At the feel of this thick yet knobby knee, matted, as she remembered, by black hair, Grace unaccountably thrilled. It was the thrill of wealth and ease and big cars, of a new dress for each occasion, and of jewels. Grace was not doing as well as she would have liked and Walsh was the best she had ever done.

“I don’t want to bore you with my own problems,” she said, “but I am worried about Ronny. My doctor says he’s near a breakdown and mustn’t be stimulated in any way.”

“In other words you want to get him off your hands for the summer,” guessed Walsh. “Quite right, a pretty woman like you has no business dragging a grown-up boy around. Besides, boys have their own tastes. Now if I had a son—”

It was as a direct result of this conversation that Ronny arrived at Star Harbour Junction one day in early June. He was met by Jeremy, Jim Walsh’s caretaker. Jeremy was a pink-cheeked man with good health and a pessimistic outlook. He had come to the peninsula when the boathouse was first built and now lived there together with his wife Mary and Walsh’s horse, Gambol. They had all three been cast away, so to speak, and existed quietly enough. Although the couple’s salary came regularly in the mail, they had never received money for the upkeep of the house nor any orders concerning its repair. Jeremy, with Gambol’s help, dug up the ground beyond the wall and had made there a large vegetable garden. It was on Mrs. Grey’s property but no word had been said. Then as a complete surprise, had come a letter from Walsh saying that a boy was coming to stay the summer; that he was to have Gambol to ride, and that a tutor had been found for him. Walsh had enclosed money and given Mrs. Villar’s address in case of emergency.

Jeremy asked no questions of Ronny on the way home from the station. He did not pay much attention to this child who was to spend the next months under his care, and Ronny, as he climbed into the old Ford, felt lonely and abandoned. While they drove into the hills along the coastline, the boy stole sideways glances, not so much at his companion’s face as at his square hands on the wheel and the black-booted feet on the pedal. Then he looked across at the woods, at the field of old and dying apple trees, and finally at the reedy marshes which fought the beaches along the shore. A sea smell filled his nostrils, stagnant and strong. It was low tide.

At last they drove over a space redeemed from the marsh, a filled-in area, which was ended abruptly by the boathouse. From the land it looked like any other house, conventional although somewhat shabby in its brick dress. How was one to know of the salt water which flowed like blood into its lower chamber? Ronny felt near to tears with dreariness, yet somewhere inside was a thrill of excitement. For a contrast he thought of his mother who would surely never come here if once she had seen the place.

“Well, how does it strike you?” asked Jeremy, carrying the boy’s one modest valise.

“Fine,” answered Ronny politely.

“Oh it’s just a house, in any case,” said Jeremy. “Houses are all the same; big or small, they can’t prevent us from going to another one in the end, as narrow as our shoulders.” For Jeremy could not conceive why he had been let live only to die in the end.

His wife Mary appeared now on the threshold. A thin woman, slightly shriveled and pale as her husband was rosy, her every gesture was kind, fussy and anxious. She hesitated, dried her fingers on her apron, and finally shook hands with Ronny.

“It’s not much of a gay place,” she said to him, “Not much company.” She peered at the boy, slightly worried. Mary had always longed for children and frequently drove Jeremy into a rage by telling him they were something to live for. “Now if we had children,” she would say, “you would have something to live for.”

“What are children but men and women,” he would cry, “born every one of them to go down into the grave?”

“They would be a comfort at the resurrection,” Mary sometimes argued, picturing her bones scattered and vibrating in the final blast. Then Jeremy would give his wife a look of despair, but because of his pink skin, his round and jolly features, his expression carried no more weight than that of a clown who has been shot by a firecracker.

Ronny, despite his first impression, soon got used to living in the boathouse. Complete freedom and lack of interference were a novelty, a blessed relief. He was one of those creatures who are doomed from infancy to attract the emotion of others. It was partly his looks—the pure, almost cameo profile over the brow of which his black hair fell—but it was partly as well some illusive quality about him as though from another world; a wind blowing, so to speak, from lost dreams. It acted on them all—his teachers, the older boys at school, his mother’s friends—and he could not respond to this host of urgent cries. They set his nerves on edge. Here, Mary was far too timid to make demands and Jeremy was almost indifferent. The couple took good care of him, however, and he adored Gambol. He had never owned a horse and had ridden seldom, but Gambol, although he might have lived up to his name seven years ago, was now a staid gelding with gentle ways. Ronny rode him without a saddle and with only a halter around his nose.

