Tregulla, of course, was a backwater; a hamlet where the pace of life was slow, set in a county thrust far out into the sounding Atlantic, flown over by seabirds and chosen as a dwelling place by seals, that is itself isolated from the rest of England. If news reached Tregulla and Selstow and Camelot as quickly as it reached any other parts, thanks to television and radio, news was seldom made in any region of the Duchy—except sometimes in the winter months when the terrible sea, awake and bellowing its thunders, ran a ship headlong onto its rocks.
Nevertheless, a cloud of local gossip, resembling in its minuteness and harmlessness a dance of midges, perpetually rose and fell in the mild air above the three small places.
Captain Beaumont soon discovered that people were talking about his daughter and young Willows. His informant was not, as might have been expected, Miss Keate, but Mrs. Monboddo.
“Is Una going to marry that boy?” she demanded one morning some weeks after Emmeline’s visit to Trelynn Manor. The car was standing still, at the side of a road high on the dry brown moor; there was no movement under the great sky, bare of cloud, except far off where the windows of cars passing along a main thoroughfare flashed for an instant in the sun. Mrs. Monboddo, remarking that there was a view from here, had stopped in order that they might enjoy the prospect of distant Brown Willy, and they had lit cigarettes.
“Of course not,” he said, startled, “why should she?”
“Girls do get married, Charlie. And she’s seeing a good deal of him, isn’t she?”
“Is she? I don’t think so—that is, I really don’t know.” In fact, he had been so relieved that Una seemed to be “settling down” that he had felt nothing more about her activities than a muted sense of relief.
“I thought she was so mad keen to leave home?” Mrs. Monboddo went on.
“Er—yes, she was. But she seems more settled now. She has these young friends and—”
“Not very desirable friends, are they? There are stories about them, in London.”
“That’s rather vague. I can’t say that I like the boy much; a gutless type, I should think, but the girl’s pretty—and sensible too. . . . What kind of stories?”
“They burnt a house down that someone lent them.”
“Burnt it down?”
“I forget who told me. Glenda, probably. But Rachel Trewin had heard it, too. Of course, she was rather concerned because apparently Barney’s smitten with the girl—what’s her name—Emily.”
“Emmeline,” Captain Beaumont corrected absently.
He was thinking that Evie would have known how to deal with the gossip, and these new friends of Una’s. She had looked so fragile, so ethereal and delicate, yet she had had a good head on her where questions of—er—love-making and that kind of thing were concerned. But I only understand ships, and men, the widower thought despondently.
Yet the knowledge that he did at least understand those provided a little comfort, and it was with freshened attention that he turned to his friend for her next remark, which was: “He’s always hanging round my kitchen door. (Shall we go on? Or do you want to stay a bit longer?)”
“(We’ll get on, please. I deserted the ship this morning, you know.) What on earth does he do that for?”
“Clara’s adopted him, apparently. He dropped in for tea one day when I was out, and she stuffed him with teacake and he mended a fuse so that she could see to read the paper—I don’t know. I believe he told her to call him Terry.”
“How extraordinary. Hasn’t the feller anything to do?” Captain Beaumont’s tone had a flavour of distaste.
“I don’t know, of course. But ‘Terry’ slipped out once when she was talking about him. (I don’t think she liked that much, of course she isn’t used to that kind of familiarity.) Oh yes, he paints. (You knew that, surely?) There are some things of his in the window of the Buttercup, in Camelot. (Most peculiar they are, too. I wished Miss Gregson joy of them.) If you don’t think it matters Una running round with him, there’s no more to be said, of course. But I do think you ought to know people are talking.” She let in the clutch, and the car bumped off the grass on to the road. “They’ll always do that.”
The tone was absent again. But the recollection of his former Service reputation as a fine judge of men prompted him to add with some decision:
“No, I don’t like him. Flabby . . . I shall never understand Una. Now there’s Barney. I know Tom would have liked her to team up with him, because he as good as told me so, a couple of years ago. But so far as I know the idea’s never entered her head. And now you say he’s after this boy’s sister.”
“Rachel hinted at it. She isn’t at all pleased.”
Mrs. Monboddo did not add Lady Rachel’s parting cry—I’d almost sooner it was that tiresome little Una. One would at least know where one was.
“No one’s pleased, it seems,” he said grumpily, but as he spoke he saw certain recent looks of Una’s, “No one of our generation, that is,” he ended.
Mrs. Monboddo continued with her usual expert management of the car, but she was congratulating herself on having put in a word that might save Charlie trouble later on. Poor Charlie—he had been cut up enough by the death of that wishy-washy Evie; he was not going to be let in for another packet if Mrs. Monboddo could help him to avoid one.
