The Sea (19 page)

“Rose,” she said in a playfully coaxing tone, “oh, Rose, what is it?”

Rose, who had resolutely turned her face to the far fields again, gave a liquid snort of not-laughter.

“What is it?” she cried, her voice flying up on the final word and spilling over on itself. “What is it?”

She blew her nose indignantly on the rim of the balled-up hankie and finished with a hair-tossing snuffle. Even from this angle I could see that Mrs. Grace was smiling, and biting her lip. Behind me from afar came a hooting whistle. The afternoon train from town, matt-black engine and half a dozen green wooden carriages, was blundering toward us through the fields like a big mad toy, huffing bulbous links of thick white smoke. Mrs. Grace moved forward soundlessly and touched a fingertip to Rose’s elbow but Rose snatched her arm away as if the touch were burning hot. A flurry of wind flattened the shirt against Mrs. Grace’s body and showed distinctly the fat outlines of her breasts. “Oh, come on now, Rosie,” she coaxed again, and this time managed to insinuate a hand into the crook of the girl’s arm and with a series of soft tugs made her turn, stiff and unwilling though she was, and together they set off pacing under the trees. Rose went stumblingly, talking and talking, while Mrs. Grace kept her head down as before and seemed hardly to speak at all; from the set of her shoulders and a stooping drag to her gait I suspected she was suppressing an urge to laugh. Of Rose’s tremulous hiccupy words the ones I caught were
love
and
foolish
and
Mr. Grace,
and of Mrs. Grace’s responses only a shouted
Carlo?
followed by an incredulous whoop. Suddenly the train was there, making the trunk of the tree vibrate between my knees; as the engine passed I looked into the cabin and saw distinctly the white of an eye flash up at me from under a gleaming, smoke-blackened brow. When I turned back to them the two had stopped pacing and stood face to face in the long grass, Mrs. Grace smiling with a hand lifted to Rose’s shoulder and Rose, her nostrils edged with pink, gouging into her teary eyes with the knuckles of both hands, and then a blinding plume of the train’s smoke blew violently into my face and by the time it cleared they had turned and were walking back up the path together to the house.

So there it was. Rose was lost in love for the father of the children in her charge. It was the old story, although I do not know how it was old for me, who was so young. What did I think, what feel? I recall most clearly the wadded handkerchief in Rose’s hands and the blue filigree of incipient varicose veins on the backs of Mrs. Grace’s strong bare calves. And the steam engine, of course, that had come to a clanking stop over in the station, and stood now seething and gasping and squirting jets of scalding water from its fascinatingly intricate underparts as it waited impatiently to be off again. What are living beings, compared to the enduring intensity of mere things?

When Rose and Mrs. Grace were gone I climbed down from the tree, a harder thing to do than climbing up had been, and went softly past the silent and unseeing house and walked down Station Road in the polished pewter light of the emptied afternoon. That train had pulled out of the station and by now was already somewhere else, somewhere else entirely.

Naturally I lost no time in telling Chloe of my discovery. Her response was not at all what I had expected it would be. True, she seemed shocked at first, but quickly assumed a sceptical air, and even appeared to be annoyed, I mean annoyed at me, for having told her. This was disconcerting. I had depended on her greeting my account of the scene under the trees with a delighted cackle, which in turn would have allowed me the assurance to treat the matter as a joke, instead of which I was forced to reflect on it in a more serious and sombre light. A sombre light, imagine that. But why a joke? Because laughter, for the young, is a neutralising force, and tames terrors? Rose, although nearly twice as old as we were, was still on this side of the gulf that separated us from the world of the adults. It was bad enough to have to entertain the thought of them, the real grown-ups, at their furtive frolics, but the possibility of Rose cavorting with a man of Carlo Grace’s years—that paunch, that bulging crotch, that chest-fur with its glints of grey—was hardly to be entertained by a sensibility as delicate, as callow, as mine still was. Had she declared her love to Mr. Grace? Had he reciprocated? The pictures that flashed before me of pale Rose reclining in her satyr’s rough embrace excited and alarmed me in equal measure. And what of Mrs. Grace? How calmly she had received Rose’s blurted confession, with what lightness, what amusement, even. Why had she not scratched out the girl’s eyes with her glistening, vermilion claws?

