The three-piece band was playing “Stardust” and then a polka, and a young, tall German—a student who was here for the summer to improve his English—was stomping around the room with a handsome young English girl on holiday.
A short, stocky man—with a shaggy mane of grey hair, a smug expression on his weak face—was talking to a pretty Canadian girl called Thelma Eskin. She was twenty-four, but her small nose, blond straight hair cut square with a fringe, and light grey eyes made her look even younger—until she opened her mouth and the teeth betrayed the youthfulness of her appearance. The man with the grey hair was called Nat Bubis, a painter. His father invented a lubricant that everyone uses. It cost about a penny a jar to make and sells for two shillings and sixpence. It has allowed him to have a fine house in Carbis Bay, a placid French wife who has borne him two daughters and whom he leaves for three or four months a year, a cook, a gardener, and one of the studios facing the beach with a bar in it, a TV, a large maroon fitted carpet. The girl lives in the Back Road, in one of the condemned cottages, on National Assistance. She has a small child. The father of the child moved to Paris on a Canadian government grant, to paint. She earns a few extra pounds a week by posing for Nat in his studio. And he takes her and the child for rides in his Bentley along the moors.
“Hello, Albert. How’s tricks?” Nat said.
“I’m mellowing furiously,” Albert Rivers said for the third time in the last half-hour to three different people who had asked him the same question. “I had a run-in with the Labour Exchange this ah-ah-afternoon. They wanted to know why I ha-ha-ha-haven’t been paying stamps f-f-f-for the last five years. I told them I didn’t ur-ur-earn enough. ‘How much do you ur-earn, Mister Rivers?’ the man in the Exchange said. ‘Tu-tu-two pounds a week,’ I said. ‘Then how do you l-l-live?’ he said. ‘How do the birds live?’ I said. He was so bwee-bwee—he was so bewildered he let me go.”
They laughed and Albert Rivers felt he could move on.
As soon as he left them Nat said to the girl, “I wish Albert didn’t feel that whenever he speaks he has to be funny.”
“I know,” she said. “I asked him earlier, ‘When did you get back?’ ‘Last week,’ he said. ‘How was Italy?’ ‘M-m-m-marvellous,’ he said, ‘bloody marvellous. See N-N-Nipples and die.’ Did you hear about Dolly?”
“What about?”
“She’s going to have a baby.”
Nat drew on his cigarette and exhaled. The smoke went into his right eye. He closed his eye and grimaced with his mouth. Then rubbed his eye. And for a moment looked as if he had just heard some very bad news.
“I thought Sam’s sperms were no good,” Nat said. “They’re supposed to have no heads, or is it no tails—”
“She’s not carrying Sam’s.”
“Oh,” Nat said and looked anxiously around the room. “Whose—?”
“I don’t know. Hugh told me that Dolly was two months pregnant.”
In one corner of the ballroom a short slender man with a sunburned face, blond straight hair, blue eyes, and an air of alert gentleness was the banker of a homemade roulette wheel. He had an old portable gramophone and, with white chalk, had divided the green baize cover of the turntable into segments. The largest segment was exactly half of the turntable; it gave two-to-one odds. The smallest, a segment of only five degrees, paid twenty to one. The man spun the turntable and when it stopped he collected all the money from the segments and paid off the winners. The man’s name was Hugh Wood. He had been a flying officer in the RAF during the war and now was a photographer. He photographed the sea, the coastline, the beaches, the farms, the moors. They were photographs without people. His wife, Lily, came from the same background. They met, just after the war, on the Lelant golf course, by the sand dunes, and the twelfth-century granite church. And two months later got married.
Both their parents belonged to a small colony of Englishmen and their wives who had gone out as young men and women to India, Burma, Africa, the Far East. And—as the Empire was coming to an end—had come back to live out their lives in West Country seaside towns. It was strange, at first, to see someone who had been in charge of a territory almost as large as Wales going through the turning narrow streets with his wife’s carrier bag to do the shopping. Or the still-attractive wife of a former bank manager in Pakistan, washing on her hands and knees her outside granite steps. As I walked by she looked up.
“If my servants could see me now.”
Money, the mild climate, the slow pace, the sea air, all helped to preserve them. They took considerable care with their appearance. And looked ten to fifteen years younger than they were. But they also looked as if they had some of the stuffing knocked out of them. Especially the men. The women tended to spend a lot of time playing bridge, the men golf. Some of their children, soon as they were old enough, left England for New Zealand, Australia, Canada. But for Hugh and Lily—though they were born abroad—St. Ives was, for the present, home.
I would often see Hugh when I went out early in the morning. A camera around his neck. “The morning light is soft,” he said. “It’s good to take pictures in.” Or else his voice would show excitement. “You can’t miss. The landscape does most of it for you.”
One morning, before six, I saw him walking along the front. We were the only ones out. I said, “You’re up early.”
“The goldfish woke me up,” he said and smiled. “It was the sound they made opening and closing their mouths. I thought at first that there was a leak of some kind in the room.”
