Irene Sees the Sea
Everything earned is also experienced. That is the point.
Irene || Sea || Freedom || Joy
She drove Irene to the coast on a Friday in June — a Friday she had specifically cleared in her schedule, the only appointment on that day being this one, which she had put in her calendar three months earlier with the notation: Irene — sea. They drove in easy companionship, speaking intermittently about things that were not Coldmoor, which was itself a new pleasure — to be with someone from that experience and to discuss other things, to discover that the other things were present and available and constituted the majority of both their inner lives, which the experience had not evacuated but had, in its way, deepened. Irene sat in the passenger seat and received the landscape with the careful, deliberate presence-focus she had been developing, occasionally saying what she was noticing — a field of pale summer wheat, a village set into a hill, the sky changing quality as they approached the coast — the way a person reports back from a careful observation. Eighteen years of other Junes were happening to her simultaneously. She was choosing this one as the primary. She was managing it well. She was getting better at it, she said, which she offered as information rather than reassurance. It was getting easier to select the present from among all the presents available to her. Not easy. Easier. She thought that easier was a reasonable destination.
They reached the coast at noon. She parked at the edge of the headland where the road ended and the ground took over, and they got out and walked the last quarter-mile on the coastal path to the cliff edge. The sea was visible from two hundred metres back — the particular shock of blue that the sea presents when you approach it from inland, appearing suddenly above the line of everything else, enormous and entirely itself. Irene stopped walking when she saw it. She stood on the path and looked at it for a long time. She did not say anything for three minutes, and Nora did not say anything, because some moments are correctly experienced in silence and this was one of them. Then Irene said: “I’ve seen the sea in eighteen Junes,” she said. “All at once. All the times I’ve ever been near it. They’re all here.” She was quiet. “This one is the best.” She said it with the quiet certainty of someone whose evaluation carried the full weight of a comprehensive comparison. Nora looked at the sea. The summer light on it, the movement of it, the sound arriving from below the cliff with the steady, indifferent, patient percussion of something that has been doing this for considerably longer than any of the things they had been dealing with and would be doing it considerably after. “Yes,” she said. “I think so too.” They stood on the cliff path in the June sun and looked at the sea, and the sea was very blue, and the air came in from the west, and it tasted like itself, and they stood there until Nora said they should probably eat something before the drive back, and Irene agreed, and they went back to the car, and the sea was still there when they left, as it had been, as it would be, as it always was.