Devil By The Sea (6 page)

In the middle of the night, Peregrine woke and screamed. Hilary got out of bed and went to him. His hands, clutching at her
nightdress, were sticky and hot.

“It’s all right,” she crooned, “all right. Hilly’s here.”

Pushing her arm aside, he stared into her face with dark, glittering eyes, words stumbled out between great, hiccoughing sobs.
“The Devil came and sat on the end of my bed. He was black. There were wings round his head.”

Hilary looked round the nursery and saw the chipped, white-wood furniture, unearthly in the moonlight but unmistakeable. Their
flannel dressing-gowns hung, grey and shapeless on the back of the door; their clothes, draped baggily over their separate
chairs, were only clothes. The painted, gleaming eyes of the rocking-horse gave her a lurching moment of fear, but she spoke
soothingly.

“There’s nothing here. Only the toys and things and me. Go to sleep.”

His eyelids drooped. She hugged him maternally and said, to comfort herself, now, “If there had been anyone here, I’d have
seen him too.”

She felt a shudder go through him. He stiffened and sat bolt upright, beating the bedclothes with clenched fists.

“He was here, he was. I didn’t see him with my eyes. I saw him out of the back of my head. He was awful.”

There was nothing to be said to
that.
She pressed him with delicious fearfulness but he either would not, or could not, answer. Nothing else that he said was at
all lucid. The
fearful vision was fading fast and there was nothing left but terror. When she tried to make him lie down he resisted her
with wiry strength and cried for his mother.

She tried to comfort him. “It’s all right now. If you like, you can come into my bed. If you promise not to wet it.”

He fought her off frantically. “Mummy.” His voice rose wildly. In moments of disaster, he always turned to his mother, believing
that once he reached her, he would be safe. Hilary would have liked to think that this was true but knew it was not: this
was the difference the years had made between them.

Peregrine got out of bed and hobbled across the linoleum, his pyjama trousers round his ankles, his small behind gleaming.
Hilary got back into her own bed and tried to warm her feet by wrapping her nightgown round them.

She heard Peregrine’s voice on the landing, outside their mother’s door. It was raised in a loud, formless wail, a cry of
lamentation. No words could be distinguished. A door opened and there was a rush of voices. Peregrine’s cries died as he was
carried into the room and the door was closed.

Hilary dozed, her head on the cold pillow. Distantly, she was aware that the whole household was awake. Someone had closed
the nursery door but the landing light shone in a streak beneath it. She heard her father’s voice, then Janet’s.

A little later, the door opened and a shaft of light sprang across the room. Peregrine was carried in, limp in his mother’s
arms. His legs and arms dangled loosely, he made no sound. Alice’s hair, out of its braid, hung gloriously to her waist. Lying
on her side, Hilary watched her with one jealous eye, the other being pressed into the pillow.

Janet said, from the doorway, “Will he sleep now?”
Hilary could only see her by moving her eye so far round in its socket that it hurt.

Alice made a shushing sound. Then she bent over Peregrine, tucking him up. She turned towards Hilary’s bed and Hilary closed
her eyes tightly. She felt her mother’s breath like a small cold wind on her skin, but the kiss she expected did not come.

Alice left, rustling, and Hilary heard her whispering on the landing.
“She’s
asleep, anyway. Did you hear him, crying about the Devil?”

Janet muttered. Then she said more loudly, “… all Hilary’s fault. I expect she was trying to frighten him.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” said Alice, exasperated. Hilary raised her head from the pillow and listened. Grownup anger, except
when it was directed against herself, excited her.

“It didn’t seem important. I forgot about it. She said Peregrine had seen the Devil. I thought—some story of Nanny’s. You
know what
she
was.”

“She’s a naughty little girl.” Their voices grew softer. They both laughed.

Then Janet said, gruffly, “You ought to go to bed. You’ll catch cold.”

The light was switched off. A little later the lavatory cistern flushed with a sound like baying wolves. A door closed and
the house was silent.

Hilary lay in the dark and listened to the sea. It was loud and angry to-night. She pictured it, crawling up the crumbling
cliffs and sweeping in through the doors and windows, drowning them all in their beds.

