This Rough Magic Read online

  He got up again, restlessly, and prowled over to the window. ‘Well, that’s all. I threw a lifebelt out, but we were being blown away at a fair speed, and by the time I’d got the engine started, and gone back to where I thought he’d gone overboard, there wasn’t a sign. I must have been somewhere near the right place, because I found the lifebelt. I cruised about for a couple of hours – rather stupidly, I suppose, but then one can’t somehow give up and go. A fishing-boat came within hail, and helped, but it was no use.’

  There was a pause. He stood with his back to us, looking out.

  Phyllida said drearily: ‘It’s a horrible thing to happen. Horrible.’

  ‘And was the propeller fouled after all?’ I asked.

  He turned. ‘What? No, it wasn’t. At least, I saw nothing there. It was a choked jet. It only took a few seconds to put right. If he’d looked there first …’ He lifted his shoulders, letting the sentence hang.

  ‘Well,’ said Phyl, with an attempt at briskness, ‘I honestly don’t see why you should reproach yourself at all. What could you have done more?’

  ‘Oh, it’s not that I blame myself for what happened, I know that’s absurd. It’s my failure to find him that I find so hard to live with. Casting round for two hours in that black windy sea, and knowing all the time that at any minute it would be too late … Don’t misunderstand me, but it would be a lot easier if I’d had to bring the boy’s body home.’

  ‘Because his mother can’t believe he’s gone?’

  He nodded. ‘As it is, she’ll probably hope against hope, and sit waiting for him to turn up. And then when – if – his body is washed ashore, this will all be to go through again.’

  Phyllida said: ‘Then all we can do is hope the body will turn up soon.’

  ‘I doubt if it will. The wind and tide were setting the other way. And if he went ashore on the Albanian coast, we may never hear about it. She may wait for years.’

  ‘The way she did for his father,’ I said.

  He stared at me, as if for some seconds he hardly saw me. ‘His father? Oh, God, yes, I forgot that.’

  Phyllida stirred. ‘Then go on forgetting it, for heaven’s sake, Godfrey! You’re not to flay yourself over this any more! The situation’s horrible enough without your trying to blame yourself for something you couldn’t help, and couldn’t have prevented!’

  ‘As long as his mother and sister understand that.’

  ‘Of course they will! Once the shock’s over, and you can talk to them, you’ll have to tell them the whole story, just as you’ve told us. You’ll find they’ll accept it, without even thinking of praise or blame – just as they’d accept anything fate chose to hand out to them. These people do. They’re as strong as their own rocks, and so’s their faith.’

  He was looking at her in some surprise. People who only see the everyday side of Phyllida – the volatile, pretty-butterfly side – are always surprised when they come up against her core of solid, maternal warmth. He also looked grateful, and relieved, as if she had somehow excused him from blame, and this mattered.

  She smiled at him. ‘Your trouble is, you’ve not only had a rotten experience and a bad shock, but now you’re dreading having to face Maria, and stand a scene; and I don’t blame you one bit.’ Her frankness was as comfortable as it was devastating. ‘But you needn’t worry. There’ll be no scenes, and it won’t even occur to them to ask you questions.’

  ‘You don’t quite understand. Spiro wasn’t to have gone with me last night – he had a date of some sort in the town. I persuaded him to break it. His mother didn’t even know till the last minute.’

  ‘So what? No doubt you were paying him overtime of a sort, the way you always did? I thought as much … oh, yes, I knew all about it, Maria told me. Believe me, they were terribly grateful for the work you gave him, and for the way you paid, always so generous. Spiro thought the world of you, and so does Maria. Good heavens, you to worry what they’ll say to you?’

  ‘Could I offer them anything, do you think?’

  ‘Money?’ She knitted her brows. ‘I don’t know. I’ll have to think. I don’t know quite what they’ll do now … But don’t let’s worry about that yet. I’ll ask a tactful question or two, and let you know, shall I? But I’ll tell you one thing, you’d better take those pictures home with you when you go. I’ve not looked at them properly, but it’d be a pity if Maria saw them just now.’

  ‘Oh. Yes, of course. I’ll take them.’

