June wandered slowly towards the beach. In the afternoon silence of meadow and wood a calm flowed into her breast. Her bare legs brushed lightly against the undergrowth while now and again, as a small branch was snapped or a leaf torn, there came to her nostrils one of those forest perfumes that are so filled with memory.

‘Will I really leave here one day,’ she wondered, ‘and never come back?’ The question with its tinge of finality pleased her because she was still so young and she tried to look around as though bidding her surroundings adieu. ‘Would I feel sad?’ she asked herself and then, like missing a breath, came the thought that her grandmother every day must look upon familiar places thus. ‘How different it is for me than for her,’ she mused with the dense, naive plainness that makes young girls disliked at times.

By now June had reached the edge of the creek and saw to her disappointment that the tide was at ebb. The green-black mud, covered with harsh rushes, was exposed and there was only a foot of water in the main channel. She traversed the crooked length of bridge, staring down over the railing at the marsh which was spread beneath her like a map of unknown lands. Yet she knew its every corner and was familiar with its monsters and its perils. The mud, for instance, was quick in patches. Icy springs flowed beneath and were choked so that a black jelly quivered above them. They could suck a man down in a perfectly deadly way, but June had known the position of the patches as far back as she could recall. Some of them indeed had lost their danger, since once one was over a certain height, one could touch bottom and stand triumphant on the freezing ground beneath. How passionately she had played here as a small, naked child! June shuddered at the thought and nothing would have made her step into the creek today.

She reached the beach, took off her sandals and walked down to the tide mark. There were a few sails to be seen lying aslant in the same breeze which played at the edges of her hair. Here it was no longer hot and the sun was sinking behind the hills across the bay. Soon she could see it no longer and the sky was left a deep, fathomless blue. No matter how far she stretched her gaze there was no end of it, nor could birds pierce it, nor any engine of man. June lay on her back in warm sand and looked up and thought of the sky and of God and listened to the seagulls mew and the lap of small waves against the pebbles.

After a while she rose and walked along the beach towards the boathouse which loomed up behind a forest of reeds. She did not re-cross the bridge, but waded through the mouth of the creek which was sandy and shallow with the tide’s ebb. As she pushed through the reeds, June felt a veil of silence around her face as though she would never be able to speak again. A sort of sweet glue was on her lips, sealing them together. ‘Soon,’ she thought, ‘I’ll have to meet a strange person and say polite things.’

Surrounded by these dry, tall, solitary stalks it was hard to believe.

CHAPTER TWENTY

June pulled faintly at the chain of the gate and then, irritated by the rusty response, pulled harder so that the noise shattered the woods and seemed to explode inside her head. Grace Villars herself opened the latch and June saw that her hostess, too, was in shorts. She realized at the same time that the older woman’s slim, muscular legs with their tight knees, their smooth and modeled shanks, made her own appear unformed. She became conscious of unshaven down and of the dimples marked out on her thighs by puberty. What a fool she had made of herself by coming thus! Blushing, she presented her excuse and realized as she did so that it had already been made obsolete.

“It got late and I was walking so I didn’t have time to change.”

“Well I shan’t change either,” said Grace, taking June by the hand and drawing her towards the house. “Ronny will just have to put up with us like this for the evening.”

June was intrigued by the mother’s fashion of speaking of her son as though he were already a man. Through the corners of her eyes and with quick glances she tried to examine her hostess. In tight, pink shorts and a boy’s white shirt, Grace was like a tomboy doll. True, her face was slightly raddled, the line broken around her jaw and the colour too high, but June was as yet uncritical of faces as long as they were pretty. ‘I wonder if high heels would make my legs look like that?’ she mused, and decided sadly against it. One had to have a boyish figure, the kind she, June, had lost already and which would surely never return.

As for Grace, she looked freely and merrily at June and could not understand. ‘What an utter lump!’ she said to herself. ‘And just at that terrible age; gauche and no proportions.’ Yet the strong, rather frowning girl’s face annoyed her slightly.

“So you’re the girl who’s putting my Ronny into such a state,” she said teasingly and showing her pretty little teeth.

June’s colour mounted and she turned away her head and looked out over the woods where a few fireflies flashed in the air. These silent lights, hardly visible in the dusk, filled her with longing. They were like a part of her childhood which, at Grace Villars’ tone, seemed infinitely remote. She wished she need never go into the house or see Ronny in this new atmosphere.

