We walked, still one behind the other, as far as a little huddle of fishing gear in the lee of a corrugated-iron shed. She perched her elegant bottom on the gunwhale of a tarred and broken boat. I sat down two yards away; a respectful distance. My weight made the boat rock alarmingly, made me feel a clumsy oaf.
She turned her face to me. Never tell me that the daughters of the gentry have faces like horses; their ancestors have married too many famous beauties. If there are girls with faces like horses in your county magazine, they are the daughters of successful suburban dentists.
She was too thin; but not in a way that did any harm. I was lost in wonder at the finely chiselled lips and curve of the nostril; Grinling Gibbons could not have done better. But certainly she was not happy. This was a lady in trouble. Is it my fault if beautiful ladies in trouble bring out my lust?
‘Can I help you?’
‘Have you seen a little boy?’ she said. ‘A little boy about seven, with red hair and a blue anorak? He’s missing.’
‘Your son?’
She nodded, biting her lip and looking down, as if to hide tears.
‘How long missing?’
‘Two hours he’s been gone. I’ve looked everywhere. He’s not anywhere. He’s carrying a teddy-bear called Brutus . . .’
I looked around the desolate stone plateau. Nothing in sight but pensioners, and gulls foraging for the pensioners’ crumbs.
‘Haven’t you rung the police?’
‘Yes. They won’t do anything. They don’t seem to believe me. They won’t come.’
‘We’ll soon see about that,’ I said. ‘C’mon. I’m a magistrate back home. I’ll move them.’
‘You’re wasting your time,’ she said hopelessly. But I got off the boat, which rocked alarmingly again, and strode off towards the solitary red telephone-box that stood perched on the stone, looking as out-of-place as everything else.
When I looked back, I saw she was following listlessly, at a distance.
I had a hell of a battle getting through to the police; the phone-book had half its sheets ripped away, and several of the panes of glass in the box had been vandalized, and the wind whistled past their jagged edges like a dozen harpies. When I finally got through to directory inquiries, I had nothing to write down the number with.
But I got through eventually.
‘Police; Portland.’
I put on my best Establishment voice; my retired colonel, chairman-of-the-Bench voice. It was not easy to sound convincing, the way that wind was whistling.
‘I want to report a small boy missing. Age seven. Red hair – blue anorak.’
‘What’s the boy’s name, sir?’
That took me aback. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know.’ I felt such a fool. Looked out of the window for the mother. She was still coming; still a long way off. ‘I can find out in a moment. Anyway, the main thing is, he’s missing.’ I was off balance, at a disadvantage; starting to disbelieve in myself and bluster. Never a good thing to do with the police.
‘You’ll be at Portland Bill, sir?’
‘How the hell did you know that?’ I thought the sound of laughter came down the line, from other policemen in the police-station. I thought I heard one of them, not the one I was talking to, say, ‘Oh, God, not that again.’ But it might have been the wind. It was so hard to hear anything.
‘What is your name and address, sir?’ There was something odd, almost mocking, about the policeman’s voice now. It made me start to get really angry.
‘What the hell’s that got to do with it?’
‘Just routine, sir. We must follow the routine.’
Striving for patience, I gave my name and address. The sound of Barlborough Hall shook him a bit. I followed up my advantage. ‘Well, how soon can I expect someone, sergeant? The lad’s been missing two hours already; the mother’s frantic!’
‘Can I have the lad’s name, sir?’
The woman was standing outside the box now, staring in at me through a broken pane. I opened the door and shouted, ‘What’s his name?’
‘Ronny Smythson,’ she said, mouthing it exaggeratedly so I could make it out over the wind.
‘Ronny Smythson,’ I told the police. ‘With a “y”, that’ll be,’ I added, striving for authority.
‘Ronny Smythson, with a “y”, sir,’ said the sergeant doggedly. I could almost see him licking the end of his pencil between every word. And again came that hint of derision from the voices of policemen in the background. I thought I heard somebody shout, ‘That’s the one!’
‘And the lad’s address, sir?’
‘For God’s sake!’ I shouted. ‘Does it matter? The kid could be lying injured . . . dead . . . drowned.’
