“Thanks. Just making sure. It’s the first time I ever saw him when he didn’t have an imaginary mirror in front of him. He must be really fond of Paddy.”
“He is,” said Dominic.
“Do I detect a note of reproof in your voice, Mr. Felse?”
He said nothing. What was the good? Only a tiny corner of her mind fretted at the memory of Simon off his guard, and that was to make their one overwhelming anxiety bearable, like pinching yourself to take your mind off a hideous toothache. Any serious thinking she was going to do about it would be done later, in repose, when, please God, they’d have Paddy Rossall safe in bed, and Simon restored to his old image. And then he’d start rubbing her up the wrong way all over again.
“You’ll notice,” she said perversely, her shoes slipping in the weedy crevices of the rock, “he never asks me to marry him when there might be the slightest fear of me saying yes.” She slithered into the edge of an invisible pool, and Dominic caught her by the arm and drew her back on to safe ground.
“All right?”
“Fine! Just a shoe-full of sea. It can’t make me any wetter.” She held on to him for a moment, steadying herself. Her hands were very cold. He saw her face close to him, feathers of wet hair plastered to her cheek, her eyes sombre and wretched. “Dom—we shall find him, shan’t we?”
“Yes,” he said, very firmly. “He’s a sensible kid, I don’t believe he’d let anyone creep up on him, and I don’t believe he’d do anything daft himself.” Which from eighteen to fifteen, when Tamsin came to think of it, was pretty generous, but he sounded as if he really meant it. “He’ll be found intact,” said Dominic strenuously, “and with any luck, we shall be the ones to find him. So hang on, and let’s have a look round the next corner.”
They had looked round a good many by then, with their hearts in their mouths at every turning, but so far there’d been no slight, tumbled body under the cliffs, and nothing washing about in the edge of the retreating waves but casual weed.
“Yes,” she said docilely. And after a moment, very quietly at his shoulder: “You’re a nice boy, Dominic Felse, I like you.”
“Good! I like you, too, I like you a lot. There, you see, nothing!” He couldn’t help reflecting, as soon as it was out, that nothing was a pretty poor return for all their hunting, and a pretty lame reassurance for Paddy’s mother. But it was all they had, and it was better than the wrong thing, at any rate.
The sea sighed away from them, down the more steeply tilted shingle. They stood close under the overhang of the cliff, on a washed and empty shore, and right above their heads must be the necklace of the lofty path that circled the Dragon’s Head, and the scattered hollows of gorse where Simon had found the bicycle. The waters had left the arched entrance of the cave now, it stood tamed and dark above a faint glimmer of salt puddles penned among the boulders.
They halted for only a second, contemplating it together.
“He wouldn’t,” said Tamsin, “would he?”
“Not without a reason, but he may have had a reason, how do we know?”
“But he knows the tides, he wouldn’t let himself get caught.”
“Something may have happened that didn’t leave him any choice. Anyhow, we’re not leaving anything out.”
“Careful, then,” she cautioned, drawing him to the right, to the landward side of the thin channel of water that lay prisoned among the pebbles in the cavern’s mouth. “This side’s the smoothest going. And look out, there are holes.”
Dominic fell into one at that moment, cold salt water gripped him to the knees, and the chilling shock surprised a muted yell out of him. Deep in the blackness beyond the beam of the torch, echo took the shout and volleyed it back to him redoubled.
“Dom!” Tamsin caught at his arm. “Did you hear that?”
Floundering out of the crevices on slippery oblique rock, he supposed that she was as startled by the force and complexity of the echo as he had been, and merely went on scrambling noisily up to safer ground. “Hear it? I started it. It wasn’t that good an imitation—”
“No—listen!” She shook him impatiently, and he froze into obedient silence, straining his ears.
Nothing at first, not a sound; then they were aware of the ceaseless, soft, universal sound of the dripping of sea water from every jutting point of the stone ceiling above them and the contorted walls around, and the soft, busy flowing of a dozen rivulets draining down between the pebbles into the central channel behind them. The place was full of the sounds of water, but empty of the sounds of men.
“But it wasn’t all echo. I’m sure!”
Almost fearfully, Dominic called upward into the invisible spaces of the cave: “Paddy?”
The call came eddying back to him from a dozen projections he could not see, repeated in a dozen hopeful, fearful inflections, ricocheting away into silence. Then a last faint and distant sound, out of turn, out of key, started a weak reverberation away on their right.
“There! Hear that? There
But Dominic was already scrambling wildly up the rattling scree of sand and gravel and shell, the pencil of wavering light wincing away from rocks and water-drips before him, clawing his way up towards the drier reaches of the cave. He stretched out a hand to her and dragged her after him. Stumbling, slipping, panting, they climbed inland; and somewhere ahead of them, distant and faint but drawing nearer, unmistakable sounds of someone else’s stumbling, slipping, panting progress came down to meet them.
Into the beam of the torch blundered Paddy Rossall, wiping his dirty face hastily with an even dirtier hand; pallid, wet, and shivering with cold, but alive, intact and alone.
“You don’t mind,” said Phil, turning in at the drive of Treverra Place, “if we call in here? I don’t know that it will do any good, but I just thought, while we’re so near—She might remember
