Five months have now passed since the cash offer was made. After a couple of weeks of trying to get them to respond, the estate agent sends a letter to them saying that unless they get in touch within seven days the house is going back on the market. Seven days elapse. The house goes back on the market. A day or so later a couple comes to view it and makes a genuine cash offer.
That same evening our original purchaser arrives on our doorstep. The situation is causing him a lot of problems, he says. He needs to move his family in as soon as possible and he would like to come in and discuss a proposition that he has for us. It had been mere chance whether David or I happened to be nearest the front door when he rang the bell. He is unlucky. He gets me. I shall draw a veil over my response but they probably heard the door slam in the next village.
David arranges for a storage company’s assessor to come, emphasising that we wish to utilise only one container. We take him round the house and show him the things we want to store. He makes notes and assures us they will all go in one container. Then we book two seats on a flight back to Mahon. They are very cheap, a last-minute booking on a return charter flight – far cheaper than one-way tickets – leaving the day after our goods go into store. We sell the car and have a garage sale.
The day arrives for the removal van to come with the container, pack it and take our goods away. We have put everything intended for storage together in one empty room. The two men survey it.
‘Who booked this?’ asks the senior of the two, sucking his teeth.
We describe the assessor.
Both men snort in unison.
‘It’ll never go in,’ says the senior one.
It doesn’t.
We are still putting stuff into piles, in the garage, for the charity shops the next morning and our neighbour very kindly volunteers to deliver them for us as we no longer have a car. We also return her spare bed, which we had borrowed overnight, having sold our own the previous day.
A friend picks us up in the afternoon to take us to the airport. It is one of those beautiful, soft sunny days you get in England in mid-May, when the trees look particularly lovely with their pale young leaves and the hawthorns across the valley are covered in white blossom.
I look at it all out of the car’s back window as we drive away, with great pleasure but no regret. I don’t live here any more. Last year, when we had left the house for the boat the first time, it had been with very mixed feelings. This second time it is with a sense of going home. Voyager is home now.
6
Flight Back to Mahon
Whenever anyone asks me to recall one of my happiest times, I remember this day. It is pure content, which is odd because I hate air travel. I hate the close confinement and I always get a 6’ 7” man behind me whose restless knees grind into my pelvis for the whole journey; or two children playing a vigorous card game on the fold-down table on the back of my seat. In front I get a young woman who has bathed in perfume that morning, which for the rest of the day makes whatever I eat or drink taste of whatever brand she is wearing. Invariably she fully reclines her seat, before I have finished my meal, so that my shins are trapped and the top of her fragrant head is 6” from my nose. She will also have long hair, a strand of which she will flick rhythmically as she reclines with her magazine, so that it keeps hitting me in the face.
Before we even reach these seats, however, we cause a security alert when the x-ray machine picks up a craft knife in our hand luggage. David had scooped it up with a few other useful tools prior to our garage sale. There is also a two-hour delay because our plane has not yet returned from its last flight and when it does it will have to be cleaned. And at the check-in we are 86lbs overweight on our luggage.
There are a variety of causes apart from the tools. There is the repaired, and extremely heavy, electronic control box from the automatic steering that had broken down during our arrival at Menorca; the repaired log which had been damaged by the hailstorm off Palma; a new aerial for the Navtex; replacement repair kits for the hatches that we have been promised will definitely fit this time; a huge roll of charts and two hefty cruising guides; not to mention a couple of items which had been overlooked when our goods had been carted off into storage and which I simply could not give away. People begin to gather round us, staring at so much luggage being taken on a week’s holiday.
The very polite young man behind the desk looks at it as well, and says regretfully that he will have to charge us for excess baggage. He picks up a calculator. It is just short of the cost of another ticket. David begins hunting through his pockets for his cheque book.
‘We’re retiring,’ I say, feeling the need for some sort of justification. ‘This is the last of our belongings.’
