When they kissed their quick breath mingled and they tasted salt between their lips. June fancied, too, that she could feel on her own bosom the throb of Ronny’s tattooed heart.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

“Grandmother,” said June on returning home, “they’re having a party at the boathouse because Mr. Walsh is coming and it’s the Fourth of July. Do you think I should go?”

Mrs. Grey was in her room. Although fully dressed, she was lying on the chaise longue and, for all the heat, her legs were covered with a shawl. She really did not feel well. ‘I wonder if I’ll die before John gets back?’ she thought, but she did not much care. Her other sons, still laughing boys, were more numerous. She anticipated already their filial kisses on her soul. She made an effort to concern herself with her granddaughter.

“Go down to the village with Catherine,” she offered, “and buy yourself a dress.” She peered at June beneath the drooping lids of her eyes. “When you are old,” she said, “you recall more clearly the first things than the later ones. I remember being your age perfectly.”

“Do you, Grandmother?” asked June, who was both surprised and incredulous.

“I had a red setter puppy,” said Mrs. Grey, “and I got a dress of the same colour, for when I took him on the leash. I’m afraid I was a very vain child.”

“Now tell about an important thing,” begged June.

But Mrs. Grey would say no more. Perhaps she had forgotten the important things, or perhaps what she had already told was of the utmost importance. Certainly it was a fact that when Catherine drove June to Star Harbour that afternoon the pleasure of buying a new dress was surprising.

Eddie and Flo received their invitations later. They had been out with a noisy family party who had taken to sea for no apparent reason. The women, three of them and very large, had lain around the deck so that Flo had constantly to step over them. They wore bathing suits from which the sides of their bosoms flowed out and turned painfully red in the sun. The men belonging to them, hairy and paunched, fished clumsily and with great good humour. Between men and women, fat children drifted like spawn in jelly.

Eddie was glad to get back and relax at Ma’s food shop. Flo, as he left the “Arabella,” could see Ruby sitting on the porch of her mother’s ramshackle house. She was wearing slacks and fanning herself with a newspaper. Flo did not even wave, but followed Eddie into SNACKS for a sandwich. Ma handed them a note. It was from Ronny.

“Mother says to come to a party tonight at our place. She says to say ‘informal’ which means not to dress up and she says to bring your girls, only of course she means women and ladies. Also please bring some mother’s milk. I have decided not to keep my tattooed heart.”

Ruby, when Flo told her they were going to a party, wanted to change out of her slacks, but Flo said not to bother.

“You wouldn’t look any better,” he said, “and you might look worse.”

“I got the figure for pants,” said Ruby with an air of complacency.

“Oh Christ!” said Flo.

Stevens had known about the party all along, because after his fight with June he had gone directly to see Grace. She had been standing outside the boathouse gate in her pale pink shorts, staring helplessly at the woods.

“I want to pick some flowers for the party tomorrow,” she said petulantly, “but I don’t know what kind or where to find them.” Becoming more aware of him, she continued: “Besides, they might be poison and make itches on my hands.” As though to present their un-itched purity, she spread her ten thin fingers which were dyed scarlet at the tips.

“Party?” asked Stevens, leaning out of the window of his car.

“Yes,” she answered in her gay little voice. “And you’re coming and you must bring your girl.”

“What if I don’t have a girl?” Stevens said. He was annoyed that she did not ask him for herself.

“Don’t be a spoil sport, James dear. How can a woman be at her best with no competition? She looked so nice, too.” Grace said all this with the most coquettish air in the world, twisting and turning on her legs to show the dainty sides of her body. “Yes, you must bring her. It’s a command, although I do hope you’re not going to neglect me or call me Mrs. Villars in front of her.”

“Can I help you get the flowers?” asked Stevens. He wanted to talk about last night, about June’s behaviour which it would have eased him to discuss.

Grace, however, appeared to have forgotten completely about the flowers for she flipped her wrist, looked at her watch and said: “Oh, how did it get so late? How do you make time pass so quickly, James? What a dangerous man you are! I must fly.” Then she twinkled into the gate and out of sight. Only her blond head reappeared for an instant. “Eight-thirty tomorrow on the dot,” she sang.

Stevens had a hard time turning his car on the sandy lane, but his dismissal made it impossible for him to enter the yard and turn in front of the house. As he backed and filled, a nervous irritation soured his blood. ‘Fly to what, pray?’ he muttered, engaging into second so roughly that his gears ground.

