Blue Fire

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  16

  Dirk stayed at home the next day. He was not ill, but there seemed in him a nervous dissatisfaction that worried Susan. How much was this mood a reaction to her own emotional vagaries of yesterday and last night?

  When she told him of her father’s plan for inviting a few people in for tea some afternoon, hoping the idea might please him, he grimaced.

  “I know. Uncle Niklaas has mentioned it to me. If it gives him pleasure, let him go ahead. We can see it through, I suppose.”

  They were sitting together in the living room and Susan was waiting for Dirk to make some decision as to what they would do with this free day. Once she would have been full of suggestions, but now she hesitated, leaving it up to him.

  “I thought it was kind of Father to suggest such a party,” she said mildly.

  Dirk shrugged and stretched, yawning. “I can warn you that the people he invites will be a bore. But he’s unlikely to take our suggestions.”

  Idly he reached out and picked up a book from the coffee table. It was the snapshot album from her childhood.

  “What’s this?” he asked, and smiled as he opened the cover. The handwriting was her father’s and Dirk read the words aloud: “‘The picture life of Miss Susan van Pelt, aged six and a half.’” He glanced at her teasingly. “I remember you when you were the very young Miss van Pelt. Where on earth did you find this?”

  “In my room at Protea Hill,” she said. Was this the road back? Did the answer lie in these pages?

  He turned the leaves and, drawn by her own uneasy fascination, she found herself looking at the pictures with him.

  So young a photographer had been haphazard in her approach. Some of the pictures were blurred because the camera had moved. Some were crooked because it had been tipped. There was one of the Lion’s Head that looked as though it was toppling away from the observer because the camera had been tilted directly up in snapping it. The better pictures had clearly been taken by adults.

  “There I am,” Dirk said, amused, tapping a picture with one finger. “There in my climbing outfit.”

  She looked at the page. How bright and shining a person he had seemed in those days; how wonderful to a little girl’s eyes. In this picture he wore shorts and a jacket, cleated shoes, and a rope slung in a coil over one shoulder.

  “You went up Table Mountain that day,” she said. “You brought a black rock down for my collection.”

  He laughed. “So I did. I’d forgotten the existence of that collection. How important you felt about it.”

  He turned a page. “There you are with your collection. Isn’t that what’s spread out on that board in the garden?”

  It was indeed. She could remember her pride in the labeling. Grownups had helped her to spell the words, though she had been able to make the letters herself. She had been seven by then and reading rather well. The pictures were too small to reveal the wording on the labels, but she could recall some of the details as she studied them. Invisible hands were pushing at the door again, widening the crack a little, and she shivered, suddenly afraid. This was too soon. She was not ready. She took the book out of his hands and closed it.

  “What is it?” Dirk said. “What’s the matter?”

  But she could not tell him. “Let’s not sit here looking at old pictures when a free day is waiting for us. Let’s go outside and do something.”

  “What would you like to do?” he asked.

  She suggested the first thing that came to mind, wanting only to get out of the house, to leave the album and all its crowding memories behind. Later she would face it, but not yet.

  “Let’s go up Table Mountain. It looks like a good bright day, with no wind.” She knew the cable cars did not operate if the wind was high.

  Dirk was willing. He seemed gayer now and more affectionate than he had been in a long while. When they were dressed in warm sweaters and Susan had put new film into her camera, they went out to the car and Dirk drove up the Kloof Nek Road, where a pass opened between the Lion’s Head and Table Mountain.

  On the way up Susan watched the little white cable house at the foot, but no cars seemed to be moving, in spite of the perfect weather. When they reached the Kloof and turned left to follow the road along the side of the mountain, they lost sight of the house for a time. But when at last the road curved beneath it and Dirk got out of the car to investigate they discovered that there were no cars running. A cable was being repaired and the cars would be out of service for a day or two.

  “Let’s get out anyway,” Susan said.

