The Sea Change (6 page)

‘Your children?’ She was deflected: her face composed to that indulgent lack of curiosity which by now he related to that question.

‘My wife and Jimmy Sullivan: he directs for me – manages everything.’

‘Do you mean to say you haven’t
got
any children?’

‘We had one: she died of meningitis. My wife is not allowed to have another; she has kidney trouble and something wrong with her heart – it was very dangerous for her to have a child
at all – so no – I haven’t.’ He said this quite mercilessly – to the girl and to himself – so that the girl would never again ask anybody those questions, and so
that it sounded to him as though he was talking about somebody else.

The girl looked stunned: then Sol leant forward and said: ‘Will you tell Lillian I saw her at the opening Tuesday looking so beautiful I meant to send her flowers for it?
Honest!
’ His eyes were like deep velvet; his great soft heart, like a cushion, plumped up to receive them.

They were drinking bitter, boiled coffee. Emmanuel said: ‘I’ll tell her, Sol, but she won’t believe
me
.’

‘Then I’ll
send
the flowers!’ His smile was like an advertising sign. ‘What does she like?’ He started unpacking his breast pocket – a flurry of
leather wallets and books and cases fell out.

‘Something blue that smells.’

‘Blue that smells,’ he wrote laboriously in a tiny book. ‘Say, what would that be? Heellio . . . Higher — ’

‘Hyacinths,’ said Martha. ‘It’s not too late for them, is it?’

‘Not too late,’ said Emmanuel, and smiled at her. He had noticed with his sharpest detachment that he had only upset her about herself and not in the least about him.

He escaped in the end – recapturing his coat for a small consideration – and set off for Finchley Road where Gloria and her sister lived and ran a small typing bureau. His progress
was erratic: as usual, he started by taking a bus whose intentions he did not discover, but he did not notice this for about half an hour because, in order not to consider immediate events, he was
engrossed with the past, trying to unwrap the layers of choice and responsibility and get to his intentions . . .

Once, at their beginning, they had hardly seemed wrapped at all: the tissue of poverty, gigantic hunger, and being always cold or sweating from enclosure had covered his life, he had shivered
and panted his way through it – his private self fortified by the permanent self-appointed post of Prime Minister which he enriched by incidents like the King sending for him: ‘Never,
in all my career as King, have I known a Prime Minister of nine. There are no lengths to which you won’t go, my boy, if you keep this up.’ He kept it up and there seemed no need for
ambition in terms of life at 492 Napoleon Road. He could even watch the spectacle of his parents tearing each other to pieces with a kind of unquestioning detachment. His father, a small man,
strong as a cat; his eyes blazing with abstract convictions: a disposition both fiery and shiftless – mostly out of work, and often mysteriously drunk even then: his mother, soft, and pale
and dark, with her lacerating silences – her grief-stricken sense of commitment: she had defied her orthodox family in marrying an Irish Roman Catholic, and so burned her courage down that
her spirit guttered like a candle for the rest of her life. He could not remember ever thinking of them as anything but not the same – different – elementally irreconcilable like fire
and water. But the night his intentions were born was a memory distinct as the smell of frying sprats which accompanied it, and the heat of his mother’s face charged with waiting. She was
wearing an overall patterned with flowers too large for her, and her shoes, which she only wore out of doors or on fine occasions. That evening was one of them; the anniversary of his
parents’ wedding, and, as usual, they were waiting for his father – had been waiting with the sprats unfried, for nearly four hours. His mother had once wept in that time, as her
fragile idea of pleasure broke to despair – and he, what he had gone through about those sprats! When the waters of his mouth had given out, he had magnified them, had made each one the size
of a whale, big enough to carry him on their backs, big enough to swallow whole somebody he disliked. He had become a sprat himself for a while, surrounded by gleaming friends with fat economical
bodies – then he got desperate and tried to count them, to work out what would be his share . . . Meanwhile the air trawled from the hot dirty street, and netted in their small room by the
lace curtains, seemed to get heavier – to press upon them like a weight of clouded water – as hopes silted up from expecting something good to waiting for something bad. After his
mother had wept, which she did with lamentable discretion – one little cry of sound and a few cold tears – he knew that the evening was spoiled, that the sprats meant nothing to her and
that if he was not careful they would be forgotten. He became inspired – adding up suddenly that his mother responded only to two things: sickness or bullying. Sickness was out of the
question if a single sprat was to pass his lips: he got the whip hand of the situation and bullied her. Shaking her head, faintly blushing, smiling at he knew not what family resemblance, she fried
the whole lot. He watched the silver fishes swoon in the clear fat (she used a special kind), jig a little as they stiffened, lost their beauty and became crumbly and confiding. She had just put a
plate with seven fishes on it – five large, two small – in front of him when his father arrived.

