Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  The La Pérouse was relatively old, spacious and comfortable. You could stride about her. Luc was fond of her, he said. She was formerly Dutch, 11,000 tons, built in 1960. Her owners, Sofrana Lines of Auckland, New Zealand, liked to employ Frenchmen of the South Sea islands, and if they are all like Luc Duflos I don’t blame them. The ship had six cabins, but the company was not in favour of taking passengers any more as a general rule. Nor was Luc. Passengers were too much trouble and expense in this time of recession.

  ‘You need stewards. Maybe a doctor. And companies think only of money – cargoes – these days.’ For himself, he regretted that. ‘These are bitter days,’ said this friendly man who, it didn’t take me long to guess, had no bitterness in him at all. Captain Luc was naturally hospitable. Despite the no-passenger rule, he gave people a lift now and again. It was up to him as master; his privilege, not a duty. ‘Sometimes I take friends. I’m delighted to take you. But, you know….’ He shook his head. ‘I’ve had bad experiences.’

  ‘Hippies? Drugs?’

  ‘No. Simply…. Well, for example, a man came with us, a stranger, a New Zealander. I was hospitable. The stewards worked extra for him. He ate a lot, drank sufficiently. He was spoilt, you might say. At the destination, he just went away. Went ashore and vanished. Not a goodbye, not a handshake, no thanks. Nothing for the stewards…. It’s not nice, that. Another man sat all day in the armchair on the bridge with his feet up.’ I knew by now that on a freighter one was expected to behave as a guest in someone else’s house.

  Once we were well out to sea we resumed our whisky, and were joined in his cabin by an extraordinarily handsome woman – Luc’s Tahitian wife. ‘Marie-Louise,’ he introduced her, and I shook her hand. ‘I expect you will be seeing where she comes from. The island of Moorea, opposite Papeete. The most beautiful island in French Polynesia.’ He laughed. ‘And I don’t say that just to please her.’

  Marie-Louise Duflos was about the same age as her husband, and she had the high cheekbones, large, soft eyes and deep butterscotch skin of the eastern Pacific. She looked from one to the other of us, smiling. If Moorea is anything like as beautiful as Madame Duflos, I thought, it’s certainly worth an effort to get there. She led a small boy by the hand. She had brought their two-year-old son on board for the voyage; he loved the sea so much, she said, and later I saw that the cabin next to mine had been turned into a nursery. Inside the half-open door a tiny gumboot and a toy train were visible on the floor.

  Captain Luc was a big man, tall, moustached: sometimes he stroked, without thinking, a stomach that was unselfconsciously ample. A Norman, born in Mali in West Africa, he lived now in Noumea, New Caledonia. ‘I wander,’ he smiled.

  Turning a corner on the spacious bridge deck next morning, I received a small shock. A furious white face met mine and a wild scream of horror drove me back against the bulkhead – ‘Aaaaaawwwwwwwkkkkk!’ A black sickle beak lunged at me, agape. Puffed up, in anger or fear, a cockatoo gripped the bars of its cage and regarded me with loathing. The beadlike eyes were encircled by tiny folds of delicately wrinkled skin of a wonderful turquoise blue, like the expensive eye shadow of an ageing society beauty, perfect against the pure lotus-white feathers and the pale yellow brushstroke on his trembling crest. ‘Good morning. Who are you?’ I said. But the angry stare was silent and unrelenting.

  I moved away to a grey prospect that once more belied my expectations of a blue Pacific. A single shard of sunlight fell across a long grey island to port, which the chart told me was called Choiseul. There were a good many killer whales around here, I’d been told; blue whales, too. We were now in the New Georgia Sound, otherwise known as The Slot because of its extended narrowness between mountainous islands and the way it led ships to Honiara, as a tram rail guides a tram to its terminals.

  Luc joined me at the rail. I had noticed that the crew of La Pérouse bore little or no resemblance to the people of Bougainville. No atomic fuzz. Their heads were round like cannonballs and short-cropped like Cromwell’s Puritans. They were formidably built; heavy and fleshy men like rugby front-row forwards. They looked surly, and vaguely menacing. I asked Captain Luc where they came from.

  ‘From Vanuatu,’ he replied – from what was, in Asterisk’s time, the New Hebrides.

  ‘They look an unfriendly lot,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, no, they’re all right. Good people. They look frightening, yes, but, like Coco, they’re quite harmless, really. You’ve met Coco, the cockatoo?’

