Legenda Maris (5 page)

Turning himself, he saw Trisaphee
standing there, as in the second dream he had, lifted on her tail in the reeds,
a girl dressed all in green.

And she held out her smiling arms, not
to him, but to Elaidh, and Elaidh jumped to her feet and ran towards her mother
and the lake, the centuries and the shadows, to sing and laugh, and to bite the
bones of men.

Elaidh had her foot even on the water’s
hem. She had let her hand almost into the hand of the tall green girl, her
mother, who seemed only five or seven years her older. Already Elaidh felt the
coolness of the lake, the freedom of a fish, she smelled the ocean and the
opening of infinity.

But then, she glanced back.

There
he
stood, her father,
straight and scaled and calm, no longer young. And he raised his hand in
farewell. “Elaidh, my love, I wish you well and happy.”

But she saw his eyes, they were full of
salty water, full of tears.

Elaidh took her foot out of the lake’s
edge, and put down her hands. She stood on the lakeshore and looked at her
wonderful mother, the mermaid.

“Mother,” said Elaidh, “thank you so
kindly for your queenly offer. But I will stay here with mankind. I’ll stay
with my da.”

And Trisaphee made a sound, that might
have been the human word
Why
?

“Oh,” said Elaidh, “because they kept me
when you let me go, and he lets me go when I
would
go and you would take
me. Because they can cry salt water. Tears—that is ocean enough for me. I will
stay with my da.”

And turning, Elaidh walked back along
the shore, into the land.

Behind her came a splash they say, as if
every mirror in the world had been smashed in fragments. No more but that, and
the reeds again were empty, green, and silent as the moon.

Magritte’s
Secret Agent

You
asked me about it before, didn’t you, the picture? And I never told you. But
tonight, tonight I think I will. Why not? The wine was very nice, and there’s
still the other bottle. The autumn dusk is warm, clear and beautiful, and the
stars are blazing over the bay. It’s so quiet; when the tide starts to come
back, we’ll hear it. You’re absolutely right. I’m obsessive about the sea. And
that picture, the Magritte.

Of course, it’s a print, nothing more,
though that was quite difficult to obtain. I saw it first in a book, when I was
eighteen or so. I felt a strangeness about it even then. Naturally, most of
Magritte is bizarre. If you respond to him, you get special sensations, special
inner stirrings over any or all of what he did, regardless even of whether you care
for it or not. But this one – this one.... He had a sort of game whereby he’d
often call a picture by a name that had no connection—or no apparent connection—with
its subject matter. The idea, I believe, was to throw out prior conception. I
mean, generally you’re told you’re looking at a picture called ‘Basket of
Apples’, and it’s apples in a basket. But Magritte calls a painting ‘The
Pleasure Principle’, and it’s a man with a kind of white nova taking place
where his head should be. Except that makes a sort of sense, doesn’t it? Think
of orgasm, for example, or someone who’s crazy over Prokofiev, listening to the
third piano concerto. This picture, though. It’s called ‘The Secret Agent’.

It’s one of the strangest pictures in
the world to me, partly because it’s beautiful and it shocks, but the shock
doesn’t depend on revulsion or fear. There’s another one, a real stinger—a fish
lying on a beach, but it has the loins and legs of a girl: a mermaid, but
inverted. That has shock value all right, but it’s different. This one.... The head,
neck, breast of a white horse, which is also a chess piece, which is also a
girl. A girl’s eye, and hair that’s a mane, and yet still hair. And she—it—is lovely.
She’s in a room, by a window that faces out over heathland under a crescent
moon, but she doesn’t look at it. There are a few of the inevitable Magritte
tricks—for example, the curtain hanging
outside
the window-frame,
instead of in, that type of thing. But there’s also this other thing. I don’t
know how I can quite explain it. I think I sensed it from the first, or maybe I
only read it into the picture afterwards. Or it’s just the idea of white horses
and the foam that comes in on a breaker: white horses, or mythological kelpies
that can take the shape of a horse. Somehow, the window ought to show the sea
and it doesn’t. It shows the land under the horned moon, not a trace of water
anywhere. And her face that’s a woman’s, even though it’s the face of a
chess-piece horse. And the title. ‘The Secret Agent’, which maybe isn’t meant
to mean anything. And yet—sometimes I wonder if Magritte—if he ever—

I
was about twenty-three at the time, and it was before I’d got anything settled,
my life, my ambitions, anything. I was rooming with a nominative aunt, about
five miles along the coast from here, at Ship Bay. I’d come out of art school
without much hope of a job, and was using up my time working behind a lingerie
counter in the local chain store, which, if you’re female, is where any sort of
diploma frequently gets you. I sorted packets of bras, stopped little kids
putting the frilly knickers on their heads, and averted my eyes from gargantuan
ladies who were  jamming themselves into cubicles, corsets and complementary
heart-attacks in that order.

