The Sea Change (18 page)

I spun it all out as long as possible: had a bath, painted my nails, massaged my hair – but even so, I wondered how countless women manage to keep quantities of men waiting while they bath
and change. Perhaps their minds aren’t on it like mine seems to be: as some women are about houses, so am I about my body. It is my house, and I enjoy cleaning and grooming and decorating it;
and to do it in an orderly, thorough – almost detached – manner, is pleasant exercise . . .

Time: it fidgeted and jerked; it clung drowning to the last straw of each second; it hung, breathlessly, over my smallest movement. I thought of railway station clocks that move every minute
with a comforting convulsion – of slow-motion films, of speedometers, of sand running through an hour glass, of my hair growing, of the sundial at Wilde whose shadow never seemed to move when
I watched it, of the only time I saw the Derby, of my forty-five years (I am more than forty-five!), of the way Em can give the illusion of a whole afternoon and evening in a forty minute act, of
the seventeen hours with Sara . . . the whole business seemed inexorably elastic.

I tried to read. I thought of all the people in the ship who had expected to arrive this morning – the atmosphere of impatience and frustration had been noticeable at lunch – I
thought of the extra drinks that were being consumed to fill in time, of the patient crew answering the same questions for hours, of the New York skyline, the Statue of Liberty, and the number of
people who had never seen it before . . . From my porthole, I could see that there was much more wind – the fog had almost cleared, but I would need a scarf for my hair – a white one,
if I could find it . . .

The time had its life – somehow – it seemed to me always to have been dead, but in the end, it had to make way for more of itself that had been waiting and that I had waited for.
There is the curious sensation in a large ship: when she is moving, her engines, however discreet, pulse like the circulation of blood in a body, and all the people in her seem to move over her
with the scurrying, soundless activity of ants – they seem nothing to her mainstream of life and movement: but when she is stopped, these activities break into sounds, she becomes simply a
hive for people and their noises; cabin doors, luggage shifted, voices, breaking glass and changing money, greetings and farewells, footsteps going down to collect trunks, and up to the sea gulls.
She is no longer moving in the moving water; it heaves and slaps against her with time to repeat itself; the air moves round her with a kind of intricate liberty which was not apparent during her
journey.

As I was walking off the boat – leaving the concentrated turmoil of crowded passages and doorways for the spread-out confusion below on the quay, I suddenly saw myself, as though it was
the beginning of a film. A tall well-dressed woman picking her way down the gangplank – what is going to happen to her? Is she going to meet somebody, and who will they be? She looks
apprehensive, and either she is rich, or it is a very bad film, because she has a mink coat slung over her arm. The camera looks for a moment with her eyes at the scene before her – a casual
sweep, and then more searchingly. As it is a film, she is looking for a man: and she is either desperately afraid of him, or desperately in love. There he is – the picture hovers at its
distance, and then approaches him; he was in the background, and he does not know we have seen him. He is standing with his weight on one leg, staring at the ship. He is a small man; hatless,
wearing a blue muffler, and the breeze is raking up his thick, dark hair. His eyes, screwed up a little against the cold air, are not characteristic like that: they should be still, and very
bright, but he does not know he has been seen. The woman – we go back to her – has smiled, and perhaps it is a better film than we thought, because it is not possible to tell from her
smile whether she is afraid or in love. Supposing, at this point, as much were to happen to me as must happen to the woman at the beginning of a film; some great change, some violent alteration
which illuminates the purpose of itself, so that at the end of it I can see where I am placed . . . While I was waiting for the Customs to clear me, and Em was out of sight, I wondered what change
there could be. In a film the change could only fall into one of two categories: the external, and some engagement of the heart or body. I didn’t want my externals changed, I suddenly
realized, excepting my wretched health – and that would not be merely a change – it would be miraculous. With the help of that miracle, I might even have another child. And yet what
were miracles? They seemed generally to be events which the people who benefited from them totally failed to understand. If my health were now suddenly to improve, I should not understand why; I
should only know just enough about it not to be able to attribute it to some new drug, because I know that there are no new drugs for me. It was then that I discovered that I had lived all my life
on the supposition, the hope, that things would be different; that I lived inside as though I was the person meant for these changes, and was waiting to live in them – in fact, as though I
was someone else.