  I had, I said, and added that both Coco and the crew could have fooled me. These unsmiling men were descendants of the islanders who, as Asterisk had described, were regularly lured on board a ship at anchor by the offer of money for some meaningless task, and ‘grogged up’ by blackbirding ships’ captains, so that they woke up miles out to sea with blinding hangovers, and were obliged, because there was no way to escape, to sign on for three years’ hard labour in a plantation in Queensland. The La Pérouse’s crew looked as if they were waiting for a suitable moment to avenge all that. No, they were good men, Luc said – until they got at the beer. Then they became raging bulls. Quite uncontrollable. Incapable of resisting more and more booze, fighting like madmen. If you gave them even one can of beer, they couldn’t stop themselves drinking their way through the entire stock. You just had to wait until they passed out. Not what you want from the crew of a ship, said Luc. It was the same thing anywhere in the Pacific islands. All islanders went berserk after a few beers. There were no exceptions.

  I could understand why Luc Duflos was fond of the Capitaine La Pérouse. The ship had the stately, cosy, if rather fusty air of a seaside boarding house. Off-season, of course, because there were no other passengers, a fact which gave me all that unaccustomed room to move about in. To heighten the boarding house illusion, my cabin had a parquet floor, a large rectangular window, and reading lights over the double bed. I could even give the place a geographical fix. It conjured up Bude in Cornwall and Edwardian villas called Balmoral or Glendower that look out over the sea from garden walls enclosing monkey puzzle trees and red-hot poker plants, a setting in which I had spent certain summers of my extreme youth dreaming of voyages like this. The Capitaine La Pérouse had a homely saloon and a library with big windows looking over the foredeck. Areas of the deck were netted off for Luc’s son to toddle about in. I suppose the baby and the cockatoo – unusual objects on cargo vessels – contributed considerably to my Cornish boarding house fantasy and to the affection for the ship I briefly shared with Captain Luc.

  Sofrana names its ships after South Pacific explorers. Apart from the Capitaine La Pérouse they had a Captain Cook and a Captain Tasman.

  ‘We had a Kermadec, too,’ Luc said. ‘And a Bougainville. But the Kermadec was sold, and the Bougainville had a terrible accident.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Some spare parts in the engine room fell from a bulkhead on to a fuel line and the whole engine room went up in a blaze. Eventually the ship was a total loss. The crew got off in lifeboats, but one capsized and the captain and his wife and his three kids were all lost.’

  ‘A freak tragedy.’

  ‘Yes, a freak. Now no one feels like calling another ship Bougainville.’

  ‘So there’s no ship named after a great explorer. He has to make do with an island hardly anyone knows, and a flower that is known the world over.’

  Luc said, ‘Perhaps that’s the best kind of memorial to have. A flower named after you. Everyone loves a flower.’

  *

  God knows who had provided the books in La Pérouse’s library. It was certainly an odd mixture, as if someone had walked into a secondhand bookshop, waved a careless hand, and said, ‘Give me everything on those ten shelves.’ I found Jack London’s De Zwerftecht van de Snark (Dutch for The Voyage of the Snark which I had in my suitcase) and next to that Dimsie Moves Up by a Dorita F. Bruce. The works of Oscar Wilde were there, and the Golden Hours of Kai Lung. I found myself flipping through a novel called Savoy
Grill at 7.30, by Stephen Lister, a very thirties novel full of tales of skulduggery in the big business world of London between the wars. Expressions like ‘By God, you’ll pay for this, you dirty swine!’ cropped up regularly in its swift-moving pages, and gorgeous girls were incessantly entertained by the hero to cocktails at the Savoy and dinner at Maxim’s (was there a Maxim’s in London as well as in Paris in those days?). I enjoyed the incongruity of such high life aboard a ship moving down The Slot of Melanesia.

  The French section of the library was really not French at all, although the titles were in French – Carnage à Chicago, Cauchemar à New York, L’Enfer Hawaiien, all by a certain Don Pendleton who, a publisher’s note told me, was also the author of Massacre à Beverly Hills, Violence à Vegas, Fusillade à San Francisco, Panique à Philadelphia, and Débâcle à Detroit. Later, over a whisky, Captain Luc and I thought up a few more – L’Horreur de Hoboken, Catastrophe à Kansas City, Meurtre à Martha’s Vineyard. We planned to settle down to write them in collaboration, and retire with a fortune.

