Secrets of the Sea

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  She sat in silent thought. “You know what would give me pleasure?”

  “What?” His answer was edged with desperation.

  “How long have we got?”

  “As long as you want. All night–if you want.” But his eye did not join in his smile. How fatally he had underestimated Merridy. It would take more cannon-fire than he had bargained for to storm this citadel. A lot more.

  “I remember you telling me that you liked to read poetry aloud.”

  “Yes,” in a mossy whisper. And pawed his moustache with his fingers. He might have been checking to see if it was still there.

  She sprang from the bed and opened the door and went into the main room. When she came back she was holding her coat. She patted its pockets. “Here we are,” and produced a faded blue clothbound book that she handed to him.

  He looked at the spine. “A Book of Nonsense, by Edward Lear,” he mouthed. Already, he smelled the renewed stench of blazing pitch.

  “Perhaps you could read to me?” she said.

  It was not simply Ray’s failure to perform that marked his rupture with Merridy. It was his inability to deal with what, remarkably for him, had not happened.

  When, failing to hear from Ray-as-in-sunshine, Merridy paid a special visit to Tamlyn & Peppiatt two days later to assure him that he must not worry, it did not matter, he had addressed her in the tones of a stranger and refused to receive her comfort. His peremptoriness caused Merridy to question whether Ray had been attracted to her in the first place. It was a little blow to her pride and she went away feeling rather stupid, which was the cause of her preoccupied expression when a moment later she ran into Alex. She had got it wrong. She was arrogant. Why should Ray not fancy Tildy, who was, after all, easier and nicer? After that Merridy tried to be happy for her cousin–in fact, washappy for her. So that when Ray telephoned–just as she was washing her hands prior to leaving for the hotel–to apologise for behaving like a jerk, and to plead, even at this late hour, for Merridy to change her mind and come as his guest to the Jazz Social, she was grateful for the opportunity to turn him down flat.

  Watched impassively by her father, whose bed she sat on to take the call, she informed Ray in an upbeat voice: “Nothing personal, no judgment intended, but it’s been a really positive experience. It’s taught me a lot to be at the end of a certain sort of behaviour, because it’s made me realise it’s not what I want right now.”

  The problem of Ray Grogan dispensed with, Merridy returned to her bedroom. She was late, she was late. That was all she could think as she slipped into her dress, called out goodbye to her parents and dashed from “Otranto”, only to stop on the top of the steps–Put this on and you’ll see. You’ll be a hit with it.

  Then, re-emerging a few moments later, she had run all the way along the main street to meet Alex Dove for dinner.

  “I was also bored,” she said, and straightened her back. She glanced around the restaurant at the paper napkins that earlier in the day she had folded into cones. “This isn’t a place for anyone under fifty.”

  “It’s not so bad,” Alex said.

  “I know what Dad would say if he could speak. He’d say it’s a one-horse town where even the horse is on its last legs. Everyone’s waiting around to die, and when they’re not sitting in, waiting for death, or being poisoned by the water, they’re waiting for you to fall flat on your face–and then they’ll jump right on you. Mum’s upset that she let herself be talked into bringing Dad here. She’d like to leave the island altogether. ‘What has Tasmania produced except Errol Flynn and he got out as soon as he could,’” in Mrs Bowman’s clipped voice.

  Merridy’s outburst took Alex by surprise. “Oh, come on. It’s no different to anywhere else. It’s all right once you get to know it.”

  “Tildy’s been here two years. She says unless you have kids no one will talk to you. Then once you have kids, you’re no longer part of the in-group. And if you stay on, then people who’ve left think you’re a loser. She says there’s no real jobs unless you want to work as a shop-girl in Talbot’s or a waitress here.” And sat back, breathing in quick breaths. She knew the details like an enemy.

  “She says that?” All the same, Merridy’s prejudices were ones that he himself had felt.

