The Sea Change (42 page)

She was his faithfully, B. Friedmann. For a while he sat, shocked by the enormous simplicity of her suggestion. That she should calmly – well, not calmly – but that she should simply
suggest handing the boy over to him! She had, of course, exaggerated ideas of his goodness since it was he who had provided her with the children and the means to keep them in the first place, and
she had wanted them more than anything else. But still – to suggest handing over an hysterical desperate child who had just lost what he clearly felt was the reason for his life just because
she felt it would be better for
him
and that he, Emmanuel, was the best person to take on this delicate and trying responsibility because he was such a wonderful character leading such a
full, interesting and good life! ‘She doesn’t know,’ he thought grimly, ‘that I am in process of trying to get rid of my extremely difficult, sick wife, and marry a girl
more than forty years younger than myself – if she’ll have me. The uproar that these two moves will create is hardly conducive to the recovery of a highly strung boy.’ He would
have to go and see the Friedmanns, however, as soon as he got to London, and explain to them. He crammed the letter into his pocket – trying to feel angry, trying to feel amused by Mrs
Friedmann’s guileless presumptions. Then Alberta returned, with Julius following her. She was very pale again: she didn’t say anything – just sat down as though she was very
tired.

They walked across the port to a restaurant for lunch – it was only because Julius said he must go home for his, that they realized that it was lunch time. The kitten followed them, and in
the end she picked it up and settled down at a table with it. They ate tiny little tepid fried fish and stuffed tomatoes which were served a little cooler than they were themselves. Neither of them
ate much, but the kitten gorged and swore until it was a triangular shape and its whiskers were sticky with rice. Then, belching heavily, it settled again on Alberta’s lap and tried to clean
itself up. She said: ‘I like the way its life goes on.’ She was holding its wretched little tail for it to wash. They had reached the coffee rather gratefully: their silence, except for
talking about the kitten occasionally, had lasted all through the meal. Now he said abruptly: ‘Will you tell me what your family said?’

‘He was knocked down by a car in the lane by the church – in the evening. He was dead by the time they found him.’

‘They? What about whoever was driving the car?’

‘They didn’t stop,’ she said: her voice had no expression at all when she said this, and something about her face checked his angry exclamation.

‘My uncle is there – I spoke mostly to him. I told him that I was coming home as soon as possible. Is that all right?’

‘Of course. Will you want to stay there for a time?’

But she looked as though the question was utterly beyond her. so he did not pursue it. Then she said: ‘I’m glad that I talked to them, anyway. Do you think we could go back to the
house now?’

He paid for lunch, and said: What about your kitten?’

‘I thought I’d take it up to the house with me. It doesn’t seem to belong to anybody, so no one will mind where it spends the afternoon. Do
you
mind?’

‘I think it is a good idea.’ He meant it: it could at least be something real for her for the day, although he had a pang of jealousy that this creature could collect her attention.
But on the way home, she said: ‘You are being so exceedingly kind and thoughtful to me. I do really notice it, I simply find it difficult to discuss.’ Her voice shook a little with the
effort of saying this.

He looked at her walking up the hill beside him. ‘It is nothing, my dear Sarah – don’t try to talk about any of it.’ His heart was pounding: she looked at him with a
gentle expression when he used her name, and suddenly he could not stop. ‘Sometimes,’ he said painfully, ‘I love you: sometimes you seem a part of something that I love.’ He
stopped abruptly; it was enough – more than enough. She gave him an odd abstracted little smile and their silence closed over these words, so that a minute later they might never have been
spoken. He did not know what she felt; minutes later, he wondered whether she had even heard them.

When they got back to the house, they found Julius sitting outside their door. He was reading a very large book which proved to be Wells’
Outline of History
: he wore his usual jeans
supplemented by a huge sheath knife and his back was the smooth and tender brown of an egg.

‘I thought you might have further telephoning and would need my services in Greek.’

‘Jimmy Sullivan is going to call me between six and seven this evening: will that be difficult, do you think?’

‘Is he the man who went this morning on the boat?’

When they said he was, Julius said ho, well he wouldn’t arrive in Piraeus until well after eight in the evening, and explained to them about the boat’s circuit. When they realized
that the boat was due back to their island in about half an hour he asked her whether she wanted to catch it.

‘I don’t know. We haven’t packed – I mean there is everybody’s packing to be done . . .’

‘If you like, I will try to arrange that a caique takes you over tonight,’ Julius offered.

He looked at her. ‘Would you prefer that?’

‘I would. But if Julius can’t manage it, won’t we be rather stuck?’

‘There are many caiques going over in summer – it will be all right, it will be fine and wonderful and much better than going in the big boat. Is that your cat?’

She had put the kitten down on the terrace and it lay on its side, gazing at them with fierce innocent eyes. ‘Not really. I just found it. Does it belong to anyone, do you know?’

‘I will find out. I will go now and leave my book here.’

