Skeleton Island (Mrs. Bradley) Page 3

  “I think the long day has been a bit too much for him,” said Fiona, diplomatically. “He’s been crying, poor boy. He must still be very weak from his illness. You mustn’t blame him.”

  “Crying? A boy of nineteen?”

  “He’s so disappointed he isn’t going to College this autumn. He’s been unburdening himself to me.”

  “What babyish nonsense! You shouldn’t encourage him, my dear. I know he’s been seriously ill, but he isn’t a little boy now, and I don’t know what people would think, if they saw him slopping all over you like that.”

  “I know. I was just putting my feet up for a bit, after I’d done the salad and things, when he began to talk, and then he went all to pieces. It’s really a little bit worrying, and I’m awfully sorry about the bedding, but he was in such a state, poor boy, that I simply didn’t think about anything else. How was it you got back so early?”

  She wondered, as soon as she put this question, whether, under the circumstances, it had been wise to do so, but she was immediately reassured. Her husband, between mouthfuls of ham, tongue, hard-boiled eggs, and salad, gave her a graphic, bitter, and sarcastic account of his reception by the headmaster.

  “But I’ll put my solicitors on to him! I told him I should, and I certainly shall,” he concluded.

  “I don’t blame you,” said his wife, his misinterpretation of the scene he had witnessed causing her to feel so much thankfulness that she spoke with unusual warmth. “I should think so, indeed! The idea! You could have him up for breach of contract, couldn’t you?”

  “Well,” said Howard, pushing aside his empty plate and helping himself to cheese, “I don’t know about him. I am inclined to think it ought to be the hotel manager. He’s the real culprit, I fancy, for letting the hotel over my head. But I’ll put Kempson on to it tomorrow. He’ll know the best thing to do. Isn’t Colin going to eat any supper? I’d better go and bring him along.”

  “He won’t hurt, dear. He’s probably better off in bed. He had a good lunch on the way down. He won’t starve. I think I’ll soon go to bed myself. I’ll leave the washing-up until the morning. The gas stove works all right. Shall I make some coffee, or will you have another glass of wine?”

  “We’d better see about making up the beds. I’ll look in on Colin and just see how he is. I don’t care about this outbreak when I thought he was getting so much stronger. Besides, I can’t have him getting maudlin over you! It’s most annoying.”

  “I wouldn’t worry him, Howard. He’s probably bundled some bedclothes round himself and gone bang off to sleep. He’s just tired out, I think.”

  “Perhaps you’re right. But I think we ought to do the washing-up before we go to bed. It’s a bad start to begin by putting off the chores until the morning. When we’ve done it, you’d better toddle along. I shall go up to the gallery on top of the lighthouse tower and get some air before I turn in, I think. The stars should be out by now, and the night is clear.”

  “I’ll do the washing-up, and make the beds, then. Don’t stay up there too long and get cold. The nights are still rather chilly.”

  She gave him five minutes by the clock, and then went along to Colin’s room. He had the light on, and was lying flat on his back staring up at the ceiling.

  “Oh, hallo,” he said, when she sat on the end of the bed. He heaved himself on to his elbow. “I’m sorry I made such a ghastly fool of myself. What does he—did he say anything about it?”

  “No, it’s quite all right. That’s what I came to tell you. Good night. Sleep well—darling.”

  He sat bolt upright at that, and stretched out his arms to her, but she was gone, and, not knowing where his father was, he dared not follow her. She returned to the kitchen, cleared the table, washed-up plates, cutlery, and glasses, and went to bed. Her husband was inadequate, she was bored by her marriage, she was not yet thirty years old, she was beautiful, healthy, discontented, and unfulfilled—but Colin was not the answer, and she did not know any gamekeepers. She reviewed the scene on the sofa with a distaste which amounted to disgust. That it had been largely her own fault she knew, and that did not make her thoughts and her yearnings any easier to bear.

