He looked at his briefcase and saw the initials M.R.T. with some reassurance. Mervyn Ralph Tressiter on the way to see some silly old—to see Mrs Miriam Albee in her summer cottage about a few wintry old bonds. Travelling on the light railway out to Dunromin on Dungeness. Definitely. Yet the initials? The resounding MERVYN RALPH? During his schooldays those initials had meant a great deal—he had carved them everywhere, written them in red ink at the top of clean blue-lined pages: as with the two Christian names, never used since in such sonorous order. Here they were with him again, full-size in a half-size train.
What then occurred through the window was not more reassuring to Tressiter, who had arrived at London Bridge and his office quite normally long, long ago that morning. For the high June grasses and the heavy-leaved branches above suddenly ceased; one moment he had been softly curtained in country green—and now here was the train running through what seemed to be an endless desert of pebbles. He craned round to see what was to come, and saw the little black rail track curving on indeed into desert distance—into a kind of nothingness. Overhead the sky hung hot and solid blue. Beneath stretched nothing but a vast pinkish-grey plain of little stones. He remembered the map, this must be the Ness proper, a monstrous long snout of silted shingle prodding into the channel. Now the sea could be seen—or at least that hollow look of unobstructed air that indicates the sea beneath: the horizon proper was hidden by a raised motor road upon which a bright blue motorcycle raced along slowly with the train, while just beyond, as though also on the road, there crawled the white fretted upper-works and orange-banded funnel of a cargo-steamer. Gravel-covered villas with brilliant red or green roofs now dotted this road—and among these the slow-travelling superstructure of the steamship looked like a white rococo casino left over from the turn of the century. An arid place, sea-blown and open—Tressiter wondered how Mrs Albee could have chosen such a spot for her summer residence. Now there came into view a holiday camp with deserted hard-courts, a wired-in corral of empty chalets. The train stopped, and the Cubs and Brownies milled out to disappear almost instantly, swallowed somehow by the very emptiness. Once more the train started—Tressiter felt he must be the only passenger, alone in the tiny train, and now even the villas receded, there remained only shingle and lonely wooden huts, creosoted bungalows on whose tarry verandahs sat solitary figures in deckchairs, tattered rugs about their knees. Occasionally a woman in an apron would be seen standing with a basin, absolutely alone, near one of these shacks. Each bungalow had a fenced surround of ground: inside the fence it was still pebble, no difference. Cocoa and strong tea must be drunk here all day, Tressiter thought, from enamelled tin mugs.
There hung over everything a desolation of peace—the kind of peace that follows war, when everything is tattered and the earth scourged dry. No cafés, nothing but shingle and these huts lonely from each other. Nothing grew but weeds. Sometimes the startling pink of valerian started up but even this looked unreal, no green to soften the hard plastic pink. The whole place of black huts and nothingness was as quiet as death.
The train stopped at its weedy terminal and Tressiter descended to visit Mrs Albee at Dunromin. It was simply another creosoted bungalow. He concluded his business quickly. Among washed-out curtains over a cup of strong tea—in fact Mrs Albee served him with a china cup, uncracked—he found his mind worked the quicker simply to get away: if she wanted to hoard her little nest-egg in such circumstances, it was—well, one could not say it was none of his business because it was his business; nevertheless Tressiter had not to reason why. Mrs Albee’s grey hair was dyed in parts red, and she settled herself to talk. She stroked him with her eyes, there was the urgent desire of loneliness about her. Against these importunities, Tressiter worked with precision: he did two hours work in one.
So that shortly after noon he stepped free from the bungalow into the rest of a day that had no precise purpose. There was not really time to get back to London and the office; and it was certainly time, his stomach rumbled, for lunch. He had been told about a café by the lighthouse on the tip of the Ness. It was a sunny day, and he thought he would go and sit a bit on the beach afterwards. To get to the end of something, over a hill or to the very tip of such a promontory, was a familiar compulsion.
