“Give me some money,” she said, going to the roundabout. There was a small crowd near that. “I’m going on the giraffe. Come on.”
“I’ll watch you,” he complained and cleaned his glasses.
There she was, riding a giraffe already, tall and like a schoolmistress among the town children, with her long hair, which she kept on throwing back as she whirled round, a young miracle, getting younger and younger. There were other girls. There were town youths and there was an idiotic young man riding backwards on a cow, kicking out his legs and every now and then waving to the crowd. Rowena on her giraffe did not smile, but as she came round sedately, waved to the old man as she sailed by.
He looked at his watch. How much longer?
“I’m going on again,” she called, and did not get off.
He found himself absurdly among the other patient watchers, older than all, better dressed too, on his dignity, all curiosity gone. He moved away to separate himself from his bunch of them, but he had the impression they all moved with him. There was a young woman in a bright-red coat who always seemed to be in the next bunch he joined. Round came the giraffe: round came the young man on the cow. The young woman in red waved. Seeing that to wave was the correct thing, the old man too waved at the giraffe. The woman waved again a moment later and stared at him as if annoyed. He moved a yard from her, then five yards, then to the other side of the roundabout. Here he could wave without being conspicuous, yet the woman was standing close to him once more. She was small with reddish hair, her chin up, looking at him.
“You don’t remember me,” she accused him in a high voice. Her small eyes were impudent. He stepped back, gaping.
“Daisy Pyke,” she said.
Pyke? Pyke? He gaped at her briefly, his mind was sailing round with Rowena.
“George’s wife,” she said, challenging his stupidity.
“George . . .” But he stopped. George Pyke’s wife must be fifty by now. This woman could not be more than thirty. Her daughter—had they had a daughter?
“Have I changed as much as that?” she said. Her manner was urchin-like and she grinned with pleasure at his confusion and then her mouth drooped at the corners plaintively, begging. Nowadays he thought only of Rowena’s wide mouth, which made all other women vague to him. And then the hard little begging, pushing mouth and its high voice broke into his memory. He stepped back with embarrassment and a short stare of horror which he covered quickly, his feet dancing a few steps, and saying with foolish smiles, “Daisy! I thought . . . I was watching that thing. What are you doing here?”
Now that he remembered, he could not conceal a note of indignation and he stood still, his eyes peered coldly. He could see this had its effect on her.
“The same as you,” she said in that curt off-hand voice. “Waiting. Waiting for them to come off.” And she turned away from him, offended, waved wildly at the roundabout and shouted, “Stephen, you fool!” The young man riding backwards on the cow waved back and shouted to her.
What an appalling thing! But there it is—one must expect it when one is old: the map in one’s head, indeed the literal map of the country empties and loses its contours, towns and villages, and people sink out of sight. The protective faces of friends vanish and one is suddenly alone, naked and exposed. The population ranked between oneself and old enemies suddenly dissolves and the enemy stands before one. Daisy Pyke!
The old man could not get away. He said as politely as he could manage, “I thought you went abroad. How is George?”
“We did. George,” she said, “died in Spain.” And added briskly, “On a golf course.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
She looked back at the roundabout and turned again to say to him, “I know all about you. You’ve got a new house at Colfe. I’ve still got the old house, though actually it’s let.”
Forty miles lay between Colfe and Daisy Pyke—but no people in between! Now the roundabout stopped. There was a scramble of children getting on and getting off, and the local watchers moved forward too.
“I must get Rowena,” he said ruthlessly and he hurried off, calling out in his peremptory voice, “Rowena!”
He knew that Daisy Pyke was watching him as he held out a hand to help Rowena off, but Rowena ignored it and jumped off herself.
“Rowena. We must go.”
“Why? It was lovely. Did you see that ridiculous young man?”
“No, Rowena,” he said. “Where?”
“Over there,” she said, “with the girl in red, the one you were chatting up, you old rip. I saw you!” She laughed and took his arm. “You’re blushing.”
“She’s not a girl,” he said. “She’s a woman I used to know in London twenty years ago. It was rather awful! I didn’t recognise her. I used to know her husband. She used to be a friend of Violet’s.”
“Violet’s!” said Rowena. “But you must introduce me.” She was always eager to know, as if to possess, everyone he had ever known, to have all of him, even the dead. Above all Violet, his wife. Rowena longed to be as old as that dead woman.
“Really, Harry, you are frightful with people.”
“Oh, well . . . But she’s appalling. We had a terrible row.”
“One of your old loves,” she teased.
“I had to throw her out of the house,” he said. “She’s a liar.”
“Then I must see her,” said Rowena. “How thrilling.”
“I think they’ve gone,” he said.
“No,” said Rowena. “There they are. Take me over.”
And she pulled him towards the hoopla stall where Daisy Pyke and the young man were standing. There lay the delightfulness of Rowena: she freed him from the boredom into which his memories had set and hardened. He had known many young girls who in this situation would be eagerly storing opportunities for jealousy of his past life. Rowena was not like that.
At the stall, with its cunningly arranged bowls, jugs, and toys, the young man with the yellow curling hair was pitching rings onto the table, telling Daisy to try and altering the angle of the ring in her hand.
