Journey to the Sea

by Gil McNeil

  I savoured the image of Fairweather pushing off in his little craft from the very spot where I was standing, now waiting for a taxi to rush me to the airport for my flight across desert, ocean and mangrove forest, to Broome on the high shoulder of the Indian Ocean. I’d enjoyed Darwin. ‘Not bad,’ I remarked to Finlay, perched on my shoulder, ‘for eighteen hours. I’ll definitely be coming back for second helpings.’

  * * *

  fn1 His Sydney gallery would keep sending him big rolls of canvas, only to receive friendly replies along the lines of: ‘Thanks for the canvas. I’ve made a new tent and some trousers.’ And he would continue happily painting on the sides of cardboard boxes.

  THREE WOMEN, AND SOMETHING ELSE

  ERICA WAGNER

  YOU CAN’T STAY,’ xanthe said.

  ‘I can,’ he said. ‘I asked.’ The clerk at the desk had seen Xanthe loading the car, but Dan had said: ‘I’ll keep the room.’ The fellow – who was also the barman at night – had shrugged. Of course. It was winter. He could keep the room for as long as he liked, now the weekend was over.

  ‘That’s not what I mean.’ She was standing over him, her hands flat on the yellow cloth on the table. ‘You know that’s not what I mean.’ Their car was parked outside, ready to go. It was Sunday. The December sunshine was brittle and knife-bright on the promenade, on the freezing sea; in the boot of the car was the bounty they’d bought in their effortful festivity: wine, crème de pêche, cheese, salty caramels.

  He didn’t answer her. Last night, in the hotel’s restaurant, à Montrachet, goose liver hot with fat on a white plate, the other diners, mostly English, laughing and toasting each other with the generous bowls of their glasses. Dan in his suit, Xanthe in the red skirt he’d bought her from Agnès B, the bleached haze of her hair pulled back with a velvet tie, the dark roots of it framing her face. But then, later, in the warm hotel dark behind the curtains, her hands on his chest, on his neck, and his silence and stillness. He heard her crying. He didn’t move. He wanted to. He could not.

  ‘You take the car,’ he said finally. ‘I’ll get a taxi. Tomorrow. To – Fréthun, isn’t it? I’ll just get on the train to Waterloo.’

  ‘You really want to stay here by yourself.’ A statement.

  ‘I don’t have any teaching until Wednesday.’

  ‘You won’t come back until Wednesday?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. I said I had to teach Wednesday, in any case. I’d have to be back by then.’

  ‘I’m not a child, Dan; don’t talk to me like I am one.’

  He knew the face she was wearing, knew it so well, her sharp chin set out, her unwillingness to be hurt, her wish to protect herself. He had wished to protect her too, but he had not succeeded. ‘I know that,’ Dan said. ‘I know.’ Outside on the promenade a man rollerbladed by, his legs swinging, his arms locked behind his back, earphones clamped to the sides of his head. The sea called out, and called again. The water moved like cloth, tearing and mending, tearing and mending. A jetty stretched out into the tide. For a moment something beyond the jetty caught his eye. Not a boat. Smaller than that, but not a bird either. His breath seized briefly; as if he were in a car and he would need to hit the brakes. Then it was gone, the feeling, whatever it was that had been in the water.

  ‘Dan,’ she said. ‘Dan.’ She was dry-eyed now. Her black fleece made her face look pale and tired.

  ‘You could stay,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t mean that.’

  He didn’t have an answer.

  ‘What will you do?’ she asked. She sat down, then, across from him, as if they were friends.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I thought I might go to Arras. Or Agincourt. We never got there.’

  ‘So you’ll go on your own.’

  He nodded.

  ‘How will you get there? Without the car.’

  ‘There must be buses,’ he said. ‘Or something.’

  Everyone else had gone from the breakfast lounge. Xanthe looked down at the table, then out to the water. He did the same.

  ‘I’ll be home tomorrow,’ he said again. ‘Or Tuesday. I’ll call you.’ He picked up a tiny spoon, set it down again with a click in the saucer of his cup.

