The Nice and the Good

Seven

'We haven't sung our bathing song once since you came back,'

Henrietta complained to Barbara.
'Well, you go and sing it.'
'No, we must all four sing it or it isn't proper.'
'I've forgotten it,' said Barbara.
'I don't believe you,' said Pierce.
Barbara was lying full length upon the ivy. Pierce was standing a little way off leaning against a tombstone off which he was intently scratching yellow lichen with a finger nail.
'You three go and bathe for heaven's sake,' said Barbara. 'I don't want to come. I feel far too lazy.'
'Mingo's getting too hot,' said Edward. 'Why don't dogs have the sense to lie in the shade?'
Mingo lay panting on the ivy near Barbara who rocked his warm sheep-like body now and then with a bare foot. Hearing his name uttered he swivelled his eyes, lifted his sausage tail an inch or two and let it languidly fall.
'It makes me hot to look at him,' said Henrietta. 'I do wish it would rain.'
'Take him away then,' said Pierce. 'Drop him in the sea.'
'Go and hunt for flying saucers,' said Barbara.
'We did see one, really we did!'
'Are you coming, Pierce?' said Edward.
'No. You go and bathe, twins, and stop making such a damn fuss.'
'No one wants to bathe these days!' said Henrietta, quite suddenly close to tears.
'Pierce, you're cross!' cried Edward accusingly. To be cross was traditionally a serious fault.
'No, I'm not. I'm sorry.'
'Maybe we won't bathe,' said Henrietta to Edward. 'We'll play Badgerstown instead.'
'Well, I want to bathe,' said Edward.
'You two go down,' said Pierce. 'Maybe I'll follow you. Go on, don't be asses.'
'Mingo, come, boy,' said Edward.
Mingo got up rather reluctantly. His grey woolly face smiled dutifully, but he was too hot and weary to wag his tail, which swung inertly behind him as he followed the twins, placing his big floppy paws carefully upon the yielding ivy.
The abandoned graveyard was about a quarter of a mile from the house. Together with its hexagonal green-domed church, the empty and padlocked fane of a geometer god, it bore witness to a vivid eighteenth-century life of the region which was now but pyramidally extant. The crowded square sloped down towards the sea and behind it, hazed by trees in small valleys or caught distantly by sunlight through folds in rounded hills, could be seen the pale rectangular facades of houses which had once contained this silent population. There, if they lingered still, they were the discreetest and most mannerly of ghosts. Here they had kept their past time untouched, become a little shadowy perhaps, but subsistent as the real dreams of real sleepers. The draped urns and obelisks, the sublimely truncated columns, the obliquely leaning slabs inscribed with angelic putti and confidently lettered with a divinely dictated clarity and proportion, all glittering a faintly blueish white now in the bright sun, quivered between presence and absence with that quality of being perhaps altogether an hallucination which belongs to certain Greek archaeological sites.
Yet for all its compactness the place was not exactly a township. It had the kind of unity which a god might have imposed, a little carelessly, upon some place to which he intended to return and which he later utterly forgot, an attentive inscrutable sort of pattern not like human art. There was a sense of speech, as if something were said which yet, as words in an outdoor theatre, was at once devoured by the air. In fact nature had taken the churchyard to herself with a relentlessness that was almost sinister, as if she had set herself to paralyse, to blur and render indistinct, the activity of those too attentive dreamers. A very thick small-leaved ivy had grown over the whole area, covering the smaller stones entirely and clambering up the slender shafts of the taller ones, woven in between into a thick springy matrix which seemed to swing a little off the ground.
From where Pierce and Barbara were, at the top of the graveyard, the thin grey spire of Trescombe parish church, marking the village, could be seen rising from trees a mile to the east, while to the west the roof of Trescombe House was just visible beyond a slope of old yews which had been bent sideways and smoothed along the top by the mingled beating and caress of the strong sea wind. Ahead was a curve of sheepnibbled green grass which flattened to the stone-strewn meadow which fringed the beach. The twins had just reached the far end of the meadow and slowed their march on to the stones, with frequent pauses now to shake the pebbles out of their sandals. Mingo, his lethargy apparently departed, had run ahead and his sharp excited barks, Mingo's 'seabarks' as Edward called them, could be clearly heard from below. Mingo, although a confident and enthusiastic swimmer, never seemed to get over his sheer surprise at the great restless watery phenomenon.
A little further on the figure of Uncle Theo could be seen, walking along very slowly with his head bowed. When Uncle Theo went for a walk he seemed to look exclusively at his own feet, as if fascinated by their regular motion. Beyond Uncle T$eo were some alien holiday-makers, referred to as 'natives' by the children, of whom this part of the shore happily attracted few, because of its rebarbatively stony nature, and because the steeply shelving beach and the strong currents were thought to make bathing dangerous.
Cradled upon a swathe of ivy Barbara now lay full length in the sun. She had kicked off her sandals, and her white cotton dress, spotted with little pale green daisies, carelessly ruffled up as she had tossed herself down on to the dark swinging greenery, displayed a length of bronzed thigh above the knee. Her eyes barely open, appeared liquid and fugitive between the lashes.
Pierce, with his back to her, was savagely ripping the ivy strands off the face of one of the smaller squarer stones to reveal a relief carving of a sailing ship.