When Flo had completed his work, Eddie and June came to take a look. Eddie was complimentary. “That’s a fine piece of work,” he said. “It’s got no frills, but it’s got class.”

June gave an unnatural laugh—a ‘ladies’ laugh,’ Ronny thought resentfully—and it was not until they had been on their way back through the streets that they had recovered their intimacy. They were brought together then by their common secret and the fact that they were late for Stevens.

Now Ronny wondered what time of night it was. One should be able to tell by the stars, or by the position of the wasting moon. Sailors could. But Ronny was ignorant of their laws. He felt for his clothes in the darkness and did not dare turn on a light for fear Mary should look out her window and see it. He had to rise. He had to go. A powerful magnate sucked him out into the night. Softly in his bare feet he descended the one flight of stairs and crept to the door. It was bolted and, pulling back the bolt, he found that it was also locked. With a smile of determination he opened the door to the boat garage and descended the spiral metal steps. When he felt the cement quay beneath his feet, he stripped and, holding his light clothing above his head, lowered himself into the water.

A rank stench from this enclosed space filled his nostrils and his splashings sounded deafeningly loud. To his dismay he could touch bottom and the thought of the crab-infested mud made him shudder and draw up his legs. The soft, corrupt wood of one of the wrecks touched his side like a living thing and he gasped. He made his way rapidly into the open and, half paddling, half touching, circled the building and came ashore in the reeds beside it. Here he redressed, shivering slightly. The moon turned the feathery tips of the reeds a leprous white and their crackling frightened him as he forced his way through. A sort of anguish possessed him. He would have liked to renounce his humanity, to become one of the small night creatures that surrounded him. Then humanity would trouble him no longer. He could obey quite simply the pull of the moon or the scurrying urge of fear.

Ronny went to the rear door of the stable which was outside the wall. “Shalimar!” he whispered softly to his hawk. “Shalimar, come with me.” But the falcon was sleepy, huddled on his block and twice his size with pouted feathers. Gambol, on the contrary, nuzzled the boy’s shoulder. He was ready, it seemed, for any wish of his master. Ronny felt guilty because he had so often thought his horse lacked spirit. He led Gambol out by the halter and left Shalimar to sleep.

Mounting by the gate, Ronny rode slowly through the forest. Here and there as Gambol made his way pathless up the hill, they came out onto a pasture ringed by trees and sown by the wind. These small fields were especially lonely. The wild wheat stalks rubbed against one another like sorcerers conversing and the surrounding woods were silhouetted in forbidding shapes. Ronny was crossing one of these fields beneath the crooked moon when a strange idea made him lay his hand upon his bosom. He fancied that his tattooed heart began to beat, a sluggish throbbing slower and heavier than his original pulse. Until that moment he had not thought where he was heading; now he realized that he was on his way to the big house on the hilltop. Every detail of the way looked new to him, covered by the mysterious film of night. Gambol must have felt the same way, for whenever he plucked at a branch or took a mouthful of meadow grass he chewed it in an astonished manner. He seemed surprised to find the same vegetable taste that he had known all his life, and acted as if he expected something completely different.

Ronny caught a glimpse of the house as he rode between the tree trunks. It was etched acidly against the moon and Ronny became a black paper figure as he rode around it. In what room, he wondered, was June asleep? He looked up at the windows, but they were opaque and blind, or else dark, cavern-like holes in the walls. And perhaps she was not sleeping at all and was looking out, leaning on the sill with her bare arms. Turning the corner, he saw two windows on the second floor lit up like bright squares. Someone at least was awake, but of course it could not be June. June would not turn on the light, would not fail him so utterly when he was riding for her sake in the dangerous hours of the night. No, it must be old Mrs. Grey. He had heard old women never slept. He rode on, passing the front drive and then the thicket which screened the kitchen porch, coming back at last to his starting point. It was then that he had an inspiration. Losing himself a little in the trees, he gave that far call with which he brought his hawk to roost, that boy’s cry which was like the sound of some animal or bird:

“Shalimar!”

Afterwards Ronny was afraid. The stillness rushed back as though angry at being broken and pressed roughly against his ears. He waited for what seemed to him to be a long time and was at last rewarded by a faint, whispered “Ronny?”

Riding forward, he saw June in a robe, running silently out on the moss. When she saw him she stopped and waited, touching the trunk of a tree with one hand and with the other holding back the night tangle of her hair.

