The Shadow and the Peak

by Richard Mason

  “Awfully nice—except that she came off the assembly line without a heart.”

  “Why were you in love with her?” Judy asked.

  “She was rather a catch. It was good for my ego. And it was bad for my ego to be fallen out of love with. All vanity. Nobody bothers half enough about vanity, and it crops up all over the shop. Look at Silvia. She must always be a heroine even if it’s a suffering one. That’s what’s behind all her pathological lying and her romantic love stories.”

  “Doesn’t she believe them herself?”

  “Yes, she’s the age when she can—and she’s out to impress herself first. Vanity, you see—and the sense of being inferior on the other side of the coin. I can understand all that, but I doubt if you can.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’ve no experience of buried conflicts and feeling inferior. As an illegitimate child you ought to be monstrously problematical—but you’re not, you’re completely natural.”

  “But—I’m vain,” she said.

  “What about?”

  “I an spend hours doing myself up in a mirror. I’m sometimes rather vain about my ankles as well. That’s why I was glad you chose the playsuit and I didn’t have to hide them.”

  “Aren’t you vain about your legs, too?”

  “I’ve never been so sure about my legs.”

  “You could be.”

  “What about you?” she said. “Aren’t you vain about your hands?”

  “The last thing I’m vain about,” he said looking at them “They’ve no good points at all.”

  “They’ve hair on the backs,” she said. “That’s one of the things I’m queer about, like cactuses and starkness. I suppose that partly explains why I went mad over Louis.”

  “You’re going to start prodding,” he said.

  “I’m not,” she said. “Honestly, I’m not. I’ve nothing to prod. I know I had awful sores at first, but they healed right up. I would never have thought of Louis’ hands if you hadn’t mentioned them.”

  “That’s got rid of Louis and Caroline, then,” he said. “Consider them impaled on a cactus.”

  “They might be safer at the bottom of the bay.”

  “All right,” he said. “If only the gun was still here, we could fire a salute. That leaves only us.”

  “And the boatman,” she said. “I suppose he’s coming up to ask for a cigarette.”

  The boatman was young and brawny and coal black. He wore a multi-coloured American shirt and a pair of expensive-looking sandals. He said he had come to tell them about the gun-site, from which not a shot had been fired throughout the war. He then told them that his brother had been in the war; he had been in the navy, and had been sunk and saved. He would have been in the war himself, only he had been disqualified for service by a pernicious croup. He forced a strange croak out of his broad chest to demonstrate how pernicious this croup was. It seemed a curious way of asking for a cigarette, but Douglas gave him one and he looked pleased and put it behind his ear. He then told them about another brother who had been a stoker on a banana boat. After a time, he ambled off down the hill. Judy was lying with her head on the haversack, and Douglas lay close to her.

  “Douglas, I warned you.”

  “You didn’t hide your ankles.”

  “I was rotten to you the other night. I hate girls who do that.”

  “It was true, wasn’t it?”

  “It would have been all right,” she said. “I was just delaying. I was giving you a chance to be put off. I’m no good, you know. I’ve told you where I’ll end.”

  “The brothel in Shanghai?”

  “I’m the sort that does. I just drift. You’re not a drifter—that’s the trouble.”

  “It would be fun to drift a little way with you.”

  “It would for me. I’m not much use at drifting alone.”

  “Nor am I.”

  Her eyes were closed, her mouth open a little.

  “You must have learnt to kiss in France,” she said.

  “I’m only just learning,” he said.

  “Don’t you mind, amongst the cactus?”

  “I shall forget them.”

  “I shall always remember them,” she said.

  “Oh, Lord,” he said. “Listen.”

  The boatman was walking up the hillside just below. He appeared through a screen of cactuses, ambling up to them genially.

  “He wants a cigarette for the other ear,” Judy said.

  He had remembered another brother he had quite forgotten about, and who would have resented the omission. This third brother had excelled in civic virtues and become a prison warder—and very possibly they had seen him in his khaki uniform, with a rifle on his shoulder, guarding the convicts who quarried the chalk cliff on the road to the Palisadoes airport. He had only used his rifle once and he had missed the target. The malefactor had escaped, but had been recaptured on the following day in the house of a light woman.

  Judy said, “Douglas, shall we go back and have tea in my flat?”

  “It might be more civilized.”

  “And less prickly. Look at this thorn in my leg.”

  “Could we buy something for supper, too?”

  “I’ve already got enough to stand a siege for weeks.”

  He told the boatman, “Let’s hear about the rest of your family on the launch. You’ve surely some sisters?”

  “Yessir—me sisters them fat an’ nice.”

  A wind had sprung up and the bay was choppy. The water plup-plupped against the lifted nose of the launch. Patiently, without reproach, the pelicans flapped off their posts in front of them, and made their circles and converged again behind.

  “Louis and Caroline must be somewhere about here,” Douglas said.

  “I can’t see them, can you?”

  “No, the water’s deep.” He watched her smiling into the wind with half-closed eyes. “Perhaps we ought to have brought along a cactus—to keep the mood.”

