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The thin tongue of coast was so flat that it was like a scar on the sea. Nothing rose above the level of the one-storeyed shacks scattered about it like cubes of sea-worn wreckage except a lighthouse, standing up like a vast white candle in a wide lofty sky, so that from a distance it seemed to float in air.

By the end of September, after the heat of summer, the sea-flowers were dead. A long flat tide floated in, almost limped in, washing over and over again the same wide salt-grey waste of sand, the same bright fringe of shingle, black with fresh-strewn seaweed and sprinkled with pretty white and rose and turquoise shells. Salt dust blew on small winds from one side of the road to the other, rattling harshly on steely patches of sea-thistle and dune-grass, and then blew back again. It drifted finely against the shacks, with their sun-spent flowers, that would soon be closed for winter, and buried the steps of their porches a little deeper every day.

From the end of the peninsula it was a two-mile walk for Brand to get the papers. Every morning he walked along the cracked concrete road and bought the papers and perhaps a magazine from the shop where squat black plaice-boats, curtained about with kipper-coloured netting, were beached from the bay. The air was always thick with the smell of sun-dried sea-fish and gangs of swooping gulls crying about the boats, and he was always thirsty by the time he began to walk back along the shore.

Half-way back was a shack, facing the sea, that had tin-plate advertisements nailed over one side of it so that it glittered harshly, blue and green and white and red, in the sun. He noticed it first not because of the advertisements but because it had outside it a square of grass. This grass, watered all summer, was vivid green in the desert of beach and sand. In the middle of it was a white flag-pole and at the top of the flag-pole was a triangular scarlet flag, with ICES sewn across it in white letters.

He had been there nearly a week when he first went in. Sun and sea-air had warped the jerry-built glass door so that he had to push it violently before it would open. Before he knew it he was half-thrown into the small café, against the counter.

Behind the counter stood a woman in a black fur coat and a green scarf on her head, and through a window behind her he could see the sea. ‘And about time too,’ she said. ‘I thought you were never coming.’

She was smoking a cigarette and she did not take the cigarette from her mouth when she spoke to him. It was burning short and the smoke was curling up into her big face, crinkling the pouches under her eyes.

Suddenly, looking at him again, she burst out laughing.

‘Oh! God alive, I thought it was the taxi.’

He smiled and she began coughing violently from smoke and laughter, so that grey ash spilt in a fine cloud on the black fur coat. She laughed again and did not shake it free.

‘Hear that?’ she called. ‘Gentleman came in and I thought it was the cab.’

Behind the counter was a door and he could see a kitchen beyond it, but no one answered.

‘Terribly sorry, sir.’ The cigarette smoke burned straight up into her baggy colourless eyes. ‘Very rude of me.’ She let the ash drop on to her coat again. ‘Something we can get you?’

‘Glass of milk?’ he said.

‘Sorry, no milk. It’s the drought. They cut us down.’ She took the cigarette out of her mouth, coughing ash on the counter. ‘Excuse me. Cuppa tea?’

‘Cup of tea.’

‘Haven’t seen a taxi anywhere, I suppose, have you? What do you make the time?’

‘Just after eleven.’

‘Supposed to be here for eleven. Puts years on you.’ She looked beyond him, irritated, through the glass door. ‘Same with everything.’

He did not answer. She took a packet of cigarettes from the pocket of her fur coat and lit a fresh cigarette from the old, coughing again.

‘Gentleman’d like a cuppa tea,’ she called. ‘Got one on?’

There was no answer.

‘Whyn’t you sit down?’ she said. ‘On holiday? Got a beach-hut here?’

‘Up by the lighthouse.’

‘Getting a bit late in the season. What d’you do with yourself all day?’

He did not know what to say; there was no point in telling her he was bored all day. Then suddenly she began coughing again, this time with excitement, spilling ash on her coat, the coarse skin of her face and neck creasing and flopping up and down; and in the same moment he heard the taxi on the road outside.

‘God alive, I must fly!

