The Sea

by John Banville

  “That was it!” I said to Claire excitedly. “The Cedars!” On the way down I had told her all, or almost all, about the Graces. “That was where they stayed.”

  She turned back in her seat to look.

  “Why did you not stop?” she said.

  What was I to answer? That I was overcome by a crippling shyness suddenly, here in the midst of the lost world? I drove on, and turned on to Strand Road. The Strand Café was gone, its place taken by a large, squat and remarkably ugly house. Here were the two hotels, smaller and shabbier, of course, than in my memory of them, the Golf sporting importantly a rather grandiose flag on its roof. Even from inside the car we could hear the palms on the lawn in front dreamily clacking their dry fronds, a sound that on purple summer nights long ago had seemed to promise all of Araby. Now under the bronzen sunlight of the October afternoon—the shadows were lengthening already—everything had a quaintly faded look, as if it were all a series of pictures from old postcards. Myler’s pub-postoffice-grocery had swelled into a gaudy superstore with a paved parking area in front. I recalled how on a deserted, silent, sun-dazed afternoon half a century ago there had sidled up to me on the gravelled patch outside Myler’s a small and harmless-seeming dog which when I put out my hand to it bared its teeth in what I mistakenly took to be an ingratiating grin and bit me on the wrist with an astonishingly swift snap of its jaws and then ran off, sniggering, or so it seemed to me; and how when I came home my mother scolded me bitterly for my foolishness in offering my hand to the brute and sent me, all on my own, to the village doctor who, elegant and urbane, stuck a perfunctory plaster over the rather pretty, purplish swelling on my wrist and then bade me take off all my clothes and sit on his knee so that, with a wonderfully pale, plump and surely manicured hand pressed warmly against my lower abdomen, he might demonstrate to me the proper way to breathe. “Let the stomach swell instead of drawing it in, you see?” he said softly, purringly, the warmth of his big bland face beating against my ear.

  Claire gave a colourless laugh. “Which left the more lasting mark,” she asked, “the dog’s teeth or the doctor’s paw?”

  I showed her my wrist where in the skin over the ulnar styloid are still to be seen the faint remaining scars from the pair of puncture marks made there by the canine’s canines.

  “It was not Capri,” I said, “and Doctor French was not Tiberius.”

  In truth I have only fond memories of that day. I can still recall the aroma of after-lunch coffee on the doctor’s breath and the fishy swivel of his housekeeper’s eye as she saw me to the front door.

  Claire and I arrived at the Field.

  In fact it is a field no longer but a dreary holiday estate packed higgledy-piggledy with what are bound to be jerrybuilt bungalows, designed I suspect by the same cackhanded line-drawer who was responsible for the eyesores at the bottom of the garden here. However, I was pleased to note that the name given to the place, ersatz though it be, is The Lupins, and that the builder, for I presume it was the builder, even spared a tall stand of this modest wild shrub—Lupinus, a genus of the Papilionaceae, I have just looked it up—beside the ridiculously grand mock-gothic gateway that leads in from the road. It was under the lupin bushes that my father every other week, at darkest midnight, with spade and flashlight, muttering curses under his breath, would dig a hole in the soft sandy earth and bury the bucketful of slops from our chemical lavatory. I can never smell the weak but oddly anthropic perfume of those blossoms without seeming to catch behind it a lingering sweet whiff of nightsoil.

  “Are you not going to stop at all?” Claire said. “I’m starting to feel car-sick.”

  As the years go on I have the illusion that my daughter is catching up on me in age and that by now we are almost contemporaries. It is probably the consequence of having such a clever child—had she persisted she would have made a far finer scholar than I could ever have hoped to be. Also she understands me to a degree that is disturbing and will not indulge my foibles and excesses as others do who know me less and therefore fear me more. But I am bereaved and wounded and require indulging. If there is a long version of shrift, then that is what I am in need of. Let me alone, I cried at her in my mind, let me creep past the traduced old Cedars, past the vanished Strand Café, past the Lupins and the Field that was, past all this past, for if I stop I shall surely dissolve in a shaming puddle of tears. Meekly, however, I halted the car at the side of the road and she got out in a vexed silence and slammed the door behind her as if she were delivering me a box on the ear. What had I done to annoy her so? There are times when she is as wilfully moody as her mother.

