by Sara Seale
“You’re in no position to know what’s been between us since we married. Men can make do with substitutes better than women can,” she said with a gallant attempt at pretence, but Melissa simply laughed derisively.
“Tell that to the marines, darling!” she scoffed. “I’ve seen your virginal couch, don’t forget, and in any case one can always tell. Besides, Piers confides—and more than that, he takes what he wants where he can get it. Too bad, my sweet—but you have grounds for divorce if you want.”
For the second time since Melissa had come to the island Lou wanted to slap her, and this time she did. She slid forward quickly to the edge of her chair and without further thought caught her cousin smartly across the cheek with the flat of her hand. For a moment Melissa said nothing, but her blue eyes held an ugly expression. Temper had drained the color from her face and the red mark of the blow stood out angrily on her cheek.
“You’ll be sorry for that,” she said then in a soft, deliberate voice. “You’ll be very very sorry, you little bitch—you little thief!”
She left the room before Lou could stammer out an apology, and presently she could be heard talking in high tones to Tibby in the kitchen. She was enlisting Tibby’s sympathy, Lou supposed, just as, later, she would certainly enlist Piers.
Lou sat on disconsolately, aware that all the headway she might have made the reasoned things she had meant to say, were defeated by that ill-considered slap. She observed with sadness that Piers’ flowers, which she had arranged in such loving expectation only a few days ago, were already dying, and all at once she felt too tired to fight any longer. There was no sense in clinging to what you had never possessed, and if Melissa was what Piers wanted then let him have her. It had, after all, just been make-believe, an impossible dream; the sort of dream any little wide-eyed bridesmaid might have while envying the lucky bride. It was time and more to wake up.
III
She apologized to Melissa the next morning, but meeting her cousin’s contemptuous expression, was reminded of Piers’ advice. Never apologize to anyone who shakes your self-confidence, he had said ... the world takes one at face value ... And Piers’ world was, of course, Melissa’s. Only last night when he had looked into her room to wish her the customary courtesy of pleasant dreams, he had added impatiently:
“Why do you have to upset Melissa?”
So taken aback had Lou been that she had stammered some incoherent reply that only made him frown.
“Why is it two women can never get on together?” he had exclaimed, and Lou’s temper, not improved by an evening listening to her cousin charming her husband and being tolerant to herself as though nothing had happened, flared up again in ill-considered speech.
“That’s a very masculine and idiotic statement,” she retorted. “There’s no particular sex distinction in not getting on with somebody else. What’s Melissa been telling you?”
“Nothing that you’d be very, pleased to hear, I imagine.”
“Very likely! She suggested a few things to me, as well, that I didn’t much care to hear.”
“Such as?”
“That you took what you wanted where you could get it. The implication was obvious.”
His face froze so suddenly into a mask of icy distaste that she shrank back against her pillows, and when he next spoke it was with the voice of a complete stranger.
“If you’re expecting a denial of that sort of statement, Lou, you’ll be disappointed,” he said with deceptive mildness. “You clearly have so little opinion of my morals that we’d best leave it at that.”
“I,” faltered Lou, suddenly drained of argument, “haven’t asked for a denial. I—I have to accept the fact that you just made use of me—that Melissa’s unlucky intervention put paid to what chances I may have had.”
She had surely, she thought much later, given him some indication that her own desires had importance, that even then she would have humbled her pride had he spoken one kind word, but his expression did not change, and when he did reply she heard such anger and bitterness in his voice that she had no words left.
“You talk like an ill-used servant, and underpaid at that,” he told her with cutting sarcasm. “If you can believe that I’m the kind of man who will make love to another woman with my wife sharing the same roof, then you’re certainly entitled to that freedom you spoke of the other evening, for you and I clearly have nothing on which to build a relationship. Goodnight!”
He had, thought Lou when he had gone, finally slammed the door in her face. She should have known him better, she supposed, than to allow the day’s mischief to come between them, yet what knowledge had she of this reputedly raffish stranger she had married than the little he chose to let her.