  At Merton, Alex had come upon Henry James’s description of Baltimore: “It affected me as a sort of perversely cheerful little city of the dead.” There was a period after he reoccupied his childhood home when he looked at Wellington Point through adult eyes accustomed to the Oxford or London metropolis. And found it as depressing as a fairground. A town of flapping gums where no one escaped their neighbour’s eye. “Don’t do or say anything in this place if you don’t want everyone else to know about it next morning,” Harry Ford had warned Alex in his first week back, before adding: “Look close and you’ll see this coast is full of quartzite. It’s why the inhabitants are fractured and double-faced.” In Wellington Point, any singularity or achievement–a little beauty or education–was regarded as an excess. In Talbot’s, Alex overheard Joe Hollows, the boy who had been helping him fence a paddock, confide to the shop-girl: “He knows fuck all. What was he reading in so-called Oxford–litter-rat-ure? That’s going to be all sorts of use down here.” In that home of gossip, the Returned Servicemen’s Club, local spite had it that Alex consorted with goats. Like any Pom left to himself. As any sensible person tended to leave Poms, which by dint of his parents and his slightly flattened accent Alex was regarded still.

  “You can always leave,” he told Merridy. He was not yet ready to admit that up until a few days ago he had been considering this option for himself. That when they met in the lane behind the school he was even then debating whether to go back to Southfields.

  “Oh, I plan to. As soon as my father…” And stared at the backs of her hands that she was washing when Ray telephoned, flecked with the salve that she had rubbed on her father’s lips. “He doesn’t have long. He’s left me an inheritance, not large, but enough to take me away from here.” To create her tiny miracle, whatever that was.

  “Where will you go?” conscious of a clatter of hooves in his heart.

  “Back to Melbourne probably. My mother is pissed off with me for dropping out of uni.”

  “Do you want to go to Melbourne?”

  “Not much. I’d prefer to go to Greece.”

  “Why Greece?”

  “I don’t know. I always wanted to go to Greece.”

  She wanted to find a partner. A Jumbly boy. She had not met anyone, there just had not been the click.

  Most convent girls in their first year at uni went–as Tildy enviously had predicted–“besonkers”. Engineering students were divided between “the Alfs”–the bogans who were rough as guts–and “the Ralphs”, who attended lectures in ties and middle-class tweeds. For the second time in her life, Merridy recognised her power and it was heady. Plucky, slightly thin-skinned, but willing to take on anything, she had had two boyfriends at the same time: a raw and puppyish Ralph, whom she saw during the day, and a more experienced Alf, whom she tormented in the evenings. Unlike the majority of her contemporaries, she had not been to bed with her boyfriends. Part of her knew that they were “practice men”. To sleep with either would risk raising the bar of complications and entail a commitment that Merridy was not prepared to make. She might have left Ulverstone and Randal Twelvetrees behind, but she could not forget her adolescent promise to herself. At twenty, she continued to feel her old antagonism to love; a suspicious fear of it that Ray Grogan had absolutely failed to lift, for all his persistence.

  Alex Dove was another matter. So far their exchange had been tentative, but the young farmer had begun to spur in her emotions that Merridy suspected of being dangerously close to those she had guarded herself against.

  At first, Alex had merely intrigued her. Then Ray told her about what had happened to Alex’s parents. The effect was galvanic. She could not help but be attracted to a quality in him to which she resp
onded in spite of herself; his candour and also his loss. She saw this vividly as the evening wore on: how his parents’ death was a stone that dragged him down. It was an odd characteristic, unusually intense in both of them, that each would be drawn to a commensurate tragedy in the other.

  Prominent in what was appealing about Alex was his instinct to blot out unpleasantness. He lived–it seemed to Merridy–with both feet planted in the present. He did not blame anything on his parents’ death. He believed in putting the past behind him; in not looking back. She, on the other hand, only looked back. This was the difference between them. If there is an instinct to chain oneself to the past that leaves even the longest-serving convict howling for mercy, Merridy had it.

