re-hung and the scorched ones taken down.
The soldiers, both Daphne’s lot and Betty’s, were asleep, but James was sitting on his bed when Daphne came to say: ‘Get on your civvies, leave your uniform, come with me. Yes, now, before anyone wakes.’ He did not argue, but obediently put on Daphne’s husband’s brothers trousers and shirt. She put on slacks and a shirt and let her hair fall on her shoulders: this was like a statement of defiance, but to whom, she could not have said. In the kitchen they drank hasty cups of coffee, ignoring the maids. Daphne put some things into a box, and they set off in her car along the coast.
Betty watched them go, from her windows. She was in a seethe of conflicting feelings but most of all she felt as if her friend had been struck by lightning. Black lightning-if there was such a thing.
The streets ran smooth and citified through the suburbs, then they were on a rough road, the sea on their right hand, and what looked like farmland on their left. Vines and oak trees, a fair and smiling scene, but soon the land was unworked, with only a few scattered sheep. James looked only at Daphne, until she put out a hand and touched his face with her knuckles. ‘Stop it, you’re making me nervous.’
‘I can’t help it,’ he said, as she had earlier. She smiled and he said bitterly, ‘It’s not just an amusement for me.’ And then, ‘Stop the car, stop it now.’
She drove until they were on the edge of a little bay where waves frisked among low black rocks. He moved up to put his arm round her. His face … it frightened her, and he was trembling. Not many cars came along this road, but now she saw one approaching.
‘James, wait. Let’s just get there,’
“Where?’
‘You’ll see.’
She put the car in motion again. She saw his face staring down past her at a postcard sea, gulls swooping, sea noise, bird noise, and the sunlight a moving glitter to the horizon. No ships.
‘I hate the sea,’ he said, ‘I hate it. It’s out to get us. And it will.’
‘Don’t look at it.’
So he looked at her, shifting his head a little, but past her head was the glare of the sea.
They turned inland. There was a broken gate. Scrubby unkept land: you’d never guess the sea was a couple of hundred yards oft”. Then a turn towards it, through low bushes, and ahead a shack or shed, with the bushes growing close all round it.
The car stopped. She lifted out the box of provisions, gathered from the party leftovers, and a big enamel can of water, which he took from her. She went ahead along a faint path, the bushes seeming to want to clutch and bring her down, to a door which she opened with a large key. Inside was dark, till she pulled down shutters. Light showed, first, a wide high bed, piled with all kinds of covers, then shelves around wooden walls, with dishes and plates, and a small wooden table in the middle on a plank floor, with two wooden chairs.
‘Our holiday home,’ she said. ‘Do you like it?’
James might have said that he seemed to spend his life now in sheds or huts - this one was called a pondokkie. What’s in a name? A little house, like one in a fairytale, m the woods. But they were scrubby bushes, smelling of salt.
The sea was a murmur, not too far away, with an occasional splash as a wave broke on a rock. The two stood looking at each other. The feverish state that had enclosed them since his arrival in the setting of fine house and gardens might have dissolved here and now, but it didn’t. They sank on to the two wooden chairs, and, holding each others hands across the table, stared, serious, quiet -and oddly, with bitterness, directed, not at each other, but at Fate, the war, something not themselves. She stroked his face with a hand that had pearly pink nails. He thought, those nails wouldn’t survive long if she really lived in this pondokkie, a rough hut. This clean and shiny sweetly- smelling woman, this was just where she played … and was he what she was playing with?
‘Wipe that bloody lipstick off.”
She opened her bag, found a handkerchief and he took it from her and carefully but thoroughly removed the scarlet lips.
‘There now,’ he said.
She said, ‘Let’s go and look at the sea. The tide’s out.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’
Gravely, he took her hand and led her to the bed. Through the open window, came the smell of salt-stung vegetation. Silence except for the murmur of the sea. Their lovemaking, trembling and hungry, seemed to celebrate not love but tragedy. They fell asleep and she woke to find him screaming, his hands over his ears.
‘What is it?’ he shouted.
‘The tide’s in.’
It seemed that the ocean was rolling in to focus on just that stretch of shore so close to their shelter that the next wave would rear and crash down on it, dragging them out to sea. The little house shook, the earth shook, crash, crash and then a thundering withdrawal: it was as if they were deep under the sea, buried in it.
His face was in her breasts and he was crying, not like a child, oh, no, a deep choking sobbing, and he was clutching to her as if they were helplessly rolling in deep surf.
‘It’s like this when it’s high tide - this must be an unusually high one.’ Her voice was like a hush within the pounding tumult. ‘I shouldn’t have brought you here. I didn’t think.’
‘But I’m with you,’ she heard, as another wave crescendoed and crashed.
‘We’ll get up and go and look at it. You’ll see, it’s quite a way off, fifty yards at least.’
‘No, no, no.’
