The Wine-Dark Sea

by Robert Aickman

  ‘But most agreeably.’ The Colonel rose and faintly clicked his heels. ‘Your husband is a fortunate man. I could only wish he didn’t build roads.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Margaret.

  The Colonel spread out his hands.

  ‘The blood. The noise. The aggression and hostility. The devastation and emptiness. The means with no ends. The first roads, the first roads like that, were built by Hitler. The place of war is now taken in society by motoring. I, a soldier, tell you that my trade has changed its shape. But these are not things I should disclose to a road-builder’s wife, who has done me the honour of taking coffee with me after dinner. I apologise, Mrs. Sawyer. I go.’ The Colonel again made the faintest possible click with his heels, and went off up the stairs, stepping very silently for so well-built a man.

  It seemed likely that all who meant to go out had now gone; possibly the entire guest-list, with the exceptions of Mrs. Total and Mrs. Ascot, Mrs. Slater and Margaret herself. Margaret sat on in the silent hall with its scattered fairy lights, hardly in sum providing even illumination by which one wishing to could read. In the end, a single late-departer descended the staircase. It was the small, slim girl, who earlier had worn a white dress. Now she wore a dark garment (there was not enough light for Margaret to discern the exact colour); which fitted as a skin and as tightly as a young one. She tripped down the stairs, swiftly but not hurriedly; not only as if to be last was her proper place, but perhaps even as if aware that she was expected and awaited. She looked skinnier and frailer than ever: her legs attentuated rather than slender, her breasts almost invisible in the darkness of the fabric that covered them. As she walked past, she glanced at Margaret directly, for the first time: her big blue eyes seemed to flash for a half-second, as light caught them; and to Margaret it seemed that her tiny, almost wasted mouth smiled slightly though whether in recognition it was impossible to say. In any case, she was past in a moment, and, in another, out through the door on to the terrace, where the blackness covered and absorbed her instantly.

  Margaret found that, without volition, she had risen to her feet and was staring out towards the night beyond the glass panels in the door. She walked down the hall and followed the girl on to the terrace.

  It was quite unexpectedly cold: she had forgotten the contrast in temperature between the Swedish daylight and the Swedish darkness. Later in the year, as she understood, there would be no darkness at any time during the twenty-four hours, but now it was thick and moonless and starless, thick and icy. Shaking all over in her dinner dress (though she could recall that many of the other guests had not looked particularly wrapped up when they went forth) and with her teeth already chattering so badly that her head felt like a skull, Margaret none the less groped her way slowly along the dark terrace, trying to dodge round the almost invisible tables and chairs, and guiding herself by the dim, pale line of the stone balustrade to her left. In the end, she reached the few steps down to the transverse path along which Mrs. Slater had so long before emerged; descending them with stress in her high-heeled shoes; and tottered off towards the wood she had entered that afternoon, the wood about which opinions seemed to differ so much, the wood where her own view of things had shifted perceptibly, as she knew quite well, and even though she had but dropped in as a foreign tripper, and but for a period of time to be counted more rationally in minutes than in hours, days, or years.

  She went forward among the trees for perhaps fifty yards, then stopped. She had not even reached the nodule where the wider path untwined into the little rabbit-runs. She realised that if she went further, she would lose even the edgeless oval of something less than darkness behind her. Now there was no sound from the Kurhus kitchen, nor a light, visible through the foliage, in any part of the structure. It struck Margaret that the staff might go away each night to sleep. For the staff – the staff, of course, slept; and might well find the indulgence easier when uncontrasted with universal wakefulness. To Margaret, the cold was the strangest thing. In only a few minutes her body had become so cold that she no longer even suffered from the chill. It felt like a body packed in a single block of ice; serene, and no longer any responsibility of hers. She wondered whether if one really were packed in a block of ice, one still spent a third of one’s life with one’s eyes closed, sleeping.

