by Ursula Bloom
Carolyn did her best to hide this from Luke; she wanted him to respect his brothers, but, of course, Luke got hold of it, and thought it a delicious joke. His bump of curiosity never let him down, he would worm out anything.
‘Mummy, isn’t it damned funny to think of old Adam getting himself stung that way?’
‘Please, Luke, I don’t want to discuss it.’
‘But it is! Adam of all people! So earnest and praiseworthy, and all that. He would want to marry her! Now I shall never want to marry anyone.’
Carolyn was ashamed that hope should burn so high within her heart. ‘But you will, Luke dear, it’s only natural, everybody wants to marry. All mothers expect to have other women come between them and their sons.’
‘Dearest, I shall have lots of jolly little illegits, and never a wedding ring. If you are married, there isn’t anybody else I want to marry. So there! Can’t get the girl I want, and won’t be fobbed off with a substitute.’
She wished that she was not so flattered, knowing that it was not right. All her sons must marry, of course. Adam’s silly affair petered out, then there was the trouble of getting him sent off on a cruise, all happening round about Marty’s first night. Marty would do well. She could always be quite sure of Marty. The moment that was over she followed the specialist’s advice, taking Luke away for a holiday to the Cornish fishing village.
‘Thank you, Mummy. I’d have hated the usual seaside place, all shrimps, and ice creams, and rock. This is going to be grand,’ he said, and packed his sketch books.
Luke loved Polprinth.
The village was clustered on either side of a single main street, through which the harbour ran, so that the masts of the boats stood down the centre of the road like curious lamp-posts. The houses were whitewashed and wreathed in clematis and rose. The clear cold air blew up the street from the sea, and on the steps of the little houses the men sat picking prickles from huge sea urchins, or discussing lobsters and crabs.
When Arthur had come to Dedbury earlier in the summer he had spoken of the house he had bought here, and it was he who had lent it to them. He loved its gracious lines, and the old figure-head which leant across the street as once she had leant across the sea. She was a virgin with quite expressionless eyes, and a blue frock that she clasped to her bosom, linking it together with a handful of stars. Inside the house there were low rooms, exquisite carved beams, and Mrs. Clare, Arthur’s old housekeeper, who ran it for them. Her stock remark seemed to be, ‘I coom from Carnwall’, which was the be-all and end-all of her existence.
Life here was good; Luke’s room led on to a balcony and he could have as much air as he needed. Arthur was staying there when they arrived, and showed them round. He was too tall and too thin, Carolyn thought, and had a little yellow beard clipped close, which, although at first it scandalised Luke, later on fascinated him. They visited the charm shop, where Joan the Wad wove her spells; they met old fishermen who told the queerest stories of the ‘little people’ so dear to the heart of Cornwall. They went out on Sunday for a sail into a new world, unbelievably blue, tipped with sunshine, so that it seemed to be quite fantastic.
Arthur introduced Luke to Loveday.
Loveday was the daughter of Jake, a sailor who owned four boats of his own, and had a prosperous side line in the semiprecious stones that he picked up from the beaches. Rumour had it that he owned the little corner shop where crystals and amethysts, topaz and rose quartz were displayed, and the charabancs brought ready customers for them. But, for all his purported wealth, old Jake lived in a tiny cottage crushed in between two bigger ones, with the strong smell of pasties coming from the door, and sea urchins and live lobsters, with their claws tied, straddling helplessly his doorstep.
Loveday was seventeen, Luke’s age, pretty, with dark eyes and hair in a face reminiscent of a phlox. She appreciated Luke’s blondness, he her darkness! Luke was girl-conscious; it didn’t worry him, because he was the type that accepts whatever life offers next, and he liked trimming life up. He admitted, but only to his mother, that occasionally he garnished life with not strictly truthful pieces of parsley set about the cold mutton of living. Luke appreciated a nice piece of parsley. ‘Hello?’ he said to Loveday.
‘You’re from London?’
‘From the Home counties. It isn’t quite the same thing.’
