The Sea Change (7 page)

‘Oh well, that must be it, then. You’ll have to take a taxi,’ he added pityingly.

They lurched down the stairs together, and the conductor, with an obvious effort of generosity, remarked: ‘Mind you, I can see the funny side of it.’

Gloria and her sister lived in part of a neo-Tudor gem set well back from the Finchley Road. He had never been there before, and he had never seen Gloria’s sister, who
was older than Gloria and called Beryl. He waited for her in a small bleak room which had been furnished for the purpose: instinct, which had driven him here, seemed to have abandoned him, and he
was now trapped with a blank and nervous mind.

She came in dressed as a professional woman of twenty years ago: the classical navy blue coat and skirt which were supposed never to date and did, as indubitably as people’s faces. The
white shirt with a bow at the neck – stud pearl earrings, as far removed from their function as tinned fruit: hair contorted with the same rigid gaiety as a municipal garden, and a face whose
energy had all been put into withstanding the unexpected. Her expression now, covering what seemed to be curiosity and resentment, was one of breezy caution.

‘It’s Mr Joyce, isn’t it? I had no idea you were coming.’

‘I came to ask you whether you had seen your sister?’

‘She was sleeping this morning – so I’m going this evening after work. She’s quite comfortable, they say.’

There was a short silence and then she said: ‘It was a terrible shock, of course.’ She said it not looking at him and as though there was no other kind.

‘I wonder whether you could spare me a few minutes to talk about Gloria?’

Her expression deepened. ‘Of course. Won’t you sit down? I’ll just tell my girl to take the telephone.’

As she went out he realized that she was really wearing the same clothes as the girl with whom he had lunched – with a difference which somehow touched him. He sat on one of the
uncomfortable chairs and stared at a water colour of some angry-looking jonquils in a gilt basket until she came back. She sat in the other chair and they looked at each other.

‘I wanted to tell you,’ he began carefully, ‘that I had absolutely no idea that Gloria would even attempt to kill herself. I am going to New York in a week or two, and
yesterday I had to tell her that I could not take her with me – with us. I hadn’t even realized that she had thought she was going until my manager – Mr Sullivan – told me
he thought so. I had absolutely no idea that my telling her would have this effect.’

She said nothing, so he asked: ‘Did
you
know that she was expecting to go to New York?’

‘I knew she wanted to go, naturally.’ There was a pause, and she added suddenly: ‘You must have had
some
idea of it. You must have known she thought she was in love with
you.’

Taken off his guard, he said: ‘Thought?’

‘People can think about love the same as they think about anything else, can’t they? And if you think all the time about that sort of thing you get narrow-minded. Gloria’s
romantic, of course.’ She said this last with a mixture of pride and resentment. ‘Mind you,’ she added, ‘I don’t think you’ve helped much.’

‘I think I’ve done very badly indeed.’

She did not confirm or deny this, but he felt her open a little to the confession. She was thinking. Then she said: ‘I suppose you’d give her a good reference?’

‘Yes – of course. She’s a very good secretary.’

‘I usually send her out for the interesting temporary jobs, but there doesn’t happen to be one just now. She gets fed up sitting here all day typing manuscripts. If
you
gave
her a very good reference, I might be able to find her something to take her mind off everything.’

‘Oughtn’t she to have a holiday first?’

A complex of emotions came and went on her face: she gave an unnecessary cough and said: ‘I don’t think that could be managed at present. We’re a very small business, you know
– just us and a girl, and she’s only training. As soon as they’re any good, they go, because I can’t afford to pay them enough. Gloria does get a holiday,’ she added
hastily; ‘it’s just that it has to be fitted in when we’re slack.’

‘Do you have one?’

‘I usually take a week at Christmas. We go down to my brother at Eastbourne: he’s married, and I always say Christmas isn’t Christmas without children. But Gloria goes in the
summer as well.’

‘I was wondering,’ he said, not looking at her, ‘whether you’d let me arrange a holiday for both of you now – any kind of holiday . . .’ he searched for what
they might like; ‘a cruise, or something like that. To Madeira or Greece – or anywhere you like.’