When Julius had gone, he said: ‘You’re quite right. We couldn’t get packed up in time and we’ll need at least one donkey to get it down to the port.’

She picked up the kitten, and said: ‘If you don’t mind, I would rather leave the packing for a bit. Could we do it later?’

Although she said nothing about it, her need to be alone was now so apparent that without a word he opened the door of her room for her and shut her into it.

He went back on to the terrace, and stood a while staring through the hot restful scene before him. It was one of the hours when the age of this country rose up to the eye: sun burning on rock
and sea: animals still – people absent – houses shuttered – the few trees still in the windless heat, and the sky so wide – so spread past a vault or a canopy, of such
penetrating height, such boundless distance that it was immortally beyond space and eternally above time: he looked up at it, and as his eyes left the sea and rocks of the island a picture of the
whole world placed itself naturally between him and the sky; only now the seas were like single drops of water, the lands small crumbs of earth – the sky was loaded with other stars, with
invisible suns and unknown moons, and this world was a grain of dust and water, a particle, an incident so small that it would demand absolute attention for its notice. And yet this same earth
contained a multitude of life about most of which he knew nothing; it was of an antiquity that he could not honestly envisage; its variety and size seemed too great for him to explore, and his
existence upon it was not significant. Inside that insignificance he thrashed and machinated and obeyed an authority made up of tomorrow, the next generation, and once upon a time. Inside that
authority he used words from one of many languages for a small specific purpose of communicating – what? only what he could feel or perceive – the fruit from his little personal shrub
of knowledge; he did this and expected to be paid for it in happiness collected off other people, a lavish change in his material scenery and any other trappings that helped to make him swell.
‘And there I am, in my nutshell,’ he thought: ‘and I can’t write a play about the stars, because I don’t understand them; nor can I become a star. I don’t even
know what it feels like to be a tree, let alone a star. I don’t really know what it feels like to be anybody else.’

He was upstairs, in his room: he had not noticed going there, and it seemed to him extraordinary that, in the middle of discovering the minute size of his life, he should fail to be aware of
even one moment of it. Some part of him must have decided to go, and his legs then carried him and here he was – almost as though he had missed out a minute of his life by not existing in it.
But if one noticed this kind of thing, then one must be living in a more slipshod manner than was intended – he was, perhaps, rattling about in his nutshell. This was too much: insignificance
was one thing – inadequacy was quite another – he did not feel that he could afford it: it made any regrets or desires about understanding the stars utterly absurd. Quite suddenly her
criticism of Clemency that she had made in New York came into his mind. She had said that all the things that Clemency had to give up didn’t seem to matter much, because she hadn’t
herself valued them. He had been going to rewrite that bit, and he’d done nothing about it. Why? It was partly laziness, of course, but it was also because although he’d agreed with
her, and thought she was right, he hadn’t felt what to do about it. It wasn’t a piece of writing where one could rely on what a lot one knew about how to write a scene. So rightly, in a
sense, he had left it. The trouble was that with his experience of doing without, he’d tended to avoid giving up anything – in case that left him utterly deprived.

He felt now extremely restless, and decided to pack. For weeks now he had been longing for a whole day alone with her, and now that he had got it, every single thing was wrong. She was deeply
unhappy, unreachable in her present state: and yet for weeks he had thought of nothing but her, and on top of that his recent thoughts had further diminished and disturbed him, until he felt that,
without her, his life would cease to have any meaning at all. He packed all his own things with a kind of angry speed. At some unknown point in time he would be packing to go away with her –
the tears, the recriminations, the public yelps of disapproval, the years of trying to compensate somebody for something which wasn’t his fault – all of it behind him; he would start a
new life – he would use everything he had learned to make it different and good for her . . .

He went downstairs quietly , in case she was asleep: her western shutters were closed, but he had such a desire to see that she was there that he went round to the other terrace, where her room
had another window. She was sitting on the floor, leaning against her bed, and she slept with her head against her arm. On the bed was a letter, a large open book, and her pen. He was afraid that
if he looked at her too long he would wake her.

He went back upstairs and packed Jimmy’s things. Jimmy felt curiously distant; like someone he had once known, but had not met for years. It did not take him long to pack up Jimmy’s
things.

