The Sea

by John Banville

  There was a day when the door did open, but it was Rose who came out, and gave me a look that made me lower my eyes and hurry on. Yes, Rose had the measure of me from the start. Still has, no doubt.

  I determined to get into the house, to walk where Mrs. Grace walked, sit where she sat, touch the things that she touched. To this end I set about making the acquaintance of Chloe and her brother. It was easy, as these things were in childhood, even for a child as circumspect as I was. At that age we had no small-talk, no rituals of polite advance and encounter, but simply put ourselves into each other’s vicinity and waited to see what would happen. I saw the two of them loitering on the gravel outside the Strand Café one day, spied them before they spied me, and crossed the road diagonally to where they were standing, and stopped. Myles was eating an ice cream with deep concentration, licking it evenly on all sides like a cat licking a kitten, while Chloe, I suppose having finished hers, waited on him in an attitude of torpid boredom, leaning in the doorway of the café with one sandalled foot pressed on the instep of the other and her face blankly lifted to the sunlight. I did not say anything, nor did they. The three of us just stood there in the morning sunshine amid smells of sea-wrack and vanilla and what passed in the Strand Café for coffee, and at last Chloe deigned to lower her head and directed her gaze toward my knees and asked my name. When I told her she repeated it, as if it were a suspect coin she was testing between her teeth.

  “Morden?” she said. “What sort of a name is that?”

  We walked slowly up Station Road, Chloe and I in front and Myles behind us, gambolling, I nearly said, at our heels. They were from the city, Chloe said. That would not have been hard for me to guess. She asked where I was staying. I gestured vaguely.

  “Down there,” I said. “Along past the church.”

  “In a house or a hotel?”

  How quick she was. I considered lying—“The Golf Hotel, actually”—but saw where a lie could lead me.

  “A chalet,” I said, mumbling.

  She nodded thoughtfully.

  “I’ve always wanted to stay in a chalet,” she said.

  This was no comfort to me. On the contrary, it caused me to have a momentary but starkly clear image of the crooked little wooden outhouse standing amid the lupins across from my bedroom window, and even seemed to catch a dry, woody whiff of the torn-up squares of newsprint impaled on their rusty nail just inside the door.

  We came to the Cedars, stopped at the gate. The car was parked on the gravel. It had been out recently, the cooling engine was still clicking its tongue to itself in fussy complaint. I could hear faintly from inside the house the melting-toffee tones of a palm court orchestra playing on the wireless, and I pictured Mrs. Grace and her husband dancing together in there, sweeping around the furniture, she with her head thrown back and her throat bared and he mincing on his satyr’s furred hind legs and grinning up eagerly into her face—he was shorter than she by an inch or two—with all his sharp little teeth on show and his ice-blue eyes alight with mirthful lust. Chloe was tracing patterns in the gravel with the toe of her sandal. There were fine white hairs on her calves but her shins were smooth and shiny as stone. Suddenly Myles gave a little jump, or skip, as if for joy but too mechanical for that, like a clockwork figure coming abruptly to life, and clipped me playfully on the back of the head with his open palm and turned and with a gagging laugh scrambled agilely over the bars of the gate and dropped down to the gravel on the other side and spun about to face us and crouched with knees and elbows flexed, like an acrobat inviting his due of applause. Chloe made a face, pulling her mouth down at one side.

  “Don’t mind him,” she said in a tone of bored irritation. “He can’t talk.”

