“Comprehensive, of course,” said Betty Castle.
“Verity’s no bluestocking, are you, dear?”
“No, Freddie, I haven’t got a brain in my head. As you know perfectly well.”
At Thalassa, George wrote to Vera as the afternoon darkened. He framed each new word with his pen as deliberately as if he was phrasing an anonymous ransom note. St Cadix was lonely … his things had arrived … he’d bought a boat … seeing a passing reference to Montedor in the papers had made him feel homesick … he’d love to hear Vera’s news. He mentioned Teddy, but crossed out that sentence. He rewrote the letter in Portuguese and read it over. It looked perfectly innocuous; boring enough to make a secret policeman yawn. He hoped the policeman was a paranoid fiction.
No-one tampered with anybody’s letters in the Montedor that George knew. But the country of the Sunday Telegraph report was not the one he knew: the scary thing about those two scrambled paragraphs was that they made Montedor sound just like any other flimsy, tarpaper Third World state—a cockleshell nation that would capsize at a puff of wind from the wrong quarter. He’d been in places like that and knew how appallingly quickly they tipped over: one morning you woke to shooting in the streets; in a week you’d got used to the sight of men you’d once met being blindfolded for their public executions in the sandy town square. But not—surely—in Montedor? Please not in Montedor.
George read his letter again. If things really were still all right, Vera would be flummoxed by it—it sounded half-baked. He was cheered up by the thought of her sitting out on the loggia reading it, her tongue searching round her upper lip, her eyes wrinkled tightly in the glare. Where is George at? She’d smooth the paper flat and leave it on the table in the tall, airy room at the front of the house, pausing over it each time she passed. In the evening, she’d show it to Teddy. Between them, they’d figure it out.
All through the morning, Penhaligon’s Taxi (“Funerals and Weddings Fully Catered For”) kept up a shuttle service in the drizzle between Thalassa and the quay. The tea chests emptied and the boat settled on its waterline as George loaded her with his cargo of precious junk. The tide was on the ebb, and by lunchtime he was standing on the edge of the dripping quay wall, lowering stuff down to the deck in Vera’s bag at the end of a rope. Herring gulls honked and wheezed over his head. He scrambled down the slippery ladder, bruising his shins, and carried another armful of books and trinkets into the dry of the cabin.
Working in the rain, he brought his life aboard; though, for a man as tall and loosely constructed as George, his life was rather on the small side. Piled up in tidy heaps in the saloon, it was, as lives went, a modest affair. There seemed to be hardly more of it than when he’d first packed up his things in a trunk and sent them Passenger Luggage in Advance to Pwllheli.
He spread the striped Wolof rug on the saloon floor and glued his pipe rack (a present from Vera two birthdays ago) to the bulkhead. It was a novelty to be using glue at all: in George’s experience, things always had to be readily movable. The safest way to live was to assume that your marching orders would arrive tomorrow. If they didn’t, that was your good luck; and you certainly didn’t tempt fate by sticking things to your walls with glue. Pleased by the way the pipe rack looked, George hesitated over a particular treasure—a framed watercolour sketch by Van Guylen of ships at anchor in Mindelo harbour in 1846—and stuck that fast, too.
He had never had a proper place of his own before. He’d always been a lodger in other people’s houses and had picked up the lodger’s habit of passing through without leaving tracks. He’d been born in a rectory that belonged to the Church and gone on to Navy quarters and Company apartments; and he left each billet exactly as he’d found it. There was no wallpaper so virulent that George couldn’t live with it: in Dar-es-Salaam he’d slept for two years in a bedroom decorated with black feet on a forsythia-yellow ground, though it had once caused a girl called Dorothy to wake him with a screaming nightmare. In Bom Porto, the sheets on his bed were marked “Shepherd’s Hotel, Cairo”, the knives and forks belonged to the French railways, the threadbare grey towels in the bathroom to St Joseph’s Mission School. George felt no more responsible for these things than he did for the weather.
