The Shadow and the Peak

by Richard Mason

  After Mrs. Cooper had gone, Pawley kept up the pretence of looking pleased, but he knew he had been made to look a fool. He was obviously annoyed with Douglas, although he tried not to show this either. He said:

  “Of course, I’m happy John’s staying, Lockwood—but I don’t think you should have tried to influence Mrs. Cooper like that. She’s not a strong character, you know, and she didn’t like to press the point about looking after John herself. But there’s no doubt she would have preferred to do so. She told me so quite clearly before you came in.” He said this as though he was now beginning to believe it. Anyhow, John was staying, so Douglas let it go at that.

  The Medical Officer came up the next day. He was a Jamaican who had studied medicine at Cambridge. He said it was absurd to suppose that John had leprosy, and wrote out a strong statement to that effect. He couldn’t wait for it to be duplicated, and trustingly signed the bottom of a blank stencil. Afterwards Douglas typed in the statement above. He ran off enough copies for all the parents, and also for the newspapers, ready to dispatch with a covering letter from Pawley. The wording of the covering letter, which Pawley had asked Douglas to write for him, was the cause of another argument. Pawley objected to the leprosy scandal being described as “malicious and detestable gossip.” Finally they called it “an unfortunate rumour that had attracted widespread attention,” in order not to hurt people’s feelings.

  The statement appeared in newspapers a day or two later. Letters of protest ceased arriving from parents, and no children were withdrawn. John began to recover from his jaundice. The other children visited him in the sick­ room, but there was a reserve in their attitude towards him that had not been there before. It was the sort of reserve that someone who had been on trial for embezzlement might notice amongst his friends—even after his ultimate acquittal.

  *

  The next time Douglas met Judy she had just come back from Venezuela. Before that she had been to Santa Dominica and Miami. During the same week Douglas had travelled only sixty miles, down to Kingston and back.

  It was somehow disturbing to hear Judy talk lightly of her trips, as in London one might talk of running out to Guildford or down to Bognor, and he remembered the curious sensation that his own flight out from England had given him. They had taken off at night from the Azores, expecting to wake up over the palm-trees and pink sunlit houses of Bermuda. The course had been changed owing to unfavourable Atlantic winds, and in the morning they had looked down instead on the uninhabited northern wastes of Newfoundland. He could have been no more surprised if it had been Tasmania or Peru. During the war, when he had always travelled by aircraft, the Orient had contracted into the size of a pocket-handkerchief; but the New World and the Atlantic, where he had never been, had remained the vast remote areas that he had only known on his Bartholomew’s atlas at school. The sudden sense of contraction came as a shock. He would have liked to stay in Newfoundland long enough to re-orientate himself; but a few hours later, in a single hop, they exchanged the northern clime for the tropics. Once in Jamaica, where his air ticket expired, the earth gradually began to expand again to its former dimensions,. Newfoundland, which had seemed close enough to pelt with mangoes, retreated to its proper position round the curve of the globe. London became as distant as a star. Now, if the station-wagon was not available, Kingston itself was out of reach. The jungles that lay ten miles away, behind Blue Mountain Peak, were as mysterious and remote as the hinterland of Tibet.

  In this reduced world it was strange to hear of Judy’s nonchalant trips beyond the limits of the Caribbean. Judy herself took the speed of air travel for granted, but the job delighted her. It was her ideal life: to spend one night in Caracas and the next in Nassau. If it had occurred to her at the time, she would have taken up flying instead of acting or being a mannequin. She had no instinct to own a plot of land or furnish a house, and had never accumulated possessions. She had left in London all that she didn’t require for Paris, and in Paris given away all but her needs for Mexico. She saw life only as the present, without a yesterday or tomorrow; and Douglas supposed that it was because of this that she had so lightly tried to commit suicide. If something else had cropped up that evening, if the doctor who prescribed the tablets had asked her out to dinner, or if she had delayed her action an hour and gone to the cinema, her first shock at Louis’ ultimatum would have dropped into the past and she probably wouldn’t have done it. She made very few demands on the present to sustain her happiness—and least of all the demand of most people, the demand for a rosy future.

  This quality of hers enchanted Douglas—for it was always the quality you lacked yourself that you first admired in others. He now saw that he had spent too much of his own life in vague and undefined fear of the future—fear that underlay the absurd dreams of impossible happiness, protracted from adolescence. It was this fear of not living out his dreams that had driven him to make mistakes. He had married Caroline out of fear, though he hadn’t known it at the time—leaping at an opportunity lest it shouldn’t reoccur. Now, if he fell into a depression and bothered to analyse it, there was the same bogy at the root: not distaste for the present, which he could enjoy, but the fear that his life would be a failure. It had taken Judy to show him that the only failure in life could be the failure of the present, and that the greatest failure of the present was the fear of what was to come. He was aware that many people would call Judy irresponsible; but he was in love with her, and in her carefree spirits saw innocence of heart.

