Thirty-six
'How much longer? T 'Only a few minutes now.'
Voices were hushed.
The night was warm and the smell of the white daisies moved dustily across the water, laying itself down upon the still satiny skin of the sea's surface. A large round moon was turning from silver to a mottled gold against a lightish night sky.
The two boats floated near to the cliff. There had been every confusion, appeals, suggestions, plans. The villagers, thrilled by the mishap, had produced innumerable theories about the cave, but no facts. The police had been told, the coastguards had been told, the navy had been told. The lifeboat had offered to stand by. Frogmen were to come to take in aqualung equipment.
Telephone calls passed along the coast. Time passed. The frogmen were needed for an accident elsewhere. Time passed on to the consummation of the high tide. After that there was a kind of lull.
'Now we can't do anything but wait,' people said to each other, avoiding each other's eyes.
Mary was sitting in the stern of the boat. There had been other craft earlier, sightseers in motor boats, journalists with cameras, until the police launch told them to go away. There was silence now. Mary sat shuddering with cold in the warm air. She was wearing Theo's overcoat which at some point he had forced her to put on. The coat collar was turned up and inside the big sleeves her hidden hands had met and crawled up to clutch the opposing arms. She sat full, silent, remote, her chin tilted upward a little, her big unseeing eyes staring at the moon. She had shed no tears, but she felt her face as something which had been dissolved, destroyed, wiped into blank Hess by grief and terror. Now her last enemy was hope. She sat like somebody who tries hard to sleep, driving thoughts away, driving hopes away.