He was still trying to find his breath, still trembling, his fists clenched with his tension and his eyes tight shut for a second as if in pain. He can’t relax, she thought, and neither can I. There’s no peace. We should be able to sleep now for a while but we won’t. There’s no peace here, no rest.
“Jon,” she said. “Jon darling, take me away from here. Let’s go tomorrow. Please. Let’s go back to London, back to Canada, anywhere, but don’t let’s stay here anymore.”
His fists were clenched so tightly that the skin was white across the knuckles. “Why?” he said indistinctly into the pillow, his voice truculent and hostile. “Why? Give me one good reason.”
And when she was silent he reached out and pulled her towards him in a violent gesture of love. “Give me another couple of days,” he said. “Please. If you love me, give me that. I can’t go just yet.”
She tried to frame the word “why” but it refused to come. She got up, went into the bathroom and washed, but when she returned from the bathroom she found that he was still lying in the same position. She started to dress. Time passed.
At last, sitting down in front of the mirror, she began to do her hair but still she made no attempt to speak, and the silence between them remained unbroken.
“Sarah,” Jon said at last in distress. “Sarah, please.”
She swiveled round to face him. “Is Marijohn your mistress?”
There was utter silence. He stared at her, his eyes dark and opaque. “No,” he said at last. “Of course not. Sarah—”
“Has she ever been your mistress?”
“No!” he said with sudden violent resentment. “Never!”
“Were you having an affair with her when Sophia was killed?”
“No!” he shouted, springing off the bed and coming across the room towards her. “No, no, no!” He took her by the shoulders and started to shake her. “No, no, no—”
“Jon,” she said gently. “Shhh, Jon...”
He sank down beside her on the stool. “If that’s why you want to leave, you can forget it,” he said tightly. “There’s nothing like that between us. She—” He stopped.
“She?”
“She detests any form of physical love,” he said. “Didn’t you guess? She can’t even bear being touched however casually by a man. Did you never notice how I’ve always avoided touching her? Did you never notice how I didn’t kiss her when we met? Didn’t you notice any of those things?”
She stared at him. He stared back, his hands trembling.
“I see,” she said, at last.
He relaxed, and she knew in a flash that he had not understood. He thought she understood only the key to Marijohn’s remoteness, and he never knew that all she understood was the despair in his eyes and the physical frustration in every line of his tense, taut frame.
3
When Sarah went downstairs the hall was dim and quiet and she decided the others must still be in the garden. There was no sign of Max Alexander. After pausing by the open front door to glance up the hillside and listen to the rushing water beyond the gateway she crossed the hall and opened the drawing-room door.
She had been wrong. Rivers and Marijohn were no longer in the garden. As she entered the room, Rivers swung round abruptly to face the door and Marijohn glanced up from her position on the sofa.
“I—I’m sorry,” stammered Sarah. “I thought—”
“That’s all right,” Rivers said easily, lulling her feeling of embarrassment. “Come on in. We were just wondering whether Max has been washed away by the tide down in the cove.”
Marijohn stood up. She wore a plain linen dress, narrow and simple, without sleeves. It was a beautiful color. She wore no makeup and no jewelry, and Sarah noticed for the first time that she had even removed her wedding-ring.
“Where are you going?” said Rivers sharply.
“Just to see about dinner.” She moved over to the door, not hurrying, her eyes not watching either of them, and went out into the hall.
There was a silence.
“Drink, Sarah?” said Rivers at last.
“No, thank you.” She sat down, twisting the material of her dress into tight ridges across her thighs and wondering what Rivers had been saying before she had interrupted him. She was just trying to think of some remark which might begin a polite conversation and ease the silence in the room when Rivers said, “Is Jon upstairs?”
“Yes—yes, he is.”
“I see.” He was by the sideboard, his hand on the decanter. “Sure you won’t join me in a drink?”
She shook her head again and watched him as he mixed himself a whisky and soda.
“How long,” he said presently, “are you staying here?”
“I don’t know.”
He turned to face her abruptly and as she looked at him she saw that he knew.
