The Sea Change (32 page)

She didn’t answer at once; then said hesitantly: ‘I don’t seem able to do anything you tell me to do. I just seem to repeat the same failure again and again. I feel all the
time that I am being most trying, but I don’t know how to change.’

‘Do you think perhaps you are taking it all too personally?’

She looked startled. ‘How do you mean?’

‘Well what you do or don’t do isn’t done to please me.’

‘But you are the person who’s teaching me.’

‘That’s incidental.
What
am I trying to teach you?’

‘To act this part in this play, I suppose.’

‘That’s it.’

‘Yes,
but
– I don’t understand all this part of the learning. I don’t see what it is for. So I don’t know how else to take it but personally – as you
say.’

‘What don’t you understand?’

She looked at me thoughtfully, although she had gone rather pink, and there was a mixture of embarrassment and determination in her voice when she answered: ‘You asked me just now what I
thought you were trying to teach me. I said to act this part in this play. You agreed. Nothing has been said about turning me into an actress – supposing that to be possible.’

‘I agree.’

‘But what you are teaching me doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Clemency. She doesn’t go shouting about breathing deeply with a book on her head.’

She said all this deadpan enough to make me laugh.

‘She wouldn’t be very convincing if she crept about staring at the floor and muttering under her breath, would she?’

‘I don’t regard any of this as a laughing matter.’

‘Right: well, we’ll both try to take a serious, but not dedicated, point of view.’

We looked at each other in wary silence: she didn’t know how to take me any more than I knew how to deal with her. Finally I said: ‘Look: I know you aren’t an actress, and
perhaps you don’t even want to be one, but you’ve agreed to try and act this part which, to prevent any further quibbling, is going to involve your doing a little acting.
Right?’

She nodded.

‘Right. From my point of view, as an actress, or as material, you’ve got a certain amount of equipment. My job is to teach you how to use it, so that it works as much as possible.
You might say that you already know this, one way or another and that it’s your own business. It is, as far as you are concerned, while you are being Alberta, but when we come to Clemency
– to you being anyone else, in fact – it’s not the same. To be Clemency, you’ve got to act: acting is not life, it gives the impression of life – if you act well, it
gives a very strong one. In this part – like all good parts – there are a certain amount of externals pre-arranged: you have to follow them. You have to say certain words, move at
certain times, and part of you knows beforehand that this is going to happen. You also have to do this in such a way that apparently intimate words and movements are none the less carried out so
that they can be heard and seen at a distance, while preserving their apparent intimacy and spontaneity. You can’t start giving these impressions until the knowledge of exactly what you are
doing has really sunk into you. I was starting with your body. Until you are aware of that – of your voice and how you move – nobody will be able to take in anything else about you on a
stage – however right it is inside you.’ I cleared my voice – it was quite a speech for me, and I hadn’t known that I had so much to say. ‘There are different schools
of acting. But you’re not a student with several years to learn all about it, and you’re not at any of the schools – you’ve got a couple of months and me. It’s urgent,
and between us we’ve got to find the best way of your learning. You must trust me not to be personal or we shall get nowhere.’ I stopped, and then said: ‘How does that seem to
you?’

‘Much better: I do begin to understand what you mean. You mean that I probably do understand more at the moment with my mind, and the rest of me is a bit behindhand. Something like
that?’

‘For this particular work – yes.’

‘And it’s also a question of scale, I suppose. I mean it all has to be a bit larger than I realized?’

‘Yes – but not at the expense of sharpness or depth.’

She was silent for a bit: she still looked nervous, but she was natural with me again. Then she said: ‘Jimmy – I don’t see why you think I’ll be able to learn all I need
to learn: it may be a disastrous gamble, and you will be angry and he will be disappointed . . .’

‘Who’s he? Emmanuel, do you mean?’

‘Mr Joyce – yes.’

Something about the way in which she had said ‘he’ made me watch her now, but she looked back steadily – her face calm. If she developed a crush on Emmanuel, I found myself
thinking savagely –
my
relations with her can be as impersonal as hell – it won’t make the slightest difference. I decided to narrow the chances any way I could.

