Dead Water

I Prelude

A boy stumbled up the hillside, half blinded by tears. He fell and, for a time, choked and sobbed as he lay in the sun, but presently blundered on. A lark sang overhead. Farther up the hill, he could hear the multiple chatter of running water. The children down by the jetty still chanted after him:

The spring was near the top. It began as a bubbling pool, cascaded into a miniature waterfall, dived under pebbles, earth and bracken and at last, loquacious and preoccupied, swirled mysteriously underground and was lost. Above the pool stood a boulder, flanked by briars and fern, and above that was the brow of the hill and the sun in a clear sky.

He squatted near the waterfall. His legs arched and a spasm jolted his chest. He gasped for breath, beat his hands on the ground and looked at them. Warty-hog. Warts clustered all over his fingers, like those black things that covered the legs of the jetty. Two of them bled where he’d cut them. The other kids were told not to touch him.

He thrust his hand under the cold pressure of the cascade. It beat and stung and numbed them, but he screwed up his blubbered eyes and forced them to stay there. Water spurted icily up his arms and into his face.

“Don’t cry.”

He opened his eyes directly into the sun, or would have done so if she hadn’t stood between: tall and greenish, above the big stone and rimmed about with light like something on the telly so that he couldn’t see her properly.

“Why are you crying?”

He ducked his head, and stared like an animal that couldn’t make up its mind to bolt. He gave a loud, detached sob and left his hands under the water.

“What’s the matter? Are you hurt? Tell me.”

“Me ’ands.”

“Show me.”

He shook his head and stared.

“Show me your hands.”

“They’m mucky.”

“The water will clean them.”

“No ’twon’t, then.”

“Show me.”

He withdrew them. Between clusters of warts, his skin had puckered and turned the colour of dead fish. He broke into a loud wail. His nose and eyes ran salt into his open mouth.

From down below a voice, small and distant, halfheartedly chanted: “Warty Walter. Warty Walter. Stick your warties in the water.” Somebody shouted: “Aw come on.” They were going away.

He held out his desecrated hands toward her as if in explanation. Her voice floated down on the sound of the waterfall.

“Put them under again. If you believe, they will be clean.”

“Uh?”

“They will be clean. Say it. Say: ‘Please take away my warts.’ Shut your eyes and do as I tell you. Say it again when you go to bed. Remember. Do it.”

He did as she told him. The sound of the cascade grew very loud in his ears. Blobs of light swam across his eyeballs. He heard his own voice very far away, and then nothing. Ice-cold water was bumping his face on drowned pebbles.

When he lifted his head there was no one between him and the sun.

He sat there letting himself dry and thinking of nothing in particular until the sun went down behind the hill. Then, feeling cold, he returned to the waterfront and his home on the bay.

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 other 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 is 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 hand in hers and looked and pressed and looked again. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “It’s not true.”

“Bean’t 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 a definable status. In those parts they talked of “Islanders” and “villagers,” making a distinction where none really existed.

The Portcarrow schoolmistress was Miss Jenny Williams, a young New Zealander who was doing postgraduate research in England, and had taken this temporary job to enrich her experience and augment her scholarship grant. 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 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 sea gull.

When they arrived on the Island, she told him she would like to see his mother. They turned right at the jetty, and round a point 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’s 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’re 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.

That evening in the Private Taproom at the Boy-and-Lobster, Wally Trehern’s warts were the principal topic of conversation. It was a fine evening and low tide fell at eight o’clock. In addition to the regular Islanders, there were patrons who had strolled across the causeway from the village: Dr. Mayne of the Portcarrow Convalescent Home; the Rector, the Reverend Mr. Adrian Carstairs — who liked to show, as was no more than the case, that he was human; and a visitor to the village, a large pale young man with a restless manner and a general air of being on the lookout for something. He was having a drink with Patrick Ferrier, the stepson of the landlord, down from Oxford for the long vacation. Patrick was an engaging fellow with a sensitive mouth, pleasant manners and a quick eye which dwelt pretty often upon Jenny Williams. There was only one other woman in the Private besides Jenny. This was Miss Elspeth Cost, a lady with vague hair and a tentative smile, who, like Jenny, was staying at the Boy-and-Lobster and was understood to have a shop somewhere and to be interested in handicrafts and the drama.

