The Sea Change (25 page)

‘And what about becoming an actress?’

‘I had not considered that at all. And after all, you may find that I’m not one. In that case, you need have no consideration for my feelings, because I shall probably know
myself.’

‘Will you be disappointed?’

She looked at me then. ‘I don’t think so, because I didn’t appoint myself. I haven’t any imagination of myself as an actress – either way.’ She smiled –
with her eyes as well – and for a moment I felt connected with her: there was some warmth, and a warning in it . . . Then her call came through, and I watched her in the glass booth talking
to her father – talking, listening carefully, explaining, listening – her laugh – her moment’s tension before she hung up. She came back.

‘Everything all right?’

She nodded, and her eyes filled suddenly with tears.

‘He wasn’t at all surprised to hear me – not
at all
! He sounded exactly the same and clearer than if I was ringing him up from London!’

‘What did he say about Greece?’

‘A prodigious piece of good fortune.’ Her tears ran down with a kind of momentous ease: then she said: ‘It’s simply that I’ve known him all my life.’ There
wasn’t anybody I had known like that, and I felt it then.

I said: ‘There isn’t anyone I’ve known all my life.’

‘Are you an orphan?’

‘I don’t even know. My mother died when I was born. She wasn’t married to my father whoever he was.’ I felt my angry smile splitting my face: ‘At least I
know
I’m illegitimate.’

‘Are you English or American?’

‘You may well ask. I’m not anything, really. I’ve got a British passport, brought up – if you can call it that – in America.’ Something in her practical
attention eased me, and suddenly I
wanted
to say it all. ‘When my mother died, she kind of left me to her sister. The sister married an Irishman who was emigrating to the States. They
took me along – the sister died almost as soon as they got there; her husband married again, they didn’t want me, and managed to farm me out to an orphanage. That was when I clung to my
having been born in England and being different from the rest of the kids. When I was sixteen and I’d been working in a store for some time saving the money for a trip to England, Emmanuel
suddenly wrote to me out of the blue and said he’d pay the expenses for the trip. It didn’t seem strange at all. I was crazy on the theatre – I’d known about him for years,
I’d saved ninety dollars and thirty-five cents for the trip, and I knew I was going in the end, anyway, but it never struck me what an extraordinary piece of luck it was for me that Emmanuel
should have picked me out and offered me exactly that. That was in ’39: late summer – the war hadn’t started, and Lillian had taken Sarah away for a long seaside holiday – I
didn’t meet her then. I spent five weeks in an hotel with Emmanuel and he showed me London. They were the best weeks in my life. We went to the theatre every night, and sometimes in the
afternoons as well – he gave me wonderful meals with wines which I’d never had before, and in the mornings he showed me London, thoroughly – every single thing I wanted to see,
and a great deal that I’d never heard of. And he talked to me! He treated me all the time as though I was human and adult and interesting; he taught me by listening to my resentment, by not
arguing with my opinions, by encouraging me to walk down each one of my little dead alleys and waiting for me at the open end. I’d gotten a grudge like a house on my back – I was
against pretty well everything you can think of from Mick O’Casey, my aunt’s husband, to Dr Heller who ran the Home where my childhood had been spent for me – to the President
himself – anything, anyone – but in those five weeks it all peeled off – like having a new skin. He once said to me: “After you’ve given up something which seemed
difficult to give up, you find out it wasn’t ever there – you feel much lighter and a little foolish”: it was just how I felt about the chip on my shoulder. He showed me the play
he was writing, and asked me what I thought of it; he bought me decent clothes; he offered to send me to college or university – it was all set that I could stay in England if I
wanted.’ I stopped and she said: ‘Why have you stopped?’

‘I don’t know why I started. Oh yes: I was trying to explain why I’m such a mongrel. I don’t even have me an accent that either country would call their own.
You’d
think it was American, and most Americans would think it was English.’

‘Yes, but what happened next?’

‘When?’

‘After the five weeks? What happened then?’

‘The war. I’d paid no attention to it, you see – was in such a trance, and it just sneaked up on me. He sent me back to America. I didn’t want to go to college, so he
sent me to learn my profession with a man he knew in Chicago who owned theatres. He promised me a job after the war, and to keep in touch. He wrote to me and I came straight out of the Army to
him.’

