Authors: Tanith Lee
Sea View curved right around the bottom
of The Rise. Behind its railing, the cliff lurched forward into the night and
tumbled on the sea. Number 19 was the farthest house down, the last in the
terrace. An odd curly little alley ran off to the side of it, leading along the
downslope of the cliff and out of sight, probably to the beach. The sound of
the tide, coupled with the rain, was savage, close and immensely wet.
I pushed through the gate and walked up
the short path. A dim illumination came from the glass panels of the door.
There was no bell, just a knocker. I knocked, and waited like the traveller in
the poem. Like him, it didn’t seem I was going to get an answer. An even more
wretched end to my escapade than I had foreseen. I hadn’t considered the
possibility of absence. Somehow I’d got the notion Mrs. Besmouth-Antacid seldom
went out. It must be difficult, with him the way he was, whichever way that happened
to be. So, why did I want to get caught up in it?
A minute more, and I turned with a
feeling of letdown and relief. I was halfway along the path when the front door
opened.
“Hi you,” she said.
At this uninviting salute, I looked
back. I didn’t recognise her, because I hadn’t properly been able to see her on
the previous occasion. A fizz of fawn hair, outlined by the inner light, stood
round her head like a martyr’s crown. She was clad in a fiery apron.
“Mrs. Besmouth?” I went towards her,
extending the carrier bag like meat offered to a wild dog.
“Besmouth, that’s right. What is it?”
She didn’t know me at all.
I said the name of the store, a password,
but she only blinked.
“You came in about your dressing gown,
but it hadn’t arrived. It came today. I’ve got it here.”
She looked at the bag.
“All right,” she said. “What’s the
delivery charge?”
“No charge. I just thought I’d drop it
in to you.”
She went on looking at the bag. The rain
went on falling.
“You live round here?” she demanded.
“No. The other end of the bay, actually.”
“Long way for you to come,” she said
accusingly.
“Well... I had to come up to The Rise
tonight. And it seemed a shame, the way you came in and just missed the
delivery. Here, do take it, or the rain may get in the bag.”
She extended her hand and took the
carrier.
“It was kind of you,” she said. Her
voice was full of dislike because I’d forced her into a show of gratitude. “People
don’t usually bother nowadays.”
“No, I know. But you said you hadn’t got
time to keep coming back, and I could see that, with—with your son...”
“Son,” she interrupted. “So you know he’s
my son, do you?”
I felt hot with embarrassed fear.
“Well, whoever—”
“Haven’t you got an umbrella?” she said.
“Er— no—”
“You’re soaked,” she said. I smiled
foolishly, and her dislike reached its climax. “You’d better come in a minute.”
“Oh no, really that isn’t—”
She stood aside in the doorway, and I
slunk past her into the hall. The door banged to.
I experienced instant claustrophobia and
a yearning to run, but it was too late now. The glow was murky, there was a
faintly musty smell, not stale exactly, more like the odour of a long closed
box.
“This way.”
We went by the stairs and a shut door,
into a small back room, which in turn opened on a kitchen. There was a
smokeless-coal fire burning in an old brown fireplace. The curtains were drawn,
even at the kitchen windows, which I could see through the doorway. A clock
ticked, setting the scene as inexorably as in a radio play. It reminded me of
my grandmother’s house years before, except that in my grandmother’s house you
couldn’t hear the sea. And then it came to me that I couldn’t pick it up here,
either. Maybe some freak meander of the cliff blocked off the sound, as it
failed to in the street.
I’d been looking for the wheelchair and,
not seeing it, had relaxed into an awful scared boredom. Then I registered the
high-backed dark red chair, set facing the fire. I couldn’t see him, and he was
totally silent, yet I knew at once the chair was full of him. A type of
electric charge went off under my heart. I felt quite horrible, as if I’d
screamed with laughter at a funeral.
“Take your coat off,” said Mrs. Besmouth.
I protested feebly, trying not to gaze at the red chair. But she was used to
managing those who could not help themselves, and she pulled the garment from
me. “Sit down by the fire. I’m making a pot of tea.”
I wondered why she was doing it,
including me, offering her hospitality. She didn’t want to, at least, I didn’t
think she did. Maybe she was lonely. There appeared to be no Mr. Besmouth.
Those unmistakable spoors of the suburban male were everywhere absent.
To sit on the settee by the fire, I had
to go round the chair. As I did so, he came into view. He was just as I
recalled, even his position was unaltered. His hands rested loosely and
beautifully on his knees. He watched the fire, or something beyond the fire. He
was dressed neatly, as he had been in the shop. I wondered if she dressed
him in these universal faded jeans, the dark pullover. Nondescript. The fire
streamed down his hair and beaded the ends of his lashes.
“Hallo,” I said. I wanted to touch his shoulder
quietly, but did not dare.
Immediately I spoke, she called from her
kitchen: “It’s no good talking to him. Just leave him be, he’ll be all right.”
Admonished and intimidated, I sat down.
The heavy anger was slow in coming. Whatever was wrong with him, this couldn’t
be the answer. My back to the kitchen, my feet still in their plastic boots
which let water, I sat and looked at him.
I hadn’t made a mistake. He really was
amazing. How could she have mothered anything like this? The looks must have
been on the father’s side. And where had the illness come from? And what was
it? Could I ask her, in front of him?
He was so far away, not here in this
room at all. But where was he? He didn’t look—oh God what word would do? —
deficient
.
Leonardo da Vinci, staring through the face of one of his own half-finished,
exquisite, lunar madonnas, staring through at some truth he was still seeking....
that was the look. Not vacant. Not.... missing—
She came through with her pot of tea, the
cups and sugar and milk.