“Get on and ride behind,” said Ronny, and even his whisper sounded shrill. He rode up to the veranda and she climbed the steps without a word and hopped sideways onto Gambol’s rump. She was as yet half asleep, but the dew on her bare feet aroused her, sending through her body a sort of bell-like note. To Gambol’s step she swayed her torso slowly and held Ronny’s waist with her arms. The boy’s flat back with its shoulder blades, its arching ribs, seemed to draw away ahead of her into the night.

‘Shall I ever think of this moment later?’ she wondered, and the question made her sad. ‘I would never have asked myself such a thing last year,’ she thought. Being taller than Ronny, she could look out over his head and see their shadows thrown in front of them by the moon. They rode from darkness to darkness between the trees and entered the woods directly, without crossing the pasture. It was the opposite direction to that of the boathouse and the ground here ran almost level to the edge of three tall sand bluffs which loomed above the sound. The vegetation was scrubby and short. A delicious odor came from its leaves; sassafras, laurel, bay, and the poisonous sumac. Thorns with shiny leaves caressed and stabbed their legs and soon there was nothing anymore between them and the moon.

All at once they were on the edge of the world, looking down over the pale water. They dismounted and, still with an intuitive silence, lay down together on the grass at the rim of the bluff. The ground was drenched in dew, but they did not mind. It cooled their skins made feverish by the close night or by the heat in their own veins. They lay side by side leaning on their elbows and gazing at the track made by the moon over the water.

“I was clever to think of calling you that way,” Ronny remarked at last.

“Yes,” agreed June, “very clever.”

“I was like those troubadours who rescue people from prison by singing songs they both know.”

For a while June mused on this in silence, comforted by the old dream that prisons are for the virtuous and that rescuers exist. Nearby, Gambol cropped at the grass and the contented sound of his chewing underlined their conversation.

“When we’re both grown-up do you think we’ll still be friends?” asked June, and despised herself for asking. Why this longing for permanent things? It was growing on her, yet it went against her sense of adventure and poetry.

“I don’t know,” said Ronny in the offhand voice of children who do not wish to be sentimentally drawn. ‘Later’ was not yet poignant for this boy. He said plaintively: “My tattoo still hurts.”

“How brave you were,” said June and smiled.

“You weren’t even watching,” said Ronny, but he was pleased and continued: “Tonight I felt as if the moon was burning it, like a sunburn.” Talking about it made him feel his tattooed heart beating once again. “Sometimes,” said Ronny in his pure, shrill voice, “I feel it will get really alive out there on my skin.”

His remark had a questioning note and a sudden spiteful feeling made June agree: “Yes, it will grow stronger and stronger and draw all the blood and suck the other dry.”

At the meanness of her voice, the voluntary cruelty of her reply, Ronny sat up quickly on his hip, but he did not pursue the subject and asked irrelevantly, pointing at the sky: “Can you tell the difference between waxing and waning?”

“No,” said June languidly. “Which is it doing now?”

“It’s waning. When it grows it looks much stronger and when it’s full there are two faces on it.”

“You mean one face.” June was by now nervous and contradictory.

“No, two. Jeremy showed me. There is a skull kissing a woman on the mouth. Jeremy says that with each kiss the woman wastes away until finally only the skull is left and then it dies too.”

June jumped to her feet. “Well, let’s go. I’m all wet from the grass and I’m afraid Grandmother will notice I’m gone.”

They were both angry now and apprehensive. ‘What have we said?’ they wondered, looking at each other, but their words lay inanimate behind them, bleached and meaningless in the moonlight.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Stevens, after his failure to get Mrs. Villars’ address out of Jeremy, decided to ask Mrs. Grey. He knew that the old lady sat in the front room of the house while he was teaching her granddaughter. Driving away he often caught a glimpse of her, pen in hand, although she never raised her head. He decided, however, to approach her on an alternate day. He was somehow reluctant to mix his request with his teaching.

June’s lesson hours were now stiff and almost silent. Alone with Stevens, she had none of the impertinence or daring she displayed in Ronny’s company. She was slow at her studies and did her homework sketchily when at all. He, for his part, hardly bothered to rebuke her, only explaining in his dry voice the chapter in algebra or history through which they passed. June’s face, thrust so strongly on her head and framed by its untidy, tawny mane would be sullen. Her eyes never met his and she hesitated, almost stammered, as she spoke. Yet, just as he would begin to feel himself the master, something in her presence would reach him like an electric current; the awareness perhaps of an adolescent girl sitting alone with a man. ‘You see,’ this current would seem to imply, ‘everyone knows that men want girls.’

