“No,” said Emma, “he’s not. And none of us set eyes on him after he put the guy on the bonfire—he just disappeared into the crowd. Then it wasn’t long before the fireworks were thrown into the staff car, and the marines started getting angry. What happened to you? I saw you on the beach earlier.”
Myrtle threw herself back on the bed and began fiddling with the transistor.
“I saw you too,” she replied. “Did you have a good time?”
“Not particularly,” said Emma. “Did you?”
Myrtle shrugged. “All right.”
There was silence between them, the only sound coming from the transistor. Myrtle hadn’t tuned it right and the singer’s voice was out of key. Then she said, “Did you tell Mum you saw me on the beach with… you know?”
“No, of course not,” replied Emma. “Why should I?”
“Well, only that Austin—that’s Corporal Wagg—has kept calling here ever since he came to apologize about one of the marines shooting Spry, and Dad and Mum didn’t look too pleased, so when he told us about the firework party we made a date to meet down there.”
“Fair enough,” shrugged Emma.
“I suppose you did the same with Lieutenant Sherman. Well, I mean, they’re different, aren’t they? They’ve seen a bit of life. You get fed up with the boys round here.”
“Even Terry?”
Myrtle’s slightly sullen, half-defiant expression changed. She looked suddenly troubled. She switched off the transistor, and slipping off the bed crossed the room and shut the door. She turned and faced Emma.
“Look,” she said, “I don’t know whether to tell you this or not…”
“You’ve started, haven’t you?”
Myrtle’s eyes filled with tears. “Everything’s such a mess,” she said. “I’m all mixed up. I don’t want to get Terry into trouble, or Austin either. You see…”—and now she began to cry in earnest—“I wasn’t speaking the truth when I told Mum and Dad I hadn’t seen Terry last night. I had. He must have guessed I’d gone round the back of the beach, because when all that shouting and sand-chucking started he came to the cave and found me there with Austin, with Corporal Wagg.”
“And so?”
“Well, he was wild. He started calling me names, and Austin too, and then Austin got wild, and before I could stop them they were fighting, not just scrapping, really fighting. Austin’s nose started to bleed, and then he winded Terry, and was going to lam into him when Terry did a Rugby tackle and got him on the ground. They were both swearing like anything, it was awful.”
She fumbled up her sleeve for a tissue, and Emma patted her shoulder. “What happened then?”
“That’s just it, I don’t know,” said Myrtle. “I saw Austin blow a whistle, to summon his friends, I suppose, and Terry jumped up and began to run along the beach. And suddenly the marines seemed to be everywhere, you know how it was, and Austin ran out on me completely, all he wanted to do was to go after Terry and maybe beat him up with the help of his mates. I just lost my head and scrambled back to the car park behind the Sailor’s Rest. I knew Dad and Mum would be there. And we came back home, and I’ve scarcely slept for the night wondering what happened.”
The two girls sat down together on Myrtle’s bed, and Myrtle blew her nose and wiped her eyes.
“If they got Terry it will be my fault,” she said.
“No,” said Emma, “not entirely. It’s all our faults.”
She had a sudden vision of Mad and Terry and the other boys making the guy between them. Wasn’t it the guy that had triggered off the laughter, and the laughter the resentment, and the resentment the antagonism between invaders and invaded? Wasn’t the making of the guy a thumb-to-nose gesture on Mad’s part, because ridicule angers your opponent and there isn’t a comeback? And wasn’t Mad’s anger due to the fact that a dog had been killed because, through age-old instinct, it had tried to defend its territory? The clue to the fight between Terry and Corporal Wagg was territorial too.
“Myrtle,” she said, “you’ve played Terry off before with several boys. He’s never been the one and only. He’s often said so. But I don’t remember him ever having a fight about you.”
“Well, he wouldn’t would he? I mean, the other boys are local, they all know each other. Corporal Wagg—Austin—may speak English, but he’s foreign just the same. Not one of us. That’s why I thought it would be fun to play him along. I wish I hadn’t now. And if he calls up here later today I don’t know what I’ll say to him.”
