The Sea, the Sea

Voi che sapete had been over for some time and Lizzie was now singing Roses in Picardy. This was a song which Aunt Estelle used to sing, accompanying herself on the piano in the drawing room at Ramsdens. There came to me, with the peculiar pain of that memory, the idea that James might have asked Lizzie to sing it. Then I remembered that I had told Lizzie I liked it, but not why. Lizzie was singing it for me.

Roses in Picardy was a bit much. As I climbed down onto the lawn James, sensing me, sat up. I sat down near him but would not look at him, though he was now looking at me. After a moment he reached out and touched me, and I murmured ‘Yes, yes’. The song ended.

After that, and until the terrible thing happened, the evening seemed quietly to break up, or to become diffused and gently chaotic like the later stages of a good party. Or perhaps it is all just confused in my memory. There was some light over the rocks, though I do not recall where it came from. Perhaps the clouds were still giving off light. A moon had made its appearance, randomly shaped and spotty, large and pale as a cloud itself. The fierce foam at the edge of the sea seemed luminous. I wandered looking for Lizzie, who had vanished. Everyone seemed to be walking about on the rocks, precariously holding glasses in their hands. An owl was hooting somewhere inland and the intermittent voices of my guests sounded equally distant, equally frail and hollow. I also wanted to find James, because I felt that perhaps I had been rude to him. I wanted to say something to him, I was not sure what, about Aunt Estelle. She had shone somehow upon my childhood. Che cosa e amor indeed. I went to the cliff and watched the waves pounding it. There was a soft growling of thunder. I could see the glowing whitenesses of the wave-crests out to sea. Gilbert’s babbling baritone started up not far off. Stay dainty nymphs and speak, shall we play barley-break, tra la la? Then later on, in another quarter, Titus also by himself could be heard rendering Jock of Hazeldean. There was something absurd and touching about the solipsistic self-absorption and self-satisfaction of these drunken singers. Then at last I heard Lizzie’s voice distantly singing Full Fathom Five. I listened carefully but could get no sense of direction, so loud was the accompaniment of the restless rushing sea. Then I thought, how strangely her voice echoes. It seems almost amplified. She must be singing inside the tower.

I was still fairly near the house and I set off through what was now a somewhat darker scene. The luminous clouds had been quenched, the moon was smaller and a little brighter, not yet quite radiant, in a near-midsummer sky which still had inklings of light. I could hear Lizzie’s voice singing, calling me, over and over again. Ding dong ding dong bell, ding dong ding dong bell… I stumbled along through the rocks, making the little detours which I now knew so well. I reached the bridge over Minn’s cauldron and paused there, as I always did, to look down into the smooth pit where the waves of the incoming tide were lashing themselves in a foaming self-destructive fury. A light seemed to rise here in the spray out of the sea itself. I looked down and it was like looking into a deep dark green glass. And then-suddenly-somebody came up behind me and pushed me in.

As I am writing this story it will be evident that I survived, and I cannot hope to convey what the experience was like, how long it was, how terrible, how hopeless: a primal experience of a total loss of hope. Falling, what the child fears, what the man dreads, is itself the image of death, of the defencelessness of the body, of its frailty and mortality, its absolute subjection to alien causes. Even in a harmless fall in the road there is a little moment of horror when the faller realizes that he cannot help himself; he has been taken over by a relentless mechanism and must continue with it to the end and be subject to the consequences. ‘There is nothing more I can do.’ How long, how infinitely expansible, a second is when it contains this thought, which is an effigy of death. A complete fall into the void, something which I had often imagined on aeroplanes, is of course the most terrible thing of all. Hands, feet, muscles, all the familiar protective mechanisms of the body are suddenly useless. The enmity of matter is unleashed against the frail breakable crushable animal form, always perhaps an alien in this hard mineral gravitational scene.

