Is regret a disease? Does distance give it strength? Can it become a pleasure? Can regret become stronger than love, and overtake its reason?
I never stopped wanting Isabel, even after she married Bernardo Roderada and moved to Sant Feliu de Guixols. She worked in her husband’s bar, waiting at table. The sun was hot, the breeze warm, the rain soft as paint, but who cared? Did the birds that flocked to sing in the trees, or the old men who carried boxes of fruit along the promenade? Did the priest care, as he strolled to visit a sick woman? Isabel did not, and she did not doubt, but I knew that loss is the worst kiss.
It should have been me: I began to indulge in a perfect murder fantasy. The crime of passion, a man lying in a pool of blood and guts at the foot of the cliffs that climb to the south of the town: yes, I have taken the early bus to Sant Feliu de Guixols. I have stood under the trees that grow along the promenade. I have turned my collar up to watch her working. I have seen the handsome Bernardo standing at the door with a white napkin over his arm, and I have seen him put his arm around her waist and kiss her lips. It should have been me, but I have to get back to my loaded ship. It should have been me, but I am standing in this Spanish drizzle watching her sweep the pavement after closing time, stopping to lean on the handle and wipe her brow. It should have been me, but I could not give her the grief of a dead husband. I know that much. I know I love her that much. It should have been me holding her in a wide bed in the room at the back, but I am sleeping on the beach with the dogs of the town. They are sniffing my feet and licking my face. The first bus leaves early in the morning.
Two days later I was lost at sea. I knew where the ship was. I knew its exact position. I stood on watch and counted the degrees and minutes but did not know where my heart was. It drifted, rudderless, windless. My thoughts concentrated on Isabel and why I had not made her happy. Had I fought in her presence? Had I forgotten to write one week? Had I ignored her father? Had I not proved that I could live without the sea? That I had money saved?
Maybe she didn’t believe me. Maybe she never trusted me. Maybe the things I said were lost in translation. The love of your life marries and life goes on. Flowers do not die, rivers continue to flow, every day has a night. The tectonic plates do not split and the sea does not drain away. God does not appear and display his chest. He does not speak. He does not prove that we are a part of a master plan. We are not in step with the stars. This is the worst of it. Something so important affects nothing; love can leave no mark. That is the crime.
The sea sleeps, but not necessarily at night. It always wakes with a new face. I watched it open its eyes as I stood on a middle watch. The sky was the black blanket wrenched from its face. A wind blew from the east and the waves began to crest. I pulled the hood of my coat over my head and buttoned up. Ahead of the ship the sea was frothing and wrenching itself in desperate heaves; we hit a trough. Slammed through. Hit another. Slammed twice. The navigation lights dimmed. The engines wailed and the captain called me in from the wing.
The bridge was warm but I was cold inside. Failed. I watched the storm through the glass. The ship was strong, the captain was called Morrison and believed that Jesus Christ was the Risen Saviour, and loved and watched over our every move. I tried to understand but could not.
‘Say a prayer. Number One,’ he barked. He was standing with his legs planted, his arms folded. I said, ‘Aye, aye, sir,’ and tried to remember one.
A minute passed. I felt blank.
‘Said it, Number One?’
Blank.
‘Number One?’
‘Sir?’
‘Trust the prayer was a good one.’ He didn’t take his eyes off the sea ahead.
‘It was what the situation demanded, sir.’
‘God heard you, Number One.’
‘I hope so…’
‘Believe me.’ He gave me a stern look. ‘And that’s an order.’
Elizabeth and I got up early in the morning, walked down to the shore and swam, and when we were there I thought again It could have been me. Is it romance that makes me think this way, or desire? I saw the world, I never wanted wealth, I live in the place of my dreams. The offshore stacks shine, the sun is warming for the day, there is Gloria sitting on the beach, guarding the towels, and the cat is hiding in the ruins of the weavers’ cottages.
The water was cold but as we swam my blood warmed, my legs were strong, my muscles didn’t cramp, I took easy strokes. She was watching me, and I watched her. She swam easily and I swam towards her.
When we met she didn’t stop, she carried on kicking and spreading her arms and we swept into each other. I felt her feet on mine. She grabbed my shoulders and pushed me down. I swallowed water, hit the bottom and pushed up. As I did I reached out and touched her waist. She yelled. I surfaced, pushed down on her head, she went down and I kicked away from her. I turned on my back and floated. She came up beneath me, grabbed my ankles and pulled down. I shouted and flipped over. She let go and bobbed up in front of me. I stared into her eyes and she stared back at me. I remembered the look and the feeling, and I was not as old as I thought I was. The impossible was as possible as it used to be, as it used to be in Barcelona in 1966.1 was sixty-eight years old and Elizabeth Green was seventy-five years old. Is that too old, or do we just become lazy? I took her face in my hands and said, ‘Look…’
‘No,’ she said. ‘You look.’ Serious as hell. ‘I can’t play games.’
‘You think this is a game?’ I moved away from her.
‘What do you call it?’
‘You can only blame yourself if you deny life. Desire’s a good thing. Regret I can live without.’
‘What do you want, Michael?’
‘This moment, that’s all.’
