Devil By The Sea Read online

  Now, she pushed a piece of bacon on to Charles’s plate.

  “I don’t need it as much as you do. I’m only an old woman.”

  Alice put down the popular morning paper she was reading. “Auntie, there’s enough for everyone,” she said sharply.

  The old woman ignored her. Alice sighed and, leaning across the table, passed the newspaper to her husband. She said something in French.

  Hearing the unfamiliar language, Hilary looked up. Her parents were discussing something with their eyes: their faces were set and ominous. She said, to attract their attention to herself, “Can we go on the beach this morning?”

  Meaning glances were exchanged. Alice answered her brightly. “Not this morning, dear. Janet can’t take you.”

  “Why can’t we? We sometimes go by ourselves,” Peregrine said innocently. His blank, sweet gaze went from one parent to another. Sensing a mystery, a faint line showed between his brows.

  “Just because, dear.” She spoke carefully to Charles. “Que pense-tu? Unwise in the circumstances, don’t you think?”

  A heavy silence hung over the table. The children watched their parents uneasily. Janet and Auntie went on eating. Charles rose from the table and cleared his throat. He said uncomfortably, “Might be a good idea to keep them away from the holiday crowds just now.”

  Hilary said, “People are always going on holiday. I don’t see why we can’t have a holiday.”

  “But you live by the sea,” chided her father, smiling.

  “A person can get tired of the sea,” Hilary said coldly.

  Alice said indulgently, “If you’re a good girl, we’ll all go on a real holiday one day. We might even go abroad. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

  Charles, passing behind Hilary’s chair, ruffled her burning hair. She twisted round and smiled up at him, her rare, refulgent smile.

  “Can I come too?” asked Peregrine, interested.

  “Of course, my darling.” Alice beamed on him. “We’ll all go. There is so much to see, you’ll love all the funny foreign places.” She caught her breath and looked at Charles. “Why not, after all? Spain is cheap just now. Charles, let’s go to Spain.”

  “We could see a bull-fight,” added Hilary happily.

  Everyone smiled: a pleasant atmosphere of family concord filled the room.

  Janet destroyed it. Her voice was thick and hoarse. “We could go to Paris, couldn’t we? Paris is lovely, especially in the spring. The blossom is out along the Seine and you can sit at the little cafés and watch the people go by. That’s what you said, isn’t it? Only I never got there, did I?”

  She flung the question at Alice with bitter, trembling intensity. It shocked them all. They sat silent and stared at her blazing eyes. Then Janet began to cry. “Always promises, promises. Why do you do it?” Leaving the room, she slammed the door.

  “Well,” said Charles. He raised his voice. “Janet, come back here at once.”

  “Leave her alone, dear.” Alice was pale. “It’s my fault. I said—oh, years ago—that we’d take her to Paris. It wasn’t serious. Has she hated me for this, all this time?”

  Hilary thought Janet was stupid. Why couldn’t she see that it was only a game? And her mother was hurt. She looked beautiful and sad.

  She said chivalrously, “Silly Janet. It’s all right, Mummy. She doesn’t understand when you’re only pretending. She wants everything to be true, always.”

  Alice addressed her resentfully, as if she were an adult. “You saw that, did you? What a fool I am.”

  “My dear girl.” Charles went to his wife and patted her shoulder. Peregrine began to cry silently. He was violently affected by family tension. The tears, like pale, transparent pearls, rolled down his cheeks and splashed on to his napkin.

  “It’s all right, old chap,” his father said.

  “Why can’t we go on the beach?” Hilary demanded. “I want to go. We don’t need Janet, we can play by ourselves.…”

  “You can’t go because I say you can’t,” cried Alice hysterically. “Must you go on and on?”

  Auntie got up from the table. “Have you finished with the newspaper?” she asked. She was quite unaware of what had been happening. “I’ll leave you the Statesman. Excellent article by Crossman.…”

  She felt for the silver-mounted stick which she felt suitable to her age and monstrous size and leaned on it heavily. She did not need it, being as strong as a horse and capable, still, of a ten-mile walk. Looking at the paper in her hand, “I see they’ve found that poor child,” she said.

