The Sea Change (30 page)

We go slowly down to the bay. The path is steep and rough, and by now it is very hot – the mainland quivers over the glistening sea – the engines of the daily boat – like a
crescendo of heat – can be heard even before she can be seen: it is delicious to feel sweat pricking out all over my skin with the sea so near. The last bit has no path – we simply
scramble down with stones rattling ahead of us; they sound shrill and pretentious beside the huge boulders, and some of them even fall into the gentle water waving at our feet. The rocks are so hot
that one can hardly walk on them. Jimmy slings our wine bottle into the sea and we float melons in a pool we have made. Jimmy and Alberta swim off with the goggles: Em stays and smokes with me. He
is browning more easily than any of us; has never bothered with oil or sunburn, but he still looks tired. I wonder about his new play – whether it is worrying him; but somehow, here, I have
learned not to ask about it. We watch the other two until they have swum out of sight round the coast: then, on the third morning, I said: ‘Wouldn’t you like to join the young? Because
I am quite happy in the sun until I have my bathe,’ and he said: ‘No, no; they’re better as they are: I haven’t their capacity for swimming – started far too late in
life.’ After a moment he said: ‘Did you notice at what point in your life you began referring to the young?’

‘No.’

He said: ‘For quite a long time during middle age, the young simply seem to be getting younger – and then there suddenly comes a day when you look at them and see that really
they’re at least thirty-five and still much younger than you, and then you see what that makes you.’

‘Darling, how
morose
. Jimmy’s not so very young, he always seems to be one of us. It’s the girl who is.’

He heaved a sigh and looked mournfully at me. I said: ‘After all,
I’m
younger than you, and you count me as the same age.’

‘When really I am an exceptionally old man?’

‘Not
old
. Late middle-aged.’

‘Late middle-aged,’ he repeated: ‘how perfectly beastly.’

‘Very wise and experienced, of course. And attractive, and successful.’

‘Distinguished is the word.’ He said it with such distaste that it made me laugh. We lay in silence: I was soaking up sun, and not thinking about anything we’d said, but when I
got up to bathe, I saw that he was staring into some distance beyond the rock a few feet away.

‘What is it?’

‘I was just wondering what the hell I’d
done
with all my time.’

I was sitting with my foot poised above the green bewitching water with the memory of when I had first done this fresh in me. I smiled consolingly – I still felt detached and protective.
Poor Em – worrying away in this beautiful place. ‘Never mind, darling – you’ve got lots more time.’ And seeing his face, I added: Well, at least you’ve got time
to do one splendid thing. What more could you want?’

‘What more indeed?’ He had turned so that I could not see his face because of the sun. Just then, the others returned, and I wanted to try the goggles. Em made Jimmy go with me as it
made him nervous if I was alone and he swam like an old-fashioned frog, he said, which was quite true. Jimmy took me to see a charming fish who lived in a particular crack in the rock with his head
sticking out to watch everything that was going on; then I saw a sponge and he tried to dive for it, but it was too far down: then we found a ledge in the cliff large enough to rest on and we sat
and talked. Jimmy adores looking under water – I’ve never known him so enthusiastic about anything. He wants to try with an aqualung and talks earnestly about the possibilities of
learning until he suddenly remembers, and turns impulsively to me.

‘It’s too bad you can’t do that when you’d love it so.’

‘I don’t even want to, Jimmy. I did want to bathe, and that is being so lovely that I am quite content.’

‘You look it. You look marvellous. Do you know, you’ve been looking lately like you were when I first knew you?’

‘Have I? Was that a good way to look?’

‘It was. You feel good as well, don’t you?’

I nearly told him then about my foot in the water, but something warned me to keep that to myself. Instead, I said: ‘I feel like a battery being recharged – more and more energy
every day.’

‘That’s fine.’

‘The only thing is I don’t know what to do with it.’

‘Do with it? Why, enjoy yourself, I guess.’

‘But I
am
– and it’s simply making more energy.’

‘Well, that’s fine.’

‘No Jimmy, you don’t understand. If I could write plays, I could write one now. If I was an actress, I could act. If I was a politician I could fight an election, if I was
Alberta’s age I could fall in love. At the moment I could do so much of anything that I was. The only difficulty is that I don’t think I’m anything – in that sense.
There’s no need here to do more than exist – like a plant or a fish.’

He didn’t say anything for a moment but I knew from his face he was thinking. Eventually, he said slowly: ‘It’s how I think of you, Lillian – not doing anything
particular, but just being someone. It’s like casting a play and that’s the role I see you in. Of course you have to be right – you can’t just be
anyone
, but if you
were right, you could just be Lillian.’

