Gina says that she is a writer. She is telling the story.
“Then you can’t be a very good one,” says Sandra. “It’s obvious I’m not the sort of person who is ever going to be a head teacher.”
Gina is getting angry. “In the story that’s what you are. And anyway you don’t know what you’re going to be like when you’re grown up.”
“Actually,” says Sandra easily, “you’ve only thought up this head teacher stuff because you know it would annoy me.”
Ah. A home truth, maybe. Something has happened. Reality has invaded the game. The game has lost its potency, its immunity, the real world has muscled in, asserting itself.
The cellar game is doomed, in fact—the Damoclean sword of time hangs over it. At twelve, Paul is still in there; at thirteen, he will not be. Sandra, a sophisticate, has perhaps already sprung clear. Quite soon, the cellar will become just that once more. The mattress, the packing case, the broken cupboard will sit out the decades—unconsidered, unrequired. The Daleks will sink into the murk of their corner. But the wooden board under the window will continue to record FORFITS and PENALTYS.
CRACKINGTON HAVEN
Katie does not have eight children. She has no children. Roger is not a British Airways pilot; he is a pediatrician in a hospital in Toronto. Katie has flown up from Boston to see him, because it is his birthday, and she is unhappy—she needs to get away for a couple of days, she needs a quick fix of family, this bit of family in particular. They are having a celebratory lunch in the restaurant at the top of the CN Tower, which is turning out to be a mistake because Katie is finding that she gets vertigo. She has to sit with her back to the stupendous view that is the whole point of the place.
“So adopt, then,” says Roger.
“Oh, we’ve thought of that. Of course. I would, but Al’s not so keen. He feels he might not . . . Oh, I don’t know quite what he feels.”
“You’ve done all the stuff?”
“All of it,” says Katie grimly. “IVF—all that. Every possible test, tried everything. It seems to be me, by the way, not him. Which makes it worse, somehow.”
Roger nods. “Yeah—I can see you’d feel that. Not that you should.”
“You would think, wouldn’t you, that I’d have inherited something of the family fertility?”
“Doesn’t follow, I’m afraid. Actually, come to think of it, none of us has managed to reproduce so far.”
“Gina wouldn’t have time. Can’t see Sandra with kids—they’d cramp her style. Nor Clare. Paul—well, better not, I should think. What about you?”
Roger spreads his hands. “I’m waiting for the love of my life. She doesn’t seem to show up.”
“Sorry to whinge,” says Katie. “Enough of that anyway. We’ll get over it. I’ll get over it. Al more or less has, I think.”
“There’s a sort of woman for whom having a child—children—is the only thing that matters. I know—I see them. I don’t think you’re like that.”
“I know who was,” says Katie, after a moment. “Mum.”
Roger nods.
“Mum without kids is unthinkable. Whereas Dad . . .”
“We happened to Dad,” says Roger.
“Oh, come on. It wasn’t parthenogenesis.”
“Short of celibacy, I assume he didn’t have much say in the matter.”
Katie looks slightly shocked. “You mean Mum just went ahead and bred, for personal satisfaction?”
Roger shrugs. “Maybe. Or just sheer inefficiency.”
“Not that,” says Katie. “It was the more the merrier.”
“Indeed. To a fault.”
They look at each other for a moment.
“Yup,” says Katie. “So was Dad put upon in a big way, or did he—um—fight back?”
Roger is thoughtful. “There is the matter of Paul’s birthday.”
“She was pregnant, you mean?”
“Well, presumably.”
“So?” says Katie. “Accidents happen.”
“Or not.”
“Oh!” she cries. “You shouldn’t say that.”
Roger inclines his head. “It’s been known. An old ploy.”
“But Mum . . .”
For both, their parents seem to hover—presences that are entirely known, familiar and also unreachable, enigmatic.
“She had people do what she wanted, somehow,” says Roger.
Katie disputes this. “That’s not right. She wasn’t as organized as that. And Dad never did anything he didn’t want to do. He stood on one side.”
