The Shadow (25 page)

She felt the heat coming up into her face. So far, what she had said to him had in some measure been rehearsed. At least she had known that her anxiety about possible police action would seem real and authentic—for indeed it was. But how to go on from that to find out what really did happen by the falls pool she had had no idea, though she had hoped that the conversation would of itself provide a way; for this, of course, was the information she really wanted. After all, if questioned by the police, Nan would have to give her own story in simple truth about the finding of the dead body irrespective of what anyone else may have said. To have Adam's version would be reassuring—nothing more. When she had put her hand on the gear lever she had realised the impossibility of even hinting at the information she wanted; indeed, with some sense of relief, was prepared to drive away. And suddenly, in a flash, she was cornered, with reddening face and restless glance.

“Well,” she replied, smiling awkwardly, “if you—if you have anything else to tell me—I should be very glad to hear it.” She was aware of his brown eyes on her face like feelers.

“That's what you really wanted to know?”

Involuntarily she nearly asked: What do you mean? but repressed it in time. Then she brought her eyes to meet his. “Yes,” she said.

He smiled slowly and showed that he rather liked her face. Speculatively he asked, withdrawing his eyes, “How much do you know?”

“Nothing,” she answered.

His eyes flashed on her instantly, and after a moment he said, “So that's the way?” This seemed to amuse him in a dawning way that ran deep. He stirred. “This is a noisy contraption,” he said.

“Yes, it's an old engine. If you like——”

“Are you in a hurry?”

“No. I have done my business in town.”

“When they brought me in from the shepherd's house they left my painting gear behind.”

“It would be very simple for me to run out for it now. Shall we?” She caught the gear lever.

“All right.”

They set off. The police inspector was standing at the corner of the street where they turned right towards the mountains.

“He made sure he saw us,” observed Adam.

“You think this will complicate matters still further?” remarked Aunt Phemie almost solemnly.

He glanced at her with appreciation and lines of laughter deepened silently. “They just don't know what to make of me. Damn them, you would think a man mustn't have a mind of his own!” He added, “They pry.”

“They do,” she said, assailed by a wild impulse to laugh.

“I was tired, muddled. I said to that police inspector: ‘Aw, get to hell out of this.' I don't think he appreciated it.” Laughter came out of him in one or two barks.

Sobered, she felt like a young girl who wasn't too sure yet where she was. She was beginning to understand Nan's perverse interest in Adam. He seemed so abnormally natural that he could be, she thought, terrifying. They were now driving through open rising country with farm steadings near the road and croft houses up on the slopes. They crossed and recrossed the Altfey, and presently were leaving the cultivated land behind. He was completely absorbed in the lie and look of things. “I like this spot,” he said.

“You would know it as a boy?”

“Yes.” And then, as though belatedly appreciating her remark, turned his head. “You run pretty deep, I'm thinking.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. If he didn't tell you anything—how did you find out?”

“Find out what?”

His brows instantly gathered. “Don't tear it,” he said, warningly.

She had known instantly she had made a mistake; she must be completely frank or shut up. This was disturbingly refreshing, even exciting in its strange bewilderment. “All I know,” she said, “I learned from the postman the following day. That's all I know.”

“He
said nothing?”

“No.”

He studied her face for a moment. “How then did you learn he was the one?”

“I didn't learn.”

“You just knew?”

“Well—yes.”

He laughed. “Good!” he said. “It's the kind of knowledge I like.” He looked around the countryside. The road was deteriorating rapidly to grass and ruts. She saw the shepherd's cottage up on the slope to the left and then had to stop for a gate.

He made no effort to get out. “I just couldn't stand the bastard and hit him. What was in his mind was sticking out a mile. It came at me—Hell, I just suddenly couldn't bear it.” He brought a fist in across his stomach.

She took a couple of breaths. “Did you know who he was?”