‘You mean you’re not going to use the return part of your ticket?’ says the young man, in what seems a slightly sharper tone than earlier. Before I can do more than shake my head he says, ‘Please wait a moment,’ and goes to confer with his supervisor.
I look at David aghast. Oh no, me and my big mouth! Maybe you aren’t supposed to do one-way trips on return flights any more. Maybe there are new rules. Maybe we’ll lose our flight …
The check-in clerk comes back. ‘You’re definitely not returning?’ he says, looking me in the eyes very earnestly.
I shake my head mournfully. It is too late to claim otherwise now, even if I wanted to.
‘OK,’ he says brightly. ‘No charge.’
Apart from thanking him I keep my mouth firmly shut but when we are settled in the departure lounge I ask David if we are so unwanted in this land of our birth that we’ve been given a reward for not coming back. He laughs and says it probably has more to do with passengers bringing more weight back in, in the form of gifts and souvenirs, than they took out.
Once our plane has been cleaned we are allowed on board. We have the window and centre seats and there is a man sitting in the aisle seat. His two children bicker across the gangway from him while his wife, sitting beside them, looks fraught. This couple sum up everything I associate with going on holiday by air: utter misery.
Because of the long delay, the man is in sitting-down-waiting mode so instead of standing up to take off his jacket he is trying to do it while remaining in his seat. He is struggling to get his right arm out of his jacket when he spots us approaching and goes into overdrive to get his arm free so that he can get out of his seat and let us into ours. His eyes are glazed. He has been sitting waiting in an airport for hours and his children are driving him mad. Now here are people who will want to get past him and one sleeve still has an arm in it while the other is gripped by the seat somehow and rising is impossible. He is about to tear the lining from his jacket in his desperate attempt to get free.
‘Shut up, Anthony!’ he snaps at the whining coming from the elder of the two boys opposite.
Beads of sweat stand out on his forehead. He is showing classic signs of stress. Our own stress has gone. Our house, that great drain on our resources, has been sold. My possessions problem, that had seemed so intractable, has been resolved and I feel like a new person. Our eternal goods and chattels, the ones we shall keep until we are no more or they are lost in transit, have been safely packed away and can be forgotten. Even the airline has given us an unexpected going-away present. We positively float down the aisle to the distressed man in the seat on the outside of ours.
‘It’s all right,’ we say, unhooking his empty left sleeve from around the arm rest where it is trapping him like a straight-jacket. ‘The plane’s not going yet. Plenty of time.’
I don’t remember if there was a 6’ 7” man with bony knees in the seat behind me. And if somebody in front reclined her seat onto my shins and flicked her hair into my face I didn’t notice. The noisy, boisterous children were on the other side of the aisle. And even that man who travels with me on every homeward journey, and coughs and sneezes all over me so that I’m ill with whatever virus he has for at least a week afterwards, appears to have taken a diff
erent flight. I don’t remember ever feeling so serene and look back upon it as a flight on angels’ wings. Happiness truly is a state of mind.
The Balearic Islands
7
Mahon
After so long away from the boat we are expecting a mammoth cleaning job: mould on the inside, and her outside stained and dirty. It is the inside that has been causing us most concern, with our having left all our belongings on board for so long. In damp conditions, and with no fresh air circulating, leather goes mouldy and books and clothing become musty until gradually the whole boat acquires an unpleasant smell that is impossible to get rid of. To make matters worse, some of Voyager’s windows had developed leaks before we left and Menorca had experienced a lot of rain during the winter.
In the event, Voyager’s inside is bone dry and mould-free thanks to Joss, the marina manager, and her decks are spotless thanks to his crew of cleaners known as The Girls. So instead of rolling up our sleeves and setting-to as expected, we open a bottle of wine, sit in the cockpit and watch the sun go down.
