The Wine-Dark Sea

by Robert Aickman

‘Shall I be mother?’ enquired Mrs. Slater; already, however, in the act of pouring. The fluid streaming from the long, thin, silver spout, looked very pale. Probably there were not enough tea-bags in the pot.

  None of the others was consuming a meal like this, though most of them seemed to be consuming something. Margaret noticed that the small, slim girl in the white dress was merely absorbing a proportionately small tumbler of water. At least, it was presumably water. She lay back at a table by herself, facing the sun; almost staring at it with her blue eyes. She was so very exiguous that her white dress looked as if inside it were merely a few pieces of straw and cardboard; leaving her head, legs, and arms as the only parts that were what they seemed. Two young men were sitting, each by himself, at tables quite near her. One would have expected them to show at least covert interest, but Margaret could see no sign of it. One was eating äggöra and drinking coffee, but both seemed far gone in melancholy.

  ‘That girl,’ asked Margaret. ‘Surely she is not here because she can’t sleep?’

  ‘That girl,’ replied Mrs. Slater, ‘has never been asleep in her life.’

  ‘I find it awfully hard to believe.’

  ‘In England perhaps. Here they’d know at once what she was.’

  Margaret looked up from her second scone.

  ‘What do you mean by that? How would they know what?’

  ‘They’d know she doesn’t sleep,’ said Mrs. Slater in her calm, conclusive way. ‘There are more people like that here than there are in England, and of course the population’s much smaller, so everyone gets to know the signs. It’s how woods like this began. But won’t you take off your jacket again? You must be too hot, I’m sure.’

  ‘No, I’m not too hot.’

  ‘I expect you thought you were coming to some kind of skiing hotel?’

  ‘Not exactly, in the middle of the summer.’

  ‘I should be delighted to lend you a frock. We’re much the same size and much the same age, so that the same style should suit us, and all my clothes come from England. We’re quite a dressy party here at night.’

  ‘Thank you very much, but I’ve got several dresses. I’ve been wearing them ever since I’ve been in Sweden,’ Margaret added, unkindly once more. ‘I hoped things up here would be more informal and that I should get two or three days of mountain walking.’

  ‘Not days,’ said Mrs. Slater gently. ‘It’s by night that we walk the mountains here. We don’t wear special clothes for it. It’s our way of life, so to speak, our destiny. Nothing special about it for us. It’s why the wood was put here in the first place.’

  ‘What do you mean by “wood”?’ asked Margaret. ‘Which wood? There are trees as far as the eye can see, and almost all Sweden seems to be made up of them.’

  ‘Round the Kurhus is a wood,’ said Mrs. Slater, ‘with paths in it, paths everywhere, paths that have been there for hundreds of years. You saw me following one. It is a Jamblichus wood.’

  ‘I’m sorry to be rude, but I think that name sounds like Alice in Wonderland.’

  Mrs. Slater smiled faintly. ‘I always thought it was more like Edward Lear,’ she said.

  ‘How can you tell, with all these trees, where your particular wood begins and ends?’

  Mrs. Slater looked down at the stone flooring of the terrace. ‘If I were to suggest that, with all these trees, it perhaps has no beginning or ending – at least in your sense of the words – you wouldn’t believe me.’ Then Mrs. Slater added softly, and as if interrogating her own heart, ‘Would you?’

  ‘It would mean an awful lot of walking, for some of these older people.’

  ‘You are right,’ said Mrs. Slater, looking up at Margaret, and again speaking firmly. ‘A time comes when people can go no further. In the end, the paths just lose themselves among the trees.’

  Really it all was like the Alice books; the Alice books and no others. Margaret thought so more and more. It was one thought that helped to keep out other thoughts.

  ‘I’ve eaten far too much tea.’ Curiously enough, she had; despite everything. At least she had if life at the Jamblichus Kurhus (an unconvincing name in almost any language, she would have thought), if life at the Kurhus followed any sort of normal order. ‘What time’s dinner? I take it that there is dinner?’