‘Once,’ said Loveday, ‘we had a real earl down here. He was from London. Your mother’s a countess, isn’t she?’
‘No, just a baroness, but we don’t count that as being very much. People matter more than what they happen to be called. I should have thought that you were a countess in this village?’ and his eyes twinkled.
‘You’re making fun of me.’
‘If that’s what you think, then we’ll say good-bye here and now.’
But it couldn’t end here and now, and he knew it.
‘Be careful of that girl,’ Arthur said, ‘she hasn’t a good name in this place.’
But he couldn’t be careful. Luke was one of those young men who plunge into life; its waves may make them gasp with cold surprise, but they enjoy it. ‘I’m being careful,’ he said. ‘Girls with bad names suit me fine! They’ve never got the reputation without doing some hard spade work for it, and a chap knows where he is.’
Loveday could sail a boat far better than he could. They went out in one of her father’s boats one afternoon. Luke wore slacks, and no top, with the sun warming his body and darkening it. Loveday had on a backless cotton frock, with a little coat to it. But when they were running before the wind, and well away from the village, she took off the coat and threw it into the bottom of the boat. Then he saw that the bodice of the dress was made like a bras, in front, crossed in braces over her bare back to the waist. It was attractive, for her skin was far darker than his, with a glow on it which made it look more like satin than velvet.
‘Gee, but you’re brown! I thought I was, but seeing you …’
‘It’s being always in the sun. Dad kicks up a fuss about it, but I like it.’ She looked at him questioningly. ‘Boys like it too.’
‘I bet you’ve got a lot of boys?’
‘I was born that way and I like attention. Maybe it is that I never had a mother. Dad spoilt me. Not but what he was always quick to punish me if I was troublesome.’
‘Too bad.’
‘Many’s the good old-fashioned beating I’ve taken.’ She turned her back to him. ‘The marks of the weals ought to be there. Are they?’
He looked at her, wishing that he was not so tempted to kiss that darkly glossy skin. ‘No, there’s nothing there.’
‘Dad hates me to have fun. He threatened to thrash Richard Thuke only this week.’
‘Now who’s Richard Thuke?’
‘The carpenter’s son; he helps his father make all the coffins for the place. Gruesome, I call it,’ and she shuddered. She was a primitive person and he recognised it at once. She was dealing in all the elemental forms of attraction, he knew, just a little sadist, yet so fascinating with it. ‘Richard kisses me,’ she said, and pouted.
‘I bet that’s fun!’
‘No, no, it isn’t.’ Then coaxingly, ‘I’d like you to kiss me. That would be fun.’
Luke needed no pressing. He reached across the boat, pulling her to him and kissing her without hurry. He had the heady impression of the spray rising, of the wind in the sail, the gull’s wings beating, and the warm moist softness of her mouth beneath his own. He hadn’t thought that it would be quite as good as this. Self-expression, that was what it was! When he set the girl down her eyes were afraid and he knew that she trembled. Luke had found it pleasurable that he had so much command of her. ‘There!’ he said.
With a feint at modesty she hid her face in her two hands, yet peeping at him between the fingers. He drew her hands down again, kissing her until he was disturbed by a cry from another boat, to find that they were bearing down upon it. It was Loveday’s cunning, her agility at quickly sizing up the situation and
taking command, that saved the crash by mere inches. The boat curved round, low in the water, and he had the exquisite thrill of an excitement suddenly past. They sat side by side, he keenly aware of all her many attractions, the upraised points of her breasts under the skimpy frock, the slender line of her waist, the warmly dark glow of that skin. He had kissed her a great many times when they got home, and he found Carolyn sitting on the balcony with all the morning papers spread round her, laboriously going through the cross-word puzzles.
‘Nice?’ she asked him. He thought her tone sounded different.
‘Oh, so so!’ He lied purposely, because he dared not admit how nice it had been. This hadn’t been the cold mutton of living, it needed no parsley of his with which to garnish it.
He couldn’t sleep that night for thinking of Loveday.
