The Seahorse

THE SCAVENGERS

October 12, 1965

Over the dappled sand the evening drew shadows and the clouds scudded overhead like grey wool. Slowly they pulled him up the beach, his feet splayed out behind him and his head lolling forward like a grotesque doll. Reaching the pebbles, they gathered his body into a broken shape and half carried, half dragged him to a verge of ragged grass. His mouth opened and shut, ejecting water and pallid vomit, and his limbs shuddered in convulsion.

A wind blew cautiously over the beach head and the waves of the incoming tide began to cover their footmarks. Gulls hovered above them but the wind, mounting in strength, tore away their mewing until the sound seemed to come from some far place beyond the gauze of the horizon mist.

The stones shifted beneath their heavy boots and his waterlogged body settled heavily into hollows, his head inanely nodding to a rhythm of idiocy. The silvered mist crept in, covering the sand with a translucent shroud, wraiths of it reaching the men as they applied themselves to the figure draped on the pebbles. In the air shifted a smell of salt and weed–and the clinging sense of the slowly enveloping haze. Wet and chilling it crept on to their shoulders until its audacity was rebuked by the sudden return of gasps of wind, which dispersed it in a matter of seconds. As they worked silently they felt the blanketing–then the icy release of the sharpened gusts.

Beyond the pebbles, wild spiky grass sought impossible root-hold and hungrily fought its way over the slate and chalk hillocks. The dry rasp of its touch set their teeth jarring and their hands scaling as they worked. Rank with salt the stems were razor thin, and they extended far below the pebbles, binding each ragged clump to the next. Their tenacity was too binding, too savage, and their lust for existence seemed to make them even verminous.

Gradually they drained him: his vomiting brought up nothing and became a dry rasping to match the green tendons that reared up around him. His body shook, liquid was forced down his throat and was immediately thrown up again. But the warmth of its temporary circulation gripped the elusive life in him–and stirred it into more useless retching. They had turned him over on his face–it had been a flopping, collapsing movement and the veins in the back of his neck were mottled blue. Their muscles tight and aching, they leaned back, exhausted and for a moment hopeless in the proximity of this saturation, at the sight of his lank, straight hair, yet encouraged by the sudden bucketing of his body. They rolled him over, working his arms and legs, desperately trying to restore a vestige of circulation. Sweat ran underneath their clothing, and one of them began to whimper.

In his awesome idiocy their patient seemed lifeless; the blankness in his eyes and the colouring of his skin made the task seem insurmountable. The inside of his palms and the flesh around his fingernails was white and bulbous–hideously flaccid, entirely lifeless. The folds of the skin were crumpled, and where it was stretched taut over his knuckles and wrist bones, it seemed parchment-like. Along one side of his face there was a graze, but the blood had ceased to flow and there were only layers of withered torn flesh.

For another ten minutes they worked, enticing colour and reviling the useless vomiting. Great shudders continued to course up and down his body–there was hope here–but they seemed to be only the results of an internal collapse, as if the lungs and rib cage, soaked for so long, could no longer stand as entities. The shuddering came and went, leaving his body as cold and lifeless as before. Forcing the hot liquid between the blue swollen lips was difficult–the teeth clenched vice-like together had to be prised apart and the neck of the flask inserted. But this was good–and improvement came with the sudden gloriously external shuddering of his body. Without warning the shivering began, racking the whole body in enormous convulsions–the blueness began to be replaced by whitened cold patches and blotches that trembled and bore away the limbs into complete pulsation. The shaking brought on more vomiting and they leant back on their haunches, happily, satisfyingly watching life renew.

As they knelt, they were suddenly conscious of the elements around them, and they realised that they had taken this limp, grotesque doll out of the shallows and beaten life back into it. An exquisite pleasure pervaded each man; fulfilment of dreams came upon them and they looked lovingly at this stranger, gazed fondly at the sodden heap of clothing in front of them. The warmth of success flooded them, and they knelt and dreamt of this wonderful thing. Around them the mist, undisturbed by the dying wind, encroached; great drifts of it obscured their stark drama and reduced them to shadowy ghosts sitting pagan-holagan-like around an offering. Neither man looked at the other, but stared ahead–and then, again, lovingly at the pathetic bundle they had won from the sea and the pebbles and the wild grasses.