  Dirk drove the car off to the side of the road and they got out and climbed a little way up the rock-strewn lower slope of the mountain. The houses of Cape Town stopped well below this level and all about them great boulders jutted from the hillside with tiny wildflowers emerging from the stubby mountain growth. At their feet lay the town spread out between Devil’s Peak and the Lion’s Head, and behind rose the precipitous rock sides of the mountain, the table a straight black line against the sky. From the town below the ever-present cooing of the doves reached them.

  Susan raised her face to the sun, clasping her arms about drawn-up knees. Dirk lounged lazily beside her, plucking at a scrubby clump of heather. A question she had been wanting to ask came to her mind and she put it into words.

  “Yesterday when I visited my father’s house and went through it upstairs, I looked into a room that must be the one John Cornish is occupying. I saw a picture on his dresser—of a woman. Does he have a wife?”

  “Cornish again? The fellow’s becoming an obsession with you.” Dirk sounded annoyed. “He did have a wife. She was an English girl who died five years or more ago. He’s been a lone wolf ever since, I gather. Anything more you want to know?”

  She shook her head, wondering at herself for asking the question. The thought of John’s odd warning had come back to her more than once, though she had been unable to puzzle out his meaning. But she had not expected to be curious about him personally.

  It was pleasant here on the mountainside and she fell to dreaming a little as they sat in silence. A further remembrance of her visit to Protea Hill yesterday returned to mind: that moment when she had found her childhood rock collection. She stared up at the top of Table Mountain, from which Dirk had long ago brought her a piece of black stone. Above the mountain the sky was a bright warm blue—almost the blue of an alcohol flame. She closed her eyes to shut away the sight, but now the flash of blue fire seemed all around her, as it had been in her dream. Without warning, the thing was there in her mind—established in full detail. The door had blown open on a great gust of memory and she knew quite clearly what had happened.

  Dirk must have seen the change in her face and sensed the tensing of her body. He left the rock on which he had been sitting and took her by the shoulders. He shook her gently so that her head fell back and her eyes looked widely up into his.

  “Tell me what you’ve remembered,” he said urgently.

  She sensed by the grip of his fingers that he would shake her far less gently if she did not reply. Now that the thing had come through so clearly there was no way to keep it from him. In words that sometimes halted and sometimes rushed ahead, she told him exactly what had happened that long-ago day in Cape Town.

  She had been playing with her rock collection out on the terrace behind Protea Hill one afternoon. The day was hot—the burning heat of their January summer. As a child she had always had an affinity for the heat of Africa, and she had set up her collection in the sparse shade of a blue gum, just as it had been arranged in those childhood snapshots.

  That day she was admiring a new stone she had added to her collection. She could not remember when or how she had come upon it, but she had liked it better than any of the other stones. True, it was not as big as the shiny lump of quartz, but it had sparkled with a most amazing fire. A blue-white stone it had been, flashing blue fire when she turned it in the light. Her mother had come out of the house and seen her playing there.
Even now Susan could remember her distraught and worried expression.

  “Susan dear, I wonder if you’ve seen—” she began. And then her eyes fell upon the stone in her daughter’s hands. She flew across the terrace and snatched it out of the child’s fingers. It had been an alarming thing to Susan to see her mother, who was always gentle and loving, grow almost hysterically angry. She had slapped her daughter and scolded her thoroughly. What she said, Susan could not remember, but she could still recall how puzzled and wounded she had been by the outburst.

  When Claire ran back inside and up the stairs, taking the stone with her, Susan, hurt and bewildered, crept after her. Not in order to spy, but wanting desperately to understand what she had done that was wrong, to understand why adult anger had struck out at her so unexpectedly, like lightning across a clear sky—when always before she had been praised and encouraged for her rock collection.

  She went softly to the door of her mother’s room. It had been closed, but the latch had not caught and she pushed it open without a sound. That was how she came to see exactly what happened. Her mother stood for a few seconds staring rather wildly about the room, her back to the door and the flashing stone in her hands. She looked as if the very touch of it burned her flesh. Then she went to her dressing table.

