The Sea (4 page)

The Cedars has retained hardly anything of the past, of the part of the past that I knew here. I had hoped for something definite of the Graces, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, a faded photo, say, forgotten in a drawer, a lock of hair, or even a hair-pin, lodged between the floorboards, but there was nothing, nothing like that. No remembered atmosphere, either, to speak of. I suppose so many of the living passing through—it is a lodging house, after all—have worn away all traces of the dead.

How wildly the wind blows today, thumping its big soft ineffectual fists on the window panes. This is just the kind of autumn weather, tempestuous and clear, that I have always loved. I find the autumn stimulating, as spring is supposed to be for others. Autumn is the time to work, I am at one with Pushkin on that. Oh, yes, Alexandr and I, Octobrists both. A general costiveness has set in, however, most unPushkinian, and I cannot work. But I keep to my table, pushing the paragraphs about like the counters in a game I no longer know how to play. The table is a small spindly affair with an undependable flap, which Miss V. carried up here herself and presented to me with a certain shy intentionality.
Creak, little wood thing, creak.
There is my sea-captain’s swivel chair too, just like the one I used to have in some rented place where we lived years ago, Anna and I, it even groans in the same way when I lean back in it. The work I am supposed to be engaged in is a monograph on Bonnard, a modest project in which I have been mired for more years than I care to compute. A very great painter, in my estimation, about whom, as I long ago came to realise, I have nothing of any originality to say. Brides-in-the-Bath, Anna used to call him, with a cackle.
Bonnard, Bonn’art
,
Bon’nargue.
No, I cannot work, only doodle like this.

Anyway, work is not the word I would apply to what I do. Work is too large a term, too serious. Workers work. The great ones work. As for us middling men, there is no word sufficiently modest that yet will be adequate to describe what we do and how we do it. Dabble I do not accept. It is amateurs who dabble, while we, the class or genus of which I speak, are nothing if not professional. Wallpaper manufacturers such as Vuillard and Maurice Denis were every bit as diligent—there is another key word—as their friend Bonnard, but diligence is not, is never, enough. We are not skivers, we are not lazy. In fact, we are frenetically energetic, in spasms, but we are free, fatally free, of what might be called the curse of perpetuance. We finish things, while for the real worker, as the poet Valéry, I believe it was, pronounced, there is no finishing a work, only the abandoning of it. A nice vignette has Bonnard at the Musée du Luxembourg with a friend, it was Vuillard, indeed, if I am not mistaken, whom he sets to distracting the museum guard while he whips out his paint-box and reworks a patch of a picture of his own that had been hanging there for years. The true workers all die in a fidget of frustration. So much to do, and so much left undone!

Ouch. There is that pricking sensation again. I cannot help wondering if it might presage something serious. Anna’s first signs were of the subtlest. I have become quite the expert in matters medical this past year, not surprisingly. For instance I know that pins-and-needles in the extremities is one of the early symptoms of multiple sclerosis. This sensation I have is like pins-and-needles, only more so. It is a burning jab, or series of jabs, in my arm, or in the back of my neck, or once, even, memorably, on the upper side of the knuckle of my right big toe, which sent me hopping on one leg about the room uttering piteous moos of distress. The pain, or smart, though brief, is often severe. It is as if I were being tested for vital signs; for signs of feeling; for signs of life.

Anna used to laugh at me for my hypochondriacal ways.
Doctor Max,
she would call me.
How is Doctor Max today, is he feeling poorly?
She was right, of course, I have always been a moaner, fussing over every slightest twinge or ache.

There is that robin, it flies down from somewhere every afternoon and perches on the holly bush beside the garden shed. I notice it favours doing things by threes, hopping from a top twig to a lower and then a lower again where it stops and whistles thrice its sharp, assertive note. All creatures have their habits. Now from the other side of the garden a neighbour’s piebald cat comes creeping, soft-stepping pard. Watch out, birdie. That grass needs cutting, once more will suffice, for this year. I should offer to do it. The thought occurs and at once there I am, in shirt-sleeves and concertina trousers, stumbling sweat-stained behind the mower, grass-haulms in my mouth and the flies buzzing about my head. Odd, how often I see myself like this these days, at a distance, being someone else and doing things that only someone else would do. Mow the lawn, indeed. The shed, although tumbledown, is really rather handsome when looked at with a sympathetic eye, the wood of it weathered to a silky, silvery grey, like the handle of a well-worn implement, a spade, say, or a trusty axe. Old Brides-in-the-Bath would have caught that texture exactly, the quiet sheen and shimmer of it.
Doodle deedle dee.

