‘Oh, I won’t let you fall! Just come this way a little and you can sit up with the cliff at your back. We’re perfectly safe, but I’m afraid we’ll have to stay here until it’s light. It’s too dark to get back the way I came. I didn’t like to leave.you long enough to go and fetch help – you were in a pretty bad position. And we’ll be all right here until the morning. Perhaps we had better exchange names. I’m Stephen Eversley, and I’m down here on a holiday. I was out watching birds and taking photographs, which is why I had a rope in the boat. I couldn’t have got you up without it. I suppose you are on holiday too. I’m on my own, and no one will bother about me, but your people will get the wind up, so we may have a search party along almost any time.’
It was nice to feel the cliff at her back. The ledge was three or four feet wide and it ran along quite a way, getting narrower until it disappeared. There was room to stretch out her feet. She looked out over the darkening sea and said,
‘Oh, I don’t know. They weren’t getting down til pretty late.’
‘Who weren’t?’
‘The people I was going to stay with, Monica Carson and her mother. We’re at school together, and Mrs. Carson asked me for part of the holidays. My train got in at four, and their’s wasn’t until six, so I was to go to the place where they had booked our rooms – it’s a private hotel called Sea View – and have tea and get unpacked. But when I got there, Mrs. Carson had telephoned to say they were doing some shopping in London and they wouldn’t be down until eight o’clock, so I went for a walk.’
He gave a half laugh.
‘And nobody had ever told you about the tide coming in! You let yourself get caught between the points, and then tried to climb up the cliff. How old are you?’
‘I’m fifteen and a half. And of course I know about tides. I asked – I asked most particularly.’
‘Who did you ask?’
‘It was someone in the hotel. There were two old ladies, and they said it wouldn’t be high tide until about eleven, so of course I thought it would be perfectly safe to walk along the beach.’
‘That depends upon how much beach there is. And the tide is high at a quarter to nine!’
She turned and stared at him. Just a shape in the dusk – a shape and a voice. But she wasn’t thinking about that – it was what he had just said about the tide. If it was high at a quarter to nine… She cut in, quick and breathless,
‘Then, why did she say it wasn’t high until eleven?’
His shoulder jerked.
‘How do I know?’
‘She did say high tide at eleven.’
‘I suppose the simple answer is that she didn’t know any more than you did.’
‘Then why did she say she did?’
He shrugged again.
‘People are like that. If you ask them the way, they will practically never say they don’t know. They just waffle on, misdirecting you. I thought you said there were two of them. Why do you say “she”?’
‘Well, really only one of them spoke. The other mostly stood there and nodded. I’d been writing my name in the book. There’s a little window between the office and the hall, and they came up on either side and looked over my shoulder. One of them said, “Is your name Candida Sayle?” and I said yes, it was. I thought it was rude of them to look over my shoulder, and I didn’t want to go on talking, so I began to walk away. But they followed me, and the one who had spoken said, “That is a very unusual name.” They were quite old, but they were dressed exactly alike. Honestly, they were odd! I wanted to get away from them, so I said I was going for a walk. And that was when she said it would be nice along the beach and the tide wasn’t high until eleven.’
‘It sounds as if they were barmy.’
‘It does rather.’
He was thinking that strangers ought to know better than to mix and meddle with the tides. They must have been strangers, because anyone who lived here would know that this was a dangerous strip of coast.
If it had been later in the year, Candida would hardly have got very far on her walk without somebody warning her, but on a chilly April evening it wasn’t likely that there would be anyone down on the beaches after tea. Candida’s old ladies were definitely a menace. He said so.
‘And I hope your friend will put it across them for misleading you. It might have been serious.’
‘Do you suppose they’ll say anything? I don’t.’
‘They’ll be bound to. Mrs. – what’s her name – Carson will be arriving. If you signed your name, she’ll know you got to the hotel, and she’ll be wondering where you are. She’ll be in a state, and your old ladies will be bound to say they spoke to you. Somebody probably saw them doing it. And if they say you were going for a walk along the beach, there’s bound to be a search-party out looking for you before long. Quite a bright thought. We’re all right here, but it will be cold before morning.’
There was no search-party, because Mrs. Carson, having started the day at 6 a.m. and crowded it with a great deal of fatiguing and mostly unnecessary exertion, was overtaken by a rather alarming fainting fit at the moment when she ought to have been catching her train to Eastcliff. She was carried into the Station Hotel and a doctor sent for. Monica, a good deal frightened, rang up Sea View to say that her mother was ill, and that she would ring up again in the morning. The line was not at all clear. Candida’s name reached her vaguely. She said, ‘Oh, I hope we’ll get down in the morning, but if we can’t, she will just have to go home.’ After which she rang off.
Stephen and Candida knew nothing of all this. They sat on the ledge and talked. She told him that she lived with an aunt who had brought her up.
‘Her name is Sayle too – Barbara Sayle. She is my father’s sister. She gardens all the time. My father and mother were torpedoed in the war. Aunt Barbara is a pet.’
Stephen was perfectly right about the cold. He made her sit close up to him and put his arm round her. Sometimes they dozed, and sometimes they talked. He was going to be an architect. He hoped to pass his final exam in the summer, after which there was a place for him in an uncle’s firm. It wouldn’t be a bad job as jobs went, only working for relations wasn’t always the best thing for you. Everyone thought you were being let down easy, but sometimes it didn’t work out that way at all.
‘Richard is all right of course. As a matter of fact he’s a very fine chap, but he’s going to expect me to be about twice as good as there’s any hope of my being – just because I’m his nephew. Of course it’s a tremendous chance.’
A drowsy voice said against his shoulder, ‘I don’t see why – you shouldn’t be – quite as good – as he is – ’
He found himself talking about the houses Richard Eversley had built and the houses he hoped to build himself. Her head was warm against his shoulder. It was like talking to himself. Sometimes he knew that she was asleep. Sometimes quite suddenly she spoke. Once she said, ‘You can do anything – if you try.’ And when he came back with, ‘That’s nonsense,’ she went off into a murmur of words which sounded like, ‘If you – really – want to – ’
The night went by.
They woke in the dawn, cold and stiff. Each saw the other clearly for the first time. Candida rubbed her eyes and stretched. The sea was the colour of the pewter plates on Aunt Barbara’s dresser. It was very calm and still. The sky was an even grey, with a yellow streak low down in the east where it touched the water. There was no breeze. Everything smelled very cold, and fresh, and clean. There was a salty taste on her lips. She looked at Stephen and saw him stretching too – a tall, loose-limbed young man of two or three and twenty with a lot of sun-burned hair. He wore an open-necked shirt under an old tweed jacket, and he was tanned to almost the same colour. His grey eyes were light against the brown of his skin. They looked back at her. What he saw was a girl with dark blue eyes and chestnut hair in a plait. The hair was all ruffled up where it had rubbed against his shoulder. The eyes were good, the features emerging from a soft roundness, the mouth wide and full, and the teeth very white. They looked at one another and laughed.