  He picked up the portfolio, and stood holding it irresolutely, as if he didn’t quite know what to do next. One habit my profession has taught me is to watch faces and listen to voices; and if the people concerned are under some kind of stress, so much the better. As an actress I shall never be in the top class, but I am fairly good at reading people, and I felt here, in Godfrey Manning’s hesitation and hunger for reassurance, something not quite in character: the contrast between the man as one felt he should be, and what shock had made of him, was obscurely disquieting, like watching an actor badly miscast. It made me say hastily, and not very tactfully – almost as if any diversion were better than none:

  ‘Are those the photographs for your book?’

  ‘Some of them, prints I brought the other day for Phyl to look at. Would you care to see them?’

  He came quickly across the room, and laid the portfolio on a low table beside my chair. I wasn’t sure that I wanted, at this moment, to look at the prints, among which were presumably some of the dead boy, but Phyl made no protest, and to Godfrey Manning, quite obviously, it was some kind of a relief. So I said nothing as he pulled the big prints from between the guard sheets and began to spread them out.

  The first ones he showed me were mainly of scenery; bold pieces of cliff and brilliant sea, with the bright tangled flowers splashing down over sunlit rock, and pictures of peasant women with their goats and donkeys passing between hedgerows of apple blossom and purple broom, or stooping over a stone cistern with their piles of coloured washing. And the sea; this was in most of the pictures; sometimes just the corner of a pool laced with seaweed, or the inside of a curling wave, or the pattern of withdrawing foam over damp sand; and one marvellous one of a rocky inlet where, smiling and with bright intelligent eye, the dolphin lay watching the camera.

  ‘Oh, look, the dolphin!’ I cried, for the first time remembering my morning’s adventure. Godfrey Manning looked curiously at me, but before I could say anything further Phyllida had lifted the print aside, and I found myself staring down at a picture of the dead boy.

  He was very like his sister; there was the round face and wide smile, the sunburned skin, the thick black hair as springy as heather. I saw at once what Godfrey had meant when he called the boy a ‘natural model’; the sturdy body and thick neck which gave Miranda her heavy, peasant look, were translated in the boy into a kind of classical strength, the familiar, deliberately thickened lines of sculpture. He fitted into the background of rock and sea as inevitably as the pillars of the temple at Sunium.

  Just as I was wondering how to break the silence, my sister broke it quite easily.

  ‘You know, Godfrey, I’m quite sure that later on, when things ease off a bit, Maria would love to have one of these. Why don’t you do one for her?’

  ‘If you think she would … It might be an idea. Yes, and I could frame it for her.’ He began to put the prints back into the portfolio. ‘Some time, perhaps, you’d help me choose the one you think she’d like?’

  ‘Oh, there’s no question,’ said Phyllida, and pulled one out of the pile. ‘This. It’s the best I’ve seen in years, and exactly like him.’

  He gave it a brief glance. ‘Oh, yes. It was a lucky one.’ His voice was quite colourless.

  I said nothing, but stared and stared.

  There was the dolphin, arching gently out of a turquoise sea, its back streaming silver drops. Standing thigh-deep beside the animal, laughing, with one hand stretched out to touch it, was the boy, bronzed and naked, his arrow-straight bo
dy cutting the arc made by the silver dolphin at the exact point known to painters as golden section. It was one of those miracles of photography – skill and chance combining to throw colour, light and mass into a flawless moment caught and held for ever.

  I said: ‘It’s marvellous! There’s no other word for it! It’s a myth come true! If I hadn’t seen the dolphin myself, I’d have thought it was faked!’

  He had been looking down at the picture without expression. Now he smiled. ‘Oh, it’s genuine enough. Spiro tamed the beast for me, and it would come right in to play when he went swimming. It was a most cooperative creature, with a lot of personal charm. Did you say you’d seen it?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve just been down for a swim, and it came to take a look at me. What’s more, I may tell you, you nearly lost your dolphin for good and all this morning.’

  ‘Lost the dolphin?’ said Phyl. ‘What on earth d’you mean?’

  ‘Someone was shooting at it,’ I said crisply. ‘I came panting up here to tell you about it, but then your news knocked it clean out of my head till now.’ I glanced up at Godfrey. ‘When I was down in the bay, there was somebody up in the woods above, with a rifle, taking pot-shots. If I hadn’t been there, and shooed the dolphin away, he’d probably have got it.’

