The Shadow and the Peak

by Richard Mason

  The silence was broken by Morgan, who said sullenly:

  “We’re probably in the centre now. It’ll start again within half an hour.”

  Douglas went across to Pawley, who was sitting on a mattress with his wife, leaning against a bookcase.

  “I’m going down to look at my bungalow.”

  “All right, Lockwood.”

  He took a lantern from one of the tables and left the library. Outside, he was surprised to find the sky was clear and he could see the stars. He turned down towards the grass slope. Before he was out of the garden, he heard the door of the Great House open and close.

  “Douglas.”

  It was Mrs. Pawley. She hurried down to him.

  “That’s rather obvious, isn’t it?” he said.

  “I told them I was coming out to look for Rex.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Douglas—I’m sorry about this afternoon.”

  “About Silvia?”

  “No; I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry I behaved so emotionally at your bungalow.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” He began to turn away, but she held him with her hand on his arm.

  “You’re not leaving the school, are you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’d only leave because of me—because we can’t go on like this.”

  “We can’t,” he said.

  “I know. I didn’t realize it this afternoon, but I do now. I was expecting too much of you. That’s what I wanted to tell you: if you’ll stay, I shan’t ask anything more. I don’t care what happens so long as you’re here. We need only be friends.”

  She had always talked like a bad novelette. He moved impatiently away.

  “I’ll see.”

  “I promise, Douglas. I shan’t ask anything.”

  He went down the grass slope, following the track with his lantern. The yellow circle of light fell on a juniper that had been uprooted. He walked round it. Should he stay . . . ? He was indecisive again. John had said pretty things to him, and Silvia hadn’t been raped, after all. Why shouldn’t he stay? Why should he go off with his bag into space and exist in relation to nothing? It was better to exist in relation to this place: better the failure he knew than the failure he didn’t know . . . Or should he leave? If only he had someone to tell him—someone to stand over him and say “Do this.”

  He could hardly recognize the track to his bungalow. The undergrowth sprawled across it, entangled with alien branches. He made his way down slowly, wondering if the bungalow had been damaged by the storm. It was a sheltered position, because the wind had been coming from behind the hill; but he hadn’t been back to it since setting out to look for Silvia—not since the beginning of the storm—and the windows hadn’t been closed or the shutters fastened. If the wind had caught it in the right way, it might have blown the roof off. He wouldn’t mind much if it had. He had only used the bungalow as an excuse to come out for air, and to try and make up his mind . . .

  As he stepped through the wet and tangled vegetation, he suddenly decided how he would do this. He would make up his mind in the way that he had often made it up as a child, telling himself, “If there’s a slug under the orange skin when I reach home . . .” Now he would leave it to the elephant: if the elephant stood as he had left it, facing the window, he would remain at the school. If the storm had shifted it, he would leave . . . Anything was better than indecision.

  The lantern shone on the verandah steps. He kicked away the stuff that littered them. The verandah was covered with debris, and the wicker chairs had been overturned, but they were all there. The windows were unbroken. He opened the door and went in, holding up the lantern. The curtains were still draw—they had never been drawn back since Mrs. Pawley’s visit. Some papers were scattered on the floor, but otherwise nothing seemed disturbed. He went across to the table. The elephant stood there exactly as he had left it.

  So I’m staying, he thought.

  He went to the cupboard and took out the bottle of rum. There was only half an inch in the bottom. He poured it into a glass and began to sip it neat, wondering where he would go for the holidays. He might go up to Montego Bay: look at the coral reefs through glass-bottomed boats and study the British plutocracy buying sunshine for sterling. Make a few resolutions for next term. Presumably Silvia would no longer be with them next term, but there would be Rosemary and John. He might be wise to discourage John’s attachment to him—there was danger in that kind of thing. What was the best way to do it, though? Not the way he’d done it with Silvia—he would have to find a gentler method. Disillusionment without tears . . . Unless of course he tried more sincerely to live up to the illusion.