‘She came from behind the counter, waddling and coughing, picking up her handbag from the corner of the counter as she passed him.

‘Cab’s here!’ she called. ‘No message for Fred?’

She pulled the door open and went out across the square of grass under the flag-pole to where, on the concrete beyond, the taxi was turning round. The thin door banged loudly, shaking the walls of the shack, but there was no answer from the room behind.

He sat on one of the stools by the counter and opened the paper. Every day they were saying it was the driest, hottest summer for fifty years. There was already something boring about the sequence of dead dry days and the calm glitter of sea.

‘Sugar?’

He looked up to see a girl standing at the door behind the counter. The high sea-light coming in at the window fell full on her face and made her eyes, especially, seem very large. They were dark brown eyes with extraordinary whites that were not really white at all. They were a pure pale blue, wet and shining, that made the point of the pupils almost black.

‘Please,’ he said.

‘One or two?’

‘One.’

He heard the lump of sugar clink on the spoon. She came up to the counter, carrying a cup in one hand and a teapot in the other.

‘Anything in the paper?’

She poured out the tea.

‘Not much.’

‘Never is.’ She tried for a second or two to read the paper where it was on the counter, upside down. ‘Anything to eat? I forgot to ask you.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Just the tea.’

She gave up trying to read the paper upside down and for some moments stood with her arms folded on the counter. She had slim cream hands, the skin thin and transparent, so that the veins shone through like soft blue tendrils; and the fingers were slightly upturned as they lay on the smooth golden hairs of her forearms.

‘Busy these days?’ he said.

‘I can be busy. Just how it takes me. Where are you?’

‘Up by the lighthouse.’ She turned the paper round where it lay on the counter, turning it with one long finger, so that she could read it with her head only slightly averted. Her neck was long and deep cream under the dark brown hair.

‘Ever been up there?’ she said.

‘No. Not me. Makes me giddy.’

‘Does it?’ she said. ‘Funny. Never affects me.’

‘Ugh,’ he said.

‘Got a beach-hut?’

‘Yes.’

‘What do you do for cooking? I hear there’s no gas up there.’

‘Never bother.’

‘You’re the sort of people who put us out of business,’ she said.

He did not know what to say; he stirred his tea without drinking and remembered the woman running for the taxi.

‘That your mother?’

‘Don’t blame me,’ she said. ‘She was born first. Off to London for the week while I look after the sea.’

With that curious expression she turned the paper round again, so that she could read it right way up. He found himself screwing his own head round, trying to read it as she had done, upside down, and as he did so he was aware of her body pressed against the counter. She gave him a quick glance and then went on reading; then after some moments she spoke without looking up.

‘Not drinking your tea,’ she said.

He sipped it gently, looking down at her over the edge of the cup.

She turned the paper over, lifting her body slightly in the act of doing so, raising her eyes, brown and casual, in the slightest flicker.

‘I’ll bet you think I’m rude. Reading your paper.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘You can have it. I don’t want it. Keep it and I’ll call in later.’

‘Come in and I’ll get you a meal,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you? You must eat sometimes.’

‘I could.’

‘Well, say it as if you wanted to,’ she said.

He smiled.

‘Nothing elaborate, just eggs or something. But say it as if you wanted to.’

She stared up at him with great brown eyes that were casual and bored but brilliant, too, with bright sea-light; he looked back at her and felt the blood beating up in his throat. He thought, too, that she knew it was beating there because she held him a little longer with that same slow bored stare.

‘All right?’

‘All right,’ he said.

She smiled. She had a way of smiling by opening her mouth and putting her tongue slowly outward and pressing it against her teeth and then upward, casually and softly, against her lip.

‘About six?’ she said.

‘About six.’

She pressed her tongue upward against her lips, and then, as if deliberately letting him go, lowered her eyes and folded her long creamy arms, blue with tender veins, on the paper.

‘Now drink your tea,’ she said.