Calliope was different. Last week, when he’d received from Harwich the cracked and elderly document that registered her as a British Ship, with George as her Master and sole owner of all her 64 shares, he found that she’d been built in 1924, the same year as him. That seemed to fit nicely—it confirmed the odd kinship he’d felt with the boat when he’d first seen her drifting out from the quay. She had been a trawler then, called Lizzie V. She had been rechristened a muse in 1958, when she’d retired and been converted to a yacht. The panelled saloon had been her fish hold; and where she’d once been stacked with crans of herring, George now snugged down his shelf of Kipling. The swastikas on the spines of their claret bindings had shed most of their gold leaf: Life’s Handicap was on its last legs, Kim’s pages had grown fat and soggy with rereading. He roped the books tight with shock-cord, then made them rock solid by wedging Palgrave’s Golden Treasury between Many Inventions and Barrack Room Ballads.
It was a bit late in the day to start building one’s first real nest. In Bom Porto, George had watched other men come out in their twenties and go home to mortgages in England in their thirties, their migratory patterns as regular as those of swallows. To begin with, there had been a little British community of young men in Montedor. Until 1964, there’d been a consulate. By the ’70s, though, there was hardly anyone left. Carmody went in ’71; Palmer and Lytton in ’75. Humphreys stayed on through Independence until 1979. Then there was just George. It was as if he lacked the internal compass, or radar, or whatever it was that told birds to take off for home at the right season. He lodged where he was, waiting for orders that had taken a quarter of a century to arrive. Every year, the young men grew a shade younger. They stopped calling him “George” and started calling him “Mr Grey”. They showed him photographs of the houses they were going to buy at home—they were all of the same house, an ugly, half-prefabricated building made out of formica and eggboxes, on a “private estate” in a suburb of a Midland city. He knew the names of the girls they were planning to marry—the Alisons, Sues and Janices, with their jobs as nurses and secretaries. “Funny-you not marrying,” they said. “Oh,” George said, “I was married once,” and left it at that. When he saw the young men off, first on the boat, later at the new airport, he felt a melancholy wriggle of envy for them. They were so sure of what they wanted, and of what they deserved; and they had the mysterious knack of seeming to want only what they deserved; where he came unstuck was that he hadn’t deserved the things he wanted. Like Angela, he thought, shaking out an old brown jacket of Donegal tweed and fitting it into the port-side hanging locker.
He wound up the small barograph which used to stand in his office at the bunkering station and glued its wooden base to the shelf. A length of shock-cord, fastened to the wall with screw-eyes, made a good waistband in which to hold the battered olive oil tin full of blunt coloured pencils. There was no room at sea for clutter and loose ends. Everything had to be strapped in its due place and battened down, if you didn’t want the first big wave to turn your life into an Irish stew. George had had enough already in the way of breakages: aboard Calliope, he meant to keep things shipshape and Bristol fashion.
A scallop boat manoeuvered alongside. Its girdle of motor tyres squeezed close. Calliope slopped heavily about in its wash as the boat went astern, its screw making the water round it boil. There were voices, booted footsteps over George’s head, the sound of a heavy rope being dragged across his roof to the quay.
Hunkered down in secret, he lit the charcoal stove and paraffin lamps, and watched the saloon fill with dodging shadows, as abrupt and quick as mice. Nothing was still. The timbers of the boat flexed and creaked. The lamps tipped in their gimbals. The floor felt spongy and provisional, as if it might dissolve away from
under his feet. The sensation of floating was unnervingly keen and intimate: it was like the childhood dreams in which George had stepped off a top stair and found himself weightless as an angel. Drifting gently down the deep stairwell, occasionally reaching out a toe to touch ground, he’d known that his power was unique. No-one else must learn that he could fly. It seemed that his dreams hadn’t changed much over the last five decades; they had just grown more grandiose. Now he was planning to step off the edge of England and float free.