Now – Lillian. She had left a certain amount of luggage in New York, but she still seemed to have brought an incredible amount. He started methodically with her shoes – mostly
sandals of every shape and colour: they all had to be packed in separate linen bags embroidered with her initials. The chest of drawers was full to overflowing with underclothes, shirts, sweaters,
shorts, scarves – what on earth could she want with forty-eight scarves, he counted wondering, the wardrobe was crammed with skirts, dresses, jackets, duster coats, hats, belts, trousers, and
dressing gowns. The top of the chest of drawers was littered with bottles and pots, little fitted cases, brushes and combs, jewellery, sun glasses, scent, toilet water, and all kinds of lipsticks
and rouge. There was also the small red leather folder that had the photographs of Sarah which she was usually never without. He opened it: there she was – two pictures of her, one laughing,
one serious: they were rather blurred as they had been too much enlarged: Sarah sitting on a table in a pale dress, with a mere coxcomb of hair: her head looking too large for her body, her bare
arms just creased at the wrist, her fingers joyfully articulate. In the serious picture her eyes looked dark and enormous, in the laughing one her forehead was charmingly wrinkled: dear little
Sarah – but she was dead: she had been dead for fourteen years and Lillian could not let go of her; pined and brooded over these pictures for hours of her life, and never forgot about them.
Whatever she thought, she felt about nothing but Sarah. Really, compared with Lillian, Mrs Friedmann’s view that naturally he would do anything for Matthias was hardly obsessive . . . Why had
he thought of her, of Mrs Friedmann? It wasn’t because of Lillian and Sarah, he realized, it was something else – it was nearly everything that had happened since he had read her
letter: he hadn’t really stopped thinking about her at all – only he hadn’t thought in words. A picture of Mrs Friedmann rose before him: fat, a vulgar shape, overdressed,
plastered with wildly unsuitable make-up, her rather hoarse but musical voice saying things that made her own eyes fill with easy tears – he realized that some of them had dropped on to the
letter that she had written him – he had to read it again. He cleared a place on the bed, and sat down.

He read it very slowly, and sat for a long time afterwards, unable to move: it might have been another letter that he had read in the morning and he another man reading it. Now, he had no words
of any kind – he felt simply, entirely exposed, and seized by some unnameable motion as though his heart was blushing a deep red. He did not know how long it lasted, but at the beginning of
its end he heard himself finding that past a certain degree emotions did not need separate names – they were all one – or at least a part of all one. This discovery seemed to be
tremendously important; it brought with it a sense of truth and triumph: for a moment he was filled with elation like a soundless fire which silently consumed all his dead, heavy rubbish until he
no longer felt like a stone inside his body, and his mind was a poised feather rising and falling over the warm breaths below it . . . Afterwards, or perhaps even before it had died, he started to
see his life as though he was on some height, and it lay on a distant plain below him; occurring without chronology, but with amazing swiftness and certainty: events – pursuing – caught
up with and overcame his imagination of himself. So – the man in New York who had remembered the boy who swore to rescue his mother in a carriage with horses was now faced with the young man
who had let her pine until he had had to lift her into it, and now the black plumes on the black horses nodded and told him so. The man who could move Jimmy to a most tender concern for his
romantic story of one fine day in the country with a beautiful girl whom he had then lost, was faced now with the man who had lied to the girl, had forgotten her, and only discovered her plight by
accident and too late. His implications to Jimmy of his grief, his fate and misfortune were now ruthlessly transplanted – to the girl – to Jimmy himself. The figure he had designed who
enjoyed his reputation for patience and loyalty to a woman who had disappointed him, was faced with the man who had chosen – in a fit of curiosity and solitude – to marry her: the
little reasons for doing so crept out now from the vault of his true memory where he had kept them incarcerated: she attracted him because ten years before she would have been unattainable –
she represented a kind of life that he thought he would never understand and it was flattering at more than forty to have this young beauty turn her first attentions to him. Everything that
happened to Lillian with him had been touched by these considerations he employed about himself in their beginning, and he resented their deserts on behalf of a man who did not exist. ‘My
wife is as good as she is beautiful,’ Friedmann had said, and his saying it recurred – the first words spoken in this silent panorama. He had never in his life felt that about anyone
until now; and as he understood this, he saw all his desires and intentions and his behaviour about them, like two sharply serrated edges, clash as though they had never been formed to meet,
annihilating all possibility of love. But now, as he approached
her
– she who seemed in a sense to have given birth to his heart, who he thought had entirely transformed him – he
was halted by pictures of past approaches in his imagination – of holding her bare shoulders in his hands – of her whole body like a young unexplored country – of her youth that
could not compare him with another man – she was to give him transfusions of life; she was to nourish him with her impressions; he was to live on the virtue of her discoveries, since he had
forgotten or discarded his own. It was then that he saw her separate from himself. He saw her whole – her promise, her dangers, her degree of life, what moved and what slept in her, what
shape what colour what sound of a woman she was now; he saw everything that she was, and not she but the truth of this sight made him see both of her and of himself what was eternal and what could
be changed. This knowledge of her, which gradually became more and more brilliantly illuminated – endured past his astonishment (was she, who he had thought entire perfection, only this?)
– and past his pain, the disorder, the abuse, the entire
lack of necessity
for her, the quantity of suffering which in ignorance of her he would invoke in order to get what he wanted,
was suddenly, perfectly plain to him – it endured until its reality met with his acceptance: there was a moment of bliss in this recognition, and then imperceptibly he became aware that it
had happened – that it had finished. He was sitting on the bed looking into empty sunlit air with Mrs Friedmann’s letter crushed in his hand.