‘Please allow me to know best, sir.’ That had been a stupid thing; to shout at him. He was going mulish on me. The background yattering in the police-station grew more derisive, I thought. Or it might have been the wind and my imagination.
I got the address and gave it to him; the phone began its warning pips, and I had to scrabble in my pockets for more money. I hadn’t liked to use 999 . . .
‘Well, you’re coming up then, sergeant? The mother really is frantic . . .’
A background voice in the police-station said, ‘What do we do with these jokers?’
‘You are coming, sergeant?’ The wind was driving me nuts. I heard that squeaky noise down the phone, which meant the sergeant had put his hand over the mouthpiece at the far end; probably to quell the revellers with a sharp word. They sounded drunk down there. Then he came back on the line.
‘I’m sorry, sir. We haven’t got anyone to spare. There’s been a spot of bother at the Borstal.’
‘What sort of bother?’
‘I’m not in a position to say, sir.’ He’d gone mulish on me again.
‘But for God’s sake, a kid could be drowning!’
‘You get a lot of lost kids this time of year, sir. They usually turn up.’ His voice sounded final; he was going to hang up on me.
‘Look! I’m a magistrate at home and . . .’
Too late. He had hung up.
I came out of the telephone-box.
‘I told you so,’ she said. Her eyes were pools of sadness; old, weary sadness. ‘They wouldn’t listen to me, either.’
‘But they’ll bloody well listen to me. I’m going down there.’
‘Don’t . . .’
‘Try and stop me! Show me the way!’ I grabbed for her hand, half in rage and half from a desire to know how it would feel. Slim, cool, a little bony, exciting . . .
She gave a small movement of ladylike rejection, and avoided my grasp. Putting me in my place as a lout; but ever so gently.
‘My car’s over here.’ I led her across to the Merc, held the passenger-door open for her. She got in gracefully, if reluctantly. As if she were used to having car-doors opened for her.
The noise of the wind stopped; the Merc has good sound-insulation. The smell of her came from where she sat close; but no closer than the space demanded. She leaned wearily against the door on her side, head down on her hand. The perfume of her came across; I sniffed at it, surreptitiously, trying to place it. Nothing like Dorinda’s Chanel No. 5, or Claire’s Dior . . . More a sea-like smell, evasive, like mist, salt, seaweed. Must be a new and very expensive one; mixing with the mob I did, I thought I knew them all . . .
I turned on the ignition. ‘Which way?’ I drove showing all my fury, but it didn’t seem to scare her. She just said listlessly ‘Left . . . right here.’ She obviously knew the way.
The police-station was small; right on the road. I braked, pulled up with a screech.
‘I won’t come in,’ she said in a low voice. You could tell she was exhausted, beaten. I didn’t bully her. I went in alone.
‘Yessir?’ said the desk-sergeant. Pretty pushy and off-putting. Trying to put you in the dock.
‘I’ve come about that child who’s missing . . .’ That caused a stir among the two or three young coppers loun
ging in the back room behind the desk. I was at least glad to know that they existed; were not an effect of the wind. The sergeant got up, said, ‘Shut up, you lot,’ and closed the door on them.
‘Yessir?’
‘Before we discuss this matter further, sergeant,’ I started, ‘and as I was just about to say when you hung up on me, I happen to be a magistrate back in Cheshire. Perhaps you would care to look at these and satisfy yourself that I am what I say I am.’ I passed him several items that proved I was a JP.
He inspected them very thoroughly; but they wiped that look off his face. The one person a copper is always respectful to is a magistrate; magistrates talk to other magistrates.
‘I’m sorry I hung up on you, sir. My apologies. It just so happens that we’ve had a lot of hoax calls from the Bill, all about children going missing; been a right plague of them this year. And the child always seems to have red hair. And it’s not kids mucking about, either. Most of the hoax calls are from grown men. But there’s never anybody waiting by the box when we get there. So you can see, we get a bit fed up . . .’
‘Well, I can assure you I’m no hoaxer, sergeant. I’ve got the lady in question waiting outside in my car.’
