The Japanese Girl Page 8

  He told her he was the illegitimate son of a Gloucestershire baronet by one of his servant girls. He told her this without shame, and before she had time to feel horrified he was on with his tale. At sixteen he had run away to sea, and for twelve years had gone all over the world. That makes him twenty-eight, she thought. She began to subtract twenty-eight from thirty-five and then stopped. I don’t know why I should bother to work that out, she thought.

  Perhaps it was because he seemed interested in her. His bright eyes were always on her. She didn’t know whether to be flattered or amused or scornful. After all he was a sailor. And he wasn’t being familiar in a familiar way. She found herself swayed by the sound of his voice, quick to be angry and quick to sympathize. Her mind was active all the time in resisting his taking ways, yet all the time step by step it was yielding.

  They talked for an hour, and then she remembered herself and got up, and he asked if he might come again. Her tongue played a trick and she said yes. It didn’t hesitate and it didn’t qualify. He kissed her fingers and went off with vigorous rangey strides, leaving her standing quietly there on the sand.

  It is the surprise. I didn’t expect him. Tomorrow I shall know. Tomorrow will be different. Kept at a distance he can be – amusing … one or two days more. He can’t be staying longer than that. I forgot to ask him. Perhaps he won’t be there even tomorrow.

  That was silly, because it weakened her. And he was there. Of course he was there. Distantly she asked him her questions, but he wasn’t put out. He was going to stay a while yet. As for money, there had been some in a belt round his waist, and when that was done he’d walk to Plymouth. He was tired of the sea and wanted change.

  That day, after her pride had been softened, he asked her about herself, and in short sentences she told him what he wanted to know. He didn’t seem to have seen anyone like her before. She was not pretty, no. But she was tall, with that grace – like the frond of a fern – and so cool and composed – or so he thought. And above all she was a lady and as unspotted as a flower growing under glass. She was so unlike his podgy, unimaginative mother and his rip-roaring father. He had met all the women he wanted in the hundred ports of the world; but not Miss Cotty.

  He came the next day and the next day and the next. It grew to be an assignation. Two o’clock or three o’clock or four. He began to call her Miss Lavinia. She never called him anything to his face. Her pride had gone down in defeat. She no longer thought of the conventions. In fact she hardly thought at all – at least not reasonably, dispassionately, not in the way she used to think.

  An hour was the time they stopped. Sometimes he talked all the time, sometimes hardly at all. He told her of the sea. Of Marseilles, and the great lion rock of Gibraltar, of the islands of Greece and the sapphire blue Caribbean; of Malay and villages built out in the water on stilts; of the opium dens of Singapore; of hurricanes in the Strait of Macassar and typhoons in the China Sea; of rounding Cape Horn in the black of the night, and scudding down the Roaring Forties; of wrecks and comradeship and old sea shanties.

  She listened most times leaning back against the rock with closed eyes, at ease now and her stiffness forgotten. And always he watched her. Now and then she would smile and sometimes she would laugh outright, which did not seem like Miss Cotty. Sometimes she would blush – it was queer how easily she blushed; he could make the colour come and go almost as he pleased. And sometimes she would open her eyes and look at him and say: ‘I don’t believe that!’ And because her eyes had a new sparkle in them he was set on convincing her and would kneel up in front of her in a supplicating way. Sometimes her laughter would stop short at this and she would get up and walk down to the sea as if her feelings were too much for her.

  One day he kissed her. How it came to that she didn’t know. He had been playfully imploring her to believe in some story about a shark and she would not. Perhaps there was something in her eyes that should not have been there, because the next moment he was nearer her and his lips were on hers.

  That changed everything. She pushed him away from her and ran breathless up the cliff-path. For three sunny days she did not go near the cove. But on the fourth she went and found him there.

  At first he was penitent, bending his yellow head and saying he was sorry. But after she’d half relented she found things subtly different. She wasn’t any longer in control, and she crossed the sandhills on her way home knowing that they had agreed to meet tomorrow and that she had listened to things no respectable lady should have stayed to hear.

