“Yes, that sounds fine.”
They set off, not speaking much, and drove north along the main road to the crossroads beyond St. Just where the left fork took them towards the sea to the mine workings of Kenidjack. At the end of the road high up on the cliffs they parked the car and started walking and scrambling over the hillside to the best view of the surrounding scenery. Below them the sea was a rich blue, shot with green patches near the off-shore rocks, and there was no horizon. As the cliff path wound steeply above the rocks the great cliffs of Kendijack and the withered stones of the old mine workings rose ahead of them, and Sarah saw that the light was perfect. When she sat down at last, gasping after the climb, she felt the excitement quicken within her as she gazed over the shimmering view before her eyes.
“I’ve bought some lemonade and some biscuits,” said Justin, modestly demonstrating his presence of mind. “It’s hot walking.”
They sat down and drank some lemonade in silence.
“It would be nice for a dog up here,” said Sarah after a while. “All the space in the world to run and chase rabbits.”
“We used to have a dog. It was a sheepdog called Flip, short for Philip, after the Duke of Edinburgh. My mother, like many foreigners, loved all the royal family.”
“Oh.” She broke off a semi-circle of biscuit and looked at it with unseeing eyes. “And what happened to Flip?”
“My mother had him put to sleep because he tore one of her best cocktail dresses to shreds. I cried all night. There was a row, I think, when my father came home.” He reached for his canvas bag and took out his painting book absentmindedly. “I don’t feel much like doing watercolors this morning. Perhaps I’ll do a charcoal sketch and then work up a picture in oils later when I get home.”
“Can I see some of your paintings?”
He paused, staring at a blank page. “You won’t like them.”
“Why not?”
“They’re rather peculiar. I’ve never dared show them to anyone except Marijohn, and of course she’s quite different.”
“Why?” said Sarah. “I mean, why is Marijohn different?”
“Well, she is, isn’t she? She’s not like other people ... This is a watercolor of the cove—you probably won’t recognize it. And this—” Sarah drew in her breath sharply. He stopped, his face suddenly scarlet, and stared down at his toes.
The painting was a mass of greens and grays, the sky torn by stormclouds, the rocks dark and jagged, like some monstrous animal in a nightmare. The composition was jumbled and unskilled, but the savage power and sense of beauty were unmistakable. Sarah thought of Jon playing Rachmaninoff. If Jon could paint, she thought, this is the type of picture he would produce.
“It’s very good, Justin,” she said honestly. “I’m not sure that I like it, but it’s unusual and striking. Can you show me some more?”
He showed her three more, talking in a low, hesitant voice, the tips of his ears pink with pleasure.
“When did you first start painting?”
“Oh, long ago ... when I went to public school, I suppose. But it’s just a hobby. Figures are my real interest.”
“Figures?”
“Math—calculations—odds. Anything involving figures. That’s why I started with an insurance firm in the City, but it was pretty boring and I hated the routine of nine till five.”
“I see,” she said, and thought of Jon talking of his own first job in the city, Jon saying, “God, it was boring! Christ, the routine!”
Justin was fidgeting with a stick of charcoal, edging a black square on the cover of his paint book. Even his restlessness reminded her of Jon.
“You’re not a bit as I imagined you would be,” he said unexpectedly without looking up. “You’re very different from the sort of people who used to come down here to Clougy.”
“And very different from your mother too, I expect,” she said levelly, watching him.
“Oh yes,” he said, completely matter-of-fact. “Of course.” He found a clean page in his book and drew a line with his stick of charcoal. “My mother had no interests or hobbies, like painting or music. She used to get so bored, and the weekend parties were her main interest in life. My father didn’t really want them. Sometimes he and I used to walk down to the Flat Rocks just to get away from all the people—but she used to revel in entertaining guests, dreaming up exotic menus and planning midnight swimming parties in the cove.”
“There were guests staying here when she died, weren’t there?”