‘Have you anything to declare?’

I felt my suspicion reflected in his eyes. He held out his hand for my passport, and I resisted the melodramatic impulse to say: ‘I have these papers, but I do not know who I am, except
that I am not what I seem: isn’t that a declaration?’ But he pushed them back into my hand and said: ‘You’ve come to the wrong place, lady. This is for American
citizens.’

Still wondering who I was, I asked him where I should go.

‘You’re an
alien
,’ he said, as though that answered everything.

So it was a long time before they let me through to find Em with a taxi, and by the time I did find him, his familiarity was so welcome that I actually ran to him.

‘There, darling,’ he said, ‘there,’ and I clung to him knowing all the clothes he was wearing and the smell of his skin, and wanting that moment to tell him everything
that I had been feeling and had discovered.

‘I wish we ran into each other like two drops of water.’

‘Then you wouldn’t be able to tell me anything: I’d know it already – you wouldn’t like that.’

‘Perhaps you do know.’

He signed my face with his finger: he was smiling faintly. ‘Is Jimmy going to bring the rest of the luggage on?’

‘Yes.’ We moved towards the taxi – he was holding my shoulders, and I said: ‘Admire my suit.’

‘It’s charming – I have been.’ I looked down myself with him to my shoes. ‘They are pretty, too. And you’ve washed your hair, and look at your hands. You take
so much trouble, my darling, do you know why?’

I wanted to tell him, but I couldn’t, because I also wanted to surprise him with my answer. Instead, when we were in the taxi, I said: ‘Jimmy was terribly sick – for two
days.’

He laughed; ‘You sound so proud of it. Of course,
you
weren’t.’

‘Of course not. I looked after him, extremely well. We both enjoyed it.’

He looked pleased. ‘I hope he’s recovered: he’s going to have to go to work here.’

‘Have you found anyone for your play?’

‘No one. The only possible is tied up with a film contract – she can’t leave for long enough.’

‘How is Miss Young?’

‘I left her covered with dirt. The poor girl has had to clear up the apartment. They’d lent it to some people for a party, and it was a shambles. It’s a good thing you
didn’t come at ten – she’s been at it all day.’

‘What have you been doing?’

‘Oh – buying flowers and things – and walking about.’

‘And thinking?’

He looked suddenly guarded, and I added: ‘Not about my arrival – I didn’t mean that.’

He said: ‘I never know what quality one has to reach in one’s thoughts to constitute thinking. I have been remembering – do you count that?’

‘I do it all the time.’ I felt a fleeting contradiction in him, although he had not moved: then he took my hand gently, and said: ‘Perhaps “remembering” is the
wrong word. I don’t mean that I have been recalling exactly what happened: I mean that I have been reminiscing with a selection of events and my impressions of them.’

‘Why?’

‘I’ve been trying to find something. The curious thing is that one doesn’t just start with revolt – one has a clear, innocent reason for it. At the beginning, something
seems valuable: one desires it; it seems necessary and possible and worth fighting for. Then the whole plot of this thickens, and by then one has the experience of activity and struggle and one
forgets what the whole thing was for.’ He was silent.

‘Have you forgotten?’

‘Very nearly all the time, but I remembered a little this morning.’

We were both very quiet: then, it costing me, I said: ‘Em, I’m not sure that I ever knew.’

He turned to me as though I had said something marvellous, kissed me – and at that moment I could remember his earliest attention and care – ‘Yes, you did once; everybody does
a little, but they don’t make it last, and I don’t think I’ve helped you.’

‘It wasn’t
you
.’

‘It was nobody else,’ he said sharply, and Sarah flared up and began to die painfully, as he dismissed her. He took my hand again, and my fingers felt stiff against his.
‘Lillian: don’t cast yourself on that reef any more. Remember you are here, with me, and that there is more to come. Move in your time: feel what it is – now. You will be so
unbearably alone if you live in that other time.’

