‘All right, then, get up and we’ll have some supper.’
‘I don’t want to eat. I don’t want to waste the time,’
She slid out, standing naked to smile at him, gravely, for this was the note that had been struck from their first moment, but there was something there, what? - melancholy? Well, that was in order, but surely not this edge of bitterness?
‘What is it?’ he asked, a too-ready suspicion flaring,
‘I don’t know,’ she said, defeated, turning to set out bread and butter and ham. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps I am trying to laugh at us.’
‘At me!’
‘Never you,’ she said. ‘Two days. Two. And I feel …’
‘Well, tell me, yes, tell me. I want to know … am I the first bloody soldier you brought here?’
Well, thank you. If that’s what you think. I think we should leave.’ She was crying; he sat on the edge of the bed, and was about to get up and go to her but then he crouched down with his hands over his ears as a wave crashed, seemingly just above them.
‘Why me? Yes, why me? But I don’t care. You’re wonderful - and that’s enough.’ And he ducked down as the little house shook.
‘I care,’ and she sat down, laid her head on her arms on the table and wept.
He left the bed and sat opposite, stroking her hair, watching her cry.
Then he put out his hand, got up, took her hand and said, ‘This is ridiculous. Let’s get back to bed.’ And he led her weeping on to the bed, and lay down beside her.
‘This little house, this pondokkie of yours, I won’t go back on the ship, I’ll just hide here, and you can come and visit me.’
After the wedding of Joe Wright, bachelor, and Daphne Brent, spinster, they had taken a week of conventional honeymoon in a smart hotel up country, famous as a haven for newlyweds, and then he had brought her here. It was not likely that she failed to think, ‘I bet he brought his girls here when he was a bachelor.’ This did not make her jealous. She rather liked the idea of this frail shelter, that seemed always about to dissolve into the sea, as a place for lovers. In this very room she and Joe, naked and happy, had made love and eaten picnic food and then run exultantly shouting down to the sea at low tide. And now she was here with this man, but she was in a different dimension with him. If Joe walked in now he would come from a sane and healthy world and she would look at him from this dream she was in - a nightmare, was it? - and then disappear, with a shriek, and he’d think he had seen an apparition from a nether world. Such pain, in this young man and in her, and she did not know where hers had come from: she had never envisaged unhappiness in her blueprints for the future. She had not experienced it. She did not know this youth: he was a stranger and this element where she found herself with him was alien. And yet, knowing that soon she would lose him, made her want to do something primitive and brutal, like pulling out her hair, beating her breasts with her fists, sit swaying, sick with grief, a black cloth over her head.
Soon she was lying with a sleeping man in her arms - if he were a Jeep, and not in some kind of trance: he trembled, or came to himself in little shuddering spasms. She lay with her eyes shut, holding him, and lived through a memory of something that happened soon after she came to South Africa. She and Joe, Betty and Henry and another couple had driven off into the mountains, following little roads known to the South Africans from boyhood rambles. They stopped the cars, not in a campers’ site, but where baboons had made a cliff their own. All up the face of the cliff, from rocks and holes that were the openings to ancient caves, the baboons perched and clung and barked at them. The humans took no notice. A few yards from the cliff, in the middle of a little plateau formed by slabs of rock split by heat and cold was a little tree. It was dead, a pale spectral thing growing from between the rocks. Dead. It was midday and strong light made the dry leaves hang whitish, sketched m air, with heat waves shimmering around them like the volatile oils made visible. Bread and wine and fruit were set out, and the women cubed some meat. The men set light to the dead tree. The idea was, it would fall and they would use it as fire for their meat. The tree flared up, it was at once a torch of white-hot flames. The baboons on their cliff barked their fear, the humans fell back, the tree was a river of flame, a rush of white sparks. Daphne was standing too close. The quick flare took her by surprise; she could feel the hairs on her arms frizzle. She was struck by the intensity of the fire into an immobility. She cried out, and Joe leaped to her and pulled her back out of the heat that was now shimmering and oiling for yards around the tree.
That was how she felt now*.
‘Too close,’ she was murmuring, eyes closed, holding a naked man lost in his dream. ‘It’s too close,’
When the light came, the waves began to come close again, and roar and pound, and they held each other, and listened, until the noise abated, and she said, ‘Now, I want you to come out and look,’
i told you I wish I need never see the ocean again.’
‘I know, but come on.’
It was late morning. The sea was in retreat. She took him through the push and clutch of the salty bushes to a little patch of sand, still wet, but drying pale on its surface, and beyond were tall black rocks, where seaweed clung. The sea was rough today, jumping and leaping about among the rocks.
‘Do you ever swim here?’ he asked.
‘Over there is a pool in the rocks. It’s safe, when the tides out.’ She stopped herself asking if he’d like to go in, just in time.
They stood with their arms about each other allowing themselves to be hypnotised by the seas noise, but she could feel him tense, discouraged.
‘It’s only sea,’ she said, though she knew he was rejecting the moment, and probably, her. ‘There it is, kept in its place, it can’t get us.’ And wished she could unsay it; she had forgotten he would be back on the ship.
‘When the war’s over I’ll never go near a ship again.’
She began to cry. She was forlorn and rejected. Why was she? She did not know herself. Her emotional extremes, sorrow, exultation, grief, passion, were leaving her rather like that fish she could see, flapping in the sand. That James should hate the sea so much: she could not bear it. She had often thought that when she came to
