The Sea (20 page)

I did not hear the door opening, only registered the light altering in the little room. Chloe stiffened against me and turned her head quickly and said something, a word I did not catch. Rose was standing in the doorway. She was in her bathing suit but was wearing her black pumps, which made her long pale skinny legs seem even longer and paler and skinnier. She reminded me of something, I could not think what, one hand on the door and the other on the door-jamb, seeming to be held suspended there between two strong gusts, one from inside the hut driving against her and another from outside pressing at her back. Chloe hastily pulled up the flap of her swimsuit and retied the straps behind her neck, speaking that word again harshly under her breath, the word I could not catch—Rose’s name, was it, or just some imprecation?—and made a low dive from the bench, fast as a fox, and ducked under Rose’s arm and was gone through the door and away. “You come back here, Miss!” Rose cried in a voice that cracked. “Just you come back here this instant!” She gave me a look then, a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger look, and shook her head, and turned and stalked off stork-like on those stilted white legs. Myles, still sprawled on the bench beside me, gave a low laugh. I stared at him. It seemed to me that he had spoken.

All that followed I see in miniature, in a sort of cameo, or one of those rounded views, looked on from above, at the off-centre of which the old painters would depict the moment of a drama in such tiny detail as hardly to be noticed amidst the blue and gold expanses of sea and sky. I lingered a moment on the bench, breathing. Myles watched me, waiting to see what I would do. When I came out of the hut Chloe and Rose were down on the little semi-circle of sand between the dunes and the water’s edge, squared up to each other and shrieking in each other’s face. I could not hear what they were saying. Now Chloe broke away and stamped in a furious, tight ring around herself, churning the sand. She kicked Rose’s towel. It is only my fancy, I know, but I see the little waves lapping hungrily at her heels. At last, with one last cry and a curious, chopping gesture of a hand and forearm, she turned and walked to the edge of the waves and, scissoring her legs, plumped down on the sand and sat with her knees pressed against her breast and her arms wrapped about her knees, her face lifted toward the horizon. Rose with hands on hips stood glaring at her back, but seeing she would get no response turned away and began angrily to gather up her things, pitching towel, book, bathing cap into the crook of her arm like a fishwife throwing fish into a creel. I heard Myles behind me, and a second later he passed me by at a headlong sprint, seeming to cartwheel rather than run. When he got to where Chloe was sitting he sat down beside her and put an arm across her shoulders and laid his head against hers. Rose paused and cast an uncertain glance at them, wrapped there together, their backs turned to the world. Then calmly they stood up and waded into the sea, the water smooth as oil hardly breaking around them, and leaned forward in unison and swam out slowly, their two heads bobbing on the whitish swell, out, and out.

We watched them, Rose and I, she clutching her gathered-up things against her, and I just standing. I do not know what I was thinking, I do not remember thinking anything. There are times like that, not frequent enough, when the mind just empties. They were far out now, the two of them, so far as to be pale dots between pale sky and paler sea, and then one of the dots disappeared. After that it was all over very quickly, I mean what we could see of it. A splash, a little white water, whiter than that all around, then nothing, the indifferent world closing.

There was a shout, and Rose and I turned to see a large red-faced man with close-clipped grey hair coming down the dunes toward us, high-stepping flurriedly through the sliding sands with comical haste. He wore a yellow shirt and khaki trousers and two-tone shoes and was brandishing a golf club. The shoes I may have invented. I am sure however of the glove that he wore on his right hand, the hand that held the golf stick; it was light brown, fingerless, and the back of it was punched with holes, I do not know why it caught my attention particularly. He kept shouting that someone should go for the Guards. He seemed extremely angry, gesturing in the air with the club like a Zulu warrior shaking his knobkerrie. Zulus, knobkerries? Perhaps I mean assegais. His caddy, meanwhile, up on the bank, an ageless emaciated runt in a buttoned-up tweed jacket and a tweed cap, stood contemplating the scene below him with a sardonic expression, leaning casually on the golf bag with his ankles crossed. Next, a muscle-bound young man in tight blue swimming trunks appeared, I do not know from where, he seemed to materialise out of the very air, and without preliminary plunged into the sea and swam out swiftly with expert, stiff strokes. By now Rose was pacing back and forth at the water’s edge, three paces this way, stop, wheel, three paces that way, stop, wheel, like poor demented Ariadne on the Naxos shore, still clutching to her breast the towel, book and bathing cap. After a time the would-be life-saver came back, and strode toward us out of the waveless water with that swimmer’s hindered swagger, shaking his head and snorting. It was no go, he said, no go. Rose cried out, a sort of sob, and shook her head rapidly from side to side, and the golfer glared at her. Then they were all dwindling behind me, for I was running, trying to run, along the beach, in the direction of Station Road and the Cedars. Why did I not cut away, through the grounds of the Golf Hotel, on to the road, where the going would have been so much easier? But I did not want the going to be easier. I did not want to get where I was going. Often in my dreams I am back there again, wading through that sand that grows ever more resistant, so that it seems that my feet themselves are made of some massy, crumbling stuff. What did I feel? Most strongly, I think, a sense of awe, awe of myself, that is, who had known two living creatures that now were suddenly, astoundingly, dead. But did I believe they were dead? In my mind they were held suspended in a vast bright space, upright, their arms linked and their eyes wide open, gazing gravely before them into illimitable depths of light.

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, that 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.