  ‘Well,’ she said eventually. ‘I’ll finish packing.’ When she’d gone he poured the dregs of the coffee from the jug. It was cold. He could have asked for more. He did not.

  There had been a show, a gallery in Mayfair. Every few months the place turned itself over to students; Xanthe knew one of the art teachers who’d swung the deal. They’d met there after work – Dan from the university where he was just about to be made a full professor, Xanthe from the studio where she worked as a producer. It was March, cool and rainy. Afterwards he always remembered the rain; or, hardly rain at all but a steady mist hanging in the air, blurring the street lights and laying slicks of glare along the pavement under his feet.

  He didn’t like what he saw. The wine was bad, warm and greeny, and the gallery was full of people with crooked hair. There were sculptures made of wire, plastic and tampons; there was an empty glass case with a label beneath it copied from the Pitt-Rivers Museum. Dan was hungry, and he wanted to leave almost immediately. He had lost Xanthe, her small form sucked into the jittery crowd. Scanning the room for her, he liked the little edge of discomfort he felt – a reminder of their differences. He could laugh at himself – he felt young to be here, with Xanthe’s people, although they weren’t really; but they were, like Xanthe, mostly younger than he was, at the beginning rather than somehow in the middle. Sometimes Xanthe teased him, called him my old man although there were only nine years between them. He had an image of his hands on Xanthe’s waist; of her sitting on the side of the bath, a towel around her head, the smell of bleach. Then he looked at his watch. He really was hungry. They could go out to eat. He pushed himself through the crowd, to where he saw Xanthe standing near the rear of the gallery, talking to a tall man in a bright green suit. He bent down to her.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’m starving.’

  ‘Just wait,’ she said, and abandoned the green suit, pulling Dan down to her, a stage whisper at his cheek. ‘It’s awful, isn’t it? All of it. Except . . .’ and she tugged at his sleeve, dragging them both through the crowds and towards the back wall, where three dark paintings hung. Rothko? Dan thought, though he didn’t know quite where that came from; but no, these weren’t like those louring slabs of colour. You’d have to call these figurative, though it would be hard to say what the figures were. The figures, however, seemed certain enough of themselves.

  ‘These are Claire’s,’ Xanthe said. ‘Oh, and look – Claire!’ Xanthe called out. Claire turned towards them both, and smiled.

  He didn’t go to Agincourt. For a long time he sat, his cold coffee in front of him. The clerk helped the two waitresses clear away the detritus from breakfast. The three of them were neat and brisk: the man in pressed black trousers and a bright crisp shirt, white with a candy-green stripe; the women, one blonde, one dark, in short but not too short black skirts and blue shirts with white collars. The blonde came up to clear his table, smiled at him apologetically, and he nodded and pushed his chair back, allowing her to take away the coffee cups, the jug, the white plates with their smears of butter and crumbs.

  Outside the plate-glass windows the promenade was filling up. Though it was cold the sun was bright, and the people of the town had bundled up to stroll, or run, or bicycle, or skate by the whipped surface of the water. A mother and father, their boy, who must have been about six, on his bike: the boy’s determined face, the helmet perched on his head and strapped under his chin. The mother took the father’s hand; the woman said something and the man threw his head back and laughed. The plate glass didn’t make for silence, he could hear the sea, and the noise of the people, but nothing was distinct. Once he lifted his hand and felt the cold drift off the glass. Claire’s daughter, Stella, was not quite six. Dan had never met Stella and yet, as he sat at the window l
ooking out at the people, the sea, the boy with his parents, it was as if she had run into the room. He had not even seen a photograph of her yet there she was, vivid, long brown hair, pink hairclips, wellington boots and a duffel coat, a grin with one tooth missing, a grin for him. This unknown child, suddenly a bright phantom, running towards him and then vanishing.

