The Shadow and the Peak

by Richard Mason

  “I’d throw you down first and then jump on top of you.”

  “Why’ve you got to go?”

  “I’ve got to see Mr. Pawley.”

  “About Silvia?”

  “About all kinds of things.”

  “I bet you’re going to see him about Silvia.”

  He lowered the rope. Douglas squeezed through the hole and began to climb down. As he was doing so, one of the boys said:

  “Look, here she is.”

  All the children became excited. “Yes, it’s Silvia.”

  “I wish we’d got some boiling oil.”

  “Don’t let’s take any notice of her.”

  “No, don’t let’s.”

  Douglas dropped to the ground. Silvia was coming along the path. She was holding her handbag and walking with an assumed dignity. He tried not to show his intense relief. He had not felt more relieved at the return of a friend from a dangerous mission in the war.

  “Hullo, Silvia,” he said.

  “Hullo.” She had never looked more strained in her effort to be supercilious.

  “Did you have a good time?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Oh,” she shrugged carelessly, “I went to the cinema.”

  She was careful to speak loudly enough for the children in the tree-house to hear, although she was pretending not to notice them. There was powder and lipstick on her face. She had put it on badly and looked pretty comic.

  “I hope you had something to eat,” he said. “You’ve missed supper.”

  “Oh, I’ve had lots. I had dinner at a restaurant.”

  “Good—we’d hate you to starve. What’s happened to your friend?”

  “He dropped me outside the gate. I didn’t want him to come in.”

  She walked on towards the Great House. The back of her dress was crumpled and there was a thorny leaf stuck to it where she had been sitting down. None of the children in the tree-house seemed to have noticed, and it hadn’t yet occurred to them that it would have been a pretty tight squeeze to get down to Kingston and go to a cinema and have a meal and come back again in the time that Silvia had been away. It might be better if it didn’t occur to them. So long as the phantasy boy-friend existed for them, he existed for Silvia. She needed him just now. If Douglas managed her all right, one day she wouldn’t.

  The children watched her out of sight. They were obviously awed.

  “I wonder who it was.”

  “She’d put on lipstick.”

  “I know; she kept it in her bag. She showed us once.”

  “It can’t have been her father, then. She wouldn’t have dared.”

  “How do you know?”

  Then one of the boys said:

  “I don’t believe she’s been to Kingston at all. She’s only showing off. Do you believe she’s been down, Mr. Lockwood?”

  They were all silent, wondering what he was going to say. He laughed.

  “Why not? She must be jolly hungry if she hasn’t.”

  He had been far too worried after tea to go and see Judy, but now that Silvia had come home all right he went up and knocked on the sick-room door. Judy was dressed and lying on her bed, reading a book that he had brought her from the school library. She looked a bit bored.

  “Oh, hullo, Douglas.”

  “You’ve heard what’s happened? I’ve been forbidden to see you. A ukase from the headmaster.”

  “Oh, Lord.” She laid down her book.

  “It would give the colonial scandal-mongers the chance of their lives—immoral goings-on in the next room to a girls’ dormitory, and all that sort of thing.”

  “I say, I’m sorry. I’d no idea. It was my fault. It was so marvellous having someone to talk to.” She didn’t sound as if it had meant much more to her than that.

  “It was my fault,” he said. “I wanted someone to talk to as well.”

  She leant on her elbow and pushed the hair from her eye.

  “I’m going tomorrow, anyhow.”

  “Pawley said you could stay.”

  “I know. But I hate causing a fuss like this.”

  “It’s all settled now.”

  “I’d decided to go, anyway. The doctor’s corning up in the morning. He’s taking me down with him.”

  He felt miserable. He didn’t know why; he wouldn’t have been able to see her, anyhow. Perhaps it was because this evening she seemed a complete stranger. He remembered how he had nearly come up to see her last night, and with what intent. The memory embarrassed him. He must have been out of his mind.

  “I’m awfully sorry.”

  “You’ve been marvellous, anyhow,” she said. “I wish I’d thought of some way to thank you.”

  “You don’t have to thank me.” There was an awkward silence. There hadn’t been any awkward silences before. “You’re not going back to the air-line again?”

  “Good Lord, yes. Why not?”

  “It’ll take a lot of courage.”

  “I don’t think so. They only have crashes once in a blue moon.”

  He said, “You won’t have started again by next Wednesday? I’ll be down in Kingston then. We might meet if you’re free.”

  “I’d love to.” She didn’t say it with much enthusiasm.

  “Only if you want to.”

  “Of course I do. I was only thinking your headmaster might object.”

  “It’s none of his business.”

  “I know I don’t look awfully respectable.” She smiled. There was nothing particularly intimate about the smile, the way he had remembered her smiling.

  “Nonsense. Do you honestly want to meet?”

  “Honestly.”