Walking back along the sea-road, he thought of Ella. Things had not been going well with Ella. More and more she seemed to him like a peremptory bright-nosed hen decked up. She had begun to be a great one on committees. At supper, after the office, she bored him with histories of committees rather as she must, he thought, have bored the committees. Sometimes, in hasty moments, he did silly things like putting his socks on inside out, and that in turn would urge her to endless nagging resolutions, all of which he felt she had put down on the agenda of their married differences. Whenever she came home from committees she wore the same dark brown straw hat. It was too small for her; it sat on her head, mocking her, like a ridiculous piece of flat stale toast. He longed to jump on it. One day he almost did jump on it and she screamed: ‘The trouble with you is that you can’t tolerate anything but yourself! You’re so selfish, so vain!’ and in a fit of rage he had driven the car down to the sea.

Back at the point, by the lighthouse, he read the papers and watched the tide. It washed over a series of shallow corrugated valleys, blue-grey with jelly-fish and sown with pretty rose and white and turquoise shells. The sandy peninsula projected so far out to sea that ships skirted it by only a hundred and fifty yards. Sometimes liners came so close that he could see even the sparkle of drinks in passengers’ glasses in the dining-saloons or the lounge. And sometimes passengers waved their hands.

He wondered about these passengers. Who were they all? Among them were surely men who hated their wives because they wore hats like slices of toast and wives who hated their husbands for the monstrosity of trivial things.

He began to think of the girl in the café. Her voice, throaty and casual, seemed to come along the seashore with the lazy softness of the tide. He thought of her hands. There was something intensely disturbing in their creamy transparence and the blue tendril veins. And then the extraordinary dark brown eyes, with the whites that were really not white, but blue, like some of the smoother pearl-like shells. And then the bored casual way of pressing her tongue against her teeth and the bored casual way of trying to read the paper upside down.

He swam twice during the afternoon. The sea, heavily salt and warm, made him hungry and drowsy. The sun curved round and shone flat on his face. He slept without realising it and woke suddenly with the idea that one of the ships was ramming the point. It was a liner painted white for the tropics and it seemed for a second or two to tangle itself with the white cone of the lighthouse and come bearing down on him where he lay.

It was past six when he woke and nearly seven o’clock by the time he had dressed and walked along the sea-road to where the scarlet flag was waving above the square of watered grass in the evening sun.

The shack was closed. He started to rap on the thin glass door. The door was loose and rattled loudly, echoing across the empty beach in the warm still air. After a moment or two he gave it up and went round to the back. The girl was lying on the sand, in a white and red-spotted cotton beach-dress, without shoes or stockings, her long blue-veined creamy legs and arms stretched out in the sun. She did not get up.

‘You’re a nice one,’ she said. ‘I went to sleep. I didn’t realise—’

‘I got fed up and closed. Nobody to talk to all afternoon, so I came out to look after the sea.’

Again he noticed that curious expression.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

She rolled over and lay sideways, looking up at him.

‘Well: what do you fancy?’

‘Anything; if it’s not too late—whatever you’ve got.’

‘It isn’t what I’ve got, it’s what you fancy.’

‘Whatever you’ve got I’ll fancy,’ he said.

‘Well, if that’s the way you look at it.’ She moved once again on the sand, turning her body. ‘Can’t see you. You’re upside down.’ He remembered how she had read the newspaper upside down and something in the turn of her body immediately electrified him, making the blood beat up in his throat.

‘Oh! You’re the same man. I wondered. Your voice sounded different.’

‘Disappointed?’

‘Oh! no. No. I just got the impression of you in my mind somehow, and I like to get the right impression’ She suddenly knelt up, brushing away sand from her dress. ‘Well, let’s go in. The sea can look after itself for a bit.’

It struck him again as curious how she spoke, now and then, of looking after the sea. She stood up, brushing sand from first one leg and then another and then from her arms. ‘Am I all sand at the back?’

‘On your shoulders.’

‘Brush me down, will you? It gets into everything—food and everything. Beds and everywhere.’