Too fever-bright to last, the affair hurled itself along. It was Luke’s first passion, but he was far more sophisticated than most boys of his age, and he plunged into it with the usual reactions. He was annoyed that the village should give her a bad name. He understood that she was intended for young Richard Thuke, though at the same time she was the reason why Andy Clarke had gone off to Canada, nearly breaking his mother’s heart in consequence. Then there had been the squire’s son, only that had been put a stop to, by the squire himself riding over and speaking to her father about it. Old Jake could manage the girl; he had no nonsense, and did not spoil her as so many widow men left with a child might have done.
‘You’d better be careful with that girl,’ Carolyn reminded him before the week was through.
‘Darling, you do take me for a mutt!’ and he spoke in a pleasant tone, but was irritated under it.
‘Oh no, I don’t. She’s very attractive.’
‘But so crude!’
‘I daresay; at your age, young men like their girls to be crude.’
‘I might be different and like them sophisticated!’
‘No, Luke, not yet; that’s the next phase.’
‘You’ve got it all planned out for me, haven’t you?’ and then quickly, ashamed of having sounded acid, ‘It’s Adam has polluted your mind. He’s probably even now losing his heart to a little Honoluluian, dressed in whisky bottle straws, and shaking her embonpoint till she gets him all hooey.’
‘Perhaps Adam is out-growing his callowness out there.’
‘I wonder what Marty’ll do.’
‘Marty’ll marry respectably. With him his career comes first.’
‘What comes first with me?’ he asked quickly.
‘I’m not sure! Not yet.’
Luke’s affair pursued him inescapably. Nothing else mattered. Although he declared that he was master of it, Loveday knew all the arts of temptation and indulged herself in them. She liked to feel her power to attract a ‘gentleman’, and she had caught sight of a letter addressed to the Honble. Luke Hinde, which had stimulated her interest.
Richard Thuke’s protestations had also spurred her on, even though he had brought her a bead necklace from Truro, which she used as a goad to try to persuade Luke to buy her pearls. Luke did not rise to the bait.
‘I’ll kiss you,’ he said; ‘pearls mean tears, and kisses mean love.’
Loveday did not appreciate the subtlety of the change.
But Luke could not go on kissing Loveday in this way without wanting more. The lovely summer days, his returning health, the lack of tutorial restraint and the abundant happiness of the moment, all weighted the dice heavily against him. Before very long he was slipping down the balcony at night. The drop from a branch of clematis or plumbago was delicious, and lent the affair a Romeo-like glamour. In the moonlight and starshine the village was unreally beautiful, and he knew it.
Loveday went out of the tiny cottage sandwiched in between larger ones, alarmed lest her father should discover, yet entranced by the adventure, which was, of course, no new one for her. She had done the same thing for Richard Thuke, for the squire’s son, for Andy, and all the others one after another.
Luke kissed her with a background of masts against a star-pierced sky, with the fir trees atop the gaunt cliff, and the sound of the tide against the shore. Then one night, when he hauled himself up the balcony again, and tip-toed silently across the wooden slats, he knew that he was satiated, and through with it. It had enchanted him, now the enchantment had a bitter taste. It was cooling.
A fellow felt such a fool levering himself up a bit of clematis, his shoes tied together by their laces and dangling between his teeth. Besides, it wasn’t really fair on poor innocent Carolyn who slept on unknowing.
It amused him that he should have drunk of his fill, yet nauseated him that Loveday should be so well versed in deceit. The village had been quite right; now he knew that she was promiscuous. He supposed that every young man in love ached to command a virgin charm, which certainly did not belong to Loveday. The heat of the passionate moments that they had spent together died on him, perhaps because the girl had been over-generous of herself.
He wouldn’t keep to-morrow’s appointment.
He lay in his room that night, unable to sleep, with the faint smell of rambler roses blown in on his disturbed mind. Then he got up again, restlessly. In Carolyn’s room adjacently the moonlight fell white and clear with the broad clarity of day. She was asleep, lying as she always did on her right side, her fair hair bound in a turban of pale blue net. She looked very pretty, nobody would ever be quite as pretty as Carolyn.
