The Sea Page 5

  “Your lares familiares,” I said now. “I suppose you have them still, propped on your maiden couch?”

  A steep-slanted flash of sunlight fell along the beach, turning the sand above the waterline bone-white, and a white seabird, dazzling against the wall of cloud, flew up on sickle wings and turned with a soundless snap and plunged itself, a shutting chevron, into the sea’s unruly back. Claire sat motionless for a moment and then began to cry. No sound, only the tears, bright beads of quicksilver in the last effulgence of marine light falling down from the high wall of glass in front of us. Crying, in that silent and almost incidental fashion, is another thing she does just like her mother did.

  “You’re not the only one who is suffering,” she said.

  I know so little about her, really, my daughter. One day when she was young, twelve or thirteen, I suppose, and poised on the threshold of puberty, I barged in on her in the bathroom, the door of which she had neglected to lock. She was naked save for a towel wrapped tightly turban-fashion around her head. She turned to look at me over her shoulder in a fall of calm light from the frosted window, quite unflustered, gazing at me out of the fulness of herself. Her breasts were still buds but already she had that big melony behind. What did I feel, seeing her there? An inner chaos, overlaid by tenderness and a kind of fright. Ten years later she abandoned her studies in art history—Vaublin and the fête galante style; that’s my girl, or was—to take up the teaching of backward children in one of the city’s increasingly numerous, seething slums. What a waste of talent. I could not forgive her, cannot still. I try, but fail. It was all the doing of a young man, a bookish fellow of scant chin and extreme egalitarian views, on whom she had set her heart. The affair, if such it was—I suspect she is still a virgin— ended badly for her. Having persuaded her to throw up what should have been her life’s work in favour of a futile social gesture, the blackguard absconded, leaving my misfortunate girl in the lurch. I wanted to go after him and kill him. At the least, I said, let me pay for a good barrister to prosecute him for breach of promise. Anna said to stop it, that I was only making matters worse. She was already ill. What could I do?

  Outside, the dusk was thickening. The sea that before had been silent had now set up a vague tumult, perhaps the tide was on the turn. Claire’s tears had stopped but stood unwiped, she seemed not to have noticed them. I shivered; these days whole churchyardsful of mourners traipse back and forth unfeelingly over my grave.

  A large man in a morning coat came from the doorway behind us and advanced soundlessly on servant’s feet and looked at us in polite enquiry and met my eye and went away again. Claire snuffled, and delving in a pocket brought out a handkerchief and stentorously blew her nose.

  “It depends,” I said mildly, “on what you mean by suffering.”

  She said nothing but put the hankie away and stood up and looked about her, frowningly, as if in search of something but not knowing what. She said she would wait for me in the car, and walked away with her head bowed and her hands deep in the pockets of that coat-shaped pelt. I sighed. Against a blackening vault of sky the seabirds rose and dived like torn scraps of rag. I realised I had a headache, it had been beating away unheeded in my skull since I had first sat down in this glassed-in box of wearied air.

  The boy-waiter came back, tentative as a fox cub, and made to take the tray, a carroty lock falling limply forward from his brow. With that colouring he could be yet another of the Duignan clan, cadet branch. I asked him his name. He stopped, canted forward awkwardly from the waist, and looked at me from under his pale brows in speculative alarm. His jacket had a shine, the shot cuffs of his shirt were soiled.

  “Billy, sir,” he said.

  I gave him a coin and he thanked me and stowed it and took up the tray and turned, then hesitated.

  “Are you all right, sir?” he said.

  I brought out the car keys and looked at them in perplexity. Everything seemed to be something else. I said that yes, I was all right, and he went away. The silence about me was heavy as the sea. The piano on the dais grinned its ghastly grin.

  When I was leaving the lobby the man in the morning coat was there. He had a large, waxen, curiously characterless face. He bowed to me, beaming, hands clasped into fists before his chest in an excessive, operatic gesture. What is it about such people that makes me remember them? His look was unctuous yet in some way minatory. Perhaps I had been expected to tip him also. As I say: this world.

  Claire was waiting by the car, shoulders hunched, using the sleeves of her coat for a muff.

