The Sea Page 14

  Have I spoken already of my drinking? I drink like a fish. No, not like a fish, fishes do not drink, it is only breathing, their kind of breathing. I drink like one recently widowed— widowered?—a person of scant talent and scanter ambition, greyed o’er by the years, uncertain and astray and in need of consolation and the brief respite of drink-induced oblivion. I would take drugs if I had them, but I have not, and do not know how I might go about getting some. I doubt that Ballyless boasts a dope dealer. Perhaps the Pecker Devereux could help me. The Pecker is a fearsome fellow all shoulders and barrel chest with a big coarse weathered face and a gorilla’s bandy arms. His huge face is pitted all over from some ancient acne or pox, each cavity ingrained with its speck of shiny black dirt. He used to be a deep-sea sailor, and is said to have killed a man. He has an orchard, where he lives in a wheelless caravan under the trees with his scrawny whippet of a wife. He sells apples and, clandestinely, a cloudy, sulphurous moonshine made from windfalls that sends the young men of the village crazy on Saturday nights. Why am I speaking of him like this? What is the Pecker Devereux to me? In these parts the x is pronounced, Devrecks, they say, I cannot stop. How wild the unguarded fancy runs.

  Our day today was lightened, if that is the way to put it, by a visit from Miss Vavasour’s friend Bun, who joined us for Sunday lunch. I came upon her at noon in the lounge, overflowing a wicker armchair in the bay window, lolling as if helpless there and faintly panting. The space where she sat was thronged with smoky sunlight and at first I could hardly make her out, although in truth she is as unmissable as the late Queen of Tonga. She is an enormous person, of indeterminate age. She wore a sack-coloured tweed dress tightly belted in the middle, which made her look as if she had been pumped up to bursting at bosom and hips, and her short stout cork-coloured legs were stuck out in front of her like two gigantic bungs protruding from her nether regions. A tiny sweet face, delicate of feature and pinkly aglow, is set in the big pale pudding of her head, the fossil remains, marvellously preserved, of the girl that she once was, long ago. Her ash-and-silver hair was done in an old-fashioned style, parted down the centre and pulled back into an eponymous bun. She smiled at me and nodded a greeting, her powdered wattles joggling. I did not know who she was, and thought she must be a guest newly arrived—Miss Vavasour has half a dozen vacant rooms for rent at this off-peak season. When she tottered to her feet the wicker chair cried out in excruciated relief. She really is of a prodigious bulk. I thought that if her belt buckle were to fail and the belt snap her trunk would flop into a perfectly spherical shape with her head on top like a large cherry on a, well, on a bun. It was apparent from the look she gave me, of mingled sympathy and eager interest, that she was aware of who I was and had been apprised of my stricken state. She told me her name, grand-sounding, with a hyphen, but I immediately forgot it. Her hand was small and soft and moistly warm, a baby’s hand. Colonel Blunden came into the room then, with the Sunday papers under his arm, and looked at her and frowned. When he frowns like that the yellowish whites of his eyes seem to darken and his mouth takes on the out-thrust blunt squareness of a muzzle.

  Among the more or less harrowing consequences of bereavement is the sheepish sense I have of being an impostor. After Anna died I was everywhere attended upon, deferred to, made an object of special consideration. A hush surrounded me among people who had heard of my loss, so that I had no choice but to observe in return a solemn and pensive silence of my own, that very quickly set me twitching. It started, this singling-out, at the cemetery, if not before. With what tenderness they gazed at me across the grave-mouth, and how gently yet firmly they took my arm when the ceremony was done, as if I might be in danger of falling in a faint and pitching headlong into the hole myself. I even thought I detected a speculative something in the warmth with which certain of the women embraced me, in the lingering way they held on to my hand, gazing into my eyes and shaking their heads in wordless commiseration, with that melting stoniness of expression that old-style tragic actresses would put on in the closing scene when the harrowed hero staggered on stage with the heroine’s corpse in his arms. I felt I should stop and hold up a hand and tell these people that really, I did not deserve their reverence, for reverence is what it felt like, that I had been merely a bystander, a bit-player, while Anna did the dying. Throughout lunch Bun insisted on addressing me in tones of warm concern, muted awe, and try as I might I could modulate no tone in response that did not sound brave and bashful. Miss Vavasour, I could see, was finding all this gush increasingly annoying, and made repeated attempts to foster a less soulful, brisker atmosphere at the table, without success. The Colonel was no help, although he did try, breaking in on Bun’s relentless flow of solicitude with weather forecasts and topics from the day’s papers, but every time was rebuffed. He was simply no match for Bun. Showing his tarnished dentures in a ghastly display of grins and grimaces, he had the look of a hyena bobbing and squirming before the heedless advance of a hippo.

