Was she really so indifferent to the happiness they had once shared? Did it mean nothing to her that they were revisiting, for the first and last time, the haunts of their youth?
And at last, when their holiday was nearly at an end, Malcolm came to a decision. Tomorrow—their last day—he would take Maisie with him to Dead Man’s Rock. Take her, knitting and all—and make her remember.
This wasn’t its real name; it was simply what the locals called it. It wasn’t a rock either, not really. It was a narrow headland, an outcrop of granite running about a hundred yards out into the water, and curved at the end, like the beak of a bird of prey. And it was at the very furthermost tip of this curious formation, where it dropped sheer, fifty feet or more, into the green water, that there stood—had always stood, as far back as living memory could trace—a worn and battered notice-board proclaiming:
DANGER. DO NOT DIVE
BY ORDER, SEACLIFFE URBAN DISTRICT COUNCIL
The trouble about such notices is, of course, that the sort of people who aren’t frightened of a fifty-foot dive into the heaving sea aren’t usually frightened of Urban District Council notices either; and so it did happen, every so often, that some bold spirit would defy the injunction and go off the perilous tip—sometimes for a dare, but more often for sheer joy in the danger, and in the triumph of achievement. And, as the grim little nickname of the place implied, some of these intrepid souls did indeed come to grief, either from choosing a time when the tide was too low, or from simple ignorance of the techniques for diving from such heights. By striking the water at the wrong angle you can break your back, or knock yourself unconscious; by tilting your head a little too high you can have the water cascading up your nose at forty miles an hour, into your sinus cavities and bursting through your eardrums.
So the young men who ventured upon this feat did have to be careful; and most of them, happily, were so.
It was in the little sandy cove sheltered by this headland and by the cliff behind that Malcolm and Maisie settled themselves on this, the last afternoon of their holiday. It was in this exact same spot, Malcolm remembered, looking out towards the curve of the bay, that they’d settled themselves that other afternoon all those years ago, rejoicing in the solitude and seclusion of the place, and in their cleverness in discovering it.
Then, of course, Maisie hadn’t had her knitting. She had been lying spread out to the sun, wearing only her bathing dress. Even now, Malcolm could recall the slender, golden limbs, the delicate curve of the lashes over the eyes half-closed against the sun as she smiled up at him.
“Do you remember,” he asked abruptly, “the afternoon I dived off Dead Man’s Rock?”
For a moment, it seemed as if she had forgotten even this. Then, with a shrug:
“So you did!” She gave a little laugh. “You were a right show-off in those days, weren’t you!”
A show-off? Is that what he’d been? Well, of course he had. Though an enthusiastic amateur diver within the safety of public swimming-pools, where the top board is rarely much higher than sixteen feet, he’d never in a hundred years have dared to go off such a height as this, if Maisie hadn’t been there watching, open-mouthed and incredulous, breathless with admiration.
It had been a beautiful dive: he had known it, he had felt it, even during the long moments of swooping through the air; and never, as long as he lived, would he forget the moment of surfacing in triumph; of swimming shorewards with long, leisurely strokes through the blue water; of coming striding out of the shallows, the bright drops spilling around him, and stepping ashore, like a god, into the arms of his love …
“It was a silly thing to do, you could have killed yourself,” Maisie was remarking, disapprovingly. “I ought to have stopped you. It was silly.”
But something in her looks belied the prim words. For just one moment, a sort of wonder shone in her plump, middle-aged face, and she raised her eyes from her knitting for a second or two and stared ahead—Not at Malcolm, oh no, but beyond him, at another Malcolm, young, and bronzed and perfect, and long vanished from the earth …
Jealousy of this young, long-ago self, who could even now bring such a look to his wife’s face, burst upon Malcolm like a storm. He felt sick and dizzy with the sheer force of it, and it was a real effort to keep his voice level and ordinary.
“I’m going to try that dive again,” he said; and looked at her.
“Yes, dear,” she answered, winding the wool twice round a needle and pulling it through the loop: and so Malcolm had to say it again, louder.
“I’m going to dive off Dead Man’s Rock again,” he said. “Now. Just you watch …”
She laughed. Well, anyone would. The mere idea of a man of his age, with a bad heart …
“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that dear,” she said, but not unkindly, for the afternoon was a mellow and soothing one. “People will think you’re gaga! Why don’t you have a nice nap before we go home, or look at the paper, or something?”
Even before he reached the base of the cliff, Malcolm’s heart was pounding uncomfortably, and he began to have an uneasy feeling that he would never manage the steep, winding path to the top. Never even reach the headland, let alone dive off the end of it! He sat for a few minutes at the foot of the cliff, getting his breath and trying to clear his thoughts: and presently the pounding of his heart subsided, and he was able to start up the path.
To his surprise, his heart seemed to be taking the climb very well. True, he was giving himself plenty of rests on the way up, but only as a precaution, not once had he been forced into immobility by that awful, griping, clutching sensation behind his ribs. It occurred to him that he must be getting better; the holiday, in spite of everything, must have been doing him good. A few feet short of the top, he gave himself just one more of these precautionary breathers, facing, now, a dazzling panorama of sea and sky. He sat for a while leaning against a sun-warmed boulder, enjoying the feel of the heat on his skin; then, getting to his feet once more, he set off on the last little lap of the climb.