Thursday
was cinema day at the Bay, when the movie palace showed its big matinee of the
week. I don’t know if there truly is a link between buyers of body linen and
the matinee performance, but from two to four-thirty on Thursday afternoons,
you could count visitors to our department on two or less fingers.

A slender girl named Jill,
ostentatiously braless, was haughtily pricing B cups for those of us unlucky
enough to require them. I was refolding trays of black lace slips, thinking about
my own black, but quite laceless, depression, when sounds along the carpet told
me one of our one or two non-film-buff customers had arrived. There was
something a little odd about the sounds. Since Jill was trapped at the counter
by her pricing activities, I felt safe to turn and look.

I got the guilty, nervous, flinching-away
reaction one tends to on sight of a wheelchair. An oh-God-I-mustn’t-let-them-think-I’m-staring
feeling. Plus, of course, the unworthy survival-trait which manifests in the
urge to stay uninvolved with anything that might need help, embarrass, or take
time. Actually, there was someone with the wheelchair, who had guided it to a
stop. An escort normally makes it worse, since it implies total dependence. I
was already looking away before I saw. Let’s face it, what you do see is
usually fairly bad. Paralysis, imbecility, encroaching death. I do know I’m
most filthily in the wrong, and I thank God there are others who can think
differently than I do.

You know how, when you’re glancing from
one thing to another, a sudden light, or colour, or movement snags the eye
somewhere in between—you look away then irresistibly back again. The visual
centre has registered something ahead of the brain, and the message got through
so many seconds late. This is what happened as I glanced hurriedly aside from
the wheelchair. I didn’t know what had registered to make me look back, but I
did. Then I found out.

In the chair was a young man—a boy—he looked
about twenty. He was focussing somewhere ahead, or not focussing, it was a sort
of blind look, but somehow there was no doubt he could see, or that he could
think. The eyes are frequently the big give-away when something has gone
physically wrong. His eyes were clear, large, utterly contained,
containing
like two cool cisterns. I didn’t even see the colour of them, the construction
and the content struck me so forcibly. Rather than an un-seeing look, it was a
seeing-through—to something, somewhere else. He had fair hair, a lot of it, and
shining. The skin of his face had the sort of marvellous pale texture most men
shave off when they rip the first razorblade through their stubble and the
second upper dermis goes with it forever. He was slim, and if he had been
standing, would have been tall. He had a rug over his knees like a geriatric.
But his legs were long. You see I’ve described him as analytically as I can, both
his appearance and my reply to it. What it comes to is, he was beautiful. I
fell in love with him, not in the carnal sense, but aesthetically,
artistically. Dramatically. The fact that a woman was wheeling him about, helplessly,
into a situation of women’s underwear, made him also pathetic in the terms of
pathos. He preserved a remote dignity even through this. Or not really; he was
simply far away, not here at all.

The woman herself was just a woman.
Stoutish, fawnish. I couldn’t take her in. She was saying to Jill: “should have
been ready. I don’t know why you don’t deliver any more like you used to.”

And Jill was saying: “I’m sorry,
maa-dum, we don’t deliver things like this.”

It was the sort of utterly futile conversation,
redolent of dull sullen frustration on both sides, so common at shop counters
everywhere. I wondered if Jill had noticed the young man, but she didn’t seem
to have done. She usually reacted swiftly to anything youngish and male and
platitudinously in trousers, but presumably only when trousers included
locomotive limbs inside them.

“Well, I can’t stop,” said the woman. She
had a vague indeterminate Ship Bay accent, flat as the sands. “I really
thought it would be ready by now.”

“I’m sorry, maa-dum.”

“I can’t keep coming in. I haven’t the
time.”

Jill stood and looked at her.

I felt blood swarm through my heart and
head, which meant I was about to enter the arena, cease my purely observational
role.

“Perhaps we could take the lady’s name
and phone number,” I said, walking over to the counter. “We could call her when
her purchase arrives.”

Jill glowered at me. This offer was a last
resort, generally employed to placate only when a customer produced a carving
knife.

I found a paper bag and a pen and waited.
When the woman didn’t speak, I looked up. I was in first gear, unbalanced, and
working hard to disguise it. So I still didn’t see her, just a shape where her
face was, the shadowy gleam of metal extending away from her hands, the more
shattering gleam of his gilded bronze hair. (Did she wash it for him? Maybe he
had simply broken his ankle or his knee. Maybe he was no longer there.)

I strove in vain towards the muddy aura
of the woman. And she wouldn’t meet me.