  Innocence of heart—he wondered how many others he knew who possessed it. The Jew at the cocktail party, perhaps . . . He could think of no more, except for the children; but the innocence of their hearts was not yet tested, and one by one they would be corrupted by disappointments and injustice, by jealousy and thwarted desire and the freshness would fade from their faces with the fading of their dreams. For innocence of heart was a subject that could only be taught by those who had not lost it themselves. There was no formula, no precedent of success, and those in whom it flowered had not learnt it at school—they had been born with it as a vivid and unquenchable talent.

  Perhaps one day they would understand how to teach it to the untalented, and the world would lose its distemper. Meanwhile how many of the children, he wondered, would grow up to take what they did not want, to resent what they had not got, to imitate what they could not become? How many would go on looking for their happiness in the future, until all at once they discovered, with bitterness, that the future was past?

  They should have had Judy up at Blue Mountain School to teach them, with her wonderfully unembittered smile. But then the letters of protest would soon have buried them alive—because, after all, married Hungarian Jews and suicide were not quite the thing.

  That afternoon they drove out to a beach some way from Kingston, and although the sand-flies abounded and the wind was too warm and sticky, it was nevertheless a happy excursion, and as they were returning to Kingston Douglas said:

  “I can’t help feeling that we’re going to find Louis installed in your flat when we get back. This afternoon is waiting for something to spoil it.”

  “I’ll throw him out if he’s there,” she said.

  Louis was not installed in the flat, but there was the next worst thing: a letter from him in the box. It was the first since his departure. It was in a fancy air-mail envelope, and came from the Argentine.

  Judy stood staring at it in her hand. Her hand was trembling slightly and she had turned pale. After a moment she gave a rather strained laugh.

  “I told him that if he wrote I’d tear up his letters.” She said it as if she was trying to remember whether she had meant it or not.

  “He probably left his hair-cream here,” Douglas said. “Or else his wife’s gone off again.”

  She went slowly through the living-room without taking her eyes off the envelope.

  “Why should I let him upset me?” s
he said. “I’m damned if I’m going to open it.” She still wasn’t doing much about it.

  “It might contain a cheque.” Douglas said. “In any case, it’s bound to make good reading, just for the culture.”

  She hesitated another moment, and then suddenly laughed and tore up the envelope and dropped the bits into the waste-paper basket.

  “I’m sorry it took so long, but it was such a surprise. I feel marvellous now—as if I’d holed in one or swum the Channel.”

  “You’ll be tearing them up without hesitation at all by the fifth or sixth,” he said.

  “Well, why on earth should we let him go on messing things up for everybody else?” she said. “He messed us up enough last time.”

  “I fact, we’ve never quite got back to where we were interrupted.”

  “I know.” She smiled uncertainly. “I wish I knew whether you wanted to get back or not. I haven’t the least idea. I don’t know if you’ve just been bothering about my feelings, or if it makes you sick to look at me after what happened. I wouldn’t blame you if it did.”

  “Do I behave as though I was feeling sick?”

  “No—but you wouldn’t. You’d just go on being pleasant because you thought I needed you.”

  “Do you need me?”

  She shrugged, smiling. “I was wonderfully happy last night because you were coming down this morning, if you call that needing you. And I tore up the letter. I don’t know what you call that.”

  “Tearing up Louis’ letter doesn’t stop you wanting him.”

  “But I don’t want him,” she said. “I don’t, honestly. It just made me feel peculiar for a minute to see his writing again, that’s all. I can probably forget him better than you can.”

  “I could forget him on the beach,” Douglas said. “But he seems to hang around this flat. He keeps coming out of that room in his braces.”

  “Oh, Lord,” she said. “And he looks so absolutely hideous in his braces. I suppose it must be his duppy. We’ll go out for supper, if you’d rather.”

  “No, I’ll get used to him.”

  “All right; I’ll see what we’ve got.”

  While she was in the kitchen Douglas smoked a cigarette on the balcony, and he thought that perhaps Louis wasn’t in the flat, after all; but when he went back into the room he saw Louis coming out of the bedroom, grinning in an ingratiating way and drying his hands on a towel. But there hadn’t been a duppy on the beach that afternoon, and Judy’s legs had been long and golden in the sun; so when they sat down at the table for supper he said:

  “There are supposed to be much better beaches in Jamaica—the genuine tropical article.”

  “And no genuine sand-flies?”

  “No sand-flies at all—but a guaranteed moon.”

  “Can you get to them in a day?”

  “No,” he said. “Not in a day. You have to rent a bungalow.”

  Her eyes were green and amused.

  “Your holidays don’t begin for nearly a month,” she said.

  “I could take a week-end off. I could have had one before, but I didn’t bother.”

  “But if someone found out?”

  “You can get bungalows miles from anywhere, with beaches of their own. We shouldn’t take the station-wagon—we’d hire a car.”

  “It would be awful if you kept remembering Louis,” she said. “And feeling sick.”

  “The duppy won’t be with us,” he said. “We’ll leave it to look after the flat. It might have grown tired of haunting the place by the time we got back.”

  Her eyes smiled at him across the table.

  “It might be so beautiful,” she said, “that I wouldn’t mind very much if we never got back.”