A good sort, Joan, poor Charlie was thinking; a thoroughly decent sort. One did not, of course, think of her as belonging to the same sex as Evie.
“I suppose I must speak to Una,” he said at last. “Don’t know quite what to say, though.”
“Say you think young Terry isn’t a good type.”
“Isn’t that going to annoy her? She seems—er—” he recalled, again, various expressions and tones of voice, “genuinely fond of him.”
“Say his friends are appalling. Have you seen those ‘beatniks’ at Dinas?”
“Caught a glimpse of some of ’em the other day when we were driving through there. When I think of that place even ten years ago . . . black’s white, it sometimes seems to me, since 1939.”
“Oh, you mustn’t take all that kind of thing too seriously.” Her big capable hands in their hand-made gloves swung the big car easily inward to avoid an overtaking “L” driver. “I was reading somewhere the other day, in one of the daily rags, that the newest war is the one between youngsters and oldsters. War! I’d give them war.” (Providence, however, had denied Mrs. Monboddo children or young relations to whom she could have given it.)
“‘Let ’em have it’, and they had it, and the same was merry war,” he murmured.
“Their bottoms need smacking,” pronounced his friend, who would have prescribed this remedy for a troupe of Bacchantes, “that’s all. . . . They weren’t smacked enough when they were small.”
“Smacking never hurt anyone.” But he remembered how against it Evie had been. Una had not been smacked. (No, and look at her.)
“Here we are.” Mrs. Monboddo drew the Hillman Minx up within two inches of the drive’s ragged grass. “Don’t worry about it. Just tell her you don’t think much of him and his friends—and you might mention the house-burning rumour.”
He nodded, though he did not think that Una was likely to find such a story shocking, or indicative of undesirability in friends. As Joan drove away, with her red face under her hard hat, he felt grateful for the morning’s excursion—fresh air was always beneficial. But he rather wished that his good friend and neighbour would leave him to the undemanding society of the whiskey bottle.
“I say,” said Barnabas to his brother, with a face of suppressed mischief that could have belonged to himself at nine years old, “do you think we could get him out on the sea?”
Hugo had driven over to Plymouth, on family business, for his father; and had taken his elder, for whom he had a strong affection concealed beneath his new caustic manner, out for a beer. Conversation had turned on affairs of the heart, and Barney had received confirmation of a suspicion.
He found it extremely surprising. But old Hugo always had been a dark horse.
“Why?” Hugo asked now. (“My god, Barney, this is a tatty place. Do you come here often?”)
“(The beer’s the best in town . . . that’s all I care about, and don’t tell anyone about it. I don’t want it pansied up and the stuff ruined.) I’ve been thinking . . . I bet you anything you like he’s a rotten sailor. He wouldn’t look so good, hanging over the side of a boat, spewing.”
Hugo so far relaxed his guard as to mutter that she might feel so sorry for him.
“Not Una. She isn’t the maternal type. I bet you—”
He bent his round brown face and sparkling china-blue eyes closer to Hugo’s. “I bet you ten bob if we once got him really sick, she’d be clean off him.”
“Well, I don’t think she will—but I wouldn’t mind seeing him spewing. He makes me feel sick.”
“The Slithy Tove,” said Barnabas, whose reading though conventional, had remained with him, “or Worm Ouroubourous. Well. Let’s get to work. How about fixing a date for showing him up? There’s a strong rumour that we’re getting next Saturday. Will you book up on the off-chance?”
“Which boat? And suppose the sea’s calm?”
“It won’t be until August at least—and you know as well as I do it’s never very calm. Oh, ‘Tregulla Girl’—I know all her little ways. Tell Morris to stow every sail he’s got aboard. And arrange with Una—better make it the afternoon; I can’t give a whole day’s shore leave to settling your love affairs.”
“It isn’t a—love—affair.”
But, driving home through the mild spring dusk, with lights sparkling out far along the misty headlands, he admitted that it was—if an entirely and painfully one-sided one.
His intellect, which was considerable, and his conscience, which was of average sensitiveness, both told him that Barney’s was a childish and silly plot, and instinct warned him that the sight of Terence sick and ridiculous might affect Una in exactly the opposite way to that which his brother expected.
But savage jealousy, and resentment at his enslavement, and a general sensation of hopelessness about everything including his lost strength and animal spirits—these must have an outlet. Could it be less than a year ago that the idea of making Terence Willows sick would have struck him as very funny? The suspicious, sour spirit that seemed to have taken over his patched-up body assured him that only a year ago he had been a child.
Pain, physical and mental, was the supreme maker of adults.
