After this, the governess had given it up—and no wonder. She contented herself with remarking mildly: ‘Quite nice, but you have not grasped the real meaning yet!’ Graham, I hope and trust, never did grasp it. He must be almost a man now. If he reads these lines, I am bound to confess to him that, when I left, I stole his exercise book and have kept it ever since.
One evening, when I got back from work, I was met by Mrs Partridge on the stairs. Something in her gaunt silhouette against the twilit window warned me of disaster, even before she had opened her mouth: ‘I’m going to give you a terrible shock, Mr Isherwood …’ Darting back into the kitchen, she emerged, a moment later, with a cup of very strong tea—she must have been keeping it hot for me: it was intended, I suppose, as a kind of local anaesthetic: ‘Oh, dear, I don’t know how I’m going to tell you … I’ve been very foolish, I realize that now … There’s times I thought I should go out of my mind …’
We went up to my room. Mrs Partridge was sobbing. She refused to sit down. Gradually, I got the whole story out of her. The rent had been in arrears for months. She owed eighty pounds. The bailiff—her mysterious visitor—had been calling on her regularly since the beginning of December. She’d made excuses, wheedled for little respites, put him off with promises she knew she’d never be able to keep—but now he’d finally lost patience. Tomorow morning, if she couldn’t produce the money, his van would come round and take away every stick of furniture in the house: ‘You’re my last hope, Mr Isherwood. I want to save my honour and the last bit of my happiness. If it wasn’t for Billy, I’d throw myself in the river tonight …’
There was nothing I could do, of course. But I remembered suddenly that the Easts had some money put aside for buying furniture. We went round to see them. Mrs Partridge overflowed with promises. In a fortnight, in a week, they should have it all back, every penny. She had a brother-in-law who owned a public-house in Guildford. She would show us letters. She would go down to see him tomorrow—no, the day after tomorrow—and explain everything. If the Easts did this for her, she’d never forget it as long as she lived. Roger was ready to agree, on the spot. Polly was more suspicious; she asked searching, practical questions. But, at last, it was arranged. The Easts would guarantee to find the money within three days. It was in a bank in Leicester: Roger couldn’t lay hands on it at once.
Everything seemed settled, and next morning I set off, as usual, for my job. While I was away, an extraordinary drama was enacted in Romilly Road. At ten o’clock, the bailiff and his van arrived. Mrs Partridge met him triumphantly, waving the Easts’ written guarantee. The bailiff, suspecting another trick, refused to look at it. He ordered his men to begin removing the furniture. Mrs Partridge dashed out hysterically to fetch Roger. Roger drove up in a taxi and argued with the bailiff, who remained unimpressed. He must have cash down, he said, or nothing. By this time, Mrs Partridge’s sitting-room was empty. The men were starting on the bedroom. Roger sprinted to the bank at the corner and persuaded the manager to phone through to the Leicester bank for authorisation to pay out the money. There were arguments, explanations, papers to be signed, endless delays. At length, Roger emerged, shouting and waving the notes above his head, just as the removers were putting into the van my second armchair.
6
And now, at the beginning of that summer, here I was, back for the third time, at the Bay. Half an hour ago I had got out of the bus at the sweetshop corner which was the end of my pleasant, complicated, familiar journey: the quick train down from London, the slow train puffing through the forest, the voyage in the paddle-steamer (known as ‘The Workhouse,’ because of the excessive amount of brass-work her crew had to polish) along the shallow estuary, where saplings growing out of the water marked the many sandbanks, past fishing boats and private yachts owned by writers of adventure stories for boys, with a glimpse of the open sea and a great liner vanishing, in a smudge of smoke, towards America; the landing and the long walking race down Yarmouth Pier for the best seats in the bus, and finally the dangerous corkscrew drive, much too fast, through the deep twisting island lanes. The more dashing flashy types of village lad worked for the bus company: they formed a sort of avant-garde corps, with certain traditions of cheek, gaiety, bad manners and pseudo-American slang. They wore their caps over one eye, shouted noisily to each other, winked at the girls and punched tickets with a conceited smirk, affecting an insolent, lunatic-warder’s patience when dealing with elderly female tourists. I recognized the conductor—last year he had been a half-time errand-boy, still at school—but he didn’t recognize me.