  Towards the end of the meal a fantasy plucked at her. Somehow to whisk herself into Alex’s slipstream and leave her history behind. She did not know what made life worth living, hadn’t a clue, but Alex might.

  She finished her meal before him. In the darkening room, she watched him chew his steak. “You’re a slow eater.”

  “It’s a family curse.”

  His father had chewed each mouthful sixty-four times, “like Mr Gladstone”–a habit that Alex could not shake. It had resulted in him having his plates endlessly taken away at school and university.

  She said: “I still don’t understand why you came back from London. I mean, don’t you mind being so far away from everywhere? This is the end of the world.”

  He put down his knife and fork. “If you want to see the end of the world, go up Regent Street on a rainy Sunday afternoon.”

  “So where is the centre?”

  “Wherever each one of us is.” He raised his head. “Isn’t it?”

  “Is that what you believe?”

  “Why not?”

  “No, I mean, really believe.” And suddenly her eyes were less playful than her mouth.

  The question having appeared from nowhere hovered like a frightful moth between them.

  Immediately, Alex was out of his depth. He had met Merridy two, three times. And yet he felt that somewhat more than the fate of the evening hung on his reply.

  He pushed away his plate that had some meat still on it. “If you’re talking about God, then no,” he said quite fiercely. His heroes might have believed in God. Merridy’s mother obviously did. But Alex could not lie, even if it meant losing her.

  “I can see from a Darwinian point of view why the Church came into force,” he went on, “because we need a body that is not the State to govern our morals. But all those wonderful con tricks about heaven and hell…”

  Her eyes relaxed. “I think that’s all a nonsense, too.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes. I think we’re just an accidental growth of moss that’s appeared on a rock. To me, it’s no coincidence that the vast majority of saints were created before the Middle Ages–when we can’t check up on them.”

  “But you do believe in something?”

  She considered his question. “The sea. I could believe in that.”

  “Any particular aspect of it?” He was smiling again. “It’s quite a big place.”

  Another pause. “I believe that people who go away to sea always come back.”

  “That sounds poetic.” For the first time, he could understand how she might irritate. “But what does it mean?”

  “Does one’s belief have to mean anything to anyone else? I suppose I have a residual superstition that when we die, we don’t die, we’re still around somehow. But what about you? You haven’t answered my question.”

  He picked at the candle wax. A piece fell away, the colour of dead flesh. Of something divine, perhaps. And though he did not have an answer, he was terrified to disappoint.

  “I believe in bottles.”

  “You’re an alcoholic?” she frowned.

  “My father probably was,” with humour. “No, not bottles with gin or wine in them. Not anything like that.”

  “What, then?”

  “Ships.”

  “Ships?” She looked at him.

  A chaffinch noise announced Debbie bringing the bill on a willow-pattern saucer. She started to clear the table when Alex reached across and seized all three satay sticks from Merridy’s plate and slipped them without explanation into his jacket inside pocket.

  The bill settled with a substantial tip, Alex was unwilling to tear himself away. He picked off a last piece of wax. The bottle was now bare of it and the candle shot up straight from the mouth. On the other side of the flame Merridy peered down into her cup.

  “What are you looking at?”

  She was insolently beautiful to him.

  “Tea leaves. You can read the future.” Another thing her father had taught her.

  “What do they say?” leaning forward, immensely interested. But seeing only warm black wet flakes in the discoloured milk.

  Her eyes fluttered towards him through the distorted air. “Not telling.”

  It was late when Alex walked her home. Past Sergeant Finter sitting in his Ford Falcon on the corner of Radley Street. The policeman looked at her and all but saluted. A woman to make you go crazy, his face said to Alex. Past the Town Hall. Barney Todman playing “Stranger on the Shore” and through tall windows a blur of faces nuzzling into necks and mascaraed eyes half-shut. Up Waterloo Street to Louisa Meredith House and the modest villa with its melon curtains closed and between the gap a bright light on.

  He stood beneath the window, the light falling in a stripe across his nose. “Goodnight.” Not daring to touch her for fear of bursting.

