The Sea Change (16 page)

‘There’s an electric carpet sweeper and quite a lot of soap powder,’ she said cheerfully; ‘so if we could find a laundry to take this, everything will be all
right.’

‘I was thinking of booking an hotel until this was cleared up.’

‘I really think that would be the most unwarrantable extravagance.’

‘Do you?’ She looked so earnest about it that he began to feel light-hearted.

‘Yes I do. I mean it really
is
my fault that everything is in a mess, and the least I can do is to clear it up. I do know about cleaning houses,’ she added anxiously,
‘and feel confident of my success.’

‘Do you?’ He was smiling at her: he found her language sustaining.

‘If you’ll trust me: it’s the least I can do.’

‘I must say I’ve never seen anybody either confident or cheerful about the least they could do before. I trust you implicitly, but you’ll have to tell me what to do.’ He
suddenly found himself viewing the prospect with enthusiasm: the experience was a new one, and she seemed perfectly suited to directing it.

‘Find a laundry, wash up, and make a shopping list are the first things.’

‘What about lunch? What about our Chinese restaurant?’

But she said that there wouldn’t be time, and perhaps they could have sandwiches. So that, in the end, was how they spent the day, and having decided upon it – or consented to it
– everything went easily for them. Years of money, travelling, and Lillian’s ill health had left him ignorant of housekeeping, and he recognized that he was probably unduly impressed by
Alberta’s practical intelligence over it, but he was none the less delighted with the pleasant results she made before his eyes. They made a shopping list and he went shopping obediently to
buy a great many things that had not occurred to him since he was young and poor. Then, having done all she expected, he bought wine, fruit juices, and whiskey for Jimmy: flowers – tulips,
lilac, narcissi, and freesias – for Lillian: then he wanted to find something for her – couldn’t think of anything that he was sure she would like him to give her – got
desperate, and bought a box of marrons glacés.

The porter, whom he had not seen on his way out, met him at the door of the taxi with suspicious alacrity, and said he’d sure bought a few items for the home. Emmanuel unwisely asked after
the monkey; the porter’s face took on an expression of hunted sentiment, and said that he’d called all the apartments, and of those that replied, nobody had ordered a monkey. He carted
Emmanuel’s load to the elevator and then stood in its door looking uncomfortable. Finally he asked if Emmanuel had by any chance a banana handy. No. It was the monkey’s eyes that were
getting him down. After all, the notice simply said that the monkey ate four bananas a day; it didn’t say that it had already eaten them; there was no chart or anything where you could strike
off the bananas as the monkey ate them – and meanwhile it sat in that goddam cage looking mournful and blaming him and he wasn’t at all sure how much more he could take. Emmanuel pushed
him gently out of the way, and advised him to get bananas.