I would also see him, with a pair of binoculars, birdwatching on the Island. “It’s the best place before a storm. They all fly by.” Or birdwatching at the estuary, at Lelant, when the tide was out. Or else I would see him and Lily, on Saturday afternoons, on the island flying kites of large painted butterflies with their two small daughters.
People danced and drank and talked and some gambled at the gramophone. And there was a sprinkling of new faces in evening dress who had come in from the paying-guests’ ballroom. Baby Bunting was on the swaying couch with a handsome blond boy, not a line in the young tanned face. The boy was talking about gliding.
“. . . and then you release. And for about ten or fifteen seconds there is a moment of utter silence.”
Baby Bunting was too moved to say anything.
“—but it doesn’t last very long.”
He put his hand around the boy’s shoulder, leaned over, and kissed the boy’s cheek.
A woman whose prettiness had not long faded, flushed with drink and sad at being thirty-five, went over, unsteadily, to a man sitting on the floor in a corner talking to some people. She stood behind the man and lifted her dress then lowered it over the man’s head, hiding his face and shoulders. “Woo-woo,” she said with a short laugh at the others. “Woo-woo.” Then she lifted her dress off the surprised man and went across the floor, back to the bar.
A middle-aged couple in evening dress who had wandered in from the paying-guests’ ballroom decided at half past one that they had had enough. While the band was playing “I Only Have Eyes for You,” they began to walk off the floor, the man visibly disgusted: “. . . people who live off milking other people, like seaside towns, are corrupt anyway—”
As they went out of the ballroom they passed a couple who had also stopped dancing. They seemed totally absorbed in each other. They looked into each other’s face, made telescopes out of their hands, put them around their eyes, touched hands, and said “Woo-woo, woo-woo,” like a pair of owls. It obviously meant something to them, but not to anyone else.
Around two Abe decided to go out for some fresh air. He opened the glass doors and went onto the balcony. A warm summer night. He could hear the three musicians playing “Kiss Me, Honey, Honey, Kiss Me,” and saw the lights and reflections of the French crabbers, the thin blue light at the end of the pier, the lighthouse flashing every fifteen seconds, the moon
, the stars. How quiet it all is, he thought. A small beach was just below him, as if some large shovel pushed hard into the land and scooped out from the rocks and earth an opening. Two lights were still on in the terraces. And he watched a car move along the dark front, its headlights raking and reflecting in the passing windows; then it went up the slope from the slipway and disappeared. The musicians had stopped. And only the surf came quietly across. What a pretty place it is, he thought. And he knew he would never leave it.
A girl came out and joined him.
“Hello.”
“Tired of inside.”
“A bit. It’s nice out here.”
A record was now playing “Mack the Knife.” The music came out to them and the lights from the crabbers moved gently up and down.
“Where are you staying?”
“In Academy Steps.”
“My studio is not far from there—right at the top of the steps—”
One of the lights from the terrace went out and the strip of black of the land became thin like a cardboard cut-out.
“Isn’t the water beautiful,” she said.
They watched the exhausted waves sliding over the sand of the small beach below them.
“Do you feel like a swim?” Abe said.
“You mean now—”
“Why not.”
He suddenly realized that she was only around seventeen or eighteen. Pretty, with black hair. Her eyes were bright, big, clear, and wet.
“Let’s go tomorrow morning instead,” she said.
“OK.”
“I bet you won’t come,” she said.
“I will,” Abe said, “if I say I will. I’ll leave the door of the studio unlocked. Come and wake me up—”
“I’ll surprise you,” she said mischievously. “I’ll be there at six.”
They went back inside. Had a couple of dances. Then someone else took her away from him.
He was awakened next morning by shaking and an eager young face, that he did not at first recognize, only inches away.
“What time is it,” Abe asked.
“Five past six. You coming for the swim?”
“Sure.” He hesitated. “Sure.”
He put on his blue trunks under his jeans, a dark blue sport shirt, and they went out armed with large striped towels. Fore Street was empty. Garbage was stacked outside the small stores. And in the Digey, outside the bed and breakfast places, bathing suits were hanging from half-open windows. An elderly woman was energetically washing her stone steps, and a smell of disinfectant came from her doorstep and the gutter. Gulls made a terrible noise. One flew low, wings outstretched, nearly touching both sides of the street.
“I’m not very good at remembering names,” said Abe.
“Sylvia.”
“Mine’s Abe—”
“I know,” she said. “The Canadian painter. What part of Canada?”
“Winnipeg.”
“I’m from Reading. I go to college there.”
“I once taught at a college in Canada,” Abe said proudly. “I expect to be coming up to London later this month. Maybe we could take in a show or something—”
“I’d like that,” she said, “very much.” And gave him a shy smile, inviting him to talk.
They came to the long beach. It was empty. A few gulls were standing above the tideline. Where they walked they left small anchors on the washed surface of the sand. The water was halfway in, on an outgoing tide. And with each breaking wave it churned and pushed up sand and small pebbles. And as the water was sucked back it left some of the pebbles embedded in the sand with a small sharp V in front of each pebble.
Excitedly she ran in. He followed her. They swam beside each other, both doing the crawl, parallel to the beach. He turned around and she overtook him. He didn’t stay in very long. She remained a few minutes longer, floating on her back. Then ran back to him and the towels. They were both shivering.
