Instead he saw the girl with the auburn hair and the bright blue sweater. She was sitting on the sand, so motionless that the outcrop of black rock beside her had partly hidden her, and she was looking at the seals. She hadn’t noticed him.
His first impulse was to leave. You don’t have to see her again, he told himself. He waited, perhaps hoping that she might turn her head. You don’t have to see her, he told himself again.
And then he began to walk slowly towards her.
4
WHITE SANDS AND BLACK SEALS
As he reached her his heavy shoes sank into the harsh sand, and the sound made her turn her head.
“Hello,” he said—hesitated, and then dropped casually down beside her on the sand. She smiled, but she did not speak. She lost the startled look which had greeted him.
David said, “Sorry, I’m afraid I’ve frightened off your friends.” After his first quick glance at her face he had looked away, and now all his interest seemed to be focused on the seals as they dived into the water and stayed there.
She was silent for some moments. And then, as if she had suddenly realised that it was her turn to say something, she spoke quickly, still clinging to the subject that he had given her, “They are easily frightened.” She hesitated, but as he seemed to be perfectly happy just sitting there, waiting for her to speak, she gained confidence. Her voice became more natural. “They are funny, you know. They love showing off, and they will flap up on these rocks and pose for us because they simply can’t help it. Then, if we move, they’ll dive into the sea. But a little later, if we keep quite still once more, they’ll come back on to the rocks. They’ll look round, as if they were making quite sure we were still there, and they’ll start posing again.”
“Disappointing for them when they find their audience has gone home to tea. What were you trying to do, sitting so still? Tame them?”
“I don’t always sit quite so still.” She looked at him with her blue eyes smiling. The nervous tightness in her throat had altogether disappeared now, and she no longer felt as if each word were being strangled. “You see,” she admitted, “sometimes I get tired of them on the rock. They aren’t so very pretty bouncing around on land, and their fur gets dried—all sort of brown and spotty. So I move, and they dive. They really are beautiful when they dive. And when they come back on to the rocks they are black and glistening. Much more attractive.”
He found he was laughing, partly because of the vivacity in her face, partly because she was laughing at herself. “One-woman society for the preservation of the beauty of the seal,” he said. “And what else do you do over here? Fascinate the waves?”
“They do the fascinating,” she admitted.
And then her conversation crumpled under her like a treacherous mountain path, and she was left stranded, afraid to go back, unable to go on. That was the kind of remark which her mother and Moira called silly. Her cheeks flushed. There was a pause. The more things she tried to think of the less she found to say.
“What do you do?” he insisted gently. Did she just think about herself? Wasn’t that what girls thought of mostly? Even when they went out with a man they couldn’t lose the habit: you’d see them looking at themselves in mirrored walls in a restaurant, comparing other women with themselves. In cinemas and theatres they still found another kind of mirror, measuring their own lives by what they saw. And even when they read there was that conscious reflection: this heroine is like, this villainess unlike, me. But what did they think about when they could sit and watch this sea with so much interest?
“Oh...” she said. “This and that.” She pretended to be unaware that he was watching her, and she turned her face to look out to sea. But she knew that his eyes were still on her. She felt a strange mixture of excitement and tension and embarrassment, and it wasn’t altogether unpleasant. She seemed to be mesmerised by it, for all she could do was to stare at the sea, and at this moment she could think of nothing at all.
Sugar and spice, David was thinking, was that all girls were made of? Born with good bones and healthy blood, three well-chosen meals a day, no worries. That produced prettiness, the kind of perfect hair and skin and colouring that Eleanor Fenton-Stevens had too. But this girl—she had turned her eyes away, and he could look at her now quite openly without being seen— this girl... This, he realised in amazement, this is what I think is beauty. He stared at her unbelievingly. If he were another man he might never have even thought she was beautiful: ideas of beauty were as varied as the men who looked at it. What he felt now as he looked at this girl depended on what he himself was. It was the proof of some strange link. This morning he had thought he was irrational. Now he knew that he had only met a strange and new experience, as overwhelming as that of a man who has lived on the plains all his life and has been well content with them, until suddenly he comes upon the high ranges of mountain peaks.
He became aware that she had been speaking. She must have asked a question, for she was now looking at him, waiting for his reply.
He said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t quite...” He recovered his sadly misplaced wits. “I was thinking about the sea,” he said. “You can hardly help thinking about it, can you?”
“No; it is sort of everywhere. At first you notice its colours and sounds, and you feel its power. Then you think of the sky too, and how the sea and sky reflect each other, each influencing the other. They are two separate things, and yet they aren’t separate. I mean”—she looked at him quickly to see if he were amused at her, but he was listening politely and quite seriously—“I mean, a bright sky makes an angry sea less terrifying. Or a dark sky will make a calm, peaceful sea quite forbidding. So when you start thinking of all the variations they can produce on each other, then—well, that is what I really meant when I said that the sea did the fascinating.”
He was still looking at her, but there was another kind of interest in his eyes. “Yes,” he said, “fascinating. Just as its power is terrifying. Sailors love and hate it, you know.”
