The name ‘Roddy,’ his baby name, brought a dark patch to each side of Ronny’s face. He looked up, his eyes black beneath the fine ridge of his brows. The light from the window, polished by the sun’s reflection on the water, entered freely into those eyes. It was lost in them as in velvet or as in a well whose depths resist sounding.
Grace could not repress a tremour of uneasiness. What chemical was in those eyes to make the irises so dark? One could not define in them the circle of the pupil. They were heavy-lidded and dense. After her angry ridicule of Ronny’s tattooed heart, the boy had not spoken, but now, seeing that he was about to do so, Grace turned her own eyes to her plate.
“Do we have to stay together all afternoon?” asked Ronny in his pure, high voice, which, coming from his somber face, startled Grace.
“I wish your voice would change,” she said. “It gets on my nerves.” Then as the meaning of his words reached her, she continued: “When you were a little baby, Roddy, you cried if I left the room even for five minutes and you were only happy in my arms.” Actually, and Grace realized it as she spoke, Ronny had had a nurse in those days and she had seldom seen him.
“I don’t remember that,” said Ronny.
“Don’t you want to be with me now?” asked Grace, with a pout.
“Well, I generally ride in the afternoons, and Gambol will wonder.”
“Who is June?” asked Grace, crumbling a piece of bread with her fingers. She observed that her son’s cheek was twitching and that lovely, quivering cheek with its dusk rose, its fine grain, almost softened her brittle heart. “She must be a very silly little girl,” said Grace since Ronny made no reply.
“She’s not a little girl,” said Ronny and smiled as though his mother had tripped over a string.
A flood of unaccountable relief swept over Grace. ‘It must be an animal,’ she thought; ‘But it’s a disfigurement nonetheless.’ Then with one of those irritating flashes of insight she reflected: ‘If my name had been there I would have thought it fine.’
As though he had read her thoughts, Ronny said with eleven-year-old sharpness: “You just wish it had been your name written underneath instead of another lady’s.”
“A lady!” exclaimed Grace.
“Well, a girl really, but she would have been a lady in olden days. A damsel.”
“Are you in love with her?” asked Grace, exactly as she would have spoken to Walsh or any other man.
But Ronny did not answer her question. He thought it foolish. Just what one would expect from a mother.
“What will you do, Ronny, when you grow up and go to a real preparatory school and have to leave fairy tales behind you?”
Ronny grinned. All his sullenness was gone. “Everyone wants to know that!” he cried. “Especially Mr. Stevens.”
Mary came in. “Would you be wanting coffee?” she asked. Mary had a flustered manner because Mrs. Villars intimidated her. Before, when Walsh had kept open house, she and Jeremy had lived above the stables. She had never had anything to do with the guests, whom, in her simple, unresentful way, she imagined to be very wicked. Now, playing with her apron and hunching her back, she thought: ‘She is my age I’m sure, but how different we are. Maybe we even had the same kind of mothers, and I was a pretty girl, too.’ Where had she, Mary, gone wrong, to be old when this sister was still young, this sister who did everything God was supposed to frown on? Could God care so much as he was supposed to, or had he perhaps been on the other side all the time? Mary realized with a start that Grace was speaking to her, asking if Jeremy could drive her to the village.
“I’ll ask him,” said Mary. “What time would it be for?”
“Oh around three will do,” replied Grace and, turning to Ronny, she explained: “I want to have a talk with this Mr. Stevens of yours. I came here for that.” She tried to make these words into a reproach but the stifling afternoon heat entered her lungs and gave to her voice the quality of a sigh. She felt exhausted, drained, almost as though some secret vein in her body were open. This woman who for many years had never known solitude and who had considered the ‘country’ to mean fashionable resorts, now felt the flatness of sudden relaxation. Her dainty, slightly dry limbs were like dead sticks extending from her body, and she thought her cheeks must sag.
“Mother’s sleepy,” said Ronny to Mary. “I can see the white beneath the blue in her eyes. Say Mary, did you know that when a person sleeps their eyes roll right up in their heads?”
“You mustn’t speak about your mother like that,” said Mary.