“Choose what you want, hold the ring level and lightly, don’t skim fast. Don’t bowl it like that! Like this.”
Daisy’s boldness had gone. She was fond and serious, glancing at the young man before she threw.
“Daisy,” said the old man, putting on a shady and formal manner as if he were at a party, “I have brought Rowena to meet you.”
And Rowena stepped forward gushingly. “How d’you do! I was telling Harry about the young man on the cow.”
“Here he is,” said Daisy stiffly. “Stephen!”
The young man turned and said “Hello” and went on throwing rings. “Like that,” he said.
Rowena watched him mockingly.
“We are just off,” said Harry.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” said Daisy to Rowena.
“We’re going to walk along the cliffs,” said Harry.
“To Withy Hole,” said Rowena.
“It was extraordinary meeting you here,” said Harry.
“Perhaps,” said Daisy, “we’ll meet again.”
“Oh, well—you know we hardly see anyone now,” said Harry.
Daisy studied Rowena impudently and she laughed at the boy, who had failed again.
“I won a goldfish once,” said Rowena, laughing. “It died on the way home.”
“Extraordinary,” the old man said as he and Rowena walked away. “That must be George’s son, but taller. George was short.”
When she got him back into the car she saw by his leaden look that the subject was closed. She had met one more of his friends—that was the main thing.
The hills seemed to pile up and the sea to get farther and farther away and then, suddenly, as they got over the last long hill, they passed the caravan sites that were empty at this time of the year and looked like those flat white Andalusian towns he remembered, from a distance. The old man was saying, “But we have this new
rootless civilisation, anarchic but standardised”—suddenly the sea appeared between the dunes below, not grey and choppy, but deep blue, all candour, like a young mouth, between the dunes and beyond it, wide and still and sleepily serene. The old man was suddenly in command, fussing about the exact place where they could leave the car, struggling over the sand dunes dotted with last year’s litter, on to the huge cliffs. At the top there they could look back and see on the wide bay the shallow sea breaking idly, in changing lines of surf, like lips speaking lines that broke unfinished and could not be heard. A long way off a dozen surfers were wading out, deeper and deeper, towards the bigger waves as if they were leaving the land for good and might be trying to reach the horizon. Rowena stopped to gaze at them, waiting for one of them to come in on a long glissade, but the old man urged her on to the close turf of the cliffs. That is what he had come for: boundlessness, distance. For thirty miles on a clear day in May like this, one could walk without meeting a soul, from headland to headland, gazing through the hum of the wind and under the cries of the dashing gulls, at what seemed to be an unending procession of fading promontories, each dropping to its sandy cove, yet still riding out into the water. The wind did not move the old man’s tough thatch of hair but made his big ears stick out. Rowena bound her loose hair with a scarf. From low cliff to high cliff, over the cropped turf, which was like a carpet, where the millions of sea pinks and daisies were scattered, mile after mile in their colonies, the old man led the way, digging his knees into the air, gesticulating, talking, pointing to a kestrel above or a cormorant black as soot on a rock, while she followed lazily yards behind him. He stopped impatiently to show her some small cushioned plant or stood on the cliff ’s edge, like a prophet, pointing down to the falls of rock, the canyons, caverns, and tunnels into which the green water poured in black and was sucked out into green again and spilled in waterfalls down the outer rocks. The old man was a strong walker, bending to it, but when he stopped he straightened, and Rowena smiled at his air of detachment as he gazed at distant things as if he knew them. To her he looked like a frightening mixture of pagan saint and toiling animal. They would rest at the crest of a black cliff for a few minutes, feel the sun burn their skin, and then on they went.
“We can’t see the bay any more,” she said. She was thinking of the surf-riders.
“The cliff after the next is the Hole,” he said and pulled her to her feet.
“Yes, the Hole,” she said.
He had a kind of mania about the Hole. This was the walk he liked best and so did she, except for that ugly final horror. The sea had tunnelled under the rock in several places along this wild coast and had sucked out enormous slaty craters fifty yards across and this one a hundred and eighty feet deep, so that even at the edge one could not see the water pouring in. One stood listening for the bump of hidden water on a quiet day: on wild ones it seethed in the bottom of the pot. The place terrified Rowena and she held back, but he stumbled through the rough grasses to the edge, calling back bits of geology and navigation—and to amuse her, explained how smugglers had had to wait for the low wave to take them in.
Now, once more, they were looking at the great meaningless wound. As he stood at the edge he seemed to her to be at one with it. It reminded her of his mouth when she had once seen it (with a horror she tried to wipe from her mind) before he had put his dentures in. Of her father’s too.
Well, the objective was achieved. They found a bank on the seaward side out of the wind where the sun burned and they rested.
“Heaven,” she said and closed her eyes.
They sat in silence for a long time but he gazed at the rising floor of eventless water. Far out, from time to time, in some small eddy of the wind, little families of whitecaps would appear. They were like faces popping up or perhaps white hands shooting out and disappearing pointlessly. Yes, they were the pointless dead.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked without opening her eyes.
He was going to say “At my age one is always thinking about death,” but he said “You.”