‘Is that what you feel women are
for
?’ I was teasing him and he didn’t like it, as he said: ‘I don’t know. I don’t express myself very well –
that’s clearer to me every morning. Come on, let’s go back and eat.’

We wetted our masks before putting them on, and as we did it, I realized that usually I would have asked him what he meant, but that I seemed to have lost some of my aimless curiosity; wondered
why, and almost laughed. We smiled at each other before setting off and I patted his shoulder. When we got back I found Em gay and peaceful – he and Alberta had unpacked the lunch and were
drinking wine. We talked about English picnics, and Em said they were nothing but sand and gooseflesh, and Alberta suddenly said that all her best picnics had been far too hot – and Em said
surely not too hot – in
Dorset
? And she said yes, because they’d had them in the boiler house that worked the central heating for the church.

‘It was a very old boiler and used too much fuel to be run all the winter, but when it was on, everything steamed with heat and Papa said it was injurious to the church and to people, so
whenever it was on we had picnics in the boiler house in order to make the most of it. The fumes were awful, they made Serena cough and none of us wanted to eat much, but Clem said it provided us
with a touch of evil so we all did it.’

‘Why, were you forbidden to go there?’

‘Not exactly, but soon after Clem had asked about it, Papa put “Strictly out of Bounds—Private – Dangerous” on the door in red ink and that made it worth
while.’

I knew by his questions that Em was amused, and I remembered how he used to question me, wanting endless details about my childhood, and how much more vivid and desirable a great deal of my
youth had seemed when I talked to him about it. I had always thought of his asking about it because he was interested in me, now it occurred to me that he had simply been fascinated by an age of
life that he had missed.

‘Surely, Em, you’re not going to have a lot of children in your next play?’

‘It had not occurred to me. Why?’ He looked both startled and reserved.

‘I thought you were collecting data.’ Nobody said anything so I went on: ‘They’re always ghastly – awful mincing little creatures – not children at all
although everybody pretends they are.’

‘Well, I promise not to put one in any play,’ he said, and lay back with his eyes shut.

Alberta and Jimmy began packing up lunch, and I wondered why I spend so much time talking and thinking about things I disliked, and whether I did this more than other people and whether they had
always noticed it.

We climb very slowly back to our house – Jimmy and Em ahead with our baskets, and Alberta with me. Halfway up the rock I come upon a few cyclamen growing out of a
crevice. They are pale pink, about four inches high, and the flowers are perfectly to scale with their height. I show them to Alberta, who kneels beside them with a cry of delight.

‘They are wild,’ I say; ‘wild cyclamen.’

We both look at them: they are calm and delicate and sweet, and they make me smile with pleasure at finding them, but when I look at Alberta, her eyes have filled with tears. She touches one
flower as though it is precious or imaginary, and says: ‘I had always thought of them as tremendously looked after, in pots and greenhouses . . .’ and I remember feeling just as she is
now when I first found some gentians; the same joy at my miraculous discovery of something that has always been there to be found – that’s half the miracle – but I do not tell her
this because these are her cyclamen. Instead, I ask her whether she wants to pick them? She says no, she doesn’t want to, and I remember that I picked my gentians and they wilted before I got
them home.

On the coast path we pass a young man – he wears faded cotton trousers and a torn cotton shirt and he is carrying a stick with a string of tiny birds slung to it and a long, thin,
archaic-looking gun. We greet him as we have learned to do; he replies, and there are the two shades of our being women, but foreigners, in his voice. I say: ‘I don’t think I should
like being a woman here,’ and Alberta thinks that although it would be different, it would be quite all right. I tell her what Aristophánes has told us – about the woman having
to provide the house and all its contents for the marriage, which meant that if a man had too many daughters, the younger ones would have little chance of marrying until they were about forty if at
all. The man had only to bring his virility to the match, and he was hardly dependent upon his father for that. Alberta says, well, in a way he was, and we agree that Greek fathers had to be strong
in every sense. And after all, she points out the moment the man had married, he had to start providing for his daughters – so it came to much the same thing in the end. I wonder what the
little birds were, and she says they are quail. We plan to search for them in a port restaurant that evening. ‘How did you know they were quail? Do you know about birds?’

‘No. A little boy told me. He speaks English and Greek and I met him in the Post Office.’

‘What is he like?

