The Sea Read online

  By the way: the bed, my bed. Miss Vavasour insists it has always been here. The Graces, mother and father, was it theirs, is this where they slept, in this very bed? What a thought, I do not know what to do with it. Stop thinking it, that would be best; least unsettling, that is.

  Another week done with. How quickly the time goes as the season advances, the earth hurtling along its groove into the year’s sharply descending final arc. Despite the continuing clemency of the weather the Colonel feels the winter coming on. He has been unwell of late, has caught what he says is a cold on the kidneys. I tell him that was one of my mother’s complaints— one of her favourites, in fact, I do not add—but he gives me a queer look, thinking I am mocking him, perhaps, as perhaps I am. What is a cold on the kidneys, anyway? Ma was no more specific than the Colonel on the subject, and even Black’s Medical can offer no enlightenment. Maybe he wants me to think this is the reason for his frequent shufflings to the lavatory by day and night and not the something more serious that I suspect. “I’m not the best,” he says, “and that’s a fact.” He has taken to wearing a muffler at mealtimes. He turns over his food listlessly and greets the mildest attempt at levity with a soulful, suffering glance that drops wearily away to the accompaniment of a faint sigh that is almost a moan. Have I described his fascinatingly chromatic nose? It changes hue with the time of day and the slightest variation of the weather, from pale lavender through burgundy to the deepest imperial purple. Is this rhinophyma, I suddenly wonder, are these Dr. Thomson’s famous grog blossoms? Miss Vavasour is sceptical of his complaints, and makes a wry face at me when he is not looking. I think he is losing heart in his attempts to woo her. In that bright-yellow waistcoat, the bottom button always punctiliously undone and the pointed flaps open over his neat little paunch, he is as intent and circumspect as one of those outlandishly plumed male birds, peacock or cock pheasant, who gorgeously stalk up and down at a distance, desperate of eye but pretending indifference, while the drab hen unconcernedly pecks in the gravel for grubs. Miss V. bats aside his ponderously coy attentions with a mixture of vexation and flustered embarrassment. I surmise, from the injured looks he throws at her, that previously she gave him some grounds for hope which were immediately whipped from under him when I came along to be a witness to her folly, and that now she is cross at herself and eager I should be convinced that what he may have taken for encouragement was really no more than a display of a landlady’s professional politesse.

  Often at a loss myself to know what to do with my time, I have been compiling a schedule of the Colonel’s typical day. He rises early, for he is a poor sleeper, suggesting to us by expressive silences and tight-lipped shrugs a fund of battle-ground nightmares that would keep a narcolept from sleep, although I have an idea the bad memories that beset him were gathered not in the far-flung colonies but somewhere nearer home, for example on the boreens and cratered side roads of South Armagh. Breakfast he takes alone, at a small table in the ingle-nook in the kitchen—no, I did not recall an ingle, not to speak of a nook—solitude being the preferred mode in which to partake of what he frequently and portentously pronounces the most important meal of the day. Miss Vavasour is content not to disturb him, and serves him his rashers and eggs and black pudding in a sardonic silence. He keeps his own supply of condiments, unlabelled bottles of brown and red and dark-green sluggish stuffs, which he doles on to his food with an alchemist’s niceness of measurement. There is a spread too that he prepares himself, he calls it slap, a khaki-coloured goo involving anchovies, curry powder, a great deal of pepper, and other, unnamed things; it smells, curiously, of dog. “A great scourer for the bag,” he says. It took me a while to realise that this bag of which he often speaks, though never in Miss V.’s presence, is the stomach and environs. He is ever alive to the state of the bag.

  After breakfast comes the morning constitutional, taken in all weathers down Station Road and along the Cliff Walk past the Pier Head Bar and back again the long way round by the lighthouse cottages and the Gem, where he stops to buy the morning paper and a roll of the extra-strong peppermints which he sucks on all day, and the faint sickly smell of which pervades the house. He goes along at a brisk clip with what I am sure he intends to be a military bearing, although the first morning I saw him setting off I noted with a jolt how at every step he swings out his left foot in a tight sideways curve, exactly as my long-lost father used to do. For the first week or two of my stay here he would still bring back from these route marches a token for Miss Vavasour, nothing fancy, nothing cissyish, a spray of russet leaves or a sprig of greenery, nothing that could not be presented as merely an item of horticultural interest, which he would place without remark on the hall table beside her gardening gloves and her big bunch of house keys. Now he returns empty-handed, save for his paper and his peppermints. That is my doing; my arrival put paid to the ceremony of the nosegays.

