The Four Beauties Read online

  ‘Describe.’

  ‘Marvellous figure. In fact, has everything.’

  ‘Don’t tell me she has bow-legs, too.’

  ‘About seventeen. Gorgeous red hair. Lovely green-brown eyes—’

  A second later, on one of those infuriating impulses of hers, she was ruffling my hair with both hands. She even thumped a knee into my thigh.

  ‘Beast. Wretch. Skunk—’

  ‘You said describe—’.

  ‘I loathe you. I hate you.’

  ‘In that case I’d better start walking home.’

  ‘It would be much easier,’ she said, ‘to jump into the river.’

  I said I was afraid I couldn’t swim and suddenly, in the flash of a second, her mood had changed. She actually stood there and smoothed my hair back into place with her two hands and looked at me with eyes at once tender and amazed.

  ‘You’re having me on. You can’t swim?’

  ‘Never liked water. Do you swim?’

  ‘I’m mad about it. Crazy. That’s one reason why I want to go down to Brighton. I’ve never swum in the sea. Would you come too? I could teach you. Promise you’ll come. Next Saturday.’

  She was so suddenly full of friendliness and warmth and sheer sweetness that I in turn was filled with a new affection for her, a quite serious wave of tenderness.

  ‘I’ll promise,’ I said, ‘if you’ll let me kiss you.’

  ‘Oh! no thank you. I’m not open to bribes.’

  Abruptly the mood was changed and shattered again. My moment of tender affection snapped into sharp annoyance. I was suddenly irritated by dalliance, tired of being kept on a string.

  ‘I think,’ I said, ‘I’d better go.’

  ‘Alone? Or could you bear my company?’

  ‘As long as it’s silent. Yes.’

  So we started to walk home in silence, I stubborn in frustration. I ought to have known that no mood of hers would last very long but I was determined, this time, that no word of mine should break it. And suddenly it was she who broke it, as I should have known she would, by stopping outside the iron gates of a largish stone house and saying with an air of casual innocence that concealed yet another charming lie:

  ‘This is my uncle’s house. It’s nice, isn’t it?’

  ‘I didn’t know you had an uncle.’

  ‘Oh! yes. He lives here. What are those white flowers?’

  Even in the summer darkness I could detect a line of short white flowers fringing a path on the other side of the gates and I said I thought they were white pinks. There were no lights to be seen in the house windows and suddenly she said:

  ‘Go and pick me a bunch. Go on.’

  ‘I am not,’ I said, ‘in the habit of stealing flowers from other people’s gardens.’

  ‘Don’t be priggish. This is different.’

  ‘I am not being priggish and how is it different?’

  ‘It’s my uncle’s garden.’

  ‘Then go and ask him for some.’

  ‘He isn’t there. He’s away on holiday.’

  ‘Then you pick some.’

  ‘You’re such a coward.’ Again she laughed in my face, throwing back her thick curled tawny hair. ‘Do I have to dare you to? Or bribe you? Or what?’

  I said that, like her, I wasn’t open to bribes and immediately she said:

  ‘Do you still want to kiss me?’

  ‘Oh! all right, damn you.’

  It was characteristic of the Davenports that sooner or later they cajoled, tricked or mesmerised you into doing things you knew perfectly well were impossible, illogical or just plain mad. I believe if Sophie had suddenly asked me, on that warm June night, to catch the midnight train and run away with her I might well have done so without even considering the consequences of abduction. In the same way I suddenly pushed open the garden gate and stepped inside to pick the flowers.

  Suddenly a dog began barking. I was half in hurried retreat when she sharply pushed me back. It was only a poodle, I heard her say, one of those toy things. To me it sounded infinitely more like the venomous growlings of some immense mastiff in the early stages of hostile rage and I instantly started to retreat again, saying:

  ‘For God’s sake let’s get out of here. Quick.’

  So I was afraid of a little dog, was I? What a man.

  ‘I am not afraid of little dogs but I am not particularly keen on being torn limb from limb.’

  ‘Scared of a little yapping.’