“Yes, that’s right.” He drew another charcoal line. “But no one special. Uncle Max drove down from London and arrived on Friday evening. He had a new car which he enjoyed showing off and boasting about as soon as he arrived, but it really was a lovely thing. He took me for a ride in it, I remember ... Have you met Uncle Max yet?”
“No, not yet.”
“He was fun,” said Justin. “He and my father used to laugh a lot together. But my mother thought he was rather boring. She was never interested in any man unless he was good-looking and was always bitchy to any woman who didn’t look like the back end of a bus ... Uncle Max was very ugly. Not that it mattered. He always had plenty of girlfriends. My parents used to play a game whenever they knew he was coming down—it was called the Who-Will-Max-Produce-This-Time, and they used to try to guess what she would look like. The girl was always different each time, of course ... During that last weekend they played the game on the morning before Max arrived and bet each other he would turn up with a petite redhead with limpid blue eyes. They were so cross when he turned up with a statuesque blonde, very slim and tall and elegant. She was called Eve. I didn’t like her at all because she never took any notice of me the entire weekend.”
He closed the paintbook, produced a pair of sunglasses and leaned back against the grassy turf to watch the blue sky far above. “Then Uncle Michael came down with Marijohn. They’d been in Cornwall on business, I think, and they arrived together at Clougy just in time for dinner. Uncle Michael was Marijohn’s husband. I always called him Uncle, although I never called her Aunt ... I don’t know why. He was nice, too, but utterly different from Uncle Max. He was the sort of person you see on suburban trains in the rush-hour reading the law report in the Times. Sometimes he used to play French cricket with me on the lawn after tea ... And then there was Marijohn.” He paused. “To be honest, I never liked her much when I was small, probably because I always felt she was never very interested in me. It’s different now, of course—she’s been so kind to me during the past fortnight, and I’ve become very fond of her. But ten years ago ... I think she was really only interested in my father at the time. Nobody else liked her except him, you see. Uncle Max always seemed to want to avoid being alone with her, Eve the statuesque blonde, never seemed to find a word to say to her, and my mother naturally resented her because Marijohn was much more beautiful than she was. And Uncle Michael ... no, I’d forgotten Uncle Michael. It was obvious he loved her. He kissed her in public and gave her special smiles—oh God, you know! The sort of thing you notice and squirm at when you’re a small boy ... So there they all were at Clougy Friday evening, and twenty-four hours later my mother was dead.”
The sea murmured far away; gulls soared, borne aloft by the warm breeze.
“Was it a successful party?” Sarah heard herself say tentatively at last.
“Successful?” said Justin, propping himself upon one elbow to stare at her. “Successful? It was dreadful! Everything went wrong from start to finish. Uncle Max quarreled with the statuesque blonde—they had an awful row after breakfast on Saturday and she went and locked herself in her room. I’ve no idea what the row was about. Then when Uncle Max went to his car to work off his anger by driving, my mother wanted him to take her to St. Ives to get some fresh shellfish for dinner; but my father didn’t want her to go so there was another row. In the end my father went off to the Flat Rocks and took me with him. It was terrible. He didn’t speak a word the entire time. After a while Marij
ohn came and my father sent me back to the house to find out when lunch would be ready. We had a maid help at Clougy in those days to do the mid-day cooking when there were guests. When I got back to the house I found Uncle Michael looking for Marijohn so I told him to go down to the Flat Rocks. After I’d found out about the lunch and stopped for elevenses I started off back again, but I met my father on his own coming back from the cliff path and he took me back to the house and started to play the piano. He played for a long time. In the end I got bored and slipped back to the kitchen to inquire about lunch again. I was always hungry in those days ... And then Uncle Michael and Marijohn came back and shut themselves in the drawing-room. I tried listening at the key-hole but I couldn’t hear anything, and anyway my father found me listening and was cross enough to slap me very hard across the seat of my trousers so I scuttled down to the cove out of the way after that. My mother and Uncle Max didn’t come back for lunch and Eve stayed in her room. I had to take a tray up to her and leave it outside the door, but when I came to collect it an hour later it hadn’t been touched so I sat down at the top of the stairs and ate it myself. I didn’t think anyone would mind...
