Coasting (22 page)

I was too busy playing with metaphors to notice that the literal sea, which was not corduroy at all, had another occupant besides
Gosfield Maid
. The Cherbourg–Weymouth
roll-on-roll-off ferry, originally observed as a dot the size of a distant sea gull, was a quarter of a mile off and bearing down on me at twenty knots. My fault entirely. Had not Commander King drummed it into me that
If to starboard red appear, it is
your
duty to keep clear?
The boat’s wheel was locked to the autopilot, and it took a frantic fumble to release it. There was a long abusive whoop from the ferry’s horn.

“Sorry!
Sorry!”

The rudder grumbled in its chains and
Gosfield Maid
swung away from the bows of the ferry in dreamlike slow motion.

“I’m
awfully
sorry—”

The ship rolled past, as big as a hospital, its windows full of faces. On the sun deck a party of schoolgirls stood pointing down and laughing. It hadn’t occurred to me before that I was quite such an obvious figure of fun.

Regardez là-bas! Le petit homme dans le petit bateau!

I waved. The girls clutched each other, enjoying the absurdity of getting an answering response from the animal in its cage. A helical twist of orange peel fell short of the cockpit and disappeared astern. Food for the monkey. The laughing girls were swept away to England while I tumbled harmlessly in the ferry’s wake. They’d find plenty more to giggle over where they were going.

I spent the next hour and a half obligingly living up to the girls’ opinion of me as a perfect fool. In all my apprehensive reading-up of Portland Race, I hadn’t taken in the fact that there was another, modestly famous race on the next block. St. Alban’s Head also produced a collision of streams on a shallow ledge. The pilot book had a paragraph about it, and the overfalls were shown on the chart as a cluster of little whorls and wriggly lines. The thing was extremely well advertised, but I failed to read the advance publicity and wandered carelessly into the middle of St. Alban’s Race.

I took the zigzag tracks of white for a school of porpoises at play. They came threading through the water under the bow, making the sky tilt and the boat slither sideways down the face of a wave. They seemed unusually boisterous for porpoises. A gobbet of foam splashed on the roof and dribbled
down the wheelhouse windows. The wheel, after another dash to free it from the autopilot, felt as if it were turning on thin air one moment and in thick glue the next. There was no pattern to the waves: they came in packs, bouncing up and down with their tongues hanging out. Nor was there much force in them. The tidal streams were weak, and there wasn’t enough wind to seriously frustrate them. The race gave the boat a few irritable shakes and tweaks, removed my deck brush as a forfeit, and disgorged us.

It was a stupid, cocksure, quite unnecessary encounter. Given the good weather and the lazy tides, there would have been some point in deliberately steering
Gosfield Maid
into the race to see how the boat handled in a confused sea. There wasn’t a grain of real danger in these conditions. But to blunder into a tide race by a silly oversight was something to be ashamed of. After an obsessively cautious, heart-in-mouth courtship I had started to take the sea for granted.

“The sea’s no place for the Walter Mittys of this world,” said the Captain of Dartmouth.

“The sea’s a job. It’s like accountancy—or writing books,” Commander King said. “Treat it as a proper job and you’ll be all right.”

The next hour was penitential work. I tightened the shivering genoa sail on the winch. I took compass bearings on every identifiable bump of land and laid them out on the chart until
Gosfield Maid
was supported by a slowly extending cat’s-cradle of pencil lines strung between Anvil Point, Warren Hill and the smudge of chalk on the western tip of the Isle of Wight. I pricked off each new distance with dividers against the latitude scale on the side of the chart. (One sea mile is a minute of latitude—a flexible measurement, since the miles get shorter and shorter as the earth flattens around the poles.) The flood tide was quickening, and the boat was moving at seven, then eight knots over the seafloor, unraveling the gray thread of land on the beam.

This low coast was short of marks. Its charted towns and villages—Christchurch, Highcliffe, New Milton, Milford-on-Sea—failed to show on the skyline. The best the binoculars could offer was the intermittent wink of bungalow
windows above a crumbled earth-face at the edge of the water. No sign, anywhere, of 1959. Not a single scowling youth on the foreshore. Not even a twist of woodsmoke from an abandoned camp of the Oedipal guerrillas.

