The Drowning People

by Richard Mason

  “You must not blame yourself for letting Eric go out alone last night,” she said. “He was foolhardy. It was what we loved about him. It was what you loved about him.”

  And as she spoke I thought that I would have preferred the clean thrust of a knife.

  The coroner delivered a verdict of accidental death and Eric was buried in hallowed ground in the tiny cemetery adjacent to the château at Vaugirard. I was a pall-bearer at his funeral, my eyes the only dry pair in that overcrowded chapel of hard pews and Norman arches, my shoulder the steadiest of the six which lifted his heavy coffin and carried it down the narrow aisle. I lived through that day with the grim determination of a man beginning a life sentence; and I watched the movements of my body with detached interest from a recess in my mind, the only refuge I could find. I watched myself dress that morning; watched my fingers knot the black tie which I had bought for the occasion; watched them run a comb through my hair; registered that I looked older, more haggard than I had done a week before; saw without concern that I was presentable nonetheless. I had hardly slept for seven consecutive nights; my cheeks were sunken; there were dark purple circles under my eyes. Exhaustion calmed me; it separated and distanced me from the world, from the acting out of my role in the last act of Eric’s tragedy. It insulated me from the tears and grief of those around me; it protected me from the knowledge of what I had done; it numbed my pain to a dull ache.

  I remember that small chapel high above the town; I remember the rustle of its black-clad congregation as they took their seats on small pews of dark wood; I remember the stately calm of Louise and the wild red eyes of Eric père. I remember the coffin; remember Eric lying in it; remember the calm pale dignity of his face; the unnatural neatness of his black curls, brushed for the last time. Standing before him in the line of people paying their last respects I found that I had nothing to say, for the suited body before me was not my friend, was not the Eric I had played my first concert with; was not the Eric I had laughed with at the Café Florian; was not even the Eric I had sacrificed so deliberately to prove my love for Ella. His soul was gone from his body, that much I knew; and all I could do was hope that it had found peace. In a state of eerie calm I looked at him and tried to say good-bye but no words would come. The face of Eric’s dead body held no meaning for me anymore; and it was not until I saw his shoes that the tears came. They tied the body before me to a living reality, a reality which I missed suddenly with a wrenching, crippling pain; and I remembered the scene at Florian’s when Eric had bought them and heard his laughing voice telling me gravely that he did not like new things. He had bought them from a friend of the woman with the severe nose, an Englishman who had fallen on hard times. They were brogues, old-fashioned and scuffed in, and had been circulated amongst the regulars of the Café Florian with an old tweed suit and some ties which had gone to others. Eric had bought the shoes without haggling over their price as the buyers of other articles had done, for he did not exploit those in need. He had paid their owner the sum requested for them and had put them on at once. It was this that made me cry.

  Ella came up to me as the mourners were beginning to stream away from the grave, a line of black figures under a gray sky, shivering in the wind. I had been only dimly aware of her during the past week; I had seen her red eyes and pinched cheeks without noticing them; her pale face and the dark circles under her green eyes without caring for them. I had made sure that I was never alone with her, for that I could not have borne. And as she slipped her cold hand into mine in that churchyard the smoothness of her touch sickened me, for it reminded me of what I had done to win it, of what I had done to be worthy of her. I could not meet her eyes.

  “Jamie …” she said at last. “Please don’t do this. Don’t pretend I don’t exist.”

  I walked on faster.

  “Please. I can’t go on.”

  “It was Eric who couldn’t go on,” I said quietly. “Not you. Not me. Eric.”

  Her hand tightened its grasp of mine. I shook it away.

  “He killed himself because of what we did,” I said, “because …” I stifled the accusation on my lips.

  “Say it.”

  “Because of what you made me do.”

  There was silence.

  “Jamie,” she said at last. “Jamie please don’t do this.” And there was real pleading in her tone.

  Still I could not meet her eyes. “You honestly think we can go on blithely as before?”

