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A SEA-CHANGE
1
His doctor had advised him to attend the coast, for his health had been something of a concern of late. It was for this reason that George Stewart, freed for a weekend from his position at the bank in the city, was to be found strolling along by the sand banks at the lip of the little beach near the town of North Sound. This being a September day in 1922, he was dressed in a jacket that seemed somewhat over-respectable for the locale, and his manner when he walked among the spears of tall grass was like that of a cautious wading-bird, as opposed to the manner of the young, who might gallop like donkeys. This unsure look was immaterial, of course, as the beach was deserted.
Reaching something of a raised vantage, he halted, turned on his heel and peered back to where the rooftops of North Sound were just visible above the low encroaching hills; then he turned out to look over the sea. Slight white crests were ripping up from the roll, and a little spray reached him, hurtling up the sandy slope. Hand flattened above his eyes, he scanned the horizon for a sail or a stack, being an amateur in boats, but could see nothing.
He took some steps forward, down closer to the waves, but found the ground suddenly a mite treacherous, and, forcing his balance a little, had to run for two paces and on coming to the edge of the long grass gave an aggravated shout.
The shout had a strange effect; something of an echo, and something of a flurry, and something of a shape reared up in front of him, causing George to shirk back instinctively. His consternation was resolved soon enough into simple concern, as the shape resolved itself into a boy, of indeterminate adolescence, wearing rough clothes.
“I say,” said George, “I didn't see you there!”
“Sorry, sir!”
Noting something of an unusual tenor in the boy's voice, George looked again at the newcomer, to whom his stumble had brought him uncomfortably close. The boy's face had that character which, without further inspection, old ladies commonly term 'unfortunate' – a certain asymmetry, a certain thickness and delineation of the brow which has the effect of forming by default an expression perhaps without control and certainly without charm. There was something else, as well – a yellow matter, and on his hands – and here and there odd-shaped flakes. Yes, the yolk of an egg and shards of its speckled shell, of more than one egg, in fact, and smeared to glisten and dry about his cheeks and lip.
“What are you doing here?”, George felt compelled to ask.
“I'm at my luncheon, sir,” replied the boy, in the idiosyncratic style of the place, “for Sally has cast me out of the Sammich shop with 'er broom again.”
A gust of wind, passing by, lifted up from below a few curls of down feather, and also a disagreeable smell into George's nostrils, so that he quickly found himself deciding that he had intruded on the activities of a peacable but perhaps – no, look at the eyes – a specimen of the unfortunate, and so he stepped back up the slope, tracked by the large, benignant eyes with their blue roundels.
“Well, good day,” said George. Then he turned and began to walk away. At three paces, however, there came a friendly but insistent trill:
“Can I have six-pence?”
George stopped, and fumbled in his pockets without turning round. “I'm afraid I don't have it,” he murmurred, and walked on, and that might have been the end of it, but he was suddenly aware of the sound of long grass being pushed out of the way, and footsteps following his own; at which he sped up his pace to a swift trot. This was echoed by a laugh from behind, a very singular laugh, in the manner of a dog's joyful expulsion when it realises that a game is afoot, accompanied by swifter movements of sand and stones, which made George, with eyes pushed straight ahead, lose all decorum and set off at an ungainly run.
When he was half way to North Sound, he allowed himself to look back, and, seeing nothing, slowed, and even chided himself at being so easily frightened, and for being so rude to a perfectly harmless character. It was, he told himself, none of his business really to be meandering about on the beach outside the season, when the concrete platform with its twin telescopes and its deckchairs was bereft of children with eager coins and parents eager to relax, so that the wind blew and whistled on the iron railings. While it did seem – to the eyes of a city man, of course – a little haphazard to have this boy at large on the coast, this was probably a strategy that worked well for those concerned. Still he looked back again.