  The newspaper consumes what is left of his morning, he reads it from first page to last, gathering intelligence, missing nothing. He sits by the fireplace in the lounge, where the clock on the mantelpiece has a hesitant, geriatric tick and pauses at the half hour and the two quarter hours to deliver itself of a single, infirm, jangling chime but on the hour itself maintains what seems a vindictive silence. He has his armchair, his glass ashtray for his pipe, his box of Swan Vestas, his footstool, his paper rack. Does he notice those brassy beams of sunlight falling through the leaded panes of the bay window, the desiccated bunch of sea-blue and tenderly blood-brown hydrangea occupying the grate where even yet the first fire of the season has not needed to be lit? Does he notice that the world he reads about in the paper is no longer the world he knew? Perhaps these days all his energies, like mine, go into the effort of not noticing. I have caught him furtively crossing himself when the tolling of the angelus bell comes up to us from the stone church down on Strand Road.

  At lunchtime the Colonel and I must shift for ourselves, for Miss Vavasour retires to her room every day between noon and three, to sleep, or read, or work on her memoirs, nothing would surprise me. The Colonel is a ruminant. He sits at the kitchen table in shirt-sleeves and an antique sleeveless pullover munching away at an ill-made sandwich—hacked lump of cheese or chunk of cold meat between two door-stoppers smeared with his slap, or a daub of Colman’s fieriest, or sometimes both if he feels in need of a jolt—and tries out feints of conversation on me, like a canny field commander searching for a bulge in the enemy’s defences. He sticks to neutral topics, the weather, sporting fixtures, horse racing although he assures me he is not a betting man. Despite the diffidence his need is patent: he dreads the afternoons, those empty hours, as I dread the sleepless nights. He cannot make me out, would like to know what really I am doing here, who might be anywhere, if I chose, so he believes. Who that could afford the warm south— “The sun’s the only man for the pains and aches,” the Colonel opines—would come to do his grieving at the Cedars? I have not told him about the old days here, the Graces, all that. Not that all that is an explanation. I get up to leave—“Work,” I say solemnly—and he gives me a desperate look. Even my unforthcoming company is preferable to his room and the radio.

  A chance mention of my daughter provoked an excited response. He has a daughter too, married, with a pair of little ones, as he says. They are going to come for a visit any day now, the daughter, her husband the engineer, and the girls, who are seven and three. I have a premonition of photographs and sure enough the wallet comes out of a back pocket and the snaps are shown, a leathery young woman with a dissatisfied mien who looks not at all like the Colonel, and a little girl in a party frock who misfortunately does. The son-in-law, grinning on a beach with babe in arms, is unexpectedly good-looking, a big-shouldered southern type with an oiled quiff and bruised eyes—how did mousey Miss Blunden get herself such a he-man? Other lives, other lives. Suddenly somehow they are too much for me, the Colonel’s daughter, her man, their girls, and I return the pictures hastily, shaking my head. “Oh, sorry, sorry,�
� the Colonel says, harrumphing embarrassedly. He thinks that talk of family stirs painful associations for me, but it is not that, or not only that. These days I must take the world in small and carefully measured doses, it is a sort of homeopathic cure I am undergoing, though I am not certain what this cure is meant to mend. Perhaps I am learning to live amongst the living again. Practising, I mean. But no, that is not it. Being here is just a way of not being anywhere.

