The Sea Change (12 page)

She hesitated: ‘I’m not sure. If they do, they can go on to something else: they don’t have to be carpet makers any more.’

‘You’ve left out the unpickers. They are often sadly diligent.’

‘I have: indeed, they are.’

‘Then you could have some who are like moths: they simply eat carpet. It is amazing that any carpet gets made at all.’

‘It should be amazing,’ she said seriously. He looked at her; recognized the amazement, and there was no more to be said.

Lights were being dimmed in the aeroplane; chairs were being flattened; people were settling for the night, and she went to wash. How she avoided the little mantraps of personal remark and
confidence, he thought: she had made the climate for their conversation – he had simply responded, because for once, and unusually, he had felt in good company.

She came back with freshly brushed hair, washed face and shining eyes. ‘Goodness! Isn’t it all beautiful – neat luxury – like an egg!’

When she was sitting in it, he said: ‘Now: this thing is called a Slumberette; they will bring bits to fit on to it for our feet, and the rest of it subsides under one until one is
helplessly comfortable. You press this and lean back.’

She pressed the knob and shot backwards with a startled gasp, but ‘they’ were instantly on the spot – rescued her, and packed her with blankets into a comfortable mummy.

‘Do you want to read for a bit?’

She shook her head, so he turned out her light, and adjusted her air conditioning so that it did not ruffle her hair.

‘If you can’t sleep, there is your reading light.’

‘Thank you so much. Are you going to sleep?’

‘After a little neat luxury.’

When he returned, she was already asleep, and he felt suddenly alone, and crowded by the thoughts he had by himself. This was the time, he knew, to make the adjustment that this kind of travel
hardly allowed: of time, and place, of work, people, incident, and country. The end of a day which one has physically left behind one is a different end. Poor Lillian: she had made the worst of his
departure, and she would be suffering for it, and, possibly, making Jimmy suffer with her. The confounding thing about Jimmy was that just when one was getting irritated by his creed of vicarious
living, and watching his comfortable selections from one’s life with mounting resentment, he engaged himself for one so thoroughly that one was touched all over again. He didn’t like
boats; he was raging to find a Clemency in New York, he was worrying about the TV performance of
The Molehill
, and he found days and days of Lillian’s company difficult. Well –
by the time they arrived he might have fixed up the apartment; that would be better for Lillian – for all of them. Alberta was too young in some ways to manage hotel life by herself, and
Jimmy always lived with them wherever they went. Then they would find somewhere in the country for a few weeks: not by the sea because it made Lillian miserable not being able to bathe, but in
good, deep country – Massachusetts, for instance, would be about right: then he would be able to get down to New York from time to time if necessary. Then, for a few weeks, they would have
what the Friedmanns at lunch today had called ‘a lovely home’. It gave him pleasure to think about the Friedmanns – partly because they knew so clearly what they wanted –
partly because he had been able to give some of it to them. He had enjoyed his lunch today more than usual – although he always found it interesting, but, possibly because he had not on this
occasion seen them for nearly a year, the effects of their continuity and change had impressed him more than before. The house was the same: comfortable, beautifully kept, and furnished more
heavily than ever with a kind of imaginative vulgarity. Thus, to strike a match you went through some mechanical whimsy; to sit down you removed one of the flouncy dolls who used to sit on beds in
the Twenties pretending to be Gertie Lawrence at the Chelsea Arts Ball; to turn on a light you approached an Elizabethan manuscript in full sail; the lavatory paper was concealed in a musical box
which lashed out Swiss banalities at you; the sitting room had the bursting flaccid appearance of an overripe plum.

Mrs Friedmann had received him: she had put on weight, and was generally glowing with maternal wealth. She had such a sense of occasion that she invariably dressed for it to be on the safe side.
Today she was dressed in lavender marocain, with a good deal of angular expensive modern jewellery at key points like road signs, and shoes whose burning discomfort had only to be glanced at to be
believed. She was corseted from just below her neck to just above her knees, which streamlined her imposing bulk, and she was heavily made up with blue eyelashes and a purple mouth, but this did
not detract from her habitual expression of active delight.

‘Come in, come
in
! When we heard you were to come we were so happy. Hans is getting some wine to be prepared, and the children are not yet from school here. But please, please come
in.’

