In the Time of Greenbloom (44 page)

“Oh go on! Mind you, you've quite piqued my curiosity. I'm really beginning to hope he will turn up soon.”

“Well, if he doesn't he won't find me here,” said Audrey, “it's half-past three and I've something better to do than sit about here all afternoon waiting for him.”

“Shopping?”

“No, my perm, I'm going to Jeanette's at four-fifteen for a Marcel wave.”

“Lucky thing! I've always wanted to have a perm.”

“If you ask me your hair's your best feature.”

“I'm glad you think so.”

They fell silent once again and John heard the little rasp of a file as Sheila manipulated it expertly against the points of her long nails. Three-thirty, he thought. If he were to meet Peter at Bobby's in three-quarters of an hour it was time he had his bathe. He got to his feet and the two girls smiled over at him.

“Going in?” asked Audrey.

“Yes. What's it like?”

“Like it always is—lovely once you're out!”

He laughed—one of Bill's jokes or Tony's he supposed. But how sweet they looked sitting there on the brown pebbles: butterflies on a wall flashing their colours in the sun, talking butterfly-talk. Behind them fat red women humped along the promenade in cotton dresses and cardigans. How would these ever become
those
? It was Natural History upside-down for butterflies so light and airy to turn into such heavy red caterpillars, he thought as he made his solitary way to the edge of the water.

They would think him stand-offish and queer for his lack of response; but it could not be helped. One day perhaps some similar pair, though not quite so common, would be awaiting
his
arrival with expectancy, quarrelling quietly about him and brushing their antennae together like tiny flexible rapiers. In a dull automatic way he would probably marry one of them and down the years watch her turning slowly into a fat red woman like those others.

His thoughts dissolved as he plunged into the water and swam out swiftly beyond the farthest of the shouting bathers. Turning round he saw that the beach had receded and enlarged. He was astonished at the extent of it and at the rapidity with which it had become at once panoramic and Lilliputian like the pictures they sold in the postcard kiosks. He was unable to distinguish the particular breakwaters between which he had been sitting. Sheila and Audrey must be one of the many tiny groups of coloured mould growing on the brown strand; but he was quite unable to know which group, and although
he was no more than three hundred yards from the shore it now seemed utterly absurd to suppose that any of their concerns really mattered in the very least. Yet their conversation was as loud and clear in his mind as though he were actually still hearing it. What they had wished for wanted or feared, the thousand implications of the things they had said were as large as they had ever been, had not diminished in the slightest degree.

He lay on his back and floated face upwards so that he saw only the sky above him bleached by the enormous light of the sun. Tonight he had to make his confession to Father Delaura and he was still dreading it.

Hitherto he had never made his confession to anyone away from home and he associated the rite more closely than anything else with his family and the parish Church: Mother dragging them all off at the end of Lent to her latest protégé—she changed her confessor even more often than she changed her doctor, the distribution of the little cards by Father the night before; little cards on which all the possible sins were neatly tabulated under their separate headings. There were consolations of course: the gaiety of the supper afterwards, the exaltation of conscious virtue in the mysterious but assured cleanliness in which it was so hard to believe. At home, confession like going to the dentist, had its cosy ritual quality; but here in Worthing with only Rooker's Close awaiting him at the end of it, how different it would be.

God, presumably, was everywhere; and though He was so far removed, higher even than the sun, upon His ears the longings and the self-accusations of the human mould upon the beach must fall intimately and urgently. He
must
care and if He did and could in some way cleanse the past, then it was a small price to pay to have to transmit one's cries through the narrow effeminate ear of Father Delaura.

He rolled over on to his stomach in the glazed surface of the sea and swam back to the beach.

Audrey's friend had arrived, he saw, as he passed the two
girls and went into the tent he had hired. He glanced at the man with some interest as he passed but he saw only his back. He was squatting on his haunches facing them and John took in only the breadth of his shoulders beneath the close-cropped head, the full sharply creased trouser legs, and the blue suéde shoes.

Inside the tent he listened eagerly hoping to discern above the flapping of the canvas the nuances of the new conversation. He thought of the stranger obscurely as a rival; a rival in more than the ordinary sense; someone whom he might himself be when he was older, someone equipped with all the perquisites at present denied him: self-assurance, a motor-car, leisure, and golden good looks.

Drawing aside the curtain a little he peered out. The man was taking a photograph; whistling softly, he was peering down into the view-finder of an expensive camera and the two girls were posed casually together just in front of him: Sheila with her hands clasped in front of her ankles and Audrey leaning back on her outstretched arms with an enormous sun-hat flopping over her neck and shoulders. They were both very self-conscious, strained, and determined to seem unimpressed. They were making the ironic jokes people always make when they are confronted by a camera.

The man himself was preoccupied, thoroughly enjoying himself, getting the utmost pleasure out of his advantage. John saw him stretch out a hand and grasp one of Audrey's ankles to move it a little farther into the centre of his picture. He noted the flash of his blue eyes as he looked up at her and made some brief joke. The intimacy of the gesture both chilled and enraged him. Conceited fool! Why didn't he get on with it? It was only a snapshot, no need to make such a to-do over it; but of course that was just what he wanted: to hold all their attention, flatter them, and from the moment of his arrival assert his male superiority and establish an intimacy to which they must respond.

They
were
responding; the empty-headed little asses were laughing at him and with him, they were jostling each other
and each of them was trying to steal the greater share of his attention.

John closed the tent flap and started to dress. If he were quick he would be in good time to meet Peter. He would have a cigarette in the sun and then make his way to Bobby's.