“Or found it was the only place to be.”
“That’s not quite how I see it. He went into that study and pulled up the drawbridge. She did everything. She and Ingrid.”
“The harem? Or monstrous regiment of women?”
“Roger, honestly . . .”
“Both? I wonder . . . We’re not the ones who can know.”
“We were there,” says Katie.
“Six of us were there. Nine. Would we all tell the same story? Take that summer holiday in Cornwall. Crackington Haven.”
They contemplate an August that is dead and gone, but not so at all, shimmering in their heads, and presumably in other heads, an assemblage of fragments, of sea and rock and sand and faces and voices, things said and done, things seen and thought.
“Oh, goodness,” says Katie. “It was one commotion after another. Paul and the police. Sandra going off with that boy all the time. Ingrid’s man turning up.”
“On the contrary, it was an amazing summer. I had that kite. I got seriously into marine biology.”
“Smelly dead things in buckets. That I do remember.”
“Police?” says Roger. “Boy? Man? I do have a vague memory of small local disturbances, on the edge of one’s vision. That’s my point, you see. Your Cornwall evidently was not my Cornwall. Nor, I suppose, was anyone else’s. Mum’s. His.”
Cornwall flickers—an old film rerun, degraded by time.
“So who’s right?” says Roger. “Who sees all of it?”
The rented holiday house has five bedrooms. Paul and Roger must share, Katie and Clare, Gina and Sandra (under protest). Charles and Alison. Ingrid alone has a room to herself, but it is a sliver of a thing, next to the kitchen, perhaps once a pantry. The whole place is overfurnished; hefty armchairs rub shoulders in the large sitting room, you fight your way through a thicket of occasional tables, magazine racks, and ottomans. The conservatory/dining room with a view over the sea has stacked white plastic chairs and a wood table. The kitchen is underequipped, but that is not a problem because Alison has brought her own batterie de cuisine—the most cherished pans and casseroles, the knives, the implements. The mattresses on the beds all have plastic covers; Alison finds these offensive and removes them. There is a forest of spider plants on every surface in the sitting room; these she banishes to the cloakroom, which is cluttered with other people’s abandoned rain jackets (torn), beach balls (punctured), and buckets (leaky). Further legacies from previous occupants of the house include a shelf of paperbacks (that Charles inspects with disdain), and detritus such as playing cards that have gotten underneath chairs and cupboards, forgotten shampoo in the shower, magazines, a postcard from Portugal to someone called Ella reporting that Joey can swim now, and a pink cotton sun hat with daisy trim.
Gina considers the magazines, the postcard, and the sun hat and tries to imagine their previous owners: what were last month’s voices like, last month’s faces?
Sandra examines the shampoo, and then bins it: an inferior brand.
Paul finds a bus timetable on the shelf under the telephone, and perks up.
Crackington Haven is a small resort: a scatter of houses and cottages, most of them summer rentals, a village shop, a couple of daily ice-cream vans, an itinerant burger bar. No cafés, pubs, or shopping malls, which is why Alison has chosen it. A lovely, lovely family sort of place, quite unspoiled, off the beaten track, just heavenly sea and the dear little beach and gorgeou
s walks along the cliffs.
There are a few things she has not reckoned with: that bus timetable, the telephone, other holiday folk.
Roger’s life is hitched to the tides. He needs low tide. He waits—daily, hourly—for low tide. He goes out first thing to assess the state of play. Waves rippling up the beach are bad news: high tide, that will take hours to recede, hours before the rock pools are revealed, hours before he can get out there and get stuck in, eyes down, net in hand, the buckets and the jars lined up on a convenient slab.