“You could ask him,” suggested Emma, “how the fight ended, and if he and his mates took Terry into detention.”
“I couldn’t in front of Mum and Dad,” replied Myrtle, “that is, if they even let him in. And I don’t think I want to see him alone again, not after last night. It wasn’t just the fight, it was… everything.”
Yes, Emma thought, it was everything. She put herself in Myrtle’s place and thought of being in a cave on Poldrea beach with Lieutenant-Wally-Sherman. And someone she was fond of like Joe coming along and seeing her. And Joe and the lieutenant getting into a fight.
“This union thing,” said Emma, “I don’t think I believe in it, do you?”
“I don’t even know what it means to people like us,” said Myrtle. “Dad says it’s the last in the Coalition Government’s bag of tricks. But if it means the Americans can go round beating up our boys then they can all go back where they came from, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Yes,” said Emma, “but you didn’t think that way when you made the date on the beach with Corporal Wagg.” She was thinking of Lieutenant Sherman.
“No,” replied Myrtle, “but you don’t think, do you, not when you’re all steamed up and a fellow’s new?”
Then they heard her mother calling up the stairs that the kettle had boiled and didn’t they want some tea? Myrtle dabbed her eyes again and combed her hair.
“Not a word, mind,” she said, “nor at home to your gran.”
“No,” replied Emma, “but if you should see Austin—Corporal Wagg—try and find out if he knows what happened to Terry.”
The two girls went downstairs. Jack Trembath and his son, Mick, a boy of about Andy’s age, had just come into the kitchen and were hanging up their wet oilskins on the back of the door.
“Well, Emma,” said Mr. Trembath, “any word of Terry?”
Emma shook her head.
“I’m afraid there’ll be nothing for it,” said the farmer seriously, “but for your grandmother to go down in person and try to see that Marine Commander. I’ll drive her down there. It would help maybe if she had a man with her.”
“That’s very kind of you, Mr. Trembath, but we’re not so certain at home it would be a good idea. If they haven’t picked up Terry they won’t know he’s missing, and it might make them try to look for him, especially if…” she hesitated, “if he’s in any kind of trouble, been scrapping or anything.”
Jack Trembath looked doubtful. “You may be right,” he said, “but if they haven’t got him, how will you find out where he is? I tell you one thing. If that corporal fellow comes up here after Myrtle I’ll darn well get him to talk and see if he knows anything.”
He stared at his daughter, who had turned very white.
“Look,” said Emma, jumping to her feet, “thanks for the tea but I ought to get back. You never know, they might have some news.”
“Tell you what,” Jack Trembath rose at the same time, “I’ll run you back in your car and have a word with your grandmother, see if there is anything I can do. She doesn’t need to go down to Poldrea if they’re being fussy still with the roadblocks, and asking questions of everyone. Being a farmer, I can get by and explain my business where it might be awkward for her. I’ve got to go down anyway, I’ve to call in at the vet’s for something he’s made up for Marigold.”
“How is Marigold?” (Marigold was the sick heifer.)
“She’ll do… she’ll do.”
Emma said good-bye to Mrs
. Trembath and Myrtle, and was halfway up the track in the car when a thought suddenly struck her.
“Would you mind very much,” she said, “taking the car back by yourself? I’ve just remembered I dropped a scarf coming across the field, and I’d better find it before it gets soaked in the rain. It won’t take me long.”
“Just as you like, my dear,” he said, “but don’t you get wet through looking for it.”
Emma jumped out of the car and he drove on alone. Lies and subterfuge again, thought Emma, who hadn’t dropped a scarf at all, but couldn’t forget what Myrtle had said about Terry running away along the beach with the marines after him. Supposing they had beaten him up? Supposing he was crouching in one of the caves, or halfway up the cliff, above high water, unable to move, not daring to shout?