  Miss Vavasour, so assiduous in other areas of her care of us, is capricious, not to say cavalier, in the matter not only of luncheon but of meals in general, and dinner especially at the Cedars can be an unpredictable refection. Anything might appear on the table, and does. Tonight for instance she served us breakfast kippers with poached eggs and boiled cabbage. The Colonel, sniffing, ostentatiously wielded his condiment bottles turn and turn about like a spot-the-pea artist. To these wordless protests of his Miss Vavasour’s response is invariably one of aristocratic absent-mindedness verging on disdain. After the kippers there were tinned pears lodged in a gritty grey lukewarm substance which if childhood memory serves I think was semolina. Semolina, my goodness. As we made our way through this stodge, with nothing but the clicking of cutlery to disturb the silence, I had a sudden image of myself as a sort of large dark simian something slumped there at the table, or not a something but a nothing, rather, a hole in the room, a palpable absence, a darkness visible. It was very strange. I saw the scene as if from outside myself, the dining room half lit by two standard lamps, the ugly table with the whorled legs, Miss Vavasour absently at gaze and the Colonel stooped over his plate and baring one side of his upper dentures as he chewed, and I this big dark indistinct shape, like the shape that no one at the séance sees until the daguerreotype is developed. I think I am becoming my own ghost.

  After dinner Miss Vavasour clears the table in a few broad fanciful passes—she is altogether too good for this kind of menial chore—while the Colonel and I sit in vague distress listening to our systems doing their best to deal with the insults with which they have just been served. Then Miss V. in stately fashion leads the way to the television room. This is a cheerless, ill-lit chamber which has a somehow subterranean atmosphere, and is always dank and cold. The furnishings too have an underground look to them, like things that subsided here over the years from some brighter place above. A chintz-covered sofa sprawls as if aghast, its two arms flung wide and cushions sagging. There is an armchair upholstered in plaid, and a small, three-legged table with a dusty potted plant which I believe is a genuine aspidistra, the like of which I have not seen since I do not know when, if ever. Miss Vavasour’s upright piano, its lid shut, stands against the back wall as if in tight-lipped resentment of its gaudy rival opposite, a mighty, gunmetal-grey Pixilate Panoramic which its owner regards with a mixture of pride and slightly shamed misgiving. On this set we watch the comedy shows, favouring the gentler ones repeated from twenty or thirty years ago. We sit in silence, the canned audiences doing our laughing for us. The jittering coloured light from the screen plays over our faces. We are rapt, as mindless as children. Tonight there was a programme on a place in Africa, the Serengeti Plain, I think it was, and its great elephant herds. What amazing beasts they are, a direct link surely to a time long before our time, when behemoths even bigger than they roared and rampaged through forest and swamp. In manner they are melancholy and yet seem covertly amused, at us, apparently. They lumber along placidly in single file, the trunk-tip of one daintily furled around the laughable piggy tail of its cousin in front. The young, hairier than their elders, trot contentedly between their mothers’ legs. If one set out to seek among our fellow-creatures, the land-bound ones, at least, for our very opposite, one would surely need look no further than the elephants. How is it we have allowed them to survive so long? Those sad little knowing eyes seem to invite one to pick up a blunderbuss. Yes, put a big bullet through there, or into one of those huge absurd flappy ears. Yes, yes, exterminate all the brutes, lop away at the tree of life until only the stump is left standing, then lovingly take the cleaver to that, too. Finish it all off.

  You cunt, you fucking cunt, how could you go and leave me like this, floundering in my own foulness, with no one to save me from myself. How could you.