Then, by her side, he saw the book, a largish one that he had never seen before, bound handsomely in dark red suede with her initials stamped on it, and the golden clasps of it locked.
He fingered it for a moment, but it did not yield. His curiosity aroused, he thought, what on earth …?
He asked her at breakfast. ‘What is that book, Mummy? The red suede one that you’ve got locked.’
‘Oh, that? That’s nothing.’
‘Don’t be aggravating, Mummy. What is it?’
‘Just a diary. Nothing.’
‘But why lock it?’
‘Why not lock it? I don’t want everybody to read it.’
‘Let me?’
‘Now look here, Luke. You always were the most curious person. You’re not going to read that diary, so put it out of your head. It’s probably because of you that I keep it locked.’
‘I think it’s very mean of you, Mummy.’
She wasn’t being drawn. He knew her when she got that look on her face, he had to let it pass. Other things were passing in his life too, and one of them was Loveday, though she did not know it.
Loveday was already picturing herself as being the Honble. Mrs. Hinde and believed that if only she played her cards properly, the thing was certain. She had never fancied becoming the wife of Richard who made village coffins; she could have denied Luke nothing, she liked his charm, she liked his fine soft clothing, and his manners. For a whole week the fire had burnt at fever heat, with emotional interludes, exquisite with tender embracing. Then he seemed to cool. One night he did not appear at all, pleading next day that his mother had had a headache and that he had been unable to leave her. That next evening he was offhand, and again on the one after did not come out into the moonlight of the little quay. Loveday sat there on the side of her father’s boat, with the shine throwing a silver fishnet of light on the cobbles, her own face bitterly resentful.
Richard Thuke came out to her and stood there, in his fisherman’s trousers and jersey, which was the village uniform even if a man didn’t put to sea. His damp hair lay flat on his brow. ‘I told you he’d go back on you, Loveday.’
‘I wasn’t expecting him to-night.’
‘Then why are you out here?’
‘Maybe to see you. Maybe not.’ She was quick at turning a few words to suit her mood.
‘Loveday, you’ll have to be proper clever to catch a gentleman like Mr. Luke. You’ve baited your line with a worm and that bait’ll never catch him.’
‘Oh, shut up!’
&
nbsp; She was a brooding mixture of attraction and scheming. Loveday believed that she could catch her future on a hook just as Richard said, and although he might think her a fool and using the wrong bait, he was wrong. It was the same old bait that every girl uses.
He came and sat beside her, his hand closing on hers was big and clumsy, whilst Luke’s was slender and gentle. Richard’s was clammy cold, but Luke’s had burnt with that fine dry fever. Richard stirred her in some ways, because Loveday was purely sensual and lived on emotion.
But the next night Luke came out again and talked to her (no more), and when he kissed her he did not sweep her off her feet, but left her with the sense of emptiness, and despair, of uncertainty as to how to clinch the matter which should have been coming to a head of its own accord.
Surely it could not be that having reached its natural climax, he was gradually shaking her off?
At the end of ten days Loveday felt that this was the answer. Even though Mr. Hardy had been down again, making it more difficult for Luke, he was gradually letting her drift. He was through.
Loveday was beginning to grate on him; her small vulgarities and mispronunciations, her innate commonness, galled. He could not think how it was that he had not noticed these things before. He missed appointments, drawing back inch by inch. Anything was better than having a row, and he knew it. Suddenly Loveday caught him.
It was that sickening night when he had come out because everything looked so unutterably lovely that it stirred the artist in him. It was a still sea with a moon unreally large, and a long golden trail coming almost to their feet. Never quite! That was the catch in it! But it was such an unbelievably beautiful night that Luke could forgive it for having a catch in it. Loveday was sitting there, where he had guessed she would be waiting for him, and he went to her. She sat limply as though tired, and she lifted her face to him. It was too dark to see the actual details, only the blur, but he guessed that she was very sad. ‘Now I’m for it,’ he thought. He said, ‘I managed to get out to-night.’