The Sea Change (3 page)

He smiled then, in a finished sort of way which made him look incongruously pathetic. ‘Oh, I think she did take it. I wondered why you thought so.’

‘She
is
going to be all right, isn’t she?’

‘She should be all right. They’ll be pumping it all out of her now, and then I shall go and have another look at her. The point is, Mr . . .’

‘Sullivan.’

‘Sullivan, that people don’t do that sort of thing without what seems to them, at least, good reason. And, as you know, whatever the reason, it is an offence to do that sort of
thing. Is there any chance that she can have taken it by mistake?’

‘I don’t know. She
could
have, I suppose – ’ I left that straw in the air where it belonged.

‘Was she attached to Mr Joyce?’

‘Well – I think she admired him. You know, he always seems a glamorous employer – the theatre, and so on, and all the publicity . . .’ I took the plunge –
‘and while we’re on that subject, it may seem callous to you, but it’s part of my job to stop anything like this getting a press. Not that anything like this has ever happened
before, of course.’

‘Of course,’ he agreed. He almost seemed faintly, not unkindly, amused. ‘Who found her, and when?’

‘Mrs Joyce. It must have been about five minutes before we called you.’

‘About twenty past twelve. Where did Mrs Joyce find her?’

‘Upstairs. She went up to her bedroom because the lights were on, and that’s when she found her.’

‘On the bed?’

For some idiotic reason, I just nodded.

‘What about her relatives? Have you got their names and addresses? The hospital will want them, tonight, if possible.’

‘She lives with a sister. I can find the address.’

I had just done this, when Emmanuel came into the room. He walked straight over to the drinks table, poured and drank another brandy. Then he turned and faced us: his eyes were bright, and he
looked unnaturally fresh.

‘Give Doctor Gordon another drink, Jimmy.’ He looked amiably at us, but there was a kind of defiance about him which I knew and distrusted. ‘Well, now, where have we got to?
Have you got Gloria out of the bath yet?’

He noted the doctor and me – he positively revelled in our reactions before, in an intentionally flat voice, he said: ‘I’m sure that Jimmy hasn’t made the situation clear
to you, doctor. He is under the impression that he has to protect me – annihilate at least one dimension of mine. We found this young woman in the bath having taken all the available sherry
and phenobarbitone, because she fancied herself – and very possibly she was – madly in love with me, and having had an affair with her as short as it was unsatisfactory, I was
abandoning her. I was not, you see, at any time in love with her. These discrepancies occur – particularly if one is irresponsible and unscrupulous; they are probably inevitable, but one
doesn’t anticipate them. If anticipation is the thief of experience, every now and then one needs an experience – even if one is just ticking over because of the repetition.’

I knew it all. The way that he could be explicit and pompous, give anybody the other side of the picture with such a devastating honesty that it was the only side they would see. They would end
up hating him with all the good reasons for doing so that he had handed them on a plate. He was making for the drink again.

‘Emmanuel: you’re drunk now, and you’ll be hell if you drink any more. We’re not amused: have some nice lime juice and lay off talking for a while.’

He stood where I had stopped him, clapping his hands gently together: the doctor, who at least had a kind of hardy convention which was soothing, made a dry noise in his throat and suggested
visiting Mrs Joyce upstairs.

‘I am sure she would be enchanted to see you,’ said Emmanuel graciously.

I started up with the doctor (I was fairly certain that even if it occurred to him, Emmanuel would not make it), and by the time I got down again, he had pinched another drink.

‘I was wondering where your courage’ – his voice rose – ‘your fidelity . . . Jimmy, why don’t you find me sooner and tell me to stop whatever it is . .
.’

‘Drinking?’

He made a shambling, helpless gesture with his hand. ‘Further back.’

‘I wasn’t born far enough back.’

‘My fault again.’ He leaned forward. ‘Jimmy – don’t you ever want a life of your own?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve thought about it, and I don’t.’

There was an unpeaceful silence edged by the rise and fall of Lillian’s voice upstairs.

‘Do you know how old I am?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘you’re sixty-one.’

‘Sixty-two, sixty-two,’ he reiterated more easily.

‘According to the files, you won’t be sixty-two until the nineteenth of September.’

He glared at me. ‘I’m like a century. I like to think ahead.’

The doctor came down, said that Mrs Joyce was all right; he’d given her a sedative and she was going to sleep. He’d ring up in the morning and he’d be getting along now.

When he’d gone, Emmanuel looked up hopefully and said: ‘Jimmy. Let’s go
out
to drink. Let’s find a nice bar where our feet don’t reach the ground from the
start, and everybody but us is drunk.’

‘You can’t,’ I said; ‘wrong country; you can’t drink all night here. Let’s get some sleep.’