She waited until the car was out of sight, then turned to the right, away from the farm buildings, and across the hill where the grazing ground sloped steeply to the cliffs below. She was wearing jeans and boots, but her light raincoat was small protection against this blow from the southeast and the stinging rain. White rollers were scudding into the bay to spend themselves on Poldrea beach, sucking at the sandbanks that formed there when the tide ebbed. She could see small parties of marines straggling along the foreshore, or drifting down from the huts and caravans they had commandeered. No smoke came from the chimneys behind the docks, and the docks themselves were bare of shipping. There were naval boats inside the harbor, and the warship itself seemed further out than usual, hardly discernible against the rolling sea. An unpleasant berth, thought Emma, with a lee shore astern of them, and she wondered if Wally Sherman was aboard and possibly seasick—serve him right—or snugly ashore in one of the harbor offices, sitting at a desk and interviewing parents of missing boys.
She reached the old coastguard footpath above the cliffs and looked down at the boiling cauldron below. It was about half-tide, and the stretch of beach where she and the boys bathed in summer was deserted. The cliffs between here and Poldrea were not high; anyone who knew his way like Terry could easily have scrambled over the rocks at low tide, even at night, and made his way to safety. She climbed down to the beach and walked to the further end. There was a cave here where they sometimes picnicked after swimming, and the overhanging ledge gave shelter from a shower. Not today, though. The rain drove inside. There was nothing on the beach but seaweed and broken bottles, and a dead gull smothered in tar. She had come on a useless mission.
She climbed back again to the cliff path, and walked along it and over the stone stile that led to a continuation of Mr. Trembath’s grazing ground above the cliffs. The land sloped very suddenly here in places. Mr. Trembath used to say that in his grandfather’s day there had been some mine-prospecting hereabouts which came to nothing, but the soil had loosened since, and in winter when rains were heavy it could be dangerous to walk too near the edge, the ground might crumble under your feet and you could pitch headlong to the beach below. Emma turned to the higher ground. The rain was driving straight into her face and it was pointless getting soaked to the skin in an impossible quest, besides, Mr. Trembath would be talking to Mad by now, and telling her that Emma had only gone to pick up a scarf in the top field.
Then she saw a little figure running towards her out of the rain. He came from the direction of the wood that hugged the cliff-side further to the east, a wood that had once formed part of the farm acreage but was now a sort of no-man’s-land, a bone of contention, if the truth be told, between Jack Trembath and a summer visitor who had bought up three deserted cottages at the bottom of the wood and wanted to develop the site. Lawyers argued and so far had come to no decision, and meanwhile a curious character known to herself and the boys as the beachcomber had established squatter’s rights in a hut built on a promontory at the far end of the wood. The summer visitor did not know of his existence, and though Jack Trembath knew he did not care.
“Let him live there if he likes,” he said, “it doesn’t worry me. He keeps an eye on the sheep, what’s more, if they stray.”
Emma stood still as the small figure paused in its headlong flight, and catching sight of her ducked behind a gorse bush, as if to avoid being seen. Emma waited. The figure did not move. It was one of their own boys, she was certain. Too big for Colin. Too small for Andy. What was he doing out here all alone, without the others, without Joe, in the driving rain? She ran quickly up the hillside to the line of gorse bushes, and she was right, it was Sam crouching there, wet through.
“Sam,” she said, “where have you been? You know you’re not allowed out here on your own, especially after what’s happened, and in this weather.”
She dragged him to his feet and held onto his hand. Sam, despite his friendship with his roommate Andy, and his reverence for Joe, was sometimes odd man out. His kinship with wild animals, with birds, was stronger than his feeling for fellow-humans. Perhaps it was his eye affliction that made him seem, at times, an outsider in the family circle. Perhaps it was subconscious memory harking back to the days when he had been a battered baby.
Sam did not answer immediately. He allowed his hand to remain in Emma’s, he did not attempt to pull it away. Those eyes of his, wherever they pointed, seemed to penetrate.
“I know where Terry is,” he said.
Emma swallowed. I mustn’t scare him, she thought, I mustn’t say anything hasty or stupid, I must remember what Mad has always said, that Sam is more sensitive than the others, that you have to weigh every word or he shies off.
