The Sea Change (14 page)

He was quite ready and standing by the window. He said: ‘Take off your coat: I want to inspect you.’ He looked at me with careful kindness – very like Papa. ‘Well, I must
say, I think we both have excellent taste.’ He touched my locket with his finger. ‘What is that? Topaz?’ I explained that it was my mother’s and Papa had given it to me for
the journey here, and that there was a beautiful ring as well, but that Papa was keeping that for me until I was married, and he asked immediately: ‘Are you going to be married?’ I said
I didn’t know, but that if I didn’t, Mary or Serena would, and that there was only one ring. ‘You have no plans about it then. It is a distant point.’ I said it was out of
my sight, and he put on my coat, smiled, and said: ‘You like the scent.’ I said yes, and explained that I had only Aunt T.’s hearsay to go on about the right amount, and that I
hadn’t agreed with her. I asked him if he could smell me properly, and he said: ‘Distinctly,’ so that was all right. When we got to the lift, I thanked him for all the beautiful
clothes and everything: he looked very pleased and said that he was enjoying them just as much as I. As we went down in the lift, it felt as though we had been doing that for weeks, and not at all
since this morning, and I asked him whether he found the measurement of time more of a convenience than not. He was feeling in his pockets for something, and asked the lift girl (another one, not
nearly so pretty, and they are called coloured, not black) to go back as he’d forgotten something. ‘Notes,’ he said: ‘I’ve got to make a speech.’ I keep
forgetting that he’s the kind of man who has to make speeches and gets photographed. While he was away, the girl asked me if it was my first time over, and I said yes, and she said she hoped
I was enjoying it and I said yes. When he came back he said he found measuring time more
in
convenient than not – that it was a scourge for writing plays, and either dull, or
nerve-racking in the rest of his life. ‘Like this evening – you’ll see,’ he said, and looked somehow bitter, and friendly at the same time.

I did see. I can hardly write about it – it was so terribly dull. Boiling hot – and so much to eat that I couldn’t taste anything after a bit, and people who seemed to have
known each other for years not at all well. He was very kind, and kept introducing me to people, but they only asked me if I was an actress, and if it was my first time over and whether I was
enjoying it. In the end I wished I
was
an actress, just to make a change in the conversation. There were a lot of cinema men and their wives and the whole thing was in aid of something, but
I couldn’t see how we could be helping anyone by having a huge, dull dinner. I couldn’t even sit next to him at dinner, because he was the guest of honour and I was fearfully dull for
the men sitting on either side of me. I asked one of them if they had read
Middlemarch
, but he said he hadn’t – he hadn’t even time to get through
Reader’s
Digest
so a book would be out of the question. He must be dreadfully busy, because even Mr Asquith, when he was Prime Minister, had time to read at least fifty pages of a new book every day. He
asked me what my ambitions were about two courses later, which seemed a funny way to put it, and I said I wanted to be a good woman, and he stared as though I’d said something rude, and then
said I sure looked good to him, so I suppose he misunderstood me and thought I meant good in his moral sense and not in the Christian one at all. So then I tried the other man, who looked older and
asked him what interested him most and he said golf, but his heart had packed up and he’d had to fall back on painting. I said what an interesting and lucky way round, and then I realized
that I was being narrow-minded about golf: conversation is much more difficult than I thought. I’ve hardly ever talked to people I haven’t known in some sort, excepting Mr J. and of
course he is different. He smiled at me twice during dinner, and that was much more like speaking than anything else. After dinner, there were two speeches before his, and I felt awfully sleepy,
and couldn’t understand what they were talking about – they seemed to veer without any warning from vast generalizations to something that happened to them last week, with people
fidgeting or laughing so that one couldn’t hear. Mr J. was the best: he didn’t talk for very long, but he was much easier to understand. Then there was another long time after the
speeches, and then I had to queue to collect my coat and had to get change for the ten dollars to give something to the woman, and didn’t know what to give her. I gave her a dollar in the end
(this was too much) and then we got into a car which was waiting for us and my head ached. Without meaning to, I went to sleep in the car, and Mr J. woke me up when we got back to the hotel. Well
– I
have
written about it. But it’s clear that there isn’t going to be time here to write the kind of diary that Mary and I write at home. I shall have to try and select
the salient points – if I understand which they are in time. Mary will be disappointed, because she will be writing hers (she was terribly pleased with the one I gave her) and we were going
to have a tremendous read to each other when I go home. It has taken me all the afternoon to write to Papa and write this. One thing is clear. I am very lucky to be working for Mr. J. because he is
the most considerate and kind man. He has given me the afternoon off to rest before we go to the opening tonight of the musical version of his play called
The Orchid Race.
