The Sea

by John Banville

  Still that day of licence and illicit invitation was not done. As Mrs. Grace, stretched there on the grassy bank, continued softly snoring, a torpor descended on the rest of us in that little dell, the invisible net of lassitude that falls over a company when one of its number detaches and drops away into sleep. Myles was lying on his stomach on the grass beside me but facing in the opposite direction, still eyeing Rose where she was still seated behind me on a corner of the tablecloth, oblivious, as always, of his beady regard. Chloe was still standing in the shadow of the pine tree, holding something in her hand, her face lifted, looking up intently, at a bird, perhaps, or just at the latticework of branches against the sky, and those white puffs of cloud that had begun to inch their way in from the sea. How pensive she was yet how vividly defined, with that pine cone—was it?—in her hands, her rapt gaze fixed amongst the sunshot boughs. Suddenly she was the centre of the scene, the vanishing-point upon which everything converged, suddenly it was she for whom these patterns and these shades had been arranged with such meticulous artlessness: that white cloth on the polished grass, the leaning, blue-green tree, the frilled ferns, even those little clouds, trying to seem not to move, high up in the limitless, marine sky. I glanced at Mrs. Grace asleep, glanced almost with contempt. All at once she was no more than a big archaic lifeless torso, the felled effigy of some goddess no longer worshipped by the tribe and thrown out on the midden, a target for the village boys with their slingshots and their bows and arrows.

  Abruptly, as if roused by the cold touch of my scorn, she sat up and cast about her with a blurred look, blinking. She peered into her wine glass and seemed surprised to find it empty. The drop of wine that had fallen on her white halter had left a pink stain, she rubbed it with a fingertip, clicking her tongue. Then she looked about at us again and cleared her throat and announced that we should all play a game of chase. Everyone stared at her, even Mr. Grace. “I’m not chasing anyone,” Chloe said from her place under the tree’s shade, and laughed, a disbelieving snort, and when her mother said she must, and called her a spoilsport, she came and stood beside her father’s chair and leaned an elbow on his shoulder and narrowed her eyes at her mother, and Mr. Grace, old grinning goat god, put an arm around her hips and folded her in his hairy embrace. Mrs. Grace turned to me. “You’ll play, won’t you?” she said. “And Rose.”

  I see the game as a series of vivid tableaux, glimpsed instants of movement all rush and colour: Rose from the waist up racing through the ferns in her red shirt, her head held high and her black hair streaming behind her; Myles, with a streak of fern-juice on his forehead like warpaint, trying to wriggle out of my grasp as I dug my claw deeper into his flesh and felt the ball of his shoulder bone grind in its socket; another fleeting image of Rose running, this time on the hard sand beyond the clearing, where she was being chased by a wildly laughing Mrs. Grace, two barefoot maenads framed for a moment by the bole and branches of the pine, beyond them the dull-silver glint of the bay and the sky a deep unvarying matt blue all the way down to the horizon. Here is Mrs. Grace in a clearing in the ferns crouched on one knee like a sprinter waiting for the off, who, when I surprise her, instead of fleeing, as the rules of the game say that she should, beckons to me urgently and makes me crouch at her side and puts an arm around me and draws me tight against her so that I can feel the softly giving bulge of her breast and hear her heart beating and smell her milk-and-vinegar smell. “Ssh!” she says and puts a finger to my lips—to mine, not her own. She is trembling, ripples of suppressed laughter run through her. I have not been so close to a grown-up woman since I was a child in my mother’s arms, but in place of desire now I feel only a kind of surly dread. Rose discovers the two of us crouching there, and scowls. Mrs. Grace, grasping the girl’s hand as if to haul herself up, instead pulls her down on top of us, and there is a melee of arms and legs and Rose’s flying hair and then the three of us, leaning back on our elbows and panting, are sprawled toe to toe in a star shape amid the crushed ferns. I scramble to my feet, suddenly afraid that Mrs. Grace, my suddenly former beloved, will wantonly display her lap to me again, and she puts up a hand to shade her eyes and looks at me with an impenetrable, hard, unwarm smile. Rose too springs up, brushing at her shirt, and mutters something angrily that I do not catch and strides off into the ferns. Mrs. Grace shrugs. “Jealous,” she says, and then bids me fetch her cigarettes, for all of a sudden, she declares, she is dying for a fag.

