The Sea Change (22 page)

‘Gee – if he was really like he said at Patrick’s, it sure would be exciting.’

‘Just dull,’ I said: ‘Those evenings are all the same – it’s just the audience that changes.’

I told Van Westinghouse that we wouldn’t be joining them, and said to tell Lillian I was sorry but things weren’t working out that way. Would he look after Lillian, and I’d
call him in the morning? He would. He was, as Emmanuel once remarked, in that minority who were at least wiser after other people’s events. I turned to Johnnie, who had the look of an
expectant schoolboy about to break bounds.

‘No more Scotch for anyone – and some small place to eat.’

And that was it. We did go out and eat at Giovanni’s, and it was a good evening. All the strain and tensions seemed to have dropped from Emmanuel and he charmed us all – making Sally
tell stories and asking Alberta what she thought of them, improvising a preface for Johnnie in the language of a well- known American weekly: ‘Slum-born mongrel-playwright Emmanuel Orchid
Race Joyce stabs at self-analytical artistic processes as taking people out of themselves and putting them back wrong’ etc. But mostly he listened: every now and then he told a story –
something very small, but the way he told them they were irresistibly fascinating, and we sat like a bunch of kids, round-eyed, begging for more.

It was not until after the zabaglione, when we were all drinking coffee, that Sally began asking about the new play. Emmanuel answered her, and I had the feeling that he was having a final
conversation with himself, and also with me about it. He told her very simply the kind of play that it was; the difficulty about Clemency – what we had done and how we had failed to find her:
Johnnie and Alberta were listening too, but the collective attention seemed not to interfere with our privacy. Johnnie, very diffirently, suggested Katie for the part, and I said yes, but she
couldn’t do it – I’d tried her again that afternoon. Emmanuel was looking at me now, and I knew the feeling – of private summing up, of conclusion – was true. It came
into my mind that he was going to scrap the play; that he’d found the reason for doing so which he had said was necessary, and I blotted up this inky fear until I must have changed colour
with it . . .

‘. . . and so, I have decided to make an experiment, if the victim is willing,’ and both he and I turned instinctively to Alberta, who had been very still, whose eyes, clear and
astonished, were the only sign she gave of this news. There was a long, full silence; then she said: ‘You know that I know nothing at all about acting.’

‘Jimmy will teach you all you need to know.’

She looked at me: I was seeing her for the second time, and entirely different again.

‘I’ll teach you,’ I said, ‘if you’re willing to learn.’

‘Are you willing?’

She put out her hand, as though she was in a dream, and must touch somebody, and Emmanuel and I both put our hands on the table.

‘I will try to learn,’ she said. Emmanuel touched her then, and she smiled.

And that was the end – or the beginning – of that.

CHAPTER IV

1

ALBERTA

My dearest Aunt Topsy,

This letter is partly for Papa, because it seems that the moment one is in a position interesting enough to warrant writing letters, one has very little time for them. You are the
most
reliable correspondent, and keep me thoroughly in touch, although I’m sorry to hear about Jemima Facks – I must say I should have thought it was extremely difficult to fall down a well
head
first – I mean one would have to be so neat about it: but then I suppose falling runs in the Facks family, and she has had a good deal of experience. Anyway, it’s a good
thing she had such presence of mind and thick pigtails.

