The beach appeared to be empty. The ebb tide had left it a sweep of hard clean sand, divided from the sky by a narrow line of frothing white breakers. Further inshore, there was a stratum of rock, crusted with shellfish and seaweed, and over this the seagulls hovered, occasionally pouncing to fight and scream over some prize. Robert sat on the windowseat, and lit himself a cigarette. When he looked up again, a figure had appeared on the horizon, right on the edge of the sea. It wore a long white gown, like an Arab’s, and as it walked back towards the studio, appeared to be wrestling with some large and unidentifiable red package.
He remembered the binoculars on Ben’s table and went to fetch them. Focused, the figure sprang into relief, and revealed itself as Emma Litton, long hair blowing, dressed in a huge white towelling robe and lugging, with some difficulty, for the wind kept catching it broadside and jerking it out of her grasp, a scarlet surfboard.
* * *
“You surely haven’t been swimming?”
Emma, struggling with the surfboard, had not seen him at the window. Now, with a hand on the rope ladder, she nearly jumped out of her skin at the sound of his voice. She looked up, trailing the surfboard in the sand, her wet black hair ripped to ribbons by the wind.
“Yes, I have, and what a fright you gave me. How long have you been there?”
“About ten minutes. How are you going to get the surfboard up the ladder?”
“I was wondering that, but now you’ve turned up all my problems are solved. There’s a rope under the seat. If you chuck one end down, I’ll tie it on, and you can pull it up for me.”
This was duly accomplished. Robert hauled the board through the open window, and hard on its heels came Emma herself, her face and hands and feet crusted with dry sand, and her black lashes spiked like starfish.
She knelt on the window seat, and laughed at him. “Now, wasn’t that the luckiest thing! What would I have done? I could hardly get it over the beach, let alone up the ladder.”
Beneath the sand, her face looked blue with cold. He said, “Come along in, and get the window shut … that wind’s freezing. How could you bear to go and swim? You’ll die of pneumonia.”
“No, I won’t.” She stepped down onto the floor, and watched him furl the ladder in and slide the window shut. It did not fit properly and there was still a draught like the edge of a knife. “Anyway, I’m used to it. We always used to swim in April when we were children.”
“This isn’t April. It’s March. It’s winter. What would your father say?”
“Oh, he wouldn’t say anything. And it’s such an utterly gorgeous day and I was sick of whitewashing … have you seen my lovely clean wall? The only thing is, it makes the rest of the studio look like a slum. Besides, I wasn’t swimming, I was surfing, and the breakers kept me warm.” And then, without any noticeable change of expression, “Have you come to see Ben? He’s down at the Sliding Tackle.”
“Yes, I know.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I left Marcus there with him.”
“Marcus.” She raised her strongly-marked eyebrows, considering this. “Has Marcus come too? My goodness, it must be important business!”
She shivered slightly.
Robert said, “Do get some clothes on.”
“Oh, I’m all right.” She went to take a cigarette from the table, and lit it, and then collapsed on to the old sofa, flat on her back, with her feet propped on the arm.
“Did you get my letter?”
“Yes, I did.” With Emma taking up all the sofa, there was nowhere to sit but on the table, so he eased the pile of magazines on to the floor, and sat there. “I was sorry about your sun hat.”
Emma laughed. “But glad about Ben?”
“Of course.”
“It’s amazing how well it’s working. Unbelievable. And he really likes having me around.”
“I never imagined for a moment that he wouldn’t.”
“Oh, don’t start being gallant. You know you did. At lunch that day, you were all quizzical eyebrows and scepticism. But you see, it really is the perfect arrangement. Ben doesn’t have to pay me to keep house for him, or be bothered with tedious details like days off and insurance stamps, nor does he have to become emotionally involved. He never knew that life could be so simple.”
“Have you heard from Christopher?”
Emma turned her head sideways to look at him. “How do you know about Christopher?”
“You told me yourself. At Marcello’s. Remember?”
