Debatable Land (14 page)

‘You were my chosen son,’ said Muriel.

He had not thought of it. The tastes of his own adulthood, its habits and adaptations, had been sheltered by the Bruces quite as surely as they grew from the enthusiasms and anathemata sown by his parents.

‘I will see you later, with tea. We will read.’

‘I think not,’ said Muriel, very clearly.

But again he did not hear it until after he had to, wishing not to set an edge to life.

Chapter 4

The boat emerged from the gap through the reef, out into the darker water and away from the air about Moorea that smelt that morning of macaroons.

‘To be certain we were covered for anything that could happen, we’d have to have spares of everything. It would mean sailing in convoy with a double, another
Ardent Spirit
down to the last pin and cleat.’ Logan was streaming the Walker log, a geared mechanical tally of miles hung over the side into the water, simpler than almost any device on the boat, just a long bit of string attached to some spinners that clocked up nautical miles.

His gestures were calm. He was entering the life that best suited him, where the thinking, if necessary, was quick, its effects external.

Leaving places fixed them in his mind. He would be happy never again to be tied up in the boulevard Pomare in Tahiti with the cars honking all night. The fishermen carrying fish yoked over their shoulders on a stick through the gills, a silver fan of fish over each shoulder, he had forgotten. The place had failed him in not being far enough from home. Like America Tahiti’s capital was full of borrowings; like Scotland it was afire with sullen endurance, set with the tinder of unbridled wrath in drink.

Logan was not prepared to look at the living confusion travel and cash had brought the town and to be amused by the mix of habits and cultures growing there, too stirred together to extricate, as hard as unravelling a tapestry on to spools of different-coloured rewound wool. A place that offered flying-fish pizza in a neon-lettered bar named Chang’s Gaff, a meal for which one paid in francs before taking a bus to a neatly labelled site of human sacrifice; this could not amuse him. In such confusion he saw not energy but degeneration. He wanted a place to be like itself, or what was the point of going to it? His own part in the modification he did not see. He arrived in the most silent way, on a breath, under sail, and gave more than he took, as he saw it.

He shared with money itself a powerful transforming knack; he could weigh heavy on the earth in hard coin or evaporate and move invisibly between lands. At sea he most respected himself for something free at last of money. His loneliness was strength at sea, his strange longsightedness in matters of personality not at all disabling. On land only strong flavours reached him, and fewer places tasted of themselves unmixed now than ever.

He would have said that it was time he did not have. Sentimentally, he might admit that there was no price he would not pay for more time. In truth he had enough but did not invest it.

‘Life’s too short,’ he said, meaning that increasingly a gap was coming between himself and life, the gap children feel and recognise as boredom. His introspection had been done in the adolescent years when he had been sick for certainty; he had not needed to look in again, for, like a grown boy, he was strong but still sheltered. His temperament was more burdened and intricate than his harsh understanding gave him the means to interpret.

Any offence he gave to men his open way dispelled; the offence he gave to women was received differently, often as intimacy. Since he found women becoming, like small countries, increasingly similar, he took advantage of the reputation he had for charm without needing consistently to show it. Certain women will take it upon the word of another that a man is desirable; it is a matter of publicity. With such a man as Logan, for these women, between whom he sometimes could not tell the difference, the retrospect was what they held on to. So they became women who spoke of him in a way that intrigued the next woman. It is a process that holds regimes in place.

‘We’ll start with watch-partners as in cabins and see how that takes,’ said Logan. ‘Two to six to ten to two to six. No breaking of the pattern, no matter how she’s creaming, or we can go off course. If we get weather I’ll spread the strength.’

The wind freshened, its strength uniting evenly behind and into the mainsail. White sail became one half of the sky. Gabriel sat at the high point of the tipped aft cabin, peeling carrots into a bowl that filled her lap. Below, Elspeth was laying out the log book.

She came up to sharpen Logan’s pencils over the side. Thinking of the company, not of the wind, she turned the pencils in the sharpener as she talked with Gabriel.

‘Now it’s almost beginning, our time at sea,’ she said. The pencil rotated sixty degrees of the sharpener’s bird’s-eye circle at a time.

Gabriel was too young to enjoy such loose conversation that relied upon drift and exchange and comparison. Elspeth did not seem to have much to show for her life. Gabriel imagined how she would wear such a life. She scraped the carrots with an artistic look on her face.

‘There is a bit of a swell always deep in the Pacific,’ Logan said. ‘It’s long so you don’t always notice it. Spit it out if you need to chuck at all, Gabriel.’

Then he smacked at his eye, remaining turned round from the wheel at the waist.

‘Hornet, or something sharp in my eye.’ He started to pull at his lid with his right hand, steering the course with his left. Elspeth vaulted over Gabriel into the aft cabin to get his antidote. The carrots spilt and rolled down the deck. Some stayed in the white gutter under the gunwhale. Most went under the sea and then like matchwood were there again but soon left behind.

‘That antidote has to be where I am,’ said Logan. ‘Not near by or somewhere you know it is safe.’ His voice was raised so that Elspeth could hear. Everyone else, as they do on a boat, heard and naturally listened. Tension on a boat is like the wind and touches everyone aboard.

The mainsail began to flap a little at its most distended point, then it beat and whipped where it was tightest to the mast. The reefing ropes that had been hanging from it at exact angles, as safe as a fringe, seemed to trace some panic. They acted as tell-tales.

A gulping long wave moved sidelong under the hull, just enough to take the wind momentarily away from the smooth mainsail. The flapping began to punch and distort the sail. The boat began to twist.

‘Nick, get up here, come and winch her in,’ called Logan. He did not speak angrily of his boat, sounding calmer than before.