Then, almost immediately, they were disturbed. Too little time was given for their abstraction. Over the rise came more figures and there was a distant ambulance bell. Still kneeling, they shouted–and reassured the stumbling, converging uniforms. The breakers thudded on to the flat wet sand, obscured by mist, and a fine spray reached them, sealing their lips with salt. Then a shifting, low grating as the waves tore at the pebbles, undermining and rebuilding in constant tumult. The clamour rioted towards them as did the sliding, stumbling boots of the officials as they bent over the man they had saved. Almost petulantly they rose as the uniforms surrounded the body–protectively they advanced lest the limp broken thing on the pebbles should be hurt. Their rescue–their child. But they were pushed away as a stretcher was laid on the pebbles and their hesitant advance was terminated, and they watched helplessly as the doll was laid face down, a blanket thrown over it and taken quickly away. Two or three times the uniforms stumbled with it over the crumbling rise, or their wet boots slithered on the smooth treacherous steel of the grasses–and the precious burden tilted precariously. They watched in horror as the stretcher seemed to overbalance and threatened to throw its wreckage on to the stones–and then sucked in mist and relief as it was righted. Over the ridge the stretcher disappeared, and they were left standing looking foolishly at each other. Above them the gulls wheeled interminably and the waves broke now in monotony on the smooth, shifting pebbles. Suddenly the mist chilled them, and they walked clumsily over the beach, stumbling over the bunched grasses. Once on the turf they walked quickly away with a nagging, growing sense of loss.

A CUCUMBER SEASON

May 1964

The boy lay on his back, staring at the sun which was a fading crimson orb in a chariot sky. Sprawled beside him was a man with a beard and small eyes who was watching the boy’s concentration. A few yards away, on an outcrop of chalk in the short springy grass, Paul gazed idly at the sea that was an unruffled lake of powder blue, here and there disturbed by darker shadows under the surface. Such was the clarity of the late afternoon that he could see the sand, duster yellow by some trick of the light, under the sea. A motor boat distorted the glazed, picture-book ocean, breaking across the rock shadow and the mirrored sky, sending a tired swell towards the beach, which broke upon the lapping wavelets, giving them the strength and impetus to crawl a few more yards ahead of the outgoing tide. This minor incident broke into Paul’s abstraction, and at the same moment the boy turned and said:

‘I’m going to outstare it–I’m going to look and look and look–until I can stare at it any time I want–and my eyes won’t hurt. But I’ve got to practise looking.’

‘You’ll have eyes like suns then,’ said the man with a beard whose name was Storm.

‘I wish I could have saucers for eyes like the cat in Alice–I’d catch raindrops in them and if I turned my eyes down you’d be soaked.’ The boy, Casey, laughed very clearly–like a bark in the afternoon stillness it seemed to resound and almost echo in Paul’s mind. For some reason he began to chant:

‘The sun was shining on the sea,

Shining with all his might:

He did his very best to make

The billows smooth and bright–

And this was very odd, because it was

The middle of the night.’

When he had finished he leaned back and grinned cautiously at Casey. His smile took up the whole of his face, which was undistinguished but hopeful.

Storm said, still looking at the boy:

‘Why don’t you look at the sea?’

‘Why should I?’

‘It’s more interesting–there’s more colour. The sun’s a dull thing compared to the sea.’

‘But the sun’s golden–the sea’s only blue and green–mostly green.’

‘There’re dozens of colours–can’t you see?’ said Storm academically. And there were: the settling lake was a cascade of soft muddled colour that grew darker as the sea lost strength.

‘I don’t care–’ Casey stubbornly stuck to his first love–‘I like the sun best.’

Paul began to laugh, and his long gargoyle of a face sprang outwards and seemed fuller with the pleasure he felt. He was not an attractive man–his features were altogether too pronounced and his eyes seemed too large and liquid amongst the ridges and furrows that surrounded them. His age was difficult to determine; he could have been anywhere between thirty and forty years old. His lips were rather thin, but the tiny lines around them prepared a half-smile almost before it had come. His hair was very dark, but it was straight and rather lank. He picked up a piece of chalk and threw it at Storm, and Casey hurled a tuft of the short, sweet turf back at him in defence of Storm’s abstraction. Paul reached for a mangled cigarette and said pedantically:

‘Well, Headmaster–I’m about to return to supervise preparation–Casey’s preparation amongst others.’

‘Oh God–is it that late? Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I was too lazy–and I didn’t like to invade the meditation.’

‘Quite correct–an interruption could have proved disastrous. Casey and I were discussing certain elements that are usually taken for granted.’

‘How about a cavalry charge down the hill?’

‘If you’ll be the enemy.’

‘Why am I always in an inferior position?’

‘Because I’m the headmaster.’

‘Of course–give me fifteen seconds’ start.’

‘Ten–Casey’s getting heavier.’

‘I’m away!’

‘Wait till the brigadier’s mounted–quick–get up!’