The landlord, Major Keith Barrimore, stationed between two bars, served both the Public and the Private Taps: the former being used exclusively by local fishermen. Major Barrimore was well set up and of florid complexion. He shouted rather than spoke, had any amount of professional bonhomie and harmonized perfectly with his background of horse-brasses, bottles, glasses, tankards and sporting prints. He wore a checked coat, a yellow waistcoat and a signet ring, and kept his hair very smooth.

“Look at it whichever way you choose,” Miss Cost said, “it’s astounding. Poor little fellow! To think…!”

“Very dramatic,” said Patrick Ferrier, smiling at Jenny.

“Well, it was,” she said. “Just that.”

“One hears of these cases,” said the restless young man. “Gypsies and charms and so on.”

“Yes, I know one does,” Jenny said. “One hears of them, but I’ve never met one before. And who, for heaven’s sake, was the Green Lady?”

There was a brief silence.

“Ah,” said Miss Cost. “Now that is the really rather wonderful part. The Green Lady!” She tipped her head to one side and looked at the Rector. “Mm…?” she invited.

“Poor Wally!” Mr. Carstairs rejoined. “All a fairy tale, I daresay. It’s a sad case.”

“The cure isn’t a fairy tale,” Jenny pointed out.

“No, no, no. Surely not. Surely not,” he said in a hurry.

“A fairy tale… I wonder. Still pixies in these yurr parts, Rector, d’y’m reckon?” asked Miss Cost, essaying a roguish burr.

Everybody looked extremely uncomfortable.

“All in the poor kid’s imagination, I should have thought,” said Major Barrimore and poured himself a double Scotch. “Still: damn’ good show, anyway.”

“What’s the medical opinion?” Patrick asked.

“Don’t ask me!” Dr. Mayne ejaculated, throwing up his beautifully kept hands. “There is no medical opinion as far as I know.” But seeing, perhaps, that they all expected more than this from him, he went on half-impatiently: “You do, of course, hear of these cases. They’re quite well established. I’ve heard of an eminent skin specialist who actually mugged up an incantation or spell or what-have-you and used it on his patients with marked success.”

“There! You see!” Miss Cost cried out, gently clapping her hands. She became mysterious. “You wait!” she said. “You jolly well wait!”

Dr. Mayne glanced at her distastefully.

“The cause of warts is not known,” he said. “Probably viral. The boy’s an epileptic,” he added. “Petit mal.”

“Would that predispose him to this sort of cure?” Patrick asked.

“Might;” Dr. Mayne said shortly. “Might predispose him to the right kind of suggestibility.” Without looking at the Rector, he added: “There’s one feature that sticks out all through the literature of reputed cures by some allegedly supernatural agency. The authentic cases have emotional or nervous connotations.”

“Not all, surely,” the Rector suggested.

Dr. Mayne shot a glance at him. “I shouldn’t talk,” he said. “I really know nothing about such matters. Other half, if you please.”

Jenny thought: The Rector feels he ought to nip in and speak up for miracles, and he doesn’t like to because he doesn’t want to be parsonic. How tricky it is for them! Dr. Mayne’s the same, in his way. He doesn’t like talking shop for fear of showing off. English reticence — thought Jenny, resolving to make the point in her next letter home — incorrigible amateurs.

The restless young man suddenly said: “The next round’s on me,” and astonished everybody.

“Handsome offer!” said Major Barrimore. “Thank you, sir.”

“Tell me,” said the young man expansively and at large. “Where is this spring or pool or whatever it is?”

Patrick explained. “Up the hill above the jetty.”

“And the kid’s story is that some lady in green told him to wash his hands in it? And the warts fell off in the night. Is that it?”

“As far as I could make out,” Jenny agreed. “He’s not at all eloquent, poor Wally.”

“Wally Trehern, did you say? Local boy?”

“That’s right.”

“Were they bad? The warts?”

“Frightful.”

“Mightn’t they have been just kind of ripe to fall off? Coincidence?”

