The Sea

by John Banville

  Mrs. Grace was leaning against the table—the one with the sweet pea on it, for magically we are back in the living room again—smoking her cigarette in the way that women did in those days, one arm folded across her midriff and the elbow of the other cupped in a palm. She lifted an eyebrow at me and smiled wryly and shrugged, picking a fleck of tobacco from her lower lip. Rose stooped and wrinkling her nose picked up reluctantly the spit-smeared ball between a finger and thumb. Outside the gate the car horn tooted merrily twice and we heard the car drive away. The dog was barking wildly, wanting to be let in again to retrieve the ball.

  By the way, that dog. I never saw it again. Whose can it have been?

  Odd sense of lightness today, of, what shall I call it, of volatility. The wind is up again, it is fairly blowing a tempest out there, which must be the cause of this giddiness I am feeling. For I have always been strongly susceptible to the weather and its effects. As a child I loved to curl up by the wireless set of a winter eve and listen to the shipping forecast, picturing all those doughty sea-dogs in their sou’westers battling through house-high waves in Fogger and Disher and Jodrell Bank, or whatever those far-flung sea areas are called. Often as an adult, too, I would have that same feeling, there with Anna in our fine old house between the mountains and the sea, when the autumn gales groaned in the chimneys and the waves were coming over the sea wall in washes of boiling white spume. Before the pit opened under our feet that day in Mr. Todd’s rooms— which, come to think of it, did have about them something of the air of a sinisterly superior barber’s shop—I was often surprised to ponder how many of life’s good things had been granted me. If that child dreaming by the wireless had been asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, what I had become was more or less what he would have described, in however halting a fashion, I am sure of it. This is remarkable, I think, even allowing for my present sorrows. Are not the majority of men disappointed with their lot, languishing in quiet desperation in their chains?

  I wonder if other people when they were children had this kind of image, at once vague and particular, of what they would be like when they grew up. I am not speaking of hopes and aspirations, vague ambitions, that kind of thing. From the outset I was very precise and definite in my expectations. I did not want to be an engine driver or a famous explorer. When I peered wishfully through the mists from the all too real then to the blissfully imagined now, this is, as I have said, exactly how I would have foreseen my future self, a man of leisurely interests and scant ambition sitting in a room just like this one, in my sea-captain’s chair, leaning at my little table, in just this season, the year declining toward its end in clement weather, the leaves scampering, the brightness imperceptibly fading from the days and the street lamps coming on only a fraction earlier each evening. Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquillity, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, toward the final, almost unnoticed, quietus.

  There were things of course the boy that I was then would not have allowed himself to foresee, in his eager anticipations, even if he had been able. Loss, grief, the sombre days and the sleepless nights, such surprises tend not to register on the prophetic imagination’s photographic plate.

  And then, too, when I consider the matter closely, I see that the version of the future that I pictured as a boy had an oddly antique cast to it. The world in which I live now would have been, in my imagining of it then, for all my perspicacity, different from what it is in fact, but subtly different; would have been, I see, all slouched hats and crombie overcoats and big square motor cars with winged manikins bounding from the bonnets. When had I known such things, that I could figure them so distinctly? I think it is that, being unable to conceive exactly what the future would look like but certain that I would be a person of some eminence in it, I must have furnished it with the trappings of success as I saw it among the great folk of our town, the doctors and solicitors, the provincial industrialists for whom my father humbly worked, the few remnants of Protestant gentry still clinging on in their Big Houses down the bosky side roads of the town’s hinterland.

  But no, that is not it either. It does not adequately account for the genteelly outmoded atmosphere that pervaded my dream of what was to come. The precise images I entertained of myself as a grown-up—seated, say, in three-piece pinstriped suit and raked fedora in the back seat of my chauffered Humber Hawk with a blanket over my knees—were imbued, I realise, with that etiolated, world-weary elegance, that infirm poise, which I associated, or which at least I associate now, with a time before the time of my childhood, that recent antiquity which was, of course, yes, the world between the wars. So what I foresaw for the future was in fact, if fact comes into it, a picture of what could only be an imagined past. I was, one might say, not so much anticipating the future as nostalgic for it, since what in my imaginings was to come was in reality already gone. And suddenly now this strikes me as in some way significant. Was it actually the future I was looking forward to, or something beyond the future?

  The truth is, it has all begun to run together, past and possible future and impossible present. In the ashen weeks of daytime dread and nightly terror before Anna was forced at last to acknowledge the inevitability of Mr. Todd and his prods and potions, I seemed to inhabit a twilit netherworld in which it was scarcely possible to distinguish dream from waking, since both waking and dreaming had the same penetrable, darkly velutinous texture, and in which I was wafted this way and that in a state of feverish lethargy, as if it were I and not Anna who was destined soon to be another one among the already so numerous shades. It was a gruesome version of that phantom pregnancy I experienced when Anna first knew she was expecting Claire; now it seemed I was suffering a phantom illness along with her. On all sides there were portents of mortality. I was plagued by coincidences; long-forgotten things were suddenly remembered; objects turned up that for years had been lost. My life seemed to be passing before me, not in a flash as it is said to do for those about to drown, but in a sort of leisurely convulsion, emptying itself of its secrets and its quotidian mysteries in preparation for the moment when I must step into the black boat on the shadowed river with the coin of passage cold in my already coldening hand. Strange as it was, however, this imagined place of pre-departure was not entirely unfamiliar to me. On occasion in the past, in moments of inexplicable transport, in my study, perhaps, at my desk, immersed in words, paltry as they may be, for even the second-rater is sometimes inspired, I had felt myself break through the membrane of mere consciousness into another state, one which had no name, where ordinary laws did not operate, where time moved differently if it moved at all, where I was neither alive nor the other thing and yet more vividly present than ever I could be in what we call, because we must, the real world. And even years before that again, standing for instance with Mrs. Grace in that sunlit living room, or sitting with Chloe in the dark of the picture-house, I was there and not there, myself and revenant, immured in the moment and yet hovering somehow on the point of departure. Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.

  For Anna in her illness the nights were worst. That was only to be expected. So many things were only to be expected, now that the ultimate unexpected had arrived. In the dark all the breathless incredulity of daytime— this cannot be happening to me!—gave way in her to a dull, unmoving amazement. As she lay sleepless beside me I could almost feel her fear, spinning steadily inside her, like a dynamo. At moments in the dark she would laugh out loud, it was a sort of laugh, in renewed sheer surprise at the fact of this plight into which she had been so pitilessly, so ignominiously, delivered. Mostly, however, she kept herself quiet, lying on her side curled up like a lost explorer in his tent, half in a doze, half in a daze, indiff
erent equally, it seemed, to the prospect of survival or extinction. Up to now all her experiences had been temporary. Griefs had been assuaged, if only by time, joys had hardened into habit, her body had cured its own minor maladies. This, however, this was an absolute, a singularity, an end in itself, and yet she could not grasp it, could not absorb it. If there were pain, she said, it would at least be an authenticator, the thing to tell her that what had happened to her was realer than any reality she had known before now. But she was not in pain, not yet; there was only what she described as a general sense of agitation, a sort of interior fizzing, as if her poor, baffled body were scrabbling about inside itself, desperately throwing up defences against an invader that had already scuttled in by a secret way, its shiny black pincers snapping.

  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.”