  “You should have asked me for the key,” I said. “Did you think I wouldn’t give it to you?”

  On the way home she insisted on taking the wheel, despite my vigorous resistance. It was full night by now and in the wide-eyed glare of the headlamps successive stands of unleaving fright-trees loomed up suddenly before us and were as suddenly gone, collapsing off into the darkness on either side as if felled by the pressure of our passing. Claire was leaning so far forward her nose was almost touching the windscreen. The light rising from the dashboard like green gas gave to her face a spectral hue. I said she should let me drive. She said I was too drunk to drive. I said I was not drunk. She said I had finished the hip-flask, she had seen me empty it. I said it was no business of hers to rebuke me in this fashion. She wept again, shouting through her tears. I said that even drunk I would have been less of a danger driving than she was in this state. So it went on, hammer and tongs, tooth and nail, what you will. I gave as good, or as bad, as I got, reminding her, merely as a corrective, that for the best part, I mean the worst part—how imprecise the language is, how inadequate to its occasions—of the year that it took her mother to die, she had been conveniently abroad, pursuing her studies, while I was left to cope as best I could. This struck home. She gave a hoarse bellow between clenched teeth and thumped the heels of her hands on the wheel. Then she started to fling all sorts of accusations at me. She said I had driven Jerome away. I paused. Jerome? Jerome? She meant of course the chinless do-gooder—fat lot of good he did her—and sometime object of her affections. Jerome, yes, that was the scoundrel’s unlikely name. How, pray, I asked, controlling myself, how had I driven him away? To that she replied only with a head-tossing snort. I pondered. It was true I had considered him an unsuitable suitor, and had told him so, pointedly, on more than one occasion, but she spoke as if I had brandished a horsewhip or let fly with a shotgun. Besides, if it was my opposition that had driven him away, what did that say for his character or his tenacity of purpose? No no, she was better off free of the likes of him, that was certain. But for now I said nothing more, kept my counsel, and after a mile or two the fire in her went out. That is something I have always found with women, wait long enough and one will have one’s way.

  When we got home I went straight into the house, leaving her to park the car, and got the number of the Cedars from the telephone book and telephoned Miss Vavasour and told her that I wished to rent one of her rooms. Then I went upstairs and crawled into bed in my drawers. I was suddenly very tired. A fight with one’s daughter is never less than debilitating. I had moved by then from what had been Anna’s and my bedroom into the spare room over the kitchen, which used to be the nursery and where the bed was low and narrow, hardly more than a cot. I could hear Claire below in the kitchen, banging the pots and pans. I had not told her yet that I had decided to sell the house. Miss V. on the telephone had enquired how long I planned to stay. I could hear from her tone that she was puzzled, even distrustful. I maintained a deliberate vagueness. Some weeks, I said, months, perhaps. She was silent for a lengthy moment, thinking. She mentioned the Colonel, he was a permanent, she said, and set in his ways. I volunteered no comment on that. What were colonels to me? She could entertain an entire officer corps on the premises for all I cared. She said I would have to send out my laundry. I asked her if she remembered me. “Oh, yes,” she said without inflexion, “yes, of course, I remember you.”

  I heard
Claire’s step on the stairs. Her anger had drained all away by now and she walked at a dragging, disconsolate plod. I do not doubt she too finds arguments tiring. The bedroom door was ajar but she did not come in, only asked listlessly through the gap if I wanted something to eat. I had not switched on the lamps in the room and the long, tapering trapezoid of light spilling across the linoleum from the landing where she stood was a pathway leading straight to childhood, hers and my own. When she was little and slept in this room, in this bed, she liked to hear the sound of my typewriter from the study downstairs. It was a comforting sound, she said, like listening to me think, although I do not know how the sound of me thinking could comfort anyone; quite the opposite, I should have said. Ah, but how far off, now, those days, those nights. All the same, she should not have shouted at me like that in the car. I do not merit being shouted at like that. “Daddy,” she said again, with a note of testiness now, “do you want dinner or not?” I did not answer, and she went away. Live in the past, do I.

