“Did you sleep well?” Roger asked.
“Yes. Did you?”
“Wonderfully,” he said.
“Tommy is the only one of us who plays backgammon,” David told the girl. “It was taught him by a worthless man who turned out to be a fairy.”
“Really? What a sad story.”
“The way Tommy tells it, it isn’t so sad,” David said. “There wasn’t anything bad happened.”
“I think fairies are all awfully sad,” she said. “Poor fairies.”
“This was sort of funny though,” David said. “Because this worthless man that taught Tommy backgammon was explaining to Tommy what it meant to be a fairy and all about the Greeks and Damon and Pythias and David and Jonathan. You know, sort of like when they tell you about the fish and the roe and the milt and the bees fertilizing the pollen and all that at school and Tommy asked him if he’d ever read a book by Gide. What was it called, Mr. Davis? Not Corydon. That other one? With Oscar Wilde in it.”
“Si le grain ne meurt,” Roger said.
“It’s a pretty dreadful book that Tommy took to read the boys in school. They couldn’t understand it in French, of course, but Tommy used to translate it. Lots of it is awfully dull but it gets pretty dreadful when Mr. Gide gets to Africa.”
“I’ve read it,” the girl said.
“Oh fine,” David said. “Then you know the sort of thing I mean. Well this man who’d taught Tommy backgammon and turned out to be a fairy was awfully surprised when Tommy spoke about this book but he was sort of pleased because now he didn’t have to go through all the part about the bees and flowers of that business and he said, ‘I’m so glad you know,’ or something like that and then Tommy said this to him exactly; I memorized it: ‘Mr. Edwards, I take only an academic interest in homosexuality. I thank you very much for teaching me backgammon and I must bid you good day.’ ”
“Tommy had wonderful manners then,” David told her. “He’d just come from living in France with papa and he had wonderful manners.”
“Did you live in France, too?”
“We all did at different times. But Tommy’s the only one who remembers it properly. Tommy has the best memory anyway. He remembers truly, too. Did you ever live in France?”
“For a long time.”
“Did you go to school there?”
“Yes. Outside of Paris.”
“Wait till you get with Tommy,” David said. “He knows Paris and outside of Paris the way I know the reef here or the flats. Probably I don’t know them even as well as Tommy knows Paris.”
She was sitting down now in the shade of the porch and she was sifting the white sand through her toes.
“Tell me about the reef and the flats,” she said.
“It’s better if I show them to you,” David said. “I’ll take you out in a skiff on the flats and we can go goggle-fishing if you like it. That’s the only way to know the reef.”
“I’d love to go.”
“Who’s on the yacht?” Roger asked.
“People. You wouldn’t like them.”
“They seemed very nice.”
“Do we have to talk that way?”
“No,” Roger said.
“You met the man of persistence. He’s the richest and the dullest. Can’t we just not talk about them? They’re all good and wonderful and dull as hell.”
Young Tom came up with Andrew following him. They had been swimming far down the beach and when they had come out and seen the girl by David’s chair they had come running on the hard sand and Andrew had been left behind. He came up out of breath.
“You could have waited,” he said to young Tom.
“I’m sorry, Andy,” young Tom said. Then he said, “Good morning. We waited for you but then we went in.”
“I’m sorry I’m late.”
“You’re not late. We’re all going in again.”
“I’ll stay out,” David said. “You all go in now. I’ve been talking too much anyway?”
“You don’t have to worry about undertow,” young Tom told her. “It’s a long gradual slope.”
“What about sharks and barracuda?”
“Sharks only come in at night,” Roger told her. “Barracuda never bother you. They’d only hit you if the water was roily or muddy.”
“If they just saw a flash of something and didn’t know what it was they might strike at it by mistake,” David explained. “But they don’t bite people in clear water. There’s nearly always barracuda around where we swim.”
“You can see them float along over the sand right alongside of you,” young Tom said. “They’re very curious. But they always go away.”
“If you had fish, though,” David told her, “like goggle-fishing and the fish on a stringer or in a bag, they’d go after the fish and they might hit you by accident because they’re so fast.”
“Or if you were swimming in a bunch of mullet or a big school of sardines,” young Tom said. “They could hit you when they were slashing in after the school fish.”
“You swim between Tom and me,” Andy said. “Nothing will bother you that way.”
The waves were breaking heavily on the beach and the sandpipers and Wilson plover ran twinklingly out onto the hard new-wet sand as the water receded before the next wave broke.
“Do you think we ought to swim when it’s this rough and we can’t see?”
“Oh, sure,” David told her. “Just watch where you walk before you start to swim. It’s probably too rough for a sting ray to lie in the sand anyway.”
“Mr. Davis and I will look after you,” young Tom said.
“I’ll look after you,” Andy said.
“If you bump into any fish in the surf they’re probably little pompanos,” David said. “They come in on the high tide to feed on the sand fleas. They’re awfully pretty in the water and they’re curious and friendly.”
“It sounds a little like swimming in an aquarium,” she said.
“Andy will teach you how to let the air out of your lungs to stay down deep,” David told her. “Tom will show you how not to get in trouble with morays.”
“Don’t try to scare her, Dave,” young Tom said. “We’re not big kings of underwater like he is. But just because he’s a king of underwater, Miss Bruce—”
“Audrey.”
“Audrey,” Tom said and stopped.
“What were you saying, Tommy?”
“I don’t know,” young Tom said. “Let’s go in and swim.”
Thomas Hudson worked on for a while. Then he went down and sat by David and watched the four of them in the surf. The girl was swimming without a cap and she swam and dove as sleek as a seal. She was as good a swimmer as Roger except for the difference in power. When they came in onto the beach and came walking toward the house on the hard sand, the girl’s hair was wet and went straight back from her forehead so there was nothing to trick the shape of her head and Thomas Hudson thought he had never seen a lovelier face nor a finer body. Except one, he thought. Except the one finest and loveliest. Don’t think about it, he told himself. Just look at this girl and be glad she’s here.
“How was it?” he asked her.
“Wonderful,” she smiled at him. “But I didn’t see any fish at all,” she told David.
“You probably wouldn’t in so much surf,” David said. “Unless you bumped into them.”
She was sitting on the sand with her hands clasped around her knees. Her hair hung, damp, to her shoulders and the two boys sat beside her. Roger lay on the sand in front of her with his forehead on his folded arms. Thomas Hudson opened the screen door and went inside the house and then upstairs to the porch to work on the picture. He thought that was the best thing for him to do.
Below on the sand, where Thomas Hudson no longer watched them, the girl was looking at Roger.