Читать книгу The Tattooed Heart & My Name is Rose - Theodora Keogh - Страница 10

Ronny did not ride up to the hilltop again that week, but June heard him every evening. The high, solitary cry of the boy calling to his bird mingled with other evening sounds: the fox, the night owl, the hurtling train. After day waned she heard them all. They were like personal messages thrown against her breast. Before, there had been no Ronny, and his call had been the night itself with its beating, secret lonely heart that reached out and sought her own. Now the voice had a shape, but June could never really believe that it was not she for whom the voice was destined. She wondered how Ronny spent his mornings, how he passed the heavy afternoons, and wondered, too, how she herself had passed them a year ago. The old pleasures were difficult to rediscover and she was bored.

Mrs. Grey was no companion for June. Hour by hour the old woman’s tranquil habits unwound themselves so that there was no idle moment left in her day, and not many of these moments were devoted to her granddaughter either. After June’s morning visit they would not meet until lunch and, after that, seldom until the evening meal. Sometimes Mrs. Grey was tired and did not even come down to supper, but at others she lingered afterwards and would ask June to read aloud to her from an enormous book of verse, marked and underlined by three generations. One of the poems, a ballad about a knight lying dead in a field, made June think of the little boy she had met.

‘I’ll go and see him tomorrow,’ she thought, looking up from the page. So the following afternoon she set out once more through the woods. By now June was stronger. A little colour had come into her face, tinting her ears and the high bones around her eyes.

After a while she took off her sandals and felt on her feet the damp, moldy earth of the path. She walked down to the edge of the marsh and then turned right until she came to the boathouse. She felt a little shy of its high gates which she had never entered before. They were silent, and around them, on the side from which she came, the reeds flourished like yellow spears. It was medium tide and the breath from the marsh made a haze in the air. On all sides were the trees, surrounding their stagnant ponds, their small and arid pastures. June tried the gate handle and then, finding it locked, pulled the bell chain. At once a loud peal echoed like a curse in the stillness.

‘Why have I come?’ she wondered. The locked gate was a rejection, the cursing bell an insult. Perhaps she had no right to penetrate these walls, for what if this gate were the door of childhood, closed to her now forever? This thought, which made her feel regret, had in it, too, a certain sweetness. She looked down at her bare arms rendered glistening by the sun. They were shaded by fine hairs which she had never noticed before and a breath seemed to pass over her body and contract the nerves against her spine.

Jeremy opened the gate to June, his cheeks flushed by the heat. With his blue shirt and brilliant health he resembled a laborer in a political poster.

“Yes, Miss?”

June was relieved to hear a human voice. Everything was ordinary after all; an ordinary country house, slightly run down, and a pink-faced gardener. “Is Ronny here?” she asked.

“He is,” said Jeremy. “He’s just finishing lunch.”

“May I see him?”

“Oh yes, you may see him,” said Jeremy. “He’s there for you to see if you like.” He turned on his heel and led the way.

June had never been inside the Walsh property before and, as she followed Jeremy, she was startled by the whiteness of the courtyard which was paved with oyster shells. Against their snowy welcome the house showed mouldering and dark. Ronny was in the kitchen, eating a piece of pie and talking to Mary. June could hear his fluty tones drifting out the doorway.

“As high as you are,” he was saying. “Really, Mary! Cross my heart.” Mary made the appropriate, soothing noises of fright. “Gambol just skimmed over it without stopping,” said Ronny, and then he caught sight of June. For a moment he stopped eating, as children do when their parents enter the nursery. His mouth was still full, but he ceased chewing and regarded her impassively from his black eyes. Then he lowered his head so that his hair fell between them like a curtain.

“Hello,” he muttered, offhand and sullen.

“Good afternoon, Miss, would you eat some pie?” asked Mary in her friendly, timid manner. She saw no difficulty here, only a nice girl paying a visit to a little boy. “Perhaps you’ll have it later,” she said as no one made a move.

“Is she staying here all afternoon?” asked Ronny, turning his face towards Mary.

“What a way to talk about a young lady guest!” Mary gave a deprecating smile at June.

June turned a slow, dull red. Her eyes blazed with anger and humiliation. “I was just passing,” she lied, “and I can’t stay. I must go home and read to my grandmother.”

“I don’t have a grandmother,” said Ronny, “and I don’t want one either. Old ladies kiss too much.”

June had to smile at the idea of her own grandmother kissing too much. Her blush faded. She grew bored by this conversation. Childhood after all, was filled with petty statements and flat denials. She made ready to go, tugging at her cotton blouse which was too short and touching the locks above her temples with a new, unconscious gesture.

“Come with me,” said Ronny suddenly. “I have something to show you.”

Getting up from the table, he slipped his hand in hers. At once the sensation returned to June of being in a lost country, a land whose shores it was perhaps dangerous to retread. For Mary’s sake she smiled and agreed with nonchalance. But Mary noticed nothing in any case and only Jeremy, slouching in the doorway, remarked after they had gone:

“What a fuss over a year or two. As though it could matter! They’ll be dead a million and it won’t be enough.”