Then there were the lovers themselves. How I marvelled at the ease, the smooth effrontery, with which they masked all that was going on between them. Carlo Grace’s very insouciance seemed now a mark of criminal intent. Who but a heartless seducer would laugh like that, and tease, and thrust out his chin and scratch rapidly in the grizzled beard underneath it, his fingernails making a rasping sound? The fact that in public he paid no more attention to Rose than he did to anyone else who happened to cross his path was only a further sign of his cunning and his skilful dissimulation. Rose had only to hand him his newspaper, and he had only to accept it from her, for it to seem to my hotly vigilant eye that a clandestine, indecent exchange had taken place. Her mild and diffident demeanour in his presence was to me that of a debauched nun, now that I knew of her secret shame, and images moved in the deeper reaches of my imagination of her glimmering pale form joined with him in dim coarse couplings, and I heard his muffled bellows and her muted moans of dark delight.

What had driven her to confess, and to her beloved’s spouse, at that? And what did she think, poor Rosie, the first time her eye fell on the slogan that Myles scrawled in chalk on the gate posts and on the footpath outside the gate—
RV
loves
CG—and the accompanying rudimentary sketch of a female torso, two circles with dots in the centre, two curves for the flanks, and, below, a pair of brackets enclosing a curt, vertical gash? She must have blushed, oh, she must have burned. She thought it was Chloe, not I, who had somehow found her out. Strangely, though, it was not Chloe whose power was thus increased over Rose, but the contrary, or so it seemed. The governess’s eye had a new and steelier light when it fell on the girl now, and the girl, to my surprise and puzzlement, appeared cowed under that look as she had never been before. When I think of them like that, the one glinting, the other shying, I cannot but speculate that what happened on the day of the strange tide was in some way a consequence of the uncovering of Rose’s secret passion. After all, why should I be less susceptible than the next melodramatist to the tale’s demand for a neat closing twist?

The tide came up the beach all the way to the foot of the dunes, as though the sea were brimming over its bounds. In silence we watched the water’s steady advance, sitting in a row, the three of us, Chloe and Myles and me, with our backs against the peeling grey boards of the disused groundsman’s hut beside the first tee of the golf course. We had been swimming but we had given up, made uneasy by this waveless, unstoppable tide, the sinister, calm way it kept coming on. The sky was misted white all over with a flat, pale-gold disc of sun stuck motionless in the middle of it. Gulls swooped, shrieking. The air was still. Yet I distinctly recall how the single blades of marram grass growing up through the sand roundabout had each inscribed a neat half circle in front of itself, which suggests a wind was blowing, or at least a breeze. Perhaps that was another day, the day I noticed the grass marking the sand like that. Chloe was in her swimsuit, with a white cardigan draped over her shoulders. Her hair was darkly wet and plastered to her skull. In that unshadowed milky light her face seemed almost featureless, and she and Myles beside her were as alike as the profiles on a pair of coins. Below us in a hollow in the dunes Rose lay on her back on a beach towel with her hands behind her head and seemed to be asleep. The sea’s scummed edge was within a yard of her heels. Chloe considered her, smiling to herself. “Maybe she’ll be washed away,” she said.

It was Myles who got the door of the hut open, twisting the padlock until the bolt broke from its screws and came away in his hand. Inside, there was a single tiny room, empty, and smelling of old urine. A wooden bench seat was set along one wall, and above it there was a small window, the frame intact but the glass long gone. Chloe knelt on the bench with her face in the window and her elbows on the sill. I sat on one side of her, Myles on the other. Why do I think there was something Egyptian about the way that we were posed there, Chloe kneeling and looking out and Myles and I on the bench and facing into the little room? Is it because I am compiling a Book of the Dead? She was the Sphinx and we her seated priests. There was silence, save for the crying of the gulls.

“I hope she gets drowned,” Chloe said, speaking through the window, and gave one of her sharp little nicking laughs. “I hope she does”—
nick
nick
—“I hate her.”

