Sailors on the Inward Sea (25 page)

I
THINK THAT
I
should take a minute or two to catch up with my life, Ford, my writerly life whose quiet and stasis contrast so wildly with the adventures I've been recounting. In this regard, I can't help citing something you wrote in your dedicatory letter to Stella Ford that prefaces
The Good Soldier:
“I was astounded at the work I must have put into the construction of the book, at the intricate tangle of references and cross-references. Nor is that to be wondered at, for though I wrote it with comparative rapidity, I had it hatching within myself for fully another decade. That was because the story is a true story . . .”

That happens to be exactly how I feel about the work I've done during the last two months I have spent aboard the junk. When I went down to the Old Port for a break from the pressures of writing this memoir, I had no idea that I would stay on her so long, but I wrote the whole of the last section aboard, having discovered that she offered an excellent vantage point for looking back over all those years. Events I had forgotten came back, lay about in profusion, rather like the drifting prayers that had dotted the bay. I suppose I need to be on the water rather than looking down on it.

In any case, I sealed the junk this morning and decamped for the bungalow, reasonably satisfied with the work I'd accomplished. I hired a
betjak
at the foot of the Old Port and on the way home asked the driver to stop at an open-air market. I wandered through narrow lanes between stalls overflowing with fruit and vegetables, spice stands displaying baskets of cumin, oregano, paprika, turmeric, red
and yellow and green chilies, fresh fish, live chickens, a bewildering array of food various enough to satisfy any taste. Scattered here and there were stalls offering handicrafts, jewelry, dinnerware,
Wayang
puppets new and old, clothing, the detritus of Batavian lives forever separated from their original owners, some of which will journey with tourists and sailors and diplomats to the ends of the earth, where they will be enshrined on mantels and tabletops, occasions for memories and the odd story or two, while others will be stuffed into drawers, stored in attics and cellars, seeing the light again only when their owners die and they are sold again or given away.

At one stall a pair of old
Wayang
puppets caught my eye. Some of their paint had flaked off and they had no provenance as far as the woman knew—from the look of them I thought they might be traceable to a renowned
dalang
—but I bargained for them anyway, settling on a price that was probably higher than I should have paid. After I returned to the bungalow and put away the food, I drove two nails into the south wall and put them up facing each other, the white wall doing service as a screen. Even though they are motionless they remain wonderfully intense, Ford, like clouds charged with lightning awaiting the conditions that will free their energy.

Soon after I sat down opposite them with the pages I had written on the junk, I saw the puppets as a reflection of you and me in the parlor of the Pent, the firelight throwing our shadows on the walls. We are like them, I think, inhabiting our own white space, our story perhaps less potent than the clash of gods and the creation myths of the
Wayang
but secularly powerful, as compelling for us as the tales a
dalang
tells to the hundreds gathered around him, hanging on every word he utters.

On the whole, I think that I have filled you in on everything you need to know, Ford. Now I want to return to the
Nellie,
picking up the story during the last few days of that fortnight.

B
ACK TO THAT
awful summer of 1924. You may remember that the heat in London broke quite unexpectedly. Within a day, the yellow haze that had choked us drifted across the Channel, where it bedeviled the French. Trees and foliage looked greener, and with the sky blue rather than chrome yellow, a sense of distance and dimension returned. At night the lights of the city were no longer dim so that when I looked across the estuary I could see again the stuttering glow of houses and the tiny sequins of their windows reflecting on the water.

The
Nellie
had come with a full range of forged steel tools, screwdrivers, knives, hammers, saws, three planes, drills, bits, paint scrapers, good horsehair brushes, cans of paint, special varnish from Copenhagen, good tools with a pleasant heft and feel that made even the most inconsequential task pleasurable. I had rebuilt the second damaged section of her deck, a tricky job that had entailed laying new teak planks along one edge of the starboard side. On the last Tuesday of the fortnight I had carried cans of varnish and brushes and solvent up from the cabin with the intention of finishing the job. With everything set out, I decided to pay an early visit to the post office, where, as usual, I found nothing from Conrad. Back on board I started varnishing the new planks, each brushstroke darkening the wood and bringing out its grain, when I noticed some movement out of the corner of my eye that caused me to look up. It was a boy on a bicycle turning off the road onto the dock. He pedaled slowly, studying the names of the boats, and when he was a little closer I
could see that he wore a telegraph office hat and carried a leather pouch slung over his shoulder. Well, Ford, the moment he stopped opposite the
Nellie,
I was convinced that he had a message from Conrad. The only reason I could think of for him to send a telegram was that Fox-Bourne had agreed to publication.

