Devil By The Sea by Nina Bawden Read Free Book Online Page B

raised her head from the pillow and listened. Grownup anger, except
     when it was directed against herself, excited her.
    “It didn’t seem important. I forgot about it. She said Peregrine had seen the Devil. I thought—some story of Nanny’s. You
     know what
she
was.”
    “She’s a naughty little girl.” Their voices grew softer. They both laughed.
    Then Janet said, gruffly, “You ought to go to bed. You’ll catch cold.”
    The light was switched off. A little later the lavatory cistern flushed with a sound like baying wolves. A door closed and
     the house was silent.
    Hilary lay in the dark and listened to the sea. It was loud and angry to-night. She pictured it, crawling up the crumbling
     cliffs and sweeping in through the doors and windows, drowning them all in their beds.
    Peregrine was whimpering in his sleep, now and again he gave a short, yapping sound like a dreaming puppy. Hilary rolled on
     to her tummy and stuffed the edges of the pillow against her ears. Anger possessed her. Why should
she
be blamed because Peregrine had seen the Devil? It was unfair. She squeezed out a few, hot tears and tasted them with her
     tongue. She would pay Peregrine out, she decided. To-morrow she would think of a way to punish him.

Chapter Three
    In his caravan on Grey’s Field, the man slept, fully clothed, beneath an army blanket. In his dream was a beautiful, laughing
     child. He loved her and stretched out his hands but her face twisted with ugly fear and she ran away. Then his mother was
     angry with him. He became frightened and restless and began to mutter in his sleep.
    Towards morning, it grew perceptibly colder. He woke in his stinking bunk and said, “Chip-chop-change, weather gone, weather
     gone, chip-chop-change.” At first he thought it was his mother speaking and then he knew it was not. She was dead and gone,
     dead and shut in a box. They had taken her away down the narrow stairs; the coffin had jammed in the turning and they had
     sweated in their black coats until, in the end, they had sawn away part of the banister rail. Four black horses with polished
     shoes and feathery plumes had drawn her carriage to the cemetery. All that she owned had been sold to pay for the funeral.
     When she was buried, his aunt had sat on the shiny, leather couch in the parlour and mourned: what shall we do now, what shall
     we do with the boy?
    Grumbling and shivering, he sat on the edge of the bunk and felt beneath it for his surgical boot. When he found it, he dangled
     it limply between his knees and stared vacantly across the narrow limits of the caravan to the naked, grease-smeared wall.
     A low table, covered with cracked linoleum, stood between the bunk and the wall: on it lay a bar ofNut Crunch and a blue saucer full of bird seed. In one corner of the caravan there was a Primus stove and a kettle, in another,
     a pile of empty bean-tins, old seed-cartons and mouldy hunks of bread. His housekeeping was methodical and simple. Every day
     he wiped the table with a wet cloth and swept the floor. Once a week, he shovelled the pile of rubbish into a sack and threw
     it into the sea at high tide. He never changed his clothes.
    It came to him, dimly, that it was time for him to go, but he did not stir. Pearly-grey light came through a small window
     cut in the door. Hanging in front of it, was a bird cage covered with a torn piece of rag and now, as the man sat on the bunk,
     the canary began to twitter sleepily. With a grunt, the man heaved himself upright and fastened the boot on to his dreadful
     foot. Limping across the caravan, he removed the covering from the cage and said tenderly, “Woke up, have you, Johnny?” The
     bird ruffled its feathers and regarded him with eyes that were like small chips of black boot polish. It made no sound.
    Chirruping gently, he filled his palm with seed and opened the cage door. The bird fluttered out, landed on his middle finger
     and began to peck at the seed. When it had finished,