Mary washed the dishes without answering. Such remarks had long lost the power to frighten her. At the sink, with her spindly legs and industrious arms, she resembled an ant. The giant stride could flatten her in an instant.

Ronny took his hand away from June’s almost at once and led the way through the house, into a little doorway and down a circular stairway which came out onto the water beneath. The tide was coming in. Its lapping harried the dark air; a sucking, eager persuasion. The sides of the cement landings, or quays, were still exposed. Underneath, one could see a muddy bottom pitted with the small holes of fiddler crabs. There were two boats here; a rowboat and a motorless speedboat. Both were rotted down into the slime and covered by the poison-green moss of the sea. At one end was an archway, which led out into the sunlit bay. It could be closed by a door that slid down from above. Standing open, it threw into this man-made cave a brilliant and painful glitter which slid over the air and did not lighten the gloom.

“Here was his dungeon,” said Ronny. “He took his prisoners down here and tied them on those boats. Then soon the crabs came and ate them up, body and soul.” He added in his soprano voice: “I would do it too, with all my enemies.”

“Crabs can’t eat the soul,” objected June, feeling in this damp place the sweat growing cold on her body.

“Oh yes they can,” he insisted. “Crabs can. They’re only baffled by the bones.” And he held up the white spine of a fish worn down by the tides which he had found that morning.

June did not contradict him and only asked: “Do you know him, the man who used to live here?”

“Oh yes, I know him,” said Ronny (who had never met Walsh). “Mother thinks he’s my father.”

“You mean Mr. Walsh,” cried June, “the millionaire?”

“Mr. Walsh, that’s it, Mr. Walsh. He has a hundred houses, I guess, and fifty cars and a hundred motorboats.”

“Don’t you call him Father?” asked June.

“No,” replied Ronny seriously, as though reflecting on this. “But you see he isn’t my mother’s husband. My mother’s husband was called Roger and he died.” Ronny nodded several times as though checking the correctness of these statements. Then a smile came over his face and brought out the twitch of his cheek. “My mother is a liar,” he said. The word must have pleased him for he cupped his hands and shouted: “Liar, liar.”

The echo came back to them several times from the imprisoning walls. It was like a bird who dashes itself to pieces trying to get free. Each time it was fainter and more plaintive. Ronny turned his eyes downwards to the murky water which was rising fast. All the mud had disappeared and the tide bit greedily into the rotten wood of the two boats. June followed the boy’s gaze. A school of minnows darted into the boathouse and just as swiftly flashed out again through the arch. The green on the wrecked planks was as brilliant as emeralds.

“What will you be when you are a man?” she asked.

“Oh,” said Ronny, scuffing his bare sole softly on the cement, “I shall be a knight. But as you know there are no more knights. Anyway it doesn’t matter as I won’t be a man very soon.”

Just then they heard steps ringing out on the metal of the stairs, a town tread, cautious and sharp. “Ronny?” a voice called interrogatively. Then a man stepped onto the quay. When he saw them he advanced and said: “I am James Stevens. I am supposed to teach you, to get you up on your lessons.”

“Mother said I didn’t have to start until July!” exclaimed Ronny shrilly, dismayed and apprehensive.

“But you don’t want to fall behind,” said Stevens, “and have to end up the summer working all day. Besides, this is just a call to get acquainted.”

James Stevens was a blond man who could still be called young. His hair thinned out at the temples over a narrow, high forehead and his mouth had a tight look to it caused by faint rays around the upper lip. He had grey, rather cold eyes. Now these eyes turned to June.

“Is this your sister?” he asked.

“No,” said Ronny. “She’s a damsel.”

“I’m June Grey,” said June, “and I think you’re supposed to teach me too.”

“Were you going to call on her to get acquainted?” asked Ronny, using Stevens’ turn of phrase.

The tutor gave June a blank look. “I shall just be helping her catch up,” he said. “It’s not the same thing.” He turned away again. “By the way, Ronny,” he said, “are you a scout? If you are I thought perhaps you would like to transfer to our local troop.” He waited, but the boy was not listening. He took June’s hand again and looked up into her face.

“Damsel,” he said again, “a damsel and a knight.”

Stevens frowned. One could see the rays now plainly as he pressed his lips together. “That’s a rather silly way of talking,” he said. “You don’t want to spend your time with girls, do you? You’ll turn into a regular sissy.”

Ronny lifted his heavy lids in astonishment until his eyes were almost round. “A knight is much braver than a boy scout,” he cried. “There’s no comparison! Just look!” Stooping, he reached down to one of the wrecks and came up with a crab in his hand. The crab was a fiddler and with its huge claw pinched at the child’s flesh. Ronny’s cheeks contracted. It looked as though he were smiling.