“Most unlikely, I’d have thought,” said Jenny.

“I see,” said the young man, weighing it up. “Well, what’s everybody having? Same again, all round?”

Everybody murmured assent and Major Barrimore began to pour the drinks.

Jenny said: “I could show you a photograph.”

“No? Could you, though? I’d very much like to see it. I’d be very interested, indeed. Would you?”

She ran up to her room to get it: a colour slide of the infant class with Wally in the foreground, his hands dangling. She put it in the viewer and returned to the bar. The young man looked at it intently, whistling to himself. “Quite a thing,” he said. “Quite something. Nice sharp picture, too.”

Everybody wanted to look at it. While they were handling it about, the door from the house opened and Mrs. Barrimore came in.

She was a beautiful woman, very fine drawn, with an exquisite head of which the bone structure was so delicate and the eyes so quiet in expression that the mouth seemed like a vivid accident. It was as if an artist, having started out to paint an ascetic, had changed his mind and laid down the lips of a voluptuary.

With a sort of awkward grace that suggested shyness, she moved into the bar, smiling tentatively at nobody in particular. Dr. Mayne looked quickly at her and stood up. The Rector gave her “Good evening,” and the restless young man offered her a drink. Her husband, without consulting her, poured a glass of lager.

“Hullo, Mum. We’ve all been talking about Wally’s warts,” Patrick said.

Mrs. Barrimore sat down by Miss Cost. “Have you?” she said. “Isn’t it strange? I can’t get over it.” Her voice was charming: light and very clear. She had the faintest hesitation in her speech, and a trick of winding her fingers together. Her son brought her drink to her and she thanked the restless young man rather awkwardly for it. Jenny, who liked her very much, wondered, not for the first time, if her position at the Boy-and-Lobster was distasteful to her and exactly why she seemed so alien to it.

Her entrance brought a little silence in its wake. Dr. Mayne turned his glass round and round and stared at the contents. Presently Miss Cost broke out in a fresh spate of enthusiasm.

“Now, you may all laugh as loud as you please,” she cried with a reckless air. “I shan’t mind. I daresay there’s some clever answer explaining it all away, or you can, if you choose, call it coincidence. But I don’t care. I’m going to say my little say.” She held up her glass of port in a dashing manner, and gained their reluctant attention. “I’m an asthmatic!” she declared vaingloriously. “Since I came here, I’ve had my usual go, regular as clockwork, every evening at half past eight. I daresay some of you have heard me sneezing and wheezing away in my corner. Very well…Now! This evenings when I’d heard about Wally, I walked up to the spring, and while I sat there, it came into my mind — quite suddenly: ‘I wonder …’ And I dipped my fingers in the waterfall—” She shut her eyes, raised her brows and smiled. The port slopped over on her hand. She replaced the glass. “I wished my wee wish,” she continued. “And I sat up there, feeling ever so light and unburdened, and then I came down.” She pointed dramatically to the bar clock. “Look at the time!” she exulted. “Five past ten!” She slapped her chest. “Clear as a bell! And I know, I just know, it’s happened. To me.”

There was a dead silence during which, Jenny thought, everyone listened nervously for asthmatic manifestations from Miss Cost’s chest. There were none.

“Miss Cost,” said Patrick Ferrier at last, “how perfectly splendid!” There were general ambiguous murmurs of congratulation. Major Barrimore, looking as if he would like to exchange a wink with somebody, added: “Long may it last!”

They were all rather taken aback by the fervency with which she ejaculated: “Amen! Yes, indeed. Amen!”

The Rector looked extremely uncomfortable. Dr. Mayne asked Miss Cost if she’d seen any Green Ladies while she was about it.

“N-no,” she said, and darted a very unfriendly glance at him.

“You sound as if you’re not sure of that, Miss Cost.”

“My eyes were closed,” she said quickly.

“I see,” said Dr. Mayne.