“My mother and Uncle Max came back in time for tea. I was rather frightened, I think, because for some reason I expected my father to have the most almighty row with her, but—” He stopped pulling up grass with his fingers, his eyes staring out to sea.
“But what?”
“But nothing happened,” said Justin slowly. “It was most odd. I can’t quite describe how odd it was. My father was playing the piano and Marijohn was with him, I remember. Uncle Michael had gone fishing. And absolutely nothing happened ... After tea Uncle Max and my mother went down to the cove for a bathe, and still nothing happened. I followed them down to the beach but my mother told me to go away, so I walked along the shore till I found Uncle Michael fishing. We talked for a while. Then I went back and snatched some supper from the larder as I wasn’t sure whether I’d be dining with the grown-ups or not. As it happened I was, but I didn’t want to be hungry. Then Eve came downstairs, asking for Uncle Max and when I told her he’d gone swimming with my mother she walked off towards the cove.
“Dinner was at eight. It was delicious, one of my mother’s best fish-dishes, fillet of sole garnished with lobster and crab and shrimps ... I had three helpings. I particularly remember because no one else ate at all. Eve had gone back to her room again, I believe, so that just left Max, Michael, Marijohn and my parents. My mother made most of the conversation but after a while she seemed bewildered and didn’t talk so much. And then—” He stopped again, quite motionless, the palms of his hands flat against the springy turf.
“Yes?”
“And then Marijohn and my father started to talk. They talked about music mostly. I didn’t understand a word of what they were saying and I don’t think anyone else did either. At last my mother told me to go to bed and I said I’d help with the washing-up—my usual dodge for avoiding bed, as I used to walk into the kitchen and straight out of the back door—but she wouldn’t hear of it. In the end it was Uncle Michael who took me upstairs, and when we stood up from the dinner table, everyone else rose as well and began to filter away. The last thing I remember as I climbed the stairs and looked back into the hall was my father putting on a red sweater as if he was going out. Uncle Michael said to me: ‘What are you looking at?’ and I couldn’t tell him that I was wondering if my father was going out for a walk to the Flat Rocks and whether I could slip out and join him when everyone thought I was in bed ... But Uncle Michael was with me too long, and I never had the chance. He read me a chapter of Treasure Island which I thought was rather nice of him. However, when I was alone, I lay awake for a long time, wondering what was going on, and listening to the gramophone in the music room below. It was an orchestral record, a symphony, I think. After a while it stopped. I thought: maybe he’s going down now to the Flat Rocks. So I got out of bed and pulled on a pair of shorts and pullover and my sand shoes. When I glanced out of the window, I saw a shadow move out of the driveway and so I slipped out to follow him.
“It was rather spooky in the moonlight. I remember being frightened, especially when I saw someone coming up the path from the beach towards me and I had to hide behind a rock. It was Eve. She was breathing hard as if she’ll been running and her lace was streaked with tears. She didn’t see me.”
He was silent, fingering the short grass, and after a while he took off his sunglasses and she saw his dark eyes had a remote, withdrawn expression.
“I went up the cliff path a long way, but he was always too far ahead for me to catch him up and the sea would have drowned my voice if I’d called out. In the end I had to pause to get my breath, and when I looked back I saw someone was following me. I was really scared then. I dived into a sea of bracken and buried myself as deep as I could. Presently the other person went by.”
A pause. Round them lay the tranquillity of the summer morning, the calm sea, the still sky, the quiet cliffs.
“Who was it?” said Sarah at last.
Another pause. The scene was effortlessly beautiful. Then: “My mother,” said Justin. “I never saw her again.”
Three
2
When they arrived back at Clougy they found the car standing in the drive but the house was empty and still. In the kitchen something was cooking in the oven and two saucepans simmered gently on the stove; on the table was a square of paper covered with a clear printed writing.