So in the morning she apologized to Melissa partly as an act of penance, partly because her own good manners regretted the slap, and she said as much.
“I told you you’d be sorry, didn’t I?” her cousin said. “And I didn’t just mean the shamefaced amends of a child.”
“I’m not shamefaced’ except for my temper,” Lou said gravely. “And I think you’ll agree I had provocation, but let’s forget it.”
“You may forget it, darling, I won’t. You look washed out. Had words with Piers again? He took himself off early this morning to potter round his blasted island.”
“He lends the fisherman a hand. The storm’s doing plenty of damage.”
“I suppose so. Too rough for a boat, still, would I you say? I’m right out of cigarettes now, and the radio battery’s quite dead.”
“You can get cigarettes from the store.”
“But not Turkish, and I’m sure the store doesn’t sell the right sort of batteries. Sam would go to the mainland for me.”
Melissa’s petulant voice became soft and coaxing on the last sentence, and Lou gave an exclamation of exasperation.
“Really, Melissa, you’re being utterly unreasonable!” she said. “Do you imagine Piers would allow one of his men to risk his life in this storm just to satisfy a selfish whim?”
“Piers needn’t know,” Melissa said, with a pout. “Besides, the storm seems to be abating, and Tibby says the launch has crossed to the mainland in rougher water than this.”
Lou’s patience snapped.
“If it’s possible for the launch to go out then it’s possible for you to go with it,” she replied sharply, and saw the faint look of surprise her cousin gave her.
“I couldn’t weather this, darling, I should be sea sick,” she said reproachfully. “Oh, well, I’ll have to do without my small necessities, I suppose, though how I’m going to fill the time without my radio, I can’t conceive.”
“You can read an improving book, or go for a walk,” Lou retorted, and Melissa stretched slowly, admiring with satisfaction the sleek, supple lines of her own body.
“I might at that—go for a walk,” she replied unexpectedly. “Do you feel like showing me that Druid’s Cave?”
“No,” said Lou shortly. “I haven’t been there again.”
“Scared of hearing the spook voice?”
“There’s no voice, it’s an echo.”
“Well, perhaps you’re just scared of the legend coming true. You’ve stolen another man’s mate, to quote Tibby, haven’t you, darling?”
Lou sighed. It was becoming very hard, she found, to ignore Melissa’s pricks and goads by trying to remember, that she was still the hostess.
“I’m not a child, Melissa, to be frightened into a state of guilt by threats of bogies,” she said, and Melissa laughed.
“I didn’t suppose you were. As to a sense of guilt—well, I was just being bitchy. I’d probably have done the same myself if I’d been in your place.” Melissa spoke with such an unexpected change of heart that Lou looked at her suspiciously.
“You’ve been doing your best to break things up since you’ve been here,” she said slowly, and her cousin made a wry little face.
“So I have,” she agreed with charming frankness. �
�I couldn’t resist giving you a few uncomfortable moments because I felt sore. It looks as if I shall have to settle for that mink, after all, doesn’t it?”
Lou had forgotten the mink and her own feeble attempt at blackmail. This, she thought with relief, was perhaps Melissa’s way of calling a truce, of admitting herself beaten. It would not be easy, perhaps possible, to wipe out the mischief so deliberately sown, but it was not in Lou’s nature to be ungenerous.
“You shall have the mink, of course,’ and anything else you want of what was, after all, your own trousseau,” she said. “In return, just tell me one thing. You were lying, weren’t you, when you implied you and Piers—?”
“Just fabricating, darling, which is different, knowing you’d run off to accuse him. You did, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I did, and I’ve hurt him mortally.”
“What a grandiose phrase! Didn’t he deny it?”
“Not in so many words, but Piers wouldn’t, would he?”
Melissa shrugged and gave a tiny yawn. She was, Lou knew, with a brief return of the affectionate indulgence she had once felt for her cousin, beginning to find too prolonged a lapse into unfamiliar confidences a strain.
