by Nina Bawden
Now he continued to smile with great sweetness and to regard Janet and Aubrey with a fixed and aimiable stare. Hilary wondered if he knew they were in love. She found it difficult to believe that they were for Janet was not pretty: her nose was too big, her hair never curled and her skin was brown as a gypsy’s. She was too ugly to be loved and yet, watching them from behind a rock one long, hot afternoon, Hilary had seen them kiss each other.
Janet said, “Would you like to go on the beach for a little while? We haven’t to go home yet.”
Hilary sniffed. “It’ll be cold on the beach. But we’ll go if you want to. Can we go by the pier?”
“If you like,” Janet answered coldly and held out her hand to Peregrine.
Outside the bandstand, the wind blew keenly. The beach was almost empty, a wide, shingly waste, and beyond the shingle, stretching to the creaming edge of the sea, was the shining blue mud and the slippery rocks with the gulls crying over them. There was the smell of low tide; the faint, pervasive smell of worms and snails and jellyfish and crabs; the lovely iodine smell of seaweed left drying by the ebbing sea.
Peregrine walked between Janet and Aubrey. They each held one of his hands and swung him in great leaps over the cracked paving-stones. He laughed and they smiled self-consciously at each other above his head. Behind them, Hilary trailed her feet along the pavement, her face fixed in a mutinous scowl. She saw Poppet and her family sitting in the shelter of the jetty and tugged at Janet’s skirt.
“I want to go there.” She pointed.
“Not on the pier? For heaven’s sake, make up your mind.” Janet turned to Aubrey with an expression that said, “See what I have to put up with?” She gave a false, merry laugh. “A frightful child. Never knows her own mind from one minute to the next.”
For form’s sake, Hilary said to Peregrine, “Come and throw stones in the sea.” When he shook his head, she did not try to persuade him and, alone, crunched across the shingle towards the jetty. Poppet’s mother was leaning back in a deckchair with her eyes closed. Two little boys played beside her, aiming stones at a bucket. Poppet had climbed across the jetty and was building a hill of stones on the other side. There were very few people on the beach.
Hilary peered across the jetty at Poppet. Then she saw the man who had been sitting next to her in the bandstand. He was standing by the steps that led from the promenade to the beach, quite close to where Poppet was playing.
Hilary leaned against the angle of the sea wall and the jetty and closed her eyes. She felt that she looked pale and distinguished. Perhaps Poppet would notice her and say, “How ill you look, would you like to play with me? We could go by ourselves to the Fun Fair and spend my prize money.” Hilary would suggest that they took Peregrine with them and Poppet would laugh and say they didn’t want boys. They weren’t any good at anything, were they? I’ll count twenty very slowly, she said to herself, and when I open my eyes she’ll come and speak to me. She closed her eyes tightly and began to count. When she opened them, nothing had happened except that the sky was clouding over above the houses on the cliff.
Poppet had not moved but the man was squatting beside her now, the skirts of his long coat spread out on the shingle. They were talking. Once, he flung up his arm and pointed towards the pier.
Hilary sat down and watched the two younger children. They took no notice of her. She stared at them, willing them to look at her. She picked up a stone and threw it at their bucket. It missed the bucket and hit one of the little boys on the leg. He wailed, his mother opened her eyes and said automatically, “Mind what you’re doing, now.”
The little boy snivelled and wiped his nose on his sleeve. He picked up his bucket and toddled down the shelving beach to the end of the jetty where he stood, weeping and resigned, ankle-deep in the yellow foam left behind by the retreating tide.
Sighing deeply, Hilary stood up and climbed on to the jetty. She had to lean on her chest and pull her legs up sideways. Lying flat on the slimy, smelly surface, she saw Poppet stand up and take the man’s hand. They walked together up the steps and on to the promenade. The man’s cloak blew about him, he looked like a great, black bird.