  After that there was no fixed hour. He crossed the beach with the incoming tide and left it with the ebb. Sometimes that meant two hours, sometimes three.

  The weather had set fair, with a faint easterly breeze which turned the sand-dunes paler, and the sea was quiet and lapped at their feet. They were like days taken from an eternal summer.

  Even Mr Cotty began to take note. These walks of Lavinia’s grew longer and longer and could not seem to be put off for more urgent things, like reading to him. And the impulse took her at any awkward hour, sometimes soon after breakfast, sometimes late in the evening. She was absent-minded and jumpy and excitable; her cheeks would flush up at nothing, her eyes were queer and wayward. When she came in she was out of breath. At meals she was out of breath. It was all very trying. But she gave him no useful answers, and he did not see whom else he might ask. He had noticed the sailor once or twice in the village, a great tall fellow with tawny hair and a rolling seaman’s walk. But nothing would ever have brought Mr Cotty to suppose that his daughter, his little Lavinia, rising thirty-five or six and devoted only to him could be carrying on with such a common fellow.

  That was what it came to. Carrying on. The vulgar phrase brought the colour into her face, so after a time she refused to use it even in her private thoughts. She knew as well as her father that Lavinia Cotty wouldn’t do what she was doing; some other woman had taken her place. Reason was there now and then, but it showed like a half-tide rock, disappearing regularly with the flood of the tide.

  And he, oddly, was in much the same state. Something withdrawn in her and untouched had turned his imagination into flame.

  On the twentieth of July they separated at one in the afternoon and he said: ‘Come tonight. At midnight the tide will be up and there’ll be a fine moon.’

  Without hesitation she said, no. But his last words were: ‘I’ll be here at midnight, waiting.’

  She went up the cliff-path, hot and angry and afraid.

  At eleven that night she stood at me window of her bedroom. She had fought the battle and won. Bad she had been – but not that. They loved each other; he had told her his own feelings often, and she – she knew what she felt about him.

  But marriage was out of the question – even if he had suggested it, and he had not. Deep down there could be nothing between them except this strange passion. He had put in here like a ship into port, for rest and repair. Soon he’d be off again on his roving. Already perhaps he was privately dreaming of standing down the Channel in a stiff westerly breeze. Miss Cotty, sailor’s wife. Futility before it began. Futility? Miss Cotty, sailor’s mistress. That was what it came to, and here thirty-five years of strict upbringing was too strong for even Stephen Dawe.

  She threw down the cloak she had picked up and went to the bed. Days of quiet work, nights of dreamless rest. Days and nights and years stretched behind her and stretching away ahead. Father asking for his spectacles. Susie crying when she is scolded and having to be petted up again. Sowing wall-flower seeds and layering carnations. Playing hymns on the piano. Knitting and sewing and reading. This is my life and I am happy in it, I am happy in it! Leave me alone! Go home, Stephen! Here in my own room I am too strong for you!

  She left the house at eleven-thirty, slipping quietly from the back door and out at the gate in the tamarisk hedge. She wore her winter cloak, and the moon made silver streaks in her hair. The sandhills were a desert of salt with deep pools and ravines of shadow. Across
them and through them she plunged, sometimes waist-deep in darkness, sometimes in full light, her shadow like a dog at her feet. She walked as if in a dream.

  At the cliff she hesitated. The surf was a line of phantom cavalry dividing sand and sea. All that was fastidious in her urged her to go back, but her will would not bring itself to check her steps. Instead, her cloak fluttering, she went down.

  At the bottom the sand was soft and pale and secret. The lightest of cool airs wafted, and she shivered, but it was not cold. Everything was different. It was not her friendly familiar cave. The rocks were sharp-edged like witches’ faces and the shadows were monstrous and misshapen. It was a midsummer night’s dream, all of it a dream, in which she walked lonely and afraid.

  She went into the cave, knowing that at any moment a shadow would move to join her and turn this dream into a muted twilit reality, to drown her thoughts in a dark ecstasy for the duration of its stay.

