The Sea (19 page)

Miss Vavasour came in, a moving wraith in the shadows of the twilit room. She enquired if I was warm enough, if she should light a fire. I asked her about Bun, who was she, how had they met, just for the sake of asking something. It was a while before she gave an answer, and when she did it was to a question I had not asked.

"Well, you see," she said, "Vivienne's people own this house."

"Vivienne?"

"Bun."

"Ah."

She bent to the fireplace and lifted the bunch of dried hydrangea, crackling, from the grate.

"Or perhaps it is she who owns it now," she said, "since most of her people have passed on." I said I was surprised, I had thought the house was hers. "No," she said, frowning at the brittle flowers in her hands, then looked up, almost impish, showing the tiniest tip of a tongue. "But I come with it, so to speak." Faintly from the Colonel's room we heard the crowd cheering and the commentator's excited squawks; someone had scored a goal. They must be playing in the almost dark by now. Injury time.

"And you never married?" I said.

She smiled a frugal smile at that, casting down her eyes again.

"Oh, no," she said. "I never married." She glanced at me

quickly and away. The two spots of colour on her cheekbones glowed. "Vivienne," she said, "was my friend. Bun, that is."

"Ah," I said again. What else could I say?

She is playing the piano now. Schumann,
Kinderszenen.
As if to prompt me. Strange, is it not, the way they lodge in the mind, the seemingly inconsidered things? Behind the Cedars, where a corner of the house met the tussocked lawn, under a crooked black drainpipe, there stood a water butt, long gone by now, of course. It was a wooden barrel, a real one, full-size, the staves blackened with age and the iron hoops eaten to frills by rust. The rim was nicely bevelled, and so smooth that one could hardly feel the joins between the staves; smoothly sawn, that is, and planed, but in texture the sodden grain-end of the wood there was slightly furry, or napped, rather, like the pod of a bulrush, only tougher to the touch, and chillier, and more moist. Although it must have held I do not know how many scores of gallons, it was always full almost to the brim, thanks to the frequency of rain in these parts, even, or especially, in summer. When I looked down into it the water seemed black and thick as oil. Because the barrel listed a little the surface of the water formed a fat ellipse, that trembled at the slightest breath and broke into terror-stricken ripples when a train went past. That ill-tended corner of the garden had a soft damp climate all of its own, due to the presence of the water barrel. Weeds in profusion flourished there, nettles, dock leaves, convolvulus, other things I do not know the name of, and the daylight had a greenish cast to it, particularly so in the morningtime. The water in the barrel, being rain water, was soft, or hard, one or the other, and therefore was considered good for the hair, or the scalp, or something, I do not know. And it was there one glittering sunny morning that I came upon Mrs. Grace helping Rose to wash her hair.

Memory dislikes motion, preferring to hold things still, and as with so many of these remembered scenes I see this one as a tableau. Rose stands bent forward from the waist with her hands on her knees, her hair hanging down from her face in a long black shining wedge dripping with soap suds. She is barefoot, I see her toes in the long grass, and is wearing one of those vaguely Tyrolean short-sleeved white linen blouses that were so popular at the time, full at the waist and tight at the shoulders and embroidered across the bust in an abstract pattern of red and prussian-blue stitching. The neckline is deeply scalloped and inside it I have a clear glimpse of her pendent breasts, small and spiked, like the business ends of two spinning-tops. Mrs. Grace wears a blue satin dressing gown and delicate blue slippers, bringing an incongruous breath of the boudoir into the out-of-doors. Her hair is pinned back at the ears with two tortoise-shell clasps, or slides, I think they were called. It is apparent she is not long out of bed, and in the morning light her face has a raw, roughly sculpted look. She stands in the very pose of Vermeer's maid with the milk jug, her head and her left shoulder inclined, one hand cupped under the heavy fall of Rose's hair and the other pouring a dense silvery sluice of water from a chipped enamel jug. The water where it falls on the crown of Rose's head makes a bare patch that shakes and slithers, like the spot of moonlight on Pierrot's sleeve. Rose gives little hooting cries of protest—
"Oo! Oo! Oo!"
—at the cold shock of the water on her scalp.