Extraordinary name
– what can it be about? I have never been to a first night in my life – and to go in these rarefied circumstances will certainly rank high in my experience of the world. But then, my
dear Sarah, your experience is laughably little. I feel like Celia: can it be possible on such a sudden, I can fall into so great an experience? My goodness, I couldn’t have managed without
my lovely new dress. I’ve just thought: accounts of places are not very interesting, unless one has some idea of the writer’s feelings about them – or their feelings generally.
There seem to be two kinds of life going on, then, and when very little seems to be happening is when one has a busier life inside. So much seems to happen here to everybody, that I wonder how they
manage the inside part. It seems to have got the wrong way round somehow – it is the skyscrapers who seem so calm and immovable and they are filled with scurrying people, instead of the
people being calm and scurrying inside. Scurrying is the wrong word: I must say I’m glad I’m not a writer. What am I? Somebody on a brink, I should say – like thousands of people
– so is the brink private, or universal? I think the
idea
of a brink is universal, and the actual brink is always a private one. Clem would say this is half-baked philosophy –
but I don’t think I can manage yet with ready cooked.

CHAPTER III

1

EMMANUEL

O
N
the morning of the day that Lillian and Jimmy were to arrive he went for a walk. He went early – because he was
sleeping badly: the ship was due to dock at half past ten, and he needed refreshment for the day. He started uptown, along Madison Avenue, with no particular sense of direction; but the faint,
elusive liberty which always stirred when he left a night stretched now in the early air and encouraged him simply to go on. He had left a message for Alberta that he would breakfast with her at
9.30 before they went to meet the travellers. In a sense, he was meeting them now: apportioning appropriate pieces of himself to the cut-up artificial day which lay ahead. Their arrival, which
ought to be a beginning, was seeming, somehow, an end. Had he enjoyed Alberta’s company so much? It was hard to say. He had liked the alternating solitude and company of somebody undemanding,
eager, and new to the offerings of his daily life. He had enjoyed being kind, because his kindness had been so simply enjoyed. I am not so kind as she thinks me, he thought – yes, to her I am
that: and she is one of the very few people who accept what I am to her uncharged by what I am to anything else. She had made an ordinary, tiring week interesting and worth the candle at both ends.
Or perhaps he simply enjoyed the freedom from intimate routine difficulties. No Clemency: Lillian loathing hotels except when they were on holiday – the hunted expense of privacy . . .