“So I did. No, I haven’t heard. But he’ll be at Brookford by now, in the thick of rehearsals. He won’t have had time to write. Anyway, there’s been such a lot to do here, getting the cottage organised and cooking and things. Don’t believe people when they say that artists never eat. Ben’s inner man is quite insatiable.”
“Have you told him you met up with Christopher again?”
“Good heavens, no! And spoil the even tenor of our life? I haven’t even mentioned his name. You know, you look much nicer in those tweedy sort of clothes than you do in the London kind. I thought when I first saw you that you weren’t the type to spend his days buttoned up in a charcoal grey suit. When did you get down here?”
“We drove yesterday afternoon. We spent last night at the Castle.”
Emma made a face. “In with all the potted palms and the cashmere cardigans. Ugh!”
“It’s very comfortable.”
“The central heating gives me hay fever. I can’t even breathe.”
She stubbed her half-smoked cigarette out in the overflowing ashtray, and swung her feet off the sofa, and stood up and walked away from him, towards the window, untying the sash of the robe as she went. She took a pile of clothes from beneath a cushion, and with her back to him, started to dress. She said, “Why did you and Marcus come together?”
“Marcus doesn’t drive.”
“There are trains. And that wasn’t what I meant.”
“No, I know.” He picked up one of the painted china eggs and began to play with it as an Arab handles a string of worry beads. “We’ve come to try and persuade Ben to go back to the United States.”
There was a sudden great squall of wind. It broke over the glass window of the studio like a wave, poured, roaring over the roof above them, with the thunder of a passing train. A cluster of gulls rose screaming from the rocks, were flung across the sky. And then, as suddenly, it was over.
Emma said, “Why does he have to go back?”
“This retrospective exhibition.”
She dropped the white towelling robe, and stood silhouetted, in jeans, pulling a navy blue sweater over her head.
“But I thought he and Marcus fixed all that when they were in New York in January.”
“We thought so too. But you see, this exhibition is being sponsored by a private individual.”
“I know,” said Emma, turning, and flipping her dark hair free of the turtle-neck of the sweater. “I read all about it in Réalités. Mrs. Kenneth Ryan. The widow of the wealthy man whose memorial is the Queenstown Museum of Fine Arts. You see how well informed I am. I hope you’re impressed.”
“And Mrs. Kenneth Ryan wants a private view.”
“Then why didn’t she say so?”
“Because she wasn’t in New York. She was sunning it in Nassau or the Bahamas or Palm Beach or somewhere. They never met her. They only saw the curator of the museum.”
“And now Mrs. Ryan wants Ben Litton to go back, so that she can throw a nice little champagne party and show him off, like a trophy, to all her influential friends. It makes me sick.”
“She’s done more than decide, Emma. She’s come to persuade him.”
“You mean come to England?”
“I mean come to England, come to Bernstein’s, come to Porthkerris. She drove down with Marcus and me yesterday and at this very moment, is sitting in the bar of the Castle Hotel, drinking very cold Martinis and waiting for us all to go and have lunch with her.”
“Well, I
for one am not going.”
“You have to. We’re all expected.” He glanced at his wrist-watch. “And we’re running late. Do hurry up.”
“Does Ben know about the private view?”
“He will by now. Marcus will have told him.”
She picked up a brown sailcloth smock off the floor and pulled it on over her sweater. As her head came through the neck, she said, “Ben may not want to go.”
“You mean you don’t want him to go?”
“I mean that he’s settled down here again. He’s not prowling, he’s not restless, he’s not even drinking very much. He’s working like a young man, and what he’s doing is fresh and new and better than ever. Ben is sixty, you know. Looking at him, it’s hard to believe, but he’s nearly sixty. Isn’t it possible that all this hopping about all over the world may no longer stimulate him, but simply wear him out?” She came back to the sofa to sit down, facing Robert, her earnest face on a level with his own. “Please. If he doesn’t want to go, don’t try to persuade him.”
Robert still held the china egg. He looked at it intently as though its convolutions of blue and green would miraculously provide the answer to every problem. Then, with care, he laid it back in the glass dish, along with its fellows.