  Speaking of the television room, I realise suddenly, I cannot think why it did not strike me before now, so obvious is it, that what it reminds me of, what the whole house reminds me of, for that matter, and this must be the real reason I came here to hide in the first place, is the rented rooms my mother and I inhabited, were forced to inhabit, throughout my teenage years. After my father left she was compelled to find work to support us and pay for my education, such as it was. We moved to the city, she and I, where she thought there would surely be more opportunities for her. She had no skills, had left school early and worked briefly as a shop-girl before she met my father and married him to get away from her family, nevertheless she was convinced that somewhere there awaited her the ideal position, the job of jobs, the one that she and only she was meant to fill but maddeningly could never find. So we shifted from place to place, from lodging house to lodging house, arriving at a new one always it seemed on a drizzly Sunday evening in winter. They were all alike, those rooms, or are so at least in my memory of them. There was the armchair with the broken arm, the pock-marked lino on the floor, the squat black gas stove sullen in its corner and smelling of the previous lodger’s fried dinners. The lavatory was down the hall, with a chipped wooden seat and a long brown rust-stain on the back of the bowl and the ring-pull missing from the chain. The smell in the hall was like the smell of my breath when I breathed and rebreathed it into my cupped hands to know what it would be like to be suffocated. The surface of the table we ate at had a tacky feel under the fingers no matter how hard she scrubbed at it. After our tea she would clear away the tea things and spread out the Evening Mail on the table under the wan glow of a sixty-watt bulb and run a hairpin down the columns of job ads, ticking off each ad and muttering angrily under her breath. “Previ ous experience essential . . . references required . . . must be university graduate . . . Huh!” Then the greasy pack of cards, the matches divided into two equal piles, the tin ashtray overflowing with her cigarette butts, the cocoa for me and the glass of cooking sherry for her. We played Old Maid, Gin Rummy, Hearts. After that there was the sofa bed to be unfolded and the sour under-sheet pulled tight, and the blanket to be pinned up somehow from the ceiling to hang along the side of her bed for privacy. I lay and listened in helpless anger to her sighs, her snores, the squeaks of broken wind that she let off. Every other night, it seemed, I would wake to hear her as she wept, a knuckle pressed against her mouth and her face buried in the pillow. My father was rarely mentioned between us, unless he was late with the monthly postal order. She could not bring herself to speak his name; he was Gentleman Jim, or His Lordship, or, when she was in one of her rages or had taken too much sherry, Phil the Flute-player, or even Fart-arse the Fiddler. Her conceit was that he was enjoying a lavish success, over there, a success he cruelly refused to share with us as he should and as we deserved. The envelopes bringing the money orders—never a letter, only a card at Christmas or on my birthday, inscribed in the laboured copperplate of which he had always been so proud—bore the postmarks of places which even yet, when I am over there and see them signposted on the motorways his labour helped to build, provoke in me a confusion of feelings that includes a sticky sort of sadness, anger or its after-shock, and a curious yearning that is like nostalgia, a nostalgia for somewhere I have never been to. Watford. Coventry. Stoke. He too would have known the dingy rooms, the lino on the floor, the gas stove, the smells in the hall. Then the last letter came, from a strange woman—Maureen Strange, her name!—announcing the very sad news I have to tell you. My mother’s bitter tears were as much of anger as of grief. “Who’s this,” she cried, “this Maureen?” The single sheet of blue-lined notepaper shook in her hand. “Blast him,” she said through gritted teeth, “blast him an
yway, the bastard!” In my mind I saw him for an instant, in the chalet, as it happens, at night, turning back from the open door in the thick yellow glow of the paraffin lamp and giving me an oddly quizzical glance, almost smiling, a spot of light from the lamp shining on his forehead and beyond him through the doorway the velvety depthless dark of the summer night.

  Last thing, when the television stations are about to plunge into their unacceptably lurid late-night schedules, the set is firmly switched off and the Colonel has a cup of herbal tea prepared for him by Miss Vavasour. He tells me he hates the stuff—“Not a word, mind!”—but dares not refuse. Miss Vavasour stands over him as he drinks. She insists it will help him sleep; he is gloomily convinced the opposite is the case, yet makes no protest, and drains the cup with a doomed expression. One night I persuaded him to accompany me to the Pier Head Bar for a nightcap, but it was a mistake. He grew anxious in my company—I did not blame him, I grow anxious in it myself—and fidgeted with his tobacco pipe and his glass of stout and kept easing back his cuff surreptitiously to check the time by his watch. The few locals who were there glowered at us, and we soon left, and walked back to the Cedars in silence under a tremendous October sky of stars and flying moon and tattered clouds. Most nights I drink myself to sleep, or attempt to, with half a dozen bumpers of brandy from the jeroboam of best Napoleon I keep in my room. I suppose I could offer him a drop of that, but I think not. The idea of late-night chats with the Colonel about life and related matters does not appeal. The night is long, my temper short.