  Alice and Mrs. Peacock were in the kitchen, washing up. They were talking in lowered voices. Hilary swung on the handle of the kitchen door, trying to hear what they were saying.

  “I’ve had to bring my Wally. I couldn’t leave ’im at home. Not after what’s happened.”

  Seeing Hilary, Alice gave Mrs. Peacock a significant glance.

  “Listeners hear no good of themselves,” said Mrs. Peacock. She was a tiny woman with a skinny body of a little girl and a soft, savage face like a baby owl’s. She had borne five sons and buried two husbands: it was somehow difficult to see her virginal body in connection with such a cavalcade of birth and death.

  “Run along now,” said Alice and Hilary went reluctantly into the garden.

  Deep in the long grass, Wally was shooting at birds with a home-made catapult. He was a fat, pale boy, already a head taller than his mother. He had bad teeth and was very clever. He had just won a county scholarship to the local boy’s public school.

  “Can I have a go?” Hilary looked longingly at the catapult.

  He shook his head silently and took careful aim. A small stone cracked through the branches of the chestnut tree.

  “Please, Wally.”

  He ignored her.

  “I’ve seen the Devil,” she announced importantly.

  He stared at her. “Liar. There ain’t no such person.”

  “You shouldn’t say ‘ain’t’. Liar yourself.”

  Wally walked, whistling, to the bottom of the garden and she followed him, trailing through the wet grass. She loved Wally deeply. He stopped suddenly and she bumped into him, treading on his heels.

  He gave a squeal of pain. He detested being hurt. “Mess off, can’t you?” he said furiously. She fled tearfully towards the house and he called after her, “Fatty. Fatty lump.”

  Hilary closed the door of Auntie’s room softly. She had never been forbidden the room but she knew that if her mother knew she was there, she would be sent on an errand or told to play with Peregrine.

  Leaning against the door, she breathed in the smell of the room, a smell compounded of old age and stiff, heavy clothes; the mustiness of blankets and rag rugs; a whiff of sweet, escaping gas from the popping fire. Then she threaded her way cautiously through the crowded furniture to the desk in the window. “Auntie,” she said, and touched her on the arm.

  “It’s you, is it?” The old woman looked up from her letter. “Don’t bother me now, I’m busy.”

  Hilary wandered round the room, picking up books and back numbers of periodicals. The room was small and stuffy, darkened by an elm tree outside the window. A heavy clock under a glass dome ticked the time away, its round, brass weight circling slowly. Hilary could remember the room before Auntie came, when it had been her father’s study. His desk had stood under the window and his school pictures had hung on the walls. Alice had cleared it out angrily, saying, “It’s good enough for her, isn’t it? Or do you think my lady should have the best bedroom?”

  Hilary found the morning newspaper crumpled on the sagging seat of Auntie’s wing-chair. She lay on her stomach on the floor, dug her toes in the rag rug and spread the sheet out before her.

  Poppet’s picture was in the middle of the front page and Hilary looked at it with interest. She knew it was Poppet although her hair looked darker because of the bad printing of the photograph and the name underneath was different. She read the first few lines beneath the picture
and a dark veil came down over her eyes. Her heart beat wildly in her throat. Something cold and evil menaced her from the shadowed corners and for a little while she crouched quite still, as if afraid to wake a sleeping beast.

  Then she whispered, “Auntie.” The erect, broad back did not move, the pen scratched unhesitatingly across the paper, but Hilary knew that she listened. She did not believe in Auntie’s deafness. Auntie said that she heard and Hilary believed her. Comforted by the mountainous, calm presence, she went on in a louder voice, “I saw a man take Poppet away. She was on the beach with her mother and he came and took her. He told her he was going to take her to the Fun Fair. I expect he said something like that, don’t you think? But he didn’t take her to the Fun Fair. Peregrine said he was the Devil. Do you think he was the Devil, Auntie? She must have been a very naughty little girl.”

  Suddenly a new and closer fear assailed her. “Auntie, he knows where I live. Will he fetch me away too?”