  Bun lives in the city, in a flat over a shop, in circumstances which, she would firmly have me know, are far beneath her, daughter of the hyphenated gentry that she is. She reminds me of one of those hearty virgins of a bygone age, the housekeeping sister, say, of a bachelor clergyman or widowed squire. As she twittered on I pictured her in bombazine, whatever that is, and button-boots, seated in state on granite steps before a vast front door in the midst of a tiered array of squint-eyed domestics; I saw her, the fox’s nemesis, in hunting pink and bowler hat with a veil, astride the sagging back of a big black galloping horse; or there she was in an enormous kitchen with range and scrubbed deal table and hanging hams, instructing loyal old Mrs. Grub on which cuts of beef to serve for the Master’s annual dinner to mark the Glorious Twelfth. Diverting myself in this harmless fashion I did not notice the fight developing between her and Miss Vavasour until it was well under way, and I had no idea how it might have started or what it was about. The two normally muted spots of colour on Miss Vavasour’s cheekbones were burning fiercely, while Bun, who seemed to be swelling to even larger proportions under the pneumatic effects of a growing indignation, sat regarding her friend across the table with a fixed, froggy smile, her breath coming in fast little plosive gasps. They spoke with vengeful politeness, barging at each other like an unfairly matched pair of hobby-horses. Really, I fail to see how you can say . . . Am I to understand that you . . .? The point is not that I . . . The point is that you did . . . Well, that is just . . . It most certainly is not . . . Excuse me, it most certainly is! The Colonel, increasingly alarmed, looked wildly from one of them to the other and back again, his eyes clicking in their sockets, as if he were watching a tennis match that had started in friendly enough fashion but had suddenly turned murderous.

  I would have thought Miss Vavasour would emerge the easy victor from this contest, but she did not. She was not fighting with the full force of the weaponry I am sure she has at her command. Something, I could see, was holding her back, something of which Bun was well aware and which she leaned upon with all her considerable weight and to her strong advantage. Although they seemed in the heat of the argument to have forgotten about the Colonel and me, the realisation slowly dawned that they were conducting this struggle at least partly for my benefit, to impress me, and to try to win me over, to one side or the other. I could tell this from the manner in which Bun’s little eager black eyes kept flickering coyly in my direction, while Miss Vavasour refused to glance my way even once. Bun, I began to see, was far more sly and astute than I would at first have given her credit for. One is inclined to imagine that people who are fat must also be stupid. This fat person, however, had taken the measure of me, and, I was convinced, saw me clearly for what I was, in all my essentials. And what was it that she saw? In my life it never troubled me to be kept by a rich, or richish, wife. I was born to be a dilettante, all that was lacking was the means, until I met Anna. Nor am I concerned particularly about the provenance of Anna’s money, which was first Charlie Weiss’s and i
s now mine, or how much or what kind of heavy machinery Charlie had to buy and sell in the making of it. What is money, after all? Almost nothing, when one has a sufficiency of it. So why was I squirming like this under Bun’s veiled but knowing, irresistible scrutiny?