  By the morning Howard, who had gone to bed after having spent a quietly rapturous hour on the gallery of the lighthouse looking through his telescope at the stars (for the windy night, though cold, had been beautifully clear), got up to breakfast in a very different frame of mind from that in which he had returned from the school. To prove how high his spirits had risen, he took a cold “in-and-out” in the zinc bath, but, unfortunately, came to breakfast with blue hands and chattering teeth.

  Colin, who had to be called twice, came to table in a vile temper and, having listened with curling lip to his father’s boasting about having taken “an exhilarating cold tub, a thing you ought to do, my boy; nothing like it for giving you an appetite,” told Howard that he didn’t want pneumonia on top of everything else. He added, in an offensive tone, that middle-aged men should not play the fool with their circulations. He then ate three rashers of bacon and two eggs and took himself off for a look at “this frightful place you’ve brought us to,” while his father and stepmother did the washing-up.

  Laura Gavin, five miles away, was not faced with the task of washing-up (fortunately, in her case, as this would have involved dealing with plates and cutlery for eighty boys, eight men, the junior boys’ form mistress, and herself), but she did face a domestic crisis of another sort. The school had occupied its present temporary quarters for a fortnight, but already the bird (to quote Laura’s report to Mr. Eastleigh) was flapping its wings over the kitchen quarters. She had gone along, having, from the first, ignored Mr. Noble’s fiat that he should act as intermediary between members of Staff and the headmaster, to report disaffection among the servants.

  “The maids complain that there’s nothing to do here on their afternoons off,” she explained to Mr. Eastleigh. “They say the place gives them the willies. I’m afraid we’ll lose the lot of them unless they’re sweetened up in some way or other.”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Eastleigh, who had not built up a successful and highly remunerative business by blinding himself to what went on below stairs as well as in the Staff common-room. “Yes, I know. How do you think it would work if I laid on a taxi to take them over to the mainland once a week?”

  “Twice a week,” said Laura. “By that,” she added hastily, “I mean there would have to be two parties. Cook and the kitchen-maid (who’s her niece, so Cook won’t feel she’s demeaning herself by sharing a taxi with her underling), and one of the parlourmaids and one of the housemaids can go on Tuesdays, and the other parlourmaid and the other two housemaids and the sewing woman can go on Thursdays. The taxi wouldn’t take more than four at a time, anyway.”

  “I’ll see about it. But there’s another thing, Mrs. Gavin.” He paused and, with his elbows on his desk, studied his beautifully-manicured fingers.

  “Say on,” advised Laura briskly. “I expect you think I’m a lousy housekeeper. Want me to hand in my cards?”

  “Dear me, no! I think you have settled in admirably, quite admirably.”

  “I don’t like that ‘quite,’ you know. It qualifies the adverb to the adverb’s disadvantage, don’t you think?”

  “Really, really! I intended no adverse comment at all, Mrs. Gavin. Quite (I beg your pardon!) actually, the reverse. What I want is some advice from you.”

  (“Blimey! What comes now?” thought Laura). There was another pause, an expectant one from her, an indecisive one from the headmaster.

  “If it’s about Mr. Heathers,” said Laura, prompting him, “I agree he’s a wretched little object, unworthy (at present) of the respect and admiration of the boys, but I’ve found out he can play the saxophone. That ought to be some help to him. Mr. Pocock makes a very fair vocalist and can play the guitar, and Mr. Skelton could be taught the drums if you put it to him in your own inimitable way. You know, employ the boss’s half-nelson. He’s g
ot a lovely wrist action and, being the P.E. panjandrum, he has a very nice sense of rhythm and plenty of follow-through. Why shouldn’t we popularise poor old Erica by running a pop group? It would go down big with the boys.”

  “Erica? Oh—Heathers! Well, really!” said the headmaster. He began to laugh. “A pop group to popularise Heathers? You certainly have a creative mind, Mrs. Gavin.”

  “Leonardo da Vinci’s little sister,” said Laura modestly. “But what did you want to see me about, if not that? I have the laundry to check.”

  “Miss Beverley wants to leave. I have had her here in tears. Most disconcerting.”

  “Her love-life’s gone wrong, that’s what.”

  “Her love-life?”

