June did not contradict him and only asked: “Do you know him, the man who used to live here?”
“Oh yes, I know him,” said Ronny (who had never met Walsh). “Mother thinks he’s my father.”
“You mean Mr. Walsh,” cried June, “the millionaire?”
“Mr. Walsh, that’s it, Mr. Walsh. He has a hundred houses, I guess, and fifty cars and a hundred motorboats.”
“Don’t you call him Father?” asked June.
“No,” replied Ronny seriously, as though reflecting on this. “But you see he isn’t my mother’s husband. My mother’s husband was called Roger and he died.” Ronny nodded several times as though checking the correctness of these statements. Then a smile came over his face and brought out the twitch of his cheek. “My mother is a liar,” he said. The word must have pleased him for he cupped his hands and shouted: “Liar, liar.”
The echo came back to them several times from the imprisoning walls. It was like a bird who dashes itself to pieces trying to get free. Each time it was fainter and more plaintive. Ronny turned his eyes downwards to the murky water which was rising fast. All the mud had disappeared and the tide bit greedily into the rotten wood of the two boats. June followed the boy’s gaze. A school of minnows darted into the boathouse and just as swiftly flashed out again through the arch. The green on the wrecked planks was as brilliant as emeralds.
“What will you be when you are a man?” she asked.
“Oh,” said Ronny, scuffing his bare sole softly on the cement, “I shall be a knight. But as you know there are no more knights. Anyway it doesn’t matter as I won’t be a man very soon.”
Just then they heard steps ringing out on the metal of the stairs, a town tread, cautious and sharp. “Ronny?” a voice called interrogatively. Then a man stepped onto the quay. When he saw them he advanced and said: “I am James Stevens. I am supposed to teach you, to get you up on your lessons.”
“Mother said I didn’t have to start until July!” exclaimed Ronny shrilly, dismayed and apprehensive.
“But you don’t want to fall behind,” said Stevens, “and have to end up the summer working all day. Besides, this is just a call to get acquainted.”
James Stevens was a blond man who could still be called young. His hair thinned out at the temples over a narrow, high forehead and his mouth had a tight look to it caused by faint rays around the upper lip. He had grey, rather cold eyes. Now these eyes turned to June.
“Is this your sister?” he asked.
“No,” said Ronny. “She’s a damsel.”
“I’m June Grey,” said June, “and I think you’re supposed to teach me too.”
“Were you going to call on her to get acquainted?” asked Ronny, using Stevens’ turn of phrase.
The tutor gave June a blank look. “I shall just be helping her catch up,” he said. “It’s not the same thing.” He turned away again. “By the way, Ronny,” he said, “are you a scout? If you are I thought perhaps you would like to transfer to our local troop.” He waited, but the boy was not listening. He took June’s hand again and looked up into her face.
“Damsel,” he said again, “a damsel and a knight.”
Stevens frowned. One could see the rays now plainly as he pressed his lips together. “That’s a rather silly way of talking,” he said. “You don’t want to spend your time with girls, do you? You’ll turn into a regular sissy.”
Ronny lifted his heavy lids in astonishment until his eyes were almost round. “A knight is much braver than a boy scout,” he cried. “There’s no comparison! Just look!” Stooping, he reached down to one of the wrecks and came up with a crab in his hand. The crab was a fiddler and with its huge claw pinched at the child’s flesh. Ronny’s cheeks contracted. It looked as though he were smiling.
CHAPTER FIVE
Ronny’s hawk grew bigger and flew further each day, hunting over wood, sea and farm. He rose from the boy’s wrist or from the stable door and his yellow eyes were fixed with the instinct to kill. Under the downy feathers of his upper wing powerful muscles stretched and knotted. He mastered the air. Sometimes, when he came home at night, falling towards that lonely, childish cry, his falcon’s heart beat so hard inside his breast that it disturbed the rhythm of his wings.
“Shalimar,” Ronny would call. “Shalimar!” The boy would look upwards with outstretched arm, waiting tensely until the hawk alighted. Nor could he repress a thrill of triumph when he felt those claws like wrinkled, primitive hands upon his skin.