Hilary dragged herself upright on the jetty, scraping her knees, and watched them go. The sky was dark now, a flat, dull, metal colour. She jumped down on the other side of the jetty and behind her, his voice made thin and fading by the wind, Peregrine called, “Hilary, Hilary, wait for me.”
Peregrine had not wanted to go on the beach. He was cold, the wind brought out goose pimples on his skin and the tips of his fingers had gone white and bloodless. He did not complain, he had learned to accept the discomforts of a bad circulation, but when Janet and Aubrey sat on the edge of a beached boat he stood beside them, frowning in a reproachful manner until Janet, giving his shoulder a quick, impatient push, said, “Run along, dear, do.”
When he had gone, Aubrey at once resumed the conversation that had been interrupted by the end of the children’s performance. He had been waiting impatiently to do so: he loved the sound of his own voice. Sheltering the flame with his jacket, he struck a match and lit his pipe. The words emerged muffled through clenched teeth. “As I was saying, Janet, I can’t possibly disassociate myself from Milly’s problem. I see it so pathetically clearly. Perhaps more clearly because I don’t love her. She is utterly dependent on me.…”
He stared reflectively at his pipe. The spent match hissed on the wet stones. His profile was stern and affecting. “I don’t mean just socially and economically. The important thing is that she needs me mentally. I think for her, I am her mind” He gestured sombrely at the wide horizon. “Sometimes I think that I did her an injustice in marrying her. If she had had to continue alone, she might have become a more complete person.” He emphasised the word, “person” lovingly, as if it had a very special significance. He continued, “As it is, if I were to leave her now, she would be lost. A foreigner in a strange land without a phrase book. A foreigner who didn’t know a word of the language,” he amended gravely, always pedantically anxious to make himself clear.
Ignoring the thrill of fear and joy that shot through her at the thought of Aubrey leaving his wife, Janet said tartly, “I thought you married her because she said she was pregnant.”
He turned wide, surprised eyes towards her. He was wounded by her vulgarity. “Janet,” he said, with infinite, sad reproach, “Oh, Janet.”
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled. Her eyes veiled, she plucked at a sticky burr that was tangled in the wool of her jersey.
There was a silence. Then his arm crept round her shoulders and he said, in a deep, rich, loving voice, “Janet, my poor child. It’s my fault. I should never have talked to you about Milly. It was tactless of me.”
This sentiment put her completely in the wrong.
“Oh, no,” she protested eagerly. “Of course we must talk about her.”
The wind caught his light-brown hair and swept it into agreeable disorder, hiding the patch of baldness on his temple that occasionally distressed her. He was a handsome young man with a profile that distracted women, a thin mouth and cold, angry eyes.
She repeated earnestly, “It’s awfully important that you should tell me what you really feel. That sort of thing is more important between a man and a woman than anything else. More important than sex.”
She brought out the last word with difficulty and lowered her eyes. She thought, with a stirring of pride, that six months ago she would not have dared to mention that word to a man. She remembered Miss Adams, the botany mistress, whose neck had become as red as a hen’s whenever she was forced, by the nature of the curriculum, to approach the “difficult subject”.
Aubrey smiled approvingly at her and she leaned her head comfortably against his shoulder. His beautiful, deep, rich voice droned on and Janet contemplated the poetic tragedy of her own position. She was in love with a married man. This did not make her unhappy. Indeed, in the beginning, it had given their love an additional piquancy, a spice
of danger. “Illicit love,” she had frequently said to herself in the privacy of her bedroom, “Illicit love.” The words had a brave and glorious ring.
They had met, earlier in the year, on the beach. They had paddled in the cold, spring sea, talked and gathered shells just—as Aubrey had said himself—like a couple of children. He was a schoolmaster and these summer holidays they had met almost daily. They talked—Janet had never talked so much, nor known there were such interesting depths in her own character—and occasionally Aubrey read his own poetry to her.
