Now, it is boring when you get used to it to crawl along a canal, to wait for a lock to open, for water to level, but you see some interesting things too, like the cyclists on the footpaths where a canal runs through a town, and kids playing, and courting couples. You see a lot of them, especially after dusk, and in the quiet places. They are in the quiet places where there is no footpath and where they have had to climb a fence to get to. Perhaps it is the water that attracts them as much as the seclusion, and of course the danger. In summer they are as thick as midges, and you hear their laughter occasionally towards evening where the broken flowers spread down the bank and touch the water, trailing flowers. You seldom see them: just voices.
Of all the jobs I had been forced to do I think I liked being on the canal best. You are not tied up in one place then as you are if you take a job in town, and sometimes, if you can forget how ludicrously small the distances are, you get the impression that you are travelling. And there is something about travelling.
Soon we were chugging along the banks of the canal and it rolled away behind us like a very neat black tape dividing two masses of green-brown countryside. I could see a boom raised ahead in the distance. It looked very awkward perched there in mid-air like a sign that meant nothing but was black in the thin meagre afternoon light. I was at the wheel, which was aft, and Leslie was sitting on the hatch over the hold, smoking his pipe. He was gazing idly at the landscape, spitting occasionally, lighting and relighting his pipe. Ella was below, tidying up after the meal, and the kid was sitting up at the bows, cross-legged, looking from my point of view like one of those black things you see on telegraph poles. It was a peaceful sight. Leslie looked peaceful too, thinking no doubt how he was going to show off at the dartboard in the little pub at Lairs. I could see him raise a pint of beer to his lips, drink deep, leaving a layer of scum-coloured froth round the side of his glass. He would ask me then if I wanted a game of darts.
Yes, everything was peaceful, like the man who was ploughing in the field far over to the left and like the two cows which were grazing slightly ahead, and there was the fresh air all round me, and everything quiet and a little numb feeling of excitement somewhere deep down in me.
Standing there at the wheel, conscious of the pull Ella was exerting, almost as though she were hanging heavily and warmly from my skin, a heaviness which centred at the base of my spine and at the back of my thighs, and conscious at the same time of the flickering images of the afternoon, it came to me suddenly that touch was more important than sight.
Touch convinced in a way in which sight did not. I was struck by the fact that sight is hypnotised by the surfaces of things; more than that, it can know only surfaces, flatnesses at a distance, meagre depths at close range. But the wetness of water felt on the hand and on the wrist is more intimate and more convincing than its colour or even than any flat expanse of sea. The eye, I thought, could never get to the centre of things; there was no intimate connection between my eye and a plant on the windowsill or between my eye and the woman to whom I was about to make love.
And I remembered Cathie, whom I had lived with for two years before I ever came to the barge, and how sometimes I had looked at her and felt appalled by a sense of distance. Say she was sitting on the bed with her knees up, a book in her hands. Somehow, I was not convinced. She was there, but only indirectly, like the wallpaper or the cart drawing up in the street outside the window. I can remember as a small boy I loved touching things: trees, cats, flowers. I saw a violet or a rose but I had to destroy the distance, to feel the soft petals with my fingers, with my cheek; I had to draw the smell of it inside me and feel it living in myself. It was the same with Cathie. I had to go over and bury my head in her thighs – to feel her in my nostrils, to move my hand over her, and finally to draw her whole warm body close to me. But even that was not enough. Even touch was deficient. Perhaps she would be lying naked in my arms. I desired suddenly to see what it was that was so soft and moist and warm. Her body. But that was an abstraction, handy like a price-tag. It had nothing to do with the existence. I drew away from her and scrutinised her, the small breasts with their dull purple tips, the firm brown heap of her belly, and the resilient fleshiness of her thighs. Her buttocks were smooth and yellow, rounded like marble.
But I could not touch these things. I wanted to touch what I saw. But I could only touch a soft thing, a moist thing, a vibrant, clinging thing. Sight and touch may be correlative but their objects are vitally different. Ceasing to see the rise of her breast as I pressed my lips to it to confirm it within myself, the thing which I wished to confirm fled away from me, and in its place was something soft and warm. There was no intimate and necessary relation between what I saw and what I touched. The impressions existed together like a stone and a melody, ludicrous, fraudulent, absurd. It is the feeling that something has eluded you.