‘He’s really become your family, hasn’t he?’

‘
He
has. I only told you all this so that you wouldn’t cry.’ This wasn’t true: I had wanted to tell her and liked it. I asked Frank for the check, and she said:
‘Did you ever know Sarah?’

‘She died that fall. Just after I left. I didn’t meet Lillian till after the war.’

She said she wanted to pay for her call. ‘No – this is part of the expense sheet: honest. We couldn’t abduct you to Greece without your father’s agreement –
you’re under the age for that kind of consenting.’

‘And I suppose now you’re well over the age of resenting?’

‘I do hope so.’ I was smiling when I said that, and then I remembered Emmanuel’s face when he had said the same thing about his magic.

Outside, she said: ‘What do you think Greece will be like? Or do you know?’

‘I don’t
know
, but I suspect that it will be hot and yellow and dusty with everybody arguing about money, and flies on the food. We shall all get dysentery and sunstroke and
be eaten by sharks.’

‘
Sharks?
Are there really sharks?’

The sea is studded with them – all half mad with hunger because there aren’t nearly enough fish to go round anywhere in the Mediterranean.’

‘Sharks,’ she repeated dreamily – she sounded pleased. What else?’

‘Isn’t that enough? Well, ruins, of course. The whole country’s lousy with ruins, and a lot of rocks so you’re worn out climbing. I just can’t wait to get back from
Greece. I suppose you’re looking forward to it.’

She nodded: ‘I really am. It may be better than you think.’

I shrugged, but she persisted: ‘Or different.’

‘I’ll tell you if it is either.’

She laughed: ‘You won’t have to tell me – I’ll know.’

4

LILLIAN

C
ONTRAST
– opposites – extremes – how I am fed by them! New York in the early evening of early summer,
shrugging with a moonstone mist, chilled, subdued, chalky; filled with a hurrying irresolution – the business day over, the professional night not begun – slung in this hour of waiting
for the end of the end. The time for illicit love, for the uncharacteristic event, for killing with a drink or some duty duologue, for playing with the children: to spend, to lose, or to waste
– the travelling is over, but nobody has arrived . . . In the aeroplane we have become a giant: everything below us diminished, cosy, twinkling, melted into the distance of our feet, until,
at our giant’s level, the sky is our country – pleasing with enormous detail and endless resource. We fly away from the sun which retreats like a beautiful calamity with such majestic
movement and tragic colour that I know it is its silence which moves me. When we are above the clouds that reflect this crisis of the sun, they lie in soft apricot waves – the smaller ones
sharper hit, red and seedy, like split pomegranate, and above us the fine, blue air is already impregnated with stars who are bom into the dying blue with little starts of light. Soon the air will
have that unbreathing colourless purity that I love and cannot communicate, and I turn to Em sitting beside me because I wonder whether all communication is, after all, only a refuge? This starts
some consideration about silence in my mind – the nearest I get to it is with music, when sometimes I am attending to sound outside myself, and if the attention is enough, I am silent inside.
I turn to Em again – illogically, even thinking of silence has made me want to talk to him, but at once an avalanche of food and information pours through the aeroplane, quenching all sparks
of hunger or need of any kind. Em asks me something but I only hear ‘glad’ and ‘darling’: I lean towards him and he repeats: ‘Are you glad that we are going to
Greece?’ and I smile, and start to imagine Athens – but I get caught by the beautiful name and can see nothing . . .

Athens – stepping out of the plane on to the hot ground into air brilliant, burning at such a pitch of light that my eyes cannot reach it. It is noon; and we walk into the Customs with the
heat like an arrow between our shoulder blades, and wait for our luggage amid the usual shuffle of languages and a knot of people becoming resigned to impatience. The stalls sell sham pottery, sham
jewellery, and doubtful peasant costumes, real silk and beautiful cigarettes; the airport officials have that Mediterranean inability to look serious in uniform. Alberta is looking at a priest: he
wears black boots below his greasy gown, but it is his head that fascinates her. After the wealth of his beard it seems impossible that his long hair can screw into so small a bun – it is no
larger than a ping-pong ball skewered below his huge stiff hat. His face is shrewd, savage, and joyous. Then we are in a taxi – a huge old American car which thunders loosely along the coast
road into Athens. To our right are mountains bleached and shimmering in the hot distance, and to the left the sea – like a stroke of summer – filling and quenching our eyes. We all
look, and say very little – the long flight is beginning to catch up on us: we none of us speak any Greek, and are to depend on my French, but when the cab driver points and says
‘Akropolis’, and there it is, crowning a hill in actual unwinking splendour, there is a different silence – we smile at one another, and I wonder what the others are thinking
until Alberta says: ‘My father has a picture of that in his study, but it is rather spotted with damp’: and Jimmy says: ‘Yes: I’ve seen pictures of that some place
too.’