“I wouldn’t know,” she said indifferently. “All I’ve ever learnt from life is not to ask gentlemen awkward questions. Be warned, Cinderella, or the glass coach may turn back into a pumpkin.”
It was so much the kind of remark that Piers himself was went to make if he wanted to evade an issue that for a moment Lou was startled.
“Do you really want me to show you the cave?” she asked awkwardly, with the naive artlessness of a child offering to share a secret as a sop, and Melissa frowned impatiently.
“Of course not. I don’t believe Tibby’s half-baked yarns, and you shouldn’t, either. Why don’t you make one last visit yourself to cock snooks at the spooks? Spit in the sacred pool, or something, to lay the curse. Go on—I dare you!” Her impatience had given way to an air of charming devilry. So, in other days, had she exhorted her more timid young cousin to stick up for her rights.
“No,” said Lou. “I don’t like the place. It’s evil.”
“Be your age, Lou! How can a damp old cave be Anything more than cold and slimy? I’ll tell you what—go this afternoon and I’ll buttonhole Piers and try to put him right on a few vexed questions. I owe you that much, anyway. All right?”
Lou was tempted. Who, she thought, but Melissa herself could undo the harm that had been done?
“Well...” she began doubtfully. “No. Piers said keep away.”
“Only because he’s jealous of his find, like a small boy. He discovered the cave, didn’t he? He doesn’t like sharing his island or anything on it, but you’d soon cure him of that if you’re clever. Look—when I’ve confessed my sins to him I’ll tell him where you are so that he can go quickly off for the grand reconciliation scene. He’ll fall for that one—Blanche always said he was a romantic at heart.”
Melissa had been speaking with such eager pleasure in her own scheme, roaming round the room with her usual restlessness, that Lou had to smile.
“You don’t do things by halves, Melissa, do you?” she said. “One minute you’re trying your best to wreck my happiness, and the next—I’ll never understand you.”
“Don’t try, darling, I’m just an empty void. You will go, won’t you?”
“No,” Lou said again, but with less firmness, and Melissa blew her a kiss and changed the subject.
Lou had not intended to fall in with her cousin’s highly fanciful scheme for the simple reason that life had already taught her that things rarely worked out as one planned. The Melissas of this world could rely on situations developing as they desired, but Lou was one of the luckless kind. She would probably end by merely catching a cold, waiting in a damp and rather unpleasant cave for a deliverer who would fail to turn up at all; and serve her right too, she thought prosaically. She had lived too long already in her enforced world of make-believe to count on a storybook happy ending, and the glass slipper was beginning to pinch.
By the time luncheon was over, however, she felt a need to escape into the open. Piers, eating his meal in a morose silence which even Melissa seemed unable to break, added little to the civil demands of hospitality. Tibby, waiting on them with unusual abstraction, appeared for the first time to be showing her age, muttering to herself, forgetting table appointments, and failing to react to Melissa’s little jokes.
“What’s wrong with the old girl?” Melissa asked, ruffled by the old servant’s withdrawal, and Lou, with a sidelong glance at Piers, replied:
“You jeered at her starry-gazey pie. Tibby’s very sensitive about local customs—isn’t that right, Piers?”
“Very likely,” he said without much interest. “She’s been becoming a little senile for some time. Rune doesn’t offer much in the way of outlet, I suppose.”
“Believing in local legends and liking local customs doesn’t necessarily mean one’s senile,” Lou said quickly, surprised at the same time that she should wish to champion a woman who had shown her so much hostility, and Piers’ eyebrows shot up in amused irony.
“No, of course not. I was forgetting you dealt in fairy tales yourself, Lou—and no one would call you senile as yet,” he said, and smiled a little unkindly as he saw her flush.
After that there seemed nothing more to be said. Even Melissa, having proffered lighthearted pleasantries which had met with scant response, had given up, and when she thought she was not observed, made graphic faces at Lou across the table, intimating that her plan for the afternoon should be reconsidered.
