The Sea Change (24 page)

‘I am quite certain that I have not got a cold, but considering the rate at which we are changing climates I may hardly escape.’

‘You don’t get asthma, do you?’ Visions of certain terrible hours with Emmanuel reared up in my mind. She would be no good if . . .

‘I don’t get anything.’ She sneezed again. ‘Greece! I simply sneeze sometimes – it is an entirely private and quite insignificant affliction.’

‘That’s all right,’ I said kindly: ‘Everybody has to have some private life. Back soon.’

We went out of the apartment, down the elevator, into the street in silence – anxiety and dissatisfaction dividing us: I had begun to feel unduly irritated with Lillian, and I knew that
– whatever he was feeling about her – this would annoy him. I sat him down in a corner, got him a draught and coffee for both of us. When he had swallowed the draught, he said:
‘How commonplace we are to be sure. Three little mechanisms jostling against one another and ticking away to no purpose. Either we regard the fact of our existence as miracle enough, or we
suffer from the delusions of that fool last night. His education and progress don’t seem even to improve our mechanism. I could undoubtedly put my foot in my mouth soon after I was born, and
I fail to see what I have gained to compensate for the loss of this honest achievement.’

‘Perhaps we aren’t here for any purpose,’ I suggested; ‘so it’s not surprising that we’re commonplace.’

‘Do you know, I think that is very unlikely?’

‘Why?’

He thought for a moment, and then said slowly: ‘Because I detect signs of order wherever anything seems to know its place.’ He leaned forward. ‘That’s the trouble, Jimmy:
we don’t know our place. We have been told what chaos that used to create in the servants’ hall. Lillian said this morning that she didn’t know what she was for: I have a nasty
feeling that that is true of nearly all of us.’

‘Well, how do we find out what we are for?’

He looked at me with amusement. ‘Jimmy – you’re just stringing along: you don’t really want to find out because you think you know, don’t you?’

‘I suppose I do. I know for myself – I wouldn’t go any further than that.’

‘But supposing you were wrong. I mean, we take ourselves so fearfully for granted. We allow that certain muscles can be developed, and certain parts of the brain, but all the rest is just
dubbed lucky, instinctive, or unlucky: we don’t question what else we are besides muscles and brains, and certainly not what we might be. We behave like ready-made products trying to grab at
change out of circumstances – as though they were the only variable factors in our lives.’

‘Well, they do make a difference. I mean, if I hadn’t happened to meet you I would never have been . . .’

He looked at me then – curiously intent. ‘You didn’t “happen to meet me”.’

There was a silence into which I tried to follow him. Then, he said: ‘Do you believe in magic?’

I thought carefully.

‘I don’t mean white rabbits. I mean something marvellous that you can’t understand, that as you are, you couldn’t understand and if you even began to have a glimmer of
its meaning you would already be different. I mean that kind.’

I thought again. ‘No,’ I said at last: ‘I don’t think that kind of magic is for me.’

‘Quite right,’ he said, ‘but
you
might be for that kind of magic, and not know it. That might be what you are for.’

‘Are you?’

There was a kind of ache in his face as he said: ‘I hope so, Jimmy. I can’t tell you how I hope that.’

Getting to his feet a minute later, he said casually: ‘So you see, Jimmy, it doesn’t really matter whether we go to Greece or not. We can make some use of it or not, but it
won’t make “all the difference” like they say in books.’

It was much later, when thinking over this close talk, I realized that he’d referred to three mechanisms. He’d left the girl out of it.

It was the next morning, in fact, when I thought of his leaving the girl out of it. We were due to fly to Athens that evening – Lillian had taken her shopping and arranged to have her hair
cut the day before, and now I had to get her photographed. I still hadn’t told Mick and the boys that their worst fears were to be realized, and I wanted to have a picture to warm them up a
little. So it had to be a good picture. I had a friend who sometimes took that kind if he liked what he saw: I’d called him and told him what I wanted, and now we were on our way there.
I’d done Stanley one or two favours in the past, and he was great on paying up favours or dues – I think he preferred dues – it was how he saw life. Alberta sat beside me in the
cab with her hands in her lap and her head a little bent. Lillian had done a very good job on her hair; now that it was cut one could see the shape of her head and the back of her neck. She
hadn’t said a word since we got into the cab, so I asked: ‘Anything on your mind?’