“What about me?” she said with that shamelessness of girls.
“Your ears,” he said.
“You are a liar,” she said. “You’re thinking about Daisy Pyke.”
“Not now,” he said.
“But you must be,” she said. She pointed. “Isn’t the cove just below where you all used to bathe with nothing on? Did she come?”
“Round the corner,” he said, correcting her. “Violet and I used to bathe there. Everyone came. Daisy came once when George was on the golf course. She swam up and down, hour after hour, as cold as a fish. Hopeless on dry land. Gordon and Vera came, but Daisy only once. She didn’t fit in—very conventional—sat telling dirty stories. Then she went swimming, to clean up. George was playing golf all day and bridge all evening; that didn’t go down well. They had a dartboard in their house: the target was a naked woman. A pretty awful, jokey couple. You can guess the bull’s-eye.”
“What was this row?” she said.
“She told lies,” he said, turning to her. And he said this with a hiss of finality which she knew. She waited for one of his stories, but it did not come.
“I want to swim in the cove,” said Rowena.
“It’s too cold this time of the year,” he said.
“I want to go,” she said.
“It’s a long way down and hard coming back.”
“Yes, but I want to go—where you all used to go.”
She was obstinate about this, and of course he liked that.
“All right,” he said, getting up. Like all girls she wanted to leave her mark on places. He noticed how she was impelled to touch pictures in galleries when he had taken her to Italy. Ownership! Power! He used to dislike that but now he did not; the change was a symptom of his adoration of her. And she did want to go. She did want to assert her presence on that empty sand, to make the sand feel her mark.
They scrambled the long way down the rocks until the torn cliffs were gigantic above them. On the smooth sand she ran barefoot to the edge of the sea rippling in.
“It’s ice!” she screamed.
He stood there, hunched. There was a litter of last year’s rags and cartons near the rocks. Summer crowds now swarmed into the place, which had been secret. He glowered with anger at the debris.
“I’m going to pee,” he said.
She watched the sea, for he was a long time gone.
“That was a big one,” she shouted.
But he was not there. He was out on the rocks, he had pulled off his clothes. He was standing there, his body furred with grey hair, his belly wrinkled, his thighs shrunk. Up went his bony arms.
“You’re not to! It will kill you! Your heart!” she shouted.
He gave a wicked laugh, she saw his yellow teeth, and in he dived and was crawling and shouting in the water as he swam out farther, defying her, threshing the water, and then as she screamed at him, really frightened, he came crawling in like some ugly hairy sea animal, his skin reddened with cold, and stood dripping with his arms wide as if he was going to give a howl. He climbed over the rocks and back to the sand and got his clothes and was drying himself with his shirt.
“You’re mad,” she said. “You’re not to put that wet thing on.”
“It will dry in this sun,” he said.
“What was all that for?” she said. “Did you find her?”
“Who?” he said, looking round in bewilderment. He had dived in boastfully and in a kind of rage, a rage against time, a rage against Daisy Pyke too. He did not answer, but looked at her with a glint of shrewdness in his eyes. She was flattered by the glitter in this look from a sometimes terrifying old man.
He was tired now and they took the short inland road to the car close to those awful caravans, and when she got him into the car again he fell asleep and snorted. He went to his room early but could not sleep; he had broken one of his rules for old men. For the first time he had let her see him
naked. He was astounded when she came into his room and got into his bed: she had not done this before. “I’ve come to see the Ancient Mariner,” she said.
How marvellous. She is jealous, after all. She loves me, he went about saying to himself in the next weeks. She drove to what they called “our town” to buy cakes. “I am so thin,” she said.
The first time she returned saying she had seen his “dear friend Daisy.” She was in the supermarket.
“What’s she doing there?” he said. “She lives forty miles away. What did she say?”
“We did not speak. I mean, I don’t think she saw me. Her son was with her. He said hello. He’d got the hood of the car up. She came out and gave me a nod—I don’t think she likes me,” she said with satisfaction.
The next week she went again to get petrol. The old man stayed at the house, shook one or two mats, and swept the sitting-room floor. It was his house and Rowena was untidy. Then he sat on the terrace, listening for her car, anxiously.
Presently he picked up the sound, much earlier than her usual time, and saw the distant glint in the trees as the car wound its way up. There she was, threading her beauty through the trees. He heard with alarm the sudden silences of the car at some turn in the hill, then heard it getting louder as it turned a corner, then passing into silence again. He put his book down and went inside in a dutiful panic to put the kettle on, and while he waited for it to boil he took the cups out pedantically, one by one, to the table on the terrace and stood listening again. Now it was on the last stretch, now he heard a crackling of wheels below. He ran in to heat the teapot and ran out with his usual phrase: “Did you get what you wanted?”
Then, puffing up the last steps, she came. But it was not she; it was a small woman, bare-legged and in sandals, with a swaggering urchin grin on her face, pulling a scarf off her head. Daisy!
“Gosh!” she said.
Harry skipped back a yard and stood, straightening and forbidding. “Daisy!” he said, annoyed, as if waving her off.
“Those steps! Harry!” she said. “Gosh, what a view.”
Essential Stories Page 26