  They were twins. I had never encountered twins before, in the flesh, and was fascinated and at the same time slightly repelled. There seemed to me something almost indecent in such a predicament. True, they were brother and sister and so could not be identical—the very thought of identical twins sent a shiver of secret and mysterious excitement along my spine—but still there must be between them an awful depth of intimacy. How would it be? Like having one mind and two bodies? If so it was almost disgusting to think of. Imagine somehow knowing intimately, from the inside, as it were, what another’s body is like, its different parts, different smells, different urges. How, how would it be? I itched to know. In the makeshift picture-house one wet Sunday afternoon—here I leap ahead—we were watching a film in which two convicts from a chain-gang made their escape still manacled together, and beside me Chloe stirred and made a muffled sound, a sort of laughing sigh. “Look,” she whispered, “it’s me and Myles.” I was taken aback, and felt myself blush and was glad of the dark. She might have been admitting to something intimate and shameful. Yet it was the very notion of an impropriety in such closeness that made me eager to know more, eager, and yet loath. Once—this is an even longer leap forward—when I got up the nerve to ask Chloe straight out to tell me, because I longed to know, what it felt like, this state of unavoidable intimacy with her brother—her other!—she thought for a moment and then held up her hands before her face, the palms pressed almost together but not quite touching. “Like two magnets,” she said, “but turned the wrong way, pulling and pushing.” After she had said it she fell darkly silent, as though this time it was she who thought she had let drop a shaming secret, and she turned away from me, and I felt for a moment something of the same panicky dizziness that I did when I held my breath for too long underwater. She was never less than alarming, was Chloe.

  The link between them was palpable. I pictured it as an invisibly fine thread of sticky shiny stuff, like spider’s silk, or a glistening filament such as a snail might leave hanging as it crossed from one leaf to another, or steely and bright, it might be, and taut, like a harp-string, or a garotte. They were tied to each other, tied and bound. They felt things in common, pains, emotions, fears. They shared thoughts. They would wake in the night and lie listening to each other breathing, knowing they had been dreaming the same thing. They did not tell each other what was in the dream. There was no need. They knew.

  Myles had been mute from birth. Or rather, simply, he had never spoken. The doctors could find no cause that would account for his stubborn silence, and professed themselves baffled, or sceptical, or both. At first it had been assumed he was a late starter and that in time he would begin to speak like everyone else, but the years went on and still he said not a word. Whether he had the ability to speak and chose not to, no one seemed to know. Was he mute or silent, silent or mute? Could he have a voice that he never used? Did he practise when there was no one to hear? I imagined him at night, in bed, under the covers, whispering to himself and smiling that avid, elfin smile of his. Or maybe he talked to Chloe. How they would have laughed, forehead to forehead and their arms thrown around each other’s neck, sharing their secret.

  “He’ll talk when he has something to say,” his father would growl, with his accustomed menacing cheeriness.

  It was plain that Mr. Grace did not care for his son. He avoided him when he could, and was especially unwilling to be alone with him. This was no wonder, for being alone with Myles was like being in a room which someone had just violently left. His muteness was a pervasive and cloying emanation. He said nothing but was never silent. He was always fidgeting with things, snatching them up and immediately throwing them down again with a clatter. He made dry little clicking noises at the back of his throat. One heard him breathe.

  His mother treated him with a sort of trailing vagueness. At moments as she weaved abstractedly through her day— although she was not a serious drinker she always looked to be mellowly a little drunk—she would stop and seem to notice him with not quite recognition, and would frown and smile at the same time, in a rueful, helpless fashion.

  Neither parent could do proper sign language, and spoke to Myles by way of an improvised, brusque dumb-show that seemed less an attempt at communication than an impatient waving of hi
m out of their sight. Yet he understood well enough what it was they were trying to say, and often before they were halfway through trying to say it, which only made them more impatient and irritated with him. Deep down they were both, I am sure, a little afraid of him. That is no wonder either. It must have been like living with an all too visible, all too tangible poltergeist.

  For my part, although I am ashamed to say it, or at least I should be ashamed, what Myles put me most in mind of was a dog I once had, an irrepressibly enthusiastic terrier of which I was greatly fond but which on occasion, when there was no one about, I would cruelly beat, poor Pongo, for the hot, tumid pleasure I derived from its yelps of pain and its supplicatory squirmings. What twig-like fingers Myles had, what brittle, girlish wrists! He would goad me, plucking at my sleeve, or walking on my heels and popping his grinning head repeatedly up from under my arm, until at last I would turn on him and knock him down, which was easy to do, for I was big and strong even then, and taller than he was by a head. When he was down, however, there was the question of what to do with him, since unless prevented he would be up again at once, rolling over himself like one of those self-righting toy figures and springing effortlessly back on to his toes. When I sat on his chest I could feel the wobble of his heart against my groin, his ribcage straining and the fluttering of the taut, concave integument below his breast-bone, and he would laugh up at me, panting, and showing his moist, useless tongue. But was not I too a little afraid of him, in my heart, or wherever it is that fear resides?

