‘Oh,’ Licht said in distress, ‘my poor … my dear …’
He touched a tremulous hand to her shoulder but she twisted away from him violently with a great slack sob. She did not know what was the matter with her. The boys stared at her with frank interest.
‘Christ,’ Pound said in happy disgust, ‘there she goes.’
Alice cries easily.
Licht led them into the kitchen, a big, high-ceilinged room with a scrubbed pine table and mismatched wooden chairs and a jumble of unwashed crockery in the sink. An enormous, gruel-coloured stove with a black chimney squatted in a blackened recess. The window looked out on sloped fields and the tree-clad rise, so that they had a curious sense of submersion, and felt as if they were looking up through the silvery water-light of a deep, still pool. Licht leaned down at the stove and opened the little door of the firebox and looked inside.
‘Out, of course,’ he said disgustedly and shouted: ‘Stove!’ but no one answered. He turned up to them an apologetic smile. ‘Are you wet?’
They were wet. They were tired. They said nothing. They had got on board a boat at first light to take a little pleasure trip and now here they were stranded in a strange house on this island in the middle of nowhere.
Licht was still leaning at the stove gazing up at them, the smile forgotten on his face. They might have walked straight out of his deepest longings. Days he had dreamed of an invasion just such as this, noise and unfamiliar voices in the hall and the kitchen full of strangers and he among them, grinning like a loon. He left the stove and busied himself with making them sit and taking their wet shoes and offering them tea, scurrying here and there, hot with happy fear that they might at any moment prove a figment after all and vanish. Sophie was asking him something about the ruins in the hills, but he could not concentrate, and kept saying yes, yes, and smiling his unfocused, flustered smile. When Flora at the table looked up at him weakly and handed him her wet, warm shoes he felt a sort of plunge inside him, as if something had dropped in the hollow of his heart and hung there bobbing lightly on its elastic. She felt strange, she told him, strange and sort of shivery. Her voice was soft. She looked at him from under her long lashes, helpless and at the same time calculating, he could see it, how she was measuring him; he did not care, except he wished that he were younger, taller, altogether different. He stood before her holding her shoes, one in each hand, and a swarm of impossible yearnings rose up in him drunkenly. He brought her upstairs to rest and lingered in the doorway of the bedroom, twisting and twisting the doorknob in his hand. She sat down slowly on the side of the bed and folded her arms tightly around herself and looked emptily at the floor.
‘Are you on a holiday?’ he said tentatively.
‘What?’ She continued to stare before her in dull bewilderment, frowning. She roused herself a little and shook her head. ‘No. I’m taking care of them.’ She gestured disdainfully in the direction of downstairs. ‘Supposed to be, anyway.’ She gave a soft snort.
‘Oh?’
She glanced up at him impatiently.
‘The children,’ she said. ‘It’s only a summer job, at the hotel.’ She bit her lip and looked sullen.
‘Ah,’ he said. Some sort of skivvy, then; he felt encouraged. He waited for more, but in vain. ‘Did that boat,’ he said after a moment, ‘did that boat really run aground?’
She did not seem to be listening. She was staring blankly at the floor again. Behind her an enormous, lead-blue cloud was edging its way stealthily into the window, humid and swollen, the very picture of his own muffled desires. She was so lovely it made him ache to look at her, with her slender, slightly turned-in feet and enormous eyes and faint hint of moustache. A memory stirred in his mind, the sense of something sleek and smooth and faintly, tenderly repulsive. Yes: the hare’s nest in the grass that he had found one day on the dunes when he was a child, the two baby hares in it lying folded around each other head to rump like an heraldic emblem. He had brought them home under his coat but his mother would not let him keep them. How tinily their hearts had ticked against his own suddenly heavy heart! That was him all over, always on the look-out for something to love that would love him in return and never finding it. Or hardly ever. Poor mama. When he went back to look for the nest he could not find it and had to leave the leverets under the shelter of a rock, with leaves to lie on and grass and dandelion stalks to eat. Next day they were gone. Not a trace. The stalks untouched. Gone. And yet how little he had cared, standing there in the grey of morning contemplating that absence, while the sea beyond the dunes muttered and the wind polished the dark grass around him. Now he sighed, baffled at himself, as always.
‘I think I want to lie down,’ Flora said.
‘Of course, of course.’
‘Just for a little while.’
‘Of course.’
He was torn between staying there, leaning sleepless on his shield, and rushing downstairs again to reassure himself that the others had not disappeared. Instead, when she had stretched herself out on the bed, yawning and sighing, and he had shut the door behind him lingeringly, he found himself wandering in a sort of aimless, apprehensive rapture about the upper storeys, stopping now and then to listen, he was not sure for what: for the crackle of wing-cases, perhaps, for the sounds of the new life breaking out of its cocoon. From the stairs he caught a glimpse through the half-closed lavatory door of Sophie sitting straight-backed on the stool with her skirt hiked up and her pants around her knees, gazing before her with a dreamy, stern stare as her water tinkled freely into the bowl beneath her. He hurried past with eyes averted, red-faced, smiling madly in embarrassment, muttering to himself.
Oh, agog, agog!
THE SEAGULLS wake me early. I hear them up on the chimney-pots beating their wings and uttering strange, deep-throated cries. They sound like human babies. Perhaps it is the young I am hearing, not yet flown from the nest and still demanding food. I never was much of a naturalist. How lovely the summer light is at this time of morning, a seamless, soft grey shot through with water-glints. I lie for a long time thinking of nothing. I can do that, I can make my mind go blank. It is a knack I acquired in the days when the thought of what was to be endured before darkness and oblivion came again was hardly to be borne. And so, quite empty, weightless as a paper skiff, I make my voyage out, far, far out, to the very brim, where a disc of water shimmers like molten coin against a coin-coloured sky, and everything lifts, and sky and waters merge invisibly. That is where I seem to be most at ease now, on the far, pale margin of things. If I can call it ease. If I can call it being.
An island, of course. The authorities when they were releasing me had asked in their suspicious way where I would go and I said at once, Oh, an island, where else? All I wanted, I assured them, was a place of seclusion and tranquillity where I could begin the long process of readjustment to the world and pursue my studies of a famous painter they had never heard of. It sounded surprisingly plausible to me. (Oh yes, guv, says the old lag, standing before the big desk in his arrowed suit and twisting his cap in his hands, this time I’m going straight, you can count on it, I won’t let you down!) There is something about islands that appeals to me, the sense of boundedness, I suppose, of being protected from the world — and of the world being protected from me, there is that, too. They approved, or seemed to, anyway; I have a notion they were relieved to get rid of me. They treated me so tenderly, were so considerate of my wishes, I was amazed. But that is how it had been all along, more or less. They had worse cases than me on their hands, fellows who in a less squeamish age would have been hanged, drawn and quartered for their deeds, yet they seemed to feel that I was special. Perhaps it was just that I had confessed so readily to my crime, made no excuses, even displayed a forensic interest in my motives, which were almost as mysterious to me as they were to them. For whatever reason, they behaved towards me as if I had done some great, grave thing, as if I were a messenger, say, come back from somewhere immensely difficult and far, bringing news so terrible it made them feel strong and noble merely to be the receivers of it. It may be, of course, that this solemn mien was only a way of hiding their hatred and disgust. I suspect they would have done violence to me but that they did not wish to soil their hands. Maybe they had been hoping my fellow inmates would mete out to me the punishments they were loth to administer themselves? If so, they were disappointed; I was a man of substance in there, ranging freely as I might among that hobbled multitude. And now I had done my time, and was out.