2
The evening found George in attendance at the Public House called 'The Old Wheel'. The place was named, according to the pride of its inhabitants, after the wheel of an Armada ship found on the beach after the wrack of that dangerous fleet, and which was still to be seen hanging above the fireplace in the bare-walled room otherwise free from clutter and decoration. To George, the wheel looked too young for a Spanish vessel of the sixteenth century; he supposed that the demotic tradition attatched to this relic changed with the seasons. Sea-smoothed, missing a spoke and worm-eaten, it was undoubtedly of some peculiar origin, and undoubtedly had some savage history attatached to it – but in a few years, he thought, smiling into his glass as he drank, in a few years the warm and merry folk who jostled and harped about him would say it was the wheel of one of Kaiser Bill's battleships.
His landlady, advanced enough to offer the services of her small hotel in the Manchester and London newspapers, evidently held a somewhat low opinion of the house, for she had said, as he set off an hour ago:
“Of course, Eleanor and I will be more than happy to entertain you with a game of scrabble.”
“Thankyou very much,” he had said, “but I wish to get a taste of the local flavour.”
“Should you find it sour, then”, she had said, and then she had ushered her young daughter, the girl called Eleanor, who had been watching George silently, indoors.
These were not bad people. Indeed, they could not be bad – they were far too simple for badness, far too removed from the tempting glamour of such things as Credit, and the Tab, and the Dogs, the things which in the city sent man against man and husband against wife; he had often said to himself that it obviously took a more refined character to deal with city life without sinking.
To his left, a red-skinned man in a tight woolen hat dropped his beer down his throat and splashed it on his white moustache and beard. Another smiled forward, nodding dreamily at the complaints of his companion. The barman, broad and powerful, clothed glasses with a firm but gentle hand. It was a scene of deserved contentment. Tomorrow, many of them would be pushing tiny boats down the fly into the greedy grey sea, and then to deep wastes where they would drag billowing catch-nets of twine and rope through thick water, fetching up portions of the flapping silver and the snapping claw.
“From the Armada,” insisted an elderly man to George's right, nodding toward the wheel. “And there was an Admiral, too, who washed up and would sit on the beach saying his Latin prayers, such as no-one could understand, and we took the constable to him.”
George nodded, noting inwardly the man's use of 'we'. It might have been yesterday.
Suddenly, with the unpleasant sensation of a swift and inevitable focus, George's eye was drawn to the window that lay in the wall ahead of him. A face had appeared there – the face of the boy who he had met earlier. Then he was gone. Through the open hinge came the sound of footfalls and heavy swearing, not the boy's own. As a man the inhabitants of the pub moved to the door, opened it, and looked out on to the street. The boy was running, in a sad, ungainly motion that included a swing of the arms and flap of the feet, and his mouth was clamped about a whole fish; above it, his eyes wheeled, eyes that spoke of an accomplishment and of adrenaline. In hot pursuit came two fishermen, shaking their fists; behind them it was possible to see a net, sabotaged, and spilling fish, from which the boy had presumably sprung his prize.
“Ah, Devil take 'im,” said the man in the woolen hat, “he's at his tricks again.”
“Ought to be clapped in chains,” said another.
When the scene had dissapeared around the bend of the street, they returned to their stations. George noticed, on his way back to his stool, a figure whom he had missed before, who was now conspicuous by his disinterest in the recent proceedings. He had remained still and seated, poring over some sheets at which he occasionally scratched with a pen. His interest was intense, and seemed almost forbidding, but George felt equally that here was a character worth talking to. Moving over, he placed his glass down on the table by the reserved man and said:
“May I join you?”
The man looked up suddenly, peering over the top of a pair of spectacles with a look, at first, like a wasp might wear – it was really quite unsettling – but which then softened into something closer to amiability.
“Of course. Do sit down.”
Seating himself, George enquired of the papers:
“Crossword puzzle?”
“Ah, no. Crossword? No.” Then, with some force: “If only I had a sword!”
“A sword?”, asked George, non-plussed.
“You know, that chap with the knot, who cut it open with a sword. Ah, never mind.”