“Yes. I knew at once. He had been nosing about the town. He asked a policeman where I stayed. But it wasn't that. That he might be out to get me—well, all right! Fine! But God, that way of coming, that theoretic questioning deadly way—that almighty logical—aw to hell! And all the time, by God, behind it all—the cold death instinct. Don't tell me! I've seen enough of it.”

Aunt Phemie sat still.

He glanced sideways at her after the sharpness of his emotion had subsided. “You think I exaggerate?” he suggested with the ironic humour in which there is no smile.

“Yes,” she replied simply.

“Of course!” He threw up a hand. “I'm only telling you how it happened. I thought you wanted to know.” He saw the gate and got out. “You can turn in there on the green and I'll go up to the house.” He opened the gate and walked away.

Aunt Phemie turned the car, stopped the engine, and let her hands fall dead in her lap. “Well!” she said. Thought would not focus. Her head turned to follow his figure through the back window of the car. Her body twisted round so that she could keep on following it. He reached the door. A woman appeared. He went into the house.

Aunt Phemie faced round again. He was alive like something charged with electricity. He was like a spoiled child that had come through its fears and frustrations, through its angers and selfishness, to an amazing condition of wilfulness which would not tolerate anything but a vivid real state of being. Once his hands had moved in front of him in a sort of swimming gesture, as if clearing things away, films and obstructions, webs. And towards the end he had grown inwardly excited; the breath swelled his chest, and his brown skin had caught underneath a coldness of rime. She needed no more words to explain what had happened at the falls pool. His apperception of Ranald had been flawless and devastating. What was she to think? to do? What about Nan? But she could not think and was staring through the windscreen when the movement of his figure made her jump. He opened a rear door and dropped his gear on the floor, then he got in beside her.

“Everything all right?” she asked.

“No,” he answered laconically. “The wet paint got smudged. I have lost a couple of tubes of paint too.”

“Would you like to have a look for them?”

“Aw,” he said, pursing his lips, “it doesn't matter.”

“It's no trouble as far as I'm concerned,” she assured him in a matter-of-fact voice.

“Well——” He still hesitated. Something seemed to have annoyed him. “All right. It's half-a-mile up.”

“I'll come with you, if you like.”

As they set off, she said sensibly, “I have never actually seen the falls, so it's an outing for me.”

“They're worth seeing,” he said, “though I couldn't tell you why.”

She remained silent.

“I can't paint. Though something may come out of it,” he concluded. After a few seconds, he added, “You have a gift of discreet silence.”

“Sometimes it may be necessary.”

He laughed and Aunt Phemie said no more. Suddenly he stopped. “That's pretty good, isn't it?”

Aunt Phemie looked up the gorge, with its outlines, birches, and glimpses of tumbling water. “Yes.” She nodded. “For me it is not too big to lose its intimacy.”

He turned his face and considered her. “I believe that's what it is.”

“In Switzerland or the Tyrol,” said Aunt Phemie calmly, “you get bulk and picturesqueness. It may be thrilling and all that, but somehow you can't enter into it.”

“You can't have it under your feet?”

“Perhaps,” said Aunt Phemie doubtfully.

“To feel free, man must dominate?”

“No,” answered Aunt Phemie at once and positively. “You can become part of this and still be yourself, only more full of—intimacy, of love of it. You don't want to dominate it. That's the very mood that does
not
arise.” Her cheek bones got whipped with colour.

They came to the falls pool and he searched about the cleared ground but found nothing. “That's where I went over.” He looked over the ledge and studied the pool. “I was so astonished that I took in water—and I'm quite a good swimmer. I was so flummoxed that I remember clawing at the rock like a silly animal. I don't remember how I did the last yard or two. Like the hen that runs round when you have drawn its neck.” He glanced sideways at her.

“Where was Ranald?” she asked.

“Lying there. I got my knee in his stomach.”

“He pushed you over?”

“No. I was so pleased at having doubled him up that I forgot where I was and stepped back—and over—by mistake.”

