The Mudflats of the Dead (Mrs. Bradley) Page 3

  “No, it’s my fault. I shouldn’t make a nuisance of myself, but the other two are so sufficient unto themselves that it really isn’t much fun for me down here. I’m glad you’ve come. Adrian and Miranda have been married for years and years, but they’re still in love with one another. Are you married, Colin?”

  “You know I’m not.”

  “Engaged?”

  “No. I told you! I was engaged at one time, but an author is no sort of a husband, so I broke it off and now she has married somebody else.”

  “Was she nice?”

  “Very nice.”

  “Do you have regrets?”

  “Sometimes; not very often.”

  “Do you ever see her nowadays?”

  “No, thank goodness, although they live in the same London suburb as I do.”

  “The other two won’t be back for ages. I’ll just wash up these tea things and then we can go to bed for a bit.”

  “Not on your life! How old are you?”

  “Nineteen. Nearly twenty.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “It’s true. Are you prudish?”

  “I’m a schoolmaster.”

  “And I’m an art student.”

  “You’re a sinful little beazel. Any more of your nonsense and I leave on the dot and go on to the town. I mean it. You damn well behave yourself, or else you’ll make it impossible for me to stay here.”

  CHAPTER 3

  MÉNAGE À QUATRE

  One for sadness,

  Two for gladness,

  Three a wedding,

  Four a death.”

  Anonymous

  The cottage comprised the sitting-room, now allotted to Palgrave, a kitchen and a small scullery downstairs, and two bedrooms at the top of a steep staircase. From his front window Palgrave could look out over the marshes. He moved a small table into the window and borrowed a chair of the right height from the kitchen and set out his notebook, a sketch-pad and his portable typewriter and continued to wait for the inspiration which still did not come.

  At first there was little to disturb him. The Kirbys were as good as their word and, except for passing through his room to go out or to come in, both of which they did quietly and expeditiously, they did not speak to him unless he spoke first. For the first two days Camilla followed their example, although he guessed that she directed pleading glances at the back of his unresponsive head as he sat at his table in the window making notes and a sketch plan of the immediate neighbourhood.

  By the third day, however, this good behaviour on her part broke down. She came downstairs before dawn and, while he was still asleep, she wriggled her way on to the studio couch beside him. He woke to find a naked nymph who clung to him with such determination that he had to use what seemed to him brutal force to break her stranglehold and deposit her on the floor, where she knelt sobbing with her head buried in the table-cover which was doing duty as a quilt and, so far as he could make out, threatening to blackmail him for seducing his girl pupils. She was clearly beside herself with frustration and disappointment.

  Palgrave got up, put on trousers and a sweater over his pyjamas and went out into the chilly half light which preceded the sunrise. When he had walked off his irritation and had rehearsed in his mind what he would have to say to Camilla when they next met, he returned to the cottage with a half resolve to leave it immediately after breakfast and look for lodgings in the town which he knew was only a few miles away.

  “And a damn nuisance that is!” he said severely to the girl, walking with her to the little bridge in the middle of the morning.

  “Oh, Colin, don’t go!” she said, leaning on the sturdy handrail and gazing not at him but across the expanse of the marshes. “I didn’t mean any harm. It was only a joke. You needn’t be so stuffy. I don’t wonder you chose to be a schoolmaster! You’re just an old stuffed shirt. Are you going to tell Miranda and Adrian about me? I shan’t do it again, you know. I don’t like puritans and you’re not very attractive, anyway.”

  Palgrave put a hand on her thin, childish shoulder and pulled her round to face him.

  “Look,” he said, “I don’t want Miranda and Adrian mixed up in this, and I don’t want to go. What I do want is to settle to my book and get this place and my main characters down on paper, that’s all.”

  “Am I one of your main characters, Colin?”

  Palgrave laughed.