  He was miserable all that night. He drank several glasses of rum on the verandah. There were clouds and Kingston was out of sight. He thought he might drop Judy a note before Wednesday and tell her he couldn’t meet her. She obviously didn’t care about it, so what was the point? His life seemed empty. He thought of Caroline, and pushed his finger into one or two sores. Then he thought of Judy again. He had needed someone like Judy—as badly as Silvia needed her boy-friend with the car. He had scarcely got her into the sick-room before he had seized on her as a prop. Like a prop used in a coal mine to stop the roof falling down. Now the prop had been kicked out of the way. His roof had collapsed. Hence the rum. God, he could understand how people went to pieces in the colonies.

  In the morning he felt a bit better. He thought he would catch Judy as she went off, and say good-bye. He looked forward to this. Probably he had only imagined her coldness. She had just been upset over the trouble with Pawley. At breakfast he asked Mrs. Morgan when Dr. Knowles was coming up. She said eleven o’clock. At eleven he went upstairs. Mrs. Morgan said that Knowles had come at ten, and had already left with Judy. Judy had gone.

  “She was really a nice girl,” Mrs. Morgan said.

  She didn’t say that Judy had told her to say good-bye to him. Why should she have done? They’d said good-bye last night. All the same, he thought he would cancel Wednes­day. He began to think how he would word the note to her. He ran into Mrs. Pawley as she came up to lunch. He hadn’t seen her since her visit to his bungalow. He had expected to find her triumphant about Judy’s departure. She wasn’t.

  “The girl’s gone, hasn’t she?” she said, without much interest. “I’m sorry if you felt my husband was making an unnecessary fuss. It was probably the best thing, though.”

  “It probably was.”

  She smiled impatiently. She was as distant as Judy. “You were most amusing the other night, Douglas. You didn’t mind my teasing you?”

  “Why should I?”

  “You looked as though you were afraid I was going to seduce you.” She laughed quickly. “Don’t worry.”

 
“I won’t.”

  She called the dogs. At lunch the dogs roamed the dining-room. It was Douglas’s turn to sit at Silvia’s table. The children were still not speaking to her. Douglas spoke to her once and she was damned supercilious and rude, so he didn’t speak to her again. She looked more sure of herself than before, as though the boy-friend who fought her battles and who loved her was sitting right by her side.

  Chapter Seven

  There was no more trouble with Silvia that day, she took a book out of the library after tea and sat reading by herself under one of the junipers, but the next evening she went off again.

  In the morning she had come of her own accord to see Douglas in the library. She had invented some difficulty over her work, but probably the purpose of her visit was to give him an opportunity to comment on her behaviour. He would have been wise to say nothing—lack of comment left her in a vacuum, made her rebelry pointless—but he asked her, on some impulse, if her friend was coming to take her out again.

  She looked straight at him.

  “He’s coming this evening.” She was obviously delighted he had asked.

  “What a pity,” he said. “Couldn’t you put him off?”

  “Are you going to try and stop me meeting him?”

  “No, I’m not,” he said. “But I thought you might like to listen to some music.”

  “In your bungalow?”

  “Yes.”

  She considered this. Then she said: “It’s too late to stop him coming.”

  “If you didn’t turn up, he would guess you were doing something else. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.”

  “I’ll see,” she said.

  “In any case, you don’t have to go off before school ends, do you?”

  She had it all worked out. She said without hesitation:

  “No, I’m not meeting him until half-past four today.”

  “Well, put it off if you can.”

  He gave these gramophone recitals at his bungalow once a week. Pawley had provided enough money for a machine and a small library of records, and often came along himself. Usually eight or nine of the children attended, half of them because they genuinely liked music, the rest because they hated to miss an occasion. Last week Silvia had been amongst them, sitting away from the others on the verandah in an attitude of studied entrancement. She affected a superior knowledge of classical music—it was an adult virtue that enhanced her prestige—and it was reasonable to hope that she might use the recital this afternoon as an excuse to put off her outing without loss of face. It can’t have been much fun sitting for hours alone in the jungle. She was not amongst the first arrivals at half-past four, but Douglas didn’t lose hope. She had a calculating mind—she wanted her performance to be convincing. Probably she would turn up in twenty minutes, pretending to have met her friend and told him she had another engagement. Douglas handed round the bag of chocolate biscuits that had become a recognized introduction to the recitals, and put on the first record.

  At a quarter to five Silvia still wasn’t there, nor at five o’clock. Shortly after five Pawley turned up to join the group on the verandah. It was in the middle of a symphony. The children began to rise. Pawley goggled and flapped his hands, as though he was shaking out dusters, to indicate that no one was to move. Then he tip-toed up the verandah steps in an exaggerated sort of way, his finger to his lips. One of the boys had vacated a chair for him. He waved the boy back and sat down between two of the children on the floor. Music was a democratic pleasure—a good opportunity for self-effacement. He took out his pipe and began to stuff it with tobacco.

  The gramophone had a clockwork motor. Between records two of the children collaborated in re-winding and inserting new needles. The others sat in sacred silence, or vindictively hushed an unmusical offender who thought the symphony had come to an end. This evening they didn’t reach the end, because in the middle of a pianissimo passage in the third movement there was a sudden outburst of shrieks from the juniper slope behind the bungalow. These were ignored, the music swelled; but a minute later a boy called Roger came racing wildly down the path. He stopped on the verandah steps, looking as scared as a rabbit. He hadn’t noticed Pawley. He said urgently to Douglas:

  “Can you come, Mr. Lockwood? Silvia’s gone mad.”

