Rising out of the water was an effort that sucked out their strength suddenly, and set them trembling and buckling at the joints with the realisation of their own tiredness. They fell together on their faces, toes still trailing in the receding foam, and lay gasping and coughing up sea-water. And there was the late afternoon sun on their backs, grateful and warm as a stroking hand, and the soft, almost silent waves lapping innocently on the long, level beach that stretched for more than two miles beyond Pentarno.
Dominic hoisted himself laboriously on his hands, and looked at his capture with something between a proprietor’s pride and a keeper’s exasperation. A slim, sunburned body, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old, in black swimming trunks. Light brown hair—probably almost flaxen when it was dry—streamed sea-water into the sand. He lay on his folded arms, the fine fan of his ribs clapping frantically for air, like cramped wings. Dominic got to his knees, hoisted the limp, light body by the middle, and squeezed out of him the remainder of the brine he had swallowed.
Hands and knees scrabbled in the sand, and the boy writhed away from him like an eel. Under the lank fall of hair one half-obscured eye, blue and steely as a dagger, glared fury.
“What the hell,” spluttered the ungrateful child, from a mouth bitter with sea-water, “do you think you’re—doing?” He choked and ran out of breath there. Dominic sat back on his heels and scowled back at him resentfully.
“Now, look here, you daft little devil, you’d do better thinking what the hell you were doing, out there in a sea like that. Don’t you know the bathing’s dead dangerous anywhere off the point? Especially when the tide’s going out, like this. This town marks all the safe places, why can’t you have the sense to stick to ’em? And don’t give me that drop-dead look, either. You can thank your stars I was around. You’d have been in a mess without me.”
“I would not! I wasn’t in trouble—” He wavered for the first time; fundamentally he was, it seemed, a truthful person, even when in a rage. “I could have managed, anyhow. I know the tides round here a lot better than you do, I bet.” The still indignant eyes had sized up a summer visitor without any difficulty. “Damn it, I live here.”
“Then your dad ought to tan you,” said Dominic grimly,“for taking such fool chances.”
“I wasn’t taking chances—not for nothing, I wasn’t.” He heaved a great breath into him, and swept back the fall of hair from his forehead. “I wouldn’t—not without a good reason, my dad knows that. I went in because I saw a man in the sea—”
Dominic was on his feet in a flurry of sand. “You saw a man? You mean, somebody in trouble? Where?”
“Off the point, where I was, where d’you think? There was something being pulled out in the race, anyhow, I’m nearly sure it was a man. I swam out to try and get to him,” said the boy, with bitter satisfaction in shifting the burden of his own frustration to more deserving shoulders,“but you had to take it on yourself to fish me out. So if he’s drowned by now, you know whose fault it is, don’t you?”
Dominic turned without a word, and set off at a run towards the water, his knees a little rubbery under him from shock and exertion. He had gone no more than a few yards when a shout from the dunes behind him brought him round again. The coast road from Maymouth over the neck of the Dragon’s Head to Pentarno dipped closer to the beach here, and a man had just left it to drop in a series of leaps towards the sands. He had come from Maymouth, by the angle at which he appproached. A tall, agile, sudden man who could glissade down loose sand like a skier, and run, once he reached level ground, with the grace of a greyhound and the candour of a child. He came up to them full tilt, and checked in a couple of light steps, already reaching down to hoist the kneeling boy to his feet, examine him in one sweeping glance, and visibly sigh relief.
“Paddy, what’s going on? Are you all right?” He turned an abrupt smile upon Dominic. “What’s he been up to? Did you have to haul him out, or something? But he can swim like a fish.”
“I haven’t been up to anything, Uncle Simon, honestly!” The injured voice grew shrill, and snapped off into a light, self- conscious baritone. Dominic had thought and hoped this might be the father, but even an uncle was very welcome, especially one as decisive as this.
Gratefully he blurted out what most needed saying: “He says he saw a man being dragged out to sea off the point. That’s why he went so far out. But I was up on the path there, and I didn’t see anyone except him. Maybe he’d have been all right—but I was afraid he might not. I thought I ought to fetch him in.”
“You were very right, and I’m most grateful. Even if he isn’t,” said Uncle Simon with the briefest of grins. He stood Paddy before him firmly, and shook him by the shoulders. “Now, what did you see? Somebody throwing his arms about? Shouting for help? What?”
“No, he wasn’t doing anything. Not even swimming. It was like a head just showing now and then, and there was more of it sort of sloshing about under the water—like when you see a drift of wood or some old rags washing about.”
“It could have been just that, couldn’t it?”
“Yes, I suppose so—only I don’t think it was.”
“O.K., I suppose we’d better have a hunt round.” He stripped off his sportscoat and shirt, and dropped them beside the boy. “Here, you stay here and mind these.”
“I’ll come with you,” said Dominic.
“Stay well inshore, then. And get out when you’ve had enough. I know this coast, you don’t, and you’ve tired yourself already.” He kicked his feet clear of his grey flannels. “Paddy, you can make yourself useful, too. Get up on the top path, and give us a hail if you see anything.”
He was off down the beach and into the water, Dominic after him. Paddy’s summer tan was only deep ivory compared with the tawny gold of Uncle Simon’s long, muscular back, and the fine, lean arms and legs that sliced through the water without a ripple. His hair was not more than a couple of shades darker. Once in the deep water he swam like a dolphin. With unaccustomed humility Dominic accepted his own lesser part, and forbore from following too far. A man who could move with so much confidence and certainty, off such a thorny coast, had the right to deploy his forces as he thought best, and be obeyed.
He stayed in the water until he felt himself tiring again, and then he came out and made his way along the rocks towards the Dragon’s mouth, as low towards the sea as he dared, watching Simon dive, and surface and dive again, achingly near to the cauldron of the rocks. The worst of the race was over now, the boiling had subsided a little. The swimmer worked methodically outward along the line of the receding tide, came back cautiously towards the rocks again where the worst spite was already spent, and clung to rest. He had torn his knuckles, Dominic saw a pink ooze of blood on the hand that grasped the rock.
“No dice, Paddy?” he called up to the boy above their heads.
“No, nothing.” The voice shouted down a little gruffly and anxiously: “You’d better come in, hadn’t you?” Even an Uncle Simon, presumably, may reach exhaustion finally, and with him Paddy was taking no chances. “It’s no good now, anyhow. Even if it was somebody.”
“All right—yes, I’ll come.”
He dropped carefully into the water and swam back to the sand, preferring that to the slower climb along the rocks. The boys came down, scrambling after him, Dominic with his clothes bundled untidily under his arm.
The tall, tawny, sinewy man stood wringing water out of his hair and streaming drops into the sand. Deep brown eyes surveyed them as they came up, and he twitched a shoulder and shivered a little. It was early September, and the evenings were growing cool. They began to dress in damp discomfort and a sudden chill of depression.