Emmanuel, years later, was to divide second-rate actors into those who could make exits and those who could make entrances. His father was essentially a man who made entrances. He had flung open
the door so that it hung gaping on its hinges, and now he leaned diagonal and dramatic in its narrow opening: breathing heavily and with a piece of blood by his left eye. Below this eye, and the
other one which shone with a purer rage, he was smiling. He paused long enough for this awful incongruity to sink in but not long enough for them to get used to it before he began:
‘I’ve been out after me sense of proportion: I have to remove myself from life to get anything out of it – if I stayed here I’d be the size of a fly on a dusty lump of sugar
– that’s you my
darling
– sweet and dusty – giving me such a thirst for distance that I can glory in a street corner – anything outside this rotten little hole
– have you thought that if we were all dead we’d take up much the same room lying down? Isn’t that a damned thought? But as you lay down when you married me and never got up
perhaps it’s another of the billion trillion things you don’t notice . . .’ And on and on. He could not remember all of it. His mother was crying, and as his father lurched past
him to her he suddenly thought of his one visit to a circus – the best day in his life – because his father smelt of lions, a hot, tawny, meaty, sawdust smell. ‘If you were as far
away as the stars I might miss you – but not much, because you wouldn’t gleam – you wouldn’t twinkle a mile away. You’re the kind of woman one bumps up against in a
foggy life and spends the rest of it apologizing. I come back from me great thoughts of the utter ruin of this country to the smell of fish, and you snivelling – what’s that but a
stinking little beano? If you’re a poor man your possessions cost money – for me that’s you and that little toad – I could keep myself one way or the other when I was
knee-high to him. You may be all I have in the world but
by God
, I could do without you! I was worn out with family life before I’d taken a girl round the corner. And what ’ave I
got? That mooney young savage – that chewed and spewed out little piece of rope heading for damnation as sure as an egg comes out of a hen – a little knocked-up piece of work without
blood or brains; with a future the length of his own nose, and eyes like some lady’s dog . . .’

Emmanuel had never felt so important. He tried to see the end of his own nose – a squint at the future – but he was already so drunk with language that it made him dizzy. His mother
had subsided on to the only chair with arms to it: his father swaying perilously over her – pieces of his overcrowded mind breaking up like a wreck, as below him she shuddered like the
sea.

‘. . . I’m like a man with a great weight on his back – but it’s no river I’m crossing – no holy child to bless
me
, and no bank in sight: I might be
carrying the river itself, you’re so like a weight of water, Leah. I could be in America by now, giving meself a fine time of it, but ever since you married me the corners of me life have
turned down – there’s no smile in it – you’re so set on concocting a tragedy out of a chance. I can walk the streets with me head in the air at the stars – all over
the sky all over the world – that’s a spectacle with some size to it, but I come back here to you jammed in this little trap of a room, chock-a-block with a thimbleful of grief –
making the worst of me all the time I’m away. One day the balloon will go up and by God I’ll be in it. Is it my fault your family are like stones to you? Is it my dreadful sin I’m
not a Jew? Have you thought of my poor mother negotiating the saints about this little heathen?’

