He’s got it mixed, she said to herself desperately, reasonably. He’s got it mixed. I was the paint, and the love and the happiness was the other one.

‘Yes, my dear. That’s what it is to be a genius, d’you see? He went on down to the cove, and put his feet in a pool, and sat drawing those little emonies. There was a young man you couldn’t but help loving. Love him I did. And do to this day.’22

‘And when was this?’ she asked, after a pause.

‘Thirty years ago,’ he said. ‘Yes, that’s when it was. Can’t be less, for in nineteen twenty-two the fishing trade got so bad that soon after midsummer I packed up and went to work for a fishmonger in Birmingham. Funny ways they’ve got with fish in those parts.’

I suppose I shall remember that ridiculous sentence to my dying day, she thought.

‘And when I came back to St Prew, he was gone,’ the old man said.

Still silent, she laid her hands on the table and looked at them. They were not shaking now. Presently, she became aware that the other guests were beginning to bestir themselves and go into the dining-room, and that Mr Caunter was getting to his feet.

‘Time I was going home,’ he said. ‘The fog is blowing in again. It will be another thick night. We’ll be hearing the foghorn again in a minute or two. Ah. Well, it’s been a pleasure. I could tell about him by the hour. But best not. The fog gets into my tubes, d’you see? And then I cough.’

It was as though the fog were billowing past, dry as smoke, between her and the old man with his stumbling attempts at the courtesies of farewell. Absorbed in her bitter melancholy, she did not notice when he went away.

23

The Children’s Grandmother

Looking westward under the dusky winter skies, which had a russet tinge, as though the colour of the moor were reflected in the low-hanging clouds, one saw along the horizon a band of pale light, and that was the sky above the Atlantic.

‘You say Roses is five miles from the sea?’ my sister Anne had commented. ‘Why, the children will grow up little sea monsters. You can whisk them into it in a moment, before the old lady has time to say no.’ In fact, it was not so easy. The children’s grandmother could not imagine the car—a large, old Daimler, a car for carrying dowagers to court rather than children to the sea—being driven by anyone but Job. Job understood it. We lived at Roses for nearly three years before I was allowed to drive the Daimler to the sea, and even then Job came too. Job also understood the tides; and as my children’s Aunt Madeleine had been drowned off the beach where they paddled, I could not contest the importance of Job’s understanding the tides. By then, I had become so much a piece of life at Roses that I was not sorry to have Job in the back of the car, representing, for he was an immensely impressive and solemn old man, the rightful dowager. Graciously rising and sinking, bowing to a non-existent populace at every jolt in the narrow lane, Job accompanied us to the sea, sat down 24on the flat rock that was called Job’s Rock, as other rocks were called the Castle, the Maiden, and the Churn, and took out his knitting. He sat on his rock and watched the sea, and his needles clicked and flicked, gathering the wool into socks and scarves and jerseys for the children, and at some mysteriously indicated moment he would cry out in his foghorn bellow that the current was flowing round the Churn, that swimmers and paddlers must return to the beach. We obeyed him, knowing that he was our friend. We must have known it by intuition, for he hardly ever spoke, his face was as expressionless as the moon, and his eyes were like two large iron nails driven deep into it and fastened by rust.