“Why is it a good thing?”
“That’s none of your business.”
How just like Truda to start hinting things and not follow them up. Celia fingered the iron that Truda was busy heating.
“Maria is old enough to take care of herself,” she said. “We can’t any of us come to harm, can we, now we can swim? We don’t go out far.”
“I don’t mind what Maria does in the water,” said Truda. “It’s what she does out of it that worries me. It’s not healthy for a young girl of her age to be so free and easy with a gentleman like that Mr. Laforge. I wonder your Pappy allows it.”
The iron was very hot. Celia nearly burned her fingers.
“I’ve always said we’ll have trouble with Maria,” said Truda.
She pulled Mama’s nightdress out of the pile of washed linen, and began ironing it, smoothing it gently up and down. The smell of the hot iron and the steaming ironing board filled the small room. Although the window was wide open there was no air at all.
“You’re in a bad mood, Truda,” said Celia.
“I’m not in a bad mood,” answered Truda, “but I soon will be if you keep fingering everything.”
“Why should we have trouble with Maria?” asked Celia.
“Because none of us knows what blood she has in her,” said Truda. “But if it’s what I suspect, then she’s going to lead us all a dance.”
Celia thought about Maria’s blood. Yes, it was brighter than either her own or Niall’s. When Maria cut her foot bathing the other day, the blood spurted very scarlet, in a little bubble.
“She’ll run after them, and they’ll run after her,” said Truda.
“Who will?” asked Celia.
“The men,” said Truda.
There was a brown mark on the ironing board where the iron had scorched the cloth. Celia looked out of the window, as though she expected to see Maria dancing along the cliffs pursued by a great company.
“You can’t go against the blood,” Truda went on. “It will out, however careful you are. Maria may be your Pappy’s girl and have your Pappy’s talent when it comes to acting, but she’s her mother’s girl too, and what I’ve heard of the mother is best left unsaid.”
Up and down the nightgown went the savage iron.
Celia wondered if Maria’s mother had had bright scarlet blood as well.
“You’ve all three been brought up just the same,” said Truda, “and you’re all three as different as chalk from cheese. And why? Because of the different blood.”
How horrid Truda was, thought Celia. Why must she go on and on about blood?
“There’s Niall,” said Truda. “There’s my boy. He’s his father all over again, the same pale face, same small bones, and now he’s found out what he can do to a piano he’ll never leave it. What does your Mama think about it, that’s what I’d like to know; what has been going on in her mind all these past weeks as she hears him play? If it takes me back across the years, what does it do to her?”
Celia gazed thoughtfully at the plain, lined face of Truda, the gray, thin hair, screwed back over the temples behind the bony forehead.
“Are you very old, Truda?” she asked. “Are you ninety?”
“Bless my soul,” said Truda. “What will you be saying next?”
She lifted the nightgown from the board, and the garment that had been limp and crumpled was now fine and smooth, ready to put on.
“I’ve seen some strange things in my life, but I’m not ninety yet,” she answered.
“Which of us do you love best?” said Celia, but the answer came back as it always did, “I love you all the same, but I shan’t love you at all if you will finger my ironing board.”
How they put you off, the grown people, with their back answers, their evasion of awkward questions.
“If the others go to school I’ll be the only one,” said Celia. “You’ll have to love me the best then, and so will Pappy and Mama.”
She suddenly saw herself getting a threefold measure of attention and the thought was a new one to her. She had not considered it before. She tiptoed behind Truda, and to plague her, tied her apron bow into a triple knot.
“Too much love is bad,” said Truda. “It’s as bad one way as too little is the other. And if you go through life asking for too much you’ll be disappointed. What are you doing to my apron?”
But Celia backed away, laughing.
“You’re all three greedy for affection,” said Truda. “That’s something you’ve all inherited, along with your other talents. And where it will lead you I don’t know, but I wonder sometimes.”
She tested the back of the iron with her horny fingernails.
“Anyway, my boy has made up for lost time these last few weeks,” she said. “If ever anyone was hungry, he was, poor mite. I only hope she keeps it up. If she does he’ll grow up a real man and not a dreamer. But she’ll have to keep it up. Maybe she will. Maybe it’s come at just the right time for her, now she’s reached the difficult years.”
“When was Niall hungry?” asked Celia. “And what are the difficult years?”
“Ask me no questions, and I’ll tell you no lies,” said Truda, suddenly impatient. “Now run along, can’t you? Get out into the fresh air.”
She twisted Celia’s plaits into a topknot on the top of her head to keep her cool, and tucked her short cotton frock into her knickers.
“Be off with you,” she said, patting her fat behind. But Celia did not want to go out into the fresh air. It was not fresh either. It was much too hot. She wanted to stay in the house and draw.
She ran along the passage to her room to find some paper. There was a block tucked away at the back of the cupboard that she had brought from Paris, and her favorite pencils, the yellow ones, Kohinoor. She found her knife, and began to sharpen one out of the window; it flaked off in clean strips, revealing the sharp lead, and the smell was good. The murmur of voices floated up to her from the veranda below. Pappy must have finished his sleep. He was sitting on one of the wicker chairs talking to Mama.