It was as if each part of the body experienced its separate despair. My back and waist felt the dreadful imprint of the hands which with great sudden violence and indubitable intent propelled me over the edge. My hands reached out in vain for something to clasp. My feet, still touching the rock with which they were parting company, jerked in a weak useless spasm, a last ghostly attempt to retain balance. Then they were jerking in empty space and I was falling head downward, as if my head and shoulders were made of lead. At the same time I felt, or thought as a kind of final thought, the fragility of my head and even knew that my hands were now trying to protect it. My trunk twisted sickeningly, trying in vain to make sense of its position. I actually saw, in the diffused midsummer darkness-light, the creamy curling waves just below me, and the particular spiral of their movement in the confined space. Then I was in the water whose intense cold surprised me with a separate shock, and I made the instinctive swimmer’s movement of trying to right myself; but my body was aware that no swimming could take place in that vortex. I felt as if my neck were breaking as I looked up to see a dome of dark faintly translucent green, the wave above me. I was choking and swallowing water, absorbed in the one task of getting another breath. At the same time I was able to think: this is the end. I fought, my whole body fought, now flailing senselessly in a maelstrom of powers which seemed about to dismember me. Then my head struck violently against the smooth rock and I lost consciousness.

I was lying on my back on the rocks. I opened my eyes and saw a star. I had been having an odd familiar dream, and yet I had never had that dream before. I dreamt that cousin James was kissing me on the mouth. I was aware of the star and of a marvel: that I was breathing. I apprehended my breath as a great thing, a sort of cosmic movement, natural and yet miraculous. Slowly, gently, deeply, decisively, I was breathing. Somewhere beneath me there was a dull steady uproar, and I lay in the cup of it and looked at the star. I felt pain and yet I felt at ease, detached from it. I lay relaxed as if I had woken from some golden sleep and would now perhaps sleep again. I closed my eyes. I breathed.

Mingled with the noise, then separated from it, I heard other sounds, discerned voices, and I knew where I was. I was lying on the flat piece of rock that led to the bridge. I was also aware, but in an entirely detached way, of what had happened to me. I heard someone groan, perhaps Perry, someone sob, perhaps Titus or Lizzie. James’s voice said, ‘Keep back, don’t crowd.’ Another voice said, ‘I think he’s breathing.’ I thought, I suppose I ought to tell them I’m all right. Am I all right? I composed a sentence which I thought I might utter soon: I am perfectly all right, what is this fuss about? I felt curiously unwilling to speak, it seemed so difficult. I realized that my mouth was open. I made an effort of will and closed my mouth, then opened it again and began ‘I’m-’, and could go no further. Some sort of sound had emerged. I made a convulsive movement, an embryonic attempt to rise. I went on breathing.

Someone said, ‘Thank God.’

The voices went on talking.

‘I think we could move him now.’

‘But suppose some bones are broken?’

‘We must keep him warm, he can’t stay here.’

This argument went on for some time. Then they argued about whether they could improvise a stretcher and which was the best way to go. At last they carried me, or hauled me, with what seemed extreme roughness, in a blanket. The journey over the rocks was a nightmare. I tried to say I could walk but (as I gathered later) produced only unintelligible moaning. All my pains had now located themselves. My head was very painful and the movement made lights flash in my eyes. There was a terrible pain like toothache in my arm. I wondered if my arm was broken and the bone was beginning to break through the skin. There was a plate of anguish in my back. My bearers were fantastically inefficient and confused, constantly quarrelling about the route, and slipping and banging me against the rocks.

At last they got me into the kitchen and, with indescribable clumsiness, pulled all my clothes off and pummelled me with towels and pulled other clothes on and had arguments about whether I should be given soup, brandy, aspirins. When they had the bright idea of lighting a fire they could not find any dry wood, then could not find the matches. At last I was lying on cushions on the floor in front of the fire in the little red room. As I became warm I felt less pain, and when I was lying undisturbed I relaxed and began to feel sleepy. I felt relief and something of the strange ease which I had felt as I looked up at the star. And only then, just before I slept, did I remember that it was not an accident. Somebody pushed me.

I must here record something which I only remembered later and which I was then half disposed to think was a