In each of these novels and novellas, Bonnie recognises the compelling power of the sea’s “siren’s song” (Banville, The Sea). The sea, she suggests, is where the characters belong, where they want to be. A mother tells her child that the sea is “just saying how glad it is to see you, it’s really missed you!” (Olmi, Beside the Sea). Far out at sea in his skiff, a fisherman thinks to himself, “I wish I was the fish… I would rather be that beast down there in the darkness of the sea” (Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea). A student, and his cousin who is in the “madhouse”, “shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses” (Lovecraft, The Shadow Over Innsmouth). The seashore represents a powerful “invitation to undertake a journey from which no one returns” (Corbin, The Lure of the Sea). Bonnie has written in the margin of her notes: “It is like the Land of Oz, which is surrounded by desert, and once you are there, it is almost impossible to leave.”
Bonnie sees inevitability in the deaths in these seaside narratives. Even the train, she says, that George Harvey Bone is travelling on seems to sense this: “Approaching Brighton in the darkness, the train slowed down, hesitated, seemed to be feeling its way before risking itself in a dangerous area” (Hamilton, Hangover Square). The characters that come to the coast, feels Bonnie, are just as surely coming to their end, one way or another. After coming on holiday to a coastal city, Lise “will be found tomorrow morning dead”. While Lise is devising her own murder, the maid at the hotel “inquires amiably if Madam is going to the beach” (Spark, The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark). Meursault thinks that he might not, after all, commit murder, “But the whole beach, pulsing with heat, was pressing on my back” (Camus, The Outsider). He is condemned to death. Characters walk steadily into the water: “Then calmly they stood up and waded into the sea, the water smooth as oil hardly breaking around them, and leaned forward in unison and swam out slowly… out, and out” (Banville, The Sea), or they plunge from the eroding cliffs into the sea that is waiting below: “And if death had come her way it was no more than she had asked for. She had gone to meet him halfway” (Drabble, The Witch of Exmoor).
The above, then, is what Bonnie has picked out of her source material. Out of all that text, all that imagery, this is what she has homed in on, this is how she sees. It is like how a dog sees: a monochrome wash and then a vivid patch of blue, someone’s blue jumper picked out, like the little girl’s red coat in Schindler’s List. This is Bonnie’s sea: Here be monsters. While Bonnie herself lives in the Midlands, about as far away from the coast as she could be, it is to the shore of this sea that Bonnie keeps sending the characters in the stories that she writes.
6
No one came to take away all the stuff that had been left behind in Bonnie’s flat. She had grown used, though, to living with the cases and boxes that made it look as if she had not quite made up her mind about staying, and she hardly noticed the traffic cones and the signs, except for when she tripped over them in the dark. She began to think that if this stuff was not there, in the corners of the lounge, the room might feel oddly empty. She thought of those spaces in which homeowners sometimes discovered strangers living, homeless people who had crept into a basement or a closet and had lived there undetected for months. Were they missed, she wondered, these trespassers, after they had gone?
She did lose things, and wondered if somehow it was because of all this junk. She kept misplacing the remote control for the television; and she had looked, one night, for her dissertation notes, wondering whether it was too late to try again, but she could not find her notes anywhere; they were not where she thought she had put them. She decided she would have to remind Sylvia about taking the junk away, but then she found the remote control again and forgot all about it.
On a Saturday afternoon in the middle of spring, Sylvia turned up again. After spotting Bonnie through the kitchen window, she came in through the back door without knocking. She was smartly dressed, in the same suit as before, as if it were a uniform, as if she were going to work. The suit matched the colour of her eyes in certain lights, at certain angles. ‘Milk and sugar,’ she said, handing a shopping bag to Bonnie, who was still in her dressing gown. Bonnie put on the kettle and made two milky, sugary teas, putting Sylvia’s in the nicest mug she had, her birthday mug, while Bonnie had the ‘I’M A MUG!’ mug, which did not look so out of place in her own hands.
Sylvia led the way through to the lounge, where she sat down on the sofa and patted the space beside her. ‘Sit down, dear,’ she said, and Bonnie sat. Sylvia smiled. ‘I’ve been thinking about your story,’ she said. ‘The Seatown in your story is fictional. There is a place on the Dorset coast called Seatown, but there is no pub there called the Hook, and there is no esplanade as there is in your story. The pub there is called the Anchor, and the shore is a pebble beach enclosed by grey clay cliffs. There is a town called Seaton, just along the coast, in Devon, where there is a pub called the Hook and Parrot, and it does have attic rooms, and there is an esplanade with signs disallowing cycles and dogs and so on. It is not closed on Mondays, though, as your Seatown pub is. There is a pub in Hampshire called the Hook and Glove, which is closed on Mondays, and which even has a pig with a chalkboard, although it is not quite like the one in your story. The Hook and Glove, however, is not by the sea.’
‘I have been to Seaton,’ said Bonnie, ‘but the story’s just made up.’
‘Have you written any more of the story?’ asked Sylvia. ‘I’d very much like to read it.’
‘I haven’t,’ said Bonnie. ‘I haven’t written a thing for weeks.’