Devil By The Sea Read online

  Hilary felt as exposed and helpless as a shelled crab. She was quite sure that her wickedness was already generally known. She was young enough, still, to believe that grown-up power was limitless: the long arm of authority could reach you anywhere. She saw the policeman out of the corner of her eye and thrust her head forward and down, hiding her face. It would not have surprised her if he had barred her way and accused her of murdering her little brother. Mrs. Peacock could easily have proclaimed her deed from the housetops and roused the town against her.

  Her first tears had dried but she still wept inwardly. She felt no specific remorse, she wept out of a black and dreadful conviction that there was no hope for her. Burning with shame, she kept her eyes on the ground. Her whole being was concentrated in her plump knees and her squat feet in their flapping sandals. There was a long scratch on her left knee that she had not noticed until now. It puckered as she ran. This blemish became so vividly stamped on her memory that in later years she could never see a similar scratch on a child’s knee without an associated feeling of guilt and misery.

  She ran aimlessly, doubling back on her tracks and coming out finally upon the Downs, midway between Peebles and the town. There, she stopped running and trod the cropped turf gently, grateful for the cold wind on her hot cheek. A steep flight of wooden stairs, known to the children as the Hundred Steps, led from the cliff-top to the beach. As she went down them, the sea looked navy blue and still and the sun was stationary in the sky. At this end of Henstable, the promenade petered out into a narrow spit of concrete. There were no shops or stalls, no boats for hire. The beach was muddy and inclined to smell. The defences put up during the war had not been completely removed: here and there, gaunt iron structures remained. The disadvantages of this part of the shore gave it privacy and the trippers seldom visited it. The sober line of bathing-huts, shuttered now against the autumn gales, were rented only by the residents. Hilary wandered sadly among them, listening to the ebbing sea. It sucked back on the pebbles with a prolonged and musical roar.

  She picked up a chalky stone and printed her name, in capitals, on the side of a hut. Then she drew a picture of Jesus on the Gross. As she worked over her drawing, including considerable macabre detail, she was filled with great unhappiness. She was innocent as He had been, as despised and rejected. The world was unjust and cold. A slow, sorrowful tear trickled from her eye.

  She had not meant to hurt Peregrine. The whole thing had been his idea, not hers.

  When she found him in the nursery he had been standing by her bed with the lamp already in his hand. Seeing the bulb glowing feebly in the strong daylight, she had reproached him.

  “Look at you now, wasting electricity. Daddy will be angry.”

  (Charles was finicky about small economies. He would patrol the house after dark, turning off what he considered to be unnecessary lights. On the other hand, the extravagant use of gas did not bother him: in winter, gas fires burned wastefully in almost every room.)

  Ignoring what was, at Peebles, a commonplace remark, Peregrine looked at his sister with an exultant expression on his face and said that he was punishing himself. “For letting you down,” he explained. He was a pupil at a day preparatory school where to stick up for the side was considered the whole duty of man. “I was holding it against my face and letting it burn me,” he continued virtuously. There was no mark on his face.

  For a moment, Hilary was at a loss. His triumph over her was complete: she felt small and shabby and mean. Then something, a kind of smugness in his attitude, a curious, suggestive brilliance in his eyes, made her realise that he knew quite well what effect his martyrdom would have on her. This was not real repentance. She became enraged.

  “You haven’t hurt yourself at all,” she taunted him. “If you had, it would show.”

  His face fell. She had misjudged him partly: he had genuinely intended to burn himself and had, in fact, held the bulb against his face for some considerable time. That it had not, as yet, been hot enough to burn him, was scarcely his fault.

  Hilary tossed her head. “It can’t have hotted up properly. I bet it has by now.”

  Mournfully eyeing the lighted lamp, Peregrine feared that she was right. He hung his head. “Perhaps my skin doesn’t burn easily. Not to show, I mean. I could have extra tough skin, couldn’t I?”