“Yet they keep going back to it. Few leave it.”
“I expect they find they start to worry too much when they live on land. The sea is so dominant that we can’t help remembering how small all our problems and worries are. The sea will still be there when they are all buried with us.” He grinned and said, “Perhaps that is why some people, including me, never feel quite comfortable when we look at the sea. It takes away our sense of importance.”
“Or perhaps they are poor sailors.” It was as if she had said, “I don’t believe you have a sense of importance,” and he felt ridiculously pleased. Then, remembering worries and problems and people who did not like the sea, he thought of Mrs. Lorrimer, who would rather be spending a summer somewhere else.
“Good Lord!” he said. “I was sent over here to collect a child. I quite forgot.” Damnation, he thought, and rose hastily to his feet. But there was no one else on the shore, not even behind the small isolated rocks cropping through the bed of powdered shells.
He looked down at the girl, realising then who she was, and saw by the look on her face that he had indeed blundered. There was amazement—well, he deserved that—and there was also a hint of disappointment. He could have understood annoyance. But why disappointment? He started making appropriate excuses: he hadn’t caught her name this morning...awfully bad at names: the photograph in the study, Betty’s likeness to the eldest girl in it... But he ended them by feeling he had only made matters worse.
He rubbed the back of his head and looked at her ruefully. “Too many ‘I thoughts’ in all this, if you ask me,” he said.
She was smiling now. But as she rose to her feet and then brushed the hard particles of shell down from her skirt there was some change in her manner. The warmth and the ease had gone. She was merely polite and charming and very practical.
“If you were sent over here to fetch me, then we are both in disgrace,” she said. “The boat must have arrived ages ago, and tea is probably over.”
“Shocking,” he admitted. “But then I never did do the right thing. I’m especially glad I didn’t today.”
She didn’t seem to hear that last sentence, mumbled as it had been. He was relieved in a way, because he was embarrassed now that he had said it. It had just slipped out somehow. All in all, he reflected moodily as they walked towards the road, he was in rather poor form today—at least, with this girl. That idea depressed him.
But Penelope Lorrimer had heard the sentence all right. And she was feeling happier once more, yet not so happy as she had been. Disappointment still was there in her heart, mocking her for her foolishness. That was what came of imagining things the way you wanted them to happen. For she had thought, when he had appeared on the shore so suddenly behind her, that he had walked across the island to meet her. She had imagined the scene when the others returned to the house— where’s Penelope, oh, still over on the shore, now you know I don’t like her to be there alone, Penelope’s my second daughter who is studying painting, I believe you met her for a moment this morning in the McDonald cottage... And it hadn’t been at all like that. Instead he had come to look for a stray child. He hadn’t even known her name.
And she had stayed on the shore, thinking that perhaps he might come, thinking—as the others left her—that surely he and Grandfather had finished talking and there might be time for a walk over to the west shore, and perhaps—just perhaps, but what fun if he did—perhaps he would come over here. And he had, but not in the way she had wanted it. If I were a man, she thought, and if I, as a man, had felt anything the way I felt in the McDonald cottage this morning, then I would have walked across three islands to meet the girl again. But either what she had felt had not been felt by this man, or men just did not think this way. She wondered, still remembering the McDonald cottage, if he said how d’you do like that to every girl. Surely he couldn’t, simply couldn’t, go about staring at people when he first met them as if his whole life had stopped for a moment. And first she had stared back at him, and then she had felt as helpless as if she had been drowning, and then she had panicked, and then she had rushed out of the cottage saying she would be late for something or other. Late, and an idiot, imagining—when the first wild surge of feeling had subsided—that he had known that strange emotion too. Surely anything so strong as that must have been shared. But it hadn’t been. She felt a warm flush spread over her cheeks.
Her colour deepened still more as she heard him laugh. He was saying that now they were even: she hadn’t been listening this time, and his question was left floating in the air.
“It wasn’t worth answering, anyway,” he said. “Questions and answers are a dull way of learning about people.” Damn, he thought, I am always saying more than I should to her. That had been a particularly naive approach. He racked his brains for a quotation or two—this scenery called for some, and he had been quite free with them as he had walked over here by himself. Normally there was always some poetry lying about in his head to be picked up and presented. But today, or now at least, his memory was failing him. He searched for his pipe and tobacco.
But that failed, too. The matches flickered and died in the strong south-west breeze. He paused, turned his back to the wind, and then, as the match was still blown out before the pipe was set going, she suddenly cupped her hands round the pipe to form a windbreak. He looked up from the flaring loose strands of tobacco in surprise. She had been completely natural in her action: she was watching the tobacco as critically as he himself might have done.
“That’s it, I think,” she said. “My grandfather is always having the same kind of trouble with damp matches.” She looked up at him and smiled. She had dropped her hands as soon as the tobacco was lit, but her eyes were still held by his. It was the McDonald cottage all over again.
She turned away hurriedly, and said quickly, “We really ought to hurry. We are frightfully late.”
“Yes,” he said.
