“See here,” he said, “and excuse us. D’you mean you have no papers and no papers you can show—?”
“He’s a White,” cried Felix, “and he lost them.”
Boris said: “That is exactly so.”
“And you’re not running dope, or away from any crime worth mentioning?”
“On my honour, no— I need a holiday and your cousin was good enough—”
Ross saw that, so far as it went, this was true. The vistas opening were more oblique. He had only to look at that head in its sea-wide aureole, the high forehead and temple-thinned black hair, the slanted cheekbones, and observant green eyes. From the remote east. Out of the sea. Lovely, ugly, helpless, high-born thing. Whipcord and ice and worn out. Wangle him papers in London.
“Boris, our stranger,” he said. “Our nurse.”
Boris kissed her hand. They climbed the little cliff path. At the top he began to look around him.
Out at sea, it had been land, earth under his feet after a night and day’s pitching. Land: an interesting new place. Another people who might have no use for him. Why should they? No longer in doubt, soon there would be food and a bath and fresh linen and bed, he took a look at England. He saw a line of treeless hills, a puzzle of fields; under his feet a pattern of sweet herbs. An arrow of wood they entered, into a tunnel of light where birds broke cover, green even under the feet. A house where the windows were doors and stood open, in front of which a yucca, taller than a man, had opened its single flower-spike. Over the house, a hill turned wall. Into a room where air and bees whispered, honey smelt and the sea. And something he remembered: the smell of fruit bubbling in copper pans, in a kitchen—a child with his nurse—in a country-house, in Russia, in a pine forest.