  Instantaneously the dog opened its lungs full blast to the night air with a bark of such reverberating savagery that I hastily shut the gate. She promptly pushed it open again, at the same time pushing me.

  ‘Just make a dash for it.’ The dog was silent now and the silence was of a chill uncanniness more forbidding than any sound of rage. I began to feel, in fact, slightly unwell. I profoundly wished I was lying in some quiet meadow with only the passionate bosom of Christie to disturb me and then suddenly she pushed me once more and I was in the garden again. ‘Go on. Just a small bunch. It won’t take a second.’

  All of a sudden it seemed like having a tooth out; I might just as well, I thought, get it over with; and still in that uncanny silence I started up the path. The pinks were thick and white in the beds on either side of the path and with a feeling of guilt that was also in a curious way uncommonly and painfully exciting I hastily bent down and started to pick among them.

  Abruptly another monstrously reverberating roar hit the night air and I turned, with a mere half dozen pinks in my hand, to see a black shape of terrifying proportions, as big as a bear it seemed, bounding at me up the path.

  Utterly convinced that I was about to be laid on the altar of some savage sacrifice, I ran, clashing the gate shut behind me. By this time Sophie was running too. A second later a man’s voice started shouting ‘Who’s there? Who the devil’s there?’ but the only answer it got was a chain of irrepressible peals of Sophie’s laughter as she tore up the road, her red hair flying out in a Bacchanalian skein behind her.

  She was still being consumed by occasional fits of laughter when we got to the churchyard. I even laughed myself once or twice, out of sheer relief, as you so often do in the blessed aftermath of fright or danger. Nor is the word blessed an accidental one. In the quietness of the churchyard everything seemed exactly that: the summer grass between the white headstones, the clover scent of pinks, a street lamp shining at the far end of the church path and in turn the lamps of the big magnolia themselves shining, purest white, in the night air.

  For some long time we sat on one of the stone seats inside the porch of the church. All excitement spent, she was calm and quiet now too, no longer tempestuous or tormenting. Affectionately I smoothed her thick hair and finally took her in my arms and kissed her. She was, surprisingly, less demanding than Christie and I was very glad of it. That night I needed kisses of a nature more soothing than sensuous and it was these she gave me, embracing me in a vacuum that might have been virginal, and indeed was. In return and in gratitude I told her I loved her, though I really didn’t, and she in turn, with that obligingly sweet side of her nature that sometimes counteracted the infuriating and inconsequent in her, told me she loved me, though that too was merely another charming, beautiful, forgivable lie.

  ‘What time do we go to Brighton on Saturday?’

  ‘I looked up a train,’ she said. ‘There’s one at five past ten. Would that suit you?’

  I said it would and she said:

  ‘Good. We’ll have a lovely day. We’ll have lots of fish and chips and I’ll teach you to swim.’

  ‘I’ll probably sink like a stone,’ I said and a second later wished, as I still wish now, that I’d never said it.

  I should have known that we would never get to Brighton: that some inconsequential change of mood in Sophie would, like a hurricane, speedily gust so simple and straightforward a plan away. I should have known too, if I had thought about it at all, that she hadn’t the remotest intention of sharing me with Chris
tie.

  When I went round to the little café about a quarter to ten on Saturday morning Mrs Davenport was alone there except for two bus drivers having tea and sausage rolls at a table by the window. I heard one of the busmen say he’d bet his best hat it was going to be the hottest day of the year, it was sweltering already, and then Mrs Davenport said:

  ‘I’m afraid my girls are always keeping you waiting. Sophie isn’t quite ready.’

  ‘We mustn’t miss the train.’

  She didn’t say anything to this. Then I noticed that she was packing a rather big rush basket with food: meat pies, bananas, cheese, a loaf, butter, hard boiled eggs, watercress and so on. Finally she put a big bottle of lime juice into the basket and I said:

  ‘It rather looks as if someone is going for a picnic.’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘Oh! this is for the beach at Brighton?’

