“I’d love to,” she said quickly; then, “So long as you realize that I’ll be no use to you at all.” She scrutinized the bramble weals on the back of her hand. “I mean, I can’t tie knots or anything like that.”
“No, no—the whole point of the boat is that I can manage her entirely on my own.”
And not only the boat, he thought, watching Diana and wishing that things were otherwise. It would have been different a year ago. It would have been different in Africa. But not now, not here. Getting up to go, he had to pause midway out of the chair to deal with a sharp twinge of Cornish lumbago. It struck him that from now on he would always have to go to bed alone. A … singlehander. The word yielded a melancholy obscenity. Upright at last, his hair tangling with a creosoted beam, he said, “Lovely evening. I did like your wild garden. I didn’t expect to at all, in honesty, but I really did.”
Diana put her hand on his sleeve for a second. “I’ll look forward to the boat. Ring me. I don’t know whether I really expect to enjoy it or not, but I’ll look forward to it.”
She drove him home. Outside Thalassa, with the car door open, he leaned across and kissed her on the cheek. Her skin tasted papery. Letting himself in to the dark house, he remembered exactly which model aeroplane it was that Diana had reminded him of. It was a Keil Kraft Osprey with a 36” wingspan, his most ambitious effort ever. It had taken six weeks of summer holiday labour with broken razorblades, coloured pins and tubes of balsa cement. Its registration letters, GA-GG, were painted on its wings and tailplane. He’d launched it on a chalky down near Oliver’s Battery. Its rubber motor had taken it straight up into a thermal, where it began to glide in a slow circle, higher and higher, its doped skin flashing in the sun. He’d timed its flight: one minute … two … three … four … four minutes forty seconds … a record. Then it lost the thermal and he had to chase it across the downs, smashing through picnickers and people with dogs out for walks. He’d run for a mile at least when the plane, losing altitude rapidly now, had banked and headed with what looked (“Oh—no! Oh, Christmas! Oh, buggeration!”) like a pure and deliberate act of will for the top of the tallest, most unscaleable elm in the whole of Hampshire. He’d been too far away to hear the crash; the white plane had dissolved silently into the branches. By the time he got to the tree, it wasn’t a plane any more; it was a mess of wastepaper, eighty feet up, with one torn wing flapping gently in the wind. At fourteen and a quarter, George had been too old to cry, but his face had felt very stiff indeed on the walk home to the Rectory. The wreckage was still visible in the tree at Christmas; by Easter there was just a small section of crushed fuselage and a triangle of skin with the letters GG on it. In the summer everything had gone. George reckoned that the rooks had probably used it to build nests with.
At high tea, his father, wearing his white alpaca summer jacket, was put into a high good humour by the news of what had happened to the Osprey. “Treasures upon earth, old boy! Moth and rust!” After tea, he’d challenged George to a game of croquet, and beat him hollow in comfortable time to go off to church and say evensong.
Now, pouring himself a modest nightcap of Chivas Regal in his father’s house, half here, half in the summer of … when was it? ’37? ’38? … George thought: you know, I haven’t changed a bloody bit. All I’ve done is fly a lot more Ospreys into a lot more trees.
He was woken by the soft splatter of the post downstairs and, stiff and liverish, was picking the letters up from the mat while the postman was still getting back into his van on the road outside. But there was nothing from Vera; just bills, a card from somebody on holiday in Crete addressed to his mother (a Cretan holiday must be seriously boring if it involved one in sending picture postcards to the dead), and a duplicated brochure for Jellaby’s Video Club. It was nearly two weeks since he’d written to Montedor. Sheila’s letters to him had rarely taken more than six days to arrive. Though that, of course, was from London, which was different. He wondered if it would be worth putting off his sea trials and waiting in for the second post. He looked up Diana’s number in the book and dialled it. Five minutes later, stooping, naked, studying his bare feet on the slate, as he rehearsed his lines, he dialled the number of his daughter. He listened to the London trill of her phone—quite different from the low chirrup-chirrup of the local telephones. It was a long time ringing. He picked up the postcard that had been sent to his mother: the handwriting on it was thin and dithery but quite legible.
