The Sea (14 page)

"Look at you, poor Max," she said to me one day, "having to watch your words and be nice all the time." She was in the nursing home by then, in a room at the far end of the old wing with a corner window that looked out on a wedge of handsomely unkempt lawn and a restless and, to my eye, troubling stand of great tall blackish-green trees. The spring that she had dreaded had come and gone, and she had been too ill to mind its agitations, and now it was a damply hot, glutinous summer, the last one she would see. "What do you mean," I said, "having to be nice?" She said so many strange things nowadays, as if she were already somewhere else, beyond me, where even words had a different meaning. She moved her head on the pillow and smiled at me. Her face, worn almost to the bone, had taken on a frightful beauty. "You are not even allowed to hate me a little, any more," she said, "like you used to." She looked out at the trees a while and then turned back to me again and smiled again and patted my hand. "Don't look so worried," she said. "I hated you, too, a little. We were human beings, after all." By then the past tense was the only one she cared to employ.

"Would you like to see your room now?" Miss Vavasour enquired. Last spikes of sunlight through the bay window before us were falling like shards of glass in a burning building. The Colonel was brushing crossly at the front of his yellow waistcoat where he had spilled a splash of tea. He looked put-out. Probably he had been saying something to me and I had not been listening. Miss Vavasour led the way into the hall. I was nervous of this moment, the moment when I would have to take on the house, to put it on, as it were, like something I had worn in another, prelapsarian life, a once fashionable hat, say, an outmoded pair of shoes, or a wedding suit, smelling of mothballs and no longer fitting around the waist and too tight under the arms but bulging with memories in every pocket. The hall I did not recognise at all. It is short, narrow and ill-lit, and the walls are divided horizontally by a beaded runner and papered on their lower halves with painted-over anaglypta that looks to be a hundred years old or more. I do not recall there having been a hallway here. I thought the front door opened directly into—well, I am not sure what I thought it opened into. The kitchen? As I padded behind Miss Vavasour with my bag in my hand, like the well-mannered murderer in some old black-and-white thriller, I found that the model of the house in my head, try as it would to accommodate itself to the original, kept coming up against a stubborn resistance. Everything was slightly out of scale, all angles slightly out of true. The staircase was steeper, the landing pokier, the lavatory window looked not on to the road, as I thought it should, but back across the fields. I experienced a sense almost of panic as the real, the crassly complacent real, took hold of the things I thought I remembered and shook them into its own shape.

Something precious was dissolving and pouring away between my ringers. Yet how easily, in the end, I let it go. The past, I mean the real past, matters less than we pretend. When Miss Vavasour left me in what from now on was to be
my room
I threw my coat over a chair and sat down on the side of the bed and breathed deep the stale unlivedin air, and felt that I had been travelling for a long time, for years, and had at last arrived at the destination to where, all along, without knowing it, I had been bound, and where I must stay, it being, for now, the only possible place, the only possible refuge, for me.

My friendly robin appeared a moment ago in the garden and I suddenly realised what it was that Avril's freckles reminded me of, that day of our encounter in Duignan's yard. The bird as usual stops on its thirdmost perch in the holly bush and studies the lay of the land with a truculent, bead-bright eye. Robins are a famously fearless breed, and this one seems quite unconcerned when Tiddles from next door comes stalking through the long grass, and even gives what sounds like a sardonic cheep and ruffles up its feathers and expands its blood-orange breast, as if to demonstrate teasingly what a plump and toothsome morsel it would make, if cats could fly. Seeing the bird alight there I remembered at once, with a pang that was exactly the same size and as singular as the bird itself, the nest in the gorse bushes that was robbed. I was quite a bird enthusiast as a boy. Not the watching kind, I was never a watcher, I had no interest in spotting and tracking and classifying, all that would have been beyond me, and would have bored me, besides; no, I could hardly distinguish one species from another, and knew little and cared less about their history or habits. I could find their nests, though, that was my specialty. It was a matter of patience, alertness, quickness of eye, and something else, a capacity to be at one with the tiny creatures I was tracking to their lairs. A savant whose name for the moment I forget has posited as a refutation of something or other the assertion that it is impossible for a human being to imagine fully what it would be like to be a bat. I take his point in general, but I believe I could have given him a fair account of such creature-hood when I was young and still part animal myself.

