The Wind and the Spray (5 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

THE HOUSE was built on old lines ... a long hall, rooms each side of the hall, a completely encircling verandah rather like the brim round a hat.

Laurel liked the direct honesty of it at once, but she could imagine how a young and impressionable girl, educated probably in a fashionable boarding school on the mainland and knowing other types of houses, her friends’ houses, contemporary houses with terraces and patios, with rooms blending into each other rather than facing squarely across a wide straight hall, might dislike rather than love this place.

Boys were different. They clung to old loyalties. They were also less sensitive as to being as modern and smart as the next.

She believed that Nathalie included dislike of this old house in her dislike of Humpback Island. She
knew
Nor Larsen included it in his love.

She was suddenly aware that Larsen was looking at her
...
probing for her reaction to the place. She turned her head away and marched behind Peter and the little girls down the hall.

It was not like other halls she had trodden, it had the tang of brine in it, it was full of the sound of the sea, and because the doors were wide open at front and back there was wind in it, and spray.

I like it ... I
like
it, she thought.

Mummy Reed was pouring tea in a big kitchen, at least the range indicated it was a kitchen, but there was also a bookcase, a sewing machine, a sofa, an easy chair, a table full of clams and old lobster markers to which the little girls ran and placed a singing shell to each small pink ear.

“They never,” observed Peter, “get tired of that. Laurel, this is Mrs. Reed, Mummy Reed; Mummy Reed, Laurel Teal.”

Mrs. Reed said eagerly, “I’m real glad you’re here, dear,” and Laurel thought they were the sweetest words she had heard.

The little girls apparently could have existed as well without her, for Peter Blake had admitted she was the result of a scheme that had gone awry, and to Nor Larsen obviously she was a self-inflicted imposition and nothing else.

But Mummy Reed’s welcome was genuine. Her old eyes shone happily and she put her arms around Laurel s shoulders and gave her a hug.

“You’re needing this, no doubt,” she said at last, releasing Laurel, pointing to the steaming tea, the laden plates of buttered toast, the dishes of blackberry jam.

Nor had already started. He had sandwiched two thick slices of toast and jam together and poured a strong black brew. He did not sit down to eat, he went and stood at the window
...
the window, Laurel noticed, facing the south, and the whaling station.

“
Clytie
been out?” he fired at Blake. “Did Mills adjust the marker-buoy? Did you get on to Thompson as I told you to attend the ramp up to the flensing deck?”

Peter said “Yes” to all three in a satisfactory if unenthusiastic manner. He looked across at Laurel. “When I asked you had you seen Nathalie just now you said ‘Not officially.’ Does that mean you saw her in the
Merchant
before you left?”

“Yes.”

“How did you consider her?”

“Really excellent. I thought she—”

“Finished, Peter?” broke in Nor without apology. “There are a few things I want to look into. Bring your book.” He strode out. With a grimace, Peter went as well.

Mrs. Reed poured more tea, plied more toast and blackberry. “Now we can talk,” she smiled.

The little girls remained glued to the singing shells. Laurel looked at the door through which the men had gone, at Mrs. Reed, at the children. I’m a pawn, she thought. Peter Blake did not intend using me as such, but Nor Larsen had only that idea right from the first. He has slammed me down on his chessboard in answer to Peter’s move; I’m just a man to him
...
no, less really than that, I’m a woman. There is nothing less to Nor Larsen than a woman. He has told me as much.

It did not satisfy her pride and her pride in her work that she had been employed merely to help a player take a trick. There was more to a job than money, she thought, there was self-fulfilment, the warm, rounded knowledge of a task well done. But there could be no fulfilment here, no warm rounded knowledge, for the simple reason that there was no task to perform.

Laurel pushed her plate aside. She felt suddenly inadequate because she was so patently unessential in this place. As she did so Mrs. Reed said contentedly, “I can’t tell you, dear, how much I’ve wanted this.”

“Wanted this?” Laurel’s eyes sought the old housekeeper’s in enquiry.

Mrs. Reed’s answer was very simple. “Someone for Nor,” she said.

“I don’t understand you, Mrs. Reed. I hope you don’t think
...
don’t imagine ... I mean—”

All at once she felt herself flushing.

“Look,” she continued painfully but determinedly, “I applied to Mr. Kittey for a job and I got this job, and that’s all there is to it—except, as far as I can see, there’s no job at all.”

“There’s plenty to do,” Mrs. Reed assured her. Either intentionally or unintentionally she did not continue in the other strain, and Laurel, weakly or wisely she did not know, did not follow it up.

“Have you been here long, Mummy Reed?” she asked. “Before the children were born.”

“These children?” Laurel looked at the little heads bent over the shells.