Peregrine was whimpering in his sleep, now and again he gave a short, yapping sound like a dreaming puppy. Hilary rolled on
to her tummy and stuffed the edges of the pillow against her ears. Anger possessed her. Why should
she
be blamed because Peregrine had seen the Devil? It was unfair. She squeezed out a few, hot tears and tasted them with her
tongue. She would pay Peregrine out, she decided. To-morrow she would think of a way to punish him.

In his caravan on Grey’s Field, the man slept, fully clothed, beneath an army blanket. In his dream was a beautiful, laughing
child. He loved her and stretched out his hands but her face twisted with ugly fear and she ran away. Then his mother was
angry with him. He became frightened and restless and began to mutter in his sleep.

Towards morning, it grew perceptibly colder. He woke in his stinking bunk and said, “Chip-chop-change, weather gone, weather
gone, chip-chop-change.” At first he thought it was his mother speaking and then he knew it was not. She was dead and gone,
dead and shut in a box. They had taken her away down the narrow stairs; the coffin had jammed in the turning and they had
sweated in their black coats until, in the end, they had sawn away part of the banister rail. Four black horses with polished
shoes and feathery plumes had drawn her carriage to the cemetery. All that she owned had been sold to pay for the funeral.
When she was buried, his aunt had sat on the shiny, leather couch in the parlour and mourned: what shall we do now, what shall
we do with the boy?

Grumbling and shivering, he sat on the edge of the bunk and felt beneath it for his surgical boot. When he found it, he dangled
it limply between his knees and stared vacantly across the narrow limits of the caravan to the naked, grease-smeared wall.
A low table, covered with cracked linoleum, stood between the bunk and the wall: on it lay a bar of
Nut Crunch and a blue saucer full of bird seed. In one corner of the caravan there was a Primus stove and a kettle, in another,
a pile of empty bean-tins, old seed-cartons and mouldy hunks of bread. His housekeeping was methodical and simple. Every day
he wiped the table with a wet cloth and swept the floor. Once a week, he shovelled the pile of rubbish into a sack and threw
it into the sea at high tide. He never changed his clothes.

It came to him, dimly, that it was time for him to go, but he did not stir. Pearly-grey light came through a small window
cut in the door. Hanging in front of it, was a bird cage covered with a torn piece of rag and now, as the man sat on the bunk,
the canary began to twitter sleepily. With a grunt, the man heaved himself upright and fastened the boot on to his dreadful
foot. Limping across the caravan, he removed the covering from the cage and said tenderly, “Woke up, have you, Johnny?” The
bird ruffled its feathers and regarded him with eyes that were like small chips of black boot polish. It made no sound.

Chirruping gently, he filled his palm with seed and opened the cage door. The bird fluttered out, landed on his middle finger
and began to peck at the seed. When it had finished, the man laughed and tossed the bird into the air. It flew round the caravan
and settled on a ledge above the bunk, watching him while he lit the stove and put the kettle on. He made strong tea in a
brown-ringed mug and drank it slowly; between sips, he chewed on a piece of bread that he had taken out of his pocket. Then
he called the canary and it came to him. He held it in his hand, caressing its feathers and murmuring love words before he
put it back in the cage.

He picked up the bar of Nut Crunch and stepped out into the cold air. The sun was just coming up. He went quickly across the
field, between the sleeping caravans,
until he reached a blue and white painted one that stood by the gate, its long shafts resting on the ground. A small tent
was erected on its lee side, the thin canvas sides bulged with movement.

The man stopped and sucking his lower lip, whistled softly. The flap opened and a small, dark head appeared.

“It’s all right, girlie,” he said softly. “It’s only Uncle. What do you think I’ve got for you?”

The gipsy eyes sparkled. “Lolly?”

“Something nicer than that. Will you give Uncle a kiss for it?”

The child pouted. “Dunno. What for, anyway?”

“Crunchie Bar,” he said and held it up in front of her. Her face became pinched with greed, her tongue crept out between her
kitten’s teeth.

She taunted him. “My Dad says I’m not to speak to you. You’re a loony. That’s what my Dad says. All them that sweeps the roads,
they’re all loonies.”

