The Feast (20 page)

‘She can’t have seen the boat,’ said Mr. Paley. ‘So she must think they are all drowned. What can she be doing?’

‘I think she means to come in, later on, and be told about it.’

‘But why?’

The strangeness of Mrs. Cove was too much, even for Mr. Paley, and he spoke with unusual interest.

‘I’m not quite sure,’ said Mrs. Paley slowly, ‘I think … I think it’s just an impulse. I don’t think she often acts on impulse. But this afternoon … well … an impulse made her run down to them when she saw the danger. But then when it was hopeless, as she thought, she didn’t know what to do. She seemed to be hesitating for quite a while.’

‘But surely her natural impulse would have been to rush off and tell somebody?’

‘I don’t think she could trust herself to tell anybody. She feels it’s better that somebody else should tell her. She’s afraid of her own voice saying it.’

‘But why?’

‘Because,’ said Mrs. Paley earnestly, ‘I think she would really rather they were dead.’

‘Oh, nonsense, Christina!’

‘You didn’t see her face. I did.’

‘What is it? Why are you coming back?’ cried Anna, as Bruce and Nancibel passed her on the sands.

‘Boat,’ panted Bruce.

She asked Miss Ellis, who was waddling along behind
her, what boat that might be. Miss Ellis explained, adding gleefully:

‘But they won’t find it, for it’s out. Gerry Siddal and Miss Wraxton took it. I saw them from my window.’

‘But why do they want it? What’s it all about?’

Anna had seen everybody running past her window and shouting, and so she had run out too. But she had not, so far, been able to discover what had happened.

‘Some of the children have gone bathing in a
dangerous
place,’ said Miss Ellis. ‘A storm in a teacup
probably
. But those two will get a shock when they find the boat gone. We’ll see them coming back ever so down in the mouth.’

‘Why on earth couldn’t you have told them?’ asked Anna sharply.

‘I don’t care to speak to Nancibel,’ explained Miss Ellis. ‘She’s a very impertinent girl. Refused to empty your ash tray this morning, Mrs. Lechene. Said it was too full.’

Anna reflected upon this information, saw the point of it, and grinned.

‘Perhaps it was fuller than it should have been,’ she agreed. ‘But who did you say had taken the boat?’

‘Gerry Siddal and that Miss Wraxton. Sneaked off at lunch-time when they thought nobody’d notice. Now there’ll be a fussification, I shouldn’t wonder; it’s bad luck on them to be caught like this. Nobody takes that boat out in a donkey’s years, but just the one day they slip off on the Q.T. it turns out to be wanted.’

Anna looked interested.

‘I didn’t know,’ she said. ‘Are they …?’

‘Why … didn’t you hear the Canon going on at her this morning, Mrs. Lechene? You could hear him a mile off.’

‘No. What happened?’

‘Why … it seems that ever since Sunday night …’ began Miss Ellis, settling down to it.

Her story was so absorbing that Anna could not tear
herself away, though she was aware that Bruce and
Nancibel
had not returned, as prophesied, from their search for the boat and she did not like to leave them long together.

They had stayed on in the kitchen, when they found the boat gone, because there seemed to be no point in rushing again to the top of the cliff. Everything would be over, one way or another, long before they got there.

‘We don’t know for sure that they ever went in the sea at all,’ said Nancibel. ‘Let’s hope somebody got there in time to stop them. I’ll get the kettle on for when they come back, for I’m sure they’ll all be glad of a cup of tea.’

She seemed quite to have forgotten that she had ever quarrelled with Bruce, and he found himself wishing that this panic might go on for a long time provided that it proved groundless in the end.

‘Anything I can do?’ he asked.

‘Yes. Put the cups out. And then look to see if
anyone’s
corning back. If there’s anybody looks to be injured you can ring up the doctor. It’s Dr. Peters,
Porthmerryn
215. But we’d better make sure he’s wanted before we do that.’

She sat down and leant her elbows on the kitchen table. Her kind eyes were full of distress.

‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘I do hope nothing’s happened to them, poor little dears. They’re such funny little things, the Coves. Very old-fashioned somehow. You know … babies for their age. Well … they’ve been kept back so. They don’t know a thing about anything. They wanted to catch a lobster and feed it to the whole hotel.’

‘What for?’ asked Bruce, revelling in this genial interlude.

