Read The Sea for Free Online Page B

there had sidled up to me on the gravelled patch outside Myler’s a small and harmless-seeming dog which when I put out my hand to it bared its teeth in what I mistakenly took to be an ingratiating grin and bit me on the wrist with an astonishingly swift snap of its jaws and then ran off, sniggering, or so it seemed to me; and how when I came home my mother scolded me bitterly for my foolishness in offering my hand to the brute and sent me, all on my own, to the village doctor who, elegant and urbane, stuck a perfunctory plaster over the rather pretty, purplish swelling on my wrist and then bade me take off all my clothes and sit on his knee so that, with a wonderfully pale, plump and surely manicured hand pressed warmly against my lower abdomen, he might demonstrate to me the proper way to breathe. “Let the stomach swell instead of drawing it in, you see?” he said softly, purringly, the warmth of his big bland face beating against my ear.
    Claire gave a colourless laugh. “Which left the more lasting mark,” she asked, “the dog’s teeth or the doctor’s paw?”
    I showed her my wrist where in the skin over the ulnar styloid are still to be seen the faint remaining scars from the pair of puncture marks made there by the canine’s canines.
    “It was not Capri,” I said, “and Doctor French was not Tiberius.”
    In truth I have only fond memories of that day. I can still recall the aroma of after-lunch coffee on the doctor’s breath and the fishy swivel of his housekeeper’s eye as she saw me to the front door.
    Claire and I arrived at the Field.
    In fact it is a field no longer but a dreary holiday estate packed higgledy-piggledy with what are bound to be jerrybuilt bungalows, designed I suspect by the same cackhanded line-drawer who was responsible for the eyesores at the bottom of the garden here. However, I was pleased to note that the name given to the place, ersatz though it be, is The Lupins, and that the builder, for I presume it was the builder, even spared a tall stand of this modest wild shrub—
Lupinus,
a genus of the Papilionaceae, I have just looked it up—beside the ridiculously grand mock-gothic gateway that leads in from the road. It was under the lupin bushes that my father every other week, at darkest midnight, with spade and flashlight, muttering curses under his breath, would dig a hole in the soft sandy earth and bury the bucketful of slops from our chemical lavatory. I can never smell the weak but oddly anthropic perfume of those blossoms without seeming to catch behind it a lingering sweet whiff of nightsoil.
    “Are you not going to stop at all?” Claire said. “I’m starting to feel car-sick.”
    As the years go on I have the illusion that my daughter is catching up on me in age and that by now we are almost contemporaries. It is probably the consequence of having such a clever child—had she persisted she would have made a far finer scholar than I could ever have hoped to be. Also she understands me to a degree that is disturbing and will not indulge my foibles and excesses as others do who know me less and therefore fear me more. But I am bereaved and wounded and require indulging. If there is a long version of shrift, then that is what I am in need of.
Let me alone,
I cried at her in my mind,
let
me creep past the traduced old Cedars, past the vanished Strand Café, past the
Lupins and the Field that was, past all this past, for if I stop I shall surely
dissolve in a shaming puddle of tears.
Meekly, however, I halted the car at the side of the road and she got out in a vexed silence and slammed the door behind her as if she were delivering me a box on the ear. What had I done to annoy her so? There are times when she is as wilfully moody as her mother.
    And then suddenly, unlikeliest of all, behind the huddle of the Lupins’ leprechaun houses, here was Duignan’s lane, rutted as it always was, ambling between tangled hedges of hawthorn and dusted-over brambles. How had it