I smiled when I thought of it. Cathie. I had met her for the first time in a holiday resort on the west coast. I had gone there because I had to get a job to earn some money. I was leaning on my elbows on the balustrade of the promenade, looking out across the sands towards the sea, I had been aware for some time of a slight movement, of the soft sea wind in coloured cloth, just below me on the beach. A girl was lying there, attempting with modest movements to oil her own back. I don’t know whether at that moment she was aware of me. I allowed my eyes to fall occasionally and each time I did so she seemed to react by giving up the attempt to oil her back and by moving her oiled hand over the smooth flesh of her thighs and calves. They were well within her reach and she oiled them with great sensuality.
I watched for perhaps ten minutes. I felt sure by this time that she was inviting me to make contact with her and I was afraid that if I did not do so she would tire, gather her things together, and move along to a more populated part of the beach.
I walked quickly along to the nearest steps, descended to the beach, and walked towards her along the sand. I walked slowly, trying to gauge her reactions.
She was wearing sunglasses. Behind them, I felt her eyes focused on me, weighing me up.
There is a point at which a man and a woman stalk one another like animals. It is normally in most human situations a very civilised kind of stalking, each move on either side being capable of more than one interpretation. This is a defensive measure. One can, as it were, pretend up to the last moment not to be aware of the sexual construction that can be placed upon one’s own movements; one is not bound to admit one’s intention to seduce before one is certain that the seduction is consented to. But one can never be quite certain because the other is just as wary, just as unwilling to consent to a man who has not shown clearly his intentions are sexual as the man is to make his intentions obvious without prior consent. So a man and a woman fence with one another and the fencing is the more delicate because neither can wholly trust the other not to simulate ignorance of all that has passed between them. In every situation the man might be a puritan, the woman might wish to have the pleasure of being courted without the finality of the sexual act itself.
Cathie, for example, could have pretended, and, as a matter of fact did pretend, to be surprised at my sudden presence beside her on the beach. It had given her pleasure to be seen stroking her own limbs, but I had no way of knowing whether she would now consent to have me stroke them. She knew this, just as women usually know it, and she was going to enjoy having my purpose unfolded before her. At the point at which she was certain, she would be able to consent or not, and without reference to my desire.
I knew this and she knew it as I sat down beside her and offered her a cigarette. She accepted it. We talked casually about the weather, about the sun, and that made it possible for me to pick up the bottle of sun-tan oil and to examine it. She said I could use some if I wanted to.
I was still fully dressed and I had no bathing costume with me so I said there was not much point in it. Before she could interpret this as a withholding of myself I suggested that I could oil her back
for her and I confessed that I had been watching her from the promenade above. She pretended not to know about this, but without a word she rolled over on to her belly and exposed her back to me. She was wearing a two-piece bathing costume of black nylon, the lower part sheathing her buttocks closely and the upper part hidden beneath her except for the thin strand of nylon which ran across her back just below her shoulder-blades.
I began at the small of her back, working with the oil in ever-increasing circles to the limits of her exposed flesh. Soon, however, the massage became a caress, and when I felt her succumb to it, her face buried in her towel in the sand, my fingers slipped first underneath the strap of the top half and then gently on to the smooth mould of her buttocks beneath the taut black nylon. She made no effort to resist. She had shut out the rest of the world from herself, shut out the fear of a casual onlooker from the promenade, by the simple expedient of closing her eyes.
