The Shadow and the Peak

by Richard Mason

  It took a little over an hour to reach the school. He drove the station-wagon between the two tall, smooth-trunked eucalyptus-trees that stood like sentinels at the gate. In the garage he nearly ran over Joe.

  “You like me for carry your bag, sir?”

  “No, I’ll manage it myself.”

  He walked up to the Great House. Pawley was taking a history class under one of the junipers, and goggled at Douglas as he passed. He went straight up to the sick-room. Judy, for once, was lying in bed. She sat up.

  “I was absolutely certain you were going to forget!”

  “I hope I’ve brought what you want.”

  “I’d feel marvellous in anything after this. I can go out now—it’s all right, the doctor said I could. Will you take me somewhere? Will you take me round the school?”

  He looked at his watch. “In half an hour. It’s free time then. You can see the hobbies if you want.”

  “That’ll give me time to dress. Will you come back and collect me?”

  He went to his bungalow. There was a letter on his desk from Caroline. It had an Austrian stamp. He left it while he washed and put on a fresh shirt. Leaving it unopened for a few minutes was an idiotic pretence to himself that he didn’t care. Not that he took himself in. It was a sort of discipline, anyhow—an exercise in emotional control. He even opened it in a controlled way, pretending he had no more interest in it than in a circular. She wrote telegraphically. “Hoping to God they don’t ask us how we’ve managed two months on thirty-five pounds. But divine here. (Sorry, too 1920s, you’d say.) Had to flee Switzerland owing influx Southend crowds. Alec met ex-wife in Lucerne and danced with her. Rather chic dancing with ex-wife. You should come back and try it, dear; very fashionable. Why Jamaica, for God’s sake? Alec says your only trouble is Midland morals.” Nice of Alec. He tore the stamp off the envelope to give to John, threw the letter in a drawer, and walked up to the Great House. Judy was making up in the wall-mirror.

  “Heavens, I’m not ready. Do you mind this?” She waved the lipstick.

  “Not in the least.”

  “I look rather a tart when I’m made up. You’ve probably had quite the wrong impression of me up to now.”

  “You had lipstick on when we picked you up.”

  “I bet it was smudged.”

  “It wasn’t—it must be crash-proof.”

  She laughed. “Crash-proof and kiss-proof. It would do as a slogan if you go back to advertising.”

  “Wonderfully.” She went on doing up her face. After a while he told her, “You’re the only person up at the school that I’ve ever been able to talk rubbish with. It’s a terrific relief.”

  “I can’t talk anything but rubbish,” she said. “I never was any use at intellectual conversation.”

  “That isn’t the trouble up here,” he said. “It’s treading on people’s toes and offending sensibilities.”

  “Awful,” she said. “I’d be in the cart the whole time. I’m rotten with other people’s sensibilities.”

  She came across the room on her bare feet, and sat down to put on her shoes. She was wearing a gay summer dress, her figure was as slender as a boy’s. You could see what a good model she must have made. But she had none of the poses that many mannequins develop; she moved with the young eagerness of a foal. It was queer to think she’d tried to commit suicide. He supposed she had done it with the same eagerness and innocence and irresponsibility.

  He smiled.

  “Why are you smiling?” she said.

  “So that you’d ask me why.” She looked perplexed. “I hadn’t enough courage to tell you unless you asked.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “I used to have a day-dream as a boy. I rescued a beautiful girl from a torpedoed ship. Finding you in the aircraft is the nearest I’ve ever come to it. My heroics weren’t quite up to the phantasy, though.”

  She brushed the hair away from her eyes and looked at him, amused.

  “What else happened?”

  “I fell in love with her, of course.”

  He felt foolish after he’d said that, it was like reaching out under the table and pinching a pretty girl’s knee. But a girl with Judy’s looks, who’d knocked about the world as she had, knew how to take knee-pinching and innuendoes in her stride. She just laughed pleasantly and said without any self-consciousness:

  “Don’t for heaven’s sake fall in love with me, Douglas, will you? It’d go to my head at first—and then I’d start behaving like a first-class bitch, and you’d be wishing like hell that I’d never walked out of your day-dream, or that you’d left me to drown.”

  When he went in to supper at half-past seven the Morgans were on the point of leaving, but Duffield had only just started. Duffield was delighted to see him, because he hated being alone at the table with Morgan and his wife. It was a strain for him to pretend to ignore their conversation, and he had no opportunity of addressing remarks to a neutral party which were intended in a thinly veiled way to cause offence to the Morgans. It might have been thought that in the stir caused by the aircraft crash they would have started talking to one another and ended the feud—but evidently they hadn’t.

  Duffield was in an unusually good temper. His hair had been cut down almost to the roots again.

  “I hear you’re making good headway with our young friend upstairs,” he said after the Morgans had gone. Of course he hadn’t heard it at all—he had happened to see Douglas showing her round the school.

  “Magnificent headway,” Douglas said. “I took her down to eat guavas off the trees. She liked those. It sent my stock up a mile.”

