“Oh?”
“Yes. She’s... she’s doing piano with Miss Harding in the village, and twice a week she studies languages at night school in St. Austell. She loves it; she’s quite a little interpreter, you know, and I feel I have to let her continue.”
“Languages, you say?” The old man’s eyebrows went up. “Well, she’ll find plenty of work as an interpreter—or as a teacher, for that matter.”
“Yes, I think so, too!” said Jilly, more energetically now. “It’s her future, and she has a very real talent. Why, she even reads sign!”
“I’m sorry?”
“Sign language, as used by the deaf and dumb.”
“Oh, yes, of course. But no, er, higher education?”
“She had the grades,” said Jilly, protectively. “She would have no trouble getting into university. But what some desire, others put aside. And to be totally honest... well, she’s not the communal type. She wouldn’t be happy away from home.”
Again Jamieson’s nod of understanding. “A bit of a loner,” he said.
“She’s a young girl,” Jilly quickly replied, “and so was I, once upon a time. And I know that we all go through our phases. She’s unsettled enough—I mean, what with her father’s death and all—so any move will just have to wait. And that’s that.”
Now, having firmly indicated that she no longer desired to talk about her daughter, it was Jilly’s turn to change the subject. And in doing so she returned to a previous topic.
“You know,” she said, after a moment, “despite that you’ll probably think it’s a morbid sort of fascination, I can’t help being interested in what you were saying about Innsmouth—the way its denizens were, well, strange.”
Denizens, Jamieson repeated her, but silently, to himself. Yes, I suppose you could describe them that way.
He might have answered her. But a moment earlier, as Jilly had spoken the last few words, so the veranda door had glided open to admit Anne. There she stood framed against the evening, her hair blowing in the unrelenting sea breeze, her huge green eyes gazing enquiringly into the room. But her face was oh-so-pale, and her gaze cold and unsmiling. Maybe she’d been out in the wind too long and the chill had finally got to her.
Sliding the door shut behind her, and going to the fire to warm herself she said, “What was that you were saying, Mother? Something about strange denizens?”
But Jilly shrugged it off. “Mr. Jamieson and I were engaged in a private conversation, dear, and you shouldn’t be so nosy.”
That was that; Anne’s return had called a halt to any more talk. But when Jamieson drew the veranda curtains he couldn’t help noticing that hulking, shambling, head-down figure silhouetted against the sand dunes; the shape of Geoff, casting long ugly shadows as he headed back toward the village.
Following which it was time to drive Anne and Jilly home...
* * *
There was a week of bad weather. James Jamieson would sit in a chair by his sliding patio window and gaze out across the decking of the veranda, across the dunes and beach, at the roaring, rearing ocean. But no matter the driving rain and pounding surf, the roiling sky split by flashes of lightning and shuddering to drum rolls of thunder, sooner or later there would be a hulking figure on the sands: “Young Geoff,” as Jilly White had seen fit to call him, the “unfortunate” youth from the village.
Sometimes the boy—or young man, whatever—would be seen shambling along the tidemark; at others he’d walk too close to the turbulent water, and end up sloshing through the foam when waves cast their spume across his route. Jamieson made a point of watching him through his expensive high-resolution binoculars, and now and then he would bring Geoff’s face into sharper focus.
The sloping forehead and almost bald head; the wide, fleshy mouth, bulging eyes and scaly bump of a chin, with the bristles of a stubby beard poking through; the youth’s skin—its roughness in general, with those odd folds or wattles—especially the loose flaps between his ears and his collar...
One afternoon toward the end of the week, when the weather was calmer, Jamieson also spied John Tremain on the beach. The link road must have washed out again, relieving the headmaster of his duties for a day or so and allowing him time to indulge his hobby. And sure enough as he walked the tidemark, he would stoop now and then to examine this or that piece of old driftwood. But at the same time “the village idiot” was also on the beach, and their paths crossed. Jamieson watched it all unfold in the cross hairs of his binoculars:
Tremain, crouching over a dark patch of seaweed, and Geoff coming over the dunes on a collision course. Then the meeting; the headmaster seeing the youth and jerking upright, lurching backward from the advancing figure and apparently threatening him with the knobby end of a stripped branch! The other coming to an awkward halt, and standing there with his arms and hands flapping uselessly, his flabby mouth opening and closing as if in silent protest.
But was it revulsion, hatred, or stark terror on Tremain’s part? Or simply shock? Jamieson couldn’t make up his mind. But whichever, it appeared that Tremain’s dislike of “bolshy” teenagers went twice for those who weren’t so much bolshy as, well, unfortunate.
That, however, was all there was to it; hardly a confrontation as such, and over and done with as quickly as that. Then Tremain scuttling for home, and Geoff standing there, watching him go. The end. But at least it had served to remind Jamieson of his promise to go and see John’s driftwood carvings—which was one reason at least why he should pay a return visit...
* * *
At the weekend Jamieson called the Tremains on the telephone to check that the invitation was still open, and on Sunday evening he drove the solitary mile to his neighbour’s place, parking by the side of the road. Since he, the Whites and the Tremains had the only properties on this stretch of potholed road, it wasn’t likely that he’d be causing any traffic problems.
“Saw you on the beach the other day,” he told John when he was seated and had a drink in his hand. “Beachcombing, hey?”
The other nodded. “It seems our talking about it must have sparked me off again. I found one or two rather nice pieces.”
“You certainly have an eye for it,” the old man commented, his flattery very deliberate. “Why, I can see you have several ‘nice pieces’—expertly finished pieces, that is—right here. But if you’ll forgive my saying so, it seems to me these aren’t so much carvings as wind-, sea-, and sand-sculptures really, which you have somehow managed to revitalise with sandpaper and varnish, imagination and infinite skill. So much so that you’ve returned them to a new, dramatic life of their own!”
“Really?” Tremain was taken aback; he didn’t see Jamieson’s flattery for what it really was, as a means to an end, a way to ingratiate himself into the Tremains’s confidence. For Jamieson found himself in such a close-knit microcosm of isolated community society that he felt sure the headmaster and his wife would have knowledge of almost everything that had gone on here; they would have the answers to questions he couldn’t possibly put to Jilly, not in her condition.
For the old man suspected—indeed, he more than suspected—that Jilly White’s circumstances had brought her to the verge of nervous exhaustion. But what exactly were her circumstances? As yet there were loose ends here, which Jamieson must at least attempt to tie up before making any firm decision or taking any definite course of action.
Which was why the ex-Doctor was here at the Tremains’s this evening. They were after all his and Jilly’s closest neighbours and closest in status, too. Whereas the people of the village—while they might well be the salt of the earth—were of a very different order indeed. And close-mouthed? Oh, he’d get nothing out of them.
And so back to the driftwood: