The Shadow and the Peak

by Richard Mason

  Pawley looked uncomfortable about that.

  “As you know, I’ve never liked to interfere with the private affairs of my staff.” He played nervously with his pencil for a minute and then brightened. “By the way, you’ll be sorry to hear that John’s leaving us this term. His mother was up here this afternoon. Her husband’s gone off with that woman. She can’t afford to keep John at a good school any longer.”

  “Never mind,” Douglas said. “Close supervision might not have suited John. He was always an independent little chap.”

  “We’re not making any radical changes, you know,” Pawley said reassuringly. “It’s only that I feel we’ve been a little too lax . . .”

  “Of course,” Douglas said. “You must definitely draw the line at suicide.”

  “Well, I expect you’d like to say good-bye to my wife, wouldn’t you?” He came round the side of the desk and held out his hand, grinning fatuously. He could think of nothing to say, and Douglas could think of nothing either. Then Pawley said, “I’m sure you’re doing right to give up teaching, Lockwood. It isn’t as though it’s what you were really cut out for.” He smiled more easily after these felicitous parting words, and went off.

  After a minute Mrs. Pawley came in. She had no make-up on, and looked very middle-aged and dark round the eyes. She pulled a cable out of the pocket of her slacks.

  “This has just come for you, Douglas.”

  He opened it. It said:

  All over. Returning Jamaica fifteenth. Judy.

  He tore it up.

  “I didn’t read it this time,” Mrs. Pawley said, attempting to smile.

  “It wasn’t awfully interesting.” He picked up his suitcase.

  “Douglas, I hope you’ll be able to think of me sometimes without—without hating me.”

  “Why should I hate you?”

  “I feel it was all my responsibility.”

  He laughed. “You too? Mrs. Morgan feels it was all hers for passing out, and Joe for kissing Silvia—and John for showing her how to tie slip-knots. That doesn’t seem to leave me with any responsibility at all. Isn’t that good?”

  Duffield drove him down in the station-wagon. He was being damned kind. He came into the hotel for a drink.

  “It was ruddy bad luck on you,” he said. “You were doing your best. But it’s no use letting children run away with the idea that they can do what they want. The only way to knock sense into them—however, there’s no point in going into that again.” He was looking rather melancholy, and presently he said, “Can’t say I don’t envy you in some ways. I’d like to be leaving that blighted place myself.”

  “You could leave if you wanted.”

  “I’ve got other things to consider.” He said this mysteriously. Perhaps he was thinking of Mrs. Morgan. His feud with Morgan had survived all cataclysms, and even fed on them; but yesterday Douglas had surprised him with Mrs. Morgan in the surgery. Duffield had explained that she was bandaging a cut on his finger, but they had evidently been getting on quite well, and they had both looked sheepish. However, this was not what Duffield had in mind now. He said, “I suppose Pawley didn’t mention anything about me before he left, did he?”

  “What sort of thing?”

  “It’s like this—I can’t see Pawley sticking it out much longer up there. Not with that ruddy wife of his, he won’t. I reckon I’ve a good chance of the headmastership. Pawley’s beginning to respect me, you know. I just wondered if he’d said anything.”

  “No he didn’t.”

  “Well, we’ll have to see. Nobody in their right minds would give the headmastership to Morgan. The only thing Morgan’s good for is digging potatoes—and, anyhow, he’s a nigger.”

  The next morning a newspaper was brought into Douglas’s room with his tea. There was a rubber-stamped message on it, saying that it came with the compliments of the manager and wishing him good morning. On the front page was an account of the inquest. There was also a photograph of himself. It was the same photograph that had appeared on his arrival in Jamaica captioned Welcome to Jamaica, Mr. Douglas Lockwood! This time it was captioned Mr. Douglas Lockwood.

