2009-01-19 11:14:45
来自: 一切归零
(我是悲剧之王)
海的评论
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 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.
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. . . .
海的评论
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 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.
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. . . .
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