The Sea Change (26 page)

She seemed so pleased at this that I could not help smiling back: ‘You sound as though you have been very busy. Did you get a picture for your father?’

‘I have sent him a postcard: it’s
wonderful
here – I can’t possibly thank you enough for bringing me. Shall I get out your pleated silk dress – the one that
screws up like rope? that won’t be in the least crushed, and it is still hot.’

‘That would be a good idea: thank you.’ I lay and watched while she unpacked my smaller case: whenever I was alone with her, I felt utterly disarmed into a liking that was almost
protective. She was simply a nice child – she could almost have been my daughter – excepting that she was not physically how I imagined Sarah would have become. Sarah had had Em’s
heavy-lidded eyes and the same curling mouth, and her hair had been dark, but otherwise she had been too young to tell: she might have become anything. This girl had a restful quality which was
graceful beside her extreme youth. She could have been drawn by Holbein, I thought – she has that well-bred homespun appearance which he would have translated into beauty. She was unwinding
my sea green dress – stroking the fine pleats and laying it on Em’s bed. She saw me watching her and said: ‘It
is
beautiful – like pale green pearls.’

It was. ‘I get them in Venice: there is one man who makes them there, although you’re supposed to be able to buy them in New York.’

‘It is such astonishing silk. It really would go through the eye of a needle, like the princess’s shifts.’

‘So it would. Is the gold belt there?’

‘Yes; and the shoes – everything. Would you like a bath run, or do you want a shower?’

‘I’d like a bath. You’re spoiling me, Alberta: I’m not an invalid and you are not meant to wait on me.’

‘I really like to do what you need. Shall I go now, or wait and talk to you when you’ve had your bath?’

‘Stay and talk to me. I’ll be quick – I want a cool one.’

The dress, which was just a pleated tent from neck to hem, drawn in at the waist by a gold belt, was much prettier than I remembered – I’d only worn it once when it was new –
and Alberta admired it deeply. She watched me doing my face with such solemn interest that I wanted to laugh, until she said: ‘I hope you don’t mind: there has been next to no
opportunity for me to learn anything like this. Do you think my dress will do for this exotic evening?’

She was wearing a brown check gingham, square necked and sleeveless. She was watching me looking at it and said anxiously: ‘I took the sleeves out in New York, because my aunt can only
make the wrong kind, but perhaps you can see that there
have
been sleeves?’

‘What about the white embroidered cotton we got in New York? Wouldn’t you like to wear that?’

‘Of course. How extraordinary! I’d forgotten its existence. Events in my life have changed scale so much. I’ll go and change.’

‘If you come back, I’ll show you how to do your eyes.’

‘
Will
you? Oh thank you. I have not had the courage to try and do them. I’ll be very quick.’

When she came back and I had sat her at the dressing table, I said: ‘Tell me something. What do you mean – events in your life have changed scale?’

‘Well at home nothing very much happened – a new dress would be a tremendous event: the whole family would notice it. Now, so much is happening that a new dress seems a very small
size of event. You know – it’s the difference between leading a Jane Austen life and a Tolstoy one.’

‘But some things stay the same size whatever happens, don’t they?’ I was thinking of Sarah.

‘Perhaps they should,’ she answered after a moment; ‘but I haven’t got far enough to make them: I’m too variable for my liking.’ She brushed away at her
eyelashes in silence and then went on: ‘I don’t mean what one
thinks
, exactly,’ she frowned: ‘Not the size or importance one thinks something should have in
one’s life: I mean what one
feels or knows it is
– all the time – it’s difficult to keep that the same.’ She put down the mascara brush I had given her.
‘Except my father: I was thinking of him. I don’t think anything changes how he is to me. I’m not at all good at this: that’s one eye – what do you think?’

‘That’s quite enough – do the other one.’

‘I wanted it to show: and it does, doesn’t it?’

‘Most alluring.’ She looked pleased and brushed away at her other eye until I said: ‘Was your father always more important to you than your mother?’

‘Yes. My mother died, you see, when Serena was born. Of course, it was like having a kind of earthquake in one’s life: afterwards, everything seemed changed – but my father
kept some bits of it the same by not changing himself.’

