The Sea Change (29 page)

Evening. Principal animals on this island: donkeys, mules, goats, cats and dogs and chickens. I do not think any of them have an enjoyable time by English standards, but perhaps, being Greek,
they have a different conception of affection and security. The cats come off best, but that is just because they are superior and independent. Jimmy and I went down to the port to arrange about a
jar of wine, and on our way we met a very small donkey tied to the third tree in a row. Nothing for him to eat or drink – nothing to do, and no one to talk to. He stood motionless with a
slightly lowered head staring at nothing and looking as though that is what happens to him every night. I haven’t met any mules yet. Goats look nice from a distance, but when you come face to
face with them, they have an expression both cynical and coarse, as though they have just stopped smiling at something unpleasant. Dogs look miserable here – the people seem afraid of them,
and they are often tied up. They lie with their heads on the ground, the children kick them and run away. Cats are mostly extremely thin, with large ears and elegant faces; there are all colours,
but a lot of black ones. I can think of nothing either kind or revealing to say about chickens. No sign of a shark, but we have not bathed yet, as we have been too busy settling into the house, and
the others all slept in the afternoon while I wrote to Papa. Mr Joyce has just asked me to come out on to the other terrace to watch the sunset.

Before I attempt any description of this place, I have to tell you something, and ask what you think about it. Don’t laugh, Uncle Vin, but Mr Joyce and Jimmy Sullivan want me to try and
act a girl called Clemency in Mr Joyce’s last play (the one act you saw in London, which is not yet done in New York). I have agreed to try and learn to do it, and tomorrow we are to start
working on it. They could not find anyone they wanted for the part in New York, and Mr Joyce says the girl in London is not right and has turned it into another kind of play from the one he meant.
The idea is that we should spend a month or six weeks here as Mrs Joyce needed a holiday, and then go back to New York. The thing is, Uncle Vin, that I have not broached this matter with Papa,
because I feel that he may not like it, and also it is likely that they may find I am no good, in which case I might as well not worry him at all. I telephoned him from New York to explain to him
about coming here, and he was delighted about it. If only I could see and talk to him I would tell him at once, but I am not used to using letters for this purpose, and am afraid that I shall not
know from his reply what he really feels. But I am not used, either, to deceiving him – it’s becoming like a smudge on everything else I tell him. Of course if it is found that I can
act I should love to do it, and Jimmy has explained that if the play is a success, I would be earning enough money to fly home and see him. What do you seriously think of my chances, as it is your
profession after all, and you know me so well? And do you think I should tell Papa, or do you think it would be possible for you to go and see him and tell him about it, or find out what he feels?
If Papa really hates the idea, I won’t do it, although I shall mind enough to want to know the reason for his disapproval. Please write to me as soon as possible about this, because it is
worrying me.

Uncle Vin, I must begin by describing the bathing here, which exceeds anything I have ever read about. The water is sea green or sea blue, absolutely clear and warm; there are rocks right down
to the water, so that one has to go straight in – I can’t dive, but I don’t mind plunging as it is so warm. We have masks to put over our faces and a tube for our mouths which
sticks up in the air so that one can breathe while one is swimming face downwards. You can see the most marvellous things – fishes, and sponges growing to rocks, and anemones, and little
octopus and seaweed of many kinds. The colours are far better than on land, or perhaps they are just new to me. The fish do not seem to mind one watching them at all; I found a great cloud of tiny
silver ones hanging at all depths in the water like a sequin veil. The rock sometimes goes sheer into the sea, and it is extraordinary to see the sharp division of what grows on it above the water
and what below. You do not have to be a good swimmer to do this, thank goodness we have two sets of masks, and take turns – the rest of the time one lies on burning rock. Mrs Joyce has an
umbrella, and gave me a lot of sunburn lotion, but I don’t think it has done much good, as I feel as though my shoulders are on fire. She can only bathe for a short time which is a pity as
she is clearly the best swimmer of the lot of us. We spent the whole morning on this piece of shore – one can’t call it a beach, thank goodness – and had a picnic lunch there. We
are all beginning to like the wine, which is very odd indeed, but suits the climate. They also have the most delicious orangeade – slighdy fizzy – in bottles, and Jimmy says very good
beer. Then there is stuff called
ouzo
; it is transparent, but when you put it in a glass and pour water over it, it goes milky – like the stuff you drank in Paris, but I can’t
remember its name. I tell you all this, because I know you are interested in drinks. People drink in a quite different way, here – I mean they sit for ages at little tables with an enamel mug
full of wine: they pour it into small glasses, and they talk a great deal. The foreigners all drink together, but with the Greeks it is only men. The women sit on chairs outside their houses or
serve in the shops which never seem to shut, and the children run about, silently, like a crowd of birds. I mean they call and shout and chatter to one another, but the actual running is silent as
they luckily do not have to wear shoes. I’m so sorry, Uncle Vin, but I shall have to stop, I am so sleepy, but I will write again soon and try to tell you better what it is like when I am
less drunk with the newness and so
much
sun.

