The Sea (5 page)

She accompanied me when I came down here to Ballyless for the first time, after that dream, the dream I had of walking homeward in the snow. I think she was worried I might be bent on drowning myself. She must not know what a coward I am. The journey down reminded me a little of the old days, for she and I were always fond of a jaunt. When she was a child and could not sleep at night—from the start she was an insomniac, just like her Daddy—I would bundle her in a blanket into the car and drive her along the coast road for miles beside the darkling sea, crooning whatever songs I knew any of the words of, which far from putting her to sleep made her clap her hands in not altogether derisory delight and cry for more. One time, later on, we even went on a motoring holiday together, just the two of us, but it was a mistake, she was an adolescent by then and grew rapidly bored with vineyards and chateaux and my company, and nagged at me stridently without let-up until I gave in and brought her home early. The trip down here turned out to be not much better.

It was a sumptuous, oh, truly a sumptuous autumn day, all Byzantine coppers and golds under a Tiepolo sky of enamelled blue, the countryside all fixed and glassy, seeming not so much itself as its own reflection in the still surface of a lake. It was the kind of day on which, latterly, the sun for me is the world's fat eye looking on in rich enjoyment as I writhe in my misery. Claire was wearing a big coat of dun-coloured suede which in the warmth of the car gave off a faint but unmistakable fleshy stink which distressed me, although I made no complaint. I have always suffered from what I think must be an overly acute awareness of the mingled aromas that emanate from the human concourse. Or perhaps suffer is the wrong word. I like, for instance, the brownish odour of women's hair when it is in need of washing. My daughter, a fastidious spinster—alas, I am convinced she will never marry—usually has no smell at all, that I can detect. That is another of the numerous ways in which she differs from her mother, whose feral reek, for me the stewy fragrance of life itself, and which the strongest perfume could not quite suppress, was the thing that first drew me to her, all those years ago. My hands now, eerily, have a trace of the same smell, her smell, I cannot rid them of it, wring them though I may. In her last months she smelt, at her best, of the pharmacopoeia.

When we arrived I marvelled to see how much of the village as I remembered it was still here, if only for eyes that knew where to look, mine, that is. It was like encountering an old flame behind whose features thickened by age the slender lineaments that a former self so loved can still be clearly discerned. We passed the deserted railway station and came bowling over the little bridge—still intact, still in place!—my stomach at the crest doing that remembered sudden upward float and fall, and there it all was before me, the hill road, and the beach at the bottom, and the sea. I did not stop at the house but only slowed as we went by. There are moments when the past has a force so strong it seems one might be annihilated by it.

"That was it!" I said to Claire excitedly. "The Cedars!" On the way down I had told her all, or almost all, about the Graces. "That was where they stayed."

She turned back in her seat to look.

"Why did you not stop?" she said.

What was I to answer? That I was overcome by a crippling shyness suddenly, here in the midst of the lost world? I drove on, and turned on to Strand Road. The Strand Cafe was gone, its place taken by a large, squat and remarkably ugly house. Here were the two hotels, smaller and shabbier, of course, than in my memory of them, the Golf sporting importantly a rather grandiose flag on its roof. Even from inside the car we could hear the palms on the lawn in front dreamily clacking their dry fronds, a sound that on purple summer nights long ago had seemed to promise all of Araby. Now under the bronzen sunlight of the October afternoon—the shadows were lengthening already—everything had a quaintly faded look, as if it were all a series of pictures from old postcards. Myler's pubpost-office-grocery had swelled into a gaudy superstore with a paved parking area in front. I recalled how on a deserted, silent, sun-dazed afternoon half a century ago there had sidled up to me on the gravelled patch outside Myler's a small and harmless-seeming dog which when I put out my hand to it bared its teeth in what I mistakenly took to be an ingratiating grin and bit me on the wrist with an astonishingly swift snap of its jaws and then ran off, sniggering, or so it seemed to me; and how when I came home my mother scolded me bitterly for my foolishness in offering my hand to the brute and sent me, all on my own, to the village doctor who, elegant and urbane, stuck a perfunctory plaster over the rather pretty, purplish swelling on my wrist and then bade me take off all my clothes and sit on his knee so that, with a wonderfully pale, plump and surely manicured hand pressed warmly against my lower abdomen, he might demonstrate to me the proper way to breathe. "Let the stomach swell instead of drawing it in, you see?" he said softly, purringly, the warmth of his big bland face beating against my ear.