He brushed with both hands at the half-circle of her naked shoulder. The skin was smooth and oily and he felt the blood beat up into his throat again as he touched it with the sweeping tips of his fingers under the thick brown hair.

‘I’ll fry you a Dover sole,’ she said. ‘A good fat one. How’s that?’

‘It’s just what I fancy.’

She had the sole ready in about half an hour. She pulled the blinds down on that side of the café overlooking the sea-road, and she laid him a table overlooking the sea. From there, as he waited, he could see the lighthouse. The lamps had not begun to burn and the tall white cylinder looked more than ever like an unlit candle on the narrow scar of sand.

‘Been up the lighthouse yet?’

She was in the kitchen and he called back: ‘No. I told you. Makes me feel—’

‘You’ll have to try it some day.’

‘Not me,’ he said.

The sole, dipped in golden breadcrumbs, was nicely fried.

‘All right?’ she said.

‘Lovely. What about you?’

‘You’re a customer. Can’t eat with the customers.’

‘I hoped you could.’ ‘

Well, there’s no law against it. I’ll have a cup of tea.’

She had changed her dress and now she was wearing a thin frock of silky sea-bright green. It gave a smouldering candle-like warmth to her bare arms as she crooked them on the table and watched him eat.

‘You wanted that. You were hungry,’ she said.

‘Didn’t bother about lunch.’

She looked at the sea. It was after eight o’clock and now suddenly, in a wonderful flash, the lamps in the lighthouse began turning, swinging startling bars of light on darkening water and shore.

‘There she goes,’ the girl said. ‘I always love that. It sends a thrill right through me. Right down. A real thrill. I watch it every night.’

She was watching the light eagerly, her mouth parted, her tongue touching her lip as she smiled.

As it grew slowly darker ships with star-like navigation lights appeared across a copper-crested sea that was deep indigo under a paler sky. After watching them for some time she turned her face and looked at him.

‘Married?’ she said.

‘No,’ he said.

‘You ought to get yourself a nice wife that can cook,’

‘Are you married?’ he said.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Not me.’

Who was Ella? The sudden accusing unreality of Ella forced itself on his conscience for a moment and then assumed the remoteness of one of the lights creeping slowly away to sea. His wife seemed in every way like one of those dim lights going out, going away for ever. Committees and the hat like toast, agenda of married faults and the face like a peremptory pecking hen’s; there was no lie about them. They did not exist any more.

‘What about Fred?’ he said. He remembered the parting words of her mother.

‘Oh! Fred. Fred’s nobody. He’s cook up there. We got another café at King’s Cross. He’s cook up there.’ The lids of her eyes, olive and dark and gleaming, closed down smoothly as she looked at his empty cup and plate. ‘More tea?’

‘No, thank you.’ ‘Like to go outside for a breath of air?’

‘If you like.’ They were already outside when she spoke once again of looking after the sea. The shack had a small railed verandah overlooking the beach. Sand had piled against it in deep smooth breasts, submerging the lower steps. She leaned against one of the posts of it. The shore was dark except for the repeated flash of the lighthouse, revolving like a wheel, and as she stared at the sea and spoke again of looking after it he said:

‘Think it’ll run away or something?’

‘No.’

‘What then?’

‘Oh! nothing.’

He watched the lighthouse flashing on her face, heightening sharply every few seconds or so the candle-like warmth given by the green dress; and then he said:

‘Odd. What’s the idea of looking after the sea? That’s one thing that’ll look after itself—’

She turned on him in the moment that the lighthouse flashed. It gave the impression of her entire body leaping into flame. All her bored casual face flared up, bright and bitter and angry.

‘What else have I got to do? God, I got nothing else to do but look after it, have I? Nobody to talk to from Monday to Friday. Nothing to do, nobody to talk to. What else have I got to do but look after it? God, I feel it’s all I got left—’

The act of kissing her for the first time had in it the shock of something bare and bruising and antagonistic. He had not expected it to be like that. He had wanted it to be drawn out of her sleepy languid casualness: to be one with the soft brown eyes, the way she read the paper upside down. Now she held him with both arms and the stiffened frame of her body, driving her mouth at his with the dry hunger of long boredom; and all the time the lighthouse flashed with its dazzling revolutions on her face.