In the asbestos-lined café there were baked beans to be had. ‘The stores haven’t arrive yet,’ the woman said, when he enquired for eggs or meat. She spoke softly, slowly, with an almost beautiful content—they might have been on an island far off the coast of Scotland. He ordered baked beans, and then ordered them again. He did not quite finish the second portion: fortified by hot coffee he left for the beach.
It was not far. A few weeds straggled like dull green paper streamers among the pebbles; then they too died away, the last black hut was passed, and only the pebbles, cleaner, yellower, remained. They rose and fell in two steep silted dunes, and suddenly dropped away shelving into deep blue water.
To one side stood the lighthouse and its buildings, to the other a single solitary hut: otherwise the yellow-pink pebbles stretched in their millions, a mighty bank as far as the eye could see, cutting exactly against the blue sea under its blue sky. A light breeze opened out the air all around.
The lighthouse compound, bright white and black, stabbed clean against the blue, its line of black-tarred chimneys as clear-cut as the white tower itself. No gulls, no refuse. Tressiter opened his lungs and breathed in the great clarity. You could smell the tar. He took off his homburg and sat down: he stuck, he had sat on a patch of tar. So most of this wonderfully clean-looking beach was fouled with tar and ship’s oil! He was just piling his briefcase and homburg into a careful castle—when a voice suddenly piped from behind:
‘Messy, ainit? I bring it in when I go ome.’
He shot his head round. He saw a thin white boy of about ten in a dark bathing-dress.
‘You—you bring it in?’ Tressiter said, startled that in such empty space a person could approach shadowless, unseen, from directly behind; and especially as no sound had come from pebbles that looked so resonant. But now a loud near pebble-crunch embodied the voice: and, after all, it was only a boy.
‘The tar of course,’ said the boy.
‘But what do you want to bring it in for? Is it valuable?’ he asked.
The boy looked vaguely out to sea, not a trace of scorn on his face for Tressiter’s obtuse confusion.
‘I bring it in on me feet,’ he said, his voice like a rising and falling aerial whine, without human direction, blank.
There was silence as the boy sat down. Here was the whole wide beach, yet the boy chose to sit just beside him, a few feet left in between so as not to be actually with Tressiter! A little essay, Tres-siter thought, in human gregariousness—grouping against the elements but taking care to remain individual, the lone wolf and the herd in the same veins.
And I’m an outsize essay, he thought again, in the misapplication of metropolitan man to the free littoral—here I’ve covered a forty guinea suit with good indigenous tar; also every brace and lace and buckle about me irks to be free: now if I did not feel in the boardroom the delightful and reassuring pressures of suspenders and braces and waistcoat strap and the back of my collar, let alone my well-fitting teeth and the smooth texture of a shaven jaw—why, if I did not feel all these armours exactly attuned I would never be able to pull my weight in conference, I’d be acutely demoralized. Yet here I want to throw them all off! It’s not hot, and I don’t want to sunbathe—it’s simply some fearful association of ideas.
‘You don’t half like baked beans,’ the boy said vaguely to the sea.
He added: ‘I’m a guts too.’
So the news had got around already! A sensation in so remote a spot—that a man should have two helpings of the same! Once again he sensed that here was a place so solitary, with so few things moving in its lonely space, that anything could happen: that something would happen.
‘I can throw a stone into the sea,’ the boy said, his slow d
reamy eyes on the near deep water. His mouth hung a little open—no purpose it seemed, in keeping it closed. Tressiter waited for him to say, ‘Can you?’—some normal inclusion of himself. But again the boy said nothing further. He was vacantly content with a plain statement of his personal, slow direction. Tressiter saw him suddenly as some awful kind of snail-boy, blindly slithering through life over an interminable vista of baked beans and pebbles without destination or purpose, except occasionally to surmount the barrier of a tarpatch. But at last the boy tossed a stone into the sea. Tressiter watched it throw up a small web of water, heard its resonant plonk-sound, and the stone was gone forever.
The boy stood up. ‘I’m going in,’ he said, ‘I’m going in plop like my stone.’
Now Tressiter lay beneath and the child was standing above him. It reduced him to child-level—once again on this strange day—and it seemed even insolent of this boy, now grown up there, not to look down at him.