  In accordance with the mysterious protocols of childhood—were we children? I think there should be another word for what we were—they did not invite me into the house that first time, after I had accosted them outside the Strand Café. In fact, I do not recall under what circumstances exactly I managed eventually to get inside the Cedars. I see myself after that initial encounter turning away frustratedly from the green gate with the twins watching me go, and then I see myself another day within the very sanctum itself, as if, by a truly magical version of Myles’s leap over the top bar of the gate, I had vaulted all obstacles to land up in the living room next to an angled, solid-seeming beam of brassy sunlight, with Mrs. Grace in a loose-fitting, flowered dress, light-blue with a darker pattern of blue blossoms, turning from a table and smiling at me, deliberately vague, evidently not knowing who I was but knowing nevertheless that she should, which shows that this cannot have been the first time we had encountered each other face to face. Where was Chloe? Where was Myles? Why was I left alone with their mother? She asked if I would like something, a glass of lemonade, perhaps. “Or,” she said in a tone of faint desperation, “an apple . . .?” I shook my head. Her proximity, the mere fact of her thereness, filled me with excitement and a mysterious sort of sorrow. Who knows the pangs that pierce a small boy’s heart? She put her head on one side, puzzled, and amused, too, I could see, by the tongue-tied intensity of my presence before her. I must have seemed like a moth throbbing before a candle-flame, or like the flame itself, shivering in its own consuming heat.

  What was it she had been doing at the table? Arranging flowers in a vase—or is that too fanciful? There is a multicoloured patch in my memory of the moment, a shimmer of variegated brightness where her hands hover. Let me linger here with her a little while, before Rose appears, and Myles and Chloe return from wherever they are, and her goatish husband comes clattering on to the scene; she will be displaced soon enough from the throbbing centre of my attentions. How intensely that sunbeam glows. Where is it coming from? It has an almost churchly cast, as if, impossibly, it were slanting down from a rose window high above us. Beyond the smouldering sunlight there is the placid gloom of indoors on a summer afternoon, where my memory gropes in search of details, solid objects, the components of the past. Mrs. Grace, Constance, Connie, is still smiling at me in that unfocused way, which, now that I consider it, is how she looked at everything, as if she were not absolutely persuaded of the world’s solidity and half expected it all at any moment to turn, in some outlandish and hilarious way, into something entirely different.

  I would have said then that she was beautiful, had there been anyone to whom I would have thought of saying such a thing, but I suppose she was not, really. She was rather stocky, and her hands were fat and reddish, there was a bump at the tip of her nose, and the two lank strands of blonde hair that her fingers kept pushing back behind her ears and that kept falling forward again were darker than the rest of her hair and had the slightly greasy hue of oiled oak. She walked at a languorous slouch, the muscles in her haunches quivering under the light stuff of her summer dresses. She smelled of sweat and cold cream and, faintly, of cooking fat. Just another woman, in other words, and another mother, at that. Yet to me she was in all her ordinariness as remote and remotely desirable as any a painted pale lady with unicorn and book. But no, I should be fair to myself, child though I was, nascent romantic though I may have been. She was, even for me, not pale, she was not made of paint. She was wholly real, thick-meated, edible, almost. This was the most remarkable thing of all, that she was at once a wraith of my imagination and a woman of unavoidable flesh and blood, of fibre and musk and milk. My hitherto hardly less than seemly dreams of rescue and amorous dalliance had by now become riotous fantasies, vivid and at the same time hopelessly lacking in essential detail, of being voluptuously overborne by her, of sinking to the ground under all her warm weight, of being rolled, of being ridden, between her thighs, my arms pinned against my breast and my face on fire, at once her demon lover and her child.

