The Sea Change (27 page)

‘Have one more cigarette, because I want to tell you something.’

‘Yes?’ He switched off the light by his bed and sat up.

‘Don’t sound so wary: it’s nothing awful. I saw Dr MacBride in New York.’ I was brushing my hair, and moved the glass so that I could see his face: there was no
expression on it. ‘About swimming. He said that it would not do any harm, to swim a little – not for too long. He said it was pointless to give up everything I enjoyed simply in order
to stay alive. So . . .’

‘Those are two quite different things to say – and opposite.’

‘No, they’re not. What he meant was that it would do me no harm to swim a little – might even do some good – but that if I did overdo it it would be my fault, and that
might even be better than giving in about it altogether.’

He looked angry now. ‘Lillian, you promised me that you wouldn’t go to doctors behind my back. We agreed that I should always go too, and that then we should both be clear about what
you might or might not be allowed to do.’

‘If I’d asked you to go this time, you would just have said that I was torturing myself, and that there was no point. Anyway, you were busy all the time.’

‘What did he say exactly?’

‘Exactly what I’ve told you. Don’t you believe me?’

He was silent, and I knew that he did not. The fact that I had had to argue with the doctor came back to me now, so that I said what I had said to him: ‘After all, it is
my
life!’

And he answered, just like the doctor: ‘It
is
your life; no one can argue that.’ He was looking for an ashtray, and I brought him one. He looked up at me peaceably:
‘I’ll write to Dr MacBride – or send him a cable. Have you brought your painting things?’

‘No. It’s no use, Em; I’m not a painter, and I can’t bear fiddling about with it. I don’t see the fun of “enjoying myself” with paints: I like it
properly done, or not at all. I’m not a Sam, and there’s no point in my struggling about in a welter of therapeutic sentiment just because it’s a nice quiet pastime.’

‘If you were Sam you wouldn’t be painting either.’

‘Well he
does
paint. I know it’s getting more difficult, as the shaking gets worse, but at least he knows he can do it.’

‘That must be a great comfort to him, as he finds himself becoming steadily more incapacitated.’

He was angry because I felt I was worrying enough about Sam and whenever he exposed me as being selfish I became violent.

‘Well
I
know what that feels like as well. We aren’t talking about either Sam’s or my main creative faculties: we’re talking about my spending a few minutes in a
beautiful warm sea – fewer minutes than anybody else, of course, but still something that I can do too, after you’ve all finished writing and directing and acting your play –
otherwise why have we come here at all? Or why be anywhere, if one can never have any life in the place?’ I was going to cry, and I went into the bathroom to do it. When I came back, he was
standing by the window which he had opened wide. He held out a hand, and I went into his arms on a high tide of apology – able, but unwilling to say: ‘I’ve been whining
again
; it’s inexcusable, and worse when I hide it by shouting at other people. I know exactly what makes me do it: I hate it, and I always always mean never to do it again. Please,
just
please
, forget it, and give me one more chance starting from a better point than my reality.’

All I did say was: ‘Poor,
poor
Sam.’

And almost at the same time, he said: ‘My poor darling. My poor Lillian. I don’t remember nearly enough what it is like. You shall bathe; of course I understand about the painting
– you’re quite right about it. My darling: it is wicked to make you cry when you were so happy: come, you’ve had a very tiring day . . .’

He put me to bed for the second time that day, and I allowed myself to be stroked and tucked up. What did it matter? He had taken us both down a peg with these allowances he made for me. What
was the good of wanting something sharper than this easy pity, if I never changed from behaviour which was designed to get only that? I lay in his arms: in a little while he made love to me, and I
lost not only all presence of mind but presence of heart. I fly back to the good times – enough memory of them evokes some echo of response in my body . . . The first time after the separate
tensions of fear and longing that I was aware of all of myself – it was like the sun coming out in me, warming and lighting all the cold and dark places into which I’d been divided, so
that I was whole, and ready to be part of him. Em’s face, looking down on me then, radiant, gentle, knowing what was possible . . . my body was like a field of grass and his hands were the
wind – I was bowing ahead of his touch . . .

He is holding my face in his hands, the light is on, and I am aware of his eyes, intent and searching. I know what he is looking for, and I wish that I had it.

