The Sea (9 page)

In those endless October nights, lying side by side in the darkness, toppled statues of ourselves, we sought escape from an intolerable present in the only tense possible, the past, that is, the faraway past. We went back over our earliest days together, reminding, correcting, helping each other, like two ancients tottering arm-in-arm along the ramparts of a town where they had once lived, long ago.

We recalled especially the smoky London summer in which we met and married. I spotted Anna first at a party in someone’s flat one chokingly hot afternoon, all the windows wide open and the air blue with exhaust fumes from the street outside and the honking of passing buses sounding incongruously like fog horns through the clamour and murk in the crowded rooms. It was the size of her that first caught my attention. Not that she was so very large, but she was made on a scale different from that of any woman I had known before her. Big shoulders, big arms, big feet, that great head with its sweep of thick dark hair. She was standing between me and the window, in cheesecloth and sandals, talking to another woman, in that way that she had, at once intent and remote, dreamily twisting a lock of hair around a finger, and for a moment my eye had difficulty fixing a depth of focus, since it seemed that, of the two of them, Anna, being so much the bigger, must be much nearer to me than the one to whom she was speaking.

Ah, those parties, so many of them in those days. When I think back I always see us arriving, pausing together on the threshold for a moment, my hand on the small of her back, touching through brittle silk the cool deep crevice there, her wild smell in my nostrils and the heat of her hair against my cheek. How grand we must have looked, the two of us, making our entrance, taller than everyone else, our gaze directed over their heads as if fixed on some far fine vista that only we were privileged enough to see.

At the time she was trying to become a photographer, taking moody early-morning studies, all soot and raw silver, of some of the bleaker corners of the city. She wanted to work, to do something, to be someone. The East End called to her, Brick Lane, Spitalfields, such places. I never took any of this seriously. Perhaps I should have. She lived with her father in a rented apartment in a liver-coloured mansion on one of those gloomy backwaters off Sloane Square. It was an enormous place, with a succession of vast, high-ceilinged rooms and tall sash-windows that seemed to avert their glazed gaze from the mere human spectacle passing back and forth between them. Her Daddy, old Charlie Weiss—“Don’t worry, it’s not a Jew name”—took to me at once. I was big and young and gauche, and my presence in those gilded rooms amused him. He was a merry little man with tiny delicate hands and tiny feet. His wardrobe was an amazement to me, innumerable Savile Row suits, shirts from Charvet in cream and bottle-green and aquamarine silk, dozens of pairs of handmade miniature shoes. His head, which he took to Trumper’s to be shaved every other day—hair, he said, is fur, no human being should tolerate it— was a perfect polished egg, and he wore those big heavy spectacles favoured by tycoons of the time, with flanged ear-pieces and lenses the size of saucers in which his sharp little eyes darted like inquisitive, exotic fish. He could not be still, jumping up and sitting down and then jumping up again, seeming, under those lofty ceilings, a tiny burnished nut rattling around inside an outsized shell. On my first visit he showed me proudly around the flat, pointing out the pictures, old masters every one, so he imagined, the giant television set housed in a walnut cabinet, the bottle of Dom Perignon and basket of flawless inedible fruit that had been sent him that day by a business associate—Charlie did not have friends, partners, clients, but only associates. Light of summer thick as honey fell from the tall windows and glowed on the figured carpets. Anna sat on a sofa with her chin on her hand and one leg folded under her and watched dispassionately as I negotiated my way around her preposterous little father. Unlike most small people he was not at all intimidated by us big ones, and seemed indeed to find my bulk reassuring, and kept pressing close up to me, almost amorously; there were moments, while he was displaying the gleaming fruits of his success, when it seemed that he might of a sudden hop up and settle himself all comfy in the cradle of my arms. When he had mentioned his business interests for the third time I asked what business it was that he was in and he turned on me a gaze of flawless candour, those twin fish-bowls flashing.

“Heavy machinery,” he said, managing not to laugh.