‘If he loved your mother very much, that must have been a difficult thing to do.’

‘I think it was
very
difficult,’ she said with emphasis, and I noticed that her voice was trembling. Because I found myself badly wanting to know, I asked: ‘Did you find
it helped to pray?’ I could not help remembering my bitter failure in this direction. The question did not seem to surprise her and she looked clearly at me in the glass.

‘Not much: the trouble is that I can’t pray – I don’t know how to. I ask and thank for things sometimes, but that isn’t the point, is it?’

‘What does your father say about that?’

‘Oh – he says that hardly anybody does know. He says it is a difficult thing to do; one hasn’t a hope of beginning until one knows one can’t, and most people think of it
as a method of getting something; it’s nice of them to pray and they ought to get something back – anything from peace of mind to some useful object. They think prayer is
for
them
, that’s the trouble: that’s some of what he says, but of course he says it much better.’

‘But what
is
prayer for? Did he tell you that?’

‘Of course I asked him: he said: “What is air for?” I said: “To breathe,” and he said: “Well, try thinking of prayer as another breath of another life”
– that was all he said about it.’ She looked up at me again in the glass and was silent for a moment before saying: ‘I am so sorry that you lost your daughter.’

She said it so quietly, that my face, which had begun to stiffen with its habit of rejection (nobody could possibly know how much I cared – all casual pity is an insult) became calm and I
felt at ease with her speaking of Sarah.

When she smiled at me and said: ‘Will I do?’ I took a handkerchief and evened up the corners of her eyes and we went down to the bar.

Everything went well that evening. For the first time, we seemed all to have achieved the right degrees of intimacy, but our composition had also a freshness, and the place, so old, so new to
us, gave us a kind of dream-like gaiety in its evening presence. Evening in Athens: the air is dry and tender; people loiter steadily – not going anywhere – simply content with existing
along a street: the cafés are like hives – their interiors violently lit, with customers bunched at tables on the pavements and waiters like worker bees scurrying darkly in and out. We
drive to Phaleron, past dusty squares where people drink orange soda under shrill strings of lights threaded through the tired trees: down one long narrow street which had at its end and above us
the Acropolis, radiant in the full dress of flood-lighting – out on to a wide highway where one notices chiefly the evening sky with land dark below it pollinated with lights. We turn on to a
road which has the harbour on our left – the waters have still a dull sheen on them from the sun – like golden oil. There are a few boats anchored and an air of gentle desertion, but to
our right, cafés, booths, restaurants are strung out with irregular bursts of cheap savage light and violent music. As we climb, the curve of Phaleron is below us to our left; pretty, laid
out with beady lights like a doll’s bay which blots out as we plunge into the quiet town above it. Our taxi takes us down to the waterfront and leaves us and we stand in the road where he has
put us, a little dazed, the scene is so full to the brim of the water’s edge where everybody is eating under canvas awnings and strings of white lights. The food is rushed to them across the
road (full of cars, and spectators) from the cafés, which are almost empty, except for a few old men drinking and thinking alone at large bare tables. The harbour is full of yachts and
little boats anchored in rows – some brilliantly lit – others as quiet and dark as a bird on a nest. We smile vaguely at each other – we are not yet in this scene which is so
chocked with gaiety and pleasure: Em takes my arm and Jimmy Alberta’s, and we walk slowly round the curve to choose where we will eat. It is difficult to choose; the restaurants are not all
the same, but we do not understand their differences. Finally we go to one which has a table right on the water – a Greek family are leaving it and we sit round their silted coffee cups to
find ourselves staring into the despairing eyes of a very old man in a rowing boat. He wants to take us somewhere, but Em tells him that we don’t want to go, and like a disillusioned old dog
he understands Em’s tone of voice – he waits for us not to change our minds and then rows painfully away. We drink
ouzo
, and poor Alberta doesn’t like it, but there are
beautiful black olives and long glasses of iced water and slices of bread.