Last words. It was early morning, just before dawn, when Anna came to consciousness. I could not rightly tell if I had been awake or just dreaming that I was. Those nights that I spent sprawled in the armchair beside her bed were rife with curiously mundane hallucinations, half dreams of preparing meals for her, or talking about her to people I had never seen before, or just walking along with her, through dim, nondescript streets, I walking, that is, and she lying comatose beside me and yet managing to move, and keep pace with me, somehow, sliding along on solid air, on her journey toward the Field of Reeds. Waking now, she turned her head on the damp pillow and looked at me wide-eyed in the underwater glimmer of the nightlight with an expression of large and wary startlement. I think she did not know me. I had that paralysing sensation, part awe and part alarm, that comes over one in a sudden and unexpected solitary encounter with a creature of the wild. I could feel my heart beating in slow, liquid thumps, as if it were flopping over an endless series of identical obstacles. Anna coughed, making a sound like the clatter of bones. I knew this was the end. I felt inadequate to the moment, and wanted to cry out for help. Nurse, nurse, come quick, my wife is leaving me! I could not think, my mind seemed filled with toppling masonry. Still Anna stared at me, still surprised, still suspicious. Away down the corridor someone unseen dropped something that clattered, she heard the noise and seemed reassured. Perhaps she thought it was something I had said, and thought she understood it, for she nodded, but impatiently, as if to say
No, you’re wrong, that is not it at all!
She reached out a hand and fixed it claw-like on my wrist. That monkeyish grasp, it holds me yet. I blundered forward from the chair in a sort of panic and scrambled to my knees beside the bed, like one of the dumbstruck faithful falling in adoration before an apparition. Anna was still clutching my wrist. I put my other hand on her brow, and it seemed to me I could feel her mind behind it feverishly at work, making the last tremendous effort of thinking its final thought. Had I ever looked at her in life, with such urgent attention, as I looked at her now? As if looking alone would hold her here, as if she could not go so long as my eye did not flinch. She was panting, softly and slowly, like a runner pausing who still has miles to run. Her breath gave off a mild, dry stink, as of withered flowers. I spoke her name but she only closed her eyes briefly, dismissively, as if I should know that she was no longer Anna, that she was no longer anyone, and then opened them and stared at me again, harder than ever, not in surprise now but with a commanding sternness, willing that I should hear, hear and understand, what it was she had to say. She let go of my wrist and her fingers scrabbled briefly on the bed, searching for something. I took her hand. I could feel the flutter of a pulse at the base of her thumb. I said something, some fatuous thing such as
Don’t go,
or
Stay with me,
but again she gave that impatient shake of the head, and tugged my hand to draw me closer. “They are stopping the clocks,” she said, the merest thread of a whisper, conspiratorial. “I have stopped time.” And she nodded, a solemn, knowing nod, and smiled, too, I would swear it was a smile.

It was the deft, brusque way that Chloe shrugged off her cardigan that prompted me, that permitted me, to put my hand against the back of her thigh where she knelt beside me. Her skin was chill and stippled with gooseflesh but I could feel the busy blood swarming just below the surface. She did not respond to my touch but went on looking out at whatever it was she was looking at—all that water, perhaps, that inexorable slow flood—and cautiously I slid my hand upward until my fingers touched the taut hem of her bathing suit. Her cardigan, that had settled on my lap, now slithered off and tumbled to the floor, making me think of something, a spray of flowers let fall, perhaps, or a falling bird. It would have been enough for me just to go on sitting there with my hand under her bottom, my heart beating out a syncopated measure and my eyes fixed on a knot-hole in the wooden wall opposite, had she not in a tiny, convulsive movement shifted her knee a fraction sideways along the bench and opened her lap to my astonished fingertips. The wadded crotch of her swimsuit was sopping with sea water that felt scalding to my touch. No sooner had my fingers found her there than she clenched her thighs shut again, trapping my hand. Shivers like tiny electric currents ran from all over her into her lap, and with a wriggle she pulled herself free of me, and I thought it was all over, but I was wrong. Quickly she turned about and climbed down from the bench all knees and elbows and sat beside me squirmingly and turned up her face and offered me her cold lips and hot mouth to kiss. The straps of her swimsuit were tied in a bow at the back of her neck, and now without moving her mouth from mine she put up a hand behind her and undid the knot and tugged the wet cloth down to her waist. Still kissing her, I inclined my head to the side and looked with the eye that could see past her ear down along the ridges of her spine to the beginnings of her narrow rump and the cleft there the colour of a clean steel knife. With an impatient gesture she took my hand and pressed it to the barely perceptible mound of one of her breasts the tip of which was cold and hard. On her other side Myles sat with his legs loosely splayed before him, leaning his head back against the wall with his eyes closed. Blindly Chloe reached out sideways and found his hand lying palm-upwards on the bench and clasped it, and as she did so her mouth tightened against mine and I felt rather than heard the faint mewling moan that rose in her throat.