He said, “You talk as though this were something important, as though he were returning to the States to teach again, as though he weren’t going to come back for years. But it isn’t. It’s simply a party. He needn’t be away for more than a few days.” She opened her mouth with a fresh protest, but he talked her down. “And you mustn’t forget that this exhibition is a great tribute to Ben. A lot of money’s been ploughed into it, and a great deal of organization, and perhaps the least he can do…”
Furiously, Emma interrupted. “The least he can do is go and parade up and down like a pet monkey, for some fat old American. And what makes it so awful is that he likes that sort of thing. That’s what I hate, that he likes it.”
“So he likes it. So, if he wants to, he’ll go.”
She was silenced. She sat, eyes downcast, her mouth sulky as a child’s. Robert finished his cigarette and stubbed it out, and stood up and said, more gently, “Now, do come on or we’re going to be late. Have you got a coat?”
“No.”
“Some shoes then, you must have some shoes.”
She felt under the sofa and produced a pair of thong sandals, and stood up, thrusting her bare feet into them. Her feet were still covered in sand, and the sail-cloth smock spotted in whitewash.
She said, “I can’t go to the Castle, for lunch, looking like this.”
“Nonsense.” He tried to sound bracing. “You’ll give the residents something to talk about. Brighten their dull lives no end.”
“Isn’t there time to go back to the cottage? I haven’t even got a comb.”
“There’ll be a comb at the hotel.”
“But…”
“There simply isn’t time. We’re late already. Now come along…”
They went together, out of the studio and up the ramp, and into the sunlit street, and began to walk back towards the harbour. After the chill of the studio the air felt warm, and the brightness of the sea was reflected from the white-washed walls of houses, and assailed the eye like the glare off snow.
5
Emma did not want to go into the Sliding Tackle.
“I’ll wait here. You go and prise them out.”
“All right.”
He went across the cobbles, and she noticed how he had to duck his tall head to get in under the porch. The door of the pub swung shut behind him. She wandered over to his car and inspected it with interest, because it belonged to him, and should therefore provide further clues to his character, as a shelf of book-titles will do, or the pictures that a man hangs on his walls. But, apart from the fact that it was dark-green, had fog lights and wire wheels and a couple of car-club badges, the Alvis gave little away. Inside on the driving-seat was a tweed cap; cigarettes in the dashboard cupboard, a book of maps. On the back seat, neatly folded, a thick, expensive-looking tartan rug. She decided that he was either trusting, or careless, but also lucky, for the rug had not been stolen.
A gust of wind blew in from the sea and Emma shivered. After the swim and the session in the draughty studio, she still was very cold. Her hands had gone numb, quite colourless, the fingernails tinged with blue. But the metal of the car was warm, and, for comfort, she leaned against it, spreadeagled across the bonnet, with her hands splayed like starfish.
The pub door opened and Robert Morrow emerged once more, ducking cautiously. He was alone.
“Aren’t they there?”
“No. We’re late, and they got fed up with waiting, so they got a lift back to the hotel.” He opened the driving-seat door, picked up his cap and pulled it on, jerked down over his nose, to add yet another sharp angle to his formidable profile. “Come on…” And he leaned over and opened the other door, and Emma unpeeled herself from the bonnet, and slid in beside him.
They left the harbour behind and below them, roared up through the town, up the steep narrow streets, up between terraces of prim houses, and the signs which said Bed and Breakfast, and front gardens where sad palm trees tossed their heads in the alien wind. They came out on to the main road, still climbing, turned into the drive of the Castle Hotel; climbed on, between banks of hydrangeas, and landward-leaning elm trees, and at last came out at the very top of the hill, into an open space of tennis courts, and lawns, and a miniature golf course. The hotel had once been a country house, and prided itself on its authentic atmosphere. A white post and chain fence kept cars away from the gravel sweep in front of the hotel, and here, in deck chairs, sat a handful of hardy residents, scarved, gloved and swaddled in rugs, like the passengers of some trans-Atlantic liner. They read books or newspapers, but when the Alvis roared up the drive and drew up with a massive scrunch of gravel, these were lowered, and in some cases, spectacles were removed, and Robert and Emma’s progress observed and noted as though they were visitors from another planet.
