This Rough Magic (3 page)

Then I had the answer, and with it a rush of relief and delight. This was the darling of the Aegean, ‘the lad who lives before the wind’, Apollo’s beloved, ‘desire of the sea’, the dolphin … the lovely names went rippling by with him, as I drew himself up on to the warm rock in the shade of the pines, clasped my knees, and settled down to watch.

Here he came again, in a great curve, smooth and glistening, dark-backed and light-bellied, and as graceful as a racing yacht. This time he came right out, to lie on the surface watching me.

He was large, as dolphins go, something over eight feet long. He lay rocking gently, with the powerful shoulders waiting curved for the plunge below, and the tail – crescent-shaped, and quite unlike a fish’s upright rudder – hugging the water flatly, holding the big body level. The dark-ringed eye watched me steadily, with what I could have sworn was a friendly and interested light. The smooth muzzle was curved into the perpetual dolphin-smile.

Excitement and pleasure made me light-headed. ‘Oh, you darling!’ I said foolishly, and put out a hand, rather as one puts it out to the pigeons in Trafalgar Square.

The dolphin, naturally, ignored it, but lay there placidly smiling, rocking a little closer, and watching me, entirely unafraid.

So they were true, those stories … I knew of the legends, of course – ancient literature was studded with stories of dolphins who had befriended man; and while one couldn’t quite accept all the miraculous dolphins
of legend, there were also many more recent tales, sworn to with every kind of modern proof. There was the dolphin called Pelorus Jack, fifty years ago in New Zealand, who saw the ships through Cook Straight for twenty years; the Opononi dolphin of the fifties, who entertained the holiday-makers in the bay; the one more recently in Italy, who played with the children near the shore, attracting such large crowds that eventually a little group of business-men from a nearby resort, whose custom was being drawn away, lay in wait for the dolphin, and shot her dead as she came in to play. These, and others, gave the old legends rather more than the benefit of the doubt.

And here, indeed, was the living proof. Here was I, Lucy Waring, being asked into the water for a game. The dolphin couldn’t have made it clearer if he’d been carrying a placard on that lovely moon’s-horn fin of his. He rocked himself, watching me, then half-turned, rolled, and came up again, nearer still …

A stray breeze moved the pines, and I heard a bee go past my cheek, travelling like a bullet. The dolphin arched suddenly away in a deep dive. The sea sucked, swirled, and settled, rocking, back to emptiness.

So that was that. With a disappointment so sharp that it felt like a bereavement, I turned my head to watch for him moving out to sea, when suddenly, not far from my rock, the sea burst apart as if it had been shelled, and the dolphin shot upwards on a steep slant that took him out of the water in a yard-high leap, and down again with a smack of the tail as loud as a cannon-shot. He tore by like a torpedo, to fetch up
all standing twenty yards out from my rock, and fix me once again with that bright, humorous eye.

It was an enchanting piece of show-off, and it did the trick. ‘All right,’ I said softly, ‘I’ll come in. But if you knock me over again, I’ll drown you, my lad, see if I don’t!’

I lowered my legs into the water, ready to slide down off the rock. Another bee shot past above me, seawards, with a curious, high humming. Something – some small fish, I supposed – splashed a white jet of water just beyond the dolphin. Even as I wondered, vaguely, what it was, the humming came again, nearer … and then another white spurt of water, and a curious thin, curving whine, like singing wire.

I understood then. I’d heard that sound before. These were neither bees nor fish. They were bullets, presumably from a silenced rifle, and one of them had ricocheted off the surface of the sea. Someone was shooting at the dolphin from the woods above the bay.

That I was in some danger from the ricochets myself didn’t at first enter my head. I was merely furious, and concerned to do something quickly. There lay the dolphin, smiling at me on the water, while some murderous ‘sportsman’ was no doubt taking aim yet again …

Presumably he hadn’t yet seen me in the shadow of the pines. I shouted at the top of my voice: ‘Stop that shooting! Stop it at once!’ and thrust myself forward into the water.

Nobody, surely, would fire at the beast when there was the chance of hitting me? I plunged straight out
into the sunlight, clumsily breasting the water, hoping that my rough approach would scare the dolphin away from the danger.

It did. He allowed me to come within a few feet, but as I lunged further, with a hand out as if to touch him, he rolled gently away from me, submerged, and vanished.