  No one asked him to move. It was nearly noon when he rose. He might as well go out, he thought. He moved steadily through the hotel, easily. Sometimes it felt to him as if he was gliding, just an inch, or half an inch, above the muted colours of the carpet.

  ‘Dan?’

  April. Not much warmer than it had been in March. But not raining. The evenings were lighter; he was walking past the British Museum. He turned.

  ‘Claire.’

  ‘What are you doing here? I thought you lived in Mile End.’

  ‘I do.’ They were standing just past the big iron gates, not quite shut, not yet. ‘I had to – nothing. You know, get something from one of those shops on Tottenham Court Road. Electronics. A cable.’ His heart was beating faster. Did he notice it at the time? She was standing with her feet planted apart; black boots with pointed toes and wedge heels, a neat black macintosh buttoned up to her neck. She was not as tall as he was, but nearly; her eyes were cool and grey, and they looked almost straight into his. They stood for what seemed to him a long time, not speaking. Perhaps it was only a moment, but later, in his memory, he would pull it out, hold it up to the light, the way the threads of grey in her dark hair made him think of feathers, the way she had made up her face, carefully, not as disguise but as – protection, he thought. Tiny diamonds in her ears above the green velvet scarf she wore. ‘I liked your paintings,’ he said. ‘I thought they were the only good things there.’

  ‘That’s because they were,’ she said, her breath blown out of her flared nostrils, her mouth turned down at its corners. ‘It’s not saying much.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘What about the tampon thing?’ Then she did laugh; they both did. ‘Would you like a drink?’ he said. ‘Or do you have to get home?’ Xanthe was at some screening. He did not have to get home.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ she answered. ‘Have to get home. Not yet, anyway.’ It was Friday night.

  Did it happen then? Did it happen the first time he saw her, standing in front of those deep, obscure oils in the Mayfair gallery? Sometimes he found himself thinking that perhaps it had happened long before that, long before they’d ever met. What idiocy, what lunacy. As if there was destiny, something in the cold stars. There was nothing: only distance, mathematics, a vacuum.

  They walked together, in silence, in step. He led her: his feet took him to a bar he’d been to once, years ago, a place in Soho down a steep flight of stairs. It was dark inside, a low vault with naked brick walls and candles on the table although it was hardly later than afternoon.

  ‘Red or white?’ he asked at the bar. The wines were chalked on a board.

  ‘Don’t mind. Well, I do really. White,’ she said.

  He asked for a bottle of Sancerre and pulled out his wallet. The barman, who was very tall with a shaved head and earrings, silently took his £20 note, gave him not much change, the bottle, two glasses, a little bowl of olives; all this they transported to a table.

  He didn’t know what to say. She was a stranger. Her knee almost touched his. He could have pulled his chair back; so could she. They did not.

  ‘Are you a student?’ he said at last. ‘An art student?’ All the others at the show had been. He knew she wasn’t, though; she heard that in his voice. She wasn’t like the others, with their spiky hair and rollups – like his students, like Xanthe. At the gallery she’d been quiet. Xanthe had talked about – something. Claire had stood in front of her paintings and watched him, watched them, the room. Shyness, or reserve, he hadn’t known.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ she said. ‘Well, I am, but not full-time, if that’s what you mean.’ She shook her head. ‘This light must be very flattering, if that’s what you think.’

  He shrugged, embarrassed. It was hard to tell her age. Her face was not beautiful, but neatly made of ordered planes and fine angles. But he looked closely at her now; again she allowed his gaze, holding his eyes with hers. ‘I couldn’t stand it, anyway. Being a student. Even when I was one. Well, that was twenty years ago. I’ve always painted. I thought it would be good to do it in a more structured way; also, I’m making bigger canvases now, and I can keep them at the school.’

  ‘So you . . .’ He didn’t know how to frame the question. There was too much he wanted to know.

  ‘I work,’ she said. ‘I’m a dentist, actually.’

  He made a noise. It was a laugh that stopped itself. She looked suddenly solemn.

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing, I . . .