Nick grabbed the heavy winch-handle from the cabin pocket, one of four slots aft of the wheel, wed it to the winch and wound till he felt the tension sit tight. It was not quite right. The poised silence that should have come was forestalled by something. He looked up at the mainsail. Somehow part of its head was folded on to the spreader. He could have torn the big sail.

‘Sandro, will you let her out easy and I’ll lift her off?’

They were all there, waiting for the sail to be reunited with the wind. Nick climbed the mainmast with the intelligence of a lemur, looping his feet on to cleats and soft bolls of rope. When he flicked the heavy mainsail off the spreader, the tension among them was such that the release of the sail was like that of a living thing. Sandro retensed the rope that held the wind at its best point for their use in the long white pouch of sail.

Logan, who had forgotten to die during this manoeuvre, remembered his hornet sting. Elspeth was dithering about with the syringe, he could feel it at his back.

Putting up his hand to his eye, he pulled from beneath it several tiny rough splinters.

‘I’ve got a splinter,’ he said, part of his brain calculating which foresail to put up.

‘Shall I get you a needle?’ said Gabriel. Really, she could be a useful girl.

‘Not in fact. It’s for my eye,’ he said.

Elspeth began to laugh in an uncontrolled way.

‘All we need is a camel.’

‘Was it you who was sharpening pencils into the wind?’ her husband asked her. ‘Do I have to tell you again that on a boat
everything you do affects everything everyone else does
.’ The voice he used for the talkings-to he gave Elspeth was less loving than the voice in which he spoke to the boat. He was severe with Elspeth when it was warranted and on principle; others saw the tough but fair way he dealt with her and thought before crossing him themselves.

‘The genoa,’ said Logan. ‘I’ll hold her still if you dress her.’

Nick and Sandro moved forward over the deck, thin, light young men who knew what to do without talk. They pulled the long fanfolded sail forward and clipped its head ready to haul it up and set it. Before raising it, they tied to the sail’s foot a rope the length of the boat, with a simple knot the size of Sandro’s head. Logan turned the rope around and with the thread of the hefty winch. At the same time he steered a course that held the sails unmoving as robes, then he called out and Nick ran aft to grind up the enormous sail and Logan turned the wheel till the wind punched and then lay once more within the cloth, that this time pulled the boat along with more speed. The tilt was so high you could sit on the windward side and look down into the sea as it was taken away by the air pushing over it. As long as it lasted, the rushing of water along the tipped boat slaked Logan’s great thirst.

Elspeth sat at the highest point she could find where she was not in Logan’s sight and looked down into the blue water that was continually never the same. There in the sails and blue she was happy as a person can be in rich emptiness.

Occasionally the lowest edge of the genoa touched the water and cut it, drawing white in that instant.

Gabriel was in the sail bin, covered with bergamot oil. The second lot of carrots she had peeled was on the gimballed stove in a pan clamped over the bobbing gas. The water in which they boiled was at an angle more probable in ice. When their warm winter kitchen smell grew strong, Gabriel stretched herself out of the sail bin and walked gingerly down the sloping deck to look through the galley hatch at these travelling carrots. How miraculous normal things could be, thought Gabriel, wondering if she ought to fall in love.

Alec looked up into the sails white on white on blue, full of an invisible resource held in place and exploited by intelligence. He knew why he had come. This was it, the rare time when peace and purpose coincided in beauty. Logan would not put it like that, but to see the man achieving this angle, this flight, was like watching a builder at work. First Logan had set a trap for the wind, then he held it and built it into racing towers.

The pitch of Alec’s thought had been lifted high by simple physical processes. Although the boat seemed sometimes vulgar to him, sometimes also squalid, that was to do more with human needs. This flying over water shook out the human dust.

He settled with himself that at the worst of the voyage he would remember that things could be like this. That there would be bad points he was certain: he had felt like a man trapped in a roomful of birds when the mainsail flapped against itself: he had noted his skipper’s temper.

He watched Logan and admired him. In many ways he seemed a creature well adapted to life. His disposition did not allow for the things upon which Alec feared he had wasted his life, shades, vagaries and tentative hues. Alec also allowed himself to feel superior to Logan, though he did not put it to himself like that.

All that day they were awake simultaneously, although Elspeth took herself off during the afternoon to read below. She did this from self-protective habit, in case there came a day when she must hide herself. If she were as a rule not there at a certain time, it would not be noticed that she was not there.

During the afternoon, she tied herself into her lee-cloth so that she did not fall out of the bunk. She read more slowly than she liked to, because the reading was one of the lures she used to get herself through the days. If she had read at her normal speed there would have been no room for the books she would need.

‘Tell me why you need to look at all these books,’ said Logan.

‘Just as you play with boats,’ she rejoined. The foolishness of replying in kind to a man who had not intended the slight he had given was typical of her, a woman who had chosen a life whose chief saboteur was herself. It was unfair of her to have lit upon him for his certainties if she was going continually to jib at his want of fluidity.

They had each chosen the other for the soothing sense they had of being to some degree balanced by the other; she felt braver, simpler, he felt less access to his rage and loneliness.

The speculations and scepticisms that had been the theme of her earliest life were dust kittens to him. He believed in Church and State; she was reared to mistrust them. The sanctity of fact filled his life; among the facts was religious belief. It was not so mystical as faith, being more a repository for exalted feelings, heightened fears and a sense of self.

She wanted to believe, for reasons as selfish as his own. Her highest bliss, in want of children, was aesthetic. She wanted to ascribe what she found transcendent to something. Elspeth had an impulse to praise.

Gabriel had been the surprise, to Elspeth. It was fortunate that this was a boat. On land, Elspeth was sure, there would have been trouble. The stags would have begun to rub away their velvet. On a boat the proximity to danger can hold off intrigue.