The Sea Page 17

  Here at last was the green iron gate, the car standing on the gravel, and the front door, wide open as so often. In the house all was tranquil and still. I moved among the rooms as if I were myself a thing of air, a drifting spirit, Ariel set free and at a loss. I found Mrs. Grace in the living room. She turned to me, putting a hand to her mouth, the milky light of afternoon at her back. This all is silence, save for the drowsy hum of summer from without. Then Carlo Grace came in, saying, “Damned thing, it seems to be . . .” and he stopped too, and so we stood in stillness, we three, at the end.

  Was’t well done?

  Night, and everything so quiet, as if there were no one, not even myself. I cannot hear the sea, which on other nights rumbles and growls, now near and grating, now afar and faint. I do not want to be alone like this. Why have you not come back to haunt me? It is the least I would have expected of you. Why this silence day after day, night after interminable night? It is like a fog, this silence of yours. First it was a blur on the horizon, the next minute we were in the midst of it, purblind and stumbling, clinging to each other. It started that day after the visit to Mr. Todd when we walked out of the clinic into the deserted car park, all those machines ranked neatly there, sleek as porpoises and making not a sound, and no sign even of the young woman and her clicking high heels. Then our house shocked into its own kind of silence, and soon thereafter the silent corridors of hospitals, the hushed wards, the waiting rooms, and then the last room of all. Send back your ghost. Torment me, if you like. Rattle your chains, drag your cerements across the floor, keen like a banshee, anything. I would have a ghost.

  Where is my bottle. I need my big baby’s bottle. My soother.

  Miss Vavasour gives me a pitying look. I blench under her glance. She knows the questions I want to ask, the questions I have been burning to put to her since I first came here but never had the nerve. This morning when she saw me silently formulating them yet again she shook her head, not unkindly. “I can’t help you,” she said, smiling. “You must know that.” What does she mean by must? I know so little of anything. We are in the lounge, sitting in the bay of the bow window, as so often. The day outside is bright and cold, the first real day of winter we have had. All this in the historic present. Miss Vavasour is mending what looks suspiciously like one of the Colonel’s socks. She has a wooden gadget, shaped like a large mushroom, on which she stretches the heel to darn the hole in it. I find it restful to watch her at this timeless task. I am in need of rest. My head might be packed with wet cotton wool and there is an acid taste of vomit in my mouth which all Miss Vavasour’s plyings of milky tea and soldiers of thin-sliced toast cannot rid me of. Also there is a bruise on my temple that throbs. I sit before Miss V. sheepish and contrite. I feel more than ever the delinquent boy.

  But what a day it was yesterday, what a night, and, heavens! what a morning-after. It all began with fair enough promise. Ironically, as it would turn out, it was the Colonel’s daughter who was supposed to come down, along with Hubby and the children. The Colonel tried to be nonchalant, putting on his gruffest manner—“We’ll be rightly invaded!”—but over breakfast his hands shook so with excitement that he set the table to trembling and the tea cups rattling in their saucers. Miss Vavasour insisted that his daughter and her family should all stay for lunch, that she would cook a chicken, and asked what kind of ice cream the children would like. “Oh, now,” the Colonel blustered, “really, there’s no need!” It was plain to see he was deeply affected, however, and was damp-eyed for a moment. I looked forward myself with some anticipation to getting a look at last at this daughter and her he-man husband. The prospect of the children was somewhat daunting, though; kiddies in general, I am afraid, bring out the not so latent Gilles de Rais in me.

  The visit was due for midday, but the noontide bell tolled, and the lunch hour came and went, and no car had pulled up at the gate and no joyous shouts of the Little Ones had been heard. The Colonel paced, wrist clasped in a hand behind him, or stationed himself before the window, muzzle thrust forward, and shot a cuff and lifted his arm to eye level and glared reproachfully at his watch. Miss Vavasour and I went about on tenterhooks, not daring to speak. The aroma of roasting chicken in the house seemed a heartless gibe. It was late in the afternoon when the telephone in the hall rang, making us all start. The Colonel leaned his ear to the receiver like a despairing priest in the confessional. The exchange was brief. We tried not to hear what he was saying. He came into the kitchen clearing his throat. “Car,” he said, looking at no one. “Broke down.” Clearly he had been lied to, or was lying now to us. He turned to Miss Vavasour with a desolate smile. “Sorry about the chicken,” he said.

  I encouraged him to come out for a drink with me but he declined. He was feeling a bit tired, he said, had a bit of a headache all of a sudden. He went off to his room. How heavy his tread was on the stair, how softly he closed the bedroom door. “Oh, dear,” Miss Vavasour said.

