Offshore

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  ‘We haven’t any money,’ said Martha, ‘so you’ll have to share our limited notion of entertainment.’

  ‘There is nothing to be ashamed of in being poor,’ said Heinrich.

  ‘Yes, there is,’ Martha replied, with a firmness which she could hardly have inherited either from her father or her mother, ‘but there’s no reason why we shouldn’t go and look at things. Looking is seeing, really. That’s what we do most of the time. We can go this afternoon and look at the King’s Road.’

  ‘I should like to visit a boutique,’ said Heinrich.

  ‘Well, that will be best about five or six, when everybody leaves work. A lot of them don’t open till then.’

  Tilda had lost interest in what was being said and had gone to fetch Stripey, who was being pursued across Maurice by a rat. Maurice was constantly being advised by Woodie and Richard to grease his mooring-ropes, so that the rats could not get across them, but he always forgot to do so.

  Later in the day they prepared for their expedition into Chelsea. ‘And your mother?’ enquired Heinrich.

  ‘You’re always asking about her!’ Martha cried. ‘What do you think of her?’

  ‘She is a very attractive woman for her years. But on the Continent we appreciate the woman of thirty.’

  ‘Well, she’s gone to talk things over with Aunt Louise, who’s also an attractive woman for her years, but a good bit older, and quite different. She lives in Nova Scotia, and she’s wealthy and energetic.’

  ‘What do they talk over?’

  ‘I expect Ma’s arranging to take us out to Canada. She hasn’t said so, but I should think it’s that.’

  ‘Then I shall see you often. We have relations both in Canada and in the United States.’

  Martha tried not to wish, as they set out, that they could leave Tilda behind. She hardly remembered ever feeling this before about her ragged younger sister.

  Without the guidance of the nuns, Tilda seemed to have lost her last vestige of moral sense. Partisan Street, the first street on the way up from the boats, was, as has been said, considered a rough place – a row of decrepit two-up, two-down brick houses, the refuge of crippled and deformed humanity. Whether they were poor because they were lame, or lame because they were poor, was perhaps a matter for sociologists, and a few years later, when their dwellings were swept away and replaced by council flats with rents much higher than they could afford, it must be assumed that they disappeared from the face of the earth. Tilda, who knew them all, loved to imitate them, and hobbled up Partisan Street alternately limping and shuffling, with distorted features.

  ‘Your sister makes me laugh, but I don’t think it’s right to do so,’ Heinrich said.

  Martha pointed out that everybody in the street was laughing as well. ‘They’ve asked her to come and do it at their Christmas Club,’ she said. ‘I wish I could still laugh like that.’

  They turned into World’s End, and opened the door into the peaceful garden where the faithful of the Moravian sect lie buried.

  ‘They’re buried standing, so that on Judgement Day they can rise straight upward.’

  ‘Men and women together?’

  ‘No, they’re buried separately.’

  Shutting the door in the wall, they walked on, Martha conscious, through every nerve in her body, of Heinrich’s hand under her elbow. She asked him what was the first sentence he had ever learned in English.

  ‘I am the shoemaker’s father.’

  ‘And French?’

  ‘I don’t remember when I learned French. It must have been at some time, because I can speak it now. I can also get along on Polish and Italian. But I don’t know that I shall ever make much use of these languages.’

  ‘Everything that you learn is useful. Didn’t you know that everything you learn, and everything you suffer, will come in useful at some time in your life?’

  ‘You got that from Mother Ignatius,’ Tilda interrupted. ‘Once, in the closing years of the last century, a poor woman earned her daily bread by working long hours at her treadle sewing machine. Work, work, ah it was all work I’m telling you in them days. Up and down, up and down, went that unwearying right foot of hers. And so by incessant exercise, her right foot grew larger and broader, while the other remained the same size, and at length she feared to go out in the streets at all, for fear of tripping and falling flat. Yet that woman, for all her tribulations, had faith in the intercessions of our Lady.’

