We saw the bobbing boat lantern at the edge of the cliff, the top of the path, heard his voice, strangely subdued. “You can come up …”
“Do you suppose it’s safe?” asked Sally doubtfully.
“Yes,” I assured her. “He’s a badly frightened man.”
“And they can be the most dangerous,” she said sharply.
“Sometimes. But not always. And I don’t propose to stay on this beach all night.”
“It is cold,” contributed John. “Yes. It is cold,” I agreed.
I led the way back up the path. Curley Green, holding his lantern high as I approached, backed away from me, retreated to the doorway of his shed. The gun gleamed wickedly in his right hand.
He demanded, “Is that all of yer?” then lowered the lantern. “Keep yer distance,” he ordered. “An’ listen. Get this straight. If we ever get off this bleedin’ island, you all keep muckin’ quiet about what happened tonight.”
“If we are taken off,” I said, “we shall have to make a full report to the authorities.”
“It was self-defense,” he muttered.
“Self-defense?” I queried. “An old, unarmed man against a man with a gun?”
“But he was a murderer himself,” cried Green. “He told me. The boongs who built these huts, who were here before we came, they wouldn’t do as he said, so he shot two of them, and the others got away on a raft … An’ what about puttin’ the porpoises up ter this stunt o’ usin’ whales to sink ships? An’ what about all the people who got drowned?”
“Two blacks don’t make a white,” I said with unpardonable smugness.
“But they do, Petey, they do! Can’t yer see? I saved the hangman a job. I was just the executioner …”
“And that’s a job that I’d as lief not have,” I told him. “But if it makes you any happier, you can look at it that way.”
For a moment I thought that he was going to dash the lantern to the ground. “I’m sick o’ the muckin’ lot o’ yer!” he swore. “You’re all muckin’ near as bad as he was!”
He went inside, slammed the door of the shed. We heard the click and grate of the key in the padlock. I tiptoed closer, listening intently, and heard other sounds — the gurgle of fluid being poured from one container to another, the clink of a bottle being set back on the table. So he was drinking to drown his conscience. What would the outcome be? Would he soak himself into torpor, or would he burst out fighting mad and shooting? One thing was certain — he would start shooting if we tried to break in.
I went back to the others.
“Well?” asked Sally.
“Maybe, maybe not,” I said.
“What the hell do you mean?”
“He’s on the turps,” I told her.
“On the turps? Oh, I get you.”
“Do you think it is safe to … to sleep?” asked John.
“As safe as it ever is,” I said.
The two Samoans drifted off — but not, I was sure, to sleep. Not at once, anyway. I hoped that somebody on the island knew something about obstetrics — and hoped, even more fervently, that we should be rescued before the lapse of nine months.
“Goodnight;’ said Sally.
“I think,” I said, “that I should sleep in your hut tonight.”
“What for?”
“Protection.”
“So he can shoot you first and rape me afterwards?”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
I saw her face in the light of the waning moon. She was smiling slightly. She said, “It’s very sweet of you, Peter, but …”
I said, “We aren’t living in Queen Victoria’s day, you know. And …”
“And what?”
“I feel somehow responsible for you,” I blurted.
“If you put it that way …”
“I put it that way. It happens to be true.”
“ ‘Let me look after you, little girl, and take you away from all this …’ ” she murmured.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” I said stiffly.
She laughed. “I know you didn’t, but that’s the way it sounds … But I think you’re right. I think that it would be wiser if we slept in company — wisest of all if we all of us, all four of us, slept in the same hut. But I don’t think that John and Mary would come at that …”
“Neither do I,” I said. “In fact, I’m beginning to worry about them …”
“Why?” she asked, genuinely curious.
“Well, what’s going to happen in nine months’ time?”
“One day,” she said, “you might learn the art of crossing your bridges when you come to them. It saves a lot of needless worry …”
“But about tonight?”
“Yes. You can always slip back to your own shack at first light. There’s need for you to lug mattresses around, there’s a spare one in my hut.” She added, “Just as well.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “Just as well. We can’t afford to take the same risk as they’re taking.”
“John and Mary? But perhaps it’s a risk that we shall want to take …” And then her flippant shell cracked and she was in my arms, holding me tightly. “Oh, Peter, Peter, I’ve seen a man die, and it could just as well have been you, and I’m afraid that if he finds out what’s between us it might be you next … But I’m frightened, so frightened. We might be on this island all our lives, and the atomic war that the old man was always raving about could happen … And … And …”
“I think I’m fairly safe,” I said. “I’m more useful to him than the old man was …”
“And I’m frightened,” she said. “Don’t go, Peter. Don’t leave me …”
From the shed came a burst of drunken song:
“The parson he will come, he will come, he will come …
The parson he will come, he will come,
The parson he will come, with his face so muckin’ glum.