  When he had finished the rum he replenished his pocket with cigarettes, fastened the shutters of the bungalow, and started back to the Great House with the lantern. There was still no sign of the storm starting up again. All the lights on the airport were out, but he could see the lights of Kingston spreading fanwise from the harbour, looking very clear and close. The door of the Great House was standing open. He slammed it behind him, and went back to the library and sat down in the chair by his desk.

  “Did you go and look at my tree-house?” John asked.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “I wish you had. I’m dying to know if it’s all right.”

  “You can see it first thing in the morning.”

  Five minutes later they heard the rumble of the wind. They felt its impact against the Great House, and the stone walls began to tremble again. Outside there was pandemonium. It was as if they were in a ship that had been launched, all at once, into a tumultuous sea.

  “I can go to sleep now,” John said. “I was only waiting for it to begin.”

  Douglas lit a cigarette. Most of the children were tired out after so much excitement and were trying to sleep, but Rosemary still lay with her eyes open, her face white. Duffield was dozing in his chair, and Morgan was asleep with his face buried in his arms on the table in front of him. Pawley was leaning his head against a bookcase, his beard stuck out, goggling at the ceiling. Mrs. Pawley sat beside him, occasionally opening her eyes to give Douglas a look of mute appeal, faintly smiling. He had not told her yet that he was staying—he would leave it until morning.

  He lit another cigarette from the butt of the last, thinking of Silvia. What would become of her? She would find out that she was not going to have a baby, as John had found out that he was not leprous—but that was only the physical side. For the rest, she was back where she had started; back where he had pushed her, and all the good was lost and he had forfeited his right to help her again. He was no more use to her now than her father; for you couldn’t turn over a new leaf and start again when you were dealing with a child . . .

  John said, “What’s the matter with Silvia, Mr. Lockwood?”

  “I thought you were asleep, John.”

  “I was nearly. Is she very ill?”

  “She is rather.”

  “I hope she gets better. I hated her at first, but she turned out very nice in the end. I let her come into my tree-house whenever she wanted. She’s not ill enough to die, is she?”

  “Oh, no,” Douglas said. “She won’t die.”

  “She looked so frightened when Mrs. Morgan was taking her into the common-room.”

  “It was probably the storm.”

  “I don’t see why the storm should frighten her. She’s quite brave, for a girl. She can climb up the rope to my tree-house better than any of the others.” He looked at Douglas’s ash-tray. “I say, you’ve smoked an awful lot of cigarettes.”

  “I must do something.”

  He had smoked through most of another cigarette, with Silvia’s terror still in mind, when something made him remember that on his return from his bungalow an hour ago the door of the Great House had been standing open.
/>   “John,” he said, “did anyone leave here during the lull?”

  “Some people went to the lavatory.”

  “Nobody else?”

  “Oh, yes, Mrs. Pawley did.”

  He knew Mrs. Pawley hadn’t left the door open—he had heard it slam behind her as he went down the hill. He got up.

  “Where are you going, Mr. Lockwood?”

  “I want to see if Silvia’s all right.”

  “Say I hope she gets better from me.”

  He stepped into the gangway between the mattresses and left the library. The hall was in darkness, and he felt his way along the wall, aware that his alarm was probably quite absurd . . . Someone during the lull must have gone outside for air. Nevertheless, groping for the handle of the common-room door, he was almost choked with dread. At last he found the handle and went in.

  There was a lantern in the room, standing on the bookcase, but the flame was burning low from lack of oil. In the dim light he could see Mrs. Morgan’s bulky shape on the chair. At first he thought that Silvia was lying on the mattress on the table. He went across. There was nothing there but a rumpled blanket. He picked up the blanket as though she might have been underneath it, and stood looking at the white, empty sheets.

  While he was standing there the wind fell for a moment, and he heard a noise in the room—a noise of deep and fruity content. It was Mrs. Morgan snoring. He dropped the blanket and went across and shook her. Her chin sank deeper into the comfort of her breasts; and as he shook harder, an empty medicine bottle fell from her lap to the floor.