Not far away were some rocks under which I knew it would be possible to be out of sight both from the beach and from the promenade. I did not even know the girl’s name at the time and I was wondering whether it would be foolish to suggest going out of sight of other people. After all, even with my hands so intimately at work, she was presently quite safe, all fears gone and tensions relaxed. I could do nothing on the exposed part of the beach. And then, even if she were to consent, the sensations, the looseness which I had already caused in her might fade entirely as we moved to a more private place. She would have a hundred opportunities to revise and decide again. At that moment, had there been no danger of being witnessed, I believe I could have pulled her bathing costume down over her thighs, but whether, out of the sun, after a walk of a hundred yards, I would still be able to assert myself with a girl who was, after all a complete stranger, I couldn’t know. The thought made me pause. I was unwilling to lose what I had already gained in a premature attempt to seduce her. But my doubts didn’t remain for long. I felt her abandon. I saw she was totally oblivious to the people who walked past on the promenade overhead. I leant down close to her and whispered that we could find a place to be alone together farther along the beach.
For a moment she didn’t answer. She was lying with her eyes closed, so relaxed that she might have lost consciousness. I sensed then that she wanted to go wherever it was but that she had not yet overcome all her scruples. The longer she analysed, the cooler she would become. Follows, alas, as the night the day. And at such a point it is always difficult to know what to do.
I was a stranger. In the normal way of things there is a structure you have to build up of another person in terms of which that person must make his impact upon you. Beyond this structural idea there is no experience; the structure itself is armour against it. For two people to come close together it is necessary to destroy the structures in terms of which each experiences the other. Cathie had done just that when she accepted a stranger’s caress. She could have no means of knowing what she was letting herself in for (unless it was the unknown). Cathie... that was the name of the girl on the beach. She had thrust away from her the whole system of weights and measures which a conventional upbringing had bequeathed to her. This she did tentatively – her back was towards me and she could at any moment turn, offended – but a tentative movement was all that was necessary. It is necessary only to act “as if” one’s conventional categories were arbitrary for one to come gradually to know that they are, that the profoundest experiences are in the ordinary situation locked out from one’s arena of experience by the inflexible barrier of good character.
As a stranger I was afraid of going too fast. As I say, in a situation like this it is always difficult to know what to do. If one is too quick a woman has her “suspicions” confirmed. She knows what you want but is able by some species of rationalization – and in spite of the fact that she knew all along what you wanted, knew, that is, that she had no need of confirmation – to be shocked by your proposal.
“I could do with a walk. Stretch my legs,” she said at last, not looking at me. She got up. She added: “It’s not far, is it?”
Perhaps she too was frightened her desire would be suffocated on the way.
“A hundred yards,” I said, pointing, trying to appear more casual than I was. “Over by the rocks there.”
Without another word she rose, lifted her towel and the small bag in which she carried her make-up, a book by Daphne du Maurier, and the other articles which a woman takes to the beach, and walked beside me in the direction of the rocks.
We walked separately, without speaking. When we had gone a few yards I took her bag from her and carried it for her. She allowed me to do this, and somehow the action and the consent, the smile, served as words would have.
The rocks were at the far end of the promenade, beyond the last hotel, and they rose up sharply and steeply enough to obscure anything on their seaboard side from the sight of whoever passed by on the promenade. They were shaped like a horse-shoe within which smaller clumps of rock rose upwards from the flat sand, forming tiny water-filled caves. We walked round the nearest point, which sloped down almost to the sea’s edge, and as soon as we had done so we had the impression that we were in a kind of amphitheatre. Once inside, we followed the lee of the outer perimeter to a patch of dry sand, overhung by rock, but which was still in direct line of the sun.
I threw off my jacket, she arranged her towel, and we sat down. The inarticulate closeness which had existed between us a few moments before had evaporated. We were strangers again. She especially seemed suspicious and aloof. We smoked two cigarettes one after the other before she finally lay down and closed her eyes. This time she was lying on her back, the disc of her belly gleaming with oil, her long legs apart and tapering downwards from the sleek casque of her bathing costume. Glistening particles of sand clung to her legs. There was no one in sight.
Cathie. But she was in the past, buried there deeply and finally. Now there was Ella.
But when she came on deck towards evening she didn’t even look in my direction. She went forward to where Leslie was sitting and said something which I couldn’t catch, and then she came back and I tried to hold her eye, but she avoided my glance and went below.