Paul was running down the cropped slopes. He would make the other side easily enough, leaving Casey mounted on a breathless Storm some distance behind. He stopped halfway down and jeered–sending the child frantic with rage. The downland shone bottle-green in the tea-time light of the hazy, velvet afternoon.

‘We’ve got him!’ shrieked Casey hysterically–and Paul was off just in time. They were close behind him now and he side-stepped, striking out along the hollow to the rising ground near the golf course.

At this point Storm gave in–to the fury of his rider. The boy jumped down and pursued Paul on foot. Unfortunately, with an abrupt change of tactics, the enemy stood and retaliated; catching Casey unawares and lifting him high in the air.

‘The horse needs watering,’ Paul observed.

‘He’s a very old horse,’ said Casey kindly.

Storm lit another cigarette and choked.

Together they began to climb the hill, tired now and wishing that they had not come so far. Casey’s small figure slouched between the two men.

‘Pick up your feet,’ said Storm irritably.

‘Yes, sir.’ The voice was sullen under the sudden authority that had been temporarily forgotten.

The tapering shadow of the sun groped, sloth-like, across the downs, concealing the blatant whiteness of the bare chalk and deepening the pallor of the light verdancy of the turf. This suggestion of gathering darkness sought out every crevice in the cliffs, reducing their craggy surface to a wraith-like, transient shape that formed a texture of mobile shadow. Evening had crept on them unawares and the afternoon was a memory.

As they climbed the last rise the sun spilt into the sea; its precipitation haloed in a flood of damask that stained the darkening, slow-moving tide and made Storm pause by the last stile and say:

‘What a bloody marvellous sunset.’

Paul and Casey turned to watch the sun drown–and then followed Storm to the dark shadow that was the brake.

‘Take it gently, Storm. It’s a lovely evening–let’s drive back slowly and appreciate it.’

Paul didn’t expect a reply. They left the headland behind them in the fading light, and the brake rushed forward on the road that ran by the glowing sea dusk. The boy was quiet now–not tired but happy in the silence that was built for him by the two men in the front, who smoked quietly with the windows down, a rush of brine and beach smells pervading the normal leathery smell of the inside. The lights of the town in front of them murmured life, and behind them the headland lay gathered like a heap of studio velvet. The tide was crawling over the firm, dry sand; there were a few last bathers and a solitary man looking for worms. In the fading light a billow of soft down that was a spiralling haze crept over the shadow, digging deep in the sand.

‘There’s the Seahorse,’ shouted Casey, as they turned in at the drive of a large house built of grey weathered stone. ‘Look–he’s coming in with the tide.’

Paul turned to look down towards the beach. A bird flew low across the water and one of the bathers ran across the beach and up on to the pebbles.

‘He’s singing–can’t you hear him singing?’

The waves rattled on the loose stones that marked the beginning of breakwater and shingle. There was a familiar roaring and tinkling sound as the water raced into some piping that led a tiny stream out to sea. A cautious wind had sprung up and was teasing the surf into a fine spray that pounded the pitted wood of the breakwaters in miniature fury, sending up tiny plumes that lashed the boarding with a gentle persistence.

There was a sudden scraping as the side of the brake came into familiar contact with the chipped masonry of the wall that ran round the house. The driver swore, more out of habit than anything else, and Paul smiled. Casey, kneeling on the back seat, continued to stare at the beach. Storm threw the brake round a bend in the drive and the sea was lost to view. The grey building loomed solidly into view and the vehicle stopped suddenly, throwing Paul forward and Casey off the seat.

‘He was singing Waltzing Matilda,’ he explained as he picked himself up.

‘But he was singing that last night.’

‘He always sings it–he doesn’t know any other songs.’

‘Why don’t you teach him some?’

‘Oh well, I’m going to–I’m going to teach him Rule Britannia’–and Casey slammed the door of the brake, causing Storm to follow him towards the house, his voice raised in righteous anger.

