Alex said at last, ‘There’s that current that goes round the point.’
Tom said, ‘Maybe we should have looked on the other side.’
‘It’s impossible to get into the sea there.’
‘I suppose it’s no use going up to Maryville and borrowing some glasses?’
‘No.’
‘Have they got a boat?’
‘If it’s at the house we couldn’t launch it here, if it’s in the sea it’ll be down the coast.’
‘It’s too late anyway,’ said Brian.
There was a little silence.
Brian went on, ‘He’ll have got cold and tired and just drowned quietly. He won’t have known what was happening to him.’
‘No, he won’t have known,’ said Tom, ‘like going to sleep.’
‘Well, let’s get ourselves home,’ said Brian. ‘Come on. It isn’t as if one of us had drowned. We’ve got something to be thankful for.’
After lunch George had kept clear of the party. He walked along the little tarmac road, first away from Maryville, where the road turned inland into a wood (this was ‘Brian’s walk’) and then back again toward Maryville (when he met Tom), passing the house and the promontory on his right, and descending toward the cliff where it was ‘impossible to get into the sea’.
George felt so blackly unhappy that he wondered how anyone so unhappy could go on living. Could one not die of resentment and remorse and hate? How too could a man feel so stupid and dull, when his soul was so full of frightful fantasies? How would it all end, how could it all end? George thought to himself, I’m like a rabid dog which has rushed growling into a dark cupboard. The best thing that can happen is that my owner will have the nerve to pull me out by the collar and shoot me. Who is my owner? The answer was obvious. But that could not happen, nor did George yet seriously consider killing himself. His misery was present to him as an occupation, as a part of the weird ‘duty’ which increasingly and horribly presented itself. Gentler influences, in so far as they touched him, seemed like frivolity, a waste of time. He had lain as gentle as a lamb in Diane’s arms. He had joined the family picnic. He came of course ‘to annoy’ and because he was expected not to, and to prove who he was through the exercise of old irritations and pains. Seeing Adam always reminded him of Rufus, and this particular grief was even not unwelcome, since it absolutely licensed him to hate the world. Yet he was fond of Alex and he was fond of Tom, and he wanted to see the sea, which had always ‘done something’ for him, a curative influence which Tom indeed had indicated when he had cried out to him that they should swim together. He would never have got himself to the sea alone. There was a kind of compulsory sanity in being with people he had known so long. Even the curious and interesting distress and excitement, upon which he looked forward to reflecting later, at finding Hattie Meynell of the party, was mingled with his resentment of her as an alien. Beyond, lay insanity. That morning he had looked at his body, at his hands and feet and what he could see of his trunk, and felt his grasp of his being waver. What was this pallid crawling object? He had stared at his face in the mirror and felt mad, as if he might have to rush whimpering and slobbering into the street and ask to be arrested and looked after. The pigeons in the early morning softly said Rozanov, Rozanov.
He had dreamt of Stella, he saw her handsome royal Egyptian head in his dreams. He was touched by Diane and she gave him a little peace, but he despised her. He admired Stella but he could not get on with her, she was an enemy. He felt a vague relief that she was somewhere else and no anxiety or curiosity about where she was. Wherever she was she was strong and sane and eating up the reality all round her to increase her own. He reflected, even in an odd way valued, that terrible strength which also made her so dangerous, so hateful. He kept on recalling the incident with the car. He remembered the huge sickening sound of the car entering the water, and the extraordinary way in which Stella came out of the door like a fish. But he could not clearly see what had happened just before. Had he actually pushed the car, could he have done that? Was he simply imagining that he had put his hands on the back window and braced his feet on the cobbled quay and made the car move forward? Surely that was a fantasy, he had so many violent fantasies and dreams. He was a weak crawling creature and his violence was purely fantastic. He thought, I can’t go on like this. I must finish my relation with Rozanov. I’ll see him again. If he would only say one kind word to me, just one, it would change the world. After one kind word I could go away in peace. How can he be so cruel as not to speak that word? And how can I be so abject as to need it?
George had reached the cliff and the other view over the sea which he knew so well. Here the yellowish grass ended abruptly at a steep edge. The dark blackish-brown rocks with red streaks in them did not descend neatly to the water but went down in a jagged graceless mess of cracks and slides and overhanging ledges. In the sea, not very far below but seemingly inaccessible, a mass of brown herring gulls were crowding and crying over some trophy. George looked at the birds’ soft spotty backs and their fierce eyes and they gave him some satisfaction. They reminded him, through old sea memories, of holidays and of his father, blessedly so dead. George had disliked his father and early turned him not into a monster but prophetically into a ghost. Twice ghosted, some association with the herring gulls passed like a harmless chill. It seemed impossible to get down to the water; but George had explored the favourite area thoroughly on visits as a child, before Alex bought Maryville, when the coveted house still belonged to a Colonel Atheling who was famous for objecting to the McCaffrey children (big George and little Brian) crossing his land. There was a way down (which George had never revealed to his brothers) where one descended through an elder tree into a round hole in the rock through which one could slither, holding on to a branch, on to a shelf from which one could jump to some ‘steps’, and so to the water. He undressed on the cliff top, he was out of sight of the house, removing all his clothes and folding them as if for a ritual. He stepped down into the tree and, bracing himself against the rock, felt with his foot for the hole which was invisible from above. He could now only just get through the hole, and the rock chafed his naked body. On the shelf he sat down to lever himself to a flat rock below, then went cautiously down the ‘steps’. He thought, I’m getting old. He dived into the deep lifting and falling water and gasped at the coldness.
George was a good swimmer and made his way otter-like out to sea. He thought, as the water laved his head and shoulders, that’s good, that’s good. At the same time the cold sea was menacing; one could soon drown in such a sea, one could die of exposure. He thought, I would like to die like that. If I just swim on and on and on I shall die and then I shall really have finished with Rozanov. Well, in that case he will have won. But does that matter? He went on, cutting through the tops of the frothy crests, on and on toward realms of sea where land was never seen or heard of. Suddenly, in the green swinging hollow of a wave, he saw below him and nearby something which he took at first for a plastic bag floating. Then he took it for a dead fish, then when it seemed to move for a strange crab or big jelly fish. He turned, halting his course, to look at it. It seemed to be some horrid kind of thing. Then he saw that it was a little four-legged mammal, a dog. It was Zed.