nauseating. Nothing could be worse, he told himself, than a raw female who giggled and blushed and had spots on her face. Now as he sat beside June he thought she gave out a musky odor. It was not really true perhaps, but the idea of her girlish body, ill-cared for as a child’s, unperfumed and unrecognized, made him almost unable to face her way.
When the clock struck twelve, June stood up with open relief. Stevens rose. “Well that’s all for today,” he said, and continued with a touch of malice: “I suppose it’s near your lunch time, and as for me I’ve been asked to lunch with your friend Ronny, so I must hurry.”
June was puzzled at the tone of his voice, but a feminine instinct made her answer: “Oh, Grandmother never eats this early!” Having indicated thus Stevens’ lack of worldly hours, she went on: “Besides, I told Ronny I’d be down for a swim.” She lifted her head defiantly and her face, too dramatic and positive for her age, jarred his nerves.
“You’re not very good for him, you know,” he said.
“Is he good for me?” asked June, her voice troubled with anger, surprise and shyness.
“You know that’s not the point,” retorted Stevens in the manner of a person really saying: ‘Who cares about you!’ He went on to explain with conscious patience: “Ronny is very high-strung. He is an extremely sensitive child and I want him to have every chance.”
“I’m sensitive too, Mr. Stevens,” said June in a dreamy voice, looking out at the woods as though at a far-off land. ‘Now why did I say that?’ she wondered. ‘What is all this talk about?’ At once her inner brain muttered a few stubborn words of reply that she could not quite catch.
‘How ugly she is!’ reflected Stevens, comforting himself with the disproportion of her head. Then he looked down at her hand which was doubled up on the desk. It was square, almost gnarled in places, and the knuckles were badly in need of scrubbing. Yet this unfeminine fist melted upwards softly and the skin above her elbow gleamed like thick brown satin as it disappeared into her sleeve. He was brought to a standstill by these contradictions and said with a faint smile: “Well, since you and I are bound in the same direction we might as well go together in my car.”
June, surprised into being grateful, thanked him awkwardly. Looking back from the car window, she could see the head and shoulders of her grandmother, sitting in her study, writing. June waved but Mrs. Grey did not look up. She was answering letters no doubt, and June pictured the receivers: old men with white beards, exchanging in envelopes the sum of their life’s thoughts. Could that be better, she wondered, than swimming in the ocean?
The beach had to be reached by a long, rickety and even dangerous bridge over the marsh. It was a sort of plank path held up by wooden supports sunk into the mud. Some of these had settled further than the rest, so that the bridge went up and down as though over hillocks. Many of the planks were rotted and both on them and on the broken railing could be seen the curious scrolls made by termites. Since the death of old Mr. Grey, before June’s birth, no one had ever bothered to repair this bridge, but June, who was walking ahead, knew its every pitfall without looking down. Her feet sought out the firm crossboards automatically and she touched the railing in quick, light snatches lest the splinters run into her palms. A sensation high upon her back let her know that Stevens was nervous, afraid of falling into the marsh ten feet below. By jumping as she walked, June made the whole structure quiver.
There was a bath hut beyond, on the sand ridge, and from the marsh this hut looked terribly forlorn. Unpainted and blackened by the elements, it leaned sideways as though it longed to lie down and rest. A sort of lawn grew around it; reed grass that sprouted coarsely from the sand and was sharp as a knife. One had only to touch it to be wounded. Above, the seagulls mewed constantly, hovering over the tide lines in search of stranded sea creatures.
Ronny was already there when they arrived. He was astonished to see Stevens and would not speak to June.
“I thought I would join you for a swim,” said the tutor, “since I am coming to lunch afterwards.”
“Are you?” asked Ronny with polite interest, and then: “Is she coming too?”
“Now Ronny, you know, this won’t do,” said Stevens. “You must recall asking me yesterday afternoon when we had our lesson.” This was only true in reverse so he hurried on: “We discussed it with Mary later. June, I presume, is lunching with her grandmother.”
Ronny said nothing further and June, going into the hut, changed hastily into her bathing suit. When she came out Stevens entered in turn and found an old pair of trunks belonging to June’s father. Ronny, who was already undressed, looked at June reproachfully and walked ahead of her to the water’s edge.
“Well it wasn’t my fault,” said June. “He just came.”
Ronny, judging from his back, seemed to accept this explanation and they waded out into the water together. Turning out of depth, they saw Stevens hobbling painfully over the stony sand. As he drew nearer they noticed to their delight that the hair on his chest, although sparse, was as long and wavy as feathers. It made up for everything.
CHAPTER SEVEN
June and Ronny were hardly aware of the village that lay not five miles away because they could not see Star Harbour from their windows or from the beach. It was tucked in the curve of the peninsula and hidden by hills. Star Harbour had once been a thriving whaling town, but now its main industry was oysters, and many of its inhabitants commuted to bigger towns or even to New York. Aside from its port, it had like any other town its schools and its clubs, its residential section, its churches and its slums.
James Stevens had been born and raised in Star Harbour. He came from a good family, as measured by local standards, and although his father had died when he was young, his mother had given him a careful education. It was the kind of upbringing some mothers give to a son when they have lost or been disappointed in their husbands; the son must repair for them their lack. They sacrifice for him, work and worry on his account, and fret away the remains of their youth. And for each thing they do or renounce doing, they demand a counterweight from that young life.
Stevens sometimes reflected that he had obeyed his mother’s every wish so far: school, college, his teacher’s degree, even Harvard—almost. Each achievement had seemed at the time worthy of effort. Only now that they were accomplished, he sometimes had a flat taste in his mouth. Perhaps, had Mrs. Stevens still been alive, she would have found some further hurdle for him to leap. It was a last example of her will power that had placed him as master in the renowned St. John’s after four years in an inferior and smaller school. Then she had died and he had come home to an empty house to wind up her affairs during his long vacation. It was Stevens’ house now, standing a little away from the road, fringed modestly with trees and flowering shrubs. Inside it Stevens’ taste had gradually supplanted that of his father, just as Stevens himself had supplanted his sire in his mother’s heart. Nonetheless, a few relics remained to clash with the subdued walls and the uncluttered rooms.
Stevens had very little in common with Star Harbour because his whole life to date had been one of straining to get ahead of his environment. As a child, his friendship with most of the other children had been discouraged and those chosen few with whom he had been urged to play had not responded. They had had other pursuits: horseback riding, for instance, or sailing on the sound. In any event, he would have been lonely. His slender blondness, called aristocratic by his mother, was thought merely scrawniness by his fellows, and the faint accent with which his mother took such pains was ridiculed, even imitated, behind his back. None of these things had bothered him when his mother was alive. On the contrary it had made them feel superior and closer to one another