  But no shadow was there. And none came.

  Next day she knew the truth. She had fled back soon after twelve, in humiliation, angry, thankful, sick at heart. She had been sleepwalking and had come awake. It was a hard blow that had roused her, but now she was thankful, hardly able to believe she had gone at all, desperately affronted. By morning she was too ill to get up. Her father was frightened by this odd turn and came to sit by her bed. He’d thought her a bit off colour for some time, he said. Sickening for something for some time. Only last night at supper … Best thing was to send for old Tregarthen. It never did to let these things run on. Women were queer creatures … Oh, by the way, had she heard? That fellow she found on the beach had been arrested in the Tavern last night. A rum-runner, or some such thing; captain of a schooner that had fallen foul of a government cutter and got itself sunk. He’d gone off to Bristol to stand his trial. You thought that sort of thing had died out nowadays. Now in his father’s time – your grandfather’s, my dear – the game had been worth the candle. Everyone was in the trade then – even the parson.

  They gave him nine months, and it was all Miss Cotty could learn. After that the papers said nothing, it being neither news nor policy to report on the health and progress of petty criminals.

  In the early spring of the following year she felt it grow in her that one day soon when she went down to the cave he would be there, with the sun shining on his yellow head. For a time then she never went without expectancy and hope, knowing that by now he would be free again, sure he would return to keep the appointment; but always the cave gaped at her and there was nothing but the mutter of the impersonal sea. Before, she had never needed company here; now her loneliness was intense and almost unendurable. All that summer and through the next winter she went daily, blaming herself now for not having got into some sort of communication with him while she could. She never expected him to write or to call at the house; if he came it would be as he’d first come and as she’d always met him.

  But she never saw him again.

  As time passed the continual ache in her breast grew less unbearable. She carried it about with her like the wound of a soldier, with a certain pride. We are the slaves of our temperaments, and hers, quietly tenacious in all things, grew more constant with the years. She forgot her old judgments and thought only of the fine things in his character. In her mind he grew into a legend. If he had turned up this might have been shattered, but he did not come, and the daily walk became a pilgrimage. She didn’t stretch luxuriously in the sun or splash shyly in the water; she came to live over in her memory the hours of that summer.

  At home, after the first week, she went on as usual, and no one noticed a lack of interest in the daily round. Susie was soon to marry the baker boy, and Mr Cotty was full of his gout. Little Lavinia, he thought, had tired of her long walks and now took short ones. She’d always been a wilful child, and if sometimes she came back soaked by the soft sou’westers he couldn’t do anything to keep her in.

  Her need to go down to the cove once every day came to be fanatical. Nothing must stop her. Even when her father died she was only away two days and then went dressed in sombre black to sit staring quietly out to sea with a feeling that her presence had been missed and resented.

  After her father had gone the house began to go too. Doors creaked and wouldn’t open, slates, rattled in the wind and some blew off and let in the drip of rain. Rooms smelt of mildew and dust, and often enough there were dead leaves lying in the hall. The sand crept round the front garden and slowly covered the soil and the rockery and the flowers.

  She grew old, but not quite in the usual way. Her hair turned grey and then white, and her tall figure lost its straightness, but her face never took the lines of age. At fifty she looked young and strange.

  They thought of her as queer, living alone in a rickety old house, and they left her alone; but she welcomed that. The important thing in her day was her visit to the shrine by the sea. She had dreamed there and loved there, and now she kept silent watch.

  Twenty-three years after that summer she was found one morning by an old tin-streamer lying at the edge of the cliff where the path went down. She had known he was coming and had gone out at dawn but had not quite been able to manage the last few yards.

  It’s still there, the house, what’s left of it, a crumbling ruin half buried in sand, eyeless and roofless and gaunt. And the cove is still there, unchanged as she was unchanged.

