The Dark Shore (17 page)

“The child seemed to sense the tension in the atmosphere for he became very troublesome, and suddenly I felt I had to get out of the room and escape. I took the child upstairs. It was the only excuse I could think of which enabled me to get away, and I stayed upstairs with him for about half an hour, putting him to bed and reading to him. I can’t even remember what we read. All I could think of was that Sophia believed Jon intended to be unfaithful to her, and was going to make trouble. My mind was going round and round in circles. Would she divorce Jon? What would she say? How much would come out? How much would it affect Marijohn? Would it succeed in driving Jon and Marijohn more firmly together than ever? What was going to happen? And I went on reading to the child and pretending to him that everything was normal, and inside my heart felt as if it were bursting
...

“When I went back downstairs, they were alone in the music room and there was a record playing on the gramophone. Sophia was in the kitchen with Max. I closed the door and said to Jon, ‘Sophia knows—you realize that?’ And he said, looking me straight in the eyes, ‘Knows what?’

“I said there was no sense in pretending any longer and that the time had come to be perfectly frank with each other. Marijohn tried to interrupt, telling me not to make such an exhibition of myself, but I shut my mind to her and refused to listen. ‘You may not be technically committing adultery with my wife,’ I said to Jon, ‘but you’re behaving exactly as if you are, and Sophia isn’t going to accept all these airy fairy tales about a relationship with no sex in it. She’s going to believe the worst and act accordingly, and in many ways she’d be justified. Whatever your relationship with my wife is, it’s a dangerous one that should be stopped—and it must be stopped.’

“They looked at each other. They looked at me. And as they were silent, thinking, I knew instinctively what it was that was so wrong. They were sharing each other’s minds. Sophia, close as she might have been to Jon as the result of physical intimacy, was as a stranger to him in the face of that uncanny intangible understanding he shared with Marijohn. Sophia was being forced into the position of outsider—but not by any means which she could recognize or label. For because their relationship was so far beyond her grasp—or indeed the grasp of any ordinary person—it was impossible for her to identify the wrongness in the relationship although it was possible to sense that wrongness did exist.

“Jon said, ‘Look Michael—’ but he got no further. The door opened and Sophia walked into the room.”

He stopped. The sea went on murmuring at the base of the cliffs, and there was no light as far as the eye could see. The darkness made Sarah more conscious of her dizziness and of her hot, aching eyes.

“Don’t tell me any more,” she whispered. “Don’t. Please.”

But he wasn’t listening to her.

“What is it?”

“I thought I heard something.” He went on listening but presently he relaxed a little. “There was a terrible scene,” he said at last. “I can’t begin to tell you what was said. It ended with Jon leaving the room and walking out across the lawn. Marijohn went up to her room, and I was left alone with Sophia. I tried to reason with her but she wouldn’t listen and in the end she went upstairs to change her shoes before going out. There was some rendezvous with Max on the Flat Rocks, although I didn’t know that at the time. I stayed in the drawing-room until I heard her go, and then I went up to my room to find Marijohn but she was no longer there. I stayed there thinking for a long while.

“After Sophia’s death, I thought for a time that everything was going to work out at last, but I was too optimistic. Marijohn and Jon had a very long talk together. I don’t know what was said, but the upshot of it was that they had decided to part for good. I think Sophia’s death—or rather, the scene that preceded her death—had shaken them and they realized they couldn’t go on as they were. Jon went to Canada, to the other side of the world, and Marijohn returned with me to London, but she didn’t stay long and we never lived together as man and wife again. She went to Paris for a while, came back but couldn’t settle down in any place with anyone. I wanted to help her as I knew she was desperately unhappy, but there was nothing I could do and the love I offered her was useless. In the end she turned to religion. She was living in a convent when Jon returned to England a few weeks ago.”

He threw away his cigarette. The tip glowed briefly and then died in the darkness.

“So you see,” he said slowly at last, “it’s quite imperative that you get Jon away from here. It’s all happening again, can’t you realize that? It’s all happening again—we’re all here at Clougy, all of us except that woman of Max’s, and you’ve been assigned Sophia’s role.”

Stone grated on stone; there was the click of a powerful torch, a beam of blinding light.

“
Just what the hell are you trying to suggest to my wife, Michael Rivers?” said Jon’s hard, dangerous voice from the darkness beyond the torch’s beam.

2

“Stay and have dinner with me,” said Eve to Justin. “I don’t know a soul in this town. Take me somewhere interesting where we can have a meal.”

“No,” he said, “I have to get back to Clougy.” And then, realizing his words might have sounded rude and abrupt, he added hastily, “I promised to get back for dinner.”

“Call them and tell them you’ve changed your mind.”