Their relationship had been, in Aubrey’s words, as fresh and innocent as a spring morning. They were not lovers although the question whether they should one day become so, had often been discussed between them. At least, Aubrey had discussed it: unable to emulate his detachment or to speak of sex without embarrassment (in the Sixth Form, such talk would have been dismissed as “sloppy”) Janet had meekly listened. He had attacked the matter both from a moral and a psychological standpoint. It was the effect on her that worried him, he frequently said: women were more disposed than men to be emotionally affected by the physical act. At first Janet had been touched by his consideration but lately his reflective monologues had ceased to excite and merely bored her. So much talk about what should be a spontaneous and fleshly business must inevitably lead to disappointment. Desire was bound to wither in this earnest, debating-society atmosphere. Now, drowsily listening to his voice, she decided that by the time she became Aubrey’s mistress, all the fun would have gone out of it.
Her own cynicism appalled her. She sat upright and said fervently, “I love you so much.”
“What?” Interrupted in his monologue (what, she wondered guiltily, had it been about?), Aubrey’s voice was brusque. He recovered himself quickly. “Do you?” His eyes wandered over her hair. “Sometimes I wish you didn’t. It would be easier for me to love you from a distance. Knowing that I could never have you.” He smiled beautifully. “La Princesse Lointaine” he murmured. “Cold and pale and virginal.”
Not for the first time, Janet found him absurd. He’s rehearsing a scene with some quite imaginary person, she thought. Seeing the impatience in her eyes, Aubrey blushed faintly and pressed his lips against her cheek.
On the beach, a child wailed. Looking up, they saw that a small boy had fallen in a pool by the jetty. He was standing in the water, soaked to the skin, the tears pouring down his outraged face. His mother left her deckchair and lumbered down to the pool.
“Where are the children?” said Janet.
They stood up. On either side, as far as they could see, the beach was empty.
“They can’t have gone far,” Aubrey said.
Janet tossed her head at him and ran clumsily towards the steps, head bent, slipping on the stones. From behind she looked angular and coltish; her shrunken cardigan barely reached below her shoulder blades. She stood on the promenade breathing asthmatically, puffed by her run.
When Aubrey caught up with her, she turned a distracted face towards him. “They might be anywhere,” she cried. “We should have watched where they went. They might have gone near the road.”
He thought her distress excessive. Looking at his watch, he saw that he would be expected at home. “Surely they can’t have gone far?”
Irritated by his calm, she said, “Don’t worry yourself, will you? I’ll find them, you go home.” Seeing he was quite prepared to do just this, she added spitefully, “It’s all your fault. You knew I was supposed to look after them.”
Her unfairness astonished him. He took revenge by observing, coldly and silently, that anger made her nose more prominent and her skin more sallow. Really, her only beauty lay in an awkward, young simplicity and bloom: she should be more conscious of her limitations and understand that to be sweet and continuously charming was her only hope. But however vicious his private thoughts, Aubrey was too cautious to speak them aloud. He did not love Janet but he had literary ambitions and believed that an affaire was necessary to an aspiring young writer. He had no intention of making Janet his mistress but in the absence of anyone more stimulating she was a useful object on which to practise his technique. He said mildly, “Perhaps they have gone on the pier.”
She muttered, “They haven’t got any money. It costs twopence.” Irresolute, angry with herself, she turned on him. “We just sat and talked and talked,” she cried in wild despair. “We were only thinking of ourselves. Anything might have happened to them.”
When Peregrine called to her, Hilary hesitated for a moment. Then she saw that Poppet and the man had stopped at the telescope. The man put a penny into the slot, Poppet climbed on to the platform and looked through the eyepiece. Then she got down and, hand in hand, the man and the child walked on, towards the pier.
Hilary glanced at Peregrine, labouring over the clattering shingle, his face purple in the wind. She decided that she wouldn’t wait for him: it would teach him a lesson.
She climbed the steps to the promenade and hurried to the telescope to see if there was anything left of the pennyworth but the shutter at the end had already clicked down. Anyway, there was nothing to look at. Where the telescope was pointing, there were no boats, nothing but the wide and empty sea.
