house when “they were all shouting at one another. Your sister said she would
throw herself off the cliff.” She who knows that Henry’s “bed had not been
slept in.” And it is after the scene she witnesses—“your father got up and
went out, slamming the door”—that she sees his ¤gure “turned to stone” on
the rock overlooking the sea. There is something so wrong with this picture
that, having boarded her tram home, she gets off again and returns to the
scene of the crime. But now there is “not a soul about.”
This is the “message” Ada relays to Henry, but what does it mean? Evi-
dently father and son have had a quarrel—“Your bed had not been slept in”—
evidently something terrible has happened, but what? What would make the
sister threaten to throw herself off a cliff? Why is everyone shouting? Why
does the father go out, slamming the door? What drives him to drown him-
self? Why is the body, in a detail perfectly suited to radio, “never found”?
Henry evidently knows some or all of these things, which is why he cannot
drown out the voice of the sea. When Ada retells her tale, a tale she herself
doesn’t understand, his sense of guilt reaches fever pitch. If Ada could only
remember more! “Every syllable is a second gained.”
The Bolton story, far from being unrelated, provides the clue. Bolton has
summoned Dr. Holloway, an old family friend, to help him in some desperate
venture. Holloway ¤nally offers to give his old friend a shot, but Bolton wants
something else that Holloway won’t give him: “We’ve had this before, Bolton,
don’t ask me to go through it again” (104). Does Bolton want Holloway to
perform euthanasia? Or perhaps, given Ada’s reference to Henry’s sister’s
threat, an abortion? Or some other act of mercy? There is no way of knowing
what Bolton’s “Please! please!” refers to except that it is evidently something
Holloway might dispense from his little black bag. The turning point, in any
case, comes after the third “Please, Holloway!”:
Candle shaking and guttering all over the place, lower now, old arm
tired, takes it in the other hand and holds it high again, that’s it, that
was always it, night, and the embers cold, and the glim shaking in your
old ¤st, saying, “Please! Please! [Pause.] Begging. [Pause.] Of the poor.
[Pause.] Ada! [Pause.] Father! [Pause.] Christ! [Pause.] (Embers 104)“Yo u r old ¤st”: with the sudden and startling shift from third to second
person, the text suddenly opens up. For who is Bolton but the father now
immediately invoked in the sequence “Ada!” “Father!” “Christ!” each appel-
lation punctuated by a pause bearing the sound of the sea? Far from being a
projection of Henry’s imagination, or Henry’s alter ego, Bolton stands in for
the father, who, having failed in his unspeci¤ed and ¤nal plea to Hollo-
114 Chapter 6