“… you can’t start them too young, in my opinion,” he was saying, “and those dramatic schools are useless. I wouldn’t give a damn for any of them. Let her learn her job the hard way, the same as I did myself, and you too, my darling, if it comes to that. She won’t come to any harm.”
Mama must have said something in reply, but her voice was soft and low, it did not carry up to the window like Pappy’s voice.
“Who says so? Truda?” Pappy answered. “Nonsense. You tell Truda to mind her own business. She’s a barren old woman with a nasty mind. Maria won’t go astray, she’s got her head screwed on too well. If it was Celia now…”
His voice sank lower, difficult to hear, hidden by the scraping noise of his chair on the veranda. Celia paused, and looked at her pencil.
“If it was Celia now…” What had Pappy been going to say?
She listened hard, but she could only catch scraps of the conversation, little indistinct words and phrases that made no pattern.
“All three of them, for that matter,” Pappy’s voice droned on. “The name alone will carry them through, if nothing else does. They’ve got the spark all right, but possibly nothing more than the spark. Anyway, we shan’t live to see it… No, probably not first class. He’ll never have the confidence unless you can give him that. He’s your responsibility, my darling. What did you say?… Oh, time alone will tell, when it comes to that… it’s the same for us, isn’t it? Where would you be without me, or me without you, my darling? Of course, he clings, so do they, so do you and I… There are only two things that matter in the whole world, you’ve taught me that, perhaps we’ve taught each other… if everything else fails, work remains. We can instill that into the three of them if nothing else…”
Celia moved away from the window. That was the worst of grown-up people. They started something, and you thought they might be going to say something special, like “Celia is the nicest of the three,” or ?
??Celia will be very pretty when she slims down a bit,” but they never did. They got sidetracked onto other things. She sat down on the floor, her block on her knees, and began to draw.
Never anything big. Always little things. Always little men and women living in small houses, where they could never be lost, and where nothing could ever happen like a fire or an earthquake, and as she drew she talked to herself for company. The afternoon went by, and still she went on drawing, her legs tucked under her, her tongue between her teeth, and when it happened—the thing she was to remember all her life—when it came, the shouting and the screaming, the terrible sound of it rang in her ears like a summons from another world.
As Maria turned out of the garden gate she looked to right and to left, undecided which way to go. To the right led to the beach, and to the rocks; to the left was the path to the cliffs, and to the hotel.
It was very hot, the hottest day of the year. The sun beat down on her bare head, but she did not mind. She never had to wear a hat in case of sunstroke, like Celia, and even if she had gone walking naked the sun would not blister her. She was brown and firm, she was browner even than Niall with his dark hair. She shut her eyes and stretched out her arms, and it was as though a great wave of heat came up out of the ground and touched her; there was a smell of earth, and moss, and hot geranium coming from the villa garden just behind her, and in front of her the smell of the sea itself, dancing and glittering under the sky.
She had her happy feeling. The happy feeling that came suddenly and swept right through her, for no reason. It traveled from the pit of her tummy right up to her throat, nearly choking her, and she never knew why it came, what brought it, or where it went, for it would vanish as swiftly as it began, leaving her breathless, enquiring, still happy, but without the ecstasy. It came, it went; and she went down the right-hand path to the beach, the hot sand burning her naked feet, and as she walked she hummed to herself, and she moved in time to the tune that she was humming.
“Who’s marvelous, who’s wonderful,
Miss Annabelle Lee,
Who’s kissable, who’s lovable,
Just wait and you’ll see…”
They played it every Saturday evening at the hotel when they had the dances; they had played it last night. The little jerky dance band, consisting of a pianist and a drummer, imported down from Quimper for the evening, who played too fast and to the inevitable quick French time, possessed, for all their faults, a sort of magic. The windows of the hotel would be wide open, and if you stood outside and listened, with the people from the village, you could see the silly, stiff figures of the English visitors bobbing past in evening dress.
Maria had gone once. Pappy had taken her. She had worn the blue frock she wore every evening at the house, for supper, with her ordinary house shoes and a coral necklace, and Niall and Celia had peeped through the windows and made monkey faces at her. It had not been much fun. Pappy danced too slowly, and kept going round and round the same way, making her giddy. And those idiot English boys were rotten, treading on her feet, clutching her waist and pulling up her dress at the back so that her knickers showed. It was only Michel who was any good at all, and he never came until halfway through, until nearly the end, because he had been with some other people in a café in the village.
When he danced he held you the right way, and his body did the things that your body did, not swaying, not bending stupidly, but moving, against the beats. Niall did the same thing on the piano, he played tunes against the beats. So few people understood the way to play, the way to dance.
It was better really to dance alone. Better to listen a moment outside, and let the music come to you, and laugh with the village people, and smell the harsh French tobacco, and the garlic, and then to slip away into the darkness and move to your own time.
“Who’s kissable, who’s lovable,
Miss Annabelle Lee.”
Better to dance alone, as she was doing now, under the hot sun to the sound of her own humming, her hands plucking the air feeling for invisible strings, and her toes digging the soft sand. The tide was out. Away in the distance an old peasant woman, with a basket on her back, stripped the rocks for seaweed, a strange, humped figure, outlined against the sky.