Lou made a face back and left the table with relief. It had, she thought with a faint hint of shame, been rather satisfactory to find that even her glamorous cousin had failed to lift Piers’ black mood, and she went, with a sense of release, into the open air and the buffeting wind which, though knocking the breath out of her to start, seemed to blow away the confusing issues of the past twenty-four hours.
She scrambled over rocks, and splashed through pools, making for the comparative shelter of the part of the shore that was flanked by the cliffs. The tide was coming in, she saw, breakers sending up a curling wall of foam and spray, but the sands still stretched, uncovered with water, to the cliffs. Great heaps of seaweed, torn from the rocks, blew wildly across the shining expanse, and gulls swooped sharply, scavenging for food, their screams harsh and shrill on the wind.
Without realizing it Lou had come upon the fissure in the rock face which led to the Druid’s Cave, or perhaps, she thought uncertainly, fingering the smooth, cold stone, a visit to the cave had been at the back of her mind, despite her denials to Melissa. For all her first antipathy to the place, she had been piqued by Piers’ refusal to take her back, thinking him churlish to resent sharing his discovery with her. For all the sinister tales Tibby had attributed to it, the cave had still been beautiful and strange and, Lou thought, only her own imagined danger of drowning had given her that sense of evil in the first place. Just once more, if it were only to test her own rational common sense, would she venture, and be able to say on return that she had accepted her cousin’s childish dare and could agree that there was nothing to cause discomfort but damp and cold, and wet feet.
She squeezed through the narrow aperture, and as she felt her way along the passage, the sudden quiet was uncanny. The sound of the storm evidently could not penetrate to the heart of the cliffs; just every so often a whistling whine echoed down some unseen cranny in the rock, dying away to leave only the monotonous dripping of moisture down the walls.
Lou traversed the passage with, more assurance this time, knowing that there were no pitfalls, apart from the broken ground, before she came to the cave itself. Despite her intention to revisit the placed treating it simply as a curiosity, however, she began to experience the tremors of that first fear. She was relieved when the passage began to widen, telling herself that she had merely been suffering from a very common form of claustroph
obia, but when she emerged from the gloom with the same sense of shock as before at that sharp spear of light cutting across the darkness of the cave, she felt no easier.
It was all just as she remembered it, the rough altar, the pool, the myriad reflections of light from the stalactites, the half-seen outlines of the crude carvings. She stood as she had then, in a shallow pool of water, staring and wondering and a little awed. The cold was intense, the clammy, moribund chill of a place which had never seen the sunlight, and with a little shiver, Lou turned to go. Honor, if that had been in question, was satisfied; she would escape now, and she would not come again without Piers.
Sounds of the storm outside had filled the cave with no more than a ghostly whisper of eddying moans and sighs seeping through the high aperture which let in the light, but as she moved carefully towards the mouth of the passage, a new sound joined them. At first it was only a long wail, rising and falling as might the wind, then it took shape, echoing eerily from the rock face, the vaulted roof, the very stones beneath her feet, stopping her in her tracks.
“Lou ... ou ... ou … it seemed to say, and Lou turned back to face the cave, her lips stiff with sudden fear.
“No!” she shouted frantically, and heard the echo of her own voice flung back to her, Oh ... oh ... oh...!
CHAPTER EIGHT
She laughed then, the sharp, staccato laugh that relieved tension, and that, too, came back to her as an echo. How idiotic can one get? she thought; the wind had merely been obliging with its traditional whoo-oo-oo, but even as she chided herself, the sound came again, this time in the shape of words which could hardly be misinterpreted.
Lou ... ou ... ou. Give back … ack … ack … what you’ve stolen … another man’s mate … ate … ate …
“It’s a trick!” cried Lou, and the last word echoed back to her with the same hollow sadness of that other voice, and then left silence. The silence was almost more frightening than the voice, and as she waited, the sound of her own heart beating was loud in her ears. She turned once more to go, trying to control her rising panic, and the voice spoke again, disembodied, sexless in its echoing overtones.