  And then suddenly, unlikeliest of all, behind the huddle of the Lupins’ leprechaun houses, here was Duignan’s lane, rutted as it always was, ambling between tangled hedges of hawthorn and dusted-over brambles. How had it survived the depredations of lorry and crane, of diggers both mechanical and human? Here as a boy I would walk down every morning, barefoot and bearing a dented billycan, on my way to buy the day’s milk from Duignan the dairyman or his stoically cheerful, big-hipped wife. Even though the sun would be long up the night’s moist coolness would cling on in the cobbled yard, where hens picked their way with finical steps among their own chalk-and-olive-green droppings. There was always a dog lying tethered under a leaning cart that would eye me measuringly as I went past, teetering on tiptoe so as to keep my heels out of the chicken-merd, and a grimy white cart-horse that would come and put its head over the half-door of the barn and regard me sidelong with an amused and sceptical eye from under a forelock that was exactly the same smoky shade of creamy-white as honeysuckle blossom. I did not like to knock at the farmhouse door, fearing Duignan’s mother, a low-sized squarish old party who seemed fitted with a stumpy leg at each corner and who gasped when she breathed and lolled the pale wet polyp of her tongue on her lower lip, and instead I would hang back in the violet shadow of the barn to wait for Duignan or his missus to appear and save me from an encounter with the crone.

  Duignan was a gangling pinhead with thin sandy hair and invisible eyelashes. He wore collarless calico shirts that were antique even then and shapeless trousers shoved into mud-caked wellingtons. In the dairy as he ladled out the milk he would talk to me about girls in a suggestively hoarse, wispy voice—he was to die presently of a diseased throat—saying he was sure I must have a little girlfriend of my own and wanting to know if she let me kiss her. As he spoke he kept his eye fixed on the long thin flute of milk he was pouring into my can, smiling to himself and rapidly batting those colourless lashes. Creepy though he was he held a certain fascination for me. He seemed always teasingly on the point of revealing, as he might show a lewd picture, some large, general and disgusting piece of knowledge to which only adults were privy. The dairy was a low square whitewashed cell so white it was almost blue. The steel milk churns looked like squat sentries in flat hats, and each one had an identical white rosette burning on its shoulder where the light from the doorway was reflected. Big shallow muslin-draped pans of milk lost in their own silence were set on the floor to separate, and there was a hand-cranked wooden butter churn that I always wanted to see being operated but never did. The cool thick secret smell of milk made me think of Mrs. Grace, and I would have a darkly exciting urge to give in to Duignan’s wheedling and tell him about her, but held back, wisely, no doubt.

  Now here I was at the farm gate again, the child of those days grown corpulent and half-grey and almost old. An ill-painted sign on the gate-post warned trespassers of prosecution. Claire behind me was saying something about farmers and shotguns but I paid no heed. I advanced across the cobbles—there were still cobbles!—seeming not to walk but bounce, rather, awkward as a half-inflated barrage balloon, buffeted by successive breath-robbing blows out of the past. Here was the barn and its half-door. A rusted harrow leaned where Duignan’s cart used to lean—was the cart a misremembrance? The dairy was there too, but disused, its crazy door padlocked, against whom, it was impossible to imagine, the window
panes dirtied over or broken and grass growing on the roof. An elaborate porch had been built on to the front of the farmhouse, a glass and aluminium gazebo of a thing suggestive of the rudimentary eye of a giant insect. Now inside it the door opened and an elderly young woman appeared and stopped behind the glass and considered me warily. I blundered forward, grinning and nodding, like a big bumbling missionary approaching the tiny queen of some happily as yet unconverted pygmy tribe. At first she stayed cautiously inside the porch while I addressed her through the glass, loudly enunciating my name and making excited gesticulations with my hands. Still she stood and gazed. She gave the impression of a young actress elaborately but not quite convincingly made up to look old. Her hair, dyed the colour of brown boot polish and permed into a mass of tight, shiny waves, was too voluminous for her little pinched face, surrounding it like a halo of dense thorns, and looking more like a wig than real hair. She wore a faded apron over a jumper that she could only have knitted herself, a man’s corduroy trousers balding at the knees, and those zippered ankle boots of Prussian-blue mock-velvet that were all the rage among old ladies when I was young and latterly seem exclusive to beggar women and female winos. I bellowed at her through the glass how I used to stay down here as a child, in a chalet in the Field, and how I would come to the farm in the mornings for milk. She listened, nodding, a pucker appearing and disappearing at the side of her mouth as if she were suppressing a laugh. At last she opened the door of the porch and stepped out on to the cobbles. In my mood of half-demented euphoria—really, I was ridiculously excited—I had an urge to embrace her. I spoke in a rush of the Duignans, man and wife, of Duignan’s mother, of the dairy, even of the baleful dog. Still she nodded, a seemingly disbelieving eyebrow arched, and looked past me to where Claire stood waiting in the gateway, arms folded, clasping herself in her big expensive fur-trimmed coat.

