The Sea (10 page)

Throughout that expectant, heat-hazed summer I seemed to have been breathing off the shallowest top of my lungs, like a diver poised on the highest board above that tiny square of blue so impossibly far below. Now Anna had called up to me ringingly to
jump, jump!
Today, when only the lower orders and what remains of the gentry bother to marry, and everyone else takes a partner, as if life were a dance, or a business venture, it is perhaps hard to appreciate how vertiginous a leap it was back then to plight one's troth. I had plunged into the louche world of Anna and her father as if into another medium, a fantastical one wherein the rules as I had known them up to then did not apply, where everything shimmered and nothing was real, or was real but looked fake, like that platter of perfect fruit in Charlie's flat. Now I was being invited to become a denizen of these excitingly alien deeps. What Anna proposed to me, there in the dusty summer dusk on the corner of Sloane Street, was not so much marriage as the chance to fulfil the fantasy of myself. The wedding party was held under a striped marquee in the mansion's unexpectedly spacious back garden. It was one of the last days of that summer's heat-wave, the air, like scratched glass, crazed by glinting sunlight. Throughout the afternoon long gleaming motor cars kept pulling up outside and depositing yet more guests, heron-like ladies in big hats and girls in white lipstick and white leather knee-high boots, raffish pinstriped gents, delicate young men who pouted and smoked pot, and lesser, indeterminate types, Charlie's business associates, sleek, watchful and unsmiling, in shiny suits and shirts with different-coloured collars and sharp-toed ankle-boots with elasticated sides. Charlie bounced about amongst them all, his blued pate agleam, pride pouring off him like sweat. Late in the day a huddle of warm-eyed, slow-moving, shy plump men in headdresses and spotless white djellabas arrived in our midst like a flock of doves. Later still a dumpy dowager in a hat got stridently drunk and fell down and had to be carried away in the arms of her stone-jawed chauffeur. As the light thickened

in the trees and the shadow of the next-door house began to close over the garden like a trapdoor, and the last drunken couples in their clown-bright clothes were shuffling around the makeshift wooden dance floor one last time with their heads fallen on each other's shoulders and their eyes shut and eyelids fluttering, Anna and I stood on the tattered edges of it all, and a dark burst of starlings out of nowhere flew low over the marquee, their wings making a clatter that was like a sudden round of applause, exuberant and sarcastic.

Her hair. Suddenly I am thinking of her hair, the long dark lustrous coil of it falling away from her forehead in a sideways sweep. Even in her middle age there was hardly a strand of grey in it. We were driving home from the hospital one day when she lifted a length of it from her shoulder and held it close to her eyes and examined it strand by strand, frowning.

"Is there a bird called a baldicoot?" she asked.

"There is a bandicoot," I said cautiously, "but I don't think it's a bird. Why?"

"Apparently I shall be as bald as a coot in a month or two."

"Who told you that?"

"A woman in the hospital who was having treatment, the kind I am to have. She was quite bald, so I suppose she would know." For a while she watched the houses and the shops progressing past the car window in that stealthily indifferent way that they do, and then turned to me again. "But what is a coot?"

"That's a bird."

"Ah." She chuckled. "I'll be the spitting image of Charlie when it has all fallen out." She was.

He died, old Charlie, of a blood clot in the brain, a few months after we were married. Anna got all his money. There was not as much of it as I would have expected, but still, there was a lot.

The odd thing, one of the odd things, about my passion for Mrs. Grace is that it fizzled out almost in the same moment that it achieved what might be considered its apotheosis. It all happened on the afternoon of the picnic. By then we were going about everywhere together, Chloe and Myles and I. How proud I was to be seen with them, these divinities, for I thought of course that they were the gods, so different were they from anyone I had hitherto known. My former friends in the Field, where I no longer played, were resentful of my desertion. "He spends all his time now with his grand new friends," I heard my mother one day telling one of their mothers. "The boy, you know," she added in an undertone, "is a dummy." To me she wondered why I did not petition the Graces to adopt me. "I won't mind," she said. "Get you out from under my feet." And she gave me a level look, harsh and unblinking, the same look she would often turn on me after my father had gone, as if to say,
I suppose you will be
the next to betray me.
As I suppose I was.