“No, I—” He stopped, blushed, shook his head. His fingers fidgeted with the door handle. “I’m sorry, but I have to get back—it’s rather important. There’s something I have to talk about with my father.”

“About your mother’s death?” she said sharply. “Was it something I said? You’re sure now that he didn’t kill her, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” he said, and added in a rush: “And I think I know who did.” He opened the door and paused to look at her.

She smiled. “Come back when you can,” was all she said. “Tell me what happens.”

He thanked her awkwardly, his shyness returning for a moment, and then left the room to go downstairs to the hall.

Outside, the golden light of evening was soothing to his eyes. He moved quickly back towards Fish Street, and then broke into a run as he reached the harbor walls and ran down the steps towards the car park. The sea on his right was a dark blue mirror reflecting golden lights from the sky and far away the waves broke in white wavering lines of foam on the sand-dunes of Hayle.

He was panting when he reached the car and had to search for his keys. For one sickening moment he thought he had lost his key-ring, but then he discovered the keys in the inside pocket of his jacket and quickly unlocked the car door. He suddenly realized he was sweating and fear was a sharp prickling tension crawling at the base of his spine.

St. Ives was jammed with the summer tourist traffic leaving the town at the end of the day. It took him quarter of an hour to travel from the car park through the town and emerge on the Land’s End road.

He had just reached the lonely stretch of the wild coast road between Morvah and Zennor when the engine spluttered, coughed and was still. He stared at the petrol gauge with incredulous eyes for one long moment, and then, wrenching open the car door he started to run down the road back to Zennor with his heart hammering and pounding in his lungs.

3

Rivers s
t
oo
d
up.
H
e didn’t hurry. “Put out that torch, for God’s sake,” he said calmly with a slight air of irritability. “I can’t see a thing.”

The torch clicked. There was darkness.

“Sarah,” said Jon.

She didn’t move. She tried to, but her limbs made no response.

“Sarah, what’s he been saying to you?”

Rivers took a slight step nearer her and she sensed he had moved to reassure her. Her mouth was dry as if she had run a long way with no rest. “Sarah!” shouted Jon. “Sarah!”

“For God’s sake, Jon,” said Rivers, still with his calm air of slight irritability. “Pull yourself together. I suggest we all go back to the house instead of conducting arguments and recriminations on the top of a cliff on a particularly dark Cornish night.”

“Go—yourself,” said Jon between his teeth and tried to push past him, but Rivers stood his ground.

“Let me by.”

“Relax,” said Rivers, still calm. “Sarah’s perfectly all right but she’s had a shock.”

“Get out of my—”

They were struggling, wrestling with one another, but even as Sarah managed to stand up Michael made no further attempts to hold Jon back, and stepped aside.

“Sarah,” said Jon, trying to take her in his arms. “Sarah—”

She twisted away from him. “Let me go.”

“It’s not true about Marijohn! Whatever he said to you isn’t true!”

She didn’t answer. He whirled on Rivers. “What did you tell her?”

Rivers laughed.

“What did you tell her?” He had left Sarah and was gripping Rivers’ shoulders. “What did you say?”

“I told her enough to persuade her to leave Clougy as soon as possible. Nothing more.”

“What the hell do you—”

“I didn’t tell her, for instance, that Sophia’s death wasn’t accidental. Nor did I tell her that she was pushed down the cliff-path to her death by someone who had a very good motive for silencing her—
”

“Why, you—” Jon was blind with rage and hatred. Rivers was forced to fight back in self-defense.

“For Christ’s sake, Jon!”

“Jon!” cried Sarah suddenly in fear.

He stopped at once, looking back at her, his chest heaving with exertion. “Did he tell you?” he said suddenly in a low voice. “Did he tell you?” She leaned back against the rock, too exhausted to do more than nod her head, not even sure what she was affirming. From far away as if in another world she heard Rivers laugh at Jon’s panic, but she was conscious only of a great uneasiness prickling beneath her skin.

Jon whirled on Rivers. “How could you?” he gasped. “You love Marijohn. We all agreed ten years ago that no one should ever know the truth. You said yourself that it would be best for Marijohn if no one ever knew that she and I were—” He stopped.

“Jon,” said Rivers a hard warning edge to his voice. “Jon—”

“Yes,” cried Sarah in sudden passion. “That you and she were what?”

“That she and I were brother and sister,” said Jon exhausted, and then instantly in horror: “My God, you didn’t know
..
.
?”

4

Justin managed to get a lift to a garage and paid the mechanic for taking him back to his car with a can of petrol.

It was after sunset. The dusk was gathering.

“Should do the trick,” said the mechanic, withdrawing his head from the bonnet. “Give ’er a try.”

The starter whined; the engine flickered briefly and died.

“Funny,” said the mechanic with interest. “Must be trouble in the carburetor. Petrol not feeding properly. Did the gauge say you was dead out of petrol?”