It is early summer in Mahon. The sycamore trees lining the quay are in green leaf, the palms on the cliff top above them are lush and the men who empty the skips along the promenade shatter the peace at seven on Monday mornings now instead of Sunday midnight. The visitors are returning, too. Up the quay the floating restaurants and the glass-bottomed boats are becoming busy while the waiters at La Minerva have to dart through unaccustomed traffic to reach their pavement tables across the street.
The cruise ships that have spent the winter in the Caribbean are also returning, and we wander along the quay to look at them. We stand and read the data board which the crew of the four-masted Star Clipper props up on the dock. The first mast, it says, is square rigged, the other three are conventional main sails. The vessel is 360 feet long, 50 feet wide, carries 36,000 square feet of sail and is the first clipper built since 1912.
Some of the conventional cruise ships that arrive are so big that when they make their slow left-hand turn to enter the terminal they blot out the end of the harbour completely for a time. The Saga Rose, owned by the club for the over-50s, sails past. David says, ‘Crinklies,’ and I say, ‘You mean, our age?’ Its generator vibrates through our hulls all night.
At the public quay a 120-foot private motor yacht ties up, mega-millions-worth and registered in the Cayman Islands. It is so sleek at the bow, so inaccessible by external means that the only way for the crew to clean the saloon windows is to abseil down them from the flying bridge. There are ten crew members on deck when it arrives, all in matching slacks and polo shirts, enjoying the air perhaps before the owner or his clients arrive if our friend Colin’s experience is typical. A marine engineer we met in Wales, Colin had spent a season as crew on a luxury yacht in the Mediterranean and found it a modern form of serfdom. Three of them had shared a windowless cabin eight feet by ten and were not allowed on deck while the family was about.
‘You’re bilge rats,’ Colin had said with feeling.
The harbour is also busy with little boats. Among them a dinghy with two people in it and a huge brown dog filling the bow like a yeti. It sits immobile, staring ahead, taller than the humans, its fur fluttering in the breeze. After its shore leave it travels back in the same monolithic pose.
The pavements are abuzz, too; not least the pretty promenade to which Voyager is tied and to where the people travelling by charter flights, ferries and cruise ships flock. And thus our daily chores become part of the scene. We are street theatre. And as you peg out your smalls along the hand rails (the launderette is closed for renovation) or do your ironing in the cockpit, people by the hundred pass. It should be hell, but they have come from a long northern winter and are in holiday mood, cheerful, wry and invariably courteous.
A middle-aged man who looks as if he does hard physical work for a living, contemplates our lifestyle wistfully and says, ‘Well, it’s a dirty job, but I suppose somebody’s got to do it.’
A little boy stares at the windmill of our wind generator and asks his Dad, ‘What’s it for?’ Fazed for a moment, but not willing to admit defeat, the man brightens and says, ‘Well, when there’s no wind they use that to sail with.’ Neither of them has noticed me sitting in the cockpit but the boy suddenly spots me.
‘Do you?’ he asks me, and the man’s eyes glaze with embarrassment.
‘Yes,’ I say, for who am I to undermine a small boy’s faith in his father?
Another time a bluff matron says, ‘Well, yerve got guts, I’ll say that for yer,’ which makes me wonder for a moment if she knows something I don’t and whether I should quit while I’m ahead.
Although they are many, none intrude, pausing only to nod or exchange a word before moving on. For sensitivity, however, none eclipse two massive middle-aged men whose bow fronts and shaved heads suggest nightclub doormen but who have brought their elderly Mum on holiday. A tiny bird of a woman, like the genteel little landlady in the 1955 Ealing film The Ladykillers, they are walking her slowly up the quay and admiring the mainly unoccupied boats.
When they reach ours she, being tiny, does not see us sitting at our meal in the cockpit. The two men, being tall, do, and both turn as one to gaze tactfully at the houses behind them. Asked a question by their mother, they turn back to answer her. As they do so she rises on tiptoe to point at whatever it is up our mast that has prompted her question and her eyes meet ours. Her face lights up.
‘Ooh, look!’ she chirps with delight, ‘they’re having their tea.’