  “Goodnight,” said Merridy and for the first time trembled for him. For them both. “Love is a weakness. It peters out, it enfeebles, it has no mandate beyond the appeasement of lust; it is lent and snatched away.” So did she remember the words of her mother, who lay on her bed behind the curtain, waiting.

  But then her father’s words returned:

  For day and night he was always there

  By the side of the Jumbly Girl so fair…

  She looked with an intense expression at Alex’s forehead where his hairline started. Quickly, she brushed his cheek with the back of her hand. “It’s been fun, I must say.”

  “Will I see you again?” he said.

  Merridy smiled at him. “What do you reckon? Small town.”

  The table radio was still on, playing Bach. Her father lay on his pneumatic bed, eyes closed and a muscle quivering under them. She switched off the motet and waited. When the head on the pillow failed to stir, she dimmed the light that her mother had kept on for the past four nights, ever since her evening with Ray Grogan.

  In the Town Hall Barney Todman struck up a faster tune.

  Merridy slipped into the room that she shared with her mother. She undressed and got into bed and stretched out, eyes on the ceiling, inhaling the music. The sound of the guitar escorted her back to a drafty barren hall of ugly red brick tacked onto the side of the Methodist church in Ulverstone, and the game that they played on Friday evenings, all the girls and boys; a sort of tribal mating ritual. The ripped copies of the Advocatestrewn quite prettily about on the floor; the brass-rubbings pinned to the walls; and the surprisingly well-tuned piano on which Randal Twelvetrees, the repressed idiot who might have married her mother and into whose care Mrs Bowman out of some deformed sense of guilt now sought to deliver Merridy, played a jolly tune like “Coming Round the Mountain” that would stop abruptly in mid-note. She recalled the boys in an outer circle, each holding an Advocate, and the girls in an inner circle, skipping round in different directions, and–when the music stopped–the rush to grab hold of your partner and open up the newspaper and leap on it, standing very still, waiting for Randal to sweep back the gingerish hair from his eyes and shuffle over to turf off the last pair who had jumped on. She remembered with a cold shiver how he pressed his unblinking face against the bodies that in order to remain upright stood on tiptoe, inspecting for any stray foot that remained off the newspaper, or any part of a foot. The
losing pair identified, the surviving couples each tore their newspaper in half and the music started up; and so on, down and down until there were just two couples left, circling each other around a shrinking island of shredded paper, an island no larger than a page, dancing closer and closer together until the piano fell silent. And she remembered what a strong connection you had with the other person if you happened to be one of these last two pairs, which repeatedly she was, so strong was her wish to escape the devouring ginger stare of Randal Twelvetrees. You were not a mob any longer, you were a couple. The girl perspiring under her little armpits and her nervous young breasts pushing against her partner’s chest, and yet really enjoying it. The boy, too. It was superb. An ornate and deadly cocktail. “When it gets down to a tram-ticket, you’re both of you dry-rooting,” laughed Tildy. And then only one couple was left. And she remembered a boy with a massive erection who was too embarrassed to press himself up against her–and so he lost the game. Merridy had felt this thing and wondered what the hell had hit her, but it was nature sorting itself out. She had won him in a way and on those Friday evenings winning was everything. Afterwards, everyone walked home, although Merridy remembered one occasion when she had to plead with the boy to remain behind, until it was time for her mother to collect her, so that she would not be left alone with Randal. Sitting there in the hall beside the boy, not saying anything. Not doing anything either, beyond holding his hand while Randal cleared up bits of newspaper. There was a rural dorkiness about it all that she imagined when she thought of England, but also a thwarted passion.

  Merridy remembered this, then looked across at her mother who lay awake, mouthing silent words at the ceiling and the beam that flashed from the lighthouse.

  “I’ve found him.”

  Her mother’s lips went on moving. Where had he got to, her dearest boy, her firstborn? Was he in trouble? In pain? But he was strong. She wished that he could be here to protect her. Then stopped. “Who?”