  ‘But … this is incredible!’ This, at least, had broken through his preoccupation with Spiro’s death. He stared at me frowningly. ‘Someone up in these woods, shooting? Are you sure?’

  ‘Quite sure. And, which makes it worse, the rifle was silenced – so it wasn’t just some sportsman out after hares or something, amusing himself by sniping at the dolphin. It was a deliberate attempt to kill it. I was sitting up under the trees, and I suppose he hadn’t seen me. But when I yelled and jumped in beside the dolphin, the shooting stopped.’

  ‘But, Lucy!’ Phyllida was horrified. ‘You might have been hurt!’

  ‘I didn’t think,’ I confessed. ‘I was just so blazing mad, I had to stop him somehow.’

  ‘You never do think! One of these days you will get hurt!’ She turned, with a gesture half of exasperation, half of amusement, to Godfrey. ‘She’s always been the same. It’s the only thing I’ve ever seen her really fly off the handle about – animals. She even rescues drowning wasps, and spiders out of the bath, and worms that come out when it rains and get caught crossing the road. The funny thing is, they see her coming. She once put her hand down on an adder, and it didn’t even bite her.’

  ‘It was probably knocked cold,’ I said curtly, as embarrassed under Godfrey’s amused look as if I was being accused of some odd perversion. I added, defiantly: ‘I can’t stand seeing anything hurt, that’s all. So from now on I’ll keep my eye on it if I have to bathe there every day. That dolphin of yours has got itself a one girl guard, Mr Manning.’

  ‘I’m delighted to hear it.’

  Phyl said: ‘I still can’t believe it. Who in the world could it have been, up in those woods with a gun?’

  I thought for a moment he was going to answer, but he turned back to his task of stowing away the photographs, shutting the portfolio on the last of them with a snap. ‘I can’t imagine.’ Then, to me: ‘I suppose you didn’t see anyone?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  This produced a gratifying amount of sensation. Phyllida gave a little squeak, and clapped a hand to where, roughly, one imagined Caliban to be. Godfrey Manning said quickly: ‘You did? Where? I suppose you didn’t get near enough to see who it was?’

  ‘I did indeed, in the wood below the Castello terrace, and he was utterly beastly!’ I said warmly. ‘He said he was Julian Gale’s son, and—’

  ‘Max Gale!’ This from Phyllida, incredulously. ‘Lucy, you’re not trying to tell me that Max Gale was running round in the woods with a rifle, loosing it off at all and sundry? Don’t be silly!’

  ‘Well, he did say it wasn’t him,’ I admitted, ‘and he’d got rid of the gun, so I couldn’t prove it was, but I didn’t believe him. He looked as if he’d be capable of anything, and anyway, he was quite foully rude, and it wasn’t a bit necessary!’

  ‘You were trespassing,’ said Godfrey dryly.

  ‘Even so, it couldn’t have been him!’ said my sister positively.

  ‘Probably not,’ said Godfrey.

  She looked at him sharply. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  But she had obviously understood whatever it was he hadn’t said. Her eyes widened. ‘But why in the world—?’ She caught her breath, and I thought she changed colour. ‘Oh, my God, I suppose it could be …! But Godfrey, that’s frightful! If he got his hands on a gun—!’

  ‘Quite. And if he did, naturally Gale would cover up.’

  ‘Well, but what can we do? I mean, if there’s any danger—’

  ‘There won’t be, now,’ he said calmly. ‘Look, Phyl, it’ll be all right. If Max Gale didn’t know before, he does now, and he’ll have the sense to keep anything like that out of the old man’s hands.’

  ‘How?’ she demanded. ‘Just tell me how? Have you ever been in that ghastly museum of a place?’

  ‘No. Why? Is there a gun-room or something?’

  ‘Gun-room!’ said Phyllida. ‘Give me strength! Gun-room! The Castello walls are just about papered with the things! Guns, daggers, spears, assegais, the lot. I’ll swear there’s everything there from carbines to knuckle-dusters. There’s even a cannon at the front door! Good heavens, Leo’s grandfather collected the things! Nobody’s going to know if a dozen rifles or so go missing!’

  ‘Now isn’t that nice?’ said Godfrey.

