The Heat of the Sun

her back on course. For a time she accepted his guidance, looping this way and that with him, cutting a figure of eight; then, growing confident, she broke free. He skated
around her in circles, then Aunt Toolie circled him.
    The sun, diffuse and orange, burned low through a wintry mist. I sat on a bench. Gripping my ashplant between my knees, I rested my chin on its knobbly top and stared across the frozen lake.
Score marks gleamed on the grey-white surface like the cat’s-cradle trace of a dance of knives; black trees, gaunt as pylons, rose around the shore. I heard the laughter. I heard the cries.
The skaters grew unreal to me, phantoms circling in the declining day.
    Passing my bench came a curious group. All were Orientals. At their head, striding forward, was a slender youth, aged perhaps fourteen or fifteen; behind him, struggling to keep up, were three
little men, none of them more than five feet high. Each had dressed with elaborate neatness, as if from a Wedger’s winter-wear display; but while the boy’s coat, hat, and gloves were of
bright yellow, the three men wore black. Only the boy had rented skates. Perching on a bench some way around the lake, he donned them with quick, capable hands.
    A little comedy played itself out. Exuberantly, the boy gestured to the ice, while the attendants, standing about the bench, remained solemn, as if to dissuade him from a course so risky. One
shook his head. One flung up his hands. One might have been about to restrain the boy, but seemed abashed and drew back. The boy, it seemed, was an object of peculiar respect. He had none for his
attendants. Laughing at them, he launched himself on to the ice.
    When he fell, almost at once, the attendants gasped; one covered his eyes and I thought of the Three Wise Monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. The boy scrambled up; within moments,
he cut a remarkably graceful figure. The attendants, like palace guards, remained by the bench. Curious, I watched the boy vanish into the distance.
    Aunt Toolie hobbled over to join me. I lit her a cigarette.
    ‘Our friend Benjy’ – she blew out a long stream of smoke – ‘is too small . I never feel he’s quite anchored to the earth. Now take Copley Wedger: a girl
could feel safe with a man like that.’
    ‘I thought you and Benjy were getting on rather well.’
    ‘Darling, you’re not going to resent me, are you?’
    ‘Who’s resenting?’ But I did. At a party at Wobblewood two nights before, Aunt Toolie had been unusually silly. Dressed, at ‘Benjy’s’ insistence, in
flapper-girl garb, she paraded haughtily amongst the guests, cigarette holder jutting just so, and I felt an impulse to slap her. Worse still was her skittishness with ‘Benjy’. He had
slicked his hair and wore white tie and tails; both of them mocked the guests, and their mockery grew worse as the evening wore on. Interrupting Arnold Blitzstein at the piano, Aunt Toolie demanded
that they put ‘Fidgety Feet’ on the phonograph; she shimmied to it flamboyantly, all by herself. Later, ‘Benjy’ played at being a dog, crouching on hind legs with hands
curled like paws, while Aunt Toolie held crackers above his head and snatched them away as he lunged up for them, yowling. In the end, she pelted the crackers at him in handfuls until he chased her
down the stairs, caught her, and kissed her.
    ‘I know you’ve been miserable since Agnes,’ I said.
    ‘Agnes! Ancient history.’ I supposed she was: not once, despite promises, had the new Mrs Copley Wedger descended to her old haunts. But what did Aunt Toolie expect? Secretly, I had
always hated her protégés. What was I to feel though, when her protégé was ‘Benjy’? Eagerly, she began saying what a tonic he was, what a broth of a boy:
Benjy this, Benjy that.
    I snapped: ‘Do you have to call him Benjy ?’
    ‘It’s his name: Benjamin. No need to be lugubrious.’
    ‘I’m not lugubrious,’ I said.
    ‘You are. You’re Mr Lugubrious.’ Aunt Toolie pouted and patted my head. ‘Don’t you know you’re first on my list? My special charge. My sacred trust. My dear,
dear boy.’
    ‘You packed me off to Blaze as soon as I arrived.’
    ‘It wasn’t all up to me. Provisions had been made.’
    ‘Oh, provisions!’
    She stiffened. ‘Darling, you must admit you were difficult. Christ, you were impossible! You’d just tried to kill yourself.’
    ‘I didn’t!’ But what had I done? I thought of the automobile that