  He looked at Hilary pitifully, daring to hope that she would excuse him on these grounds. She frowned at him. The feebleness of his suggestion merely exacerbated his offence—how like him to try and wriggle out of it like that! Anger uplifted her: she did not count the cost.

  “We’ll see about that,” she said in dark, meaningful tones that echoed the departed Nanny. “Come here this minute.”

  Completely in her thrall, he came, his eyes sad and mute. She took the lamp from him and held the bulb against his mouth. He was small and thin for his age and the littleness of his body, pressed against hers, the slight trembling that possessed him, gave her a wild and savage pleasure. She could have smashed his face, broken his bones.

  Convinced that the punishment was just, Peregrine endured the pain for a full minute before he whimpered. Hilary took the lamp away and saw, appalled, the crimson mark on his upper lip. Her anger vanished and she was terrified. Everyone would see what she had done.

  “Will it go away?” She begged, “Wash it and see.”

  Dutifully, he spat on his handkerchief and rubbed tentatively at the mark but it was too painful, his eyes filled with tears. He looked at himself in the mirror. “I look awful,” he complained sadly. He was really upset by his appearance; he was a vain child.

  Partly to console him but mainly because she hoped to stave off retribution, Hilary pressed the burning bulb against her own arm. If they saw that she too was hurt, surely they would not punish her? Looked at in that light, the pain, which was worse than she had imagined, was also welcome. She showed the mark to Peregrine. “Look. I’ve done it too. We can tell them we were playing a game, can’t we? Spartans, or something like that.” She remembered a story of which Peregrine was most curiously fond. “You know, like the brave little boy who let the wolf eat at his tummy.”

  “Why?”

  “All right, don’t,” said Hilary, turning away. Her voice was muffled. “You don’t love me very much, do you?”

  Her bowed shoulders expressed utter dejection. Peregrine moved round so that he could see her face which was screwed up and plainer than usual. He was sorry for her because she was ugly. He thought, with a sudden flash of insight, that perhaps that was why she was so often naughty.

  “You can tell them if you like, and I won’t say it isn’t true,” he compromised. He was a truthful child but limited, more concerned with the letter than the spirit. At the moment, he was not particularly interested in justice. His mouth was hurting him and he did not really care what was said to the grown-ups one way or the other, although he knew that if Hilary were punished for burning him, it would only make more trouble for him later on.

  But there was no opportunity for pretence. Mrs. Peacock came in just then and took in the situation at a glance. She ignored Hilary’s explanation: she had had children of her own and knew a cook-up story when she heard one. She turned on Hilary indignantly. Her histrionic words, adding to Hilary’s already violent sense of guilt, were too much for the child and she fled, weeping.

  Now, re-living the episode, Hilary was seized with painful embarrassment. She could never go home, never, never. She flung the chalk stone away and ran to the farthest limit of the promenade. There were no steps down to the beach: the concrete simply came to an end in an abrupt and arbitrary fashion as if the builders had unexpectedly run out of materials or, suddenly, lost heart. She jumped down and continued along the deserted shore below the breakwaters at the edge of the tide. Here, the shingle ended in a desolation of sandy mud that sucked at her sandals. The beach was empty, the only sign of life far out at sea where the gulls fluttered like pieces of paper in the wake of a slow steamer.
/>   The clay cliffs were high and bare with a narrow frill of grass on the top like green icing on a chocolate cake. The lower slopes were gentle but the children were forbidden to climb them because they were treacherous: from time to time, great slabs tumbled into the greedy sea. The erosion was not as rapid as on the marshy flats at the other end of the town but more dramatic: during a wild night in the previous winter, the entire garden of a house on the cliff top had slid neatly two hundred feet into a hollow where the banked flag irises continued to flower in season and a fishing gnome sat snugly by an ornamental pond.

  Aware of the danger, Hilary climbed the cliffs. She hoped that they would fall on her. Death was preferable to the situation in which she found herself. Once she was dead, they would remember her with more love than they had shown to her in life. After a while, these mournful thoughts left her and she began to enjoy her freedom. She became a gallant explorer, opening up a waste land.