“These children’s mother and uncle, dear. My husband and I came over to help the Larsens. We were here when Nor and Nathalie were bo
rn
, bo
rn
in this very house. It was an old house then, it’s very old now. Too old. I keep telling Nor that. It wall fall one day. But he takes no notice. I expect he loves it. I also expect he has other things to spend the money on.

“When we came, Tim and I, we planned to serve only a short term and save every penny to buy a little business back home, only this became home instead, and apart from shopping trips across, we never went back again.”

Mummy Reed looked through the kitchen window up to one of the shallow rolling hills and said quietly, “Now I shall never go back.”

“Your husband never went back?” Laurel asked equally as quietly.

“He is up there, with Nor’s father and mother, grandfather and grandmother, all of his forebears who did not die in the sea. It was a dangerous livelihood then. It still is. That’s why I’m glad that
—
I mean
—
well
—”

This time Laurel could see that Mrs. Reed’s change in topic
was
intentional.

Quickly, too quickly, the old lady said, “There’s a lot to do. I need help in the house, the children need someone to take them to the beach, make dolls’ clothes
...
My dear
!”

For Laurel was laughing in spite of her chagrin. Before her father had died he had had Laurel trained, undoubtedly in the knowledge that she was to be the future mainstay, in an expensive and very thorough secretarial school. Only completely efficient graduates left the school’s portals. It said so on an engraved diploma. “This Certificate Declares,” Laurel now thought humorously, “that the abovementioned can wash up, lay table, pack a picnic hamper and sew a doll’s dress.”

She laughed again
...
seeing it all written in a letter to make Davey laugh. What did it all matter, she thought resignedly, so long as there was money for David? What did it matter if Mrs. Reed secretly believed that her beloved Nor had chosen Laurel for something other than he had?

She liked Mrs. Reed. She liked Peter. She felt quite confident that she would get on with the children. She liked Humpback Island, she believed. Nothing could be perfect. The only pity was that the most important person so far as she was concerned, or rather so far as her employment was concerned, had to be the one imperfection and the one flaw, that it had to be
him
.

Mrs. Reed was looking at her anxiously, and impulsively Laurel leaned across and squeezed her hand.

“We’ll get on fine,” she promised.

“I know we will. I’m an old woman now. Not just that, dear, but a very tired old woman as well.” The glance went up the hill
...
came back to Laurel again.

“The children need you. There are no other children on Hump. There have been some, but the families left.”

“After Mrs. Blake left?” Laurel was remembering Nor’s bitter words.

“Well—yes. It only follows
.
I expect Nathalie could have made up a little society of women, of young mothers. She didn’t. She couldn’t stand it so she went. It spread discontent, I expect.”

“So it wasn’t”—Laurel was still recalling Nor and his contempt of his sister’s talent—“the call of the theatre that really took Mrs. Blake?”

“Nathalie was always good at acting, but it’s not her life blood like I’ve heard it is with some. I’ve no doubt she’s acting being an actress right now just to ge
t
her way.”—Mrs. Reed, Laurel smiled, was a shrewd old lady indeed.

All the same, her sympathies still lay with Nathalie Blake, with Nathalie’s reason for doing what she had.

“It’s not such a big thing to ask, surely,” Laurel argued, “to have one’s husband and one’s children by one’s side.”

“Nor believes a wife should be by a husband’s side.”

“If the husband is not where he wants to be?” persisted Laurel. “If he is not happily situated?”

“Nor pays him a large salary,” reminded Mummy Reed gently. “Nor is never mean.”

“No,” agreed Laurel, “I know that.”

T
h
ere
was a little silence.

“Anyway,” smiled the old lady, “all’s well that ends well.”

Laurel searched her mind and decided rather blankly that apart from reminding Mummy Reed that nothing was ended yet she had nothing to reply, nothing at all.

She followed the housekeeper down the long hall full of brine and wind and spray to her room. It was large, with large windows, and simply furnished in unpainted wood. One of the large windows framed the low rolling hills with their clearings of plantations, one framed the sea.

There were white muslin curtains, straight-hanging for all the fresh wind. “It’s the salt” Mummy Reed explained.

From those brief breaks in the craggy coast, those little creamy beaches, came the perpetual pattern of surf
...
crash of breaker, swirl, soft withdrawal, crash and swirl again.

It enticed Laurel. She decided to unpack only what she needed at once, and to take the children down there. She told Mummy Reed, and the old lady beamed.

Laurel put on the jeans she had worn on the
Leeward
and called the little girls.

They were ready at once, of course. Nor Larsen had said that here they always wore pants.

Holding a hand of each and clambering over rough ground, Laurel decided a few minutes later that pants were the only possible apparel.

“I’m twenty-old,” proffered Jill. “How old are you?”

“Older than that.”

“A very old lady! You don’t look a very old lady.”

