Dinner Along the Amazon (19 page)

There was a quick and deathly hush, which seemed to pervade the entire hotel. It appeared even to invade the lawns, for not a single bird gave sound. The sea-flow could be imagined ceasing, while we waited. Knives, forks, spoons and napkins were poised between plates and open mouths. Mrs Hogan had been in the midst of pouring her laxative-salts, and even the fall and effervescence of these were dried up.

And then it came.

Loretta’s laughter: ringing out over the porches and in through the windows: pouring down over the lawns and through the dunes to the beach, where, for all we knew, it might even have reached South America.

We could all look out and see Loretta being lifted by her family onto her feet, with the cane seat of the broken rocking-chair sticking out like a grotesquely mangled straw-hat or wicker halo round her behind and, at that, we all began to laugh. Us, the Lewises, even Mrs Hogan—everyone was laughing: everyone except the Ottawa Jacksons, who were ensconced far away from laughter, up in their rooms with supper-trays balanced on their knees.

No, she was not a paragon, but she had extraordinary virtues. One of these was an understanding of children that was beyond the normal everyday understanding you could expect from a parent. Loretta had some way of remembering what it was, precisely, to be a child.

I was ten. Would that make her thirty-five or so? Approximately, yes—and she already had Elvira, who toddled, and Elizabeth in arms, though Angus was another three-four years away from life. Angus was born when it was said Loretta was getting too old for children—but, that isn’t part of this story.

On the day I’m trying to remember, I could see my brother far off down the sands, in a white sun-hat and a black bathing suit. He was wading far out after some other child’s model sail boat that had got marooned in one of the tidal pools. Michael is older than me, and—at this time—he was on the verge of his adolescence. He was a worldly child, who read a great deal and he made a great fuss about being ‘shy.’ But, the fact was, he had a great many friends and, amongst them, he was always accorded the rank of leader. In fact, he was leading now, followed by a lot of children, out towards the model shipwreck. To me—his back was his most familiar feature. I just wasn’t a part of the world he was trying to create: neither was he, with the exception of his back, a part of mine. My world was a place devoid of other children, pretty well. I intended it to be so: something in me—possibly perverse—didn’t like other children: particularly of my own age. They seemed always to be something I was not—and to know something that was beyond my understanding.

Along came Mrs Lewis, with spade and pail.

I was sitting on the sand, with my feet and ankles covered with a towel and I believe there was a rise where I sat, a sort of hummock, perhaps created by an old, deflated castle. Mrs Lewis had lost Elvira.

To have lost Elvira—even by the sea—was not so alarming as it might seem. There was always a life-guard, who kept his eye on the children: Elvira was probably with Miss Cunningham, anyway—or with her father and so, when Mrs Lewis spoke, she was merely curious:

“Tiffy—have you seen Elvira?”

“No ma’am.”

She stood there, casting down shade over my shoulders and out-stretched legs.

“Oh well. If she wants her pail and shovel, she’ll scream for them—” (Mrs Lewis smiled)—“and that’s always the easiest way of finding out where she is. Mmm?”

She laughed.

I looked away.

There was a pause, behind my back, and I could sense that she was making up her mind about whether to stay or go away and leave me alone.

She stayed.

“My ankles sunburn, too,” she said. “Do you mind if I sit down—or, do you want to be alone?”

“I don’t mind,” I said.

She began to scoop out an indentation in which to sit. Nobody ever sat directly onto the top layer of sand. That was the sure sign of a novice on the beach—and ‘lifers’ knew better.

Finally, Mrs Lewis sat down and placed Elvira’s pail and spade between us.

“I had the most extraordinary dream last night,” she said, at once. “Would you like me to tell you?”

“Yes, please.”

“Well—we were all lined up, right here, on the sand, looking out to sea. There was something going on out there and we were all very carefully watching, trying to see what it was. It wasn’t a storm and it wasn’t a sinking ship. It wasn’t someone drowning—or any of the things you might think it was.”

“Was it a submarine?” I asked.

“No. It wasn’t a submarine. And it wasn’t an airplane crash, either: nothing at all like that.”