He got up, raised the flap of his counter, and walked across to the window. I walked with him. We stared out. She was still sitting in the passenger-seat, slumped on her hand as I had left her.
‘She’s pretty shattered,’ I said. ‘But who wouldn’t be? I asked her to come in, but she won’t. She said you wouldn’t listen to her the first time.’
The sergeant did not reply. I looked at him, crossly. There was a totally unreadable look on his face. As I watched, little beads of sweat grew visibly on his upper lip. He was without doubt a very shaken man. Well, he’d bloody asked for that . . . the English police may have slipped a bit, but they haven’t got round to ignoring mothers in distress with impunity yet.
‘Well?’ I said.
‘You’re on holiday, sir?’ he asked cagily. ‘Alone?’
‘With my wife.’
‘But she’s not with you today?’
‘She’s spending the afternoon with a friend of hers. Mrs Farnaby. At Cootisham Court. What the hell has that got to do with it?’
‘Er . . . nothing, sir.’ But for some reason he sounded relieved. ‘Well, I’m sorry, sir, but we can’t do anything about this business, I’m afraid. It’s not as if it was a crime. We’re rushed off our feet at the moment . . .’
‘Trouble at the Borstal?’ I said sarcastically. ‘I suppose these three idle young constables in your back room are up to their eyes investigating the trouble at the Borstal?’
‘No, sir . . .’
I’m afraid I lost my temper then. And said a lot of things about falling standards and police callousness, and contacting Chief Constables with complaints and bringing it before the Dorset police committee. All of which left him unmoved; though the sweat was by now freely trickling down his face, and it was not a hot day. I mean I was blasting away, and not anywhere near sweating. In the end I stamped out, breathing fire and thunder.
I looked back through the glass swing-doors. He had dived for the phone the moment my back was turned.
Or maybe the phone had just rung; maybe I was getting paranoid in my old age.
She looked up as I got into the car.
‘I told you . . .’
‘It’s incomprehensible. The world seems to have gone mad. Somebody’s going to pay for this . . . I’m driving into Weymouth . . .’
‘But what about Ronny?’ she asked. Her eyes were desperate. ‘It’ll be getting dark soon . . . he’ll be so frightened.’
‘God, I’m sorry . . .’ I said, reaching for her hand to comfort her.
Again, she moved back, avoiding me, keeping me at the proper distance. We drove back to the Bill in silence. She stayed sitting, until I walked round and opened the door for her. Then she said simply, ‘Please help me look. There are places I haven’t looked yet. I got so discouraged on my own.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘We’ll ask at the café.’
The open-air part of the café was emptier than before. What warmth there had been was gone from the day, and we’d met a succession of ancient Morris Minors full of wrinkled faces, homeward bound. But we went from table to table.
‘Excuse me,’ I said, each time. ‘You haven’t seen a little boy anywhere today – a little boy with red hair and a blue anorak? He’s this lady’s son. He’s lost. He was carrying a teddy-bear. He’s called Ronny . . .’
The old people looked at me, at first with astonishment, and then, affronted, they said gruffly, ‘No we haven’t seen anybody, have we, Emma? Nobody at all.’ Or, ‘We’ve just come . . .’ Then, abruptly, they turned their backs on us, pulled up their coat collars, and went back deliberately to finishing their tea or counting their change. Except when we were well clear of them; then they would turn and stare at us, rudely, and whisper among themselves. Then they would get up hurriedly, gather their bags and baskets, and hurry away.
Before I could ask at every table, the whole area was empty.
It hurt. I can tell you that it hurt. It hurt me as an Englishman. Were these the people that had helped each other so much in the Blitz?
‘I suppose,’ I said bitterly to Mrs Smythson, ‘they think that the old have enough troubles of their own, without adding other people’s. I never knew the old were so selfish.’
‘You’re wasting your time asking people,’ she said. ‘People don’t care any more. I’ve learnt that this morning. Oh, yes, I’ve learnt that. I didn’t realize it, all my life, until this morning. When real trouble comes, everybody walks away. Nobody wants to know.’ I have never in all my days heard anyone so bitter.
‘You’ve got me,’ I said. ‘I won’t walk away.’
