The Sea (21 page)

I must have fallen asleep then, or passed out even, for I do not remember the Colonel finding me, although he insists I spoke to him quite sensibly, and allowed him to help me up and walk me back to the Cedars. This must have been the case, I mean I must have been in some way conscious, for he would not have had the strength, surely, to get me to my feet unassisted, much less to haul me from the beach to my bedroom door, slung across his back, perhaps, or dragging me by the heels behind him. But how had he known where to find me? It seems that in our colloquy on the stairs, although colloquy is not the word, since according to him I did the most part of the talking, I had dwelt at length on the well-known fact, well-known and a fact according to me, that drowning is the gentlest death, and when by a late hour he had not heard me returning, and fearing that I might indeed in my inebriated state try to make away with myself, he had decided he must go and look for me. He had to scout the beach for a long time, and had been about to give up the search, when some gleam from moon or brightest star fell upon my form, supine there on that stony littoral. When, after much meandering and many pauses for expatiation by me on numerous topics, we arrived at the Cedars at last, he had helped me up the stairs and seen me into my room. All this reported, for of that faltering anabasis I recall, as I have said, nothing. Later he had heard me, still in my room, being uproariously sick—not on the carpet but out of the window into the back yard, I am relieved to say—and then seeming to fall down heavily, and had taken it upon himself to come into my room, and there had discovered me, for the second time that night, in a heap, as they say, at the foot of the bed, lost to consciousness and, so he judged, urgently in need of medical attention.

I woke at some early hour of the still-dark morning to a strange and unnerving scene which I at first took to be an hallucination. The Colonel was there, spick as usual in tweed and cavalry twill—he had not been to bed at all—pacing the floor with a frown, and so, far more implausibly, was Miss Vavasour, who, it would turn out, also had heard, or felt, more likely, in the very bones of the old house, the crash I made as I collapsed after that bout of vomiting at the window. She was wearing her Japanese dressing-gown, and her hair was gathered under a hair-net the like of which I had not seen since I was a child. She sat on a chair a little way off from me, against the wall, sideways on, in the very pose of Whistler’s mother, her hands folded on her lap and her face bowed, so that her eye sockets seemed two pits of empty blackness. A lamp, which I thought was a candle, was burning on a table before her, shedding a dim globe of light upon the scene, which overall—a dimly radiant round with seated woman and pacing man—might have been a nocturnal study by Gericault, or de la Tour. Baffled, and abandoning all effort to understand what was going on or how the two of them came to be there, I fell asleep again, or passed out again.

When I next awakened the curtains were open and it was day. The room had a chastened and somewhat abashed aspect, I thought, and everything looked pale and featureless, like a woman’s unmade-up morning face. Outside, a uniformly white sky sat sulkily immobile, seeming no more than a yard or two higher than the roof of the house. Vaguely the events of the night came shuffling back shamefaced to my addled consciousness. Around me the bedclothes were tossed and twisted as after a debauch, and there was a strong smell of sick. I put up a hand and a shot of pain went through my head when my fingers found the pulpy swelling on my temple where it had struck upon the stone. It was only then, with a start that made the bed creak, that I noticed the young man seated on my chair, leaning forward with his arms folded on my desk, reading a book lying open before him on my leather writing pad. He wore steel-framed spectacles and had a high, balding brow and sparse hair of no particular colour. His clothes were characterless too, although I had a general impression of jaded corduroys. Hearing me stir he lifted his eyes unhurriedly from the page and turned his head and looked at me, quite composed, and even smiled, though cheerlessly, and enquired as to how I was feeling. Nonplussed—that is the word, surely—I struggled up in the bed, which seemed to wobble under me as if the mattress were filled with some thick and viscous liquid, and gave him what was intended to be an imperiously interrogative stare. However, he continued calmly regarding me, quite unruffled. The Doctor, he said, making it sound as though there were only one in the world, had been to see me earlier, while I was out—
out,
that was how he put it, and I wondered wildly for a moment if I had been down to the beach again, without knowing it—and had said I seemed to be suffering from a concussion compounded by severe but temporary alcohol poisoning. Seemed? Seemed?

“Claire drove us down,” he said. “She’s sleeping now.”

Jerome! The chinless inamorato! Now I knew him. How had he wormed his way back into my daughter’s favour? Had he been the only one she could think of to turn to, in the middle of the night, when the Colonel or Miss Vavasour, whichever of them it was, had called to tell her of the latest scrape her father had got himself into? If so, I thought, I shall be to blame, although I could not see exactly why. How I cursed myself, sprawled there on that Doge’s daybed, crapulent and woozy and altogether lacking the strength to leap up and seize the presumptuous fellow by the scruff and throw him out a second time. But there was worse to come. When he went out to find if Claire had wakened yet, and she came back with him, drawn and red-rimmed and wearing a raincoat over her slip, she informed me straight away, with the air of one hastily drawing fire so as to be able all the better to deflect it, that they were engaged. For a moment, befuddled as I was, I did not know what she meant—engaged by whom, and as what?—a moment which, as it proved, was sufficient for my vanquishment. I have not managed to bring up the subject again, and every further moment that passes further consolidates her victory over me. This is how, in a twinkling, these things are won and lost. Read Maistre on warfare.

