Up and down the channel, high cliffs rose, airy, glittering, but some way off. Their headland was low, their valley shallow and open, spiked only with undersea reefs, no less lovely and disastrous than the famous precipices which made their coast their pride.
“Mare Nostrum,” they said, in Paris or in London, at the sea’s winter takings there. An outlet for a natural ferocity they were too proud to exercise, too indifferent to examine. Also a kind of ritual, a sacrifice, willing but impersonal to their gods.
Meanwhile the weather was good. One of them sat up, and rolled off the reef’s edge into the sea.
A brother and sister to whom the house belonged, and a young man they had known a long time. They called her Scylla from her name Drusilla, altering it because they said she was sometimes a witch and sometimes a bitch. They were handsome and young, always together, and often visited by their friends. It was Felix, the brother, who had swum out. His sister sat up and watched him with the touch of anxiety common to females, however disciplined. “Be careful,” she called, “the tide’s turning.” He wallowed under the sea.
“Leave him alone,” said the other man, “it’s the last day’s peace,” and rolled over on his face and ate pink sea-weed.
She approved because it was good for his complexion, wood-brown as they were fair, but she stood up and watched the boy’s head popping in and out of the crisp water. Naked, the enormous space, the rough earth dressed her. The sparkling sea did not. But the sea at the moment was something for the men to swim in, an enormous toy. She thought again: ‘He won’t drown. Besides, why worry?’ Lay down again, and fed an anemone with a prawn.
“Ross, why do you say ‘the last day’s peace’? You like people when they come.”
He answered:
“One always enjoys something. But this one’s an American.”
“No, we’ve never had one before.”
“I don’t mind ’em. I always like their women. But take it from me, all we shall get out of this one is some fun. He won’t like the wood. The wood will giggle at him.”
“It laughs at us. . . .”
“We don’t mind—it’s our joke.” He laughed, sitting upright staring down-Channel, his head pitched back on an immensely long neck, his mouth like a wild animal’s, only objectively pre-occupied with the world. She thought: ‘Grin like a dog, and run about the rocks,’ accepting him as she accepted everything there. She said: “Give him a good time and see what happens.” That was her part of their hospitality, whose rewards were varied and irregular. None of them, with perhaps the exception of Felix, could understand a good time that was not based on flashes of illumination, exercises of the senses, dancing, and stretches of very insular behaviour.
Something long and white came up behind them out of the sea. An extra wave washed Felix a ledge higher. “Thank you,” he said and skipped across. “Oh, my dear, I’m sure an octopus caught my leg.”
“D’you remember,” said Ross, “the chap last winter who killed them with his teeth and fainted at the sight of white of egg?”
The pleasant memory united them; they became a triple figure, like Hecate the witch, amused, imaginative. They put on their things: Felix’s pretty clothes, Ross’s rough ones, the girl, her delicate strong dress. With their arms round her shoulders, they crossed the rocks and went up the cliff-path, and through the wood to the house.
They woke to a clean superb day. The high trees broke the sun, and Scylla admired the form of them, standing straight to the east in the natural shape of trees, their tops curled to the west, tightened and distorted against the ocean wind.
Below them the copse was a knit bundle, almost as firm as stone. Still there were long shadows as she dressed, still dance and flash of birds. The wood was innocent, the house fresh and serene. At breakfast, in a quicksilver mirror, she saw the men come in. The eagle over it had a sock-suspender in its beak, but between the straps and the distortion she did not like the look of them.
They meant not to help her with the American, whom they had ordered like a new record from town. Who would have to be met.
They were like that. She was like that herself, but did not manage to give in to it. Which made her despise herself, think herself too female.
All three had work to do. She got hers done, and at the same time believed herself the sole stay of her men. Separated and bound to them because of her service they seemed unable to do without.
Ross was saying, cautiously: “That man’s coming today.” She wondered what he was thinking about in the train. Staring about and trying to remember the name of the station. A name as familiar as their own. Nothing to him. Fun to make it part of his consciousness? Fun for them. The men were saying: “We really ought to go over to Tollerdown and see if the others have turned up.”