She skipped along the front, past the clock tower and the lavatories, stopping at the photographer’s kiosk to pat the old, stuffed bear that stood outside. Some of his inside was coming out and one eye was missing. Sometimes there was a queue of children waiting to have their pictures taken sitting on the bear but this afternoon it was too cold, there was no one there. She inserted a finger into the worn hole on the bear’s back and pulled out a little more of the kapok stuffing. Then she saw that the photographer was watching her thoughtfully from his little box: she hummed a casual tune under her breath and ran on.
A little farther along the front, you came to the pier and the Fun Fair and beyond that the town petered out into the flat marshes of the estuary where once the herons had nested and now there was nothing except a road, protected by the high, sea wall, a few wooden shacks and the soft, flat land crumbling away before the encroaching sea.
Poppet and the man had stopped outside the Fun Fair. They were looking into the distorting glass that hung outside the entrance to the fair, advertising the Hall of Mirrors, the Big Laugh. The little girl was pointing to her reflection in the mirror. The sound of her high, light laugh came to Hilary on the wind.
Hilary walked a little closer and stood in a prominent position so that if they turned round, they would see her. If they were going into the Fun Fair and saw another little girl, alone, perhaps they would take her too. She saw that Poppet was pulling at the man’s hand, almost as if she wanted to get away, but he was bending over her protectingly, sheltering her with his great, black coat. His attitude was one of loving kindness.
Suddenly, for no reason at all, Hilary was afraid. The whole sea front was cold and empty and dead, her heart beat loudly. She no longer wanted to be seen: she bolted into the doorway of a café and hid behind a placard that said “Oysters in Season”. The wording of the notice was hopeful but faded and dim. No one who came to Henstable would be likely to ask for oysters. The café did a brisk trade in fish and chips and Coca-Cola. With relief, Hilary saw that Peregrine was running along the front towards her.
His hair streamed behind him, the tears were drying on his cheek. “Why didn’t you wait for me?” he panted accusingly. “I didn’t hear you,” she lied softly. His hands, she saw, were white with cold. “Give them to me,” she commanded and he yielded them meekly so that she could rub them between her knuckles.
“Why did you go without me?” he complained. “What are you doing here? Are you hiding from someone?”
“Be quiet,” she hissed, thumping him warningly between the shoulder blades. Apprehensive, he followed the direction of her eyes.
The man and the little girl had left the entrance to the Fun Fair and were walking away from the town, towards the marshes. They were linked closely together
as if a great affection bound them. From this distance it was impossible to tell whether the child’s steps were lagging or whether she went willingly. Once she turned round, her small face, as flat and blank and meaningless as a piece of white paper, appearing briefly against the man’s dark sleeve. Perhaps she was crying: if she was, it was a very tiny cry, not loud enough to be heard above the sound of the sea and the noisy yelling of the gulls. The man’s wide skirts blew around them both so that some of the time Poppet was almost completely hidden. She was so small, now, that she had little character or significance. She was, already, a committed child, lost beyond redemption.
The children, sensing that something irrevocable was happening, drew closer together and watched in silence.
At last Hilary whispered, “I wonder where they’re going.” Peregrine did not answer her. He was breathing noisily, watching the departing couple with a fixed, glazed stare.
Hilary said hopefully, “I expect he’s her Daddy.” This, on the whole, had not seemed likely so she tried again. “Or her Uncle, or somebody like that.”
Peregrine suddenly flushed bright scarlet. “He’s not anyone she knows. He’s taking her away. He’s the Devil.”
As he spoke, the colour ebbed from his face as quickly as it had come, leaving him very pale. He took a pace forward, one hand clutching Hilary’s wrist. Memory served him now, not sight, for the figures had dwindled. He remembered what he had seen, without understanding, when the man had sat beside him in the bandstand: the clumsy horror beneath the full, concealing skirts, the surgical boot, the club foot. Now he knew what he had seen and felt the knowledge strike him like a sword.