Supposing one bought one’s oxygen for the day every day – that would be a nice direct way of paying for existence, instead of having it clothed in State taxes, with privacy like mink; a
luxury to be flaunted by people who didn’t know what to do with it. But perhaps there were animals – like the mink – who could wear privacy for free. The trouble was not so much
that one was trying to avoid paying for things, it was trying to find out how to pay. When you buy something – on the whole you choose neither the price nor the currency. Some people seemed
to spend their whole lives trying to pay for one thing without knowing how to do it – and probably I am one of them. If they know, of course, there is an element of dedication – there
is more height and light about it – a little dignity and the possibility of something more than mere behaviour. The passionate interest now commonly displayed in the sub-conscious was
probably due to the fact that hardly anybody’s behaviour rose above that point. It was therefore natural that they should pay large sums to see anybody who had achieved even partial control
of their bodies – let alone anything else. Am I, in any sense, a dedicated man, he wondered? Jimmy would say that I was dedicated to the theatre – to writing plays. Lillian would say
that I ought to be dedicated to making a life with her. I don’t think either of them would stop to consider these purposes: why should they – they are supposed to be my purposes, and I
haven’t stopped to think about them much. He stopped now in the street to consider them, but arresting his body, he lost his mind: it noted that he was on the corner of East 57th – it
reminded him that this was Lillian’s favourite street because of the picture galleries, and then it asked him why he had stopped at all. At that he went on; observing the morning and the
scene set in it – the sky a startling blue – air like soda – the light freshly minted by sun – the streets clean and almost empty – too early yet even for people
walking their dogs – the scene not yet swelling with its crowds: an empty city has an innocence which country, inhabited on a much larger scale, has not, he thought. He was back to how they
were to inhabit this city that day – die four of them. After Lillian and Jimmy had arrived they would go straight to the apartment on Park Avenue. Lillian would start to unpack – would
say she couldn’t possibly face it, and that she wanted her favourite morning drink of champagne and orange juice – and then they would all sit in the sitting room exchanging little
canapés of news until it was time to decide where they should lunch, which meal would compromise between a festivity for Lillian and a businesslike snack for Jimmy. Then he and Jimmy would
go off on the audition racket, and Alberta would help Lillian unpack and hang her pictures. Once he and Jimmy were in a cab and on their way to the west side, Jimmy would relax and ask him all
about the week. He’d ask about
The Molehill
and what cuts they’d made; he’d ask about
The Orchid Race
(it looked like a smash hit and he’d enjoyed it in a
detached sort of way); and of course he’d ask what the Clemencys had been like. Then he might ask if the new play was shaping, and he would answer no, it wasn’t. Finally he’d ask
how Alberta had made out. And he would tell Jimmy that she had done very well considering that she hadn’t known her way around at all: that she was conscientious and enduring and good
company. Then he’d tell Jimmy about the expressions on the faces of Messrs Rheinberger and Schwartz sitting each side of her at the dinner, and leave it at that. They’d go back about
six and he’d see Lillian who would have been resting and she’d have an ‘at last’ expression and ask him all about the week. He’d tell her who had called them up, and
what places they’d been offered in Connecticut and Massachusetts, and explain about not going south because they had to be near New York until they’d achieved Clemency. And then she
would want to know how Alberta was getting on, and he would tell her that she was very clever to have found Alberta, who was quiet and nice and had very good manners. Then she’d ask if he was
getting on with the new play and he’d say yes, he was; that was why he wanted to move out of New York as soon as possible. Here, he broke down: he was cutting a poor pair of figures out of
this – the only difference between him and a chameleon was that the creature had real reasons for its behaviour, and he hadn’t. He could not say that this flickering dishonesty and
failing in either saved his life or earned him his bread – so why do it? Because, of course, they were not the only real reasons for doing anything. Right: if he was not, as a medical friend
of Lillian’s had once said, an integrated personality, he could at least indulge in a really personal argument – Joyce v. Joyce – or perhaps it was Emmanuel v. Joyce. Very soon
after his first success he had discovered that women who were certain of seducing him nearly always said how marvellous it must be to be Irish and Jewish if you were a playwright, and the ones who
wanted to seduce him but lacked self-confidence always asked him if it wasn’t very difficult for a playwright having so many points of view – sympathy, in fact, was a more tentative