  ‘We follow the customary scheme of things. Perhaps we value it all the more,’ said Mrs. Slater, courageous to the last. ‘Dinner is described as from eight, but most of us are very punctual. You are sure you have a frock? I hope you will share my table?’

  ‘I should be delighted,’ said Margaret. ‘Thank you.’

  Margaret wanted both to stretch her legs in the sunshine and mountain air and to examine for herself Mrs. Slater’s alleged wood, where she suspected she would find nothing very special. But she did not want Mrs. Slater to come with her. In fact, a further thing she wanted very much, was simply to get away from Mrs. Slater. She thought of escaping by going up to her room as an excuse, and then running off into the forest, but this might be made difficult by the fact that the only public exit from the Kurhus seemed to be that on to the terrace. Moreover, she felt in her bones that she would never evade Mrs. Slater of all people, merely by dodging her round the bushes, as if they had been two schoolgirls. Mrs. Slater would be the first to cry caught any day.

  Mrs. Slater insisted on showing Margaret some of the large dress illustrations in Vogue, making, on the different garments, comments which were detailed and long-winded, but which struck Margaret as academic, where Mrs. Slater’s own needs and circumstances were concerned, and as rather creepy when applied to her own supposed case.

  ‘You would look gorgeous in that,’ Mrs. Slater would breathe out earnestly; pointing at something fleecy with her dark red forefinger and pushing the something almost into Margaret’s face, while Margaret gazed out at the slopes of green descending from the terrace and ascending another mountain ridge, ten, twenty, or thirty miles off, it was hard to guess how many.

  ‘If I lived your life, I’d always wear nice things,’ said Mrs. Slater. ‘I have excellent taste.’

  Margaret had often heard women of sixty or seventy talking for hours in just that way: weighing every detail; speculating, wistfully or cattily, about how this or that garment would suit this or that common acquaintance; at once identifying with and envying Margaret herself, when she happened to be at their disposal for the purpose. The half-dream, half-contest seemed to keep innumerable women not happy, but certainly alive, even through senility. It must serve a purpose, but Margaret did not find it even pathetic. She found it a spun-out makeshift (the very words were significant) which symbolised the worst aspect of being a woman. But everyone lived on makeshifts. Look at Henry, his lumbering toys and his social anxieties!

  ‘What colour do you find suits you best?’ asked Mrs. Slater.

  ‘This colour,’ said Margaret, pointing to her legs. ‘That colour’: pointing to the wilderness of leaves.

  The others on the terrace had stopped eating and drinking. In any other community, half of them would by now have fallen asleep.

  ‘Forgive me, please,’ said Margaret. ‘I should like to wander about a little before dinner.’ She rose. No one seemed to take any notice; even to glance at her.

  ‘I’ll show you round,’ said Mrs. Slater, scrambling together her papers. ‘There are things that need to be explained.’

  ‘It’s very kind of you, but I’ll take my chance.’ Margaret had a bright idea. ‘Like a famous Swede, I want to be alone.’

  ‘Mrs. Slater was not to be silenced conclusively, ‘Just as you like,’ she said, ‘but remember: it is not like going for a stroll in England.’

  *

  The differences, Margaret at first thought, were that here there were no litter, no structures, no advertisements, no noise of cars and aeroplanes and radios, and, above all, no people. Man had presumably planted these trees and tramped out these paths, but he had done nothing else. It was, indeed, very unlike a wood in Cheshire.

>   When Margaret had descended from the terrace, she had by instinct avoided the green tunnel from which Mrs. Slater had originally emerged, and, crossing below the terrace, had entered the other one, which for a few yards ran beneath the wall of the Kurhus itself. Margaret could hear the swill and clatter of the kitchen; and as well as these things, the chatter of the staff, which harmonised with them. After the silent terrace, the cheerful sound came as a relief. But it was audible for only a minute or two; nor was the Kurhus building visible for longer than that through the forest.