After a time she was quieter and they lay down on the sand. He could hear the sea: gentle, the tide out, endless small waves licking backwards in the warm September darkness. ‘If you hadn’t turned up I’d have gone off my head. I thought you wouldn’t turn up—I’d have gone off my head—’

He liked her more as she quietened. She seemed to grow drowsy and languid again, the frame of her body in its relaxation melting into the deep softness he wanted: the entire antithesis of Ella, the pecking hen-like face, the toast-like hat; the antidote to all his own dry boredom and rage. He found her limbs in long deep curves. Her skin had seemed so delicate, with its fine transparence and the many blue tendrils of veins, that the full discovered strength of her body surprised him. ‘I wanted you like that,’ she said, ‘by the sea. I wanted you terribly.’ The lighthouse flashed on her face, giving the brown eyes a look of transfixed dark burning. ‘Be careful how you touch me. You make me feel how the lighthouse does.’

Walking home at last, after midnight, he understood her feeling about the lighthouse. It had been the flame in the drabness of her boredom: burning and flashing suddenly to excite her once a day. He was pleased to think he was like that. He was pleased to stand where he was and watch, like a fading down-channel light, the dying discordant figure of Ella and Ella’s hat, the former world of committees and catechisms and the pecking hen. He felt slightly intoxicated and elated as if he stood on the top of the lighthouse, watching the minute and inconsequential light of something that had bored and angered him and would do so no longer.

He had arranged to go back for lunch next day. ‘Not too early,’ she said, ‘because I can close up from two to five. You can swim and have a lie in the sun,’ and in the morning, for the first time, he did not trouble to fetch the papers. It was enough to wait for afternoon.

But about two o’clock, after they had eaten and just as she was about to lock up, something happened. He looked out of the window and saw a wild troop of Boy Scouts invading the shore. Soon they began to invade the shack. He had dreamed so long of lying with her in warm sun, alone on the shore, that the sight of scores of small boys besieging her for ice-cream and drinks and sandwiches brought him furious frustration. She, too, looked desperate and he could have hit a ridiculous grey-haired scoutmaster who said:

‘You may remember us. We dropped in last year. We remembered your flag.’

Bathing and yelling, punting footballs, littering the shore with cartons and trousers and shirts and papers, the boys stayed until six o’clock. So many of them came into the shack that finally he took off his jacket and for four hours, impotent and full of hatred of them, he helped the girl behind the counter. All afternoon there was a dry hunger in her eyes that made him think she could not wait for him.

‘Well, it’ll please Ma,’ she said when it was all over. And then a cheerful thought: ‘Anyway, we took enough so we close tomorrow and the next day. That’s if there’s no Boy Scouts.’

‘There’ll be no Boy Scouts,’ he said. ‘To-morrow we’ll go to the lighthouse.’

‘That’s an idea.’

‘Perhaps we could have a trip in the car.’

‘I’d like that. That would be lovely.’

Again and again, in the darkness on the shore, to the sound of small consuming lapping waves, the lighthouse flashed on her face. Her long arms held him down on the soft sand and the deep brown eyes burned insatiably.

Next day, when they climbed the lighthouse, a little breeze was blowing in fitful gusts against the sun. It had the effect of ploughing the sea into furrows of brilliant white and blue. Along the coast small sails skimmed about; white gulls planed down on long air-currents about black plaice-boats and the dazzling candle of lighthouse; and the white sea-light was heady and very beautiful.

It seemed to him that the top of the lighthouse swayed. All his fear of heights rushed up through his body and he felt the irresistible paralysing terror of wanting to go over. It froze the back of his legs coldly and he was hardly conscious of the keeper, who was also a guide, saying:

‘The point puts on another six feet of land every year. Can you see where it’s creeping out? Ten or fifteen years and they’ll have to be thinking of building another lighthouse.’