  When we returned to the grassy bank and the pine tree Chloe and her father were not there. The remains of the picnic, scattered on the white cloth, had a look of deliberateness to them, as if they had been arranged there, a message in code for us to decipher. “That’s nice,” Mrs. Grace said sourly, “they’ve left the clearing-up to us.” Myles emerged from the ferns again and knelt and picked a blade of grass and blew another reed note between his thumbs and waited, still and rapt as a plaster faun, the sunlight burnishing his straw-pale hair, and a moment later from far off came Chloe’s answering call, a pure high whistle piercing like a needle through the waning summer day.

  On the subject of observing and being observed, I must mention the long, grim gander I took at myself in the bathroom mirror this morning. Usually these days I do not dally before my reflection any longer than is necessary. There was a time when I quite liked what I saw in the looking-glass, but not any more. Now I am startled, and more than startled, by the visage that so abruptly appears there, never and not at all the one that I expect. I have been elbowed aside by a parody of myself, a sadly dishevelled figure in a Hallowe’en mask made of sagging, pinkish-grey rubber that bears no more than a passing resemblance to the image of what I look like that I stubbornly retain in my head. Also, there is the problem that I have with mirrors. That is, I have many problems with mirrors, but mostly they are metaphysical in nature, whereas the one I speak of is entirely practical. Because of my inordinate and absurd size, shaving mirrors and the like are always set too low for me on the wall, so that I have to lean down to be able to view the entirety of my face. Lately when I see myself peering out of the glass, stooped like that, with that expression of dim surprise and vague, slow fright which is perpetual with me now, mouth slack and eyebrows arched as if in weary astonishment, I feel I have definitely something of the look of a hanged man.

  When I came here first I thought of growing a beard, out of inertia more than anything else, but after three or four days I noticed that the stubble was of a peculiar dark-rust colour— now I know how Claire can be a redhead—nothing like the hair on my scalp, and frosted with specks of silver. This rufous stuff, coarse as sandpaper, combined with that shifty, bloodshot gaze, made me into a comic-strip convict, a real hard case, not yet hanged perhaps but definitely on Death Row. My temples where the greying hair has gone sparse are flecked with chocolatey, Avrilaceous freckles, or liver spots, I suppose they are, any one of which, I am all too well aware, might in a moment turn rampant at the whim of a rogue cell. I note too that my rosacea is coming on apace. The skin on my brow is marked all over with rubescent blotches and there is an angry rash on the wings of my nose, and even my cheeks are developing an unsightly red flush. My venerable and much thumbed copy of Black’s Medical Dictionary, by the estimable and ever unflappable William A. R. Thomson, M.D.—Adam & Charles Black, London, thirtieth edition, with 441 black-and-white, or grey-and-greyer, illustrations and four colour plates which never fail to freeze the cockles of my heart—informs me that rosacea, a nice name for an unpleasant complaint, is due to a chronic congestion of the flush areas of the face and forehead, leading to the formation of red papules; the resultant erythema, the name we medical men give to redness of the skin, tends to wax and wane but ultimately becomes permanent, and may, the candid Doctor warns, be accompanied by gross enlargement of the sebaceous glands (see SKIN), leading to the gross enlargement of the nose known as rhinophyma (qv) or grog blossoms. The repetition there—gross enlargement . . . gross enlargement—is an uncharacteristic infelicity in Dr. Thomson
’s usually euphonious if somewhat antiquated prose style. I wonder if he does house calls. He would be bound to have a calming bedside manner and a fund of information on all sorts of topics, not all of them health-related. Medical men are more versatile than they are given credit for. Roget of Roget’s Thesaurus was a physician, did important research on consumption and laughing gas, and no doubt cured the odd patient, into the bargain. But grog blossoms, now, that is something to look forward to.