I stood breast-deep, watching the sea. Nothing. It stretched silent and empty towards the tranquil, floating hills of the mainland. The ripples ran back to the shore, and flattened, whispering. The dolphin had gone. And the magic had gone with him. This was only a small – and lonely – bathing-place, above which waited an unpleasant and frustrated character with a gun.

I turned to look up at the enclosing cliffs.

The first thing I saw, high up above the bay’s centre, was what must be the upper storeys of the Castello dei Fiori, rearing their incongruously embattled turrets against a background of holm-oak and cedar and Mediterranean cypress. The house was set well back, so that I could not see the ground-floor windows, but a wide balcony, or terrace, edged with a stone balustrade, jutted forward right to the cliff’s edge over the bay. From the beach directly below nothing of this would be visible through the tangle of flowering shrubs that curtained the steep, broken cliff, but from where I stood I could see the full length of the balustrade with its moss-grown statues at the corners, a stone jar or two full of flowers showing bright against the dark background of cypress, and, a little way back from the
balustrade, a table and chairs set in the shadow of a stone-pine.

And a man standing, half invisible in the shade of the pine, watching me.

A moment’s study convinced me that it could not be Sir Julian Gale. This man was too dark, and even from this distance looked quite unfamiliar – too casual in his bearing, perhaps, and certainly too young. The gardener, probably; the one who threw the trespassers over the cliff. Well, if Sir Julian’s gardener had the habit of amusing himself with a bit of shooting-practice, it was high time he was stopped.

I was out of the water before even the dolphin could have dived twice, had snatched up shoes and wrap, and was making for a dilapidated flight of steps near the cliff which, I assumed, led up to the terrace.

From above I heard a shout, and looked up. He had come forward to the balustrade, and was leaning over. I could barely see him through the thick screen of hibiscus and bramble, but he didn’t look like a Greek, and as I paused, he shouted in English: ‘That way, please!’ and his arm went out in a gesture towards the southern end of the bay.

I ignored it. Whoever he was – some guest of Julian Gale’s, presumably – I was going to have this out with him here and now, while I was hot with temper; not wait until I had to meet him at some polite bun-fight of Phyllida’s … ‘But you really mustn’t shoot at dolphins, Mr. Whosit, they do no harm …’ The same old polite spiel, gone through a thousand times with stupid, trigger-happy men who shot or trapped badgers,
otters, kestrels – harmless creatures, killed because some man wanted a walk out with his dog on a fine day. No, this time I was white-hot, and brave with it, and I was going to say my piece.

I went up those steps like a rocket leaving the launching-pad.

They were steep and crooked, and wound up through the thickest of the wood. They skirted the roots of the cliff, flicked up and round thickets of myrtle and summer jasmine, and emerged into a sloping glade full of dappled sunlight.

He was there, looking annoyed, having apparently come down from the terrace to intercept me. I only realised, when I stopped to face him, how very much at a disadvantage I was. He had come down some fifty feet; I had hurtled up a hundred or so. He presumably had a right to be where he was; I had not. He was also minding his own business, which was emphatically none of mine. Moreover, he was fully dressed, and I was in swimming costume, with a wet wrap flying loose round me. I clutched it to me, and fought for breath, feeling angrier than ever, but now this didn’t help at all, as I couldn’t get a word out.

He said, not aggressively but not politely: ‘This is private ground, you know. Perhaps you’d be good enough to leave by the way you came? This only takes you up to the terrace, and then more or less through the house.’

I got enough breath to speak, and wasted neither time nor words. ‘Why were you shooting at that dolphin?’

He looked as blank as if I had suddenly slapped his face. ‘Why was I what?’

‘That was you just now, wasn’t it, shooting at the dolphin down in the bay?’

‘My dear g—’ He checked himself, and said, like someone dealing with a lunatic: ‘Just what are you talking about?’

‘Don’t pretend you don’t know! It must have been you! If you’re such death on trespassers, who else would be there?’ I was panting hard, and my hands were shaking as I clutched the wrap to me clumsily. ‘Someone took a couple of pot-shots at it, just a few minutes ago. I was down there, and I saw you on the terrace.’

