The Lily Hand and Other Stories (25 page)

When we reached the cottage she asked me to come in, and I wouldn't, because I was chary of bringing all that water into her mother's house; but also because it gave me an opportunity to ask if we could meet again next day, instead. She said yes, and I knew she was glad, and all the way back to the hotel room where I shed my soaked clothes I was in a kind of wary dream, conscious of the danger of waking, and the necessity for walking and even breathing with infinite delicacy, not to puncture the thin shell of sleep that kept such delight possible.

I saw her again next day, and the next, and now that the wind had dropped, and the sun came out over a placid sea, Lucy appeared to me more ordinary, more accessible, but not less wonderful nor less to be desired. On the seventh day I asked her to marry me, shaking with nervousness, because I was no great catch for any girl, and her happiness seemed to me so vulnerable that I was terrified of touching, much less taking, her. She drew herself against me in the sun-warmed grass on the cliff-top, and wound her arms round me, and said yes, she loved me, yes, she would marry me. And suddenly she said, against my cheek:

‘Take me away to your inland town. Take me away from the sea!' Quite softly and thoughtfully, while the sea sparkled and basked innocently among the rocks three hundred feet below us.

‘The very thing that frightened me most,' I said, startled, ‘was that you wouldn't want to go. I've got the offer of a job in a school there, but you love the sea so much, and I was afraid—'

She put her hand over my lips, and said again: ‘Yes, I want to go, I want you to take me away.' And when I asked her why, she said: ‘I love you, and I don't want to have to share myself out between you and the sea. I want to be only with you.'

I promised her, gladly. Her saying she wanted it could have made me embrace a far worse fate than teaching English in a school in a dim little town. And the sea never said anything then, only lay sleepily babbling to itself among the rock pools, and ignoring us, so it seemed no one had any complaint about our future, and no one wanted to interfere with us.

I went to see her mother, and break the news to her. There wasn't any father, Mrs Hillier was a widow. She was Cornish born and bred, a small, elderly, competent creature so unlike Lucy that my imagination could make no connection between them. Mr Hillier had been a well-to-do fisherman, with his own boats and this house, and Mrs Hillier was exactly the relict of such a man; and where did Lucy come in, if this was all? But it seemed that Lucy wasn't theirs, she was a foundling they'd taken in and reared because they had none of their own. At least that made her credible.

‘You ought to know it,' said Mrs Hillier, ‘though it's never made any difference with us, and I don't suppose it will with you. Hillier found her among his nets on the beach one morning, all wrapped up in a blanket. Just a young baby, she was. We took her in, though, of course, we had to tell the police, and the County Council people. But they never found out whose she was, or anything about her, so in time we adopted her legally. Some poor local girl's child, I expect. It happens everywhere. Though I never could see any resemblance to any of the folks round here, I must say.'

I didn't pay much attention, all I felt was a kind of satisfaction, because this story made things more comprehensible to me; and it was only a loving curiosity about everything connected with Lucy that prompted me to put even the questions she expected. About the answers I no longer cared at all, except to resolve to love Lucy more for her solitariness and strangeness, and be parents and brother to her as well as husband and lover. I was relieved, too, that Mrs Hillier was ready to let her go with so little fuss.

‘I'm only sorry about taking her so far away from you,' I said apologetically. ‘I know how fond of her you must be.'

She looked at me with a startling calm, and said: ‘Well, to tell the truth, though I have cared for her like a daughter, I've never let her get inside me too much. Somehow it never seemed safe to be too fond of her.'

‘I understand,' I said, really believing I did. ‘She's so lovely that sooner or later she was bound to be taken away from you.' And I thought that Lucy's not being her own flesh and blood had made it easier for her to keep her heart armed against that inevitable time.

‘That's right,' said Mrs Hillier. ‘I always felt that sometime she'd go.'