“Justin!” called Sarah.
He was upstairs putting his painting gear away. “Hullo?”
“Marijohn wants you to go up to the farm to get some milk.” She replaced the note absently beneath the rolling pin and wandered out into the hall just as he came downstairs to join her. “I wonder where they are,” she said to him as he stopped to check how much money he had in his pockets. “Do you think they’ve gone down to the beach for a stroll before lunch?”
“Probably.” He apparently decided he had enough money to buy the milk and moved over to the front door. “Do you want to come up to the farm?”
“No, I’ll go down to the beach to meet them and tell them we’re back.”
He nodded and stepped out into the sunshine of the drive. The gravel crunched beneath his feet as he walked away out of the gate and up the track to the farm.
After he had gone, Sarah followed him to the gate and took the path which led down into the cove, but presently she stopped to listen. It was very still. Far away behind her she could still hear the faint rush of the stream as it tumbled past the disused waterwheel. But apart from that there was nothing, only the calm of a summer morning and the bare rock-strewn hills on either side of her. London seemed a thousand miles away.
Presently the path forked, one turning leading up on to the cliffs, the other descending into the cove. She walked on slowly downhill, and suddenly the sound of the sea was in her ears and a solitary gull was swooping overhead with a desolate empty cry, and the loneliness seemed to increase for no apparent reason. At the head of the beach she paused to scan the rocks but there was no sign of either Jon or his cousin and presently she started to climb uphill to meet the cliff path in order to gain a better view of the cove.
The tide was out; the rocks stretched far into the sea. She moved further along the path round the side of the hill until presently, almost before she had realized it, the cove was hidden from her and the path was threading its way through the heather along the shallow cliff.
And below were the rocks. Hundreds of thousands of rocks. Vast boulders, gigantic slabs, small blocks of stone all tumbled at the base of the cliff and frozen in a jagged pattern as if halted by some invisible hand on their race into the sea.
The path forked again, one branch leading straight on along the same level, the other sloping downhill to the cliffs edge.
Sarah stopped.
Below her the rocks formed a different pattern. They were larger, smoother, flatter, descending in a series o
f levels to the waves far below. There were little inlets, all reflecting the blue sky, and the waves of the outgoing tide were gentle and calm as they washed effortlessly over the rocky shelves and through the seaweed lagoons.
It was then that she saw Jon’s red shirt. It lay stretched out on a rock to dry beneath the hot sunshine, and as she strained her eyes to make sure she was not mistaken, she could see the pebbles weighting the sleeves to prevent the soft breeze from blowing it back into the water.
She moved on down the path to the cliff’s edge. The cliff was neither very steep nor very high but she had to pause all the same to consider how she was going to scramble down. She saw the rough steps, but one was missing and another seemed to be loose; the sand around them bore no trace of footmarks to indicate that it would be easy enough to find another way down. She stood among the heather, her glance searching the cliff’s edge, and suddenly she realized she was frightened and angry and puzzled. This was where Sophia had died. The steps were the ones leading down the cliff and the rocks below were the Flat Rocks. And Jon had come back. He had come back deliberately to the very spot where his wife had been killed. Marijohn had taken him. It was her fault. If he had not wanted to see her again he wouldn’t have dreamed of returning to Clougy. He had talked of how fond he was of the place and how much he wanted to see it again in spite of all that had happened, but it had been a lie. He had come back to see Marijohn, not for any other reason.
She sat down suddenly in the heather, her cheeks burning, the scene blurring before her eyes. But why, her brain kept saying, trying to be sensible and reasonable. Why? Why am I crying? Why do I feel sick and miserable? Why am I suddenly so convinced that Jon came back here not because he loved Clougy but solely because of his cousin? And why should it mutter even if he did? Why shouldn’t he be fond of his cousin? Am I jealous? Why am I so upset? Why, why, why?
The Dark Shore Page 10