  When I consider my face in the glass like this I think, naturally, of those last studies Bonnard made of himself in the bathroom mirror at Le Bosquet towards the end of the war after his wife had died—critics call these portraits pitiless, although I do not see why pity should come into it—but in fact what my reflection most reminds me of, I have just realised it, is that Van Gogh self-portrait, not the famous one with bandage and tobacco pipe and bad hat, but that one from an earlier series, done in Paris in 1887, in which he is bare-headed in a high collar and Provence-blue necktie with all ears intact, looking as if he has just emerged from some form of punitive dousing, the forehead sloped and temples concave and cheeks sunken as from hunger; he peers out from the frame sidewise, warily, with wrathful foreboding, expecting the worst, as so he should.

  This morning it was the state of my eyes that struck me most forcibly, the whites all craquelured over with those tiny bright-red veins and the moist lower lids inflamed and hanging a little way loose of the eyeballs. I have, I note, hardly any lashes left, I who when young had a silky set a girl might have envied. At the inner extremity of the upper lids there is a little bump just before the swoop of the canthus which is almost pretty except that it is permanently yellowish at the tip, as if infected. And that bud in the canthus itself, what is that for? Nothing in the human visage bears prolonged scrutiny. The pink-tinged pallor of my cheeks, which are, I am afraid, yes, sunken, just like poor Vincent’s, was made the more stark and sickly by the radiance reflected off the white walls and the enamel of the sink. This radiance was not the glow of a northern autumn but seemed more like the hard, unyielding, dry glare of the far south. It glinted on the glass before me and sank into the distemper of the walls, giving them the parched, brittle texture of cuttlefish bone. A spot of it on the curve of the hand-basin streamed outward in all directions like an immensely distant nebula. Standing there in that white box of light I was transported for a moment to some far shore, real or imagined, I do not know which, although the details had a remarkable dreamlike definition, where I sat in the sun on a hard ridge of shaly sand holding in my hands a big flat smooth blue stone. The stone was dry and warm, I seemed to press it to my lips, it seemed to taste saltily of the sea’s deeps and distances, far islands, lost places under leaning fronds, the frail skeletons of fishes, wrack and rot. The little waves before me at the water’s edge speak with an animate voice, whispering eagerly of some ancient catastrophe, the sack of Troy, perhaps, or the sinking of Atlantis. All brims, brackish and shining. Water-beads break and fall in a silver string from the tip of an oar. I see the black ship in the distance, looming imperceptibly nearer at every instant. I am there. I hear your siren’s song. I am there, almost there.

  II

  We seemed to spend, Chloe and Myles and I, the most part of our days in the sea. We swam in sunshine and in rain; we swam in the morning, when the sea was sluggish as soup, we swam at night, the water flowing over our arms like undulations of black satin; one afternoon we stayed in the water during a thunderstorm, and a fork of lightning struck the surface of the sea so close to us we heard the crackle of it and smelt the burnt air. I was not much of a swimmer. The twins had been taking lessons since they were babies and clove the waves effortlessly, like two pairs of gleaming shears. What I lacked of skill and gracefulness I made up for in stamina. I could go long distances without stopping, and frequently did, given any kind of audience, churning along steadily in side-stroke until I had exhausted not only myself but the patience of the watchers on the strand as well.

  It was at the end of one of these sad little gala displays that I had my first inkling of a change in Chloe’s regard for me, or, should I say, an inkling that she had a regard for me and that a change was occurring in it. Late in the evening it was, and I had swum the distance—what, a hundred, two hundred yards?— between two of the green-slimed concrete groynes that long ago had been thrown out into the sea in a vain attempt to halt the creeping erosion of the beach. I stumbled out of the waves to find that Chloe had waited for me, on the shore, all the time that I was in the water. She stood huddled in a towel, shivering in spasms; her lips were lavender. “There’s no need to show off, you know,” she said crossly. Before I could reply—and what would I have said, anyway, since she was right, I had been showing off—Myles came leaping down from the dunes above us on wheeling legs and sprayed us both with sand and at once I had an image, perfectly clear and strangely stirring, of Chloe as I had first seen her that day when she jumped from the edge of that other dune into the midst of my life. Now she handed me my towel. We three were the only ones on the beach. The misty grey air of evening had the feel of dampened ash. I see us turn and walk away toward the gap in the dunes that led to Station Road. A corner of Chloe’s towel trails in the sand. I go along with my towel draped over one shoulder and my wet hair slicked down, a Roman senator in miniature. Myles runs ahead. But who is it that lingers there on the strand in the half-light, by the darkening sea that seems to arch its back like a beast as the night fast advances from the fogged horizon? What phantom version of me is it that watches us—them—those three children—as they grow indistinct in that cinereal air and then are gone through the gap that will bring them out at the foot of Station Road?