  On its surface sat a glass powder bowl with a silver top that had always fascinated Susan. It was a Chinese piece with silver dragons entwined around the lid so that their raised heads made a knob in the center. Claire lifted the cover from the bowl, dropped the stone into the flesh-pink powder, and thrust it well out of sight with her fingers. Then she wiped off the powder with a handkerchief, wiped up a sifting of it from the dressing table, its delicate fragrance reaching the child who watched around the corner of the door. Claire’s face was visible in the mirror, but she did not see the door ajar or Susan watching behind her. She looked only at her own pretty face and gradually the anxiety faded out of it. She began to look pleased as a kitten, as if she thought herself a very clever person.

  The hidden Susan lingered a moment more, shaken as much by what she had seen as by her mother’s anger. Her teeth had begun to chatter and she knew with frightening certainty that her mother would be even more angry if she discovered her here. Tiptoeing as if the very house watched her, she had returned to her rocks. But all her pleasure in the collection had vanished and the remaining rocks seemed dull and unmagical compared with the beautiful, shining stone it had been so wicked of her to possess.

  “The Kimberley!” Dirk said tensely.

  Susan came back from the sharply etched past to see his face. There was something almost avid in his expression. It was a face she did not recognize, had never seen before.

  “So you did find it!” he went on. “You did know what happened to it. Go on with your story. Tell me the rest.”

  She stared at him blankly. So thoroughly had she been caught up in the illusion of the past that her feelings were those of the young Susan, and her eyes still watched her mother with a rising fear that was beyond her years. Why had she been so frightened? Why had so vivid an experience been thrust out of her mind, for so long buried and forgotten?

  “Do go on,” Dirk prompted impatiently.

  She could only shake her head. “That’s all I know. That’s all I can remember.”

  Clearly he did not believe her. “That isn’t possible. You must have been curious. You must have wanted to know why your mother hid the diamond in the powder and what became of it afterwards.”

  “I didn’t even know it was a diamond,” Susan said in a low voice.

  “What does that matter? You thought the stone pretty, didn’t you? You wanted it for your collection.” Excitement had risen in him, and an urgency she hated to see.

  Again she shook her head. “I don’t know. Truly I don’t know any more than I’ve told you.”

  The door had blown open on a wave of vivid memory. And as surely it had blown shut again. There was nothing left except a sickness at the pit of her stomach and a feeling that the threat of utter disaster hung over her head. New questions were crowding her thoughts. Was this something she had felt as a child or was it her reaction now—this foreboding and dread? What had really happened that day?

  In any event, the moment had been spoiled. Dirk would not forgive her now. She stood up limply. “Let’s go home,” she said.

  For a moment she thought he meant to urge her further. Then, without a word, he started down to the car, striding impatiently, and she went with him. But when they had driven to the Kloof, where the roads branched, he took the downhill highway that led through the gap and south along the Peninsula. He drove recklessly, wildly, and his speed on the turning road frightened her.

  To their left lay the wine valleys and Groot Constancia, with all its history, but Dirk turned sharply onto the coast road and mountains shut away the calm, sunny valleys as the car sped toward the ocean level. Here they were beyond the flanks of the Lion and this was no longer Table Bay, but the cold South Atlantic.

  Below the clustering houses, pink and yellow and creamy white, gay with red roofs, curved a crescent of white sand. The car plunged down a zigzagging road that led to Camp’s Bay. Above them the sharp leaning peaks of the Twelve Apostles stood out against the sky.

  Dirk braked to a jarring halt beside the palm-lined drive and came around to pull open the door on her side. He said nothing, but merely held out his hand. There was no gentleness in his fingers as he drew her from the car. Together they walked down a bank and out upon the warm sand. Susan stepped lightly, carefully, so that her shoes would not fill with fine white sand, but all her movements were automatic and she was shaken by a sickness of despair. Now she had truly angered him, and in a way she could not help. There was an ugliness in his anger that she had never seen before and she winced away from it as though he had lashed out at her physically.

