by Nina Bawden
“He’s the Devil,” he insisted gently. “I saw …” He caught his breath and began to cry. “I saw his cloven hoof.”
Hilary felt quite faint and sick. Peregrine was always truthful. She remembered the Nanny who had said long ago when they were in their bath to an aunt or some other, shadowy, forgotten figure, “That child’s a saint, too good to live. He’d never tell a lie, not to save his soul.” Then, the wraith-like person, swathed in steam and bath towels, had muttered something about long ears and no more had been said.
That night, lying awake in the moon-cold nursery, Hilary had thought that Peregrine was going to die or, worse, had somehow damned himself irretrievably, and sobbed herself to sleep. When morning came and she watched Peregrine across the breakfast table, saw his calm, living face, this acute terror passed and she knew that the sly words had been no more than a cold dig at her, Hilary, the untrustworthy one, the unwanted girl, the liar. From that moment she had known that she was wicked and worthless and that Peregrine was wholly good, the beloved of God, the flower of the flock.
If Peregrine said that he had seen the Devil, it was true. He knew the Devil when he saw him because he was a saint, too good to live. With a bursting heart, she cried, “Let’s go back, go back…” She began to run, weeping, into the wind. After a little, her breath gave out and she turned to Peregrine. “You’re quite sure?” she asked.
“Oh yes.” His clear eyes looked back at her with tranquil certainty. He was no longer troubled by his vision. He believed in the Devil and, after the first shock, to see Him had seemed nothing out of the ordinary.
He said calmly, “Let’s play at jumping over the cracks, shall we?”
Slowly, hopping and skipping, they returned to the jetty. Janet was standing by the clock tower alone, looking in the opposite direction. Giggling, they slipped down on to the beach and crept along in the shelter of the sea wall.
The face of Poppet’s mother appeared above the jetty. There was a spot on her chin, an inflamed, red pustule with a fat, white head.
“Poppet,” she called. She ignored the children and her voice was squeaky as if she were angry or afraid. “Poppet, come here this minute.”
She clambered on to the jetty, flopping on her forearms like an old seal as she heaved her legs sideways. Her cotton skirt whipped in the wind. Her legs were knotted with purple veins and thick as tree trunks. She wore dirty, white plimsolls, the laces dangled. Hilary watched her, thinking how ugly she was. Beside her, Peregrine turned his face away. He found ugliness quite unbearable, it made him sick.
“Poppet.”
The salt wind tore at the dry, permed hair. Legs straddled wide, she stood on the slimy jetty and looked wildly at the empty beach, at the grey, curling sea.
“Hilary, you naughty girl. I’ve been looking everywhere.”
Janet bore down upon them like an avenging angel. She seized Hilary’s hand and pulled her towards the steps, prodding Peregrine in front of them. Hilary dragged back, watching the woman over her shoulder.
“How could you? I’ve been out of my mind. Don’t you ever think of anyone except yourself?”
Janet’s voice was quivering, her breast heaved beneath her cotton dress.
“I’m sorry,” Peregrine said instantly, his mouth trembling.
“Oh, it’s not your fault. I’m not cross with you” Janet said contemptuously. She waited, her face bent wrathfully towards her little sister. Hilary could never apologise. Sometimes she wanted to but the words always stuck in her throat like pills. Now, sullenly staring at her sandalled feet, she tried to distract attention from this failing in her character.
“It wasn’t my fault, either. I saw the Devil.”
She smiled proudly at Janet, confident that this was excuse enough. What else she had seen was too terrible to think of for the moment, too private to mention.
“This is too much….”
The words, exploding like rifle shots, the tone of utter exasperation, came as a surprise to Hilary. She looked up, puzzled.
“But it’s true. Peregrine saw him, too.”
Wordlessly, Janet turned towards Peregrine. His uplifted face expressed a deep, inner calm.
“Well?” asked Janet.