He took no notice of this. ‘Why
don’t
you want a life of your own? A private life? You’re young enough.’

‘I have yours,’ I said gently: he was beginning to look as though he was made of glass, or paper.

‘She was so beautiful. She wore a blue cotton dress: it was old, and it had faded on the tops of her shoulders in the sun. Her hair was a real brown, and her skin smelled of fruit and the
tops of her arms were round. We lay in a chalk hollow on the Downs by the sea, and the air was streaming with poppies over our heads, and the blue air was brittle with larks. I asked her questions
and she answered – she never told me anything more than I asked. She filled me to the brim and never slopped anything over. She had the most complete smile I’ve ever seen in my life.
That was one fine day.’

He took his head out of his hands and said: ‘Jimmy: now I must have one more drink.’

‘We’ll have one each.’ I got up to get them and he said: ‘I’ve told you all that before, haven’t I? It is one of the things I tell you, isn’t
it?’

‘Yes; you’ve told me before.’ The odd thing was that in one sense he’d never told me. The feeling was the same; but the settings, and even, perhaps, the girl, would be
different each time. I’d heard about it in a pub – all plush and frosted glass, and they were sharing a bag of hot potato chips with a fog outside; another one was on top of an open
tram with a tearing sky above them; she was wearing his raincoat and the wind made her hair come down. No – the girl wasn’t different, I suppose: he’d simply pick out different
aspects of her – her fingers eating the chips – her eyes looking up at the sky – her neck before her hair came down over it. Once it had been a snowy morning at the Zoo, and once
a lake and a rowing boat on a September afternoon, with leaves dropping silently on to the water round them burying her reflection. I knew it was the same time in his life: and the more times that
he told me, the more sure I was that there had only been one time. There was a kind of pure joy about the way he remembered her, and a kind of pure grief at the end of his memory. If I’d
asked her name, he would have given her a dozen names, but it was the same girl, and each time he told me he added another occasion to that one time. He only told me when he was drunk, anyway, and
I don’t think he told anyone else.

On the stairs he stumbled, and clutched my arm to steady himself. He stood for a moment clutching me, and then said – much too loudly:

He’d gone a bit green by then.

‘We mustn’t wake Lillian,’ I said hopelessly, and he earnestly agreed.

At the bathroom he looked at me as though I hardly knew him and said: ‘Jimmy, if you want the bathroom, use it now, because I shall have to be sick.’ He gave me the harassed
embarrassed smile he usually reserves for actresses he can’t remember, and added: ‘My heart always goes to my stomach.’

Later, after I had made sure that he finally got to bed, I fell on to my own, but I couldn’t relax. The others could sleep one way or another; it was I who was left twisting and turning
over the practical problems – soothing myself with the might have been much worse formula. But if I thought much about that, it stopped me cold. Supposing she
had
been given the
phenobarbitone by somebody? Not by Emmanuel; he might hit anyone if he got angry fast enough, but he’d never poison them. Not by me – I was all for a quiet life. That left Lillian. She
was mad about drugs; she’d probably think that phenobarbitone was a nice quiet death for Gloria. Of course, she
hadn’t
had anything to do with it, but I was tired enough, and
resentful enough and sorry for myself – all the usual reactionary crap – to consider the responsibility with brutal calmness. It was I, after all, who would have to pack up this
particular set of Emmanuel’s troubles – all he had to do was to smile; and Lillian could lie on her back racked with nostalgia and the mitral valve in her heart . . .

2

LILLIAN

I
HAVE
woken up in so many bedrooms that now I concentrate upon the shape of my body before the shape of the room. There are
three kinds of waking for me. One is like being cast from some smooth deep water on to a rocky shore; I am aground and wake with the same shock – the day is hard and slippery under my eyelids
and my bones ache from years of wrecking. There is a kind when I move like a ship mooring so unobtrusively to the day that memory of my last dream is not crushed; I come so meekly alongside reality
that I can scarcely believe that I have arrived. And there is a third kind – when I seem slowly, imperceptibly to discover myself lying in warm sand, and the water is creeping down my body,
leaving it bleached in a delicious lassitude. This last kind is the best, but I only have it now after sleeping-pills, and they won’t always let me have them. This is the time when I am
devoted to myself; before I have made any false move of the day: when I can imagine actually wanting to eat breakfast; and then dressing – putting on for the first time a pair of simple, but
exquisitely made shoes, and a scarf of some ravishing colour that I’ve never worn: spending the morning with somebody younger, not very happy, who really needs me to be gay and gentle with
them; having an exciting lunch with somebody I have never met before; in the afternoon buying wonderful shirts for Em, and some windcheater or windjammer or whatever they’re called, for Jimmy
(he adores tough sporting clothes although he’d never see the daylight if he could help it); racing back to give everything to them while we have heavenly English tea; Em asking me about some
character in his play – the one he hasn’t even started writing yet – but he and Jimmy look so kind and secretive that I know that something lovely is going to happen to me, and
when they can’t bear it any longer they – no Jimmy – goes and gets it, and gives it to Em to give to me . . . a wicker basket and inside it is a golden labrador puppy that I have
wanted more than anything else and that Em has never let me have because of the quarantine and he gets asthma with dogs – but he’s changed about it entirely, and he chose this puppy
especially for me . . .