Poor Rosie. I can never think of her name without that epithet attached. She was, what, nineteen, twenty at the most. Tallish, remarkably slender, narrow at waist and long of hip, she was possessed of a silky, sulky gracefulness from the height of her pale flat brow to her neat and shapely and slightly splay-toed feet. I suppose someone wishing to be unkind—Chloe, for instance—might have described her features as sharp. Her nose, with its tear-shaped, pharaonic nostrils, was prominent at the bridge, the skin stretched tight and translucent over the bone. It is deflected, this nose, a fraction to the left, so that when one looks at her straight-on there is the illusion of seeing her at once full-face and in profile, as in one of those fiddly Picasso portraits. This defect, far from making her seem mis-proportioned, only added to the soulful expressiveness of her face. In repose, when she was unaware of being spied on—and what a little spy I was!—she would hold her head at an acute downward tilt, her eyes hooded and her shallowly cleft chin tucked into her shoulder. Then she would seem a Duccio madonna, melancholy, remote, self-forgetting, lost in the sombre dream of all that was to come, of all that, for her, was not to come.

Of the three central figures in that summer's salt-bleached triptych it is she, oddly, who is most sharply delineated on the wall of my memory. I think the reason for this is that the first two figures in the scene, I mean Chloe and her mother, are all my own work while Rose is by another, unknown, hand. I keep going up close to them, the two Graces, now mother, now daughter, applying a dab of colour here, scumbling a detail there, and the result of all this close work is that my focus on them is blurred rather than sharpened, even when I stand back to survey my handiwork. But Rose, Rose is a completed portrait, Rose is done. This does not mean she was more real or of more significance to me than Chloe or her mother, certainly not, only that I can picture her with the most immediacy. It cannot be because she is still here, for the version of her which is here is so changed as to be hardly recognisable. I see her in her pumps and sheer black pants and shirt of a crimson shade—although she must have had other outfits, this is the one she wears in almost every one of my recollections of her— posed among inconsequentials, the arbitrary props of the studio, a dull drape, a dusty straw hat with a blossom in the band, a bit of mossed-over wall that is probably made of cardboard, and, high up in one corner, an umber doorway where, mysteriously, deep shadows give on to a white-gold blaze of empty light. Her presence was not as vivid for me as that of Chloe or Mrs. Grace, how could it be, yet there was something that set her apart, with that midnight-black hair of hers and that white skin the powdery bloom of which the strongest sunlight or harshest sea breeze seemed incapable of smudging.

She was I suppose what in the old days, I mean days even older than those of which I speak, would have been called a governess. A governess, however, would have had her modest spheres of power, but poor Rosie was helpless before the twins and their unheeding parents. For Chloe and Myles she was the obvious enemy, the butt of their cruellest jokes, an object of resentment and endless ridicule. They had two modes by which they treated her. They were either indifferent, to the point that she might have been invisible to them, or else they subjected everything she did or said, however trivial, to a relentless scrutiny and interrogation. As she moved about the house they would follow after her, crowding on her heels, watching closely her every action—putting down a plate, picking up a book, trying not to look at herself in a mirror—as if what she was doing were the most outlandish and inexplicable behaviour they had ever witnessed. She would ignore them for as long as she could bear but in the end would turn on them, flushed and trembling, and implore them please, please, to leave her alone, keeping her voice to an anguished whisper for fear the elder Graces should hear her losing control. This was just the response the twins had wanted, of course, and they would press up to her more closely still and peer eagerly into her face, feigning wonderment, and Chloe would bombard her with questions—what had been on the plate? was that a good book? why did she not want to see herself in the glass?—until tears welled up in her eyes and her mouth sagged askew in sorrow and impotent rage, and then the two of them would run off in delight, laughing like demons.