We have just moved into an apartment and I have spent this morning helping Mrs Joyce who has just gone out to luncheon with a Russian Princess (not a real one – she just married a Russian
Prince). You asked me to describe Mrs J., and I’ll try, appearance first, because I’ve seen more of it. She is very tall and thin and extremely
elegant
– with rather
knobbly bones and thin blue veins which show out of the sides of her forehead and on the backs of her hands (like Lady Gorge, only not so useful-looking – prettier). She has very fine hair
which is a mixture of yellow and white – grey, I suppose, but again, pretty, cut short and waving carelessly about in what turns out to be a very expensive manner, and huge rather pale blue
eyes with black pupils. Her skin is very white and looks thinner than most people’s – almost papery, and her mouth droops slightly downwards but is a beautiful shape. Her hands and feet
are what Clem would call pre-Raphaelite – very long and faint-looking, and altogether, if she had long hair one could imagine her in a garden of carnations, or sitting in some banqueting
hall; she is very much like a heroine – someone to be rescued or saved. She is extremely delicate, as she has something wrong with her heart, and she had a daughter who died – it is
still all very sad. I had to do her unpacking – goodness! – she has two cabin trunks with hangers for dresses down one side and drawers for clothes down the other – apart from
countless suitcases. She also travels with her pictures, drawings and paintings – nearly all portraits, I wondered if any of them were of her daughter, but naturally didn’t ask. Most of
the morning she was in bed talking to people on the telephone, while I put things away until there wasn’t any more room to put them. I suppose they are all the consequence of a glittering
life, but it must be rather sad not to have anywhere permanent to keep them. Mrs Joyce said I must buy some clothes here because pretty ones are so cheap. I have got one or two things . . . Then
she suddenly
gave
me a summer coat: it is a lemon colour, and a little too long for me, but it is beautifully cut – it is loose and absolutely simple and she said it was a French one
but she had cut out the label. This evening we are all going to Mr Joyce’s publishers who are giving a party for him. I don’t think I could possibly have been more lucky in getting this
position. The work is not hard, varied, and nearly always interesting, and the Joyces are so very kind about including me in all the things they do. They seem used to doing things with Jimmy
Sullivan, and I just get added on; this is a great help against homesickness, which I’m afraid assails me from time to time. Please tell Mary that I am writing my diary as much as I possibly
can, and that I look forward to hers also.

I do not know how long we are to remain in New York – it depends upon the casting of Mr J.’s new play which proves a difficult matter. When that is settled, we are to go somewhere to
the country, as Mrs J. wants a holiday and Mr J. has to write – but no certain plans are made. Tell Papa that I quite agree about experiences knowing their place if only one will let them,
and that I am trying to remember this. I must add that I find the vast luxury in which I am now living enjoyable; it is rather like
being
a parrot, instead of just looking at one – but
perhaps you don’t think parrots are luxurious birds? Humphrey says my taste in birds is vulgar – but I suppose one’s taste in anything is conditioned in part by one’s
curiosity about it, and I have never managed to care for little brown birds one can hardly see. I am saving half my salary: this can be certain, the rest is a constant battle between what I need
and what I want. You would not like the food here at all. It is either foreign and tastes like it (which I like) or else it looks like ours, only larger, and does not taste at all, so that you have
a kind of dream of what you’re eating. It is no good my trying to describe New York as I did in my first letter. It would get dull, because I don’t know where to begin or what needs
describing and what doesn’t. I shouldn’t worry too much about Serena wanting to be a doctor – it takes such ages she’ll probably end up by being a nurse – think of
Florence Nightingale – you wouldn’t mind that, and you
have
brought us all up awfully well, and, as Papa says, once we’re up there isn’t much you can do about it. I
do hope your hay fever hasn’t started: give my love to everybody – including Napoleon and Ticky, but most of all to you and Papa and Mary and Serena and the boys.