‘That’s just what I said. Whatever for, I said. Oh, they wanted to give a party. A feast! And ask
every
body
.
And they didn’t have any money to buy anything
so they planned to catch a lobster and asked me if I knew how to do it. Well, I said I didn’t think they could. And if they could, they couldn’t cook it. And if they could cook it, one lobster wouldn’t go far. So the little one, Maud, she said, What about the loaves and fishes? That was Jesus, I said. So then Blanche, she said, He
might
do it again for us. Just like a kid of five. So I said, you wait till Christmas and then p’raps your mother will let you give a party. But no, it seems they’ve never given a party in their lives. And they’re just mad to give one here.’

‘Poor kids! What a shame.’

‘That’s what I felt. There’s something sort of … pathetic about them, if you know what I mean. That Hebe … she ought to be smacked. Oh dear! I do hope they’re all right.’

‘Sure to be,’ consoled Bruce. ‘Duff Siddal’s gone. He’s a fine swimmer. They’ll be all right.’

‘I could easily get some lobsters. And I could cook ’em. And I thought p’raps Mrs. Siddal would let me make some jelly. I could get some cream too, and I’ve still got some sweet points. It does seem a shame they shouldn’t have their feast, poor little loves.’

‘I’ve got all my sweet points,’ said Bruce. ‘They could have them. And there are peaches in Porthmerryn. I would like to help.’

‘They could ask the little Giffords, and make quite a party of it … if … if they get home all right. Oh dear!’

‘Don’t worry. Have a cig. It’ll all come right.’

Poor Bruce pulled a packet of Player’s Weights out of his pocket, and the truce was over. He did not know what he had done wrong, but he saw her expression change.

‘No thanks,’ she said coldly.

‘Nancibel!’

He got up and tried to go round the table to her, but she waved him off, saying drearily:

‘It’s no use. I can’t ever feel any different to what I do feel, Bruce. But this isn’t a proper time for us to quarrel and be angry. There’s other things more
important
than our affairs. P’raps we’d better look out and see if anyone’s coming.’

Bruce took some comfort, as well he might, in the allusion to ‘our affairs’. It seemed to admit some tie between them, and he was not absolutely without hope of winning her round.

He followed her into the garden where a glimpse of the boat coming into the creek put an end to their anxieties. With cries of relief they ran to the slip-way to help the party ashore.

Blanche and Beatrix, the most nearly drowned of the Coves, were sufficiently restored to be getting a severe lecture from Hebe upon their want of resource.

‘You just went down like stones,’ she was saying. ‘If you couldn’t swim you could have floated. If I hadn’t gone in …’

Gerry told her to hold her tongue. They would all have been drowned if he had not brought the boat in close to the rock, when he saw what they were going to do.

‘Oh, I could have managed quite well without the boat,’ boasted Hebe airily, ‘if I hadn’t had three
fatheads
to save at once.’

She had had a shattering fright, and she was trying to work it off.

‘You saved nobody,’ said Gerry severely. ‘You had to be saved yourself.’

‘And you gave more trouble than anyone,’ said
Evangeline
, ‘You struggled. The Coves had the sense not to.’

Gerry looked at her anxiously, for her voice had an overtone of exhaustion. He was still transported with amazement at her courage and judgment during the critical five minutes. She had gone into the sea at the very moment when the Coves had jumped, and as she dived she told him to take the boat back. He saw what she meant. She was afraid that the current might carry
them all past him and that he would never catch them up. So he raced round in a wide circle and picked up Maud, who was floating. Then he came in to meet Evangeline. She had got Blanche by the hair and Beatrix by one foot, but could do no more than hold on to them until he came up. Hebe was carried right past the boat and they had to chase her. She could swim a little but lost her head and sank as the boat came up, so that Evangeline had to go in again to fetch her. He had been obliged to allow it, for no one else could manage the boat, but he very much disliked taking the safer rôle, and he had been furious when she was forced to go in a second time. If it had not been for her persistence, her intrepidity and her accuracy in gauging the direction of the current, he would have been helpless. Not a word had passed between them, from the moment she went in, but he had always managed to meet her at the point for which she was making, and he felt that her sense had been as valuable as her courage.

‘You’re all in,’ he said. ‘You must have a hot drink the moment we get back, and go to bed with a hot bottle.’

