Legenda Maris (8 page)

The whisky lay in a little warm pool
across the floor of my mind. I began irresistibly to withdraw inside myself,
comparing her hopeless life with mine, the deadly job leading nowhere, the
loneliness. And all at once I saw a horrid thing, the horrid thing I had brought
upon myself. Her position was not hereditary, and might be bestowed. By
speaking freely, she was making the first moves. She was offering me, slyly,
her mantle. The role of protectress, nurse and mother, to Daniel—

I arranged the sandwich slowly on a
plate. There was still time to run away. Lots of time.

“Just walking,” I heard her say. “You
didn’t think about it then. Not like now. The sea was right out, and it was dark.
I never saw him properly. They’d make a fuss about it now, all right. Rape. You
didn’t, then. I was that innocent, I didn’t really know what he was doing. And
then he let go and left me. He crawled off. I think he must have run along the
edge of the sea, because I heard a splashing. And when the tide started to come
in again, I got up and I tidied myself, and I walked home.”

I stood quite still in the kitchen, the
sandwich on its plate in my hands, wide-eyed, listening.

“I didn’t know I was pregnant, thought I’d
eaten something. The doctor put me right. He told me what he thought of me,
too. Not in words, exactly, just his manner. Rotten old bugger. I went away to
have the baby. Everybody knew, of course. When he was the way he was, they
thought it was a punishment. They were like that round here, then. I lived off
the allowance, and what I had put by, and I couldn’t manage. And then, I used
to steal things, what do you think of that? I never got found out. Just once,
this woman stopped me. She said: I think you have a tin of beans in your bag. I
had, too, and the bill. What a red face she got. She didn’t tumble the other things
I’d taken and hadn’t paid for. Then I had a windfall. The old man I used to
work for, the butcher, he died, and he left me something. That was a real
surprise. A few thousand it was. And I put it in the Society, and I draw the
interest.”

I walked through into the room. She had
had a refill from the bottle and was stirring sugar into it.

“Do you mean Daniel’s father raped you?”

“Course that’s what I mean.”

“And you didn’t know who it was?”

“No.” She drank. She was smiling
slightly and licked the sugar off her lips.

“I thought you said he was a sailor.”

“I never. I said he was at sea. That’s
what I told people. My husband’s at sea. I bought myself a ring, and gave
myself a different name. Besmouth. I saw it on an advertisement. Besmouth’s
Cheese Crackers.” She laughed. “At sea,” she repeated. “Or out of it. He was
mother naked, and wringing wet. I don’t know where he’d left his clothes. Who’d
believe you if you told them that?”

“Shall I take this up to Daniel?” I said.

She looked at me, and I didn’t like her
look, all whisky smile.

 “Why not?” she said. She swallowed a
belch primly. “That’s where you’ve wanted to go all along, isn’t it? ‘How’s
Daniel?’” She mimicked me in an awful high soppy voice that was supposed to be
mine, or mine the way she heard it. “‘Is Daniel Ookay?’ Couldn’t stop looking
at him, could you? Eyes all over him. But you won’t get far. You can strip off
and do the dance of the seven veils, and he won’t notice.”

My eyes started to water, a sure sign of
revulsion. I felt I couldn’t keep quiet, though my voice (high and soppy?)
would tremble when I spoke.

“You’re being very rude. I wanted to
help.”

“
Ohhh
yes,” she said.

“The thing that worries me,” I said, “is
the way you coop him up. Don’t you ever try to interest him in anything?” She
laughed dirtily, and then did belch, patting her mouth as if in congratulation.
“I think Daniel should be seen by a doctor. I’m sure there’s some kind of
therapy—”

She drank greedily, not taking any
apparent notice of me.

I hurried out, clutching the sandwich
plate, and went along the corridor and up the stairs, perching on two wobbly
sticks. If I’d stayed with her much longer, I, too, might have lost the use of
my lower limbs.

Light
came into the hall from the glass in the door, but going up, it grew progressively
murkier.