  ‘No, no, she doesn’t want to go to Brighton after all.’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘For one thing she thinks it’s too hot. And for another it’s too far. And I must say I’m inclined to agree with her.’

  ‘Where does she want to go?’

  ‘She’ll tell you.’

  While I was pondering on the possibility of Sophie being in a mood more than usually fickle and elusive, Tina came into the café from the back room. I immediately said ‘Hullo’ to her but she didn’t say a word in answer. There was an extraordinarily strange look on her face: disturbing and hard to define. She looked partly as if she hadn’t slept very well and partly as if she were the victim of some self-afflicted confusion. She had lost all trace of mischief and impishness. Her mouth was set. A dark and distant air not unlike that I sometimes detected in her mother gave her a touch of near-bitterness intolerable in someone so young. Defensively she glowered not at me, but through and past me.

  ‘I think you might say good morning to people when they speak to you,’ Mrs Davenport said.

  Far from saying ‘Good morning’ or indeed anything else the youngest of the Davenports merely gave me another glower that I can only describe as old in female contempt, turned on her heel and disappeared into the back room.

  ‘What on earth is the matter with Tina?’

  ‘If you gave me all the tea in China I couldn’t tell you.’

  ‘She’s usually so gay.’

  ‘Not today she isn’t. Not today.’

  Five minutes later Sophie came into the café carrying a towel and a yellow swim-suit, which she put into the picnic basket. She had evidently washed her hair the previous night and now it shone more than ever brightly, with the tiger-lily sheen. I had never seen her look so lovely or, strangely enough, so serene. Serenity, in fact, was something I had never associated with her and it struck me some time later that it might well have been deliberately assumed, for the sole and irritating purpose of maddening Tina.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I said.

  There was a gorgeous place about five miles up the river that a girl she knew had raved about: a place called Queen’s Meadow. You could get there by bus. It seemed there was a boat-yard there and you could hire boats or canoes by the hour or the day. We would hire a boat, she thought, and row until we found some nice secluded spot where we could picnic and swim. Didn’t I think it sounded better than Brighton?

  I felt bound to agree that it did and half an hour later we were in the bus, riding up the flattish river valley, most of it flaming yellow with buttercups, with here and there a field cut newly for hay. It was already so hot that most of the windows of the bus were open and you could smell the glorious summer fragrance of hay as it poured in from across the river on the utterly tranquil morning air.

  When it eventually came to hiring a boat from the big wooden boat-house at Queen’s Meadow I had to confess that I didn’t row very well. She gave me a tired sort of look about this and said she was rather beginning to despair of me.

  ‘You don’t swim. I hear you don’t waltz. Now you can’t row. What do you do?’

  ‘I play a lot of tennis.’

  ‘With some gorgeous creature, I suppose.’

  ‘As a matter of fact she’s plain and beefy. But she hits the ball like a man. I’m in a tournament with her next week.’

  In slow and clumsy fashion I managed to row about half a mile up river, Sophie doing the steering. The water was very wide on that stretch of stream and it was too early for other boats to be out. This created an atmosphere of placidity that matched her own serenity to perfection and it was only after some time that I, in a moment of something like folly, suddenly broke it.

  ‘What on earth was the matter with our Tina this morning?’

  ‘She’s growing up too fast.’

  ‘Was that the cause of the grim glower? She didn’t say a word.’

  ‘She’s got the tizzies about a man.’

  ‘In love?’

  ‘I suppose she thinks it is. She’s threatened to run away. Or worse.’

  For several moments I didn’t say anything, but once again I was assailed by that trick of being haunted by one of the Davenports in absence; I saw once again Tina’s dark-eyed face, contemptful, drained of gaiety; and finally said:

  ‘And who is the victim? or should it be the cause?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if it’s you.’

  ‘Good God.’

  ‘I’m afraid it is.’

  ‘But hell! – it’s ridiculous – she’s so young—’

  ‘What difference does that make?’

  ‘Well, thank God I didn’t give her any cause.’

  ‘Cause? You promised to take her to a dance, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, but good God, that was merely to put her off.’

