The Sea Read online

  I suppose I shall not be allowed to sell the house, either.

  Miss Vavasour says she will miss me, but thinks I am doing the right thing. Leaving the Cedars is hardly of my doing, I tell her, I am being forced to it. She smiles at that. “Oh, Max,” she says, “I do not think you are a man to be forced into anything.” That gives me pause, not because of the tribute to my strength of will, but the fact, which I register with a faint shock, that this is the first time she has addressed me by my name. Still, I do not think it means that I can call her Rose. A certain formal distance is necessary for the good maintenance of the dainty relation we have forged, re-forged, between us over these past weeks. At this hint of intimacy, however, the old, unasked questions come swarming forward again. I would like to ask her if she blames herself for Chloe’s death—I believe, I should say, on no evidence, that it was Chloe who went down first, with Myles following after, to try to save her—and if she is convinced their drowning together like that was entirely an accident, or something else. She would probably tell me, if I did ask. She is not reticent. She fairly prattled on about the Graces, Carlo and Connie—“Their lives were destroyed, of course”—and how they, too, died, not long after losing the twins. Carlo went first, of an aneurysm, then Connie, in a car crash. I ask what kind of crash, and she gives me a look. “Connie was not the kind to kill herself,” she says, with a faint twist of the lips.

  They were good to her, afterwards, she says, never a reproach or the hint of an accusation of duty betrayed. They set her up at the Cedars, they knew Bun’s people, persuaded them to take her on to look after the house. “And here I am still,” she says, with a grim small smile, “all these long years later.”

  The Colonel is moving about upstairs, making discreet but definite noises; he is glad I am going, I know it. I thanked him for his help last night. “You probably saved my life,” I said, thinking suddenly it was probably true. Much huffing and clearing of the throat—Faugh, sir, only doin’ me demned duty!—and a hand giving my upper arm a quick squeeze. He even produced a going-away present, a fountain pen, a Swan, it is as old as he is, I should think, still in its box, in a bed of yellowed tissue paper. I am graving these words with it, it has a graceful action, smooth and swift with only the occasional blot. Where did he come by it, I wonder? I did not know what to say. “Nothing required,” he said. “Never had a use for it myself, you should have it, for your writing, and so on.” Then he bustled off, rubbing his white old dry hands together. I note that although it is not the weekend he is wearing his yellow waistcoat. I shall never know, now, if he really is an old army man, or an impostor. It is another of those questions I cannot bring myself to put to Miss Vavasour.

  “It’s her I miss,” she says, “Connie—Mrs. Grace—that is.” I suppose I stare, and she gives me another of those pitying glances. “It was never him, with me,” she says. “You didn’t think that, did you?” I thought of her standing below me that day under the trees, sobbing, her head sitting on the platter of her foreshortened shoulders, the wadded hankie in her hand. “Oh, no,” she said, “never him.” And I thought, too, of the day of the picnic and of her sitting behind me on the grass and looking where I was avidly looking and seeing what was not meant for me at all.

  Anna died before dawn. To tell the truth, I was not there when it happened. I had walked out on to the steps of the nursing home to breathe deep the black and lustrous air of morning. And in that moment, so calm and drear, I recalled another moment, long ago, in the sea that summer at Ballyless. I had gone swimming alone, I do not know why, or where Chloe and Myles might have been; perhaps they had gone with their parents somewhere, it would have been one of the last trips they made together, perhaps the very last. The sky was hazed over and not a breeze stirred the surface of the sea, at the margin of which the small waves were breaking in a listless line, over and over, like a hem being turned endlessly by a sleepy seamstress. There were few people on the beach, and those few were at a distance from me, and something in the dense, unmoving air made the sound of their voices seem to come from a greater distance still. I was standing up to my waist in water that was perfectly transparent, so that I could plainly see below me the ribbed sand of the seabed, and tiny shells and bits of a crab’s broken claw, and my own feet, pallid and alien, like specimens displayed under glass. As I stood there, suddenly, no, not suddenly, but in a sort of driving heave, the whole sea surged, it was not a wave, but a smooth rolling swell that seemed to come up from the deeps, as if something vast down there had stirred itself, and I was lifted briefly and carried a little way toward the shore and then was set down on my feet as before, as if nothing had happened. And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world’s shrugs of indifference.

  A nurse came out then to fetch me, and I turned and followed her inside, and it was as if I were walking into the sea.

  John Banville

  The Sea

  John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. The author of thirteen previous novels, he has been the recipient of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and, most recently, the Man Booker Prize. He lives in Dublin.

  INTERNATIONAL

  ALSO BY JOHN BANVILLE

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  Nightspawn

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  The Book of Evidence

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  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, AUGUST 2006

  Copyright © 2005 by John Banville

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  of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the

  author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Banville, John.

  The sea / John Banville. —1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Authors—Fiction. 2. Widowers—Fiction. 3. Seaside resorts—Fiction.

  4. Middle-aged men—Fiction. 5. Loss (Psychology)—Fiction.

  6. England—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6052.A57S43 2006

  813’.54—dc22 2005050418

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  eISBN: 978-0-307-42930-8

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