Good to see you looking so well in your enchanting house in St C. V pleasant hotel here in Timbakion, though spring weather only fair. Davina and I return on 23rd. Look forward to seeing you for early lunch on 25th. D. sends love, Alice.
Some poor old bat with a badly disturbed memory. Today was the 27th, and there’d been no sign of Alice. Away in London, the phone was lifted from the hook and Sheila’s voice, still thick with sleep at 0915 hours, was saying, “Yes? Hullo?” as George swallowed the knot of anxiety in his throat and began to speak.
CHAPTER TEN
It must be the effect of the seasickness pill. The chemist—who’d brought Diana a glass of water from the back of the shop to swig it down with—had said that it might make her feel drowsy. Well, there was drowsy and drowsy. Her vision tended to wobble and there was a definite buzz in the flesh of her arms and legs. The sensation was actually quite nice, but it roused unnerving echoes of things that she’d aged out of long ago, like the little foil-wrapped slugs of Acapulco Gold that she used to keep in the bedroom closet on Ocean Avenue.
She sat up at the front of the boat with the anchors, hands clasped round her knees, watching the sea slide round and under her, as if the boat was a boulder breaking the stream of an enormous river. The sea kept on coming; an unending drift of open water, teased and crimped by a wind as faint and irregular as the breath of a sleeping invalid. On the shadowy side of the hull she could see jellyfish—whole schools of them, sailing past a foot or so beneath the surface, like tasselled art-deco lampshades on the run. Their colours were so immodest … purple, mauve, blue and livid scarlet. As she watched they changed in size, swelling as big as buckets then gathering themselves to the size of a clenched fist. One moment she thought them beautiful; the next they were disgusting, with their wrinkled glassy skins and trailing guts.
She’d been here before, but it was so long ago, when you lay back in the scatter-cushions and found yourself up on a high wire, not knowing which way you were going to fall, into a good trip or into a bad one. If you thought about it, it always turned out bad; you had to go with it, feed it, nurse it along.
She focused on a single small jellyfish, trying to count its mass of radiant filaments; then, as if she was carrying a tray full of water and not spilling a drop, she transferred her attention to the warty, galvanized steel of the anchor at her feet.
From the moment that they’d left the quay, things had started to seem more than a bit odd. First the boat (which had seemed so solid, so cottagey, when it was tied up) had shrunk to a walnut shell as it nosed out into the estuary. Then George Grey had grown. Perhaps it was just that ridiculous cap (H LSUM—AM R CA’S #1 B AD, whatever, in God’s name, that meant), but he seemed to have put on a good eighteen inches overnight. He had been stooping, apologetic, Eeyoreish. Now he was disconcertingly tall. He seemed possessed by some private, and rather irritable, good humour, as he danced round his boat from end to end in baggy jeans and scuffed plimsolls, with the sunlight glinting in his infant silver beard.
They had stolen past the lifeboat, through the line of moored yachts. The river didn’t look like water at all—it had a deep substantial gleam to it, like polished brass. “No flies in this ointment!” George Grey had called to her in a voice too loud for the still morning. As they passed the candy-striped beacon on St Cadix Head, she had gone up front to get out of earshot of the heavy bass chatter of the engine. A moment later, he was dancing again—pulling up sails the colour of red rust. Mostly they hung slack from the masts; every so often a sudden exhalatio
n of wind would make them clatter over her head and shake out their wrinkles, but they seemed to be there only for show, really. George Grey had looked up at them with such obvious pride that she wondered if he’d cut and sewn them all himself.
“They’re a very pretty colour,” she said politely.
He gazed at her, smiling, as if she’d said something surprising and original. “Yes,” he said. “They work by suction, you know—like an aerofoil. They generate lift …” Then his face clouded and he went back to his wheelhouse, where she watched him through the window, his big untidy head bent over his compasses and charts and rulers and whatnot.
Now he was back again, a towering jack-in-a-box. He was carrying a heavy, rubberclad pair of binoculars. “Have you ever seen your house from the sea?”
