The Shadow and the Peak

by Richard Mason

  Her eyes were bright with hatred, and at the same time there was something like triumph in them—perhaps the triumph of arousing his anger. He thought she would refuse to go and he would have the discomfort of carrying out his threat; but she smiled in a way that was dangerously undefeated, and said:

  “All right, I’m not interested in your stupid expedition, anyway.” She turned and walked off up the path.

  When he caught up with the other children again, John came to his side.

  “It was partly my fault, Mr. Lockwood,” he said meekly. “I pretended to hit her, and she thought I really meant to, so she started the fight.”

  “It was silly of you both,” he said.

  “Why did you send her back? Because she called me a leper?”

  “It was a disgraceful thing to say to anybody.”

  “You don’t think she could have really thought—?”

  “Don’t be absurd, John,” Douglas said. “You’re used to Silvia by now, aren’t you?”

  *

  The coffee factory was on a stream. Part of the stream was directed through the building, where it washed the berries, and then the berries were spread out on the flat concrete barbecues to dry in the sun. A rain-cloud drifted overhead. The manager blew his whistle, and half a dozen Negroes jumped into action and brushed the berries into sheds. The rain-cloud passed without giving rain. The manager blew his whistle twice. The workmen brushed out the berries again, coating the concrete with an even layer. The manager was a Jamaican, with bushy white hair and a kind brown face that matched the newly sun-tanned berries. He led the children into the factory to demonstrate the machines—one that sorted the berries into sizes, and one that picked out the misshapen offenders which might displease the connoisseurs of Blue Mountain coffee. Then they all trooped into the shed where plump and jolly coloured girls were making the final inspection, dribbling the berries through their fingers—and after that they sat by the stream and ate their sandwiches, and the manager sent down a tray of lime-juice, freshly made. They had only just finished lunch when the manager’s whistle blew. A cloud obscured the sun and it began to rain. After Morgan’s forecast of fine weather, they might have expected it.

  They sheltered in the factory. The first deluge settled down into a steady drizzle, and the sky became a dull uniform grey. They waited half an hour, and then decided to step out into the drizzle and start home. It was a steep track up the hillside, but the children were in a good humour and still very lively.

  Douglas was not in such a good humour: he was upset about John and worried about Silvia. It occurred to him that Silvia might have taken it into her head to run away. He recalled the expression in her eyes of hatred and triumph. He should have sent her back with an escort—sent her straight to Pawley and transferred the responsibility to him. He wished he had thought of it at the time. But it was no use wishing . . . he decided to think of something else, and he thought of Judy and wondered what she was doing at this precise moment with Louis. It was probably raining in Kingston as well, and they would be in the flat, and he thought of the intimate little flat with the kitchen and the fridge and the stock of food to withstand a siege for a month, and the bedroom and the golden smooth­ness of Judy’s legs . . .

  “What are you thinking about, Mr. Lockwood?”

  “I’m hoping nobody will catch pneumonia.”

  “I shan’t. I adore the rain.”

  “Your hair’s dripping,” he said. “You look like a mermaid.”

  “I don’t believe in mermaids.”

  “You ought to. It’s good to believe in things.”

  When they reached the farm they found Morgan working amongst the grapefruit trees. He was enveloped in a black sou’wester and an immense black mackintosh cape.

  “Sorry I didn’t catch you again before you went off,” he said. “I had another look at the barometer. I could tell this was coming. I’m glad for the farm.”

  They were all soaked through to the skin by now. They dripped all over the hall of the Great House. He hurried the children upstairs to have baths, and went into the kitchen to arrange for a brew of tea. Then he went upstairs and found Mrs. Morgan. He asked her if she had seen Silvia.

  “Yes she came back, Mr. Lockwood. She wouldn’t say why. I thought she must be ill, because she didn’t eat any lunch. She’s been sitting in the library all day.”

  “She’s still there?”

  “I think so.”

  He went downstairs and looked into the library. Silvia was sitting at a table, reading a book. She glanced up and saw it was Douglas, and immediately looked down at her book again. He felt most relieved. Perhaps her need for revenge would be satisfied by the rain and the fact that they had all got wet. He closed the door and went into the kitchen for a cup of tea. Ivy saw his wet clothes and started giggling, and the pain of restraint drove her into retreat in the pantry. When she eventually returned, he asked her to run down to his bungalow and fetch his towel and a change of clothes, so that he could take a hot bath up at the Great House. She put on her mackintosh and went off, her plump little body still quivering with mirth. He took his tea into the dining-room, and began to wonder what would have happened if Louis hadn’t turned up the day before yesterday. How long would the happiness with Judy have lasted? A long time, perhaps—until Louis turned up somewhere else. Louis would always turn up . . . He was just finishing the tea when Ivy returned. She had none of the things he had asked her to fetch. She was no longer giggling. She looked as frightened as if she had run into a whole battalion of duppies.

  “What’s the matter, Ivy?”

  She could hardly speak.

  “Somebody is bin in your bungalow, sir.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Yes, please, sir. Somebody is bin in.”

