by Rose Tremain
He moves slowly across the sea bed, his meanderings guided by the compass attached to his wrist. Steer north-east and the continental shelf will eventually drop away and leave him poised above the real depths he’s never entered. So he goes in a westerly way, remembering to stay quite close to Jason, the sea grass just brushing his body, his lamp like a cartoon wand creating a pathway of colour in front of him. Clusters of tiny brownfish explode into sudden stillness, like spilt wild rice, petrified by its light.
He’s hoping for some discovery today, for something man-made, trailing a thread of story. He remembers the megaphone and the thurible. The stories he made up around these have taken on substance in his mind, as if they were events and not inventions.
He keeps swimming west, then, signalling to Jason, north a little, out towards the deep. He finds a rusty camera and a bicycle wheel – nothing of interest. He and Jason measure the areas where the sea grass has died.
And so the day passes. He spends quite a lot of it thinking about his two demanding angels and the Scanda-house he’s building for them, so that more light can fall on their hair and on their breakfast spoons.
When Rachel has done her homework and taken Viola upstairs (‘I don’t want her going out at night. She chases birds’), Karen makes strawberry tea and sits at the kitchen table opposite Tom. She warms and warms her hands on the tea mug. ‘Tom,’ she says, ‘you know I went to the mortgage people today?’
‘Did you? I thought you were going to see the builders.’
‘First the builders. Then the mortgage people about the new loan.’
‘And?’
‘The Scanda-house can’t be finished unless we take out another loan, can it?’
‘No. But there shouldn’t be a problem. This house is worth far more than we’ve borrowed, so when we sell it—’
‘It isn’t, Tom. Not any more.’
‘What are you talking about, Karen?’
‘They sent a young man back here with me. He looked at this house. Just looked at it. Barely came inside. Didn’t even go upstairs. He said, “Mrs Harris, there’s no question of any further loan. You already have negative equity on this property.”’
‘Negative equity?’
‘It’s a term. Nowadays, there’s a term for everything you can’t quite believe could ever happen. I suppose the term is meant to make it real to you.’
‘It’s not “real” to me. What does it mean?’
‘You haven’t heard it? I’d heard it somewhere. Out in the air somewhere. It means the house is worth less than the sum we’ve borrowed on it.’
‘It’s not, Karen. We had three valuations.’
‘But they were a while ago and now all its value is gone. I mean, like water or something. Or into the same air where all these new terms come from. It has just gone heaven knows where. And so I don’t see how the Scanda-house is ever going to be completed now.’
Tears start to fall into Karen’s tea. Tom feels a hollow place open inside him and bloat with misery. He reaches out and takes Karen’s hand and says weakly: ‘You may have been misinformed. They may be quite wrong.’ He wishes this moment were a story or a dream. ‘I’ll look into it, Karen,’ he says. ‘I’ll go into it, love.’
He takes a day off. He talks to the builders, to the mortgage company, to the bank loans department. He is told that the gap between what his present house is worth and what he has borrowed to pay for the new one is now approximately £40,000. The only way the Scanda-house can be finished is by borrowing yet more. But nobody will lend him any more because he can’t, now, repay the existing loan. His collateral is used up, suddenly, without any warning, like the compressed air in a cylinder that has no reserve valve. He can’t move.
He tells Karen he will find a way. ‘What way?’ she says. ‘Tell me what way.’
‘I don’t know,’ he says, ‘but I will.’
They say nothing to Rachel. One evening, she informs the cat: ‘Our room in the Scanda-house is going to be right up in the roof, Viola, and we’re going to be able to see the sea.’
Tom considers asking Karen to go back to work. She used to be an art teacher. One day, she said: ‘I can’t do this any more, Tom. These children are too savage for me. In Denmark, pupils are not like this.’