It was a small house, and the landing,
when I got to it, was barely wide enough to turn round on. There was the sort
of afterthought of a cramped bathroom old houses have put in—it was to the
back, and through the open door, I could see curtains across the windows. They,
too, must be boarded, as she had said. And in the bedroom which faced the back.
A pathological hatred of the sea, ever since she had been raped into unwanted
pregnancy beside it. If it were even true.... Did she hate Daniel, as well? Was
that why she kept him as she did, clean, neat, fed, cared for and deliberately
devoid of joy, of soul—?

There was a crisp little flick of paper,
the virtually unmistakable sound of a page turning. It came from the room to my
right: the front bedroom. There was a pane of light there too, falling past the
angle of the half-closed door. I crossed to the door and pushed it wide.

He didn’t glance up, just went on poring
over the big slim book spread before him. He was sitting up in bed in spotless
blue and white pyjamas. I had been beginning to visualise him as a child, but
he was a man. He looked like some incredible convalescent prince, or an angel. The
cold light from the window made glissandos over his hair. Outside, through the
net, was the opposite side of the street, the houses, and the slope of the hill
going up with other houses burgeoning on it. You couldn’t even see the cliff.
Perhaps this view might be more interesting to him than the sea. People would
come and go, cars, dogs. But there was only weather in the street today, shards
of it blowing about, The weather over the sea must be getting quite
spectacular.

When she went out, how did she avoid the
sea? She couldn’t then, could she? I suddenly had an idea that somehow she had
kept Daniel at all times from the sight of the water. I imagined him, a sad, sub-normal,
beautiful little boy, sitting with his discarded toys—if he ever had any—on the
floor of this house. And outside, five minutes’ walk away, the sand, the waves,
the wind.

The room was warm, from a small electric
heater fixed up in the wall, above his reach. Not even weather in this room.

He hadn’t glanced up at me, though I’d
come to the bedside, he just continued gazing at the book. It was a child’s
book, of course. It showed a princess leaning down from a tower with a pointed
roof, and a knight below, not half so handsome as Daniel.

“I’ve brought you some lunch,” I said. I
felt self-conscious, vaguely ashamed, his mother drunk in the room downstairs
and her secrets in my possession. How wonderful to look at the rapist must have
been. Crawled away, she had said. Maybe he too—

“Daniel,” I said. I removed the book
gently from his grasp, and put the plate there instead.

How much of what she said to me about my
own motives was actually the truth? There were just about a million things I
wouldn’t want to do for him, my aversion amounting to a phobia, to a state not
of wouldn’t but couldn’t. Nor could I cope with this endless silent
non-reaction. I’d try to make him react, I was trying to now. And maybe that
was wrong, unkind—

Maybe I disliked and feared men so much
I’d carried the theories of de Beauvoir and her like to an ultimate conclusion.
I could only love what was male if it was also powerless, impotent, virtually
inanimate. Not even love it. Be perversely aroused by it. The rape principle in
reverse.

He wasn’t eating, so I bent down, and
peered into his face, and for the first time, I think he saw me. His luminous
eyes moved, and fixed on mine. They didn’t seem completely focussed, even so.
But meeting them, I was conscious of a strange irony. Those eyes, which perhaps
had never looked at the sea, held the sea inside them.
Were
the sea.

I shook myself mentally, remembering the
whisky plummeting on the gin.

“Eat, Daniel,” I said softly.

He grasped the sandwich plate with great
serenity. He went on meeting my eyes, and mine, of course, filled abruptly and
painfully with tears. Psychological symbolism: salt water.

I sat on the edge of the bed and stroked
his hair. It felt like silk, as I’d known it would. His skin was so clear, the
pores so astringently closed, that it was like a sort of silk, too. It didn’t
appear as if he had ever, so far, had to be shaved. Thank God. I didn’t like
the thought of her round him with a razor blade. I could even picture her
producing her father’s old cutthroat from somewhere, and doing just that with
it, another accident, with Daniel’s neck.