A month later we were married. What is there to be told about a happy marriage? Nothing could have been less exciting, on the face of it, than the quiet, contented life we led at the small public school where I taught, about as far inland as you can get in this sea-haunted cluster of islands. We adored each other, and it was excitement enough to be together, always assured of each other, and always newly startled by our own happiness. She grew softer, plumper, all her sudden lines of face and body mellowed into a golden serenity that lasted three years.

I had begun to write again, and had one play running in London, one about to be produced, and one in the writing. I felt in my bones that the second one was headed for more than a success of esteem, and when it finally saw the light the results more than justified me. I had already decided to risk giving up my job, and give all my time to writing, even before we had word of the sudden death of Mrs Hillier; but that made the decision easier for us, because she had left us the cottage by the harbour. There we could not only save the rent, but live more cheaply in other ways, too. We never hesitated; it seems incredible, now, but there was nothing to make us hesitate, nothing. In three years we had grown into such a unity, such a fused and final security, that we could not even remember how it felt to walk precariously among the perils and terrors of love. We had forgotten that the sea had ever had anything to say to us.

It was like that, no tremor in the placidity of our happiness, for at least a month after we settled in the white cottage. The weather was calm, late summer, with the sun drowsing day after day over a lazy, pacific sea. I wrote and wrote, and we walked and gardened, and re-painted our little house, and were happy.

Late in September, the wind began to rise, and this sleepy cat of a sea got up and clawed the cliffs, and for seven days lashed itself into a temper, until the night of the storm. I was working and had hardly noticed the mounting gusts that pulled at the walls, or the crescendo of the surf raking the beach, until suddenly the papers were plucked from under my hands by a great swirl of wind that blew through the living room, and the ceiling light swung in a wild arc, and the coldness of the night struck me like a breaking wave. The invasion stung me instantly into terror, and still I don't know why. I jumped to my feet, the pages of the play spinning round me, my hair erect in the gale.

Lucy had opened the window wide. She was standing there leaning into the twilight, with the spray blowing over her, and her face lifted to the screaming wind; and when I plunged to her side she turned a glittering face upon me, and cried:

‘Listen, darling! Listen to the sea!'

I hadn't seen until then how she had begun to change. She was already thinner, and her look and movements were bright and strange and urgent, full of a secret excitement that rose with the cries of the sea and the demoniac voices of the blown gulls, tumbling and drifting under the cliff. I pulled her away by the waist, and got the window closed, and held her clutched in my arms with the force of a fear I could not understand myself. Her black hair was wet, it clung to the delicate shape of her head in flat, glistening plumes. She called me silly, and said I was hurting her; and when I let go she went back to the window, and watched the darkening patterns of the spume and the rhythm of the waves breaking, with her cheek against the glass.

In the night I was afraid to sleep. I kept an arm across her shoulders, and tried to watch out the dark hours without dozing, but the clamour and crying had become a constant and drowsy thing to me, and lulled me like a pebbly river. She lay beside me hard and alert, full of a restless joy, and the beating of her heart was like the pulse of the sea, rhythmic, peremptory, irresistible. I heard her whispering in my ear, when my senses were reeling with sleep:

‘Listen, darling! Listen how it's calling!'

I awoke suddenly from an uneasy doze, and she was gone from the bed. It was the wind and the rain beating in at the open window that awoke me, and the first bleak, drowned hint of pre-dawn was tossed in with it, and spilled wet and wild over my feet as I stumbled out of bed. The curtains were streaming inward soaked with spray, the window swung wide upon the black, chaotic, sea-crying night; and Lucy was not there. Not in the room, not in the house. I felt her absence, an instant and killing pain. I ran down the stairs, crying out for her, and there was no one to answer me. The walls rang in terror and desolation: ‘Lucy, Lucy! Where are you?' but she never answered.

I tugged back the bolts of the door, and ran out into the howling dark and the rain, and the wind took my shouts, snatching them from me as I ran towards the sea. I heard from a long way off, high in the air, tossed from rock to rock: ‘Lucy!' in my own voice. The gulls were beginning to cast themselves into the wind, with their reckless, demonish delight, with their self-abandoning resignation, possessed creatures in ecstasy. My feet slithered on the cobbles at the edge of the square, the pebbles of the beach began to wrench at my ankles. The cold of the spray soaked me and chilled me to the bone, and I found myself standing in the frothing rim on the incoming tide, barefoot, crying: ‘Lucy!' into the boiling throat of the sea.