My parents had not met Mr. and Mrs. Grace, nor would they. People in a proper house did not mix with people from the chalets, and we would not expect to mix with them. We did not drink gin, or have people down for the weekend, or leave touring maps of France insouciantly on show in the back windows of our motor cars—few in the Field even had a motor car. The social structure of our summer world was as fixed and hard of climbing as a ziggurat. The few families who owned holiday homes were at the top, then came those who could afford to put up at hotels—the Beach was more desirable than the Golf—then there were the house renters, and then us. All-the-year-rounders did not figure in this hierarchy; villagers in general, such as Duignan the dairyman or deaf Colfer the golf-ball collector, or the two Protestant spinsters at the Ivy Lodge, or the French woman who ran the tennis courts and was said to copulate regularly with her alsatian dog, all these were a class apart, their presence no more than the blurred background to our intenser, sun-shone-upon doings. That I had managed to scramble from the base of those steep social steps all the way up to the level of the Graces seemed, like my secret passion for Connie Grace, a token of specialness, of being the one chosen among so many of the unelect. The gods had singled me out for their favour.

The picnic. We went that afternoon in Mr. Grace's racy motor car far down the Burrow, all the way to where the paved road ended. A note of the voluptuous had been struck immediately by the feel of the stippled leather of the seat cover sticking to the backs of my thighs below my shorts. Mrs. Grace sat beside her husband in front, half turned toward him, an elbow resting on the back of her seat so that I had a
view
of her armpit, excitingly stubbled, and even caught now and then, when the breeze from the open window veered my way, a whiff of her sweatdampened flesh's civet scent. She was wearing a garment which I believe even in those demurer days was called, with graphic frankness, a halter top, no more than a strapless white woollen tube, very tight, and very revealing of the curves of her bosom's heavy undersides. She had on her film star's sunglasses with the white frames and was smoking a fat cigarette. It excited me to watch as she took a deep drag and let her mouth hang open crookedly for a moment, a rich curl of smoke suspended motionless between those waxily glistening scarlet lips. Her fingernails too were painted a bright sanguineous red. I was seated directly behind her in the back seat, with Chloe in the middle between Myles and me. Chloe's hot, bony thigh was pressed negligently against my leg. Brother and sister were engaged in one of their private wordless contests, tussling and squirming, plucking at each other with pincer fingers and trying to kick each other's shins in the cramped space between the seats. I never could make out the rules of these games, if rules there were, although a winner always emerged in the end, Chloe, most often. I recall, with even now a faint stirring of pity for poor Myles, the first time I witnessed them playing in this way, or fighting, more like. It was a wet afternoon and we were trapped indoors at the Cedars. What savagery a rainy day could bring out in us children! The twins were sitting on the living room floor, on their heels, facing each other, knee to knee, glaring into each other's eyes, their fingers interlocked, swaying and straining, intent as a pair of battling samurai, until at last something happened, I did not see what it was, although it was decisive, and Myles all at once was forced to surrender. Snatching his fingers from her steely claws he threw his arms around himself—he was a great clutcher of the injured or insulted self—and began to cry, in frustration and rage, emitting a high, strangled whine, his lower lip clamped over the upper and his eyes squeezed shut and spurting big, shapeless tears, the whole effect too dramatic to be entirely convincing. And what a gloatingly feline look victorious Chloe gave me over her shoulder, her face unpleasantly pinched and an eye-tooth glinting. Now, in the car, she won again, doing something to Myles's wrist that made him squeal. "Oh, do stop, you two," their mother said wearily, barely giving them a glance. Chloe, still grinning thinly in triumph, pressed her hip harder against my leg, while Myles grimaced, making a pursed O of his lips, this time holding back his tears, but barely, and chafing his reddened wrist. At the end of the road Mr. Grace stopped the car, and the hamper with its sandwiches and tea cups and bottles of wine was lifted from the boot and we set off to walk along a broad track of hard sand marked by an immemorial half-submerged rusted barbed-wire fence. I had never liked, even feared a little, this wild reach of marsh and mud flats where everything seemed turned away from the land, looking off desperately toward the horizon as if in mute search for a sign of rescue. The