Ronny acquired his hawk quite soon after arriving. He had been riding out along the edge of the marsh early one morning when Gambol shied suddenly, rolling his eyes towards the edge of the path. A young hawk was lying there, stunned, with its feathers ruffled. Ronny jumped off his horse to kneel beside the bird.

“Are you dead?” he asked softly, and the hawk replied by giving him a proud, hostile look from its yellow eye. “You must come with me,” said Ronny, “and be called Shalimar.”

Ronny, as it happened, knew about hawks because one of Grace Villar’s friends had been a hunter in Arabia and was versed in the keeping and training of falcons. The man had dropped out of his mother’s life, but since then Ronny had longed for such a bird and had even named it in his mind. It seemed quite natural to him that here his wish came true.

Shalimar had hardly been a favourite with Mary for she was afraid of the bird. Nonetheless, she had made it a little hood of scarlet cloth, cut and sewn under Ronny’s supervision. Jeremy had given him one of the old gardening gauntlets that lay in the tool shed. Having hooded his bird, Ronny put it in the box stall beside that of Gambol, and in a short time Shalimar had become quite tame. Ronny’s natural love for animals had given him a way with them; dogs that were fierce with others would submit to his caress, and he had spent many hours taming squirrels and chipmunks.

So Ronny lived the life of the country child who sees no one; quiet yet excited, passing his days along the marsh and in the hilly woods. And then one morning he had met June. Her languid air and her solitude that matched his own attracted him. He felt as though he had never really looked at anybody before; as though she were the first person he had truly seen in the world so far. After he had ridden her to her home, June had stood for a moment gazing down at him over the railing. Then with a mockery natural to girls who have brothers she had said:

“Goodbye and thank you, little boy.”

Her teasing manner stung him, yet refreshed him as well. Although she did not treat him as a knight riding a charger with a hawk at his command, her very mockery was an admission. “I know you are of chivalry,” it seemed to say, “but I’m not going to admit it.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Ronny did not ride up to the hilltop again that week, but June heard him every evening. The high, solitary cry of the boy calling to his bird mingled with other evening sounds: the fox, the night owl, the hurtling train. After day waned she heard them all. They were like personal messages thrown against her breast. Before, there had been no Ronny, and his call had been the night itself with its beating, secret lonely heart that reached out and sought her own. Now the voice had a shape, but June could never really believe that it was not she for whom the voice was destined. She wondered how Ronny spent his mornings, how he passed the heavy afternoons, and wondered, too, how she herself had passed them a year ago. The old pleasures were difficult to rediscover and she was bored.

Mrs. Grey was no companion for June. Hour by hour the old woman’s tranquil habits unwound themselves so that there was no idle moment left in her day, and not many of these moments were devoted to her granddaughter either. After June’s morning visit they would not meet until lunch and, after that, seldom until the evening meal. Sometimes Mrs. Grey was tired and did not even come down to supper, but at others she lingered afterwards and would ask June to read aloud to her from an enormous book of verse, marked and underlined by three generations. One of the poems, a ballad about a knight lying dead in a field, made June think of the little boy she had met.

‘I’ll go and see him tomorrow,’ she thought, looking up from the page. So the following afternoon she set out once more through the woods. By now June was stronger. A little colour had come into her face, tinting her ears and the high bones around her eyes.

After a while she took off her sandals and felt on her feet the damp, moldy earth of the path. She walked down to the edge of the marsh and then turned right until she came to the boathouse. She felt a little shy of its high gates which she had never entered before. They were silent, and around them, on the side from which she came, the reeds flourished like yellow spears. It was medium tide and the breath from the marsh made a haze in the air. On all sides were the trees, surrounding their stagnant ponds, their small and arid pastures. June tried the gate handle and then, finding it locked, pulled the bell chain. At once a loud peal echoed like a curse in the stillness.

