The Sea Change (43 page)

Julius stood in the doorway, and it struck him as an interesting piece of order that he should arrive just then – not a few minutes earlier, and not much later when, alone, he might have
succumbed to bitterness at the difficulties ahead. Julius said: ‘Your caique is arranged – it will cost you five hundred drachs. It leaves at somewhere after half past eleven tonight; I
have come to an arrangement with my parents whereby I am enabled to see you off. Are you in favour of vengeance?’

‘I don’t know.’ He felt truthful and startled.

‘It is very much done here: of course it is dull compared with the old days.’

‘What was it like then?’

‘Oh – embroidered cloaks stiff with poison and poisoned wine and swords and things – poisons were generally fashionable, but I don’t think people are very well up in them
any more. I have been told you write plays: it must make that much more difficult. No wonder,’ he added kindly.

He did not feel equal to being unfavourably compared with Euripides, so he said: ‘It really is kind of you to have made all the arrangements for us: there is one more thing. Do you think
when you go back to the port you could arrange a donkey or two for us for the luggage?’

His face fell, but he simply said: What time?’

‘I thought about nine. Then we’ll lock up here and come in and perhaps you would have dinner with us at about half past at whatever restaurant you think the best. Could you do
that?’ His eyes shone and he gave a little hop, but he said solemnly: ‘I should be charmed and delighted and – charmed. I’ll meet you at Janni’s at twenty past
nine.’ Then he moved closer and said in a piercing whisper: ‘I have paid for that kitten myself as a parting present for her. It will be a surprise to cheer her up: we might have a
discussion on English literature at dinner, mightn’t we?’

‘We easily might.’

He gave a shout of joy and chanted: ‘Alternative subjects – astronomy, history of civilizations, or whether it is necessary to get to the moon. The donkeys will come.’ And he
went.

He folded up Mrs Friedmann’s letter and put it carefully away – he felt that one way and another he was going to need it.

By the time she appeared he had finished Lillian’s packing and was sitting on the terrace. She walked slowly across the terrace towards him rolling up the sleeves of a faded shirt that he
remembered had once belonged to Lillian: he looked at her face – she was a little flushed from her sleep but her eyes had not changed – they had still the distant look of strain about
them which made them too large and dark. ‘Would you like to have one last bathe?’ he said: ‘All the plans have been excellently made by Julius, and we are dining with him at nine
thirty.’

‘What about the packing?’

‘It is all done excepting yours and whatever I have forgotten. We have plenty of time. Where is your kitten?’

‘It has gone to sleep in my hat.’ She stood aimlessly by the parapet. ‘It is still very hot. Perhaps it would be a good idea to bathe.’

They walked in silence down to the bay where they had always bathed: he found that he was intensely aware of his surroundings; of the late afternoon sun turning amber on the rocks – the
sea below them streaked with dark purple patches – the hot, somehow antique smell from the land – but he felt that she was simply following him – she hardly knew where she was.
They had all taken to getting up in their bathing things so she unbuttoned her shirt, pulled carelessly, at the zip on her skirt, stepped out of it and moved towards the water. He said:
‘Please wait for me,’ he was afraid that she would swim miles away, and he was too poor a swimmer to be any help if she needed it. She sat down on the rock with her feet in the water
and waited, without answering. When she saw he was ready she slipped in and he followed her. The water was marvellous after all the sweat of the day, and for a few minutes he simply floated and let
it wash him, and looked up at the sky, and when he looked he saw that she was swimming furiously to the point where Jimmy and she used to go with the goggles, and, worrying about her, he started
laboriously to follow. When he was less than half way there, he saw that she had climbed on to a ledge and was sitting with her back to him looking out to sea. He had not swum to this point before,
and it took him a long time; he was out of breath and exhausted by the time he reached her. He clutched the sharp edge of the rock and painfully hoisted himself out of the water, but she did not
turn round.

‘Phew!’ he said, feeling nervous and absurd; ‘that’s the longest swim I’ve done here.’

