were a species of wild animal, ravening and unappeasable, but the sea does nothing, it is simply there, its own reality, like night, or the sky. Is it the heave and lurch and sudden suck of it that frightens? Or is it that it is so emphatically not our medium? I think of the world beneath the ocean, the obverse of ours, the negative of ours, with its sandy plains and silent valleys and great sunken mountain ranges, and something fails me in myself, something that is mine draws away from me in horror. Water is uncanny in the way, single-minded and uncontrollable, it keeps seeking its own level, like nothing else in the world that we inhabit. There are storms, yes, and tidal waves, and even in these temperate zones the estuarial bore, or eagre, but such phenomena are not due to any inherent qualities of water itself, for water, though fluid and eerily always beyond our grasp, surely is essentially inert. Yet it puts us off balance; one is always at an angle to the ocean—keeping one’s head above water ensures that. To wade into the waves is to seem to fall without falling, feeling the steep squirming sandy incline under one’s slowed-down, leaden tread. Yes, the inhuman constant levelling, and the two-dimensional, angled aspect which we see of it, these are the characteristics of water that unnerve us. And drowning, of course, drowning is strange, I mean strange for those on shore. It all seems done so discreetly. The onlooker, attention caught by a distant feathery cry, peers out intently but sees nothing of the struggle, the helpless silencing, the awful slow-motion thrashing, the last, long fall into the bottomless and ever-blackening blue. No. All that is to be seen is a moment of white water, and a hand, languidly sinking.
The sea was not blue now, though; it hardly ever is. In our latitudes it is more often a gleaming grey, or purplish, like a bruise, or, after the churnings of a gale, marl-coloured. But rarely, rarely blue.
The black bird on the rock opened wide its wings and shook them vigorously and after a long moment of absolute, cruciform stillness carefully refolded them.
When I was young I had no fear of the sea, and loved the beach. Disporting myself on that narrow strip of not-quite-land wedged between sky and water, I would feel all down the imperceptibly declining curve of the afternoon a sense of the great world’s glamour. Some girl in cheap sunglasses and crimpled swimsuit would catch my attention and seem a glimmering naiad. The yard of undersprung soft sand at the edge of the waves was a trampoline on which I trod with a gracefulness not to be achieved elsewhere in the gawky world of boyhood. And then the sea itself, running off flat to the low horizon, like a limitless promise—no, I had no dread of it, then. As a boy I was a fair swimmer, in my unruly way, all splash and thrash. Especially I loved to dive, loved that moment of breathless almost-panic under water, the eerie greenish glow, the bulging silence, the sense of slide and shift and sway. My father too was fascinated by things maritime. He did not swim, had never been out on the ocean, but he was irresistibly drawn to its margins. He would roll up the bottoms of his trousers and paddle in the shallows, like all the other fathers, but away from them, keeping himself to himself. In my memory it is like a scene in one of those gaudy seaside postcards of the time, him there in his sleeveless pullover and sun hat made from a white handkerchief knotted at the corners, paddling in the running surf, while up the beach my mother sits on a towel with her embarrassingly bare legs stuck straight out before her, deep in a novelette. Later, when the sun lost strength and the light grew heavy, and we collected our things and mashed our way back through the dunes in the direction of the train station, my father would maintain a remote, frowning silence, which even my mother would not try to break, as if he had been away somewhere distant, and had seen incommunicable things.
