Devil By The Sea (9 page)

Hilary felt as exposed and helpless as a shelled crab. She was quite sure that her wickedness was already generally known.
She was young enough, still, to believe that grown-up power was limitless: the long arm of authority could reach you anywhere.
She saw the policeman out of the corner of her eye and thrust her head forward and down, hiding her face. It would not have
surprised her if he had barred her way and accused her of murdering her little brother. Mrs. Peacock could easily have proclaimed
her deed from the housetops and roused the town against her.

Her first tears had dried but she still wept inwardly. She felt no specific remorse, she wept out of a black and dreadful
conviction that there was no hope for her. Burning with shame, she kept her eyes on the ground. Her whole being was concentrated
in her plump knees and her squat feet in their flapping sandals. There was a long scratch on her left knee that she had not
noticed until now. It puckered as she ran. This blemish became so vividly stamped on her memory that in later years she could
never see a similar scratch on a child’s knee without an associated feeling of guilt and misery.

She ran aimlessly, doubling back on her tracks and coming out finally upon the Downs, midway between Peebles and the town.
There, she stopped running and trod the cropped turf gently, grateful for the cold wind
on her hot cheek. A steep flight of wooden stairs, known to the children as the Hundred Steps, led from the cliff-top to the
beach. As she went down them, the sea looked navy blue and still and the sun was stationary in the sky. At this end of Henstable,
the promenade petered out into a narrow spit of concrete. There were no shops or stalls, no boats for hire. The beach was
muddy and inclined to smell. The defences put up during the war had not been completely removed: here and there, gaunt iron
structures remained. The disadvantages of this part of the shore gave it privacy and the trippers seldom visited it. The sober
line of bathing-huts, shuttered now against the autumn gales, were rented only by the residents. Hilary wandered sadly among
them, listening to the ebbing sea. It sucked back on the pebbles with a prolonged and musical roar.

She picked up a chalky stone and printed her name, in capitals, on the side of a hut. Then she drew a picture of Jesus on
the Gross. As she worked over her drawing, including considerable macabre detail, she was filled with great unhappiness.
She
was innocent as
He
had been, as despised and rejected. The world was unjust and cold. A slow, sorrowful tear trickled from her eye.

She had not meant to hurt Peregrine. The whole thing had been his idea, not hers.

When she found him in the nursery he had been standing by her bed with the lamp already in his hand. Seeing the bulb glowing
feebly in the strong daylight, she had reproached him.

“Look at you now, wasting electricity. Daddy will be angry.”

(Charles was finicky about small economies. He would patrol the house after dark, turning off what he considered to be unnecessary
lights. On the other hand, the extravagant
use of gas did not bother him: in winter, gas fires burned wastefully in almost every room.)

Ignoring what was, at Peebles, a commonplace remark, Peregrine looked at his sister with an exultant expression on his face
and said that he was punishing himself. “For letting you down,” he explained. He was a pupil at a day preparatory school where
to stick up for the side was considered the whole duty of man. “I was holding it against my face and letting it burn me,”
he continued virtuously. There was no mark on his face.

For a moment, Hilary was at a loss. His triumph over her was complete: she felt small and shabby and mean. Then something,
a kind of smugness in his attitude, a curious, suggestive brilliance in his eyes, made her realise that he knew quite well
what effect his martyrdom would have on her. This was not real repentance. She became enraged.

“You haven’t hurt yourself at all,” she taunted him. “If you had, it would show.”

His face fell. She had misjudged him partly: he had genuinely intended to burn himself and had, in fact, held the bulb against
his face for some considerable time. That it had not, as yet, been hot enough to burn him, was scarcely his fault.

Hilary tossed her head. “It can’t have hotted up properly. I bet it has by now.”

Mournfully eyeing the lighted lamp, Peregrine feared that she was right. He hung his head. “Perhaps my skin doesn’t burn easily.
Not to show, I mean. I could have extra tough skin, couldn’t I?”

He looked at Hilary pitifully, daring to hope that she would excuse him on these grounds. She frowned at him. The feebleness
of his suggestion merely exacerbated his offence—how
like
him to try and wriggle out of it like that! Anger uplifted her: she did not count the cost.