She got Tom’s agreement. He could see that the children had no interest in the kind of knowledge that Karen could give. So Karen left the school and stayed at home and painted and now and then made a little money from drawings and watercolours. One of the things promised to her in the new house is a studio of her own. It would have a big, sliding window and a balcony made of steel. And Tom longs to see her in there, working quietly, in her own space at last. He can’t ask her to return to teaching. He can’t. She’s forty-three. She wants a sunny house with a studio and her days alone with her painting. It’s not unreasonable.
Back he goes, down into the deep, to think, to try to work it out. He moves more slowly than usual over the sea bed, barely noticing what appears in the beam of his lamp. He feels like the victims of his stories about the megaphone and the thurible, caught up in something they never intended, that no one intended, but which happened nevertheless. He retells the stories to himself, to see if they shed light on his predicament:
– One day, a Scouts decathlon is taking place on the beach. There are scarlet markers out at sea for the thousand metres freestyle. The Scoutmaster’s name is Dawlish . . .
– One winter’s day, a Mass is said out at sea on a trawler for a drowned fisherman. The thurifer is a boy named Marcus Grice who is prone to sea-sickness . . .
Tom stops and thinks, so much of our life is invention, so much the way we choose to see it. I see Karen and Rachel as my bossy angels. Karen sees the lost land of her childhood coming back to her in the guise of a house. The men I work for see this ribbon of water as the conscience of England. In both cases, I have inherited so much responsibility.
– And so. A boy named Pip (the fair-haired boy Dawlish loves single-handedly in his single bed night after night) is coming last in the thousand metres freestyle. Out at the scarlet marker, Pip starts to panic, to wave his arms, to signal that he’s in trouble. Dawlish, wearing his Scoutmaster’s heavy shoes, wades into the sea and calls to Pip through the megaphone . . .
– And so. At a certain moment in the Mass for the dead fisherman, with twenty-foot waves hurling the trawler about, Marcus Grice realises he is about to vomit. Forgetting everything but his own nausea, he drops the thurible and staggers to the ship’s rail. Burning incense falls onto the trawler’s wooden deck . . .
‘Oh no,’ said Karen, when Tom told her these stories, ‘I see the endings. I see tragedy coming. Don’t tell me. I hate tragedy, when it’s so senseless.’
As Tom swims on, he realises a truth that he’s never understood before: he wants, through the design of the new house, to remind Karen that England is only partly a dark place, that it can be calm, not savage, that beautiful light often falls on it. This, in his imagination, is why it matters so much. His worst fear is that Karen will leave, one day, and go back to a place where she once found lapis lazuli in the water.
Sailing yachts and kitchen appliances: he dreams of them often now. The thing which is nimble and defies the water; the thing which, superseded, might float for a while and then sinks.
Karen gets used to this dream of his. When he wakes and reaches for her hand, she just strokes it gently and says: ‘That old dream, Tom. It’s so rotten to you. I wish it would go.’
One morning, she says: ‘I told Rachel about the Scanda-house. I explained there is nothing we can do. Just make it watertight and wait. She understands.’
And they’re being so good about it now, his fair women. Hardly any tears from Karen after that first time; no sulking from Rachel. They’ve understood what’s happened and that’s that. In the mornings, when he leaves, there they are, chatting softly together, as if the future were going to arrive today. They eat their muesli. They raise their faces to his for a
goodbye kiss, exactly as they always and always did.
He’s the one who cries. Nobody sees him do it, not even Jason. He tries not to see himself do it. He dives down to the sea floor and switches off his lamp, so that darkness round him is as absolute as the darkness of the grave, and lets his tears fall. His sobs, through his breathing apparatus, sound unearthly.
He does little searching for human objects any more. He prefers lying in the dark. He’s tired of the stories men tell. The only thing he’s started to long for is to go beyond the coastal shelf, to go to the true deep, where all the variety of the ocean lives. He’s begun to believe – at least with half his mind – that only if he is brave enough, insane enough, to go down into this vast darkness will he find the solution to the problem of the house.