We are into Athens – the air is white and dusty – every other road seems to be up – buildings are being demolished, being built, and traffic is either charging at full speed or
hopelessly jammed. Our driver becomes dramatically concerned with getting us to the hotel – he sweats and sways and groans over his wheel – he hoots and pounces whenever he can take
anyone by surprise – he swerves round pot holes and shoots down side streets muttering the breathy, liquid language – his face tragic with resolution – I see Em watching it in the
driving mirror and take his hand, but it is too hot to touch hands. The hotel is very cool and dark and antiseptic: the man at the desk speaks English, and Jimmy is visibly cheered. In a spurt of
excitement at our arrival, we decide to go out to lunch . . .

Now – in the early evening I lie stupefied in the darkened room. We walk back here from the restaurant after lunch, and suddenly I am so tired that I can hardly bear it – the air
feels like a hot curtain falling over my face – wonder why I wanted to come here and how quickly we can leave this sordid stew of heat and glaring concrete and the ashes of antiquity all
casually stirred together and simmering with clouds of dust. The lift does not work and I stumble up three flights of stairs with Em holding my arm – making me wait between each flight
– my ankles hurt – I am horribly breathless and I know I am behaving like a weak, angry child. Disappointment! I am encrusted with it like the grit from the streets: I think the pain is
starting, and clutch Em’s arm, but it is simply that I am aching to cry: I say ‘Athens’ to myself and remember what I had imagined. ‘You are simply exhausted,’ Em says
and, because I want to scream and hit him for saying it, I know he is right. He puts me to bed – as he shuts the door I start to cry and immediately fall into sleep.

Now – I am slowly waking – remembering our departure from New York, the lovely first minutes in the aeroplane, the long, uneasy night, the early morning stop at Orly – French
breakfast and we bought brandy (it was raining there and we all huddled in our overcoats) and then our dazzling arrival in Athens. The word sounded beautiful again; all the afternoon horror had
gone, and from the blissful lassitude in my bones now, I knew how tired I had been.

There is a gentle knock on the door and Alberta stands in its entrance saying, ‘Mr Joyce told me to wake you at seven. Shall I open your shutters?’

‘Please do.’

When we could see each other she came over to my bed: ‘Do you feel better now?’

‘Much better: marvellous – I must have slept for four hours.’

‘We should not have walked back from lunch – it was terribly hot: they say it is unusually hot for June.’

‘It’s nothing: when I get overtired I just get the horrors, like retired pirates.’ I was looking for my bag, and she fetched it saying: ‘
They
got them from too
much rum trying to forget their wicked deeds – not at all the same.’

‘Are you fond of Stevenson?’

‘Some of him: but I haven’t read all. My sister has – she likes him better than anybody –
my
knowledge of him is partly vicarious.

I lit a cigarette, and she said: ‘Would you like me to unpack for you? Just what you need for now, I mean.’

‘Tell me what has been happening while I’ve been asleep.’

‘Well – quite a lot, really. Jimmy and I have got tickets for the boat tomorrow morning which goes to the island. We’ve been to American Express and cashed an enormous sum of
money. We’ve arranged for a taxi to take us to the boat – it’s quite a long way. Mr Joyce met somebody he knew in the street who said he knew someone who might lend us a house on
the island and they went off to somewhere called Monestarike and then to the Acropolis. Then we met them and I’ve just been having a shower. I think the others are sleeping, and,’ her
eyes widened, ‘apparently we are all going out to dinner to eat fish with our feet in the sea.’