“All but June,” said Mrs. Grey.
“Yes, I hate to leave her,” said June’s father.
“Well, you know,” said the old woman, “I don’t think she’ll mind. She’s at that age.”
John Grey looked startled, threw away his cigarette and said: “I guess I better go up and have a talk with her now. There won’t be time tomorrow.”
He found June sitting on the bed, brushing the lion-coloured hair which fever had somewhat dulled. She was thinking: ‘When they leave I can experiment with it,’ or rather she had started in that vein before her father’s step sounded on the stair. Then all reflections were cut off. Her body tensed and she waited.
As her father entered, June looked away and listened to his summer instructions while examining her hairbrush. She was to work hard so as not to go back a class. She was to remember that she was now fifteen. She was also to keep in mind that money did not grow on trees.
“But I won’t spend any here,” she said defensively.
“I’m not talking of spending,” said John Grey. “You can’t have been listening. I was saying that you must begin to think of the future; of what you want to do in the world to support yourself, and of how to prepare for it. Of course,” he continued, making his voice stay matter of fact, “your mother and I hope you will marry. That’s another thing I want to talk about. When we come back we must think of your wardrobe and appearance.”
He was self-conscious by now and June felt cold with embarrassment. ‘So he too sees the change,’ she thought, and aloud she muttered: “I won’t be fifteen for more than a week.”
After her father had gone and while June undressed, she pondered on those remaining days in which she would still be fourteen. They did not count, it seemed. Her father had spoken as though they were over already. Yet she was sure he would never discount them in the other direction. He would never, two weeks after her birthday, call her fourteen. People hurried one along so fast, as though to urge one to catch up with them. And it was useless because their own spans ran on ahead. The talk of marriage was especially outrageous. How unbecoming of her father! How dare he speak of such a horrible thing? As if she, June, would ever marry! On the other hand the thought of preparing for some unknown job was equally alarming. The words ‘support yourself’ had a dry, routine, tedious sound.
June shook her head as if in this physical act to scatter her father’s words. She released the blind once more and turned out the light. As she got into bed she could feel the summer evening take possession of the room again. Its throbbing insect song permeated the darkness. How quickly the summer would pass here on the peninsula—the last remaining months before she would have to think about life. June lay back with a sigh, and her hair, loose on the sheets, gave out to her nostrils a strange, womanly smell. This odour seemed to June in some odd way to answer the night sounds from her window.
Suddenly, down the hill towards the bay, a cry sounded: high, thin, melodious, hauntingly sweet. June had heard that same cry just after nightfall for the last week. Not knowing from what creature it came, she had imbued it with profound meaning. It was repeated a second and a third time. Vague longings filled the young girl’s head and mingled with her dreams.
CHAPTER TWO
June waved goodbye to her family. She had been carried downstairs by McGreggor, the gardener, and stood on the porch while, with much confusion, her brothers, mother and father settled themselves in the car and drove off. She moved her arm up and down to them across the shimmering space of heat which widened as they circled a clump of bushes and then nosedived over the edge of the hill. Although she had never wished to go with them, June felt rather abandoned. “They might go away and never come back,” she murmured experimentally, but no new sensation entered her heart. Then she saw McGreggor returning to carry her upstairs.
McGreggor, to go by his name, sounded like someone out of a children’s book. Yet he was a dour man and June did not like him much. Rumour had it that he had been the suitor of Catherine, Mrs. Grey’s one remaining servant, for twenty years. If so, his courtship was discreet. He lived in a cottage which was joined on to the rear of the stables and he came over every evening to sit for an hour on the back porch with Catherine. No one had ever heard them utter a word during these sessions although Catherine was talkative at other times. Occasionally too, in the late summer dusk, McGreggor could be heard playing his bagpipes to the woods. June had seen him standing on the far side of the stables, his face crimson with effort, hurling into the pipes at once his breath and his spit. Aside from these two diversions, he was a tireless worker, rising at dawn to brew his black tea. He had a team of horses and three fields which he rotated, one lying fallow. Although Mrs. Grey did not know it (or appeared not to) McGreggor made quite a good thing out of selling extra vegetables to the village. He sold butter and cream as well from the five cows. For this reason he disliked it that the son and grandchildren of Mrs. Grey came to stay with her, and thought of them as parasites robbing him of his just dues.