  I went to the Pier Head Bar by myself and got sozzled. I did not mean to but I did. It was one of those plangent autumn evenings streaked with late sunlight that seemed itself a memory of what sometime in the far past had been the blaze of noon. Rain earlier had left puddles on the road that were paler than the sky, as if the last of day were dying in them. It was windy and the skirts of my overcoat flapped about my legs like Little Ones of my own, begging their Da not to go to the pub. But go I did. The Pier Head is a cheerless establishment presided over by a huge television set, fully the match of Miss V.’s Panoramic, permanently switched on but with the sound turned down. The publican is a fat soft slow man of few words. He has a peculiar name, I cannot remember it for the moment. I drank double brandies. Odd moments of the evening stand out in my memory, fuzzily bright, like lamp standards in a fog. I remember provoking or being provoked into an argument with an old fellow at the bar, and being remonstrated with by a much younger one, his son, perhaps, or grandson, whom I pushed and who threatened to summon the police. When the publican intervened—Barragry, that is his name— I tried to push him, too, lunging at him across the counter with a hoarse shout. Really, this is not like me at all, I do not know what was the matter, I mean other than what is usually the matter. At last they calmed me down and I retreated grumpily to a table in the corner, under the speechless television set, where I sat mumbling to myself and sighing. Those drunken sighs, bubbly and tremulous, how like sobs they can sound. The last light of evening, what I could see of it through the unpainted top quarter of the pub window, was of that angry, purplish-brown cast that I find both affecting and troubling, it is the very colour of winter. Not that I have anything against winter, indeed, it is my favourite season, next to autumn, but this year that November glow seemed a presagement of something more than winter, and I fell into a mood of bitter melancholy. Seeking to assuage my heaviness of heart I called for more brandy but Barragry refused it, advisedly, as I now acknowledge, and I stormed out in rageful indignation, or tried to storm but staggered really, and came back to the Cedars and my own bottle, which I have fondly dubbed the Little Corporal. On the stairs I met Colonel Blunden and had some converse with him, I do not know what about, exactly.

  It was night by now, but instead of staying in my room and going to bed I put the bottle under my coat and went out again. Of what happened after that I have only jagged and ill-lit flickers of recollection. I remember standing in the wind under the shaking radiance of a street light awaiting some grand and general revelation and then losing interest in it before it could arrive. Then I was on the beach in the dark, sitting in the sand with my legs stuck out before me and the brandy bottle, empty now or nearly, cradled in my lap. There seemed to be lights out at sea, a long way from shore, bobbing and swaying, like the lights of a fishing fleet, but I must have imagined them, there are no fishing boats in these waters. I was cold despite my coat, the thickness of which was not enough to protect my hindparts from the chill dampness of the sand in which I was sitting. It was not the damp and the chill, however, t
hat made me struggle to my feet at last, but a determination to get closer to those lights and investigate them; I may even have had some idea of wading into the sea and swimming out to meet them. It was at the water’s edge, anyway, that I lost my footing and fell down and struck my temple on a stone. I lay there for I do not know how long, fluttering in and out of consciousness, unable or unwilling to move. It is a good thing the tide was on the ebb. I was not in pain, not even very much upset. In fact, it seemed quite natural to be sprawled there, in the dark, under a tumultuous sky, watching the faint phosphorescence of the waves as they pattered forward eagerly only to retreat again, like a flock of inquisitive but timorous mice, and the Little Corporal, as drunk it seemed as myself, rolling back and forth on the shingle with a grating sound, and hearing the wind above me blowing through the great invisible hollows and funnels of the air.

  I must have fallen asleep then, or passed out even, for I do not remember the Colonel finding me, although he insists I spoke to him quite sensibly, and allowed him to help me up and walk me back to the Cedars. This must have been the case, I mean I must have been in some way conscious, for he would not have had the strength, surely, to get me to my feet unassisted, much less to haul me from the beach to my bedroom door, slung across his back, perhaps, or dragging me by the heels behind him. But how had he known where to find me? It seems that in our colloquy on the stairs, although colloquy is not the word, since according to him I did the most part of the talking, I had dwelt at length on the well-known fact, well-known and a fact according to me, that drowning is the gentlest death, and when by a late hour he had not heard me returning, and fearing that I might indeed in my inebriated state try to make away with myself, he had decided he must go and look for me. He had to scout the beach for a long time, and had been about to give up the search, when some gleam from moon or brightest star fell upon my form, supine there on that stony littoral. When, after much meandering and many pauses for expatiation by me on numerous topics, we arrived at the Cedars at last, he had helped me up the stairs and seen me into my room. All this reported, for of that faltering anabasis I recall, as I have said, nothing. Later he had heard me, still in my room, being uproariously sick—not on the carpet but out of the window into the back yard, I am relieved to say—and then seeming to fall down heavily, and had taken it upon himself to come into my room, and there had discovered me, for the second time that night, in a heap, as they say, at the foot of the bed, lost to consciousness and, so he judged, urgently in need of medical attention.

