The Sea (16 page)

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 anyway, 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.

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.