The Sea Change (4 page)

These are the things that seep through my mind on the mornings when I have the third and best kind of waking – all past and done with – but in them I have a memory of life, a distant
gratitude for gesture, for that committed animation from which I seemed to have died. Out of Em came Sarah; out of Sarah came Em; but I also had something to do with it, and I want so much to have
something to do with somebody.

The daily maid who brought my breakfast said that Mr Joyce had overslept, that he was finishing his coffee and letters, before he came up. There was only one letter for me, and it is curious
that only when I picked it up did I remember the extraordinary shock of seeing that woman in the bath the night before . . .

There was something about those pages being impeccably typed that made them worse – something striking and venomous and machine-made: only the signature was written – sprawling in
green ink, like somebody suddenly revealed in the wrong coloured underclothes. I was still staring at it when Em came in. He walked straight over to the window and stood with his back to the light,
but even then I could see that he looked dreadful, and I felt suddenly angry that he, out of all this, should look ill.

‘How are you?’

I didn’t reply; just looked at him as though I couldn’t understand what he meant by such a question. I was thinking of Gloria’s shapeless silken knees tilted in the bath; sick
that he had touched her, angry that I had no longer an innocent anger with him – that I knew so much that I couldn’t understand. He was picking a matchbox to pieces – seemingly
intent – but I knew he was watching me with the acute delicacy of somebody in a fight waiting for an opening to knock me out with pity – to leave me defenceless and protective towards
him.

‘How is Miss Williams?’

‘Not dead. All right,’ he added.

I wanted to smoke; my hands were shaking too: I had no matchbox, and instantly he was lighting my cigarette: he looked pathetic and intent doing it, and my anger rose again.

‘As far as I can remember, it is approximately eighteen months since you last achieved anything like this.’

‘My dear Lillian – nobody has ever been found in the
bath
before.’ But his eyes filled with tears, and he sat down on the bed suddenly.

‘Well, if you wanted first-hand evidence of a young woman literally dying of love for you . . .’

‘I don’t want any of it: no part of any of it.’ He reached for one of my cigarettes, put it back, and started fumbling for one of his own.

‘She
might
have been dead, and I might have died discovering her. What does that make you? Lucky? Apart from being damned irresponsible, of course. But perhaps you think it’s
bad
luck. A clean sweep and you could have started making all the nice familiar mistakes, with nobody to watch you. Except Jimmy, of course – he’s a real audience – numb,
dumb and devoted . . .’ Suddenly I heard this thin and savage voice; I had never heard it before – hearing it twisted everything round so that what I was saying sounded reasonable
– a better life for him if I had died and only Jimmy was left to care for him. This was extraordinary: I stopped, and thoughts streamed back in the silence. ‘I can’t admire
you.’

‘No,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t see how you can.’

‘And I don’t seem able to help you.’

‘Are those the reasons?’ He looked sad and enquiring – and intolerably like Sarah, and he was going to twist about like some intellectual fish: I had to make him laugh, or
I’d lose him.

‘All I ask is that they shouldn’t end up in baths. It’s so bad for my heart.’

‘You can ask more than that.’ He spread out his hand, and I pulled the bedclothes round me.

‘If I did, you’d say I was blaming you. “Let there be no deserts,” you said.’

‘Now I say – mind on your own count. Don’t fabricate a climate for concern.’

‘Do you remember when you said “Let there be no deserts”?’

‘Cherry said it in
The Orchid Race
. Just before she goes back on her street.’ He sounded preoccupied, which he always does when he’s trying to evade me.

‘
You
said it after Sarah died. In Florida on the beach in the dark. You simply put it in a play afterwards – like everything else.’ The familiar sweet aching was there
when I said her name to him. Miss Williams, or anybody else, couldn’t destroy that, and with the life of this feeling I burst into tears. ‘You wouldn’t have done these things if
she hadn’t died. If there had been another child! You would have had some difference between real life and what you write – it would not have all been the same. She would have been
sixteen – I can’t
bear how far
I have to imagine her now. You wouldn’t have wanted
her
to have that kind of shock – you’d have conducted your life with
more taste – more discrimination – I wish you’d stop worrying about humanity and live more like . . . like . . .’