Brand could not look and the keeper pointed inland over flats of sea-thistled shingle: ‘That’s the old lighthouse. That shows you where the point used to be.’

All the time the girl moved carelessly from side to side of the lighthouse top, following the keeper’s fingers, leaning nonchalantly over, long arms folded, staring straight down. To Brand’s intense horror she hung over the side, laughing, waving to groups of people below.

‘For God’s sake,’ he said, and felt terribly and weakly sick at the thought that a beating squall of wind might, in an awful moment, move the wrong way and take her over.

‘Now if you’ll follow me down, sir,’ the keeper said.

They stood for a moment together, alone on the top. She held him flat against her body, her skirt flapping in the breeze against her legs, and he could have sworn that once again the lighthouse swayed.

She kissed him, holding him rigidly, but he knew the lighthouse rocked. For some idiotic reason he thought of the precarious toast-like hat perched on Ella’s head, and the girl said:

‘Don’t be so jittery. There’s nothing to be scared of—’

‘I hate it. I always have hated it.’

‘It’s because you let it,’ she said. ‘If you looked down—just made yourself look down—you’d be all right.’ She began laughing at him: gay with the quivering exhilaration of breeze and height and sun. ‘Come on—look down. Make yourself. It’s better.’

Once again she leaned far over. This time she held his hand, and for the space of a second or two he looked down too, his entire body wrapped in a stiffened chrysalis of vertigo. A sinister narrowing world of shore, of boats, of faces and of kaleidoscope sea-waves seemed to draw him down and then the girl laughed at him again, mocking slightly:

‘Come on. You can’t take it. The keeper’s waiting.’

Even fifty or sixty feet below he could still feel the horror in his legs and he said:

‘Don’t you feel anything? Doesn’t it affect you at all?’

‘Only like you,’ she said. ‘That nice feeling. Right through my body.’

She was pleased about the car. From the new lighthouse they drove inland, through a flat sea-beaten world of drab shingle and faded sea-poppy and steely sea-thistle, towards the old. He thought its black tarred stump looked hideous even among the cracked concrete of ruined sea-defences and shabby summer bungalows whose doorsteps were being slowly buried by autumn sand.

‘Like an old lady going to a funeral or something,’ the girl said.

Like every horrifying experience the cold moments at the lighthouse top afterwards exhilarated him. For each of the three following nights as he lay on the shore with the girl he felt a certain vague bravery about it all.

‘I’m your lighthouse,’ he would say to her. Already it was Friday, and for two nights he had not troubled to go back to sleep at the hut. ‘I make you feel the same way—’

‘Not after to-night,’ she said.

A moment of freezing sickness, identical with all he had felt on the lighthouse, turned his stomach over.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Ma comes to-morrow. Did you forget? She’s down every week-end, Saturday to Monday.’

‘Oh! God,’ he said, ‘is that all? I thought—’

‘You better keep out of the way,’ she said. ‘Just for a night or two.’

‘I could come in for a cup of tea or something,’ he said, ‘couldn’t I? She’d never know.’

‘Not Ma?’ she said. ‘The old gimlet. Not Ma? You never get over Ma.’

‘God,’ he said, ‘the whole week-end—’

‘There’s all next week,’ she said. ‘Plenty of time.’ He felt her reasoning sweetness express itself in one of those slow casual expanding smiles. Her tongue touched her lip and a wonderful beauty of dark eyes held him profoundly as the lighthouse flashed. He was agonised once again by the thought of giving her up, and she said: ‘A rest from each other will do us good. Then we’ll have all next week. What are you worrying for?’

‘I want you—all the time. Terribly—’

‘I’m here,’ she said. He saw all the languid beauty of her long curving body as she pressed herself down into dark dry sand. ‘Nobody’s stopping you.’

