way (“Please! please!”), takes his own life. And it is Henry who, for reasons
never made wholly clear, cannot stop feeling he is to blame. No removal to
Switzerland, no memories of “normal” family life, no retelling of Ada’s un-
comprehending story of what happened the fatal day of his father’s death,
no invocation of horses hooves’ marking time, of water dripping, of stones
struck together with a loud grinding sound, can drown out the sea’s endless
sounding.
What is perhaps the key word linking the two narratives in Embers is the
word “washout,” which appears in Henry’s opening monologue. He has just
gone over the Bolton-Holloway story for the ¤rst time and has recounted
Holloway’s refusal to do what Bolton wants: “ghastly scene, wishes to God
he hadn’t come, no good, ¤re out, bitter cold, great trouble, white world, not
a sound, no good. [Pause.]” At this point, “No good” is repeated, now refer-
ring back to Henry himself:
No good. [Pause.] Can’t do it. [Pause.] Listen to it! [Pause.] Father!
[Pause.] You wouldn’t know me now, you’d be sorry you ever had me,
but you were that already a washout that’s the last I heard from you, a
washout. [Pause. Imitating father’s voice.] “Are you coming for a dip?”
“No.” “Come on, come on.” “No.” Glare, stump to door, turn, glare. “A
washout that’s all you are, a washout!” [Violent slam of door. Pause.]
Again! [Slam. Pause.] Slam life shut like that! [Pause.] Washout. [Pause.]
Wish to Christ she had. (96)The terrible irony here is that if Henry is ¤guratively a “washout,” his father
is literally one. But “washout” also refers to Henry’s own death wish, his wish
never to have been born coupled with his wish that he himself had never
become Addie’s father: “horrid little creature, wish to God we’d never had
her” (96). An important intertext here is Beckett’s late prose composition
Company, speci¤cally the following childhood memory:
You stand at the tip of the high board. High above the sea. In it your
father’s upturned face. Upturned to you. You look down to the loved
trusted face. He calls you to jump. He calls, be a brave boy. The red
round face. The thick moustache. The greying hair. The swell sways it
under and sways it up again. The far call again. Be a brave boy. Many
eyes upon you. From the water and from the bathing place.^16The reference here, as James Knowlson notes in his biography, is to the “fa-
mous deep ‘Gentlemen Only’ Forty-Foot” into which Bill Beckett, a superb
Acoustic Art in Beckett’s Radio Plays 115