He heard her give a little gasp; saw her hands clench together in her lap; her neck, her face painfully coloured a dark pink, and her eyes filled with tears. She was withstanding nothing at all,
and plainly exposed she lifted the whole situation from the cheap embarrassment he had felt in offering to pay for his behaviour, to a most gentle pleasure at being able to afford her delight. He
went on explaining that he would help for somebody to run her bureau while she was away, and ended by saying that nothing could happen to it in six weeks or so.

‘Six weeks!’ She searched for and discovered an inadequate handkerchief. He gave her his; she took it without noticing – crying and trying to explain to him. She’d always
wanted to go abroad, but Mother had only died last year, and had been too poorly for thirteen years before that; Mother simply couldn’t bear to go away, even for the week at Christmas.
She’d started the typing bureau because she’d had to work at home. She’d been engaged for nearly four years but he wouldn’t have Mother to live with them, and you
couldn’t blame him – Mother didn’t like him, and Gloria – she was only seventeen at the time – said she’d die if she was left alone with Mother. You
couldn’t blame Gloria – she and Mother had never really got on. In the end he’d got fed up and gone off, and you couldn’t blame him really. She was forty now – no
chicken, ten years older than Gloria – so she felt responsible for her in a way, and she’d been trying to save a bit for a rainy day – her heart wasn’t what it was –
and she hadn’t felt justified in taking a holiday – let alone going abroad . . . ‘Abroad!’ she repeated, cramming his handkerchief from one hand to the other with shiny,
nervous fingers.

He said he would have some itineraries of cruises sent to her to choose from, and that apart from making her choice, she was not to worry about any of the arrangements. He must go: he got to his
feet – she sprang to hers like a clumsy young girl, and his handkerchief fell to the ground.

‘Oh!’ It was the first time that she was aware of it.

As he returned it to her, she said: It’s
ever
so good of you to do this – and to think of me. I hadn’t thought – I think I’d better talk to Gloria first: she
might prefer to go alone. She might feel that you were
her
friend, and that I had no business taking so much from you. Besides, she might feel she’d have more fun on her
own.’

‘She has to be looked after,’ he said firmly; ‘she’s been ill. Either you go with her, or she doesn’t go.’

Her face lightened and she followed him meekly to the door.

‘And if I were you,’ he ended, ‘I should not tell Gloria that I had anything to do with this trip. I would much prefer that you didn’t, and I think it will be more of a
success if there is an element of mystery about it. Didn’t you say she was romantic?’ He was smiling at her now, and afterwards – for the rest of her life – this precise and
delicate goodness was her secret blessing.

In the taxi he lay back; his body relaxed, and his mind drifting towards the moments that he recognized but could never invite. He felt calm and alert, and he knew he was
waiting for something. Somewhere, at an extremity, he was touching it: as though he was adrift in an ocean with his fingers on a raft: the swell was moving him and the raft in its different way,
and the difference was at the end of his fingers . . . Her neck and her face suffusing that painful pink; her clumsy movement to her feet; her acceptance of his handkerchief . . . the machinery of
money – use it, abuse it, it was still the same stuff – people only generalized about anything out of a personal lack of grip . . . ‘Her heart was not what it was.’ He
wondered if she had ever known what it had been. He started to imagine her heart: raw – touched by the man she didn’t marry – grabbed by Gloria – squeezed to its death by
her mother; the substitutions encouraged, bolstered by provocative whining: ‘Beryl’s the one with a head on her shoulders: Beryl’s strong – she’s a good worker’:
and beneath that we’ve all got bodies that must be warm and clothed and fed: the rainy days are always with us: where would we be without Beryl – without her heart she won’t be
able to consider where she might be without us . . . and Beryl ‘settling down’ to earning her bread and spreading it on both sides for Mother and Gloria – always goaded into her
place by the unwinking certainty that she was a substitute – doing for them the least that a man might have done on top of the housekeeping-nursing which was her mother’s idea of
companionship: pinched by circumstances which she had not made but was constantly expected to improve – expected also to be in four places at once, and to ‘lose herself’ in the
process. The outlets: the week at Eastbourne in December; an unmarried sister-in-law exhausted with the maintenance of chronic illness and romanticism, picking gratefully at the crumbs of goodwill
that her brother and his wife had to spare. ‘It was only for a
week;
it was
Christmas
, after all.’ During that week, the continual nag of Mother hating her to be away; of
her and Gloria not getting on; of the knowledge that even in a week they could accumulate a bulk of resentment and self-pity that it would take her fifty-one weeks to redeem. The mother had died:
Gloria, if the slightest chance offered, would abandon her, and she would be left to her own resources, having served their purposes, and never her own. The spark he had touched in her – its
endurance, its dignity in surviving at all – blazed now in retrospect, and illuminated elements with no limit – no horizon but a deeper blue – a rounding off of such distance that
the eye could not carry it.

