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

remembered delight. They kneel, not minding the mournfully reproachful gaze the statue of their Saviour fixes on them from the cross. After their midday Sunday dinner perhaps they will send the children out to play and retire to the sanctuary of their curtained bedroom and do it all over again, unaware of my mind’s bloodshot eye fixed on them unblinkingly. Yes, I was that kind of boy. Or better say, there is part of me still that is the kind of boy that I was then. A little brute, in other words, with a filthy mind. As if there were any other sort. We never grow up. I never did, anyway.
    By day I loitered about Station Road hoping for a glimpse of Mrs. Grace. I would pass by the green metal gate, slowing to the pace of a somnambulist, and will her to walk out of the front door as her husband had walked out that day when I caught my first sight of him, but she kept stubbornly within. In desperation I would peer past the house to the clothesline in the garden, but all I saw was the children’s laundry, their shorts and socks and one or two items of Chloe’s uninterestingly skimpy underthings, and of course their father’s flaccid, greyish drawers, and once, even, his sand-bucket hat, pegged at a rakish angle. The only thing of Mrs. Grace’s I ever saw there was her black swimsuit, hanging by its shoulder straps, limp and scandalously empty, dry now and less like a sealskin than the pelt of a panther. I looked in at the windows, too, especially the bedroom ones upstairs, and was rewarded one day— how my heart hammered!—by a glimpse behind a shadowed pane of what seemed a nude thigh that could only be hers. Then the adored flesh moved and turned into the hairy shoulder of her husband, at stool, for all I knew, and reaching for the lavatory roll.
    There was a day when the door did open, but it was Rose who came out, and gave me a look that made me lower my eyes and hurry on. Yes, Rose had the measure of me from the start. Still has, no doubt.
    I determined to get into the house, to walk where Mrs. Grace walked, sit where she sat, touch the things that she touched. To this end I set about making the acquaintance of Chloe and her brother. It was easy, as these things were in childhood, even for a child as circumspect as I was. At that age we had no small-talk, no rituals of polite advance and encounter, but simply put ourselves into each other’s vicinity and waited to see what would happen. I saw the two of them loitering on the gravel outside the Strand Café one day, spied them before they spied me, and crossed the road diagonally to where they were standing, and stopped. Myles was eating an ice cream with deep concentration, licking it evenly on all sides like a cat licking a kitten, while Chloe, I suppose having finished hers, waited on him in an attitude of torpid boredom, leaning in the doorway of the café with one sandalled foot pressed on the instep of the other and her face blankly lifted to the sunlight. I did not say anything, nor did they. The three of us just stood there in the morning sunshine amid smells of sea-wrack and vanilla and what passed in the Strand Café for coffee, and at last Chloe deigned to lower her head and directed her gaze toward my knees and asked my name. When I told her she repeated it, as if it were a suspect coin she was testing between her teeth.
    “Morden?” she said. “What sort of a name is that?”
    We walked slowly up Station Road, Chloe and I in front and Myles behind us, gambolling, I nearly said, at our heels. They were from the city, Chloe said. That would not have been hard for me to guess. She asked where I was staying. I gestured vaguely.
    “Down there,” I said. “Along past the church.”
    “In a house or a hotel?”
    How quick she was. I considered lying—“The Golf Hotel, actually”—but saw where a lie could lead me.
    “A chalet,” I said, mumbling.
    She nodded thoughtfully.
    “I’ve always wanted to stay in a chalet,” she said.
    This was no comfort