Coasting (12 page)

“Thank you
so
much for your hospitality,” I said as we left. “Thanks awfully.”

But from my room at the top of the parsonage I could just see over the hedge to the Common, where the daughters of the Double-Barrels rode their ponies.
Stupid bitches
.

I did have a secret life of my own as a double agent. On the sly I mingled with the comeover kids. They had foreign names like Stew and Kevin and Marilyn and Tracey, and they spoke with a lazy-tough burr in their voices. Up to the age of twelve they fished in the posted waters of the brook, had fights, built dens and pedaled their bicycles round improvised dirt tracks. After the age of twelve, they gave all that up and devoted themselves to snogging.

Kicking stones and swapping obscenities with Kev, I would sometimes see my father, conspicuous from half a mile away in his cassock, ballooning round him like a black spinnaker, trawling for souls.

“Your dad.”

“Fuck him,” I said, and the word worked on me like a snort of cocaine. “I wish he’d go and stuff that fucking cassock up his arse.” These bold denials came hard. They were said with the same excitement and trepidation that the blasphemer feels when he reckons that there’s at least an even chance that God will actually strike him dead.

“He’s all right,” Kev said. Kev’s own father regularly beat his mother up, and she was an occasional late-night visitor to the parsonage.

“All right for some,” I said, kicking moodily at a dead hedgehog in the road.

At twelve I learned to snog with Tracey. It was passionless and apathetic, like doing things to frogs in Science. We lay in the long grass at the bottom of Lower Common, just a few yards from where we could hear Kev and Marilyn learning to snog too. We rubbed and wriggled against each other for a bit, tried a French Kiss, in which I choked on Tracey’s tongue, then Tracey sat up and fiddled with her hairdo. I stared resentfully at the ends of my first pair of long trousers. They were
miles
too wide. Kev’s were “twelves,” which meant that they clung tightly round his ankles in the peg-top style that the Teddy Boys were bringing in. Mine were
twenty-twos
—well, eighteens, anyway. Hideous public school trousers, like Oxford Bags. Hating my trouser ends must have given my face an expression of aroused broodiness, for Tracey said:

“Show?”

“What?”

“
You
know …”

She giggled and pulled a face. The she lifted her skirt with all its flouncing layers of accessory petticoats. Amazed and deeply interested, I saw the rigging of belt and suspenders that held up her nylons, and her navy blue pants. She tweaked the front of her pants down and held them there so that I could see.

I had expected—but there had been no time in which to expect anything. However, Kev had given me the general gist of the way things worked down there. Asked to describe it, I would have said that there should be a sort of dark fleshy tunnel, its entrance probably marked by a pair of smiling lips. I rather imagined that the lips might look rouged.

I was appalled by what I saw. It was a dreadful absence, like the bald scar tissue of an amputation. A few pale hairs sprouted from the pink skin around what appeared to be a healed cut.

The pants snapped back, to my immense relief.

“Now you.”

Good God!

“Go on, pet,” Tracey said. “Undo your trousers, then. Fair’s fair.”

I couldn’t. I blustered and stammered and said sorry,
awfully sorry
. I rode back to the island on my bike, knowing that I’d just had a close shave with the Scarlet Whore of Babylon in person. For several days I quaked every time I heard the doorbell ring, fearing either that Tracey would turn up to demand the payment of her forfeit or, far worse, that her father would come clumping down the drive with serious news for mine. But neither Tracey nor her father braved the hedge, and within a week I was safely away at boarding school. When the next holidays came, I wrote off the council estate as a no-go area and failed to recognize Kev in the Post Office, although the experience with Tracey, artistically embellished, had made me more nearly popular at school than I’d ever been before.

I was getting deep into my teens when, on the far edge of the parish, I found another island, just as socially isolated as our own. Where ours was frowsty and full of English lumber, the other island was glamorously tropical. It was a millionaire’s weekend cottage standing on several acres of lawns and woods. No one knew the people who lived there. They never showed up for Christmas drinks at the Double-Barrels’. They certainly never came near the church. The most one ever saw of the owners of the cottage was their new, gunmetal-gray Aston Martin purring through the village with its windows up.

This famous car once purred to a stop for me when I was hitchhiking, and my first anxiety was that its owner would tell the parsonage about how I traveled, thumbing my way to places as far as possible out of parental reach. I needn’t have worried. Talking to the driver as he swept us round the Winchester bypass at a hundred and ten, I made my first grown-up friend.

Mr. Rapp had taught Philosophy at Oxford, worked for Reuters, taken over his father’s scrap-metal business and turned it into one of the country’s biggest manufacturers of aluminum tubes. He drove like Fangio. His bare skull was tanned the color of teak, his beard closely clipped to a circle
of gray round his upper lip and chin. I thought it likely that he was the cleverest man in England, and at weekends I cycled slowly backward and forward in front of his cottage, praying to be noticed and invited in.

The Rapps’ bookshelves were full of books that people actually read: green-backed Penguin thrillers, Left Book Club editions of Tawney and Crossman, the newest novels by Iris Murdoch and Kingsley Amis and C. P. Snow, whom Mr. Rapp always referred to as Mr. Pamela Hansford Johnson.

