The Sea (12 page)

Miss Vavasour was shyly excited by my arrival, two small round spots like dabs of pink crêpe paper glowed high on her finely wrinkled cheeks and she kept clasping her hands before her and pursing her lips to stop herself smiling. When she opened the door Colonel Blunden was there, bobbing behind her in the hallway, now at this shoulder now at that; I could see straight away he did not like the look of me. I sympathise; after all, he was cock of the walk here before I came and knocked him off his perch. Keeping a choleric glare directed at my chin, which was on his eye-level, for he is low-sized despite the ramrod spine, he pumped my hand and cleared his throat, all bluff and manly and barking comments about the weather, rather over-playing the part of the old soldier, I thought. There is something about him that is not quite right, something too shiny, too studiedly plausible. Those glossy brogues, the Harris tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows and the cuffs, the canary-yellow waistcoat he sports at weekends, it all seems a little too good to be true. He has the glazed flawlessness of an actor who has been playing the same part for too long. I wonder if he really is an old army man. He does a good job of hiding his Belfast accent but hints of it keep escaping, like trapped wind. And anyway, why hide it, what does he fear it might tell us? Miss Vavasour confides that she has spotted him on more than one occasion slipping into church of a Sunday for early mass. A Belfast Catholic colonel? Rum; very.

In the bay of the window in the lounge, formerly the living room, a hunting table was set for tea. The room was much as I remembered it, or looked as if it was as I remembered, for memories are always eager to match themselves seamlessly to the things and places of a revisited past. The table, was that the one where Mrs. Grace had stood arranging flowers that day, the day of the dog with the ball? It was laid elaborately, big silver teapot with matching strainer, best bone china, antique creamer, tongs for the sugar cubes, doilies. Miss Vavasour was in Japanese mode, her hair done up in a bun and pierced with the two big crossed pins, making me think, incongruously, of those erotic prints of the Japanese eighteenth century in which puffy, porcelain-faced matrons suffer imperturbably the gross attentions of grimacing gentlemen with outsized members and, I am always struck to notice, remarkably pliant toes.

The conversation did not flow. Miss Vavasour was nervous still and the Colonel’s stomach rumbled. Late sunlight striking through a bush outside in the blustery garden dazzled our eyes and made the things on the table seem to shake and shift. I felt over-sized, clumsy, constrained, like a big delinquent child sent by its despairing parents into the country to be watched over by a pair of elderly relatives. Was it all a hideous mistake? Should I mumble some excuse and flee to a hotel for the night, or go home, even, and put up with the emptiness and the echoes? Then I reflected that I had come here precisely so that it should be a mistake, that it should be hideous, that it should be, that I should be, in Anna’s word, inappropriate. “You’re mad,” Claire had said, “you’ll die of boredom down there.” It was all right for her, I retorted, she had got herself a nice new flat—
wasting
no time,
I did not add. “Then come and live with me,” she said, “there’s room enough for two.” Live with her! Room for two! But I only thanked her and said no, that I wished to be on my own. I cannot bear the way she looks at me these days, all tenderness and daughterly concern, her head held to one side in just the way that Anna used to do, one eyebrow lifted and her forehead wrinkled solicitously. I do not want solicitude. I want anger, vituperation, violence. I am like a man with an agonising toothache who despite the pain takes a vindictive pleasure in prodding the point of his tongue again and again deep into the throbbing cavity. I imagine a fist flying out of nowhere and striking me full in the face, I almost feel the thud and hear the nose-bone breaking, even the thought of it affords me a grain of sad satisfaction. After the funeral, when people came back to the house—that was awful, almost unbearable—I gripped a wine glass so hard it shattered in my fist. Gratified, I watched my own blood drip as though it were the blood of an enemy to whom I had dealt a savage slash.

“So you’re in the art business, then,” the Colonel said warily. “A lot in that, yes?”

He meant money. Miss Vavasour, pinched-lipped, frowned at him fiercely and gave her head a reproving shake. “He only writes about it,” she said in a whisper, gulping the words as she spoke them, as if that way I would be spared hearing them.

The Colonel looked quickly from me to her and back again and dumbly nodded. He expects to get things wrong, he is inured to it. He drinks his tea with a little finger cocked. The little finger of his other hand is hooked permanently flat against the palm, it is a syndrome, not uncommon, the name of which I have forgotten; it looks painful but he says it is not. He makes curiously elegant, sweeping gestures with that hand, a conductor calling up the woodwinds or urging a fortissimo from the chorus. He has a slight tremor, too, more than once the tea cup clacked against his front teeth, which must be dentures, so white and even are they. The skin of his weatherbeaten face and the backs of his hands is wrinkled and brown and shiny, like shiny brown paper that had been used to wrap something unwrappable.

“I see,” he said, not seeing at all.

One day in 1893 Pierre Bonnard spied a girl getting off a Paris tram and, attracted by her frailty and pale prettiness, followed her to her place of work, a
pompes funèbres,
where she spent her days sewing pearls on to funeral wreaths. Thus death at the start wove its black ribbon into their lives. He quickly made her acquaintance—I suppose these things were managed with ease and aplomb in the
Belle Époque
—and shortly afterwards she left her job, and everything else in her life, and went to live with him. She told him her name was Marthe de Méligny, and that she was sixteen. In fact, although he was not to discover it until more than thirty years later when he got round to marrying her at last, her real name was Maria Boursin, and when they had met she had been not sixteen but, like Bonnard, in her middle twenties. They were to remain together, through thick and thin, or rather say, through thin and thinner, until her death nearly fifty years later. Thadée Natanson, one of Bonnard’s earliest patrons, in a memoir of the painter, recalled with swift, impressionistic strokes the elfin Marthe, writing of
her wild look
of a bird, her movements on tiptoe.
She was secretive, jealous, fiercely possessive, suffered from a persecution complex, and was a great and dedicated hypochondriac. In 1927 Bonnard bought a house, Le Bosquet, in the undistinguished little town of Le Cannet on the Côte d’Azur, where he lived with Marthe, bound with her in intermittently tormented seclusion, until her death fifteen years later. At Le Bosquet she developed a habit of spending long hours in the bath, and it was in her bath that Bonnard painted her, over and over, continuing the series even after she had died. The
Baignoires
are the triumphant culmination of his life’s work. In the
Nude in the bath, with dog,
begun in 1941, a year before Marthe’s death and not completed until 1946, she lies there, pink and mauve and gold, a goddess of the floating world, attenuated, ageless, as much dead as alive, beside her on the tiles her little brown dog, her familiar, a dachshund, I think, curled watchful on its mat or what may be a square of flaking sunlight falling from an unseen window. The narrow room that is her refuge vibrates around her, throbbing in its colours. Her feet, the left one tensed at the end of its impossibly long leg, seem to have pushed the bath out of shape and made it bulge at the left end, and beneath the bath on that side, in the same force-field, the floor is pulled out of alignment too, and seems on the point of pouring away into the corner, not like a floor at all but a moving pool of dappled water. All moves here, moves in stillness, in aqueous silence. One hears a drip, a ripple, a fluttering sigh. A rust-red patch in the water beside the bather’s right shoulder might be rust, or old blood, even. Her right hand rests on her thigh, stilled in the act of supination, and I think of Anna’s hands on the table that first day when we came back from seeing Mr. Todd, her helpless hands with palms upturned as if to beg something from someone opposite her who was not there.

She too, my Anna, when she fell ill, took to taking extended baths in the afternoon. They soothed her, she said. Throughout the autumn and winter of that twelvemonth of her slow dying we shut ourselves away in our house by the sea, just like Bonnard and his Marthe at Le Bosquet. The weather was mild, hardly weather at all, the seemingly unbreakable summer giving way imperceptibly to a year-end of misted-over stillness that might have been any season. Anna dreaded the coming of spring, all that unbearable bustle and clamour, she said, all that life. A deep, dreamy silence accumulated around us, soft and dense, like silt. She was so quiet, there in the bathroom on the first-floor return, that I became alarmed sometimes. I imagined her slipping down without a sound in the enormous old claw-footed bath until her face was under the surface and taking a last long watery breath. I would creep down the stairs and stand on the return, not making a sound, seeming suspended there, as if I were the one under water, listening desperately through the panels of the door for sounds of life. In some foul and treacherous chamber of my heart, of course, I wanted her to have done it, wanted it all to be over with, for me as well as for her. Then I would hear a soft heave of water as she stirred, the soft splash as she lifted a hand for the soap or a towel, and I would turn away and plod back to my room and shut the door behind me and sit down at my desk and gaze out into the luminous grey of evening, trying to think of nothing.