“This is very kind of you,” I said.
She grunted. She poured the tea in a cup
and gave it to me. She had put sugar in, without asking me, and I don’t take sugar.
The tea became a strange, alien, sickly brew, drunk for ritual. She poured tea
into a mug, sugared it, and took it to the chair. I watched, breathing through
my mouth. What would happen?
She took up his hand briskly, and
introduced the mug into it. I saw his long fingers grip the handle. His face did
not change. With a remote gliding gesture, he brought the mug to his lips. He
drank. We both, she and I, looked on, as if at the first man, drinking.
“That’s right,” she said.
She fetched her own cup and sat on the
settee beside me. I didn’t like to be so close to her, and yet, we were now
placed together, like an audience, before the profile of the red chair, and the
young man.
I wanted to question her, ask a hundred
things. His name, his age. If we could get him to speak. If he was receiving
any treatment, and for
what
, exactly.
How
I wanted to know that.
It burned in me, my heart hammered, I was braised in racing waves of adrenalin.
But I asked her nothing like that.
You could not ask her these things, or I
couldn’t. And he was there, perhaps understanding, the ultimate constraint.
“It’s very cosy here,” I said. She
grunted. “But I keep wondering why you can’t hear the sea. Surely—”
“Yes,” she said, “I don’t get much time
to go into the town centre. What with one thing and another.”
That came over as weird. She belonged to
the category of person who would do just that—skip an idea that had no interest
for her and pass straight on to something that did. And yet, what was it? She’d
been a fraction too fast. But I was well out of my depth, and had been from the
start.
“Surely,” I said, “couldn’t the council
provide some sort of assistance—a home-help—”
“Don’t want anything like that.”
“But you’d be entitled—”
“I’m entitled to my peace and quiet.”
“Well, yes—”
“Daniel” she said sharply, “drink your
tea. Drink it. It’ll get cold.”
I jumped internally again, and again
violently. She’d said his name. Not alliterative after all. Daniel...! She’d
also demonstrated he could hear, and respond to a direct order, for he was
raising the mug again, drinking again.
“Now,” she said to me, “if you’ve
finished your tea, I’ll have to ask you to go. I’ve his bath to see to, you
understand.”
I sat petrified, blurting some sort of
apology. My brief brush with the bizarre was over and done. I tried not to
visualise, irresistibly, his slim, pale, probably flawless male body, naked in
water. He would be utterly helpless, passive, and it frightened me.
I got up.
“Thank you,” I said.
“No, it was good of you to bring the
dressing gown.”
I couldn’t meet her eyes, and had not
been able to do so at any time.
I wanted at least to say his name,
before I went away. But I couldn’t get it to my lips, my tongue wouldn’t form
it.
I was out of the room, in my coat, the
door was opening. The rain had stopped. There wasn’t even an excuse to linger. I
stepped on to the path.
“Oh, well. Goodbye, Mrs. Besmouth.”
Her face stayed shut, and then she shut
the door too.
I walked quickly along Sea View Terrace,
walking without having yet caught up to myself, an automaton. This was
naturally an act, to convince Mrs. Antacid, and the unseen watchers in their
houses, and the huge dark watcher of the night itself, that I knew precisely
where I wanted to go now, and had no more time to squander. After about half a minute,
self-awareness put me wise, and I stopped dead. Then I did what I really felt
compelled to do, still without understanding why. I reversed my direction, walked
back along the terrace, and into the curling alley that ran down between Number
19, and the shoulder of the cliff.
I didn’t have to go very far to see the
truth of the amorphous thing I had somehow deductively fashioned already, in my
mind. The back of Number 19, which would normally have looked towards the sea,
was enclosed by an enormous brick wall. It was at least fourteen feet high—the topmost
windows of the house were barely visible above it. I wandered how the council
had been persuaded to permit such a wall. Maybe some consideration of sea-gales
had come into it.... The next door house, I now noticed for the first time,
appeared empty, touched by mild dereliction. A humped black tree that looked
like a deformed cypress grew in the garden there, a further barrier against
open vistas. No lights were visible in either house, even where the
preposterous wall allowed a glimpse of them.
I thought about prisons, while the
excluded sea roared ferociously at the bottom of the alley.
I walked along the terrace again, and
caught the bus home.
Sunday
was cold and clear, and I went out with my camera, because there was too much
pure-ice wind to sketch. The water was like mercury under colourless sunlight.
That evening, Angela had a party to which I had been invited. I drank too much,
and a good-looking oaf called Ray mauled me about. I woke on Monday morning
with the intense moral shame that results from the knowledge of truly wasted time.
Monday was my free day, or the day on
which I performed my personal chores. I was loading the bag ready for the
launderette when I remembered—the connection is elusive, but possibly Freudian—that
I hadn’t got the pre-paid receipt back from Mrs. Besmouth. Not that it would
matter too much. Such records tended to be scrappy in Angela’s department. I
could leave it, and no one would die.
At eleven-thirty, I was standing by the door
of Number 19, the knocker knocked and my heart was in my mouth.
I’ve always been obsessive. It’s brought
me some success, and quite a lot of disillusion, not to mention definite hurt.
But I’m used to the excitement and trauma of it, and even then I was; used to my
heart in my mouth, the trembling in my hands, the deep breath I must take
before I could speak.
The door opened on this occasion quite
quickly. She stood in the pale hard sunlight. I was beginning to learn her face,
and its recalcitrant, seldom-varying expression. But she had on a different apron.
“Oh,” she said, “It’s you.”
She’d expected me. She didn’t exactly
show it, she hadn’t guessed what my excuse would be. But she’d known, just as I
had, that I would come back.