  One day seventy years after, six people walked into the cove and settled to spend the afternoon in the sun. After bathing they sat in the mouth of the cave for lunch. After lunch they sun-bathed and kicked a ball about and sea-bathed again. After tea the girls began to gather up the things while the three men still lay indolently smoking. It had been a perfect day, and only the salesman was talkative.

  ‘I bought an ordnance map this morning. It’s interesting. The gap we’re in is called Cotty’s Cove.’ He spread the map and pointed with a pencil. ‘You can tell which it is by the way the rock juts out into the sea.’

  ‘Every rock and every stump round here has a name,’ said the young married man, peering. ‘Pass my towel, would you, Dawe?’

  The tall fair man roused himself. He’d been almost asleep, on the border-line of dreaming, yet hearing the talk of others.

  ‘Personally,’ he said, ‘I don’t care what it’s called so long as they don’t fence it in and say it belongs to someone called Cotty.’ Curious name. ‘The wind’s getting up a bit.’ Cotty, strange name. Cotty. His pipe was out.

  ‘And the sea,’ said the salesman. ‘We shall have to move soon.’

  ‘We’re safe enough,’ said Dawe. There’s some sort of a path, I know.’

  Silence fell then until one of the sisters came out of the cave.

  ‘Look what I’ve found,’ she said. ‘I hung my bikini on a ledge and this caught in the strap.’ She showed a comb.

  It was old, sticky with sand, and the silver of the handle was badly corroded with rust.

  ‘Looks pretty ancient,’ said the salesman. ‘Must have been there a few years.’

  ‘More than a few years,’ said the girl. ‘More than a few years, by the shape of it.’

  ‘Is it worth keeping? Take it back with you as a souvenir.’

  ‘It’s not much good. It might clean up, but …’ She stopped and looked across at Robert Dawe, whose eyes were on it. Curious eyes he seemed to have just then, gold-specked on the pupils, and lambent and foreign and old.

  ‘I should put it back,’ he said. ‘ You never know. Someone may come to claim it.’

  The sun had gone behind a cloud, and the cove was suddenly chill and colourless. The girl shivered slightly. Dawe’s eyes were fixed with a puzzled frown on the horizon where the sea still shimmered. What had he been thinking of when he dozed off? Odd, broken thoughts not quite his own … He felt as if he had just forgotten something and now would never remember. He was sad because something was lost to him for ever.

  The girl made a move back towards the cave. ‘All right,’ she sai
d. ‘It’s no use to me so I think I will.’

  No one nowadays believes in ghosts. Like other superstitions, they have been explained away or gone out of fashion. And anyway the rusty comb on the ledge in the cave remains unclaimed.

  But on some nights when the moon is up and the sea quiet – all but that thin line of muttering surf; and the sandhills are white and lumpy and the black rock edge alive with a hundred silhouette faces – then maybe something of Miss Cotty; not perhaps her ghost, but some impress of her vigil, some part of her maiden lonely spirit, broods over the cove like an echo of rapture and a memory of pain.

  The Island

  I am nine years old, and I live in the park three miles from the centre of the city. I have lived there all my life. My mother is a delicate woman with catarrh, a weak heart and a resolute will. My father is my mother’s husband. He is a merchant, a small tubby vigorous man with a fair moustache, a bald head and keen twinkling eyes. They are both over forty when I am born and they have not much in common with my youth.

  They have lived all their lives on an island. Although they are living in a city they are on an island. I too am on this island until I am nine.

  We live in a tall semi-detached house with a long narrow garden. On the ground floor there is a drawing-room, a kitchen and a dining-room, connected by a long hall. The dining-room has a big square mahogany table covered between meals by a green velvet cloth with tassels. A white tablecloth is put over this for mid-day dinner, for high tea and for supper. There is a bookcase with Chambers’ Encyclopaedia, Darwin’s Descent of Man and Morley’s Life of Gladstone. There is a cane-bottomed rocking-chair before the fire and almost always a fire. The walls are hung with a heavy crimson flock paper, and there are big paintings of cattle sitting beside lakes with dark mountains in the background.