‘I can swim,’ the boy said and began to walk off.
Thank God at least for that, Tressiter muttered under his breath. Then in sudden despair for some sort of communication, he called after him: ‘Where do you live? Is that your Mum and Dad back there?’
But the boy never noticed, broke into a run crunching sudden brittle thunder from the pebbles, and then, all arms and pony-stepping legs, windmilled a white spray into the sea. ‘Arms like little white sticks,’ Tressiter thought, looking back to the distant hut where perhaps the boy had come from, and where he had noticed two figures sitting wrapped up in the sun. ‘He couldn’t have been here long, no brown on him. Perhaps it’s his holiday, his first day.’ He remembered the slight red flush beginning on the boy’s arms, showing the skin whiter beneath—and found this rather touching.
The thought took him back to his own holidays as a child, to smells of sea and sand long ago. That miraculous secret land of rocks and sea-weed left by an unusually low tide! The gritty feeling of sand from his feet in the bath as evening fell and the long salty day was over!
He shook his head regretfully and looked down at his grown-up paunching stomach in its adult lease-holder’s season-ticket suit. Again he was back again thinking of himself small, the whole day seemed to contrive it—and he looked over at the lighthouse, and even this, in the big simplicity of its patterned white and black, looked more like a giant model than a high windswept tower. He squinted at it, solitary against sea and wide shingle. ‘I could have built that myself,’ he thought as he reduced it, ‘with my bricks.’
And close inshore there passed model ships, perfect in all detail. Heavy-tonned cargo-steamers came right in to round the point of the Ness: the sea was deep here, and from the little hill of shingle shelving sharply down it looked the deeper, one could imagine the angle continuing straight down like the side of a basin—and somehow in the clear air the ships looked nearer even than they were, and in his eyes reduced in size, for one seldom sees a ship so, it is more usually either a speck in the distance or a high wall of steel at a quayside. The breeze blew their smoke to nothing: moving slowly past, with no visible effort to be seen, they might have been drawn on underwater strings. Tressiter felt his heart jump as he saw the bright orange and black paint, and the white deck-works, and blocks and rigging and bollards and capstans: long ago he had pressed his nose to the toyshop window and seen such ships in all their miniature detail, each item priced … how he had yearned for those little brass knobs, how his pocket-money had loved out at the window….
A faint cry came from the water.
Idly, not lowering his eyes to the sea between his pebble-dune and the ship, he left the cry unanswered. If the boy ignored him on the beach, he’d be damned if he’d applaud whatever he was up to in the water.
Again the cry, louder. The letter L seemed to curve up on the wide air, then blow away. Casually he looked down. The boy was waving at him.
Well, he could wave. Then a vomit of hard fear raced up to catch the breath in his throat—the boy was struggling, waving for help, ‘Help!’ the cry came, ‘. . el.!’ and he saw the stick-arms thrashing lop-sided and the boy’s chin thrust urgently up as if he were being strangled, gasping for air.
For a second urgency paralysed Tressiter. He felt the taste of salt-water in the boy’s mouth, he looked back at the two doll-figures sunning in the tarry verandah back up the beach, he stood up and waved wildly. Neither moved.
He looked down with horror at his suit, his shoes. The boy was absurdly close inshore. No more than twenty or thirty feet out: but in deep water; and with what currents pulling down?
He thought wildly: They take off their boots, they take them off and fling their jackets off and plunge over the embankment wall … he struggled with a lace, then heeled the shoe right off, then the other, and his jacket —in the last second he rolled this up and put it not on tar but on the homburg-briefcase castle—and then stood again milling his arms in a wild semaphore to the sunning rugs up there.