Charlie regarded the spectacle of his life with delight and a certain wonder at the fact of having got away so easily with so much. He was a crook, probably dangerous, and wholly, cheerfully immoral. Anna held him in fond and rueful regard. How such a diminutive man had got so mighty a daughter was a mystery. Young as she was she seemed the tolerant mother and he the waywardly winning manchild. Her own mother had died when Anna was twelve and since then father and daughter had faced the world like a pair of nineteenth-century adventurers, a riverboat gambler, say, and his alibi girl. There were parties at the flat two or three times a week, raucous occasions through which champagne flowed like a bubbling and slightly rancid river. One night towards the end of that summer we came back from the park—I liked to walk with her at dusk through the dusty shadows under the trees that were already beginning to make that fretful, dry, papery rustle that harbinges autumn— and before we had even turned into the street we heard the sounds of tipsy revelry from the flat. Anna put a hand on my arm and we stopped. Something in the air of evening bespoke a sombre promise. She turned to me and took one of the buttons of my jacket between a finger and thumb and twisted it forward and back like the dial of a safe, and in her usual mild and mildly preoccupied fashion invited me to marry her.

Throughout that expectant, heat-hazed summer I seemed to have been breathing off the shallowest top of my lungs, like a diver poised on the highest board above that tiny square of blue so impossibly far below. Now Anna had called up to me ringingly to
jump,
jump!
Today, when only the lower orders and what remains of the gentry bother to marry, and everyone else takes a partner, as if life were a dance, or a business venture, it is perhaps hard to appreciate how vertiginous a leap it was back then to plight one’s troth. I had plunged into the louche world of Anna and her father as if into another medium, a fantastical one wherein the rules as I had known them up to then did not apply, where everything shimmered and nothing was real, or was real but looked fake, like that platter of perfect fruit in Charlie’s flat. Now I was being invited to become a denizen of these excitingly alien deeps. What Anna proposed to me, there in the dusty summer dusk on the corner of Sloane Street, was not so much marriage as the chance to fulfil the fantasy of myself.

The wedding party was held under a striped marquee in the mansion’s unexpectedly spacious back garden. It was one of the last days of that summer’s heat-wave, the air, like scratched glass, crazed by glinting sunlight. Throughout the afternoon long gleaming motor cars kept pulling up outside and depositing yet more guests, heron-like ladies in big hats and girls in white lipstick and white leather knee-high boots, raffish pinstriped gents, delicate young men who pouted and smoked pot, and lesser, indeterminate types, Charlie’s business associates, sleek, watchful and unsmiling, in shiny suits and shirts with different-coloured collars and sharp-toed ankle-boots with elasticated sides. Charlie bounced about amongst them all, his blued pate agleam, pride pouring off him like sweat. Late in the day a huddle of warm-eyed, slow-moving, shy plump men in headdresses and spotless white djellabas arrived in our midst like a flock of doves. Later still a dumpy dowager in a hat got stridently drunk and fell down and had to be carried away in the arms of her stone-jawed chauffeur. As the light thickened in the trees and the shadow of the next-door house began to close over the garden like a trapdoor, and the last drunken couples in their clown-bright clothes were shuffling around the makeshift wooden dance floor one last time with their heads fallen on each other’s shoulders and their eyes shut and eyelids fluttering, Anna and I stood on the tattered edges of it all, and a dark burst of starlings out of nowhere flew low over the marquee, their wings making a clatter that was like a sudden round of applause, exuberant and sarcastic.

Her hair. Suddenly I am thinking of her hair, the long dark lustrous coil of it falling away from her forehead in a sideways sweep. Even in her middle age there was hardly a strand of grey in it. We were driving home from the hospital one day when she lifted a length of it from her shoulder and held it close to her eyes and examined it strand by strand, frowning.

“Is there a bird called a baldicoot?” she asked.

“There is a bandicoot,” I said cautiously, “but I don’t think it’s a bird. Why?”

“Apparently I shall be as bald as a coot in a month or two.”

“Who told you that?”

“A woman in the hospital who was having treatment, the kind I am to have. She was quite bald, so I suppose she would know.” For a while she watched the houses and the shops progressing past the car window in that stealthily indifferent way that they do, and then turned to me again. “But what is a coot?”

“That’s a bird.”

“Ah.” She chuckled. “I’ll be the spitting image of Charlie when it has all fallen out.”

She was.

He died, old Charlie, of a blood clot in the brain, a few months after we were married. Anna got all his money. There was not as much of it as I would have expected, but still, there was a lot.