  “Not if you don’t behave yourself,” he said. “I’d like to put you in the book, but as an older, more sensible girl, I hope. I don’t mind swimming and walking and talking with you—in fact, all those things will help me to round out the character I want to build up—but beddery, and all that, is definitely out. You wouldn’t be a bad kid if you gave yourself half a chance, but giving me the rush of a lifetime is not going to do either of us any good. When I bed a woman she’s got to be just that—a woman—not a half-baked art student hardly out of her teens. You’re still wet behind the ears, my child. You save your antics until you’ve grown up a bit. Then perhaps one day somebody will fancy you enough to do the pursuing instead of you having to do it all. That will be the day!”

  He was trying deliberately to make her angry. He did not succeed. She took his hand and said:

  “Yes, teacher. I’m sorry. I won’t be naughty again.”

  As the end of the week approached he felt the beginnings of his old despair. The conditions were right, the weather was right, the doleful scenery was right. Another Wuthering Heights ought to be under contemplation, but no Muse approached him to murmur in his ear those vital sentences which would get him off the mark and start him on the opus. He had already settled upon Adrian, Miranda and Camilla as three possible main characters, but how to use them in a story, how to manipulate them, was more than he could determine.

  What was worse, it soon became clear that, however sincere the welcome he had received from the married couple, they had had an ulterior motive for taking him into the cottage.

  Finding himself alone with Miranda one afternoon when she had asked permission to paint in his room and the other two had gone on to the marshes, Camilla to make some impressionistic daubings, Adrian to roam the foreshore in search of more of those specimens, either of flora or fauna, which apparently he needed for his work, Palgrave pushed his notebook aside and said:

  “How do you come to team up with Camilla? If I may say so, she doesn’t seem quite your cup of tea.”

  Instead of answering his question, Miranda said, in what seemed an inconsequent way:

  “My Adrian is a good man.”

  “Yes? Why shouldn’t he be?”

  “He is, I tell you. But that girl!”

  “I know. I’ve had some.”

  “Are you a good man, Colin?”

  “I hope so. Why?”

  “Camilla needs a husband.”

  “Very likely. Most girls do.”

  “She has a private income, not large, but permanent, you know. She would not be a financial burden on a man.”

  “That’s as may be, but, so far as I’m concerned, I’ve enough on my plate already without taking on a young nymphomaniac’

  “She would not be like that—not if she had a man of her own.”

  “Well, frankly, Miranda, I’m not in the market.”

  “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “Once. Not any more. She married.”

  “Oh, I am sorry! I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “She thought I was too self-centred. It was while I was writing my first novel. I needed all my faculties.”

  “Well, of course, I understand your point of view. Art is a mistress. No wife can hope to compete with her. Of course you had to put your novel first.”

  “Yes, but the girl didn’t think so. Sometimes I wonder if that’s why I can’t get down to any more writing. There’s a blockage, and I think she is the cause of it. You see, it was I who broke the engagement.”

  “It would be nice if you had taken the same f
ancy to Camilla as she has taken to you.”

  “Well, I haven’t.”

  Miranda sighed and squeezed out a dollop of green paint just as Adrian, bearing a jam-jar containing low forms of aquatic life, returned to the cottage.

  “Why are you painting in here?” he asked.

  “Because Colin is lending me part of his front window. There is the view I want from here, but it’s too windy to sit outside today. I am not breaking our contract. I was not intending to interrupt his work. I did not say a word for more than an hour, and then he spoke first. Now I come to think of it, he asked me a question which I did not answer.”

  “It doesn’t matter now,” said Palgrave. “It was an idle, impertinent question, anyway. Where did you leave Camilla?”

  “Oh, your question was about her, was it?” said Adrian. “I carried some of her things for her and saw her settled down to her sketching, but I don’t think she did very much work. The last I saw of her she was talking to one of the summer visitors.”

  “A man, of course,” commented Miranda.

  “Well, she would not trouble herself to talk to a woman, still less to stroll towards the village shops with one.”