‘A gentleman? Or other people?’ But neither of us even tried to laugh. He picked up the napkin from my breakfast tray.

‘Darling, don’t distress yourself. Have a quiet morning in bed. Don’t race so much.’ He was mopping my face, and I didn’t mind his touching me now.

‘What are
you
going to do?’

‘Jimmy has organized the morning to the brim. I’ve got to lunch with Sol Black, and there’s this party at the Fairbrothers’, but you can cut that.’

‘What are you doing in the afternoon?’

I saw him square himself to be elusive.

‘Going to work a little.’

‘Here?’

‘No – out. Lillian, you know I can’t work here.’

‘I won’t disturb you. I’ll take the receiver off. I’ll only warn you in time for the party.’

‘I’ve told you a hundred times I cannot work in the house: I must be alone.’ He managed to look both angry and patient.

‘I’m coming to the Fairbrothers’ – I want to.’ It would be the only time of the day with him. ‘And you needn’t think I’m going to lie about in bed
all day. I’ve got a lot to do before we go to America.’

‘Rest in the afternoon before the party. How
are
you feeling, really?’

‘Perfectly marvellous.’

‘Jimmy said don’t answer the telephone today – he’ll do it.’

‘Don’t start telling me how wonderful Jimmy is.’

He didn’t.

‘Perhaps
I’d
better engage the next secretary. At least we might have a lady, while we’re at it: they’re no more expensive and at least they won’t wear such
awful stockings.’

‘Were Gloria’s stockings so awful?’

‘All greasy and stretched; panic-stricken stockings.’ I felt better that he hadn’t noticed. He smiled faintly when I said ‘panic-stricken’. ‘All I ask is that
we don’t have another neurotic virgin. All their imagination’s gone the wrong way.’

He laughed suddenly.

‘What?’

‘I was thinking how
very
little that had to do with “being a lady”.’

‘Em; you know perfectly well what I mean.’

‘You mean somebody not brought up in a slum as I was.’

‘Now you’re just being difficult. You’re different because you’re an artist.’

‘That’s like the countless dear people who’ve said to me: “I don’t usually like Jews but you’re different.”’

‘There’s no point in getting angry with
me
:
I’ve
never said that.’

He threw the napkin on to the floor. His hands still shook. ‘Imagine Lillian – imagine meeting an elephant, and presuming so far. Different from what? From whom? How many elephants
have you met? Are you sure that what you met was an elephant? What kind of palsied constricted vulgarity are you employing now? If I am the exception, then I am interested in the rule. You are so
much the rule that you can’t stand an exception. You’re only nourished by being able to take things for granted, and the only things we can take for granted are either not pretty, or
totally unreal. Honest intentions, I tell you, are the fertile ground: they edge their way out and make cracks in society . . .’

Jimmy came in.

‘I did knock. Some society in Bradford want to know whether you’ll waive the royalty on
Our Little Life
.’

‘That awful play. Why do they keep doing it?’

‘Seven women, two men, and one set.’ There was nothing Jimmy didn’t remember about Em’s plays. ‘They call themselves the Mad Hatters,’ he added morosely. He
looked ill too.

‘What are they doing it for?’

Jimmy picked up my telephone.

‘Mr Joyce would like to know why you are putting on the play,’ and Em snarled silently at the instrument.

‘They say it’s to raise money to build a swimming pool for their Club premises.’

‘No. Tell them I haven’t got a swimming pool. Parochial bastards.’

‘Mr Joyce is very sorry, but he only waives royalties for international charities.’

When Jimmy had finished, Em said peevishly:

‘That play’s like a double-bed eiderdown in a cheap hotel. It gets thinner and thinner, but it still slips all over the place. I thought we didn’t allow ourselves to be
besieged on the telephone anyway.’

‘We don’t, usually. It’s my fault. I just can’t help being unnaturally polite this morning. It’s my weak character. How are you, Lillian?’

‘Displaced. Em’s been bullying me about class structure.’

