“Yes, Ronny’s mother.” He went on in an attempt to explain: “You see, I feel I should write to her.”

His tone must have struck Mrs. Grey for she said: “I hope you are not having difficulties with the child, Mr. Stevens.”

“Well,” said Stevens, “not exactly difficulties.”

“Of course, I should help in any way if I could,” she continued as though she had not heard him. “I know June is very fond of him and he is company for her.”

“That’s just it!” cried Stevens, unable to stop himself. “Don’t you realize, Mrs. Grey, that it is unnatural for a boy of eleven to be in the continuous company of a girl of fifteen?”

Mrs. Grey looked mildly amused. “When I was a little girl, Mr. Stevens, children were not so rigidly divided as all that.”

Stevens gazed around him hopelessly. Here on the edge of the bluffs where the glittering ocean threw its glare into the sky, all his words sounded wrong. Flushing to the roots of his blond hair, he said in a forced voice: “But Mrs. Grey, your granddaughter is no longer a child.”

Mrs. Grey gave that peculiar stare in another direction which severe people use to ignore remarks in bad taste. There was a pause and then, from a nearby bush, an invisible bird sang out so innocently and sweetly that they both turned.

“There he goes, the little one!” exclaimed Mrs. Grey in a benign tone. Looking at Stevens once again, she remarked conversationally: “It is hard to believe, is it not, that he is first cousin to the snake?” She held up her finger. “Hark,” she said, “there he is again. Sing away! Sing away!” Her tone was completely unselfconscious. She tilted her head so that her face, sheltered before by the brim of her hat, was exposed to the light. The skin of her cheek was smooth where the grain stretched over bone, but in the hollows of her jaw one could see a thousand wrinkles. In these and at the sides of her mouth and eyes gleamed the humours of old age, the juices of her small, slight, shriveled body. She reached into a bag at her wrist, drew out a clean, folded handkerchief and passed it over her face. Stevens saw how her hand trembled.

‘Heavens,’ he thought, ‘how old she must be! How can I possibly be afraid of her?’ He was miserable because there seemed no way to get back to the original subject of the address. A fly settled on his forehead and, before he could brush it off, gave him a venomous bite from its poison-green head. He exclaimed angrily, and as though at a signal Ronny rode into view below, sitting astride Gambol, with June behind him.

The couple were riding on the moist sand at the water’s edge and the rising tide slapped at the animal’s legs. Ronny wore his gauntlet with the red-hooded Shalimar on his wrist. His soprano floated up to them through the air although June’s lower voice was lost.

Stevens and Mrs. Grey were silent on the cliff top, watching this pageant from curve to curve of their short view of the beach. When it was finally out of sight, Mrs. Grey said absently:

“I hope Catherine prepared enough food for their picnic. She sometimes forgets young appetites.”

Stevens made no comment. The force of that sight, of those two riders on the sand, had entered into his breast like an arrow. A terrible nostalgia darkened the sun for him and made his palms sweat. He would have liked to hold back his emotions and doctor them one by one as they crossed the depths of his soul, but they were gone too quickly, leaving only a sense of flatness and of regret.

Mrs. Grey spoke again, this time directly to him. “They are wandering,” she said, “in the woods of Arcady. I hope they will be permitted there a little longer.”

Nonetheless, when Stevens looked in his mail box the following morning, he found Mrs. Villars’ address in an envelope written in an old lady’s spidery hand.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Almost every year a fair came to Star Harbour; a double row of caravans that carried with them scenery and appurtenances of many sorts. The fair occupied a flat stretch of ground near the village, beyond the port, that is, and along the edge of the water. It attracted Ronny’s notice one evening when he was coming from the stable, because, although Star Harbour was out of sight, those winking circles and squares were visible around the far bend of the shore. They moved, so it seemed, upon the water itself. Their promise fascinated him and he decided to go.

Entering the house, Ronny met Jeremy leaning in the door jam. “Say Jeremy,” said Ronny, “there’s a fair over at the village.”

“Is there?” asked Jeremy.

“Can we go? Can we go tomorrow?”

Jeremy drew on his pipe and said thoughtfully: “I’ve got instructions you’re not supposed to go to the movies.”

“Movies!” cried Ronny. “Who’s talking about movies?”

“Well, I guess the idea was it’s not good for you to get excited.”

“A fair’s not the movies,” said Ronny as though stating a profound truth. He plucked at Jeremy’s sleeve just as he was taking his pipe from his mouth and a scattering of sparks flew from it into the dusk. Jeremy, feeling that flutter at his elbow and looking at the bright sparks, almost wished that Ronny were his own little boy, that from his whole life and married years he had had the faith to erect one barrier against the night, against the terrible seas, the waters of oblivion. He shrugged. “I got my orders,” he said.

“Who gave you the orders—Mr. Walsh or my mother?”

“I was never in touch with your mother. Mr. Walsh wrote me and told me what to do.”