  But come now, Max, come now. I will not deny it, I was always ashamed of my origins, and even still it requires only an arch glance or a condescending word from the likes of Bun to set me quivering inwardly in indignation and hot resentment. From the start I was bent on bettering myself. What was it that I wanted from Chloe Grace but to be on the level of her family’s superior social position, however briefly, at whatever remove? It was hard going, scaling those Olympian heights. Sitting there with Bun I recalled with an irresistible faint shudder another Sunday lunch at the Cedars, half a century before. Who had invited me? Not Chloe, surely. Perhaps her mother did, when I was still her admirer and it amused her to have me sitting tongue-tied at her table. How nervous I was, really terrified. There were things on the table such as I had never seen before, odd-shaped cruets, china sauce-boats, a silver stand for the carving knife, a carving fork with a bone handle and a safety lever that could be pulled out at the back. As each course arrived I waited to see which pieces of cutlery the others would pick up before I would risk picking up my own. Someone passed me a bowl of mint sauce and I did not know what to do with it—mint sauce! Now and then from the other end of the table Carlo Grace, chewing vigorously, would bend a lively gaze on me. What was life like at the chalet, he wanted to know. What did we cook on? A Primus stove, I told him. “Ha!” he cried. “Primus inter pares!” And how he laughed, and Myles laughed too, and even Rose’s lips twitched, though no one save he, I am sure, understood the sally, and Chloe scowled, not at their mockery but at my haplessness.

  Anna could not sympathise with my sensitivities in these matters, she being the product of a classless class. She thought my mother a delight—fearsome, that is, unrelenting, and unforgiving, but for all that delightful, in her way. My mother, I need hardly say, did not reciprocate this warm regard. They met no more than two or three times, disastrously, I thought. Ma did not come to the wedding—let me admit it, I did not invite her—and died not long afterwards, at about the same time as Charlie Weiss. “As if they were releasing us, the two of them,” Anna said. I did not share this benign interpretation, but made no comment. That was a day in the nursing home, she suddenly began to speak about my mother, with nothing to prompt her that I had noticed; the figures of the far past come back at the end, wanting their due. It was a morning after storm, and all outside the window of the corner room looked tousled and groggy, the dishevelled lawn littered with a caducous fall of leaves and the trees swaying still, like hungover drunks. On one wrist Anna wore a plastic tag and on the other a gadget like a wristwatch with a button that when pressed would release a fixed dose of morphine into her already polluted bloodstream. The first time we came home for a visit— home: the word gives me a shove, and I stumble—my mother hardly spoke a word to her. Ma was living in a flat by the canal, a dim low place that smelled of her landlady’s cats. We had brought her gifts of duty-free cigarettes and a bottle of sherry, she accepted them with a sniff. She said she hoped we were not expecting her to put us up. We stayed in a cheap hotel nearby where the bath water was brown and Anna’s handbag was stolen. We took Ma to the Zoo. She laughed at the baboons, nastily, letting us know they reminded her of someone, me, of course. One of them was masturbating, with a curiously lackadaisical air, looking off over its shoulder. “Dirty thing,” Ma said dismissively and turned away.

  We had tea in the café in the grounds, where the blaring of elephants mingled with the clamour of the bank holiday crowd. Ma smoked the duty-free cigarettes, ostentatiously stubbing each one out after three or four puffs, showing me what she thought of my peace offerings.

  “Why does she keep calling you Max?” she hissed at me when Anna had gone to the counter to fetch a scone for her. “Your name is not Max.”

  “It is now,” I said. “Did you not read the things I sent you, the things that I wrote, with my name printed on them?”

  She gave one of her mountainous shrugs.

  “I thought they were by somebody else.”

  She could show her anger just by her way of sitting, skewed sideways on the chair, stiff-backed, her hands clamped on the handbag in her lap, her hat, shaped like a brioche and with a bit of black netting around the crown, askew on her unkempt grey curls. There was a little grey fuzz on her chin, too. She glanced contemptuously about her. “Huh,” she said, “this place. I suppose you’d like to leave me here, put me in with the monkeys and let them feed me bananas.”

  Anna came back with the scone. Ma looked at it scornfully.

  “I don’t want that,” she said. “I didn’t ask for that.”

  “Ma,” I said.

  “Don’t Ma me.”

  But when we were leaving she wept, backing for cover behind the open door of the flat, lifting a forearm to hide her eyes, like a child, furious at herself. She died that winter, sitting on a bench by the canal one unseasonably mild mid-week afternoon. Angina pectoris, no one had known. The pigeons were still worrying at the crusts she had strewn for them on the path when a tramp sat down beside her and offered her a swig from his bottle in its brown-paper bag, not noticing she was dead.

  “Strange,” Anna said. “To be here, like that, and then not.”