The restless young man, who had been biting at his nails, said loudly, “Look!” and, having engaged their general attention, declared himself. “Look!” he repeated. “I’d better come clean and explain at once that I take a — well, a professional interest in all this. On holiday: but a news-hound’s job’s never done, is it? It seems to me there’s quite a story here. I’m sure my paper would want our readers to hear about it. London Sun, and I’m Kenneth Joyce. K.J.’s column, you know: ‘What’s the Answer?’ Now, what do you all say? Just a news item. Nothing spectacular.”

“Oh, no!” Mrs. Barrimore ejaculated and then added: “I’m sorry. It’s simply that I really do so dislike that sort of thing.”

“Couldn’t agree more,” said Dr. Mayne. For a second they looked at each other.

“I really think,” the Rector said, “not. I’m afraid I dislike it too, Mr. Joyce.”

“So do I,” Jenny said.

“Do you?” asked Mr. Joyce. “I’m sorry about that. I was going to ask if you’d lend me this picture. It’d blow up quite nicely. My paper would pay—”

“No,” Jenny said.

“Golly, how fierce!” said Mr. Joyce, pretending to shrink. He looked about him. “Now, why not?” he asked.

Major Barrimore said: “I don’t know why not. I can’t say I see anything wrong with it. The thing’s happened, hasn’t it, and it’s damned interesting. Why shouldn’t people hear about it?”

“Oh, I do agree,” cried Miss Cost. “I’m sorry, but I do so agree with the Major. When the papers are full of such dreadful things, shouldn’t we welcome a lovely, lovely true story like Wally’s? Oh, yes!”

Patrick said to Mr. Joyce: “Well, at least you declared yourself,” and grinned at him.

“He wanted Jenny’s photograph,” said Mrs. Barrimore quietly. “So he had to.”

They looked at her with astonishment. “Well, honestly, Mama!” Patrick ejaculated. “What a very crisp remark!”

“An extremely cogent remark,” said Dr. Mayne.

“I don’t think so,” Major Barrimore said loudly, and Jenny was aware of an antagonism that had nothing to do with the matter under discussion.

“But of course I had to,” Mr. Joyce conceded, with a wide gesture and an air of candour. “You’re dead right. I did want the photograph. All the same, it’s a matter of professional etiquette, you know. My paper doesn’t believe in pulling fast ones. That’s not the Sun’s policy at all. In proof of which, I shall retire gracefully upon a divided house.”

He carried his drink over to Miss Cost and sat beside her. Mrs. Barrimore got up and moved away. Dr. Mayne took her empty glass and put it on the bar.

There was an uncomfortable silence, induced perhaps by the general recollection that they had all drunk at Mr. Joyce’s expense and a suspicion that his hospitality had not been offered entirely without motive.

Mrs. Barrimore said: “Good night, everybody,” and went out.

Patrick moved over to Jenny. “I’m going fishing in the morning if it’s fine,” he said. “Seeing it’s a Saturday, would it amuse you to come? It’s a small, filthy boat and I don’t expect to catch anything.”

“What time?”

“Dawn. Or soon after. Say half past four.”

“Crikey! Well, yes, I’d love to if I can wake myself up.”

“I’ll scratch on your door like one of the Sun King’s courtiers. Which door is it? Frightening, if I scratched on Miss Cost’s!”

Jenny told him. “Look at Miss Cost, now,” she said. “She’s having a whale of a time with Mr. Joyce.”

“He’s getting a story from her.”

“Oh, no!”

“Oh, yes! And tomorrow, betimes, he’ll be hunting up Wally and his unspeakable parents. With a camera.”

“He won’t!”

“Of course he will. If they’re sober they’ll be enchanted. Watch out for K.J.’s ‘What’s the Answer’ column in the Sun.”

“I do think the gutter press in this country’s the rockbottom.”

“Don’t you have a gutter press in New Zealand?”

“Not as low.”

“Well done, you. All the same, I don’t see why K.J.’s idea strikes you as being so very low. No sex. No drugs. No crime. It’s as clean as a whistle, like Watty’s hands.” He was looking rather intently into Jenny’s face. “Sorry,” he said. “You didn’t like that, either, did you?”

“It’s just — I don’t know — or yes, I think I do. Wally’s so vulnerable. I mean, he’s been jeered at and cowed by the other children. He’s been puzzled and lonely, and now he’s a comparatively happy little creature. Quite a hero, in a way. He’s — not attractive, his sort aren’t, as a rule, but I’ve got an affection for him. Whatever’s happened ought to be private for him.”