Claire, my daughter, has written to ask how I am faring. Not well, I regret to say, bright Clarinda, not well at all. She does not telephone because I have warned her I will take no calls, even from her. Not that there are any calls, since I told no one save her where I was going. What age is she now, twenty-something, I am not sure. She is very bright, quite the blue-stocking. Not beautiful, however, I admitted that to myself long ago. I cannot pretend this is not a disappointment, for I had hoped that she would be another Anna. She is too tall and stark, her rusty hair is coarse and untameable and stands out around her freckled face in an unbecoming manner, and when she smiles she shows her upper gums, glistening and whitely pink. With those spindly legs and big bum, that hair, the long neck especially—that is something at least she has of her mother—she always makes me think, shamefacedly, of Tenniel’s drawing of Alice when she has taken a nibble from the magic mushroom. Yet she is brave and makes the best of herself and of the world. She has the rueful, grimly humorous, clomping way to her that is common to so many ungainly girls. If she were to arrive here now she would come sweeping in and plump herself down on my sofa and thrust her clasped hands so far down between her knees the knuckles would almost touch the floor, and purse her lips and inflate her cheeks and say
Poh!
and launch into a litany of the comic mishaps she has suffered since last we saw each other. Dear Claire, my sweet girl.

She accompanied me when I came down here to Ballyless for the first time, after that dream, the dream I had of walking homeward in the snow. I think she was worried I might be bent on drowning myself. She must not know what a coward I am. The journey down reminded me a little of the old days, for she and I were always fond of a jaunt. When she was a child and could not sleep at night—from the start she was an insomniac, just like her Daddy—I would bundle her in a blanket into the car and drive her along the coast road for miles beside the darkling sea, crooning whatever songs I knew any of the words of, which far from putting her to sleep made her clap her hands in not altogether derisory delight and cry for more. One time, later on, we even went on a motoring holiday together, just the two of us, but it was a mistake, she was an adolescent by then and grew rapidly bored with vineyards and chateaux and my company, and nagged at me stridently without let-up until I gave in and brought her home early. The trip down here turned out to be not much better.

It was a sumptuous, oh, truly a sumptuous autumn day, all Byzantine coppers and golds under a Tiepolo sky of enamelled blue, the countryside all fixed and glassy, seeming not so much itself as its own reflection in the still surface of a lake. It was the kind of day on which, latterly, the sun for me is the world’s fat eye looking on in rich enjoyment as I writhe in my misery. Claire was wearing a big coat of dun-coloured suede which in the warmth of the car gave off a faint but unmistakable fleshy stink which distressed me, although I made no complaint. I have always suffered from what I think must be an overly acute awareness of the mingled aromas that emanate from the human concourse. Or perhaps suffer is the wrong word. I like, for instance, the brownish odour of women’s hair when it is in need of washing. My daughter, a fastidious spinster—alas, I am convinced she will never marry—usually has no smell at all, that I can detect. That is another of the numerous ways in which she differs from her mother, whose feral reek, for me the stewy fragrance of life itself, and which the strongest perfume could not quite suppress, was the thing that first drew me to her, all those years ago. My hands now, eerily, have a trace of the same smell, her smell, I cannot rid them of it, wring them though I may. In her last months she smelt, at her best, of the pharmacopoeia.

When we arrived I marvelled to see how much of the village as I remembered it was still here, if only for eyes that knew where to look, mine, that is. It was like encountering an old flame behind whose features thickened by age the slender lineaments that a former self so loved can still be clearly discerned. We passed the deserted railway station and came bowling over the little bridge—still intact, still in place!—my stomach at the crest doing that remembered sudden upward float and fall, and there it all was before me, the hill road, and the beach at the bottom, and the sea. I did not stop at the house but only slowed as we went by. There are moments when the past has a force so strong it seems one might be annihilated by it.