“We’ll see about that,” she said in dark, meaningful tones that echoed the departed Nanny. “Come here this minute.”

Completely in her thrall, he came, his eyes sad and mute. She took the lamp from him and held the bulb against his mouth.
He was small and thin for his age and the littleness of his body, pressed against hers, the slight trembling that possessed
him, gave her a wild and savage pleasure. She could have smashed his face, broken his bones.

Convinced that the punishment was just, Peregrine endured the pain for a full minute before he whimpered. Hilary took the
lamp away and saw, appalled, the crimson mark on his upper lip. Her anger vanished and she was terrified. Everyone would see
what she had done.

“Will it go away?” She begged, “Wash it and see.”

Dutifully, he spat on his handkerchief and rubbed tentatively at the mark but it was too painful, his eyes filled with tears.
He looked at himself in the mirror. “I look awful,” he complained sadly. He was really upset by his appearance; he was a vain
child.

Partly to console him but mainly because she hoped to stave off retribution, Hilary pressed the burning bulb against her own
arm. If they saw that she too was hurt, surely they would not punish her? Looked at in that light, the pain, which was worse
than she had imagined, was also welcome. She showed the mark to Peregrine. “Look. I’ve done it too. We can tell them we were
playing a game, can’t we? Spartans, or something like that.” She remembered a story of which Peregrine was most curiously
fond. “You know, like the brave little boy who let the wolf eat at his tummy.”

“Why?”

“All right, don’t,” said Hilary, turning away. Her voice was muffled. “You don’t love me very much, do you?”

Her bowed shoulders expressed utter dejection. Peregrine moved round so that he could see her face which was screwed up and
plainer than usual. He was sorry for her because she was ugly. He thought, with a sudden flash of insight, that perhaps that
was why she was so often naughty.

“You can tell them if you like, and I won’t say it isn’t true,” he compromised. He was a truthful child but limited, more
concerned with the letter than the spirit. At the moment, he was not particularly interested in justice. His mouth was hurting
him and he did not really care what was said to the grown-ups one way or the other, although he knew that if Hilary were punished
for burning him, it would only make more trouble for him later on.

But there was no opportunity for pretence. Mrs. Peacock came in just then and took in the situation at a glance. She ignored
Hilary’s explanation: she had had children of her own and knew a cook-up story when she heard one. She turned on Hilary indignantly.
Her histrionic words, adding to Hilary’s already violent sense of guilt, were too much for the child and she fled, weeping.

Now, re-living the episode, Hilary was seized with painful embarrassment. She could never go home, never, never. She flung
the chalk stone away and ran to the farthest limit of the promenade. There were no steps down to the beach: the concrete simply
came to an end in an abrupt and arbitrary fashion as if the builders had unexpectedly run out of materials or, suddenly, lost
heart. She jumped down and continued along the deserted shore below the breakwaters at the edge of the tide. Here, the shingle
ended in a desolation of sandy mud that sucked at her sandals. The beach was empty, the only sign of life far out at sea where
the gulls fluttered like pieces of paper in the wake of a slow steamer.

The clay cliffs were high and bare with a narrow frill of grass on the top like green icing on a chocolate cake. The lower
slopes were gentle but the children were forbidden to climb them because they were treacherous: from time to time, great slabs
tumbled into the greedy sea. The erosion was not as rapid as on the marshy flats at the other end of the town but more dramatic:
during a wild night in the previous winter, the entire garden of a house on the cliff top had slid neatly two hundred feet
into a hollow where the banked flag irises continued to flower in season and a fishing gnome sat snugly by an ornamental pond.

Aware of the danger, Hilary climbed the cliffs. She hoped that they would fall on her. Death was preferable to the situation
in which she found herself. Once she was dead, they would remember her with more love than they had shown to her in life.
After a while, these mournful thoughts left her and she began to enjoy her freedom. She became a gallant explorer, opening
up a waste land.