  Finally the wind went with the dawn. The shutters shook feebly for the last time, and silence lapped mercifully against the walls of the Great House.

  “That’s all,” Morgan said. “We were lucky. I wouldn’t call it a real hurricane.”

  The children stirred and stretched. They looked round with bleary eyes, waiting for something to happen.

  “You’d all better stay in the library for a minute,” Pawley said. Then he came over to Douglas and whispered nervously, “You’ll remember what I told you, won’t you, Lockwood”

  “I don’t care what you tell people,” Douglas said.

  “We must all say the same thing.”

  “Why not find out what’s really happened first?”

  “I’m afraid we can take that for granted,” Pawley said. They probably could take it for granted by now. Douglas had been out with Morgan and Duffield during the storm, but of course the search had proved quite hopeless. It had been impossible to stand in the wind. They had crawled on their hands and knees. The torches, which they had borrowed from the children, had only penetrated a yard or two through the darkness and the terrible metallic whip-thongs of rain. Douglas had gone in the direction of the gate. It had taken him over half an hour to reach it; and then just beyond the gate he had suddenly been lifted right off the ground by the wind and hurled across the road. He had come to rest against a tree, with a fierce pain in his back. The torch had fallen somewhere and smashed. He had lain groaning in the darkness, but unable to hear his own groans for the noise of the wind. He had thought at first that he would have to remain there until the storm was over, but presently the pain had subsided, and he had made his way back to the Great House, guided by nothing but the slope of the hill. Both Duffield and Morgan had lost their torches, and had already returned without news of Silvia.

  Before Douglas had recovered his breath in the hall, Pawley had come out of the library to discuss what line they were to take if Silvia had been killed. The truth was too unsavoury, even though she hadn’t actually been raped—the school would never survive the scandal. They would have to explain her exit from the Great House in the middle of the storm as some childish prank—make it look as though her death was due to mischievousness and dis­obedience, for which the school couldn’t reasonably be indicted.

  Douglas had felt too disgusted to discuss it; and he felt too disgusted still. But Pawley was anxious to have everything clear before they went out to search again. He accompanied Douglas outside the library door.

  “I’m not thinking of ourselves. I’m thinking of the other children. We must spare them all the unpleasantness we can.”

  “If a tree’s fallen on top of her it might be rather unpleasant, anyway,” Douglas said bitterly.

  “You know what I mean . . . But we can talk about it afterwards. The important thing to remember is not to discuss it with anyone—not until we’ve decided what line we’re going to take.”

  “We might take the line that she went out to look for your wife’s dog,” Douglas said. “Let her pass down in history as the Heroine of Blue Mountain School.”

  “I know you didn’t mean that seriously,” Pawley said.

  “But as a matter of fact—”

  “I don’t mind telling people that,” Douglas said. “I don’t care a damn what we tell them. We can try to get her canonized, if you like.”

  He left Pawley and went outside. The sun had not yet risen over the mountains, but it was quite light, and the sky was cloudless—an immaculate sweep of pale blue that innocently disclaimed the storm. Beneath it, in the clear, still air, lay the turbulent scene of disorder. The garden was hardly to be recognized. All the green had been stripped away as if by locusts, or as if a northern winter had descended all at once on this Caribbean isle. The trees had taken on new shapes and bore fresh white wounds where branches had been wrenched from their trunks, and the ground was strewn desultorily with all the flotsam of the gale. He stood gazing about him, bewildered, unable to distinguish the familiar landmarks. It was like the aftermath of some fabulous drunken orgy.

  Presently Duffield came out of the Great House with two or three boys that he had picked to help in the search. He despatched them in different directions. Douglas set off down the slope towards the gate. Only one or two of the junipers on the slope had been uprooted, but the others looked strange to him, bereft of the Old Man’s Beard that had dripped from their branches like tinsel. The two eucalyptus trees by the gate stood denuded and stark.