An’ he’ll talk o’ Kingdom Come.
Damn his eyes …”
“Not quite at the hymn singing stage,” I said. “But not far from it …”
“Do we have to listen to this?” she asked.
“… The Sheriff he will come, he will come,
The Sheriff and his crew, they’ve muck all else to do …”
She broke away from me, went hastily to her hut. I did not follow at once. I still wasn’t happy about Curley Green. The only accurate prediction that can be made about drunks is that they will behave unpredictably. But Curley seemed to be settled in for the, night. With each succeeding verse of his song his voice was more slurred, more indistinct. Of course, I thought, he might just be one of those infuriating drinkers found all too frequently aboard ship who, having ingested a skinful, take a childish delight in wandering through the accommodation, waking their more sober shipmates. But such pests do so because they must have somebody with whom to drink — and Curley Green, quite obviously, was a solitary drinker.
I went to Sally’s hut, tapped lightly on the door frame. In response to her soft call I pulled the curtain to one side. I saw that she was already in bed, the sheet pulled to her chin. I didn’t trust myself to go near her — I was still worrying about the possible consequences of cohabitation — so took her spare mattress from the other side of the hut, spread it just inside the doorway, stretched out on it.
“Goodnight,” she said rather distantly.
“Goodnight,” I said.
I listened to Curley Green’s disjointed rendition of The Ball At Kerriemuir and then, it was preferable, to Sally’s even breathing. So she was asleep already. I envied her.
“Peter,” she said suddenly.
“Yes, Sally?”
“I’ve been thinking …”
“Oh.”
“John and Mary … In spite of the circumstances, they’re very happy …”
“It’s easy to be happy if you take no thought for the morrow,” I said.
“Isn’t that the best way, perhaps? In these circumstances?”
“In these circumstances,” I pointed out, “we are thousands of miles from the nearest chemist’s shop. And the nearest doctor. And the nearest midwife.”
She said, “There are still ways and means … And an intelligent woman …”
“It will still be risky …”
“And what the hell is life but one long risk — from the moment they drag you squalling into the world to the moment you’re mashed by a bus crossing a busy street …” She added maliciously, “Curley Green wouldn’t mind the risk.”
“That’s because he has no sense of responsibility,” I said.
“Some people,” she said, “have too much.”
I shifted to lie on my side, turned towards her. Her eyes, in that faint light, seemed enormous, luminous almost. The sheet had fallen from her shoulders, revealing one breast, and I remembered how those breasts had felt pressed against the bare skin of my chest.
She said, “We may be here for years, or for only a matter of days. We don’t know. We may have long lives ahead of us, we may die tomorrow. Either way, I think that we shouldn’t wait …”
I got off the mattress, went to sit beside her. That way (I told myself) we could talk more quietly, that way there would be less risk of our being overheard either by the Samoans or Curley Green.
“A rather dangerous philosophy,” I whispered.
“But I thought we’d covered that point, Peter; I thought that we’d agreed that all life was dangerous, from the cradle to the grave …”
She had propped herself on one elbow and her face was close to mine. I could smell the clean, yet earthy scent of her, a scent owing nothing to toilet soaps or perfumery. The sheet had fallen entirely away from her breasts. My tight swimming trunks had become extremely uncomfortable.
“There are some risks that are unavoidable,” I said. “And some that are avoidable …”
“As when Ulysses stopped the ears of his crew with wax and had himself lashed to the mast …”
But there was no mast here that I could have myself lashed to …
“At least,” I quipped, “he had the interests of his ship at heart.”
Her smooth shoulder was touching mine and her full lips (how had I ever thought of them as thin?) were very close to my mouth. The sheet was almost off her now, and I could see the full, lovely length of her, the warm shadow at the fissure of her thighs. (And was it my hand that had pushed aside her draperies, that was rediscovering the silken softness of a woman’s skin?)
“I think …” I began.
“Don’t think, you dear fool,” she murmured.
And then her mouth was on mine, and mine on hers, and the few rags between us had been cast aside, and the accumulated tensions were released, stormily at first, chaotically, and then with a rhythm like that of the sea, like that of a long, heavy swell breaking rhythmically on some reef, breaking rhythmically yet abating, easing, until there was the seventh wave of seven waves and all was lost in a crashing thunder of surf …
And then, such is the nature of Man, the slave to his own habits, I felt that I would sell my soul for a cigarette.