across the pavement, looking into the water. She pulled the door behind her with a bang and he turned and came towards her. To her chagrin, she felt sweat breaking out over her body and drew her coat tightly round her.
He greeted her with some words she could not hear, and when she moved her lips in reply she could not speak, but felt as if she were drowning.
‘You are going this way?’
She pointed helplessly along the waterfront, leaning a little towards him to catch his words, so strangely pronounced.
‘I am attracted by your face all the evening. I find myself watching you.’ He turned his small brown hand in the moonlight, as if the words were not enough.
‘Where do you come from?’ she asked, hoping that her own voice would steady her.
‘From Paris. Unfortunately, they did not yet change my money into English.’
They walked slowly, with bowed heads, beneath the uneven, lowering buildings.
‘Do you like scent?’ he suddenly asked.
‘I . . . well . . . yes. It depends.’
He looked at her with quick, mournful eyes, as if trying to make something exact out of her hesitation. From his pocket he brought a little square, glinting bottle. Pausing by Mrs Bracey’s doorway, he took her bare hand and smeared some scent across the palm and put it to her face.
‘Yes, lovely,’ she murmured, in a dream. They walked on.
‘Perhaps you would like to buy this bottle from me. It is from Paris last week. Only a little money.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said quickly, stopping at her doorway. ‘This is my home. Good night.’ She put the key in the lock, her face turned from him.
He shrugged and slid the bottle carefully back into his pocket and mooched on down the harbour.
She breathed the musty darkness of indoors and closed out the fishy-smelling quayside, shutting the door quickly. ‘Oh, Bob!’ she thought. ‘Why did you leave me?’ She blamed the dead, feeling herself exposed to danger and humiliation. As she put her hand up to her eyes her scented skin made her shudder. Her shame seemed to be a real thing, following her upstairs and into her room.
When she drew the curtain and looked out the sailor had disappeared. The place was empty. Only Bertram stood by the water’s edge.
Bertram looked down at the water. He felt dejected. Tory had not opened her door. Prudence had avoided him. No one, apparently, needed him. He was tired of the cronies in the bar, tired of the dingy pub bedroom. ‘I shall go away,’ he told himself. ‘In the end I always move on somewhere else, as all selfish people do, who do not let themselves become deeply involved in others, nor bound to one place. For all I feel is curiosity; and curiosity, unlike Mrs Bracey’s hunger for life, and Tory’s illicit hunger for her next-door neighbour, is quickly satisfied, a fleeting thing, leading nowhere.’ Curiosity had tired him, too, but he did not admit that. He would have liked to have settled down now, to marry Tory. To-night, confronted by that silent yet lighted house, he had realised the improbability of such a thing. Standing there, with his hand still upon the brass ring of the knocker, he had felt that Tory’s passion was not a thing ever to be put on one side for promises of devotion or for friendship, nor overthrown by conscience or convention. It put her beyond the pale, in every sense, and out of his reach.
But that glimpse of imagined comfort and companionship, of being settled, had fascinated him more than he thought. He no longer cared about what was round the next corner, unless it was Tory and his life running alongside hers.
He walked back towards the lighted windows of the Anchor, his lungs filled with their bedtime breath of fresh air. ‘I am a man with a passion for turning stones,’ he thought. ‘And wherever I went there were always more stones than I could turn.’
When he went in and shut the door there was nobody about. The scene was quite empty.
Twenty miles out at sea the fish fought and slithered in the nets, floundering and entangled.