Her action disturbed me, the more so because I had been watching her and because even as lately as a few moments before when she was standing talking to Leslie the wind had lifted her skirt gently towards the stern and I could imagine what it would have been like if I had been sitting where the kid was and seen her from the other side. I thought then that the skirt would have been clinging up and against her left thigh, like a soft pew cloth in the wind, and that the muscles of her thigh would have been clearly outlined against the cotton. I found it difficult not to think speculatively about her body, to finger it in my imagination, and yet it had been there at the other side of the partition for two months.
Simultaneously, I derived a pleasing sense of detachment and isolation from the fact that she ignored me. It meant, after all, that she was aware of me, and from that I derived a powerful sense, a vindication of my own existence. To exercise power without exerting it, to be detached and powerful, to be there, silent and indestructible as gods, that is to be a god and why there are gods.
We would see the church tower of Lairs in the distance, a black cone against a red-flecked sky, a witch’s hat in a haze of blood. It seemed very far away and enchanted.
Leslie said we would get there before seven. He knew a good place to tie up not far from the little pub he had told me about, so we would have our evening meal and get along to the pub about eight. He wondered whether our discovery of the corpse would be reported in the evening paper. He hoped it would be. Anyway, he would see a paper at the pub. He was in high spirits.
The kid came back from the bows and went down below to his mother. Leslie took over the wheel and I sat down and had a smoke. I was thinking that I didn’t want to go to the pub but I didn’t see how I could get out of it. I didn’t want to play darts, nor to drink for that matte
r, because Ella wouldn’t have drunk anything and she might make that an excuse to refuse me, I had already decided to return earlier than Leslie.
Come to think of it, I had never been alone with Ella, not for more than five minutes at a stretch anyway, and we had hardly spoken. She had resented me from the first, perhaps because I was a man simply and because she judged all men in terms of her experience of Leslie. And of course during the first few weeks Leslie and I had grown quite close to one another. I was, I suppose, his ally against her. But now, after the dangerous intimacy at the cabin table, she must have known I was interested in her. I was anxious now to be alone with her so that I could see what her attitude was.
It was five to seven by Leslie’s watch when we made Lairs. We tied up the barge in a little cutting off the main stream and before we went below he pointed out the road we would take to get to the pub afterwards. It was just up round the back of the church, he said, the cosiest little place I had ever seen.
Close up, the church tower looked just as disenchanted as most church towers in Scotland do. Later in the evening, as we skirted the churchyard to reach the pub, I noticed the usual ugly red and black posters proclaiming the evil influence of alcohol and the imminence of the Last Judgement.
“Let’s go down and eat,” I said. Leslie followed me.
The tea was already on the table, at least mine and his was, because Ella had had hers with the kid, Leslie grunted. He had no suspicions at that time.
It was sausages for tea, and bread and butter and jam to follow, so, as our sausages were already on the table, there was nothing for her to do except pour the tea. After she had done this, she sat down with her back to me near the stove and went on with her darning.
As I put mustard on my sausages I realized that now I was away from the wheel and the fresh air – the wheel itself under my hands had given me a sense of control – it was only natural that I should have lost that feeling of restrained tension which made me feel so good during the afternoon. It was not so easy down there in the cabin with their double bunk staring me in the face and her with her back turned towards me and Leslie so sure of himself he was thinking only of darts. To Leslie it must have seemed she wasn’t thinking of anything. As though she was simply darning his socks, like she might have been shouting at him or scolding the nipper, and wondering how he got such big holes in them. But I knew she couldn’t be as calm as she looked. She must have known she had let me go too far at the midday meal to expect me to have forgotten about it. I suspected that that was why she had had her tea early. She had probably thought it over during the afternoon and decided that no good could come of it, perhaps that I was getting ideas above my station, for I had known for a long time that Ella was a snob and she had set her heart on leaving the canal one day to go to live in a “nice little bungalow”, as Leslie called it, in one of the quieter suburbs of Edinburgh. Whatever she was thinking, I decided that it was a good thing I was going to the pub after all, because a couple of whiskies would give me just the right amount of courage.
Young Adam Page 4