Nobody recognized me. Mr Peck, the coastguard, tapping out his pipe on the breakwater wall, regarded me with incurious bleached blue eyes. Bruiser was coming out of the pub. A new girl appeared at the sweetshop door: Ivy (nicknamed ‘The Soldier’s Friend’), whom I’d known last summer had evidently found the Bay too small or too hot to hold her. Even the curate, going somewhere in a great hurry, with a brown-paper parcel under his arm and his skinny red neck poked forward like a hen’s, appeared to have forgotten our extraordinary evening conversation about television and Christianity, on the downs. Absolutely unnoticed, I carried my suitcase down the sandy lane, past Marine View and Ocean Villa, to the gate of Beach View, where I was staying. The low white gate stuck, just as it had stuck last year, and had to be lifted with both hands. The garden was full of lilac. And there, on the steps, beneath the veranda which was like an inverted green boat, Miss Chichester stood waiting to receive me. Nothing had changed.
One’s first glimpse of Miss Chichester was so startling and shocking that I had always to prepare my friends for her appearance beforehand. Even Weston’s clinical glance had blenched for a moment, when they were introduced; and Philip had exclaimed: ‘Phew, boy! That’s nasty! Pernicious anaemia. She can’t possibly live another six months.’ Nevertheless, Miss Chichester had lived. Indeed, she had looked exactly the same on the day when I had first seen her, two years before. I have never seen any other human being who so closely resembled a corpse. Although she cannot have been more than fifty years old, she had the face of a woman of ninety, parchment yellow, a network of tiny wrinkles radiating from her thin tight bluish lips. Her legs and arms were shrivelled to the size of walking-sticks; it was a wonder that she could move about at all. Only her hair, which was of the copper tint admired at the beginning of the century, seemed really alive. Yet Miss Chichester was no invalid. She was surprisingly active. With the help of a daily maid, she did all the housework, and I suppose she cooked my meals. (I never once penetrated to the back of the house, during any of my visits.) Occasionally, I saw her in the garden, weeding or pruning the borders, a cigarette between her corpse-like lips. There was something particularly disconcerting in the sight of Miss Chichester smoking; this habit of hers was much discussed, I later discovered, by her neighbours at the Bay. People said that she smoked hundreds of cigarettes a week, that she went over to neighbouring seaside resorts to buy them, in order that her curious vice should excite less comment. This was nonsense, no doubt. Yet nicotine, absorbed even in moderate doses, must surely have done her some harm; and I often had the impression, as I watched her blowing out the smoke through her withered nostrils, that she wasn’t so much smoking the cigarette as that the cigarette was smoking her.
Miss Chichester welcomed me without the least animation, quite as though I had returned after an absence of a couple of hours. ‘Did you have a pleasant journey?’ she asked, and barely waiting for an answer retired into the house to prepare my tea. Henceforward, we should exchange, perhaps, two dozen words a day: we were the perfect landlady and lodger.
I entered the sitting-room through the big window which opened to the ground, and, sitting down at the piano which Weston had so often thumped, played through my only piece, The Merry Peasant. Nothing had been moved. The frosted glass lamp still stood in the middle of the table-cloth with the woollen pom-poms. The Maiden’s Prayer still hung over the fireplace and above the piano was the photog
raph of Lord Tennyson, described by the poet himself as ‘The Dirty Monk.’ How happy I felt, in this room! How absolutely at home. Morning after morning, I should sit out on the veranda in the plush armchair, with my block of ruled paper, my ink eraser and my fountain-pen, working away like an etcher, neurotically tidy, never crossing anything out, erasing every mistake, polishing the roughened surface over with my thumb-nail to prevent the ink from running, destroying ten sheets for every one I wrote. For I had made a vow: I wouldn’t leave the Bay until Seascape with Figures had been completely rewritten from beginning to end.
After tea, I went out of doors. The Bay lay wedged between two immense masses of cliff; it was so tiny that, standing upon the steep shingle bank by the bathing huts, you were like an actor on the stage of a theatre—anybody at any of the windows in the little semicircle of boarding-houses and fishermen’s-cottages could follow your every movement. Men at work in the gardens on opposite sides of the valley shouted across to each other without effort. On the left, backed up against the steep slope of the cliff, stood the pub, which in summer was also an hotel; a biscuit-coloured building with small classical pillars, permanently shabby because the salt spray ruined each fresh coat of paint within a week. During the big winter storms, Mr Peck had told me, the waves sometimes broke right over the shingle bank and swamped the low meadow behind the houses. Before the war, the Bay had had a miniature esplanade, but the sea had undermined it and, one night, smashed the entire structure to bits. Great chunks of concrete still lay scattered about the beach, as if flung apart by dynamite.