Lucy Philmore heard about the party first from June. June would rather have bought her dress at some more flashy store. She was not sure the gift-shop dresses were right for a party at the boathouse. Catherine, however, was firm.

“It’s your grandmother has the account there, so it’s there we’ll go. Besides, you’d have yourself looking like Sodom and Gomorrah if I let you be.”

Lucy’s dresses turned out to be very nice after all, and Lucy herself seemed unusually interested in the party.

“I suppose your teacher will be there,” she said finally, just as they were leaving.

“Oh I hope not,” said June from the doorway. “He’s awful.”

Lucy smiled sadly and wished she could think him awful in such a light-hearted way. She had never had him, and now she seemed to be losing him. The peninsula, like a hungry animal, had swallowed him up and devoured as well her slender chance of happiness. She recalled that only a few weeks ago it had seemed possible. She had even dreamed of their life together, had pictured herself discussing the problem of this or that child, or having one of his classes in for tea as she heard they did in boarding schools. Now these dreams made Lucy blush as though she had been caught out in an immodest act.

Lucy’s shop was cool despite the heat. Customers gratefully remarked on it and stayed to gossip. She had two of them in the front room that afternoon when Stevens came in, and the more she tried to get rid of them the longer they wanted to stay. They must have known perfectly well that the man had come to talk to her. Both of them knew Stevens and had known his mother, yet they pretended not to notice he was there and when, as they were finally leaving, they almost tripped over him, they made surprised recognition an excuse for lingering.

“Mr. Stevens, what a tan! You look quite the movie star! Your dear mother would have been pleased to see you picking up like this.”

“Mr. Stevens, my boy just loves his outings with you! My husband thinks they should do more sports, but I tell him: ‘Henry, they learn manners with Mr. Stevens and that’s just as important.’ ”

By the time Lucy and Stevens were alone they were both exasperated.

“How I loathe Star Harbour,” said Stevens. “Thank God it won’t be long. I’ve decided to sell the house.”

“That’s sad news to me,” said Lucy simply.

Stevens forced himself to smile. “Yes, Lucy, and I’ll be sorry not to be neighbours anymore. If all the village were like you——”

‘One of me would be enough,’ thought Lucy, ‘if you cared,’ but she said brightly: “You’re right to go, James. You have your interests which the people around here can’t understand. You have your career to think of, too.”

“Oh I shall give up teaching,” said Stevens.

“Give up teaching?” Lucy started and then pressing her hands together said: “Don’t, please don’t, do anything hasty, James.”

Suddenly he knew she was thinking of Grace Villars whom she had seen at the movies. Her attitude, her long, thin body in its summer print, made him angry and his own pity hardened his heart. “Lucy, you must allow me to know my business.” He waited an instant and then went on: “Besides, I didn’t come to speak of these things. I merely wished to ask you if you cared to come to a party with me tomorrow tonight.”

“On Grey’s Neck?” she asked, using the old Star Harbour name for the peninsula.

“How did you know?”

“Oh, where else?” she parried gaily. “Where else?”

This bright gaiety of Lucy’s, so out of keeping with her tight hands and the rigid set of her jaw, made Stevens more irritated than ever.

Jim Walsh drew in towards the boathouse around six-thirty the next day. He was excited and in an unexpected state of anticipation. From the beginning, that is from the party where he had renewed his friendship with Grace, something had been working inside of him. Sometimes, in fact most of the time, Jim did not think of it, but now and then into his old flesh crept the atavistic longing. ‘Woman,’ said this longing, ‘is but a vessel and through this vessel there must run without a break the male germ, the miracle that is father and son.’

Now, as the “High Kick” neared land, Jim took out his binoculars and looked towards the boathouse. He had not so much as set eyes on the place for seven years, and with a sigh he acknowledged that those seven years had led him into old age. They had also sufficed to turn the boathouse from a deluxe oddity into a grimy and rundown building. In another seven it would commence to be a ruin. Already, through his lenses, he could see the crumbling walls that bordered the water and the wild reeds that were closing in everywhere. Had it not been for Jeremy and Mary, he supposed, there would be no staying in the place anymore. Even so, Walsh did not think the actual boathouse would be of any use for his landing boat. He observed that the slide door, green with mould, was half down across the opening and guessed that inside all must be mud and sea grass.

“You’d better land me on the beach, over near those high reeds,” he said to his sailor.

Although, as Walsh had remarked, the water gate was half down, Ronny had meant to draw it down all the way. It had got stuck in the middle and would go no farther for all his straining.