  She had ceased to shiver or to chatter. She stood still and, there being nothing at all to see, listened. The steady, slight rustling of the afternoon was still to be heard. It could then have been the small creatures of the day. Margaret supposed it could not be the small creatures of the night; even more numerous, she understood. Still it seemed unlikely that small creatures would continue the same noise – and the same degree of noise (so that only when one stopped making an unnecessary noise oneself could one hear it) – in light and in darkness. Then Margaret realised that this might be a wood in which nothing slept; perhaps not even the trees.

  The soft rustling went on and on. Occasionally a black bird swooped down invisibly. Outside and beyond the clear ice that enfolded her, Margaret suddenly began to be afraid lest in the darkness one of the perambulant Kurhus guests brush past her. She doubted whether she could face such an occurrence.

  Probably it was this comparatively trifling fear which tipped the scale. Probably everything in the world is decided by tiny last straws. Though she had no doubt that, for a little time to come, she would despise herself, Margaret resolved upon retreat, upon leaving it at that: she would return to the Kurhus at once; go to her room; rub the ice out of herself with the huge Swedish bath towel, have a hot bath, turn on the heater, if there was one; snuggle down, as the women’s papers put it, in bed; aim to sleep, even pray to sleep, if she had to, though not once in her life hitherto had she found sleep to involve anything of the kind. And tomorrow, as would then be logical and necessary, she would return, having made herself as invisible as possible during the short remaining time at the Kurhus, to Sovastad, a day of her holiday lost, to say nothing of a day of Henry’s money. Perhaps, she thought, she had reached her limit; considerably sooner than for a brief period that evening she had supposed, even taken for granted about herself.

  As she picked her way out of the dark wood, she realised that she had begun to shiver again. Crossing the silent hall, she wondered whether it would all end merely in a bad cold. It would be an appropriate sequel to her surrender. She despised herself for not changing her clothes and returning to the wood. She had not even confirmed that the people who had gone out through the Kurhus hall were in the wood at all. She was only sure that even in her thickest clothes she would find the wood almost as icy as if she were wearing nothing.

  She rubbed herself down. She sank into steaming water. She went to bed. She felt self-betrayed, that she had behaved as an average woman would do; she had reached a point where she could be told little more and beyond which, if she went on, she would have to go alone, frozen and undefended; but she soon slept, and with no special measures.

  *

  When she woke to the morning sun (as high as this on the mountains the sun could shine at any hour), she knew that she would have to go at once. If a taxi could not be got, she would make her way on foot down the mountain to Sovastad, leaving her small luggage for Henry to go after when he returned. At one point she would not have wished that Henry should visit the Kurhus, but now it did not matter. She put on the dress in which she had arrived.

  There was no demur. The hall was empty of guests, as it so often was, but the young Swede who looked like a boxer, was behind his desk, produced Margaret’s passport, and said he would ring up for a taxi at once. He did enquire whether Margaret wanted breakfast, but seemed unsurprised when she declined. Margaret wanted to meet neither Mrs. Slater nor Colonel Adamski, and did not know which, in their very different ways, she wanted to meet the less. Perhaps she wanted least of all to meet the frail-looking girl with bright blue eyes; whose resistance to cold, even in thin black tights, seemed to be so much greater than her own. The young reception clerk
did not offer to abate half of Henry’s liability; or seem to think that the matter called for reference.

  Surprisingly soon, the taxi arrived and Margaret directed it back to the familiar hotel in Sovastad. She hoped that she would not find it full. Her present reservation began, of course, only on the night of the next day, when Henry would be back. Looking out of the taxi’s rear window, she saw the white tables scattered about the deserted terrace, the bright flowers in hanging baskets, the vast sweep of green descending the side of the mountain, of which the lower part had not yet caught the morning sun. Presumably the regular inmates of the Kurhus were, in their own way, resting after the night’s peregrinations. There was still so much that Margaret did not understand.