When she came, by accident, upon the fallen garden, she was elated. Earlier in the year, she had been taken to look at it
from a safe distance on the cliff top. (Its comical preservation had become, this summer, a tourist attraction. The enterprising
council had put up notices directing visitors to the spot from which it could most effectively be observed.) Hilary was not
at all disappointed to find that the garden looked less perfect close to. She was only sorry because it seemed so neglected.
The stone pond was cracked across the bottom and very dirty. She cleaned it up as well as she could with her handkerchief
and tried to mend it with lumps of sticky clay. When this was done, she began to fill it with rainwater which she collected
in a battered can from a depression in the cliff. It was laborious work but she became
completely absorbed in it as the sun moved slowly across the sky.

Two elderly gentlewomen, pausing in their midday constitutional, saw her from the top of the cliff. One of them was rich and
not quite right in the head, the other was paid to look after her. The companion, perturbed by the obvious danger of the child’s
position, urged that something should be done, but her employer, who had often been incommoded by the younger woman’s attempts
to rescue kittens from trees and stray dogs from teasing children, refused to discuss the matter. When she chose, she could
be as deaf as a stone carving and, indeed, looked rather like one for she was aristocratic and so old that her flesh appeared
to be made of some pale and indestructible material. After a while, the companion gave up trying and resigned herself to the
conclusion that if they
were
to find someone to rescue the child, her parents, who were probably happily watching from some unseen vantage point, would
accuse them of being a couple of interfering old spinsters.

“As of course, we are.” The carving came to life suddenly and the companion was seized with a dreadful fear that, in addition
to her other eccentricities, her charge had suddenly become able to read what went on inside other people’s heads.

“A couple of nasty old maids. Stale virgins, good for nothing, barren as rock,” went on the madwoman viciously. She was aware,
in her saner moments, of her dependence upon this other woman whom she hated and despised and took great pleasure in embarrassing
her. She went on to express the hope that the child on the cliff would be killed by a land-slide and so be saved from old
age and suffering. She showed every sign of working herself up into one of her “states”, but, having delivered herself of
this outburst,
she allowed herself to be appeased by the promise of a nice afternoon watching television and went home to lunch like a lamb.

By the early afternoon, Hilary had lost interest in the garden. She was hungry. She began to climb upwards. It was harder
going than it had been on the lower slopes because the cliff top overhung in places. Once or twice, she was badly frightened
by a slipping stone. She was not an agile child and she looked, from a distance, a very small and precariously balanced creature
whose bright hair, when the sun caught it, flamed like a beacon against the brown mud of the cliff.

Auntie saw her from the shore.

The fuss and the flurry attendant on the child’s disappearance had disgusted her. Her deafness saved her from the worst of
it but even she could not escape the atmosphere at lunch-time. Tinned soup and bread and cheese were served to the family
by Mrs. Peacock whose eyes were red and whose quivering sighs reminded them continually of the drama they were engaged in.
The air trembled with hysteria. Auntie, pecking at her food, found it degrading.

After she had eaten, she went out. Leaving the house, she presented a dignified, if eccentric figure. Unlike most of the old
ladies of Henstable, she wore no hat and her thin, grey hair streamed in the wind. She was wrapped in a dark blue coat made
for her by a naval tailor, fastened at the throat with onyx buttons and lined with scarlet silk.

Like Hilary, she descended the Hundred Steps. She carried her stick, but made no use of it. Her walk was unfaltering, her
head held high. At the end of the promenade, she climbed heavily down on to the shingle and walked
along the beach, breathing a little faster than usual and with a bright look of pleasure in her eyes. After a short while
she stopped and looked sharply round her. Seeing the empty beach, she removed her cloak and laid it, carefully folded, upon
a flat stone. She slipped off her skirt and appeared clad below the waist in a capacious pair of waterproof bloomers. She
took off her shoes and stockings and walked to the edge of the sea. She waded along the shore, her eyes fixed on the sucking
water. Occasionally she bent and picked up a handful of sand, trickling it through her fingers. She prodded with her stick
at drifts of seaweed, examining them closely. Finding an old, canvas shoe, she removed the sodden lace and tucked it into
a specially made pocket in the front of her bloomers. Her face relaxed into lines of complete contentment.