The odd thing, one of the odd things, about my passion for Mrs. Grace is that it fizzled out almost in the same moment that it achieved what might be considered its apotheosis. It all happened on the afternoon of the picnic. By then we were going about everywhere together, Chloe and Myles and I. How proud I was to be seen with them, these divinities, for I thought of course that they were the gods, so different were they from anyone I had hitherto known. My former friends in the Field, where I no longer played, were resentful of my desertion. “He spends all his time now with his grand new friends,” I heard my mother one day telling one of their mothers. “The boy, you know,” she added in an undertone, “is a dummy.” To me she wondered why I did not petition the Graces to adopt me. “I won’t mind,” she said. “Get you out from under my feet.” And she gave me a level look, harsh and unblinking, the same look she would often turn on me after my father had gone, as if to say,
I suppose you will be the next to betray me.
As I suppose I was.

My parents had not met Mr. and Mrs. Grace, nor would they. People in a proper house did not mix with people from the chalets, and we would not expect to mix with them. We did not drink gin, or have people down for the weekend, or leave touring maps of France insouciantly on show in the back windows of our motor cars—few in the Field even had a motor car. The social structure of our summer world was as fixed and hard of climbing as a ziggurat. The few families who owned holiday homes were at the top, then came those who could afford to put up at hotels—the Beach was more desirable than the Golf—then there were the house renters, and then us. All-the-year-rounders did not figure in this hierarchy; villagers in general, such as Duignan the dairyman or deaf Colfer the golf-ball collector, or the two Protestant spinsters at the Ivy Lodge, or the French woman who ran the tennis courts and was said to copulate regularly with her alsatian dog, all these were a class apart, their presence no more than the blurred background to our intenser, sun-shone-upon doings. That I had managed to scramble from the base of those steep social steps all the way up to the level of the Graces seemed, like my secret passion for Connie Grace, a token of specialness, of being the one chosen among so many of the unelect. The gods had singled me out for their favour.

The picnic. We went that afternoon in Mr. Grace’s racy motor car far down the Burrow, all the way to where the paved road ended. A note of the voluptuous had been struck immediately by the feel of the stippled leather of the seat cover sticking to the backs of my thighs below my shorts. Mrs. Grace sat beside her husband in front, half turned toward him, an elbow resting on the back of her seat so that I had a view of her armpit, excitingly stubbled, and even caught now and then, when the breeze from the open window veered my way, a whiff of her sweat-dampened flesh’s civet scent. She was wearing a garment which I believe even in those demurer days was called, with graphic frankness, a halter top, no more than a strapless white woollen tube, very tight, and very revealing of the curves of her bosom’s heavy undersides. She had on her film star’s sunglasses with the white frames and was smoking a fat cigarette. It excited me to watch as she took a deep drag and let her mouth hang open crookedly for a moment, a rich curl of smoke suspended motionless between those waxily glistening scarlet lips. Her fingernails too were painted a bright sanguineous red. I was seated directly behind her in the back seat, with Chloe in the middle between Myles and me. Chloe’s hot, bony thigh was pressed negligently against my leg. Brother and sister were engaged in one of their private wordless contests, tussling and squirming, plucking at each other with pincer fingers and trying to kick each other’s shins in the cramped space between the seats. I never could make out the rules of these games, if rules there were, although a winner always emerged in the end, Chloe, most often. I recall, with even now a faint stirring of pity for poor Myles, the first time I witnessed them playing in this way, or fighting, more like. It was a wet afternoon and we were trapped indoors at the Cedars. What savagery a rainy day could bring out in us children! The twins were sitting on the living room floor, on their heels, facing each other, knee to knee, glaring into each other’s eyes, their fingers interlocked, swaying and straining, intent as a pair of battling samurai, until at last something happened, I did not see what it was, although it was decisive, and Myles all at once was forced to surrender. Snatching his fingers from her steely claws he threw his arms around himself—he was a great clutcher of the injured or insulted self—and began to cry, in frustration and rage, emitting a high, strangled whine, his lower lip clamped over the upper and his eyes squeezed shut and spurting big, shapeless tears, the whole effect too dramatic to be entirely convincing. And what a gloatingly feline look victorious Chloe gave me over her shoulder, her face unpleasantly pinched and an eye-tooth glinting. Now, in the car, she won again, doing something to Myles’s wrist that made him squeal. “Oh, do stop, you two,” their mother said wearily, barely giving them a glance. Chloe, still grinning thinly in triumph, pressed her hip harder against my leg, while Myles grimaced, making a pursed O of his lips, this time holding back his tears, but barely, and chafing his reddened wrist.