At this moment, like the faint movement of air before a warm wind, the shut red knowledge of sun through the eyelids, like the sudden stroking of a shadow, this kaleidoscopic collection of fact,
invention, instinct, and heart, shivered, shook itself, and fell into a beautiful pattern which filled and spread to the edges of his mind. Not to touch or test it – not to move any of his
formidable machinery near it – but simply to let it lie there printing itself was like the motionless effort of a time exposure, and at the end of it he was matchwood and water. He got out of
the taxi shaking, and so cold that it took him minutes to find the change.

Even if they rented houses, he thought, they never managed to live in them. The sitting room had the watchful, uninhabited air that made him feel rootless and apologetic about it. Upstairs, he
heard the petulant sound of drawers being opened and closed – felt steam creep out of the bathroom as he passed its open door – smelled face powder and scent on the wing. Lillian would
have dressed for the party, and he was probably late.

She had been to the hairdresser: her head was shining – stern and casual – an expensive business. She was wearing a dress which in a dishonest and conciliating moment he had once
said that he liked. It was a floral silk – predominantly blue – with a skirt tightly swathed over her hips, and a low square neck that showed all her delicately prominent bones. It
emphasized all her angles without giving an impression of her shape as a whole, and he did not like it. She was adding a pair of diamond clips, diamond and pearl earrings, and a pearl collar with a
diamond clasp. He was late and she did not like it; she was dressed and he did not like it: she would want to know exactly how he had spent the day and he did not want to tell her; she would want
to tell him exactly how she had spent hers, and he did not want to know. This is where we start from, he thought; do I want to make anything of it? He said: ‘Sol Black said how beautiful you
looked on Tuesday and sent his love. He was really struck: I think you’ll get flowers.’

Her face assumed the expression of indulgent scorn that a compliment she wanted from a man she despised always engendered. ‘He’s so effulgent!’ She sighed, and started to fill
her Fabergé box with herbal cigarettes.

‘Did you rest?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t like being alone here now. Did you work?’

‘A bit.’ The pattern shimmered in his mind like a heat haze; resolutely he kept it out of focus.

‘Em – you’re developing a nervous tic. You keep screwing up your eyes. Don’t you think you ought to see an oculist? Although I can’t see why
writing
should
strain your eyes.’

‘Nor can I.’

‘It worries me,’ she said, and looked up at him for approbation.

‘Don’t worry. You’ll upset your head, and it looks very pretty. I’ve only got to change my shirt: won’t be a minute.’

But she followed him into the dressing room where first Gloria and then he had lain on the bed.

‘Where have you got to?’

‘Got to?’

‘In your new play. How far have you got?’

‘Not very far . . .’ His temper loomed and changed into an ugly shape before he could stop it.

‘Darling, it’s not an unreasonable question. People keep asking me, and I feel such a fool not knowing the first thing about it.’

‘Well, you can tell them not very far.’ He ripped out his cuff links savagely, and started hunting for a clean shirt.

She said something – he knew what the sense of it would be and didn’t listen to the words – by now he had split into three worthless pieces: with an appearance of anger, he was
dressing; with an appearance of patience, he was flowing into her gaps of silence; with (was it an appearance of?) despair, he was running over his pattern of deceit with her; his barren periods
– of months – when he pretended that he was working; his moments of being part of some truth which he kept inviolate from her; his weeks of writing – hanging on by the skin of his
skill to the memory of those moments – endured privately without her knowledge or consent; and the payment for all this. When the work was whole and out of him, he let her read it before
anyone else – let her pat and prick it and mark it with L: let her argue and discuss and find the faults which she felt were her contribution – thereby losing to her all the fine flush
of a piece of work finished. Because of her, play after play slipped from the heart where it had been building and was cast upon his waters of Lethe – all over, bar the cheering, and there
wasn’t any of that . . .