Another crack of the whip. The laughter dwindles to silence. At the edge of the dance floor Swats and Wet Eye are dispensing complimentary rum punches from an elderly perambulator that once bore the infant Low himself. The older children squat cross-legged, the two boys with folded arms, the girls hugging their knees. Daniel is propped against Jed, thumb in mouth. Roper stands next to her. Lord Langbourne takes a flash photograph, distressing Major Corkoran. "Sandy, old love, for Christ's sake, can't we just remember it for once?" he says in a murmur that fills the amphitheatre. The moon hangs like a pink parchment lantern over the sea. The harbour lights bob and twinkle in a restless arc. On the balcony where Jonathan is standing, O'Toole lays a proprietary hand on Melanie Rose's arse and she wriggles herself obligingly against it. Only Miss Amelia in her curlers spurns the proceedings. Framed in the white-lit window of the kitchen behind them, she is intently counting the cash.
The band plays another roll of drums. Mama Low bows to the black wicker basket, grabs the lid and bears it into the air. The crabs are under starter's orders. Abandoning their perambulator, Swats and Wet Eye strike out into the audience with their books of tickets.
"Three crabs racin', all crabs is evens!" Jonathan hears Swats yell.
Mama Low is appealing to the spectators for a volunteer:
"I'm
His whip is pointing at Daniel, who lets out a serio-comic yell and buries his face in Jed's skirts, then rushes to the back of the audience. But one of the girls is already scampering forward. Jonathan hears the rah-rah voices of the polo boys applauding her.
"Well played, Sally! Sock it to 'em, Sals! Jolly good!"
Still from his place of vantage on the balcony, Jonathan takes a raking glance at the bar, where the two men and their girls are clustered in earnest conversation, resolutely ignoring the dance floor. His gaze glides back to the audience, the band, then the dangerous patches of darkness in between.
They'll come from behind the terrace, he decides. They'll use the cover of the bushes beside the steps.
The girl Sally or Sals pulls a face and peers into the black basket. The drummer strikes up another roll. Sally reaches one bold arm into the basket, then the other. To shrieks of laughter, she puts her whole head in, emerges with a crab in each hand and places them side by side in the starting gate, while Langbourne's camera whirs and zooms and flashes. She dives in for the third crab, adds it to the starting line and bounds back to her place, to more rah-rah from the polo set. The trumpeter on the tower sends up a hunter's tattoo. Its echoes are still resounding round the harbour as a pistol shot tears the night apart. Caught off guard, Frisky drops into a half-crouch, while Tabby starts to push back the spectators to make himself shooting space, without knowing whom to shoot.
Even Jonathan momentarily searches for the shooter, until he spots Mama Low, sweating under his topee, pointing a smoking starter's pistol at the night sky.
The crabs are off.
* * *
Then, casually, it was happening.
No formality, no epiphany, no commotion, no screams ― scarcely a sound beyond Roper's curt order to Frisky and Tabby to "stand still and do nothing,
If anything was remarkable at all, it was not the noise but the quiet. Mama Low abandoned his harangue, the band stopped playing fanfares and the polo players gave up their frenzied cheers.
And this quiet developed slowly, in the same way that a large orchestra fizzles out at rehearsal, with the most determined players, or the most oblivious, going on for several bars before they too dwindle to a halt. Then for a while all Jonathan noticed were the things you suddenly hear on Hunter's Island when people stop making such a din: bird cries, cicadas, the bubbling of the coral water off Penguin Point, the bray of a wild pony from the cemetery and a couple of tinny wallops of a hammer as some late toiler down in Deep Bay negotiates with his outboard. Then he heard nothing at all, and the quiet became vast and terrible, and Jonathan with his grandstand view from the balcony picked out the two broad-armed professionals who had left the restaurant earlier in the evening and ridden away in their new white Cigarette but were now edging along the lines of the spectators like sidesmen in church, taking their collection of pocketbooks, wallets, purses and wristwatches and little wads of cash from people's back pockets.