  In the silence, her head sang with light, tripping voices. Who will they send to fetch her away, fetch her away, fetch her away? Choking, she scrambled up from the rug and ran to the desk, looking up urgently into the leathery face. “Will he come for me, too?”

  Auntie felt the plucking fingers and looked at the moving, anxious mouth. “Come for you? Who, dear?”

  “The man in the newspaper.”

  “You naughty child….” Auntie brushed her away and, rising from her desk, lumbered across the room. Bending stiffly, she screwed the page of the newspaper between her hands, stuffed them in the wastepaper basket and kicked it out of sight. She lowered herself into the wing-chair, breathing heavily.

  “You’re not supposed to read the newspaper. It’s not suitable. Your mother will be very angry.” Her massive shoulders hunched, her face became, suddenly, sad and crumpled and very old. “I should never have let you see it,” she said.

  Hilary saw, with astonishment, that Auntie did not care about her. She was only concerned that her own carelessness in leaving the paper lying about should not be discovered. Uncertainly she promised, “I won’t tell Mummy.”

  “No.” Half to herself, Auntie mumbled, “She wants to get me out of the house. All she needs is an excuse like this. Charles wouldn’t be able to stand up for me. He’s a good man, but just. He’d know I was in the wrong. And what would happen to me? I’m old, my friends are dead. I ask you, what would happen to me?”

  The question escaped her lips in a little, whimpering breath. Her trembling hands played with the brooch at her throat. Between the thick, blue veins, the flesh was livid white.

  “Stop it,” cried Hilary, terrified, “Oh, stop it.”

  Auntie’s eyes flickered over her without awareness. In a little while she would, if she remembered, be ashamed of behaving like this before the child. Just now, she was absorbed in her spirit’s cowardice and her body’s failure. She dreaded Alice’s anger. When you were old, nothing mattered except your physical comfort and security: without it, all her pretensions and eccentricities would wither, she would be a shell of an old woman. Her eyes watered with self-pity. “I’m old,” she mourned, “old.”

  The door of the hot little room opened, letting in a cold blast of air. Janet stood there, one hand on the door jamb, her skirts swaying about her. She looked sullen, her hair was blown spikily about her face as if she had been running in the wind.

  Seeing Hilary, she frowned. “You shouldn’t be here, bothering Auntie.” She ignored Hilary’s tears, assuming that the child had broken something. The room was full of small china treasures and Hilary was clumsy. “Run along to the nursery,” she said.

  Moving her lips carefully, Janet asked, “Was she being a nuisance?”

  “A nuisance? No, she is never a nuisance.” Auntie sat upright in her chair. Without much effort, she drew her character round her like a sumptuous cloak, concealing the tell-tale rags of her reality. “There was nothing wrong with the child.”

  She spoke quite sincerely. She had already forgotten the cause of Hilary’s tears. She was not deliberately self-deceptive, only very old and unwilling to remember her moments of weakness. Now she was herself again, as proud and unflinching as a stage dowager.

  She said maliciously, “You don’t like the child, of course. You’ve always been jealous of her. When she was a baby they were afraid to leave you alone with her in case you did her a mischief.”

  Janet peered at herself in the looking-glass and pulled her hair tightly away from her face. She observed the effect despondently. Turning towards Auntie, she mouthed, “I was rude at breakfast. She hasn’t said anything yet, but she will. She’s never liked me.”

  “Why should she?” said Auntie in a bracing voice. “When she married Charles, you were a very cross-grained little creature. You adored her and that irritated—no one could have stood it. You followed her round like a spaniel, brimming over with sad, suffering love.”

  “I only wanted her to love me,” said Janet miserably.

  “Don’t brood over your misfortunes.” Auntie was never happier than when giving advice. “You don’t have to stay here. You’re young, you could get away.”

  “What could I do?” she asked inertly. “What have I got to offer?” She looked at her disconsolate face in the glass and smiled experimentally.

  “You’re pretty enough.”

  “But when it’s all I’ve got, it’s not much, is it?”

  “Looks aren’t the only thing.”

