He smiled too, not saying anything, his eyes still faintly astonished, and she wondered what he was thinking and whether she was as like Sophia, as he had imagined she would be. “Where’s Jon?” she said, for lack of anything else to say.
“He went out to look for you, as a matter of fact.”
“Did he? I must have just missed him.” She helped herself to a cigarette and he gave her a light. “When did you arrive?”
“About half an hour ago. Justin was the only one at home so he went down to the cove to tell everyone I’d arrived. Apparently I wasn’t expected to lunch ... Jon tells me you’re both going over to see some old friends of his in Penzance this afternoon?”
“Are we? I mean—” She blushed and laughed. “I haven’t seen Jon since breakfast. He and Marijohn went into Penzance this morning to do some shopping—”
“Ah, he must have arranged something when he was over there ... I was just wondering what I could do with myself while you’re out. Marijohn says uncompromisingly that she has ‘things to do’ and Justin is taking her car to go over to St. Ives for some reason, so I’ll be on my own. Maybe I’ll have a swim or a paddle, depending on how Spartan I feel. I never usually bathe except in the Mediterranean ... Ah, here’s Jon! He must have decided you hadn’t lost yourself after all... Jon!” He moved out through the open French windows on to the lawn beyond, his arm raised in greeting, and when he next spoke she heard the hard careless edge return to his voice. “Jon, why didn’t you tell me how young and pretty your new wife is?”
4
“I don’t want to go,” she said to Jon. “Would it matter awfully if I didn’t come? I feel so tired.”
The bedroom was quiet, shadowed by the Venetian blinds.
“Just as you like,” said Jon. “I happened to meet this fellow when I was in Penzance this morning—I used to do a certain amount of business with him in the old days. When he invited us over this afternoon for a spin in his motor-boat, I thought it would be the sort of invitation you’d enjoy.”
“I—I’m sorry, Jon.”
“Of course you must rest if you’re tired. Don’t worry.” He stooped to kiss her on the forehead. “Perhaps Marijohn will come,” he said presently. “I’ll ask her.”
“She told Max she was going to be very busy this afternoon.”
“That was probably merely a polite way of excusing herself from entertaining him. I’ll see what she says.” He turned to go.
“Jon, if you don’t want to go alone, I’ll—”
“No, no,” he said. “You lie down and rest. That’s much the most important thing. But I’ll have to go over and see this fellow and his new motor-boat—I’ve committed myself. If Marijohn doesn’t want to come I’ll go alone.”
So she waited upstairs in misery as he went down to talk with Marijohn, but when he came back she heard that Marijohn had decided against going with him.
“I’ll be back around six,” he said, kissing her again before he left the room. “Sleep well.”
But she did not sleep. Presently she dressed, putting on slacks and a shirt and went downstairs. Justin had gone off to St. Ives and Marijohn was relaxing on the swing-seat in the garden with some unanswered correspondence and a pen. Alexander was nowhere to be seen.
In order that Marijohn would not see her, Sarah left the house by the back door and moved through the back gate on to the hillside behind the house. Five minutes later she was by the beach of the cove.
Alexander wasn’t paddling. He had taken off his shirt to bask in the heat and eased off his shoes but he was sitting on one of the rocks facing the sea, a book in his hands, a pair of sunglasses perched insecurely on the bridge of his nose. As she moved forward and began to scramble towards him he caught sight of her and waved.
“Hullo,” he said when she was in earshot. “I thought you were resting.”
“I decided I didn’t want to waste such a lovely afternoon.” She ignored his outstretched hand and climbed up on to the rock beside him. The tide was still rising and before them the surf thundered among the boulders and reefs in great white clouds of spray.
“I see,” said Alexander. His skin was already tanned, she noticed. He had probably been abroad that summer. His chest and shoulders were muscular but were beginning to run to fat. She thought of Jon’s body suddenly, remembered the powerful lines and hard flesh and strong muscles, and suddenly she wondered how often Max Alexander had been compared with his friend in the past and how often the comparison had been unfavorable.