They started walking towards the village, but their pace was just as slow as it had been before. He began to talk. Gradually she was made to talk too. A strange mixture of talk about people and food and pictures and plays and novels. Little things, trivial things perhaps, never definitely with an end or a beginning, always merging as their minds set out to entertain each other and were in themselves entertained. But they were all somehow vitally important to both of them, as they unconsciously strove to build up the shadowy outline of each other’s life. It would have been simpler if they could have said directly, “Who are you? What are you?”
David, if he had found any time to rationalise—his favourite method of defence against women in these last months at Oxford—would have found himself in grave difficulties. He was talking, and listening in his turn, without any fashionable pretence or attitudes. His words came easily, as they did when he was alone. Now he could quote himself without fear of a misplaced interruption or of a dazed, tolerant smile, or— worse still—of the supercilious smirk which warned you that everything you said was being taken down and would be used against you. And if he talked well it was not for the old reason that he wanted to talk well, but also because he wanted to hear her replies.
As for Penny, even her most critical mother—if she could have listened—would have had to admit, in spite of her alarm, that her daughter had never been more charming.
* * *
They came at last to the path that led to the house on the hill. It was only when they saw the group standing at the doorway that they realised how late they must be. For Captain MacLean was there. David remembered with sudden guilt that there were such things as tide and current to be considered. MacLean had warned them to be ready to sail at six o’clock.
Betty came running towards them. “You’re late—awfully late. What went wrong? Penny, Mother’s simply furious. You missed tea.”
David noticed Penny’s suddenly grave face. “I’m sorry about this,” he said. “It’s my fault.”
“No, it wasn’t. It was mine too. The time seemed so short.”
“Did it?” He was pleased.
“Yes,” she said simply. They had forgotten about Betty. But she reminded them quickly enough.
“It was both their faults!” she called to the waiting group as she ran back to them.
Penny said furiously, “That’s torn it. I sometimes wonder if I was really so impossible at her age.”
“We all were. Come on, cheer up.” David still looked bewildered at the peculiar reactions to a harmless walk. God, he thought, does that old dragon think I was seducing her daughter? Then he saw that Penny was more embarrassed than he was. “Aren’t you ever allowed out alone?” he asked half-jokingly.
“We have pretty strict rules,” she said in a low voice. Now he would think that she was only a schoolgirl. That would be enough to damn her in the eyes of any University man. She wished the hillside would open and swallow her up.
As they reached the group at the door she forced an air of unconcern which deceived neither her mother nor Moira. Moira was looking very much elder-sister. By one year, Penny thought angrily. She ignored Moira, and said to her mother, “Sorry we were late.”
“We had no idea of the time,” David said cheerfully. “My watch stopped. I’m awfully sorry if we kept you waiting.”
“Captain MacLean has been waiting,” Mrs. Lorrimer said with marked dignity, “for almost fifteen minutes.”
“We’ve time enough yet,” MacLean said, with his usual slow smile. “Time enough.”
“My fault entirely,” David said, conscious of Fenton-Stevens’s amused eye. “I didn’t believe that seals would appear. So we waited until they did.”
“They actually did?” George was interested now.
“A regular squad, complete with sergeant-major and waxed moustache.”
Penny laughed, and the others smiled, all except Mrs. Lorrimer, who thought the remark quite meaningless.
“Well,” Dr. MacIntyre said, “I’m glad you did have time to see the Atlantic
coast. Goodbye. And come again. Delighted to see you. We all might have a picnic together some day.” He waved a friendly hand to the two young men, and retired into the house with an abruptness which David thought admirable.
“That would be grand,” George said to Mrs. Lorrimer. “We shall have another free day in a week’s time.”
“But we are leaving at the end of the month, and that’s next week,” Betty said. There was exaggerated disappointment in her voice. Mrs. Lorrimer made a mental note to speak to Betty really severely this evening: far too much play-acting in front of people, far too much consciousness of an audience.
“Well, perhaps we could arrange an earlier date than that,” Fenton-Stevens said. “What day would suit you, Mrs. Lorrimer?”
David let George do all the arranging. George liked that kind of thing, anyway. David stood silent, near Penny, not looking at her and yet conscious of her. He moved restlessly as George and Mrs. Lorrimer, then Betty and Moira and even MacLean, were all drawn into the whirlpool of discussion. First the day, then the time, then the place...what did it all matter? He and Penny would not be allowed one moment together. They would have to listen to others, talk to others, and hardly dare look at each other. Even now the family’s influence was trying to check the current of intimacy which had flowed so easily between them only half an hour ago.
It was with relief that he heard MacLean say that they must leave.
The goodbye was as disappointing as he had feared. Their hands touched briefly. Her eyes wouldn’t meet his. George, he noticed with some bitterness, was given a longer handshake and a generous smile.
David was sullen, and he knew it, which made him even more bad-tempered as he walked with Fenton-Stevens and MacLean to the jetty. He had begun to feel that he had never been more foolish in his life than he had been that afternoon. He groaned at the thought of his self-confidence, based on so little. A pretty girl had at least a face to justify her hopes.
Friends and Lovers Page 4