He came trudging around the corner with his dead pipe clamped in his mouth, his heavy hands hanging by his side. June, looking at him, did not want to be in his arms. How had she stood it on the way down? As he came close she became aware of his smell: mingled with earth and sweat, there was also the peculiar odour of a celibate and bad-tempered man.
“Let me try myself, Mr. McGreggor,” she said. “Mother told me I could.”
He shrugged and went off without a word.
The climb up the two flights of stairs was difficult that first time and June stopped often, drenched and trembling. The joints of her ankles, which she could not control, hit against each other and made bruises. There seemed not only a weakness in her muscles but also in her veins. They quivered like string that is pulled too hard. The exasperated nerves of convalescence made her want to cry.
Mrs. Grey’s house was very big. It contained twenty-seven rooms, although most of them were now closed. Once, of course, all the rooms had been open and filled. Mrs. Grey had had three sons and a husband. Two of the sons were dead; a childhood illness had taken one, and the other had bled to death in a foreign land. Their faces looked down from the walls fresh and innocent, stamped with the righteousness of those who die young. Mrs. Grey’s husband had followed the two boys. The money had dwindled. The servants departed.
June went up and downstairs every day after that and her muscular strength came back very fast. One morning, determined to conquer the lethargy which kept her indoors, she decided to take a walk. As was customary in the Grey family, she stopped first to bid her grandmother good morning.
Mrs. Grey was playing cards in bed as she always did between eight and nine at the beginning of the day. She went along as far as she could honestly, and then cheated to make her game come out. Although she was neither senile or foolish, she imbued the cards with a life of their own and treated them as sly, mischievous elves of whom one must get the better by guile. Her fingers, slightly swollen at the joints, darted down on this one or that. The old woman wore a lace cap on her head, which failed to soften the austerity of her features, and a linen nightgown of old-fashioned make.
The door was open and June did not knock. She had only just greeted her grandmother when Catherine entered the room. Catherine was a spidery little woman with eyes like sapphires. As the remaining servant, she ruled the house, vying for authority with its owner. She was getting on and the heavy work was now beyond her strength, so a cleaning woman from the village came once a week. Catherine, aside from her domestic talents, could drive and she owned an ancient car of uncertain make. She was proud of her car, for Mrs. Grey no longer owned one. But the old woman never left the peninsula and Catherine took this as a secret slight against her driving. She hoped that if ever an emergency of the right sort came about, the young Greys would not be there, then her mistress would have to swallow her pride in this respect. Not that Catherine wished her mistress ill; in their own way they loved each other.
Now Catherine said: “How sweet to see them both together! It’s a real picture you make, the two of you.”
She was ignored, and both June and Mrs. Grey felt drawn together in their disapproval of such remarks. Catherine, not at all nonplussed, proceeded to lay out her mistress’ clothes. First, batiste undergarments, straight in shape and neatly darned, then intricately clocked stockings of strong silk, and finally a black dress.
“I don’t want to wear that dress. It’s too warm,” complained Mrs. Grey, dealing out the cards afresh.
Now it was Catherine’s turn for ignoring. She brushed the garment vigorously in preparation and said: “Isn’t it grand to see Miss June up again?” Catherine emphasized the ‘Miss’ which she had not used before June’s illness. “And it’s different she is now, I’m thinking. More of a young lady.”
“Is that an improvement?” asked June.
“Sure and you don’t want to be a kid forever,” said Catherine. “Now will you kindly step out and away while I dress your grandmother?”
June trailed out of the room, glancing up in passing at the portrait of her grandfather on the wall near the door. She had never known him and, despite this portrait and others in the house, she had no clear picture of the man in her imagination. The house too, which was outwardly his shrine, had secretly forgotten him. His robust footsteps had faded from the halls, and if the corridors had ghosts they were not his. Believing firmly in the harmony of body and soul, he had taken his spirit courageously with him to the grave.