In the sitting room they both sat down: Mrs Friedmann, however, never wasted preliminaries.

‘I have been so anxious for you to see our children – they have so much changed in the last year. But first I must again thank you and assure you that I love them all the time as my
own, but sometimes I think
more
than that because I have had time to know what the loss is of no children, and these two are so remarkable that it is my honour to care for them.’

‘You’ve thanked me quite enough before, Mrs Friedmann, and really for very little. It is the children who are lucky . . .’

‘Children should be above luck! But I know that I can never repay you, but I am happy to owe you so much.’

Here there were sounds of children in the hall and her husband arrived.

‘Mr Joyce, I am delighted to see you here. Berta, you will perhaps now go to the kitchen, my darling angel, and finish that our meal may be soon? I have sent Matthias and Becky to wash
their hands again.’

She went at once, and he looked admiringly after her.

‘My wife is as good as she is beautiful.’ He got some sherry and poured it out. ‘Mr Joyce: since I do not wish to mix business with family matters I will try to put the
business in a nutshell. As you know, at the time that you so kindly approached us with the children, I had no work, no money – nothing. If Berta had been able to have a child I should have
been overjoyed, but I should also have been desperate. It is only because of your great generosity that we were able to take Matthias and Becky and do for them all that we could wish. Our happiness
is extremely good, and Berta has been a different woman with her life so rightly filled. But now is different: I prosper each year and have now twenty-five men working for me and three delivery
vans and all premises convenient. I can now afford to educate the children and buy for them everything that they need.’ He raised a hand as Emmanuel was about to speak. ‘Only for one
thing. Money of yours has been saved now for nearly a year: if more of it might be saved I would buy Matthias a good instrument. I have heard of a Gagliano going very cheap, and it is a very fine
instrument. I have a friend who knows of these things, and he has tried it and says that it is worth what they ask. When we have bought it for the boy we do not need any more money. Some money I
have already put down for the Gagliano to secure it for him but he does not know. Berta wishes to put ribbon round it and make a surprise.’

Mr Friedmann took nothing for granted. Emmanuel could not remember any conversation they had had which did not, so to speak, start at the beginning: each time his situation after the war and his
subsequent gratitude was faithfully and persuasively outlined before he arrived at present affairs. Emmanuel also knew by now that it would not do to agree immediately about the money: that he was
meant to consider Friedmann’s proposals at least during lunch – if not longer. He therefore replied with weighty caution, and Friedmann was delighted.

‘Of course! You must have all the thought you could wish,’ he said, his eyes blazing with innocent conspiracy.

Lunch – and the children. The girl had grown since he last saw her and was something of a beauty, with a very white skin and enormous slanting eyes. She gazed at him solemnly throughout
the meal, but whenever he looked directly at her, she hung her head, her black hair flopped each side of her face and she gave him a rich slow smile. The boy – he was older – was
awkward and very shy: with his gentle, protuberant eyes, elaborate nostrils, and small delicate mouth, he reminded Emmanuel of a young hare – since he seemed quiveringly poised for some
convulsive movement which would defy pursuit. Both children spoke German and English indiscriminately, but a guest was clearly an unusual event, and they did not speak unless they were asked to do
so. As soon as they had finished they kissed their parents and left the room. Friedmann told Becky to fetch her drawings and Matthias to tune his violin. Mrs Friedmann served coffee, and Emmanuel
congratulated them both on the children. Mrs Friedmann glowed.

‘They are different. Just has Matthias grown out of sleeping with the piece of bread in his hand. All these years he has needed it, not to eat, but to know that it was there, but lately he
has been collecting pictures of composers and musicians – newspapers, postcards, anything – and sticking them to the wall round his bed, and every night my husband goes to see him and
they talk about one of the people in the pictures. My husband knows a very great deal which Matthias wishes to know. They were talking about – Schumann, was it, Hans?’

‘Schubert, my darling, Schubert.’

‘Ja, ja. I know nothing at all! Of course Schubert who was so poor, and after as Hans was to go Matthias held out the bread and said: “I don’t need bread at night.” And
since then no more bread.’

The girl, they said, was an easy child. After all, she had only been a baby when she left the camp – a few months old, with nothing, or very little, to remember.