What I was looking for through the glasses was the string of parish halls and Women’s Institutes which you could rent, for immoral purposes, for ten shillings for a Saturday night. Outside each hall was a tangle of piled bicycles; inside, the keen sweet stink of cigarettes and a storm of rock-and-roll.

The brand names of the cigarettes—Anchor, Strand, Weights, Woodys—had as homely a period ring to them now as Tiffany, Bugatti or Lalique. The rock-and-roll, at tinny full volume, came out of a Dansette gramophone, a year or two before anybody had learned to call the thing a record player.

Everyone was in uniform. Their toggled duffel coats were heaped on a trestle table. The sweaters of the boys hung in shapeless short skirts above their knees. The fastidious girls, all heels and hairdos, moved as if they had been blown in glass and were liable to a fatal fracture, while the boys shambled and slouched, their antique cigarettes pouched in the corners of their lips, their lids hanging low, their faces cast in the required pose of unillusioned
Weltschmerz
.

Even when they were in each other’s arms, the boys and the girls were separated by the Atlantic Ocean. The girls knew exactly where they were—in Harold Macmillan’s England, a bountiful country that would yield, if not next year, then the year after, engagement rings, white weddings, houses with gardens, fridges, spin-dryers, Mother-care smocks, holidays abroad (with a G. B. sticker on the boot of the Rover), lots of jobs for fun and pin money, a green and pleasant future. But the boys were a world elsewhere, in an imaginary America of bums and hoboes, crash-pads and one-night stands.

Right
, you said,
Right
, when what you meant was “Yes,” and the best sentences all finished with the word
man
. If you could manage to bring it off (a difficult trick if your voice was still tainted with the braying vowels of boarding school), the proper way of introducing any new remark was
to shrug it in with a
Like
 …, followed by a long exhalation of smoke through the nose, followed by the remark itself.

Like … you want to hitch to Bournemouth, man?

Right
.

This dream America, discovered in the books of Jack Kerouac and the films of James Dean, was a land exclusively inhabited by rude sons striking their fathers dead. From now on, fathers were finished. God was down already, although the girls persisted in being sentimentally superstitious about him. Mr. Macmillan, waffling, with insufferable paternalism, about how we had never had it so good, was for the chop, along with all the rest of the old fools who ran England as if it were a gentleman’s club in St. James’s. That left only the daily warfare of the breakfast table, the late-night skirmish on the stairs, the old, pitiless and sullen wrangle between real father and real son—a conflict as stylized as a Noh play.

How many times do I have to tell you that I will not have you wearing that C.N.D. badge in this house?

Fuck off
.

What did you say?

Nothing
.

The sulky heroes of the American cinema stood their ground with contemptuous passivity. Hands sunk deep in the pockets of their jeans, lips curled in a sneer, they kicked at the dust with their boots and dispatched the father figures with a mean wriggle of their shoulders.

Have you been smoking in your room again?

Nah
.

It smells like a French estaminet in there. Yeah
.

In the parish halls on Saturday nights, the James Deans and Neal Cassadys of the south coast lounged over a shared quarter-bottle of Scotch and waited for the girls to make the first move. Highcliffe, or New Milton, or Milford-on-Sea was just an illusory trick of the light. You were on the road, somewhere far out in that America of the spirit where Allen Ginsberg had seen the best minds of his generation destroyed, et cetera.

You’re not dancing?

Nah
.

Want to dance?

Yeah. Okay
.

The boys slopped about the floor in their long sweaters, knees bent, shoulders hunched, like easygoing gorillas. The girls, who were so soft and bosomy from the waist up, were curiously slippery and reptilian from the waist down. Every time you came together, you could feel not flesh, but the elasticated roll-ons which they wore under their skirts. Safely girdled against American influences, they danced like spinning tops, talked brightly, and wouldn’t even smoke.

Later, much later, after the girls had gone home in their fathers’ cars, the bums and hoboes came into their own. They stood on the dark verges of the Hampshire roads, thumbing lifts. The A33 from Bournemouth to Southampton was Highway 5. Red taillights faded out over the hill, going south to L.A. and San Diego. Trucks cruised through the long cloisterd avenue of black pines.