  She had crossed her arms in front of her chest. The nails of her hands were neat, round, unpolished, and she wore no rings.

  ‘Kidding,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry. People seem to be surprised. And they don’t know any dentists. But really, I am.’ One grey eye closed and opened again.

  ‘And they probably think, oh no, it’s been ages since I’ve been.’

  ‘Generally.’

  ‘Artist-dentist. An unusual combination.’

  ‘Maybe. Or there could be hundreds of us out there. Have you ever asked your dentist what she does in her spare time?’

  ‘His spare time.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘I’ll have to get home,’ she said. ‘Not yet, but just to warn you. Nanny’s waiting.’

  ‘You have kids?’ The feeling of something bursting and deflating. Whatever he had begun to imagine suddenly changed; but she saw, he was sure, what he was thinking. The flame of the candle on their table flinched, jerked a little and guttered, then rose again, straight and clear.

  ‘Stella,’ she said. ‘My daughter. She’s five. It’s just the two of us.’

  There was no adequate response to this, or not one where the etiquette was available to him. I’m sorry was tactless and, in any case, incorrect. In the afternoon, in this dark bar, his wife not many streets away, he was not sorry at all.

  He walked out of the hotel and headed not for the promenade but for the main street of the town. This ran parallel to the sea, but back a few blocks: narrow, straight streets where some of the houses were spindly, dark edifices from a story by Edgar Allan Poe, all stained wood and turrets. This place had been popular at the turn of the last century; these faded fantasy mansions were the remnants of that. They were grand no longer. Their paint was bubbling or stripped away by the salt air entirely, clapboards and decorative carving splintered and torn. Some had been pulled down, he guessed, to make way for ugly modern flats with big terraces that looked as if they had been built to overlook the sea, but did not: they faced into the street, only staring at the other ugly modern blocks across from them. Now, in winter, they stared at nothing: steel shutters were rolled down over their faces.

  But the main street was pleasant. On a Sunday morning quite a few of the shops were open – the patisserie, the boulangerie, the flower shop, the newsagent’s. People carried baskets filled with fruit and vegetables, with bottles, with terrines wrapped in wax paper and tied with string. Everything was pleasingly, but not ostentatiously, displayed behind glass, on tidy shelves; and in front of the flower shop there was a little row of Christmas trees in pots, their branches tied with gingham ribbons. He didn’t need to buy anything, of course. He would eat at the hotel – or somewhere else – or not eat at all. When he was on his own, lately, he often didn’t bother until he discovered he was so hungry he had a headache, or felt ill. The rhythms of his life had gone and he did not feel moved to replace them; he couldn’t see what there was to replace them with. Sometimes, for an instant, he could imagine a possibility of something; it could be as simple as a scent. Just now, as he walked, it happened: a quick whiff of frying, of frites, and the drift of hot oil brought
saliva to his mouth and made him feel as if this could be what he wanted, that it might be this easy. And then the odour vanished, and so did the desire.

  At the newsagent’s he stopped to buy cigarettes. It had been a long time since he smoked. He stood behind the counter for a while, staring up at what seemed, for a small shop in a small town, a vast selection of tobacco of every variety. ‘M’sieur?’ the woman behind the counter asked him. She was tall and pale, thick red hair pulled back in a plait.

  ‘Ah – un moment,’ he said. His French was not very good at all. She nodded, and went back to leafing through a magazine. A man moved past him, and the woman looked up to sell him three postcards and a pack of gum; someone else came in and bought a newspaper, a woman with a little boy in tow. The boy was about four, he guessed; wore a coat with a velvet collar. Stella.

  The woman with the boy left. The door banged; a draught of freezing air blew by. It took a minute for him to be able to speak, and then he said, ‘Mademoiselle . . .’ and the woman looked up from her magazine. ‘Un paquet – les cigares . . .’ He pointed. More interesting than cigarettes. He saw a little wooden box shut with a brass clasp, a pattern of stars scattered on the label: Les Pléiades.