“She looks seven,” said Meredith. “Mummy is seven. So is Mummy Reed.”

“Not seventy,” suggested Laurel of Mummy Reed.

“She might be. I know she has tired old bones and wants to go with Tim. Tim’s up on the hill. We put flowers there sometimes, with Mummy Reed. Daddy is five-old, and Uncle Nor is twelve.”

“Luke is two hundred million,” said Meredith. “He told me so. He gets coughs in the winter and almost dies, he says. When we do our prayers at night we always ask God to make it hot for Luke.”

“So,” explained Jill, “he won’t almost die again.”

They were on the beach by this time. Sands, creamy as co
rn
, edged with the silver of sea-poppy, were soft under their feet. Above them gulls mocked and laughed and made swirling patterns in the air.

To the south, the whaling station stretched itself by its particular strip of coast, rather like a sleeping animal by its lair, the jutting jetties its claws.

Two masts of boats were etched like bare trunks of winter trees against the sky. Laurel wondered where was the new boat that Nor Larsen was building. She interrupted a sand-castle contest to enquire.

“Over there.” Jill waved to the north.

“How does your uncle get there?”

“In the jeep. There are roads on Hump. Great-Grandy Larsen made them, Uncle Nor says. We don’t like the jeep. It’s too dirty and rough. In Sydney Town there are
motor cars with
cushion
seats. Did you know that, Laurel? We saw them once, didn’t we, Dith?”

Meredith did not answer. She had found some birds’ eggs. “I’ll take them home to cook.”

Laurel appealed on behalf of the mother bird, said sentimentally how the mummy would miss her bird babies, but Jill advised more practically, “Don’t do it, Dith, you know last time you carried eggs you breaked them.”

“I did not so,” protested Meredith. “Only the shells came off.”

They were easy children to manage, decided Laurel. Almost she could have wished that they were difficult. That at least would have been a challenge, she thought.

She glanced at her watch and wondered whether she should suggest returning to the house. At that moment Jill said firmly, “We all go home for dinner. Nor says so.” Her tone said clearly that that was that.

The Dynasty, thought Laurel a little wryly, following the girls back to the cottage again, the Kingdom of Humpback Island, the House of Larsen.

It seemed it was really the House of Larsen when she entered that kitchen again. Nor sat at the head of the table, Peter, Meredith and herself on one side, Mummy Reed and Jill on the other. Nobody was at the foot, but that did not matter. A Larsen sat at the head.

When the meal was over, Laurel followed the big rock of a man into the hall.

“If you didn’t require me this afternoon, I thought I’d unpack.”

“Require you?” he echoed a little blankly. “Of course not.”

She flushed slightly.

“I
am
an employee, remember?” she pointed out, piqued at his indifference.

“Yes, but you might remember I’m not your employer. Peter asked for you, I simply transacted the deal, that’s all.”

“Does Peter Blake pay me?”

“Look here, so long as you’re paid what does it matter to you?”

“It matters a lot. I like to give my money’s worth. I know I can help Mrs. Reed, but—”

“No need for that. She has island help with the actual chores.”

“I know I can help,” persisted Laurel, ignoring the interruption, “but I must have something else besides that, besides helping Mrs. Reed I mean, standing in.”

“Standing in?”

“For the children’s mother. The red hair,” Laurel said.

He took out the makings and rolled a cigarette. He did it leisurely.

“Bored already?” he asked.

“You really are an impossible man,” she flung, irritated.

“And you really are an unimaginative woman if you have to be told every move,” he came back.

“Where
can
I move?” She demanded in return. “There’s only the house, the jetty beneath it, the beach.”

“Claustrophobia?”

“No, a natural impulse to see what’s round me.”

“Anything particular?”

“I’d like to see”—she paused—“the whole island. I’d like to see the whaling station.” She had been about to say ‘I’d like to see your new boat’, but boats, she sensed intrinsically, for all their being man-made, had character and a soul. You could not intrude, unasked, uninvited, on a boat.

His eyes had flicked alertly as she said ‘the whaling station.’

“It’s no shopping excursion,” he warned her, “No social outing.”

“I’d like to see it,” she repeated.

“Then you’ll go tomorrow.”

“The girls?”

“They did all right before you came; they’ll do the same now.”

“Yes,” she said a little bitterly, “I’ve discovered as much.”

He regarded her a moment as though he would say something, then he shrugged and left it at that.

“Some people,” he stated idly, “find tasks for themselves, discover some sort of niche.”

He picked up some book-keeping journals and turned on his heel. At the door he looked back and regarded her again.

“I have no particular objection,” he patronized loftily, “if you do that, Miss Teal.”

“Very well,” nodded Laurel, “I shall endeavour to. Thank you.” Then she put her lips firmly together. For almost she had been about to say, “Thank you,
king
.”