He crouched on his haunches and threw the Crunchie Bar on the ground between them. She stared at him suspiciously. Then she
wriggled out of the tent on hands and knees. She wore a cotton vest and navy knickers, round her small neck hung a thin, gold
chain with a dependent cross. The man had found it in the gutter a few days before and given it to her.

She made a sudden dive and kissed him damply and swiftly, her coarse, curly hair tickling his cheek. He tried to take her
in his arms but she evaded him and fled back to the tent. He followed her. Lifting the flap, he peered inside. She was crouching
at the far end on a safari bed.

“You forgot your Crunchie Bar,” he said.

She shook her head. “Go away. Don’t want your mouldy old Crunch Bar.”

A dog barked in the field and he glanced swiftly over his
shoulder. A boy was standing by the steps of a caravan about thirty yards away and watching him.

The man dropped the flap of the tent and began to limp away towards the gate. The boy bent with a quick gesture and jerked
his arm forward as if he were throwing a stone. The man ducked instinctively and quickened his pace. The boy laughed loudly
and put his thumb to his nose.

Above, in the cold sky, there was a pale ring round the sun.

Hilary had been awake since six o’clock. Wearing her Dayella nightgown, frilled at the neck and wrists and covered with pink
rosebuds, she stood on a cane-bottomed nursery chair, her nose pressed against the cold glass of a small aquarium. The water
was the colour of weak tea, faintly cloudy as if a dash of milk had been added to it. Dark shapes moved mysteriously over
the glass sides and clustered on a smooth, spotted stone.

There were no fish in the aquarium. Once, long ago, there had been two mountain minnows: they had died within a day of each
other. Hilary had not mourned their death for they had been dull and disappointing fish, quite unlike the glorious, flashing
creatures she had hoped for. The tank had been a birthday present and one that she had chosen; she had imagined a glittering,
alien world like the tanks in the pet shop, with bright, fantastic shapes gliding between waving water-weed. When she saw
the small tank and the drab minnows, she had wept. Alice had been understanding and reasonable. She said she understood Hilary’s
disappointment but she had expected too much. Tropical fish could only live in heated water and such a tank would have been
too expensive a present, wouldn’t it, for such a little girl?

Once the minnows were dead, however, Hilary had lost her desire for fish. There were snails in the tank and she
loved them dearly, feeding them, when she remembered, with dandelion leaves gathered from the garden. In the beginning, there
had been only two snails but they had multiplied rapidly and incestuously: now there were so many that it was impossible to
count them. The biggest were the size of heir thumb nail and the smallest barely visible: minute dots crowding on the green
stalk of the one, fragile weed.

Hilary talked to them in a maternal voice, calling them by name in the manner of Miss Spiegler checking the roll call at school.
“Bernice, Chloe, Ariadne….” Her lips moved against the glass, making a damp, cloudy pattern. To spite Peregrine, she had insisted
that there were no boy snails in the aquarium.

When she heard the dust-cart, she jumped off the chair and went to the window. Lately, she had not bothered to look out at
the sweeper in the mornings but to-day she was bored. Peregrine, who usually woke before she did, was still sleeping soundly,
breathing heavily through his open mouth.

The nursery looked out over the road and the high window was barred with vertical, iron rods. Holding on to the bars, she
climbed on to the sill and peered through them.

The man was two or three houses away, sweeping the gutter with a long, smooth movement and picking up the dirt with his spade.
She could see the top of his head, covered with a tweed cap. As he came nearer, almost opposite the front gate of Peebles,
she began to tap with her fingers on the window pane. This was a game the children had played the summer before: Hilary had
forgotten it until this moment. You tapped on the window until the dustman or the postman looked up and then you hid behind
the nursery curtains. If you attracted their attention without being seen, you won a point. If you were spotted, you lost
two.

The man glanced up briefly and went back to his sweeping. He was a different man from the one she remembered from last summer’s
game and yet there was something familiar about him. Suddenly, for no reason at all, she was afraid. Fear twisted deliciously
in her stomach. She dreaded the moment when he would look up again and yet she longed for him to see her. She banged her knuckles
loudly on the window pane.