‘Don’t worry about Emmanuel,’ I said; ‘he understands the situation. He’s an old hand at gambling, which means he’s prepared to lose out on a hunch, but also
that his hunches are often good. He’s got a new play on his mind, and the only thing to do then is to leave him alone as much as possible. The best thing we can do for him is to get Clemency
into your blood. You’ve got what it takes all right – believe me – we’ve just got to get everything working. Let’s start – yes?’

She smiled warmly at me. ‘Yes: thank you, Jimmy.’

Then I made a fool of myself. ‘Anyway – any time he has left over for social intercourse ought to be kept for Lillian. This holiday is largely for her benefit, and heaven knows
it’s long enough since she had him to herself.’

She started to speak – checked herself, and put her hands in her lap: the colour which had flooded into her face slowly went away again. Already angry with myself, I could not help asking:
‘What were you going to say?’

She shook her head.

‘Maybe I shouldn’t have said that. It sounded disloyal – I was thinking of Lillian: what
were
you going to say?’

‘Nothing that has anything to do with Clemency.’

‘Forget it,’ I said miserably; ‘I’d do anything for Emmanuel – you know that.’

She looked at me then with such a kind of sweetness – she didn’t say anything, but the cheap, nasty feeling I had just went – she got to her feet and simply said: ‘How do
we start?’

And that was
that
.

CHAPTER VI

1

EMMANUEL

H
E
had taken to sleeping on the eastern terrace: it was far enough from Lillian, and out of Jimmy’s irritating,
anxious clutches. Jimmy had twice followed him down in the night when he had tried to sleep in the room upstairs, and he could not stand any more of it. He had to be alone; he had himself become so
crowded that he could not manage these deputations of himself that he seemed forced to meet, if there were other people there: excepting her.

They had been nearly three weeks on the island, and his insomnia had settled to three or four hours’ sleep from about two a.m. until the sun slid up from behind the hill gradually gilding
the early grey air: the gentle warmth was like a waking caress on his skin – he could not sleep after it. Then he got up and went down to the sea, pausing outside her window, because once she
had come too. He went to the beach where they all went each morning for lunch: sometimes he forgot to bathe. A great deal of the time he thought he was mad, and wondered with a kind of reckless
irresponsibility what would happen to him next. He lived alternately with her image and her presence: with the first he became a starving rabble, all crying their separate hungers – with the
last he seemed to collect into some adoring, accepting unity. Her presence was like air to him; essential at the time, but of no avail as a mere memory; it was only on the rare occasions when he
managed to be alone with her that he could store something with which to bear her absence.

Any shreds of control that he still possessed – and perhaps they were substantial shreds – were spent on concealing his state from the others. This meant particularly being a
charming, accommodating companion to Lillian during the first half of the morning, and leaving no outward expression of his feelings in Jimmy’s way. With her, surprisingly, he found it easy
to be ‘natural’ and passive. Alone, he beat off attacks of terror about the future – the frightful evening when some casual remark had introduced the idea of her being thousands
of miles away in New York while he struggled with English country life – attacks of desire that occurred with such sudden force that they ruled out any consideration for anything or anyone
else – and attacks of humiliating fear when he felt that if anyone knew of all this, they would simply find it unbearably funny and embarrassing – when even she would laugh. His ability
to reason, to analyse the situation with any degree of detachment had vanished: the state of dogged calm which he had reached through his conclusions on the boat might have been reached by someone
else, since they seemed to have made not the slightest difference. Alone, he counter-attacked his fears with imagination, invention, and a kind of translation of his memory; these three active
ingredients easily idealized the future, transformed the present, and distorted the past. Thus he would declare himself to her, and she, he would reflect with amusement both cunning and tender, she
would almost certainly blush and resort to language that she had gleaned from her papa’s library . . . she would be deeply sensible of the honour he did her – and she would turn those
marvellously clear calm eyes upon him with her consent . . . Later he would confess that he was sixty-two, and ask her whether she minded. She did not mind at all – it was quite all right.
(Anxiety in these scenes was like salt – only adding to their taste.) The week in New York with her became encrusted with dreams of moments . . . her head on his shoulder in the taxi, his
touching her hair, her smiling peacefully in her sleep. Her confusion when she realized all he had bought her in the store – his taking her hands and explaining to her that there was nothing
unseemly in accepting anything if one was loved as he loved her . . . But there were moments, also, which needed no embellishment: her walking into the crowded room at the party and answering his
public question – steadily denying his wisdom – he had loved her then, or he had loved something true in her which she had made suddenly recognizable. In the flat, when they had been
talking about the play and he had pressed her for her opinion: she had given it and touched some spring in him – illumined some part of himself that he thought had died in his early days . .
. The part of him that needed reasons for loving her was satisfied by the purer memories – by this steady core of truth in her – some inner unchanging beauty that he had not recognized
in anyone before, and this was the only discovery he made through comparison; the rest of him seemed to forget or ignore any other experience. In the same way, in the scenes with which he decorated
his solitude, only he and she were there – and occasionally an anonymous conglomerate crowd – but no single other person; even Lillian seemed not to exist. All this was when he was
alone – chiefly the nights, the early mornings, and some of the hot afternoons.