Robert said, “We’re probably the first exciting thing to happen since the manager fell into the swimming-pool.”
Once inside the revolving doors, the heat of the place struck like a newly-opened oven. Emma professed to despise such comfort, but to-day it was blissfully welcome.
She said, “I expect they’ll be in the bar. You go, I’ll be there in a moment. I must try and get rid of some of this sand.”
In the Ladies’, she washed her hands and her face, and rubbed the sand off her feet on to the back of her jeans, like a schoolboy trying to polish his shoes. There was a pretentious set of brushes and combs on a be-ruffled dressing-table, and she used the comb on the snarls of her hair, breaking half the teeth, but reducing the tangled mass into some sort of order. As she turned back for the door, she caught sight of herself in the long mirror. No make-up, faded jeans, white-wash stains. She pulled off the offending smock, and then was infuriated with herself for minding about anything so trivial as her own personal appearance, and pulled it on again. They would think she was a beatnik art student. A model. Ben Litton’s mistress. Let them. As Robert Morrow had so rightly said, it would give them something to talk about.
But as she emerged from the Ladies’ and went down the long, carpeted hall, she was grateful to see that Robert Morrow had not abandoned her and gone to join the others, as she had told him to, but was waiting for her by the porter’s desk, reading a Sunday paper which had been left on a chair. When he saw her coming, he folded the paper and tossed it down again, and gave her a grin of encouragement.
“You’ve done splendidly,” he said.
“I’ve ruined the hotel comb. Ever so nice it was, too, one of a matching set. You didn’t need to wait. I’ve been before and I know the way…”
“Come along, then.”
It was a quarter to two, and the busy Sunday lunchtime session was over. Only a few serious drinkers still sat at the bar, cradling their gin and
tonics and beginning to look a bit red in the face. Ben Litton, Marcus Bernstein and Mrs. Kenneth Ryan were over on the other side of the room, grouped in the bay formed by a huge picture window. Mrs. Ryan was on the window-seat, against a back drop like a travel agent’s poster—a shout of blue sea, a sweep of sky, and the green undulations of the miniature golf course. The two men, Ben in his French workman’s bleus, and Marcus in his dark suit, were talking, turned slightly towards her, so that it was Mrs. Ryan who first saw Emma and Robert.
“Well, look who’s here…” she said.
They turned. Ben remained sitting, but Marcus stood up and came to greet Emma, his arms outstretched, his pleasure at seeing her both genuine and demonstrative and very un-British. He could on occasion be almost embarrassingly Austrian.
“Emma, my darling child. Here you are at last.” He put his hands to her shoulders and kissed her, formally, on both cheeks. “What a pleasure to see you again, after this very long time. How long is it? Five years? Six years? What a lot we have to talk about. Come along, and meet Mrs. Ryan.” He took her hand to lead her over. “… But your hand is like a block of ice. What have you been doing?”
“Nothing,” said Emma, catching Robert’s eyes, and daring him to say more.
“And your bare feet … how can you stand it? Mrs. Ryan, this is Ben’s daughter, Emma, but don’t shake hands with her, or you will die of shock.”
“I can think of worse ways to die,” said Mrs. Ryan, and held out her hand. “How do you do?”
They shook hands. “I must say, you are very cold.”
On an insane impulse, Emma said, “I was swimming. That’s why we’re late. And why I’m so untidy. There wasn’t time to go back to change.”
“Oh, but you don’t look untidy, you look charming. Sit down … we have time for another drink, don’t we? The dining-room isn’t going to shut down on us or anything like that. Robert, would you be a darling, and order another round for us. What would you like, Emma?”
“I … I don’t really want anything.” Ben gave a small cough. “Well … a glass of sherry.”
“And we’re all drinking Martinis, Robert. If you want one too?” Emma lowered herself carefully on to the chair that Marcus had vacated, aware of her father watching her from the other side of the table.