  Douglas rose at once, and followed Roger back along the path that led up by the side of the bungalow. As they came out into the open he saw Silvia half-way up the grass slope. She was lashing about in hysterical fury with a length of bamboo. Alan, the boy whose ambition was a mammoth firework display, was dodging her blows and making ineffectual attempts to stop her. Silvia was not only keeping him at bay, but also managing to land an occasional whack on a girl who had fallen over on the grass. The girl was Norah, the Queen of Jamaica. She was crying exhaustedly and making no attempt to rise. Douglas ran forward quickly. As Silvia saw him coming she increased the violence of her attack. Then she turned on him. She only had time to strike him once before he caught hold of the bamboo and wrenched it out of her hands. She stood there panting, her face distorted with fury. Norah lay on the ground, gasping and sobbing. There were red weals across her arms and legs. Douglas helped her to her feet, and told Roger to take her up to the house. She went off on his arm, her hobble looking rather overdone. As Douglas turned back to the others he saw that Pawley had followed him up the slope. He was standing some yards away, watching with an expression of pained but impartial concern, as though a spectator at a particularly gruelling boxing-match. He was still sucking his pipe. He apparently didn’t intend to take on the job of referee.

  “What happened?” Douglas said to the children.

  Neither of them spoke. Silvia put on an expression of haughty indifference to show she didn’t care about the revelations of an inquest. Then Alan said:

  “She said she was meeting a friend and going down to Kingston again. We didn’t believe it, so we followed her. We found her hiding in the jungle. She chased us back with the stick.”

  “You’re a lot of cowards,” Silvia said. “It was three against one.”

  “We didn’t use sticks.”

  Pawley interrupted and said rather diffidently:

  “Lockwood, I’ll leave this to you to sort out. Perhaps I’d better have a word with you afterwards. Would you mind coming down to my bungalow?” He shambled off.

  Silvia said, “l was meeting someone, anyhow. If you don’t believe it, I can show you the letters.” In spite of her haughty manner, she was pretty nearly crying.

  “You’re a liar,” Alan said. “Everyone’s had about enough of you. It was time you were found out.”

  “Mr. Lockwood knows I was meeting someone,” Silvia said. “He gave me permission. If you’d waited a bit longer you’d have seen for yourself.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Alan said.

  Silvia opened her mouth, and then realized she couldn’t stop herself crying. She turned and walked off. Alan said in a superior tone:

  “We’re not such fools as she thinks. That’ll teach her to show off. Will you expel her?”

  “What for?”

  “She’d have killed Norah if I hadn’t been there.”

  “I’m sorry any of you were there,” Douglas said. “Why did it matter whether she was meeting anyone or not?”

  “She was only doing it to make us think she’d got someone in love with her who took her to the cinema. She thought she was being clever.”

  “She wasn’t doing you any harm. You should gave gone on ignoring her. It would have saved Norah a nasty beating.”

  Alan looked at him suspiciously.

  “You’re not going to let Silvia get away with it, are you?”

  “Punishing Silvia won’t help Norah. You were all asking for something like that to happen. Didn’t you expect Silvia to be furious when you found her out?”

  “I suppose so,” Alan said. “But
somebody’s got to do something. No one else seems interested in making her behave.”

  He said this rather pointedly, and Douglas didn’t like it. He said:

  “They’re more interested than you think, Alan. Now you’d better get up to the Great House and see what you can do for Norah.”

  Alan went off in silence. Douglas saw that Silvia was standing under one of the junipers, and he went over to her. She tried to look as if she hadn’t been crying.

  “That wasn’t a very dignified performance,” he said.

  She suddenly screwed up her face again. He waited. After a time she said through her sobs:

  “He’ll think I didn’t want to meet him because I wasn’t there. He won’t come again now.”

  Pawley, of course, was reasonable—portentously reasonable and patient. He goggled in silence from behind his desk while Douglas explained the whole thing, and then after a pause to ensure against over-hasty comment, he said: “I only wish you’d thought it worth-while to speak to me the first time she went off, Lockwood. I feel perhaps you should have done.”

  “I probably should,” Douglas said. “But after she’d come back, it didn’t seem to matter.”

  “I might have been able to give you some advice.” He was afraid this had sounded presumptuous, and qualified it at once. “Or at any rate it might have helped if we’d put our heads together.”

  “I don’t see how we could have stopped her going off a second time.”

  “I think if we’d spoken to her a little more firmly . . .”

  “Short of locking her up, she would probably have gone anyway,” Douglas said. “In any case I thought it was best to let her. If the others hadn’t followed her it would have been all right.”

  Pawley shook his head slowly.

  “We can’t have children wandering off all over the countryside like that. It’s not a question of what we think is best ourselves. It’s a question of what other people are going to think.”

  “In that case we might as well start running this place on the same lines as all the other schools in Jamaica.”

  “We need hardly go quite so far as that,” Pawley said moderately.