‘Not my mind exactly.’

‘What is it on?’ But she didn’t answer.

‘If you’re nervous or worrying about the part – don’t. We’ll start on that when we get to Greece. Once we’re there, and anything worries you, speak up, and if
I can straighten it out for you I will.’

‘Thank you, Jimmy.’

‘But don’t start worrying about it now. Emmanuel said you read the part very well, and understood what it was about: well – that’s the main thing.’

‘Yes.’

She was so quiet, she made me feel a fool – as though I was the one who was nervous, and perhaps this was true.

‘You’re not nervous about the picture being taken?’

She shook her head, and said: ‘I’ve never had my photograph taken, excepting for my passport. But there is nothing surprising about that. I hardly do anything nowadays to which I am
accustomed.’

‘You don’t sound happy about it.’

‘Oh, I am not
un
happy about it. But it is a little like having meals every day of food you’ve never seen before in your life. Very interesting,’ she added primly,
‘but a lot of the time I feel rather full.’

‘I must get to know you better, or I’ll be a wreck myself. First I think you have asthma, and then I think you’re scared, when really all you do is sneeze and have
indigestion.’ She smiled and did not reply, but just before we arrived at Stanley’s studio she said: ‘There is one thing that I should very much like to ask you.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Is it – would it be possible for me to telephone to my father to explain to him about going to Greece? He is not very young, and I don’t want to cause him unnecessary
anxiety.’

‘Will our going to Greece worry him?’

‘Oh no – don’t think so. He may regard it as a bit fidgety – but that’s all. But I should like to tell him – if it is possible.’

‘We’ll put a call in right after your picture has been taken.’

‘Thank you, Jimmy.’

Stanley had a curious act, or attitude towards his sitters – I never knew which it was – he never spoke to them – he just didn’t say anything at all. All the other times
I saw him, he talked all the time: softly, almost inaudibly – but that way he didn’t use much breath so he never needed to stop. The moment he saw you, he fixed you with expressionless
pale blue eyes and started right in telling you what had happened to him since he woke up that morning. He never expressed an opinion, or asked you what you thought; he just quietly, confidently
unrolled a record – it was like hearing a newsreel of someone’s life – consecutive events with all the commentator’s time-honoured adjectives removed. But whenever I’d
taken people to him for pictures, he hadn’t said a word. He’d greet us with a soft, absent smile and immediately go to the other end of his studio and fiddle interminably with equipment
whilst I and his sitter carried on an uneasy conversation until we’d said again everything that we’d said on the way to him and had subsided into an edgy silence. Then he would advance
upon us with an ancient lamp and a slightly menacing expression and the sitter – agog for some notice to be taken of her – would turn to him expectantly . . . This was his cue for
dragging out a dirty, hideously uncomfortable chair – half-heartedly upholstered in khaki plush: he patted it invitingly, and the sitter, mesmerized by his indifference, invariably sat upon
it. He took his photographs with an air of reckless gloom – if he wanted his sitter to move he came and moved her, but with an expression on his face of it not making much difference. When he
had finished, he smiled again and went into the only other room he had which I knew was a bathroom, kitchen and darkroom combined, locked the door very noisily, and turned on all the taps. And that
was that.

As we climbed the stairs of the old brownstone house where he lived, I nearly told Alberta; then curiosity about what they would make of each other intervened, and I said nothing, except that he
was the best photographer I knew – which was true.