  It was all she could say. He left her and walked out of the Great House and down the grass slope. It was slippery and he had to go carefully. The door of the bungalow was standing open—there were no thefts up here, and he was not in the habit of keeping it locked. He went in, and stopped at once.

  It was necessary to stop, because there was no room to walk. He had never seen a room in such incredible confusion. It looked as if a hurricane had passed through. Everything possible had been overturned. The floor was a chaos of torn papers, bedclothes, and broken glass. The drawers had been dragged from the chest and emptied out. The gramophone lay open and upside down amidst fragments of records. The bedside table had been smashed. Every-thing had been swept off the top of the desk. A bottle of rum had been shattered in the stone fireplace.

  He stood for a minute staring in bewilderment. Then he stepped across the bed. The mattress had been thrown off, so he sat on the bare springs. He had cooled down after the climb, and he began to shiver in his wet clothes.

  Soon he noticed something scribbled in red pencil on the opposite wall. It was in large lettering, but he had to get up and go across before he could read it. It said:

  Dear Mr. Lockwood,

  I hope you had a nice expedition.

  With love from,

  Silvia.

  Underneath this she had written, in capital letters and followed by an exclamation mark, the worst obscenity she knew. Douglas could have thought of no worse one himself.

  After a hot bath he accepted a stiff glass of rum from Mrs. Morgan, and then went down to Pawley’s bungalow. Pawley left his wife in the drawing-room and accompanied Douglas to the study. He listened to the story with his customary patience.

  “And now,” Douglas said, when he had reached the end, “you’d better ask Silvia’s father to take her away.”

  This was obviously what Pawley would want to do, so he might as well suggest it first.

  It was not what Pawley wanted to do at all. After a long pause for considering every angle, he pushed himself back in his chair and said:

  “I’
m disappointed you should suggest that, Lockwood. I should have thought it was rather an admission of defeat.” This was also what Douglas would have thought, but it was a point of view he had not felt up to defending. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to defend it either—just then he would happily have given Silvia away with a crate of rum.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I imagined that by now you must have lost faith in her—or at any rate in me.”

  Pawley beamed reassuringly.

  “I don’t ask you to work miracles. But perhaps it’s too much to expect you to have more patience. You must have suffered a substantial loss. Of course I shall ask her father to reimburse you—and meanwhile we can help you from school funds—but it’s naturally caused you a great deal of inconvenience.”

  “I don’t mind about that,” Douglas said. “Most of the stuff belonged to the school. I’ve nothing except the few clothes I flew out with.”

  “All the same—” Pawley said condolingly. This was one of his psychological gambits, straight from the book about how to influence people. He was influencing Douglas very well.

  Douglas said, “I’d be perfectly happy to keep on trying with Silvia. But I want your support. If her next move is to murder Mrs. Morgan, I don’t want to feel it’s all my responsibility.”

  “I don’t think you’ve ever found me unwilling to accept responsibility, have you?” Pawley asked in a plaintive sort of way.

  “Not at all,” Douglas said. “But I want your advice on what to do with Silvia. Are we going to punish her?”

  Pawley knitted his brows.

  “We must put our heads together,” he said. “What are your own ideas?”

  “Well, I know all the arguments for punishing her,” Douglas said. “Let her get away with it and she’ll do it again. Don’t punish her and she’ll despise you. I can hear the whole chorus shouting out that all she needs is an almighty thrashing that will stop her sitting down for a week. There’s probably a lot in it.”

  “You think it’s the solution?” he said, goggling non-committally.

  “I’ve no doubt it would save a great deal of further expense in broken gramophone records.”

  “And it would help Silvia?”

  “Perhaps it would,” Douglas said. “Perhaps her last school wasn’t ruthless enough. They shut her up in her room, but forgot to bar the windows. Perhaps she ought to go to a reformatory. Some place where they’re tough enough to break her.”

  “Shall we recommend it to her father?” Pawley said, looking humorous. “Shall we close down the Great House and admit we’re barking up the wrong tree?”

  “Why not?” Douglas said. “Because if we don’t, I’d like to know what I’m going to say to Silvia, and in what way.”

  Pawley smiled and looked confident, and said helpfully:

  “It’s no use my giving you advice about that. It’s a matter of individual touch. But I know I can rely on you absolutely, Lockwood—absolutely.”

  He had seldom felt less like relying on himself absolutely. He would have sacrificed a great many principles to have the cowardly catalogue of penalties at his elbow—but now he was committed to the progressive way of treatment, so he sent a message up for Silvia. He still didn’t know what he was going to say to her. He had got over being angry and now he was only nervous about messing up the interview. He had hardly been more nervous as a boy when it had been the other way round, and his name had been read out after Prayers to attend outside the housemaster’s door.

  He reminded himself that Silvia must be nervous, too, but she was working desperately hard not to show it. She came down at once in response to his message, to demonstrate her boldness and lack of guilt or concern. He was beginning to tidy up. She stood insolently in the doorway, and he went on tidying, trying not to look concerned either.

  “Now you’ve got an excuse for expelling me,” she said.