I discovered Rose's secret one Saturday afternoon when I came to the Cedars to call for Chloe. As I arrived she was getting into the car with her father and about to leave for a trip to town. I stopped at the gate. We had made an arrangement to go and play tennis—could she have forgotten? Of course she could. I was dismayed; to be abandoned like this on an empty Saturday afternoon was not a thing lightly to be borne. Myles, who was opening the gate for his father to drive through, saw my dismay and grinned, like the malignant sprite that he was. Mr. Grace peered out at me from behind the windscreen and inclined his head toward Chloe and said something, and he also was grinning. By now the day itself, breezy and bright, seemed to exude derision and a generalised merriment. Mr. Grace trod hard on the accelerator and the car with a loud report from its hindquarters bounded forward on the gravel so that I had to step smartly out of the way—although they shared nothing else, my father and Carlo Grace had the same truculently playful sense of fun—and Chloe through the side window, her face blurred behind the glass, looked out at me with an expression of frowning surprise, as if she had just that moment noticed me standing there, which for all I knew she had. I waved a hand, with as much carelessness as I could feign, and she smiled with down-turned mouth in a fakely rueful way and gave an exaggerated shrug of apology, lifting her shoulders level with her ears. The car had slowed for Myles to get in and she put her face close to the window and mouthed something, and raised her left hand in an oddly formal gesture, it might have been a sort of blessing, and what could I do but smile and shrug too, and wave again, as she was borne away in a swirl of exhaust smoke, with Myles's severed-seeming head in the rear window, grinning back at me gloatingly. The house had a deserted aspect. I walked past the front door and down to where the diagonal row of trees marked the end of the garden. Beyond was the railway line paved with jagged loose blue shale and giving off its mephitic whiff of ash and gas. The trees, planted too close together, were spindly and misshapen, their highest branches confusedly waving like so many arms upflung in wild disorder. What were they? Not oaks—sycamores, perhaps. Before I knew what I was doing I was clambering up the middlemost one. This was not like me, I was not daring or adventurous, and had, and have, no head for heights. Up I went, however, up and up, hand and instep, instep and hand, from bough to bough. The climb was exhilaratingly easy, despite the foliage hissing in scandalised protest around me and twigs slapping at my face, and soon I was as near the top as it was possible to go. There I clung, fearless as any jack tar astride the rigging, the earth's deck gently rolling far below me, while, above, a low sky of dull pearl seemed close enough to touch. At this height the breeze was a steady flow of solid air, smelling of inland things, earth, and smoke, and animals. I could see the roofs of the town on the horizon, and farther off and higher up, like a mirage, a tiny silver ship propped motionless on a smear of pale sea. A bird landed on a twig and looked at me in surprise and then flew away again quickly with an offended chirp. I had by now forgotten Chloe's forgetfulness, so exultant was I and brimful of manic glee at being so high and so far from everything, and I did not notice Rose below me until I heard her sobbing.

She was standing underneath the tree next to the one in which I was perched, her shoulders hunched and her elbows pressed into her sides as if to keep herself upright. Her agitated fingers clutched a wadded handkerchief, but so novelet-tishly was she posed, weeping there amidst the soughing airs of afternoon, that I thought at first it must be a crumpled love letter and not a hankie she was holding. How odd she looked, foreshortened to an irregular disc of shoulders and head—the parting in her hair was the same shade of off-white as the sodden handkerchief she was holding—and when she turned hastily at the sound of a step behind her she wobbled briefly like a ninepin that the bowl has succeeded only in striking a glancing blow. Mrs. Grace was approaching along the pathway worn in the grass under the clothesline, her head bowed and her arms folded cruciform over flattened breasts and a hand clasped crosswise on each shoulder. She was barefoot, and wore shorts, and one of her husband's white shirts that was flatteringly far too big for her. She stopped a little way off from Rose and stood a moment silent, turning from side to side in quarter turns on the pivot of herself, still with her hands on her shoulders, as if she too like Rose were holding herself up, herself a child that she was rocking in her arms.

"Rose," she said in a playfully coaxing tone, "oh, Rose, what is it?" Rose, who had resolutely turned her face to the far fields again, gave a liquid snort of not-laughter.

"What is it?" she cried, her voice flying up on the final word and spilling over on itself. "What is it?" She blew her nose indignantly on the rim of the balled-up hankie and finished with a hair-tossing snuffle. Even from this angle I could see that Mrs. Grace was smiling, and biting her lip. Behind me from afar came a hooting whistle. The afternoon train from town, matt-black engine and half a dozen green wooden carriages, was blundering toward us through the fields like a big mad toy, huffing bulbous links of thick white smoke. Mrs. Grace moved forward soundlessly and touched a fingertip to Rose's elbow but Rose snatched her arm away as if the touch were burning hot. A flurry of wind flattened the shirt against Mrs. Grace's body and showed distinctly the fat outlines of her breasts. "Oh, come on now, Rosie," she coaxed again, and this time managed to insinuate a hand into the crook of the girl's arm and with a series of soft tugs made her turn, stiff and unwilling though she was, and together they set off pacing under the trees. Rose went stumblingly, talking and talking, while Mrs. Grace kept her head down as before and seemed hardly to speak at all; from the set of her shoulders