She looked up and met, for the first time in her life, a glance of unqualified admiration. It was so new and so agreeable that she smiled broadly, as if he was handing her a prize.

‘Danger,’ said Hebe, ‘is good for people.’

This was really too much for Gerry.

‘You don’t know very much about it, do you?’ he said. ‘You’ve had less of it than most of us. You were kept in cotton wool in America, weren’t you, while the Coves went all through the London Blitz?’

Hebe grew pale with mortification.

The boat bumped up against the slip-way where Bruce and Nancibel were waiting. Maud, when lifted out, could walk, but Blanche and Beatrix had to be carried. Bruce took one and Nancibel the other, while Gerry helped Evangeline on to dry land.

‘I haven’t said … I haven’t begun to say … how wonderful you were,’ he told her. ‘Go along, Hebe. Go into the house.’

‘Why should I?’ protested Hebe. ‘I don’t need hot drinks and hot bottles. I’m not frightened of a little sea water.’

‘You need a whipping,’ declared Evangeline fiercely.

For it was too bad of this horrible child to spoil
everything
and interrupt Gerry just when he was saying such delightful things.

‘That’s very old-fashioned,’ said Hebe. ‘Modern parents don’t whip their children.’

‘Perhaps not. But modern children aren’t generally quite as spoilt and pampered as you are.’

‘Pampered?’ howled Hebe. ‘I am
not.
I am not pampered. I am not pampered. I am not pampered. I can’t help it if they adopted me so Caroline shouldn’t get an only child compress. I’m a homeless waif. I’m a bastard.’

Gerry and Evangeline were obliged to laugh, but they went into the house with the delightful things unsaid and with little charity in their hearts for Hebe.

‘You wouldn’t think it, to look at her, would you?’ said Miss Ellis.

‘Yes, I would,’ said Anna. ‘It’s exactly what I’d think. The first time I ever saw her, when she made that scene in church, I said to myself that girl is a
nymphomaniac
. I know all the signs. But how do you know it’s Gerry Siddal she’s meeting?’

‘Fred,’ said Miss Ellis. ‘I asked him if he’d heard anything in the stables last night—anybody coming in late, I mean.’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Anna smoothly. ‘You would be anxious to know about that.’

Miss Ellis gave her a sharp look and continued:

‘Poor Fred complained he couldn’t sleep at all. Such a racket going on! First there was your chauffeur; he came in and got shut in that awful camp bed. And then it was Gerry. He’d been on the tiles too. So I put two and two together. I knew her bed hadn’t been slept in, and I didn’t think it was the chauffeur somehow.’

‘Fascinating,’ agreed Anna. ‘Hullo! They’re all coming back. It must have been a false alarm.’

The panic party from the cliff was strolling back across the beach. Well in advance came Fred, not because he was in any hurry to get back to his work but because he wanted to be first with the news and to startle the few people who had remained at Pendizack. He had quite a little success with Anna and Miss Ellis, for they had been talking so eagerly that they had not seen the boat go past to the creek, and knew nothing of the rescue. Fred, who liked news to be bad, made it as little of a rescue as he could.

‘They’ve just brought the bodies in,’ he said solemnly. ‘See the boat? It’s gone round to the creek.’

‘Bodies?’ cried Anna and Miss Ellis.

They had not understood that there was any serious danger, and they were both shocked.

‘The Cove kids,’ explained Fred,’ and Hebe. S’awful!’

‘But not drowned? Not dead?’ cried Anna.

Fred breathed heavily and said:

‘They’re trying that artificial prespiration.’

There was a gloomy pause, broken by Anna.

‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘What a bloody nice holiday!’

Turning abruptly, she went through the garden and up the drive, away from the stricken house. She caught a bus at the cross roads into Porthmerryn where she sought the bar at the Marine Parade.

Miss Ellis pursued Fred into the house asking for details. But he could tell her no more.

‘But where’s their mothers?’ demanded Miss Ellis. ‘Do they know? Were they there? Has anybody broken it to them?’

Fred shook his head. Neither Lady Gifford nor Mrs. Cove had been up on the cliff, that he did know.

‘Lady Gifford’s asleep in her room,’ said Miss Ellis eagerly. ‘Had no idea of it probably. Somebody really ought …’