The Sea Change (38 page)

‘What kind do you want?’

‘It isn’t simply what I want. I mean do
you
want it to be near or far from London; what sort of size, and how much land – things like that. And also, how much can we
afford it to cost?’

He finished his brandy and reached for the bottle. ‘My dear, I haven’t the slightest idea about any of this. I think you had better get what
you
want. I don’t know how
to approach such a plan because I cannot think about life in your terms.’

‘But it was
your
idea that we should buy a house!’

‘I know. But the idea started from something else. I can’t explain to you, but the difference is something like you starting to paint a picture by designing its frame, and I wanting
to start at whatever is to be the picture’s centre and then discovering what surround it may need. Something like that.’

‘Well?’

‘Do you remember saying to me that the trouble with you was that you didn’t know what you were
for
, and that that made it very difficult for you to know what you wanted
because you never wanted the same thing for very long?’

‘Did I say that?’

‘In New York in the morning.’ He smiled. ‘Isn’t it extraordinary – what we remember and what we forget? Well, you assumed then, that it was different for me –
that I did know.’

‘Yes?’

‘I don’t, most of the time. That’s all. But when I don’t, there is nothing I feel I can safely do. I can’t fabricate results with no cause.’

He drank some brandy and stood up. ‘But
you
go on with it; you find a house that you like: I am not trying to stop you.’

‘But I can’t possibly do it all by myself!’

‘You may have to.’ He paused. ‘I may have to go – to New York for this play.’

Somehow I had known he was going to say this ever since I had talked to Jimmy, but that just made it worse. It was no good simply being angry, because I wanted him to change his mind –
seeing this, I saw how much I really wanted the house with him: so I waited until the worst things I was going to say had cleared off.

‘You don’t feel that Jimmy could manage on his own just this once?’

‘No.’

‘But you haven’t even decided whether she is going to do the part, have you?’

‘No.’

After a moment, he added: ‘When I’ve decided these things I’ll tell you, of course.’

It was the ‘of course’ that did it. ‘Do you have to say things like that to me?’

He looked deliberately surprised – I knew that he wasn’t and felt suddenly furious.

‘Do you have to treat me all the time as though I was a sick child? Can’t you ever discuss what we are going to do – or even what you are going to do – reasonably with
me? Or does it satisfy your dramatic instinct to have little secrets all the time? I suppose you know that that dreadful Gloria Williams wrote me a mad letter just before she took all those pills?
You thought that that was quite all right as long as I didn’t know. Well, it wasn’t. It was just as awful, and worse in the end when I did. While we’re about it, perhaps
you’d explain what on earth this means.’ I knew the letter was somewhere in my bag, but I couldn’t find it: really it would have been better if I hadn’t even tried for a
second to be reasonable . . . I found the letter and held it out for him to see.

He said: ‘Where
did
you find that? I’ve been looking for it everywhere.’

‘It was on the floor in your room. I saw it when you were asleep. I read it while I was changing for dinner. Who are the Friedmanns? You obviously know them well – have known them
for years. Don’t you
understand
, Em – I don’t mean it is like Gloria Williams – I realize that this is a man writing to you about a boy and that you saw these people
when you were in London, but why don’t I know anything about them? When you say that you may go to New York when we have something very important to do together in England and that
you’ll let me know when you’ve decided about it you make me so angry and
despairing
about us that I lose my head and my temper at once. You don’t take me into your
confidence at all.’

‘Perhaps I have no confidence in your confidence.’

It was exactly like being slapped for hysteria. I found myself staring at him – my hands with the letter dropped back into my lap. He sat down on the bench beside my chair, took the letter
from me and said: ‘Sometimes you are very stupid and then there is no reason why I should trust you. If I gave you certain confidences, you would do something stupid, and when things turned
out badly you would fall back on your good intentions, when, in fact, you had had no intentions of any kind. The Friedmanns are the people who took the two children you would not adopt. They are
Jews: they understood what these children had endured, and like you, Mrs Friedmann was childless: but they have given them what was needed. I have continued to see them because when they undertook
the children, they had very little money, and although I could not keep the most serious part of the promises I had undertaken I could at least help somebody else to do so. That’s all. But
remember how we last talked on this subject – years ago now – and see why you are the last person I would consult. Last time I saw her, Mrs Friedmann said children should be above luck
– they were beyond your notice – you simply did not consider them at all. What was there for me to tell you about them, if they were only to provide fuel for your resentment and
self-pity?’