  He turned off the path towards Pawley’s bungalow, poking amongst the debris and the undergrowth with a stick as he passed. Pawley’s garden was in confusion, but the bungalow itself had been sheltered and bore no signs of damage. He walked round the garden and followed the path back to the gate. Once, lifting up some leaves with the stick, he saw a patch of white. Instantly everything inside him froze he had seen the whiteness of Silvia’s skin. He looked again, and it was Mrs. Pawley’s dog. Its hind­quarters were flat, crushed by the trunk of a tree, and its eyes bulged out of their sockets, glassy and sightless. He let the branch fall again.

  Suddenly he thought, I shall support Pawley’s story, I shall say that she had always loved dogs, and had run off—against orders, but heroically—to look for Rex.

  Until this moment he had not brought himself to believe that she was dead. She had fled, perhaps, in the hope of being killed, even trying to kill herself, but there were few cliffs in these mountains, and only by remote chance could a falling tree have struck her. She might have been injured or stunned—but not killed. It had been impossible to think of her dead. But now, vividly and horribly, he had seen her body crushed . . . He would say she had loved dogs, not to save the school, but to avoid perpetuating the horror with useless inquiry and research. In time he might come to believe it himself.

  He reached the gate. The garage was intact, but the adjacent shed, that had contained the lighting-plant, had lost its door and corrugated-iron roof. He searched inside, and then went out through the gate and down the road, climbing over a tree that had fallen across it. At the corner he stopped, looking out across the valley at the other mountains. From this distance there was no sign of devastation. They stood in perfect calm, with the appearance in this early-morning light of being a fresh creation—a new inspiration of God. The sky was brilliant behind them, and h
e waited for the sun to appear—waited for its warmth.

  He was still standing there when he heard someone on the road behind him, and he turned and saw John scrambling over the tree. He came dashing down towards Douglas, stumbling in his haste. He stopped a few yards away, panting and speechless.

  “What’s the matter?” Douglas asked. “Has your house gone?”

  John stood there, looking at him dumbly with large, brown, terrified eyes.

  “Have you found her?” Douglas said.

  John said at last, in a tiny, tremulous voice, “It was my fault, Mr. Lockwood. I once told her how to do it, just for fun.”

  Douglas climbed back over the fallen trunk. He went up between the eucalyptus trees and through the gate and past the garage, and as he climbed the path round the side of the hill he saw the dazzling liquid light spilling over the Blue Mountains from the tip of the sun. The naked wintry trees were touched with gold. He went on, and the branches of John’s mango tree came into view, leafless and sinewy like upturned roots. The house had gone, all except for a few pieces of sturdy wood; but as he advanced he saw that the rope was still attached to the branch, and was hanging taut. He went on a few more paces, and then stopped.

  For a moment it meant nothing; he had been more affected by the sight of the dog. Then, as he stood there, he saw that it was still turning—turning slowly round towards him in the golden light, a tiny, lifeless hanging sack. Behind the mango tree, on Blue Mountain Peak, the blue shadows dwindled in the sun. He suddenly felt extraordinarily cold. He waited. It would only be a moment now before he saw her face.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Pawley was the last to give evidence. He had been shaking his head tragically all week-end, and saying that he didn’t know how he was going to bring himself to face the inquest; but now in some curious way he seemed to be enjoying it. He started off by saying that as headmaster he felt himself entirely responsible for what had happened, and then went on to demonstrate that neither he nor the school was responsible at all. His speech lasted about twenty minutes. This seemed an unnecessarily long time to point out that seductions in the jungle and suicide were not strictly part of the curriculum at Blue Mountain School, but the anxious little coroner listened with patience. Afterwards he asked Pawley about Silvia’s character. Pawley said, “She was a most hysterical and abnormal child. I identify myself with all that Mr. Lockwood said. We realized the hopelessness of our task very early on. Her response to our treatment was never more than superficial.”