mud shone blue as a new bruise, and there were stands of bulrushes, and forgotten marker buoys tethered to slimed-over rotting wooden posts. High tide here was never more than inches deep, the water racing in over the flats swift and shiny as mercury, stopping at nothing. Mr. Grace scampered ahead bandily, a folding chair clutched under each arm and that comical bucket hat tilted over his ear. We rounded the point and saw across the strait the town humped on its hill, a toy-like lavender jumble of planes and angles surmounted by a spire. Seeming to know where he was going Mr. Grace struck off from the track into a meadow thronged with great tall ferns. We followed, Mrs. Grace, Chloe, Myles, me. The ferns were as high as my head. Mr. Grace was waiting for us on a grassy bank at the edge of the meadow, under an umbrella pine. Unnoticed, a shattered fern stalk had gouged a furrow in my bare ankle above the side of my sandal. On a patch of grass between the low grassy bank and the wall of ferns a white cloth was spread. Mrs. Grace, kneeling, a cigarette clamped in a corner of her mouth and one eye shut against the smoke, laid out the picnic things, while her husband, his hat falling further askew, struggled to draw a resistant wine cork. Myles was already off among the ferns. Chloe sat froglike on her haunches, eating an egg sandwich. Rose— where is Rose? She is there, in her scarlet shirt and dancing pumps and dancer's tight black pants with the straps that go under the soles of her feet, and her hair black as a crow's wing tied in a plume behind her fine-boned head. But how did she get here? She had not been in the car with us. A bicycle, yes, I see a bicycle asprawl in abandon among the ferns, handlebars turned sideways and its front wheel jutting up at a somehow unseemly angle, a sly prefiguring, as it seems now, of what was to come. Mr. Grace clamped the wine bottle between his knees and strained and strained, his earlobes turning red. Behind me Rose sat down at one corner of the tablecloth, leaning on a braced arm, her cheek almost resting on her shoulder, her legs folded off to the side, in a pose that should have been awkward but was not. I could hear Myles running in the ferns. Suddenly the cork came out of the wine bottle with a comical pop that startled us all. We ate our picnic. Myles was pretending to be a wild beast and kept running in from the ferns and snatching handfuls of food and loping off again, hooting and whinnying. Mr. and Mrs. Grace drank their wine and presently Mr. Grace was opening another bottle, this time with less difficulty. Rose said she was not hungry but Mrs. Grace said that was nonsense and commanded her to eat and Mr, Grace, grinning, offered her a banana. The afternoon was breezy under an as yet unclouded sky. The crooked pine soughed above us, and there was a smell of pine needles, and of grass and crushed ferns, and the salt tang of the sea. Rose sulked, I supposed because of Mrs. Grace's rebuke and Mr. Grace's offer of that lewd banana. Chloe was engrossed in picking at the stipples of a ruby cicatrice just below her elbow where the previous day a thorn had scratched her. I examined the fern-wound on my ankle, an angry pink groove between translucent deckle edges of whitish skin; it had not bled but in the deeps of the groove a clear ichor glinted. Mr. Grace sat slumped into himself in a folding chair with one leg crossed on the other, smoking a cigarette, his hat pulled low on his forehead, shadowing his eyes. I felt a soft small thing strike me on the cheek. Chloe had left off picking at her scabs and had thrown a breadcrumb at me. I looked at her and she looked back without expression and threw another crumb. This time she missed. I picked up the crumb from the grass and threw it back, but I missed, too. Mrs. Grace was idly watching us, reclining on her side directly in front of me on the shallow incline of the verdant bank, her head supported on a hand. She had set the stem of her wine glass in the grass with the bowl wedged at an angle against a sideways lolling breast—I wondered, as so often, if they were not sore to carry, those big twin bulbs of milky flesh—and now she licked a fingertip and ran it around the rim of the glass, trying to make it sing, but no sound came. Chloe put a pellet of bread into her mouth and wetted it with spit and took it out again and kneaded it in her fingers with slow deliberation and took leisurely aim and threw it at me, but the wad fell short. "Chloe!" her mother said, a wan reproach, and Chloe ignored her and smiled at me her cat's thin, gloating smile. She was a cruel-hearted girl, my Chloe. For her amusement of a day I would catch a handful of grasshoppers and tear off one of their back legs to prevent them escaping and put the twitching torsos in the lid of a polish tin and douse them in paraffin and set them alight. How intently, squatting with hands pressed on her knees, she would watch the unfortunate creatures as they seethed, boiling in their own fat.