This morning we started Clemency. It is a mysterious business. Mr Joyce and Jimmy were there. They made me sit on a chair and read one little bit two or three times very quietly, and then Jimmy
told me what sort of place I was in while I was doing this bit and then he made me walk about while I was reading it which was much more difficult. Then he suddenly said: ‘Make as much noise
as you can.’ I tried, but it felt all wrong, as the things Clemency says are all quiet ones in this bit, and I felt exceedingly foolish. Jimmy just said do it again and I tried – it was
even worse. I said the words felt wrong for shouting, and Jimmy said, nonsense the boy stood on the burning deck three blind mice one could say anything – just make a noise. Mr Joyce was
staring at the ground and not saying anything. I took a deep breath and tried to shout three blind mice and it came out breathless and squeaky but was apparently no laughing matter to any of us.
Then Jimmy said pretend you are a man shouting that, telling five hundred other men about the mice. This was the odd thing. I did: and I had an entirely different voice – heavy and rather
hoarse. Then Jimmy smiled at Mr Joyce, and Mr Joyce smiled at me, and Jimmy said, now, don’t shout, just tell them about the mice, but be sure they hear. Then Mr Joyce said he’d leave
us to it, and the rest of the time was spent on Jimmy making me feel my body while the noise was coming out. We didn’t do any more Clemency. Jimmy said that we’d leave her for the
moment, but that I would read some of her with Mr Joyce every day, and he and I would practise counting and breathing together. He is quite different when we are working – very businesslike
and rather stern, but by the end of the morning I understood that he was right to make this distinction, and that in the end (even of one morning) it made it easier to work if we behaved together
as though that was all we did. At the end he said: ‘Now, we won’t discuss this when we aren’t working – there’s nothing to say about it. Try during the rest of the day
to be aware of how you breathe; that is all you need to do.’ Mrs Joyce wants me to go and see if there are any letters as the boat has come in.

3

LILLIAN

I
WAS
sitting on a rock at the edge of the sea with the sun like a burning fan on my shoulders, and I looked alternately up
into the sky and down into the water for the origin of the beautiful reflection one cast upon the other. It was a small bay – almost a semi-circle scooped out from the steep rocks – and
the others had swum out of sight round the coast: I sat by myself. I had meant to sit or lie there until their return, and was half-heartedly trying not to feel envious, but inside I was poor
Lillian putting a cheap brave face on her disability. I looked down again at the water that was only a few inches below me – lucid, sinuous bulk that heaved and broke its colour against the
rock with something between a slap and a stroke: patched in jewelled greens and blues and shot with diamond fish who casually pursued their geometric sense of direction. Looking, I knew that I had
only done so to make myself unhappy (really, Lillian, at your age!) and I thought, ‘If I wept now the tears would scald on the rock in this heat.’ Then, without thinking, I swung my
legs over the sea and waited before putting my right foot in the water; it slipped in without seeming to break the surface and gleamed whiter than my leg in the sun. The water was smooth and softly
cool after the burning rock: I stretched my foot in it, and as I did this a forgotten, overwhelming sensation began. It started with my foot: I began to feel its length and weight, and the
separations of my toes, the water on my skin and my blood under it, and then, through the joint of my ankle this discovery travelled slowly up my body until I reached the palms of my hands pressed
down on the rock each side of me and the roots of my hair hot with sun. The difference between
seeing
my hand or my foot, and
knowing
them – feeling absolutely contained within
all of my body at once, was marvellously new and clear, and for some unknown quantity of time I remained alive in this way, until my foot – idle and cold in it – turned my attention to
the sea. Now it seemed so beautiful that I was freshly struck by its shades of light and mysterious melting depths – its irresistible movement, its enormous, effortless continuity . . . I was
still joyfully self-contained, when I flung myself in to meet and join it.