  When she came, by accident, upon the fallen garden, she was elated. Earlier in the year, she had been taken to look at it from a safe distance on the cliff top. (Its comical preservation had become, this summer, a tourist attraction. The enterprising council had put up notices directing visitors to the spot from which it could most effectively be observed.) Hilary was not at all disappointed to find that the garden looked less perfect close to. She was only sorry because it seemed so neglected. The stone pond was cracked across the bottom and very dirty. She cleaned it up as well as she could with her handkerchief and tried to mend it with lumps of sticky clay. When this was done, she began to fill it with rainwater which she collected in a battered can from a depression in the cliff. It was laborious work but she became completely absorbed in it as the sun moved slowly across the sky.

  Two elderly gentlewomen, pausing in their midday constitutional, saw her from the top of the cliff. One of them was rich and not quite right in the head, the other was paid to look after her. The companion, perturbed by the obvious danger of the child’s position, urged that something should be done, but her employer, who had often been incommoded by the younger woman’s attempts to rescue kittens from trees and stray dogs from teasing children, refused to discuss the matter. When she chose, she could be as deaf as a stone carving and, indeed, looked rather like one for she was aristocratic and so old that her flesh appeared to be made of some pale and indestructible material. After a while, the companion gave up trying and resigned herself to the conclusion that if they were to find someone to rescue the child, her parents, who were probably happily watching from some unseen vantage point, would accuse them of being a couple of interfering old spinsters.

  “As of course, we are.” The carving came to life suddenly and the companion was seized with a dreadful fear that, in addition to her other eccentricities, her charge had suddenly become able to read what went on inside other people’s heads.

  “A couple of nasty old maids. Stale virgins, good for nothing, barren as rock,” went on the madwoman viciously. She was aware, in her saner moments, of her dependence upon this other woman whom she hated and despised and took great pleasure in embarrassing her. She went on to express the hope that the child on the cliff would be killed by a land-slide and so be saved from old age and suffering. She showed every sign of working herself up into one of her “states”, but, having delivered herself of this outburst, she allowed herself to be appeased by the promise of a nice afternoon watching television and went home to lunch like a lamb.

  By the early afternoon, Hilary had lost interest in the garden. She was hungry. She began to climb upwards. It was harder going than it had been on the lower slopes because the cliff top overhung in places. Once or twice, she was badly frightened by a slipping stone. She was not an agile child and she looked, from a distance, a very small and precariously balanced creature whose bright hair, when the sun caught it, flamed like a beacon against the brown mud of the cliff.

  Auntie saw her from the shore.

  The fuss and the flurry attendant on the child’s disappearance had disgusted her. Her deafness saved her from the worst of it but even she could not escape the atmosphere at lunch-time. Tinned soup and bread and cheese were served to the family by Mrs. Peacock whose eyes were red and whose quivering sighs reminded them continually of the drama they were engaged in. The air trembled with hysteria. Auntie, pecking at her food, found it degrading.

  After she had eaten, she went out. Leaving the house, she presented a dignified, if eccentric figure. Unlike most of the old ladies of Henstable, she wore no hat and her thin, grey hair streamed in the wind. She was wrapped in a dark blue coat made for her by a naval tailor, fastened at the throat with onyx buttons and lined with scarlet silk.

  Like Hilary, she descended the Hundred Steps. She carried her stick, but made no use of it. Her walk was unfaltering, her head held high. At the end of the promenade, she climbed heavily down on to the shingle and walked along the beach, breathing a little faster than usual and with a bright look of pleasure in her eyes. After a short while she stopped and looked sharply round her. Seeing the empty beach, she removed her cloak and laid it, carefully folded, upon a flat stone. She slipped off her skirt and appeared clad below the waist in a capacious pair of waterproof bloomers. She took off her shoes and stockings and walked to the edge of the sea. She waded along the shore, her eyes fixed on the sucking water. Occasionally she bent and picked up a handful of sand, trickling it through her fingers. She prodded with her stick at drifts of seaweed, examining them closely. Finding an old, canvas shoe, she removed the sodden lace and tucked it into a specially made pocket in the front of her bloomers. Her face relaxed into lines of complete contentment.