He shook his head. He could not speak. He knew, already what Hilary could never learn; what was acceptable to the grown-up world and what was not. Only Nanny would have understood; it was Nanny who had formed his beliefs in a personal, vengeful religion; Nanny who, more than anything else, had meant security and safety and home. But Nanny had left in a huff one hot, August morning; she had kissed him, called him her lamb and her love, reminded him to remember, always, his prayers. “Though how long you’ll be allowed to in this heathen house is more than the Dear Lord knows,” she had finished, wiping the tears from her cheek with her cracked, leather glove, turning away, leaving him for ever.
Now, if he were to back Hilary up as he knew he should, Janet would only say it was that awful woman putting ideas into his head. He could not bear anyone to attack Nanny. He had been even less able to bear it since her departure because he could no longer make it up to her by climbing on her lap and kissing her rough, scrubbed cheek. Whereas he could compensate Hilary in a hundred different ways. He could let her have some of his things. Nothing that belonged to Hilary ever worked for five minutes together and usually Peregrine was careful not to lend her anything he valued because, once lent, it was gone for ever. But now, as he’d let her down, he would give her anything she wanted, even his ball-point pen. But would she think even the sacrifice of his pen enough? Would she spurn the rich gift, turn from him with loathing? The conflict of loyalties tore him in two: it was like a death.
Janet, watching him, thought he looked tired and washed out. “There,” she said triumphantly to Hilary, “you’ve been filling him up with a lot of nasty stories.”
“I have not.” She stamped her foot. “He saw the Devil too. He did. And so did I. He’s just lying.” She glared at Peregrine. Before her angry eyes, his own shifted and fell. “Liar,” she said pungently, and he began to snivel.
“That’s enough.” Janet jerked Hilary’s arm so hard that it hurt her shoulder. “Come along, or we’ll miss the bus. Run, Hilary, or are your legs too fat?”
They ran. The cold wind whipped their hair. The bus was waiting. They sat on the upper deck, Janet and Peregrine in the front seat. Janet’s arm was laid affectionately round Peregrine’s shoulders. Hilary looked at them and longed for Janet to love her.
She said, “We might have got lost while you were talking to Aubrey. Mummy would have been angry with you.”
“Shut up,” said Janet, without turning her head.
“Do you love Aubrey, Janet? You can’t marry him, you know, he’s married already.”
Janet stared out of the window. The bus started with a jolt and moved along the front. Hilary looked at the sea and saw, on the lonely beach, the woman stumbling along the shingle, one child tucked under her arm and hoisting her skirt above her knee, the other trailing behind. Above her, the gulls whirled and screamed against the stormy, metal-coloured sky.
Hilary shivered and looked away. She gazed at her transparent reflection in the glass of the window. “Janet,” she said, in a coaxing voice, “will you take us to the Fun Fair before we go back to school?”
Chapter Two
Charles Bray, the children’s father, sat in the stuffy cubby-hole at the back of his shop with a cup of tea and the evening paper and hesitated to telephone his wife. If he telephoned her, she would laugh at him and he was afraid of her laughter.
The face of the murdered child stared up at him from the badly printed page. She had lost one of her milk teeth and the gap gave her face a sentimental innocence that her eyes denied. They were bright eyes with a clear, knowing look: she was a very self-conscious little beauty. Dressed in her party frock, she had posed for the camera artfully, turning slightly away so that you could see the childish line of her cheek, the loveliness of bone beneath the
baby flesh. He saw, briefly, what she might have grown into: the pretty blonde from the London slum, a rose in the gutter, the boys mad about her. Her name had been Camelia, Camelia Perkins. Wondering what wild and hopeless fantasy had inspired her christening, he thought the grand name made her ugly death seem even more pointless and absurd, a kind of cosmic joke.
He stubbed out his cigarette and swore at himself. He was being foolish. Death had given this sad child no significance: it had only finished the promise of those eyes. She was not important any more. Only the living mattered, his children with a madman loose in the town. His panic mounted. He stretched out his hand and slowly dialled the number of his house.
The telephone rang once and Alice answered it. “Is anything the matter, dear?”
“You’re not busy?” he inquired nervously. She was frequently impatient when he telephoned her: her day, she sometimes hinted, was a good deal more fully occupied than his.