Can I score a Woody off you, man?

Sure thing
.

Sooner or later, the driver of a Hillman Minx or a Ford Popular would come to a stop, seeing a pair of schoolboys out too late for their parents’ peace of mind. He’d reach across from the driver’s seat and the door of a Chevy sedan would open.

Where ya goin’, fella?

I dunno. Purdy far
.

If only I could actually see into the bungalow windows now, I’d probably manage to spot a fellow hobo or two there—fathers of sons and daughters older than themselves. Did they stay up till all hours, waiting to “read the riot act” and sniff their children’s breath for booze, or, shakey with apprehension, ask to see their children’s forearms for signs of something worse? Tramping past their houses in
Gosfield Maid
, it seemed to me that I had taken the whole game a great deal more seriously than it was ever intended to be played. Like, I was still on the road.

The past and the present were too all of a piece to be true. In the low sun the tongues of foam on the wave crests
were as thick and yellow as gouts of clotted cream. Ahead, the Needles were standing proud of the chalk cliff behind them, looking more like stumpy thimbles than needles. Feet planted wide on the wheelhouse floor, I swayed pleasantly in time to the boat’s rhythmical lurching in a slow and easy sea. A Buddy Holly number.

A 45 in a torn white paper sleeve. Holly’s voice, throbbing with glottal echoes, came more clearly over the waves than it had ever done out of the Dansette, jumping the spark gap of twenty-something years.

No, indeed. Rocking and rolling, trying to get a bearing on the Needles lighthouse in front and on 1959 behind, I thought, I’ve thrown away my nights and wasted all my days over You-

  u-

   u-

    oo, and brought the boat’s head round a point to starboard.

Lymington, where I berthed, was in the money: it both was and wasn’t the town I knew, and it was hard to recover my land legs as the streets rose and sank in a sick-making swell. On home ground one moment, in bottomless water the next, I floundered up Quay Hill and out into the High Street.

The Lymington I remembered was handsome, spinsterly and dull. It was just the kind of bourgeois burg in the deep sticks that a self-respecting angel-headed hipster was honor-bound to light out from at the first possible opportunity,
preferably riding on a boxcar roof. Its rosy brickwork and bowfronted shops were Georgian and Queen Anne; its dominant voices were refined and Edwardian.

They played a game called goff on the links, and larnched their boats down at the quay. The forsythia in their exquisitely tended gardens bloomed yaller for them in the early spring, when they were quite orfen to be seen taking cups of cawfee on their wrought-iron bal-
coneys
. I was occasionally introduced to their granddaughters, who were, without exception, fraffly nice gairls. The Lymingtonians handled words like envelope, fanfare and garage as foreign upstarts, and corrected my pronunciation of them by saying them again in French. Ongve
lopp
. Fong
farr
. Gah
raj
. Their manners—at least whenever they encountered the bums and hoboes—were distinctly frorsty.

Born in the 1880s and ’90s, the retired gentry set the tone of the place and did their best to maintain Lymington as a museum in which their own ways of speech and feeling were reverently conserved. Their conservatism, in every sense of the word, was ardent. The key to their character lay in their beautifully preserved shoes—brogues, handmade in 1923 or thereabouts, which had been so waxed and buffed that their polish lay in a deep lucent film on a spiderweb of tiny cracks like the glaze on a Ming vase. Their tweeds, apparently of much the same vintage, were fluted and patched with leather at the elbows, cuffs and knees. The skin of their faces, most of which had seen long service in the tropics, had the same crazed, antique finish as the leather of their shoes.

They were so spry, so sure of the way in which they ran their world, that I was gloomily convinced that they had the gift of eternal life. In the year 2000, they’d still be changing their books at Boots’ Lending Library and gruffing the time of day in the bar of the Royal Lymington Yacht Club, the retired rear-admirals jostling for precedence over the retired air vice-marshals. They’d look after themselves exactly as they looked after their shoes. Their loving thrift was justified only by the assumption that they’d live forever, saving, investing, turning their collars and reknitting their old jerseys, as perpetually self-renewing as winter trees.