  “I don’t need a cactus,” she said. “Do you need anything?”

  “I never did,” he said.

  At the dock they paid off the boatman and climbed back into the station-wagon. It took twenty minutes to reach Judy’s flat, going through the town. He stopped outside the gate.

  “We’ve nothing to celebrate with,” he said. “It’s quite an occasion—living out a day-dream.”

  “There’s some more scented beer in the fridge.”

  “Couldn’t we do with something else? I could run back to town and get some gin.”

  “Let’s have rum. You can buy it from the grocery just up the road. I’ll go in and tidy up.” She got out, and said through the window, “But don’t be long, darling, will you? Please don’t be long.”

  “Five minutes,” he said. “I’ll be waiting.”

  He drove a quarter of a mile up the road to the grocery. Like all the Chinese groceries, it was as clean as a hospital surgery. There were American comics strung out with clothes-pegs on a wire above the counter, and a prodigious stock of tins and bottles and cartons stacked symmetrically on the shelves. The proprietor had a lean and wrinkled face, and wore a traditional Chinese wispy beard. He rolled up the rum in a piece of brown paper, twisting the top. Then he asked Douglas if he required aspirins, fruit salts, toothpaste, chocolate. . . ? Douglas said no, nothing, and he climbed back into the station-wagon, and he looked with especial care in each direction before he swung round in the road because an accident at this juncture was the sort of trick that fate delighted to play. He turned with the same care into the drive of the house, and parked the wagon round the back and pocketed the ignition-key. He took the bottle of rum and went in. As he reached the top of the stairs Judy came out of her flat. He thought at first, from her expression, that the place must be on fire.

  “Douglas,” s
he said.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Louis is here.”

  He stopped on the stair. He couldn’t take it in. He wondered if she was playing a joke.

  “Louis?”

  She was still wearing the playsuit, and her legs were long and smooth. She was looking utterly wretched.

  “He was waiting on the stairs when I came in.”

  “But he didn’t know you were in Jamaica,” Douglas said.

  “He found out what happened to me in Mexico City. The hospital told him I’d come here. He flew in this morning and the post-office gave him my address.”

  “I suppose his wife’s left him again?”

  “No; he told her he was coming to Jamaica on business.”

  They were both silent.

  After a minute he said, “Can’t you throw him out?”

  She looked at him wretchedly and didn’t speak, and presently he said, “No, of course you can’t.”

  “Douglas, please, come in.”

  He followed her into the flat. There was a suitcase standing in the hall. It was made of expensive leather and was plastered with labels. They went into the living-room. At the same time Louis came out of the bedroom. He was in his shirt-sleeves and carrying a towel over his hands as if he had just been drying his face. He was small and swarthy, and had black greasy hair and the sunken chest of a consumptive. His ears were very large and his nose grotesque.

  He smiled at Douglas amiably.

  “Hullo old chap.” The “old chap” sounded rather peculiar, because he spoke with a foreign accent. “I hope I’m not upsetting anything?” He was very concerned and sincere.

  “Not at all,” Douglas said. “Except that we thought you were at the bottom of the bay.”

  Louis didn’t bother to inquire what this meant, but grinned all the same. Judy went on looking wretched. Douglas felt quite sorry for her; she wasn’t enjoying herself a bit.

  “How long are you staying?” he asked Louis.

  “A fortnight, I hope. Depending.” He was really being very friendly.

  “I may run into you again later.”

  “You’re not going, Douglas?” Judy said.

  “I’d better be getting along.”

  “Douglas, please . . .”

  “I might as well leave you this.” He put the bottle of rum down on the table, and went to the door. Judy followed him outside and shut the door behind her. She was nearly crying.

  “Oh, Lord, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “It is.”

  Then she suddenly said, almost angrily, “Well I told you, didn’t I? I told you I was a rotten sort of person. I told you to leave me alone.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I didn’t have to choose the playsuit.”

  She stared at him. He turned and went downstairs. He paused downstairs, and after a minute heard her go back slowly to the flat. The door slammed. He went out and started up the station-wagon and drove out on to the road, only this time he did not bother so much about looking out for other traffic. It was four o’clock. He didn’t feel like going back to the school just yet, so he drove to the Carib Cinema. It was cool in there, anyhow. He entered in the middle of a news-reel. Then there was an American film about a man who went out to New Zealand and wrote home for the girl he loved; but he was drunk when he wrote the letter and he wrote the sister’s name by mistake. The sister went out, and he had to marry her; they had a baby and an earthquake, and he became very prosperous; and then they all went home. By that time the sister he had loved had become a nun and wore a beatific smile; but luckily he had now decided that he loved Lana Turner after all in a pure proven way, and Lana Turner showed by the tears in her eyes that she loved him. It was all very beautiful, and everybody except Douglas seemed to end up feeling fine.

  Chapter Ten

  He had hoped that the leprosy gossip could be kept from the children at the school, but two days after his interview with Mrs. Cooper Rosemary came to him in the library.

