Walsh property before and, as she followed Jeremy, she was startled by the whiteness of the courtyard which was paved with oyster shells. Against their snowy welcome the house showed mouldering and dark. Ronny was in the kitchen, eating a piece of pie and talking to Mary. June could hear his fluty tones drifting out the doorway.
“As high as you are,” he was saying. “Really, Mary! Cross my heart.” Mary made the appropriate, soothing noises of fright. “Gambol just skimmed over it without stopping,” said Ronny, and then he caught sight of June. For a moment he stopped eating, as children do when their parents enter the nursery. His mouth was still full, but he ceased chewing and regarded her impassively from his black eyes. Then he lowered his head so that his hair fell between them like a curtain.
“Hello,” he muttered, offhand and sullen.
“Good afternoon, Miss, would you eat some pie?” asked Mary in her friendly, timid manner. She saw no difficulty here, only a nice girl paying a visit to a little boy. “Perhaps you’ll have it later,” she said as no one made a move.
“Is she staying here all afternoon?” asked Ronny, turning his face towards Mary.
“What a way to talk about a young lady guest!” Mary gave a deprecating smile at June.
June turned a slow, dull red. Her eyes blazed with anger and humiliation. “I was just passing,” she lied, “and I can’t stay. I must go home and read to my grandmother.”
“I don’t have a grandmother,” said Ronny, “and I don’t want one either. Old ladies kiss too much.”
June had to smile at the idea of her own grandmother kissing too much. Her blush faded. She grew bored by this conversation. Childhood after all, was filled with petty statements and flat denials. She made ready to go, tugging at her cotton blouse which was too short and touching the locks above her temples with a new, unconscious gesture.
“Come with me,” said Ronny suddenly. “I have something to show you.”
Getting up from the table, he slipped his hand in hers. At once the sensation returned to June of being in a lost country, a land whose shores it was perhaps dangerous to retread. For Mary’s sake she smiled and agreed with nonchalance. But Mary noticed nothing in any case and only Jeremy, slouching in the doorway, remarked after they had gone:
“What a fuss over a year or two. As though it could matter! They’ll be dead a million and it won’t be enough.”
Mary washed the dishes without answering. Such remarks had long lost the power to frighten her. At the sink, with her spindly legs and industrious arms, she resembled an ant. The giant stride could flatten her in an instant.
Ronny took his hand away from June’s almost at once and led the way through the house, into a little doorway and down a circular stairway which came out onto the water beneath. The tide was coming in. Its lapping harried the dark air; a sucking, eager persuasion. The sides of the cement landings, or quays, were still exposed. Underneath, one could see a muddy bottom pitted with the small holes of fiddler crabs. There were two boats here; a rowboat and a motorless speedboat. Both were rotted down into the slime and covered by the poison-green moss of the sea. At one end was an archway, which led out into the sunlit bay. It could be closed by a door that slid down from above. Standing open, it threw into this man-made cave a brilliant and painful glitter which slid over the air and did not lighten the gloom.
“Here was his dungeon,” said Ronny. “He took his prisoners down here and tied them on those boats. Then soon the crabs came and ate them up, body and soul.” He added in his soprano voice: “I would do it too, with all my enemies.”
“Crabs can’t eat the soul,” objected June, feeling in this damp place the sweat growing cold on her body.
“Oh yes they can,” he insisted. “Crabs can. They’re only baffled by the bones.” And he held up the white spine of a fish worn down by the tides which he had found that morning.
June did not contradict him and only asked: “Do you know him, the man who used to live here?”
“Oh yes, I know him,” said Ronny (who had never met Walsh). “Mother thinks he’s my father.”
“You mean Mr. Walsh,” cried June, “the millionaire?”
“Mr. Walsh, that’s it, Mr. Walsh. He has a hundred houses, I guess, and fifty cars and a hundred motorboats.”
“Don’t you call him Father?” asked June.
“No,” replied Ronny seriously, as though reflecting on this. “But you see he isn’t my mother’s husband. My mother’s husband was called Roger and he died.” Ronny nodded several times as though checking the correctness of these statements. Then a smile came over his face and brought out the twitch of his cheek. “My mother is a liar,” he said. The word must have pleased him for he cupped his hands and shouted: “Liar, liar.”
The echo came back to them several times from the imprisoning walls. It was like a bird who dashes itself to pieces trying to get free. Each time it was fainter and more plaintive. Ronny turned his eyes downwards to the murky water which was rising fast. All the mud had disappeared and the tide bit greedily into the rotten wood of the two boats. June followed the boy’s gaze. A school of minnows darted into the boathouse and just as swiftly flashed out again through the arch. The green on the wrecked planks was as brilliant as emeralds.
“What will you be when you are a man?” she asked.
“Oh,” said Ronny, scuffing his bare sole softly on the cement, “I shall be a knight. But as you know there are no more knights. Anyway it doesn’t matter as I won’t be a man very soon.”
Just then they heard steps ringing out on the metal of the stairs, a town tread, cautious and sharp. “Ronny?” a voice called interrogatively. Then a man stepped onto the quay. When he saw them he advanced and said: “I am James Stevens. I am supposed to teach you, to get you up on your lessons.”
“Mother said I didn’t have to start until July!” exclaimed Ronny shrilly, dismayed and apprehensive.
“But you don’t want to fall behind,” said Stevens, “and have to end up the summer working all day. Besides, this is just a call to get acquainted.”
James Stevens was a blond man who could still be called young. His hair thinned out at the temples over a narrow, high forehead and his mouth had a tight look to it caused by faint rays around the upper lip. He had grey, rather cold eyes. Now these eyes turned to June.
“Is this your sister?” he asked.
“No,” said Ronny. “She’s a damsel.”
“I’m June Grey,” said June, “and I think you’re supposed to teach me too.”
“Were you going to call on her to get acquainted?” asked Ronny, using Stevens’ turn of phrase.
The tutor gave June a blank look. “I shall just be helping her catch up,” he said. “It’s not the same thing.” He turned away again. “By the way, Ronny,” he said, “are you a scout? If you are I thought perhaps you would like to transfer to our local troop.” He waited, but the boy was not listening. He took June’s hand again and looked up into her face.
“Damsel,” he said again, “a damsel