  I turned toward the wall and away from the light. Even though my knees were bent my feet still stuck out at the end of the bed. As I was heaving myself over in a tangle of sheets—I have never been able to cope with bedclothes—I caught a whiff of my own warm cheesy smell. Before Anna’s illness I had held my physical self in no more than fond disgust, as most people do—hold their selves, I mean, not mine—tolerant, necessarily, of the products of my sadly inescapable humanity, the various effluvia, the eructations fore and aft, the gleet, the scurf, the sweat and other common leakages, and even what the Bard of Hartford quaintly calls the particles of nether-do. However, when Anna’s body betrayed her and she became afraid of it and its alien possibilities, I developed, by a mysterious process of transference, a crawling repugnance of my own flesh. I do not have this sense of self-disgust all the time, or at least I am not all the time aware of it, although probably it is there, waiting until I am alone, at night, or in the early morning especially, when it rises around me like a miasma of marsh gas. I have developed too a queasy fascination with the processes of my body, the gradual ones, the way for instance my hair and my fingernails insistently keep growing, no matter what state I am in, what anguish I may be undergoing. It seems so inconsiderate, so heedless of circumstance, this relentless generation of matter that is already dead, in the same way that animals will keep going about their animal business, unaware or uncaring that their master sprawled on his cold bed upstairs with mouth agape and eyes glazed over will not be coming down, ever again, to dish out the kibble or take the key to that last tin of sardines.

  Speaking of typewriters—I did, I mentioned a typewriter a minute ago—last night in a dream, it has just come back to me, I was trying to write my will on a machine that was lacking the word I. The letter I, that is, small and large.

  Down here, by the sea, there is a special quality to the silence at night. I do not know if this is my doing, I mean if this quality is something I bring to the silence of my room, and even of the whole house, or if it is a local effect, due to the salt in the air, perhaps, or the seaside climate in general. I do not recall noticing it when I was young and staying in the Field. It is dense and at the same time hollow. It took me a long while, nights and nights, to identify what it reminds me of. It is like the silence that I knew in the sickrooms of my childhood, when I would lie in a fever, cocooned under a hot, moist mound of blankets, with the emptiness squeezing in on my eardrums like the air in a bathysphere. Sickness in those days was a special place, a place apart, where no one else could enter, not the doctor with his shiver-inducing stethoscope or even my mother when she put her cool hand on my burning brow. It is a place like the place where I feel that I am now, miles from anywhere, and anyone. I think of the others in the house, Miss Vavasour, and the Colonel, asleep in their rooms, and then I think perhaps they are not asleep, but lying awake, like me, glooming gaunt-eyed into the lead-blue darkness. Perhaps the one is thinking of the other, for the Colonel has an idea of our chatelaine, I am convinced of it. She, however, laughs at him behind his back, not entirely without fondness, calling him Colonel Blunder, or Our Brave Soldier. Some mornings her eyes are red-rimmed as if she had been crying in the night. Does she blame herself for all that happened and grieve for it still? What a little vessel of sadness we are, sailing in this muffled silence through the autumn dark.

  It was at night especially that I thought about the Graces, as I lay in my narrow metal bed in the chalet under the open window, hearing the monotonously repeated ragged collapse of waves down on the beach, the solitary cry of a sleepless seabird and, sometimes, the distant rattling of a corncrake, and the faint, jazzy moanings of the dance band in the Golf Hotel playing a last slow waltz, and my mother and father in the front room fighting, as they did when they thought I was asleep, going at each other in a grinding undertone, every night, every night, until at last one night my father left us, never to return. But that was in winter, and somewhere else, and years off still. To keep from trying to hear what they were saying I distracted myself by making up dramas in which I rescued Mrs. Grace from some great and general catastrophe, a shipwreck or a devastating storm, and sequestered her for safety in a cave, conveniently dry and warm, where in moonlight—the liner had gone down by now, the storm had abated—I tenderly helped her out of her sopping swimsuit and wrapped a towel around her phosphorescent nudity, and we lay down and she leaned her head on my arm and touched my face in gratitude and sighed, and so we went to sleep together, she and I, lapped about by the vast soft summer night.