Alberta seemed to have done so much that he was almost shocked. The living room was clean and orderly: it was now the charming room he remembered. Two bedrooms were done and their adjoining
bathroom; she was just starting on the other two and she’d made up all the beds. She had a large transparent smudge on her forehead, and her hair was tied back from her head in a tail. He
said that they must stop to have lunch, and she said that she wanted to finish all the rooms first excepting the kitchen: he felt it would be dangerous to stop her. So he went and sat in the living
room, and wondered vaguely what it would be like to live somewhere – to have some roots that he had never had since he had left home that November morning. The digs, the theatres, the top
back rooms, the faded shady little boarding houses, the arty pinched guest houses kept by war widows who had frozen and starved and ground out of him the pittance for their roofs which was their
only hope – the miserable appearances which he had contributed towards keeping up – and the rooms themselves, multiplying now out of his memory into myriad icy draughts from sash
windows; wardrobe doors that flew open to flush forth sour sweat and moth balls; the spilled powder and hairpins in the top drawers of dressing tables; the threadbare carpets held together by aged
dirt and grease; the creaking skeleton beds with fibrous rigid blankets; the chamber pots and sooty lace curtains; the daguerreotypes of Disraeli and Henry Irving and
First Love
; the spotted
mirrors and explosive cane chairs; the papers of anonymous flora that roved and climbed, wriggled and wilted over countless walls; the empty grates with paper fans; the cold, the wet feet, the
loneliness . . . What had sustained him then? It was easy to remember. The theatres, of course, a new one each week, but above all, the plays; in most of them strong sentimental or melodramatic
meat – there was not their equivalent entertainment today even in the cinema – the plots were rich, like dark plum cake, the ideas behind them simple. Right prevailed and there was no
doubt about what was right; Love won through; dramatic justice was done to characters who attempted to thwart courage or chastity; motives were declaimed from the start, and the language (except
for minor character parts) made no attempt at contemporary idiom. But when he was in his early teens and working with a touring company, these plays and the people in them, this language, these
principles, were life – all and more than he had ever asked of it, and for years he lived with this inversion of reality; from the moment each time that the company took possession of an
empty dim theatre, and he was on the stage with its menacing odour of size – its dim whiffs of gas – its chalky sweetmeat draughts, he felt, helping to fly backcloths and brace flats,
that he was preparing the scene for life. He did not expect to take any part in it: he had been engaged as a general dogsbody – he shifted scenery, did the calling, fetched drinks for the
cast, cleaned out dressing rooms, distributed handbills, packed and unpacked clothes and prop baskets, patched flats, made noises off with tea trays, coconut shells, air pistols, and his own voice,
and went on the book for rehearsals. Once, they tried him with a one-line part in an historical drama. He was to come on at the end of the second act and announce the sudden death of a main
character to the assembled company. He had no rehearsal for this, as he knew the play by heart and was a last-minute substitution – they simply gave him the clothes and told him to make
himself up. This had taken a long and exciting time, and the result had been that at the last possible moment he had shot on to the stage, chalk white, with a spectacular and improbably black
moustache, creaking boots, and a cloak several sizes too large for him. He stood for a moment, intoxicated by the dazzling, powdery light, delivered the line, and then, feeling that this was not
enough for the occasion, he made a speech – his thin arms whirring inside the cloak like a windmill, his voice, which was breaking, cracked and squeaky with excitement, as he recounted in
gory and horrible detail the manner of the character’s death. After seconds of paralysis – the hero – a man of considerable, if repetitious, experience, had picked him up and
carried him, a small struggling bat, to the wings where he was flung at and fielded by a distraught stage hand. This was his one and only appearance on any stage, and it was good old Elsie who had
saved him from getting the sack. Dear Elsie – she was a good woman, and she’d been his first friend. It was she who had tried to explain what came over him to the boss, while he stood
speechless and trembling – it was she who gathered him to her exuberant bosom and breathed comfort and stout and Devon violets over him while he cried in an agony of fear and contrition
– who made him look at his white and black streaky face in the glass until he gave a watery laugh at the sight – it was she, who, standing like a rock beside him in her corsets, turned
the whole thing into a joke with the company . . .

Alberta stood in the open door saying: ‘I’ve had to stop: I’m too hungry.’

She looked like a cross little girl, and then he saw that it was simply another smudge on her face.

‘We’ll eat immediately.’

He had brought what seemed to him a simple sensible meal; she made a prim admiring remark about it, and ate for some minutes in an awed silence. Then, just as he was wondering why he was
wondering what to talk about, she said: ‘May I ask you something?’

‘Well?’

‘Do the people who have auditions for Clemency read the rest of the play?’

He started to say ‘of course they do’, and then realized that in many cases he didn’t know. ‘Some of them get the whole script certainly. Whether they read it or not is
another matter.’

‘But all the ones who are just given that scene we had hectographed.
They
don’t?’

‘No. But they are mostly the shots in the dark: they are expected to go wide of the mark. Why?’

‘Because I don’t see how they can be any good in that scene unless they know what it is for. Of course I don’t know anything about acting. But I didn’t understand the
scene in spite of watching so many people read it, until I’d read the whole play. Is it different for actresses?’

‘Some people would claim that it was. You see, at the moment, we’re not looking for somebody who gives the perfect performance of Clemency, we’re looking for a certain quality
without which she wouldn’t ever be Clemency.’

