海《海》原文节选

The Sea

They departed the gods on the day of the strange tide. All morning under a milky sky the waters in the bay had swelled and swelled

rising to unheard-of heights the small waves creeping over parched sand that

for years had known no wetting save for rain and lapping the very bases of the

dunes. The rusted hulk of the freighter that had run aground at the far end of

the bay longer ago than any of us could remember must have thought it was being

granted a relaunch. I would not swim again after that day. The seabirds mewled

and swooped unnerved it seemed by the spectacle of that vast bowl of water

bulging like a blister lead-blue and malignantly agleam. They looked

unnaturally white that day those birds. The waves were depositing a fringe of

soiled yellow foam along the waterline. No sail marred the high horizon. I would

not swim no not ever again.

Someone has just walked over my grave. Someone.

The name of the house is the Cedars as of old. A bristling clump of those

trees monkey-brown with a tarry reek their trunks nightmarishly tangled still

grows at the left side facing across an untidy lawn to the big curved window of

what used to be the living room but which Miss Vavasour prefers to call in

landladyese the lounge. The front door is at the opposite side opening on to a

square of oil-stained gravel behind the iron gate that is still painted green

though rust has reduced its struts to a tremulous filigree. I am amazed at how

little has changed in the more than fifty years that have gone by since I was

last here. Amazed and disappointed I would go so far as to say appalled for

reasons that are obscure to me since why should I desire change I who have

come back to live amidst the rubble of the past? I wonder why the house was

built like that sideways-on turning a pebble-dashed windowless white end-wall

to the road; perhaps in former times before the railway the road ran in a

different orientation altogether passing directly in front of the front door

anything is possible. Miss V. is vague on dates but thinks a cottage was first

put up here early in the last century I mean the century before last I am

losing track of the millennia and then was added on to haphazardly over the

years. That would account for the jumbled look of the place with small rooms

giving on to bigger ones and windows facing blank walls and low ceilings

throughout. The pitchpine floors sound a nautical note as does my

spindle-backed swivel chair. I imagine an old seafarer dozing by the fire

landlubbered at last and the winter gale rattling the window frames. Oh to be

him. To have been him.

When I was here all those years ago in the time of the gods the Cedars was a

summer house for rent by the fortnight or the month. During all of June each

year a rich doctor and his large raucous family infested it-we did not like the

doctor's loud-voiced children they laughed at us and threw stones from behind

the unbreachable barrier of the gate-and after them a mysterious middle-aged

couple came who spoke to no one and grimly walked their sausage dog in silence

at the same time every morning down Station Road to the strand. August was the

most interesting month at the Cedars for us. The tenants then were different

each year people from England or the Continent the odd pair of honeymooners

whom we would try to spy on and once even a fit-up troupe of itinerant theatre

people who were putting on an afternoon show in the village's galvanised-tin

cinema. And then that year came the family Grace.

The first thing I saw of them was their motor car parked on the gravel inside

the gate. It was a low-slung scarred and battered black model with beige

leather seats and a big spoked polished wood steering wheel. Books with bleached

and dog-eared covers were thrown carelessly on the shelf under the sportily

raked back window and there was a touring map of France much used. The front

door of the house stood wide open and I could hear voices inside downstairs

and from upstairs the sound of bare feet running on floorboards and a girl

laughing. I had paused by the gate frankly eavesdropping and now suddenly a

man with a drink in his hand came out of the house. He was short and top-heavy

all shoulders and chest and big round head with close-cut crinkled

glittering-black hair with flecks of premature grey in it and a pointed black

beard likewise flecked. He wore a loose green shirt unbuttoned and khaki shorts

and was barefoot. His skin was so deeply tanned by the sun it had a purplish

sheen. Even his feet I noticed were brown on the insteps; the majority of

fathers in my experience were fish-belly white below the collar-line. He set his

tumbler-ice-blue gin and ice cubes and a lemon slice-at a perilous angle on the

roof of the car and opened the passenger door and leaned inside to rummage for

something under the dashboard. In the unseen upstairs of the house the girl

laughed again and gave a wild warbling cry of mock-panic and again there was

the sound of scampering feet. They were playing chase she and the voiceless

other. The man straightened and took his glass of gin from the roof and slammed

the car door. Whatever it was he had been searching for he had not found. As he

turned back to the house his eye caught mine and he winked. He did not do it in

the way that ***s usually did at once arch and ingratiating. No this was a

comradely a conspiratorial wink masonic almost as if this moment that we

two strangers *** and boy had shared although outwardly without

significance without content even nevertheless had meaning. His eyes were an

extraordinary pale transparent shade of blue. He went back inside then already

talking before he was through the door. "Damned thing" he said "seems to be

..." and was gone. I lingered a moment scanning the upstairs windows. No face

appeared there.