  “No, not as before perhaps, but…. Can’t you see how much we need each other? We need each other now more than ever. You’re my only hope. I’m yours.”

  We were nearing the other mourners now; and I heard the shutting of car doors and the tap of high heels on cobbles.

  “What did you tell him?” I asked suddenly, quietly. “What did you say to him after I left you?”

  There was silence.

  “What did you say?”

  “Please, Jamie….” She was crying now.

  “What did you say to him?”

  “I…” Ella looked at me. I met her eyes stonily and for the first time their beauty did not move me. “Please don’t,” she said again.

  “Tell me.”

  “I…” She hesitated and opened her bag for a cigarette.

  I pulled her hand. “I don’t want you to smoke. I want you to tell me what you said to Eric after I left you.”

  “I told Eric the truth,” she said quietly. “He was very angry after you left. He said that you loved him, that you had kissed him, that I was trying to do you harm. So I told him why you had kissed him. I made him understand that you did it for me.”

  “And then?”

  “And then I left him.”

  We walked on in silence, through the churchyard gate and into the street. I heard the tap of Ella’s shoes on the stones, the desultory conversation of the other mourners, the growl of car engines. I cannot describe how I felt; I have no words for the numbness which ran through me. I tried to speak but no sound would come. And as Ella and I walked on together I felt as though I were floating, as though the world around me was no more real than a dream. For an instant I clung to this hope. Then I told myself that the world was real, that I was not a shadow but a person who lived and breathed like other people. In a moment of clarity the future stretched before me: a life lived in the shallows of my mind, from whence it would be dangerous to stray.

  I am straying now and I know the dangers I face; but I am past caring for such things.

  As the street began to steepen, for we were walking from the castle down the hill to the town, I looked at Ella once more and drank my fill of her fine, delicate face; of the indentation made by her collarbone above the line of her black dress; of the green of her eyes and the symmetry of her cheekbones. She looked at me too, and pressed closer towards me; for the last time I smelled her subtle, complex scent. “I don’t ever want to see you again,” I said slowly.

  And then I left her and broke into a run, frightened of the sound of her voice, of its power to sway me; and I did not stop running until I was lost in the crowds of the town and she was far behind, an isolated figure in a black dress, face whipped by the wind, eyes expressionless, hands shaking.

  CHAPTER 24

  IT IS DIFFICULT FOR ME TO TALK OF THE DAYS and months that followed my homecoming. Eric’s friendship and Ella’s love had gone from my life at a single stroke and I mourned them both, with a pain I could not share. I did not mourn the loss of my innocence, for I hardly knew that I had had it to lose; but I felt that things had changed, that I was not the boy who had gone to Prague three months before; and in that I was correct. I remember my journey to England on a gray day of choppy waves and circling gulls. I remember the lurching of the boat, the salt of the wind on my face, the crowds of people meeting the ferry. I passed through them all, oblivious, and when I reached home I slept, resolving to rely no longer on the opiate of exhaustion.

  Sleep shielded me for a day or two as the Christmas cards mo
unted on the mat and my mother started to talk of trees and tinsel and mince pies and of how difficult it was to buy presents for my father. Delighted to have me home earlier than expected—and wishing, I suspect, to smooth away all traces of past struggles between us—she included me resolutely in her plans for the festivities; and finding me somber and inclined to solitude, she thought me resentful of her attentions and pressed them on me all the harder. Day after day my opinion was sought on the pressing issues of the hour. Should we or should we not give a dinner party on Christmas Eve? Should we or should we not ask Aunt Julia to spend the holiday with us as usual? Should we or should we not invite the vicar to lunch on Boxing Day? (My mother, you see, was strict in her social observance of religious principle; and the annual entertainment of such minor clergy as were known to her was a sacred rite.)

