Moira looked quickly over her shoulder. Naturally there was no one there. Little boys wouldn’t be allowed out so late at night. Oliver must be talking in his sleep, and his bed was pushed up against the open window which made her able to hear him. Or else he was awake and playing—which was very naughty of him. He ought to have been asleep hours ago. She glanced up at the façade and caught the flash of a striped pyjama sleeve as it was whisked back behind a curtain. She returned to the house and hurried up the stairs. Oliver was fast asleep. She scrutinized the heart-breakingly innocent face and the closed eyes with their fingers of dark lashes. Or was he just pretending? Moira tucked in the sheets and he did not stir, and closing the door softly behind her she went on to her own room. Tomorrow would be their final day. It was so hard to remember how vivid the games of childhood had been and how real the imaginary companions. Perhaps he had been missing Sammy all the time and had been putting up a brave front.
She smiled wistfully as she started to undress, for so soon it would be childhood’s end.
It was the following evening, and Moira straightened up from her packing. It was all finished except for the few things which they would need in the morning. She looked with a jaundiced eye at the collection of souvenirs which Oliver had painstakingly accumulated during their stay, limpet-spotted strands of bladder-weed, smoothly frosted fragments of glass of white, blue, green and brown, which had been ground by the action of the waves until they had acquired the beauty of uncut jewels. There were scallop and razor shells, and some with exquisite pink shading that had housed minute bivalves such as she clearly remembered having collected during her own long ago foragings. In a bucket there were other shells containing live or moribund winkles and whelks, which would promptly die and smell to high heaven, but she knew that Oliver would insist on taking them all back with him to his home near Guildford.
She saw from the Mickey Mouse watch by Oliver’s bed that it was almost seven. As their holiday was finishing she had asked Miss Wallace if she would put back their supper until a quarter to eight as a treat for Oliver, so she would not have to chase him up yet but could leave him to enjoy the extra time. She closed the cases and went down the precipitous stairs with their worn oilcloth and into the sombre hall that was dominated by the ponderously ticking grandfather clock and the big brass gong, and which always smelled of yesterday’s roast mutton and cabbage.
As she entered the sitting-room Miss Wallace came up from the basement with a bulky album cradled in her arms. “Oh, there you are, Mrs. Latten!” she exclaimed. “While I was having a turn-out yesterday I came across this book of photographs and Connie said I must show it to you, so I’ve brought it up as she suggested. There’s a sweet one of you taken when you used to come to see us as a little slip of a thing.” Miss Wallace followed Moira into the room and dumped the heavy book on to the tablecloth. “It’s quite a comprehensive record of our lives here,” she said. “My parents began it and after they died we three girls kept it up. Of course these are only a selection in this, from the years nineteen fifteen to thirty-eight.” She carefully turned the thick gilt-edged leaves.
Moira, who topped her by a head, peered down over her shoulder. “But what fun!” she said politely.
“There!” said Miss Wallace, pointing in triumph with a wrinkled finger. “There you are!” She displayed proudly the photograph of a skinny and singularly unprepossessing child who was making hideous grimaces above a shrimping net that she extended towards the camera. “Connie declares that you haven’t changed at all!” enthused Miss Wallace contentedly. “She told me that she would have known you anywhere. And so would I!” Moira’s smile was a trifle bleak. “And what is more,” Miss Wallace went on, “in an earlier book I have one of your dear mother when she was a kiddy! I’ll just pop down and fetch it. It’s no trouble,” she said as Moira began to protest, “only carrying more than one album is too heavy for me. I’m not so young as I was.”
“We none of us are,” said Moira automatically.
Miss Wallace gave a primly appreciative laugh. “You cannot bracket yourself with me, Mrs. Latten!” She pattered out of the room, with evident enjoyment, leaving Moira to thumb through the pages.
The dreadful thing was that none of the names that confronted her rang any bell at all, so that it would be hard to show satisfactory enthusiasm. She stared at a forbidding “Miss Hill and Ivor,” who had probably been staying at Stonethorpe when she had been taken there, but she had retained no recollection of them.
Miss Dolly Wallace returned. The second volume was even more massive than its predecessor, and had once been secured by a large brass lock, but this was now tarnished and hung open disconsolately. She was panting from her exertions and her pince-nez were askew. Her yellowish-white hair was also in need of tidying.
Moira suddenly remembered how much her grandmother had laughed when she had told her of her own early visits to Cleeness, which had always been to Stonethorpe and which had taken place shortly after the turn of the century. The Misses Wallace had been young women then and the personifications of Edwardian respectability but, according to Grandma, their lavatory had, for utilitarian purposes, been stocked with sheaves of neatly cut up newsprint from an obscure Bolshevist publication which had prophesied, and indeed advocated, bloody revolution. “As if,” the old lady had told her, “the poor dears would have liked to have packed all of us into tumbrils and sent us off to the guillotine!” Fortunately this economy had long been discontinued and more normal amenities were now provided.