It seemed a long time that I was alone, and then to my cry the piteous scream of a gull replied, and I heard the convulsion of wings, and suddenly another cry, light and lost in the gale; and down the stony incline of the beach close to me Lucy sprang, and in the instant that I felt myself again completed by her coming, her arms were round me. It was as if she had alighted from the air. The very motion of her arms folding round me was like the folding of wings.

I snatched her up and carried her home, and all the way we were both weeping, and the wind flattened the very tears we shed into the salt coating of our cheeks. She never said a word, only clung to me, rigid, her cheek against mine. She was wet and cold and smooth as a fish, and she smelled of the sea – not the sea of harbours, but the outer sea, the depth and the greenness, the unrest and the calm. I carried her in, and stripped her drowned nightdress from her, and dried her, and laid her in the bed, and then dried myself and lay down beside her, because she clung to me so that I was afraid to separate myself from her arms, or let her for an instant out of mine. Until the true light came I held her like that, and she held me, until we grew warm together, and ceased to weep. When we were eased of the trembling, and lay quietly, I began to ask her: ‘Darling, why did you leave me like that? Where did you go? Why did you frighten me so?'

But she only began to tremble and to cry again, and wound her arms round me so desperately that I was again afraid; and all she would say was: ‘I love you, I love you! Hold me, don't let me go!' So I stopped asking her questions, for fear I should kill her, because it seemed to me that she might break into pieces.

The smell of the sea had come in with her, it filled the room. Once, as she lay in my arms, I felt her stir and rise, and her hair against my cheek brushed cold and sleek, and as she struggled for an instant against my hold her arms were hard and strenuous as wings. Then she relaxed, embraced me, sighed and slept.

When it was almost light the wind died down a little, and I drew myself out of her arms, and dressed, and went down to make tea. Only when I found myself gazing at the drawn-back bolts of the front door did I remember that I myself had pulled them back when I ran out in search of her.

It is true that there was another door at the back; but that was still bolted. And yet the house was empty of her before ever I left it.

From that moment I was afraid. I watched her steadily, hedging her up from the very sound of the sea, until she grew silent with being watched so, and her eyes were veiled and, I sometimes thought, hostile. I could not bear it, it was not possible for us to live like that.

Without asking her, I had the cottage offered for sale; and until I could take her away from it I haunted her like an enemy, like an assassin, I who loved her more than my own life. When we had an offer for the property, and I had to break the project to her, I did it with my heart in my mouth, fearful of grief and pain; but she laid her cheek against my hand and sighed, and made no difficulties. I no longer knew whether she wished to go or to stay; I think she wanted only to have the decision made for her, and to hold her mind intact, since everywhere about her was danger.

We bought, in haste, a house in an inland town again, and moved there early in November. A river town it was, double-bridged and hilly and beautiful, and from our window we had a view over the silver ring of water, and the roofs, and the meadows beyond. It was very quiet there, and out of the sound of the sea she became normal and calm again, and softened almost into the Lucy of our first happy years together. She could change very quickly. During that placid and still winter she grew rosy and easy, and seeing her taut eagerness relax I was happy, and believed in my victory. I was careful not to reflect, never to wonder; to wonder is to invite the enemy in.

Then in March came the sudden iron frost, that clanged in our narrow streets like armour, and shut down upon the river a hand of stillness and silence. All the echoes were distorted under ominous slate-grey skies; day after day the ice grew thicker on the water, and the mornings whitened and rime stood an inch long on the leeward rims of leaves, and fell, tinkling like chandeliers, when the brushing of a sleeve passed by. And in the incredible stillness of the nights Lucy would rouse a little, lying listening beside me, and whisper sharply: ‘Listen, darling!' On the breath of an excitement which seemed to me now to have no origin, to be at most a memory.