“Oh—I hadn’t noticed where we were.”
She took the binoculars and found the cottage, framed between cliffs of birdlimed granite. The curtains in the bedroom were carelessly half-drawn and the kitchen window was open. It looked as if she was still inside. Weird. She said, “God, it’s like being your own ghost, isn’t it?” The heron was fishing from the wet rocks below the drawing room. She imagined herself stepping out of the front door and the heron flapping off on stiff and creaky wings. She passed the binoculars back a shade more hurriedly than she had meant.
“How fast are we going?”
“Oh, not very fast. About five knots.”
“What is a knot?”
“It’s a measure of speed through the water. One nautical mile in an hour. On the old ships, they used to chuck out a block of wood from the stern and see how many feet of rope it would unwind in a given time from a revolving drum … a fishing-reel thing. The rope was marked off with knots, so they just had to count the knots on the rope to find out how fast they were going.” He was scanning the coast through his binoculars. “But that’s not our real speed. That’s just our speed through the sea. But the sea’s moving too. It’s travelling with us on this tide, out to the Atlantic. It’s making about three knots, here, so we’re moving over the ground at about eight. If I turned the boat round, our speed would drop to two knots.”
“I see.” Diana didn’t see at all, but what he was saying corresponded with her own sense that things were relative and slippery here at sea.
“Have you given up?”
“What?”
“Smoking,” he said.
“Oh.” She didn’t catch on immediately; she thought (was she really so jellyfish-transparent?) that he was talking about dope. “No. Sometimes I just forget to.”
“You ought to forget to more often,” he said in his new, sea captain’s voice. “Do you a world of good.” He went off to do something with a rope at the far end of the boat. He was, Diana heard with astonishment, singing. “Get that tiger,” George Grey sang, “Get that tiger … Get that old tiger rag!”
He was full of information this morning. When she’d arrived at the quay and he stowed away the things she’d brought for lunch in the tiny kitchen of the boat, he rattled on about his daughter’s baby—quite out of character with his reticence last night. It was expected on September 28th … Sheila had had a scan but didn’t want to know the sex of the child in advance … It was, thought Diana, v. odd. This time, she was the one who was embarrassed: since reading The Noblest Station, she had rather cooled on the lady. She’d found the book voguish and a bit pretentious—the sort of book that people wrote by copying bits out of other people’s books in libraries and reassembling them. It hadn’t spoken directly to her at all. George Grey, though, had talked as if her only interest was in his daughter. For the first time, he’d seemed just like everyone else that one met at people like the Walpoles’, dismally crowing over the doings of their children.
“Yes,” he’d said, his head and shoulders framed in the hatchway, “apparently Tom–her … chap–is the one who’s going to the ante-natal classes.”
“Oh, really?” was all she could say to that.
At noon, he came out of his wheelhouse carrying what Diana assumed to be a sextant. He sat on the cabin roof with the instrument clamped to his eye, as absorbed and solemn as if he was performing a religious office.
“Are we lost already?” she called, but he gave no sign of hearing. She could see the twisty pillars of white steam from the china clay works near St Austell, and Dodman Point like a portion of apple crumble in the haze.
He padded back to the wheelhouse, muttering numbers. She saw him behind the glass, poring intently over the chart table. She had always liked the priest’s air of self-containment as he got on with the business of the Mass up at the holy end, and in George Grey’s face there was the same kind of seminarian youthfulness. His tongue showed between his lips, and the expression of his mouth and eyes was unmasked as he turned the page of a book as fat as a family Bible.
A few minutes later, he was back. “I was about a mile out,” he said. “Not bad, after thirty-five years.”
A mile seemed rather a lot to Diana, but she said, “No. That must be reassuring. I suppose it’s like riding bicycles.” A huge and psychedelic jellyfish, gorged with blood, floated past the rail. “Are they Portuguese men-of-war?”
“Where?” He was looking in the wrong place, at the horizon.
“The jellyfish.”
“Oh … no, I don’t think so. They’re too small, aren’t they?”