“That’s good,” she said slowly. “I went looking for him on the beach but he wasn’t there. I hope he’s hiding somewhere safe.”
Sam nodded. “He’s got a broken leg but he’ll be all right.”
He mustn’t be rushed, he mustn’t have questions flung at him. Joe should be here, he would know what to do. She waited, and then she spoke again.
“A broken leg. Then he can’t walk.”
“No, that’s why I was running up home. I thought I could get some as’prin out of Dottie’s medicine cupboard, it would ease the pain. I wasn’t going to tell Dottie what it was for.”
“Why not? We’ve all been so worried about Terry. Madam ought to know about the broken leg.”
“It’s not that I mind Madam knowing, or Dottie either, but I don’t want the soldiers to know. They might come and take Terry away. Or they might shoot him, like they shot Spry.”
What must I do, Emma asked herself, to try and make him talk? Terry may be lying out there on the cliff somewhere, not only with his leg broken, but perhaps ill, dangerously ill.
“Listen, Sam,” she said, “you know how you look after the squirrel, and the pigeon, and all sorts of other animals, but they have to be somewhere warm and sheltered, they can’t be left out in the rain with a broken limb or a broken wing. The limb has to be set.”
Sam considered her for a moment, or, rather, considered the sky.
“Mr. Willis has set the leg,” he said. “He used to know firstaid, though he says he’s a bit rusty. But he doesn’t want the soldiers to know where Terry is either. He hates them as much as I do.”
Mr. Willis… Mr. Willis…? Emma had never heard of a Mr. Willis.
“You know,” said Sam, suddenly impatient, “the beachcomber. I thought of him directly we all stopped talking. He’s a friend of mine. So I went to tell him about Terry. And Terry was there, in his hut. Mr. Willis found him on the beach last night and carried him there. Come and see.”
9
The hut in the woods had been a summerhouse originally, erected before the 1914–18 war by a former landowner who had lived at Trevanal and was a keen bird-watcher. During the Hitler war it was taken over by the Home Guard as an observation post. It later fell on lean times, the planking began to rot, and the whole structure might have fallen in had not the beachcomber appeared on the scene, established his squatter’s rights and made the summerhouse weatherproof, dry, and comparatively snug. Emma now learned, as Sam led her through the wood to the
promontory, that he and Andy had frequently called on the beachcomber but had kept the fact secret.
“He doesn’t much like people,” confessed Sam, “he says they’re nosey, and I agree with him. He’s been all sorts of things in his life. A ship’s carpenter, a farm laborer, he’s worked in a zoo, in an electric shop—he’s got his own radio he made himself.”
Emma wasn’t interested in the life history of the beachcomber, all she wanted to know was how Terry had broken his leg and if he were in pain.
“You must be polite,” urged Sam as the roof of the hut emerged through the trees. “He doesn’t like girls or women, he says they’re noisier than men.”
Emma had visualized a dark, broken-down, makeshift sort of dwelling, shrouded by overhanging trees. She was mistaken. The beachcomber had cleared a fair space around his home and had tilled a vegetable plot behind it. The spring running down the side of the cliff formed his water supply, and he was filling a pail of water as Emma and Sam came upon him. He turned at bay, then relaxed at the sight of Sam.
“This is Emma,” said Sam, “I met her in the field. She was looking for Terry and I had to tell her. She’s very trustworthy.”
“How do you do?” said Emma.
She had only seen the beachcomber in the distance before. He had his own way down to the shore from his lair, a steep path which he had cut himself out of the cliff face, and when she and the boys had come upon him on the beach he was generally bent double, filling a basket with seaweed or driftwood. Winter or summer he would be dressed the same, in an old jacket green with age, flannel trousers thrust into seaboots and a peaked cap pulled low over his craggy features. Colin had had the effrontery to say last summer, when they were all on the beach and the recluse had appeared at the further end poking about the rocks with a long-handled stick, that he looked like Mad.
“You know what,” he cried delightedly, “he’s Madam’s brother, and she lets him live in the hut in the wood and it’s a great secret.”