“When you’re dead you only stare,” continued Ronny, “and your eyes grow hard as stones. That’s what Jeremy says anyway. Shalimar loves the eyes of dead knights to eat and that’s what a poem says, and do you know what Flo says? Do you mother?” A frown came into Ronny’s face and he touched his mother softly and almost pleadingly on the arm, one of those anxious, timid touches which children use and which are often ignored.
Grace roused herself irritably. “No I don’t know what Flo says and I don’t know who Flo is, but I do know that you are being tiresome. You meet me with an ugly tattoo mark on your chest which you’ll be sorry for one day. When I laugh at it, you have the nerve to sulk. Well, I had to have some reaction, didn’t I?” She spread her little hands and opened her blue eyes.
“Yes, but it’s about the tattooing that Flo said this thing,” Ronny said eagerly.
Mary had left the room by now to speak to her husband, and Grace, feeling uneasy, got up and started wandering about from object to object. Behind her back Ronny’s voice continued:
“You see, Flo says the only sure thing to take tattoo marks out is——” But Ronny found he could not say it after all. The idea was laughable, and he skipped out of the room as light as down.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Stevens prepared for the arrival of Mrs. Villars by putting away the few last, genteel relics which he had kept so far for memory’s sake. There was, for instance, a lace antimacassar on his mother’s special chair. It was spotless of course, but frayed slightly by the hard, tight knot of her hair. He folded it carefully, feeling that curious mixture of love and distaste which was beginning to come whenever he handled these maternal things. He removed as well the semi-religious sampler from above the mantle, and the abalone shell from before the door. The shell had been his mother’s ideal of beauty. It had taken that place in her soul which may be filled by the various artistic creations of man. Stevens hated the shell worse than anything else. He hated it even more bitterly because he still found it so beautiful and it was such bad taste. He put it in the coat closet where it remained in the darkness what it had always been: curled, rosy, shining, fair, murmuring about the sea whose miracle it was.
When Grace arrived in Jeremy’s Ford, Stevens was polishing the mirror in the front hall with newspaper. He had his shirt sleeves rolled back over his thin arms and the afternoon heat had made his blond hair curly. He was startled by Grace, for the radio was on in the next room and he did not hear her coming. She stood in the doorway a moment, very small in her short, full skirts and tight bodice, like a doll with real golden hair. Stevens, who was balancing on a chair, almost fell off it.
“Hello,” she said. “You asked me to come so I came.”
He jumped down with a light movement that was one of his graces. Thus they were both pleased, as two adults must be when they catch each other in mutually youthful attitudes.
“Won’t you come in?” he asked. “I hardly dare think you are Ronny’s mother for you don’t look old enough.”
She moved towards him with her birdlike steps and gave him her bird hand. Then they went into the living room and in the different light from his mauve walls, Stevens saw that Grace was not as young as all that. Grace, for her part, saw a rather pallid man whose boyishness had lasted only a moment. But because of their first view they were smiling amicably.
“Before our talk,” he said, “I shall order coffee for you. Will you have it iced?” He was proud of being able to ring for the servant even though she was fat and wore no uniform other than an apron.
“Yes,” he continued when they were settled, “I really did think we should have a talk.”
Grace was looking around the room shrewdly, drawing her summer gloves through her hands. The gloves were made of blue and white striped cotton, very pretty and fresh so that the eye followed them as they passed between her fingers. Stevens admired her immensely and could not help but compare her to Lucy, whose hands were large, red and always moist.
“I can see you are an artistic young man, Mr. Stevens,” observed Grace, looking at the prints on the walls and at the colour tone of the room.
He breathed deeply: “Ah Mrs. Villars, it’s rare, for anyone to notice things like that in Star Harbour.”
“I was born in a place very like Star Harbour,” said Grace, “and even now I shudder at the narrowness of my escape.” Then she leaned forward and said coaxingly: “I didn’t mean that as a slight, you know. It’s different for a man. A man can make his own world anywhere, as I see you have done.” The caress in her voice and its emphasis when she said ‘man’ sent a faint chord to vibrating in Stevens’ body. He was flattered. His subdued virility stirred.