  Avril, the young woman said her name was. Avril. She did not volunteer a surname. Dimly, like something lifting itself up that for a long time had seemed dead, there came to me the memory of a child in a dirty smock hanging back in the flagged hallway of the farmhouse, holding negligently by its chubby flexed arm a pink, bald and naked doll and watching me with a gnomic stare that nothing would deflect. But this person before me could not have been that child, who by now would be, what, in her fifties? Perhaps the remembered child was a sister of this one, but much older, that is, born much earlier? Could that be? No, Duignan had died young, in his forties, so it was not possible, surely, that this Avril would be his daughter, since he was an adult when I was a child and . . . My mind balked in its calculations like a confused and weary old beast of burden. But Avril, now. Who in these parts would have conferred on their child a name so delicately vernal?

  I asked again about the Duignans and Avril said yes, Christy Duignan had died—Christy? had I known that Duignan’s name was Christy?—but Mrs. D. was living still, in a nursing home somewhere along the coast. “And Patsy has a place over near Old Bawn and Mary is in England but poor Willie died.” I nodded. I found it suddenly dispiriting to hear of them, these offshoots of the Duignan dynasty, so solid even in only their names, so mundanely real, Patsy the farmer and Mary the emigrant and little Willie who died, all crowding in on my private ceremony of remembering like uninvited poor relations at a fancy funeral. I could think of nothing to say. All the levitant euphoria of a moment past was gone now and I felt over-fleshed and incommensurate with the moment, standing there smiling and weakly nodding, the last of the air leaking out of me. Still Avril had not identified herself beyond the name, and seemed to think that I must know her, must have recognised her—but how would I, or from where, even though she was standing in what was once the Duignans’ doorway? I wondered that she knew so much about the Duignans if she was not one of them, as it seemed certain she was not, or not of the immediate family, anyway, all those Willies and Marys and Patsys, none of whom could have been her parent or doubtless she would have said so by now. All at once my gloom gathered itself into a surge of sour resentment against her, as if she had for some fell reason of her own set herself up here, in this unconvincing disguise—that hennaed hair, those old lady’s bootees—intentionally to usurp a corner of my mythic past. The greyish skin of her face, I noticed, was sprinkled all over with tiny freckles. They were not russet-coloured like Claire’s, nor like the big splashy ones that used to swarm on Christy Duignan’s strangely girlish forearms, nor, for that matter, like the worrying ones that nowadays have begun to appear on the backs of my own hands and on the chicken-pale flesh in the declivities of my shoulders on either side of the clavicle notch, but were much darker, of the same shade of dull brown as Claire’s coat, hardly bigger than pinpricks and, I regret to say, suggestive of a chronic and general lack of cleanliness. They put me uneasily in mind of something, yet I could not think what it was.

  “It is just, you see,” I said, “that my wife died.”