  “Want to take her down to eat some of Morgan’s oranges next time,” Duffield said. That amused him enormously. He practically smiled. Morgan allowed no one within fifty yards of his orange-trees.

  “Or the grapefruit,” Douglas said. Morgan’s grapefruit always won prizes. But he was sorry he’d said that. It sounded as if he was taking sides with Duffield, and he never took sides. However, Duffield was delighted with the remark. He glowed.

  “Don’t care for a woman with painted nails myself,” he said reasonably, as though he conceded that it was no more than a trifling personal prejudice. “But I grant you she’s a good-looker.”

  “For these parts, anyhow.”

  “You want to watch out, though.” He was the man with infinite experience of women. “Don’t want to burn your fingers, or we’ll be hearing wedding-bells before we know where we are.” He spoke waggishly.

  “We didn’t get as far as discussing anything like that this afternoon.”

  “You looked as though you were getting on all right.” He was still joking. “I don’t miss much, you know. I’ve had plenty of experience myself. You don’t stay a bachelor to the age of forty without knowing how to look after yourself. You’ll grant that.”

  Douglas granted it. It sounded as though Duffield was leading up to his reminiscences. He was. He went on to tell Douglas about a girl in Bolton whom he’d courted, until he’d come to the conclusion that marriage would interfere with his career. He had broken the girl’s heart, but think of all the children who had thereafter benefited from his singleness of purpose. Then there’d been the girl in the Middle East during the war. He’d been an education officer out there in the R.A.F. The girl was a sergeant. She’d wanted to go to bed with him, and so that was that. Not that he objected to a spot of fun, he’d been a “bit of a lad” himself in his time, but with a girl it was different. Douglas remembered Morgan once hinting that Duffield slept with one of the coloured servants. He doubted if it was true.

  The reminiscences put Duffield in an even better humour. After supper he asked Douglas down to his bungalow for a tot of rum. Douglas went in order not to offend him. The tots lived down to their name, you could hardly taste the rum after adding water. Duffield never drank much himself, probably out
of parsimony, although he had long since turned it into a matter of principle. Douglas suspected that he had remained a bachelor for the same reason. He had made that into a virtue, too. He was as adept in the art of justification, always convincing himself first. Well, there were others who were pretty good hands at that game.

  From romantic biography Duffield passed on to education. A discussion about education with Duffield rarely touched on anything more subtle than the question of corporal punishment. He trotted out a few old stories about boys he’d licked and then shaken hands with, and ten years later they’d come back as successful men and thanked him for the lickings. One of them had become a Member of Parliament at thirty. The Member of Parliament had told Duffield that he might not have been a Member of Parliament but for Duffield’s conscientious attention to his behind. Douglas asked Duffield if he was a good M.P., and Duffield said, “He doesn’t stand for any of this bolshie nonsense, anyhow.” That didn’t seem to answer the question, but it was left at that. Douglas tried to lead him off corporal punishment before he trotted out that in his days at school you got the sort of whacking that stopped you sitting down for a week, and it hadn’t done him any harm, had it? But Duffield wouldn’t be headed off, and so Douglas just gripped his glass and resisted the observation that if it hadn’t been for that sort of whacking, he might not be so obsessed with the idea of whacking now. Soon afterwards he said he ought to be getting along. Duffield said what about one for the road, and poured out a rather more generous tot. He was damn lonely, and liked talking once he got warmed up. He quite liked Douglas, thinking­ him misguided and inexperienced, but open to conversion to his own points of view. He also liked Douglas because of his feud with the Morgans—he hadn’t quite enough nerve to dislike everyone at once. While Douglas drank the tot for the road, Duffield told him why he hadn’t gone back to teach at the same grammar-school after the war. It was because of the new headmaster. He’d taken one look at the new headmaster, and that was enough. The new headmaster was only thirty-two and a blighted bolshie. Douglas thought that things in the grammar-school must be looking up, and finished the drink. Duffield said, “I was offered the head­mastership myself in nineteen-thirty-nine, and I turned it down to join up. That’s how they thank you for doing­ your bit.” Douglas took this with reservation, but thought he now understood why Duffield had come to Jamaica. He’d often wondered. He got up.

  “Might as well finish the bottle,” Duffield said.

  “I’ll leave that to you.”

  “Hurrying off to call on our friend?” he said, getting waggish again.

  “That would cause a scandal, wouldn’t it?”