Aroused by this nubile aura, this innocent breath from an unconscious flesh, Stevens would grow uneasy. His voice would quicken; his glance would shift. At such moments he was glad to feel that Mrs. Grey was next door, pursuing calmly and serenely the correspondence of her old age.

He chose a Saturday for his request, driving up to the house at noon in the thick heat of the day.

Catherine opened the door. “Sure she’s not in,” she said. “She’s out for a little walk, the darling.”

Stevens was astonished to hear the stern old lady called a darling. Taking his silence for hesitation, Catherine volunteered:

“Miss June is out too.” The manner in which she said this showed that Catherine really thought it was June the young tutor had come to see. The idea made him redden with vexation.

“It’s Mrs. Grey I wish to find,” he replied, pinching his lips and trying to repress a pulse of embarrassment which beat visibly in his throat. “I understood she was in at this hour because I have noticed her at her desk when I tutor Miss Grey.”

“Sure and she’s old-fashioned,” said Catherine, giving Stevens to understand that Mrs. Grey had not trusted him alone in the house with her granddaughter. Catherine’s manner also implied that personally she felt her mistress’ precautions absurd. Thus Stevens was insulted from two directions and stood there with an air of having been slapped on both cheeks. Catherine took pity on him then because he was now drained of venom by her own strong personality.

“You’d be sure to find her if you walked towards the bluffs,” she said. “Just follow that path there. It’s her favourite walk because it’s flat and she’s getting old for the hills.”

Stevens thanked her in his coldest tones and pursued the direction she had indicated. His heels, as he crossed the lawn, made definite tracks in the moss. Looking down he saw with a pang that a horse had passed this way, a horse carrying no doubt the boy over whom he fretted. The lawn with its black, moist, acid earth was like a record noting on its page the encounters of purpose and of chance.

The path changed soon into a grass-grown cart track which divided the scrub. A murmur of insects was all around Stevens, casting its spell upon his senses like a soporific drug. The birds, too, called to one another and flew about at his approach and the heavy sun glared down on his path. He felt all at once like throwing himself down on the ground with outstretched limbs and letting the noonday heat engulf him utterly. Perhaps it might then loosen in his brain the tight knot that had been tied there: the knot of Ronny and of June.

Stevens recalled that at night, while still a child, he had sometimes been seized by a fear of oblivion. At such moments he had been wont to range his thoughts and thus prove, as he had been taught, the existence of heaven and of God. These arguments, learnt at Sunday school and at his mother’s knee, were like rocks flung into a dangerous morass, one by one. And at last they would form a foundation for peace, for sleep without fear.

Today Stevens felt that if he could only put together his reasonings in the same way, they would touch perhaps the bottom of his emotions and rob them of danger. Walking along he tried it, whispering to himself: “June is too old to be Ronny’s companion.” No, that wasn’t enough of a beginning. “Ronny is nervous, overstrained in his imagination.” There, that was true. Then: “June is—” But what was June and what was this feeling, this dark saliva in his mouth? Could he, a school master, a keeper of children, really hate a girl of fifteen?

At that moment, Stevens looked up and saw that he had reached the bluffs and that Mrs. Grey was there with her back turned, looking out over the ocean and leaning on her tall, man’s cane. Stevens cleared his throat. “Mrs. Grey?” he called.

The old woman turned, surprised to see him there, annoyed almost, in a haughty way. “Yes, Mr. Stevens?” she asked. “What is it?” She came towards him a few steps but did not offer her hand.

In one of those rare flashes of insight Stevens realized that this woman was his mother’s ideal, more, her vision, while he, Stevens had yet been in the womb. Those small blue eyes which never twinkled had a clear iciness, a true coldness beside which his own glance became counterfeit. The wrinkles around her sunken mouth mocked his own, faint, spinsterish lines. “I have got these through living,” they seemed to say, “through chewing, through the conjugal embrace and the groans of labour. You, young man, have come by yours through fear of life.”

“Is there something you wished to discuss with me?” asked Mrs. Grey. As he did not answer at once, she looked with a slightly bothered air into his face. But her mind was plainly still on other things.

“I am sorry to disturb you,” he said, gathering courage. “I just wanted to ask you something. I wanted to ask you for the address of Mrs. Villars.”

“You mean the little boy’s mother?”