there appeared to be tier upon tier of white, silent edifices like a scene on a backcloth or in a dream.
Further along the path she came to some steep stone steps, but she passed these, pushed her way through long, flowering grasses and blackberry trails and came upon another flight of steps, but these led downwards and were so little used that they were grass and weed grown.
She descended cautiously and came to the little stream which marked the garden boundary of a fairly large house. There were stepping stones across the stream, but it ran fast and turbulently and, in any case, if she crossed it she would be trespassing.
As she stood there studying what appeared to be another tiny cove even smaller than the one beside which the hotel was built, a youth and a woman came out of the house and made their way towards the water. He was the dark, beautiful young man whom she had met on the previous evening. The woman was a stranger. Hers was a tall, slim figure dressed in a towelling bath-robe which reached to her knees. Her legs and feet were bare and as she let go of her clutch on the front of her robe to push aside an untrimmed bush on the other side of the garden, it was clear that the robe was her only garment. The boy was in bathing trunks and he was running and leaping ahead of her until he was suddenly aware of the visitor.
He checked, stared and then came over to her. The tall woman walked on, entered the cave which opened out by the far side of the cove and emerged wearing a bikini. She stood looking irresolutely at the incoming tide and then nerved herself and waded in.
‘Do you want to come across?’ the dark-skinned boy said winningly. ‘Take my hand and don’t slip on the stones.’
‘No, I am content to be where I am, thank you, Ubi,’ she replied.
‘All right. Then I shall join Fiona. She has come to live with us. My great grandmother wants me in exchange, but I shall not go.’
‘You have a choice?’
‘Oh, yes. There is nowhere to swim where my great grandmother lives. Besides, I won’t leave Garnet. What would he do without me?’
‘I cannot think. Enjoy your swimming. I am going back to breakfast.’
‘Could I have breakfast with you at the hotel? It will be a better breakfast than here, and I don’t have to go to school today.’
‘It will be a pleasure to give you breakfast and your companion, too, if she would like to come.’
‘Oh, yes, that will be great. I will let the others know.’
‘Very well. I will go back and make the arrangements. When may I expect you?’
‘In one hour. I myself could make it sooner, but—’ he jerked his head towards where Fiona, a timid naiad, was floundering about in four feet of water on a spasmodic, tentative breast-stroke— ‘you know what ladies are like.’
He ran back towards the house and shouted. The artist who had been painting a view of the cove on the previous day came out on to the lower balcony. Dame Beatrice climbed up the smugglers’ steps and, from the top, looked down again. The cliffs hid Fiona’s splashing struggles from her view, but out in the open she saw a dark, bobbing head which might have been that of a seal.
‘Laura would be hard put to it to keep pace with that boy,’ she thought. She cackled gently to herself. ‘I must make sure that it is a better breakfast than he gets at home. Fiona has gone to live with them and it was to have been in exchange for Ubi, but he has jibbed. Well, we should not be short of conversation at the breakfast table.’
Neither were they. Fiona said little, but Gamaliel more than made up for her taciturnity and by the end of the meal Dame Beatrice knew all about the family dinner party and the distribution of the family among the three houses. Fiona seemed indifferent to Gamaliel’s naive disclosures and when, at the end of the meal, she thanked Dame Beatrice and stated that she had better return to Seawards to help Bluebell with the household chores, all the boy said was:
‘Yes, you go. Tell them I will be back soon to study and learn. I am hoping that Dame Beatrice will show me over the hotel. I have never been inside it before and I have to learn about staying in hotels because of my future career.’
Dame Beatrice, amused and rather touched by his ingenuous approach, took him into the dimly-lit lounge, out through the picture-windowed bar (closed, so early in the day) on to the bar terrace. She also showed him the entrance to the sauna bath which had been built underneath the broad terrace which ran round two sides of the annexe. He saw the annexe entrance hall and the flight of stairs which led down to the passage between the annexe and the dining-room in the old part of the house and then she showed him her bedroom and bathroom before she returned with him to the courtyard and the car park.
‘But, of course, you won’t stay in a place like this when you are world champion,’ she said. ‘You will stay in cities which have hotels the size of palaces.’
‘But they won’t be better than this?’
‘Oh, no, they won’t be better than this.’
‘It is strange, the way you became my friend.’
‘Why strange?’
‘Because you are the third lady who has been pushed in the back like that.’ He gave her details.
‘You are right to call it strange,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘People seem to be very clumsy at times.’
‘Oh I think the other incidents were meant to end in death,’ said Gamaliel calmly. ‘There is a smell of death around these parts, don’t you think?’
‘No, only of decaying shellfish,’ said Dame Beatrice, cackling.