“I don’t know where that dreadful man is who drives the car,” Grace was saying. “I thought we could go to the movies after dinner. But you’re probably a blue stocking,” she added, turning to June with her impudent glance, “and prefer more serious pleasures.”

June, who had not given the movies much thought since her illness, felt keenly the injustice of this remark. It was folly to say: “I’m not a blue stocking,” because that would show she was afraid of being one. On the other hand to say: “Oh I love the movies!” would be utterly servile. The only right answer was a light laugh just touched with scorn; the glamorous, careless kind of scorn which is like bells tinkling. June gave her laugh, which sounded off key, and became more uncomfortable than ever so that she explained:

“You see, I used to love the movies, the kind my brothers like, but that was last year and since then I’ve grown out of adventure stories.”

Now it was Grace’s turn to feel unhappy. An obscure pain inside her, brought out by something in June’s words, made her cry out sharply: “Nonsense, there is no such thing as ‘growing out’ of adventure films. I still love them best of all.”

“Oh but it’s different for you,” said June. “You’re older. I mean you’re a mother and everything.” What she meant was that once one was married and had children, romance could no longer be of any possible interest. One might just as well return to adventure stories. Yet could Mrs. Villars quite be considered as out of the way as that? June began to blush for her words. On the other hand the thought occurred to her that she was confronted by a loose, free woman; a fascinating idea.

They had reached the house whose open door showed black in the oncoming dusk. No lights were yet lit and one got the impression on crossing the threshold of being in a place afloat, half island and half ship. The tide had turned and June, hearing its urgent voice beneath, fancied the building trembled. She looked at Grace. Did this woman know that there was water right under the house? Would she care if she did?

Grace was calling Mary and running about, switching on lights. She did not feel the turning tide, yet the coming of night in this lonely place depressed her. She felt like crying and could not understand why she had come. There was nothing wrong with Ronny. He was just a boy, and as for James Stevens, he was silly and repressed. June, too, was nothing but a growing girl, hardly a rival. The whole thing in fact was futile. Then, because it was dusk and the house so gloomy, she thought: ‘Yes, and when June is my age I will be old!’ Grace shuddered at this terrible woman’s thought for which there is no remedy, no poison strong enough to be its antidote.

“Mary!” she called in an exasperated voice. “Ronny!”

“You see!” she said to June, speaking with her lips drawn off her teeth. “Ronny is awful. He doesn’t even come to meet his guest. You should train your young men better.”

June stood quite still. ‘Am I being insulted?’ she asked herself in dismay.

Mary sidled into the room, drying her arms on her apron. It upset her that she must feed Grace Villars, for she had never cooked outside her home circle before.

“Oh Mary, for God’s sake do bring in something to drink,” begged Grace.

Mary’s body at these words became slippery with apprehension. The problem of drink was exactly what she had been dreading most. Walsh had said in his letter: “Don’t forget to buy liquor in case Mrs. Villars should want any during the week before I arrive.” What did ‘liquor’ mean, in this case? Mary had consulted her husband.

“Well, the old man used to get in whisky, gin and vodka,” Jeremy said.

Mary thought all these things sounded too manly. “Mrs. Villars is a lady,” she protested.

“Yes, but I’m no butler and you’re no ladies maid and the old man knows it.”

“What about some nice wine or champagne?” suggested Mary soothingly. In the end Jeremy had got a selection, but up until this evening Mrs. Villars had not seemed aware that such a thing as alcohol existed. It was upsetting to have her suddenly ask for it now. It was probably insulting for a lady to be offered whisky, and did one drink champagne in front of children? Mary felt her nose growing red and her brow damp. All she could do was to stand wiping her hands and her wrists in her apron, as though awaiting further orders.

Grace came over and shook her gently, saying with a smile and in a sisterly voice: “Alright, tell me what you’ve got.”

While they were talking, Ronny came up the boathouse stairs. For the last hour he had been crouching there on the quay, holding a line out over the water. He wanted to catch one of the eels which glided about the rotting timber of the boats. Mosquitoes tormented him as he crouched bare-legged over the half stagnant water, and the constant menace of their whine seemed like the thoughts inside his own brain.

He was squatting on his heels, and his knees, which thrust up in front of him, square-ended, were covered with warts. He had been getting dozens of warts lately on his joints; hard, pale growths which might be a message or a warning. In the dim light down here the mark of his tattoo appeared darker. As always when he was alone, he felt it to have a life apart: a heavy, hungry existence, like a vampire fastened to the pores of his breast.

