Coasting (23 page)

As soon as I stepped ashore, I knew they were dead. The windows of Lymington’s quayside restaurants were bright, slaphappy collages of credit cards. They wouldn’t have stood for
that
. Eating out was something that you grumbled over having to do, once or twice a year, at an hotel, where you spent a contented half-hour reading the bill at the end and making noises of irritable disbelief. Nor would they have tolerated the nautical boutiques with their displays of high-fashion storm gear and the port and starboard lanterns which were meant to grace not a boat but an inglenook fireplace or the cocktail bar in the (shiver my timbers!)
lounge
.

But all this was nothing compared with what had happened to the salt marshes, a wide southward sweep of banks of springy glasswort, where herons creaked into the air on rusty wings and long-legged curlews went prying in the mud for lugworms. From the Royal Lymington Yacht Club, the official HQ of the gentry, you could sit at the big telescope on its brass tripod and combine some unobstructed ornithology with a few choice remarks about how Major DashPouncet had just managed to gybe his old Bristol pilot cutter off Jack-in-the-Basket.

In the Club, the word “development” was pronounced in the same tone that one used for the word “war.” Chaps were taken aside. The whisper went round. Cabals were formed in scented drawing rooms. The gentry were capable of every strategy and subterfuge known to the ingenious military mind when it came to protecting the town from incursions on its comfortable old architecture and brimming, looking-glass Nature.

Yet somehow, sometime between 1959 and 1982, Lymington had been sacked by the barbarians of the new. The marshes had been quarried out to make marinas. Where the herons used to fish was now a solid mile of car parks, catwalks and floating jetties. The clink and jangle of steel rigging against alloy masts rang out over Lymington like the bells of a demented herd of alpine cows. The boats themselves, wedged into their slots like bits of a gigantic Lego kit, appeared to be identical. Shark-nosed and white, they wore their slit-eyed windows of smoked Perspex like an
army of mobsters in shades. They loafed sulkily in their berths, their white plastic fenders sighing a little as they grazed the jetty.

The gentry had seen the coming of fiberglass yachts, and knew it was a fad that wouldn’t last. “Tupperware,” they said, consigning the material from which the boat was made to its proper station in the lower-lower-middle class. The gentry’s own boats were made of wood, with unwieldy gaffs hanging from their masts like gallows trees. They treated them as they treated their shoes. In floppy sun hats and old trousers, they sanded and varnished their brightwork, re-whipped the ends of their cherished manila ropes, stitched their sails, and found themselves so happily engrossed in their life’s calling of conservation that half a summer of manual labor would go by before they’d risk an afternoon’s voyage across to the Isle of Wight.

The boats in the marinas needed no such maintenance. Many of them never left their jetties and were used only occasionally as weekend chalets. Some were left unvisited by their owners from one year’s end to the next. These big plastic toys spent nearly all their time lying idle, spoiling the view and frightening the birds with the incessant tintinnabulation of their halyards.

There were, so I was told, about 1,300 yachts on the Lymington River. At, say, £18,000 a throw, that would mean a total value of nearly £25 million. The berthing fees alone would come to about a million pounds a year. And all this money was invested in a newfangled toffeelike substance made of resin and glass fiber called GRP. This unalluring acronym officially stands for glass-reinforced plastic; looking at and listening to the vandalized salt marshes of Lymington, I thought it might more appropriately stand for gloatingly rich possession, and be pronounced to match, as a tonsillitic rumble in the throat,
Gurrrrp
.

I had arrived in Lymington as a bum; I was now indignantly on the side of the fogies. The frippery of the place! The gewgaws! The waste! The destruction! The money! If any of the old guard did still survive, they must be boiling, puce-faced, from behind high windows. This was worse
than “the hippies,” worse than the infamous Beaulieu so-called Jazz Festival, worse than the crackpot Wykehamist, Gaitskell, worse than—there was no other word for it, it was worse than worse, it was
the worst
.

It took a little while to remove the pepper-and-salt mustache from my upper lip, undo the threadbare regimental tie and cool down into being a bum again. I was in no position to rail against the craze for owning boats, and the Lymington marinas were simply the inevitable consequence of a lot of people sharing my own dream of making an escape from an overcrowded country in a private ark. They were a perfectly fair reminder that the dream was not an innocent one: it violated the landscape and the wild things that lived there; it created its own kind of industrial pollution; as with so many dreams, there was an ugly twist to the idyll.

