Elise shivered exaggeratedly. “Childish, of course,” she agreed. “Someone is playing pranks. Later on, Richard, you and I will have a little talk.”
Richard seemed unabashed. “I know what it means,” he said. “When you were all young, Merlin—I mean Aunt Floria—used to send you warnings with sand dollars, didn’t she? And the person who got the warning had to be very careful from then on, or something terrible would happen to him. So you’d better be awfully careful now, Cousin Lacey. You’d better be careful, so—”
“That’s enough,” Giles said sharply and firmly.
“We’ll talk about this later,” Elise repeated. “Though I must say this is the sort of trick I used to love to play when I was young. You never guessed, did you, Lacey, how many of those sand dollars you found among your things were put there by me, not Floria? It was rather fun—you frightened so easily.”
The eerie sense of exhilaration was upon her again—a somehow wicked exhilaration that took pleasure in another’s discomfort. I remembered my dream of flight, and the pervading sense of evil that had seemed to pursue me.
“If that’s what you were doing, you should be ashamed to admit it,” Floria said flatly to her sister.
Richard was watching his mother, bright-eyed and observant, and he gave me a sidelong look—a look of impudence and mischief. Yet it was far more likely that Elise had played this trick, though I could not guess what her action portended. Why should she want to frighten me now, when all the cards lay in her hands, and when it was she who had invited me here?
The incident appeared suddenly to bore her, and she changed the subject casually.
“How did you get along with Hadley’s manuscript, Lacey, and what do you think of it?” she asked.
I answered noncommittally. “I find it interesting, but I really know nothing about the subject. I’ll take the book back with me and put it in the hands of some editor more competent on this topic. I can’t promise anything, though. You could have mailed it in cold with exactly the same results.”
“But I wanted you to meet Hadley,” Elise said. “When there’s someone colorful behind a manuscript, I’m sure that must be a point of interest to the publisher.”
Giles said, rather coolly, “I imagine any manuscript has to stand on its own feet,” and that ended the matter, to my relief.
Vinnie’s stuffed crab was delicious and we began to eat. I tried to forget the incident of the shell, but an uneasiness seemed to linger in the room.
Aunt Amalie began to talk about the doings which were to take place at the new Sea Oaks plant tomorrow, and soon there was general conversation about the plant and the people who would be coming in to see it the following morning. I could listen without taking part in the discussion. I could think my own thoughts.
Once or twice I caught Giles watching me in a questioning, rather troubled way. Once when my eyes met his he smiled at me reassuringly, as though he did not want me to worry about the incident of the shell. Once Aunt Amalie too smiled at me down the table and shook her head slightly, as if to say that I must disregard what had happened. I wondered if she had guessed who it was who had slipped the shell into my napkin, and if she had some reason to know that I need not worry. I would question her when I had the opportunity.
But there was no chance to do anything immediately because when we rose from the table, Richard caught me by the hand and reminded me of my promise to go to the beach with him. Giles heard him and broke in at once.
“That’s a good idea. Will you let me come along? It’s going to be a beautiful afternoon, and not too hot. Anyone else like to come? We can drive to one of the other beaches.”
“If you’re through with me, Giles,” Paul said, “I’m going over to The Bitterns with Floria.”
And Elise shook her head. “I’ve an errand in town. Hadley will take me over to Malvern.” She spoke lightly, almost tantalizingly, as though she wanted to evoke some angry reaction from Giles. But if anything, he seemed indifferent.
Aunt Amalie said she and Charles had some details to talk over—so it was left for the three of us to drive to the beach. We went to our rooms to change our clothes, and Richard was waiting for me in the hall when I came out. I’d put on blue shorts with a white blouse, and tossed a light cardigan about my shoulders.
Out on the driveway Giles waited for us in the station wagon. Hadley was driving Elise into town in his red Ferrari. We followed the asphalt road past The Bitterns, and then turned along gravel that ran for a distance beside Turtle Creek, skirting the green marshes until the road reached the Atlantic shore of the island in the other direction from Sea Oaks.
I felt in a strangely suspended state. It was as if I accepted only this moment when Giles and Richard and I could be together. All the unhappy truths of the situation seemed to fall away, and leave only this core of temporary contentment. I was intensely aware of the man in the seat beside me, and of the boy in between.
Giles looked brown and fit in gray slacks and a gray shirt open at the throat. He had thrown off whatever burden had seemed to hang over him at the house. Richard wore slightly grubby shorts of his own choosing, and a shirt with a hole in one shoulder. He was comfortable and obviously did not feel that such things mattered. Elise, apparently, had let him dress as he pleased.
“I wish Mother could have come,” he said when we were on our way, and threw his father a bright upward glance that told me a lot. Richard knew very well that there was trouble between his parents, and he was not above playing one against the other when the opportunity arose.
This I did not want for him. I hated to see a slight maliciousness creep into his behavior at times. Material advantages did not compensate if he was to grow into that kind of person. My mood of contentment and unreality shivered on the verge of dissolving.
