The Dark Shore (11 page)

The sea murmured far away; gulls soared, borne aloft by the warm breeze.

“Was it a successful party?” Sarah heard herself say tentatively at last.

“Successful?” said Justin, propping himself upon one elbow to stare at her. “Successful? It was dreadful! Everything went wrong from start to finish. Uncle Max quarreled with the statuesque blonde—they had an awful row after breakfast on Saturday and she went and locked herself in her room. I’ve no idea what the row was about. Then when Uncle Max went to his car to work off his anger by driving, my mother wanted him to take her to St. Ives to get some fresh shellfish for dinner; but my father didn’t want her to go so there was another row. In the end my father went off to the Flat Rocks and took me with him. It was terrible. He didn’t speak a word the entire time. After a while Marijohn came and my father sent me back to the house to find out when lunch would be ready. We had a maid help at Clougy in those days to do the mid-day cooking when there were guests. When I got back to the house I found Uncle Michael looking for Marijohn so I told him to go down to the Flat Rocks. After I’d found out about the lunch and stopped for elevenses I started off back again, but I met my father on his own coming back from the cliff path and he took me back to the house and started to play the piano. He played for a long time. In the end I got bored and slipped back to the kitchen to inquire about lunch again. I was always hungry in those days
...
And then Uncle Michael and Marijohn came back and shut themselves in the drawing-room. I tried listening at the key-hole but I couldn’t hear anything, and anyway my father found me listening and was cross enough to slap me very hard across the seat of my trousers so I scuttled down to the cove out of the way after that. My mother and Uncle Max didn’t come back for lunch and Eve stayed in her room. I had to take a tray up to her and leave it outside the door, but when I came to collect it an hour later it hadn’t been touched so I sat down at the top of the stairs and ate it myself. I didn’t think anyone would mind
...

“My mother and Uncle Max came back in time for tea. I was rather frightened, I think, because for some reason I expected my father to have the most almighty row with her, but—” He stopped pulling up grass with his fingers, his eyes staring out to sea.

“But what?”

“But nothing happened,” said Justin slowly. “It was most odd. I can’t quite describe how odd it was. My father was playing the piano and Marijohn was with him, I remember. Uncle Michael had gone fishing. And absolutely nothing happened
...
After tea Uncle Max and my mother went down to the cove for a bathe, and still nothing happened. I followed them down to the beach but my mother told me
t
o go away, so I walked along the shore till I found Uncle Michael fishing. We talked for a while. Then I went
b
ack and snatched some supper from the larder as
I
wasn’t sure whether I’d be dining with the grown-ups or not. As it happened I was, but I didn’t want to be hungry. Then Eve came downstairs, asking for Uncle Max and when I told her he’d gone swimming with my mother she walked off towards the cove.

“Dinner was at eight. It was delicious, one of my mother’s best fish
-
dishes, fillet of sole garnished with lobster and crab and shrimps
...
I had three helpings. I particularly remember because no one else ate at all. Eve had gone back to her room again, I believe, so that just left Max, Michael, Marijohn and my parents. My mother made most of the conversation but after a while she seemed bewildered and didn’t talk so much. And then—” He stopped again, quite motionless, the palms of his hands flat against the springy turf.

“Yes?”

“And then Marijohn and my father started to talk. They talked about music mostly. I didn’t understand a word of what they were saying and I don’t think anyone else did either. At last my mother told me to go to bed and I said I’d help with the washing-up—my usual dodge for avoiding bed, as I used to walk into the kitchen and straight out of the back door—but she wouldn’t hear of it. In the end it was Uncle Michael who took me upstairs, and when we stood up from the dinner table, everyone else rose as well and began to filter away. The last thing I remember as I climbed the stairs and looked back into the hall was my father putting on a red sweater as if he was going out. Uncle Michael said to me: ‘What are you looking at?’ and I couldn’t tell him that I was wondering if my father was going out for a walk to the Flat Rocks and whether I could slip out and join him when everyone thought I was in bed
...
But Uncle Michael was with me too long, and I never had the chance. He read me a chapter of
Treasure Island
which I thought was rather nice of him. However, when I was alone, I lay awake for a long time, wondering what was going on, and listening to the
gramophone
in the music room below. It was an orchestral record, a symphony, I think. After a while it stopped. I thought: maybe he’s going down now to the Flat Rocks. So I got out of bed and pulled on a pair of shorts and pullover and my sand shoes. When I glanced out of the window, I saw a shadow move out of the driveway and so I slipped out to follow him.

“It was rather spooky in the moonlight. I remember being frightened, especially when I saw someone coming up the path from the beach towards me and I had to hide behind a rock. It was Eve. She was breathing hard as if she’ll been running and her lace was streaked with tears. She didn’t see
me.”

He was silent, fingering the short grass, and after a while he took off his sunglasses and she saw his dark eyes had a remote, withdrawn expression.

“I went up the cliff path a long way, but he was always too far ahead for me to catch him up and the sea would have drowned my voice if I’d called out. In the end I had to pause to get my breath, and when I looked back I saw someone was following me. I was really scared then. I dived into a sea of bracken and buried myself as deep as I could. Presently the other person went by.”

A pause. Round them lay the tranquillity of the summer morning, the calm sea, the still sky, the quiet cliffs.

“Who was it?” said Sarah at last.

Another pause. The scene was effortlessly beautiful. Then: “My mother,
”
said Justin. “I never saw her again.”

T
hree

2

When they arrived back at Clougy they found the car standing in the drive but the house was empty and still. In the kitchen something was cooking in the oven and two saucepans simmered gently on the stove; on the table was a square of paper covered with a clear printed writing.