‘Why have I come?’ she wondered. The locked gate was a rejection, the cursing bell an insult. Perhaps she had no right to penetrate these walls, for what if this gate were the door of childhood, closed to her now forever? This thought, which made her feel regret, had in it, too, a certain sweetness. She looked down at her bare arms rendered glistening by the sun. They were shaded by fine hairs which she had never noticed before and a breath seemed to pass over her body and contract the nerves against her spine.

Jeremy opened the gate to June, his cheeks flushed by the heat. With his blue shirt and brilliant health he resembled a laborer in a political poster.

“Yes, Miss?”

June was relieved to hear a human voice. Everything was ordinary after all; an ordinary country house, slightly run down, and a pink-faced gardener. “Is Ronny here?” she asked.

“He is,” said Jeremy. “He’s just finishing lunch.”

“May I see him?”

“Oh yes, you may see him,” said Jeremy. “He’s there for you to see if you like.” He turned on his heel and led the way.

June had never been inside the Walsh property before and, as she followed Jeremy, she was startled by the whiteness of the courtyard which was paved with oyster shells. Against their snowy welcome the house showed mouldering and dark. Ronny was in the kitchen, eating a piece of pie and talking to Mary. June could hear his fluty tones drifting out the doorway.

“As high as you are,” he was saying. “Really, Mary! Cross my heart.” Mary made the appropriate, soothing noises of fright. “Gambol just skimmed over it without stopping,” said Ronny, and then he caught sight of June. For a moment he stopped eating, as children do when their parents enter the nursery. His mouth was still full, but he ceased chewing and regarded her impassively from his black eyes. Then he lowered his head so that his hair fell between them like a curtain.

“Hello,” he muttered, offhand and sullen.

“Good afternoon, Miss, would you eat some pie?” asked Mary in her friendly, timid manner. She saw no difficulty here, only a nice girl paying a visit to a little boy. “Perhaps you’ll have it later,” she said as no one made a move.

“Is she staying here all afternoon?” asked Ronny, turning his face towards Mary.

“What a way to talk about a young lady guest!” Mary gave a deprecating smile at June.

June turned a slow, dull red. Her eyes blazed with anger and humiliation. “I was just passing,” she lied, “and I can’t stay. I must go home and read to my grandmother.”

“I don’t have a grandmother,” said Ronny, “and I don’t want one either. Old ladies kiss too much.”

June had to smile at the idea of her own grandmother kissing too much. Her blush faded. She grew bored by this conversation. Childhood after all, was filled with petty statements and flat denials. She made ready to go, tugging at her cotton blouse which was too short and touching the locks above her temples with a new, unconscious gesture.

“Come with me,” said Ronny suddenly. “I have something to show you.”

Getting up from the table, he slipped his hand in hers. At once the sensation returned to June of being in a lost country, a land whose shores it was perhaps dangerous to retread. For Mary’s sake she smiled and agreed with nonchalance. But Mary noticed nothing in any case and only Jeremy, slouching in the doorway, remarked after they had gone:

“What a fuss over a year or two. As though it could matter! They’ll be dead a million and it won’t be enough.”

Mary washed the dishes without answering. Such remarks had long lost the power to frighten her. At the sink, with her spindly legs and industrious arms, she resembled an ant. The giant stride could flatten her in an instant.

Ronny took his hand away from June’s almost at once and led the way through the house, into a little doorway and down a circular stairway which came out onto the water beneath. The tide was coming in. Its lapping harried the dark air; a sucking, eager persuasion. The sides of the cement landings, or quays, were still exposed. Underneath, one could see a muddy bottom pitted with the small holes of fiddler crabs. There were two boats here; a rowboat and a motorless speedboat. Both were rotted down into the slime and covered by the poison-green moss of the sea. At one end was an archway, which led out into the sunlit bay. It could be closed by a door that slid down from above. Standing open, it threw into this man-made cave a brilliant and painful glitter which slid over the air and did not lighten the gloom.

“Here was his dungeon,” said Ronny. “He took his prisoners down here and tied them on those boats. Then soon the crabs came and ate them up, body and soul.” He added in his soprano voice: “I would do it too, with all my enemies.”

“Crabs can’t eat the soul,” objected June, feeling in this damp place the sweat growing cold on her body.

“Oh yes they can,” he insisted. “Crabs can. They’re only baffled by the bones.” And he held up the white spine of a fish worn down by the tides which he had found that morning.