Giles said nothing, but I saw his hands tighten on the wheel, and I wondered what lay behind his careful schooling of indifference to whatever Elise did.
4
It was a perfect day to drive about the island. The afternoon was sunny and warm, but not hot the way the weather would be a month or two later. Though Hampton never suffered from the heat to the extent that the mainland did, thanks to ocean breezes and water all around.
Richard sat between us, stretching tall so that he could look out in every direction, his light brown hair lifting gently in the wind, his tan a smooth golden glow. Away from Elise he seemed a different boy, less imperious, as though he felt no need to play the prince when he was with his father. I longed to slip an arm about him, but I dared not. There was something independent about the boy that I must respect. He was growing up.
I basked in my corner of the seat, grateful for the day I held in my hands, gradually forgetting to be on guard and watchful of my emotions.
“Do you know where we’re going?” Giles asked.
It had to be one place. One perfect place, because this was that sort of afternoon. “Elephant Beach,” I said.
Giles’s laughter had a light sound, as though he too were momentarily carefree. “That’s your beach, you know, Lacey. Ever since you named it years ago. Even Richard calls it that.”
I remembered. I must have been no more than seven years old, and Giles ten. In the morning we had gone to a traveling circus over in Malvern. And in the afternoon I had fallen asleep on island sand. I’d had a frightening dream of elephants thundering through the waves and up the beach—sure to trample me. Giles had been there when I had come yelping awake, and he had soothed me gently, while everyone else had laughed. No elephants had ever been seen on a Hampton Island beach, he assured me, but after that this particular stretch of gray sand had been called Elephant Beach, and it was one of my favorite havens on the island.
Swimming was good there, and when the car had been parked in a cedar grove where twisted trees, leaning grotesquely away from the ocean, gave us shade and protection, we took turns at changing to swim suits. Then we made our way past sea grapes and the inevitable rows of cabbage pa
lms, and ran down to the sloping wet band that marked where the tide was coming in.
The water was pleasant and we swam vigorously for a while. Afterwards we came up the beach to lie on the sand and let the welcome sun pour over us. The island light was dazzling, and even the gray sands took on a more golden hue.
Richard was still at the sand-castle age and he went to work building a magnificent structure down near the water’s edge. Giles lay on his back with an arm flung across his eyes, and I turned on my side so I could study him, memorize him against all the lonely months ahead of me in New York. His body was brown and smooth, his legs straight and powerful and long, his feet well shaped. All these things I remembered from the past. But it was his face in profile I studied longest—the nose strong and firm, the wide mouth with a faintly sad twist to the lips, betraying more than he meant to betray. I wanted to touch him—and did not. This was not what I had come to Hampton Island for. There was no exorcism for me here. I had been wrong in coming to the island—but for the moment I did not care. Giles was beside me, and I did not want to escape. I knew how much I loved him.
After a time I got up and strolled the wet sand where waves rolled in from the Atlantic, foaming about my feet as I searched for whatever I could find. The pickings were not very good—only a broken cowry, an unbleached sand dollar, an imperfect cockle shell. I gathered them up and took them across the sand to where Giles lay. He had turned over on his stomach and I knelt beside him.
“I’ve brought you gifts from the sea,” I said.
He propped himself on one elbow and looked at me. I held out my hand with its meager offering, and he smiled at me, remembering as I had remembered. When he took the shells from me, he folded my hand into his.
“Do you know,” he said, “I still have three or four of those ocean treasures you used to bring me. I came across them in a drawer in my room just the other day. They made me think about you, wonder about you.”
“Of course!” I said lightly. “That’s what they were supposed to do.”
He sat up on the sand and crossed his legs. “I do wonder about you, Lacey. What is your life like in New York? Tell me.”
“It’s busy,” I said, “but not very dramatic. I have a small apartment in the Village, and I ride a bus uptown to work every day. At the firm I have my own small office, and I live surrounded by piles of manuscript, with other people’s words running through my head. It’s interesting. I like it.”
“Why no marriage?” he said.
I laughed uneasily. “You sound like Aunt Amalie. ‘A suitable marriage is the proper thing for any girl.’ There seems to be no other acceptable answer. But why can’t a woman be happy in her own sort of life without all that dishwashing and bedmaking and child-raising?”
“I suppose some girls can be,” he said. “But not you, Lacey. You’ve always been too warm and loving. I should think you’d want other human beings in your life. Someone to give yourself to.”
Oh, but I do! I could have told him. It’s just that I can’t have the one I want, so I’d better settle for the substitutes.
“I go out often enough,” I said. “There are two or three men I like rather well.”
He shook his head at me, playing the stern uncle. “Liking several rather well isn’t the same as liking one a whole lot. How old are you, Lacey?”
He should have remembered the three years between us. “I’m twenty-seven, and practically gray-haired, the way you’re making me feel,” I said.
A handful of sand slipped through his open fingers. “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business, of course. It’s just that I’ve always been fond of you, Lacey. Once there was a time—” He broke off and for a moment I think we both remembered Elise. Elise that vivid summer when I had been seventeen. He ended lamely. “I’ve wanted the best for you. I think you deserve it.”