I was not cruel, I would not kill a bird or steal its eggs, certainly not. What drove me was curiosity, the simple passion to know something of the secrets of other, alien lives.

A thing that always struck me was the contrast between nest and egg, I mean the contingency of the former, no matter how well or even beautifully it was fashioned, and the latter's completedness, its pristine fulness. Before it is a beginning an egg is an absolute end. It is the very definition of self-containment. I hated to see a broken egg, that tiny tragedy. In the instance I am thinking of I must inadvertently have led someone to the nest. It was in a clump of gorse on a slanted headland in the midst of open fields, I would easily have been spotted going to it, as I had been doing for weeks, so that the hen bird had grown used to me. What was it, thrush, blackbird? Some such largish species, anyway. Then one day I arrived and the eggs were gone. Two had been taken and the third was smashed on the ground under the bush. All that remained of it was a smear of mingled yolk and glair and a few fragments of shell, each with its stippling of tiny, dark-brown spots. I should not make too much of the moment, I am sure I was as sentimentally heartless as the next boy, but I can still see the gorse, I can smell the buttery perfume of its blossoms, I can recall the exact shade of those brown speckles, so like the ones on Avril's pallid cheeks and on the saddle of her nose. I have carried the memory of that moment through a whole half century, as if it were the emblem of something final, precious and irretrievable.

Anna leaning sideways from the hospital bed, vomiting on to the floor, her burning brow pressed in my palm, full and frail as an ostrich egg.

I am in the Strand Cafe, with Chloe, after the pictures and that memorable kiss. We sat at a plastic table drinking our favourite drink, a tall glass of fizzy orange crush with a dollop of vanilla
ice
cream floating in it. Remarkable the clarity with which, when I concentrate, I can see us there. Really, one might almost live one's life over, if only one could make a sufficient effort of recollection. Our table was near the open doorway from which a fat slab of sunlight lay fallen at our feet. Now and then a breeze from outside would wander in absent-mindedly, strewing a whisper of fine sand across the floor, or bringing with it an empty sweet-paper that advanced and stopped and advanced again, making a scraping sound. There was hardly anyone else in the place, some boys, or young men, rather, in a corner at the back playing cards, and behind the counter the proprietors wife, a large, sandy-haired, not unhandsome woman, gazing off through the doorway in a blank-eyed dream. She wore a pale-blue smock or apron with a scalloped white edging. What was her name? What was it. No, it will not come—so much for Memory's prodigious memory. Mrs. Strand, I shall call her Mrs. Strand, if she has to be called anything. She had a particular way of standing, certainly I remember that, sturdy and four-square, one freckled arm extended and a fist pressed knuckles-down on the high back of the cash-register. The ice cream and orange mixture in our glasses had a topping of sallow froth. We drank through paper straws, avoiding each other's eye in a new access of shyness. I had a sense of a general, large, soft settling, as of a sheet unfurling and falling on a bed, or a tent collapsing into the cushion of its own air. The fact of that kiss in the dark of the picture-house—I am coming to think it must have been our first kiss, after all—sat like an amazement between us, unignorably huge. Chloe had the faintest blond shadow of a moustache, I had felt its sable touch against my lip. Now my glass was almost empty and I was afraid the last of the liquid in the straw would do its embarrassing intestinal rattle. Covertly from under lowered lids I looked at Chloe's hands, one resting on the table and the other holding her glass. The fingers were fat to the first knuckle and from there tapered to the tip: her mother's hands, I realised. Mrs. Strand's wireless set was playing some song to the swoony tune of which Chloe absently hummed along. Songs were so important then, moaning of longing and loss, the very twang of what we thought was love. In the night as I lay in my bed in the chalet the melodies would come to me, a faint, brassy blaring carried on the sea breeze from the ballrooms at the Beach Hotel or the Golf, and I would think of the couples, the permed girls in brittle blues and acid greens, the quiffed young men in chunky sportscoats and shoes with inch-thick, squashy soles, circling there in the dusty, hot half-dark.
O darling lover lonesome moonlight kisses heart and soul!
And beyond all that, outside, unseen, the beach in the darkness, the sand cool on top but keeping still the day's warmth underneath, and the long lines of white waves breaking on the bias, lit from inside themselves somehow, and over everything the night, silent, secret and intent.