One evening, Tom comes home and hears Karen talking on the telephone to her mother, Eva. He can understand quite a bit of Danish. Karen is telling Eva that she’s waiting for her life to change. She says: ‘I’m not living my life any more, Mama. I’m waiting to start it again, when I’ve got my studio.’
He sits down dumbly and listens to this conversation. He knows that Eva has offered to lend them money, but that the money offered is nowhere near enough and, even if it were, it couldn’t be accepted because it couldn’t be repaid. Eva is a kind woman and she has passed this quality of kindness onto Karen.
At supper, addressing both Karen and Rachel, Tom says: ‘I want to talk about our situation. I promised you I’d find a way out of it. And I still mean to. I don’t want you to think I’ve just given up.’
‘No, Tom,’ says Karen, ‘you’re not a person who gives up.’
‘It’s not your fault anyway,’ says Rachel.
Tom pushes away his half-finished meal and lights a cigarette. He doesn’t often smoke and the cigarette tastes old. ‘I thought,’ he says, ‘I would have a word with the insurance company.’
Karen says: ‘I don’t think the insurers can do anything, Tom.’
‘Well,’ says Tom, ‘they will have some idea about the future – about when the value gap might start to close.’
Rachel is looking at Tom’s face intently, as though it were a map of the world. ‘Do you think it will ever?’ she asks.
‘Yes,’ says Tom. ‘Yes.’
He sees the summer pass. The insurers say that they really do not know when the value gap may start to close and they dare not guess. The temperature of the sea rises and then starts to fall again. Tom promises himself that, before the winter comes, he will do the thing he has planned.
It requires the hiring of a boat. He chooses a Saturday morning in September when the air is bright. As he manoeuvres the boat out of the harbour, he looks back and sees, half hidden by trees, his new house, waiting.
He is four or five miles out when he throws the anchor. He can see the grey smudge of a ferry going towards Harwich and wonders whether, for some of the Dutch passengers coming over from the Hook of Holland, this may be their first sighting of England. When Karen first saw England, she and her friend Else said together: ‘It looks a bit like home.’
He checks his equipment carefully. He knows certain important things are being done incorrectly: he should have a reserve valve on his cylinder; he should not be diving alone.
He lets himself tip backwards into the water and goes down slowly, barely moving his flippers, his lamp directed onto the depth gauge at his wrist. He has no idea how far he has to dive before he starts to see it, the life of the true deep. For the first hundred feet of his fall, there seems to be nothing but himself and the drifting bladderwrack and the bubbling of his own breathing.
But then they start to swim into his light: shoals of silver herring; the brown swirl of an eel; a kite-shaped ray with its dancing tail; the blue bodybags of squid; the fingers of cuttlefish; the first red fronds of deepwater seaweed.
For a while, he hangs still, poised where he is, turning and turning his head so that his lamp beam makes an arc and every arc reveals a new picture. He opens his arms to everything he sees, like he used to open his arms to Rachel when she was a small child. With every suck of compressed air that he takes, his feeling of elation increases.
He goes lower, lower. He’s no longer looking at his depth gauge. And then, just ahead of him, he sees a dark mass and feels his body pressed by an underwater current. The mass moves by him and on, and thousands of brownfish rush from its path and Tom knows that something vast is down there with him and he chooses to believe that he’s found a whale.
He turns and starts to follow it. He scans it with his lamp, but he can see nothing, only the small fish darting from its path. He wants to touch it, to hold onto it, to become its passenger. He wants it to lead him down. Only by going deeper and further can anything be solved.
Tom doesn’t know whether he can keep pace. He has to swim as fast as he can, taking in a lot of air, but he does keep pace until he feels the mass suddenly drop away beneath him. It drops and he’s stranded there alone, at some mid-point, foolishly kicking his flippered feet. Then he makes the steepest dive he’s ever made in his life. Briefly, he thinks of Jason’s face wearing a look of terror, then of Jane Fonda wearing a striped leotard and hanging from a wallbar by her feet, and then of nothing, nothing but the beauty of the dive. It doesn’t matter whether the thing that leads him down is a whale or not. It’s a whale in his mind, just as the Scoutmaster and the thurifer were real people in his mind. It is something alive which, in its every moment of existence, can express its own individual purpose. He has only to follow it and he will attain perfect clarity of thought. The deeper he goes, the more euphoric he feels.