Nor did she stop there, but, flushed with that initial triumph, and seizing the advantage offered by my temporary infirmity, went on to direct, a figurative hand cocked on her hip, that I must pack up and leave the Cedars forthwith and let her take me home—home, she says!—where she will care for me, which care will include, I am given to understand, the withholding of all alcoholic stimulants, or soporifics, until such time as the Doctor, him again, declares me fit for something or other, life, I suppose. What am I to do? How am I to resist? She says it is time I got down seriously to work. “He is finishing,” she informed her betrothed, not without a gloss of filial pride, “a big book on Bonnard.” I had not the heart to tell her that my Big Book on Bonnard—it sounds like something one might shy coconuts at—has got no farther than half of a putative first chapter and a notebook filled with derivative and half-baked would-be aperçus. Well, it is no matter. There are other things I can do. I can go to Paris and paint. Or I might retire into a monastery, pass my days in quiet contemplation of the infinite, or write a great treatise there, a vulgate of the dead. I can see myself in my cell, long-bearded, with quill-pen and hat and docile lion, through a window beside me minuscule peasants in the distance making hay, and hovering above my brow the dove refulgent. Oh, yes, life is pregnant with possibilities.

I suppose I shall not be allowed to sell the house, either.

Miss Vavasour says she will miss me, but thinks I am doing
the right thing.
Leaving the Cedars is hardly of my doing, I tell her, I am being forced to it. She smiles at that. “Oh, Max,” she says, “I do not think you are a man to be forced into anything.” That gives me pause, not because of the tribute to my strength of will, but the fact, which I register with a faint shock, that this is the first time she has addressed me by my name. Still, I do not think it means that I can call her Rose. A certain formal distance is necessary for the good maintenance of the dainty relation we have forged, re-forged, between us over these past weeks. At this hint of intimacy, however, the old, unasked questions come swarming forward again. I would like to ask her if she blames herself for Chloe’s death—I believe, I should say, on no evidence, that it was Chloe who went down first, with Myles following after, to try to save her—and if she is convinced their drowning together like that was entirely an accident, or something else. She would probably tell me, if I did ask. She is not reticent. She fairly prattled on about the Graces, Carlo and Connie—“Their lives were destroyed, of course”—and how they, too, died, not long after losing the twins. Carlo went first, of an aneurysm, then Connie, in a car crash. I ask what kind of crash, and she gives me a look. “Connie was not the kind to kill herself,” she says, with a faint twist of the lips.

They were good to her, afterwards, she says, never a reproach or the hint of an accusation of duty betrayed. They set her up at the Cedars, they knew Bun’s people, persuaded them to take her on to look after the house. “And here I am still,” she says, with a grim small smile, “all these long years later.”

The Colonel is moving about upstairs, making discreet but definite noises; he is glad I am going, I know it. I thanked him for his help last night. “You probably saved my life,” I said, thinking suddenly it was probably true. Much huffing and clearing of the throat—
Faugh,
sir, only doin’ me demned duty!
—and a hand giving my upper arm a quick squeeze. He even produced a going-away present, a fountain pen, a Swan, it is as old as he is, I should think, still in its box, in a bed of yellowed tissue paper. I am graving these words with it, it has a graceful action, smooth and swift with only the occasional blot. Where did he come by it, I wonder? I did not know what to say. “Nothing required,” he said. “Never had a use for it myself, you should have it, for your writing, and so on.” Then he bustled off, rubbing his white old dry hands together. I note that although it is not the weekend he is wearing his yellow waistcoat. I shall never know, now, if he really is an old army man, or an impostor. It is another of those questions I cannot bring myself to put to Miss Vavasour.

“It’s her I miss,” she says, “Connie—Mrs. Grace—that is.” I suppose I stare, and she gives me another of those pitying glances. “It was never him, with me,” she says. “You didn’t think that, did you?” I thought of her standing below me that day under the trees, sobbing, her head sitting on the platter of her foreshortened shoulders, the wadded hankie in her hand. “Oh, no,” she said, “never him.” And I thought, too, of the day of the picnic and of her sitting behind me on the grass and looking where I was avidly looking and seeing what was not meant for me at all.

Anna died before dawn. To tell the truth, I was not there when it happened. I had walked out on to the steps of the nursing home to breathe deep the black and lustrous air of morning. And in that moment, so calm and drear, I recalled another moment, long ago, in the sea that summer at Ballyless. I had gone swimming alone, I do not know why, or where Chloe and Myles might have been; perhaps they had gone with their parents somewhere, it would have been one of the last trips they made together, perhaps the very last. The sky was hazed over and not a breeze stirred the surface of the sea, at the margin of which the small waves were breaking in a listless line, over and over, like a hem being turned endlessly by a sleepy seamstress. There were few people on the beach, and those few were at a distance from me, and something in the dense, unmoving air made the sound of their voices seem to come from a greater distance still. I was standing up to my waist in water that was perfectly transparent, so that I could plainly see below me the ribbed sand of the seabed, and tiny shells and bits of a crab’s broken claw, and my own feet, pallid and alien, like specimens displayed under glass. As I stood there, suddenly, no, not suddenly, but in a sort of driving heave, the whole sea surged, it was not a wave, but a smooth rolling swell that seemed to come up from the deeps, as if something vast down there had stirred itself, and I was lifted briefly and carried a little way toward the shore and then was set down on my feet as before, as if nothing had happened. And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world’s shrugs of indifference.

A nurse came out then to fetch me, and I turned and followed her inside, and it was as if I were walking into the sea.

John Banville

The Sea

John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. The author of thirteen previous novels, he has been the recipient of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and, most recently, the Man Booker Prize. He lives in Dublin.

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