  I have not yet described Chloe. In appearance there was not much difference between us, she and I, at that age, I mean in terms of what of us might have been measured. Even her hair, almost white but darkening when it was wet to the colour of polished wheat, was hardly longer than mine. She wore it in a pageboy style, with a fringe at the front overhanging her handsome, high-domed, oddly convex forehead—like, it suddenly strikes me, remarkably like the forehead of that ghostly figure seen in profile hovering at the edge of Bonnard’s Table in Front of the Window, the one with the fruit bowl and the book and the window that itself looks like a canvas seen from behind propped on an easel; everything for me is something else, it is a thing I notice increasingly. One of the older boys from the Field assured me one day with a snicker that a fringe like Chloe’s was the certain sign of a girl who played with herself. I did not know what he meant, but I felt sure that Chloe did not play, on her own or otherwise. Not for her the games of rounders or of hunt that I had formerly enjoyed with the other youngsters in the Field. And how she sneered, flaring her nostrils, when I told her that among the families in the chalets there were girls of her age who still played with dolls. She held the majority of her coevals in high scorn. No, Chloe did not play, except with Myles, and what they did together was not really play.

  The boy who had remarked on her fringe—suddenly I see him, as if he were before me here, Joe somebody, a hulking, big-boned fellow with jug ears and horrent hair—also said that Chloe had green teeth. I was outraged, but he was right; there was, I saw, the next time I had the opportunity to take a close look at them, a faint tinge to the enamel of her incisors that was green indeed, but a delicate damp grey-green, like the damp light under trees after rain, or the dull-apple shade of the undersides of leaves reflected in still water. Apples, yes, her breath too had an appley smell. Little animals we were, sniffing at each other. I liked in particular, when in time I got the chance to savour it, the cheesy tang in the crevices of her elbows and her knees. She was not, I am compelled to admit, the most hygienic of girls, and in general she gave off, more strongly as the day progressed, a flattish, fawnish odour, like that which comes out of, which used to come out of, empty biscuit tins in shops—do shops still sell loose biscuits from those big square tins? Her hands. Her eyes. Her bitten fingern
ails. All this I remember, intensely remember, yet it is all disparate, I cannot assemble it into a unity. Try as I may, pretend as I may, I am unable to conjure her as I can her mother, say, or Myles, or even jug-eared Joe from the Field. I cannot, in short, see her. She wavers before my memory’s eye at a fixed distance, always just beyond focus, moving backward at exactly the same rate as I am moving forward. But since what I am moving forward into has begun to dwindle more and more rapidly, why can I not catch up with her? Even still I sometimes see her in the street, I mean someone who might be she, with the same domed forehead and pale hair, the same headlong and yet curiously hesitant, pigeon-toed stride, but always too young, years, years too young. This is the mystery that baffled me then, and that baffles me yet. How could she be with me one moment and the next not? How could she be elsewhere, absolutely? That was what I could not understand, could not be reconciled to, cannot still. Once out of my presence she should by right become pure figment, a memory of mine, a dream of mine, but all the evidence told me that even away from me she remained solidly, stubbornly, incomprehensibly herself. And yet people do go, do vanish. That is the greater mystery; the greatest. I too could go, oh, yes, at a moment’s notice I could go and be as though I had not been, except that the long habit of living indisposeth me for dying, as Doctor Browne has it.