I did not bathe for very long; but it seemed to me then that time was a secondary consideration which I had used to measure partial enjoyment, and now, in the sea, I did not need it. I was out
of the water and drying in the sun before the others returned. Jimmy said: ‘Lillian, you’ve been swimming!’ and Em came and sat by me to say: ‘You weren’t in for too
long?’ and I felt my face relaxed and easy for smiling when I said that I’d had a perfect bathe.

I lost this feeling of my body: I don’t know exactly when it went, but I was suddenly aware that it had gone, although now I could remember it, and everything I saw and heard continued to
be affected – to be more sharply true. This is a place for sight. Now that we have been here long enough to establish some kind of routine, and I need not be concerned with the order of
events, there seems to be even more chance of simply being here. In the morning, early, some of us go and swim – usually then I stay behind on the terrace where the sun has come up over the
little nearby hill, and the colours on the rock are soft, and fresh and delicate – cinnamon, tawny, agate, crystalline – with grey-green cactus, signal cypress, and the pure white
houses, and the pale blue of the sky glows with morning sunlight. To the left is the sea – denser blue mark and at this distance, still; and to the right, the warm and savage shoulder of
mountain, already stripped of mist and naked to its bones for the sun. I look down at the tops of the olive trees in the little field below our terrace; the leaves are like moonshine, oblique,
almost apologetic in this young light. The others come back, and Jimmy lights the Primus to boil water for our coffee which we drink black. The island butter is rancid – we eat the bread with
honey and melons. Jimmy works with Alberta, and often I persuade Em to walk into the port with me. We buy food for lunch, and beautiful sponges and silk made in the monastery at the top of the
mountain. We collect letters and drink more coffee or orange juice at one of the cafés and watch the people and the caiques unloading vegetables and the butcher bringing back scrawny and
dripping haunches of goat from the abattoir at one end of the harbour. Em makes me ride home and I acquire a favourite donkey. It is very peaceful; we do not talk much except about what we need to
buy or to point out people to each other. Sometimes we meet Aristophánes and then we are chocked full of island gossip and incident. The very old lady who walks slowly up and down in a pale
pink coat and skirt and pink high-heeled shoes – bought, Em feels, to match the marble – owns the richest house; it is floodlit at night and she is always trying to fill it with
important people, only hampered by continuous and haunting uncertainty as to who they are. Once she turned a man out of her house because his clothes were poor and he was very dirty: he proved to
be a painter with an international reputation, and ever since then she has courted the dirtiest and poorest men she could find, with – Aristophánes tells us, contorted with glee
– the most murderous results. He would talk to us until the boat came in with fresh hordes of travellers and tourists whom he could waylay with instructions and gossip, but Em gets restive
and wants to go back to the house. There are two ways back. One, climbing up through the village, steps and narrow paths and houses all the way; or, round the coast, a switchback path edging the
island for the short distance between the port and our village. The first is all whites and stone and shadows on white – enclosed, angled, domestic, made and built and used: the second is
wilder, emptier – rock and sea coloured, with few houses, with the air like the clearest honey, and the rocks declining steeply into the water – flowers and sea-birds, and that curious
breathless calm that on a fine day lies over the brink of land and sea, but this is the longer way, and we use it more in the evening. We get back to find Jimmy walking up and down the western
terrace, smoking, with his worried, professional expression, and Alberta nowhere to be seen. I think he reduces her to tears, poor girl. Em asks how it has gone, and Jimmy shrugs and looks black,
Em’s tic round his eyes begins, and for a moment there are echoes of the organized tensions that I associated with empty half-lit theatres and hotel bedrooms late at night, but here, suddenly
confident and detached, I can say something which disperses them; Jimmy smiles and Em smooths his face with his hand and we all set about preparing for our picnic in the charming bay which we have
come to look on as ours. Alberta appears; in shorts and an Aertex shirt she looks about fifteen, and I feel that it is hard that Jimmy should have been making her cry. She looks solemn and subdued;
I feel protective and take her to pack the figs and tomatoes and melon and eggs and cheese and bread and wine for lunch.