The time when we had celebrated our knowledge of Sarah coming; when he had discovered the only courage in me, and I was so steeped in joy at my discovery of this meaning of making love with him
that desire seemed to change scale: I felt blessed by him. All the times when I was carrying her, becoming sicker and more unwieldy, and wanting him, and his understanding perfectly how my two
loves were growing: he used to put me to bed in the afternoons then, and make very quiet love to me and leave me to sleep . . .

He is kissing me – the taste of fruit and charcoal is over my mouth, and I feel his heart knocking on my breast.

And after Sarah – the great gaiety and affections, and lovely, easy, recognizable times . . .

He says my name – asks me little, tender questions – using my name again for each one. I have no answers, but I think I am smiling.

And after Sarah again – when she was dead – nothing: angry rejection, frozen despair – the sun gone out: nothing but dumb, dark confusion, until that morning when I woke and
could say her name to him again – admit that she was dead and that I had lost her and cry to him about her. Then he made love to me, and once it was memorable – as though he was
piloting me home after a storm: I was so tired, and he gave me peace. It was very long afterwards that I understood that he had not come to me as Lillian (how I used to love his saying my name
– ‘like all the pretty flowers at once’, he said) but as though I was simply a part of that humanity he found so agonizing, whose pain he wanted to share, to help, to save: that
it was then that I began to be an object equally of his ignorance and his compassion. When I remember that, I have to go back to anonymous sunny hotel bedrooms of years ago . . .

He finishes his love and I kiss him: it feels just like greeting him after a separation. I touch his forehead with my fingers and some sense of reality is back again – the affection is
real – I am about to say something, but he shakes his head, puts his hand over my mouth, and turns off my light. He is right, there are no words to be said.

CHAPTER V

1

EMMANUEL

O
NCE
they were on the boat, there was an unobtrusive opportunity of being alone. ‘I need it,’ he thought;
‘I am gasping for silence.’ Or peace, perhaps, since his internal life was far from silent. He had found a bit of boat deck, empty and sunlit, and now he sat down on it, leaning against
the davits of one of the ship’s life boats and shut his eyes . . . ‘I am too many small, anxious men’ – he could see a procession of them, small, shabby and identical, each
holding a placard which yelped ‘Joyce will win through’.

‘I am one little man who is afraid he’s had the best years of his life when he wasn’t looking. I am another who, having taken his little secret spring for granted, is now
suddenly afraid that it has run dry. I am also a man who has a wife who needs but does not want him. I had no land or house which is mine for no good reason. I care less and less what anyone writes
or says about writing, including myself. I have no children to care for, unless you count Jimmy, and he certainly wouldn’t count me as his father – it would ruin his whole romantic
structure. He works for me because he thinks I’m a wonderful playwright.’ He thought for a moment without words. ‘I have a good deal of money and I’ve almost entirely
overcome asthma. My best days have a kind of winter sun about them – there is light, but no warmth. I know enough people to fill Drury Lane, but apart from Jimmy, none of them are my friends
– perhaps the Friedmanns almost are. I don’t care enough,’ he thought, ‘my emotions nowadays seldom reach beyond anxiety, irritation, and sometimes, pity.’ It
hadn’t always been like this. He could distinctly remember times when he had loved Lillian – when he wanted to use himself and pay for it, he could remember other times too when he had
felt that life was marvellous and astonishing, that the future was exciting and unknown, and that he was moving towards it, instead of its overtaking him – whatever happened, he had a hopeful
interest in the outcome. Now he felt as though he knew what would happen, and he didn’t care. He used to sink himself in some idea – he could leave and lose external problems and live
inside a play he was making – he had always been able to draw on that; it gave him his reputation for patience and detachment, for kindness and bad manners. But everything, presumably, had to
be fed by something else – there is no absolute everlasting spring in anyone which has no source but itself. Instead of these plays needing him to write them, he was starting to need the
plays – or even a play – one idea that would knit these small anxious men together. Twice the thing had unfolded in his mind for a little while, and died – like those white
trumpet flowers (what were they called?) that only lived for an hour or two – and the rest of the time he seemed to be travelling at the beginning of some future desert without water or
shade. People still moved him sometimes; Gloria’s sister, that boy playing his fiddle, and the girl – Alberta. As he thought of her, a scene the previous evening recurred –
bringing the same impression, but more deeply cut . . .