Mrs Lewis lighted a cigarette from a package she carried in Elvira’s pail and, as she was waving the match out, and taking the first, deep puffs of smoke, old Mrs Hogan went by—(old even then—old always, I suspect)—down by the water, with her parasol tipped at the sun, a relic of her mother’s and another age.

“There goes Mrs Hogan,” said Mrs Lewis: “all alone, as ever. But, not in the dream. Do you know, Tiffy, in the dream, Mrs Hogan stood right up here on the sand with all the rest of us—and, I guess you don’t remember him, but I do, from a long, long while ago: Mr Hogan was standing here with her. Oh! There were lots of people here. People you would remember—people you might not. Have you ever looked in the photograph albums in the library?”

“Yes.”

There were books dating way back to the 1800s and the earliest guests at the hotel.

“Well, all of those people were here, too, dressed exactly as they are in the pictures: up here on the sand, in their photograph-clothes. And we still didn’t know what it was we were looking for. All we knew was—there it was out there, somewhere above, or on the water…”

“Why not in it?” I asked.

“Well, now: that’s a good question,” she smiled. “We didn’t even think of that one.”

“I still think it might have been a submarine.”

“No. It definitely was not a submarine.”

She smoked for a moment and, when she saw that I was looking off towards Michael, who, by now had reached the marooned toy ship, she looked off towards him, too, and then she said:

“I had a sister who was always saving things. And I always used to think—oh, dear—I’ll never, never be able to save anything—because she’ll always get there and save it first…” Mrs Lewis looked at me, very frankly, through the smoke from her cigarette. She met my gaze, as serious as any friend, without that autocratic-adult smile that children dislike so much: just looking at me—and then:

“It’s just as good to want to be brave—just as good to get there second, you know, as it is to be brave and get there first.”

I was so shocked by her understanding that I looked away, and I can remember thinking that if I looked at her, the meaning of what she had said would alter and that we wouldn’t understand one another any more.

Mrs Lewis must have sensed this, because she watched, for quite a long time, a sea-gull, floating above us on the off-shore draught: and then she sighed and buried her cigarette in the sand and said: “the most curious thing of all, about this dream, was that here we all were on the beach—every single person you can think of, as I say, and more—Mrs Hogan, Mr Hogan, me…Elvira…Mr Lewis—the Jacksons—you—and your mom and your dad, Michael, Miss Cunningham, Joe—Frances—Joellen—Harry…Mrs Clarke: everyone you can think of, ever…”

“Janet and Aunt Kay?”

“Yes, yes: everyone. Bill and everyone. There we were—all of us, over and over again in all our different ages. Oh—I don’t mean one of us for every year of our lives—but, well…I was there as a baby, being carried and I was there as a little girl and—hah!—there in those terrible pigtails my mother made me wear when I was fifteen. And, there I was older, too—and married to Mr Lewis and then with Elvira and then with Elizabeth and then…”

I waited.

There was a very long pause.

I looked at her.

Her expression was curiosity itself: as if she truly couldn’t comprehend the numbers of herself there had been. Or that were possible. As if there might have been too many Mrs Lewises—too many Mrs Hogans—too many Elviras—too many of each and every one of us, so that she could not fit us all together onto the beach—so that the beach had become different, larger, wavering in size.

“Were you there as old as Mrs Hogan?” I wanted to know…

“No, I wasn’t,” she said, too quickly. And after that, she shook her head and looked at me and laughed out loud. “But, you were,” she said. “You were—and you were very, very old!”

We both laughed at that and finally, I asked her what it was we were watching in the dream. But, she didn’t answer me all at once.

I think the answer came in two parts, with something in between, so that I thought one thing was the answer and that the other was inconsequential. Only now, do I see that they were both the answer.

“I had on a red dress,” she said, evidently thinking of one of her ‘selves’ in the dream. “A red, redress. And I hate red. I mean—” she looked at me: “I never wear it—do I.” And then, she looked away and then she said: “Oh—look!” and she was looking out at the ocean and then, not making it clear whether this was what she had just seen, or what we had all seen in the dream, she pointed and said: “a seal. A seal. More than anything I can think of—what I’ve always wanted to be: and I would swim way out—a way, way out—and I could turn and look back at the people on the shore…”

Her mouth was open, still open, as though there might still be more to be said: some concrete explanation—but, then Elvira was screaming: “Mummy! Mummy!” and Mrs Lewis was opening her arms to her own child, who was running across the sand and I was forgotten.