I put the brush in the varnish can and cleaned my hands on a rag soaked with solvent. Happy as I was for Conrad, as I watched the boy heading for the gangway, I found myself thinking of how Fox-Bourne must have suffered on the way to his decision. Think about it. After years of believing that he was shielded by the Official Secrets Act, Conrad's cover letter must have dropped him to his knees. And that initial shock would have been nothing compared with the anguish of reading the book. The only equivalent I could think of was walking barefooted across a deck strewn with broken glass. Once he would have started to read he could not have stopped. You know why. As Viereck said, it's human nature to be drawn to our own image, no matter how unflattering. Conrad had guessed correctly about the fellow, and I realized that the testimony of my own experiences on this earth should have warned me against jumping to conclusions about how he would react, that the pride he felt in Conrad vouchsafing him the power of choice would have fed his moral vanity, one of the few things I know of that will make a person act against his perceived best interests. I imagined Fox-Bourne pacing the bridge of the
Brigadier,
or the living room of his house, his conscience tugging at him from one side while from the other there was the equally powerful tug of silence. Like everyone who has brushed up against something unsound in his own character—who hasn't?—he knew the clamor would ease if he could just hold on, and that was what fascinated me, Ford. The telegraph boy, who had reached the deck by then, proved he couldn't, but why?

“Please, sir,” the boy said, “are you Mr. Malone?”

“I am,” I answered.

“I have a telegram for you.”

Undoing the clasp on his pouch, he removed an envelope and handed it over. The question of why Fox-Bourne hadn't been able to wait for his crisis of conscience to pass faded as I impatiently opened the envelope, anticipating some clever remark from Conrad, a gentle dig at my shortsightedness. But there was nothing of the kind. Instead, a few terse lines from Jessie informed me that Conrad had died of a heart attack the previous day. They had been at home, and he had seemed fine an hour before it happened. The funeral was to be in Canterbury on the weekend.

I felt as though I had fetched up against something hard, like a good-sized chunk of marble or a mainmast, the blow causing my head to fill with the echo, a kind of obdurate ululation, a sound appropriate to death. To the best of my recollection, I was aware of nothing else. As I look back now, I think the flatness of my response was due to the collision of the victorious narrative I had blithely concocted with Jessie's, which shattered it. I stared at her words, all in capital letters, thick, black, indisputably authoritative, her sentences shorn of everything but cause and effect. Conrad was dead. Only minutes earlier he had been alive in my mind. I had forgotten about the boy, but suddenly he was a presence again, the unwelcome messenger, bringer of sad tidings and heartache, a thin boy of thirteen or fourteen charged with a terrible responsibility, whose work made him a daily witness to anguish. While I was fishing around in my pocket for some change, intending to send him on his way, I felt the need to speak to the little chap. It seemed indecent for the two of us to stand there without acknowledging what had happened.

“My friend has died,” I said.

“I'm sorry, sir.”

“He was a great writer.”

“Of what, sir?”

“Stories, novels. Maps of the world.”

“Maps, sir?”

“To show us where we've been and where we're going.”

I handed him some coins.

“Will you be wanting to reply, sir?”

“No,” I told him, “not just now. Thank you for riding all the way out here.”

As I watched him return to his bicycle the Powers favored me with a vision of Conrad disappearing into the weave of ropes and masts and I couldn't help but wonder if he had known that death's hand was resting on his shoulder. If he had, had that contributed to his need to tell me his story, get it off his chest before it was too late? No answers, of course, but the questions settled like seeds in my mind.

I hadn't budged since reading the telegram. My eyes swept over the deck, coming to rest on the can of varnish with the brush sticking out of it. It seemed an odd thing to mark a passage in my life but that was exactly what it did. I thought again of how Conrad had been alive to me when I put it down, how I had imagined his witty quips. I was left with the brush in the can, the two colors on the deck, the section I had been working on glowing like ice under a winter sun. I finished the job, Ford. In some odd way I can't explain, the work was comforting.

Afterward I walked up to Sebold's shop and used his phone to call Harrison. When his secretary said that he was in an important meeting I told the man I didn't care if he had an audience with the pope, I damned well had to talk to him. While I waited I gazed out a large window that framed the river traffic, a familiar scene for someone who has spent years living on the water, the movement and sounds and drifts of smoke coming together in a kind of visual
elegy not only for Conrad but also for our past with the old gang. Change lies at the heart of our lives. It is one of the undisputed things we can count on. And yet we are never prepared for the swing of the wheel when it comes, are we? It always occurs as a surprise and I'll wager that is true for the most pessimistic of us, the most disappointed. I suppose it is a blessing but it makes the moment when we see the change more poignant, for we still feel as we reach out that we'll take hold of something solid when it turns out to be a shimmering mirage.

Harrison's irritated voice startled me out of my reverie.

“What the devil is so all-fired important?” he said.

“Conrad's dead,” I answered, delivering the news in telegraphese. “Yesterday. Heart attack. The funeral's Saturday.”

Harrison could do no better. We were like two men who had had the wind knocked out of them, capable of speaking only in whispers. I doubt that we talked more than a minute or two, just long enough for me to offer to call Barnes and Kepler. He thought it was a good idea for all of us to go up to Canterbury together.