“That was my last swim for the summer,” she said. “I’m leaving on this morning’s Riviera.”
She put on a blue bathing robe and removed her wet bathing suit from beneath it, dried herself, then put on her coloured summer skirt and white blouse. While he did a quick change using a large towel.
“When do you think you’ll come up?” she said, rubbing her hair with a towel.
“In two weeks’ time,” he said, knowing it was a lie.
She spread out the driest towel and they sat on the fine yellow sand in a slight dune and looked out across the empty beach and at the gulls facing the wind and watched the waves breaking and the water flattening rapidly on the sand then sliding back.
“What are you thinking?” she said.
“I just realized,” he said, looking out to the miles of sea. “There’s nothing in between us and North America.” And as soon as he said it, he regretted it.
“It’s something I would never have thought of,” she said.
There were times Abe felt hopelessly alone, and then at some trivial sight—like looking at the horizon or seeing a second-rate Canadian film or running out into the streets at the first sight of snow—it touched him where he was most vulnerable.
“Do you think you’ll go back?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’d like to think I still can,” he added without conviction. “How about some coffee?”
“Fine,” she said.
They smelled the wild garlic as they passed the cemetery. At the top the road turned and sloped steeply down, ending in the sea. They seemed to be walking right into the bay, the lighthouse, the colours of the far shore.
“I think you’re very lucky to live down here,” she said.
“I think so, too,” said Abe, suddenly feeling refreshed and lightheaded.
The only place open on the front was Connie’s and they went in and had two cups of coffee and smoked cigarettes and held hands while they both brought out their small accomplishments for each other’s approval. She gave him her address and phone number.
“You will get in touch.”
“Yes,” he said. “I will.”
He walked her slowly back to Academy Steps and said goodbye outside a yellow-painted door that had “Cat’s Cradle” in black letters above the letter slot. And went back to his studio now feeling the lack of sleep. Why do I go and do things like this? He didn’t think he would ever see her again. But he thought about her. And told this episode to several people. How a strange, seventeen- or eighteen-year-old girl—a child—that he didn’t even make a pass at, had woken him up to go swimming at six. And he went. It was to become one of Abe’s fondest memories.
III
The height of the season came in the middle of August. The single-line train went to St. Erth and filled up with weary tourists from the mainline station who had come with immense patience in crowded compartments all the way from London, Manchester, Birmingham, and Glasgow. The single-line train brought them around the estuary at Lelant. Past the mud flats cracked like a jigsaw puzzle with some of the pieces missing and the curlews, oyster-catchers, plovers, gulls. The shabby houseboats with bed and breakfast signs. The birdwatchers out with binoculars. Climbed by the golf course, sounding like a water pump. Past the Towans, the squat Cornish church, the caravan site. Stopped at Carbis Bay to let some off. Then down the slope to their first glimpse of the bay, the harbour, the front, and at the narrow siding, above Porthminster Beach, it stopped and emptied its thousands into the fresh and glittering air.
This week was “Swindon week,” an entire factory came down for its annual holiday; next would be “Newcastle”; the week after, “polio victims”; then “the nuns.” Local girls who worked during the day in the shops up Tregenna Hill and finished at six went home for tea then back to work at the bric-a-brac stores along the front until eleven at night. Ice cream lineups formed by the slipway at Har
ts and in the post office. And there were lineups for hot pasties and for fish and chips. Outside Connie’s, a wooden stand had stale bread in brown paper bags, “Seagull Food 3d a Bag.” Nothing was wasted. The man who swept the streets for the local council in the morning put on a black and gold cape, a cocked hat in the afternoon and, with a handbell and “God Save the Queen,” became the town crier.
There was the season’s drowning when the pale girls from the mattress factory came running like schoolgirls at an outing onto the long beach giggling with excitement. While the maroons cascaded into the bay after the explosion and the blue-painted lifeboat was pulled by its neat tractor along the length of the front—a practice run for the tourists’ cameras. There was the morning’s token fish auction at the slipway. A few congers, dogs, skates, rays, lay on the concrete; the wooden cart and horse backed through their slime. And as they went across the wet sand of the harbour to the beached boats for the next load the wind blew through the spokes of the large wheels, making from the slime fantastic balloon shapes.
Otherwise the holiday crowds smothered what signs there were that said a different kind of life was going on. People died and funeral cards appeared on the fishermen’s shelters. But a local death in summer did not have the same dominant effect in the town as one in winter. There remained, however, a few gestures. Sunday. When nearly everything was closed and from the chapels and churches the hymns and organs boomed out into the warm streets. And afterwards the walks; by the cemetery, along the moors, or to Tregenna Woods. While the tourists headed for another day on the beaches. And met the locals around teatime at the slipway where the Salvation Army held its regular singsong. Thousands overflowed along the front, the harbour, their voices booming out—“This is my story. This is my song . . .” While cars in the narrow streets scraped the sides of cottages blotting out the light, and the surf between the piers churned up thousands of discarded crab legs. And on the magnificent beach the tide left behind dead seaweed and used contraceptives.
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