“You want to go, don’t you?”
“No,” she said, lying out of pride. “No, I like it here.”
“I shouldn’t stay here too long if I were you.”
She shrugged, assuming indifference. “Jon wants to stay here for a day or two longer.”
“I’m sure he does.” He took a gulp of his drink and she saw his fingers tighten on the stem of his glass. “I didn’t realize you would both be coming down here,” he said evenly at last. “I didn’t think he would be seeing Marijohn again. She had made up her mind not to see him again, I know. I suppose he persuaded her to change her mind.”
She stared at him blankly. From somewhere far away she heard the clatter of a saucepan in the kitchen.
“He wanted to see her again—I know that because he came to me in an attempt to find out where she was. Naturally I didn’t tell him. I knew she had made up her mind that it would be much better for her not to see him again, and I knew too that it would be disastrous if—”
He stopped.
There were footsteps on the stairs, Jon whistling the old American country song You Win Again.
“Listen,” said Rivers suddenly. “I must talk to you further about this. It’s in both our interests, don’t you understand? I must talk to you.”
“But I don’t see. Why should—”
“You have to get Jon away from here. I can’t persuade Marijohn to leave—we’re not even married any more. But you can persuade Jon. God, you’re all but on your honeymoon, aren’t you? Get him away from here, right away. Back to Canada, anywhere—but get him away from this place.”
“From this place?”
“From Marijohn.”
The whistling stopped; the door opened.
“Sarah? Ah, there you are! Come on down to the cove with me and rescue Max!”
“I think,” said Rivers, “that he’s just walking up to the gateway.”
“Well, so he is!” Jon moved out on to the lawn. “Max!” he shouted his hand raised in welcome. “Where’ve you been, you bastard? We thought you’d drowned yourself!”
Rivers was already beside her even as she stood up to follow Jon out on to the lawn.
“Come for a walk with me after supper and I’ll explain.”
“I—”
“You must,” he interrupted. “I don’t think you understand the danger you’re in.”
She felt the color drain from her face as she stared into his eyes. And then Jon was blazing across the silence, bursting back into the room to mix a round of drinks, and Alexander was crossing the threshold of the French windows with a lazy, indolent smile on his face.
“Why, Michael! Fancy that! Just like old times! How are you these days? Still soliciting?”
There was brittle, empty conversation for a few minutes. Max started to expound the virtues of his latest car. Jon, moving across to Sarah, kissed her on the mouth with his back to the others and sat down beside her on the sofa.
“All right?”
When she nodded he put his hand over hers and kept it there. She stared blindly down at his fingers, not hearing Max Alexander’s voice, aware of nothing except that Jo
n was a stranger to her whom she could not trust. It occurred to her dully to wonder if she had ever imagined unhappiness to be like this; it’s not the raw nagging edge of desolation, she thought, but the tight darkness of fear. The pain is convex and opaque and absolute.
Marijohn returned to the room fifteen minutes later.
“I suppose Justin’s coming back for dinner, Jon?”
He shrugged. “I’ve no idea. I imagine so.”
“Can I get you a drink, Marijohn?”
“No ... no thanks. I think I’ll go out for a while. Dinner will be in about another half hour.”
On the sofa Sarah felt Jon stir restlessly.
“Another drink, Jon?” offered Max Alexander from the sideboard.
Jon didn’t answer.
“Jon,” said Sarah, pressing against him instinctively. “Jon.”
“Do you want to come, Michael?” said Marijohn. “I don’t want to walk far, just down to the cove and back.”
“No,” said Rivers. “I’m in the middle of a perfectly good whisky and soda and I want to finish it and have another one to follow.”
“Don’t look at me, Marijohn,” advised Max Alexander. “I’ve staggered down to the cove and back already this afternoon. I’ve had my share of exercise today.”
Jon stood up, hesitated and then reached for the cigarette box to help himself to a cigarette.
“Do you want to go, Jon?” said Rivers pleasantly.