It was when the child had brought the jasmine up to him in a basket. He had been looking at Alberta: she had been wearing a white cotton dress with a low, rounded neck and no sleeves, and her
skin was warm against the paper-white stuff – her arms like natural silk, smooth and womanly, their outline from her shoulders to her wrists running in pretty leisured curves. Lillian and
Jimmy were showing her something – she leaned forward and the edge of her breasts moved and rose to the shape of magnolias. At the same moment the scent of the jasmine struck him – it
seemed to come from her, and he was seized and filled with desire so violent and immediate that it was as though all the breath was knocked out of his body. The child was speaking to him, holding
out a bunch of her flowers, and the others were all looking at her: Alberta – the jasmine – they were separate – he felt air choking his lungs as though it was water and turned
heavily to the child, whose eyes, impassive and intent, were fixed upon his face. He had bought two bunches of jasmine, one for each of the women, and for the rest of the evening he flung his
attention in every other direction.

Now, sitting alone in the morning sun, trying to collect and to see himself; discussing his absence of heart as though it was simply a piece of history, he was faced with this accident (for the
moment he could not think of anything else to call it); but at least he would not delude himself that it had anything to do with his heart. He knew better than that. When one was twenty –
even thirty – one was open to this delusion; that an unexpected onslaught of desire constituted love. There were even people of his age who continued to think so – whose deadly security
lay in frequent and entire repetition: they used the same words to blame the same situations which the same part of themselves had taken the trouble to attract. ‘He is not better, he is much
the same.’ The point about these little generalizations was that they ceased to be amusing when they applied to oneself. But he was a little better – he wasn’t quite the same.
While far from sure that he knew what love was, he did feel that he knew what it was not. And this attack he had had was not love . . . He made himself consider carefully what it had been, forced
some discovery of what his mind had been doing inside his romantically breathless body. This was very unpleasant: he could easily remember what he had wanted – a part of him jeered with words
like lechery and pictures of very old men fumbling with shoulder straps – disgust, ridicule, the poor old creatures – he had not come to that – was nowhere near that age: a part
of him justified, denied, made angrily reasonable explanations . . . good God, where was the harm in an experienced man being attracted to a pretty young girl? something wrong with him if he
wasn’t, surely – no
harm
had been done, he had been simply, acutely, susceptible to her charms . . . but by far the most frightening part of him simply repeated the feelings of
the night before again; the desire, the intoxication, the panic, and the humiliated withdrawal into diffusion: this last part did not seem to have any opinions or views on the subject; given half a
chance it just went through the same motions again as though to confirm that they had been real. The effect of this, physically, was of a deep, internal blush which he had then to endure for the
third time before he started to gather up some rational shreds of dignity. The points were that he had been extremely stupid about his previous secretary; the thing had never for an instant been
worth what everybody had paid for it. Alberta was not only his secretary, she was very very young, very innocent, and she had been discovered by Lillian, who had a bad heart, who seemed to have
lost the mainspring of her life, who on top of that had already suffered a good deal from his infidelities, and deserved at the least his consideration: if he pretended to love anybody, it ought to
be Lillian. If he seduced anyone, it should not be Alberta, for whom he had great liking, almost affection, and the feeling that she should be protected. The whole thing was out of the question on
every possible count, and what was the point of being his age if one did not face up to and understand this? He remembered then Lillian sitting up in bed with her enormous, glistening eyes saying:
‘
Don’t
seduce her – anything else, but not that’; and then, immediately, the picture of Alberta sneezing, saying that excitement made her sneeze – saying, too,
that she wanted in the end to give up excitement – no, first, she had said that she wanted to be excited by fewer things – he didn’t understand the giving-up part of it, but it
struck him now that she was damn well right about being excited over fewer things. He had to write a play because on the whole that seemed to be what he was for, and if he needed to replenish his
spring for doing it he must find a way which didn’t, so to speak, involve pouring alcohol down his throat. She is on good ground, young Alberta, he thought; she seems to stand in the middle
of her territory – she may not have explored it yet, but she’s in a better position on it than I am, and he had a sudden picture of himself standing just inside the railings of a
municipal park with his back to the well-worn paths holding on to the bars and looking out. I will rest here, help her (meaning Lillian) with her swimming, get some kind of map of this play in my
mind, and keep an eye on Jimmy training her (meaning Alberta) for Clemency. And see to it that he doesn’t upset her by making passes at her or any other irresponsible behaviour. I’m old
enough to be her father, and I am responsible for her, after all. If I want excitement, I must get it out of the play. He felt his mind shift, strain a little at the familiar traces and settle to
this decision. ‘I’m tired,’ he thought; ‘this holiday will be a good thing if I keep it calm and simple – we all need some fresh air.’