‘Ell!’ piped loud now from the sea, desperate as a gull’s cry. The dolls sat on staring at him, not a movement. Once sunlight seemed to flash on glasses. Asleep? Sun-blind? Spectators immobilized in the sun, quiet as insects … and the lighthouse, the black and white coastguard’s house impregnably walled—no sign of life … and on a ship passing he could see decks and rails and lifebuoys so near, but impossible … he ran down the shingle, not feeling the stones, nor then, as he dived in, the sudden chill of the water. Only when he was swimming, a heavy-breathed breast-stroke towards the stuggling bob of a head—only then did he realize suddenly a kind of hopelessness, a smallness about himself alone among waves. Not waves only wind-ripples, but at water-level waves higher than the eye … and now his soaked trousers weighed him back, his own breath was going … and what would he do when he got to the boy? If he struggled? The thing was to hit them? Hit them in the face? But where in the face?
In the long few yards pushing through the water he saw the hull of the oil-tanker, wondered if he should go back and signal it from the beach, knew he shouldn’t … and then half way to the boy he saw the head disappear. Had he gone under or was it a wave in between? Suddenly he thought for the first time: Is it worth it? Is it worth two lives? And though hitherto during that day a specious sense of being small again had struck him, in the little train, then on the beach—now much more darkly and deeply he felt it, he was right back again like a small boy with big things round him and the old guilt worming up, he was doing wrong and he would do it knowing it and there was a shadow of punishment above though he would find a tale to tell himself out of it … and, so thinking, tears burned in his eyes as his helpless breath came and he turned and started to dog-paddle back to the shore.
But on the beach a figure came, bounding enormously alone down the shingle an old man in striped pyjamas, grey hair whisking in the sun, shouting something, now plunging straight into the sea and coming fast with an overarm crawl. And Tressiter, gulping down his guilt, turned slowly round and began his hopeless dog-paddle back towards the boy.
But even then he trod water, hoping the man would pass him, hating to lose more distance from the shore, hoping with fear even greater than fear of water that he had not been noticed.
The boy’s head was clearly to be seen again, and this strong swimmer flailed swiftly past him: Tressiter trod water a little nearer, wanting to appear at hand to help, yet not moving far, calculating each foot … and the man had the boy safe and had turned on his back and was frogging hard to the beach. Tressiter turned and kept pace, paddling fast now. At last they stumbled up the first wet shingle, and the man stooped to gather the boy firmly in his arms. Tressiter found his own arms outstretched round and under and a little way off this burden, as if to catch it if it fell—but a cautious inch or two away, useless yet looking useful as crabwise he trod up beside the man to the dry shingle above.
He stood by uselessly as the man got the boy’s arms moving and water trickled out from his bluing lips. He felt he must say something. The man paid
no attention to him. He might not have been there. Yet now he felt he ought to be congratulated—the lie had formed in him, he had never really turned back, he had gone in after the boy and risked his life, he who was a poor swimmer had done this.
‘How is he?’ he said.
The man took no notice, working away concentrated only on the body beneath. The thought came to Tressiter that it would have been uselsss if he had brought the boy in, he had no knowledge of these respiratory exercises—and this too excused him. Yet he could have carried the boy to the coastguards? No time, no, there would not have been time.
A woman was stumbling over towards them—he saw that now the verandah of the hut was empty, they must have seen him go in after he had waved, and a little hope clutched at him as he thought how purposeful his back must have looked—and now the man raised his head and yelled: ‘Cocoa, Ma! Hot cocoa, get back quick!’
Then as she turned, the boy made his first movement. The man muttered ‘Thank God,’ and gathered him up again. He stood up, breathing hard‚ with the boy in his arms. Tressiter urged forward a step: ‘Can I help?’ he said.
He saw the man’s eye take in the pile of homburg and briefcase. the coat neat on top, and then the man looked at him, from his feet up to his eyes, a long look from old wise eyes. ‘You’ve helped,’ the man said. ‘Haven’t you?’
‘Yes, but …’ Tressiter stuttered, wanting to explain, wanting the man to see how hopeless it would have been, and above all wanting now to act in some way—so that he stumbled after the man up the shingle to the hut, thinking that perhaps the old eyes had not accused, that he had misheard a note of sarcasm. As the man passed through the verandah, Tressiter said: ‘Can’t I get you some brandy?’
The Stories of William Sansom Page 45