A child has come up to Em – she might be about eight or nine, and she is carrying a huge basket in which there are tiny bunches of white flowers. She stands very close to Em without
actually touching him, and thrusts a spindly bunch before us: it is jasmine: she says something in a small, hoarse throaty voice. She is not pretty, but her face has a finesse and pride, so that
even her begging – her single gesture and one speech – have a kind of casual distinction. Em buys two bunches from her – she does not smile, but accepts his money impassively and
glides away. Each flower of the jasmine has been pulled off and fastened with cotton to a stiff stem: the effect is exotic and enchanting and our table is clouded with their night scent. We eat a
great deal – fish and rice, and there is resinated wine which we all, in varying degrees, dislike, and baclava and very good Turkish coffee and the most fiery brandy: the stars come out and a
ripe moon. More children come round with baskets and bundles of nuts and sweets and flowers – we cannot buy from all of them, but they all seem to have an ageless detachment from our
responses – we buy or we do not buy – either event may occur. At our feet are elegant, desperate cats who eat anything they find with sibilant speed – pieces of bread, the heads
and tails of prawns, grains of rice – anything. Our talk has been pleasant, easy, small – the size suited to our remembering all the other aspects of this evening. In the end we manage
to pay our bill and find our taxi in the road (he has found where we were eating) and drive back to Athens. We say goodnight to the others and go to our room and I throw myself on to my bed.

‘Are you tired now?’ I notice how often he looks anxious: how if I think of an expression of his it would be anxiety.

‘No – I am just delighted with my evening. Are you glad we came here, darling?’

‘If
you
are glad, I am.’

‘Oh – more than that, surely?’

He sat down and lit a cigarette. ‘Yes, I am. It is the people here that I like – they are different, and it is a good difference.’

‘Different from whom?’

‘I was thinking of other countries that we have visited. We have looked at buildings and pictures and sculpture, and it has been rather like going to see a woman because she comes of a
good family and dresses well, and because she is old and poor, she’ll see
you
as long as you give dinner and anything else you can spare. You have to care very much about blue blood
and good clothes to do it – there is an exchange, but it is a dull one. But these people don’t feel to me sold out in that same degree. I don’t feel that they are struggling to be
comfortable at all costs; to keep up classic or baroque appearances – they have some separate, present pride in themselves, and this makes them less divorced from their heritage.’ He
was silent for a minute, and then said abruptly: ‘I felt this very much at the Acropolis.’

‘Tell me about it: what was it like up there?’

He smiled: ‘I can’t: fortunately there don’t seem to be words for its appearance. But I sat on a stone in the sun for a while, and I had suddenly the feeling of life without
time: that these temples were building always – that their whole was implicit in each part of them, that they were never completed, never begun, and never abandoned. It was something to do
with the people I had been seeing all the afternoon. Touch the place in them, and they would come up the hill with stone and rope and chisels, and be building under the sun.’ He waited a
moment, and then said: ‘Always.’

‘Like the child with these?’ I held up my jasmine.

He nodded: ‘Do you want water for them?’

‘It would be no good.’ I showed him how the bunch was made. ‘Em. Tell me about the house on the island.’

‘It is a house in a village – not the main harbour, but near it. It has two terraces and its own well. But – we do not know whether it is empty or not. There is somebody called
Aristo
phánes
who arranges the letting of it and has the keys. We have to disembark and find him.’

‘Supposing it is let?’

‘Sam says that Aristo
phánes
will find us another house: there are also two hotels. Sam was in the house for a month in May, and said that it was one of the nicest
there.’

‘
If
we get it.’

‘I think we will get it: I might not have run into Sam after all. He’s leaving for Paris tomorrow.’

‘Is he having a show there?’

‘He wouldn’t say.’

‘How was he?’

‘Very gay and shaky: bad.’ He got up. ‘Darling – you must take offyour beautiful dress; we have a very early call tomorrow.’

By the time I had taken off my earrings and my gold sandals and cleaned my face, he was in bed. It was a long while since we had shared a room and the speed with which he put on or took off his
clothes struck me again with a kind of affectionate irritation. He looked at me over the sheet, and grinned: ‘I’ve cleaned my teeth as well.’