You see my impulse, however. I didn’t
even attempt to deal with the hard practicality of supporting such a person as
Daniel really was. I should have persuaded or coerced him to eat. Instead I sat
and held him. He didn’t respond, but he was quite relaxed. Something was going
through my brain about supplying him with emotional food, affection, physical
security, something she’d consistently omitted from his diet. I was trying to
make life and human passion soak into him. To that height I aspired, and,
viewed another way, to that depth I’d sunk.

I don’t know when I’d have grown embarrassed,
or bored, or merely too tired and cramped to go on perching there, maintaining
my sentimental contact with him, I didn’t have to make the decision. She walked
in through the door and made it for me.

“Eat your sandwich, Daniel,” she said as
she entered. I hadn’t heard her approach on this occasion, and I jerked away.
Guilt, presumably. Some kind of guilt. But she ignored me and bore down on him
from the bed’s other side. She took his hand and put it down smack on the
bread. “Eat up,” she said. It was macabrely funny, somehow pure slapstick. But he
immediately lifted the sandwich to his mouth. Presumably he’d recognised it as
food by touch, but not sight.

She wasn’t tight anymore. It had gone
through her and away, like her dark tea through its strainer.

“I expect you want to get along,” she
said.

She was her old self, indeed. Graceless
courtesies, platitudes.

She might have told me nothing, accused
me of nothing. We had been rifling each other’s ids, but now it was done, and
might never have been. I didn’t have enough fight left in me to try to rip the
renewed facade away again. And besides, I doubt if I could have.

So I got along. What else?

Before
I went back to my room, I stood on the promenade awhile, looking out to sea. It
was in vast upheaval, coming in against the cliffs like breaking glasses, and with
a sound of torn atmosphere. Like a monstrous beast it ravened on the shore. A
stupendous force seemed trying to burst from it, like anger, or love; or grief,
orchestrated by Shostakovich, and cunningly lit by an obscured blind sun.

I wished Daniel could have seen it. I
couldn’t imagine he would remain unmoved, though all about me people were
scurrying to and fro, not sparing a glance.

When I reached my nominative aunt’s, the
voice of a dismal news broadcast drummed through the house, and the odour of
fried fish lurked like a ghost on the stairs.

The next day was Tuesday, and I went to
work.

I
dreamed about Daniel a lot during the next week. I could never quite recapture
the substance of the dreams, their plot, except they were to do with him, and
they felt bad. I think they had boarded windows. Perhaps I dreamed she’d killed
him, or I had, and the boards became a coffin.

Obviously, I’d come to my senses, or
come to avoid my senses. I had told myself the episode was finished with.
Brooding about it, I detected only some perverted desire on my side, and a trap
from hers. There was no one I could have discussed any of it with.

On Wednesday, a woman in a wheelchair
rolled through lingerie on her way to the china department. Dizzy with fright,
if it was fright, I watched the omen pass. She, Mrs. Besmouth, could get to me
any time. Here I was, vulnerably pinned to my counter like a butterfly on a board.
But she didn’t come in. Of course she didn’t.

“Here,” said Jill-sans-bra, “look what
you’ve gone and dunn. You’ve priced all these eight-pound slips at
six-forty-five.”

I’d sold one at six-forty-five, too.

Thursday arrived, cinema day. A single
customer came and went like a breeze from the cold wet street. There was a
storm that night. A little ship, beating its way in from Calais, was swept over
in the troughs, and there were three men missing, feared drowned. On Friday, a calm
dove-grey weather bloomed, and bubbles of lemonade sun lit the bay.

I thought about that window looking on
the street. He should have seen the water, oh, he should have seen it, those
bars of shining lead, and the great cool topaz master bar that fell across
them. That restless mass where men died and fish sprang. That other land that
glowed and moved.

Saturday was pandemonium, as usual.
Angela was cheerful. Her husband was in Scotland, and this evening the
extra-marital relationship was meeting her. Rather than yearn for aloneness
together, they apparently deemed two no company at all.