“No, dear. I’ve just had a bath.”
He pictured her, sitting at her dressing-table, talking into the white, telephone receiver and watching herself in the glass.
He said flatly, “You remember that child who was missing two days ago? The little girl?”
“Have they found her?”
“In one of those filthy huts on the flats. She was murdered.”
“How dreadful,” she said in an interested, bright voice. “Is it all in the papers?”
“Yes. In the evening papers. Alice …” He cleared his throat. “Are the children home?”
He heard her chuckle softly. “No, Charles. They’re on the beach. But nothing can happen to them. They’re with Janet, quite safe.”
“I suppose Janet is responsible?” A new worry nagged his mind. “You know what young girls are. Running about after boys.”
“Not Janet, dear. She’s a nice, sheltered, hockey-playing schoolgirl. She knows nothing about sex except what she learned in Botany.”
“Perhaps you’re right. She doesn’t mind looking after the children, does she?”
There was an edge to her voice. “Why should she? When I was seventeen, I’d been earning my living for three years. And looking after an invalid mother.”
“I know, dear. I’m sorry.” He felt deeply guilty about his wife’s early life. She had had a terrible childhood and he could not bear to think about it. She had only to mention it to gain the moral advantage in any disagreement between them.
Alice went on, “Now, Charles, you must promise me not to worry over the children. They’ll be home quite soon. I’ll telephone you if you like. But you mustn’t get worked up for nothing. It’s bad for you.”
Her voice, indulgent and reproving, set his teeth on edge. The blood rushed to his forehead. “Do you call murder nothing? It seems to me …”
The door of his cubby-hole opened and Miss Hubback, his assistant, peered at him inquiringly. He beckoned her in and she squeezed past his desk to the pile of school atlases that were stacked in the corner. She was a heavily built young woman whose drooping breasts, beneath a nylon blouse, were inadequately enclosed in a pink, spotted brassiere. The effect was neither provocative nor pretty. As she bent over the atlases, Charles saw an expanse of fat, pale thigh. One of her stocking seams was twisted. Charles averted his eyes.
Alice said patiently, “What were you going to say, dear? Must you say, ‘it seems to me’? It’s becoming such a silly habit.” He knew that her face had assumed a sweet, martyred expression. “Now, Charles, I’m just as worried as you are. You know how terribly I worry over the children. But I force myself to control it. For their sakes. It’s so bad for them to feel that you’re worried on their behalf. It destroys their sense of security.”
Miss Hubback tiptoed elaborately back to the shop. Before she closed the door she smiled at Charles brightly, showing her strong teeth.
Alice continued, “So you’re not to be a silly old hen. Think of your blood pressure. The children won’t be long. I’ll go and watch for the bus as soon as I’ve made myself decent. And I’ll let you know the moment they’re safely home. Will that do?”
“Yes,” he said. “That’ll do. Thank you.” He wondered why he was thanking her. Perhaps because it was nice of her to humour him.
He said, “I’m sorry if you think I’m being an ass.”
“Not an ass, darling. Just an old fussbudget. But I love you.”
It was only a gesture, he thought, a habit, like asking people how they were when really you didn’t care at all.
He said, “I love you, too,” and put the telephone down. He was conscious of feeling tired, the way he had often felt tired lately when he had been talking to Alice. It was as if an enormous physical effort had been asked of him and his body had to call upon all its reserves of energy. He longed for peace.
It was odd, he thought, because Alice wasn’t particularly difficult. She was a good sort and she didn’t nag, except very occasionally. And anyway, he loved her. He must hang on to that: he loved his wife.
He looked at the letter lying on his desk and the murder went out of his mind. His rates had been put up in the last assessment: they were three times what they had been when he had taken over the bookshop at the end of the war. As things stood at the moment, to pay them would just about cripple him. He supposed he could appeal: he wondered what good it would do. He brushed his hand over his eyes and thrust the demand into an open drawer among the other unpaid bills. He would think about it to-morrow. He got up heavily and went into the shop.
