fuss,’ said Mrs Carstairs, ‘I expect it’ll all simmer down.’
‘I hae me doots,’ her husband darkly rejoined. ‘Yes, Dulcie. I hae me doots.’
VII
‘How big is the Island?’ Jenny asked, turning on her face to brown her back.
‘Teeny. Not more than fourteen acres, I should think.’
‘Who does it belong to?’
‘To an elderly lady called Mrs Fanny Winterbottom who is the widow of a hairpin king. He changed over to bobby-pins at the right moment and became a millionaire. The Island might be called his Folly.’
‘Pub and all?’
‘Pub and all. My mother,’ Patrick said, ‘has shares in the pub. She took it on when my step-father was axed out of the Army.’
‘It’s Heaven: the Island. Not too pretty. This bay might almost be at home. I’ll be sorry to go.’
‘Do you get homesick, Jenny?’
‘A bit. Sometimes. I miss the mountains and the way people think. All the same, it’s fun trying to get tuned-in. At first, I was all prickles and antipodean prejudice, belly-aching away about living-conditions like the Treherns’ cottage and hidebound attitudes and so on. But now –’ she squinted up at Patrick. ‘It’s funny,’ she said, ‘but I resent that rotten thing in the paper much more than you do and it’s not only because of Wally. It’s a kind of insult to the Island.’
‘It made me quite cross too, you know.’
‘English understatement. Typical example of.’
He gave her a light smack on the seat.
‘When I think,’ Jenny continued, working herself into a rage, ‘of how that brute winkled the school group out of the Treherns and when I think how he had the damned impertinence to put a ring round me –’
‘“Red-headed Jennifer Williams says warts were frightful”,’ Patrick quoted.
‘How he dared!’
‘It’s not red, actually. In the sun it’s copper. No, gold almost.’
‘Never you mind what it is. O Patrick –’
‘Don’t say “Ow Pettruck”.’
‘Shut up.’
‘Well, you asked me to stop you. And it is my name.’
‘All right. Ae-oh, Pe-ah-trick, then.’
‘What?’
‘Do you suppose it might lead to a ghastly invasion? People smothered in warts and whistling with asthma bearing down from all points of the compass?’
‘Charabancs.’
‘A Giffte Shoppe.’
‘Wire-netting round the spring.’
‘And a bob to get in.’
‘It’s a daunting picture,’ Patrick said. He picked up a stone and hurled it into the English Channel. ‘I suppose,’ he muttered, ‘it would be profitable.’
‘No doubt.’ Jenny turned to look at him and sat up. ‘Oh, no doubt,’ she repeated. ‘If that’s a consideration.’
‘My dear, virtuous Jenny, of course it’s a consideration. I don’t know whether, in your idyllic antipodes, you’ve come across the problem of constant hardupness. If you haven’t I can assure you it’s not much cop.’
‘Well, but I have. And, Patrick, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.’
‘I’ll forgive you. I’ll go further and tell you that unless things look up a bit at The Boy-and-Lobster or, alternatively, unless my step-father can be moved to close his account with his bookmaker and keep his hands off the whisky bottle you’ll be outstaying us on the Island.’
‘Patrick!’
‘I’m afraid so. And the gentlemen of the Inns of Court will be able to offer their dinners to some more worthy candidate. I shan’t eat them. I shall come down from Oxford and sell plastic combs from door to door. Will you buy one for your red-gold hair?’ Patrick began to throw stones as fast as he could pick them up. ‘It’s not only that,’ he said presently. ‘It’s my Mama. She’s in a pretty dim situation, anyway, but here, at least, she’s –’ He stood up. ‘Well, Jenny,’ he said. ‘There’s a sample of the English reticence that strikes you as being so comical.’ He walked down to the boat and hauled it an unnecessary inch or two up the beach.
Jenny felt helpless. She watched him and thought that he made a pleasing figure against the sea as he tugged back in the classic posture of controlled energy.
‘What am I to say to him?’ she wondered. ‘And does it matter what I say?’
He took their luncheon basket out of the boat and returned to her.
‘Sorry about all that,’ he said. ‘Shall we bathe before the tide changes and then eat? Come on.’
She followed him down to the sea and lost her sensation of inadequacy as she battled against the incoming tide. They swam, together and apart, until they were tired and then returned to the beach and had their luncheon. Patrick was well-mannered and attentive and asked her a great many questions about New Zealand and the job she hoped to get, teaching English in Paris. It was not until they had decided to row back to their own side of the Island and he had shipped his oars, that he returned to the subject that waited, Jenny felt sure, at the back of both their minds.
‘There’s the brow of the hill,’ he said. ‘Just above our beach. And below it on the far side, is the spring. Did you notice that Miss Cost, in her interview, talked about the Pixie Falls?’
‘I did. With nausea.’
He rowed round the point into Fisherman’s Bay.
‘Sentiment and expediency,’ he said, ‘are uneasy bedfellows. But, of course, it doesn’t arise. It’s quite safe to strike an attitude and say you’d rather sell plastic combs than see the prostitution of the place you love. There won’t be any upsurge of an affluent society on Portcarrow Island. It will stay like this – as we both admire it, Jenny. Only we shan’t be here to see. Two years from now and everybody will have forgotten about Wally Trehern’s warts.’
He could scarcely have been more at fault. Before two years had passed everybody in Great Britain who could read a newspaper knew all about Wally Trehern’s warts and because of them the Island had been transformed.