“Doesn’t Mr. Walsh ever come here himself?” asked Ronny.

“Well, he used to,” explained Jeremy. “Seven years ago a weekend hardly passed that there weren’t a dozen people in the house. Champagne and whisky like water. Ronny, you should have seen those blonds. One just like the next, so you could hardly tell when one left off and the other started.”

“My mother’s a blond,” said Ronny.

Mary came into the doorway, drying her hands on her apron. “I don’t think blonds are a nice thing to talk about in front of a child,” she said, tartly for her.

“His mother’s a blond,” said Jeremy.

“Yes, my mother’s very pretty, but I think I like Mary better.”

“You mustn’t say that,” said Mary, tears of pleasure coming into her eyes.

“Anyway,” continued Ronny, “do we get to see that fair?”

Three days later they went: Jeremy, Mary, Ronny and June. June had walked down early to the boathouse so that they could eat together first. She was wearing a silk print dress of the kind mothers buy with a view to all occasions. But it had been bought before June’s illness and fitted her no longer. The V neck was unbecomingly high, and beneath, her nascent breasts fought with the tight, childish bodice. The skirt was uneven, drawn up here and there by the new fullness of her hips, while her brown legs were thrust out beneath with a sort of indecent innocence. Ronny, who had never seen her before in a ‘good’ dress, thought she looked beautiful and took her arm proudly when they got out at the fairgrounds.

“You are really like ‘you know what’ tonight,” he said. He meant ‘damsel,’ but did not want to say it openly in front of Jeremy.

“Oh I hate this old dress!” cried June.

Ronny and June had a little over three dollars between them and for this could take their pick of the amusements. They chose the mechanical rides first, as though to exhaust the obvious possibilities of the fair and so pierce beneath its surface to its less apparent mysteries. Jeremy and Mary meanwhile strolled around and talked to the villagers. They did not come to town often any more, but Mary had been born in Star Harbour and Jeremy on a farm nearby, so they knew almost everyone. The fairground was noisy and bright beneath the warm summer evening sky. Occasionally a shoot of lightning crossed the horizon as though the earth were thrusting out a burning tongue. Everybody’s face was glistening. The women’s dresses clung to their bodies and the men’s shirts showed dark patches of sweat.

At the far end of the fair the marsh with its reeking mud took over and lent a different quality to the entertainment, less mechanical. Humbler perhaps, but more free. The refuse of Star Harbour had been thrown into the water here for years, to build out and solidify the shore, but the mud refused to become real land. The water breathed against it, choking and sighing, a rank vegetation grew underfoot. Here the real being of the fair existed still, however humbly; the charlatan and fertile monster; the root, whose branches were theatre and church, circus and screen; a few poor wanderers tied together by uncertain crafts and bodily defects. All the benefits of modern life conspired to crush them. Mechanics had dried the sap of their imaginations; electricity had sterilized their hearts; social leveling had left them timid and ashamed—the sword eater, the snake charmer, the strong man and the freak. Their caravans were parked on the mud banks, just a handful of them, with platforms out in front.

June and Ronny, gravitating in this direction, saw on one of the platforms a bearded lady with a complacent, motherly expression. Beside her stood a woman with a doll coming out of her chest, feet first, as far as its waist. The woman pretended the doll was her twin sister and the rag legs moved and swung about as she turned from side to side.

“I call her Irene,” she was saying. She used a tone and choice of words which she thought refined and pinched her mouth daintily as she spoke. “Irene is a great trial to me,” she continued, “but I cannot help loving her as you do your little sister—or little brother,” she added, turning to June.

“How can you love someone who’s got no head?” demanded a scornful young man.

“Oh, but Irene has a head,” said the woman very seriously and not at all angry. “Irene has a head and shoulders and arms, only they’re all inside my chest. They just never emerged. She can think too, and she’s very smart because I feel her thoughts right along with my own.”

The young man said: “Oh go on!” and his squirming girl friend gave an artificial cry of repulsion.

Ronny piped up in his fluty voice: “Anyway Irene’s just a rag doll.”

The bearded lady who had been sitting quietly in her chair now smiled. She stroked her fingers through the soft, dark growth of hair which sprang more from her neck than from her cheeks. “I am a real freak,” this gesture seemed to say, and she looked approvingly at Ronny.

After this they tried looking at the sword swallower who was lifting weights with a hook through his tongue. His open mouth was drawn down and there were tears in his eyes, so they did not stay. They walked to where, in a small, sawdust ring, a donkey shuffled stubbornly and slowly, carrying a young woman on his back. During the daytime it was children, but now he was playing an unwilling cupid. The girl on his back swayed continually towards the waiting arms of her companion, squealing and giggling, while behind them the adolescent donkey-boy strode along indifferently.

“Poor donkey,” said Ronny. “How he must long to be a glorious horse. Then this never would have happened to him.”

“Sad things happen to horses too,” said June.