  He shaved and began to dress. As he was looking for a clean shirt in his suitcase, he came across the wooden elephant. There was no wastepaper-basket in the room, so he threw it out of the window. After breakfast he walked into the town. He had no reason for walking into the town except to demonstrate to himself that he was not afraid to show his face. In Harbour Street he saw one of the boys’ father. He crossed over to the opposite pavement to save the father the trouble of doing so. It was already getting hot. He turned up King Street and went into a soda-bar and ordered a chocolate soda. After a time he remembered Judy’s cable. He wondered what she had meant by “All over.” He had supposed at first that she had meant her affair with Louis. Now it occurred to him that she might have meant Louis was dead. In that case her first cable, saying that he was very ill, had probably been true. If it was true, you couldn’t blame her for staying with him. She would have stayed with anyone who was ill and dying. She would have stayed with a dying dog.

  He thought about this, and couldn’t bring himself to mind if Louis was dead. It would have pleased him—it would have meant that Judy hadn’t insulted him with a stupid lie after all. It was nice to find he could still feel pleased about something.

  As he left the soda-bar, he nearly knocked into a seedy­ looking chap in a filthy suit. It was the mulatto who called himself a poor nigger. Douglas said, “Hullo.” The man touched his forehead sheepishly and muttered, “Good morning, sir,” and then made himself scarce. Douglas supposed he must have been reading the newspapers—or just listening to people talking. It would have been bad for business to be seen in the wrong company.

  He felt rather shaken after this encounter. Then he remembered he had been feeling pleased about something. For a minute he could only recall the feeling, without being able to remember what it was. Then it came back to him. He thought about Judy’s cable again. “Realize you’ll never forgive or understand how much I wanted you.” So she had meant it—she had only stayed in Buenos Aires because Louis was dying. Darling Judy.

  Suddenly he remembered about Louis’ address. She had told him she had burnt it. She couldn’t have done. She wouldn’t have known he was ill unless she had gone to see him. In that case he probably wasn’t ill. He probably hadn’t died. So she had deceived him after all.

  He would have to decide what to do—where to go. He thought of going to Africa. Then he thought of Cyprus and Egypt and British Honduras and British Guiana, but they all seemed equally pointless. He thought he would go to the first place he saw written in print, and he started looking in shop windows. Presently he saw a label saying “Product of Jamaica.” Jamaica didn’t count. Then he saw a boy selling newspapers. The headline said something about Moscow. Well, Russia didn’t count either.

  He supposed he would have to go back to England. He could go on a banana-boat. He thought he might as well see about it now, and he turned back towards Harbour Street where the shipping companies had their offices. On the way he suddenly saw a picture of himself coming up Arlington Street towards Piccadilly and running into Caroline and Alec by the entrance of the Ritz. Caroline said, “Darling! You’re not back? Look, Alec, it’s my ex!” He stopped going towards Harbour Street and turned in somewhere for a cup of coffee.

  In the afternoon he went to a cinema. He sat the film round twice. As he was going into the hotel again he noticed the elephant by the side of the path outside his window. He left it there and went in and had a drink. He lingered over the drink and then went out and picked it up. Someone had trodden on it. A tusk and a leg were broken.

  That night he read for a long time in bed. He hoped that after he put the book down he would drop off to sleep at once; but when he eventually closed his eyes the picture was waiting for him behind his lids, in horribl
e detail and more vivid than ever. The brain was supposed to draw a dark curtain across disagreeable memories—but the mechanism of his brain had miserably failed him. It had not even drawn a veil. He tried for a time to displace the picture by forcing other memories into his mind, and by making mental inventories of the objects in rooms he had lived in; but all these images soon disintegrated and faded, whilst the mango tree remained, in its awful clarity, holding up its leafless branches, and the tiny lifeless body in bedraggled pyjamas still listed slowly round in the early sun.

  After half an hour he turned on the light and began to read again. He could still see the picture against the printed page, but much less vividly than in the dark. At one o’clock he made another attempt to sleep, with no more success; so he turned on the light again and smoked a cigarette. While he was smoking he thought of Judy, and he got out of bed and fetched the crumpled pieces of her cable from his pocket. He smoothed them out and put them together on the bedside table. The message read the same as before, and still didn’t explain what she meant by “All over.”