Abstractedly Paul remained in the car. He watched them walk towards the door, Casey’s small figure with its stocky innocence and Storm, large and ungainly, his shoulders slightly rounded and his hair matted and unkempt around his enormous forehead. It was at times like this–after a perfect day–that Paul knew how much he loved them. They had so much purpose–and yet it was strangely contrasted. On the one hand so material and on the other so irrelevantly intent on dreams. Paul thought of Casey for a moment as if he were a stranger, and amidst this transitory reassessment felt troubled. He tried to remember himself as a child, but it was just a maze of ill-remembered sequences that meant nothing. He could recall scenes and people’s faces, but how he had felt in relation to them was quite impossible to remember. Vaguely he could recall sensations–moods of disappointment or jubilation. But he knew that he was applying an adult’s mind to the recollection of the ecstasy of the first day of the holidays, or the night before Christmas, or the time his father had brought home the toy garage that he had treasured more than any of his possessions at the time. He couldn’t really remember exactly how it had felt–he could only suppose that it must have been a sensation that was beyond recapturing–a sensation that eluded him however intently he pursued it now. Paul knew, fatalistically, that try as he might, his mind was quite different; it was overlaid with years of adult sensation–bitterness particularly, and a sense of dogged resilience that he knew was too many layers thick to begin probing now. And, above all, the ever oppressive weight of his perpetual guilt blocked the delicacy and the luxury of an open mind. Because of this, he could confirm to himself that the chance of re-exploration was nil, and the way to understanding Casey by sharing his imagination was utterly barred until he could turn away the dead weight of his introverted conscience. But it was such a bloody shame, he thought savagely and miserably, as he stared at the darkened dashboard. At the outset, at least, his mind had been lucid–perhaps he could have made an attempt then. But now it was almost too late. If only for a few weeks he could forget his own thoughts and become part of someone else. If he could face the problem again with a fresh mind, then he might find some way of equating what had happened with what was going to happen. To him and to Meg in the future–so there was something there to look forward to–rather than to look back on.

Absentmindedly he found he had switched on the headlights, and to his surprise he saw that Casey and Storm were still in the porch, bending over something on the step. Idly he wondered what had been dropped, or who had tripped. No doubt Storm had fallen over Casey–he was pretty clumsy generally. For some reason they were very still–in silhouette they seemed frozen over something that they stared at very closely. Then he saw Storm draw Casey aside and they separated. The boy went quickly inside and Storm walked round the side of the house. Curiously Paul eased himself stiffly out of the car and walked slowly across the gravel. He knew that he was going to experience some alien sensation. This feeling came about mainly because of the events that had preceded it during which detail would become unusually concise and his own minor movements seemed to be in slow motion. Now, Paul heard the gravel crunch under his heavy shoes, and the noise it made seemed to go on for a very long time as if each stone that was dispersed made its own individual sound. It was extraordinary how he knew by these small signs of an approaching disturbance. Perhaps too inadequate a word to use in some cases. With Stephen he had known before by the way he was driving. He had noticed very distinctly his whitened knuckles as they gripped the wheel of the car, and there had been irregular patches of tar on the road surface that had seemed to build up to some kind of crazy pattern. He still remembered that pattern and the way the tar lay hard on the road. After that he could remember nothing else–and this was dreadful to him, because he particularly wanted to. Neither could he remember much of what had happened before. Just his knuckles, the tar and snatches of a song that Stephen and Meg were singing:

‘She’ll be coming down the mountain when she comes,

She’ll be coming down the mountain when she comes,

She’ll be …’

He found himself humming it under his breath and almost breaking off at the point where Meg and Stephen had stopped singing so abruptly.

He reached the door and knelt down beside the bedraggled heap that sprawled half in and half out of the porch. The raven night masked the outline of the broken shape, but as he bent nearer Paul could distinguish the body of a cat. Its fur was unkempt, and as his eye travelled along its untidy form he noticed that the head had been cleanly severed from the neck. There was a movement behind him and he looked up. Storm stood by his side with a spade in his massive hand. Without looking at Paul he inserted it under the cat, lifted it away from the porch, and said:

‘The best thing I can do is to get rid of this–thing. I don’t feel much like talking about it–I can’t think of anything to say anyway.’

Then he turned and disappeared around the side of the house, his arms rigid and his shoulders bowed, with the spade held out directly in front of him. He was swallowed up in the darkness almost immediately. Paul stood for some time, feeling rather sick, watching the place where he had disappeared as if it were a velvet curtain from which Storm would presently re-emerge. After a while he turned away and walked into the house. The babble of children’s voices greeted him, and he sank gratefully into the warmth of their clamour. Immediately he began to look for Casey.