The stranger had spoiled the afternoon: he was just the type of man he loathed most, experienced and cocky. Everything about him: the sharp crease in his flannels, the blue shoes and the golden hair led him to a sharper appreciation of his own inferiority. He was just the sort of man who
would
own a fast car and stay in luxury and leisure at South-Coast hotels picking up girls on the beach.

Outside he heard a pause in the conversation and laughter, a pause that was filled in by the repetition of the man's whistled tune, an idle speculative trill: three notes full of a sort of self-love and contentment, three notes curiously evocative, reminding him of something, of someone. He stiffened: the wind brushing the tent, the creaking of the framework, the continuous wash of the sea and the shouts of the swimmers receded. He was in a cave; it was dark, and through the darkness he heard the clatter of feet moving through water, was sensible of the pause and the silence which precedes communication and received once again with all of his hearing the notes of the whistle, the same vain lazy notes he had never heard repeated until this moment.

All of her death, all of his love, all of his hatred, rose up within him black and choking so that for a moment he swayed within the airy greenness of the tent and put out his hands blindly before him seeking for some means of physical support against the dynamic of his emotion. He shook his head slowly from side to side hearing the measure of his own breathing so remotely that he seemed no longer to be within his body but to be watching it from afar with a completely detached compassion. And the day came back to him, once again he knew where he was and what had happened: Victoria's murderer was at this moment sitting outside the tent in which he stood; only twelve paces away from him.

He knew this with a greater certainty than if he had seen the man only yesterday in the full light of the sun. One upward glance of the eyes over the camera, the upward flash of the eyes above the torchlight; the set of the head upon the shoulders in the car, the blazered back and the close-cropped golden head he had seen as he came up from the beach; these things and many other paired apprehensions too numerous to be named had now been finally sealed and signed by the notes of the tune whistled over two years ago—and today.

He stepped out of the tent on to the wide terrace of the pebbles and stood for a moment in the wind and sunshine. He did not know what he must do; he did not know what he would do; something of him lingered behind him in the tent, in the moment of realisation he had experienced within it. A part of him, an aspect of his sensibility, was divorced from the present in which he moved so that he felt himself to be ageless, living simultaneously now and in the past; and the knowledge gave him an extraordinary sense of power. Whatever he did it would be right; if he did nothing he would give himself no offence, if he confronted the man and turned him over to the Police who were still searching for him he would be no more than the passive instrument of a terrible justice. In himself, for the first time since he had grown up, he was nothing, need do nothing; and yet could do anything and be sure of doing right.

He sat down unsteadily, his knees trembling as he bent them beneath him. With cold hands he sought for the packet of cigarettes he kept in his coat pocket and drawing one out placed it between his lips.

Beside him the stranger got up.

“I think I'll risk it,” he said; and if his voice had changed it had changed only in the way that recollections become more like themselves when the need to recall them is banished by the actuality of the thing recalled.

“Are you coming in with me, Audrey?”

“No, we'll watch. Once is enough for me.”

“Come on! I'll teach you the back-stroke.”

“Not today please, Desmond! Just look at me, I've got goose-flesh as it is; it's this horrible wind.” She blinked up at him in the bright sunlight. “I told you to come early, you've missed your chance now.”

“My chance of what?” He was stooping and running his hand over her brown back.

“Swimming with me of course. What else?”

His hand lingered on the full curve of her shoulder muscle; John saw the thumb and index finger contract until their knuckles blanched.

“OW! You pinched me!”

“Did it hurt?”

Even from where he was John could see that her eyes had moistened in response to the pain, that pleasure hung briefly in the laxity of her mouth.

“You don't know your own strength,” she said with aggrievement. “I'll have a bruise there for the rest of the Summer.”

“A souvenir!”

His swimming-trunks swinging from his idle hand he moved off towards their tent. John got up and walked after him. He felt nothing; he felt as though he were floating in the strong wind which blew from the sea, as though he were being impelled weightlessly over the pebbles. In front of the door of the tent he put out a hand and touched the blue sleeve of the man's blazer and he turned round very sharply.

“Excuse me! Could you give me a light please?”

There was a flash of teeth above the brown chin

“Certainly!” The cigarette-lighter was proffered; the flame licked the top of his trembling cigarette, but he did not draw on it.

“Do you remember me?” he asked.

The little cap extinguished the flame and the lighter was abruptly withdrawn.

“No—I don't think so. Ought I to?”

John removed the unlighted cigarette from between his lips.

“Do you remember the caves?”

“
Caves
?” The smile had gone but the teeth still showed.

“Yes, the caves. Victoria!
The murder
!”

You're crazy.
What
caves?”

‘
You
know,” said John. “You murdered her in the caves. She was a young girl. Don't you remember? You strangled a girl called Victoria Blount in the Stump Cross Caves in Yorkshire two years ago. The Police are still looking for you. I'm John Blaydon and because I was with her just before you did it, I know it was you. You'll have to come to the Police with me straight away.”

The man put a hand on his shoulder.

“Look! I think
you'd
better see a doctor—you've had too much sun.”

“No,” said John. “I knew it was you when you whistled. Please don't make it difficult for me. Don't you
see
? I'm not making a mistake: I don't want to do this—because it's too late now, it can't do any good for anyone; but if I don't do it, the way things have happened, I shall never be sure. If I hadn't moved, if I'd let you go, I know it would have been all right; but I didn't let you go, so you will have to come with me; you'll have to give yourself up.”

He moved in front of the entrance to the tent. Beyond the man's shoulder he was aware of the attention of the girls; they had turned round and were watching, trying to overhear; but he knew that they couldn't because he and the man were both talking so intimately.

“Get out of the way, son!”

“No! You'll have to come to the Police with me. If I've made a mistake, if you think I've made a mistake, why don't you come? It will only take a minute or two.”