“If you’d just let me have your name,” I
said brightly, trying to enunciate like Olivier, which I do at my most desperate.

“There’s no phone,” she said. She could have
been detailing a universal human condition.

“Well... “ I was offhand “...your
address. We could probably drop         you a card or something.”

Jill made a noise, but couldn’t summon the
energy to tell us such a thing was never done. (Yes, he was still there. Perfectly
still; perfect, still, a glimpse of long fingers lying on the rug.)

“Besmouth,” said the woman, grudging me.

It was a silly name. It sounded like an
antacid stomach preparation. What was he called, then? Billy Besmouth? Bonny
Billy Besmouth, born broken, bundled baby-like, bumped bodily by brassieres—

“I’m sorry?” She’d told me the address
and I’d missed it. No I hadn’t, I’d written it down.

“19, Sea View Terrace, The Rise.”

“Oh yes. Just checking. Thank you.”

The woman seemed to guess suddenly it
was all a charade. She eased the brake off the chair and wheeled it abruptly
away from us.

“What did you do that for?” said Jill. “We
don’t send cards. What d’you think we aar?”

I refrained from telling her, I asked
instead what the woman had ordered. Jill showed me the book, it was one of a
batlike collection of nylon-fur dressing gowns, in cherry red.

At four-thirty, ten women and a male
frillies-freak came in. By five-forty, when I left the store, I should have forgotten
about Bonny Billy Besmouth, the wheelchair, the vellum skin, the eyes.

That
evening I walked along the sands. It was autumn, getting chilly, but the
afterglow lingered, and the sky above the town was made of green porcelain. The
sea came in, scalloped, darkening, and streaked by the neons off the pier, till
whooping untrustworthy voices along the shore drove me back to the promenade. When
I was a kid, you could have strolled safely all night by the water. Or does it
only seem that way? Once, when I was eight, I walked straight into the sea, and
had to be dragged out, screaming at the scald of salt in my sinuses. I never
managed to swim. It was as if I expected to know how without ever learning, as
a fish does, and when I failed, gave up in despair.

You could see The Rise from the
promenade, a humped back flung up from the south side of the bay, with its
terraced streets clinging on to it. He was up there somewhere. Not somewhere: 19,
Sea View. Banal. I could walk it in half an hour. I went home and ate banal
sausages, and watched banal TV.

On
Saturday a box of furry bat-gowns came in, and one of them was cherry red.

“Look at this,” I said to Jill.

She looked, as if into an open grave.

“Yes. Orrful.”

“Don’t you remember?”

Jill didn’t remember.

Angela, who ran the department, was hung
over from the night before, and was, besides, waiting for her extramarital
relationship to call her. I showed her the dressing gown and she winced.

“If she’s not on the phone, she’s had
it.”

“I could drop it in to her,” I lied
ably. “I’m going to meet someone up on The Rise, at the pub. It isn’t any
trouble to me, and she has a crippled son.”

“Poor cow,” said Angela. She was touched
by pity. Angela always struck me as a kind of Chaucerian character—fun-loving, warm-hearted,
raucously glamorous. She was, besides, making almost as much a mess of her life
as I was of mine, with a head start on me of about ten years.

She organised everything, and the
department did me the great favour of allowing me to became its errand-person.
I suppose if the goods had been wild-silk erotica I might not have been allowed
to take them from the building at all. But who was going to steal a bat-gown?

“You aar stew-pid,” said Jill, “You
should never volunteer to do anything like that. They’ll have you at it all the
time now.”

At half past six, for Saturday was the
store’s late closing, I took the carrier and went out into the night, with my
heart beating in slow hard concussions. I didn’t know why, or properly what I
was doing. The air smelled alcoholically of sea and frost.

I got on the yellow bus that went
through The Rise.

I
left the bus near the pub, whose broad lights followed me away down the
slanting street. I imagined varieties of normal people in it, drinking gins and
beer and low-calorie cola. Behind the windows of the houses, I imagined
dinners, TV, arguments. It had started to rain. What was I doing here? What did
I anticipate? (He opened the door, leaning on a crutch, last summer’s tennis
racket tucked predictably under the other arm. I stood beside his chair,
brushing the incense smoke from him, in a long queue at Lourdes.) I thought
about his unspeaking far-awayness. Maybe he wasn’t crippled, but autistic. I
could have been wrong about those strange containing eyes. Anyway, she’d just
look at me, grab the bag, shut the door. She had paid for the garment months
ago, when she ordered it. I just had to give her the goods, collect her
receipt. Afterwards, I’d go home, or at least to the place where I lived. I
wouldn’t even see him. And then what? Nothing.