It was only when he reached the cliff top and was setting off, barefoot and stripped to his bathing-trunks, along the tussocky, boulder-strewn headland, that the reality of what he proposed to do hit him with full force: and for a moment he stood stock-still, absolutely horrified.
He would die. There were no two ways about it. He was taking himself to his death. There was no way that this seventy-six-year-old body, weakened by two bad heart attacks, could possibly survive the ordeal that he had planned for it. And it wasn’t just his heart, either; how could these flabby muscles of his possibly fulfil the demands he was going to make on them—the command to make this old, slack body straight and taut as a diver’s body needs to be as it plummets towards the water, if it is not to strike the surface in a crumpled mess, with the breath battered out of it and bones broken everywhere?
It was hopeless, hopeless. How could he even expect to launch himself on the dive at all, with no spring in his ankles any more, and maybe unable even to raise himself on tiptoe? His reaction-times, too, would be all to pieces, four decades too slow. Inevitably, he would bungle the timing of his spring, of his entry into the water—everything.
I must be mad, he thought, mad!—and continued on his way.
Up here, beyond the shelter of the cliff, the wind was icy; it whipped against his spare old body like a knife, almost overbalancing him. Down there, in the sunny sheltered cove, you’d never have guessed there was any wind at all. Maisie, at this very moment, could have no idea of it. Soon, he would be in full view, silhouetted against the sky, from where she was sitting.
He shivered, hugged his brown, bony arms across his chest, and thought about giving up. Of turning round and slinking back the way he had come; of putting on his warm clothes again, left in a neat little pile at the top of the cliff path, waiting for him.
“Thought I’d take a little stroll,” he’d say to Maisie, in explanation of his absence, and she would accept it—not u
ncomplainingly, perhaps, but certainly without question. Well, there was nothing to question; not for one second had she taken that wild boast of his as anything but an idle joke.
There would be no disgrace in going back. No disgrace, that is, that anyone other than himself, in his own soul, would ever know about.
It had been a crazy idea, right from the start; on top of which, he was getting his death of cold.
Still, having come so far, it would be a pity not to go on to the end, stand on the end of the spit for a moment and look over: no harm in just having a look, and reliving, just once, those moments of terror, of ecstasy, of intensity of living, such as he had never known before or since.
*
It was all exactly the same. The icy wind, the awful distance of the green, crawling water far, far below; the same uncontrollable shrinking of the flesh from even the sight of so sheer a drop … and the same compulsive scanning of the shore, too, to make sure that Maisie was still there …
Yes, there she was, just as he had left her, facing right towards him. Without his glasses, which of course he had left with the pile of clothes, he couldn’t see the expression on her face or even the set of her shoulders—but he knew, well enough, the scorn that both would be expressing. Silly old fool, he has gone up there after all! Wallowing in sentiment and nostalgia—I might have guessed it! Living in the past again, dreaming futile, old man’s dreams about the days when he really could dive …
I’ll show her! he thought. It’ll be the last thing I shall ever do, but, my God, I’ll show her!
“Look, Maisie, look!” he yelled into the wind, across the curving sea; and raising himself on his toes—yes, he could still do that much—he sprang.
Strange how the old skills came back, and came back instantly, without fumbling or unsureness. It was as if they had been patiently waiting all these years, deep within his body, poised in readiness through all the long, dull decades for just such a chance as this. Even as his feet left the rocky edge, he could feel every muscle, every nerve, springing into old familiar action, like old war-horses at the sound of a trumpet. They took his body in charge just as they used to do, and straight and taut and perfect he swooped towards the sea. Already, during those two swift seconds of his downward flight, he knew that he was going into a perfect dive. His head tucked well down between his outstretched arms, as the head of a high-diver needs to be, and with his eyes correctly closed, he did not see the green, bulging water rushing up to meet him, and yet the timing of his entry, once again, was flawless. He cut the surface clean as an arrow, and there was scarcely a splash, only a hugely widening circle of ripples, as his body went into the long, graceful parabola that would bring him, after many seconds, safe to the surface a dozen yards away.
*
He could hardly believe that he was still alive! Breathless, yes, as who would not be?—But what a marvellous kind of breathlessness!—how utterly, gloriously different from the sick, dreary kind of breathlessness that had assailed him in the corridor of the train that time! This was the breathlessness of Odysseus when the sea hurled him towards the crags of the Phæacian isle after two days and two nights of swimming; the breathlessness of Hector when the all-day battle rolled towards the walls of Troy …
Once again, with long, slow strokes he swam shoreward in triumph through the blue water; he hadn’t felt so well, so physically perfect, for years. Not for years and years and years. Once again he came striding out of the shallows, the bright drops spilling around him, and once again he stepped ashore like a god—but not, this time, into anyone’s arms. In fact, he had to walk right up the beach, right to where she was sitting.
“You saw that? You saw me? —Now what have you to say?” he cried as he drew near; and now, at last, she raised her eyes from her pattern. She’d been decreasing at the neck-edge, a rather tricky operation, as any knitter knows, and one demanding all of one’s concentration.