June moved down the stairs, laying her hand against the banister. Beneath her palm the wood stuck and made a small, squeaking sound. She pushed open the side door, which was of screen, and held it deliberately ajar while a fly zig-zagged into the house. Then she walked down the veranda steps and onto the lawn.
Mrs. Grey owned all the peninsula of which the house was center and, except for a small corner, would neither let nor sell. She owned the acid, moss-covered lawns and the tangled woods. She owned the beaches with their bluffs, their stones, their quick-mud creeks. The unkept, rutted roads were hers. The taxes for these things took the place of the suburban villa and the comfortable apartment in town for which her daughter-in-law sighed. But Mrs. Grey would stay out her life here and ask no change.
June now wandered slowly between the trees on the lawn. The shade from their expanded leaves threw a tender light on her head, and beneath her feet fresh rings of moss were scattered here and there. These brilliant, soft circles of varying sizes were like secret signals, or an antique alphabet which no one could read any more. June and her brothers had played many games around them and had attached to them a hundred meanings. Now June looked down carelessly with abstracted eyes.
She stepped out of the shade. Had anyone been watching, he would have seen, in the instant the sun hit her, a gleam of future beauty. Just now June was only half formed. There was a lack of harmony about her; that soft, sliding, disturbing quality that is at once the despair of adolescents and their fascination. Her face was over-large for the skull behind it. The strong sweep of her jawbone met her ears as though surprised to come so suddenly upon these exquisite, small shells. Her eyes were yellow-brown; set deep with rough brows above them. Her forehead was too high. Only her nose, piercing through, so to speak, from behind the mask of her face, showed the same proportion as that dainty skull. It was straight, narrow, pure and of medium length. The nostrils were so thin that one could see the blood through, and they quivered with every emotion, giving her an angel look. Then too, softening the whole, were the rich, blond locks of her hair which fell wild upon temple, cheek and nape.
June kicked through the spiked grasses of the pasture and avoided the five cows with her eyes. She had never gotten over her fear of them and did not want to attract them with her regard. A few mushrooms which had sprouted in the morning dew now lay dying. Their rosy, pleated undersides were black. She reached the woods and started down the steep path to the bay. Occasionally her knees bent the wrong way from weakness and sent a sharp twinge along her leg. She had had the intention of bathing, but now she knew she would never have the strength to do so. She went on simply because it was downhill and had no idea of how she would ever get back up. The path wound around the trunks of trees like a cool, dark snake slipping downwards to drink in the marsh. Presently June could see the glitter of water through the branches and she came to a little dell at the bottom of the path where a spring burst out of the ground and ran away.
Someone was here already; a boy on a horse. He was a lad of eleven or so, with a dark mop of hair and his horse was drinking thirstily at the spring. June was startled. One might wander through these woods day after day and never meet a soul. Then she noticed that the boy had a bird on his wrist and, probably to protect himself from beak or claw, wore a leather gauntlet which reached up his forearm. The boy was regarding her, black-eyed, from a face which, even in repose, bore a mobile, nervous expression.
An unaccountable feeling of happiness came over June on seeing this child, like the pleasant recollection of a dream which one cannot really remember. She spoke first. “Do you live near here?” She neither smiled nor made any gesture of friendship, but the boy did not seem shy.
“Yes, over there.” He jerked his head in the direction of the beach. His voice was in that fluty stage which not all boys have. So far no trace of manhood marred its tone although it was touched by shrillness. June, listening, thought that it reminded her of something. Then she asked, surprised:
“You don’t live in the millionaire’s boathouse, do you?”
She was referring to a large brick building which had stood tenantless now for years, yawning over the water. Mrs. Grey had rented the land over ten years ago to a rich man called Walsh. No one knew why and perhaps there was no reason. At any rate Mrs. Grey had never given one to her son. Walsh had built a house on it for his mistresses and his speed boats, but no one seemed to know what had happened to him lately. Only a caretaker and his wife remained, and they kept to themselves and were ignorant of the intentions of their employer. A high wall around the property kept out intruders, or rather wild animals, since forests and reeds had grown up on three sides and on the other the salt water slid beneath the building, in and out.