approach. This was more than thirty years ago – in England, when class consciousness was more or less confined to the upper and upper middle classes, and had not spread democratically to all
‘income groups’. (How the Indians would howl with laughter at this childish equation of money with caste.) The point had been that, with success, he had met a lot of people who
didn’t want to sound rude or patronizing about his background, were incapable of being anything else, and therefore picked on his mongrel blood as a safer alternative. He hadn’t minded;
he hadn’t wanted to talk about his background either – he had discovered at one attempt a number of shocking platitudes. If your parents had been well off, or even comfortable, it was
quite in order to hate them; but if they had been damned poor, and you’d been brought up in what they called a ‘distressed area’ – the thought of their two rooms and
‘area’ still made him smile – any breath of criticism was disloyalty and being stuck-up: your parents became characters and you were expected to have a character attitude towards
diem. So he had never told anybody but one how much he had hated his father in the end . . . by the time he had outgrown the dresser drawer and had to sleep always on his back in it – in
winter with his knees drawn high up – in summer with his legs lolling over the end so that the wood bit into the soft place under his knees – he used to lie there and imagine his father
dead: in winter of pneumonia – in summer of prickly heat which he had read about and sounded awful enough to kill anyone. But his father lurched and jabbered on; charged with disastrous
vitality – bored by everything but his own imagination of himself and haunted by all the chances he might have had. By the time he was eleven, he had been earning more regularly, at least,
than his father: by the time he was twelve he had caught his father pinching these wages out of his mother’s pocket and had knocked him against a gas bracket which had knocked him out. This
random shot – which had astonished Emmanuel – had terrified his mother and produced a kind of angry respect in his father for a day or two, but when this was succeeded by a menacing
swagger, he felt it was time to leave . . . That was one morning he would never forget – November; raw and foggy; six o’clock, the time when every other morning for months he had lit a
candle, wriggled out of his drawer, pulled on a jersey over his shirt (he slept in all his clothes but his jersey in winter), eaten the piece of bread and dripping left out for him overnight, and
trudged off to the stables where he worked. Fifteen milk ponies: they all got a small feed before being harnessed for their rounds, and he used to pinch a pocketful of oats to eat while he fed
them. The stables were dark but comforting after home; he liked the warm smell of manure and the ancient smells of dirty harness and dried sweat, and the animals welcomed him with confidential
nickers as they stood in their line in patient cynical attitudes awaiting the day’s work. Daisy, Bluebell, Captain, Lilly, Brownie, and Rose, Twinkle, Major, Melba, and Blackie – good
Lord, he couldn’t remember all of them now – he would feed them – mostly bran and chaff and a few precious oats, and then start lifting their heavy collars down from the pegs on
the white-washed wall, and hoisting them on to their shoulders. He was tortured by chilblains in those days; the icy slush of the walk cooled his feet, but his hands were chapped and swollen so
that he could hardly grasp the collars, and the men arrived long before he was through. But the morning that he left home he woke even earlier than six, and lay in the dark collecting his final
impression of it. Except for the cheap clock with its weary hysterical tick there was silence – darkness, and smells: of distant cabbage; of partially washed clothes – his mother took
in washing then, and there was a tub in the corner with garments soaking that these mornings was covered with thin grey ice – the curiously angry smell of mice, like sweated cheese; the
little peevish draughts of leaking gas; his father’s clay pipe – a blackened greasy odour that was in the imagination until one touched it; the rotting plaster of the walls like damp,
sleepy pears; a sour damp rot smell from the floor; the purple Church smell of the book his mother had won at school as a prize; the tea leaves which she kept for the small mat in her bedroom; the
faint wafts of urine from the yard . . . he collected it all, and the wanting to pack himself with bread and dripping till the yawning grave inside him was filled. If he had the luck to be
shipwrecked on an island in the Pacific, like those holy little nippers he’d read about – if he ever had the chance to go on a crusade, or the King wanted anywhere discovered for
England, by God he’d remember this – because whatever his luck or chance, he was making a change for himself. First he was going to earn a lot of money and then he was going to build a
huge house and put his mother in it. She was going to have a fur coat – several of them – and nothing to do ever, and the house would be boiling hot and full of Jews because she liked
them best. He’d come for her one day in a carriage and four horses and silk handkerchiefs for her tears, and just take her and her book and leave the rotten rest . . .