The barograph ticked on the shelf. A brick of charcoal hissed and settled in the stove. The air was rich, laden with the good smells of wax, oil, tobacco and old wood. Moving carefully, taking pleasure in each sensation as it came, George stooped under the beams to read the barograph. The inked line on the drum was at 1023 millibars and rising steadily. Soon the wind would die and the sky clear. He stretched himself on the plum-coloured leather of the settee berth and watched the sauntering lamplights. As the boat stirred in the water, the lights crossed and tangled. They chased each other along a row of books, rested for a moment on a framed photo of Vera at the beach, and dived to the rough and vivid weave of the rug on the floor.
George closed his eyes. From across the water he could hear the jerky chatter of an outboard motor. Shouting boys were pulling the tuna boats in out of the surf. Women were carrying away armfuls of tarnished silver skipjack, and yellow dogs were barking hopefully on the fringe of things. George’s mouth sagged open. There was something he’d forgotten to tell Raymond Luis, but he couldn’t remember what it was … something about the discharge gauge on Number 2 Dock … He grunted loudly three times, and began to snore. Waking, an hour later, to the sway of the boat and the gobbling noise of water in the bilges, he opened one cautious eye on the lamplit saloon, and saw that it was all right—he was home.
CHAPTER NINE
Diana Pym was a black silhouette against the sun. In outline she was comically topheavy: an obese and shaggy sheepskin coat supported by a starved pair of ankles and calves.
George was down on his knees on the deck scraping at the caulked planking with a block of holystone.
“That looks like a nice thing to be doing,” she said, talking out of her private patch of darkness. There was something actressy in her voice, fogged and roughened with chainsmoking as it was. Once upon a time it had been sent to school to learn things like projection and breath control.
“Do come down, if you can manage the ladder,” George said.
“May I really? I’d like that-”
There were only five rungs of the ladder to negotiate, but Diana Pym faced them like a mountaineer on a precipice. George reached out to help her step over the rail; when she gripped his hand he felt the tense bony nervousness of her, like a fizzle of static.
“Oh. Thank you. I’m not so hot at heights.” She stared back at the dripping weed on the quay wall. When she moved out of the wall’s shadow into the sun, she looked tired. Daylight wasn’t kind to her. At first glance her face was that of a girl, then the sun picked out the skin around her eyes, like the crazed varnish of an old picture.
“In five years of living here, I’ve never actually been on a boat before.” Her gaze was loose and unfocused as she looked about her, smiling vaguely at everything she saw. To the two anchors lashed down on the foredeck, she gave a little knowing nod. “What do you call this? I mean, is it a yacht, or a schooner, or what?”
“She’s a ketch,” George said. He pulled aside a tangle of dirty rope to clear a gangway for her.
“Oh, I’m sorry. She, of course.” She laughed. “And that brick there … is that what they call a holystone?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“I thought it must be. You looked just like a Muslim on a prayer mat.”
“Facing east, too,” George said. “Though more towards Moscow than Mecca.”
“Is that the way you incline?”
“To Moscow? Good Heavens, no.”
Diana Pym looked disappointed. She walked gingerly on the deck, clinging to the rail, as if the boat might at any moment choose to tip her out into the harbour. At the entrance to the wheelhouse she said abruptly: “You’re growing a beard—”
George touched the bristles on his chin: he’d forgotten about them. “No, not exactly. I suppose I’m just waiting to see if one turns up.”
She stared at his face for a moment with a frankness that he found unsettling. “It’ll suit you.”
“The last time I tried to grow a beard, it wasn’t a success. I was nineteen and in the Navy. You had to get permission from the captain to stop shaving, then after thirty days you had to take your beard to him for an inspection. I was inordinately proud of mine. I thought it added no end of authority to my face. Made me look born to command. That … wasn’t what the captain thought, though. At the end of thirty days, he took one look at it and ordered the thing off.”
“How long has this one been going?”
“Oh … four days, I think. No, five.”
“You’ll pass.”
“You think?”
“It’s such a lovely colour. Pure silver.”