That then was my first encounter with the Graces: the girl's voice coming down

from on high the running footsteps and the man here below with the blue eyes

giving me that wink jaunty intimate and faintly satanic.

Just now I caught myself at it again that thin wintry whistling through the

front teeth that I have begun to do recently. Deedle deedle deedle it goes

like a dentist's drill. My father used to whistle like that am I turning into

him? In the room across the corridor Colonel Blunden is playing the wireless. He

favours the afternoon talk programmes the ones in which irate members of the

public call up to complain about villainous politicians and the price of drink

and other perennial irritants. "Company" he says shortly and clears his

throat looking a little abashed his protuberant parboiled eyes avoiding mine

even though I have issued no challenge. Does he lie on the bed while he listens?

Hard to picture him there in his thick grey woollen socks twiddling his toes

his tie off and shirt collar agape and hands clasped behind that stringy old

neck of his. Out of his room he is vertical man itself from the soles of his

much-mended glossy brown brogues to the tip of his conical skull. He has his

hair cut every Saturday morning by the village barber short-back-and-sides no

quarter given only a hawkish stiff grey crest left on top. His long-lobed

leathery ears stick out they look as if they had been dried and smoked; the

whites of his eyes too have a smoky yellow tinge. I can hear the buzz of voices

on his wireless but cannot make out what they say. I may go mad here. Deedle

deedle.

Later that day the day the Graces came or the following one or the one

following that I saw the black car again recognised it at once as it went

bounding over the little humpbacked bridge that spanned the railway line. It is

still there that bridge just beyond the station. Yes things endure while the

living lapse. The car was heading out of the village in the direction of the

town I shall call it Ballymore a dozen miles away. The town is Ballymore this

village is Ballyless ridiculously perhaps but I do not care. The man with the

beard who had winked at me was at the wheel saying something and laughing his

head thrown back. Beside him a woman sat with an elbow out of the rolled-down

window her head back too pale hair shaking in the gusts from the window but

she was not laughing only smiling that smile she reserved for him sceptical

tolerant languidly amused. She wore a white blouse and sunglasses with white

plastic rims and was smoking a cigarette. Where am I lurking in what place of

vantage? I do not see myself. They were gone in a moment the car's sashaying

back-end scooting around a bend in the road with a spurt of exhaust smoke. Tall

grasses in the ditch blond like the woman's hair shivered briefly and returned

to their former dreaming stillness.

I walked down Station Road in the sunlit emptiness of afternoon. The beach at

the foot of the hill was a fawn shimmer under indigo. At the seaside all is

narrow horizontals the world reduced to a few long straight lines pressed

between earth and sky. I approached the Cedars circumspectly. How is it that in

childhood everything new that caught my interest had an aura of the uncanny

since according to all the authorities the uncanny is not some new thing but a

thing known returning in a different form become a revenant? So many

unanswerables this the least of them. As I approached I heard a regular rusty

screeching sound. A boy of my age was draped on the green gate his arms hanging

limply down from the top bar propelling himself with one foot slowly back and

forth in a quarter circle over the gravel. He had the same straw-pale hair as

the woman in the car and the man's unmistakable azure eyes. As I walked slowly

past and indeed I may even have paused or faltered rather he stuck the toe

of his plimsoll into the gravel to stop the swinging gate and looked at me with

an expression of hostile enquiry. It was the way we all looked at each other we

children on first encounter. Behind him I could see all the way down the narrow

garden at the back of the house to the diagonal row of trees skirting the

railway line-they are gone now those trees cut down to make way for a row of

pastel-coloured bungalows like dolls' houses-and beyond even inland to where

the fields rose and there were cows and tiny bright bursts of yellow that were

gorse bushes and a solitary distant spire and then the sky with scrolled

white clouds. Suddenly startlingly the boy pulled a grotesque face at me

crossing his eyes and letting his tongue loll on his lower lip. I walked on

conscious of his mocking eye following me. . . .