  When he had finished playing jig-saws he turned off the light again and played consequences. The consequences of a mechanical defect in an aircraft was that he had met Judy, and the consequence of meeting Judy was that he had made love to Mrs. Pawley, and the consequence of making love to Mrs. Pawley was that Silvia had hung herself from the mango tree. Therefore Silvia’s death was the consequence of a mechanical defect in an aircraft. Tomorrow he would have to write a letter to the Gleaner about it, demanding more thorough inspections before take-off . . . He only woke once more that night, and it was because his face was being stroked by the poor mulatto who called himself a nigger. A cactus instead of a hand grew out of the mulatto’s wrist.

  In the morning there was a photograph of Pawley on the third page of the Gleaner and a statement about the school going on. Douglas only read the first sentence. The date on the newspaper was the eleventh.

  At breakfast he asked the waiter which island in the Caribbean was the nicest. The waiter said he would ask the cook. He came back and said the cook said Tobago. He pronounced it to rhyme with cargo. After breakfast Douglas looked for it on the map in the hall. It was a tiny island near Trinidad. He asked the clerk about it, and the clerk said it had nutmegs and pimento and cool breezes and beautiful beaches. He pronounced it to rhyme with sago.

  He went down to the cable office. He didn’t know Judy’s address in Buenos Aires, so sent the cable care of the air-line. He said he would meet her in Trinidad. The aircraft stopped there en route for Jamaica.

  Then he went to the air-line office and bought a ticket to Trinidad and two tickets from Trinidad to Tobago. The clerk was extremely polite and said:

  “I hope you enjoyed your stay in Jamaica, Mr. Lockwood?”

  He sat down in a seat next to a window in the aircraft, and then a man leant over and said, “I wonder if you’d mind if I took the window-seat, I want to get some photo­graphs?” and he looked up and saw the expensive-looking camera and saw it was Burroughs.

  Luckily Burroughs was only going to Trinidad. He was going to do Trinidad as thoroughly as he had done Jamaica, and he said incredulously, apropos of an English couple he had met, “D’you know they’d been in Trinidad a week and hadn’t been to see the pitch lake. It didn’t interest them. Imagine coming all the way out here, and not wanting to sec the pitch lake.” Douglas didn’t bother to say that he had no interest in the pitch lake either.

  Burroughs kept a watch out of the window and took a photograph of everything they passed over, even if it was only a rock sticking out of the sea. When they landed at Antigua he snapped the crew and all the passengers and the fuel-truck, and then they took off again and he put away the camera and started to write the shorthand account of his trip to send to his sister to type for his daughter.

  At Trinidad they put up at the same hotel. The next morning when Douglas met him at breakfast, he had already been out. He described early-morning life in Port of Spain, and then said:

  “I’ve decided to go on to Tobago with you today. It’s a place I’ve always wanted to see. It’s the original Robinson Crusoe Island, you know.”

  “What about the pitch lake?”

  “I’ll do that on my way back.”

  “A friend of mine may be coming along,” Douglas said. He hadn’t mentioned it before.

  “The same one you were meeting last time? Perhaps she won’t turn up again. Anyhow, don’t worry about me. I shan’t be in your way.”

  He insisted on sharing a taxi out to the airport, and while they were waiting at the barrier he took a photograph of Douglas to pass the time. Douglas wondered how he would look. He was probably wearing the look of forced indifference with which a gambler lays his last pound on the roulette table.

  The aircraft was three minutes early. It taxied up and he stood quite still and Burroughs went on talking, and he remembered standing like this before with Burroughs talking, and it seemed as if they had gone back in time. And then the passengers began to descend and he turned away while Burroughs went on describing the burial of his wife, and then he turned back and saw Judy coming down the steps. She waved.