This is after tea, and there is such a feeling of tension, that I have escaped to write this in peace. Even the monkey has gone: his owner has turned up at last, and I am quite alone for a bit,
which one certainly couldn’t be with him. I don’t understand people at all well: or just when I think I’m beginning to, they change into someone else. Or do I change? Everybody
has turned out unexpectedly today – so perhaps I have too. Take Papa: anybody who really wanted to meet him could do so, and at the worst he’s simply shades of himself: one might say:
‘He’s rather pale today’, but he would still be a recognizable colour. I think this is unusual though – there are fewer people like Papa even than I thought. This morning,
helping Mrs J., the thread that seemed to run through her morning was her feeling for him. She asked me endless questions about what he had been doing all the week, and whether I had been with him
or not, and when I told her about all the shopping he’d done before her arrival she seemed pleased. (I didn’t tell her about his buying me clothes – even when she asked me whether
I’d got any new ones. This is another piece of deceit, which begins to sit on me rather too often, I think.) But then, when she came into the kitchen, and I was reading to him, she seemed an
entirely different person who neither loved nor cared about him – and he was different as well; I didn’t know either of them, and had a miserably insular feeling that I wasn’t
used to people treating each other like that. I was making tea with these bleak thoughts, when Jimmy came in, and
he
was different too: I suddenly felt I could tell him about it, and did,
and he made it all the right size with a flick of consideration. He seems to be both experienced and kind, and I do admire him for that. The pear blossom will be out at home, and the magnolia will
be right out. They will be having tea in the dining room with drops of water on the pound of butter and white crystals on Aunt T.’s blackcurrant jam, and Ticky on the picture rail shrilling
for sugar. But of course, it isn’t the same time at home as it is here. That is a curious separation – the hours as well as the miles. This morning Mrs J. asked me whether I’d
ever been to Greece in exactly the same voice as she had asked me earlier whether I had been to Saks – a shop on Fifth Avenue – haven’t been to either. Jimmy has just come in to
tell me the time of the party tonight. I have never met a publisher. I did ask Mr J. about them, and he said that nearly all publishers hovered uneasily between a business and a profession, that
they suffered from the most unpredictable raw material, and that most writers were like a zoo masquerading as a circus with one or two societies for the prevention of cruelty to authors. Then he
laughed and said he was a member of the zoo; but none of this – although memorable – is really illuminating. I have no suitable dress for this party and this makes me wish that I was
not going to it. It was so odd, reading the play today, to reach that scene that I have heard so many people read. It made me see how, in a well-made play, everything depends on something else. We
got a little way into the third act before we were interrupted – I’d stopped feeling nervous ages before, and when we stopped I realized that my throat was aching, which I hadn’t
noticed at the time, at all. I have never known
anything like
his attention: it is as though he is listening, seeing, almost breathing in the play – as though the words as I read them
were falling into his body, and as though everything outside the play had been turned off and didn’t exist. Somehow it is impossible not to be drawn into this attention – not as a
person – but as a path between it and him. Sometimes I seemed to be nearer the play, and sometimes nearer his attention to it. He hardly spoke at all: once or twice he repeated a line after
me, and I realized that I’d got some of the words wrong – even one word – but he always knew and always repeated them right. Ordinarily, I think I’d have felt confused at
being corrected – would have wanted to interrupt with apologies, but as the play grew, these personal feelings diminished, until afterwards I wondered whether all apologies weren’t
simply to oneself for failing to be the marvellous creature one wanted to appear. It is so much more interesting to be a vehicle – transporting something – because one seems to have a
place in relation to so much else, instead of being a tiny over-emphatic full stop. Mary will not understand this, but whom does one write a diary for? I think to save oneself a few conversations
with oneself. I do hope he finds the right Clemency. I almost feel that I’d know her now just by looking. I think Jimmy feels this: the best part of Jimmy is his recognition, and that is not
a small thing to say of anybody. Must go and put on boring dress for glamorous party.

2

EMMANUEL

H
E
woke in the night – eyes burning, hands clenched – as though he’d been fighting with himself to stay
asleep, and lost. I drank a good deal, he thought, as another part of his mind started to fidget and jeer. ‘No sooner said than done!’ it began; ‘now we’ll see the result of
all that grandiose simplicity!’ His body seemed to be stretched, strained out, weightlessly over the bed. Now, if only he knew exactly what to do, he would leap out of bed and it would be
done. It was a quarter to five. ‘Just think what you can’t do at a quarter to five – or a quarter to anything come to that.’ By eight o’clock he would be wrapped in
lead, his head throbbing like an electric pump, his eyes little pinpoints of self-pity: but now some feverish energy remained from the evening and the decision he had taken in it; now he could
tackle Mick, even Lillian – work through the traffic of their reactions to the business of getting the girl right on a large enough scale. In practice that would be Jimmy’s job,
although he’d keep an eye on it: he wasn’t sure whether Jimmy had seen what he saw in Alberta. We can’t stay in New York once the news has been broken to Mick and the boys, he
thought – they’ll scare the lights out of her: that means finding somewhere quiet for a month or two – where Jimmy can work with her, and I can work, and Lillian can –
somewhere that Lillian wants to go. That is all that has to be
done,
he reflected irritably; but he wanted the whole thing settled now, while he lay there – to be handed a little
public peace so that he could afford some private excitement. I’m getting old, he thought, to need favourable conditions for everything. It’s time we lived somewhere: travel as well, of
course, but have some point of departure, some deeper shades to our behaviour – a home for Jimmy, some possible responsibilities for Lillian, and a key to his own cage for himself. This idea
– suddenly presenting itself from above and beyond any immediate action – coloured his bleak and crowded mind, softening considerations, lighting necessities, touching up his distant,
fleeting pleasures; and like magic slides, pictures of Lillian in an element he could provide – hedged in with roses, aired with music, with her own library, with parks and trees and far-off
animals – soundlessly, speechlessly – jerked and slipped to his attention and out of it . . . He leapt out of bed.