‘But the boy does remember, too much.’

‘What does he remember?’

‘He will not say. He will never talk about it. I know, only from the questions he asks me now – difficult questions with some knowledge behind them.’

Mrs Friedmann interrupted: ‘Yes. And you know we gave them days of birthday as they had none and we did not know how to find them? Well, last June, when Matthias was to be thirteen, on his
day he said: “This is not my birthday: then it was cold.” ’

‘Sometimes I cannot
answer
him, Mr Joyce,’ said Friedmann. ‘I have no good answer for Buchenwald – perhaps I do not wish to find one. He ask why, why, all the
time. Why this for one because he is such and such, and that for another. I say to him: “You are a boy; Becky is a girl: you are not the same. You are a Jew, and your friend” – he
has one friend from school – “Martin is a Gentile. You have music, Martin wishes astronomy, Becky likes to draw. You are not born the same, and therefore injustice is nonsense.”
He is passionately concerned with justice: everybody must have the same, but I think when the mind is very young there is a confusion between having and being. But I think also he will learn
because he wishes to know.’

‘And Hans will tell him,’ Mrs Friedmann looked at her husband with a certainty that went to Emmanuel’s heart: ‘because he is knowing so much of everything.’

Friedmann smiled at her, but said nothing until she had gone ahead of them to the sitting room, when he smiled again at Emmanuel and said: ‘As you see, Mr Joyce, the philosophical
responsibilities of this great household are entirely mine.’

In the sitting room Matthias stood by the piano with his fiddle, and Becky lay on the floor with a drawing block. They had hardly sat down before Matthias said ‘Bach’, and began to
play.

It was a long time since he had heard any unaccompanied Bach, and the sound was a royal shock to him; waking suddenly some part of the heart that keeps awe and adoration locked: charging and
changing his body with a stream of joy. Then he looked to see it coming from the boy, but the boy had changed too: he was no longer shy or awkward; he had now a kind of gallant stability – he
was struggling with music too difficult for him and an indifferent instrument, but his eyes were luminous with intention, his mouth still, his whole face and body serving one purpose. He was too
young to conciliate or to compromise with his instrument: he treated it sternly as though it was the best, and made his own whole in spite of it. Afterwards, nobody said anything, until Becky
looked up from her drawing, and said: ‘Well done, Matthias, you can very nearly play that piece now.’

He had left soon after that, but as he sat now in the aircraft the boy’s playing occurred all over again and shed light on his memory either side of it. He had promised the Gagliano, and
said that he would write about the rest of the business from New York: but in the taxi he had had other thoughts – of regret, envy, and confusion. These were the children who were connected
to his worst mistake with Lillian: so sure had he been that she would want and love them that he had gone far in the arrangements before he told her, and when he did they had both suffered a bad
shock – as they fought their way through layers of dishonest objection and justification to the raw bone of his wanting to pay for the war which he had not fought, to her wanting nothing but
their child. To wanting Sarah back, in fact, or another Sarah. He looked at the girl sleeping beside him, and for a moment, imagined that she might be his daughter. He would only have had to marry
Lillian three years earlier . . . But Lillian’s daughter had died, and so had the parents of Matthias and the parents of Becky – if this girl had been his daughter she would be dead now
– if he had been the father of either Matthias or Becky he would be dead now. These were matters of fact – of accident? Where would little Alberta put that in her carpet? When he had
left the Friedmanns he had said to them that he did not think the children could possibly be in better hands, and meant it, and Mrs Friedmann’s blue-fringed eyes had filled as she said:
‘We
love
them: but Hans will see that it is wisely.’ What he had really meant, he discovered, was that he and Lillian would not have done so well even if she had wanted them.
‘We’re really not fit for it,’ he had thought, churning along in his taxi, and then the boy’s music had come back – he had accepted his unfitness, and wondered whether
when one thanked God for Bach, one did not also thank Bach for God. Compassion for Lillian filled him, because she did not see their unfitness, and he made a promise to look after her well on the
journey. And then, accident, which trod softly on anyone’s dreams with the confident deliberation of a cat, had prevented Lillian and substituted Alberta, and it was he who had been looked
after in the end. Interesting – that the best parts of die day had been the boy and this girl beside him. Two children . . .