  Through all this flurry of seasonal enthusiasm I moved numbly, as one in a dream: adding my name to the greetings on the Christmas cards; murmuring my approval of the mince pies that appeared, fragrant and warm, at regular intervals; suggesting presents for my father. But I felt removed from the jolly bustle around me; and my parents, relentlessly cheerful in my presence, said privately to each other that my music was doing me no good and that I was in need of more fresh air. Exercise, you see, was always the solution in my family; and so I was encouraged, when Aunt Julia came to stay, to adopt her dog and to take it on its daily walks: a solitary task in which I rejoiced, for in it lay my only respite from the forced conviviality of home life.

  Aunt Julia was a tall, straight woman with intense brown eyes and pugnacious eyebrows. Traces of risqué chic lingered about her still, though she was approaching seventy; and they manifested themselves in her tastes for smoking and swearing, both of which she indulged with military gusto in the manner of her long dead brigadier husband. Splendidly indifferent to my mother’s disapproval, she took a maternal interest in my father (whose mother’s best friend she had been) and she rather enjoyed her courtesy title of aunt, I suspect, for she used it to assume the endless license of a family intimate. Advice for my parents flowed freely from Aunt Julia; and on me she lavished a sort of barking kindliness which she supposed, not having children of her own, to be the correct way of conducting oneself towards members of the younger generation.

  An iron will and unchanging habits were two of her most obvious qualities; and it was these that made me look forward to her visit more than usual in the bleak weeks which followed my return from France. I needed old assurances then: I needed to feel that life would go on; to believe that the passing of time would help me to live with what I had done. And there was nothing so reassuring as a visit from this time-honored Christmas habituée, in whose presence life assumed a kind of military efficiency, an efficiency relieved and made charming by the incongruous irreverence of the old lady herself.

  Her movements were exact. She arrived without fail three days before Christmas and left, without variation, on the day after Boxing Day. And the method of her arrival was consistent too: she came in two taxis from Waterloo (“One for bags, one for owner and dog”); and descended, accompanied by the lazy barks of a sleek basset hound, to present one wrinkled cheek to my mother before paying the taxi drivers and sending them away with loud wishes for a “bloody good Christmas.” Inside, safely ensconced by the fire, her bags upstairs and unpacked (“I can’t abide people who live out of suitcases”) she would light a small cigar, accept a glass of water—for Aunt Julia didn’t drink—and question her audience with a ruthless directness which offended my mother and occasioned the first of the icy silences which inevitably punctuated the five days of her visit.

  I remember the day she came. I remember standing in the hall, waiting to submit to her inspection and to her two, efficient Christmas kisses; and I remember thinking that Julia’s visit might divert me from myself; that she might take the attention of the household from me and allow me some of the space I needed, without resorting to the emotional intrusion I so dreaded from my parents. It was by Julia, you see, that I hoped to be removed from the immediacy of Eric’s death. I looked forward to the unquestioned authority of her conversation and to the way in which she assumed control of my Christmas entertainment. I wanted her to protect me from myself in a way in which my parents, who knew me better, were powerless to do; and I felt that her protection, like mine in the beginning for Ella, would come at a time when it was sorely needed.

  It was my mother who suggested I take Jep on his daily walks; and the privilege was graciously bestowed on me by Julia, who thought no honor higher than that which came with the entrustment of his care. He was a happy, self-important little dog, with the shiny coat and benevolent eyes of the well-loved basset hound; and his impatience for his daily exercise gave me the opportunity and excuse for solitude, for I pretended to be jealous of Jep’s affection and would allow no one to accompany us on our excursions together.

  It’s strange, you know: strange that those few walks through the windy drizzle of an English December should have been so important to me; strange that now, from a distance of fifty years, they should recur to me with such vividness. I wonder why they do. Perhaps already I was tired of drama; perhaps already my hopes and dreams were shrinking, or had shrunk, and my desires were tilting towards the secure mediocrity of a warm bed and a quiet life. I don’t know. I know only that I found something reassuring in the uncalculating, uncomplicated affection of Jep; something endearing in his long ears and waddling gait. The trust of animals is easy to keep, easier than that of humans: for it carries with it no real burdens; no real temptations. It is a bond that ties us to reality, to the limitations of the everyday; and that was precisely the sort of bond I most needed then. Even through my grief I was human enough to be grateful for Jep’s companionship, and I showed my gratitude in an endless affection which he accepted complacently as his right.