  And almost immediately, the fat, beaten path reached a nodule whence it unwound into a dozen or more rabbit runs among the trees. It was as if at this point the withdrawal of man had left small animals to continue his work. The paths, though very narrow, seemed definite, but it was impossible to know which to choose. All were compelled to wind continuously, as they pressed forward through the irregularly planted trees. Already, after only a few hundred yards from the terrace, there was a real danger of being lost. It struck Margaret as an ideal area for going round and round in a hopeless circle, as the lost are well known to do, owing (she had heard) to almost everybody having one leg shorter than the other. It was not at all the sort of situation she had contemplated as having perhaps lain behind Mrs. Slater’s rejected offer of guidance. She had visualised something far more fanciful.

  She selected a path almost at random, and began to weave about among the trees. The path, however narrow, was unobstructed: there was no question of pressing through bushes, or pushing aside branches. Even the surface was comparatively smooth. It was almost as if the vegetation had been cut back, but Margaret saw that there was no sign of this. It seemed rather as if it had never grown across the path; just as weeds never take root in water that is constantly traversed by boats. Margaret perceived at once what this implied: the little paths must be in continuous use, as Mrs. Slater had said. It was a further confirmation of Mrs. Slater’s entire improbable thesis about the insomniacs.

  Margaret stopped. There was a steady, rustling, pulsation in the thick undergrowth between the trees; and a whirring and flapping among the leaves overhead that would rise and fall suddenly, like a very irregular line on a graph. To judge by the sounds, there might have been condors among the branches and anacondas among the bushes. Margaret, in fact, was unsure what might not really be there: were there not still wolves and bears in Sweden, and, probably, many more varieties of reptile than in Britain? The brush was here as high as her elbows and dense enough to conceal anything short of an elephant. It was a second situation that she had not thought of when dismissing Mrs. Slater’s offer.

  She walked on. The narrow shafts of sun struck down like spotlights in a theatre, she being the principal actress; the wider cataracts descended like a benediction in an Italian painting, she being the saint. But in many places the trees were so thick that the sunlight penetrated only as a flickering radiance, suggesting a different and brighter world above. After a time, and quite suddenly, the underbrush almost ceased and the little tracks traversed dunes of pine needles.

  Tracks, not track. Even through the underbrush had run several transverse tracks. Out here, many intersecting paths could be seen simultaneously, which was reassuring, because, at the worst, and if one knew one’s direction, one could cross the open ground, but disconcerting too, as suggesting that the entire forest was a maze.

  Margaret was in many ways enjoying herself, but she realised that she would have to go back. She regretted that she had so little equipment for pathfinding. She had been feeling regrets of that kind almost since she had first arrived in Sweden. But it was so difficult to know what one could do. All the possibilities seemed ridiculous. Her mother had not let her even be a Girl Guide.

  Margaret felt, in any case, that woodland techniques, though important in themselves, were very secondary to something else … She had words for it, she had long had them, though they were negative words: what was needed was the rejection of so many of the things that her husband, Henry, appeared to stand for. The thought had roamed about her brain and body for years, like a germ in the blood, always poisoning her content. In this Swedish forest, a far and lonely place by comparison with most other places she had known, the unrest flared up and momentarily put her off balance. She attempted to make her usual answer to herself: tried to enter into Henry’s point of view, to make proper allowance for the fact that he was far from a free agent. He was hardly more a free agent than the people were at the Kurhus, according to Mrs. Slater’s tales, and according to the evidence of these teeming little rabbit-runs through the woods. All the same, she felt that it was up to a man to be more of a free agent than Henry was. It was not that she herself especially wanted to blaze trees and utter bird-calls. It was rather that the forest symbolised something that was outside life – certainly outside Henry’s life and her own. And not part of Henry’s inner life either, though it apparently was part of hers, if one could judge by what she felt now.

  Margaret took a small pull on herself. Henry must be broadly right and she broadly wrong, or life would simply not continue as it did, and more and more the same everywhere. The common rejoinder to these feelings of rebellion was, as she knew well, that she needed a little more scope for living her own life, even (as a few Mancunians might dare to say) for self-expression. But that popular anodyne never, according to Margaret’s observation of other couples, appeared in practice to work. Nor could she wonder. It reduced the self in one to the status and limits of a hobby. It offered one lampshade making, or so many hours a week helping the cripples and old folk, when what one truly needed was a revelation; was simultaneous self-expression and self-loss. And at the same time it corrupted marriage and cheapened the family. The rustling, sunny forest, empty but labyrinthine, hinted at some other answer; an answer beyond logic, beyond words, above all beyond connection with what Margaret and her Cheshire neighbours had come to regard as normal life. It was an answer different in kind. It was the very antithesis of a hobby, but not necessarily the antithesis of what marriage should be, though never was.