“They look enormous to me.” She remembered Father McKinley, lonely in his white air-conditioned church, raising the Host into a beam of bland Pacific sun. Then, at lunch, they’d started with artichokes and hot butter. Father McKinley had stared at the spiky vegetable on his plate as if he’d never seen anything like it in his life. He watched Diana eating, and clumsily copied every movement that she made. Afterwards, having treated the finger bowl like a stoup, he said: “So clever of you, Diana. I just love asparagus.” That was the thing about priests: they knew everything and nothing all at once.
For lunch on the boat, she laid out an ascetic, priestly picnic in the cockpit: sticks of celery, two kinds of cheese, French bread, green olives. George Grey uncorked a bottle of wine that looked far too extravagant for the occasion. She sipped it and studied the label. Leoville-Barton 1971.
“It’s terribly good,” she said.
“It’s travelled too much,” he said, but didn’t explain. She watched the wake of the boat dwindling behind them, the ghostly bulk of the Cornish coast, a long way off now, too far to swim. George Grey’s face, shadowed by the peak of his cap, looked suddenly very unfamiliar. It was like the face of a man in a neighbouring car in a traffic jam, yet the littleness of the boat and the wide emptiness of the sea made him seem almost as close as if they were in the same bed. She munched noisily on a celery stick and hoped that he wasn’t thinking the same thing.
“It looks as if we’re going to get a bit of wind.” He was frowning at the water ahead. It was an even blue except for a broad, inky stripe along the horizon.
“Oh?”
“The barometer’s dropping. We’ll turn when the tide turns.” He leaned back in the cockpit, arms spreadeagled, his knobbly wrists sticking out a long way from the cuffs of his jumper. With an open palm he made himself the sponsor of the sea, the tall sky, the jellyfish, the easy lollop of the boat on the water. “Well?” When he smiled he showed receding gums and overlong teeth.
“It’s magic,” she said. “It’s so … laden.” She stopped herself from saying what she was really thinking, which was that it was just like smoking. As the hash took hold, you found yourself in free fall, out of control of your own sensations. Everything took you by surprise. As now. The diving guillemot past George Grey’s shoulder was astonishing: it looked like a bathtoy. Then there was the grubby Band Aid round the base of his thumb; wrinkled, pink, prosthetic. Every time she caught sight of something, it swelled to fill her field of vision. The air round the boat was hard and glittery: if you listened closely, you’d hear it tinkle. She heard it tinkling. It sounded full of iron filings
. Trying to kill this train of thought, she lifted her glass, but the vibration of the engine made the surface of the wine tremble and she saw it as a rippling sea.
She said: “You’ve hurt your hand.”
“It’s nothing. Just a scratch.”
When the wind came, she felt the boat tilt and stiffen, the red sails setting as smooth and hard as if they’d been moulded on to the masts in painted plaster. The sea, too, suddenly changed texture, scissored by the wind into little houndstooth crests that went spitting past the rail. With the engine off, she listened to the busy noise of wood and water, of slaps and creaks and gurgles. Spray was breaking over the boat’s nose, wetting the sail at the front and making a bright corona in the air. Diana, gripping a wooden handle at the back of the wheelhouse, hardly dared to breathe for fear of breaking the spell. It was like … well, nothing on earth, nothing on land. It felt as if the boat was dangling between the top of the sky and the bottom of the sea, as weightless as a money spider on its thread of luminous gum.
It made Diana dizzy, but it was the nicest sort of dizziness, like dreams of floating through the air. In need of ballast, she looked across to the rim of dark land, and found the land gone. It had vanished clean off the face of the sea, and the boat was in the dead centre of a gigantic disc of squally water. She searched the far sky for hills, for Cornwall. There was nothing there at all, and Diana felt the first, niggling spasm of alarm.
George Grey was in the wheelhouse, steering by hand now. The boat lurched as she stepped inside, and she lost her balance and collided into him. He smelled of diesel oil and the stuff that he used on his hair.
“Sorry—” she said. He steadied her with his arm, and for the second time she had the vivid, disturbing sense of having found a stranger in her bed. This time, though, there was something dangerous and arousing in the thought.
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