  The solitude of those walks was a welcome release for me too, for at home I had no time to myself. The house was filled with a constant stream of guests whose coats I had to take, whose glasses I had to fill; and whose conversation, smooth with the practiced fluency of countless Christmas drinks parties, I had to listen to and smile at. In only one room could I be sure of privacy, and that was the tiny one at the top of the house in which I’d spent long summer afternoons playing to Ella. But it, of all places, held no peace for me. Her laugh rang there continually, I could not go near its door.

  And so, with an irony I didn’t appreciate then, I sought solitude amongst the pavement crowds of a large city; and amongst faces I did not know, faces which held no memories for me, I found some release from memory and some, very fleeting, peace. With Jep the basset hound by my side, I walked through the stream of shoppers making hasty purchases on Christmas Eve and the days immediately before it; I listened to frenzied discussions about food and gifts and clothes and lovers and holidays; saw friends laughing loudly at bus stops and couples arguing quietly about nothing, their faces pinched from cold and irritation. I walked through these vignettes of other people’s lives and listened with the frightened enthusiasm of one who is no longer interested in his own life. I tried to care about the nameless faces I saw; about the passions and desires which fueled their smiles and gave an edge to their angers. I tried to wonder about the resolution of their conflicts; about the continuance of their friendships and the futures of their loves. I tried even to envy them. For I felt then that I had lost such things forever; that my own life had lost the power to move me; and I dreaded the cold blandness of a spiritual divorce from oneself.

  I was not yet ready to face what I had done; to return even mentally to the scene of Eric’s death or to the events which had preceded it. I lived in constant terror of my own memory, for I knew what pain it could inflict; and so I tried to interest myself in the lives of people I did not know, hoping thus to escape from myself and to reestablish some kind of emotional reality in my own life, vicarious though it might be.

  Christmas came and went and I ate and drank and trie
d to laugh as I was meant to, watching my mother’s concealed irritation as Julia lit cigars at the dinner table land fed Jep bits of turkey and called my father an old dog. The vicar’s wife came alone to lunch on Boxing Day—her husband being “terribly run down with flu”—and held forth on the subject of the church bazaar while Julia asked whatever anyone saw in antimacassars. I took Jep out twice a day: hour-long oases of time alone to which I looked forward with an eagerness I could not quite hide and from which I returned, cheeks flushed, to face the social obligations of life in my mother’s house with renewed energy.

  It was from one of these expeditions, made on the eve of Julia’s departure, that I returned, at six o’clock, to find no guests present and Julia in full flow on the subject of the vicar’s wife.

  “Bloody awful dress, I thought,” she was saying as I came in. “I for one see no reason why ugliness should be next to godliness, do you?”

  “None whatever,” replied my father, handing her a glass of water.

  Julia was sitting bolt upright in her favorite chair by the fire, a cigar in one hand, her iron gray hair scraped back from her face. Helping myself to a gin and tonic from the drinks table, I sat down in a dark corner by the window, a corner from which I could watch my father laughing and listen to the conversation without necessarily having to contribute to it myself.

  “Damned cheek, dressing so badly,” Aunt Julia continued. “It must be an awful embarrassment to her husband.”

  And I thought with pity of the vicar’s dowdy wife and of what she must have suffered at Julia’s hands over lunch, a pity which did not prevent me from laughing at her misfortunes and at the good-humored malice with which her character and tastes were systematically assassinated before me. Sitting with Jep on my lap I felt with relief that the cold flagstones and peeling shutters of Ella’s house in France were very far away; that the events which had taken place under its blackened beams and in the unloved decay of its gardens had taken on the quality of a nightmare; that they belonged to a different world from the one to which I had returned, and in which I was safe once again.