Replacing the receiver, Alice smiled at herself in the glass. Charles was getting to the difficult age, she thought, he took everything so hard. If he wasn’t worrying about the children, he was worrying about his health or about the business. He walked through life suspiciously, beset by imaginary dangers on every side.
She picked up a brush and painted her lips carefully. The silver charms tinkled on the bracelet on her wrist. Her raised, bare arm was shapely, the flesh smooth and covered with freckles. As she outlined her eyes with a dark pencil, she thought about the murder and about the empty field behind the house, dense with long grass and scrubby thorn bushes. It had been bought by a speculative builder at the beginning of the summer and he was waiting for his licence. Anyone could approach the back of the house without being seen. Perhaps there was already someone there, waiting and watching.
The pulse jumped in her throat. Her wide, alarmed eyes stared back at her from the tinted mirror. How silly and thoughtless of Charles to alarm her so. He knew how imaginative she was….
She stood up and regarded herself critically in the glass, her lips pursed. The grey dress fitted her perfectly, the soft wool flowed easily over her breasts and hips. She was a big woman and needed to dress carefully. She twisted round to see that her stocking seams were straight and touched her braided hair. A small, pleased smile flickered on her lips.
She left her bedroom and went slowly down the stairs. A floor creaked and her heart raced. Muttering under her breath, she went into the kitchen, shut and bolted the back door. The action stirred up panic: she ran from room to room, closing and locking the windows against the chill air of the dying summer. She stood in the hall, her hand to her heart, listening to the ticking of the clock.
The stillness came alive around her. Whispering sounds menaced her from every room. Perhaps she had locked the door too late, perhaps there was already someone in the house? She was alone except for Auntie, resting in her room. And Auntie, Charles’s Aunt Florence, would never have heard an intruder: she was deaf as a post. Intractable, old and proud, she refused to admit this failing of her senses although for years she had heard no sounds but the ringing bells inside her own head.
Thinking of this, an ancient resentment stirred. Why should Auntie be allowed to keep her eccentric illusion just because her father had been a knight? Anger drove out fear.
“Don’t be a bloody fool,” Alice said aloud. She never swore in public, being anxious, above all things, to appear well bred, but when s
he was alone she frequently abused herself with violent expressions and found they comforted her. “You silly, neurotic bitch,” she said. The sound of her voice pleased and calmed her. Her pulses resumed their normal, regular beat.
Glancing at her watch, she left the house and walked to the front gate, looking across the Downs to the wide sea. Peebles was one of a single line of houses built high on the cliff top with an uninterrupted view of the sea and, in summer, of the long line of yellow sewage that appeared, bubbling beyond the outer limits of the tide. The road was called The Way. The houses were big and rambling, Gothic in conception: at the time of their construction they had been thought rather grand houses. When Alice had been a child, the road had been a fashionable place to live. The best people in Henstable lived on The Way: at Christmas-time, the best parties had been given there and they were always the parties Alice had not been invited to. She used to walk up and down the road after dark, an angry child, loving and hating the people in the houses, watching the lighted windows and listening to the laughter. That was how she was always to feel: the good things happened on the other side of the wall.
Now the grandeur of the houses had diminished. They were merely large and inconvenient and shabby, the gardens impossible to maintain. They expressed, in their peeling paint, their dusty chandeliers, a whole chapter of middle-class decay. There were no more parties. The only rich household left belonged to Miss Fleery-Carpenter and she was old, potty, lived on boiled onions and the daily expectation of the Second Coming of Christ. Apart from the Brays, the owners of the houses were old, mostly retired people, barely conscious, though they discreetly let rooms in summer and grumbled about rising prices, that the world had changed. Occasionally they would remark to each other that people “of their sort” did not live in Henstable any more.
But to Alice Bray, who had been Alice Parker, the bright, disciplined child from the slum houses at the other end of the town, it still seemed, for most of the time, a considerable achievement to be living on The Way. She, who had run the streets, been beaten by a drunken father, been abandoned by him at the age of fourteen, left in sole care of a paralysed, whining mother, now owned a car, sent her children to expensive schools, voted Conservative.