“Look at you, poor Max,” she said to me one day, “having to watch your words and be nice all the time.” She was in the nursing home by then, in a room at the far end of the old wing with a corner window that looked out on a wedge of handsomely unkempt lawn and a restless and, to my eye, troubling stand of great tall blackish-green trees. The spring that she had dreaded had come and gone, and she had been too ill to mind its agitations, and now it was a damply hot, glutinous summer, the last one she would see. “What do you mean,” I said, “having to be nice?” She said so many strange things nowadays, as if she were already somewhere else, beyond me, where even words had a different meaning. She moved her head on the pillow and smiled at me. Her face, worn almost to the bone, had taken on a frightful beauty. “You are not even allowed to hate me a little, any more,” she said, “like you used to.” She looked out at the trees a while and then turned back to me again and smiled again and patted my hand. “Don’t look so worried,” she said. “I hated you, too, a little. We were human beings, after all.” By then the past tense was the only one she cared to employ.

“Would you like to see your room now?” Miss Vavasour enquired. Last spikes of sunlight through the bay window before us were falling like shards of glass in a burning building. The Colonel was brushing crossly at the front of his yellow waistcoat where he had spilled a splash of tea. He looked put-out. Probably he had been saying something to me and I had not been listening. Miss Vavasour led the way into the hall. I was nervous of this moment, the moment when I would have to take on the house, to put it on, as it were, like something I had worn in another, prelapsarian life, a once fashionable hat, say, an outmoded pair of shoes, or a wedding suit, smelling of mothballs and no longer fitting around the waist and too tight under the arms but bulging with memories in every pocket. The hall I did not recognise at all. It is short, narrow and ill-lit, and the walls are divided horizontally by a beaded runner and papered on their lower halves with painted-over anaglypta that looks to be a hundred years old or more. I do not recall there having been a hallway here. I thought the front door opened directly into—well, I am not sure what I thought it opened into. The kitchen? As I padded behind Miss Vavasour with my bag in my hand, like the well-mannered murderer in some old black-and-white thriller, I found that the model of the house in my head, try as it would to accommodate itself to the original, kept coming up against a stubborn resistance. Everything was slightly out of scale, all angles slightly out of true. The staircase was steeper, the landing pokier, the lavatory window looked not on to the road, as I thought it should, but back across the fields. I experienced a sense almost of panic as the real, the crassly complacent real, took hold of the things I thought I remembered and shook them into its own shape. Something precious was dissolving and pouring away between my fingers. Yet how easily, in the end, I let it go. The past, I mean the real past, matters less than we pretend. When Miss Vavasour left me in what from now on was to be
my room
I threw my coat over a chair and sat down on the side of the bed and breathed deep the stale unlived-in air, and felt that I had been travelling for a long time, for years, and had at last arrived at the destination to where, all along, without knowing it, I had been bound, and where I must stay, it being, for now, the only possible place, the only possible refuge, for me.

My friendly robin appeared a moment ago in the garden and I suddenly realised what it was that Avril’s freckles reminded me of, that day of our encounter in Duignan’s yard. The bird as usual stops on its thirdmost perch in the holly bush and studies the lay of the land with a truculent, bead-bright eye. Robins are a famously fearless breed, and this one seems quite unconcerned when Tiddles from next door comes stalking through the long grass, and even gives what sounds like a sardonic cheep and ruffles up its feathers and expands its blood-orange breast, as if to demonstrate teasingly what a plump and toothsome morsel it would make, if cats could fly. Seeing the bird alight there I remembered at once, with a pang that was exactly the same size and as singular as the bird itself, the nest in the gorse bushes that was robbed. I was quite a bird enthusiast as a boy. Not the watching kind, I was never a watcher, I had no interest in spotting and tracking and classifying, all that would have been beyond me, and would have bored me, besides; no, I could hardly distinguish one species from another, and knew little and cared less about their history or habits. I could find their nests, though, that was my specialty. It was a matter of patience, alertness, quickness of eye, and something else, a capacity to be at one with the tiny creatures I was tracking to their lairs. A savant whose name for the moment I forget has posited as a refutation of something or other the assertion that it is impossible for a human being to imagine fully what it would be like to be a bat. I take his point in general, but I believe I could have given him a fair account of such creature-hood when I was young and still part animal myself.