  The roads were empty, and he drove fast out of Kingston, exhilarated by the rush of the cool night air, and already living in his thoughts the idyll they had planned. He mused at the same time over possible eventualities that could mar it: he thought of the car going wrong and leaving them stranded, and then, for some reason, there came into his mind a perfectly clear picture of Mrs. Pawley’s brother, Findlay, walking along the beach and discovering them together, and this made him wonder what would happen if the news reached Pawley. But in his present state of elation he hardly cared if it did, and his thoughts returned to Judy and her innocence of heart . . .

  He was four or five miles out of Kingston when he re­membered he had left a parcel in Judy’s flat—a meteorological instrument of Morgan’s that he had picked up that morning after repair. He turned the station-wagon round and drove back. When he reached the house he saw that the light in Judy’s flat was still on. He climbed the stairs. and rang the bell. After a moment Judy came to the door.

  “Oh, I couldn’t think who it was!” Her manner seemed rather strange, and when he told her what he had come back for, she said, “I’ll get it for you, shall I?”

  “I’ll get it myself if you like.” She was obviously reluctant to let him pass through the hall, so he asked her, “What’s the matter? You haven’t got someone in there, have you?”

  She looked grim.

  “Oh, well, I suppose you’ll have to see.”

  He went into the living-room. There was nobody there, but the pieces of Louis’ letter were lying on the table. She had been fitting them together.

  He laughed without amusement. “I didn’t know you liked playing jig-saws. There may be some more letters by the week-end—you can tear them up and play with them all day long on the beach. It’ll help pass the time.”

  “I wish you hadn’t come back,” she said, looking wretched. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Except that you want to know what’s in the letter.”

  “I’ll tear it up again, if you like. I’ll burn it.”

  “No, go on with it now,” he said. “You never know, he might be offering me a job. I’d hate to miss anything like that. May I fix myself a drink while you’re doing it?”

  He found a bottle of rum in the kitchen, and some ice-cubes in the refrigerator. When he returned to the living-room Judy had finished putting the letter together. It had been quite easy because the envelope had only been torn across twice.

  “You can read it if you want,” she said. “He’s hopeless at writing letters, like me.”

  “What does he want?”

  “His wife’s gone back to New York. He thinks she might stay. He wants me to arrange a trip down to Buenos Aires.”

  “Well, why not?” Douglas said. “Your air-line goes to the Argentine, doesn’t it? You could fix it up with them.”

  “I’m not going to fix it up,” she said.

  “I don’t see why not.”

  She looked at him very miserably, screwing up the pieces of the letter. “I don’t want to. I’ve finished with Louis. I told you before.”

  “You also told me you’d given up reading his letters.”

  “I only read it because I’d nothing else to do after you’d gone.”

  “Nothing except think about the week-end.”

  She turned away. “I deserve that. I suppose you want to call it off now. I was terrified something would stop it, but I never thought it could happen as soon as this.” She sounded as if she would burst into tears; but after a moment she turned back, smiling wryly. “Oh, it’s all right, I’m not going to cry. Not until after you’ve gone, anyhow. No blackmail.”

  “You always wanted to see the Argentine,” he said.

  “I always wanted to see Brazil,” she said. “I never cared particularly about the Argentine.”

  “You’d care about it more if you weren’t afraid of letting me down again,” he said. “I’m much too nice a chap to be let down twice. You’re too nice to do it. We’re both so nice we can’t do what we want.”

  “I’d go to Buenos Aires if I wanted,” she said. “But I don’t—I want
to go with you.”

  “You’d better think it over until tomorrow,” he said. “There may be another letter from Louis in the morning.”

  “It wouldn’t make any difference. Not if there were fifty more letters. I’ll send them to you if there are, and you can burn them yourself.”

  “You’re not tired of playing jig-saws already.”

  “Yes, I am.” She smiled, still looking pretty wretched. “Can I have a sip of your drink? I’m beginning to need it.” She took a drink, and then laughed and said, “I nearly pushed the letter back into the wastepaper-basket when the bell rang. Then I thought it must be the woman from the flat below.”

  “I hate not reading letters,” Douglas said. “I always read Caroline’s.”

  “It’s more fun to tear them up first and play jig-saws,” she said. “In fact, it’s the only way of enjoying Louis’ letters—they’re so fearfully dull.”

  Douglas said, “Are you sure the air-line will give you the week-end off?”

  “I’ll give them notice, if necessary.”

  “I was probably wrong about the moon,” he said. “It might not be full.”

  “I don’t mind if there’s no moon at all,” she said. “I don’t mind if it rains all night. I might not notice.”

  “You might notice you were not in Buenos Aires.”

  “Where’s Buenos Aires?” she said.

  “It’s a place you had a letter from today. It was from an Hungarian chap in braces.”

  “Oh, yes, I remember,” she said. “From a duppy. But isn’t it lucky?—I’m not hauntable any more.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Pawley’s attitude had never quite recovered its former affability since the interview with Mrs. Cooper, and he boggled for at least twenty minutes. This seemed pretty graceless of him, considering that Douglas was entitled to four week-ends off in the term and so far hadn’t taken one. However, when he saw that the threat of his displeasure was not going to make Douglas withdraw his request, he finally gave a grudging consent.