Well, it would be quite a party, for Barnabas’s last instructions to him were that he must be sure to get Emmeline to come, too.
A few days before the launching of the childish plot, Emmeline and Una were sitting on the white seat in the little garden of the cottage.
Emmeline’s pose, and the needlework lying beside her, suggested an intention of remaining there for the afternoon while Una’s, seated upright on the extreme edge of the interwoven iron fern-leaves, proclaimed that she might fly off at any minute.
“But where has he gone?” she was demanding. “I’ve been to all our usual places.”
“Then I expect he’s gone somewhere that isn’t one of your usual places,” picking up the needlework.
“You don’t think he’s gone to Penna Cove? Or Megg?”
“Don’t know where they are,” placidly.
“They’re those two little coves across Tregulla Bay—he promised,” restlessly, springing up, “that he’d take me there.”
“Then I expect he will, when he gets around to it,” Miss Willows said.
“I couldn’t bear it if he went there without me—why are you so calm all the time?” she demanded suddenly, swinging round upon her. “Everybody gets worked up about things except you.”
“Someone has to keep calm, I suppose.”
“Well it’s maddening for the rest of us . . . don’t you ever get in a stew about Barney?”
“Why should I?” lifting clear eyes from the drawn threadwork.
“I suppose you think there’s no need to.”
“Do you?” She began to roll up the work again. “Look here, I don’t want to push you off but I must go and change; I have a date.”
“Who with? I’ll give you a lift, if you like.”
“No, thanks all the same, you can’t get a car where I’m going. It’s with Jim Pilcher.”
She lifted her eyes again. There was amusement in them, and another expression not easy to name: it was as if she wanted to see how Una would respond to this information—which was not true. She merely wanted to get rid of her importunate visitor.
“Em, how can you!” The tone was as shrill and amazed as she could wish. It also had an element of honest disgust which made her regret the teasing impulse. Una was quite capable of babbling out some exaggerated version to Barnabas.
“Oh, we’re all going prawn-fishing,” she said hastily, “Margery and he and some other people and I . . . you didn’t think I was going alone with him, did you?”
“I didn’t know what to think. I hate the way he looks at you,” Una said bluntly.
Emmeline turned away, murmuring to the effect that Jim “wasn’t so bad”, and Una, having called “good-bye” to her retreating back, moodily began the long trudge up to the head of the valley.
Emmeline waited until she was out of sight, then went and stood under a tree and whistled, and Terence came shinning down: smiling with satisfaction.
It was the first really hot day. The high banks and the young trees in thick early leaf shut out every breeze and the flies were active. Una was relieved to come out on to the green turf below Saint Austell’s Head and to get a glimpse of the distant, cool green sea.
Sitting in the shadow cast by the Land-Rover was Hugo Trewin.
“Oh hullo,” he called at once, “filthily hot, isn’t it? I’ve been botanizing on the Head, and I wanted to—to speak to you so I was waiting . . . I thought you mightn’t be long.”
(Dark hair in ragged locks on your white brow, thin scarlet lips, light, light eyes that glitter. My tropic lily, my green hellebore. Not mine at all. A nice load you’d, be if you were.)
“Oh did you? Well, here I am. Get in—we don’t want to stay here; it’s boring. I’ll drive you home—or will you come back to tea? Daddy’s gone into Truro to see the solicitors.” She held the door open while he awkwardly climbed in. The red blood was flaming high on her delicate cheekbones.
“I’ll come to tea—if that’s all right? I haven’t anything to do . . .”
“No signs of a job yet?” she asked, vigorously starting the engine and sending the car rushing down the empty white road.
“Plenty of signs, but nothing definite. If I suit them, the terms don’t suit me.”
“I thought scientists could ask what ‘terms’ they like, nowadays. . . . Do you want to be in London?”
“As much as I want to be anywhere . . . but for my botanizing I’d sooner be down here. I suppose you still want London?”
“Of course, Hugo, I’d sell my soul to get there. Life down here is—simply impossible.”
“It is dull. There aren’t any strong contrasts.”
“No, are there?” She turned to look at the colourless face and scarred forehead. “I think that’s the real trouble.”
She was struck by that remark, and began to hope that the rest of the afternoon might not be as dull as she had feared.
She had been pleased to use her powers of charming on someone else, because she was so angry with Terence. It was only Hugo, the hanger-on with the wrong piece of seaweed, and one never knew what he was thinking and feeling anyway, but he was a young man, and she could feel, with each smile and movement of her lashes, that she was getting her own back on Terence.