She could not have sounded more pleased had she spotted the Queen at a royal garden party. The two huge men blush to their eyebrows and shepherd her away, while she looks back over her shoulder with sweet interest.
If we are street theatre, we are also a captive audience. One afternoon a boat registered in Hamburg but flying a French ensign arrives with five Frenchmen aboard. They are in their thirties except for one a decade or so older, all well-dressed and almost formal in demeanour.
After tying up they go quickly into town. They return around 11pm, very drunk. One of the younger ones stands naked on the pontoon while the oldest one turns the hose on him and the pile of clothing beside him. Then, for several hours, they set about what can only have been a competition among themselves to see who can make the most noise.
It is odd to hear French words shouted to the tune of Roll out the Barrel. They also howl, whistle, turn on some very loud music and appear to be taking hammers to the interior of the boat. It seems a joyless enterprise. There is no laughter, just maximum noise. By 1am every house along the waterfront has its bedroom lights on.
Early next morning a gloomy-looking Frenchman leaves the pontoon in search of breakfast. He passes a slender, white-haired local man fishing with a rod and line from the quay just beyond our stern. The elderly angler wears a neat, three-piece brown suit and a check deerstalker hat and nods a greeting to the yachtsman as he passes. The Frenchman ignores him.
The elderly and middle-aged of this town dress very stylishly and are very gracious. The streets are also very clean. It may be the absence of take-away food outlets, or the availability of skips, although if you are abroad early you will see the shopkeepers at work with their brooms doing their stretch of the street; not just the pavement outside their own premises but also the gutter and the street itself.
The other four Frenchmen emerge later, to urinate over the side of their boat and pace the pontoon with mobile telephones pressed to their ears. I am pegging out laundry by then but do not bother to acknowledge them. When you have observed people’s penises hanging over their side rails the usual civilities seem misplaced somehow. They leave at noon, and you wonder what it is in their affluent middle-class lives – or missing from it – that prompts them to behave like this, and whether they do it at home too or only abroad.
Next afternoon Joss and The Girls line the outer pontoon, hands shading their eyes, looking down the harbour. A rally is due, Joss says, and they have come to mee
t it. They wait and they wait and go away and come back and wait some more. Finally, early evening, half a dozen very expensive English motor yachts arrive. In my ignorance, the only rally I know of is the ARC, the annual Atlantic Rally for Cruisers where yachtsmen sail across the Atlantic from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean and usually arrive tired and dishevelled after several weeks at sea. These sailors have motored from Mallorca a few hours away and arrive immaculate in blazers and designer knitwear.
Joss and The Girls take their lines and secure the boats. Somewhere on board one of them a button is pressed and a gangplank whirs down onto the pontoon. Another press of a button and handrails shoot up from it and snap into place. Then, while the rally members step ashore for cocktails, The Girls get to work. Elbows a blur, within the hour they have these boats hosed, buffed and flossed. They have barely evaporated from the pontoon before the rally members return to bathe and change for dinner at one of the restaurants down the quay.
In the early hours I wake to the sound of their voices coming back up. If you have ever envied people who live on pretty waterfronts or in picture postcard villages, all this nocturnal activity by summer visitors is food for thought if you like an undisturbed night’s sleep. They are walking slowly and talking loudly, as people holidaying often do at night, as though everyone else in the world is on holiday too, and I wait patiently for them to troop past the houses and Voyager, through the gate and down the pontoon onto their boats. With them on the outer pontoon, and us tied to the quay, we are as far away from each other as it is possible to get, so once they are on board they can chat to their hearts’ content and I, and the families in the five stuccoed houses, can all go back to sleep. Unfortunately, two of the women settle themselves on the bench on the quay right alongside our boat, and four feet from the foot of our bed one of them proceeds to pour the miseries of her soul into the sympathetic ear of the other for the rest of the night.
Turtles in Our Wake Page 3
