The Sea Stayed

I sat and watched him come down the sand path between the lupins, a towel over his shoulders. From the high rocks you could see the whole beach like a toy shop come alive – sunbathing couples, solitary baskers, kids burrowing in their trenches. The sun which had caused it all looked down nonchalant; the sea which abets rose and fell like a giant breathing; the giant of fatal spray, the inverted mountain taller than mountains of land, with more of infinite variety than snow and ice possess; the land-mountain the Ego, curdling of magma; the sea eternity itself, neither life nor death, but to us land-born for ever death. . . .

He was thick-set, fleshy. A butcher – butchers, they say, grow fat by eating the raw scraps of steak left on the chopping board. Fifty perhaps, or fifty-five. Nothing picked him out from the others except an air of vitality; and the blood vessels dark in his cheeks. A burly man, a ‘buirdly chiel’ Burns would have said.

He walked down to the sea; the sun went behind a cloud. The sea was lead now, the weeds heavy.

He swam out, throwing his head under now and then, wiry-haired. Out of the bay, he struck the current. Soon he was floundering; soon he drifted under water, showing only when the high swells caught him.

They brought him in hanging on their shoulders like a sack; so much lime, so much phosphorus . . . a trace of copper, I believe. The red had gone from his face; there was a tracery on the calves of his legs. They worked on him for an hour. He was obviously dead.

And the gulls came over, and the sun came out. And the sea stayed. The bathers, too.

1944 (9)