  “You didn’t make a very good job of it,” he said. “I thought you might like to finish it off.” He picked an unbroken gramophone record from the pile, and held it out to her. She didn’t take it, so he said, “Go on. I want to see what you look like in the throes of your destructive passion.”

  She took the record with a smile and tossed it lightly on the floor. It broke into several pieces.

  “That’s fine,” he said. “Only there wasn’t much passion. Try something else.” He lifted an upturned chair and put it in front of her.

  “I’ve done all I want,” she said.

  “Have you lost your spirit?” he said. “I’m disappointed in you. Look, you even forgot to tear up my clothes. I’d have been furious if I’d got back wet and found nothing to change into. What on earth made you overlook them?”

  “I couldn’t be bothered,” she said with a shrug.

  “Well, why did you do it at all?” he said. “Have you the faintest idea?”

  She smiled contemptuously, without answering.

  “It evidently wasn’t because you missed the coffee factory,” he said. “You said you didn’t care about that.”

  “It was because you made me go back and not John. It wasn’t fair.”

  “How would you like to be called a leper?”

  “John is one.”

  “He isn’t,” Douglas said. “And you might have done a great deal of harm by calling him one.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Perhaps you don’t care,” Douglas said. “But I do, because I’m here to look after the interests of all the children, not only yours. What would you have done if you’d been in my shoes?” She shrugged again, and he said, “But if you ask me, that’s not why you smashed up my room. You did it to show you hated me.”

  “I don’t hate you,” she said indifferently.

  “Yes, you do. You hate me because you can’t succeed in making me punish you. You’re going to hate me more than ever after this, because I’m still not going to punish you. I’m a rotten spoil-sport, aren’t I? I don’t give you anything to get your teeth into. I stop you feeling important.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

  “You’ll know if you think about it,” he said. “Now for heaven’s sake stop trying to look so damned superior. Go and sit on the bed.”

  She hesitated. Then she went haughtily across the room and sat down.

  “Don’t you ever relax?” he said.

  “I’m quite all right, thank you.”

  “You’re not posing for a photograph. Relax. Lie down if you want.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Well, let yourself go. Just look at your fingers!” She looked at them involuntarily and looked away again at once. “They’re as taut as violin strings. So are the muscles in your face. How in the world can you be yourself when you’re all tensed up like that?” She said nothing. “Or don’t you want to be yourself?” He picked a drawer off the floor and fitted it back into the desk.

  After a minute he said, “You know, it must have taken a lot of energy to muck up this room. Has it ever struck you that you’ve only a certain amount of energy to spend in the whole of your life? It’s worth wondering what’s the best way to spend it, Some people spend theirs building ships or painting beautiful pictures or making films or simply being happy—and here you go squandering yours on trying to make an impression on a handful of schoolchildren and teachers. Trying to show them all how clever you are—and leaving yourself no time for being clever.”

  “How silly!” Silvia said. She had glanced covertly at her fingers once or twice to see if they looked relaxed.

  “You must admit that other girls don’t run after boy-friends and smash up rooms. How do you explain that?”

  “They daren’t.”

  “They don’t want to dare. They don’t have to boost themselves up all the time like you. Perhaps one day they’ll be drawing attention to themselves by being
successful or interesting, and you’ll still be offering round sweets to make people say they like you.”

  She flushed.

  “Who said I did that? It’s a filthy lie.”

  “Is it? Well, that doesn’t matter much. You’ve done lots of other things to make people take notice of you. It puzzles me why you haven’t been still more daring. Why didn’t you set fire to this place instead of emptying the drawers? It would have been far more impressive.”

  “I would, if I’d thought of it.”

  “Would you like to try now?” He threw a box of matches on to the bed.

  “What’s the use when you’re here to stop me?”

  “I won’t stop you.”

  He turned away and went on clearing up the floor. Silvia sat motionless on the bed ignoring the matches. He had been quite confident about that: her pride would stop her doing anything he suggested.

  Presently he said, “Hullo, look what’s here.” He had spotted the elephant on the floor amongst some pieces of smashed crockery. “What a stroke of luck. It isn’t broken—not even the tusks.” He showed it to her. “Did you spare it on purpose?”

  She stared at it sullenly. “Why should I?”

  “I’m delighted it isn’t a casualty, anyhow.” He put it down on the desk, looking towards the window and aiming it. “I’ll have to get this right.”

  “What are you doing?” She tried to drain her voice of interest.

  “He’s my mascot. He’s supposed to bring me luck if I point his trunk to the window. Isn’t it nonsense? I expect you grew out of that sort of thing years ago.” She was silent. “It must be nonsense, anyhow. He was pointing to the window today—and now look what’s happened.”

  “Did you ever believe in it?” She meant to sound scornful.

  “I might have done. I kept him to be on the safe side.”

  “How childish,” she said. He could see that in some way she was rather impressed. Perhaps for the first time he seemed human to her.

  He laughed and said, “Even at my age people go on wishing things could be better than they are.” He picked a propelling-pencil off the floor and examined it. “You must have stamped on this. Do you think there’s any hope of mending it?”