“But he won’t take it in, will he? All the ballyhoo, if there is any ballyhoo? He may even vaguely enjoy it.”

“I don’t want him to. All right,” Jenny said crossly. “I’m being bloody-minded. Forget it. P’raps it won’t happen.”

“I think you may depend upon it,” Patrick rejoined. “It will.”

And, in the event, he turned out to be right.

Dr. Mayne read the full story, gave an ambiguous ejaculation and started on his morning round.

The Convalescent Home was a very small one: six single rooms for patients, and living quarters for two nurses and for Dr. Mayne, who was a widower. A verandah at the back of the house looked across a large garden and an adjacent field towards the sea and the Island.

At present he had four patients, all convalescent. One of them, an elderly lady, was already up and taking the air on the verandah. He noticed that she, like the others, had been reading the Sun.

“Well, Mrs. Thorpe,” he said, bending over her, “this is a step forward isn’t it? If you go on behaving nicely we’ll soon have you taking that little drive.”

Mrs. Thorpe wanly smiled and nodded. “So unspoiled,” she said, waving a hand at the prospect. “Not many places left like it. No horrid trippers.”

He sat down beside her, laid his fingers on her pulse and looked at his watch. “This is becoming pure routine,” he said cheerfully.

It was obvious that Mrs. Thorpe had a great deal more to say. She scarcely waited for him to snap his watch shut before she began,

“Dr. Mayne, have you seen the Sun?”

“Very clearly. We’re in for a lovely day.”

She made a little dab at him. “Don’t be provoking! You know what I mean. The paper. Our news! The Island?

“Oh, that. Yes, I saw that.”

“Now, what do you think? Candidly. Do tell me.”

He answered her as he had answered Patrick Ferrier. One heard of such cases. Medically there could be no comment.

“But you don’t pooh-pooh?”

No, no. He didn’t altogether do that. And now he really must…

As he moved away she said thoughtfully: “My little nephew is dreadfully afflicted. They are such an eyesore, aren’t they? And infectious, it’s thought. One can’t help wondering…”

His other patients were full of the news. One of them had a first cousin who suffered abominably from chronic asthma.

Miss Cost read it over and over again: especially the bit on Page 9 where it said what a martyr she’d been and how she had perfect faith in the waters. She didn’t remember calling them “Pixie Falls,” but, now she came to think of it, the name was pretty. She wished she’d had time to do her hair before Mr. Joyce’s friend had taken the snapshot, and it would have been nicer if her mouth had been quite shut. But still…At low tide she strolled over to the news agents’ shop in the village. All their copies of yesterday’s Sun, unfortunately, had been sold. There had been quite a demand. Miss Cost looked with a professional and disparaging eye at the shop. Nothing really, at all, in the way of souvenirs, and the postcards were very limited. She bought three of the Island and covered the available space with fine writing. Her friends with arithritic hands would be interested.

Major Barrimore finished his coffee and replaced the cup with a sightly unsteady hand. His immaculately shaven jaws wore their morning purple tinge and his eyes were dull.

“Hasn’t been long about it,” he said, referring to his copy of the Sun. “Don’t waste much time, these paper wallahs. Only happened last Thursday.”

He looked at his wife. “Well. Haven’t you read it?” he asked.

“I looked at it.”

“I don’t know what’s got into you. Why’ve you got your knife into this reporter chap? Decent enough fellah of his type.”

“Yes, I expect he is.”

“It’ll create a lot of interest. Enormous circulation. Bring people in, I wouldn’t wonder. Quite a bit about the Boy-and-Lobster.” She didn’t answer and he suddenly shouted at her. “Damn it, Margaret, you’re about as cheerful as a dead fish. You’d think there’d been a death on the Island instead of a cure! God knows we could do with some extra custom.”

“I’m sorry, Keith. I know.”

He turned his paper to the racing page. “Where’s that son of yours?” he said presently.

“He and Jenny Williams were going to row round as usual to South Bay.”