The best was Giles Severn, and I still knew it very well. I had to mock him to save face.
“Oh, I do—I do deserve the best!” I cried. “But it just hasn’t come my way. And now you’re talking to me as if you were old and wise, and I was a child, and I don’t think I like it.”
His smile returned my mockery. “That’s for self-protection. I find that I’m all too ready to see you as a woman, and it’s not altogether comfortable.”
To occupy myself I picked up the sand dollar he had dropped on the beach and broke it carefully in two across the middle. When I tapped the broken parts on my palm, the little “doves” fell out in my hand. I poked at the tiny winged formations that every sand dollar contains. Giles was watching me, and I knew we were both thinking of the shell that had been tucked into my napkin at lunch.
“It might have been Elise,” he said. “She remembers how I used to feel about you.”
I tipped my hand and let the bits of shell lose themselves in the sand. “That was a long time ago. And Elise herself invited me here.”
“Perhaps she shouldn’t have,” Giles said, still watching me.
Before I could find anything to say, Richard came running toward us up the beach.
“Dad! Cousin Lacey! Come and see my castle. It’s the best one I’ve ever made.”
He reached out and pulled his father to his feet, then offered a hand to me. I let him pull me up, and the three of us went to admire his creation of turrets, battlements and courtyards, with a circling moat to which he had carved a channel leading in from the water. It was, indeed, the finest of sand castles. And it was something else. It was a structure built by Giles’s son. A boy who needed his father. I might not care about the woman Elise had become. I might turn a blind eye upon a marriage that was not working out. I might evoke in my mind old “rights” of my own. But Richard I could not ignore. He was mine only in secret. He belonged to his father in fact.
There was a sudden urgency in me—a hardly-to-be-endured longing to say to him, “Giles, this is our son. He doesn’t belong to Elise. He’s yours—and mine.”
I said nothing. The outcome of speaking would be disastrous—for Richard, as well as for Giles and me.
Instead, I gave myself to admiring the sand castle, and after a time I remarked that the afternoon was getting along, and perhaps we should drive back to Sea Oaks.
I was all too well aware of Giles’s eyes, his searching look, and I could not face him. The only safe thing to do was run away again. I had a bargain to keep. I could not say to him, “This is our son.”
We returned to the car hand in hand—the three of us, with Richard between. We pulled our clothes on over bathing suits that had dried in the sun, and I chattered about how I had enjoyed a lovely afternoon. Giles was silent, thoughtful. I wished I knew what he was thinking—and was afraid to know. He drove all the way around the island before he took us back to the house, and several times we stopped at some favorite place. There was a picnic grove of cedars above the Malvern River, where we had often gone as children with a basket of Vinnie’s wonderful food. And there was a spot where one had a clear view of Dune Island to the north, with the causeway crossing Hampton marshes.
There we got out of the car and stood for a little while looking out across a great expanse of tall grass interlaced with water. Only birdcalls broke the vast silence, and I wished I might gather for myself something of the peace of this place to take away with me.
“It’s always so—so lonesome,” Richard said softly. “I like it here. There’s nobody to pull me different ways at once.”
His words gave me a painful insight. Elise, undoubtedly, pulled at him like that. Whatever the others tried to teach him, however they tried to help him, she would pull him askew for the satisfaction of her own vanity in binding him to her. I was beginning to think she turned him in new and wrong directions out of sheer maliciousness in order to even some score with Giles.
Giles did not reply to his son’s words, but he put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. Richard looked up at him and for a moment I saw the love that flashed between them. It was beautiful and touching, and tears stung my
eyes. At least Elise had not been able to affect this bond between father and son—nor must I. I must go quietly back to New York and trust Giles to care soundly for our son.
All the way to Sea Oaks the urgent need to be off was upon me. I must return to New York as quickly as I could. There was still another day to live through here, and then I could escape. There was nothing I could do on the island. Nothing that would not make everything worse.
The rest of the afternoon I spent with Hadley Riker’s manuscript. It was not always easy to concentrate, but I managed, and at least the typed words were a distraction to help me get through the time that must evolve before I could go.
When the last manuscript pages had been read, I found there was time for a walk before the seven o’clock dinner hour at Sea Oaks. I let myself out of the house without seeing anyone, and wandered in the direction of the old fort.
The original buildings had been placed at a strategic point commanding the river, and some of the crumbling foundations were left, marking where the fort had stood. The construction was all tabby—that material made of burned shells and lime that was indigenous to this coastal region, and had been widely used by the early settlers.
The only building left partially intact was the one which had been a powder magazine. It boasted a square, flat roof, with broken steps leading up to it, and battlements all around. Beneath the roof two yawning black entryways led down into the earth beneath. I had thought them fascinatingly spooky when I was a child.
I climbed the steps, noting the rough shells in the familiar tabby construction, and walked out upon the battlemented roof. Across the river were the marshes, and on this side more marshes beyond the high ground of The Bitterns. The elusive odor was on the wind and I breathed it deeply. It was an odor that belonged to this coast.
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