Leaving the shingle bank, I walked slowly up the path which led on to the downs, passing the big granite house which stood far too near the cliff edge; a slice of its garden had already slithered down to the beach. (There was a legend that, one night, during a gale, a maid in this house had been awakened by a man trying to climb in through her bedroom window—he was clinging to the rigging of a big sailing-ship which had just been driven ashore.) Then came a couple of new bungalows, standing amidst gorse bushes, inhabited only during the summer months. (At the Bay, ‘the summer’ meant August and September—the sixty-one fat days during which the shop and lodging-keepers counted on making enough to see them through the lean remainder of the year.) And now, far ahead, against the sky, the monument appeared, a stumpy little moss-covered obelisk, barely four feet high, surrounded by an iron gothic railing, engraved simply with initials and a date: G. F. 1857. Very few of the Bay’s inhabitants could tell you who had put it there, or why: even Mr Peck was unusually vague; he knew only that it marked the spot where a boy had been murdered by two sailors and his body thrown over the cliff into the sea—for what reason, he couldn’t really say.
From the obelisk, you could see the whole sweep of the island coast away beyond Blackgang, to the southern headland, with the waves creaming in over the great red deserted beaches; seeming, at this distance, to be frozen to the shore in scribbled overlapping margins of dazzling foam. Far out, the sea was a dull violet haze. There was a strong peppery smell from the gorse and the sheep droppings on the sunburnt turf. Below, on the hot cliff face, the gulls circled and squawked; one, in particular, seemed to utter a kind of mirthless laugh.
Suppose Weston were here, I thought, he would know the names of the different species of gull—and, by naming them, would dismiss them to their proper recognized unimportant place in the background of the poet’s consciousness; of course, he would imply, one expects to be supplied with gulls during a seaside walk, just as one expects to be provided with hot and cold water in an hotel bedroom. Very well, the gulls are there. One bestows a word of commendation upon them, passing; perhaps, even, a quotation from Tennyson (the only nature-poet Weston hadn’t yet discredited) and then goes on to speak of something more interesting, something out of a book. No, at this particular moment, I didn’t wish that Weston was here. And I didn’t wish that Philip was here, either, or the Cheurets, or the Easts; they belonged to the town, and I didn’t want to be reminded that I, too, was an intruder, a townee. Chalmers I should have been glad to see, as always; had he been with me now we should have immediately begun to reconstruct the scene of the murder, the Bay would have become yet another annexe of Mortmere, and the real Bay, as the tourists and the fishermen saw it, would have gradually grown invisible to my eyes. That’s the disadvantage of travelling with Chalmers, I thought; wherever we are together is always the same place.
And so, finding that, for once, I was not sorry to be alone, I said to myself: I am happy. Perfectly happy, I repeated, as my eyes roamed wide over the brilliant desolate sea and the empty contours of the land. Were they, after all, searching for something that was lacking? I hardly knew. A tiny obstinate figure by the dwarf obelisk under an enormous sky, I declared for the third time: I am absolutely happy, absolutely content. And, increasingly overcome by a profound melancholy which I interpreted simply as an appetite for supper I began to walk downhill, towards my sitting-room, my holiday task and my lonely bed.
Every morning during the weeks that followed, round about eleven o’clock, I would break off my first session of work on the revised Seascape, put away my papers and start off on my tour of inspection round the Bay.
Mr Peck, the coastguard, would usually be digging in his garden as I passed. Bandy-legged, stocky and agile, in his blue trousers and square-cut sailor’s vest, he was still every inch the naval man. Even his gardening was an affair of exact measurements: ‘I dig three trenches like; eighteen inch by two foot …’ By talking to Mr Peck, I acquired a considerable stock of useless but fascinating information, of the kind which no novelist can bear to waste. I learnt, for instance, that the part of a flagstaff which is driven into the ground and into which the pole is fixed, is called ‘the tabernacle.’ It is correct to speak of ‘dressing the staff.’ The big flagstaff at the coastguards’ lookout was so strong that it would take a gale of one hundred and fifty miles an hour to break it. The coastguards’ own flag is ‘envelope-shaped, red, blue, black and yellow.’ (I realized that Mr Peck was describing it out of a text-book, although we were both looking at the flag as he spoke.) The Mayor of Southampton, he told me, had taken one of the bungalows on the downs for the summer, and was going to fly his own flag, bearing the city arms. Passing ships would be expected to dip their colours to it. (Mr Peck seemed to find nothing at all funny in this.) But his conversation was not without its lyrical passages. One day, we were admiring his poultry: ‘Take that old hen now, that Rhode Island there. Tomorrow I’ll set her, like, on the eggs. Twelve eggs, I’ll give her: that’s ten like, and two to make sure. And then, in twenty-one days, maybe, I’ll have nine, tea, eleven fine chicks … And do you know what does it all?’