“Saw what?” she said.
A STRONG SHOULDER TO WEEP ON
WHAT WOULD you do, friends (and I’m addressing married men everywhere)—what would you do if you were roused from the marital bed at two a.m. by a phone call from a blonde and unhappily-married neighbour, telling you that a flying saucer has just landed in her back garden, and she’s frightened?
Well, go on, what would you do? Don’t all answer at once; think about it, just like I had to think. And remember that in my case I’d just been wrenched out of my first and deepest sleep—what with the Harpers coming round for Scrabble and staying till all hours, we hadn’t got to bed till after twelve—and so my brain was at its lowest ebb.
To clear it, I shook my head feebly from side to side. I rubbed my eyes. I switched on the bedside light and looked down at my wife Pam, still sleeping peacefully. It takes an earthquake to wake Pam once she is really off, this I know well; but then, of course, an earthquake is one thing, and the husky voice of a blonde and attractive neighbour phoning me in the middle of the night is quite another. Still, asleep she was, no doubt about it at all.
And so the options were all open. I could, if I chose, shake her by the shoulder, pull the covers off her, and bellow into her ear: “Darling, Sheila Curtis has just phoned up to say there’s a flying saucer in her garden. What had I better do?”
Well, how would your wife react? I can tell you straight away how Pam would:
“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, John!” she’d mumble irritably. “Do shut up and go to sleep. I told you not to eat all those pickled gherkins last thing at night …” And she’d be dead to the world again before the words were properly out of her mouth.
And so that left the second option.
“I’ll be along right away,” I breathed carefully into the phone. Then I slipped quietly out of bed, pulled on slacks and sweater over my pyjamas, slid my feet into the comfortable old leather slippers at my bedside, and tiptoed out of the room. Pam’s relaxed and regular breathing followed me across the landing and part-way down the stairs, but after that I lost it. By the time I reached the hall I could hear absolutely nothing. The house, as I gently closed the front door upon it, seemed silent as the grave.
I was to wish, later, that this hackneyed little phrase hadn’t slipped into my mind at that particular moment; but there you are, it did. I’m just telling you.
Outside, the moon was just rising—a half-moon, orangey-coloured, and lying almost on its back in the low, star-studded sky. Have you noticed how the moon, if it is visible at all at these strange hours of the night, always seems to be lying at some strange angle? Once, when I was quite young, I used to understand why this had to be so; and I find it touching, somehow, that it’s all still going on, even though the clear and beautiful explanation of it is gone from my mind for ever.
All this sounds like a digression, doesn’t it, a mere irrelevance; but it isn’t really. The phase of the moon that night, and the hour of its rising, was more important than you might imagine; more important, certainly, than I could have imagined as I walked the hundred yards or so to Sheila’s along the deserted street. The neat familiar little front gardens were familiar no longer, but seemed twice their daytime size under the grey, primeval light, and suddenly pregnant with dark, mysterious bushes.
And it was only now, listening to the slip-slop of my own footsteps along the silent pavement, that I began actually to think: to ask myself what the hell I thought I was doing? Until now, I’d been in that state of shock that you experience when you are confronted with the fact that something has happened which can’t have happened. Just simply can’t. But it has.
And I don’t mean the flying saucer. Naturally, as a rational man, I dismissed out of hand the possibility that there might actually be a flying saucer in Sheila’s garden. But that only left the mystery even more insoluble—more sinister, even, when you really came to think about it. What on earth could have got into Sheila that she’d make a crazy call like that? And at this hour of the night, too; and to me of all people? What the hell did she think she was u
p to? Had she, at long last, actually gone mad?
The thought gave me a nasty little twinge of fear. Goodness knows, Sheila had complained often enough that her husband, Brian, was driving her round the bend; but lots of wives talk like that, as we all know. They seem positively to enjoy their status as most-miserable-wife-in-the-road, weeping on every available shoulder, and sitting at each other’s kitchen tables crying into cups of tea. It can give one quite a jolt to realise, suddenly, that all these tears and dramas may sometimes actually mean something.
By this time, I had reached Sheila’s house, and as I stood at the gate, hesitating, I became aware of something that was really rather strange. How come that all the windows of the house were in darkness? Surely a woman as scared as Sheila had claimed to be would have switched lights on everywhere for reassurance? And why wasn’t she already hurrying out to meet me—or at least calling to me from some upper window? Mad or sane, after that panicky phone call, she must surely have been watching anxiously for my arrival?
Or was the whole thing a trick? A deliberate, carefully thought-out trick for some purpose as yet undivulged? It would be false modesty on my part to pretend that it had not yet crossed my mind that Sheila Curtis might be in love with me. Mine was one of the shoulders she had not infrequently wept on when Brian was up to one or other of his various misdemeanours; and you know what women are. Might she not have cooked up this whole absurd flying saucer story simply and solely to lure me along to her place in the middle of the night, while her errant husband was away? To invite me in, and then, on the pretext of viewing the mysterious object from an upstairs back window, to get me into one of the bedrooms ..?
A Lovely Day to Die Page 5