‘I want more than that,’ she said, and before I could speak, before I could tell her that she was contradicting herself, she reached for my arm, pulled me to her and kissed my lips.
It is the dream I had in the Bay of Bengal, the Tasman Sea and the Panama Canal. Over the Grand Banks and off the Angolan coast. The Chagos Archipelago. The Aleutian Islands. In fog banks, in seas the size of evil and over seas like glass. In rooms over bars in Rio and Hamburg with a girl who knew a navigation officer called Jurgen and did I know him. Or I was in Tilbury and I was leaving the Gaumont. I’d just seen Missing You for the eighth time, and I was watching the final scenes in my head as I was jostled in the crowd, out of the warm and on to the pavement. But not a pavement in Tilbury; I was in Marseille, and I could see her through the cafe window, except now there was no one waiting for her, George really was dead in the desert, and she needed someone to turn to.
‘Michael?’
I had your face in my hands. You were mine; the million other people who said they loved you were lying. When you kissed Cary Grant it meant nothing to you. You were not a movie star. You were bigger than that and your mouth tasted of salt and vodka.
We were very chaste. We did not open our mouths or move our hands away from our faces and shoulders. The sea swelled towards us, and as we relaxed she fell on to me. We sank, broke and came up again, and she splashed towards the shore, stood in the shallows and waded to the towels. Gloria barked. I lay back and floated again. A cloud drifted by, and then another. High cirrus. It was about half past nine, and we hadn’t eaten breakfast.
She cooked pancakes and I felt bold enough to put my feet up and ask, ‘What more do you want?’
She didn’t answer.
‘Are you going home with Jacob?’
She flipped the first pancake and said, ‘You want this one?’
‘He’s coming tomorrow, you…’
‘Please!’ She slammed the frying pan down. ‘I know when they’re coming!’
‘Them? Who’s them?’
‘He’ll bring Angie with him.’ She slid the pancake on to a plate. ‘My agent,’ she said, and poured some more mixture into the pan.
‘Why?’
‘She’ll remind me about my commitments and what I’ll lose if I renege. She’ll call me selfish, sympathise with Jacob. He’s the advance party. She’s the big guns.’
The pancake was very good. I squeezed lemon juice over it. ‘What are your commitments?’
She did not answer straight away. She fiddled with the pan, turning it this way and that. Gloria sat up to watch, her mouth open, panting. I put some of my pancake in my mouth and chewed. ‘Pieces of paper,’ she said.
‘What does that mean?’
She slid her pancake on to a plate and came to the table. She sat down opposite me and sighed. ‘I’ve got the lead in another movie,’ she said. ‘And if you knew how difficult it is for a seventy-five-year-old woman in Hollywood…’
‘I can imagine.’
‘And then there’s the money. I’m being offered more money for ten weeks’ work than I earned in thirty years.’ She smiled. ‘But the most important thing is being wanted. Needed. People who used to leave the room when I walked in return my calls. When I signed that contract…’
‘You’re wanted with or without a contract. You know that.’
‘Sure. But do I believe it?’
‘Don’t ask me.’
‘You said the right thing again.’
‘I’ve had a lot of practice.’
‘So it’s automatic? Maybe you don’t mean it.’
‘I mean it all right,’ I said.
In the afternoon we walked down to the weavers’ cottages. The sun was bright. Solitary clouds drifted as slow as our walking, their shadows following the feathering of the grass in the fields.
We wandered through the ruins. Weeds were growing where the floors had been, and tufts of grass sprouted from the cracked window sills. Elizabeth stopped to pick up a shard of broken glass, wiped it on her sleeve, held it to her eye and said, ‘My mother could have looked through this.’
I said, ‘I wonder which cottage was hers.’
Elizabeth narrowed her eyes and nodded her head, slowly. ‘This one. This was it.’ It was the second along in the row of five, and she was certain. ‘I can see her here.’ She looked at the broken walls, the piles of stone, a blackened hole where a fireplace had been. Her eyes were glazed and red. ‘She made cloth for a tailor in town. Zennack, I suppose.’
‘Or Truro,’ I said, uselessly.
‘Or Truro,’ she repeated, softly, an echo, and she took my arm. ‘She told me she never wanted to leave a place so much. And then, later, want to return to a place so much. She missed this ocean.’ She looked at the sky. ‘And the light.’
‘A painter used to live here, a long time ago.’
‘Yeah?’
‘For the light.’
We stepped over a low pile of shattered slate, through the gap where the front door had been and into the overgrown waste of the gardens. These sloped to a broken wall, some strands of rusted wire and the beach. A cloud shaped over the offshore stacks, dying as the high breezes ripped its edges, and then its heart.
‘She used to sit here and watch the sun go down. Used to wait for my father to come home and kick her around the block.’
I looked at the ground.
‘Would you fetch some chairs?’
‘Of course.’
She squeezed my arm.
I patted her hand and broke away. ‘Don’t go away,’ I said, and I walked back through the old gardens to my house. As I turned the corner I looked back and watched her for a moment. She was untying her hair, letting it fall over her shoulders. She shook her head and it streamed out, and she ran her fingers through it. She looked towards me and waved. I waved like the boy caught in the bushes, and then went to my house and the kitchen chairs.