Claire gave a colourless laugh. "Which left the more lasting mark," she asked, "the dog's teeth or the doctor's paw?" I showed her my wrist where in the skin over the ulnar styloid are still to be seen the faint remaining scars from the pair of puncture marks made there by the canine's canines.

"It was not Capri," I said, "and Doctor French was not Tiberius." In truth I have only fond memories of that day. I can still recall the aroma of after-lunch coffee on the doctor's breath and the fishy swivel of his housekeeper's eye as she saw me to the front door.

Claire and I arrived at the Field.

In fact it is a field no longer but a dreary holiday estate packed higgledy-piggledy with what are bound to be jerrybuilt bungalows, designed I suspect by the same cackhanded line-drawer who was responsible for the eyesores at the bottom of the garden here. However, I was pleased to note that the name given to the place, ersatz though it be, is The Lupins, and that the builder, for I presume it was the builder, even spared a tall stand of this modest wild shrub—
Lupinus,
a genus of the Papilionaceae, I have just looked it up—beside the ridiculously grand mock-gothic gateway that leads in from the road. It was under the lupin bushes that my father every other week, at darkest midnight, with spade and flashlight, muttering curses under his breath, would dig a hole in the soft sandy earth and bury the bucketful of slops from our chemical lavatory. I can never smell the weak but oddly anthropic perfume of those blossoms without seeming to catch behind it a lingering sweet whiff of nightsoil.

"Are you not going to stop at all?" Claire said. "I'm starting to feel car-sick." As the years go on I have the illusion that my daughter is catching up on me in age and that by now we are almost contemporaries. It is probably the consequence of having such a clever child—had she persisted she would have made a far finer scholar than I could ever have hoped to be. Also she understands me to a degree that is disturbing and will not indulge my foibles and excesses as others do who know me less and therefore fear me more. But I am bereaved and wounded and require indulging. If there is a long version of shrift, then that is what I am in need of.
Let me alone,
I cried at her in my mind,
let me creep past the traduced, old Cedars, past the vanished Strand Cafe, past the
Lupins and the Field that was, past all this past, for if I stop I shall surely dissolve in a shaming puddle of tears.
Meekly, however, I halted the car at the side of the road and she got out in a vexed silence and slammed the door behind her as if she were delivering me a box on the ear. What had I done to annoy her so? There are times when she is as wilfully moody as her mother. And then suddenly, unlikeliest of all, behind the huddle of the Lupins' leprechaun houses, here was Duignan's lane, rutted as it always was, ambling between tangled hedges of hawthorn and dusted-over brambles. How had it survived the depredations of lorry and crane, of diggers both mechanical and human? Here as a boy I would walk down every morning, barefoot and bearing a dented billycan, on my way to buy the day's milk from Duignan the dairyman or his stoically cheerful, big-hipped wife. Even though the sun would be long up the night's moist coolness would cling on in the cobbled yard, where hens picked their way with finical steps among their own chalk-andolive-green droppings. There was always a dog lying tethered under a leaning cart that would eye me measuringly as I went past, teetering on tiptoe so as to keep my heels out of the chicken-merd, and a grimy white cart-horse that would come and put its head over the half-door of the barn and regard me sidelong with an amused and sceptical eye from under a forelock that was exactly the same smoky shade of creamy-white as honeysuckle blossom. I did not like to knock at the farmhouse door, fearing Duignan's mother, a low-sized squarish old party who seemed fitted with a stumpy leg at each corner and who gasped when she breathed and lolled the pale wet polyp of her tongue on her lower lip, and instead I would hang back in the violet shadow of the barn to wait for Duignan or his missus to appear and save me from an encounter with the crone.