Em got up from my bed. Jimmy said: ‘Emmanuel, you’ll have to shave before lunch today. Don’t you think so, Lillian? He can’t go out to lunch like that, he looks like a
charcoal biscuit.’

Before I could agree, the telephone rang, and Jimmy was caught between blocks of interminable listening and short bursts of disagreement. Em lit another cigarette and wandered to the window. It
was raining: it would probably rain most of the day, with cold, gusty sunshine – like somebody who does not know how to laugh. Suddenly, because I knew then that I could not laugh either, I
had a picture of the three of us – back this morning where we started, to our shallow centre made up of ritual allowances for one another, traditional misunderstanding and a kind of idiomatic
discomfort. Em turned towards me, and for a moment I wondered whether we were both thinking the same thing, and whether he knew it.

‘But those are
twenty
-
four
-foot flats,’ Jimmy was saying: ‘you might as well put them in Piccadilly Circus – you
can’t
: you’ll have to
border them till the whole thing looks like the wrong end of a telescope.’

He was tapping his cigarette with his forefinger – not listening to Jimmy – preparing to go. If only Jimmy wasn’t on the telephone I might have caught him: we could have talked
about telescopes – which
was
the right end, or were they just an instrumental admission of failure, only resorted to when one could not really see anything at all . . . He left the
room and my mind reeled after him: I hadn’t even shown him the letter – but weeks later I’d say something about it as though I’d said it by mistake. This kind of restraint
would impress him: his face would light on me – already I could feel a warmth like the instant’s burning of the piece of paper on which Miss Williams had written her letter . . .

When Jimmy had finished, I asked him to have lunch with me. He couldn’t, he said. He’d got to have a drink with the girl we’d seen last night to tell her that she wasn’t
right for Clemency in New York. There was a call for understudies at two – he didn’t think he’d get lunch at all. He turned all these reasons into excuses with his face.
That’s when I know about people – with the most bitter, exacting certainty. ‘See you at the Fairbrothers’?’ he finished hopefully.

‘My dear Jimmy, I’m not going to the Fairbrothers’ to see
you
.’

‘No chance,’ he said, and contrived to look defeated. When he had gone, I squeezed the letter into my hand against the sick burning jolt of being humoured. I hate it: I hate that
kind of shallow understanding – the allowances made for me and the person who allows himself to make them. I’ll make my own allowances for myself: I’d rather he’d taken the
trouble to say I was a bitch. But although he thinks in those terms, he’d never call me that. It doesn’t go with my liking poetry and Sicilian jewellery and English country life. And
after all, I am Em’s wife: a kind of holy relic. I looked at the letter, crushed up into exactly what it was worth. Em didn’t care about
her
; probably was bored by and disliked
her; might even have swung into a violent distaste – so active with him that he would actually have wished her dead . . . But this suddenly frightened me, fitting too easily into my second
picture of Em – not the majestic migratory bird, but the little figure with mournful eyes – on a platform by himself, in the dock; against the party, the crowd, the law, who hate him
and do not know why he is here, and he does not hate them but does not know why either. I am the only one who knows, and they cannot hear me, and he won’t understand because he is fixed upon
the crowd with a kind of reckless grief – indifferent to their judgment. My head has started to ache, and it is raining hard now. The only kind of day that I could have by myself would sound
like a schoolgirl’s diary. ‘In the morning, head ached – am I in love? In the afternoon bought gramophone records.’ And then some extraordinary little clutch at a cultivated
comparison: Satie with Seurat; Renoir with Roussel – the self-conscious yardstick of appreciation so pathetically employed by the young; such intellectual bathos in the old. I shall stay in
bed until I am better, or it is time to go to the party. If I could tell them that simply to know something was only like having keys that will unlock anything but one’s private house, they
would not write about Satie in their diaries: but Sarah did not even have time to write her name: she just liked colours, and any noise designed to charm her. Remembering her little starting shout
of laughter is as sharp as Em’s sudden blaze of anger – it seems so extraordinary to be left simply with the anger, and that it should be his . . .