‘A prodigy,’ she answered seriously. ‘He said he would take me for a short adventure if I liked, if I would discuss some interesting subject with him while we were on
it.’

‘What does he consider interesting?’

‘He said he would give me a list of topics when we met and I could choose from it. He is compiling it today.’

We have passed the place where I have rested before – our house is in sight . . .

Afternoon . . . I lie alone on the hard bed with all the shutters closed excepting those on the small shady window behind my head: from it there come occasional movements of air smelling of hot
fig leaves. The room is very bare and simple; there are curious pieces of stone and rock lying on the window ledges and the chest of drawers to hold down the linen mats which are the only
concession to essential detail. Somebody must have collected them, having once found them curious? beautiful? and then perhaps bought the mats to provide a use for their collection. I lie on a
sheet – it is too hot for covering of any kind – I am like a larger stone on more linen; my limbs are heavy with sun and exercise – sinking into a rock-like immobility of sleep I
am not even a plant or a fish. Fragments of what Jimmy said circle lazily in my mind looking for the roost of my conclusions about them. Looking as I used to look – my energy – my just
being Lillian – what did that mean? I try to remember being her, and suddenly, the one time is quite easy because I had been so intensely aware of it then . . .

I was twenty-four; it was December, and I was staying with my uncle and aunt in Norfolk – supposedly for Christmas, but really no term had been set for my visit because nobody knew what to
do with me. My parents had left me enough money to provide me with an education as protracted as it was useless; my aunt had eventually presented me, and I had spent a long hectic summer eating
cold salmon and strawberries to the seasonal accompaniment of horses, boats, tennis balls, dance bands, and fresh-faced young men who had just changed their size in collars and whose conversation
would have read very like an engagement book with a narrow column for remarks. Although nothing was actually said about it there was a tacit admission between my aunt and myself that my season had
not been a success. It was known, for instance, that I had been dubbed delicate and brainy, and my only conquest had been an extremely dissolute old peer called Sandlewood who had pinched my thigh
most painfully and asked me to go to Majorca with him.

In Norfolk, my cousins shot duck and geese and hunted, whilst I, debarred from these pursuits by ill health and indifference, went for sodden, solitary walks, wondering sometimes, with a kind of
numb hysteria, what was to become of me. I had one secret from everyone: I had met the playwright Emmanuel Joyce – twice: once at a party, and once when he had taken me out to lunch and then
to Kew Gardens for the afternoon. On both occasions I had been dazzléd – aware that I had never met anyone like him, and that there was a different taste to both these times from any
that I had had with anyone else. At the end of the afternoon at Kew he had taken me back to the house in Lowndes Square where I had been staying, and said that he hoped to see me again, soon, and
gone. Months later, I plodded across frozen ploughed fields remembering Kew at the height of the summer – recalling what he had said and how he had looked when he had said it –
wondering whether I had said too much or too little (curiously, I could remember none of my replies to his questions and confidences) for I had heard no more of him and no longer expected to do so.
But unwittingly he had opened the world a little to me by showing me something beyond the familiar element that I knew – like being shown the sea for the first time: one is conscious of the
end of land and the beginning, but not the end of something new. He had represented change, creation, experience, and freedom to me, and I knew that if I never saw him again, this would still be
true: so I hoarded these two meetings as my secret treasure, to be recaptured and examined again and again in private. I lived on this and on Matthew Arnold whose poetry touched some melancholy
yearning spring in me. The rest of the time I drifted in the domestic, communal vacuum; large regular meals, violent exercise, amusements made up of repetition and some play on any particular
character’s idiosyncrasy of the ‘Keep still, Sally, there’s a spider on you’ variety; round games, dancing to the gramophone, everybody changing their clothes, getting
bathed and fed, having fun, doing things all together every day, every evening . . . until this particular evening when the telephone rang as usual at half past six, and as usual Sally leapt to her
feet, tripped over the setter Moll, and dashed away. Sally was in love and spent twenty minutes on the telephone talking to her young man every evening except at weekends when he came down. But she
returned round eyed with curiosity and amazement. ‘It’s a personal call from
Stockholm
for
Lillian
’ – as though she didn’t know which surprised her most,
and an extraordinary feeling – like an electric shock – ran through me. It must be he, but of course it could not be – nobody else I knew could possibly be in Stockholm; but he
did not even know my address in the country. I reached the telephone room and shut the door carefully behind me. If it was he I was right, I had known it was the moment Sally came back; if it was
someone else of course I was right, he could never have traced my telephone number – would not want to, had forgotten me.