  ‘Tilda,’ said Martha, stopping suddenly and taking her sister by the shoulders, ‘I’ll give you anything you like, within reason, to go back to the boats and stay there.’

  Between the sisters there was love of a singularly pure kind, proof against many trials. Martha’s look of request, or appeal, between her shadowing lashes, was one that Tilda would not disregard. Her protests were formal only.

  ‘There’s a lot more of that sewing-machine story.’

  ‘I know there is.’

  ‘I shall be all by myself. Ma’s gone into London.’

  ‘You must go to Rochester.’

  ‘I’ve just been there.’

  ‘Mrs Woodie told me she never finds the little ones a worry.’

  ‘Perhaps she wishes she hadn’t said that.’

  ‘Willis will be there.’

  Tilda alternately nodded her head and shook it violently from side to side. This meant consent.

  ‘You must promise and vow to go straight to Rochester,’ Martha told her. ‘You must swear by the Sacred Heart. You know you like it there. You don’t like it in the King’s Road, because they won’t let you into the boutiques, and you’re too young to try on the dresses.’

  Tilda darted off, hopping and skipping.

  In this, its heyday, the King’s Road fluttered, like a gypsy encampment, with hastily-dyed finery, while stage folk emerged from their beds at a given hour, to patrol the long pavements between Sloane Square and the Town Hall. Heinrich and Martha went in and out of one boutique after another, Dressing Down, Wearwithal, Wearabouts, Virtuous Heroin, Legs, Rags, Bags. A paradise for children, a riot of misrule, the queer looking shops reversed every fixed idea in the venerable history of commerce. Sellers, dressed in brilliant colours, outshone the purchasers, and, instead of welcoming them, either ignored them or were so rude that they could only have hoped to drive them away. The customers in return sneered at the clothing offered to them, and flung it on the ground. There were no prices, no sizes, no way to tell which stock was which, so that racks and rails of dresses were transferred as though by a magic hand from one shop to another. The doors stood open, breathing out incense and heavy soul, and the spirit was that of the market scene in the pantomine when the cast, encouraged by the audience, has let the business get out of hand.

  Heinrich and Martha walked through this world, which was fated to last only a few years before the spell was broken, like a prince and princess. At Wearwithal, Heinrich tried on a pair of pale blue sateen trousers, which fitted tightly. Martha, guarding his jeans while he changed, admired him more for deciding against them than if he had bought them.

  ‘Won’t they do?’ she asked.

  ‘Such trousers are not worn on the Continent.’

  ‘I thought perhaps you hadn’t enough money.’

  Heinrich in fact had plenty of money, and his own chequebook, but his delicacy, responding to Martha’s pride, prevented him from saying so.

  ‘We will go to a coffee bar.’

  These, too, were something new in London, if not in Vienna. The shining Gaggia dispensed one-and-a-half inches of bitter froth into an earthenware cup, and for two shillings lovers could sit for many hours in the dark brown shadows, with a bowl of brown sugar between them.

  ‘Perhaps they’ll be annoyed if we don’t have another cup.’

  Heinrich again put his fine, long-fingered hand over hers. She was amazed at its cleanliness. Her own hands were almost as black as Tilda’s.

  ‘You must not worry. I am in charge. How does that suit you?’


  ‘I’m not sure. I’ll tell you later,’ said Martha, who wished one of her school friends would come in and see her. They’d tell Father Watson and the nuns, but what did that matter, they must know why she was absent from school anyway.

  ‘I expect, living here in Chelsea, you go out a great deal.’

  ‘How can I? I’ve no-one to go out with.’

  ‘I think you would like the cake-shops in Vienna, also the concerts. I should like to present you to my mother and great-aunts. They take subscription tickets every winter for all the concerts, the Musikverein, anything you can name. You’re fond of music?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Martha impatiently. ‘What music do your great-aunts like?’

  ‘Mahler. Bruckner …’

  ‘I hate that. I don’t want to be made to feel all the time.’