She smiled; a tiny, weary smile, dragged from the depths. She was beautiful; my bowels moved with lust for her. But I only said, ‘D’you want a cup of tea? You look so cold.’
‘I just want to find Ronny, before it’s dark.’
So we went.
God, was there ever so dreary a place as the cliff-top of Portland Bill? We kept dipping into little hollows, without a visible sign of humanity. Except for the never-ending crisp-bags and crushed Coke-cans, lying embedded in the grey ooze of mud that lay in every gully of the cliffs. And the sea, coming out of the mist and breaking at the foot of the cliffs, and the endless shouting of the bullying lighthouse. At every rise I hoped to see a little shape, running towards us, tear-stained, daring to cry now his mother had come and it was all right . . .
Nothing. Except the body of a dead gull, decomposing back to brown string and bone and soaked pinion-feathers, washing about with a dreadful semblance of vitality in a circular eddy at the foot of one cliff.
Dreadful. And yet I didn’t want to find him, in one way. Because then she would be full of effusive thanks; then only concerned about the boy, chiding him, scolding him, hurrying him back to her car and driving off with a grateful wave, and I’d never see her again. Every time I caught her sad, shy eye, I lusted after her lithe slender body more. Lie down with me here, and I will give you another child, a child who will never get lost, whom I will never allow to get lost because he will be made of you and me . . . I felt mad urges to throw her down on the thin grey turf and take her, unconsenting; mad urges to grasp her in my arms and throw both of us down into the sea to drown with him. What an ending!
Because more and more, as the mist closed in and the light began to fade, I was convinced that we would not find him. He was gone. If we saw a little figure now, running towards us, carrying a teddy-bear and waving, he would be a little pathetic ghost . . .
But still she kept on and on, her hope getting more desperate as her strength ebbed.
And then, we heard a cry. As we ascended a slope of the cliff-top.
‘It’s him!’ Her eyes looked at me, huge and flaring with gladness. ‘This was always our favourite place. He must have come here, knowing
I’d come here to look for him.’
‘It sounded like a gull to me,’ I said doubtfully.
‘No, listen!’
The cry came again. Was it a gull? Or a child crying, ‘Here!’
Against the sea, and the foghorn’s distant bellow, it was hard to tell.
Then the cry came a third time. It was a child’s voice. Mrs Smythson’s voice echoed down the high cliff, loud in reply.
‘Darling! Ronny! Hold on, we’re coming! Oh, thank God, thank God! He’s down there, on the little beach. And he’s still got Brutus.’
I peered down, and could see nothing but the strands of mist drifting up the cliff, and through them, vaguely, losing and finding, a narrow nail-paring of bouldery beach, and the froth of breaking waves, endlessly swirling.
‘Hang on,’ I shouted to her. ‘Let’s think. Let’s get organized.’
But she was already lowering herself over the cliff-edge. I tried to grab her back, but she was below my reach. She stared up at me, her face scarcely human with the strain of urgency.
‘Come on. Help me!’
‘Let’s go and get help! Ropes. Let’s get organized.’
She went on climbing down.
‘This is dangerous,’ I shouted. ‘We need help.’
‘Haven’t you got any guts at all?’ She was ten feet below, now, clinging on for dear life to what looked like two blades of grey grass and a knob of rock no bigger than a tea-cup. ‘Call yourself a man?’ Then she turned her head from me, and went on descending into the mist.
‘We need help!’
‘No time – the tide’s coming in. He’ll drown. I know the way down – we always come this way – it’s much safer than it looks.’
And still I hovered. And still the child seemed to call. And the tide was coming in . . .
You will think me a pretty poor sort of coward. But it wasn’t that. I’d done my share of rock-climbing, in the Cuillins on Skye, before the War, when I was a young man. I had a mountaineer’s eye for rock. But sea-cliffs are always murder, and this was worse than most. The strata of the rock was fractured; what looked like good footholds were cracked, starting to come away from the main cliff. And even what wasn’t cracked was sloping gently seaward, and carrying that little slick of grey mud born of dust and sea-mist. The place was a death-trap.
Antique Dust Page 18