“Tell me about yourself,” Alexander said sociably, closing the book and fumbling for a cigarette. “How on Earth did you come to be in a godforsaken country like Canada?”
She started to talk. It was difficult at first, for she was shy, but gradually she began to relax and speech came more easily. He helped her by being relaxed himself.
“I’ve been mixed up in motor racing most of my adult life,” he said casually when she asked him a question about his hobbies. “It’s a hell of a thing to get mixed up in. It’s all right if you want to play chess with death and have half your face burnt off and get kicks out of a fast car and the smell of scorched rubber, but otherwise it’s not much fun. I’ve more or less had enough.”
“What are you going to do now, then?”
“Depends on how long I live,” he said laconically. “I have heart trouble. I’ll probably go on doing damn all and paying my taxes until I drop dead, I should think.”
She wasn’t sure how she should reply. Perhaps she was beginning to sense that he wasn’t nearly as relaxed and casual as he appeared to be.
“It must be strange for you to come back here,” she said suddenly after a pause. “Are you glad you came?”
He swiveled his body slightly to face her, and the sun shone straight into the lenses of his dark glasses so that she could not see his expression.
“It’s nice to see Jon again,” he said at last. “We’d drifted right apart. I was rather surprised when he rang up and said he wanted to bury the hatchet... There was a hatchet, you know. Or did you?”
“Yes,” she said, lying without hesitation. “Jon told me.”
“Did he? Yes, I suppose he would have.” He fidgeted idly with the corner of his book. “When I knew he was going back to Clougy, I—well, quite frankly I was astonished. So astonished that I couldn’t resist coming down here when the opportunity arose to find out why he’d come back.” There was a little tear in the dustjacket of his book, and he tore the paper off at right-angles so that he had a small yellow triangle of paper in his hand. “I didn’t know Marijohn was living here.”
“Jon was very anxious to see her before he returned to Canada.”
“Yes,” said Alexander. “I dare say he was.”
“Jon told me all about it.”
He looked at her sharply again. “About what?”
“About himself and Marijohn.”
“I didn’t know,” said Alexander, “that there was anything to tell.”
“Well...” She was nonplussed suddenly, at a loss for words. “He said how fond of her he was as they’d spent some of their childhood together.”
“Oh, I see.” He sat up a little and yawned unconcernedly. “Yes, they’re very fond of each other.” For a moment she thought he wasn’t going to say any more and then without warning he said abruptly: “What do you think of Marijohn?”
“Sophia hated her; did Jon tell you that as well? To begin with, of course, it didn’t matter because Jon worshipped the ground Sophia walked on and for Sophia the world was her oyster. She could say, do, want anything she wished. A pleasant position for a woman to be in, wouldn’t you think? Unfortunately Sophia didn’t know how lucky she was—she had to abuse her position until one day she discovered she hadn’t any position left and her worshipping husband was a complete stranger to her.” He drew on his cigarette for a moment and watched the surf pound upon the rocks a few yards away before being sucked back into the ocean with the roar of the undertow. “But of
course—I was forgetting. Jon’s told you all about that.” The waves were eating greedily across the shingle again swirling round the rocks.
“I felt sorry for Sophia,” said Alexander after a while. “I think I was the only person who did. Marijohn despised her; Jon became totally indifferent to her; Michael—well, God, a conventional pillar of society such as Michael would always look down his nose at a sexy little foreign girl like Sophia who had no more moral sense than a kitten! But I felt sorry for her. It was terrible at the end, you know. She couldn’t understand it—she didn’t know what to do. I mean, Christ, what was there to do? There was nothing there, you see, nothing at all. It wasn’t as if she’d caught Jon in bed with someone else. It wasn’t as if he’d thrashed her with a horsewhip twice a day. There was nothing tangible, nothing you could pinpoint, nothing you could grasp and say ‘Look, this is what’s wrong! Stop it at once!’ She discovered quite suddenly that her loving husband didn’t give a damn about her and she didn’t even know how it had happened.”