  The time posted on a wall of the dining room for the midday meal was 11.30, but to my relief Captain Luc, his wife, the chief officer – a silent Wallis Islander – and I ate together at noon after the other officers and crew had finished: tongue, cucumber salad, potatoes, cheese (strong and good), and a bottle of Côtes du Rhône. A poster advertising Sofrana Lines hung over us: a Tahitian beauty, standing naked to the waist in clear, shallow water. She was so close to the camera you could see the pores of her skin, and her breasts, like overripe paw-paws, seemed about to tumble out of the photograph and onto the table. ‘Get to know the Pacific better!’ the poster said.

  Luc said, irritably, ‘I’m going to put two Papuan masks up there instead.’

  Luc and Marie-Louise would have liked to take a house in Vila rather than Noumea; it would have been convenient for his work, but there had been political troubles in Vanuatu. It had been difficult, after that, to know where exactly was best. There was New Zealand, of course, and Australia. ‘But Australians and New Zealanders are really cowboys,’ Luc said, making a face.

  Grey curtains of rain were falling outside the windows. Darker grey, a smudge of land crawled past in the distance.

  ‘You’ll find that French officials round the Pacific are often Corsicans,’ Luc said over coffee. ‘Corsicans travel all over the world, like the Scottish people.’

  ‘Their names end in “i”, you know,’ said Marie-Louise.

  ‘Even “j”,’ I said. And I told them about the old Corsican hotelier, Jean Ottavj, who became my friend in Saigon during my years in Vietnam between 1965 and 1973.

  Ottavj (the name had some obscure Hungarian or Finnish derivation and was pronounced Ottavee) had arrived in Indo-China with the French Army in the early 1920s, already a sergeant after service in Syria. When the time for his discharge came, he decided to stay on – many Frenchmen chose to stay in this Asian paradise, particularly if they had the adventurous blood of Corsica in their veins – and, like so many, had felt the enchantment of the lively little women of Tonkin and Annam. He went into the hotel and restaurant business, starting as a waiter or a cook, presently climbing to higher things – his automatically good standing with Saigon’s unofficial Corsican ‘Mafia’ must have helped. After the Second World War he took over an unpretentious but centrally situated hotel called the Royale which, with its wood panelling, wooden bar and red and white check dining room tablecloths, was more like a relais in some small Corsican town than a Saigon hotel. By this time Ottavj had a pretty, diminutive Vietnamese woman of great character; she had a good head for figures, he said. They were ideally suited: she sharp, quick, devoted; he soft-spoken, shrewd, unexcitable.

  ‘He had developed a passion for opium,’ I told Luc. ‘He needed a good many pipes a day by the time I met him. She was far too Vietnamese to object to that.’

  Luc shrugged as if to say, ‘Of course.’

  Ottavj was an amazing human spectacle. He was on the short side, frail, with papery skin. He brushed his hair straight back, flat on his skull, and his face was as creased as a relief map of the Central Highlands of South Vietnam. He had a long nose like a fleshy beak; his purple lips were thin by now and he pursed and unpursed them constantly like a man sampling mouthfuls of wine. His voice was a solemn, rather courtly murmur that matched an unflagging courtesy and dignity; and his eyes shone like black beads, full of life and humour. There was something in M. Ottavj’s appearance that reminded me of a kindly Mr Punch.

  To know Ottavj was to love him. Year after year, each time I put my foot across his threadbare doormat I felt I was coming home. The Royale! Oh, what a refuge! – from the hideous, exhausting world of the war; from the lumbering, cacophonous American presence that so smothered the small, quicksilver world of the Vietnamese. In another refuge, a little back-alley loft hidden up in a rickety wooden stairway, the war could be conjured out of existence as the birdlike attendant teased a dark, golden, hissing globe over a tiny flame, and the world outside became an obscene irrelevance. Here a few of Ottavj’s elderly Vietnamese friends – doctors, teachers, lawyers – murmured, sighed and sighed, sucking up in long, steady, greedy inhalations the peace the sweet smoke gave them – temporary peace in a thirty-year-old war that might last who knew how long.

  For years, at intervals, riots raged, baton charges surged outside the door of the Roy ale; tear gas eddied down the street. Time and again Jean Ottavj stood calmly surveying the aftermath of pandemonium. ‘En somme, cher M. Yoong’ (in eight years of friendship I was always ‘M. Yoong’, never Gavin), he would say at last, pursing and unpursing his old, thin lips, ‘Plus ça change….’ Old Ottavj’s life could have been measured in the number of tear gas canisters he’d seen in the gutters of Saigon.