“Getting very thick, aren’t they?”

“Not alarmingly so. She’s a dear girl.”

“If you can stomach the accent.”

“Hers is not so very strong, do you think?”

“P’raps not. She’s a fine strapping filly, I will say. Damn’ good legs. Oughtn’t he to be swotting?”

“He’s working quite hard, really.”

“Of course you’d say so.” He lit a cigarette and returned to the racing notes. The telephone rang.

“I will,” said Mrs. Barrimore.

She picked up the receiver. “Boy-and-Lobster. Yes. Yes.” There was a loud crackle and she said to her husband, “It’s from London.”

“If it’s Mrs. Winterbottom,” said her husband, referring to his suzeraine, “I’m out.”

After a moment or two the call came through. “Yes,” she said. “Certainly. Yes, we can. A single room? May I have your name?”

There were two other long-distance calls during the day. By the end of the week, the five rooms at the Boy-and-Lobster were all engaged.

A correspondence had got under way in the Sun on the subject of faith healing and unexplained cures.

By Friday, there were inquiries from a regular television programme. The school holidays had started by then, and Jenny Williams had come to the end of her job at Portcarrow.

While the Barrimores were engaged in their breakfast discussion, the Rector and Mrs. Carstairs were occupied with the same topic. The tone of their conversation was, however, dissimilar.

“There!” Mr. Carstairs said, smacking the Sun as it lay by his plate. “There! Wretched creature! He’s gone and done it!”

“Yes, so he has: I saw. Now for the butcher,” said Mrs. Carstairs, who was worrying through the monthly bills.

“No, Dulcie, but it’s too much. I’m furious,” said the Rector uncertainly. “I’m livid.”

“Are you? Why? Because of the vulgarity or what? And what,” Mrs. Carstairs continued, “does Nankivell mean by saying two lbs bst fil when we never order fillet, let alone best? Stewing steak at the utmost. He must be mad.”

“It’s not only the vulgarity, Dulcie. It’s the effect on the village.”

“What effect?… And threepence ha’penny is twelve, two, four. It doesn’t even begin to make sense.”

“It’s not that I don’t rejoice for the boy. I do, I rejoice like anything and remember it in my prayers.”

“Of course you do,” said his wife.

“That’s my whole point. One should be grateful and not jump to conclusions.”

“I shall speak to Nankivell. What conclusions?”

“Some ass,” said the Rector, “has put it into the Treherns’ heads that — oh, dear! — that there’s been a — a—”

“Miracle?”

“Don’t! One shouldn’t! It’s not a word to be bandied about. And they are bandying it about, those two.”

“So much for Nankivell and his rawhide,” she said turning to the next bill. “No, dear, I’m sure it’s not. All the same it is rather wonderful.”

“So are all recoveries. Witnesses to God’s mercy, my love.”

“Were the Treherns drunk?”

“Yes,” he said shortly. “As owls. The Romans know how to deal with these things. Much more talk and we’ll be in need of a devil’s advocate.”

“Don’t fuss,” said Mrs. Carstairs, “I expect it’ll all simmer down.”

“I hae me doots,” her husband darkly rejoined. “Yes, Dulcie. I hae me doots.”

“How big is the Island?” Jenny asked, turning on her face to brown her back.

“Teeny. Now more than fourteen acres, I should think.”

“Who does it belong to?”

“To an elderly lady called Mrs. Fanny Winterbottom, who is the widow of a hairpin king. He changed over to bobby pins at the right moment and became a millionaire. The Island might be called his Folly.”

“Pub and all?”

“Pub and all. My mother,” Patrick said, “has shares in the pub. She took it on when my stepfather was axed out of the army.”

“If s heaven, the Island. Not too pretty. This bay might almost be at home. I’ll be sorry to go.”

“Do you get homesick, Jenny?”

“A bit. Sometimes. I miss the mountains and the way people think. All the same, it’s fun trying to get tuned in. At first, I was all prickles and antipodean prejudice, bellyaching away about living conditions like the Treherns’ cottage and hidebound attitudes and so on. But now…” She squinted up at Patrick. “It’s funny,” she said, “but I resent that rotten thing in the paper much more than you do, and it’s not only because of Wally. It’s a kind of insult to the Island.”