He pushed the sheets of paper off the table and into a napsack. George had time to glimpse rows and patterns of numbers and mathematical symbols. By way of conversation he said:
“What do you know of that boy?”
“Yes, curiouser and curiouser – I wonder how they justify him.”
“'They' – you're not from here?”
“Oh, no.”
“Then you might be here for your health, the same as me.”
“Not entirely. Research, you see.”
“Ah, a novellist? Or a scientist?”
“A doctor, actually.” The man's voice had drifted, but then suddenly he said: “What if it's a submarine?”
“I'm sorry?”
“It might be – but then, those signals – not Morse code, for sure – I wonder.”
“I'm afraid you've lost me. What are you a doctor of?”
“Oh, cultural studies,” said the man, waving the question away with his hand. “I say – might I ask you for some help?”
“Certainly,” said George.
“Come with me. Oh – what's your name?”
“George Stewart.”
“Good, good. Come along, George.”
He was up from the table with a swiftness uncannily child-like in its enthusiasm.
“What, now?”, protested George.
“Yes, the perfect time!”, said his new friend with a broad grin. Feeling a little non-plussed, George followed the doctor out into the darkness.
3
They reached the platform. The only light was a torch beam that swung ahead of them, illuminating odd patches of gravel and grass. The wind was chilly, now, coming in cold from the sea, the sheet that crashed off-stage. Such places, thought George, attractive in the day-time, aquire an unpleasant character at night. Climbing up to the telescopes, the doctor said:
“I do like to be beside the sea-side, I do ... now, George, come here and let me show you something.”
The doctor was pointing at one of the telescopes.
“I haven't got six pence,” said George.
“What?”
“To make them work.”
“Ah. Oh.”
The doctor stroked his chin for a moment, and then clicked his fingers and reached into a deep pocket. George could not see exactly what it was that he produced, but evidently the mechanism worked - there was some kind of noise, and then the shutter of the telescope clicked obediently open.
“Now come and look through here, and tell me what you see.”
George did as he said, and at first could see only blackness with some unsure movements.
“I can see nothing.”
“A little to the left. Yes. Further. There. Do you see it?”
“No. I can't see anything. Doctor, what is all this, what -”
“No, there. There. Can you see it?”
George saw: and felt a sudden wave of fear pass through his very bones.
“Lights,” he said simply, in a small voice. “Lights – underneath the water -”
“Astounding, aren't they?”
“I – I don't like them. Doctor, what is this? What -”
“I've been trying to figure out what's to do for a month now!”
“I don't like them.”
The combination of what he saw, and the darkness, and the cold, and the sensation of the metal against his face, made George step back from the telescope, shivering.
“What have I seen?”, he asked, harrowingly, and this time the doctor looked at him.
“Dear, dear. Perhaps I misjudged –”
At that moment, in a burst of noise, a figure shot from the shadows. The torch was knocked from the doctor's hand and bounced down the steps, sending wild pools of light in mad circles. George slipped and fell, and heard the doctor's shout, and a new voice, a voice he recognised:
“Go away! Away! Not for you to see! Not for you to see!”
George, fumbling in the mud and dirt, grasped the torch and shone it up at the platform. The light illuminated a terrible scene. The boy was gripping the doctor by the throat, his other hand raised like some bestial claw, to smash, to kill.
“Calm down, now!”, the doctor was saying. “We're awfully sorry. I have – would you – would you like a jelly baby -”
“Break their necks!”, bawled the boy, whose eyes had rolled back into his skull, making two white baubles. “I'll break their necks! Not for you to see!”
“Doctor!”, shouted George, unable to do anything else. At his shout the fuming boy turned face, and peered down at him. As his eyes focussed on him, a new anger lit his distorted features. He dropped the doctor, and then made like a leopard about to pounce.