  “I hope she won’t be a nuisance to the poor man.”

  “So long as she is not a nuisance to me, I’m afraid I don’t mind in the least who else she afflicts.”

  “Colin wanted to know why we had brought her with us. The fact is, Colin, that we often take one or more of the art school students away with us in the summer. We quite like young company and, as I teach part-time, I’m able to give them some hints about their work. Camilla begged us to let her join us this year, and at the time we saw no reason to refuse. I’m afraid, though, that we grasped at the idea of having you join us. It really was most unfair considering that you had come here to work on your novel. How is it coming along?”

  “It isn’t, so far. Inspiration is absolutely lacking.”

  “It will come,” said Miranda comfortingly. “When it does, you won’t be able to get the words down fast enough.”

  “I don’t think that’s my style of writing. I weigh up and discard and alter. I’m very painstaking.”

  “So am I,” said Adrian, “but when Miranda finds a subject she likes, she slaps it on to the canvas like a man slapping creosote on to a garden fence.”

  “You should never be skimping with oils,” said Miranda, making a quick dab at her husband’s nose with a brush full of green paint. Adrian picked up her paint rag and wiped his face. Lifting up the jam-jar, he said:

  “I have had some success today, I think, but I wish I had some transport. Further along the coast there are freshwater marshes. The specimens would be different there.”

  “I must take you in my car,” said Palgrave, without committing himself to a definite promise.

  “Would you? I’ll show you the kind of things I do.” He took himself and his jam-jar upstairs and returned with a portfolio. From it he took some water-colour sketches and some pencil drawings. He named the subjects as he displayed them. “Yellow flag, water violet, marsh pea, marsh woundwort, marsh sow thistle, and this is one which not everybody knows, the rayed nodding bur-marigold. Of course not all of them came from these marshes.”

  “They are exquisite,” said Palgrave sincerely. “Really lovely work.” So indeed they were. Botanically correct in every finely finished detail, they were also delicate, beautiful, sensitive works of art.

  “Thank you,” said Adrian simply. “By the way, if, when you are going down to bathe, you should come across a specimen of the peacock-worm”—he made a quick sketch on a blank sheet in his portfolio—“I wish you would let me know. It’s a lovely creature, but it feeds underwater. It’s a brownish-coloured tube—that’s the worm—and these tentacles I’ve sketched can be pink, red or violet-coloured. So says my book, but I’ve never seen an actual specimen. I’d like to see what kind of design I could make from it.”

  “I’m not terribly good at spotting marine animals except jellyfish and crabs, and those for the best of reasons,” said Palgrave, “but I’ll do my best.”

  “Thank you. Oh, and if you should see this”—he made another rapid sketch—“I should be most awfully glad. It’s called the brittle star. They are five-armed, like an ordinary starfish, but they leave the most fantastic patterns on the sand. The photograph I was shown was taken in Pembrokeshire, so they may not inhabit the beaches here, but you may be luckier in spotting things than I am.”

  “I doubt that very much.”

  “I want my supper,” said Miranda. “I think we won’t wait for Camilla. The food is salad and things, so she can have hers when she comes in.”

  They sat on, after supper, and chatted until Palgrave suggested that his room was both larger and more comfortable than the kitchen. By ten o’clock Camilla still had not come in, so the couple went to bed. Palgrave sat at his window and tried to concentrate on a plot which would involve his three companions. The best he could do was to envisage Adrian falling in love with Camilla, but, even if he used this most unlikely opening, he could not see where it was going to lead him, or how it was going to bear the weight of the thousands of words and the score or so of chapters which would have to follow this less than auspicious beginning.

  At a quarter past twelve, while he was still sitting there, but this time with the light on, Miranda came downstairs fully dressed, opened the front door without a word to Palgrave, and went out. Adrian, in his dressing-gown, came down five minutes later.

