The Burden - Christie Agatha - Страница 26

It was almost an hour later when Llewellyn signalled for his check and prepared to leave. As he passed near her chair, he looked at her.

She seemed oblivious both of him and of her immediate surroundings. She stared now into her glass, now out to sea, and her expression did not change. It was the expression of someone who is very far away.

As Llewellyn left the cafe and started up the narrow street that led back to his hotel, he had a sudden impulse to go back, to speak to her, to warn her. Now why had that word 'warn' come into his head? Why did he have the idea that she was in danger?

He shook his head. There was nothing he could do about it at the moment, but he was quite sure that he was right.

2

Two weeks later found Llewellyn Knox still on the island. His days had fallen into a pattern. He walked, rested, read, walked again, slept. In the evenings after dinner he went down to the harbour and sat in one of the caf?s. Soon he cut reading out of his daily routine. He had nothing more to read.

He was living now with himself only, and that, he knew, was what it should be. But he was not alone. He was in the midst of others of his kind, he was at one with them, even if he never spoke to them. He neither sought nor avoided contact. He had conversations with many people, but none of them meant anything more than the courtesies of fellow human beings. They wished him well, he wished them well, but neither of them wanted to intrude into the other's life.

Yet to this aloof and satisfying friendship there was an exception. He wondered constantly about the girl who came to the cafe and sat at the table under the bougainvillaea. Though he patronised several different establishments on the harbour front, he came most often to the first one of his choice. Here, on several occasions, he saw the English girl. She arrived always late in the evening and sat at the same table, and he had discovered that she stayed there until almost everyone else had left. Though she was a mystery to him, it was clear to him that she was a mystery to no one else.

One day he spoke of her to the waiter.

"The se?ora who sits there, she is English?"

"Yes, she is English."

"She lives in the island?"

"Yes."

"She does not come here every evening?"

The waiter said gravely:

"She comes when she can."

It was a curious answer, and Llewellyn thought about it afterwards.

He did not ask her name. If the waiter had wanted him to know her name, he would have told it to him. The boy would have said: "She is the se?ora so and so, and she lives at such-and-such a place." Since he did not say that, Llewellyn deduced that there was a reason why her name should not be given to a stranger.

Instead he asked:

"What does she drink?"

The boy replied briefly: "Brandy," and went away.

Llewellyn paid for his drink and said good-night. He threaded his way through the tables and stood for a moment on the pavement before joining the evening throng of walkers.

Then, suddenly, he wheeled round and marched with the firm decisive tread of his nationality to the table by the coral bougainvillaea.

"Do you mind," he said, "if I sit down and talk to you for a moment or two?"

Chapter Two

1

Her gaze came back very slowly from the harbour lights to his face. For a moment or two her eyes remained wide and unfocused. He could sense the effort she made. She had been, he saw, very far away.

He saw, too, with a sudden quick pity, how very young she was. Not only young in years (she was, he judged, about twenty-three or four), but young in the sense of immaturity. It was as though a normally maturing rosebud had had its growth arrested by frost-it still presented the appearance of normality, but actually it would progress no further. It would not visibly wither. It would just, in the course of time, drop to the ground, unopened. She looked, he thought, like a lost child. He appreciated, too, her loveliness. She was very lovely. Men would always find her lovely, always yearn to help her, to protect her, to cherish her. The dice, one would have said, were loaded in.her favour. And yet she was sitting here, staring into unfathomable distance, and somewhere on her easy, assured happy path through life she had.got lost.

Her eyes, wide now and deeply blue, assessed him.

She said, a little uncertainly: "Oh-?"

He waited.

Then she smiled.

"Please do."

He drew up a chair and sat.

She asked: "You are American?"

"Yes."

"Did you come off the ship?"

Her eyes went momentarily to the harbour again. There was a ship alongside the quay. There was nearly always a ship.

"I did come on a ship, but not that ship. I've been here a week or two."

"Most people," she said, "don't stay as long as that."

It was a statement, not a question.

Llewellyn gestured to a waiter who came.

He ordered a Cura?ao.

"May I order you something?"

"Thank you." she said. And added: "He knows."

The boy bowed his head in assent and went away.

They sat for a moment or two in silence.

"I suppose," she said at last, "you were lonely? There aren't many Americans or English here."

She was, he saw, settling the question of why he had spoken to her.

"No," he said at once. "I wasn't lonely. I find I'm-glad to be alone."

"Oh, one is, isn't one?"

The fervour with which she spoke surprised him.

"I see," he said. "That's why you come here?"

She nodded.

"To be alone. And now I've come and spoilt it?"

"No," she said. "You don't matter. You're a stranger, you see."

"I see."

"I don't even know your name."

"Do you want to?"

"No. I'd rather you didn't tell me. I won't tell you my name, either."

She added doubtfully:

"But perhaps you've been told that already. Everyone in the caf? knows me, of course."

"No, they haven't mentioned it. They understand, I think, that you would not want it told."

"They do understand. They have, all of them, such wonderful good manners. Not taught good manners-the natural thing. I could never have believed till I came here that natural courtesy could be such a wonderful-such a positive thing."

The waiter came back with their two drinks. Llewellyn paid him.

He looked over to the glass the girl held cupped in her two hands.

"Brandy?"

"Yes. Brandy helps a lot."

"It helps you to feel alone? Is that it?"

"Yes. It helps me to feel-free."

"And you're not free?"

"Is anybody free?"

He considered. She had not said the words bitterly-as they are usually spoken. She had been asking a simple question.

"The fate of every man is bound about his neck-is that what you feel?"

"No, I don't think so. Not quite. I can understand feeling rather like that, that your course was charted out like a ship's, and that you must follow it, again rather like a ship, and that so long as you do, you are all right. But I feel more like a ship that has, quite suddenly, gone off its proper course. And then, you see, you're lost. You don't know where you are, and you're at the mercy of the wind and sea, and you're not free, you're caught in the grip of something you don't understand-tangled up in it all." She added: "What nonsense I'm talking. I suppose it's the brandy."

He agreed.

"It's partly the brandy, no doubt. Where does it take you?"

"Oh, away… that's all-away…"

"What is it, really, that you have to get away from?"

"Nothing. Absolutely nothing. That's the really-well, wicked part of it. I'm one of the fortunate ones. I've got everything." She repeated sombrely: "Everything… Oh, I don't mean I've not had sorrows, losses, but it's not that. I don't hanker and grieve over the past. I don't resurrect it and live it over again. I don't want to go back, or even forward. I just want to go away somewhere. I sit here drinking brandy and presently I'm out there, beyond the harbour, and going farther and farther-into some kind of unreal place that doesn't really exist. It's rather like the dreams of flying you have as a child-no weight-so light-floating."