It is not important. Do you remember hunting for cowries along the margin of the tide, each one so fine and perfect it became a precious jewel to be held in the hand all the way home; and the little orange-coloured scallops, the pearly oyster shells, the tiny bits of emerald glass, a live hermit crab, a cockle, the spine of a skate, and once, but never to be forgotten, the dry seawashed jawbone of a human being with teeth in it, white and wonderful among the shells and pebbles. Oh Mummy, look what I’ve found! Look, Mummy, look!
But to go back to the splinter. She had really been rather unpleasant about that.
‘What do you mean, you didn’t notice?’ she had asked, scornful.
‘I just didn’t notice, that’s all.’
‘I suppose you’re going to tell me if I stick a pin into your foot you won’t feel it?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
And then she had jabbed him suddenly in the ankle with the pin she had been using to take out the splinter, and he hadn’t been watching so he didn’t know about it till she had cried out in a kind of horror. And when he had looked down, the pin was sticking into the flesh all by itself behind the ankle-bone, almost half of it buried.
‘Take it out,’ he had said. ‘You can poison someone like that.’
‘You mean you can’t feel it?’
‘Take it out, will you?’
‘You mean it doesn’t hurt?’
‘The pain is terrible. Take it out.’
‘What’s the matter with you?’
‘I said the pain is terrible. Didn’t you hear me?’
Why did they do things like that to him?
When I was down beside the sea, a wooden spade they gave to me, to dig the sandy shore. My holes were empty as a cup, and every time the sea came up, till it could come no more.
A year ago the doctor had said, ‘Shut your eyes. Now tell me whether I’m pushing this toe up or down.’
‘Up,’ he had said.
‘And now?’
‘Down. No, up. I think it’s up.’
It was peculiar that a neuro-surgeon should want to play with his toes.
‘Did I get them all right, doctor?’
‘You did very well.’
But that was a year ago. He had felt pretty good a year ago. The sort of things that happened now never used to happen then. Take, for example, just one item – the bathroom tap.
Why was the hot tap in the bathroom on a different side this morning? That was a new one.
It is not of the least importance, you understand, but it would be interesting to know why.
Do you think she could have changed it over, taken a spanner and a pipe-wrench and sneaked in during the night and changed it over?
Do you? Well – if you really want to know – yes. The way she’d been acting lately, she’d be quite capable of doing that.
A strange and difficult woman, that’s what she was. Mind you, she used not to be, but there’s no doubt at all that right now she was as strange and difficult as they come. Especially at night.
Yes, at night. That was the worst time of all – the night.