There was complete silence. It was as though all my blood had turned and was trying to move in a different direction: I heard myself asking something . . .

He smiled then, and gave my hand a little, absent pat. ‘ . . . do about them? Why nothing, now. They are much better off with the Friedmanns than they would be with us.’

Soon after that, we went to bed – he upstairs, I to my room, the best room in the house, on the ground floor. For the first time in my life at any such moment, I did not cry – just
lay – with what he had said printing itself again and again. It was as though a thought, like a piece of paper, was pressed on to me and torn off – painfully – as though I was
publishing this truth about me alone in a room, dark, excepting for the shallow, childish strips made by the moon, which seemed only an echo of light. One piece of the letter recurred: about the
boy: ‘a child who survives what he has survived, and with his gift, only to have it taken away suddenly by a foolish accident – what is his destiny? All day he looks at his hand. He
does not speak not even yet has he wept.’ I did not need to understand the situation to recognize this.

I woke in the morning feeling wonderfully light-headed and calm, and with a great desire to begin the day; but before getting up, I lay and remembered how I had lain in the night: Em’s
voice, the shock, the pain which was still not an ordinary kind, as some locked-up part of me had almost welcomed it – the only part which plainly hurt was when he had said: ‘Why
nothing, now.’ I could nearly have again that curious, physical jolt inside me with the feeling that everything, at that moment, was changing direction . . .

It was the most brilliant and beautiful morning: cloudless sky, heraldic sun, and the sea the smoke-blue of distant flowers. I found Alberta in the kitchen hut at the end of the western terrace,
making coffee: she had already boiled a pan of water for us to wash. She was the only one of us who could get a full bucket of water out of the well. She was wearing a blue cotton skirt and a pink
cotton shirt I had given her; it had faded, but it suited her more like that than it had ever suited me.

‘It is remarkable the way you always make very old clothes look their best. Oh dear. That sounds like the remark of a prize bitch – I really meant it: it is a great art –
usually only men have it.’

She said: ‘I can’t tell you what fun it is having such a choice of clothes. I lie in bed and choose them every morning.’

‘Did you have a good bathe last night?’

‘Yes. The water seems even warmer in the dark – more salt, too. The ants have got the old figs – we’ll have to eat the new ones, but there’s a new melon as well.
The honey is in the washing-up bowl.’

‘Why?’

‘Ants! There’ve been more every day since we’ve been here.’ She blew out the stove and said: ‘We must get more paraffin today – there’s just about
enough for one more morning.’

‘Are the others awake?’

‘I don’t know. They usually seem to hear when I take the coffee on to the terrace – it’s a bit like the ants when we move the honey.’

We took the breakfast out of the kitchen hut. Already the sun was stronger, and one of the scarlet trumpet flowers was dying. She said: ‘Julius said that it would get hotter nearly every
day. He is making a list of the advantages of winter. He’s going to read them to me this afternoon.’

Jimmy came out: he did not look as though he had slept very well. He and Alberta seemed calm with each other so I am afraid Jimmy cannot have mustered the courage to tell her what he feels.

Em did not join us until the middle of breakfast: he looked as though he had not slept at all, but when I saw him I had such a rush of warmth of affectionate gratitude towards him, that I could
not stay where I was. He saw me rise, came over, and pushed me gently down again. Alberta poured his coffee and he asked about the bathe. Jimmy answered him – they looked at each other, and I
had the feeling I often have with them, that they are talking to each other without words. The end of breakfast was friendly and serene – as though we had all known each other all our lives,
and I thought, ‘How well Alberta has fitted in with us — ’ and then, rather rashly, said so aloud. It was very silly; she blushed, and Jimmy began slowly going scarlet, the way he
does, and Em said, ‘She has indeed,’ in a mechanical sort of voice to fill the gap.