‘I certainly saw a dolphin there. I didn’t see you, until you shouted and came jumping out from under the trees. But you must be mistaken. There was no shooting. I’d have been bound to hear it if there was.’

‘It was silenced, of course,’ I said impatiently. ‘I tell you, I was down there when the shots came! D’you think I’d have come running up here for the fun of the thing? They were bullets all right! I know a ricochet when I hear it.’

His brows snapped down at that, and he stared at me frowningly, as if seeing me for the first time as a person, and not just a nuisance to be thrown down the cliff as quickly as possible.

‘Then why did you jump into the water near the dolphin?’

‘Well, obviously! I wanted to drive it away before it got hurt!’

‘But you might have been badly hurt yourself. Don’t you know that a bullet ricochets off water the way it does off rock?’

‘Of course I do! But I had to do something, hadn’t I?’

‘Brave girl.’ There was a dryness in his voice that brought my cooling temper fizzing to the boil again. I said hotly:

‘You don’t believe me, do you? I tell you it’s true! They
were
shots, and
of course
I jumped in to stop you! I knew you’d have to stop if someone was there.’

‘You know,’ he said, ‘you can’t have it both ways. Either I did the shooting, or I don’t believe there was any shooting. Not both. You can take your pick. If I were you, I’d choose the second; I mean, it’s simply not credible, is it? Even supposing someone wanted to shoot a dolphin, why use a silencer?’

‘
I’m
asking
you
,’ I said.

For a moment I thought I had gone too far. His lips compressed, and his eyes looked angry. There was a short silence, while he stared at me frowningly, and we measured one another.

I saw a strongly built man of about thirty, carelessly dressed in slacks and a sleeveless Sea Island shirt which exposed a chest and arms that might have belonged to any of the Greek navvies I was to see building the roads with their bare hands and very little more. Like theirs, too, his hair and eyes were very dark. But something at once sensual and sensitive about the mouth contradicted the impression of a purely physical personality; here, one felt, was a man of aggressive impulses, but one who paid for them in his own private coinage.

What impression he was getting of me I hated to think – damp hair, flushed face, half-embarrassed fury, and a damned wrap that kept slipping – but of one thing I could feel pretty sure: at this very moment he was having one of those aggressive impulses of his. Fortunately it wasn’t physical … yet.

‘Well,’ he said shortly, ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to take my word for it. I did not shoot at the beast, with a rifle or a catapult or anything else. Will that do? And now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be obliged if you would—’

‘Go out by the way I came in? All right. I get the message. I’m sorry, perhaps I was wrong. But I certainly wasn’t wrong about the shooting. I don’t see any more than you do why anyone should do it, but the fact remains that they did.’ I hesitated, faltering now under his indifferent eye. ‘Look, I don’t want to be any more of a nuisance, but I can’t just leave it at that … It might happen again … Since it wasn’t you, have you any idea who it could have been?’

‘No.’

‘Not the gardener?’

‘No.’

‘Or the tenant at the Villa Rotha?’

‘Manning? On the contrary, if you want help in your protection campaign I suggest you go to the Villa Rotha straight away. Manning’s been photographing that beast for weeks. It was he who tamed it in the first place, he and the Greek boy who works for him.’

‘Tamed it? Oh … I see. Well, then,’ I added, lamely, ‘it wouldn’t be him, obviously.’

He said nothing, waiting, it seemed, with a kind of
neutral patience for me to go. I bit my lip, hesitating miserably, feeling a fool. (Why did one always feel such a fool when it was a matter of kindness – what the more sophisticated saw as sentimentality?) I found that I was shivering. Anger and energy had drained out of me together. The glade was cool with shadows.

I said: ‘Well, I imagine I’ll see Mr Manning some time soon, and if he can’t help, I’m sure my brother-in-law will. I mean, if this is all private land, and the shore as well, then we ought to be able to stop that kind of trespasser, oughtn’t we?’

He said quickly: ‘We?’

‘The people who own the place. I’m Lucy Waring, Phyllida Forli’s sister. I take it you’re staying with Sir Julian?’

‘I’m his son. So you’re Miss Waring? I hadn’t realised you were here already.’ He appeared to be hesitating on the brink of some apology, but asked instead: ‘Is Forli at home now?’

‘No,’ I said shortly, and turned to go. There was a trail of bramble across my shoe, and I bent to disengage it.