There they are, going out now; down the sandy path to the station; Theo bare-legged and bare-headed as usual, swinging a basket; off to buy jam, I expect, for the visitors’ tea; Blanche carrying letters. I heard his step on the cobbles ten minutes ago, and Mrs. Waters always rests in her room until three o’clock. The coast’s quite clear, then. Why shouldn’t I go out and have my bathe? I missed it this morning—thanks to all that! Perhaps the cool green waves of the Bay will help me to feel as if I’d washed a little of that memory away from me. Already it seems years since my last bathe; only yesterday morning! When the girls and I ran down together, to find him already in, practising walking under the water; and he’d called out “I say! Isn’t it topping to be alive on a day like this?” as he emerged, head up once more, dripping and glowing in his indigo-blue sheath, his hair sleek once more with the wet, his arms and shoulders as smooth and pinky-white as any of ours, but making ours look curiously slender and delicate.
Years ago! Everything had been so different! I’d thought he was so different.
Well! This will be my last bathe for the summer, so I may as well enjoy it, all to myself.
* * * * *
I undressed quickly, slipped into my black woven silk club costume, and twisted round my head the long orange silk scarf that keeps my hair from getting too wet. I simply won’t take to one of those sponge-bag-like rubber caps that some girls still wear for bathing. They’re too unsightly for anything—and one doesn’t exactly want to look a blot on the seascape, even if there doesn’t happen to be anyone else bathing, to see one....
As it happened, I found, to my great annoyance, that there was someone else already in the little cove next to the cottages that it was Theo’s idea to christen “The Bay of Many Waters.” There was a smooth head, some distance out, dark against the afternoon glitter; a steady stroke that I knew.
Oh!
So he’d come out first!
Well, that meant that I couldn’t have my bathe here after all—just like him!... Fresh rage against him surged up in me as I caught up the white wrap of Turkey-towelling that I had thrown down upon a seaweedy rock with my string-soled shoes. I’d leave him to it. Perhaps I could get a dip in the next bay under that cliff where the wooden woman leaned forward to her watch?