As I didn’t have to go to the port to get food for lunch, we agreed to bathe as soon as possible. Jimmy said that Alberta must do her minimum routine stint – he is a great stickler
for discipline; Em said that in that case he would go on to the other terrace to read, and I went to the kitchen hut to clear up breakfast and collect our lunch. It was very hot there. I opened its
one window and the door: for a moment I considered opening the heavy gate beyond the hut which is our entrance, but when I looked out the sun was already on the gate.

It was so hot by now that I did everything slowly, with half my attention on the exercises that Jimmy was directing. On the steep rocks outside the kitchen hut window a goat was trying to eat
bits of cactus – moving with light, uneasy footsteps on the rocks, its bell muttering round its neck. I threw it a piece of bread, but it didn’t seem able to find it. I leaned out of
the window with another piece; it looked at me with its stuffed animals’ eyes and nodded irritably, so I threw that piece too. I was watching it eat, and listening to all the sound of the
small valley made lazy by heat when there was suddenly a brief pounding outside – although I had not heard anybody approach – but there was a sense of violence in the sound which made
me run to the gate: as I reached it, it burst open, and there was the little boy I knew must be Julius. He wore simply a pair of faded jeans – his face and his shoulders were streaked with
sweat. He stared at me with frightful urgency for a second – I just had time to wonder why he was not scarlet after running so hard because he was panting, gasping for breath – when he
pushed past me and ran to the terrace. He went straight to Alberta and said: ‘Here is a tragic telegram!’ gave it to her, and burst into tears.

She seemed to open it very slowly, and to read it for a long time; and then she looked at the boy crying, and he looked at her with tears streaming down his face – then he raised his fist
clenched, and shook it in the air, crying: ‘
That
– to the driver of the car!’

She put the telegram carefully away in the pocket of her skirt: she was still looking at the boy – had gone very pale: she put out her hand and touched his fist – he flung his arms
round her with such a cry, that for a moment I thought that the telegram had been his – his grief was so intense, and she was so still. But then – I think it was Jimmy – said:
‘What
is
it, Alberta?’ and she looked out over the boy’s head that she was holding, and said: ‘He was knocked down by a car. He is dead: my father.’

Now she was dead white: we all seemed to be frozen: then I saw that she had been speaking to Em, who was standing in the doorway of the house. He was staring at her, and I saw on his face what I
had only seen before in the barest shadow at odd seconds of our lives – that he loved her – and I was struck by it.

CHAPTER VII

1

JIMMY

W
HAT
struck me was the kind of courage she had. She didn’t cry, or faint or make a scene or even say anything very
much. Emmanuel made her sit down and I got her some brandy, but she didn’t want it. She was even soothing the boy who sat shivering beside her. He’d had quite a time, poor kid;
apparently they’d called to him from the Post Office because they couldn’t make out the message – he’d written it out for them and then run all the way here in this heat.
She hadn’t talked to me much about her father, but somehow I knew it was far the worst shock she’d ever had in her life, by the way all her reactions seemed to have slowed down, so that
it took her time to understand what you said: she stared at the brandy and held the glass for a minute before she said she didn’t want it. It was Lillian who drank the brandy. She’d
gone a bad colour – for her to have an attack now was just
all
we needed – but she pulled herself together. The only thing Alberta said was that she had to telephone, and the boy
said he would help her. Emmanuel said: ‘You’d like to go back, wouldn’t you?’ and she looked up at him as though she hardly knew him and nodded. He wanted me so we went on
to the other terrace.

‘Jimmy. You’d better go down to the port with them and ring the airport. Get four seats – I don’t think there is much point in any of us staying here now.’ He
thought for a moment and said: ‘We might all go to the port.’