"That picture was stupid," Chloe said. She brought her face close to the rim of the glass, her fringe hanging free. Her hair was pale as the sunlight on the floor at her foot . . . But wait, this is wrong. This cannot have been the day of the kiss. When we left the picture-house it was evening, an evening after rain, and now it is the middle of an afternoon, hence that soft sunlight, that meandering breeze. And where is Myles? He was with us at the pictures, so where would he have gone, he who never left his sister's side unless driven from it? Really, Madam Memory, I take back all my praise, if it is Memory herself who is at work here and not some other, more fanciful muse. Chloe gave a snort. 'As if they wouldn't have known that highwayman was a woman."

I looked at her hands again. The one that had been holding the glass high up had slipped down to encircle the base, in which a spiked point of pure white light steadily burned, while the other, bending the straw to her lips delicately between a thumb and forefinger, cast a pale shadow on the table in the shape of a bird's beaked and high-plumed head. Again I thought of her mother, and this time I felt briefly something sharp and burning in my breast, as if a heated needle had touched my heart. Was it a twinge of guilt? For what would Mrs. Grace feel, what would she say, if she were to spy me here at this table ogling the mauve shading in the hollow of her daughter's cheek as she sucked up the last of her ice cream soda? But I did not really care, not deep down, deep past guilt and suchlike affects. Love, as we call it, has a fickle tendency to transfer itself, by a heartless, sidewise shift, from one bright object to a brighter, in the most inappropriate of circumstances. How many wedding days have ended with the tipsy and dyspeptic groom gazing miserably down on his brand-new bride bouncing under him on the king-size bed of the honeymoon suite and seeing her best friend's face, or the face of her prettier sister or even, heaven help us, of her sportive mother? Yes, I was falling in love with Chloe—had fallen, the thing was done already. I had that sense of anxious euphoria, of happy, helpless toppling, which the one who knows he will have to do the loving always feels, at the precipitous outset. For even at such a tender age I knew that there is always a lover and a loved, and knew which one, in this case, I would be. Those weeks with Chloe were for me a series of more or less enraptured humiliations. She accepted me as a suppliant at her shrine with disconcerting complacency. In her more distracted moods she would hardly deign to notice my presence, and even when she gave me her fullest attention there was always a flaw in it, a fleck of preoccupation, of absence. This wilful vagueness tormented and infuriated me, but worse was the possibility that it might not be willed. That she might choose to disdain me I could accept, could welcome, even, in an obscurely pleasurable way, but the thought that there were intervals when I simply faded to transparency in her gaze, no, that was not to be borne. Often when I broke in on one of her vacant silences she would give a faint start and glance quickly about, at the ceiling or into a corner of the room, anywhere but at me, in search of the source of the voice that had addressed her. Was this a heartless teasing or were these moments of blankness genuine? Galled beyond bearing I would seize her by the shoulders and shake her, demanding that she see me and only me, but she would go slack in my hands and cross her eyes and let her head waggle like a rag doll's, laughing in her throat and sounding unnervingly like Myles, and when I flung her roughly from me in disgust she would fall back on sand or sofa and lie sprawled with limbs awry and pretend to be grotesquely, grinningly, dead.