  ‘Look,’ I said forcibly, ‘one minute more of this, and I shall scream. What’s all the mystery? Are you two talking about Julian Gale? Because if you are I never heard anything so silly in my life. Why in the world should he go round getting savage with a rifle? He might pick off a few theatre critics – I can think of one who’s been asking for it for years – but not that dolphin! It’s just not possible.’

  ‘D’you know him?’ Godfrey Manning’s tone was abrupt and surprised.

  ‘I’ve never met him, he’s way out of my star. But I’ve known stacks of people who’ve worked with him, and they all adored him. I tell you, it’s not in character. And if you ask how I know that, let me tell you I’ve seen every play he’s been in for the last ten years, and if there’s one kind of person who can’t hide what sort of man he is under everything he has to do and say, it’s an actor. That’s a paradox, I suppose, but it’s true. And that Julian Gale could kill a living creature straight out of a Greek myth – no, it simply isn’t on. Unless he was drunk, or went raving mad—’

  I stopped. The look that had flashed between them would have wrecked a geiger-counter. There was a silence that could be felt.

  ‘Well?’ I said.

  Godfrey cleared his throat awkwardly. He seemed uncertain of how to begin.

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, if she’s going to be here for a few weeks she’d better know,’ said my sister. ‘She’s almost certain to meet him sooner or later. I know he only goes to the Karithis’ place, and to play chess with someone in Corfu, and they never leave him alone the rest of the time, but I met him myself at the Karithis’, and she may come across him any day in the grounds.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  She turned to me. ‘You said this morning that you wondered why he disappeared like that after he’d retired. You knew about the car smash three or four years ago, when his wife and daughter were killed?’

  ‘Oh, lord, yes. It happened just the week before he opened in Tiger Tiger. I saw it after it had been running about a month. Lucky for him it was a part to tear a cat in, so he was better than ever, if possible, but he’d lost a couple of stones’ weight. I know he was ill after he left the cast, and rumours started going round then that he was planning to retire, but of course nobody really believed them, and he seemed quite all right for the Stratford season; then they suddenly announced The Tempest as his last appearance. What happened, then? Was he ill again a
fter that came off?’

  ‘In a way. He finished up in a nursing home with a nervous breakdown, and he was there over a year.’

  I stared at her, deeply shocked. ‘I never knew that.’

  ‘Nobody knew,’ said my sister. ‘It’s not the sort of thing one advertises, especially if one’s a public person like Julian Gale. I only knew myself because Max Gale said something to Leo when they rented the house, and then a friend of mine told me the rest. He’s supposed to be better, and he does go out sometimes to visit friends, but there’s always someone with him.’

  I said flatly: ‘You mean he has to be watched? You’re trying to tell me that Julian Gale is—’ I paused. Why were all the words so awful? If they didn’t conjure up grotesque images of Bedlam, they were even worse, genteel synonyms for the most tragic sickness of all. ‘–Unbalanced?’ I finished.

  ‘I don’t know!’ Phyllida looked distressed. ‘Heaven knows one doesn’t want to make too much of it, and the very fact that he was discharged – if that’s the word – from the home must mean that he’s all right, surely?’

  ‘But he must be all right! Anyway, you said you’d met him. How did he seem then?’

  ‘Perfectly normal. In fact, I fell for him like a ton of bricks. He’s very charming.’ She looked worriedly across at Godfrey. ‘But I suppose these things can recur? I never thought … the idea wasn’t even raised … but if I’d thought, with the children coming here for their holidays and everything—’

  ‘Look,’ said Godfrey briskly, ‘you’re making altogether too much of this, you know. The very mention of a gun seems to have blown everything up right out of proportion. The man’s not a homicidal maniac or anything like it – and never has been, or he wouldn’t be here at all.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose you’re right. Silly of me to panic.’ She gave a sigh, and subsided in her chair. ‘In any case Lucy probably dreamed it! If she never even saw a gun, and never heard it, either … ! Oh, well, let’s forget it, shall we?’

  I didn’t trouble to insist. It no longer mattered. What I had just learned was too fresh and too distressing. I said miserably: ‘I wish I’d been a bit nicer to Mr Gale, that’s all. He must have had a foul time. It’s bad enough for other people, but for his son—’