Excerpt of The Sea by John Banville
(Page 1 of 2)
Printer Friendly Excerpt
I
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 adults 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, adult 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.
Excerpted from The Sea by John Banville Copyright © 2006 by John Banville.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights
reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without
permission in writing from the publisher.
