Festa and Celice were not sleeping when Joseph, carrying a wet-pad for his fieldwork notes and wearing the high surf boots provided at the centre, reached the dark end of the veranda, pressed himself against the outer wall, hidden by the building frame, and peered at the women through the age-ochred glass. Both of them had been woken by the first hint of daylight and by the drumming of the kitchen tap. Joseph washing. The veranda was not screened or curtained, and the roof was mostly timbered glass. Festa had shuffled her mattress and her sleeping-bag towards Celice’s and they were sharing a cigarette, sitting with their backs against the planking wall and warming their faces in the smoke. They were too stiff and half asleep to talk.
Joseph could not see their faces very well, except from time to time when one of them drew on the cigarette and spread a brief light on a nose or chin. Otherwise the women were just silhouettes, though the outline of Celice’s broad head was unmistakable. He dared not rub the glass to clean away the grime and mould. Glass whispers when it’s touched by spies. But he pressed his eye a little closer to the window-pane to watch Celice’s chest and shoulders. She could be naked above the thick skirt of her sleeping-bag, or swathed in shirts and tops. It was too dark to tell. He waited for the revealing illumination of the cigarette or a match, perhaps. He hoped to glimpse her flaring throat and her ignited breasts. But he was disappointed. More nose and chin, and nothing that he shouldn’t see. Here was a chance, though, to reveal himself to her. He’d walk along the path below the veranda steps as innocent and large as life, and wave, in passing, at the women in their beds.
He’d say, whenever they looked back — not often — or whenever they reminded each other how they’d met, a not entirely happy memory, that he had won her with that single wave, as open a display as any peacock tail, and irresistible. He had only to lift his hand, beyond the glass, and Celice would get up and follow him. The night before, when he was sitting in the common room, he’d sung only for her, not for the men or Festa. He’d heard her calling out, ‘Keep quiet!’ and then the silence of her eavesdropping. He’d sung the first verse loudly then dropped his voice, to make her hold her breath and listen. Singing was his greatest eloquence. It went through walls. How could the other men compete with such a voice? What was the benefit in being tall and handsome if they couldn’t be admired through wooden panels, or at night? ‘Attend my tide,’ he’d sung to her. ‘I’ll not be far from your bedside.’ He knew that she would join him on the shore. It was not arrogance. It was simply the self-regarding optimism of the young. This was life’s plan. The tide would make white chevrons round their boots.
So Joseph walked out from his hiding-place on to the open ground in front of the veranda. He stopped and stared through the windows at the women. He coughed and shuffled until he saw their heads align with his, and then he waved, a bit self-consciously, before climbing the tumbled garden wall and dropping out of sight.
Celice did not wave back at him. She had determined to be unsociable for the six remaining days. The men had kept their noise up through the night and even when, in the early hours, they’d finally retreated to their bunks, the timber study house had creaked so badly in the exchanging temperatures of night and day that Celice imagined, when she dozed, that she’d been abandoned in a sinking ship.
She should have waved, of course. She could hardly blame Joseph for her disrupted night. He was not drunk or germinating a venereal infection like his room-mates. Nor had he proved to be the icy castaway that she’d imagined. In fact, he was amusing. She’d heard the laughter from the common room. And he could sing. What were the words?
Mark well the harbour with your light.
For I’ll be steered across the bar
to you, by candlelight.
If only men were sentimental like their songs.
She really should have waved.
She really ought to get to work. That, at least, would be her good excuse for jumping up, stubbing out her half-smoked cigarette and rushing after him. She had her studies to pursue.
Celice got dressed without washing, not even splashing her lips and eyes at the sink. She collected her own wet-pad and her own surf boots as well as a field kit and some specibags, and followed Joseph, first round the building and then over the garden wall that he had inexplicably favoured above the yard gate for leaving the grounds of the study house. At least she’d not be there when the others stumbled from their bunks. She wouldn’t have to tolerate their belches or minister to their headaches. She’d not have to witness Festa and her makeup bag.
Joseph’s tracks through the snapped masts of the flute bushes and, later, in the mud and sand were easy to follow. It was exciting, dogging him, looking for the evidence of his big boots, and discovering for herself the layers and faces of the coast. He’d descended to a roughly surfaced farm lane, strewn with manac husks. It edged the backlands, skirting a line of freshwater ponds, to serve the few surviving wind-stripped summer cottages, mostly used by anglers. He’d then cut off towards the coast along a signposted path through forest pines and salt marshes before climbing the ridge of the inner, non-salty dunes. A first sight of the sea and the jutting foreland of Baritone Bay.
Celice could see Joseph now, going eastwards on the coastal track through flats and thickets towards the bay. She waved at his back. A late reply. He left the track and walked across the scrubshore on to the beach, still colourless and grainy in the residues of night. The dawn was low and milky, no hint, so far, of blue or green. What little light there was had spread to waterlog the sky.
Celice rested for a while on the dune ridge, sitting on an empty phosphate sack, regretting that she had not brought some fruit, a flask of coffee and a cigarette. Climbing the sand had been hard work and she was breathless. Clearly — and surprisingly — she was not as fit as Joseph, who was already knee deep, wading at the water’s edge. She wished she had binoculars.
When she finally reached the sand gully, which led down to Joseph on the beach, she did not turn to join him, as she had imagined, as she would have liked. She carried on along the track towards Baritone Bay. Was she embarrassed? Afraid of more rebuffs? Or cautious? She told herself it wasn’t rational to follow his every step like some schoolgirl. She’d frighten him. It would be subtler, sexier, simply to coincide with him by accident, preferably later in the morning when she had recovered from the lack of sleep and from the hurried walk. Besides, the period of resting on the ridge, alone, the views, the detail of the land, the sour ocean smell, the melancholy drama of being young and unattached and not quite warm enough, had reminded her how joyful it could be to have the landscape to herself. She put a Latin and a common name to all the plants and birds she saw. A family game. By naming them, she doubled their existence and her own. This was the pleasure of zoology, to be the lonely heroine of open skies and specibags. Science, romance, oxygen. A potent brew.
Of course, she was embarrassed by herself. What had she been thinking, to leap from her mattress at dawn and rush off in pursuit of this curmudgeon? Just because the other men preferred the village girls to her. Because she hadn’t waved at him. So what? Because he hadn’t snooped amongst her clothes. Because his voice was fine and, as she had discovered, climaxing. Because her heart and body told her to. Because there was an escalating and persuasive case for running to him through the surf like some starlet from the fifties. She was bewitched. She could imagine being old with him. His was her pillow face. But no, to join him on the beach at once would be unwise. Unsubtle, anyway. What would she say to him? What could a man who hadn’t even spoken to her yet reply?