There was very little architectural beauty to Exeter Court, inside or outside there was a consistency of grey weathered stone and chocolate-brown paintwork that would sober the most lunatic imagination. The building, anonymous to the extreme, seemed to have been hurled into its own particular cleft in the South Downs. The ground rose protectively from it at either side, whilst the continuation of a golf course veered steeply away from the ramshackle conservatory that clung like a growth to the side of the house. Exeter Court was square-fronted, symmetrical in regard to its quota of doors and windows and therefore extremely dull in conception. A battered portico surrounded the front door, which looked as if it had been the recipient of the perpetual kicking of small boys for a good many years. The general effect was solidarity, conforming to a vague standard of late Victorian building. The house looked as if it should have huddled under a Welsh hillside or formed part of a high street in the Lake District. Its provincialism was not of the South but of the North, and this perhaps compensated a little for its negative characteristics. The whole structure was slightly out of place and faintly uncomfortable, standing as it did amidst the smooth, chalk-torn downland. Yet, a personality lingered in the innocuous façade. The battered walls were scored by the constant leaning of bicycles against them and the threadbare lawn was mainly given over to a huge tent that hung crazily askew in the stirring whisper of the night wind. Dimly, in the glow of the cloudy blackness, rambling outbuildings stood hunchbacked to the walls of the house, arched against its protective solidarity in a turmoil of untidy framework. The downstairs windows were lit, a line of boys standing with their backs to the glass. Faintly a rostrum could be made out in front of them, and on it a bald figure with sloping shoulders and a mass of tousled hair, who seemed to be vigorously addressing them. Then the muffled sound of a hymn seeped from the scarred stone walls, lustily sung, yet muffled and indistinct. It was doused by the wind that carried the subdued murmur of the waves and the dragging sigh of the pebbles–and was lost. Inside they started to pray; eyes half shut, with shuffling feet, they muttered the Lord’s Prayer. Storm’s voice could be heard above those of the children, pronouncing every syllable evenly and distinctly:

‘But deliver us from Evil

For Thine is the Kingdom …’

Paul’s lips moved rhythmically to the sing-song slur of their voices. His eyes, grimly closed, saw only the emerald downland of the afternoon. It had been the first warm spring afternoon of the year, yet already the season seemed to be tentatively giving way to a mellow summer. Up until the beginning of May there had been no indication of spring–simply a dreary extension of winter that had overlapped unfairly with excessive mists and rain. Then suddenly–this afternoon–the wan pulse of a season that had hardly come before it was forgotten was felt for a few moments before a kind of experimental summer took control. It seemed to Paul as if one season had been eclipsed, unfairly, by the next.

‘The Power and the Glory,

For ever and ever–Amen.’

Storm’s voice drew up abruptly on the last word. Paul noticed that his gown was torn and there was something lodged in the lower part of his beard. Paul smiled, his perpetual half-smiling furrows broadening as he watched Storm search his pockets desperately for the slip of paper on which he wrote the school notices. There was a perpetual, expected, wait at this stage of prayers and it was too regular a routine even to be punctuated by the odd giggle.

With a start Paul forgot the afternoon and his mind turned to the macabre discovery of this evening. Certainly the unfortunate cat was a stranger to Exeter Court–it had definitely been no one’s pet. The whole affair, gruesome as it was, rather fascinated him, despite an increasing worry concerning its instigators. Paul was sure that no child at the school could have been capable of such cruelty–and yet every other possibility seemed to be ruled out. It was unlikely that it could have been done by another animal; the incision had been obviously by a sharp blade and probably in one movement. Paul’s amateur-detective faculties faded as he thought of Casey. He had found him in the bathroom crying his heart out. Paul had tried to comfort him, but the boy seemed unable to stop the monotonous sobbing that was like a dry cough. Then–suddenly–he stopped and turned his face up towards Paul, who felt a tightening feeling of grief in his stomach as he looked into Casey’s wide grey eyes.

Now Storm had found the piece of paper which had been inside his Bible. His eyes were almost black and were set, small and insignificant, far back in their sockets. They looked like tiny, kindly fish that swam in a clear film, enabling them to dart from side to side more swiftly than Paul had ever seen a pair of eyes move. Blackcurrant eyes in the face of a gingerbread man. But Storm’s mouth was firm and his lips were full enough to make up for the inadequacies of his upper features. Paul wondered if Storm was going to mention their discovery or not. He began:

‘Jeremy–if you continue to pick your nose so fervently you’ll have a growth which even Matron, with all her experience, won’t be able to remove!’

There were sniggers from the back of the hall and Storm’s eyes darted like angry tadpoles to the centre of the disturbance. In a moment there was silence.

‘Today we begin a new week and at the outset of this I would like to say …’

Twenty minutes later Storm finished. He hadn’t mentioned the cat and Paul was relieved. The delivery had entirely concerned routine affairs of the coming week and had wound up with the regular entreaty to make it more perfect in the sight of God than the previous one. Storm undertook his religion, as everything else, with a perfectionist intent that repeatedly continued to wound him. The boys filed out noisily and the staff followed, bound for the common-room where Storm would give a further oration, this time on various problems affecting the running of the school and particularly upon the staff’s own relationships with the boys.

Paul walked towards the common-room through the chipped, chocolate-brown corridors, that seemed to stretch endlessly through Exeter Court. The building had been constructed on three levels: the first floor housed a large bleak entrance hall