The sardine boats were returning to port. They followed one another like battleships, in line astern, painted all colors, their blue nets drying in the sun. Maria wished she could be with them. She wished suddenly, and with passion, to be a fisherman, burned black with wind and sea, dressed in red sailcloth trousers and wearing clogs.
She had watched them once with Pappy. They had walked to the little port and stood on the end of the quay, and the men had stood laughing and joking with one another, standing waist-deep in fish. The fish slid from their bronzed rough hands onto the wet decks of the boats, and the fish were slimy and fat, the scales glistening. The men talked to each other in the Breton patois, and one of them kept looking up and laughed at Maria, and she had laughed back at him.
Yes, that would be it, that would be the thing. To be a fisherman, smelling of the sea, your lips caked with salt and your hands stinking of the slimy fish, and then to walk back along the cobbled quay with your feet in clogs, and go and sit in a little café and drink raw harsh cider, deep brown in color, a bitter brew, and smoke rank tobacco, and spit, and listen to the wheezy tinkling phonograph behind the bar.
“Parlez-moi d’amour, et dites-moi des choses bien tendres,
Parlez-moi toujours, mon cœur n’est pas las de l’entendre.”
The disque would be cracked and old, the woman screeching at the top of her voice, but it would not matter.
Maria was a fisherman, her cap tilted over one eye, laughing with her comrades, lurching along a cobbled quay, and as she jumped down the steep crevice of rock to the inlet below she remembered that she must stop being a fisherman and become Maria again once more, Maria at the appointed tryst-place, who had come to say good-bye to Michel, the man who loved her.
He was waiting there, sitting against their usual slab of rock, smoking a cigarette. His face was drawn and pale, and he looked unhappy. Oh, dear, it was going to be one of those days…
“You’ve been a long time,” he said, accusing her.
“Sorry,” said Maria. “We finished lunch late.”
It was not true, but it did not matter. To appease him, she sat down beside him and took his arm and put her head against his shoulder.
“I heard you singing,” he said, still reproachful, “as if you were happy. Don’t you realize I’m going tomorrow, we may never see one another again?”
“I couldn’t help singing,” she said. “It was such a lovely day. But I’m sad really. I promise you I’m sad.”
She turned her face away, so that he could not see her smile. It would be dreadful to hurt his feelings, but really, when his face was long and grave, as it was now, and his eyes watery, it was so silly, like a complaining sheep.
When he put his arms round her and kissed her it was better because then she did not have to look at him. She could shut her eyes and concentrate upon the kissing, which was warm and pleasant and very comforting. Even that did not seem to please him today. He sighed, and groaned, and kept harping on the business of their never seeing one another again.
“We shall see you in Paris, or in London,” she said. “Of course, we shall meet again, especially if you are going to do some work for Mama.”
“Oh, that,” he said, shrugging his shoulders, “that won’t come to anything. Your Mama is even more difficult than you. She nods her head, she smiles, she says ‘Yes, how interesting, how clever, we must discuss it,’ but that is all. Never anything more. There is no getting anywhere with her. Even this tour they talk of to America, she and Mr. Delaney, will anything come of it? I wonder. I very much wonder.”
There was a periwinkle stuck to the rock beside Maria. She tore it off and began to prod at it with her nail. It vanished instantly to its lair beneath the shell. She took another and prodde
d it. It was fascinating, the way they scuttled back into the darkness. Presently, Michel stood up and looked around him. The sound of the sea was nearer now. The tide was coming in.
“There’s no one in sight,” he said. “The beach is quite deserted.”
Maria yawned and stretched herself. It was time really to have another bathe, but perhaps Michel would think her heartless to suggest it. She glanced idly over the rocks to the gaping cave under the cliff. She had explored it once, with Niall. It traveled quite a long way, and then the roof sloped suddenly, descended, shelving to their heads, and a cold trickle of water fell onto their shoulders.
She looked up and saw that Michel was watching her.
“I see you are looking at the cave too,” he said. “Have you the same thoughts as I have?”
“I don’t know what you are thinking,” said Maria. “I was just remembering how dark it was in there. I went once, with Niall.”
“Come again,” said Michel. “Come with me.”
“What for?” said Maria. “There’s nothing up there. It’s very dull.”
“Come with me,” repeated Michel. “This is the last time we shall be together. I want to say good-bye.”
Maria stood up, scratching her ankle. Something must have bitten her, there was a little red spot. She looked over her shoulder at the advancing sea. There was still some way for it to come. It broke with a surging roar on the further rocks, and somewhere it struck a funnel, throwing a cloud of spray into the air.
“Why go into the cave?” said Maria. “Why not say good-bye out here? It’s warm and nice; it will be gloomy in the cave.”
“No,” he said, “in the cave it will be quiet and still.”
She looked at him standing on the ledge of rock beside her, and she thought how tall he looked suddenly, as tall as Pappy. And he did not have his sheep’s face anymore. He looked confident and strong. Yet something inside her whispered, “I wouldn’t go into the cave. Stay in the open; much better stay in the open.”