In the evening, he pores over the book, the guide to the seashore. He is getting good at identification. He has a notebook, and he lists what he has caught and identified. The daily catch heaves, crawls, and wriggles in the containers that Alison insists must be left outside. In the morning, he returns the lot to their proper environment, but there are often a few casualties. He regrets these, but scientific inquiry necessarily involves a degree of detachment. He is immersed, absorbed, away in an intellectual frenzy. He thinks of nothing but sea anemones and sea urchins, limpets and whelks, shrimps and sea slugs. He has had a red cushion star and a spider crab, a sea lemon and a shore rockling. He is desperate for a butterfly blenny. The guide has put him on his mettle; its illustrations offer alluring creatures that he has not yet met. He must have a rock goby and a velvet swimming crab. Will he achieve these before the end of the holiday? He cannot afford to lose a single moment of low tide, even when it is windy and the kite also calls. The best days are when wind and high tide coincide and he can take to the cliff, with the kite dancing overhead and the sea waiting to be harvested in due course.
Horse mussel? Dog whelk? He squats outside the kitchen door, staring into the bucket, the book open alongside. He hears Alison’s voice, a background noise to which he is impervious, as irrelevant as a bluebottle on a windowpane. “Where is Paul?” she is crying. “Where on earth has he got to? Has anyone seen Paul?”
Sandra has spent the day stretched out on the sand in her pink bikini. When, at points, she becomes too unbearably cold, she sits up and huddles her towel around her, eyes trained on the far side of the beach where the boy’s family is encamped, where he is idly kicking a ball around with a younger brother.
It is working. One has not suffered in vain. He glances towards her more and more frequently. The ball is kicked in her direction again and again. Once, it skims across her legs. “Sorry!” he calls. Sandra glimmers at him, sideways.
This is day three. Day one was a dead loss. The beach had nothing to offer but kids building sandcastles, lolloping dogs, and parents erecting windbreaks and staking out territories. She sat morosely on a rock, in shorts and a sweater, glaring at the sea. Other families go to the Algarve, or Majorca, where there’s proper sun and you can get a decent tan; we have to come to bloody Crackington Haven.
At the end of day two everything changes. She has spotted him. Eighteen, probably—even nineteen. Very nice. Suddenly Crackington Haven takes on a different complexion. The sun is not as feeble as one had thought; the beach and the cliffs are really very pretty. Now it is just a question of the pink bikini, and perseverance.
Katie knows where Paul is. Paul is either in Bude, or on his way there. She knows this because she saw him at the bus stop. “You haven’t seen me, right?” he tells her, and now she is in a quandary, as Alison bounces around the house in escalating distress. Where should her loyalties lie?
Paul is grounded this summer because of the trouble at college. Paul did not make it to what Alison calls “one of the nice universities,” and is doing an engineering course at a place that he says is utterly crap but actually he quite likes it because they leave you pretty well alone. Perhaps in consequence of this there has been trouble. The lower-grade trouble is that Paul has not applied himself, and has failed the end-of-year exams. The higher-grade trouble is referred to by Alison only in whispered asides to Charles, but Katie knows what it is, as does Sandra, as does Gina. Paul has been caught doing drugs. So Paul is grounded for the summer; he has to do remedial studies at evening classes run by the council, and he is to account for his movements. Bude is not accounted for.
Supper is ready and Alison is still keening. In fact, the way things are going, supper will be put on hold altogether and Alison will be on the phone to the coast guard. It is only three years since the episode of Paul and the cliff rescue. Katie realizes that common sense dictates a single course of action: she must shop Paul.
Clare too needs high tide. She needs that expanse of hard wet sand. Even so, she will have to compete for possession with the cricket-playing family and the volleyball lot.
She does handstands. She walks on her hands. She does cartwheels. She wheels over and over until Crackington Haven spins around her, and when eventually she stops, she staggers.
She has made a friend. Emma. Emma is hopeless at handstands and cartwheels but she is an audience, and they are digging a trench, when Clare is through with cartwheels—for the moment.
“So he’s gone to Bude . . .” says Gina. “So? It’s not Las Vegas. He’s nineteen, Mum.”