She didn’t answer for a bit, and then said: ‘I’m sorry – but I haven’t got anything at all to say. I think I’ll go in now,’ jumped off the rock and swam
away.

He watched her go; he was too tired to swim back at once – and she was swimming back to the beach anyway. The sleep had slackened the hold she had over herself and it was the first time
she had had to wake with her father’s death. He knew about this from seeing Lillian struggle with it, but it had caught her unawares. He watched her land and put her towel round her –
he could almost see her tenseness from here: he had to get her over this bit of it. ‘My poor darling,’ he thought, and it was a simple thought, charged only with gentleness.

The swim back seemed interminable: he tried to take it slowly and easily – but in the end it just became a matter of getting there somehow. He climbed out at last and sat gasping on the
rock feeling too weak to reach his towel. She had dressed and was drying her hair.

‘Throw me my towel, like a kind girl,’ he said. ‘I’m not built for swimming and I’m far too old to learn now. Did your father like swimming?’

She stopped towelling her hair, and said: ‘He never had much time for it. Besides the water is awfully cold at our nearest bit of sea.’

‘Women are supposed to be much better at it than men: especially indoor men like me. Although I don’t suppose he had rickets as a child as I did.’

She said: ‘I don’t think so,’ in a muffled voice and tried to go on with her hair.

He continued to talk and to dress as though he was completely unaware of her. ‘Do you remember when you first told me about your father? It was on the aeroplane going to New York: you told
me all kinds of things that he had said to you, and instead of that being irritating or dull, you made me feel what a delightful man he was.’

She had stopped even trying to dry her hair – her head was bent so that he couldn’t see her face, but she was shaking from head to foot. He got up, drew his belt round him and moved
closer to her before sitting again.

‘I was thinking how difficult it was for you to have this shock without having him to help you about it. I was wondering – if this doesn’t sound too strange to you – what
as the person who has always helped you most he would say if you told him that your father, whom you loved, had suddenly died. I was thinking that if you could manage to separate these two things
at
all
– it might make a difference. What do you think about that?’

She looked up at last – her face white again – a tumult of misery and recognition: he said again very gently: ‘What do you think?’ and held out his arms . . .

He held her in silence through the worst of it – until he felt her beginning to return from her abandon – to come out of her maze of grief; then when she was quieter and beginning to
be aware of him, he pushed her hair out of her eyes and mopped her face with her towel – with an intentional clumsiness so that she smiled like watery sunlight and sat up. When he had found
her a handkerchief, she said: ‘If one loves somebody very much indeed – it is difficult to be impersonal about them, isn’t it?’

‘Very.’

She blew her nose again. ‘You know what you said about trying to separate the two things?’

‘Yes?’

‘Well – I agree with it. It is just that I was finding it very difficult to do.’

‘Easier now?’

She nodded. ‘I just needed to cry for him once.’

‘You may need to again: you are very young, dear Sarah; you have a great deal ahead.’

She looked at him uncertainly.

‘I mean – cry because you love him – don’t feel too bitterly deprived.’ That’s enough of that, he thought, and got to his feet.

On the way back to the house the thoughts that he had held her in his arms and that tomorrow she would be on her way back to England occurred with random wildness – he couldn’t stop
them occurring, but he found it possible to jerk his attention to something else: it would be easier when there was some distance to them: when he had to say ‘last week, last month, two years
ago’.

When she had packed, she joined him on the terrace: she was carrying the kitten – squirming with appreciation – in her arms. Her tears seemed somehow to have cleansed and simplified
her face: she was beautiful after them – her eyelids swollen and smooth as cream, her eyes clear as washed slate, her mouth and forehead gentle with the tensions gone. She had changed into a
dark blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up – there was a white stripe on her wrist where her watch had been.

‘It has slept all the afternoon. It seems so fond of me that I cannot help reciprocating. Do you think it will mind awfully being returned to its guttersnipe life?’

‘Well give it another enormous dinner anyway’; he did not want to spoil Julius’s surprise. He had brought out the large wicker-covered jar which was still half full of wine,
and now he handed her a glass.