But there were hours without her, spent with Lillian, and sometimes Jimmy, and these he found interminable. Then, all the words that he had read and heard applied to his state were not, he
discovered, merely elegant eighteenth-century turns of phrase, but painfully, bitterly apt. Love
was
a fever – it burned and consumed him as he tossed and ached through burning
delirious nights: it was a snare, a trap, a gin – injuring and imprisoning those it caught; then, sick with an impatience like pain, he would endure the leisurely mornings with Lillian
– the cup of coffee that he did not want and which was too hot to drink, the amble back beside Lillian’s donkey. Once, she had a headache, and did not come out to dinner with them: he
thought the evening would never end, and when, at last, they were back at the house, Lillian had looked in at her room and said that she was fast asleep, and the disappointment at not seeing her
brought unexpected, confounding tears to his eyes.

Time seemed now to have a life of its own – double-edged, airy and malignant. On the few occasions when he was alone with her, it was gathered together into a whole – like a jewel in
his hand – each moment with her was a facet reflected in his shining content. When they were four, it flowed over him in a flowery inconsequent manner – neither here nor there so to
speak; but when he was alone or without her, it assumed thunderous, sullen, immovable proportions: it hung like a stone round his neck; it was like an eternal black sea with no shore – his
restlessness had no relation to it. He would sit in the afternoons at the wooden table in his room at the top of the house while the others slept. This was when he was supposed to be writing. Once,
then, he wrote her a letter beginning ‘My darling love’, and when he had written even that part he wondered how many million letters had been started like that, and how many dozen
truths were embedded in the tradition. In spite of his desire to write the letter, he wrote it slowly and painfully – each word of it seemed to be wrenched and wrung from his heart, but also,
it seemed a strangely impersonal business. It was extraordinary, but the effort and effect of putting down exactly what he had intended, neither adding nor leaving out anything, somehow removed him
from the enterprise: it was necessary that the letter could be to no one but her, but it did not matter who had written the letter – this was the measure of his praise. When it was finished,
he read it very carefully to see that it was right, and then burned it. Afterwards he had a feeling that he knew from good writing-days – when he was empty and light with a kind of exhausted
peace, until energy from the work done slowly refilled him. But all the other afternoons he did not write anything.

In the late afternoon, when the sun was still simply shining, but the shadows on the Peloponnese – like a giant kneeling on the mountains – had turned violet, he would go down to the
western terrace, and often she would come out from her room at one end of it and join him. Sometimes she came only a few minutes before one of the others; sometimes not before them at all, and
every day now he was trembling, praying that she would come first. But when she did come, and walked softly on her bare feet across the marble towards him, warm, honey-coloured, entirely
unconscious of changing his world, all his tension, his parched breathless waiting and longing for her transformed to a joy like sunlight in his blood.