  The hotel in Sovastad said it was already fully booked that night, and was none too polite about it either. Had it not been that she and Henry had just stayed in the establishment for a week, and had this not been emancipated Sweden, Margaret might have thought from the demeanour of the reception staff that a foreign woman travelling alone was not welcome as a guest. All three of them glowered at her, as if she were a complete stranger and an undesirable one. Moreover, the taxi-driver had brought her case into the hotel and was shifting about apparently almost as eager to be rid of her as were the hotel people.

  ‘Can you recommend me somewhere else?’

  ‘The Central.’

  ‘You realise that I shall be returning here tomorrow?’

  They simply stared back at her and said nothing. She imagined that they had not enough English to understand her.

  The taxi-driver, with extreme grumpiness, took her to the Central.

  The Central was apparently so fully booked that the elderly woman behind the desk did not even need to consult her record. In fact, she did not speak at all. She merely shook her head, on which the smooth grey hair surmounted the familiar Swedish bone structure. However, she shook it with great decisiveness.

  ‘Can you recommend me somewhere else?’

  This time Margaret seemed more or less to be understood.

  ‘Krohn’s.’

  Sovastad was only a small town, despite its skilful graft of Scandanavian urbanity, and Margaret appreciated that as the quest continued, standards were bound to sink. Krohn’s was a pension, basically, perhaps, for commercial travellers. None the less, it was clean, bright, and attractive.

  It was also full up. This time the reception was in charge of a small boy, with a tousle of wild blond hair larger than his face, and curious, angular eyes. He wore an open white shirt, and a scarlet scarf round his neck. He could speak no English at all, so that it was useless even asking for a suggestion of somewhere else. Foreign visitors were unusual at Krohn’s.

  The boy stood behind a table (Krohn’s did not rise to a formal reception desk) holding tight to the edge of it, and visibly wishing Margaret out of the place and far away. One might have thought he was quite frightened of her, and Margaret supposed it was only reasonable seeing that he was perhaps but ten or eleven, and with not a word he could share with her.

  ‘Where now?’ she asked the taxi-driver.

  It was still only half past ten, but the situation was becoming disturbing. Margaret wondered if the taxi-man would by this time suggest that she return for the night to the Kurhus. She began to wish that she was not alone in Sovastad. She supposed that she could have recourse to Henry’s Swedish friends, but it was the last thing she wanted (short of returning to Kurhus) and the last moment at which she would have wanted it. She would have such particularly difficult things to explain, and she was bound to be questioned with solicitous closeness, and probably reported back to Henry in the same spirit.

  ‘Frälsningsarmén,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Frälsningsarmén,’ he said again. ‘It’s all you’ll get.’

  This last could hardly be true, Margaret thought. Sovastad was not a large town, but she herself, during the previous week, had seen more than three places at which it seemed possible to stay. Possibly the taxi-driver knew that all were full. Possibly there was some big event in the town which had booked all the beds. She decided at least to have a look at the place the taxi-driver had suggested.

  It proved to be a hostel of the Salvation Army.

  ‘No, really,’ said Margaret; but she was too late.

  A woman officer had immediately appeared and was not so much welcoming her in, as drawing her in; pulling at her arm, gently but very firmly, as if already commencing the process of redemption, manifesting the iron goodness beneath the common flesh.

  The place proved to look quite agreeable (as well as most astonishingly cheap, to judge from the prominently placed list of charges): more like a normal hotel, though simple and scrubbed, than like Margaret’s idea of a Salvation Army hostel in England, concerning which Major Barbara was her most recent authority. Margaret’s room contained a Bible, a book in Swedish expounding the Bible, a holy picture, and a selection of Swedish tracts; there seemed to be no reference to any more direct programme of observance in the establishment.

  At one moment, however, when Margaret was lying down, there was a knock at the door, and the officer who had received her, handed her a tract in English. It was entitled ‘Purification’, and the woman passed it over unsmilingly. Margaret had realised already that the woman had very little English. Now Margaret got the impression that the English tract was the fruit of searching in cupboards and chests for something suitable for the visitor from abroad. She felt mildly appreciative of so much trouble on her behalf and smiled as gratefully as she could. The woman went silently away.

