Walsh had decided tastes in women, although they had evolved slightly. When he had first been in a position to choose, show girls had been his choice; blond, with adequate experience and without tiresome, dramatic ambitions. Later, perhaps because this type was becoming hard to find, Jim had preferred women on the fringe of society: elegant but slightly flashy, women in their thirties, women who knew how to dress and how to set off a man’s wealth without looking like a wife, women with thin, active legs, with long, tubular arms and bracelets on their wrists. He had never had a dark woman and he had never been in love.
A dozen years ago Grace, even if too young, had been a fairly good embodiment of his ideal. Married to a man whose money and career were slipping from his fingers, she had been looking around with those blue eyes of hers to find something different. By her husband Roger’s trembling hands, his mute mouth and desperate gaze she knew that he was finished. Sometimes he had looked as though he wanted to beg her understanding, as though some sign must pass between them for their eight years together, their common meals, the darkness of their bed. Then Grace would cry:
“Roger, don’t look like such an old bear! Take a drink! Do something! I must hurry and dress for dinner. I’m going out.”
Her liaison with Walsh had lasted a little over a year and it was Walsh who had tired first; Grace could have gone on forever in the atmosphere of wealth which he exuded. Never mind, she had her twin diamond brooches, an emerald and diamond bracelet, a superb fur coat and the beginnings of Ronny. About Ronny she had not been so sure, and had tried several times in a haphazard way to get rid of him. But he clove stubbornly to her side and, after nine months and three days, emerged as dark as a changeling and yellow with jaundice.
Grace today was no longer too young. Her hair was bleached and she covered her face with a bricklike powder, in imitation of the ash blond curls, the peachy glow that had once been hers. Those little birdlike ways were showing a hint of the peckish; the nerves were rubbing through. Yet such details were only to be seen on scrutiny. Grace could still show a stranger that blond, dolly femininity for which men are supposed to sigh. The brave candid blue eyes glittered as though to say: “We at least are fearless, two stones unworn by tears.”
Walsh looked into them now and smiled. “Well, he said, “what is it?” and moved his knee beneath the table.
At the feel of this thick yet knobby knee, matted, as she remembered, by black hair, Grace unaccountably thrilled. It was the thrill of wealth and ease and big cars, of a new dress for each occasion, and of jewels. Grace was not doing as well as she would have liked and Walsh was the best she had ever done.
“I don’t want to bore you with my own problems,” she said, “but I am worried about Ronny. My doctor says he’s near a breakdown and mustn’t be stimulated in any way.”
“In other words you want to get him off your hands for the summer,” guessed Walsh. “Quite right, a pretty woman like you has no business dragging a grown-up boy around. Besides, boys have their own tastes. Now if I had a son—”
It was as a direct result of this conversation that Ronny arrived at Star Harbour Junction one day in early June. He was met by Jeremy, Jim Walsh’s caretaker. Jeremy was a pink-cheeked man with good health and a pessimistic outlook. He had come to the peninsula when the boathouse was first built and now lived there together with his wife Mary and Walsh’s horse, Gambol. They had all three been cast away, so to speak, and existed quietly enough. Although the couple’s salary came regularly in the mail, they had never received money for the upkeep of the house nor any orders concerning its repair. Jeremy, with Gambol’s help, dug up the ground beyond the wall and had made there a large vegetable garden. It was on Mrs. Grey’s property but no word had been said. Then as a complete surprise, had come a letter from Walsh saying that a boy was coming to stay the summer; that he was to have Gambol to ride, and that a tutor had been found for him. Walsh had enclosed money and given Mrs. Villar’s address in case of emergency.
Jeremy asked no questions of Ronny on the way home from the station. He did not pay much attention to this child who was to spend the next months under his care, and Ronny, as he climbed into the old Ford, felt lonely and abandoned. While they drove into the hills along the coastline, the boy stole sideways glances, not so much at his companion’s face as at his square hands on the wheel and the black-booted feet on the pedal. Then he looked across at the woods, at the field of old and dying apple trees, and finally at the reedy marshes which fought the beaches along the shore. A sea smell filled his nostrils, stagnant and strong. It was low tide.
At last they drove over a space redeemed from the marsh, a filled-in area, which was ended abruptly by the boathouse. From the land it looked like any other house, conventional although somewhat shabby in its brick dress. How was one to know of the salt water which flowed like blood into its lower chamber? Ronny felt near to tears with dreariness, yet somewhere inside was a thrill of excitement. For a contrast he thought of his mother who would surely never come here if once she had seen the place.
“Well, how does it strike you?” asked Jeremy, carrying the boy’s one modest valise.
“Fine,” answered Ronny politely.
“Oh it’s just a house, in any case,” said Jeremy. “Houses are all the same; big or small, they can’t prevent us from going to another one in the end, as narrow as our shoulders.” For Jeremy could not conceive why he had been let live only to die in the end.
His wife Mary appeared now on the threshold. A thin woman, slightly shriveled and pale as her husband was rosy, her every gesture was kind, fussy and anxious. She hesitated, dried her fingers on her apron, and finally shook hands with Ronny.
“It’s not much of a gay place,” she said to him, “Not much company.” She peered at the boy, slightly worried. Mary had always longed for children and frequently drove Jeremy into a rage by telling him they were something to live for. “Now if we had children,” she would say, “you would have something to live for.”
“What are children but men and women,” he would cry, “born every one of them to go down into the grave?”
“They would be a comfort at the resurrection,” Mary sometimes argued, picturing her bones scattered and vibrating in the final blast. Then Jeremy would give his wife a look of despair, but because of his pink skin, his round and jolly features, his expression carried no more weight than that of a clown who has been shot by a firecracker.
Ronny, despite his first impression, soon got used to living in the boathouse. Complete freedom and lack of interference were a novelty, a blessed relief. He was one of those creatures who are doomed from infancy to attract the emotion of others. It was partly his looks—the pure, almost cameo profile over the brow of which his black hair fell—but it was partly as well some illusive quality about him as though from another world; a wind blowing, so to speak, from lost dreams. It acted on them all—his teachers, the older boys at school, his mother’s friends—and he could not respond to this host of urgent cries. They set his nerves on edge. Here, Mary was far too timid to make demands and Jeremy was almost indifferent. The couple took good care of him, however, and he adored Gambol. He had never owned a horse and had ridden seldom, but Gambol, although he might have lived up to his name seven years ago, was now a staid gelding with gentle ways. Ronny rode him without a saddle and with only a halter around his nose.
Ronny acquired his hawk quite soon after arriving. He had been riding out along the edge of the marsh early one morning when Gambol shied suddenly, rolling his eyes towards the edge of the path. A young hawk was lying there, stunned, with its feathers ruffled. Ronny jumped off his horse to kneel beside the bird.
“Are you dead?” he asked softly, and the hawk replied by giving him a proud, hostile look from its yellow eye. “You must come with me,” said Ronny, “and be called Shalimar.”
Ronny, as it happened, knew about hawks because one of Grace Villar’s friends had been a hunter in Arabia and was versed in the keeping and