Then Ronny would ask softly: “Did you hunt well, Shalimar?” And he would look for an instant into that serpent glance which remained unchanging; twin enemies separated by the hawk’s deadly beak. Ronny often talked to his bird and asked questions of Shalimar about the day’s journeys and Ronny was answered. At least that was the way it seemed, although when Ronny thought about it closely he could recall no phrases of those replies. Nonetheless, it seemed to Ronny that Shalimar told him of the thunderstorm catching him mid-air and throwing him this way and that between the heavy clouds, also of the sun which grew closer and closer at midday like another hostile, fiery bird. Or else it seemed to Ronny that Shalimar told him of hunting incidents, of the young rabbit who did not know enough to go to earth, of its piercing death squeal and blood-streaked fur.
Ronny found Shalimar’s descriptions indescribably fresh. They weren’t exactly talking, but—if they existed—they made talking ponderous in comparison, as though to talk were a tame and fussy way of doing things. Ronny conversed with Gambol, too, in this manner, but the horse, although more garrulous, was less interesting.
It was also a fact that June’s presence severed this correspondence. Not only could he not communicate with Gambol and Shalimar when she was there, but even after she had gone they were mute for hours. One day, however, he tried to explain his conversations to her. They were on the edge of the marsh and June had just come down through the woods. She looked up curiously at the boy as he sat his horse. His profile was turned, out of shyness, as he spoke of these private things. Its perfect cut and the suave, rose-olive bloom of his cheek surprised her and she thought suddenly: ‘I think him beautiful!’
How her brothers would have laughed at that description of a boy! But Ronny was alien in every way to them—to their blond, open faces, their sturdy limbs, their boyish scorn of everything that did not fit into their school world. She could not weld them together in her imagination.
“You are lucky to be able to talk to animals,” she said.
“Oh they don’t really answer me, you know.” He frowned in regret of his confidence. “Only sort of.” Unhooding Shalimar, he set the bird free. It was a stifling day and the high tide had just turned so that all but the tips of the marsh grass were covered in swirling water. The current dragged through the creek, a mirror for the pale summer sky. Ronny took off the leather gauntlet he wore to protect his arm and the skin beneath was drenched from the heat of the leather. On the moist back of his hand June could still see the marks made by the fiddler crab; small violet patches.
“I don’t like James Stevens,” said June.
Ronny slipped down from Gambol’s back, careless of his bare feet in the undergrowth. “Oh Stevens doesn’t know about anything important,” he said.
“He doesn’t like me,” said June, trying to recall that only a year ago the thought of someone disliking or even hating her had been a gratification.
“I like you,” said Ronny. “Didn’t I prove it with the fiddler?”
“I didn’t really know you were doing it for me,” replied June and because his shrill, sweet voice stirred her, she gave the mocking, sisterly smile which her brothers found so odious.
“The wicked fiddler!” cried Ronny suddenly. “I’m going to punish him.” And he ran to the edge of the marsh.
June followed and they stood side by side, peering into the creek. At first there was nothing to be seen for the tide had driven the crabs to their holes. Yet even as they watched, the water dropped. It raced swiftly through its channels to the bay and gradually, quarter-inch by quarter-inch, the mud reappeared; soft, black and reeking. An eel slithered down current, whipping its head from side to side, its snout pointed, its eyes blind as a mole’s.
Ronny stepped down onto the creek bed and under his foot a clam spouted, throwing a liquid jet as high as his knees. The water ran in rivulets through the caking slime in which holes could now be seen, holes where one could just spy the frantic, jerky movements of the crabs. Soon they began to move, pushing in front of them their huge, single fiddler claws. The young ones came out first, active and shiny. The larger ones followed at a slower pace. Ronny took a jackknife from his pocket, although as yet he remained upright. Then, immediately in front of him an old crab, a veteran, scuttled sideways towards the bank. Its fiddler’s claw, almost black with age, made the crustacean stagger and dwarfed its other limbs. Its hasty, almost obscene movements were too much for Ronny. June could hear his teeth grind as he released the catch of his knife and threw himself upon his knees in the slime. He thrust downwards and with a short, bitter movement severed the crab’s claw from its body.
To June it seemed as though the crab gave out a sound of anguish, but perhaps that sound had come from her own throat. All was so terribly clear beneath the glaring sun. June felt sick with revulsion, yet another feeling, too, welled from the core of her body; a primitive force she dared not name.
The fiddler, bereft now of all its strength, of its weapon, of the very symbol of its virility, appeared to shrivel. Its remaining claws, frail as those of a spider, could no longer balance its body. It jerked forlornly and frantically sideways; a humiliated creature in pain and without hope.