  She came up to the barrier, smiling, and she looked happy and unchanged and quite excited.

  “I got your cable,” she said. “What on earth are you doing? Passing through, or something?”

  “I’m on my way to Tobago.”

  “How marvellous!”

  Burroughs was hanging around. Douglas said, “This is Mr. Burroughs. We met in Jamaica.”

  “How’s the Argentine looking these days?” Burroughs said. “I was down there before the last war. I expect it’s changed a bit since then.”

  “I expect it has.” She smiled at him quickly, and then said, “Douglas, I have to go on in this plane because the company’s given me a special passage. Can we talk somewhere? I’ve only an hour.”

  “You’ve only half an hour,” Douglas said.

  “The plane leaves again at twelve.”

  “It leaves at half-past eleven for Tobago,” he said. “I’ve got you a ticket.”

  “For Tobago?”

  “Of course.”

  She stared at him. “Are you sure?”

  “I have it here.”

  “I mean that you want me to come?”

  “If you haven’t any other plans.”

  “I’ve no plans at all.”

  “That’s the way to travel,” Burroughs said. “Without any plans. The only way to enjoy yourself.”

  “Have you any bags?” Douglas said.

  “Yes, one—it’s in the plane.”

  “You’d better get them to unload it.”

  “All right.” She went off.

  “I’m glad she’s coming,” Burroughs said. “She looks a decent sort. I must say it’s sporting of her to decide on the spur of the moment like that.”

  “We’d better fetch our own bags,” Douglas said.

  The seats were in pairs on the aircraft. Burroughs sat just behind, but the engines made too much noise for him to hear their conversation. After they had taken off, Douglas said:

  “What about Louis?”

  “Oh, he’s gone.” She laughed rather artificially, looking out of the window. “You know. Dead.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “It was his own fault. He should have stayed in Switzerland.”

  “Was it dreadful for you?”

  “Oh, yes, frightful.” She said it brightly, still looking away from him. “You know how people die like that. He just coughed all his insides on to the floor. A lovely sight.”

  After a time he asked her, “How did you find him in Buenos Aires?”

  “He was waiting at the airport. He’d been meeting all the arrivals from Jamaica. He was sure I’d turn up.” She looked at him. “I suppose you thought I�
��d kept his address and gone after him? You must have been furious.”

  “I was rather.”

  It was a clear day. The sea was dark blue and crinkled and motionless, and there was a motionless cargo boat like a scale model with a motionless wake.

  “How long are your holidays?” Judy asked.

  “I’ve left the school.”

  “Left?”

  “I hadn’t much of a bent for teaching.”

  “I never thought you’d give it up,” she said. “I thought you were too fond of your pupils.”

  “They’ll manage all right without me.”

  “What about Silvia?”

  He decided to leave that until later. “She doesn’t need me now,” he said.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I haven’t thought,” he said. “I haven’t any plans after Tobago.”

  When they reached the Tobago airport they tried to give Burroughs the slip, but it didn’t work. Burroughs must have known they were trying to give him the slip, and he still hung on. The first two or three hotels they went to in the taxi were full up. At another the woman said she had only two rooms.

  “That’s all, right,” Burroughs said. “You and I can share.”

  “I think we’ll look for something else,” Douglas said.

  “It’s a bit late to go on hunting around. This’ll do for tonight. I don’t mind sharing at all.”

  Finally they stayed. The rooms were adjoining and opened on to the same balcony. There were two beds in the room that Douglas shared with Burroughs. Burroughs locked his camera in the bedside cupboard and undressed. He wore blue-striped cotton pants. He put on his dressing­ gown and went off to have a bath. Douglas went along the balcony to Judy’s room. She was unpacking.

  “Do you like my new shoes?” she said. “They’re rather smart, aren’t they? Louis gave them to me.”

  “Good for Louis.”

  “I had to ask for the money,” she said. “He never gave me anything unless I asked. Except the benefit of his culture.”