  ‘You can’t put our Tina off. She isn’t the putting-off sort. No, she’s deep in.’

  A wave of irritation and wretchedness went through me. Suddenly I could see the morning, perhaps the entire day, in ruins. Stupidly I started thinking of how, sometimes, girls did demented things for love’s sake or what they felt was love. The dark face of Tina again nagged and haunted me and then suddenly, in that typically disarming way of Sophie’s, she was off at an airy tangent, waving an excited arm.

  ‘Oh! look at all the water-lilies. Hundreds of them. Oh! this is the place. We must pull in here – pull in by the wood.’

  From out of a dark reproachful cloud I passed, in less than half a minute, into sudden paradisical waters. I had never seen so many water-lilies: chalices of pure swan-white in great islands stretching half across the river, glittering in the perpendicular sun. A wood of mostly alders and poplars and fringed thick with reeds and many wild yellow flag irises stretched along one bank and I pulled the boat into it, marvelling at the wonder of it all, Tina forgotten.

  After I had tied the boat up to a tree trunk and unloaded the picnic basket Sophie went into the wood to undress and change. A powerful impulse to follow her after some minutes and find her there in full nakedness went through me like white fire and I managed only to resist it because, all of a sudden, I felt that the morning had already lived too dangerously on complications.

  She came out looking radiant. Her yellow swim-suit was as dazzling as her hair and I kissed her as she stood there in the sun. Her skin was beautifully warm as I touched it and all the serenity of the early day came back again.

  The sight of her red head swimming about the water-lilies was like a fox moving among a flock of pure white birds. She swam with ease and grace, rather slowly, and once for more than a hundred yards upstream, calling as she came back that there were everywhere shoals of tiny fish. Then she lay flat on her back, almost motionless, floating, the air so supremely still all about her that I actually saw a grass snake swim across the river, leaving a thin trail of silver disturbance in its wake, head forked in the air.

  I suppose she swam half a dozen times or more that morning and afternoon. In between her swims we lay sometimes in the sun and then, as the day grew hotter, in the thick alder shade. Mo
stly when I kissed her it was with the lazy somnolence of the day itself but once, in mid-afternoon, I drew down the shoulder straps of her swim-suit and put my mouth first against one breast and then the other and she stirred with ecstasy and said simply:

  ‘You’ve been a long time coming to this.’

  She had her last swim about eight o’clock. The air was still very warm but as she dived in I called after her that I would start to tidy up in readiness for going home. By now we had eaten every scrap of food and she called back that she was ravenously hungry and that we’d have to call at a pub somewhere and get a sandwich or a pie or she’d certainly die of it.

  For a few minutes I stood watching her red head going downstream. Then I turned away to fetch her towel, which had been drying on a bush in the sun. The towel was warm and almost crisp to the touch as I picked it up and a moment later I bent down by the waterside and started to swill my face and hands.

  When I stood upright again she had utterly disappeared. There was no sign anywhere of her flaming tiger head. My heart at once started thumping furiously and it seemed like a minute or more before my voice suddenly unlocked itself and I yelled her name.

  ‘Sophie! For God’s sake! Where are you? Sophie!’

  For what seemed fully another minute there was no sign of her and no answer. I then started to run along the bank, downstream, desperate with fright, still calling her. I had a swift and awful vision of the ropes of water-lily roots strangling her down under the water and at last I stopped dead in my tracks, panting desperately and suddenly speechless and cold.

  ‘Hullo there! What’s all the noise?’

  I turned with painful sharpness to see her fiery head and one arm waving clear above the water, thirty or forty yards back upstream. Sickly at first without a word I walked back towards her. She was laughing, her voice teasing and gay. I didn’t know whether to laugh too or yell at her in anger and all I said was:

  ‘Never do that to me again. God, I thought you’d gone—’

  ‘Me? Never worry about me. I can take care of myself.’

  She laughed gaily again and the tormenting sound of it once again woke in me that strange premonition I sometimes had about her, leaving a dark ghost behind.