“It made me quite cross, too, you know.”

“English understatement. Typical example of.”

He gave her a light smack on the seat.

“When I think,” Jenny continued working herself into a rage, “of how that brute winkled the school group out of the Treherns, and when I think how he had the damned impertinence to put a ring round me—”

“ ‘Redheaded Jennifer Williams says warts were frightful,’ ” Patrick quoted.

“How he dared!”

“It’s not red, actually. In the sun it’s copper. No, gold almost.”

“Never you mind what it is. Oh, Patrick!”

“Don’t say ‘Ow, Pettruck!’ ”

“Shut up.”

“Well, you asked me to stop you. And it is my name.”

“All right. Ae-oh, Pe-ah-trick, then.”

“What?”

“Do you suppose it might lead to a ghastly invasion? People smothered in warts and whistling with asthma bearing down from all points of the compass?”

“Charabancs.”

“A Gifte Shoppe.”

“Wire netting round the spring.”

“And a bob to get in.”

“It’s a daunting picture,” Patrick said. He picked up a stone and hurled it into the English Channel. “I suppose,” he muttered, “it would be profitable.”

“No doubt.” Jenny turned to look at him and sat up. “Oh, no doubt,” she repeated. “If that’s a consideration.”

“My dear, virtuous Jenny, of course it’s a consideration. I don’t know whether, in your idyllic antipodes, you’ve come across the problem of constant hardupness. If you haven’t I can assure you it’s not much cop.”

“Well, but I have. And, Patrick, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“I’ll forgive you. I’ll go further and tell you that unless things look up a bit at the Boy-and-Lobster or, alternatively, unless my stepfather can be moved to close his account with his bookmaker and keep his hands off the whisky bottle, you’ll be outstaying us on the Island.”

“Patrick!”

“I’m afraid so. And the gentlemen of the Inns of Court will be able to offer their dinners to some more worthy candidate. I shan’t eat them. I shall come down from Oxford and sell plastic combs from door to door. Will you buy one for your red-gold hair?” Patrick began to throw stones as fast as he could pick them up. “It’s not only that,” he said presently. “It’s my mama. She’s in a pretty dim situation, anyway, but here, at least, she’s—” He stood up. “Well, Jenny,” he said, “there’s a sample of the English reticence that strikes you as being so comical.” He walked down to the boat and hauled it an unnecessary inch or two up the beach.

Jenny felt helpless. She watched him and thought that he made a pleasing figure against the sea as he tugged back in the classic posture of controlled energy.

What am I to say to him? she wondered. And does it matter what I say?

He took their luncheon basket out of the boat and returned to her.

“Sorry about all that,” he said. “Shall we bathe before the tide changes and then eat? Come on.”

She followed him down to the sea and lost her sensation of inadequacy as she battled against incoming tide. They swam, together and apart, until they were tired, and then returned to the beach and had their luncheon. Patrick was well-mannered and attentive, and asked her a great many questions about New Zealand and the job she hoped to get, teaching English in Paris. It was not until they had decided to row back to their own side of the Island, and he had shipped his oars, that he returned to the subject that waited, Jenny felt sure, at the backs of both their minds.

“There’s the brow of the hill,” he said. “Just above our beach. And below it, on the far side, is the spring. Did you notice that Miss Cost, in her interview, talked about ‘Pixie Falls’?”

“I did. With nausea.”

He rowed round the point into Fisherman’s Bay.

“Sentiment and expediency,” he said, “are uneasy bedfellows. But, of course, it doesn’t arise. It’s quite safe to strike an attitude and say you’d rather sell plastic combs than see the prostitution of the place you love. There won’t be any upsurge of an affluent society on Portcarrow Island. It will stay like this — as we both admire it, Jenny. Only we shan’t be here to see. Two years from now everybody will have forgotten about Wally Trehern’s warts.”

He could scarcely have been more mistaken. Before two years had passed, everybody in Great Britain who could read a newspaper knew all about Wally Trehern’s warts, and because of them the Island had been transformed.