“Justin!” called Sarah.

He was upstairs putting his painting gear away. “Hullo?”

“Marijohn wants you to go up to the farm to get some milk.” She replaced the note absently beneath the rolling pin and wandered out into the hall just as he came downstairs to join her. “I wonder where they are,” she said to him as he stopped to check how much money he had in his pockets. “Do you think they’ve gone down to the beach for a stroll before lunch?”

“Probably.” He apparently decided he had enough money to buy the milk and moved over to the front door. “Do you want to come up to the farm?”

“No, I’ll go down to the beach to meet them and tell them we’re back.”

He nodded and stepped out into the sunshine of the drive. The gravel crunched beneath his feet as he walked away out of the gate and up the track to the farm.

After he had gone, Sarah followed him to the gate and took the path which led down into the cove, but presently she stopped to listen. It was very still. Far away behind her she could still hear the faint rush of the stream as it tumbled past the disused waterwheel. But apart from that there was nothing, only the calm of a summer morning and the bare rock-strewn hills on either side of her. London seemed a thousand miles away.

Presently the path forked, one turning leading up on to the cliffs, the other descending into the cove. She walked on slowly downhill, and suddenly the sound of the sea was in her ears and a solitary gull was swooping overhead with a desolate empty cry, and the loneliness seemed to increase for no apparent reason. At the head of the beach she paused to scan the rocks but there was no sign of either Jon or his cousin and presently she started to climb uphill to meet the cliff path in order to gain a better view of the cove.

The tide was out; the rocks stretched far into the sea. She moved further along the path round the side of the hill until presently, almost before she had realized it, the cove was hidden from her and the path was threading its way through the heather along the shallow cliff.

And below were the rocks. Hundreds of thousands of rocks. Vast boulders, gigantic slabs, small blocks of stone all tumbled at the base of the cliff and frozen in a jagged pattern as if halted by some invisible hand on their race into the sea.

The path forked again, one branch leading straight on along the same level, the other sloping downhill to the cliffs edge.

Sarah stopped.

Below her the rocks formed a different pattern. They were larger, smoother, flatter, descending in a series of levels to the waves far below. There were little inlets, all reflecting the blue sky, and the waves of the outgoing tide were gentle and calm as they washed effortlessly over the rocky shelves and through the seaweed lagoons.

It was then that she saw Jon’s red shirt. It lay stretched out on a rock to dry beneath the hot sunshine, and as she strained her eyes to make sure she was not mistaken, she could see the pebbles weighting the sleeves to prevent the soft breeze from blowing it back into the water.

She moved on down the path to the cliff’s edge. The cliff was neither very steep nor very high but she had to pause all the same to consider how she was going to scramble down. She saw the rough steps, but one was missing and another seemed to be loose; the sand around them bore no trace of footmarks to indicate that it would be easy enough to find another way down. She stood among the heather, her glance searching the cliff’s edge, and suddenly she realized she was frightened and angry and puzzled. This was where Sophia had died. The steps were the ones leading down the cliff and the rocks below were the Flat Rocks. And Jon had come back. He had come back deliberately to the very spot where his wife had been killed. Marijohn had taken him. It was her fault. If he had not wanted to see her again he wouldn’t have dreamed of returning to Clougy. He had talked of how fond he was of the place and how much he wanted to see it again in spite of all that had happened, but it had been a lie. He had come back to see Marijohn, not for any other reason.

She sat down suddenly in the heather, her cheeks burning, the scene blurring before her eyes. But why, her brain kept saying, trying to be sensible and reasonable. Why? Why am I crying? Why do I feel sick and miserable? Why am I suddenly so convinced that Jon came back here not because he loved Clougy but solely because of his cousin? And why should it mutter even if he did? Why shouldn’t he be fond of his cousin? Am I jealous? Why am I so upset? Why, why, why?

Because Jon lied to me. He had planned this trip before he ever mentioned it to me—and Marijohn had the piano tuned because she knew he was coming.

Because he talks to Marijohn of things which he has never mentioned to me.

Because this morning he preferred Marijohn’s company to mine
...

She dashed away her tears, pressing her lips together in a determined effort to pull herself together. She was being absurd, worse than an adolescent. Trust was a basic element of marriage, and she trusted Jon. Everything was perfectly all right and she was imagining all kinds of dreadful possibilities without a grain of proof. She would go down to the rocks to meet them because there was no reason why she should be afraid of what she might find and because it was utterly ridiculous to sit on top of a cliff weeping. She would go right away.

She found a way to the first shelf after a few minutes and started to scramble over towards the red shirt. In spite of herself she found she was thinking about Marijohn again. Marijohn wasn’t like other people, Justin had said. Marijohn could talk to Jon when he was in the Distant Mood. She could cope with him when Sarah did not even begin to know how to deal with the situation. Marijohn
...

The scramble over the rocks was more difficult than it had appeared from the cliff path above. She found herself making wide detours and after a time she had lost sight of the red shirt and realized she had been forced to move too far over to the left.

It was then that she heard Jon laugh.

She stopped, her heart thumping from the exertion of the scramble and from something else which she refused to acknowledge. Then, very slowly, despising herself for the subterfuge, she moved forward quietly, taking great care that she should see them before they should see her.

She suddenly realized she was very frightened indeed.

There was a large white rock ahead, its surface worn smooth by centuries of wind and rain. It was cold beneath her hot hands. She moved forward, still gripping the rock, and edged herself sideways until she could see round it to the rocks beyond.