“Not particularly.” He lit the cigarette, wandered over to the fireplace and started to straighten the ornaments on the mantelshelf.
Marijohn walked away across the lawn. She walked very slowly, as if savoring each step. Jon glanced after her once and then abruptly turned his back on the window and flung himself down in the nearest armchair.
“Why don’t you go, Jon?” said Rivers. “Don’t feel you have to stay here and entertain us—I’m sure Sarah would make an admirable hostess. Why don’t you go with Marijohn?”
Jon inhaled from his cigarette and watched the blue smoke curl upwards from between his fingers. “We’ve been down to the sea already today.”
“Oh, I see... Not to the Flat Rocks, by any chance?”
“I say,” said Alexander suddenly, “what the hell’s Justin doing in St.—”
“No,” said Jon to Rivers. “Just down to the cove.”
“How strange. Marijohn told me she hadn’t been down to the cove today.”
“Sarah,” said Max. “Do you know what Justin’s doing in St. Ives?”
“Do you often come down here?” said Jon idly to Rivers. “It must take up a lot of your time if you have to visit Marijohn personally whenever it’s necessary to discuss some business problem with her. Or do you like to have a good excuse to visit her as often as possible?”
“At least,” said Rivers, “my excuse for coming here is a damned sight better than yours.”
“Look,” said Max, spilling his drink slightly on the carpet, “for Christ’s sake, why doesn’t one of you go down to the cove with Marijohn now? Michael, she asked you—why the hell don’t you go if you’ve come down here to see her?”
Jon flung his cigarette into the fireplace and stood up. “Come on, Sarah, we’ll go down together.”
There was a silence. They were all looking at her.
“No,” she said too loudly, “no, I don’t want to come. I’d rather stay here.”
Jon shrugged his shoulders. “Just as you like,” he said shortly, sounding as if he couldn’t have cared less, and walked through the open French windows across the lawn without even a hint of a backward glance.
4
In St. Ives the white houses were basking in the golden glow of evening and the sea was still and calm. In the little house in one of the back-alleys near Fish Street. Justin was holding a mug of steaming coffee in his hands and wondering what had possessed him to tell this woman the story of his life. It was her fault. If she had not questioned him so closely about the aftermath of that terrible weekend at Clougy he would not have needed to explain anything about his grandmother and the parting from his father, but for some reason he had wanted to explain. At first he had been guarded and cautious, but when she had seemed to understand he had lost some of his reserve. She hadn’t laughed at him. As the afternoon slid gently away from them, he began to trust her sufficiently to be able to talk more freely.
“And you never told anyone what you saw that night?” she said at last. “You said nothing?”
“I didn’t think it would help my father.”
“But you’re sure now that he didn’t kill her.”
“He told me he didn’t. Someone else must have killed her. I have to find out who it was.”
She thought about it for a long moment, and the smoke from her cigarette curled lazily upwards until it was caught in the slanting rays of sunlight and transformed into a golden haze.
“I thought at the time that Jon had probably killed her,” she said at last. “But it was a mere suspicion backed up by the knowledge that he had more than enough provocation that weekend ... And then last week Max phoned me and asked me out to dinner. As soon as I saw him I realized he was itching to discuss his meeting with Jon earlier and speculate on why Jon should return to Clougy. We talked for hours, recalling all our memories, and in the end he said Jon had half-invited him down to Clougy and he had a good mind to accept in order to have the chance of finding out what was going on. He was convinced that Jon had killed Sophia and he thought it curious, to say the least, that Jon should take his new wife back there ten years later. I’d planned to take a few days’ holiday anyway at around this time, and I suddenly thought it might be rather interesting to come down here so that I would be close at hand if Max should discover anything ... But the more I thought about Jon and his connection with Sophia’s death, the more I felt—” She stopped.
“Felt?”
“I—I felt that it was better to let sleeping dogs lie ... After all, it was ten years ago, and Jon’s married again now. I suddenly disliked the thought of Max deliberately going down to Clougy with the idea of probing a past which was better buried and forgotten.”
“So you wrote to my father to warn him.”