In the little garden enclosed by tamarisks, with teacups and Samuel French editions of Cat on A Hot Tin Roof, and Chicken With Barley Soup scattered on the grass, they spent nearly two hours, talking, and reading from the plays. Hugo delivered the speeches of Brick in a stammering mumble which caused Una to wonder just how much acting he had done at Cambridge, and broke off at last, in the middle of one, to ask her if she would come out in a boat on Saturday afternoon?
“With you?” She gave him a not-well-mannered stare.
“With me and Barney—and he said would you get Emmeline Willows to come along and—and her brother.”
“I don’t know. I never know what they’re doing. But I could try. Why can’t he ask her himself?”
“I don’t know. He only suggested it yesterday—I suppose he thought it would be quicker through you. Don’t you want to come?” He was looking down at the grass and plucking up tufts of it with his blunt fingers.
“Well . . . yes. I do, and thank you very much.” She laughed. Impossible to explain that her first hesitation was due to not knowing whether Terence might want her for Saturday afternoon. If he was coming too . . . she suddenly felt light-hearted. “I’ll ring them up now,” she said, scrambling up.
“Don’t bother now. Let’s go on—I want to see what happens to this type.” He tapped the play lying beside him.
“Oh I may as well. They may get booked up.”
She came back ten minutes later looking even more cheerful—glowing, thought Hugo resentfully—and sat down again on the grass.
“It’s all right. They’ll come. At least, he will, he doesn’t know about Em. Where’ll we meet?” and he gave details as to place and time which she promised to give Terence.
Captain Beaumont returned about six o’clock, in search of tea, and found them in the middle of Act I of Look Back In Anger. After standing for half a minute, concealed by a tamarisk hedge, with a keen but unhopeful eye fixed on the teapot, listening unbelievingly to what was being declaimed, he came forward demanding refreshment.
“The glass is set fair,” he observed, when Una had gone into the house to make fresh tea. Hugo passed the test, as a young person, of belonging to a family known to him and having grown up in the neighbourhood, but as a student of science he was suspect. Barney would have been more welcome.
“Is it? I hope it holds until Saturday. A party of us are going sailing.” Hugo was leaning heavily on his stick with the monkey’s head, which was apparently stronger than it looked.
“Oh? What boat?” Captain Beaumont sat down in a deck-chair and reached towards a plate of curling bread and butter.
“‘The Tregulla Girl’.”
“That’s Michael Morris’s, isn’t it? Who’s going?”
Hugo told him, adding that there was a small cousin staying at Trevanian whom Lady Rachel had demanded should be included in the party.
There was a pause. Captain Beaumont muttered something and put down a half-eaten slice. He seemed about to speak, hesitated, then, pointing at one of the plays lying scattered on the grass, he demanded:
“You did some acting while you were up at Cambridge, didn’t you? What’s your opinion of Una as an actress?”
“I didn’t do much. It was only for one term,” quickly.
“Yes, but you must know something about it. I think she’s cut out for comedy—not these tragic parts . . . how anyone can want to watch them, let alone act them, beats me. Anyone with any feelings wants to get up and do something about all these poor blighters—unless they need kicking, of course. Now this chap,” nodding down at Look Back In Anger, “he needs kicking. But tell me what you think about Una.”
There was a pause before Hugo answered. Then he said decidedly: “I agree with you.” But if an enlargement of this was desired, Captain Beaumont did not get it, for Una reappeared carrying fresh tea.
Her father’s day in Truro had been tiring and depressing, and something in her manner, a look of being withdrawn into a warm and glowing private world, irritated him. He said rather sharply, as he accepted a cup:
“Here’s Hugo, who knows something about acting, agreeing with me, Una. He thinks you’re cut out for comedy, too.”
“I don’t know much about it, of course,” Hugo said hastily, and then there was a pause. Captain Beaumont looked from one young face to another over his teacup; Una’s expression is best suggested by the word bodeful. At last, not looking at Hugo, she said in a tone cool and smooth as ice-cream:
“An actress—a true actress—should be able to act in any style the producer wants. Perhaps Hugo believes in nothing but type-casting?”—a feeble shake of the head from Hugo—“but, in any case, there’s no point in discussing it, as I’m not going to be an actress. And I rather doubt,” the chilly tone breaking into lively anger, “whether Hugo knows the least thing about acting.”
She began to gather the scattered plays together, with bent head; Captain Beaumont made a rueful face at the guest, which perhaps was not seen for it was not returned, and shortly afterwards, his reminder to Una about the arrangements for Saturday having been received with a curt nod, Hugo made his farewells and limped off.
“Insufferable bore!” and Una flounced into the house.
Captain Beaumont, soothed by a return to familiar surroundings and much hot tea, finished his meal in solitude and comparative peace.