“So he didn't——” She stared at him.

“No. He tried his damnedest to punch me over, but failed.” There was a real if withering humour in his face, a satisfaction.

“He left you to drown?”

“Well——” He shrugged. “He meant to drown me—as I meant to drown him. Looking from the ledge there I should say he thought I was well and truly sunk.”

She turned away from him and began walking back. Presently she sat down.

“Feeling a bit sick?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said coldly.

He left her, going back towards the pool. She lay over against the hillside. Deeper than her sudden feeling of nausea was an utter hopeless despair. It had little to do with any individual in particular; something was swimming in below and choking life itself. Vile, awful, terrible. This wasn't the awfulness of despair she had known once. This was vile. It spread over all life, crawling, choking everything, every thought and hope, everything.

Presently she got some control of this mood which had so blindly assailed her and sat up. Then she arose and began walking down the path. As she rounded a bend, she saw him standing away in front, his head over his shoulder, watching her approach. How he had got there she had no idea, for he hadn't passed her on the path. There was something startling about this, but she was too weary to let it trouble her. He turned his face away and strolled slowly on so that she might overtake him.

She tried not to look at his body, but saw it, the legs, the length of his jacket, his hair and his neck. He stood to one side, his head slightly tilted, a smile on his face, in his eyes.

“I got one of the tubes,” he said. He held it out on his palm.

She acknowledged it in an indifferent way.

He glanced quickly at her and went on, stepping sometimes off the path in order to give her plenty of room. “I have told you now all I know,” he said. “More than I told the inspector.” That amused him but in an attractive way, as though he were being delicately thoughtful, prepared now to give her every consideration. It was quite plain that he had come to a decision about her, that in fact he liked her.

This did not interest her. She now just did not care about him at all. Weariness had washed her body and left it spent.

“I agree with you, of course, about the intimacy,” he said. “Only it's not so easy when you want to—get at it.”

“No?” she said, keeping going, but up through the indifference had come a subtle inflection of scorn.

“There was I trying to get the sucking whirls of the pool as if the whole glen was sucked in there to its own peculiar death. But all the time I was aware of—the intimacy. I knew it didn't get sucked in. At least … I know now.”

She offered no comment.

“Farmers' wives are not usually so perceptive,” he suggested.

“You seem to know,” she said, lifting her eyes in search of the shepherd's cottage.

“I'm afraid I have offended you.” He glanced at her, his eyes bright with a mirth in which there was an extraordinary tentative quality like shyness.

“No,” she answered coldly. “You haven't offended me. You have merely shown me something utterly beastly.”

He did not take this amiss. On the contrary, he looked now more than ever as if he would like to propitiate her. He even remained silent. They walked towards the car. He stepped forward quickly and opened the door for her, shut it and stepped round the car; by the time he got in beside her the engine was running and the gear lever waiting.

They drove in silence. In the mirror near the top of the windscreen she glimpsed his face looking slyly round at her. It not only contained a suppressed humour but also something else more alive. She realised that, given half a chance, he would make advances to her. Age did not matter. It was an intimacy, an understanding, the hidden movement of the spirit that delighted him, that was the sort of air in which he could breathe and live. He wanted this. Yet because the moment was genuine, he would not intrude. The speed of the car increased.

She was aware that he knew why the speed increased better than she did. An anger began to grow in her. She deliberately looked at the farmsteadings which they passed. Within ten minutes they were in town. A policeman seemed to be, somewhat indefinitely, on point duty. “I'll get out here,” Adam said all at once as if he had seen someone. She immediately drew up. “I should like,” he said, before closing his door, “to see you again.”

She bowed, her eyes on the policeman. The door slammed and she stuck out an arm; the policeman waved her round the corner. Only as she was approaching her own farm road did it strike her that his gear was in behind. She drew up. Yes, it was there. Ignoring it, she sat and tried to think.