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?”
“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.
