The Mudflats of the Dead

‘Oh, wait for me,’ she said, ‘and I’ll make you a cup of tea.’ Palgrave turned his back while she dressed. She caught his hand when she was ready and held on to it, swinging his arm a little as they walked, more slowly this time, across the marshes and along the banks of the creek. They crossed the plank bridge, took to the causeway and made their way towards the village.

They did not converse. The girl hummed something monotonous and, to his ears, tuneless, but he sensed that she was happy. He himself was filled with a languorous contentment after his bathe. It came from the enchanted confluence of the sun’s warmth and the sea, and he felt at peace with all men and even in some kind of comradeship with the determined girl. He was still certain that the invitation to stay at the cottage came from her and from nobody else, but in his state of euphoria he felt sufficiently grateful to her not to make any attempt to put an end to the hand-holding, embarrassing though he found it.

‘After all, she’s only a kid,’ he thought, ‘and she’s probably lonely.’ On impulse, when they were drinking the tea she had made, he said, ‘Do you really think I’m rude?’

‘No, it’s my fault. I shouldn’t make a nuisance of myself, but the other two are so sufficient unto themselves that it really isn’t much fun for me down here. I’m glad you’ve come. Adrian and Miranda have been married for years and years, but they’re still in love with one another. Are you married, Colin?’

‘You know I’m not.’

‘Engaged?’

‘No. I told you! I was engaged at one time, but an author is no sort of a husband, so I broke it off and now she has married somebody else.’

‘Was she nice?’

‘Very nice.’

‘Do you have regrets?’

‘Sometimes; not very often.’

‘Do you ever see her nowadays?’

‘No, thank goodness, although they live in the same London suburb as I do.’

‘The other two won’t be back for ages. I’ll just wash up these tea things and then we can go to bed for a bit.’

‘Not on your life! How old are you?’

‘Nineteen. Nearly twenty.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘It’s true. Are you prudish?’

‘I’m a schoolmaster.’

‘And I’m an art student.’

‘You’re a sinful little beazel. Any more of your nonsense and I leave on the dot and go on to the town. I mean it. You damn well behave yourself, or else you’ll make it impossible for me to stay here.’

CHAPTER 3

MENAGE A QUATRE

‘One for sadness,

Two for gladness,

Three a wedding,

Four a death.’

Anonymous

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The cottage comprised the sitting-room, now allotted to Palgrave, a kitchen and a small scullery downstairs, and two bedrooms at the top of a steep staircase. From his front window Palgrave could look out over the marshes. He moved a small table into the window and borrowed a chair of the right height from the kitchen and set out his notebook, a sketch-pad and his portable typewriter and continued to wait for the inspiration which still did not come.

At first there was little to disturb him. The Kirbys were as good as their word and, except for passing through his room to go out or to come in, both of which they did quietly and expeditiously, they did not speak to him unless he spoke first. For the first two days Camilla followed their example, although he guessed that she directed pleading glances at the back of his unresponsive head as he sat at his table in the window making notes and a sketch plan of the immediate neighbourhood.

By the third day, however, this good behaviour on her part broke down. She came downstairs before dawn and, while he was still asleep, she wriggled her way on to the studio couch beside him. He woke to find a naked nymph who clung to him with such determination that he had to use what seemed to him brutal force to break her stranglehold and deposit her on the floor, where she knelt sobbing with her head buried in the table-cover which was doing duty as a quilt and, so far as he could make out, threatening to blackmail him for seducing his girl pupils. She was clearly beside herself with frustration and disappointment.

Palgrave got up, put on trousers and a sweater over his pyjamas and went out into the chilly half light which preceded the sunrise. When he had walked off his irritation and had rehearsed in his mind what he would have to say to Camilla when they next met, he returned to the cottage with a half resolve to leave it immediately after breakfast and look for lodgings in the town which he knew was only a few miles away.

‘And a damn nuisance that is!’ he said severely to the girl, walking with her to the little bridge in the middle of the morning.

‘Oh, Colin, don’t go!’ she said, leaning on the sturdy handrail and gazing not at him but across the expanse of the marshes. ‘I didn’t mean any harm. It was only a joke. You needn’t be so stuffy. I don’t wonder you chose to be a schoolmaster! You’re just an old stuffed shirt. Are you going to tell Miranda and Adrian about me? I shan’t do it again, you know. I don’t like puritans and you’re not very attractive, anyway.’

Palgrave put a hand on her thin, childish shoulder and pulled her round to face him.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t want Miranda and Adrian mixed up in this, and I don’t want to go. What I do want is to settle to my book and get this place and my main characters down on paper, that’s all.’

‘Am I one of your main characters, Colin?’

Palgrave laughed.

‘Not if you don’t behave yourself,’ he said. ‘I’d like to put you in the book, but as an older, more sensible girl, I hope. I don’t mind swimming and walking and talking with you – in fact, all those things will help me to round out the character I want to build up – but beddery, and all that, is definitely out. You wouldn’t be a bad kid if you gave yourself half a chance, but giving me the rush of a lifetime is not going to do either of us any good. When I bed a woman she’s got to be just that – a woman – not a half-baked art student hardly out of her teens. You’re still wet behind the ears, my child. You save your antics until you’ve grown up a bit. Then perhaps one day somebody will fancy you enough to do the pursuing instead of you having to do it all. That will be the day!’

He was trying deliberately to make her angry. He did not succeed. She took his hand and said,

‘Yes, teacher. I’m sorry. I won’t be naughty again.’

As the end of the week approached he felt the beginnings of his old despair. The conditions were right, the weather was right, the doleful scenery was right. Another Wuthering Heights ought to be under contemplation, but no Muse approached him to murmur in his ear those vital sentences which would get him off the mark and start him on the opus. He had already settled upon Adrian, Miranda and Camilla as three possible main characters, but how to use them in a story, how to manipulate them, was more than he could determine.

What was worse, it soon became clear that, however sincere the welcome he had received from the married couple, they had had an ulterior motive for taking him into the cottage.

Finding himself alone with Miranda one afternoon when she had asked permission to paint in his room and the other two had gone on to the marshes, Camilla to make some impressionistic daubings, Adrian to roam the foreshore in search of more of those specimens, either of flora or fauna, which apparently he needed for his work,