Or—so I thought for fifteen years.

It was cancer and she had asked specifically that she be allowed to come to the sea to die.

Some of the guests had thought this request was grotesque, and they shunned her altogether. Some others (a very few) were so distressed, they cancelled their accommodations and left, taking up residence at another hotel, further down the beach. But, most of us stayed: a fact that I think stands best without any explanation.

Still: there were moments when it was worse than difficult to watch her and to be there. She came down twice every day, either with Elizabeth or Elvira, and always with Miss Cunningham beside her and, until she had been seated, most people on the beach found some reason or other to look away. But, once she was down, with towels spread under and over her legs, and this great umbrella tilted to give her all its shade—and, once her back-rest was in place and her sun-hat readjusted—then, there would be a gradual return to the normal activities.

Games of tag sprang up from the sand like pop-up tableaux from a children’s book and the swimmers ran yelling back into the waves, and all the old ladies with dogs let all their dogs off the leash and, instantly, there was dispersal, abandonment and chaos. Oh yes—one or two people would amiably pass her by, from a distance of about ten feet, making certain not to look away as they crossed her sight-path, and for a while, it was awful. It took Mr Lewis, coming up, from some other place on the beach, to bring one or two of his friends—or one or two of hers and, more and more spontaneously, as the days went on, the selected guests would be put at their ease by Loretta, and they would sit and chat with her, crossing their legs and leaning back in their chairs with every semblance of normal people. She was always so genuinely glad to see them, that, after a while, you knew you could count on the laughter. And, it always came. There was more genuine laughter from the Lewis enclave that summer, than from any other enclave on the beach: real laughter, never merely reassuring.

Elvira and Elizabeth each had a boy-friend that summer. Perhaps Elvira had two, although I think she was only ‘serious’ about the one. But, each of the girls would make a point of sitting with her—one all through the morning session—the other through the afternoon. Angus brought dogs and sea-shells to meet her.

But, curious things did take place.

The Ottawa Jacksons, for instance, who had long since reconciled their differences with Loretta, took up drinking on the beach. That is to say, they set up a bar and began their drinking at ten o’clock in the morning. Great show was made of this—the bar being decorated with a grass skirt from Hawaii and a cocktail shaker shaped like a flamingo. Music was added. A gramophone was brought down from the attic of the hotel and records entirely from another age—pre-War, distressing and confusing.

With the music, there was often ‘dancing’ and the dancing, one day, led to a piece of crude, unlikely exhibitionism: Mrs Jackson let the straps fall from her tailored Jantzen and exposed her breasts. No one knew what to do: after all, what could one do? She was a friend—she was a guest at the hotel. For a moment, Mrs Jackson stood there, defiantly refusing to cover herself and, when she turned, as if on purpose to show Loretta, she also smiled and there was just the flash of triumphant teeth—as if she had made an obscene gesture at Death.

Loretta looked away and someone, (I forget who it was), handed Mrs Jackson a towel and she covered herself and walked across to the bar, where she turned the record up and poured herself another drink. Later, that same day, Mr Jackson made a “speech to the seals”—which was meant to honour and glorify Loretta’s “undying beauty.” Loretta herself applauded when it was over. Nobody else did, not even Mrs Jackson: and for awhile, they retired once more to their rooms, as they had on the earlier occasion when Loretta had been so angry.

One other afternoon, very hot and lazy, the children were building moats with which to trap the incoming tide down near the shore. There was a single runner, sprinting the length of the beach, and I remember the red bandanna tied round his hair and the tireless beating of his heels on the sand and I was watching him as if he were a runner through a dream, when all of a sudden Loretta screamed.

It was not like any other sound I have ever heard, having nothing to do with fear, or alarm or even, so it seemed, with pain. It was more a shout, perhaps, than a scream and she gave it as one might shout at a distant sail on an otherwise vacant sea. It was a cry of such terrible loneliness, that it made the crowded sand seem empty.