  At times the image of her would spring up in me unbidden, an interior succubus, and a surge of yearning would engorge the very root of my being. One greenish twilight after rain, with a wedge of wet sunlight in the window and an impossibly unseasonal thrush piping outside in the dripping lupins, I lay face down on my bed in such an intense suffusion of unassuageable desire—it hovered, this desire, like a nimbus about the image of my beloved, enfolding her everywhere and nowhere focused—that I broke into sobs, lavish, loud and thrillingly beyond all control. My mother heard me and came into the room, but said nothing, uncharacteristically—I might have expected a brusque interrogation, followed by a smack— only picked up a pillow that the thrashings of my grief had pushed off the bed and, after the briefest of hesitations, went out again, shutting the door soundlessly behind her. What did she imagine I was weeping for, I wondered, and wonder again now. Had she somehow recognised my rapturously lovesick grief for what it was? I could not believe it. How would she, who was merely my mother, know anything of this storm of passion in which I was helplessly suspended, the frail wings of my emotions burned and blasted by love’s relentless flame? Oh, Ma, how little I understood you, thinking how little you understood.

  So there I am, in that Edenic moment at what was suddenly the centre of the world, with that shaft of sunlight and those vestigial flowers—sweet pea? all at once I seem to see sweet pea—and blonde Mrs. Grace offering me an apple that was however nowhere in evidence, and everything about to be interrupted with a grinding of cogwheels and a horrible, stomach-turning lurch. All sorts of things began to happen at once. Through an open doorway a small black woolly dog came skittering in from outside—somehow now the action has shifted from the living room to the kitchen—its nails making frantic skittling noises on the pitchpine floor. It had a tennis ball in its mouth. Immediately Myles appeared in pursuit, with Rose in turn pursuing him. He tripped or pretended to trip over a rucked rug and pitched forward only to tumble nimbly head over heel and leap to his feet again, almost knocking into his mother, who gave a cry in which were mingled startlement and weary annoyance—“For heaven’s sake, Myles!”—while the dog, its pendent ears flapping, changed tack and shot underneath the table, still grinningly gripping the ball. Rose made a feint at the animal but it dodged aside. Now through another doorway, like Old Father Time himself, came Carlo Grace, wearing shorts and sandals and with a big beach towel draped over his shoulders, his hairy paunch on sh
ow. At sight of Myles and the dog he gave a roar of sham rage and stamped his foot threateningly, and the dog let go of the ball, and dog and boy disappeared through the door as precipitately as they had entered. Rose laughed, a high whinny, and looked quickly at Mrs. Grace and bit her lip. The door banged and in rapid echo another door banged upstairs, where a lavatory, flushed a moment previously, had set up its after-gulps and gurglings. The ball that the dog had dropped rolled slowly, shiny with spit, into the middle of the floor. Mr. Grace, seeing me, a stranger—he must have forgotten that day of the wink— mugged a double-take, throwing back his head and screwing up his face at one side and sighting quizzically at me along the side of his nose. I heard Chloe coming downstairs, her sandals slapping on the steps. By the time she entered the room Mrs. Grace had introduced me to her husband—I think it was the first time in my life I had been formally introduced to anyone, although I had to say my name since Mrs. Grace had still not remembered it—and he was shaking my hand with a show of mock solemnity, addressing me as My dear sir! and putting on a cockney accent and declaring that any friend of his children’s would always be welcome in our ’umble ’ome. Chloe rolled her eyes and gave a shuddering gasp of disgust. “Shut up, Daddy,” she said through clenched teeth, and he, feigning terror of her, let go my hand and drew the towel shawl-like over his head and hurried at a crouch on tiptoe out of the room, making little bat-squeaks of pretend fright and dismay. Mrs. Grace was lighting a cigarette. Chloe without even a glance in my direction crossed the room to the door where her father had gone out. “I need a lift!” she shouted after him. “I need—” The car door slammed, the engine started, the big tyres mashed the gravel. “Damn,” Chloe said.