Yet it still seemed odd that this should have happened to Lymington, of all places. In the late 1950s when Britain had money to spare, no town could have been more genteelly frugal. Now, in the middle of Britain’s worst slump for half a century, the town was awash in hard cash.

Lymington wasn’t in the sticks anymore. In 1959 it had been a three-hour drive from London along a road on which the traffic fretted and squeezed through a dozen big villages and small towns. On Quay Hill, London was hardly more than a rumor, and the London people who did come down for the weekends, like the Rapps in their gun-metal Aston Martin, were exotic foreigners. But the motorways which had been built in the 1960s and 1970s had shrunk England to a country less than half the size of the one in which I grew up. Lymington was now an hour and a half away from Hyde Park Corner, and not much more than two hours from the cities of the Midlands like Coventry and Birmingham. Its keynote was struck not by its live-in gentry, but by the weekenders, the guys with the real gravy.

The marinas represented just a small tithe of the profits still to be made in Mrs. Thatcher’s England. Behind each mean-eyed boat there lay the rich pickings of the real estate business, the money markets, the motor trade, North Sea
Oil, silicone chippery or the legerdemain of tax accountancy.

I ate at the Stanwell House, a hotel I remembered for its constrained and dowdy hush and its prevailing smell of overboiled greens. It had been a favorite of my grandmother’s, who used to moor Fritz, her miniature dachshund, a neurotic dandy in his lime-green knitted winter coat, to the table leg with a round turn and two half-hitches, and bribe him with scraps to stop him from warbling like an off-key flute. Fritz would not have been welcome in the dining room now. People were scoffing chicken-liver pâté with walnuts and knocking back Château Langoa-Barton at £22.50 a bottle. They were not hushed. Their boisterous gold-card voices rang out over the tables, and they talked in the new slang of space and computers.

“We have lift-off on the Swanley deal …”

“I find the Volvo pretty user-friendly …”

I recognized their faces. They had the family features of Stepmar Securities Offshore (I. O.M.) Ltd. It took me a few moments longer to realize that had I been spotted at my table by a surviving retired rear-admiral, I would myself have been put down unhesitatingly as a Stepmar clone. It was my sort of people—sloppy-shouldered townees with loud voices and plastic money—who had lowered Lymington’s tone and driven the herons away from the marshes.

I walked the two miles out of Lymington to the parsonage. The gorse was in flower on the common, where a leggy, fair-haired girl was up aboard a cantering pony. So Diana Double-Barrel, in hard hat and jodphurs, did still survive; but I couldn’t remember whether the pony was called Achilles or Ajax. Ajax, I rather thought.

The parsonage hedge had been severely pruned and no longer rolled and billowed like the sea. The house’s leaded windows showed clearly through the holly branches: new paint, new guttering, new curtains, new people. Staring in, I found my stare returned by a pale and sexless face behind the glass of my own room. I made a pantomime of following the flight of an imaginary bird—from the parsonage lawn, up over the Crowthers’ roof, and into the stand of pines
behind. The face was still watching. I turned and went on down the road, a marked man.

At St. Mark’s, the name of a new clergyman had been painted on the parish notice board by the lych-gate, but I recognized nearly all the names on the slabs of the fresh graves. In the porch I ducked my head and absentmindedly took on the pious hunch of someone entering a church. But the door was locked against vandals.

I found my parents less than twenty miles away, in the red-light district of Southampton. The directions I’d been given for reaching them in their new quarters were entertaining to follow. You had to turn right at the tattooist’s, right again at the Indian grocery and off-premises license, then left along the terrace where the prostitutes hung out their shingles. My parents’ house was on the first corner.

The terrace was built of blue-tinged Edwardian brick, and the faces of its houses were aggressively English. The bulbous ornamental stuccowork around their doors and windows had once very nearly entitled them to be called villas. They had the wholesome snobbery of Mr. Pooter, the dim clerk in
Diary of a Nobody
, and there still clung to them the stuffy, cozy, anxiously superior air of the bowler hat, the Bicyclists’ Association and the meat tea.