The next day, Saturday, he did not see her at all. He could not bring himself to walk along the sea-road; he did not want the papers. Teasing him, she had said: ‘You can always go up the lighthouse. You can wave from there. If I see you I’ll know it’s you.’ And that afternoon, in a moment of puerile anguish, he went up.

A great dry loneliness, horrible as the lifeless sea-broken concrete road and the barren shingle, had held him all day. From the top of the lighthouse the tranquil bay, circled by a gigantic bracelet of sun-dried sand, was like pure glass, windless and beautiful. He stared across lines of plaice-boats and a few trippers to the shack. The red flag had not enough air to raise it from the pole; but he could see, underneath it, the spray of a water-hose, sprinkling the bright square of grass.

Presently he saw figures there. It seemed like a man and perhaps, he tried to persuade himself, the girl; but it was much too far away. He even waved his hand; but nothing happened and soon, driven by sudden misery and vertigo, he hurried down.

For the rest of that day and during Sunday his only remedy was to swim and walk westward, away from the shack, in the queer derelict half-urban, half-marsh country between the two lighthouses. He began to think of Ella. When he was with the girl all his thought of Ella was moulded in terms of an amused and tolerant pity. Poor dear old Ella: he really felt sorry for her. All the discordance about her vanished. Did she wonder about him? Had she gone round in panic circles of distress? Had it spoiled the routine of committees, the hideous respectable pose of the toast-like hat? What would she say, he thought, if she could see me now? Poor dear old Ella. The ease of that long generous body on the sand would have shocked her, would have made her realise that there were not only women who gave more pleasure than they asked, but gave it without asking questions, as beautifully as flowers.

But that day, as he tried to wear out Sunday, he did not have many amused and rather fanciful thoughts of women like flowers. Ella appeared to stand up in the flat endless day with the gauntness of the old lighthouse above the ugly marsh. She was a terrible relic, Ella; and somehow Sunday was her day. She had a great fondness for fussing about the kitchen on Sunday mornings, roasting beef, baking a particular kind of tart called Maids of Honour. What maids, he would tease her, and what honour? Her hands were floury and he ate the tarts from the stove, while they were still hot. To-day, inexplicably, between loneliness and discordance, he felt keenly the absence of these trivialities. It was not permanent; he knew that. It was just Sunday. It was less that he missed Ella than that Sunday was a day of infinite desolation when deprived of the comfort of floured hands, beef, hot tarts and long-known company. Monday would show it all to have been another example of puerile heartache; but to-day he could not bear it at all.

And finally, because he could not bear it, he walked along, about half-past seven, to the shack. Lights were burning and a few people were having supper. He walked past and got himself several drinks, a mile farther on, at a place called The Fisherman’s Arms, before walking back again.

When he walked back lights were still burning in the shack but the place seemed empty. After a few moments he went in. The girl’s mother was leaning on the counter, coughing cigarette ash down the heavy black front of her body, but there was no sign of the girl.

‘Yessir?’ she said.

‘Too late for anything?’

‘Never too late for anything. What’ll it be? Coffee, tea, orange?’

‘I’ll take coffee.’

‘You’ll take coffee,’ she said.

While he drank it he said:

‘Remember me? I’m the fellow you mistook for the taxi-driver last Monday.’

‘God alive, so it is.’ Coughing and laughing, she sprayed a small cloud of cigarette ash. ‘I don’t know whatever you thought of me, sir.’

‘Your daughter made up for it,’ he said. ‘Got me a nice meal that day.’ ‘Nice cook,’ she said.

He looked round the café. ‘Not here to-night?’

‘Gone to the flicks with Fred.’

‘Fred?’ he said. He could feel a horrible tightness, cold and not unlike the vertigo he so hated and dreaded, taking hold of his body, cramping it with jealousy and fear. ‘Boy friend?’

‘Boy friend my foot,’ she said. ‘Husband.’

Monday brought, as he knew it would, the notion that to be lonely for Ella was something quite puerile. Between the thought of Ella and the thought of the girl he felt a haunting and growing sense of being cheated. Ella, he felt, had got him into this. He felt dislocated, slightly crazy, trapped. That infernally silly hen-like face, the committees and the maddening toast-like hat had manoeuvred him into a trap.