  I do not know what came over me to blurt it out like that. I hoped Claire behind me had not heard. Avril gazed into my face without expression, expecting me to say more, no doubt. But what more could I have said? On some announcements there is no elaborating. She gave a shrug denoting sympathy, lifting one shoulder and her mouth at one side.

  “That’s a pity,” she said in a plain, flat tone. “I’m sorry to hear that.” She did not seem to mean it, somehow.

  The autumn sun fell slantwise into the yard, making the cobbles bluely shine, and in the porch a pot of geraniums flourished aloft their last burning blossoms of the season. Honestly, this world.

  In the flocculent hush of the Golf Hotel we seemed, my daughter and I, to be the only patrons. Claire wanted afternoon tea and when I had ordered it we were directed to a deserted cold conservatory at the rear that looked out on the strand and the receding tide. Here despite the glacial air a muted hint of past carousings lingered. There was a mingled smell of spilt beer and stale cigarette smoke, and on a dais in a corner an upright piano stood, incongruously bespeaking the Wild West, its lid lifted, showing the gapped grimace of its keys. After that encounter in the farmyard I felt quivery and vapourish, like a diva tottering offstage at the end of a disastrous night of broken high notes, missed prompts, collapsing scenery. Claire and I sat down side by side on a sofa and presently an awkward, ginger-haired boy tricked out in a waiter’s black jacket and trousers with a stripe down the sides brought a tray and set it clattering on a low table before us and fled, stumbling in his big shoes. The tea-bag is a vile invention, suggestive to my perhaps overly squeamish eye of something a careless person might leave behind unflushed in the lavatory. I poured a cup of the turf-coloured tea and bolstered it with a nip from my hip-flask—never to be without a ready supply of anaesthetic, that is a thing I have learned in this past year. The light of afternoon was soiled and wintry now and a wall of cloud, dense, mud-blue, was building up from the horizon. The waves clawed at the suave sand along the waterline, scrabbling to hold their ground but steadily failing. There were more palm trees out there, tousled and spindly, their grey bark looking thick and tough as elephant hide. A hardy breed they must be, to survive in this cold northern clime. Do their cells remember the desert’s furnace-heat? My daughter sat sunk in her coat with both hands wrapped for warmth around her tea cup. I noted with a pang her babyish fingernails, their pale-lilac tint. One’s child is always one’s child.

  I talked about the Field, the chalet, the Duignans.

  “You live in the past,” she said.

  I was about to give a sharp reply, but paused. She was right, after all. Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, the will butting its blunt head against the world’s wall, suchlike, but when I look back I see that the greater part of my energies was always given over to the simple search for shelter, for comfort, for, yes, I admit it, for cosiness. This is a surprising, not to say a shocking, realisation. Before, I saw myself as something of a buccaneer, facing all-comers with a cutlass in my teeth, but now I am
compelled to acknowledge that this was a delusion. To be concealed, protected, guarded, that is all I have ever truly wanted, to burrow down into a place of womby warmth and cower there, hidden from the sky’s indifferent gaze and the harsh air’s damagings. That is why the past is just such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking off the cold present and the colder future. And yet, what existence, really, does it have, the past? After all, it is only what the present was, once, the present that is gone, no more than that. And yet.

  Claire drew her head tortoise-fashion deep into the shell of her coat and kicked off her shoes and braced her feet against the edge of the little table. There is always something touching in the sight of a woman’s stockinged feet, I think it must be the way the toes are bunched fatly together so that they might almost be fused. Myles Grace’s toes were naturally, unnaturally, like that. When he splayed them, which he could do as easily as if they were fingers, the membranes between them would stretch into a gossamer webbing, pink and translucent and shot through leaf-like with a tracery of fine veins red like covered flame, the marks of a godling, sure as heaven.

  I suddenly recalled, out of the evening’s steadily densening blue, the family of teddy bears that had been Claire’s companions throughout her childhood. Slightly repulsive, animate-seeming things I thought them. Leaning over her in the grainy light of the bedside lamp to bid her goodnight, I would find myself regarded from above the rim of her coverlet by half a dozen pairs of tiny gleaming glass eyes, wetly brown, motionless, uncannily alert.