The Sea Change by Elizabeth Jane Howard

Author:Elizabeth Jane Howard [Howard, Elizabeth Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447211662
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

4

LILLIAN

CONTRAST – opposites – extremes – how I am fed by them! New York in the early evening of early summer, shrugging with a moonstone mist, chilled, subdued, chalky; filled with a hurrying irresolution – the business day over, the professional night not begun – slung in this hour of waiting for the end of the end. The time for illicit love, for the uncharacteristic event, for killing with a drink or some duty duologue, for playing with the children: to spend, to lose, or to waste – the travelling is over, but nobody has arrived . . . In the aeroplane we have become a giant: everything below us diminished, cosy, twinkling, melted into the distance of our feet, until, at our giant’s level, the sky is our country – pleasing with enormous detail and endless resource. We fly away from the sun which retreats like a beautiful calamity with such majestic movement and tragic colour that I know it is its silence which moves me. When we are above the clouds that reflect this crisis of the sun, they lie in soft apricot waves – the smaller ones sharper hit, red and seedy, like split pomegranate, and above us the fine, blue air is already impregnated with stars who are bom into the dying blue with little starts of light. Soon the air will have that unbreathing colourless purity that I love and cannot communicate, and I turn to Em sitting beside me because I wonder whether all communication is, after all, only a refuge? This starts some consideration about silence in my mind – the nearest I get to it is with music, when sometimes I am attending to sound outside myself, and if the attention is enough, I am silent inside. I turn to Em again – illogically, even thinking of silence has made me want to talk to him, but at once an avalanche of food and information pours through the aeroplane, quenching all sparks of hunger or need of any kind. Em asks me something but I only hear ‘glad’ and ‘darling’: I lean towards him and he repeats: ‘Are you glad that we are going to Greece?’ and I smile, and start to imagine Athens – but I get caught by the beautiful name and can see nothing . . .

Athens – stepping out of the plane on to the hot ground into air brilliant, burning at such a pitch of light that my eyes cannot reach it. It is noon; and we walk into the Customs with the heat like an arrow between our shoulder blades, and wait for our luggage amid the usual shuffle of languages and a knot of people becoming resigned to impatience. The stalls sell sham pottery, sham jewellery, and doubtful peasant costumes, real silk and beautiful cigarettes; the airport officials have that Mediterranean inability to look serious in uniform. Alberta is looking at a priest: he wears black boots below his greasy gown, but it is his head that fascinates her.

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