The oldest of the photographs had been printed in that delightfully soft sepia that is now seldom used. These were for the most part stiffly posed tableaux of the Wallace family, steadfastly hypnotized by the lens. Then, with the coming of black and white processing, emerged the more informal “snaps” of the guests who had come to Stonethorpe on annual holidays. Miss Wallace found the one of Moira’s mother and it bore a striking resemblance to that which Moira had been shown of herself. It could not be denied that it was fortunate that the looks of the female members of her family had invariably improved with puberty.
She put the book down and as she did so it fell open at a page which was headed in intricate script: “Summer Season, 1912”. The lady lodgers of that year had worn long white skirts and busy high-necked blouses. Their hair had been arranged in a fashion which Moira mentally labelled as “cowpat”, or else they had pinned on elaborately trimmed hats. The men had worn choking collars with their blazers and boaters and had displayed a wide variety of moustaches.
In one corner was the picture of a small serious boy in a sailor suit leaning bashfully against the side of a young and pretty woman. The caption underneath read: “Mrs. Mortlock and Sammy. July.”
Miss Wallace could not fail to notice Moira’s fascination as she studied it. “That poor little boy!” she said. “It might have been yesterday. Such a tragedy! He was the Mortlocks’ only son, and he met his death on the last evening of his stay with us.” She shook her head. “He was sucked under by the quicksands. A fearful calamity! He had been cautioned about them continually, as all of our visitors are always cautioned, but he managed to give Mrs. Mortlock the slip, and in spite of the fact that as soon as he was missed we all of us went out to search for him, it was too late. It was terribly distressing. Poor, poor Mrs. Mortlock! I thought she would go out of her mind! Sammy was a charming child who won everybody’s heart with his winning ways. Such a friendly little fellow, although in some ways he gave the impression of being shy and lonely—or shall I say reserved? We used to call him Little Boy Blue.” Dolly Wallace was looking back through the long tunnel of the years. “Such a lovable little fellow,” she repeated. “I feel haunted by him to this very day, and even after all this time! It’s funny but it’s true. And so does Connie. He seems so real, he might never have left us.”
It came with dreadful impact to Moira that she had never met Oliver’s “Sam
my”. Up to this moment, without troubling to think, she had accepted alternative explanations concerning him. Either he had been granted scant liberty until the evenings, or else he had never had any existence except in Oliver’s imagination. He had been a “dream friend”, such as solitary children often invented and adopted. But how could Oliver have dreamed up the sailor suit and coupled it with the correct Christian name? And why had Sammy only come to him at the close of day . . . when he would find him alone?
Without a word of explanation to Miss Wallace Moira hurried out of the sitting-room, brushing past the branched hat-stand in the hallway on her way to the door. She crossed the road and, squeezing through the railings which protected the bowling green, dropped down and ran across the dark patchy grass to the spiked hummocks of the dunes. “Oliver!” she called. “Oliver . . . where are you?” There was no answer. Driven by a sense of panic urgency she climbed up the hillocks, the loose sand slipping down and filling her shoes.
At the top she paused. The boundless sweep of the deserted beach stretched out before her. Away to her left were the forsaken fantasies of the Amusement Park; the figure-of-eight, the phallic tower embraced by the curving path of the helter-skelter, the Ghost Train, whose gaping fang-fringed entrance was closed by a barrier. The distance dwarfed them all into toys, and they would be untenanted and silent until Whitsun.
“Oliver!” she called again. Her voice in the vast emptiness was thin and tinny. “Oliver . . . where are you?” A strong breeze was blowing in from the sea and it flung her words back to her, flattening her skirt against her body and tangling her hair before her eyes.
Across the expanse of the sand a scattering of gulls, startlingly white, strutted and pecked in search of food, or rode on the swell of the waves before they broke and forced them to take flight, and their plaintive strident cries were both harshly angry and forlorn.
The sea was racing in, flooding over the hard corrugated ridges which the receding waves had carved earlier and which were so painful to hastening naked feet. There was a network of creeks which at low tide became stretches and lakes of sand-locked water, but which swiftly joined together with alarming speed when the tide turned.
At what seemed to her to be an incredible distance the flowing together of the creeks had combined to leave an island around which the encroaching waters lapped and nibbled, and marooned in this low lying hump of sand stood the figure of a little boy. Moira’s heart leapt until it seemed to stick in her throat. From where she was standing it must be a quarter of a mile to the water’s edge, and beyond that was a stretch of sea which was nearly as wide. She stumbled forward, kicking off her shoes, in the grip of paralyzing terror. The cold of the water struck at her ankles and calves as she splashed through the shallows. For a hundred yards the shelving of the beach was gradual, although the water was rising steadily until it became waist high. When she judged herself to be within hailing point of Oliver she shouted his name once more. This time the child, who had been looking out to sea, heard her and turned his head, his delicate arms planted with heroic bravado on his hips as he tried to swivel round.
The island on which he stood had in a few minutes shrunk to half of its former size. “Stay where you are,” she called, “and I’ll try to get to you.” She staggered into a hollow and almost fell, but managed to struggle to her feet, the salt stinging and smarting in her eyes. Battling on determinedly she realized that very soon she would be out of her depth and would be able to go no further. Oh God, why had she never been made to learn to swim? Oliver was too far away for her to see his expression, but she knew that he must be afraid.