  Margaret could again hear the sounds of the Kurhus kitchen. A girl there was singing. Margaret stopped and listened for a moment; which, as she reflected, she would probably not have done had she been able to understand the words. The song had some pure existence and beauty, which understanding of the words, while possibly bringing something else, would have destroyed. Listening to the talk in the intervals at Hallé concerts, Margaret had suspected that too much understanding of musical theory can be similarly destructive. And so often people said to her that when they travelled abroad they wanted really to meet and know the local population; in the same sort of way, as far as possible, as they met and knew their fellow English. They spent hard evenings learning languages for the purpose – or in the hope. Margaret realised that this was not her idea at all. The song of this girl was precisely akin to the song of the forest: if one worked at it, one would cease to hear it. In fact, now that Margaret came to think, she realised that she had been unconsciously disengaging the song from the loud clanging of pans in which, properly speaking, it was submerged. She had been hearing only the song, and nothing of the mechanism that, objectively, almost overwhelmed it; and assuredly put it in its place. So it had been in the forest. One had to lose the noise of the mechanism, not least the ever-deafening inner echoes of it. One had to dispel practicality. Then something else could be heard – if one was lucky, if the sun was shining, if the paths were well made, if one wore the right garments: and if one made no attempt at definition or popularisation.

  Margaret perceived with surprise two practicalities: she had been walking for an hour and a half, far longer than she had supposed; and from the clear ground where the rabbit-runs were all visible at once, she had returned without giving a thought to her route. Blazing trees could not be the only ciphering. Losing one’s way was largely an act of intention.

  *

  All the same, Margaret had virtually to scamper into her d
ress with the velocity of a child. Not only was the terrace deserted, but there was the beginning of a crowd in the hall, as she hastened through. They were arrayed in half-festivity; the counterpart of half-mourning. As usual, Mrs. Slater had spoken aright. What was more, Margaret observed that her huge bed had not been ‘turned down’. It was the first hotel of that standing where she had encountered such an omission.

  Margaret stood for a moment naked in the evening sunlight, finding her silhouette more pleasing than she had found it for some time; then scrambled into a stone-coloured garment in hard silk, the best she could do for Mrs. Slater, whom there could be no hope of eliminating.

  *

  ‘Look,’ said Mrs. Slater. ‘There are the other two Englishwomen.’

  Few could have told to what nation they belonged. They resembled two very ancient, long-neglected, near-to-death bushes; which now put out each year only a few half-hearted leaves in the entire mass. One felt that at any moment, a branch might quietly drop off, or the entire bole split and subside.

  ‘Mrs. Total and Mrs. Ascot,’ expounded Mrs. Slater. ‘I used to be able to play games with them, but no more. I do wish you were here for longer, Margaret. You can imagine how alone I am.’

  ‘Is there really nowhere else you could go?’

  ‘The other places are even worse.’

  There was more conversation at dinner, in a variety of tongues; and more at the end than at the beginning. Undeniably it was as if they were all working up to something, even though they did it in a careful and hypochondriac way. None the less, those who had sat alone on the terrace, sat alone in the dining room also. It was merely that some of them spoke from time to time across a void, and that certain of the couples appeared more in touch. Also there were more people in the dining room than Margaret had until then seen in the Kurhus. Certainly the better spirits could not be attributed to liquor, because there was none. Margaret was accustomed to hotels where before one dined, one had several drinks at the bar, sometimes in advance of one’s husband. Occasionally one met people there. Infrequently, they were quite interesting. She realised that here there was seldom anyone new to meet. She was surprised that no one other than Mrs. Slater seemed concerned to meet her. Possibly it was the language difficulty.