He never did pounce. A shot rang out, flew over George's shoulder and struck the boy's shoulder. Instantly his face lost all its agression and became a mask of innocent pain, before he tumbled to the ground. The fishermen and other villagers appeared now, a dozen or more. The man who had fired looked dazed, holding an old, rusty shotgun. There was silence, save for the whisper of the sea.
3
“He is involved, then,” said the doctor, pacing the boards of the room.
They had returned, cold and shocked, to the living room of the hotel where George was staying; the boy had been taken to the chapel. The men had dourly said that he would receive help there, which prognosis seemed dubious – but they had ignored George and the doctor's entreaties.
“Hell knows what they'll do to him. They're rough men – and you a trained doctor -”
“There is nothing we can do, George. They are faced with something they don't understand – they are afraid. It is, unfortunately, their way. We've to try to work out what is ocurring.”
George watched him mournfully from the plush armchair.
“Doctor – you know more than you're letting on, don't you?”
“About those lights? Oh, yes, I know that something is beating its wings, something is singing – but what I do not know, George, is whether we are faced with a dove or a vulture.”
“Birds? Under the water?”
“A metaphor, George! A metaphor – George, you know about the war, don't you?”
“Know about it? I lost my brother -”
“Yes, yes, then you'll know about all those ship-wrecks, all those explosions, all that noise – torpedoes and depth charges - try and imagine, George, imagine what kind of signal all that noise – all that absolutely unprecedented noise might send out – and who might hear it – who might wake -”
There was a wild stare in his eyes. George continued,
“My brother was a gunner on a ship, actually, he -”
“We haven't got time for that now!”
George fell silent, for the first time wounded by the doctor's stare.
“The boy knows something. I just don't know what. Doves or vultures ... He is the key. He must be.”
At that moment, the door was slammed open, and the barman from the pub appeared, a stern look on his face.
“Ah, hello!”, said the doctor cheerfully. “How is he?”
The barman watched them steadily for a moment, his eyes flickering between them. Then he said:
“Leave. Both of you.”
“Leave? Why?”
“The boy – he keeps ranting about the ones who've come from far away. There's blood everywhere. Oh, it's a sight – they don't know what to do – they keep pumping him for information – and they want to get you two. They think it's you – they think you've brought the Changes -”
“What changes?”
“That boy going mad! Ranting about rock-pools ... little kiddies afraid of going to the beach – and what old Wilkie saw ...”
“What did he see?”, said the doctor. “This is very important. What did Wilkie see?”
“Never mind! You need to get away! They sent me to do you in. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt. Just run! Just get away from here!”
“Please. Please, tell us what Wilkie saw!”
“Terrible things!”
The words were wrung out with a painful volume.
“Terrible things – he was out at sea – he drifted back – passed away in the night – before he died – jabbering about them coming to get us – and his eyes -”
“What about his eyes?”
“White! White, and hard as marbles! Pearls - because 'e'd seen them – pearls, what were 'is eyes!”
The doctor's face was dark.
“That settles it. Vultures, not doves. We need to get everyone away from here. We must go to the chapel.”
“They'll kill you!”
The sea seethed.
4
It was only when it had all finished that George wept. They had tried to draw the villagers away, but they would not move – the gun had been levelled at them. They refused to move. Every villager was clustered around the little chapel. The doctor had cursed them and begged them, and then they had fired the gun into the air. Wretched, he had led George to a boatshed, where there had been that strange pair of blue doors ... and the doctor had sat George down on a little chair, and told him not to worry, and George had simply stared around him as the doctor manipulated the humming, bleeping machinery at the centre of the room. Then the room had lurched, churned, George had clung to the chair, there had been an infinity of violent movement.
When it finished the doctor had opened the doors again, and it was daylight, and when they stepped out into the village there were only charred stumps of wood and blackened bricks, mounds of ruptured earth, a motor-car on its side, solitary beams whistling in the wind, and glass that had melted, run in rivers, and then hardened again.
They walked slowly towards where the chapel had stood. The stench was horrific. Among the black dust were a hundred pairs of pearls. |
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