“Yes, I thought he should know Max’s motives in returning to Clougy.” She leant forward and stubbed out her cigarette. “Odd how convinced Max was that she had been murdered ... After all, murder was never mentioned at the time, was it? And the jury at the inquest decided it was an accident. But maybe we all knew she’d been murdered although we were too frightened to say so. That’s ironic, isn’t it! We all had a motive, you see, each one of us. We all had a reason for killing her, so we all kept silent and accepted the verdict of accident because we were afraid of casting suspicion on ourselves by speaking our suspicions aloud to the police ... What’s the matter? Didn’t you guess I might have had a motive for wishing your mother dead?”
He shook his head wordlessly, watching her.
“I was an outsider from the first,” she said, lighting another cigarette and shaking out the match as she spoke. “They all belonged to a different world—all of them except Sophia, and even her world of Soho cafes wasn’t exactly mine. I was only eighteen then; I hadn’t been working in London for very long. I met Max by accident at some party which I and a few friends had gatecrashed and I didn’t know the kind of man he was. I just knew he was rich and moved in an expensive, exciting world, and I didn’t find it difficult to fall in love and start to imagine all kinds of exotic, romantic pictures. It’s so easy when one’s only eighteen to live with one’s head in the clouds, isn’t it? Anyway, we had an affair, and eventually he took me to Clougy for that weekend.
“I was still in love with him then, still dreaming my romantic little daydreams.
“I think I hated Clougy from the first moment that I saw it. As for the other people, I didn’t understand them at all—God, how baffling they seemed at the time! I found Jon interesting but he scarcely seemed to notice I existed—he was entirel
y engrossed with his wife and his cousin, and cared for nothing else. As for his cousin—well, I had nothing to say to her; we simply didn’t even begin to talk the same language. The solicitor-husband was nice but too polite to be friendly, and anyway he too seemed to be almost entirely wrapped up in his personal problems. I disliked Sophia straight away, but it wasn’t a very active dislike. I remember thinking that she just seemed rather common and vulgar.
“She started to flirt with Max about an hour after we’d arrived. I didn’t take her seriously at first because I thought she surely couldn’t flirt with one of her guests under her husband’s nose, but that was my mistake. She meant it all right. The next morning Max and I quarreled violently and he went off with Sophia to St. Ives on a—quote ‘shopping expedition,’ unquote. I don’t think I’ve ever been so unhappy either before or since. I stayed in my room all morning and until the early evening when I heard them come back from St. Ives. After a while I went to look for Max and you told me—do you remember?—that he’d gone down to the cove with your mother for a swim. So I went out, taking the path down to the beach.
“I heard them talking before I saw them. She was saying in that ugly foreign voice of hers that she had a wonderful scheme all planned. She was sick to death of Clougy and wanted to get away from Jon and go back to London, and Max was to be her savior. She had it all worked out—a cosy little ménage a deux with just the right-sized luxury flat in Mayfair and maybe a cosy little divorce at the end of the rainbow. It sounded wonderful. God, how I hated her! I can’t describe how much I hated her at that moment. And then I realized that Max wasn’t exactly enthralled with all these beautiful schemes and I suddenly wanted to laugh out loud. He tried to put it tactfully at first but when she refused to understand, he spoke more frankly. He didn’t want a ménage a deux in Mayfair or the scandal and publicity of being correspondent in his best friend’s divorce suit! The last thing he wanted was to have Sophia permanently on his hands in London! He didn’t really want an affair with the woman at all and the thought of her shouting from the rooftops that she was his mistress was enough to make his blood run cold. ‘Look,’ he said to her. ‘I can’t and won’t play your game the way you want it played. You’d better find yourself another lover.’ And then just as I was closing my eyes in sheer relief I heard the woman say, ‘I have to get away from here—you don’t understand. I’ll go mad if I have to stay here any longer. If you don’t take me to London and give me money and somewhere to live I’ll make you the most famous correspondent in town and blow your friendship with Jon to smithereens.’
The Dark Shore Page 14