His mother uttered one loud wailing cry at this, threw her apron over her head, and there was a savage silence. He could not remember now how the scene between them ended: they went into the
other room where they slept, and he was left alone. Words, words, words: he did not consider their meaning – his heart was so packed with their power. There was a kind of force about them
that stretched his little, open mind (for the first time he thought of its size, and knew that it was small because he felt it growing with an irregular surging excitement). It hurt him, and he did
not know why; he remembered looking at his arms and legs for some mark, while pieces of his father’s language rocketed in his head with explosions of colour and sound. He seemed to be as big
as the room now – if he moved his hand the walls would fall down: his eyes were already outside them, and some other part of him was further than that – higher and further than his
eyes. He tried to catch this piece by pinning it down. America? The stars? Negotiating the saints with his unknown grandmother? But this piece was gigantically obliging – if he said America,
it was there, and rushed to supply him with detailed evidence: cowboys eating golden ice cream galloped over him; rivers spiked with Indian canoes poured towards him; mountains, cactus, animals,
seeded like magic. The stars were not made of gold: they were silver – crisp and pointed, so that if you pulled them together with your fingers, they fitted in one piece of patched and
dazzling beauty, and the dark air round them was warm, like feathers to his skin. His grandmother – wearing a white dress because she was dead – carrying an umbrella like a dame in the
pantomime he had seen at Drury Lane, was jabbing it at a circle of saints – all men, with golden beards, bare feet, and heavy holy eyelids, and he laughed because she could not break the
circle with her umbrella . . . This piece of him could go anywhere; indeed, he could not stop it – it was like a marvellous machine to him. Did his father, using all those angry, travelling
words also have such a machine? He decided not: his father was too angry and despairing: but perhaps his machine had broken down, or perhaps he made it run the wrong way. This was an easy, but
frightening thought: if the machine was so very obliging and one went the wrong way with it, anything could happen . . . Oily black underground rivers crept up with a horrible silent speed, so that
his feet hugged the legs of the chair: the sun was an enormous red angry stare, and he could hear the blood behind his ears like thunder – he was the size of a drop or a grain –
drowning, scorched – he threw all his remaining weight against the machine – it gave a convulsive shudder and was stopped, and the words lay scattered about like broken pieces of it.
They had to be used right: had to be put together, and then they could reach, could cover, anything. He looked down at his hands lying each side of the plate of fish, and saw them, and saw the
difference in his sight. His hands were soft, grey, boneless, small, calm, and rather dirty; but they were simply waiting to do what he wanted; he could move a finger, turn a wrist, have any power
with them – they were another kind of this astonishing machinery. He felt so wonderfully made that he was easily contained in the small greasy room; he felt now that he was a right and
powerful size in it. He looked at his hands again and thought: ‘I shall write the words. I’ll use them like that,’ and a burning shot up in his heart until he felt his eyes alight
with it. He went to the small stove on which his mother had cooked the sprats, and opened the fire box. It was nearly out – one layer of red, and below it a powdery bed of grey. The pan of
sprats lay on the top; he touched one and it was almost cold. He lifted the pan carefully and tipped the fish on to the fire; it gave a creak of amazement, and rustled to life. New clear flames
with unexpected streaks of an unearthly blue slipped up and down over the fish. The blaze suited him, and when it began to die down, he fetched his own plate and fed the fishes one by one to the
fire. He waited until the very end: then pulled out the bottom drawer of the dresser, which was his bed, turned out the gas, and plunged into sleep.

Here, he was woken up: the bus had reached its terminus, and, as the conductor pointed out, he was not now much nearer Finchley Road than he had been when he boarded the bus. He became quite
passionate about Emmanuel’s poor sense of direction: reproached him bitterly for not stating his destination; explained to him three or four ways by which he could have reached Finchley Road
by public transport; and made it very clear to Emmanuel that his concern was the more justified as the situation meant nothing personally to
him.

Emmanuel apologized, which had a calming effect, and the conductor asked whether he was a foreigner. He could not really say that he was. That was funny, because the conductor felt that
he’d seen his face somewhere.

‘I do go abroad a great deal.’