It was late afternoon before he could bring himself to go along to the café. The girl had closed the café and he found her lying behind it, as he always did, on the sand. The breeze of the last few days had piled up still higher the smooth clean breasts of sand below the verandah, submerging yet another of the steps. In one of the hollows between these breasts she lay in her red beach-dress, staring at the sky.

‘Oh God, I thought you were never coming. I wanted you terribly—I hated the waiting—’

He let himself be drawn down, almost sucked down, by her long arms and the tightened frame of her body, stiffly anguished as it had been when he had first kissed her.

‘Did you want me?’ she said.

‘All the time,’ he said.

‘How was the week-end?’

‘Oh! terrible. She talked and talked. Nothing but talk. I was bored to death. What did you do?’

‘Went to the lighthouse.’

‘There,’ she said. ‘You see. How was it?’

‘I’m getting better. It’s like you said. I just need practice.’

She laughed, pressing her tongue against her lips, her brown eyes brilliant and languid and burning in the shell-like whites.

‘One more trip and you’ll be all right,’ she said.

‘Might be.’

‘Probably when you’re all right you won’t make me feel how you do,’ she said.

‘Had you thought of that?’

‘No.’

‘Make me feel like it now,’ she said.

He did not speak of Fred until they lay in the sand in darkness. A twisted and crazy sort of dislocation made him keep back, until then, all he felt by way of the trap, the cheating and the jealousy. Out at sea small navigation lights floated about like stars and one of them, as before, was Ella, dying and fading away; and he hated her because of his pain.

‘How was the husband?’ he said.

‘You don’t have to speak like that,’ she said. ‘No need to speak like that.’ Her face, in the flash from the lighthouse, was undisturbed, casual and languid as ever.

‘You didn’t tell me,’ he said. ‘It didn’t make any difference. It didn’t and it doesn’t now.’

‘Me during the week and a change for Sundays,’ he said. Rage beat at his pride with callous and lacerating strokes of pain. He felt himself drop away, crazy and blinded and embittered by acid dregs of cheating and jealousy. All the time he was aware of her moving her body with quiet suppleness deeper into the sand and that movement, too, made him ache with helpless bitterness.

‘You didn’t tell me either,’ she said. ‘But it wouldn’t make any difference if you did. No difference at all.’

‘I’d nothing to tell.’ His voice was quiet; he could hear the tide slowly coming in across the sand.

‘Well, then—who should care?’ She moved in the sand again, supple and astonishingly quiet, and in distraction he found her body once again in long deep curves; the flash of the lighthouse fell on her mouth, making it glisten and then leaving it wonderfully dark again as the light swung out to sea.

‘We’re just two people,’ she said. ‘People get so messed up about the right and wrong of things. We’re just two people. What do we want with rights and wrongs? All we want is here.’

No: not here, he thought. Vainly he tried to listen to the tide; but he was distracted by the feel of her soft body into agonies of mind that flung up thoughts of Ella and the lighthouse. He determined not to be afraid of the lighthouse any longer, and now, too, he remembered the girl, high up there, leaning over.

‘Come on, kiss me; it’s nothing,’ she said. ‘Come on; just once more like the lighthouse. In case it cures you. You never know.’

She folded him down into a body that had lost the last of its rigidity and seemed now to have the quality of burying him into itself, like the sand. The lighthouse flashed several times, across the shore and across the long, oblivious kiss, and then she freed her face and said, smiling:

‘When do we go up again?’

‘To-morrow?’ he said.

‘When do you suppose they’ll put up the new lighthouse,’ she said. He did not answer. His heart, at that moment, seemed to stop beating. His body lay imprisoned in its harsh chrysalis of jealousy and weakness and fear. He could not look at her face; and down on the shore there was no movement but a small wind eating at the sea and innumerable small waves casually consuming what remained of the waste of sand.