“Sammy brought me out here,” Oliver called. “He said that we could dig up buried treasure. And now he’s gone. He disappeared and left me all alone, and then I found that I was surrounded. He disappeared under the sand and left me. I thought he must have found a secret tunnel and had gone to look for the treasure, but I couldn’t find one, and I’m frightened.” His voice grew higher. “The sand is getting all wobbly and shaky. It’s up to my knees and I’m stuck. I can’t lift my legs. Hurry, Mummy, and find somebody with a boat.” Oliver tried to move round towards her but the effort only made him sink the deeper.
Moira tried to remember what little information she had ever heard about quicksands. You must remain quite still. Best of all you should lie down flat to distribute the weight as evenly as possible. But Oliver was too frightened to do that. If only she had a plank. But there was no plank, and very soon there would be no island. “Keep still darling,” she shouted. “I’m going back for help now. Don’t try to make a move. I know it’s hard, but don’t do it. You understand? Whatever happens you must not struggle.” The impossibility of her being able to reach him appalled her. If she could have done so somehow she would have managed to pull him clear. On the horizon a tiny cargo boat was chugging northwards.
She fought desperately back to the shore and ran blindly up the beach and over the dunes to enlist aid, and the knowledge that the water was rising with each passing second pounded like hammers in her brain.
“Oh Little Boy Blue
Come blow on your horn . . .”
Oliver watched his mother’s retreat as she made her way back to dry land. He was afraid, terribly afraid. Right at the beginning, playing and laughing with Sammy, he had not been at all frightened. When the sand had started to quake a little he had regarded it as funny, and had prodded at it jokingly with his spade. Soon afterwards Sammy had dared him to collect the sailing boats which had overturned and had drifted some way out, and he had chased after them, and it was while he was on his way back that his legs had become stuck in the sand and he had not been able to free them, and he had noticed that the sea was all around him and that Sammy was no longer there.
He had sunk up to his thighs. The sea was closing in on him from every side, and through the sands, not six feet away, bubbles were rising, bubbles which grew and pulsated before they burst. The movement he gave was involuntary, and immediately the suction was increased. He must remain absolutely still as his mother had told him to do, until she could return to him with help. She would not fail him, she had never done so. He must be courageous and calm.
Despite his resolutions he pushed down with his hands at the melting sand and it offered no resistance, but when he endeavored to withdraw them he found that he could not do so. A wave darted in and, having spent itself, gently touched his arm. The wind had turned colder with the fading daylight, and a gull flew low over his head, and the sea began to slap against him in a regular and rhythmic caress. He was being drawn down inexorably by the enveloping sand.
It was as if eager arms were dragging him down, a small boy’s insistent arms, arms that were covered by the navy blue sleeves of a sailor suit, and he thought that he could hear Sammy’s urgent whisper: “Come and join me, Ollie. I’m lonely and I want you, and it will not hurt for long.”
He made one last effort to free himself and the sand welled up to his chin and was forcing itself into his mouth and nostrils. He twisted back his head and started to choke and gave a retching spluttering cry as he tried to spit out the sand and water which were suffocating him. All he could see now was the cloud smudged sky. His small round face was stricken. On what, at his age, should have been an unsullied canvas, there was stamped an incredulous horror, the realization of what was about to happen, a hopeless and rebellious despair that no human being, least of all a child, should have ever known.
The ripples lifted his fair hair so that it floated in the sea, and presently the remaining vestige of the sand bar was submerged and the surface of the water was untroubled.
Miss Wallace had kept her head admirably and had rung up the police who were already on their way and who had in turn immediately alerted the Cleeness lifeboat. The two young men with Moira were the Melvilles, who lived in the house next to Stonethorpe, and who were powerful swimmers.
T
hey were standing beside her at the water’s edge and, gazing out over the smooth grey waste of the sea, and she realized that she could no longer even be certain of where the island had been. As she scanned the water it seemed that for an instant two children rose above its surface, and that one of them had on a yellow jersey and flannel shorts, while the other was wearing an old-fashioned sailor suit.
THE CORNERED BEAST
There were several gaps, as depressing as those of missing or broken teeth, in the semi-circle of electric bulbs that outlined the entrance to Funland. For many months the management had intended to remedy this defect, but somehow they had never got around to doing so, and the spirit of failure and decay which permeated the interior had also claimed the façade; for no amount of invitation, they comforted themselves morosely, would be likely to entice back their clientèle in its former numbers, so why throw good money after bad?
Funland was situated on the fringe of the theatrical district. Its red plush and gilt had become sadly shabby and tarnished, and a worrying proportion of the slot machines which lined the passages leading to the main halls and galleries were almost permanently out of order.
During the afternoons unemployed youths lounged or barged against one another, and small urchins scampered among these down at heel attractions, hopefully pulling the levers and pressing buttons in case an obstinate coin had lodged, unused, from the previous evening; but usually it was not until two hours before closing time that the paying public—or that small and faithful remnant of it—arrived to kill time for a short while before rounding off an evening.
The Smell of Evil Page 19