  Heinrich put his head on one side and half closed his eyes.

  ‘You know, I think that you could be heading for a very serious depression.’ Martha felt flattered. It seemed to her that she had never been taken seriously before.

  ‘You mean I could break down altogether?’

  ‘Listen, Martha, the best thing would be for you to tell me about your worries. They are probably those with which your catechism class does not help. The nuns will not understand the physiological causes of your restlessness and priests do not know everything either. Perhaps you would rather I did not speak like this.’

  ‘It’s all right, Heinrich, go on.’

  ‘I too, have many problems at school. About that you wouldn’t understand very well, Martha. We are all of us youths between sixteen and eighteen years of age, and for month after month we are kept away from women. I, personally, have the number of days pasted up on the inside of my locker. All this can produce a kind of madness.’

  ‘What do your teachers say?’

  ‘The monks? Well, they comprehend, but they can’t cover all our difficulties. A good friend of mine, in the same set for physics and chemistry, grew so disturbed that he took some scissors and cut all round the stiff white collars, which we have to wear on Sundays, and made them into little points.’

  ‘Like a dog in a circus,’ said Martha, appalled.

  ‘He wanted to make himself grotesque. He has left school, but I received an air-letter from him recently. Now he is anxious to join the priesthood.’

  ‘But are you happy there?’

  Heinrich smiled at her consolingly. ‘I shall not allow sex to dominate my life, I shall find a place for it, that is all … But, my dear, we are here to talk about you.’

  She could see that he meant it, and knew that there might never again be such an opportunity.

  ‘There’s a great deal of sin in me,’ she began rapidly. ‘I know that a great part of me is darkness, not light. I wish my father and mother lived together, but not because I care whether they’re happy or not. I love Ma, but she must expect to be unhappy because she’s reached that time of life. I want them to live together in some ordinary kind of house so that I can come and say, how can you expect me to live here! But I shall never lead a normal life because I’m so short – we’re both short – that’s why Tilda stands on the deck half the day, it’s because somebody told her that you only grow taller while you’re standing up. And then I don’t develop. We had a class composition, My Best Friend, and the girl who was describing me put up her hand and asked to borrow a ruler because she said she’d have to draw me straight up and down.’

  ‘That is not friendship,’ said Heinrich.

  ‘There might be something wrong with me. I might be permanently immature.’

  ‘I am sure you aren’t, my dear. Listen, you are like the blonde mistress of Heine, the poet Heine, wenig Fleisch, sehr viel Gemüt, little body, but so much spirit’. He leaned forward and kissed her cheek, which, from being cold when they entered the coffee-bar, was now glowing pink. This was quite the right thing to do in a coffee-bar in the King’s Road. But afterwards they became, for the time being, rather more distant.

  ‘It has been very pleasant to spend the day here, Martha, and to see your boat.’

  ‘Yes, well, at least that’s something you haven’t got in Vienna.’

  Heinrich’s father was a member of the Wiener Yacht Club.

  ‘Certainly, not such a large one.’

  Outside the boutiques were still aglow with heaps of motley flung about the feet of the disdainful assistants. The music grew louder, the Chelsea Granada welcomed all who would like to come in and watch the transmission of Bootsie and Snudge. They wandered on together at random.

  ‘Two people can become close in a very short time,’ Heinrich said. ‘It is up to them not to let circumstances get the better of them. It is my intention, as I think I told you, to shape my own life.’

  Tilda had not gone straight onto Rochester. Aware of the not quite familiar atmosphere which had surrounded Martha and Heinrich and detached her sister, she felt, for the first time, somewhat adrift. Jumping defiantly onto Grace’s deck, she gathered up the surprised Stripey and hugged her close. Then she examined her more attentively.

  ‘You’ve got kittens on you.’

  Depositing the cat, who flattened out immediately into a gross slumber, she swarmed up the mast. Low tide. A tug passed, flying a white house flag with the red cross of St George, and with a funnel that might have been either cream or white.