“Maybe she deserved it. If she was constantly unfaithful to Jon—”
“Oh God, it wasn’t like that! She behaved like a spoiled child and grumbled and sulked and complained, but she wasn’t unfaithful. She flirted at her weekend parties and made Jon go through hell, time and again with her tantrums and whims, but she wasn’t unfaithful. What chance did she have to be unfaithful stuck down here at the back of beyond? And anyway underneath her complaints and sulks she probably found Jon attractive enough and it was pleasant to be adored and worshipped all the time. It was only when she realized that she’d lost him that she was unfaithful in an attempt to win him back.”
Sarah stared at him.
“And he didn’t give a damn. She flaunted her infidelity and he was indifferent. She was sexy as hell in an attempt to seduce him back to her bed and he was still indifferent. It was a terrible thing for a woman like Sophia whose only weapons were her sex and her femininity. When she found both were worthless she had nothing—she’d reached the end of the road. And still he didn’t care.”
“He—”The words stuck in Sarah’s throat. “He must have cared a little. If he’d loved her so much—”
“He didn’t give a damn.” He threw away his cigarette and the glowing tip hissed as it touched the seaweed pool below. “I’ll tell you exactly what happened so that you can see for yourself.
“I came down to Clougy that weekend with a friend called Eve. We were having an affair, as I’m sure Jon has told you, but at that particular stage the affair was wearing rather thin. We arrived on Friday evening, spent an unsatisfactory night together and quarreled violently after breakfast the next morning. Not a very bright start to a long weekend by the sea! After the quarrel she locked herself in her room or something equally dramatic, and I went out to my car with the idea of going for a spin along the coast road to St. Ives or over the hills to Penzance. I find driving soothing after unpleasant scenes.
“I was just getting into the car when Sophia came out. God, I can see her now! She wore skin-tight black slacks and what Americans would call a ‘halter’—some kind of flimsy arrangement which left her midriff bare, and exposed an indecent amount of cleavage. Her hair was loose, waving round her face and falling over her shoulders in the style which Brigitte Bardot made so famous. ‘Ah Max!’ she said, smiling brilliantly, ‘are you going into St. Ives? Take me with you!’ She made it sound so exactly like an invitation to bed that I just stood and gaped, and then as I started to stammer ‘Of course’ or something mundane, Jon came out of the front door and called out to her, but she took no notice, merely sliding into the passenger seat and wriggling into a comfortable position.
“ ‘Sophia’, he said again, coming over to the car. ‘I want to talk to you.’
“She just shrugged idly and said she was going into St. Ives with me to buy shellfish for dinner that night. Then Jon turned on me. ‘Did you invite her,’ he said furiously, ‘or did she invite herself?’
“ ‘Jon darling,’ said Sophia before I could reply, ‘you’re making su-uch an exhibition of yourself.’ She had the habit of drawing out some syllables and thickening her foreign accent sometimes when she was annoyed.
“Jon was shaking with rage. I could only stand and watch him helplessly. ‘You’re the one who’s making an exhibition of yourself!’ he shouted at her. ‘Do you think I didn’t notice how you did your damnedest to flirt with Max last night? Do you think Eve didn’t notice? Why do you think she and Max quarreled this morning? I’ll not have my wife behaving like a whore whenever we have guests down here. Either you get out of that car and stop acting the part of a prostitute or I’ll put a stop to your weekend parties once and for all.’
“ ‘Look, Jon—’ I tried to say, but he wouldn’t listen to me. I did my best to pour oil on troubled waters, but I was wasting my breath.
“ ‘That’s ridiculous!’ cried Sophia, and she was as furious as hell too. ‘Your stupid jealousy! I want to get some shellfish for dinner and Max is going to St. Ives—why shouldn’t he give me a lift there? Why shouldn’t he?’
“Well, of course, put like that it did make it seem as if Jon was making a fuss about nothing. But there she sat in the front seat of my car, her hair tumbling over her shoulders, her breasts all but spilling out of that scanty halter, her mouth sulky—Christ, any husband would have had the excuse for thinking or suspecting or fearing all kinds of things! ‘You’d better stay, Sophia,’ I said. ‘I’ll get your shellfish for you. Tell me what you want.’
“ ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m coming with you.’
“It was extremely embarrassing. I didn’t know what to do. She was looking at Jon and he was looking at her, and I was just trying to work out how I could tactfully make my escape when there was the sneeze from the porch. Jon and I swung round. It was the child. He’d been standing listening, I suppose, poor little bastard, and wondering what the hell was going on. After he sneezed, he turned to sidle indoors again but Jon called out to him and he came sheepishly out into the sunlight.
“ ‘Come on, Justin,’ Jon said, taking him by the hand. ‘We’re going down to the Flat Rocks.’
“He didn’t say anything else. He took the child’s hand in his and the child looked up at him trustingly, and the next moment they were walking across the lawn away from us and we were alone.
“So we went to St. Ives. It was a hot day, rather like this one, and after we’d bought the shellfish we paused at one of the coves down the coast to bathe. I’ve forgotten what the cove was called. It was very small and you could only reach it when the tide was out a certain distance. No one else was there.
“I don’t make excuses for what happened. I made love with my best friend’s wife, and there can be no excuse for that—no valid excuse. Of course it was Sophia who suggested the swim, and Sophia who knew the cove, and Sophia who took off her clothes first and Sophia who made the first physical contact with her hands, but what if it was? I suppose if I’d had half an ounce of decency I could have said no all along the line, but I didn’t. I suppose I’m not really a particularly decent person. And there were other reasons ... Jon had often taken things of mine, you see. I’d had girls and then as soon as they saw Jon they weren’t interested in me any more. He was interested in motor-racing for a while, and when I introduced him to the right contacts it turned out that he could drive better than I could and the contacts became more interested in him than in me. Oh, there were other situations too, other memories ... It wasn’t Jon’s fault. It was just the way he was made. But I built up quite a store of resentment all the same, a long list of grudges which I barely acknowledged even to myself. When his wife was mine for the taking, I never even hesitated.
“We arrived back at Clougy at about four o’clock in the afternoon. Everyone was very still. At first we thought everyone must be out, and then we heard the piano.
“ ‘He’s crazy,’ said Sophia indolently. ‘Imagine playing the piano indoors on a beautiful afternoon like this!’ And
she walked down the corridor and opened the door of the music room. ‘Jon—’ she began and then stopped. I walked down to see why she had stopped, and then I saw that Jon wasn’t alone in the music room. Marijohn was with him.
“I can’t describe how strange it was. There was no reason why it should be strange at all. Marijohn was sitting on the window-seat, very relaxed and happy, and Jon was on the piano-stool, casual and at ease. They weren’t even within six feet of each other.
“ ‘Hullo,’ said Marijohn to Sophia, and her eyes were very blue and clear and steady. ‘Did you manage to get the shellfish in St. Ives?’ I’ll always remember the way she said that because I saw then for the first time how much she despised Sophia. ‘Did you manage to get the shellfish in St. Ives?’
“And Sophia said, ‘Where’s Michael?’
“Marijohn said she had no idea. And Jon said, ‘Didn’t he go fishing?’ And they laughed together and Jon started to play again.
“We might as well not have existed.
“I’m going down to the cove with Max,’ said Sophia suddenly.
“ ‘Oh yes?’ Jon said, turning a page of music with one hand.
“ ‘Don’t get too sunburnt,’ said Marijohn. ‘The sun’s hot today, isn’t it, Jon?’
“ ‘Very,’ said Jon, and went on playing without looking up.
“So we went out. Sophia was furious although she said nothing. And then when we arrived at the beach we found the child was following us, and she vented her temper on him, telling him to go away. Poor little bastard! He looked so lost and worried. He wandered off along the shore and was soon lost from sight amongst the rocks.
“We had a swim and after that Sophia started to talk. She talked about Marijohn, and in the end she started to cry. ‘I hate it when she comes here,’ she said. ‘I hate it. Nothing ever goes right when she comes.’ And when I asked what Marijohn did, she couldn’t explain and only cried all the more. There was nothing, you see, that was what was so baffling. There was nothing there to explain...
The Dark Shore Page 12