  Throughout the last year, she had gone beachcombing on every possible occasion. One October afternoon, shortly after she had come to Henstable, she had seen a set of false teeth floating on the scummy tide. She had kilted up her skirts and waded into the cold water, a curious excitement mounting within her. From that moment her afternoon walks had led her, almost as if some power outside herself had willed it, to the edge of the sea.

  In the beginning, she looked only for things of value: wedding rings, silver coins, conch shells that she could sell to the flower shops as rose holders. But as her mania grew, she dropped all pretence of financial gain. She collected anything and everything; broken crockery, sodden garments, the bodies of dead gulls soaked in oil. She took home what she could and hid it secretly in her room. She found it increasingly difficult to reject things that could not be concealed at home: finally she found an empty petrol drum in a cave and there she stored the things that would decay and betray her. As her treasures became more important to her, she grew cunning. She had keys made for her drawers and bought an old wooden playbox with a padlock. She locked up carefully when she left her room. She trusted nobody.

  This afternoon, she was unlucky. After the tennis shoe, she found nothing except a child’s toy boat, its sails draggled by the sea. She disentangled the seaweed from the tiny mast and held it tenderly between her hands. She had fleeting thoughts of painting it blue and scarlet and mending the little sails but she knew she would not do this. She never mended anything.

  She glanced casually up at the cliff. Although she knew she could be seen from the top of the cliffs, their high, sloping angle meant that the details of her activity were safe from prying eyes. Seen from that distance, she would look like someone shrimping.

  She recognised Hilary reluctantly. For a desperate moment she pretended to herself that it might be any child. There were plenty of children with red hair. Then she saw her duty and feared it.

  She must call out to the child, order her down to the beach and take her home. But she would have no time to dress: by the time she reached her clothes, Hilary would be out of sight. The child would have to see her as she was and her long, happy afternoons would be over. She saw her cherished occupation through unfriendly eyes as ludicrous and shameful: she saw, as vividly as if she stood before her, Alice’s disgusted face. Her treasures would be
torn from her, thrown disregarded into the dustbin. Henceforth, she would be watched continually, spied upon. They might even suggest that she was mad and have her put away.

  At this thought, Auntie’s face folded like a baby’s. She began to whimper softly. Knee-deep in water, she shivered, hugging the toy boat to her breast. Up on the cliff, the child slipped and a stone rolled. Auntie hid her eyes with one, wet hand. Then, her face averted, she left the sea and ran heavily on her old, veined feet towards her clothes. She scrambled into them, her harsh breathing sounding like a wind instrument. The beach watched her with a thousand glittering eyes; the wide, empty silence mocked her cruelly. Panting, she fastened her cloak at her throat and made for the Hundred Steps. Their steepness almost defeated her. Half-way up she was forced to rest, clinging like a cripple to the slender rail. At the top she was too exhausted to carry out her intention of looking for Hilary: unusually bent, and leaning on her stick, she walked in at the gate of Peebles.

  Alice, standing with her back to the drawing-room window, was visible from the garden path. As Auntie approached the front door, Alice flung out one hand in an emphatic, accusing gesture as if she were engaged upon a violent argument with someone in the room.

  Auntie was relieved to see her. She had been afraid that Alice would be out, searching for Hilary. Now, she could tell her where to find the child. She had nothing with which to reproach herself: it had all turned out for the best. She had acted as promptly as she could and in the only possible way. She could not have climbed after Hilary. Even if she had been nimble enough, she was too heavy for those crumbling cliffs. And if she had shouted, Hilary would not have heard her: her old, thin voice would have been blown to silence by the wind. Much better to have done as she did, to have dressed quickly and hurried home for help. Convinced and comforted, she entered the house and pushed open the drawing-room door.