George laughed; an embarrassed honk that scared the gulls on the quay wall. He showed Diana Pym through the wheel-house, down the steps and into the shadowy saloon. He lit the gas under the kettle and covertly fingered his raw bristles.
He’d hung a trailing fern in a raffia basket from a beam on the coachroof, and Diana Pym stood on the far side of the greenery. The saloon was full of the damp fleecy smell of her coat, and this stranger’s smell made the saloon itself seem suddenly strange. She was peering at his books and pictures, at the ticking barograph, at the overpolished lamps, and with each quick movement of her head, George saw that he’d created something reprehensible—something too neat to be real. It was fussy and self-regarding. He felt that he’d been caught out playing with a dolls’ house.
“I see,” she said. “It’s an ark.”
He stared at her. Was there mockery there?
“What’s it made from?”
“Oh … oak … larch … mahogany … teak …”
“No gopher wood?”
“Not a splinter.”
“Noah would have envied you.”
He made coffee in the tall pewter pot that he’d collected in Aden.
“Who is this?”
George pretended not to know what she was talking about, and carefully inspected the picture on the bulkhead. “Ah … a friend. In Montedor, … in fact.”
“And you miss her.”
He looked at her for a moment. In the half dark, she was a girl with a wistful voice on an old black and white television screen. “Yes. I do, rather.”
“She looks special.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just the way she’s looking into the camera. It’s obvious that you were taking the picture …”
“Is it?” He’d never realized that Vera wore such a giveaway expression in that photograph. It was two years old. They’d been on the beach at Sào Filipe. Teddy, who’d been snorkelling, was wearing a pair of red rubber flippers. He had picked up George’s camera and snapped Vera sitting on a rock.
“What’s her name?”
“Oh … ah, Vera …” said George distantly, pouring coffee into mugs in the galley.
A long muscle of wash from a coaster going out on the tide made the boat roll. There was a gasping sound from the fenders as they were squashed against the quay. Diana Pym clung to the saloon table, her knuckles showing white.
“It’s disorienting, isn’t it—being on a boat? It feels as if you might suddenly find the sky right under your feet.”
“Yes.” George put the mugs cautiously down on the tabletop. The green fern was swaying, the coffee slopped from rim to rim, and the four weak sunbeams from the portholes went raking up and down the mahogany walls. “I think that’s what I like best about it: I like the way it makes one moment seem quite different from the next—”
“And o
ne day, you’ll just sail off?”
“In a while. When the weather’s right. When I’ve learned to get the hang of her.”
“Gosh.” She lit a cigarette. “Where will you go?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t made up my mind. It doesn’t do to make too many plans when you take to a boat; they never work out, anyway. The best thing is just to wait and see where the weather and the tides allow you to go. Then you decide that that’s exactly where you had every intention of going in the first place.”
“Will it be far? I mean, could you go to Africa in this, or sail the Atlantic?”
“Oh, one could. I shan’t. England’s quite foreign enough for me, at present.”
Behind the coils of pale smoke and the moving fronds of fern, Diana Pym’s face dissolved, reappeared, dissolved again. “Does it ever stay still?”
“No, there’s always a sort of spongy feeling to it—you always know you’re afloat.”
“Isn’t it weird—”
“You get used to it.”
He was looking at Vera’s picture. Her expression didn’t really look all that special to him.
“I like it. It feels cosy and dangerous in equal parts.”
The sand in the foreground of the photo was as fine and white as baking powder. A line of big, crumbly tracks led from Vera’s rock to the camera. In the low sun, they showed as wedge-shaped pools of shadow. Flipper prints. He’d never noticed them there before. My Man Friday, George thought; to Diana Pym he said, “It’s best at night, with the oil lamps on and the stove going—”
“If my cottage had just been tied up to Cornwall with a rope, I guess I’d have undone the knot long ago.”
“Well, that’s the trouble with houses. They don’t float.”
“I always thought that was their point,” she said and started coughing, with the sound of crackling timber coming from deep in her lungs. Excuse me—” Her voice was hoarse and her face was reddened. “It’s this damned rainy winter.”
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