  “Is it true that John’s got leprosy, Mr. Lockwood?”

  He said emphatically, “No, Rosemary, it is not true” and he asked her where she had heard about it.

  “I can’t remember,” she said.

  “Well, you’ve got to remember,” he said. “I want to know.”

  She thought.

  “I heard two people talking about it.”

  “Who.”

  “It was Alan and someone.”

  “Go and fetch Alan,” he said.

  Alan was a little bit surly.

  “I just heard it,” he said. “I’d not the slightest idea whether it was true or not.”

  Douglas had to talk to him firmly before he would say any more. Eventually he said:

  “Well, Joe told me, if you want to know.”

  “How long ago?”

  ‘Yesterday.”

  “Has anyone said anything to John?”

  “No, I’m certain he doesn’t know about it. I’d never dream of telling him.”

  “You might not, but someone else might,” Douglas said. “John hasn’t got leprosy, but if he hears what people are saying, he could be badly hurt. You can tell all the people you’ve spoken to that it isn’t true. You can also tell them to shut up about it.”

  He promised to do so. Later in the day Douglas went down to the garage and found Joe.

  “Please, Mr. Lockwood, I hear it from the man at the garage, and him plenty liar. I only tell Mas’ Alan what I hear, please. I don’t say it for true.”

  “You shouldn’t repeat things you don’t know for true,” Douglas said. “You can cause a lot of damage.”

  “Yessir, Mr. Lockwood, I never say it again at all.”

  But he had already said it once too often, as it turned out the next day.

  The next day was Thursday, and it was Expedition Day, which occurred once a year. The expedition was always to the same place: a coffee factory in the bottom of the valley five miles from the school. Last year it had been conducted by Duffield, but this year Douglas was to be in charge. The arrangements had been made before his outing with Mrs. Pawley, and Pawley had hinted that his wife would be delighted to accompany the expedition, although he would probably be too busy to go along himself. Now it appeared that owing to certain unspecified duties Mrs. Pawley would not be able to go along either. Douglas was to conduct the expedition alone. There would only be eighteen. children, because seven of the younger ones were not up to the ten-mile walk.

  They assembled at ten o’clock, with sandwiches, outside the Great House. It was a fine morning, and Morgan prognosticated a whole day of fair weather. The departure was photographed by Pawley, who was accustomed to record such events for the school album with a dilapidated folding camera. They set off down the hill past the farm.

  Silvia was one of the children on the expedition. During the last few days she had not committed any acts of sabotage, she had attended classes on time and worked at her assignments, but there was no reason to suppose from her demeanour that the fire of her rebelry had gone out. It was probably just smouldering. Since the affair with Norah, the other children’s efforts at ostracism had collapsed. They now spoke to her when necessary, and one or two of the weaker ones showed an expedient friendship. They professed to believe, and possibly did believe, that there was a man in love with her, and that the recent event had somehow prevented him from coming up again.

  She had two of these children with her as they started out on the expedition. They walked just behind Douglas and he heard her telling them, as a matter of course, that she already knew all there was to know about a coffee factory. She had once been taken round one by “her friend,” who owned several as a side-line. She had been a guest of honour, and had sat drinking rum on the verandah of the manager’s bungalow.

 
Douglas was walking with John and Rosemary, who liked to show, as his pupils, that they had a certain proprietary right in him. They had only gone about half a mile when John said over his shoulder to Silvia:

  “Stop kicking stones at me.”

  “I wasn’t kicking stones at you,” Silvia said.

  “You were.”

  Probably Silvia hadn’t been kicking stones at him purposely, but now she felt she must live up to the accusation. A moment later a stone hit John in the calf of his leg.

  “I told you to stop it,” John said. He was being particularly bold in front of Douglas.

  “Walk somewhere else, if you don’t like it,” Silvia said.

  “Walk somewhere else yourself.”

  “I shall walk where I like.”

  Douglas told them to stop squabbling, and they walked on. Then another stone must have hit John, because he suddenly dropped behind. Douglas went on talking to Rosemary; but presently he heard a row and looked back and saw John and Silvia scrapping on the path. Neither of them stopped when he called to them, so he went back and parted them, and told them to behave or he would send them both home. This started them bickering about who had been responsible. He shut them up. They looked at each other angrily. Then Silvia said with venom:

  “I don’t know why I touched you, anyhow. You’re a filthy little leper. I suppose I’ll catch it now.”

  This may not have signified much to John, he had heard Silvia’s violent invective before, but it signified a great deal to Douglas. He told John and the other children to run on. Then he ordered Silvia to return to the school.

  “It was a most disgusting thing to say—you’re not fit to mix with the other children.” He was extremely angry. He had seldom lost his temper at the school, and even more seldom shown it; but now it must have been quite evident. “You can tell Mrs. Morgan I sent you back. Ask her to give you some lunch.”

  “I don’t want to go back,” Silvia said. She put her head in the air and started walking off down the path.

  Douglas overtook her and stood in her way.

  “You’re not coming on this expedition,” he said. “If necessary I’ll have you taken back by the others.”