I
won’t
forget! I don’t want to.’

‘I’m not asking you to forget anything – only to remember more.’

‘Tell me something to remember, then.’

He thought for a moment, put one of his large handkerchiefs into my hands, and said: ‘I will tell you. When you were a child – I think you were about ten – you had your tonsils
out. Afterwards, your parents sent you away with your nurse for a holiday, and as your nurse came from one of the Scilly Islands, that is where you went. The first evening that you arrived, you
were put straight to bed. You were very tired from the longest journey you had ever done – a train from your home to London; from London to Cornwall; a boat to the main island; and finally, a
little boat run by your nurse’s uncle to the small island which was her home. You didn’t notice anything that night: but next morning you woke very early with sun filling the small
whitewashed bedroom. You found yourself in a feather bed, which had a kind of bulky, silky softness, and that was as strange as it was charming. You put on your clothes, lifted the squeaking latch
as quietly as you could, and went out, because you couldn’t wait to start being on the island. Your house was on high ground, and you could see everything. It was rocky, with green turf
– like bice, you said, in your paintbox – and gorse, and slender strips of land brilliant with flowers: you had never seen whole fields of flowers growing in your life. The sky was
blue, and the sea streamed and creamed round the edges of the island which had rocks and little shell-shaped bays of shining sand. There were no roads, and this made you feel wonderfully free, but
not lonely, because there were a few other clusters of cottages and the air above them had delicate veins of chimney smoke. You walked where you liked, up the hill until you came to a smooth grey
rock shouldering out of the ground. And there you found a little hollowed place in it, filled with slate-coloured water. You sat down on your heels beside it . . .’ He stopped. ‘Wait a
minute – yes, and put your hands face downwards on the rock. You’d never left England before, and you thought of this island having been here all the time of your life – which
seemed a very long time – rooted in the sea, rising up to the sun, complete and the perfect size for an island, and you had never known about it until now. The air smelled of salt and honey:
the little basin of water shivered from invisible winds, and you were singing inside as though you had several voices. You looked into the little basin – it was glittering – just
containing your face, and you felt so new on the island that you decided to christen yourself. You said your name aloud, and marked the water on to your forehead, and it was softer, and colder,
than snow. Later in the day, when you were out with your nurse, you came upon another rock, and it also had a little basin, but with hardly any water, and your nurse said that these rocks were the
first places on the island to be touched by the sun, and that the bowls had been made a long time ago for sacrifices. You didn’t tell her, or anyone else about your rock, until you told
me.’ He waited a moment, and then, still in the same, quiet story-telling voice, he said: ‘There you are. I remember so well your telling me that, you see, and when you told me I think
you meant to share it, but perhaps you gave it to me by mistake.’

‘You’ve kept it very well.’ Indeed, he had: the morning which I had not remembered for years was back with me in its true language – fresh and unfaded, as when I had told
him first, as when I had felt it. The taxi stopped: he said: ‘We have arrived. Have you arrived, darling?’ Before I could reply, the porter had opened the taxi door.

‘You read that notice on his cage. So I give him four bananas and what does he do? He
eats
them! He peels them like he’s tired and his mind’s on something else, but he
eats them so quick and hands the skins out to me that in a few minutes it’s like there never were any bananas at all, and he’s back to his staring at me like I was illiterate. He
dominates
me.’

Em finished paying the taxi and took my arm. The porter followed us to the lift, and asked if I wanted a monkey. Em pinched me and said: ‘My wife is allergic to monkeys.’

‘I adore them,’ I said, ‘but they give me a rash. Lobsters and monkeys.’

The porter said forget it – he’d still got twenty-three apartments to call.

In the lift Em said: ‘He isn’t absolutely crazy. He really got landed with a monkey that doesn’t seem to belong to anyone, and, as you see, it’s preying on his
mind.’

I think I smiled at him, but I was in full possession of the peace he had given me in the taxi, and so warm with it that I would have smiled at anything he said. He was saying something
else.