Ronny was thinking about Shalimar and Gambol. That afternoon an incident had made him realize that his life with them and with all animals was coming to an end. The bird had arrived home without being called and with its feathers ruffled. It had been in some fight, a battle of the air, for there was blood on its beak. Ronny had been curious. He had smoothed the harsh plumage, talking softly. But something had gone wrong. There was a stillness, a sort of lack in the atmosphere. The bird, quiet under its master’s hand, had gazed its yellow gaze to each side of its head, and there was nothing said and nothing thought between Shalimar and Ronny. The communications were cut.

‘But of course I never did really talk to him,’ reasoned Ronny now, peering down into the shallow green water and dangling his line. ‘No, that’s not true,’ he contradicted himself. ‘I must have since I knew everything.’ Then a horrifying idea struck him. What if only his heart had spoken? They said the heart knew languages no tongue could utter; that it could leap the barrier from man to beast, a speech fashioned in the center of the blood.

And now Ronny’s heart could speak no longer. It had grown feeble, drained as June had predicted by the sorcery on his bosom.

Ronny threw down his line and, leaping to his feet, ran up the circular iron staircase. He did not know that June had arrived and when he saw her upstairs in the big, gloomy living room, could not repress a start that was like a shudder of animosity.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Stevens had spent the whole day doing nothing, or rather in yielding with an almost voluptuous pleasure to the hypnotic pull of the peninsula.

“Let us have some fun with June Grey,” Grace Villars had said when last they met, looking at him like a wicked little girl. “I’ll ask her to dinner and you must come along afterwards.”

Stevens woke up early that morning. Standing barefoot in front of the kitchen stove, he brought a pan of water to the boil. He always drank tea in the mornings and the pot stood on the hob waiting to be scalded. Through the screened kitchen window the morning air poured into the room and refreshed his eyes. Stevens, because he slept without a pillow, had a temporarily congested look to his face when he woke up. It made him appear more full and virile. Yet there was no one there to see it. He always drank his morning tea alone. As alone, he reflected, as an old maid. Indeed, the other day he had heard himself called that by one of his scouts, repeated no doubt from the conversation of the child’s elders.

Stevens prepared a tray and carried it into the living room where he sat down on the sofa. ‘After all,’ he thought, ‘I am a desirable bachelor. Why do I think of myself as forlorn? I have only to crook my finger and Lucy would be at my side for life.’ He pictured Lucy in her sweater and skirt, with her body that seemed to go in slightly everywhere, save at the elbows. How would she be as a companion, as the mistress of his house and of his bed? The idea was unwelcome and brought into his cold eyes a flicker of distaste. Yet he had found comfort in her admiration, and she had been the only one in town who appeared to appreciate his qualities and his taste.

Grace Villars had no taste at all. She had gone through it, so to speak, and come out triumphantly on the other side. It was only when one was struggling to become something that taste was needed. After that, perhaps, it could be cast aside, like a disguise.

Stevens ran his hand through his thin, tousled hair and looked ruefully around the room. ‘Mother was right,’ he thought. ‘They would have loved this house just the way it was. It would have been an honest atrocity.’ It was remarkable what a difference Grace Villars’ coming had made and he hated to think how soon she would go away again. ‘But after all,’ he reflected ‘she is probably no older than I am or very little. We could even marry and then I would be Ronny’s father.’

This thought which had come boldly and clearly into Stevens’ mind took him aback. A sharp sensation pierced his blood, whether of pleasure or pain he could not tell. He rose and began to walk up and down the room repeating to himself aloud:

“Yes, we could marry!”

Then, from the recesses of his brain, the rest of the sentence sent its echo to his heart. ‘Then Ronny would belong to me—’ The boy’s face came before his eyes; that face at once too suave, too wild, too fair, too dearly loved.

It was night time when Stevens drove his car along the peninsula road with its deep, sandy ruts. Rabbits flew in front of his lights, unable in their terror to get out of the way, and a great moth came softly to die against the windshield. Above, the falling stars shot across the atmosphere to vanish in unknown skies. Stevens did not look up. He did not like the sky at night with its mocking blaze of planets and stars. Anyway, he had to concentrate and drive slowly because of the rabbits for he was tender-hearted.

The gate was open at the boathouse, with Jeremy leaning against it, smoking his pipe and gazing over the reeds at the glimmer of the bay.