  I woke at some early hour of the still-dark morning to a strange and unnerving scene which I at first took to be an hallucination. The Colonel was there, spick as usual in tweed and cavalry twill—he had not been to bed at all—pacing the floor with a frown, and so, far more implausibly, was Miss Vavasour, who, it would turn out, also had heard, or felt, more likely, in the very bones of the old house, the crash I made as I collapsed after that bout of vomiting at the window. She was wearing her Japanese dressing-gown, and her hair was gathered under a hair-net the like of which I had not seen since I was a child. She sat on a chair a little way off from me, against the wall, sideways on, in the very pose of Whistler’s mother, her hands folded on her lap and her face bowed, so that her eye sockets seemed two pits of empty blackness. A lamp, which I thought was a candle, was burning on a table before her, shedding a dim globe of light upon the scene, which overall—a dimly radiant round with seated woman and pacing man—might have been a nocturnal study by Gericault, or de la Tour. Baffled, and abandoning all effort to understand what was going on or how the two of them came to be there, I fell asleep again, or passed out again.

  When I next awakened the curtains were open and it was day. The room had a chastened and somewhat abashed aspect, I thought, and everything looked pale and featureless, like a woman’s unmade-up morning face. Outside, a uniformly white sky sat sulkily immobile, seeming no more than a yard or two higher than the roof of the house. Vaguely the events of the night came shuffling back shamefaced to my addled consciousness. Around me the bedclothes were tossed and twisted as after a debauch, and there was a strong smell of sick. I put up a hand and a shot of pain went through my head when my fingers found the pulpy swelling on my temple where it had struck upon the stone. It was only then, with a start that made the bed creak, that I noticed the young man seated on my chair, leaning forward with his arms folded on my desk, reading a book lying open before him on my leather writing pad. He wore steel-framed spectacles and had a high, balding brow and sparse hair of no particular colour. His clothes were characterless too, although I had a general impression of jaded corduroys. Hearing me stir he lifted his eyes unhurriedly from the page and turned his head and looked at me, quite composed, and even smiled, though cheerlessly, and enquired as to how I was feeling. Nonplussed—that is the word, surely—I struggled up in the bed, which seemed to wobble under me as if the mattress were filled with some thick and viscous liquid, and gave him what was intended to be an imperiously interrogative stare. However, he continued calmly regarding me, quite unruffled. The Doctor, he said, making it sound as though there were only one in the world, had been to see me earlier, while I was out— out, that was how he put it, and I wondered wildly for a moment if I had been down to the beach again, without knowing it—and had said I seemed to be suffering from a concussion compounded by severe but temporary alcohol poisoning. Seemed? Seemed?

  “Claire drove us down,” he said. “She’s sleeping now.”

  Jerome! The chinless inamorato! Now I knew him. How had he wormed his way back into my daughter’s favour? Had he been the only one she could think of to turn to, in the middle of the night, when the Colonel or Miss Vavasour, whichever of them it was, had called to tell her of the latest scrape her father had got himself into? If so, I thought, I shall be to blame, although I could not see exactly why. How I cursed myself, sprawled there on that Doge’s daybed, crapulent and woozy and altogether lacking the strength to leap up and seize the presumptuous fellow by the scruff and throw him out a second time. But there was worse to come. When he went out to find if Claire had wakened yet, and she came back with him, drawn and red-rimmed and wearing a raincoat over her slip, she informed me straight away, with the air of one hastily drawing fire so as to be able all the better to deflect it, that they were engaged. For a moment, befuddled as I was, I did not know what she meant—engaged by whom, and as what?—a moment which, as it proved, was sufficient for my vanquishment. I have not managed to bring up the subject again, and every further moment that passes further consolidates her victory over me. This is how, in a twinkling, these things are won and lost. Read Maistre on warfare.

  Nor did she stop there, but, flushed with that initial triumph, and seizing the advantage offered by my temporary infirmity, went on to direct, a figurative hand cocked on her hip, that I must pack up and leave the Cedars forthwith and let her take me home—home, she says!—where she will care for me, which care will include, I am given to understand, the withholding of all alcoholic stimulants, or soporifics, until such time as the Doctor, him again, declares me fit for something or other, life, I suppose. What am I to do? How am I to resist? She says it is time I got down seriously to work. “He is finishing,” she informed her betrothed, not without a gloss of filial pride, “a big book on Bonnard.” I had not the heart to tell her that my Big Book on Bonnard—it sounds like something one might shy coconuts at—has got no farther than half of a putative first chapter and a notebook filled with derivative and half-baked would-be aperçus. Well, it is no matter. There are other things I can do. I can go to Paris and paint. Or I might retire into a monastery, pass my days in quiet contemplation of the infinite, or write a great treatise there, a vulgate of the dead. I can see myself in my cell, long-bearded, with quill-pen and hat and docile lion, through a window beside me minuscule peasants in the distance making hay, and hovering above my brow the dove refulgent. Oh, yes, life is pregnant with possibilities.