Why did I put up with her caprices, her high-handedness? I was never one to suffer slights easily, and always made sure to get my own back, even on loved ones, or on loved ones especially. My forbearance in Chloe's case was due, I believe, to a strong urge of protectiveness that I had toward her. Let me explain, it is interesting, I think it is interesting. A nice, an exquisite, tactfulness was in operation here. Since she was the one on whom I had chosen, or had been chosen, to lavish my love, she must be preserved as nearly flawless as possible, spiritually and in her actions. It was imperative that I save her from herself and her faults. The task fell to me naturally since her faults were her faults, and she could not be expected to evade their bad effects by her own volition. And not only must she be saved from these faults and their consequences for her behaviour but she must be kept from all knowledge of them, too, insofar as it was possible for me to do so. And not just her active faults. Ignorance, incapacity of insight, dull complacency, such things too must be masked, their manifestations denied. The fact for instance that she did not know that she was later in my affections than her mother, of all people, made her seem almost piteously vulnerable in my eyes. Mark, the issue was not the fact of her being a late-comer in my affections, but her ignorance of that fact. If she were somehow to find out my secret she would likely be let down in her own estimation, would think herself a fool not to have seen what I felt for her mother, and might even be tempted to feel second to her mother in having been my second choice. And that must not be. In case I should seem to be casting myself in too benevolent a light, I hasten to say that my concern and care in the matter of Chloe and her shortcomings was not for her benefit alone. Her self-esteem was of far less importance to me than my own, although the latter was dependent on the former. If her sense of herself were tainted, by doubt or feelings of foolishness or of lack of perspicacity, my regard for her would itself be tainted. So there must be no confrontations, no brutal enlightenments, no telling of terrible truths. I might shake her by the shoulders until her bones rattled, I might throw her to the ground in disgust, but I must not tell her that I had loved her mother before I loved her, that she smelled of stale biscuits, or that Joe from the Field had remarked the green tinge of her teeth. As I walked meekly behind her swaggering figure, my fond and fondly anguished gaze fixed on the blond comma of hair at the nape of her neck or the hairline cracks in the porcelain backs of her knees, I felt as if I were carrying within me a phial of the most precious and delicately combustible material. No, no sudden movements, none at all. There was another reason why she must be kept inviolate, unpolluted by too much self-knowledge or, indeed, too sharp a knowledge of me. This was her
difference.
In her I had my first experience of the absolute otherness of other people. It is not too much to say—well, it is, but I shall say it anyway—that in Chloe the world was first manifest for me as an objective entity. Not my father and mother, my teachers, other children, not Connie Grace herself, no one had yet been real in the way that Chloe was. And if she was real, so, suddenly, was I. She was I believe the true origin in me of self-consciousness. Before, there had been one thing and I was part of it, now there was me and all that was not me. But here too there is a torsion, a kink of complexity. In severing me from the world and making me realise myself in being thus severed, she expelled me from that sense of the immanence of all things, the all things that had included me, in which up to then I had dwelt, in more or less blissful ignorance. Before, I had been housed, now I was in the open, in the clearing, with no shelter in sight. I did not know that I would not get inside again, through that ever straitening gate. I never knew where I was with her, or what sort of treatment to expect at her hands, and this was, I suspect, a large part of her attraction for me, such is the quixotic nature of love. One day when we were walking along the beach at the water's edge searching after a particular kind of pink shell she needed to make a necklace she stopped suddenly and turned and, ignoring the bathers in the water and the picnickers on the sand, seized me by the shirt-front and pulled me to her and kissed me with such force that my upper lip was crushed against my front teeth and I tasted blood, and Myles, behind us, did his throaty chuckle. In a moment she had pushed me away, in high disdain, it seemed, and was walking on, frowning, her eye as before moving sharply along the waterline where the bland, packed sand greedily inhaled the outrun of each encroaching wave with a sucking sigh. I looked about anxiously. What if my mother had been there to see, or Mrs. Grace, or Rose, even? But Chloe seemed not to care. I can still recall the grainy sensation as the soft pulp of our lips was ground between our teeth. She liked to throw down dares, but was vexed when they were taken up. Early one eerily still morning, with thunder clouds on the far horizon and the sea flat and greyly lucent, I was standing before her waist-deep in the warmish wash and about to dive and swim between her legs, if she would let me, which she sometimes did. "Go on, quick," she said, narrowing her eyes, "I've just done a pee." I could not but do as she urged, aspiring little gentleman that I was. But when I surfaced again she said I was disgusting, and leaned into the water to her chin and swam slowly away.