  Ottajv was superstitious. He often talked to me of the sayings and doings of mysterious eighteenth-century dabblers in the occult like the Count of St Germain, and quoted unceasingly the predictions of ‘Nostradamus et compagnie’ (I never knew who made up ‘the company’). One year, he told me across the dinner table in his little restaurant that ‘selon Nostradamus, M. Yoong,’ the Mediterranean would be a ‘sea of flame’ that summer. ‘On va voir,’ he said, nodding his head with certainty. And the Egyptians and Syrians were soon at war with Israel. M. Ottavj shrugged almost imperceptibly; he was not surprised. ‘C’était écrit,’ he explained, ‘par les anciens.’ He believed unshakeably in Nostradamus and the Count of St Germain.

  No one who met him will ever forget M. Ottavj. Rooms were hard to find, with all the soldiers and journalists crowding into Saigon, but he joyfully lowered his rates for people he liked. If they were short of cash they could stay for nothing. ‘Plus tard, plus tard,’ he said, waving away the money. His restaurant was a delightful throwback to French Indo-China days; nowhere else had such elderly, gnomelike Vietnamese waiters, such dusty wall emblems of long-departed French Air Force squadrons, such friendly – though most respectable – Vietnamese bar-girls. As the war went on, and the Vietcong, closing round the capital, began spasmodically to shell the city’s long, winding, vulnerable river outlet to the sea, food became scarce. Jean Ottavj continued to serve good, simple food: soupe pistou (the Corsican minestrone), clams, cassoulets, good omelettes, blood puddings, crisp French bread, cheeses, even crêpes suzette. After tense days out in the unpredictable provinces with baffled Americans and demoralized Vietnamese, to return to the Royale was not merely luxury – it was heaven.

  ‘How was the wine?’ Luc asked.

  ‘The wine was both heaven and a miracle.’

  Good wine had become harder and harder to get. Algerian wine was shipped out in tankers in bulk, and rammed into bottles in some obscure Saigon warehouse. What distinguished Ottavj’s wine was the fact that the labels on the bottles, when they arrived on the table, announced not the year, but the day and the month of bottling. A label would say, for example, ‘23 February’. And Ottavj warned that some days were better than others. ‘Oh, M. Yoong.’ Hi
s old, bony hand, tangled with veins and blotched with grave marks, gripped my wrist. ‘Je vous conseille … le dix mai – non! Jamais le dix mai!’ I suppose certain shipments had gone ‘off’ in a ship or a warehouse. Ottavj made it sound as if he had personally removed a dead rat from that day’s cask.

  Luc roared with laughter. ‘Oh, yes. Or let it mature a week or so. “It’ll be ready to drink by 3 p.m. on 1 June.”’

  As the Americans began to pull out, friends of M. Ottavj asked him what plans he had made. Wouldn’t it be better to retire to Corsica? The Communists would surely confiscate his hotel; they might give him a very hard time.

  I don’t believe there was much real debate in Ottavj’s mind. He was seventy. He hadn’t been ‘home’ for years. He had his Vietnamese ‘wife’ to think of; she would not be happy in France. Besides, he himself had lost all his close relatives. Above all, there was the necessity for good and sufficient opium. France was not like easy-going Asia. It was difficult. Even Nostradamus, he told me, had nothing much to give him in the way of advice. His situation might become tragic….

  ‘Is he still there?’ Luc asked. ‘Getting on with the Communists?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  Before they came, Ottavj celebrated his seventieth birthday in fine, hilarious fashion with a party at his own restaurant for which he brought out good wine he had hoarded for years. A short while later, the French Consul pinned the Order of the Legion of Honour on the lapel of his well-brushed, shining blue suit and kissed the pale, bony cheek, while old Ottavj, forcing his rheumatic bones to attention, pursed and unpursed his lips and water swam in his red-rimmed eyes. Fifty years in Indo-China! Ottavj and his friends celebrated again in his restaurant with a few bottles of hoarded champagne, and innumerable bottles of red wine labelled with a bewildering variety of days and months, and a good outpouring of calvados to end up with. I was sad because I missed this party, but I wrote to him, and he wrote back, sending a photograph of the event and a pair of Parker pens, with a note: ‘L’objet n’est rien! Ce qui compte après tout, c’est le gueste [sic], l’idée, l’intention qui constitue l’ensemble du souvenir quand une pensée ineffable n’est pas capable d’exprîmer toute la Psychologie qui l’enveloppe ou qui l’invoute. Jean Ottavj.’