‘I should have thought that that quality would make whoever it was insist on reading the whole play before an audition.’

‘Supposing you’re right about that. Then what would happen?’

She said simply: ‘Then they’d know whether they could be her or not. No, thank you, if I drink any more I’ll go to sleep.’

‘It isn’t quite as simple as that. Do you want to know why?’ She nodded. ‘A good actress can’t always be playing inside her emotional experience. But she must play
inside her imagination, which is based on her emotional experience. There is always a margin, you see, beyond actual experience, where the imagination can be pure – untainted by the
players’ false ideas of themselves. It’s their business to keep that margin pure – alive – to enlarge it if possible; it’s my business to gauge what it is. I’m
talking about good actresses now – artists if you like – not just anybody who happens to act. One doesn’t write parts like Clemency for them. Of course, I may be wrong about the
play. If I am, then however I cast it, it won’t come off. It didn’t in London.’

‘I thought it was a great success?’

‘It’s running. I mean it hasn’t turned out at all as I meant it to.’

‘Does that happen often?’

He smiled: she had an unconscious capacity for his sense of proportion which made him laugh at himself and like her. ‘No – it does
not
, and I always talk as though it does, or
should. Have some grapes now, and tell me what you thought of the play.’

She put a finger gently on the smoky skin and rubbed it clear. ‘Isn’t that extraordinary? Imagine collecting bloom; it’s something you can’t
have
– you can
only see it sometimes.’

He looked absently at the grape: he wanted suddenly to hear what she thought about Clemency, and he felt that she mightn’t tell him. ‘You weren’t cloaking your opinions in some
sort of whimsical symbolism, were you?’

She looked so startled that he nearly laughed. ‘Give me your valuable opinion, Miss Young.’

‘I liked it. I like the whole idea: it starts and finishes and seems complete in itself, and there is still something on either side of it.’ She was getting pink again, round the
smudges. ‘My experience of play reading is extremely limited, so I don’t think I understood all of it, and therefore my opinion must be of little significance.’

‘Do you feel that if your experience of play reading increased the significance of your opinion would go up?’

‘It would depend . . .’ she began – saw his face and stopped: ‘The trouble is that I think I take almost everything seriously, which really only means taking
me
seriously about them. I’m so sorry: it is such a dreary bad habit – Papa says it is the broad highway to being a bore.’

‘It’s a crowded highway,’ he said, as a feeling of affection shifted in his heart, and he wondered what to do with it. ‘Is there any more of your insignificant
opinion?’

She looked up from the grapes with eyes that were nervous with honesty. ‘A bit more. Why do you want me to tell you?’

‘I might find something out.’

‘About your play.’ She did not put that as a question, so he did not deny it. She thought for a moment, and then said: ‘About the beginning. You mean her – Clemency
– to be beautiful, successful, rich, surrounded by admirers, friends, and achievements, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And in some ways she is happy like that?’

‘Externally.’

‘This is the beginning of what I don’t understand. After that extraordinary evening she spends meeting the anonymous man outside the theatre, she wants something quite
different?’

‘Yes. But she can’t have it with her existing life. She understands that.’

‘
Yes
. To get what she wants she has to give up the success and admiration – all that. But, as she doesn’t seem to value them much in the first place, they aren’t
much to give up, are they? I mean they might be impossibly hard for some people, but they are so shadowy to her that they hardly count. I don’t know what you mean by external happiness, but
surely you can’t cheat by paying for something you want very badly with twopence – it isn’t expensive enough – and if she felt she was really rich in the beginning,
she’d have something to pay with.’

There was a complete silence: he was looking at her, and he saw her so clearly that in her was his own reflection: he saw so much of himself that there were no words in his mind for it –
the few seconds were filled so that they were round and unrecognizable drops of time. She knew something – or understood that there was something for him to know, because she did not break
this moment; having furnished him, she was still, and when it was over she waited for him to resume, or assume what he would. It was much as though she had unerringly laid a finger on something
that he found it very difficult to find, and left him to count the beats.