The Wind and the Spray (25 page)

He did not answer. He simply looked at her. It came to Laurel that never before he had looked at her just like this. There was a flicker of enquiry in the sailor blue eyes, a quiet demand, a gradual understanding, then a strange power so that time came hurrying, hurrying, speeding up and covering all the usual accepted preliminaries in the duration of one suspended, breathless, asking look.

Laurel was aware of nothing now
...
nothing save a sense of wonder ... a marvel at it all.

“Grow up,” he was saying in a low voice. “Grow up, little green duck.”

Down in the bay a few moments later a whale blew and the look-out man called “HVAL-BLAST!” then instantly shouted “Thumbs down, it’s Willie back again.”

Up from the bay blew the wind and the spray. It whipped their hair, it touched each face.

Down at the root of the hill the last of the storage waste swirled away
...
and with it suddenly tumbled the Larsen house. Not all of it, but most of it. There was left only the remnant of a cottage, one room, and that was all.

All at once Laurel was remembering that night before they had married, she and Nor, how she had asked this man beside her now things that had to be said.

He had made a bargain with her. He had answered to her had-to-be-saids, “Until you say.”

“There it goes,” Nor told her now. “You said it would and it has—all except one room.”

Shyly, her head turned away so he would not see the soft colour growing in her cheeks, so he had to bend his own head to catch the soft words she asked, “One is enough, isn’t it, Nor?”

He took out the makings, rolled hers, rolled his, lit both, his face near hers, his breath warm on her face.

But Laurel waited without breath herself, waited
...
waited
...

Then:

“One is enough, mate,” said Nor.

THE END