The original Pooters, who’d been proud to pay off their mortgages at five bob a week, would have been baffled by the appearance of the street now—by the turbaned Sikhs on the corner, by the small brown boys who scuffled decorously on the pavement, and, most of all, by the notices in the windows. Where there should have been aspidistras on gothic stands, there now hung pink striplights with black transfer lettering, irregularly spaced and positioned:

The blush-pink lights were just the right color for this quiet and suburban combat zone; they promised mild
naughtiness rather than serious red-light depravity, a spot of slap and tickle, not the heavy stuff with ropes and rubber. Even so, it was an odd street on which to find oneself looking for one’s parents.

Their corner house was much the biggest on the terrace. My father had bought it from an Indian landlord who had run it, so he said, as a warren of student lodgings. It looked to me as if it might make a handsome brothel. There wasn’t a twig of hedge round it: in their retirement from the Church, my parents had chosen to advance full-frontally on the secular world, and their new house was a sort of parsonage-in-reverse, deliberately picked for its exposed position in this louche and gamey quarter of the city.

I kissed my mother on the doorstep. “What an amazing place to discover you in.”

“We like it. It’s got so much
character
, don’t you think?”

The lingering notes of Swiss finishing school in my mother’s voice were accentuated by the way in which, on turning sixty, she had somehow managed to regain the bobbed and boyish figure of the girl in the 1930s photographs. I wasn’t altogether surprised to hear that only that morning she’d been propositioned by a cruising motorist on her way home from the shops.

“I was rather bucked, actually. He was extremely polite about it when I said no.”

My father appeared in the doorway behind her. “Hullo, old boy.” But the
old boy
was the only surviving component of the father I remembered. The beard which he’d started in the 1970s had grown out into a luxuriant tangle of ginger, jet and silver. Bespectacled, six-foot-two, with a long straggle of hair round his collar, he looked improbably like Lytton Strachey in one of his more etoilated and bony postures. He wore a C.N.D. badge on his lapel, and his pipe, like mine, was couched in the left-hand corner of his mouth. Squaring up to each other with lopsided, smoker’s smiles, we bobbed and weaved like image and essence in a looking glass. Father and son, definitely. But an outsider might have found it difficult to tell who was which and which was who.

Five minutes later, carrying a whisky bottle, he passed behind the chair where I was sitting in the drawing room. I sensed him slowing, then going suddenly astern.

“You’ve gone a bit thin on top,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “It sort of happened all at once, over the winter.”

“Gave me a bit of a shock, seeing it like that,” my father said.

“Me too.” I thought:
I
wouldn’t much like to wake up and find myself the father of a bald son. His own hair, like his beard, was gratuitously abundant. No longer barbered to Church or Army regulations, it flowed and rippled on his skull, profuse and rivery.

“Well—that’s your mother’s family for you, I’m afraid,” he said, slopping Scotch into glasses. “Your Uncle Peter was bald as a coot at twenty-five.”

“I know. It’s always been one of my chief failings, that I don’t take more after you.”

“Cheers,” my father said.

Alfie, my parents’ elderly dog, lay like a bundled rug in front of the popping gas fire, his eyes watering. On the mantelpiece, a large whorled ammonite was parked on top of a sheaf of bills.

“I went hunting for fossils when I was in Lyme Regis. They’ve all gone. They’ve been selling them off as tourist souvenirs.”

“You heard that Christian Pitt died?”

“Yes, I did”; but I was looking at Cousin Emma seated at her writing desk, holding a quill pen. The window behind her gave on to a haha and a park with sheep grazing in the avenue of young elms. Her frame had been damaged in the move; bits of gilt had broken away, leaving chips and grazes of raw plaster. She looked as if she might have just been bought in a job lot at an auction.

For in their transfer from the parsonage the Ancestors had suddenly lost all their old power to hex. They used to follow one around the house with their offended eyes; a board of unapproachable trustees who could be seen to wince every time one touched a piece of their precious
furniture or waded into the mashed potatoes with their crested forks. In the world of Miss Tress and the Pakistanis, they had become merely quaint. They might have been anyone’s distant relatives. They certainly didn’t look related to us.