  “Yes. She and young Ferrars have parted brass-rags. He smacked one of her little boys and she’s handed him the mitten.”

  The headmaster, dismayed, realised that his knowledge of what went on among the Staff was not as comprehensive as he had supposed. “Well, what am I to do about it?” he asked plaintively. “She’s under contract to stay at least until the end of the term, but, of course, I don’t want to keep her if she really wants to go.”

  “So you want me to find out whether she does really want to go. Is that it?”

  “Well,” said the headmaster gratefully, “you know how it is. With no other lady available, my wife, owing to unfortunate circumstances, not being with us…”

  “In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king? Right, then. I’ll sort her out. Not that you wouldn’t be just as well off without her. You’d get far more work out of young Ferrars if she weren’t here, you know. There’s a lot of good in that boy, but she doesn’t give him a chance. Between ourselves, she’s quite a nasty little bit of work. I wouldn’t put much past her.”

  “You really think I should take her at her word, then?”

  “Well, she’s only doing this job for pin-money. She won’t be on the streets if you sling her out.”

  “Well, really!” said the headmaster. He began to laugh again. “You seem to know a great deal more about the Staff than I do myself.”

  “Ah, well, you know, we who live between the soup and the savoury get to know the smell of the stuffing,” said Laura.

  While she was having this heart-to-heart talk with her new employer, Howard was having a serious conversation with his son. Summoned to the presence as soon as he came back from a half hour stroll which convinced him that the island was an ante-chamber to hell, Colin felt the qualms of a little boy conscious of sin when his father put his head out of the living-room doorway and told him to come in, as he desired to speak to him. The peremptory tone which frightened his son was the result of extreme nervousness on Howard’s part, but Colin’s guilty conscience did not allow him to see that.

  The truth, although he himself did not realise it, was that Howard had been psychologically affected by the physical reaction he had suffered as a result of his cold bath. Even his breakfast had not really warmed him, and it was not until he had sat crouched over the gas fire for some minutes that he could trust his numbed fingers not to drop the crockery when he dried it. It no longer seemed a good or even a possible thing to throw Mr. Eastleigh to the lawyers. Suppose Eastleigh really had a case? Suppose Howard summoned him, and not only lost the suit but was admonished by the Bench for selfishly putting his own convenience before the safety and perhaps the lives of little boys? Howard’s morale, in fact, was at such a low ebb that he was almost at the point of allowing the whole business to slide, and purchasing a waterproof cover for the car, when he gave a second thought and then some deep consideration to Mr. Eastleigh’s suggestion concerning Colin.

  Had he but known it, he could hardly have chosen a better moment to put the headmaster’s offer before his son. Colin, avoiding the fishermen’s cottages and the modern lighthouse in case he might encounter a fellow-being, had struck out westwards across the point of the island and then had turned south to gain the cliffs. He dared not approach too near the edge, but from where he stood he had seen the fury of the Race and the long, exposed strata of the limestone which reached out below the cliff-level and into the sea. He had stood there, contemplating suicide, and wondering what Fiona would feel when his battered body was left at low tide among the cruel rocks, until, with a shudder at the thought of his own agonising demise, and a passing query as to whether he had the right to deprive the world of a potentially great man, he had walked across to a disused quarry, gazed at it with loathing and horror, paused while he recited to the seabirds some of the more despairing lyrics of A. E. Housman, and then, in a mood of blackest depression, had returned to the disused lighthouse, only to be met by the voice of doom requesting his attendance in the living-room.

  “Oh, God!” muttered Colin. “Now what’s he going to say?”

  Laura’s impression of the island was vastly different from that of Colin. For one thing, the very fact that it was called an island—although, geographically speaking, it was only when the winter gales were at their worst that the title was logically justifiable—prejudiced her in its favour. Then, again, she had chosen of her own freewill to spend her time on it, whereas Colin had been given no choice in the matter, but had been obliged to give way to his father’s (he considered) selfish whim. Apart from other considerations, its uncompromising bleakness and bareness, its quarries, and its vertical limestone cliffs repelled and disquieted him, but these were features which stimulated and interested Laura.