Stanley occupied half of the top floor, and his studio (he called it that) had a kind of anonymously international eccentricity. It was drab and rather dirty – filled with spiteful
draughts in winter and hot, dead air in summer. It was packed with incongruous objects nearly all of which were being used for some makeshift purpose not their own – and some seemed to have
none at all, except the doubtful chance of their owner having at one time thought them decorative. A small gong hung on a nail on the door, and almost as soon as I struck it, there was Stanley
ready in his smile with the overpowering smell of caraway seeds behind him. Inside, he left us to the usual problem of where to sit: today it was a couple of shooting sticks stuck into the wide
cracks between the floorboards. He had acquired several new things – a large, old-fashioned birdcage which was stuffed with dead lamp bulbs and his bed in the corner was covered with yards of
window-dressing grass – but all the old pots made out of twisted gramophone discs were there and the child’s playpen with rocks and sand and the old gopher tortoise: the collection of
hats on pegs arranged in a serpentine pattern on the wall, and several volumes of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
spread open on the floor.

Alberta – unlike anyone else I had brought there – did not walk about in search of a mirror and end by furtively jabbing at herself with a powder puff out of her handbag; nor did she
run her fingers through her hair and talk to me with one eye on Stanley – she simply sat and looked round the room with a frank accepting interest. So I lit a cigarette and watched them and
didn’t talk. The silence was preserved while Stanley took three or four pictures: he moved her for each one, but somehow he was doing it differently – he did not manipulate her as
though she was material that he knew all about: once he lifted her chin and looked at her with a kind of tentative searching, and after that, he took three more pictures with – it seemed to
me – a tender attention in his treatment of her. I knew then that the pictures were going to be good. When he had finished, he did not immediately escape but stood by his camera staring at
the floor, and she sat still with her head bent as she had sat in the taxi. Then at the same moment they both looked up at each other and smiled; he moved and we got to our feet: there was a
curious feeling in the room – as though they were talking so privately that I could not even hear them.

I had explained when I called him about our going to Greece, and now I gave him a piece of paper with ‘American Express, Athens’, written on it. He read it, patted my shoulder,
nodded, and stuffed the paper into a pocket of his filthy old leather jacket. Alberta held out her hand and said ‘Thank you.’

He bowed over her hand and replied: ‘I recognized you: the pictures should be good.’

‘Shall I see you again?’

Still holding her hand, he was absolutely still for a moment before answering: ‘I’m not sure,’ then he let it go, waved his own and we left.

Outside, I took her arm to guide her across the road, and asked her what she thought of Stanley, and she said: ‘I don’t think he is an ordinary man.’

‘He certainly liked you.’ I noticed at the time what a lame reply this was.

I took her to a bar I knew nearby where she could telephone: ‘It will be more private for you than the apartment, and we can eat here if we want.’

‘Would you mind very much helping me to put through the telephone call? I know it sounds silly when I’m supposed to be a secretary, but I’ve never made a call like this
before.’

‘We’ll get Frank to put it through for you – all you’ll have to do is take it. Write down your father’s name and telephone number, and I’ll give it to
him.’

She wrote down The Reverend William Wyndham Young in full with a place and a number.

I gave the piece of paper to Frank, and sat down opposite her at the small table.

‘How long will it be?’

‘He’s getting through now to find out. What do you want to eat?’

She shook her head.

‘You’ve got to eat. Have some – have some Littlenecks.’

‘Some
what
?’

‘Clams. Special American food.’

‘Oh! Yes please.’

Her immediate enthusiasm made me want to smile. ‘Are you very fond of them, then?’

‘I’ve never had them. But I don’t suppose they’ll have them in Greece, will they? So it would be a waste not to try now.’

We had them, and some beer, and talked. The clams were a success, and while we talked I watched her – trying to feel what she was, what stuff she was made of and how I could use it. She
had the most extraordinary dignity: at least I couldn’t figure it out alongside her extreme lack of sophistication – her English schoolgirl appearance (except when she had been wearing
that black dress, I suddenly remembered) – her funny, prim way of expressing herself, and her admitted inexperience in any field I knew about anyway. It wasn’t exactly self-confidence
– she was shy except when she was alone with you and even then you had to be careful – it was more as though she was collected – all in one piece – no acts, no
exaggerations, no trying to make out she was different: she didn’t get in the way of whatever she was talking about. I asked her if she had wanted to be a secretary who travelled – she
said she never thought about it – it had just happened. ‘If my uncle hadn’t taken me to the party where I met Mrs Joyce, I don’t suppose I would be a secretary who
travelled.’