The Rapps themselves seemed to me at sixteen to have stepped out of a book. They were like people one read about, not people one knew. Mr. Rapp, with all his acres, his amazing car, his tailored shirts and handmade shoes, voted Labour—a wonderfully unlikely equation in my world. The whole family, parents and children together, had just been on the first Aldermaston March against the bomb, and all wore Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament badges in their lapels.
Inconceivable
.

They said that they found the Double-Barrels “too tedious for words,” a phrase I clasped to myself and used till it went threadbare.
Our
isolation in the village was stiff and uncomfortable. It bristled with class tension, class guilt, class pride.
Their
isolation was lordly. They liked the view but the people bored them. They made living on an island look like a handsome and graceful thing to do.

Best of all, the Rapps were Jews. To them, the idea that the world had been created by a Palestinian peasant just a few hundred years ago was no more than a quaint conceit. To go to church every Sunday in order to eat this man’s flesh and drink his blood was an interesting survival of an old pagan ritual. It was like the business of saying hello to the fairies in the dell. Lots of people did it, but the Rapps wouldn’t bother.

I heroized them. Their free and easy talk went to my head. I ached to be a part of their exotic diaspora. Late one night, Mr. Rapp drove me to the gate of the parsonage. The passenger door of the Aston Martin closed with a soft, expensive click, leaving a brief bubble of Havana cigar
smoke in the air. When I walked up the drive toward the Ancestors glowering through their uncurtained windows, I was a comeover from a superior island.

When I tied up in Pwllheli, the pubs were full of talk of the
South Stack
. The total disappearance, in fine weather, of a large, well-found steel trawler was something for every fisherman to worry over and exorcise his own fears by speaking them out loud.

There was the Bermuda Triangle theory. Liverpool Bay was a bad and treacherous place for any ship. All sorts and conditions of boats had gone down there for no good reason. Why, only last year …

There was the Gas Bottle theory. One fisherman had heard a bang on the Saturday morning. It was not a big bang, mind. It was a very faraway bang, from somewhere beyond and beneath the horizon. It was so faraway that he could not rightly tell the direction of it, exactly. But it was a bang, definitely. If there had been a leak, or the gas bottles on board the
South Stack
had gone rusty, then perhaps one of the men, lighting a cigarette, maybe, or putting on the kettle for a brew …

There was the Secret Submarine theory. Everyone knew somebody who had gone trawling and suddenly found himself being pulled backward, or forward, or sideways through the sea at terrifying speed. He’d had to cut his nets to free himself from the underwater monster or be dragged down to the bottom as the sub dived. There were certainly submarines about—
nuclear
submarines, people said. You never saw them, but they made great, mysterious waves on the surface of the sea, like bulging muscles. Some thought they were “ours,” others were sure they were Russians. If they were ours, they were so secret that the Admiralty would never own up when a man’s gear—thousands of pounds’ worth—was lost to them. Suppose the
South Stack
had not had time to cut herself free …

There were other theories too—theories which involved piracy, spies, women. Suppose a man wanted to start a new
life for himself, in Africa or South America: then wouldn’t a fine trawler like that be the perfect vessel to sail away in into blessed anonymity? And could one discount the IRA?

When I left Pwllheli, still nothing had been found. The Irish Sea had been combed from end to end and side to side and not a scrap of wreckage had been spotted. I double-checked the fittings on my own gas bottles and sniffed the bilges of
Gosfield Maid
before I sailed. I never heard anyone mention the
South Stack
again—until last week.

While I was beginning this chapter and describing the arrival of the Nimrod search aircraft, I wrote a letter to the Holyhead Coastguard asking if there’d been any further news. The reply makes sad reading.

The
South Stack
sailed from Holyhead on a Thursday for two days’ fishing in Liverpool Bay. The three men who were on board were due to show up for a family celebration back in Holyhead on the Saturday evening. When they failed to arrive, their relatives rang the Coastguard, who first put out a PAN broadcast, asking vessels in their area to look out for them, then, on Sunday morning, put out a MAYDAY call.

What the Coastguard is careful to avoid saying is that for such a vessel to overturn as a result of catching her gear in an “obstruction,” the obstruction would have to be moving, and moving very fast.

There was nothing unusual in the disappearance of the
South Stack
. Every day the seamen’s newspaper,
Lloyd’s List
, carries hundreds of such entries in its Casualties columns: boats announced as Overdue, then as Missing; boats known to have foundered on rocks; boats presumed lost “due to stress of weather.” Some catch on fire, some spring leaks, some run into hurricanes, and their fates are reduced to a single line of small print. Their names stay posted in the paper for a week or two, then they’re dropped to make way for other, more recent, missing ships.

It is the way they go that makes one shiver. “Results were negative.”

“No further evidence.” First you are steaming along under a blue sky, and then you are sunk. For a few minutes you leave a trail of bursting bubbles—then nothing. Not even bubbles.

AN INSULAR WAR

S
eesawing in a swell of grizzled waves, with the tide running hard against us, the boat was marking time. It bucked and rolled, shunting the books about in their fiddled shelves, rattling the saucepans in the galley, making the glass frames of the pictures on the walls snatch and lose the sun. There was a lot of motion in my floating house, but no sense of making headway.
Gosfield Maid
felt as if she were tethered to the seafloor on a chain.