“No,” said Justin. “According to the gauge there was still a little in the tank. I just thought the gauge must have gone wrong.”

“Funny,” said the mechanic again with a deeper interest, and put his head cautiously back under the bonnet. “Well, now, let me see
...
”

5

Sarah was running. The heather was scratching her legs and the darkness was all around her, smothering her lungs as she fought for breath. And then at last she saw the lighted windows of Clougy and knew she would be able at last to escape from the suffocation of the darkness and the isolation of the Cornish hillsides.

Max Alexander came out into the hall as she stumbled through the front door and paused gasping by the stairs, her shoulders leaning against the wall, her eyes closed as the blood swam through her brain.

“Sarah! What’s happened? What is it?”

She sank down on the stairs, not caring that he should see her tears, and as the scene tilted crazily before her eyes she felt the sobs rise in her throat and shudder through her body.

“Sarah
...”
He was beside her, his arm round her shoulders almost before he had time to think. “Tell me what it is
...
If there’s anything I can do—”

“Where’s Marijohn?”

“In the kitchen, I think, clearing up the aftermath of the meal. Why? Do you—
”

“Max, can you—would you—”

“Yes?” he said. “What is it? Tell me what you want me to do.”

“I—I want to go away. Could you drive me into St. Ives, or Penzance, anywhere—
”

“Now?”

“Yes,” she whispered, struggling with her tears. “Now.”

“But—”

“I want to be alone to think,” she said. “I must be able to think.”

“Yes, I see. Yes, of course. All right, I’ll go and start the car. You’d better pack a suitcase or something, hadn’t you?”

She nodded, still blind with tears, and he helped her to her feet.

“Can you manage?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, thank you.”

He waited until she had reached the landing and then he walked out of the open front door and she heard the crunch of his footsteps on the gravel of the drive.

She went to her room. Her smallest suitcase was on the floor of the cupboard. She was just opening it and trying to think what she should pack when she sensed instinctively that she was no longer alone in the room. “Max,” she said as she swung round, “Max, I—”

It wasn’t Max. It was Marijohn.

The silence which followed seemed to go on and on and on.

“What is it?” said Sarah unsteadily at last. “What do you want?”

The door clicked shut. The woman turned the key in the lock and then leaned back against the panels. Somewhere far away the phone started to ring but no one answered it.

“I heard your conversation with Max just now,” she said after a while. “I knew then that I had to talk to you.”

There was silence again, a deep absolute silence, and then Marijohn said suddenly, “If you leave Jon now it would be the worst thing you could possibly do. He loves you, and needs you. Nothing which happened in the past can ever change that.”

She moved then, walking over to the window and staring out at the dark night towards the sea. She was very still.

“That was Sophia’s mistake,” she said. “He loved and needed her too but she flung it back in his face. It was an easy mistake for her to make, because she never really loved him or understood him. But you do, don’t you. I know you do. You’re quite different from Sophia. As soon as I saw you, I knew you were quite different from her.”

It was difficult to breathe. Sarah found her lungs were aching with tension and her fingernails were hurting the palms of her hands.

“I want Jon to be happy,” Marijohn said. “That’s all I want. I thought it would make him happy to come down here with you to stay. I thought that if we were to meet again here of all places nothing would happen between us because the memories would be there all the time, warning us and acting as a barrier. But I was wrong and so was he, and there can never be another occasion like this now. He’s leaving tomorrow—did you know that? And when he leaves I know I shall never see him again.”

She took the curtain in her hands, fingering its softness delicately, her eyes still watching the darkness beyond the pane.

“I don’t know what I shall do,” she said. “I haven’t allowed myself to think much about it yet. You see
...
how can I best explain? Perhaps it’s best to put it in very simple language and not try to wrap it up in careful, meaningless phrases. The truth of the matter is that I can’t live without Jon, but he can live perfectly well without me. I’ve always known that. It’s got nothing to do with love at all. It’s just something that
is,
that exists. I do love Jon, and he loves me, but that’s quite irrelevant. We would have this thing which exists between us even if we hated one another. I can best describe it by calling it color. When he’s not there, the world is black and gray and I’m only half-alive and dreadfully alone. And when he is there the world is multicolored and I
c
an live and the concept of loneliness is nothing more than a remote unreal nightmare. That’s how it affects me, but Jon I know isn’t affected in the same way. When I’m not there, he doesn’t live in a twilight black-and-white world as I do. He lives in a different world but the world is merely colored differently and although he may miss me he’s still able to live a full, normal life. That’s why he’s been able to marry and find happiness, whereas I know I can never marry again. I should never even have married Michael. But Jon told me to marry. I was unhappy and he thought it was the answer to all my difficulties. I was always unhappy
...