‘We might as well drink until the donkey man arrives.’

‘And watch our last sun set.’

‘Yes.’ He wondered painfully what that meant to her. ‘You have not got your watch on.’

‘I’m going to give it to Julius. It is the only thing I can think of that he would like. I’ve put it in a box – the one that had my evening bag you gave me in
it.’

‘Isn’t that far too big a box for a watch?’

‘Yes, but I’ve wrapped it in a good many fig leaves, so it doesn’t rattle. It’s not a very girlish watch. Do you think he will like it?’

‘He is sure to. Sarah!’

She pushed the kitten down into her lap and looked up.

‘Shall you be going to New York, do you think?’

‘Have you both decided that you want me?’

‘We have both decided that we want you.’ He smiled to ease the words for himself. ‘But I may not be able to come over with you as I have things to do in England. You may have
to go with Jimmy; will that be all right for you?’

‘Would you come and see the play in the end?’

‘Oh yes, I expect so. But Jimmy would look after you: or will your family need you at home?’

‘I think my family will need me to earn some money more than anything else.’

‘Jimmy would look after you,’ he repeated, pressing the point.

She blushed a little, and said: ‘I know.’ She was silent for a moment, and then added suddenly: ‘He even said he’d
marry
me in order to look after me better in New
York.’

‘What did you say to that?’

She spread out her hands. ‘Well – nothing – except thanking him. He asked me in the sort of way you advise people to go to your dentist, because he’s so much better than
the one they’ve got.’

‘I don’t suppose he felt like that, at all. He hasn’t got much confidence in people liking him, unless he feels he’s useful to them. That is probably my fault.’
Then, suddenly, he told her about the girl in the country – the whole story, with all its truthful uncertainties: including the search he had made, for years, but too casually, for Jimmy: how
he had thought when finally he discovered him and sent for him in London that he would be sure when he saw him, and hadn’t been – had never been sure, and had therefore (therefore? he
wondered) never told Jimmy. He considered nothing but the truth while he was telling it, not even his own motives for telling it to her, but at the end he was conscious of some lightening of this
particular weight on him, and looked nervously to see whether it had transferred to her. But she, who had listened quietly making no sound or sign, now looked back at him with an impersonal
friendliness and said: ‘I should think anybody would be glad to know that you might have been their father.’

‘You mean you think I should have told him?’

She hesitated: ‘I don’t know whether you
should
have. I meant only that he might be glad to be told.’

They watched the clouds like a veiled chorus, gather and turn iris in a sky flushed to cloth of gold by the brilliant sun which suffused as it sank and left streaks of greens and pinks –
both tender and piercing like a lament, in the air – the sea like burnished steel – the land mysteriously shadowed – and the air turning to velvet, sparked with stars and the
yellow domestic lights.

‘Would
you
tell him for me?’ he asked after a long and companionable silence.

‘Don’t you want to do that yourself?’

‘I – no, no I don’t. Unless you think I must?’

‘The truth, you see,’ he said a minute later: ‘I should find that peculiarly difficult with him after all these years.’ He looked at her almost pleadingly: ‘If
I
knew precisely one way or the other whether he was my son it would be different. As it is I am afraid of simply kicking up a lot of dust about his mother – and also, it is my fault
that I don’t know, of course.’

She said: ‘Yes – I will tell him when the right moment comes. If you trust me.’

‘I would be very grateful to you.’

‘So am I to you. Does it seem to you a very long time since this morning?’

‘A very long time.’

‘And tonight this house will be as though we were never in it.’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘shall we have left no mark?’

He felt her looking at him gravely in the dusk: ‘I very much doubt it. It may have marked us, but I don’t think we have marked it: its time is too long.’

They heard the delicate, hesitant tapping of a mule or donkey’s feet on the stone outside. ‘This is the end of being really alone with her,’ he thought: ‘even the boat
won’t be quite like this: this is an end.’ He got to his feet: ‘How are you going to manage the kitten?’

‘In a sling round my neck. It is the most adaptable creature. It made a very neat mess in a flower pot in my room.’