A shimmer, a shiver in the air. Uncanny sensation, as of a chill presentiment. I peered about the beach. Still there was no one, yet I seemed not alone. I felt a sudden, familiar cold, and scrambled to my feet and at a half- crouch scuttled up the beach in fright. Had my phantoms followed me? At the edge of the hazel wood there was a sort of hut part sunk in the sand, a hide for hunters, I suppose, made of tarred planks warped by sunlight and the salt winds, just three walls and a leaning roof and a board wedged lengthwise to make a bench for sitting. The thing was so old and weathered it had lost almost all trace of human industry, and seemed one with the gnarled trees massed behind it, with the scaly sand and clumps of podded seaweed and strewn driftwood. I went inside and sat down, out of sight of that inhospitable shoreline and the sighing waves. There was the usual litter of cigarette ends and rusty cans and yellowed scraps of newsprint. I imagined myself a fugitive landing up here out of the way of the world’s harm. Perhaps, I thought, perhaps this is what I need to do, finally to give it all up, home, wife, possessions, renounce it all for good, rid myself of every last thing and come and live in some such unconsidered spot as this. What would I require for survival, except a cup, a dish, a blanket? Free then of all encumbrance, all distraction, I might be able at last to confront myself without shock or shrinking. For is this not what I am after, the pure conjunction, the union of self with sundered self? I am weary of division, of being always torn. I shut my eyes and in a sort of rapture see myself stepping backward slowly into the cloven shell, and the two halves of it, still moist with glair, closing around me…
When I came out of the hut and looked about again the day seemed different, as if the light had shifted, as if a shadow had swept across the sand and left something behind it, a darkening, a chill. Beyond the little waves a patch of water grew a hump, and then there was a heave, and a brief churning, and a figure reared up, clad all in black, with a flashing mask for a face and carrying in one hand what seemed a slender trident. My heart reared on its tethers, bumping like a wind-tossed balloon. The seabird rose from its rock and flew away with a lazily majestic motion. Then Poseidon pulled off his mask and spat, and, seeing me, waved his harpoon gun and flip-flopped away over the shingle. His rubber suit had the same thick dull sheen as the seabird’s plumage. I turned and plunged into the wood, blunderingly. Coming, I had got lost, and now I thought I knew the straight way back, but I was wrong.
I am thinking of my daughter. At once an angry buzzing of emotions starts up in my breast. She exasperates me, I confess it. I do not trust her. I know, I know, there is even a name for the syndrome from which she suffers, yet half the time I think there is nothing at all the matter with her, that her fits and fallings, her obsessions, her black days and violent sleepless nights, are all no more than a strategy to make me pay for some enormity she imagines I visited on her in the far past. At times she has a look, a fleeting, sidelong, faintly smiling look, in which I seem to glimpse a wholly other she, cold and sly and secretly laughing. With such ingenuity does she connect the workings of the world to her own fate. Everything that happens, she is convinced, carries a specific and personal reference to her. There is nothing, not a turn in the weather, or a chance word spoken in the street, that does not covertly pass on to her some profound message of warning or encouragement. I used to try to reason with her, talking myself into spluttering, head-shaking, wildly laughing transports of frustration and rage, while she stood silently before me, as if in the stocks, shoulders up and arms hanging and her chin drawn down to her collarbone, frowning in sullen refusal and defiance. There was no keeping track of her moods, I never knew when she might veer aside and turn and confront me with a new version of herself, a whole new map of that strange, intense and volatile world that she alone inhabits. For that is how she makes it seem, that she lives in a place where there is no one else. What an actor she is! She puts on a character with an ease and persuasiveness that I could never match. Yet perhaps she is not feigning, perhaps that is her secret, that she does not act, but variously
Lydia never shared my doubts. This is, of course, another source of annoyance to me. How she would run to Cass, breathless with forced enthusiasm, and try to press her into the latest game she had devised to divert the child’s attention from herself and her manias. And Cass would play along for a while, all smiles and trembling enthusiasm, only to turn away in the end and retreat again listlessly into herself. Then Lydia would seem the crestfallen child and Cass the withholding adult.
She was five or six when she displayed the first symptoms of her condition. I came home late one night after a performance and she was standing in her nightdress in the darkness at the top of the stairs, talking. Even yet, as I remember her there, a slow shiver crawls across the back of my scalp. Her eyes were open and her face was empty of expression; she looked like a waxwork model of herself. She was speaking in a low, uninflected voice, the voice of an oracle. I could not make out what she was saying except that it was something about an owl, and the moon. I thought she must be rehearsing in her sleep a nursery rhyme or jingle out of infancy. I took her by the shoulders and turned her about and walked her back to her room. She is the one who at such times is supposed to experience strange auras, but that night it was I who noticed the smell. It was the smell, I am convinced, of what was, is, wrong with her. It is not at all extraordinary, just a dull flat grey faint stink, like that of unwashed hair, or a garment left in a drawer and gone stale. I recognised it. I had an uncle, he died when I was young, I barely remember him, who played the accordion, and wore his hat in the house, and walked with a crutch. He had that smell, too. The crutch was an old-fashioned one, a single thick rough stave and a curved crosspiece padded with sweat-stained cloth; the part of the upright where his hand grasped it was polished to the texture of grey silk. I