‘No.’ I tried to keep this as non-committal as possible, uncertain whether Mr Peck was going to say ‘God,’ recommend some particular kind of hen food or make a dirty joke.
‘Warmth! Nothing but warmth!’ Mr Peck shook his head smilingly, as though compelled to admit himself baffled by the ingenuity of Nature. ‘It’s wonderful, really. Just a little warmth …’
My next stop would be at the sweetshop, for a chat with Muriel, Ivy’s successor. Muriel was a tall, pretty, simpering girl with a consciously refined voice, who wore flat-heeled shoes to conceal her height. (Her fiancé, I gathered, was considerably the shorter of the two, and she was sensitive about this.) All our conversations were on an elaborate and rather tiring note of facetiousness: I frequently reminded myself of Philip at the skating rink and reflected that at least seventy-five per cent of my ‘personality’ consisted in bad imitations of my various friends. Actually, Muriel was the only person at the Bay to whom I confided any facts about myself at all. One day, I told her, I should probably inherit an estate in the North of England, I had been to Cambridge, I had seen the Alps, I had owned a motor car, I had spoken to Betty Balfour, I was writing a novel. ‘Oh, you are awful!’ she laughed; for thanks to my sarcastic tone she didn’t believe a single word.
‘But what do you rea
lly do?’ she would insist.
‘Well … I’m a kind of schoolmaster …’
Muriel uttered a scream, and immediately put her hand over her mouth: screaming was not ladylike: ‘You a schoolmaster! How can you tell such dreadful fibs!’
‘But it’s not a fib. Honestly it isn’t.’
‘Well then,’ Muriel challenged, ‘tell me what you teach.’
‘Oh, all sorts of things.’ (This with one of Philip’s most suggestive smiles.)
‘All sorts of things! Very likely! Tell me one thing!’
‘Well, Latin, for instance …’
‘Latin!’ This time she fairly shrieked. ‘The idea!’ Whisking out her dainty little scrap of a handkerchief, she dabbed quickly at her eyes. ‘How can you!’ she gasped.
‘How can I what?’
‘How can you … oh dear!’ She was off again.
‘You’d be surprised at all the things I can do.’ (At this point Philip would undoubtedly have given her a long glance in the celebrated ‘certain way,’ and perhaps produced his latest trick cigarette-case, with one of those infinitely sophisticated Noel Coward gestures which contrived, without the least ostentation, to display his gold cuff-links.) Muriel regarded me for a moment, literally panting with swallowed laughter.
‘Latin!’ The word exploded out of her, violently, almost angrily, like an accusation.
And so on, and so forth.
One morning, when I came out of the sweetshop, I found a charabanc full of trippers halted outside the pub. It was the first of the summer fleet. Henceforward, there would be a daily service of tours round the island. The trippers, packed tight into their seats (the driver had dashed into the pub for a moment to get a drink, feeling hoarse no doubt from shouting the names of the beauty spots), looked dazed: they were suffering from ocular indigestion; they had seen far too much in too short a time. Also, they were being forced to listen, involuntarily, to an extraordinary kind of sermon. The preacher stood on the low wall at the end of the breakwater. He was a small stout red-faced man dressed in a suit of very loud check plus-fours and wearing an immense tartan bow-tie, which might once have been the ribbon off a big chocolate-box. He resembled a music-hall low comedian. Although his small audience was only a few feet away from him, he was bawling at it with all the power of his lungs. Yet his attitude wasn’t in the least degree threatening or aggressive. He seemed to regard his hearers with boundless, magnificent contempt. As I approached, he pulled something out of his pocket and flourished it in the air; it was a dandelion, with earth still clinging to its roots:
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