A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs

six-strand necklace above him, a tapering crescent of pebbles below. Not a local in sight to take the load from him. And if he didn’t make up his mind quickly it might be too late. Better make a fool of yourself than watch some other fool kid drown himself before your eyes.

Oh, damn! Whether he was in trouble or not—!

Dominic launched himself from the path and went down the last slope of thinning grass and shale in a long, precarious slither, to arrive upright but staggering in the grey pebble shelf under the rocks, just clear of the hissing water. It was falling rapidly now, and this was no very good place to go in, but he had no choice. He shed his shirt and slacks, kicked off his sandals, and waded into water that ran back before him, snatching its last fringes away from his toes in a scurry of foam. He overtook it, felt his way as fast as he dared down the broken slippery descent, took one last rapid sighting, and struck out strongly towards the boy in the sea.

The first stages were easy, and he knew his own capabilities and could trust himself in this much of a sea, even if his own experience had been, gained in the makeshift river-and-swimming-bath conditions of a land-locked county. But the currents off these rocks were something nobody would willingly venture in a fast ebb like this, and the thought of the jagged teeth ripping up the water into oil-green ribbons clung in his mind through every minute of that swim. Half a mile northward, and the mild, long rollers would be sliding innocently down the level sand, as harmless as the ripples in a baby’s bath. Here he had a fight on his hands.

He dug his shoulders into it, head low, edging away from the rocks with every stroke. Once he hoisted himself out of the trough to take a fresh sighting, and found the boy by the glimpse of a slender arm flung clear of the water for an instant. Nearer than Dominic had expected. And perhaps still clear of the treacherous pull of the rocks. Maybe he’d known what he was doing, after all. Maybe he was one of the harbour kids, bred from some ancestry involving fish, and did this every afternoon for fun.

But no, that wouldn’t do. The harbour kids simply didn’t go in off the point, they had too much sense. The ones who can do nearly everything never push their luck to the last rim, because they don’t have to prove anything, they know.

Well, if this kid was the strongest swimmer on the North Cornish coast, he was coming ashore now, if his rescuer had to knock him out to bring him.

The sea flung them together almost unexpectedly in the end; two startled faces, open-mouthed, hair streaming water, glared at each other out of focus, six inches of ocean racing between them hard and green as bottle-glass. Dominic caught at a thin, slippery arm, and gripped it, pulling the boy round to lie against his body. The boy opened his mouth to yell, and choked on water, rolling helplessly for a moment; and then he was being towed strongly back towards the shore, and seemed to have lost all command of his own powers at the shock of such an indignity. He recovered almost as quickly, and suddenly he was a fury. He jerked himself free and tried to dive under his rescuer, but he had met with a resolution as grim as his own. The plunging head was retrieved painfully by its wet hair, and clipped smartly on the ear into the bargain. The sea effectively quenched the resulting yell of rage, and Dominic recovered his hold and kicked out powerfully for the distant sands.

For the first stage of that return journey, in the event more arduous and tedious than risky, he got no help from his passenger. But after a few minutes he was aware of a considerable skill seconding his own strokes; however sullenly, certainly to good effect. The kid had given up and resigned himself to being hauled ashore; and at least, having gone so far, he had sense enough to reason that he might as well make the journey as quickly and comfortably as possible. They came in like that, together, struggling steadily northward across the tug of the undertow into the sunny water off the beach, until they touched ground, and floundered wearily through the shallows, feet sliding, deep into the soft, shaken sands.

Rising out of the water was an effort that sucked out their strength suddenly, and set them trembling and buckling at the joints with the realisation of their own tiredness. They fell together on their faces, toes still trailing in the receding foam, and lay gasping and coughing up sea-water. And there was the late afternoon sun on their backs, grateful and warm as a stroking hand, and the soft, almost silent waves lapping innocently on the long, level beach that stretched for more than two miles beyond Pentarno.

Dominic hoisted himself laboriously on his hands, and looked at his capture with something between a proprietor’s pride and a keeper’s exasperation. A slim, sunburned body, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old, in black swimming trunks. Light brown hair—probably almost flaxen when it was dry—streamed sea-water into the sand. He lay on his folded arms, the fine fan of his ribs clapping frantically for air, like cramped wings. Dominic got to his knees, hoisted the limp, light body by the middle, and squeezed out of him the remainder of the brine he had swallowed.

Hands and knees scrabbled in the sand, and the boy writhed away from him like an eel. Under the lank fall of hair one half-obscured eye, blue and steely as a dagger, glared fury.

“What the hell,” spluttered the ungrateful child, from a mouth bitter with sea-water, “do you think you’re—doing?” He choked and ran out of breath there. Dominic sat back on his heels and scowled back at him resentfully.

“Now, look here, you daft little devil, you’d do better thinking what the hell you were doing, out there in a sea like that. Don’t you know the bathing’s dead dangerous anywhere off the point? Especially when the tide’s going out, like this. This town marks all the safe places, why can’t you have the sense to stick to ’em? And don’t give me that drop-dead look, either. You can thank your stars I was around. You’d have been in a mess without me.”

“I would not! I wasn’t in trouble—” He wavered for the first time; fundamentally he was, it seemed, a truthful person, even when in a rage. “I could have managed, anyhow. I know the tides round here a lot better than you do, I bet.” The still indignant eyes had sized up a summer visitor without any difficulty. “Damn it, I live here.”

“Then your dad ought to tan you,” said Dominic grimly,“for taking such fool chances.”

“I wasn’t taking chances—not for nothing, I wasn’t.” He heaved a great breath into him, and swept back the fall of hair from his forehead. “I wouldn’t—not without a good reason, my dad knows that. I went in because I saw a man in the sea—”

Dominic was on his feet in a flurry of sand. “You saw a man? You mean, somebody in trouble? Where?”

“Off the point, where I was, where d’you think? There was something being pulled out in the race, anyhow, I’m nearly sure it was a man. I swam out to try and get to him,” said the boy, with bitter satisfaction in shifting the burden of his own frustration to more deserving shoulders,“but you had to take it on yourself to fish me out. So if he’s drowned by now, you know whose fault it is, don’t you?”

Dominic turned without a word, and set off at a run towards the water, his knees a little rubbery under him from shock and exertion. He had gone no more than a few yards when a shout from the dunes behind him brought