I am back where I seemed to have begun; the last time that I had a puppy – on my fourteenth birthday, at Wilde, in 1925. That was my last real bedroom and I can remember it best with my
eyes shut. I can remember all of that day with its currents of pleasure, its peaks of excitement: I think that it is the only day that I remember which has nothing in it that I want to forget or
have forgotten. It was the first time that I had ever had an animal entirely of my own; it was the last birthday before I was ill; it was the first time that I stayed up to dinner (bronze silk
stockings and my christening present jewellery – changed like the grown-ups); it was the last autumn we spent at Wilde, and the whole day had a most lingering beauty which I didn’t know
that I noticed at the time, but now I can’t say the word autumn without remembering it; it was the first time that I thought about the future – ‘for ever and ever’ –
‘the rest of my life’; it was the last time that I accepted my parents as the puppy accepted me. After that day, everything seemed to swoop and pounce and happen too fast; as though I
was running breathlessly behind my life – shrieking with the need to choose – out of earshot – in a frantic slipstream of the events which rocketed on before me; a paper chase of
examination papers I couldn’t pass, prescriptions to stop a pain I couldn’t describe, the death certificates of my father and mother – in the same boat for the first time in their
lives, and drowned, the catalogue of books and furniture, of pictures, of silver and glass and the auction of Wilde; a picture lying on a railway carriage seat – Em looking intelligent and
disastrous and so fascinating that although someone had wrapped a sandwich in the newspaper, I picked it up and remembered how horrible my family had always been about Jews . . . Marrying Em
– papers, papers, papers. I nearly caught up with the chase then; seemed to reach something, but he only stopped a little while to admire the view of me, and then flew on: my heart was
affected – I couldn’t keep up – I gasped and pounded and had always the weak angry sensation that he could fly; for him, at least, there was no uneven ground. He streamed away,
above and ahead of me, scattering a new trail of paper – of plays, opinions, letters, cuttings, invitations, and tickets, tickets – for theatres, for boats, for trains and aeroplanes;
‘I’ll go on ahead by plane; you follow by boat in comfort.’ In comfort! I seemed always to be in mid-ocean, in the dark, cut off – from the remains of my family who never
approved of my marriage, the combination of somebody who was half Jewish and wholly an artist exceeding the wildest bounds of their worst imagination (they concentrated as hopelessly on his origins
as I on his destinations) – cut off from Em to the point where I seemed only to discover him through secondhand sources; through reading his plays – through the people he worked with
and swung towards with the sudden irascible illumination of a lighthouse – through the newspapers who fired rumours and accounts of his more violent, scandalous doings which lit up his
behaviour to me like starshell. And then, for two years, Sarah – but she dies – in such hideous evil agony that I wanted to kill her. I sat with her for seventeen hours, until her small
mechanical shrieks ran out and her head was still: then there were telegrams. Hatred; murder; and a great fear of God: I wanted the doctor’s children to be like Sarah; I wanted everyone I
knew to suffer for her – to nail them to her pain which they would not stop: I wanted to brand them with the senseless wicked cruelty which had been done to my little, beautiful, dear Sarah.
I had been weeping – imploring them to do something – to stop it, and when they had done nothing and it was stopped, I tried to kill one of the nurses. At least I struck out at her and
wanted her to be dead. Then Em took me away for nearly a year. We travelled, but he was with me all the time – with such patience for my bitterness that in the end my heart, which seemed so
hard and intolerably heavy, suddenly opened, and a great weight of grief gushed out: the exquisite relief, the weakness; the sinking into a single merciful sorrow – that Sarah was dead
– it was almost like bleeding to death. It was then that Em gave me transfusion after transfusion of his love; seemed to pour all his life into me – all his creation into my comfort
– gave me every breath of his compassion. At first I couldn’t say anything about her; then from the morning when he held my head and for the first time since before she died I could
weep and say again and again ‘I’m so sorry that Sarah is dead: I’m so sorry that she is dead’, I couldn’t stop talking about her. Then he mourned with me, and
gradually he made of it a natural grief – not monstrous, but life-size – until he had taught me to live with her death. He said that her dying was an innocent business: that there was
nobody to hate or to forgive for her death – that it had not the terror and dirt about it which there must always be when people were responsible to one another for such things . . .