  “I haven’t anything else. All I’m fit for is to go clickety-clack, clickety-clack, typing in an office, giggling with the other girls. I’m not clever. I take after my mother.”

  Auntie shook her head. “I mean, if you want to get married, your looks will do. You have other assets—a compliant nature, for example—and you are very ready to admire. These things count for a lot. In the end, more than beauty. I was beautiful.”

  Taken aback by this cold calculation of her prospects, Janet gave her an incredulous glance. “Is it so important, then, to catch a man?”

  Auntie looked at her. “I think so, yes. Once you’ve done it, you may wonder what all the fuss was about, but if you never do, you’ll feel, all your life, that you’ve missed the most important thing. Of course, you can fill up your life with other things but they don’t last and when you’re old no one will know that you were pretty or clever.…” Her voice fading, she gazed out of the window at the elm tree. Janet fidgeted. After a moment or two the old woman dismissed her solitary thoughts and continued, “And it would be no good your taking a lover. It’s marriage that is the badge of success. Once you’ve been married, everyone will know you’ve been loved.”

  The room was silent. Auntie brooded in her chair. On the point of departure, Janet drooped with inanition, stifling a yawn.

  There was a scuffle on the landing. Immediately following her peremptory knock, Mrs. Peacock appeared on the threshold of the room. In spite of her frail, shrinking appearance, she had a large, dramatic soul: she made her entrance as to a roll of drums. For a long, impressive moment she waited, gathering their startled eyes.

  Then she spoke. “Look at him. Just look at ’im.”

  Pulling the child forward into the room, she pointed to his face with her free hand. Peregrine, who could not bear her proximity, shrank away, his arms stretched to the limit. He was tear-stained and paler than usual. His upper lip was disfigured by a dark, spreading burn.

  To their shocked cries, Mrs. Peacock returned a nod of grim satisfaction. “What a thing for a sister to do! She can’t deny it. I caught her in the act. Holding his little mouth on to the bulb of her electric lamp. He’ll be marked for life.” She drew in her breath with a sharp, indignant hiss: the air quivered.

  “The little beast,” cried Janet. Falling to her knees, she gathered Peregrine into her arms.

  “I told her straight. You’re a wicked girl, I said, a wicked girl and God will punish you for this. She knew what she’d done then, I can tell you….”

  Groping
for her stick, Auntie rose ponderously to her feet. “You had no right to say that. No right at all. You exceeded your authority. Where is she now?”

  Mrs. Peacock did not answer. Before this frontal attack, her righteous indignation faded: an alarmed and sheepish expression crossed her face.

  “Where is she?” Auntie insisted, thumping her stick on the floor, “What has become of the child?”

  Chapter Four

  In the playground of the Primary School, the children chattered like starlings. Their feet dragged and scraped on the grey asphalt. It was the first day of term and they were still drunk with the summer’s freedom: their shouting and laughter rose to the blue roof of the sky. Presently, the cold clanging of the bell sobered them a little and they straggled out of the sunlight into the dark, stone doorway. Through the open window thumped the first, stolid bars of the morning hymn.

  Beyond the high, fearsomely spiked railings, the bodyguard of mothers lingered, their perambulators spilling out into the road. Toddlers, wailing at the inactivity, were slapped and given sweets to suck. On the opposite pavement, a young bobby in blue paced his beat self-consciously, his heart brimming over. A deeply sentimental man, he had been painfully affected by the death of poor Camelia Perkins and, seeing the waiting women, he loved them for the suffering which he was sure they must endure while her murderer was still at large in the town. He trod the ground with a heavy, solemn tread as if to tell them by his bearing that their children were safe with him.

  At last the women began to disperse. Hilary, coming upon a group of them as she rounded a corner, dodged between the perambulators and ran on. They looked after her with a faint censorious interest. Why wasn’t she at school? Perhaps she went to one of the private schools where term had not yet begun. You wouldn’t believe, would you, that any mother would allow her little girl out alone at a time like this? In all their minds dawned the mild, unadmitted hope that if anything were to happen, they would have a chance to say that they had seen her. You couldn’t mistake that hair. It was a lovely colour and, really, quite uncommon.