And then, without warning, he’s in darkness. He remembers it from his sea-bed crying, this darkness-of-the-grave, and with a heavy arm reaches up to switch on his lamp. But no light appears. The battery of his lamp is used up.
In a mere few seconds he feels a drunken sickness come on and now he can’t say if this darkness is the real, external darkness of the deep sea or only a darkness of his mind. Far, far away, weak and soft, he hears Karen’s voice say: ‘Oh! This darkness of us northerners, this blackness of ours . . .’
Sick as he feels, he knows that he must take control. Karen must be his light now, Karen and Rachel, there on the dry cliff, in a dry wind, with the sun on their hair.
He starts to swim up. But he’s lost all sense of time. For how long has he been following the imaginary whale? And how deep is he? Without a light to shine on his depth gauge, he has no means of knowing.
So one question only remains, the question of equity: is the sum of water above him greater than the corresponding sum of compressed air left in his cylinder, or is the sum of the air greater than the sum of the water? He says it like a mantra, over and over, to calm him, to keep his sickness in check: Which is greater? Which is greater?
Somewhere far above him his bossy angels wait in the bright September sun and all he can keep trying to do is swim upwards to meet them.
Bubble and Star
Leota Packard had been born and raised in Georgia, not far from Jimmy Carter’s home town of Plains. But when she was twenty, she left the South and never returned.
Once in her subsequent life – during the Carter presidency – she found her mind wandering like a lost child back to her mother’s porch swing; and there it sat for a few minutes, rocking to and fro, watching the fields. Above the fields, it saw creatures dancing in the air – gnats and fireflies. But this wasn’t its usual habit. If Carter hadn’t become President, it might never have gone back. Because normally it stayed in Canada, where Leota lived after her marriage to Eugene Packard, a Canadian plastics manufacturer. It stayed in the bright and tidy house Packard built for them two miles from Niagara Falls. It was perfectly happy there and seemed to have no need or inclination to remember the past.
But then, when Leota and Packard were old, when the plastics company had made them rich, when they had lived together for fifty years, the subject of Georgia came back suddenly into Packard’
s head. Not into Leota’s head, but into Packard’s. He began saying to strangers at parties: ‘Leota is old enough to remember slavery.’ The mouths of the strangers would gape and their eyes turn towards Leota, but she would ignore them and look at Packard through the purple sun visor she wore in all weathers and say: ‘Those people were not slaves, Pack.’ And he would reply: ‘They were not free, neither, Leota. And that’s the truth.’
He was getting angry with the world.
Leota watched him through her visor and wondered when this anger had started.
She decided it had begun the day they went to the unveiling of a painting.
He said to her as they set out: ‘Take off that frigging visor, Leota! You see the world through cough linctus.’
She replied: ‘I like it that way, Pack.’
‘OK,’ he said, ‘but it’s not the way it is!’
‘How can you say what way it is? Everyone sees it differently.’
‘Not me,’ he said, ‘not any more. I see it as IT IS!’
The painting was black. They sat with friends and neighbours in two rows in the town gallery and looked at it and there it was, a black square on a beige background with nothing in it but black, black. The gallery had raised $100,000 to acquire it and yet it looked completely and utterly worthless. Leota had taken off her visor, but as they all sat there in silence she put it on again so that there would be a new kind of magenta colour to the border of the black square.
The artist was introduced to the audience. His name was Pethcot and he wore round black glasses, like pebbles. He smiled and preened and was about to begin to talk about his marvellous square when Packard stood up and said: ‘I guess I always knew your world was hollow. Now I get it; it isn’t only hollow, it’s filled with crap.’