  Except for one tiny cove, where low tide displayed a small arc of sand and a stretch of pebbles, the island appeared to have no beaches, and she had been intrigued, on her walks abroad, to notice that on top of the comparatively low cliffs which lay about halfway between the cove and the Point, derricks had been rigged so that small boats could be lowered into the water.

  The tackle consisted of three stout wooden posts, one of which was perpendicular. The others were joined to it by iron grapplings and slanted away from it at an angle of forty-five degrees. Two large iron cogwheels, one of which was furnished with a handle, were fixed to the upright post, and a fourth enormous pole, acting as a crane, was rigged with tackle from which a wire rope could be attached to the centre thwart of the boat which was to be launched and drop it, at the end of the plumb-line thus formed, into the deep water at the foot of the cliff.

  There were other points, too, which pleased Laura. The hotel (temporarily Mr. Eastleigh’s school) was set in the most attractive part of the island. The view from its upper windows was not that of the turbulent Race, or even that of the strangely symmetrical blocks of limestone which formed the cliffs. Behind the hotel, on the seaward side, the heights were covered in trees and the prospect was mostly of the wide and beautiful bay which curved from the eastward coast of the island to the mainland and then along the sandy shore of the nearest seaside town, whose broad, firm beach and white-washed houses and hotels could be made out, with the aid of field-glasses, from the upstairs windows of the school.

  What was more, Laura’s job, although (as she expressed it in a letter to Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, who employed her, in the normal course of events, as secretary) not exactly her particular cup of tea, had its compensations. For one thing, her sole responsibility was to run the domestic side of the school. She was not responsible for administration, discipline, class teaching or financial matters, and was, in most respects, a law unto herself. The headmaster allowed her the free use of her time. So long as meals and the masters’ morning coffee were not delayed, so long as the boys were laundered, mended and first-aided, so long as supplies of food and fuel were maintained, she might occupy herself as she wished.

  She found, by the end of her first week, that this dispensation was modified by the boys’ demands and wishes. None of them was more than twelve, and twenty of them were only between seven and eight years old. As the only woman on the strength (except for Miss Beverley, who was the junior form mistress, and the servants) she found herself in the rôle of foster-mother, co
nfidante, advisory bureau, and conniver at immorality.

  “I say, Mrs. Gavin, aren’t you glad Peters burnt the school down?”

  “Oh, I say, I didn’t, you know!”

  “Well, it wasn’t really his fault, Mrs. Gavin. It was really Mr. Ferrars. He was new last term, and wanted to help us with the bonfire and the guy, so, as Peters is a prefect and has to encourage new masters, he thought he’d better let him.”

  “We really ought to have taken his I.Q. before we trusted him with fireworks,” said the squarely-built Peters, whom Laura had already noticed as a man of few but trenchant words.

  “So we were all sent home early for Christmas—well, jolly early, as a matter of fact—and some of our people blenched a bit at having us for double the usual time, so I suppose Mr. Eastleigh had to do something about it, because the school won’t be ready again for years and years.”

  “Probably never,” said Peters.

  “Everybody was fearfully pleased with Mr. Ferrars, though, so you won’t say a word about it, will you? We made him an hon. member of the Illya Kuryakin Society, but, of course, he doesn’t know, because it’s such a secret society that none of the members know who they are except Peters and me. He’s Solo and I’m Illya. As a matter of fact…”

  “No, you’re not to tell her! You know our rules!” interpolated the stolid Peters. Laura gathered that she herself had qualified for hon. membership of the Illya Kuryakin Society, and was gratified but somewhat alarmed. Knowing something of the mentality of small boys, she could not help wondering how long the full membership of the Illya Kuryakin Society would be allowed to remain ignorant of the honour which had been thrust upon it, and what the harvest would be when the members were apprised of their good fortune and called upon to participate in some frightful act of sabotage or mayhem. She had clear recollections of the hair-raising exploits demanded of Nicholas Blake’s Nigel Strangeways when he became a candidate for membership of a school secret society while employed in investigating a case of murder.