  A roaring of surf sounded where the rolling line of breakers pounded in. The water was still too cold for swimming and no one else walked the beach. They had the sand and the creaming surf, the breeze from the ocean, to themselves.

  She did not move quickly enough for him and he caught her hand again to pull her along. Bits of broken shell strewed the rim of the high-water mark, and there were dry brown coils of seaweed like snakes upon the sand. Ahead a great mass of smooth, rounded rocks encroached upon the beach from shoreline to ocean, looking like huge animals with their wet brown heads in the sea. Dirk sprang ahead of her upon the nearest rock and held out his hand to pull her up. They moved from rock to rock and Susan saw the green marbling of the water where the surf roared in, saw it break high in the air over the farthermost point.

  The calming effect of sea and sky, the physical effort, was quieting Dirk’s anger and when he said, “Let’s sit here for a bit,” his tone was gentler than before. She took her place beside him on the warm smooth stone, but she could find no comfort in his change of tone. She sat staring mutely at the scene about her.

  Toward the land golden lichen grew upon the rocks, and between them clung small purple flowers. On the water side seaweed hung like strands of long dark hair, drifting and lifting with the movement of the waves. Far out across the water was a small island where cormorants gathered on the beaches. And always, all about them, was the roar of the waves, rising and falling endlessly.

  She knew why he had brought her here and there was only bitterness and sorrow in her at the thought.

  “This is where we said good-by before I went away to America,” she said, musing aloud. “I tried to take a picture of you that last day, but it never came out because I had broken my camera. Father never knew I’d broken it. It was a special gift from him and he was always angry when I broke anything. I was afraid to tell him. So I have no picture of you the way you looked that day. But I can still remember.”

  She did not know why she related these things, when obviously he did not care and they were not the memories he wanted. He was looking away from her toward the land, toward the
familiar tipping peaks that numbered twelve and had been named for the Apostles. The strangeness had gone from his face, but there was no true relenting in him.

  She brushed the warm surface of rock with her hands and saw the greenish shine of mica in the sun. Beneath her feet was a sandy crevice and she bent to peer into it—a flat cave large enough for a child to crawl through. On every hand was nostalgic memory. She leaned over to pick up a handful of sparkling sand from a crevice and let it sift through her fingers. Was this sifting away what was happening to her marriage? The boy she had said good-by to on these rocks was not the man she had married. Or was there perhaps less difference than she supposed? Had the promise of the man been there in the boy and she too young and adoring to sense in him the things she shrank from now?

  Softly Dirk began to whistle and her heart caught in pain as she heard the tune, remembered the words. “I’ll see my darling when the sun goes down … down, down below the mountain …” Sadly she turned the ring palmward on her finger so that the pink diamond would not glow so brightly in the sun.

  He saw her gesture and it must have told him he would get nothing more from her. This time it was he who said, “Let’s go home,” and there was a coolness in his eyes.

  They clambered across the rocks and returned to the car. Dirk chose the lower road into Cape Town, below the flank of the Lion that made Signal Hill, and around Sea Point to the shores of Table Bay. Ahead the table was in view again and suddenly Susan felt oppressed and hemmed in by the mass of gray stone with its flanking, guardian hills. As she had always known, she could never escape the mountain. It knew everything.

  17

  The tea party Niklaas van Pelt gave for Susan and Dirk proved a mixed success. The afternoon, to begin with, was gray, cold and drizzling. Mara, acting as hostess, looked beautiful but distant, so that her presence did little to warm the atmosphere.

  It was clear to Susan that she detested the task that had been assigned her. When Mara’s eyes met hers there was a fierce burning in them that was close to hatred. Susan, who had never found herself so intensely disliked before, recoiled inwardly and did her best to avoid the girl. Dirk seemed to notice nothing out of the ordinary and Susan could hardly appeal to him for protection against hostile glances.