Читать книгу Dead Water - Ngaio Marsh, Stella Duffy - Страница 8

For about twenty-four hours after the event, the affair of Wally Trehern’s warts made very little impression on the Island. His parents were slugabeds: the father under the excuse that he was engaged in night-fishing and the mother without any excuse at all unless it could be found in the gin bottle. They were not a credit to the Island. Wally, who slept in his clothes, got up at his usual time, and went out to the pump for a wash. He did this because somehow or another his new teacher had fixed the idea in his head and he followed it out with the sort of behaviourism that can be established in a domestic animal. He was still little better than half-awake when he saw what had happened.

Nobody knows what goes on in the mind of a child: least of all in a mind like Wally Trehern’s where the process of thought was so sluggish as to be no more than a reflex of simple emotions: pleasure, fear or pride.

He seemed to be feeling proud when he shambled up to his teacher and, before all the school, held out his hands.

‘Why – !’ she said. ‘Why – why – Wally!’ She took both his hands in hers and looked and pressed and looked again. ‘I can’t believe it,’ she said. ‘It’s not true.’

‘Be’ant mucky,’ he said. ‘All gone,’ and burst out laughing.

The school was on the mainland but the news about Wally Trehern’s warts returned with him and his teacher to the Island. The Island was incorrectly named: it was merely a rocky blob of land at the end of an extremely brief, narrow and low-lying causeway which disappeared at full tide and whenever the seas along that coast ran high. The Island was thus no more than an extension of the tiny fishing village of Portcarrow and yet the handful of people who lived on it were accorded a separate identity as if centuries of tidal gestures had given them an indefinable status. In those parts they talked of ‘islanders’ and ‘villagers’ making a distinction where none really existed.

The Portcarrow school-mistress was Miss Jenny Williams, a young New Zealander who was doing post graduate research in England, and had taken this temporary job to enrich her experience and augment her bursary. She lodged on the Island at The Boy-and-Lobster, a small Jacobean pub, and wrote home enthusiastically about its inconveniences. She was a glowing, russet-coloured girl and looked her best that afternoon, striding across the causeway with the wind snapping at her hair and moulding her summer dress into the explicit simplicity of a shift. Behind her ran, stumbled and tacked poor Wally, who gave from time to time a squawking cry not unlike that of a seagull.

When they arrived on the Island she told him she would like to see his mother. They turned right at the jetty, round a point and into Fisherman’s Bay. The Treherns lived in the least prepossessing of a group of cottages. Jenny could feel nothing but dismay at its smell and that of Mrs Trehern who sat on the doorstep and made ambiguous sounds of greeting.

‘She’m sozzled,’ said Wally, and indeed, it was so.

Jenny said: ‘Wally: would you be very kind and see if you can find me a shell to keep. A pink one.’ She had to repeat this carefully and was not helped by Mrs Trehern suddenly roaring out that if he didn’t do what his teacher said she’d have the hide off of him.

Wally sank his head between his shoulders, shuffled down to the foreshore and disappeared behind a boat.

‘Mrs Trehern,’ Jenny said, ‘I do hope you don’t mind me coming: I just felt I must say how terribly glad I am about Wally’s warts and – and – I did want to ask about how it’s happened. I mean,’ she went on, growing flurried, ‘it’s so extraordinary. Since yesterday. I mean – well – it’s – Isn’t it?’

Mrs Trehern was smiling broadly. She jerked her head and asked Jenny if she would take a little something.

‘No, thank you.’ She waited for a moment and then said: ‘Mrs Trehern, haven’t you noticed? Wally’s hands? Haven’t you seen?’

‘Takes fits,’ said Mrs Trehern. ‘Our Wally!’ she added with an air of profundity. After several false starts she rose and turned into the house. ‘You come on in,’ she shouted bossily. ‘Come on.’

Jenny was spared this ordeal by the arrival of Mr Trehern who lumbered up from the foreshore where she fancied he had been sitting behind his boat. He was followed at a distance by Wally.

James Trehern was a dark, fat man with pale eyes, a slack mouth and a manner that was both suspicious and placatory. He hired out himself and his boat to visitors, fished and did odd jobs about the village and the Island.

He leered uncertainly at Jenny and said it was an uncommon brave afternoon and he hoped she was feeling pretty clever herself. Jenny at once embarked on the disappearance of the warts and found that Trehern had just become aware of it. Wally had shown him his hands.

‘Isn’t it amazing, Mr Trehern?’

‘Proper flabbergasting,’ he agreed without enthusiasm.

‘When did it happen exactly, do you know? Was it yesterday, after school? Or when? Was it – sudden? – I mean his hands were in such a state, weren’t they? I’ve asked him, of course, and he says – he says it’s because of a lady. And something about washing his hands in the spring up there. I’m sorry to pester you like this but I felt I just had to know.’

It was obvious that he thought she was making an unnecessary to-do about the whole affair, but he stared at her with a sort of covert intensity that was extremely disagreeable. A gust of wind snatched at her dress and she tried to pin it between her knees. Trehern’s mouth widened. Mrs Trehern advanced uncertainly from the interior.

Jenny said quickly: ‘Well, never mind, anyway. It’s grand that they’ve gone, isn’t it? I mustn’t keep you. Good evening.’

Mrs Trehern made an ambiguous sound and extended her clenched hand. ‘See yurr,’ she said. She opened her hand. A cascade of soft black shells dropped on the step.

‘Them’s our Wally’s,’ she said. ‘In ‘is bed.’

‘All gone,’ said Wally.

He had come up from the foreshore. When Jenny turned to him, he offered her a real shell. It was broken and discoloured but it was pink. Jenny knelt down to take it. ‘Thank you very much,’ she said. ‘That’s just what I wanted.’

It seemed awful to go away and leave him there. When she looked back he waved to her.