  “I tried to persuade her not to bother about Camilla,” he said, seating himself on the studio couch, “but she says we are responsible for the girl. I don’t see that. Camilla opted to come here with us and she is of age, so why should we bother what she’s up to?”

  “I don’t see how Miranda is going to begin looking for her at this time of night,” said Palgrave.

  “There’s a song and pop dance thing at the pub tonight. Miranda thinks she has gone to it.”

  “It would have been over long ago, surely?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  Miranda came back and sat beside her husband. He looked at her and raised his eyebrows. She shook her head.

  “She has never stayed out like this before,” she said. “I hope she hasn’t been out in somebody’s car and they’ve had an accident.”

  “If she picked up a lift in somebody’s car, she probably got what she’s been asking for,” said Palgrave.

  “I know. But, Colin, sometimes they kill the girl afterwards.”

  “No such luck where Camilla is concerned,” said Adrian, “so stop worrying. The bad pennies always turn up.”

  “Oh, Adrian, I don’t think she’s a bad penny, not really.”

  “A little defaced and debased, perhaps,” said Palgrave. “And now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to go to bed.”

  “Oh, Colin! Of course we’re sitting on it! Adrian, help him open it out and we’ll make it up for him.”

  At three in the morning there was a heavy thunderstorm. In the middle of it Camilla came in. She was soaking wet. She put on Palgrave’s light and began to take off her dripping garments and drop them on the floor. Her entrance did what the thunder had failed to do. It woke Palgrave. He sat up, blinking in the light.

  “Hey!” he said. “What do you think you’re up to? Get the hell out of here, and p.d.q., or I’ll give you what I wanted to give you the other night when you managed to climb in on me.”

  “Oh, Colin, I’m cold and so tired.”

  “Up you go. We’ll discuss your sad case with the others in the morning.”

  “Just a minute while you get me warm?” She came towards the bed. Palgrave got out of it, walked over to his suitcase and took off the strap which held it together against a broken fastening.

  “Ready when you are,” he said, giving the strap an experimental flick through the air, “and it won’t be quite the warming you have in mind.” Camilla gave a coquettish little shriek just as Miranda came do
wn the stairs.

  “What happened to you?” she asked fiercely.

  “Nothing at all. Somebody gave me a lift into the town, we had dinner and then there was the usual engine trouble on the way back. It might have happened to anybody.”

  “Oh, go to bed,” said Miranda. “Leave those wet clothes in the scullery. I’ll see to them in the morning. I’m glad you’re all right.”

  “I’m not. I hope she’s caught her death of cold,” said Palgrave. “If she has, what a blessed relief that will be to one and all!”

  He spent the next morning walking over the now spongy marshes. The creek was brimming and was wider than he had seen it before. The water was shadowed with grey which began to turn to silver and then to glints of gold as the sun rose. His wanderings took him as far as the pebble-ridge. It was clear that the holiday season was getting under way, for all the moorings in the creek had been taken up by the smaller yachts and he could see, when he scrambled to the top of the ridge, that several larger craft were anchored offshore, their dinghies either hoisted up on deck or riding behind them.

  He came down from the ridge and found a track, muddy and waterlogged after the thunderstorm, which led to the church. Once past the church he decided to take to the road and walk to the village with the windmill which he had passed on his way to Saltacres. Miranda had made a painting of the windmill and he wanted to study the romantically situated little building for himself. As he had become rather too fond of saying since his first book had been published, all was grist which came to a novelist’s mill, and he was still hoping that something, somewhere, would bring him what he still thought of as inspiration.

  The village, with a mile of marshes between it and the sea, was larger than, when he had passed through it in his car, he had supposed. He explored its ancient streets, found a good road which led down to the beach, looked at the outside of the church but did not go in, and made what inspection he could of the windmill, but discovered that it had been co-opted as part of a modern house. Time passed. He found a small pub near what had been the harbour and jotted down notes and sketches while he had a beer, and then he made his return journey to Saltacres.