Kathleen Sully uses death as punctuation in A Man Talking to Seagulls, a tale of one day in the life of Dundeston, a resort somewhere on the east coast of England. She opens the day with the body of a young woman washed up on the beach. Scratcher, a vagrant living in a shack on the beach, “a man of little account to anybody — even himself,” is the first to find her and, it seems, the only one to take any note of her death. “Where is she?” he asks the seagulls as he feeds them.
She must be somewhere; she can’t be nowhere. A person is a person the same as a gull’s a gull. And a soul’s a soul: indestructible, quite — quite indestructible, everlasting, for ever and ever. The good Lord said it was so — is so. The body holds the soul — holds us.
The police come quickly and take the body away and Dundeston carries on with its day. The man who rents the beach chairs begins setting them up. The man with the donkeys brings them out to await a new batch of riders. The cockle seller lights up his stove and raises the awning on his stand. The day-trippers start flowing in from the bus stand and train station. The people staying in holiday bungalows awake and breakfast.
In one of the bungalows, two young people away for a secret weekend begin arguing. He loses his temper and throws a vase at her head. She collapses. He tries to rouse her. Finding no sign of life, he decides he must dispose of the body. “Val won’t be missed — yet,” he thinks. “When she was missed — and who would miss her apart from her landlady and a few casual friends — would she be traced?” He stashes the body in a shed and heads into town for breakfast.
This disregard for the value of a life threads throughout A Man Talking to Seagulls like a motif in a minor chord: never too long, never too loud, but persistent and unsettling. To the young and healthy, it’s an irrelevance. To the middle aged trying to get through another day, it’s an annoyance. And to an old woman quietly nipping from the bottle of gin in the family picnic basket, it’s a disturbing inevitability:
Her youth was long past, yet she found it difficult to accept the fact that she was old — really old. But her weak and trembly legs insisted upon it; her gnarled and blue-roped hands proclaimed it; only the oldest of human flesh was as crepe-like and yellowed as her own.
And a little while after having these thoughts, as she sleeps in her beach chair, death makes its second appearance of the day. “What can we do with her out here — how will we get her home?” is her daughter’s first reaction. She is still at the annoyance stage.
Sully manages to squeeze a cast of dozens into the space of barely 160 pages. They weave in and out, crossing paths or missing each other entirely. Val, the girl with the cracked skull, comes to, finds herself wrapped up in a canvas cloth in the shed, susses the situation, manages to slip out, and heads for the first train out of town. Her would-be murderer wanders the town trying to decide between finding a shovel and a discreet bush to bury her behind and attempting to toss her body into the sea that night. He meets a creepy old man in a isolated mansion at the edge of the town and is left with the distinct impression that the old man may have buried a body or two himself.
But he never meets with any sense of regret until death makes its last visit of the day. Wandering along the beach, he comes across another body:
For an instant he knew that he beheld a husk — that the man was elsewhere — and that life was life and could not be denied or extinguished — ever. The body was merely a shack.
The instant passed and all knowledge of it: all he knew afterwards was that he had felt something to stupendous to comprehend.
After reading six of Kathleen Sully’s seventeen novels, I think I can see two themes emerging in her work: life is chaotic and rarely comprehensible; and death is inevitable and never more than a breath away. A Man Talking to Seagulls is an apt example of how she managed to weave both themes into a single composition almost Simenon-ian in its grim efficiency.