The sound of stone falling stops, whereas the sea’s “sucking” continues. “Suck-
ing,” with its harsh spirant and voiceless stop, now extracts Ada’s monologue,
which is, from the point of view of plot, the key to the play, providing as it
does the crucial information Henry has sought all along.
The climactic scene in question begins with Henry’s challenge: “I can’t
remember if he [Father] met you,” and Ada’s immediate reply, “You know he
met me” (102). Henry demurs: “No, Ada, I don’t know, I’m sorry. I have for-
gotten almost every thing connected with you.” Now comes the following
dialogue:
ADA: You weren’t there. Just your mother and sister. I had called to fetch
you, as arranged. We were to go bathing together. [Pause.]
HENRY: [Irritably.] Drive on, drive on! Why do people always stop in the
middle of what they are saying?
ADA: None of them knew where you were. Your bed had not been slept
in. They were all shouting at one another. Your sister said she would throw
herself off the cliff. Your father got up and went out, slamming the door. I
left soon afterwards and passed him on the road. He did not see me. He was
sitting on a rock looking out to sea. I never forgot his posture. And yet it was
a common one. You used to have it sometimes. Perhaps just the stillness, as
if he had been turned to stone. I could never make it out. [Pause.]
HENRY: Keep on! keep on! [Imploringly.] Keep it going, Ada, every syl-
lable is a second gained. (102)
Ada cannot remember anything else, but she insists that “there are attitudes
remain in one’s mind for reasons that are clear” (103) and that she cannot
forget “the great stillness of the whole body, as if all the breath had left it”
(103). It remains for Henry to ¤nish Ada’s story for her: she sees, or so Henry
imagines it, the old man sitting on the rock but keeps on toward the tram
stop, gets on the next tram into town, but feels “uneasy” and gets off again.
She retraces her steps: “Very unhappy and uneasy, hangs round a bit, not a
soul about, cold wind coming in off sea, goes back down path and takes tram
home” (103).
The critics have made very little of this whole sequence. “When Ada
leaves Henry’s mind,” writes Cohn, “he tries to weave a story about her en-
counter with his father, but Ada ‘takes tram home,’ and Henry drops her”
(Just Play 84). But then why is this the only moment in the play when Henry
urges Ada to “drive on!” and “keep on!”? That “Every syllable is a second
gained”? Note that for the ¤rst time it is revealed that Ada was the last person
to have seen Henry’s father alive. It is she who witnessed the scene at Henry’s
Acoustic Art in Beckett’s Radio Plays 113