  He left Duffield and walked back towards his bungalow. The moon was nearly full, and he could see his way as if it was daylight. He hadn’t thought of going up to call on our friend, but now he did think of it, and the idea threw him into a state of perturbation. He might have been a schoolboy contemplating a daring prank. He stopped at the fork where one path led on to his bungalow and the other up the grass slope to the Great House. He was actually trembling, and his stomach was leaden with apprehension. He didn’t know whether he was apprehensive about what Judy would think or about what anyone else might think who found out. He was sure to run into Mr. or Mrs. Morgan, who lived in the Great House on the same floor as the sick-room. He looked at his watch. It was just after nine. He couldn’t stay in the sick-room, but he could ask Judy if she would like to come to his bungalow and have a drink. She was bored, he felt sure she would come. If she came he would make love to her. He saw himself making love to her, and he was stroking away the hair from her forehead and he was saying, Judy darling, darling Judy, you came to me out of the sky . . . and then he again thought of running into Mrs. Morgan in the corridor and feeling a fool and not knowing what to say, and Mrs. Morgan going back to talk scandal with her husband. And then he thought Judy didn’t want to be made love to, and then he remembered her saying it would go to her head and he thought that she did, and then he didn’t know what to think and he stood there in the moonlight at the fork of the path perspiring with indecision. God, one never grew up. He had stood like this long before the war, and before Caroline, at the fork of a road in Notting Hill Gate trying to find courage to call on a girl in a boarding-house and seduce her. On that occasion he’d called and he had been paralysed with nerves, and the girl, who was nineteen and probably a virgin, had said she would give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he was mad. He had learnt something since then, though, and he had lost his spots. He hoped nobody was watching him standing there in the moonlight, and he pretended to be examining the leaves of a shrub. He hadn’t learnt all that much. He hadn’t learnt expedience, it appeared; he hadn’t learnt that as a schoolmaster you didn’t start making love right in the middle of the school to a girl you scarcely knew. He let this argument of expedience impress him, and he left the bush and started walking down the path through the undergrowth towards his own bungalow. The weight of apprehension left his stomach. God save expedience; what a bloody fool he’d nearly been.

  When he reached the bungalow he felt exhausted after all that indecision, and he fetched a glass and a bottle of rum and a bottle of ginger from inside and sat down in a chair on the verandah. He knew it hadn’t been expedience at all, it had been plain funk. Calling it expedience was a Duffield trick, making a virtue of a shortcoming. All the same, he was glad he hadn’t gone up to Judy now. He had stopped wanting her so much, and it didn’t seem so likely that she wanted him. She wouldn’t have assumed he must be mad, she wasn’t that sort; but she might have laughed and said no. She might have told him she was still in love with Louis. Not that he thought that would stop her. Or would it? You never knew.

  He poured himself out a small rum, and then he made it a large one just to show Duffield. It was a warm night; the moon increased in brilliance as it rose. The harbour and plain lay below him, bathed in the flat white light. The spidery line of surf on the Palisadoes was like a streak of forked lightning on a photograph. The lights of Kingston radiated like yellow stars into the bony whiteness of the plain. He remembered what he had felt like in Kingston that morning. He remembered it so well that it was as though he still existed down there, and had been permitted at the same time to step up to heaven and take a look at himself from the viewpoint of a god—or that he was an actor who had left his shell on the stage while he went up to see what he looked like from a box. It was queer how you could look at yourself in different ways. Not that it meant much. In the end you were just yourself; you were the person who did or didn’t like figs, the person who did or didn’t believe in beatings, the person who had or hadn’t been divorced. You might sometimes cover your mediocrity with a cloak of yellow stars, but came the dawn and you had to throw it off.

  He remembered he had a cigar in the bungalow, and went in to fetch it. He sat down again and lit it, and wondered what he ought to do about Judy. He thought about her long, slender legs and her quick, frank smile. Probably she was very promiscuous and would let him make love to her, and afterwards he would regret it because she would go away. He was not good at making love to people and not falling in love with them; he was more like a woman in that way. He had even got upset over that Chinese girl in Penang, who had loved him so much on account of his nice red tins of Craven “A” cigarettes which could be sold for eight dollars a tin, and he hadn’t even been able to talk to her except in mime. He could fall in love in a brothel; though unfortunately he couldn’t fall out of love with Caroline in one or he’d have tried it long ago. Perhaps Judy would help him fall out of love with Caroline a bit. It was a good excuse, anyhow.

  The cigar was a good one. In England it would have cost five-and-six, but in Jamaica it only cost a shilling. Its aroma gave him a sense of well-being, and he thought of stroking the hair out of Judy’s eye again, instead of her having to do it for herself, and the pleasure of saying Judy darling, darling Judy; and he decided that he would see her tomorrow
and ask her if she would like to come down after dinner; and she would know what he meant and would say yes or no. Thank God, she wasn’t the sort who would say yes, if you promise not to take advantage of me, and would come down and arrange her skirt so that you saw her thighs and then say, now don’t spoil it all, you remember you promised.

  It was only half-past nine, and he gave himself another rum. As he put the cork back in the bottle he wondered if tomorrow morning he would be feeling expedient again—he was nearly always expedient in the mornings—and would decide to leave Judy alone, and in a few days she would go away and that would be that. It was funny not to know whether he would ever make love to Judy or not. If it wasn’t Judy, he wondered who would be the next person he’d make love to. He was still wondering this when he was startled by the sound of an animal crashing through the undergrowth, and a moment later one of Mrs. Pawley’s Dalmatians bounded out on to the path in front of the bungalow. It was immediately joined by the second. They both stood there, panting in the moonlight. Their coats might have been designed as a moonlight camouflage, for the black spots were like the speckled shadows of leaves.