  She sighed, and looked out at the trees. They fascinated her, those trees, she wanted to go out and stand amongst them, to hear the wind blowing in the boughs. But there would be no going out, for her, any more. “To have been here,” she said.

  Someone was addressing me. It was Bun. How long had I been away, wandering through the chamber of horrors in my head? Lunch was done and Bun was saying goodbye. When she smiles her little face becomes smaller still, crinkling and contracting around the minute button of her nose. Through the window I could see clouds massing although a wettish sun low in the west still glared out of a pale sliver of leek-green sky. For a second I had that image of myself again, hunched hugely on my chair, pink lower lip adroop and enormous hands lying helplessly before me on the table, a great ape, captive, tranquillised and bleary. There are times, they occur with increasing frequency nowadays, when I seem to know nothing, when everything I did know seems to have fallen out of my mind like a shower of rain, and I am gripped for a moment in paralysed dismay, waiting for it all to come back but with no certainty that it will. Bun was gathering her things preparatory to the considerable effort of unbunging those mighty legs of hers from under the table and getting herself to her feet. Miss Vavasour had already risen and was hovering by her friend’s shoulder—it was as big and round as a bowling-ball— impatient for her to be gone and trying not to show it. The Colonel was at Bun’s other side, leaning forward at an awkward angle and making vague feints in the air with his hands, like a removals man squaring up to a weighty and particularly awkward item of furniture.

  “Well!” Bun said, giving the table a tap with her knuckles, and looked up brightly first at Miss Vavasour, then at the Colonel, and both pressed a step more closely in, as if they might indeed be about to put a hand each under her elbows and heave her to her feet.

  We went outside into the copper-coloured light of the late-autumn evening. Strong gusts of wind were sweeping up Station Road, making the tops of the trees thrash and flinging dead leaves about the sky. Rooks cawed rawly. The year is almost done. Why do I think something new will come to replace it, other than a number on a calendar? Bun’s car, a nippy little red model, bright as a ladybird, was parked on the gravel inside the gate. It gasped on its springs as Bun inserted herself rearways into the driving seat, first pushing in her enormous behind then heaving up her legs and falling back heavily with a grunt against the fake tiger-skin upholstery. The Colonel drew open the gate for her and stood in the middle of the road and directed her out with broad dramatic sweeps of his arms. Smells of exhaust smoke, the sea, the garden’s
autumn rot. Brief desolation. I know nothing, nothing, old ape that I am. Bun sounded the car horn gaily and waved, her pinched face grinning through the glass at us, and Miss Vavasour waved back, not gaily, and the car buzzed away lopsidedly up the road and over the railway bridge and was gone.

  “That’s a perisher,” the Colonel said, rubbing his hands and heading indoors.

  Miss Vavasour sighed.

  We would have no dinner, lunch having lasted so long and having been so fraught. Miss V. was still agitated, I could see, from that bandying of words with her friend. When the Colonel followed her into the kitchen, angling for afternoon tea, at least, she was quite sharp with him, and he scuttled off to his room and the commentary to a football match on the wireless. I too retreated, to the lounge, with my book—Bell on Bonnard, dull as ditch-water—but I could not read, and put the book aside. Bun’s visit had upset the delicate equilibrium of the household, there was a sort of noiseless trilling in the atmosphere, as if a fine, taut alarm wire had been tripped and was vibrating still. I sat in the bay of the window and watched the day darken. Bare trees across the road were black against the last flares of the setting sun, and the rooks in a raucous flock were wheeling and dropping, settling disputatiously for the night. I was thinking of Anna. I make myself think of her, I do it as an exercise. She is lodged in me like a knife and yet I am beginning to forget her. Already the image of her that I hold in my head is fraying, bits of pigments, flakes of gold leaf, are chipping off. Will the entire canvas be empty one day? I have come to realise how little I knew her, I mean how shallowly I knew her, how ineptly. I do not blame myself for this. Perhaps I should. Was I too lazy, too inattentive, too self-absorbed? Yes, all of those things, and yet I cannot think it is a matter of blame, this forgetting, this not-having-known. I fancy, rather, that I expected too much, in the way of knowing. I know so little of myself, how should I think to know another?