He should have said. He knows what the agreement is. What the rules are. He should have talked it over. We could have gone there all together, for a family outing. There’s no need to go off like that on his own. Bude is horrid, by all accounts, crowds of people, and rubbishy shops and bars. You get those leather bikers there, apparently, and goodness knows what else. That’s exactly why we come to Crackington Haven.
The conservatory/dining room reverberates with Alison’s dismay. Supper is being eaten, by those unaffected. “Is there any more?” inquires Roger. Sandra has just realized with disgust that she forgot to take her watch off while sunbathing, and now she has a watch-strap mark.
Gina turns to Charles. “Where do you stand on this, Dad?”
A challenge. Get involved—one way or the other.
Charles appears to reflect. “I have never been to Bude.”
“Oh, you have,” cries Alison. “We went there once when the car had to have a new exhaust. But never mind that. It’s the principle. He knows.”
Gina sighs. We have been here before. Many times. Mum going berserk (and usually about Paul); Dad standing back.
Alison continues, at length. When she draws breath, Charles speaks. He says, “Paul will presumably return, in due course. At that point, there can be discussion.” He puts his knife and fork together, rises, and leaves the table.
Gina watches him. Does he have a point? What is the view from Dad? We hear a lot about the view from Mum, but what does he see? What is there to be seen?
Charles has brought with him on the holiday three boxes of books, his typewriter, and a sheaf of paper. This baggage, along with everyone else’s, Alison’s cooking equipment, Paul’s guitar, and other essentials meant that the family car—a Volkswagen bus that can seat ten—was so crammed that all except Charles, Alison, and Clare had to travel by train.
Charles plans to work, insofar as this is possible. He has always found the summer holiday particularly taxing. He has no dedicated study to which to retreat, he cannot escape from a degree of communal activity (sandcastle building, thank God, is done with), he must take part in outings to places of interest. In fact, he is not entirely averse to these last—a castle or stately home is fine—but the definition of a place of interest is a matter of impassioned argument within the family; he is equally likely to find himself at an ice rink or a funfair. He likes to walk, and does so, though usually alone, since the concept of walking for pleasure has not caught on with his offspring, and Alison finds that she gets out of breath rather soon.
He is forty-seven. Age has never been of great interest, but occasionally he finds himself looking at this figure: an awful lot of life seems to have leaked away. He is reasonably satisfied with his achievements, but has the feeling that his magnum opus is still to come. What will it be? He is known for his range. He is waiting—for a consuming new interest to sneak up on him. In the meantime, there is a thing on the
Romantic poets; something of a potboiler, in fact. In the service of this, Charles walks on the cliffs above Crackington Haven, thinking about the Romantic Revival.
Or trying to. But today there are distractions. He is distracted by the view—the serenely sailing fleet of clouds, the soft rim of the horizon on which sits the gray shape of some ship, Tennyson’s crawling sea down there below the cliff. He is distracted by last night’s scene with Paul, which hangs in his head. And he is distracted by thoughts that have no bearing on the Romantic poets but stem from their very existence: the concurrence of things, the fact that the Romantics march on because he and a mass of others are interested in them, Tennyson too for that matter, the sea forever hitched to his words, if you are that way inclined. Concurrence, juxtaposition, the absence of any sequence.
Could the magnum opus be lurking here? If so, it is an effective lurk; Charles cannot see beyond that single intriguing perception. And, oddly, it translates to a vision of his own children, whom he sees suddenly as multiple creatures, each of them still present in many incarnations—smaller, larger, babies, lumpen teenagers, any of them to be summoned up at will.
He contemplates this, picking his way along the cliff path, past clumps of thrift, little thickets of gorse, outcrops like rocky gardens, none of which he notices, locked into these thoughts. It occurs to him that a novelist would make more of this sequence problem, if that is what it is, rather than a serious analytical worker like himself.
Ingrid receives a phone call. She talks for some while in a low voice, in her own language.
Ingrid says, “My friend is in Cornwall and would like to come to stay for a few days. All right?”
“Of course,” says Alison. “How nice. She won’t mind going in with you, will she? There’s that extra foldout bed.”