Duignan was a gangling pinhead with thin sandy hair and invisible eyelashes. He wore collarless calico shirts that were antique even then and shapeless trousers shoved into mud-caked Wellingtons. In the dairy as he ladled out the milk he would talk to me about girls in a suggestively hoarse, wispy voice—he was to die presently of a diseased throat—saying he was sure I must have a little girlfriend of my own and wanting to know if she let me kiss her. As he spoke he kept his eye fixed on the long thin flute of milk he was pouring into my can, smiling to himself and rapidly batting those colourless lashes. Creepy though he was he held a certain fascination for me. He seemed always teasingly on the point of revealing, as he might show a lewd picture, some large, general and disgusting piece of knowledge to which only adults were privy. The dairy was a low square whitewashed cell so white it was almost blue. The steel milk churns looked like squat sentries in flat hats, and each one had an identical white rosette burning on its shoulder where the light from the doorway was reflected. Big shallow muslin-draped pans of milk lost in their own silence were set on the floor to separate, and there was a hand-cranked wooden butter churn that I always wanted to see being operated but never did. The cool thick secret smell of milk made me think of Mrs. Grace, and I would have a darkly exciting urge to give in to Duignan's wheedling and tell him about her, but held back, wisely, no doubt.

Now here I was at the farm gate again, the child of those days grown corpulent and half-grey and almost old. An illpainted sign on the gate-post warned trespassers of prosecution. Claire behind me was saying something about farmers and shotguns but I paid no heed. I advanced across the cobbles—there were still cobbles!—seeming not to walk but bounce, rather, awkward as a half-inflated barrage balloon, buffeted by successive breath-robbing blows out of the past. Here was the barn and its half-door. A rusted harrow leaned where Duignan's cart used to lean—was the cart a misremembrance? The dairy was there too, but disused, its crazy door padlocked, against whom, it was impossible to imagine, the window panes dirtied over or broken and grass growing on the roof. An elaborate porch had been built on to the front of the farmhouse, a glass and aluminium gazebo of a thing suggestive of the rudimentary eye of a giant insect. Now inside it the door opened and an elderly young woman appeared and stopped behind the glass and considered me warily. I blundered forward, grinning and nodding, like a big bumbling missionary approaching the tiny queen of some happily as yet unconverted pygmy tribe. At first she stayed cautiously inside the porch while I addressed her through the glass, loudly enunciating my name and making excited gesticulations with my hands. Still she stood and gazed. She gave the impression of a young actress elaborately but not quite convincingly made up to look old. Her hair, dyed the colour of brown boot polish and permed into a mass of tight, shiny waves, was too voluminous for her little pinched face, surrounding it like a halo of dense thorns, and looking more like a wig than real hair. She wore a faded apron over a jumper that she could only have knitted herself, a man's corduroy trousers balding at the knees, and those zippered ankle boots of Prussian-blue mock-velvet that were all the rage among old ladies when I was young and latterly seem exclusive to beggar women and female winos. I bellowed at her through the glass how I used to stay down here as a child, in a chalet in the Field, and how I would come to the farm in the mornings for milk. She listened, nodding, a pucker appearing and disappearing at the side of her mouth as if she were suppressing a laugh. At last she opened the door of the porch and stepped out on to the cobbles. In my mood of half-demented euphoria—really, I was ridiculously excited—I had an urge to embrace her. I spoke in a rush of the Duignans, man and wife, of Duignan's mother, of the dairy, even of the baleful dog. Still she nodded, a seemingly disbelieving eyebrow arched, and looked past me to where Claire stood waiting in the gateway, arms folded, clasping herself in her big expensive fur-trimmed coat.

Avril, the young woman said her name was. Avril. She did not volunteer a surname. Dimly, like something lifting itself up that for a long time had seemed dead, there came to me the memory of a child in a dirty smock hanging back in the flagged hallway of the farmhouse, holding negligently by its chubby flexed arm a pink, bald and naked doll and watching me with a gnomic stare that nothing would deflect. But this person before me could not have been that child, who by now would be, what, in her fifties? Perhaps the remembered child was a sister of this one, but much older, that is, born much earlier? Could that be? No, Duignan had died young, in his forties, so it was not possible, surely, that this Avril would be his daughter, since he was an adult when I was a child and ... My mind balked in its calculations like a confused and weary old beast of burden. But Avril, now. Who in these parts would have conferred on their child a name so delicately vernal?