  ‘Thames Conservancy. She oughtn’t to be as far down-river as this. What’s she doing below Teddington?’

  On Maurice, fifteen feet below her, Harry, in the owner’s absence, was unusually busy. He was wiring up the main hatch above the hold, in such a way that showed he was certainly not an electrician by trade, with the intention of giving a mild electric shock to anyone who might try to get into it.

  Tilda did not understand what he was doing, but she stared at him from the height of the mast until he became conscious of her, and turned round. He put down his pliers and looked up at her. His eyes were curious, showing an unusual amount of the whites.

  ‘Want some sweeties?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Want me to show you a comic?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Come on, you can’t read, can you?’

  ‘I can.’

  ‘You could get over here, couldn’t you? You can come and sit on my knee if you like and I’ll show you a comic.’

  Tilda swung to and fro, supported by only one arm round the mast.

  ‘Have you got Cliff Richard Weekly?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I’ve got that.’

  ‘And Dandy?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve got that too.’

  ‘This week’s?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I don’t need showing.’

  ‘You haven’t seen the things I’ve got to show you.’

  ‘What are they like?’

  ‘Something you’ve never seen before, love.’

  ‘You’ve no right on that boat,’ Tilda remarked. ‘She belongs to Maurice.’

  ‘Know him, then?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘Know what he does for a living?’

  ‘He goes out to work.’

  ‘I’ll show you what he does, if you like. You won’t find that in a comic.’

  Tilda persisted. ‘Why are you putting up wires on Maurice?’

  ‘Why? Well, I’ve got a lot of nice things in here.’

  ‘Where did you get them from?’

  ‘Don’t you want to know what they are?’

  ‘No, I want to know where you got them from.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’re a criminal.’

  ‘Who told you that, you nasty little bitch?’

  ‘You’re a receiver of stolen goods,’ Tilda replied.

  She watched him sideways, her eyes alight and alive. After all, there were only two ways that Harry could come on to Grace, the gangplank across from Maurice, on which Stripey lay digesting uneasily, or back to the wharf and round by the afterdeck.r />
  Harry bent down and with one hand lifted the gangplank so that it hung in mid-air. Stripey shot upwards, sprang, and missed her footing, falling spreadeagled on the foreshore.

  ‘Your kitty’s split open, my love.’

  ‘No, she’s not. She’s been eating a seagull. If she was open you’d see all the feathers.’

  Harry had a bottle in his hand.

  ‘Are you going to get drunk?’

  ‘The stuff in this bottle? Couldn’t drink that. It would burn me if I did. It’d fucking well burn anybody.’

  It was spirits of salt. He looked at her with the points of his eyes, the whites still rolling. The bottle was in his right hand and he swung it to and fro once or twice, apparently judging its weight. Then he moved towards the wharf, coming round to meet her on Grace.

  Tilda clambered over the washboard, and clinging on by fingers and toes to the strakes, half slithered and half climbed down the side, gathered up the cat and skimmed across to Rochester. The side-ladder was out, as she very well knew.

  ‘Oh, Mrs Woodie, will you look after me? Martha told me to come here. I came here straight away.’

  ‘What’s that you’re carrying?’ asked Mrs Woodie, resigned by now to almost anything.

  ‘She’s my pet, my pet, the only pet I’ve been allowed to have since I was a tiny kiddie.’

  Mrs Woodie looked at the distended animal.

  ‘Are you sure, dear, that she’s not …’

  ‘What do you mean, Mrs Woodie? I believe that there’s an angel that guards her footsteps.’

  The hold of Rochester had changed, in the last few weeks, from below decks to a cosy caravan interior. There was a good piece of reversible carpet put down, and Tilda seated herself, open-mouthed, in front of the television, where Dr Kildare flickered. Mrs Woodie began to cut sandwiches into neat squares. ‘Where are you?’ she called to her husband.

  Woodie appeared, somewhat put out. ‘I’ll take a cup to Willis. He’s still dwelling too much on the past, in my opinion.’