Read Online The Sea by John Banville - Free Book Online Page A

fighting, as they did when they thought I was asleep, going at each other in a grinding undertone, every night, every night, until at last one night my father left us, never to return. But that was in winter, and somewhere else, and years off still. To keep from trying to hear what they were saying I distracted myself by making up dramas in which I rescued Mrs. Grace from some great and general catastrophe, a shipwreck or a devastating storm, and sequestered her for safety in a cave, conveniently dry and warm, where in moonlight—the liner had gone down by now, the storm had abated—I tenderly helped her out of her sopping swimsuit and wrapped a towel around her phosphorescent nudity, and we lay down and she leaned her head on my arm and touched my face in gratitude and sighed, and so we went to sleep together, she and I, lapped about by the vast soft summer night.
    In those days I was greatly taken with the gods. I am not speaking of God, the capitalised one, but the gods in general. Or the idea of the gods, that is, the possibility of the gods. I was a keen reader and had a fair knowledge of the Greek myths, although the personages in them were hard to keep track of, so frequently did they transform themselves and so various were their adventures. Of them I had a necessarily stylised image— big, nearly naked plasticene figures all corded muscle and breasts like inverted tun-dishes—derived from the works of the great masters of the Italian Renaissance, Michelangelo especially, reproductions of whose paintings I must have seen in a book, or a magazine, I who was always on the look-out for instances of bare flesh. It was of course the erotic exploits of these celestial beings that most took my fancy. The thought of all that tensed and tensely quivering naked flesh, untrammelled save by the marmoreal folds of a robe or a wisp of gauze fortuitously placed—fortuitous, perhaps, but fully and frustratingly as protective of modesty as Rose’s beach towel or, indeed, Connie Grace’s swimsuit—glutted my inexperienced but already overheating imagination with reveries of love and love’s transgressions, all in the unvarying form of pursuit and capture and violent overmastering. Of the details of these skirmishes in the golden dust of Greece I had scant grasp. I pictured the pump and shudder of tawny thighs from which pale loins shrink even as they surrender, and heard the moans of mingled ecstasy and sweet distress. The mechanics of the act, however, were beyond me. Once on my rambles along the thistled pathways of the Burrow, as that strip of scrubland between the seashore and the fields was called, I almost stumbled over a couple lying in a shallow sandy pit making love under a raincoat. Their exertions had caused the coat to ride up, so that it covered their heads but not their tails—or perhaps they had arranged it that way, preferring to conceal their faces, so much more identifiable, after all, than behinds—and the sight of them there, the man’s flanks rhythmically busy in the upright wishbone of the woman’s lifted, wide-flung legs, made something swell and thicken in my throat, a blood-surge of alarm and thrilled revulsion.
So this,
I thought, or it was thought for me,
so this is what they do.
    Love among the big people. It was strange to picture them, to try to picture them, struggling together on their Olympian beds in the dark of night with only the stars to see them, grasping and clasping, panting endearments, crying out for pleasure as if in pain. How did they justify these dark deeds to their daytime selves? That was something that puzzled me greatly. Why were they not ashamed? On Sunday morning, say, they arrive at church still tingling from Saturday night’s frolics. The priest greets them in the porch, they smile blamelessly, mumbling innocuous words. The woman dips her fingertips in the font, mingling traces of tenacious love-juice with the holy water. Under their Sunday best their thighs chafe in