  In those days I was greatly taken with the gods. I am not speaking of God, the capitalised one, but the gods in general. Or the idea of the gods, that is, the possibility of the gods. I was a keen reader and had a fair knowledge of the Greek myths, although the personages in them were hard to keep track of, so frequently did they transform themselves and so various were their adventures. Of them I had a necessarily stylised image— big, nearly naked plasticene figures all corded muscle and breasts like inverted tun-dishes—derived from the works of the great masters of the Italian Renaissance, Michelangelo especially, reproductions of whose paintings I must have seen in a book, or a magazine, I who was always on the look-out for instances of bare flesh. It was of course the erotic exploits of these celestial beings that most took my fancy. The thought of all that tensed and tensely quivering naked flesh, untrammelled save by the marmoreal folds of a robe or a wisp of gauze fortuitously placed—fortuitous, perhaps, but fully and frustratingly as protective of modesty as Rose’s beach towel or, indeed, Connie Grace’s swimsuit—glutted my inexperienced but already overheating imagination with reveries of love and love’s transgressions, all in the unvarying form of pursuit and capture and violent overmastering. Of the details of these skirmishes in the golden dust of Greece I had scant grasp. I pictured the pump and shudder of tawny thighs from which pale loins shrink even as they surrender, and heard the moans of mingled ecstasy and sweet distress. The mechanics of the act, however, were beyond me. Once on my rambles along the thistled pathways of the Burrow, as that strip of scrubland between the seashore and the fields was called, I almost stumbled over a couple lying in a shallow sandy pit making love under a raincoat. Their exertions had caused the coat to ride up, so that it covered their heads but not their tails—or perhaps they had arranged it that way, preferring to conceal their faces, so much more identifiable, after all, than behinds—and the sight of them there, the man’s flanks rhythmically busy in the upright wishbone of the woman’s lifted, wide-flung legs, made something swell and thicken in my throat, a blood-surge of alarm and thrilled revulsion. So this, I thought, or it was thought for me, so this is what they do.

  Love among the big people. It was strange to picture them, to try to picture them, struggling together on their Olympian beds in the dark of night with only the stars to see them, grasping and clasping, panting endearments, crying out for pleasure as if in pain. How did they justify these dark deeds to their daytime selves? That was something that
puzzled me greatly. Why were they not ashamed? On Sunday morning, say, they arrive at church still tingling from Saturday night’s frolics. The priest greets them in the porch, they smile blamelessly, mumbling innocuous words. The woman dips her fingertips in the font, mingling traces of tenacious love-juice with the holy water. Under their Sunday best their thighs chafe in remembered delight. They kneel, not minding the mournfully reproachful gaze the statue of their Saviour fixes on them from the cross. After their midday Sunday dinner perhaps they will send the children out to play and retire to the sanctuary of their curtained bedroom and do it all over again, unaware of my mind’s bloodshot eye fixed on them unblinkingly. Yes, I was that kind of boy. Or better say, there is part of me still that is the kind of boy that I was then. A little brute, in other words, with a filthy mind. As if there were any other sort. We never grow up. I never did, anyway.

  By day I loitered about Station Road hoping for a glimpse of Mrs. Grace. I would pass by the green metal gate, slowing to the pace of a somnambulist, and will her to walk out of the front door as her husband had walked out that day when I caught my first sight of him, but she kept stubbornly within. In desperation I would peer past the house to the clothesline in the garden, but all I saw was the children’s laundry, their shorts and socks and one or two items of Chloe’s uninterestingly skimpy underthings, and of course their father’s flaccid, greyish drawers, and once, even, his sand-bucket hat, pegged at a rakish angle. The only thing of Mrs. Grace’s I ever saw there was her black swimsuit, hanging by its shoulder straps, limp and scandalously empty, dry now and less like a sealskin than the pelt of a panther. I looked in at the windows, too, especially the bedroom ones upstairs, and was rewarded one day— how my heart hammered!—by a glimpse behind a shadowed pane of what seemed a nude thigh that could only be hers. Then the adored flesh moved and turned into the hairy shoulder of her husband, at stool, for all I knew, and reaching for the lavatory roll.