  There seemed to be no further attempt at Margaret’s conversion.

  Indeed, she was perfectly free to go off into the town and eat there or go to the cinema. There was no real reason why she should not be, but she felt faintly surprised all the same. A more real difficulty was that she had already very much seen all there was to be seen in Sovastad, and also very much wanted not to meet at the moment anyone there whom she knew. She therefore read for much of the day and industriously washed things; lunched in the hotel or hostel or whatever it properly was (the food was primitive but good); and confined herself to sneaking out to dinner in a café she had not before entered. She did not read the tract on purification.

  She found the café disappointing. She was hidden away in a corner and served with a rudeness and indifference she had not previously met with in Sweden – or perhaps elsewhere either. But Margaret had not travelled very much, and still less on her own. She knew that lone women were often said not to be popular with waiters, or even with restaurant managements. ‘No wonder,’ she thought, ‘that, with one thing and another, women tend to retreat into their little nests.’ Altogether, she reflected, her short period of time away from Henry might well, in one way and another, have been the most vivid and informative of her entire life. She tried to put away the thought. It might at all times be a mistake to know more than one’s husband. She had never before noticed the Swedes as being so dour and unobliging, but that was doubtless something to be learnt too.

  That night Margaret slept brokenly and badly. There was heavy traffic in the street outside. Margaret wondered how much worse it would be when Henry’s road was completed; thought warmly of Colonel Adamski; and tried to deflect her mind, though, lying there awake, it was difficult. She explained to herself that she had, after all, consumed very little energy that day; done little but lie about and ruminate.

  At some dark and unknown hour, there was a tap at the door. It actually woke Margaret up.

  The woman officer entered. Could this be another, Margaret instantly thought, who did not sleep? It seemed very unlikely, despite Adamski’s emphasis upon the all-sorts-to-make-a-world theme.

  The woman was carrying a candle. She walked towards the bed and, without preliminary, asked in her strong accent ‘Would you like me to pray with you? I’m afraid I can pray only in Swedish.’

  Margaret sat up, with a view to showing some k
ind of respect. Then she felt that the black nightdress which Henry liked, might here be a mistake.

  ‘It’s very kind of you,’ she replied uncertainly.

  ‘Do not despair,’ said the woman. ‘There is pardon for all. For all who seek it on their knees.’

  ‘But if I could not understand you –’ said Margaret, trying to cover her unsuitable apparel with her arms. It was neither a very ready nor a very gracious reply, but Margaret, newly awakened from scanty sleep, could think of nothing else.

  The woman gazed at her from behind the candle in its cheap tin candlestick.

  ‘We never force salvation upon any,’ she said, after a longish pause. ‘Those who are able to find it seek it on their own.’

  It did seem to Margaret that the woman, having decided to appear at all, could have been more cordial; but she thought she had heard that something of what the woman had said was an item of Salvation Army philosophy.

  The woman turned and walked away, shielding the candle-flame with her left hand, and quietly closing the door. Margaret felt that she herself would have been obscurely glad of something further; but had to admit that she had offered little encouragement. She returned to her disturbed and scrappy slumbers. The night seemed very long as well as shockingly noisy; and Margaret had troubled thoughts about the morrow.

  In the morning, the woman officer was merely quiet and efficient, though still unsmiling, at least where Margaret was concerned. Margaret wished she could have eaten more of the pleasant breakfast, but found that her mind was too full of conflict. Henry was due to arrive before lunch, and in due course she set off for the railway station, this time carrying her own bag. The place where she had stayed seemed to think it the normal thing to do. They did not offer to send for a taxi, and Margaret felt one could hardly ask. Nor did she much care for the taxi-drivers of Sovastad. Perhaps her muscles had strengthened a little, as her vision, for better or for worse, had a little cleared.