“That was it!” I said to Claire excitedly. “The Cedars!” On the way down I had told her all, or almost all, about the Graces. “That was where they stayed.”

She turned back in her seat to look.

“Why did you not stop?” she said.

What was I to answer? That I was overcome by a crippling shyness suddenly, here in the midst of the lost world? I drove on, and turned on to Strand Road. The Strand Café was gone, its place taken by a large, squat and remarkably ugly house. Here were the two hotels, smaller and shabbier, of course, than in my memory of them, the Golf sporting importantly a rather grandiose flag on its roof. Even from inside the car we could hear the palms on the lawn in front dreamily clacking their dry fronds, a sound that on purple summer nights long ago had seemed to promise all of Araby. Now under the bronzen sunlight of the October afternoon—the shadows were lengthening already—everything had a quaintly faded look, as if it were all a series of pictures from old postcards. Myler’s pub-postoffice-grocery had swelled into a gaudy superstore with a paved parking area in front. I recalled how on a deserted, silent, sun-dazed afternoon half a century ago there had sidled up to me on the gravelled patch outside Myler’s a small and harmless-seeming dog which when I put out my hand to it bared its teeth in what I mistakenly took to be an ingratiating grin and bit me on the wrist with an astonishingly swift snap of its jaws and then ran off, sniggering, or so it seemed to me; and how when I came home my mother scolded me bitterly for my foolishness in offering my hand to the brute and sent me, all on my own, to the village doctor who, elegant and urbane, stuck a perfunctory plaster over the rather pretty, purplish swelling on my wrist and then bade me take off all my clothes and sit on his knee so that, with a wonderfully pale, plump and surely manicured hand pressed warmly against my lower abdomen, he might demonstrate to me the proper way to breathe. “Let the stomach swell instead of drawing it in, you see?” he said softly, purringly, the warmth of his big bland face beating against my ear.

Claire gave a colourless laugh. “Which left the more lasting mark,” she asked, “the dog’s teeth or the doctor’s paw?”

I showed her my wrist where in the skin over the ulnar styloid are still to be seen the faint remaining scars from the pair of puncture marks made there by the canine’s canines.

“It was not Capri,” I said, “and Doctor French was not Tiberius.”

In truth I have only fond memories of that day. I can still recall the aroma of after-lunch coffee on the doctor’s breath and the fishy swivel of his housekeeper’s eye as she saw me to the front door.

Claire and I arrived at the Field.

In fact it is a field no longer but a dreary holiday estate packed higgledy-piggledy with what are bound to be jerrybuilt bungalows, designed I suspect by the same cackhanded line-drawer who was responsible for the eyesores at the bottom of the garden here. However, I was pleased to note that the name given to the place, ersatz though it be, is The Lupins, and that the builder, for I presume it was the builder, even spared a tall stand of this modest wild shrub—
Lupinus,
a genus of the Papilionaceae, I have just looked it up—beside the ridiculously grand mock-gothic gateway that leads in from the road. It was under the lupin bushes that my father every other week, at darkest midnight, with spade and flashlight, muttering curses under his breath, would dig a hole in the soft sandy earth and bury the bucketful of slops from our chemical lavatory. I can never smell the weak but oddly anthropic perfume of those blossoms without seeming to catch behind it a lingering sweet whiff of nightsoil.

“Are you not going to stop at all?” Claire said. “I’m starting to feel car-sick.”

As the years go on I have the illusion that my daughter is catching up on me in age and that by now we are almost contemporaries. It is probably the consequence of having such a clever child—had she persisted she would have made a far finer scholar than I could ever have hoped to be. Also she understands me to a degree that is disturbing and will not indulge my foibles and excesses as others do who know me less and therefore fear me more. But I am bereaved and wounded and require indulging. If there is a long version of shrift, then that is what I am in need of.
Let me alone,
I cried at her in my mind,
let
me creep past the traduced old Cedars, past the vanished Strand Café, past the
Lupins and the Field that was, past all this past, for if I stop I shall surely
dissolve in a shaming puddle of tears.
Meekly, however, I halted the car at the side of the road and she got out in a vexed silence and slammed the door behind her as if she were delivering me a box on the ear. What had I done to annoy her so? There are times when she is as wilfully moody as her mother.